by ·Comments Off on A Wife Confesses (1961, Yasuzo Masumura)

One of the most stylishly shot courtroom dramas ever, beating Clouzot’s La Verite. Ayako Wakao, star of Seisaku’s Wife, is again the titular wife, again with marital problems. This time she’s defending herself in court, accused of self-widowing on a mountain climb so she could marry her lover and climbing buddy.

The facts are laid out right from the start: the married couple fell and Kouda was holding on, with Ayako in the middle and her husband dangling below. Kouda couldn’t pull them both up. She cut the rope below her, letting her husband fall to his death.

She testifies that she and her husband (Eitaro Ozawa: Minobe in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Kinichi’s dad in Kiss) were never in love, but he wouldn’t allow a divorce. Meanwhile young, ambitious Kouda (Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Kinichi in Kiss) is engaged to his best client’s high-haired daughter Rie, but is spending all his time with the accused Ayako.

Kinichi and his dad, in love with the same woman:

Rie testifies:

The court case continues, experts are called in, stories are told by witnesses, a flashback within a flashback, as they try to determine whether Ayako had to kill her husband in order to save her own life. It has become a wide-open secret that the two surviving climbers are in love, and the day before the verdict, they go to the beach together as the soundtrack plays haunted string music. The next day she’s proclaimed innocent.

Kouda is dumping his fiancee and marrying Ayako, but surprised that she’s so quick to start spending her life insurance windfall. He grills her, and finally we get to see the fateful climb, as she confesses that she took the opportunity to get rid of her hateful husband, then Kouda calls her a liar and runs back to Rie. Ayako poisons herself, and Rie gets the last word: “Mr. Kouda, you killed her. If she’s a murderer, you’re also a murderer. Goodbye. I won’t be seeing you again.”

Shot the year before Masumura’s Black Test Car, from the writer of three of Kurosawa’s most famous later films.

Berkeley: “combines the pessimistic observations of film noir with the sensuality that Masumura would pursue further in later films… an early film to deal openly with a woman’s feelings about sex… Within an unusually complex narrative structure, Wakao beautifully develops contradictory desires in her heroine – her lust to live and her wish to die – and somehow makes them one.” Rosenbaum: “A powerful metaphor for Japanese interdependence, this rope connecting the members of a romantic triangle is also tied, one might say, to Masumura’s major theme: the tragedy as well as the necessity of individual choice and desire in a highly interactive society.”

by ·Comments Off on Inquietude (1998, Manoel de Oliveira)

“Men were vulgar. They wanted to forget their history. Only funerals seemed true, as they passed streets of dirty houses, like tombs for the living.”

Almost an anthology film – three stories with no overlapping characters, set maybe in the 1920’s or 30’s. An adaptation of three separate works – a fact I didn’t catch in the opening credits. Very strange, but as magnetic and thrilling as Non.

The Immortals

A burst of music over the opening, then the first line, from a father to his son, is “Kill yourself.” Both father (Jose Pinto of Abraham’s Valley) and son (Luis Miguel Cintra, star of Non) are the most famous scientists of their respective generation. But the father is feeling washed-up and forgotten, and urges his son to die at the height of his fame.

Time out for a picnic with Marta (Isabel Ruth of The Uncertainty Principle), an old student/flame of the father’s, then back to the apartment. The son won’t be convinced, refuses to swallow cyanide, but agrees to fix his father’s curtain rod over the back door, at which time his dad pushes him over the balcony, then jumps after, yelling about immortality.

I’d noted that the movie felt like theater, the old man playing towards an imagined crowd instead of his son, in a single location except for the cutaways to the picnic and a downstairs neighbor’s place as the men fell to their deaths – and it was theater after all. A half hour into the movie, a curtain raises, and we begin to follow a couple groups of friends who have been watching the play, never to return to the scientist family.

Suzy

Square-jawed Diogo Doria of Non and his friend David Cardoso are paying as much attention to a pair of courtesans/prostitutes in another box as to the play. Cardoso meets the girls and reports back, having claimed Gabi (Rita Blanco) as his own, and later, Doria starts spending much time with Suzy (the ever-present Leonor Silveira), though he remains rational when he sees her out with other men.

All along, I’m suspicious that this will be another play, even though the atmosphere has changed – it’s more realistic, mostly shot in long takes (as was the first episode), but still held at a strange remove, with ellipses of undetermined lengths between scenes.

Suzy: “I have wealthy lovers, dresses by the best seamstresses, everything, except happiness.” Eventually she’s seeing Doria less often, though they exchange letters. In the end, Suzy has died in hospital during an operation (“she said: it’s a small thing”), but he keeps writing the letters. Cardoso stops by to visit his pathetic friend, and tells him a story.

Mother of the River

Young Fisalina (Leonor Baldaque, star of The Portuguese Nun) is in love with Ricardo Trepa (who played her husband in Christopher Columbus, The Enigma). But it’s not that simple: there are customs, rules, meddling parents and a small, stifling village. So she sneaks off to see the Mother of the River (Irene Papas, greek singer in A Talking Picture, also star of Z). “I love a boy with pretty teeth. I do not know how to marry him… curse me, but set me free.” So the mother takes Fisalina through a candlelit cavern to the edge of the water.

The next day Fisalina notices her fingertips are golden. She hides them from everyone, but no longer feels urgent towards her boy, and seems at peace with the village. During a candlelight festival, the light shines off her fingers and she is discovered, a witch! “Fisalina, reckless, fated, has chosen to live beside the deep water, where she will wait a thousand years before swapping lives with someone else.”

Goldfinger:

Trepa, despondent:

Oliveira has returned to these writers: his A Caixa was a play by Prista Monteiro (The Immortals), and he’s done at least four major films based on stories by Agustina Bessa-Luis (Mother of the River).

D. Kehr says the segments are “all centered on themes of death and eternity and presented sequentially as social comedy, existential tragedy and lyrical epic,” but Rosenbaum, more correctly I think, says it’s “the theme of existential identity” that unites the stories.

by ·Comments Off on Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh)

Back with his rival/writer Lem Dobbs of The Limey and Kafka, but I don’t see much point in celebrating the reunion since this was a straightforward double-crossed super-spy story. If not for the Soderbergh name and the A-list cast that always follows the Soderbergh name, this would be filler content on HBO starring Edward Furlong or the like. I’m starting to think that I’ve been suckered into believing that Soderbergh is some important auteur, when really he just makes slick entertainments rather well. But I guess he goes back and forth – some turns out better than others – and this one is firmly on the slick-entertainments side of things.

The reviews focused entirely on whether action hero Gina Carano can act in the non-action scenes, and the answer is “well enough”. More surprising is that the stars (particularly Fassbender and Tater) can keep up with Gina in the fighting scenes, also well enough.

Gina is a spy/mercenary/thing working for Ewan McGregor’s private organization, rescues a Chinese fellow from kidnappers along with her buddy “Tater” Channing, then accepts a quick follow-up assignment with British agent Michael Fassbender at the house of Mathieu Kassovitz (Amelie‘s photo-booth boyfriend), where she finds the dead Chinese guy, realizes she’s being framed, gets jumped by Fassbender and shoots him dead after a struggle.

But wait, the movie starts in the middle, where she’s met by Tater in a diner while being tracked by Ewan’s people, kicks Tater’s ass but does not kill him, then kidnaps a dude named Scott (the kid who was shot by Stephen Root in Red State) to escape. Now she’s off to clear her name, tracking down Ewan (traitor with a bad haircut who gets left to drown Ted Danson-style), Tater (killed by Ewan), Michael Douglas (gov’t good guy who helps slightly). We know the big baddie at the end will be Antonio Banderas, since we saw him with a Castro beard early in the film then he never came back, and he wouldn’t just have the one cameo. Help also comes from her dad Bill Paxton (his first movie since 2007, and the first I’ve heard of since ’04).

According to the IMDB, shot and edited by Soderbergh under pseudonyms, well enough.

by ·Comments Off on Il Generale Della Rovere (1959, Roberto Rossellini)

First some context from the always-reliable Tag. By 1958/59, Rossellini “hated commercial cinema with a vengeance,” but was broke as usual, so “was selling himself to a producer for a project that wasn’t his own.” Films about the Italian government’s WWII collaboration with nazis had been forbidden for years, and as this ban was lifted, Rossellini shared the golden lion at Venice with Mario Monicelli (The Great War) for breaking taboos. So, sucked back into a system he hated, he ended up with his biggest success since Open City.

Adapting the true story about a fake leader of the anti-fascist resistance planted in a political prison to try and ferret out the real resistance leaders, Rossellini was assigned fellow neorealist director Vittorio de Sica as a lead actor. And he’s excellent, I thought, but Tag says R.R. considered VdS a ham, and utilized tricks to make him tone down his huge performance. Either way, it’s an engrossing movie about sordid wartime subjects.

De Sica is Bardone aka Grimaldi, a local during the occupation who meets nazi Colonel Muller (Hannes Messemer, POW camp commandant in The Great Escape) on the street and gives him directions, then proceeds to his usual past time, which is scamming his countrymen whose relatives are in jail, collecting gifts to pass on to the imprisoned, and money for their release, then gambling it away. His girl Valeria (Sandra Milo of Juliet of the Spirits and 8 1/2) leaves him, and while looking for a sucker to buy some fake jewelry, he visits Olga (Giovanna Ralli, star of RR’s follow-up Escape By Night), an ex working in a brothel.

Valeria:

Olga:

Meanwhile, in a botched capture attempt, General Della Rovere of the partisan underground is killed. And Bardone is arrested, turned in by a girl he was trying to scam (Anne Vernon, Deneuve’s mom in Umbrellas of Cherbourg), promising to free her husband who had already been executed. Bardone pleads his case passionately, saying he’s providing a great service to the locals by providing false hope in a hopeless time, and Col. Muller gets an idea.

Anne Vernon:

The second half of the movie is traitorous Bardone doing time in a political prison, trying to identify captured leaders of the underground so they can be tortured for information. But Bardone spends enough time faking that he’s General Della Rovere that he starts to believe it, taking to heart the letters he receives from Rovere’s wife. “When you don’t know which path to take, choose the hardest one.”

His new friend Banchelli the barber (Vittorio Caprioli, plant manager in Tout va bien) is tortured to death, and Rovere is tortured as well, as Muller gets tired of waiting for results. In the end, Bardone/Rovere meets the leader of the resistance, but goes voluntarily to the firing squad without divulging the secret, a patriot at last. Yeah, it’s a bit melodramatic.

Banchelli:

Film Quarterly said the first section, before Bardone is arrested, was “much too long.” This may be true if you’ve read the true story, or are expecting a prison movie. But I thought it was perfectly timed out, because we get to know him before prison, see what a scoundrel he is, and how he deals with friends and strangers. Then his turn in prison from early nervousness to pride in his (false) position of honor to partisan has more meaning.

by ·Comments Off on Snow White and the Huntsman (2012, Rupert Sanders)

A fairy tale for today’s mob of Twilight-raised, grimly serious gothic youth who prefer the Christian Bale Batman to the Michael Keaton Batman. Pretty obvious movie, and no part is more obvious than James “Newt” Howard’s big, big score. Alternates between patient carefully-composed images and too-close, too-frantic action scenes. Overall pretty good, especially when Evil Queen Charlize Theron is around.

After Charlize takes over the kingdom and kills all flowers and happiness, the imprisoned princess grows up to be Twilight Stewart and realizes there might be trouble in the kingdom when her cellmate Lily Cole leaves to see the queen and returns as an old hag, so Twilight escapes by slashing Theron’s albino brother Sam Spruell in the face. She meets her reluctant protector Thor Hemsworth and they go adventuring, collecting the exiled Duke’s army and the all-important dwarfs to help.

Pity doomed Lily Cole:

First it’s into the dark forest, which is extremely menacing to Twilight until she passes out, then it leaves her alone. It doesn’t bug Thor at all, making me wonder if he’s the actual Chosen One who will defeat the Queen with his beauty, but that was a false lead, because soon they meet a bridge troll, whom the princess charms with her sleepy Twilight stare. Then they visit the city of scar-faced women, and get it burned down, oops. Now the dwarfs, who were played by digitally-shrunken full-size actors – and this is why movies should bring back opening credits. I’d have surely recognized Dwarf Bob Hoskins and Dwarf Toby Jones (and maybe Dwarf Ray Winstone) if I’d been looking for them, but unaccustomed to seeing them so short and beardy, we only figured out Dwarf Nick Frost (in about one second) and Dwarf Ian McShane. Then all nine venture into the Fairy Garden, where CG animals go to relax between Tim Burton and Brendan Fraser movies, and they meet a white moose made out of butterflies. Finally to the Duke’s palace, where Twilight meets her boyfriend from when she was seven, now grown into a dreamy archer.

Thor w/hammer:

Evil Queen Charlize tires of all this, makes herself into a Dreamy Archer Terminator and delivers the poison apple (via doomed CG crows, in the third scene of bird death in this movie. Snow White of the Huntsmen hates birds!). Real Dreamy Archer cannot wake Twilight with his kiss, and when all hope seems lost, Thor makes a successful attempt. Queen’s palace by the seaside, dwarves in the sewer, arrows and boiling oil, too-close/too-frantic sword fighting, and Charlize is done in by Twilight’s Pure Love & Light (actually a model rocket dagger).

Screamy Queen Charlize:

Sanders has made Nike and X-Box commercials. One writer was behind Drive, and the other writes/directs Dennis Quaid movies. Newt Howard scores every laughably over-serious movie of recent years (The Last Airbender, Water for Elephants, The Dark Knight, Breast Cancer: The Path of Wellness & Healing) and the Australian D.P. shot Spider and Bright Star.

by ·Comments Off on We Bought a Zoo (2011, Cameron Crowe)

A typically crap Crowe movie with big obvious pop music cues (in Crowe’s hammy hands, I understand why they’re called cues) and a big fat score by Jonsi. Adapted from the real zoo-buyer’s memoir by Crowe and Aline “Morning Glory/27 Dresses” McKenna.

Adventure-craving newsman Matt Damon is sad because his wife Gwyneth Paltrow died from plague, so he buys a zoo from realtor JB Smoove, warms up somewhat to head zookeeper Scarlet Johansson (taking time out from her new career of having cameos in other people’s superhero movies), and tries to assure his brother (Tommy Sandman Church) and moody kids that it’ll be a great adventure. Spoiler alert: it is! I might’ve spotted a big La Jetee reference in the family-photos montage, but I looked away for a while, so maybe not.

by ·1 Comment

Evil, decadent Queen Regina V (Seena Owen, doomed queen of Babylon in Intolerance) is engaged to wolfish Prince Wolfram, but he falls for convent orphan Gloria Swanson whose pants have fallen down. I am not making this up. They go on for twenty minutes about her pants falling down, which is a pretty big deal in an hour and forty minute movie. Anyway the queen decides to punish Wolfram by moving up their wedding to the next day. And Wolfram plays a hilarious prank, breaking into the convent, setting it on fire to flush out his beloved, then kidnapping her. This doesn’t end well for either of them when the queen finds out. Wolfram is imprisoned (I like that he receives visitors in “solitary confinement”) and Gloria jumps into the river, killing herself, the end.

Queen:

Kelly:

But that’s only the end because Stroheim was fired from what was meant to be a five-hour film, so producer Swanson wrapped it up quickly and shipped to theaters. The DVD contains a couple reels of what was shot next, after Gloria was supposed to be saved from drowning in the river: some crazy scenes in an African brothel where Gloria is forced to marry the brilliantly grotesque Tully Marshall (Intolerance‘s High Priest who deposes the queen). The movie pops to life here, turns from a stodgy old costume drama with a few exciting shots into a sleazy melodrama with only exciting shots.

Wolfram, receiving bad news:

Kelly hanging over the river, remembering everyone laughing at her (left) as the queen (right) chased her from the palace with a whip.

Silent movies can get tiresome when they have too many intertitles, each of which lasts too long. Definitely the case here. Produced by Swanson and Joe “JFK’s dad” Kennedy, and supposedly sunk by clash of personalities, increase in Hollywood censorship, and the advent of talkies. I didn’t feel like watching the thousand minutes of extra features today, so I read the Senses of Cinema article instead.

Tully/Jan:

M. Koller:

In the African sequences… the relationship between Regina and Wolfram is mirrored by Jan Vooyheid and Kitty’s loveless, contemptuous marriage. As with Regina’s introduction at the beginning of the film, Stroheim uses a series of vignettes to summarise Jan’s attributes. Jan (Kitty’s benefactor) can also be seen as the degenerate extrapolation of an unredeemed Wolfram; old, ugly, and crippled by syphilis, he is a violent, disrespectful, gambling, whoring drunk.

by ·Comments Off on Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson)

Precocious children with parental issues, highly-organized secret plans and old-fashioned craftsy props surrounded by superstar actors including Bill Murray – so yes, it’s like any Wes Anderson movie, but it’s a good one. He has a unique talent for collapsing different locations into one hermetic snowglobe of a film. The visual/conceptual unity is helped by the soft, grainy 16mm cinematography, and that fact that all the action takes place on an island.

In the celeb-actor world, Frances McDormand is cheating on husband Bill Murray with local cop Bruce Willis. Edward Norton leads a troop of scouts, hopes to join his idol, scout commander Harvey Keitel, at the big convention where Jason Schwartzman is some kinda mercenary merchant. And Bob Balaban is a sort-of-present character/narrator.

But one of the movie’s strengths is that it focuses primarily on its young heroes, Sam and Suzy, who run off together and camp on the beach, leaving the celeb-actors as background players. Willis and Norton lead search parties as two threats approach: an epic storm, and Tilda Swinton of Social Services, coming to take Sam to a home.

Katy liked it more than she thought she would.

by ·Comments Off on Prometheus (2012, Ridley Scott)

A frustrating movie, because even while watching the two-hour theatrical version opening week, we knew that Ridley Scott has been talking up his extended director’s cut for blu-ray. But Ridley learned nothing from the Lord of the Rings model, cutting out really important stuff instead of fun but unnecessary scenes of hobbits singing, leaving the two-hour version full of plot holes, confusing explanations and out-of-character behavior. At least that’s what I generously assume to be the case, that the movie made perfect sense before the cuts, because otherwise how would a mega-expensive-looking star-studded major film arrive in theaters full of massive story problems that nobody noticed?

I admit the story problems and look forward to watching Ridley’s second (and third, and fourth) edit on my little laptop screen. But I still loved the theatrical version, unlike every single person I’ve heard mention it, because it’s simply the most amazing looking and sounding movie I’ve seen in theaters for a year or more. The picture (2D) is clear, with seamless effects, and I must’ve lucked out and got the only screen in Atlanta with properly calibrated surround sound. I’ve thought I was past the point of being impressed by massive explosions and outer-space action scenes, but I guess everyone else (looking at you, Michael Bay) has just been doing ’em wrong.

Two archaeologists (Noomi Rapace of the Swedish Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Logan Marshall-Green of Devil) discover star maps in prehistoric cave paintings, so a mega-rich old man (played by Guy Pearce in distracting old-age makeup) sends a space exhibition led by a sleek, evil Charlize Theron to check it out. Logan is given black-oil sickness by android Michael Fassbender, impregnates Noomi with an alien. Also on board are pilot Idris Elba, punk miner Sean Harris (Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People) and other guys who will be killed in interesting ways.

There’s some religious mumbo, with secret (but easily predicted) stowaway Pearce wanting to confront our creators, the giant, pale muscular men, and ask why they created us. But I could’ve sworn the scientists said at least twice that they’re an “exact genetic match” with us – so they didn’t create us, they are us. Right? And if I got this straight, the planet to which the map led the Earth explorers isn’t the home planet of any race, but an outpost where they were creating biological alien weapons. And when the one living pale guy awakens from cryo-sleep, he sets to destroying Earth, as if that was his plan all along. Anyway, lot of questions, but ultimately I enjoyed the spectacle and think the movie is interesting enough to find the unanswered questions tantalizing, looking forward to sequels or deleted scenes, not blowing off the movie as badly written.

dissenting opinion from R. Brody in the New Yorker:

Scott is the perfect former TV commercial director: he doesn’t invent images but decorates them and lights them to set a consistent mood, which he then maintains, without surprises. He tells you what to feel, or not even—he tells you to admire his ability to get you to feel one thing, whether it’s worth feeling or, in this case, not. As in a TV commercial, the amount of money spent on production design is a part of the movie’s import; the sets and the effects might as well have their price tags dangling from them … he took the same laborious pompier style as fell flat in Robin Hood and attempted to justify it with a ponderous subject. The movie lacks any joyful sense of discovery, such as emerges (intermittently) through the vainglorious bombast of Alien.

But then instead Brody praises the “exuberance” and lack of self-important seriousness of Benjamin Buttons. If he had more fun at The Ben Buttons than at Prometheus, we can learn nothing from each other.

June 2015:
Now that I’ve watched this again on 2D blu-ray, I don’t mind the plot problems as much – in fact, Lindelof convincingly explains in the commentary that character motivations are purposely unknowable – and the visuals hold up beautifully (though scenes like the spaceship crash don’t have the power they held in theaters). The writer commentary implies that it’s all overlit because of demands from the 3D process, but a sci-fi horror flick with great lighting and strong color is a nice change of pace.

The deleted scenes actually weren’t so interesting, especially after playing half the writers’ commentary, but the blu extra called The Weyland Files was nice – strange character bits, training and prep for the mission, research, unexplained anthropological stuff, an infomercial for android David, and a Ted Talk by Guy Pearce without his age makeup.