by ·Comments Off on Take Aim at the Police Van (1960, Seijun Suzuki)

Something like my tenth Suzuki movie. They’re always so reliably entertaining – except to Katy, who still hasn’t forgotten how much she hated Kageroza four years later. Maybe she’d like these earlier, more straightforward films over the late, poetic, bonkers ones.

This isn’t stylistically bonkers, but it’s got a super-twisty plot compared to A Colt Is My Passport, or even to a similar disgraced-cop detective story like Stray Dog. Lead character Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima of Underworld Beauty) isn’t even a cop, just a prison security guard, but he does as well connecting the dots as Mifune in Stray Dog. He was on duty when a sniper took aim at the police van, and now that he’s suspended from duty he spends his free time trying to solve the case independently.

Tamon with his Underworld Beauty costar Mari Shiraki:

Shadowy suspicion:

Dancing girls:

No U Turn:

by ·Comments Off on A Colt Is My Passport (1967, Takashi Nomura)

Finally checking out that Nikkatsu Noir set. I liked this, a cool little hit-man flick, but it didn’t jump up and grab me, so afterwards I watched Take Aim at the Police Van, which did.

Chipmunk-cheeked Joe Shishido (Branded to Kill, Youth of the Beast, Fugitive Alien), whose face never fails to amaze and confuse me, is a hit man for the __ family. Joe assassinates the head of the Shimazu family, gets paid, and is making his company-assisted getaway with junior partner Shun (Jerry Fujio of Masumura’s A False Student). But Shimazu’s son is now in charge, and he partners with __. One last piece of old business: he wants the hit-men dead.

Shun, who sings us a song halfway through the movie:

We still need a girl in our movie, so they meet Mina at their laying-low hotel. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life in this dead-end town, so she plots to escape with our (anti)heroes. But of course the now-teamed-up gangsters know exactly where everyone is, since they sent ’em there, so Shun is kidnapped, and noble old-school Joe offers himself in exchange, shipping Shun off to escape with Mina. Kind of amazing how honorably the exchange takes place, that they release Shun without any plan to recapture him, and Joe meets them at the appointed time. He never said he wouldn’t come armed, though – blows away four guys then explodes the baddies’ car (you should never put all your gang leaders in the same car) by jumping in a ditch and tossing up a homemade magnetic time-bomb. Joe, surprisingly, stays alive up to the final credits, though he’s probably mortally wounded.

Mina and her employer:

C. Stevens for Criterion:

Opening with the moans of a haunted harmonica, a sudden gunshot, and the florid, Morricone-oni twanging of an electric guitar, Colt begins by practically begging to be seen in the light of the spaghetti westerns that had been sweeping the globe since 1964. And much of what follows—in mukokuseki terms, anyway—remains true to that already distinctly hybrid Euro-American form, as triggerman Joe Shishido and his guitar-strumming sidekick, Jerry Fujio, go on the lam after a job Joe’s done too well incurs the wrath of the very mobsters who hired him.
…
Dragging a golf bag filled with guns and a freshly crafted time bomb through a dust storm on some barren wasteland, Shishido prepares for the film’s astonishing climax by digging a hole in the dirt: Is that his own grave? Is that tiny, skittering fly in the rubble a measure of his own mortality? The answers arrive in the sudden shapes of marksmen materializing from the swirling silt all around him.

I love that the cars screech whenever they move. Lot of zooms, and guns pointed right at the camera. Ends with six hundred gunshots in 20 minutes. What is not to like?

Joe’s cheeks might make me laugh, but he is still a badass:

by ·Comments Off on Flying Down to Rio (1933, Thornton Freeland)

Kind of a clunky picture about a lovestruck band leader who takes his group to Brazil and falls for a local firebrand. Lots of time wasted on groany romantic drama between musical numbers, then the nine-minute songs wear out their welcome until I start hoping for the return of the groany drama. It’s saved by the charisma of the band members and some light filmmaking flourishes – over-the-top musical bits with oddball camera placement and silly-ass graphic transitions between every scene – brought to you by Thornton Freeland (directed Brewster’s Millions) and D.P. J. Roy Hunt (who also shot I Walked With a Zombie – someone needs to look into this guy). I don’t remember anymore why we watched this in film class at Tech (following Wings and Things To Come), probably something to do with 1930’s audiences’ love and fascination for new technologies such as the aeroplane (“electric tie rack! rackin’ up electric ties!”).

Something like Ginger Rogers’s 25th film, but Fred Astaire’s first, and it’s remembered for that. Central music number The Carioca was oscar-nominated, but beaten by Astaire & Rogers’ follow-up The Continental from The Gay Divorcee. Both songs are five minutes too long, so I’d like to cast my belated vote for the third nominee, Bing Crosby and Miriam Hopkins’s cross-dressing college gangster comedy She Loves Me Not.

Dolores del Rio was harmless in this, would turn up in Journey Into Fear with Orson Welles a decade later. Less harmless was star bandleader Gene Raymond, our blonde German-looking chunkhead romantic lead. Suppose I might have to see him again in Mr. and Mrs. Smith or If I Had a Million, but mostly he had the courtesy to stay out of the more acclaimed movies of the 30’s. Good-natured gentleman Raul Roulien as Dolores’s family-arranged fiancee failed to make as much of an impression as did Etta Moten (“the first Negro woman to play a dignified role in pictures”) who sang a verse of The Carioca, or Eric Blore (Sullivan’s valet) and Franklin Pangborn (another future Sturges player) as comically uptight hotel managers in the opening scene.

by ·Comments Off on Elena and Her Men (1956, Jean Renoir)

I remember an early scene in which Elena (Ingrid Bergman) is trying to see the parade honoring Jean Marais, then a mutual friend takes her to meet him, and he seems to like her. Doesn’t she give him a special flower that she says will bring luck? Other things must happen after that.

by ·Comments Off on The Informant! (2009, Steven Soderbergh)

Sodie’s fifteenth film of the 2000’s. I like a filmmaker who can be good and productive, and there aren’t many of those left. And this was good for sure. Steven and the actors and production designers and music composer Marvin Hamlisch all seem to be having a good time, turning a low-key piece of mid-90’s corporate intrigue into a light comedy – the comedy being provided by Matt Damon’s character Mark Whitacre, his odd behavior and agent Scott Bakula’s incredulous reactions, as set forth in the trailer. We never do meet the “real” Mark, figure out exactly what’s going on in his mind – I suppose that’s because of the non-involvement of the real Mark, now out of jail and president of a biotech firm. The filmmakers taunt us by offering a voiceover of Mark’s thoughts, but only the most irrelevant non-sequitur thoughts.

Damon with wife Melanie Lynskey, who played one of George Clooney’s sisters in Up in the Air – and I didn’t realize she also starred in Heavenly Creatures:

The payoff is when the movie strays from the light tone at the very end. Whitacre is prosecuted for embezzling and lying to the feds, and ends up serving far more time in prison than the executives he had been working to successfully convict. The sleight-of-hand here at the end makes the movie more interesting than the straightforward hero story of Erin Brockovich (or Flash of Genius, I’m guessing). The supporting cast is peppered with comedians (Scott Adsit, Patton Oswalt, Dick Smothers, the little lovesick poet from Waitress) – strange, since there doesn’t seem to be any improv and no one gets to be funny except for Damon.

Paul F. Tompkins:

D. Kasman:

To hit a target as broad as a barn – American corporate atmosphere – Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who adapts Kurt Eichenwald’s book) narrow the subject as much as possible, getting just so the exacting blandness of 1990s corporate culture. … But a brief picture of The Informant!’s genre parody does little justice to the closet character study that emerges from Damon’s performance and the story’s deadpan plot twists. The crackling humor of the film—which comes from a myriad of sources—then builds off the inane, if not legitimately surreal impossibility that someone so high up and so well off would ever dare expose the horrible mechanisms behind their success and others’ suffering.

Good to see Scott Bakula, even if he’s under some very silly hair:

by ·Comments Off on Sweetgrass (2009, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbarsh)

For a few minutes I was mad at the Tara for projecting the film out of focus, not an unreasonable thought given previous disasters at that theater, but then I realized the movie was shot on low-grade DV – probably a good financial choice for a two-person three-year project, but less than ideal for landscapes, which the camera turns into mud. A would’ve-been-lovely shot of pack horses parading before distant mountains ended up looking like a blurry painting. K Uhlich agrees: “As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect. For every gorgeously low-res image (a blobby, white sea of sheep racing heedlessly toward their pen), there’s a correspondingly ineffectual visual or vista that one wishes had been captured with higher-end equipment and a keener cinematic eye.”

Jimmy wasn’t bothered by the camerawork so much as the editing, saying that each shot lingered too long, which became cumulatively frustrating. But we agreed it was neat overall, even if most of its value was in teaching us city folk how ranching works.

by ·3 Comments

Perhaps I’ve suffered my own bout of amnesia because I already can’t remember much of this movie. I remember it wasn’t as rapid-edit-afflicted as I’d heard, but then I realized that’s the two Paul Greengrass sequels that people have said each contain so many edits as to render the entire film a work of abstraction. I don’t see how that would be desirable, but I’m willing to give it a go. This one is by Doug “Swingers” Liman, who somehow pulled off a very competent, not over-stylish, gripping action movie before immediately falling under Greengrass’s shadow when Liman’s follow-up Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a critical bomb. Co-written by Tony Gilroy, all of whose movies I’ve been enjoying lately.

Matt Damon wakes up on a fishing boat after apparently having a change of heart about killing an African leader. The CIA doesn’t need an ex-superkiller roaming around, slowly regaining his memories along with a newfound conscience and thirst for vengeance, so bosses Chris Cooper and Brian Cox send bunches of faceless assassins (silent badass Clive Owen stands out just because he is Clive Owen) to stop him and hapless co-traveler Franka “Run Lola Run” Potente. Even with no memory (or because he has no memory: discuss) Damon is a super-effective instinctual ultra warrior who outthinks and outfights many assassins and possibly kills either Cooper or Cox, I don’t remember, before earning his Shawshank island retirement scene at the end.

by ·Comments Off on The Owl’s Legacy (1989, Chris Marker)

“It all began on a summer night in 1987. The idea for a television series based on Greek culture had just crystalized and we were facing a spectre which haunts the realm of the cultural documentary and that Chekhov defined for eternity: to say things that clever people already know and that morons will never know.”

Marker hosts banquets across the world and interviews subjects one-on-one (in front of giant pictures of owls), discussing Greece. Mostly it’s school, like a PBS doc without the music or the constant zooming around ancient photographs. Hard to stay interested, since I had no real curiosity about Greek culture, only a curiosity about Chris Marker’s movies (in the credits he’s listed as “skipper” and producer Jean-Pierre Ramsay is listed as “long-distance calls”).

Each episode is preceded by a disclaimer from the billionaire Greek funding agency distancing themselves from its content… way to go there, Chris. Something must have upset the rich people who thought ancient Greece would be a harmless, noble topic. Maybe it’s when Richard Bennett in episode six says: “Pythagoras was a great man. He was in the same league – I may shock some people here – as Moses, Buddha and Jesus Christ.”

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1. Symposium, or Accepted Ideas

Droney keyboard sounds behind scenes from Olympia mixed with war films. One minute later we are looking at a storehouse of sculptures, supposedly underneath the roundtable discussion, and I’m already put in mind of Statues Also Die.

“This was an extreme example, but the fact remains that Greece, or at least the idea of Greece, has been used to fuel the spirit of totalitarianism, and it still does now and then. All the more need, then, to look for that Greek word which is theoretically the safest antidote to totalitarianism… the word “democracy.”

“We have this horrid image of Greece as a land of light and harmony. Abysmal nonsense. Greece is a land of incest, murder, where Oedipus blinded himself … In Greece, moderation and order are won against reality and not as their birthright, hence their obsession with aphorisms. ‘Be moderate.’ ‘Do not exaggerate.’ I can’t imagine a Swiss or a Dutch with such obsession for moderation. The Greeks are obsessed with it, obsessed with going too far, because it’s their natural tendency.” – Cornelius Castoriadis

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2. Olympics, or imaginary Greece

It’s not in fact about the olympics, but about modern Germany’s relationship to and interpretation of Greek culture. The series can’t go on like this for eleven more episodes, can it? Interviews of people speaking in general terms about Greece and its perceived contributions to the current world? I will get bored.

Film clip of naked rituals from Paris 1900, a documentary which young Alain Resnais and Yannick Bellon both worked on, produced by Pierre Braunberger

Renate Schleisser:

Manuela Smith:

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3. Democracy, or the city of dreams

Democracy vs. oligarchy, and the terrible truth behind greek democracy. Nice cut to a clip of George Bush Sr. right as a guy says “the large amount of hypocrisy.” Nostalgia for when people were passionate about participation in the system.

Clips from the Greek episode of Marker’s 1969-71 On vous parle series – I didn’t know there was a Greek episode. It’s not on IMDB.

John Winkler and Elia Kazan at a dinner party:

philosopher/economist Cornelius Castoriadis:

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4. Nostalgia, or the impossible return

Much talk about Greek identity, nostalgia and homeland. I think I dozed off. Clips from a 1911 film and from Kazan’s America, America.

George Steiner: “The Greeks are nostalgic. Nostalgic for what? For everything and nothing. They have nothing left – it’s all in their heads.”

musician Angelique Ionatos:

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5. Amnesia, or history on the march

About Greece’s sense of history vs. our own. A segment on the person (and the film) Z. Jean-Pierre Vernant mentions that the word autopsy means “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes”. Vassilis Vassilikos says the country has always been a battleground because it links Africa, Asia and Europe. And I got hooked on the story of the first king of independent Greece after 1820, a Bavarian who didn’t speak any Greek.

author of Greek and Roman histories Oswyn Murray:

director Elia Kazan:

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6. Mathematics, or the empire counts back

All about logic and mathematics, with graphic examples in hyperstudio. Scenes from a Norman McLaren film and from something called Avant-Poste, featuring a totally-80’s feathered-hair blonde (it’s Arielle Dombasle, who I’ve seen in La Belle Captive) in closeup with tubular music playing telling us about Greek mathematics.

Daniel Andler gets brownie points for using owls in his example about uncertainty. I haven’t seen the dinner party for a few episodes now.

Michael Serres: “I wish the scientific heritage could recover its humanistic trail. I wish the humanistic heritage, also a bit lost at the moment, could recover its scientific trail. It’s one and the same heritage, but we are mediocre inheritors.”

The controversial Richard Bennett:

–
There’s more (I only watched half of the series) but I’m stopping here for now. I tried to struggle through for the sake of Marker completism but I’m not terribly interested in Greek culture at the moment and can’t imagine that three more hours of this will help. Maybe I’ll pick it up again sometime.

Credits: Co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière was Buñuel’s co-writer for some of his best work, then worked on The Tin Drum and Godard films, and recently on Birth. Some of the cinematographers would work with Angelopoulos, Youssef Chahine, Jean-Jacques Beineix. Other interview participants included Catherine Belkhodja (star of Level Five), director Theo Angelopoulos, artist Matta, Arielle Dombasle (star of movies by Terayama Shuji, Eric Rohmer, Raoul Ruiz and Alain Robbe-Grillet), Yukio Ninagawa (Funeral Parade of Roses), Alex Minotis (Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs), Melina Mercouri (Jules Dassin’s wife/lead actress), computer-music pioneer Iannis Xenakis and Vasilis Vasilikos (writer of Z). André Dussollier (Love on the Ground, Wild Grass) apparently narrated the French version, but not the version that I’ve got.