by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 3: A Quick One

Here are three that’ve been hanging about for the last couple months because I haven’t felt like watching any more awful movies lately.

Seven Pounds (2008, Gabriele Muccino)
After flashing-back to the time he killed his wife and six other people because he wouldn’t stop looking at his cellphone, Will Smith lowers himself into a bathtub full of ice and jellyfish. I think he died and donated his heart to Rosario Dawson, because she wakes up seeming all sad then goes and hugs Woody Harrelson in the park. Seeing all these people cry makes me wanna cry. The director made The Pursuit of Happyness which would probably also make me wanna cry, and the writer once did an episode of Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

Blindness (2008, Fernando Meirelles)
I wasn’t expecting this jaunty Thomas Newman-sounding music (it’s not by him), nor this confused, fuzzy montage-looking filmmaking – hmmm, it’s from the guy who made City of God, so maybe I should’ve. This movie would seem to call for more straightforward direction, like Seven Pounds, which looked totally reasonable, but maybe Meirelles doesn’t know how to be straightforward. Anyway, Julianne Moore leads everyone to her house, Danny Glover has an eyepatch and tells some girl he loves her, and then Yusuke Iseya (who ruled as the white clan leader in Sukiyaki Western Django) can see again and everyone is glad. Just like the book, but blurrier.

Swing Vote (2008, Josh Stern)
Montage: two cute girls (Costner’s girlfriend[?] Paula Patton of Mirrors, and daughter Madeline Carroll of Resident Evil: Extinction) are reading mail to scruffy Kevin Costner in front of a whiteboard while media types are gathered outside his trailer. Arianna Huffington has some awkward dialogue, then there’s a Texas debate between Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper staged just for Costner, but then why is Costner doing all the talking? Why, it’s a big patriotic speech to America, in which he declares himself an enemy of America for being a crappy citizen all his life. Hopper didn’t get to say a single word, and we don’t see who Costner votes for – booo! Director Stern previously wrote an Amityville sequel and directed an absolutely star-studded fantasy movie I’ve never heard of called Neverwas.

by ·Comments Off on JCVD (2008, Mabrouk El Mechri)

A very grey-brown movie (because it’s so “real”) about the “real” Jean-Claude Van Damme (“really” named Jean-Claude Van Varenberg) in his “real” hometown, who gets caught in the middle of a “real” action adventure when “real” thieves are robbing a bank (or is it a post office – I didn’t get that part). Not done mockumentary style (in fact, there are some impressive showoff long-shots), although JC does have a talk-to-the-camera monologue in the middle, where he gets real with his fans.

I’ve got nothing against JC (Steven Seagal, on the other hand…) and could’ve enjoyed this if it was more what I’d expected – a fake-reality situation in which JC kicks some righteous ass while getting real about his career. But after a not-much-happening mistaken-identity hostage situation is shown again and again from multiple perspectives, JC finally does kick a dude… in his imagination! Really he’s saved from the thieves by the cops who then arrest him for extortion, haha! It’s so real. Kind of depressing, really. I’ll take the first ten minutes and leave the rest.

Indy Week: “What could have been a crisp little concept movie (how do you say Phone Booth in French?) is instead a limply paced, murky-looking attempt to state the obvious: that big action stars are not, in fact, invincible.” But Cinema Scope calls it remarkable: “By pitting JCVD the axiom against JCVD the person, JCVD deconstructs and deepens the understanding of both. It is nothing if not a triumph of humanism.”

by ·Comments Off on The Virginian: It Tolls For Thee (1962, Samuel Fuller)

A silly TV western series in which the good guys smile all the time, with an episode written/directed by the great Sam Fuller in his prime (between Underworld USA and Shock Corridor) and guest starring Lee Marvin. In 1884, Marvin shoots gang leader Sharkey (Warren Kemmerling of Close Encounters) and takes over the gang (were they called gangs back then?), plotting revenge on Judge Garth (Lee J. Cobb of Party Girl, Call Northside 777, Our Man Flint) for sending him away years earlier (of course, that’s always why dudes in westerns want revenge on judges). It’s up to our gang of interchangeable white-hats to stop him – and stop him they will, but not before Lee Marvin gets in a good bit of badassery (oh, spell-check doesn’t like that word).

I assume Fuller was working with a rush schedule and stock crew, but he was always a guy who worked fast, so he gets in plenty of striking shots. He also crams the script with literary quotes and references to newspapermen (Joseph Pulitzer is a major presence in the episode). Glad I tracked this one down.

by ·Comments Off on Of Time and the City (2008, Terence Davies)

I can’t remember if I finished watching this. I know I watched the first hour, but can’t be sure of anything after that. Or was it only an hour long? Anyway I know two things: one, that I was under the effects of dramamine at the time of the viewing, and two, that I found it disappointingly plain after the advance hype of Davies’ big festival comeback and the nostalgia poetry of his previous features.

I guess it wasn’t universally loved. The Telegraph: “Rarely have I had the misfortune to sit through such a relentlessly maudlin drool of clichés and sentiment. … As a poet of the proletarian past, Davies is no Bill Douglas or Dennis Potter. He has nothing of any profundity to say about time except that it passes.”

by ·Comments Off on Eight Men Out (1988, John Sayles)

A good, if depressing, baseball movie. Funny that it was made in the 80’s and not more recently – a writer today could make some good parallels to today’s baseball fans feeling cheated after the steroid scandals.

Sayles is good with ensembles, and he masterfully introduces most of the players and other characters mid-game at the beginning of the movie. The movie was high-quality throughout even if it didn’t blow me away. I thought each game of the world series was too montagey, though I don’t have a better suggestion of how to get through eight baseball games in a two-hour movie. Katy liked how it showed the strained personal relationships on the field when the team started underperforming – especially strained since some team members weren’t in on the fix and didn’t know why their teammates were playing such crappy ball. I also dug how the sports reporters kept scorecards on possible cheaters, gathering evidence, because who would know better than the reporters what constitutes a dodgy play? Funny how the small-time gamblers (Richard Edson and an under-used Christopher Lloyd) even testified at the trial, apparently having nothing to lose legally. The players were so screwed financially that they agreed to throw the series, and they were rewarded with a little money and with a lifetime ban from the sport.

John Cusack (fresh off Tapeheads) plays a neighborhood boy who grudgingly accepts the situation but tries not to look too bad in public, or get dragged down into the scandal. His teammates: Charlie Sheen (who directly followed this film with Major League), David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck) as a shame-filled pitcher, DB Sweeney (The Cutting Edge) as Shoeless Joe Jackson, Michael Rooker (Slither, star of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) as the lead schemer, and Gordon Clapp (Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven) as the frustrated catcher. Also money man Michael Lerner (the movie mogul in Barton Fink) and Comiskey (played by Clifton James of Cool Hand Luke, The Last Detail).

by ·2 Comments

“A film should never be an illustration of a book or a play; it should be itself.”

Welles is in a good place here – not a passive interview subject nor the hammy magician from F For Fake nor the self-important actor/director, but some happy role in between those. But I know Welles can be a suave, informative and entertaining fellow; what’s surprising here is that it’s a 90-minute Q&A, seemingly unedited (except when the camera ran out of film) without being full of stupid questions from the audience. The same day I watched this, Katy & I attended a Q&A with an author at the book festival at which ALL (or at least most) of the questions were stupid. Somehow, some university found a group who was familiar with The Trial (maybe they’d just watched it), interested in the conversation, and not just raising their hands to ask “what are your influences?” in order to get themselves on camera.

So, a good interview, full of valuable material. It’s inexcusable that this isn’t out on DVD alongside the film itself. Welles was making great DVD extras twenty years before there were DVDs.

by ·Comments Off on Branded To Kill (1967, Seijun Suzuki)

IMDB says:
“A hit-man, with a fetish for sniffing boiling rice, fumbles his latest job, putting him into conflict with his treacherous wife, with a mysterious woman eager for death and with the phantom-like hit-man known only as Number One.”

I say: “She was his wife??”

Crazypants movie, seems to have been semi-remade in Suzuki’s own even-crazier Pistol Opera (they share a writer). This one has four credited writers, but Suzuki seems to have paid the script little mind, leading to his firing from the studio.

Starring my favorite chipmunk-cheeked badass Jo Shishido, who I just watched in the same year’s A Colt Is My Passport.

Joe, the third-ranked hitman, busts around with new partner Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami of a couple Miyamoto Musashi movies), gets a contract to protect a dude, but Kasuga seems unstable.

Kasuga loses it and charges the fourth-ranked hitman in a tunnel, killing both of them.

Joe kills the second-ranked hitman next – I’m not sure if he was supposed to, or if there was any plan, but he sets the guy on fire. Joe returns home to his wife and snorts rice fumes. It gives him energy (AKA makes him horny). But she tries to kill him and runs off.

Next, Joe is hired by a mysterious girl with a funny nose named Misako (Anne Mari of The Killing Bottle and Mini Skirt Lynchers).

But she is confusing, aims a gun at him, and maybe wants to kill herself.

Joe kills his own wife, the guy he was protecting ends up dead, he fails a job for Misako when a butterfly lands on his rifle scope. The movie begins to confuse Joe excessively.

Shadowy, mysterious Number One (Koji Nanbara of The Human Condition I) begins to threaten Joe, saying he’s kidnapped Misako.

Joe checks the film, says “this can’t be right”:

Joe is set up, hides under a car for cover, dragging it along as a ludicrous shield. But he can’t escape Number One, who leads him to a boxing ring, where Joe accidentally shoots Misako, and either Joe or Number One or maybe both are killed.

John Zorn loves it:

Born in 1923 during the short-lived and quirky Taisho period in Japan, Suzuki inherited a powerful appetite for Haikara (modern style) that was tempered by his experiences in World War II. As the member of a meteorological unit, he was twice shipwrecked in the Philippines and Taiwan, and bore witness to atrocities we can only imagine. His nihilistic philosophy is quite apparent in this work—“Making things is not what counts: the power that destroys them is”—as a kind of playful irreverence that echoes the French New Wave that influenced Suzuki and his contemporaries.

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: