by ·Comments Off on A Constant Forge (2000, Charles Kiselyak)

So I’m with you here… Cassavetes was a great man who made great films. This doc is so convincing, in fact, that I want to give two movies I disliked some years ago (Chinese Bookie and Shadows) another shot. And there’s good footage: film clips, interviews with cast and crew, and behind-the-scenes stuff. And I understand if you’ve got that much good stuff you want to use it. But three and a half hours of pure Cassavetes love is an awful lot to take!

Good to see the actors from Faces thirty years later. Good to see Peter Falk… every story he tells is golden. And of course, good to see my favorite actress Gena Rowlands.

image

JC:
“In this country, people die at 21. They die emotionally at 21, maybe even younger now. For those of us who are lucky not to die at 20, we keep on going, and my responsibility as an artist is to help people get over 21. The films are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrains that provide a solution to how one can save pain. As people, we know that we are petty, vicious, violent and horrible, but my films make an effort to contain the depression within us and to limit the depression to those areas that we can actually solve. The resolution of the films is the assertion of a human spirit.”

by ·Comments Off on For A Few Dollars More (1965, Sergio Leone)

Zowie, a pip of a western, and not at all a sequel to A Fistful of Yojimbo like I’d feared. Thrilling action with all the close-ups and wide-shots, Morricone twang and badass tough guys we’d expect.

Clint, eight years before facing off against Briggs:
image

Clint is a steely young bounty killer out for heaps of money.

Lee, some six years after Ride Lonesome:
image

Lee is a steely older bounty killer out for revenge. Of course we do not know he’s out for revenge until the very end when it’s revealed that the music-box portrait chain he carries around belonged to his sister who was long ago killed by super-thug El Indio.

Gian Volontè of Hercules and the Captive Women, later in Le Cercle rouge and Sacco & Vanzetti:
image

The meaning of this musical/emotional prop is withheld until the final showdown, almost exactly like Charles Bronson’s harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West. Lee and Indio are shown to be excellent long-range shooters. Lee, however, is the Fastest Man In The West (making the outcome of the climactic shootout a foregone conclusion). I think Clint’s special skill is a supernatural awareness of his surroundings, knowing exactly where/who to shoot. Awesome movie, anyway.

image

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched January 2009

Flight of the Conchords: A Texan Odyssey
Short doc of the duo band at SXSW. Funny! Seen below massaging the feet of Peaches.
image

Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008, Nick Park)
This was as fast-paced as the action scenes in the Wallace & Gromit full-length, and packed full of jokes and puns. Our heroes are bakers now, and a former bread company model, now grown fat on breads and pastries, is out for revenge on the bakery world. She gets cozy with Wallace, plotting to murder him with a giant cartoon bomb (among other things) while Gromit and the woman’s terrified pet poodle try to ruin her plans. Lovely movie, probably inspired by the name of cowriter Bob Baker and/or voice actor Peter Sallis’s appearance in the movie Who Is Killing The Great Chefs of Europe. Must check out Nick Park’s series Shaun The Sheep.
image

Living in a Reversed World
Educational doc. Sadistic Austrian professor, trying to prove a point about perception, gets students to wear special mirror/prism glasses which reverse left/right or up/down and see if they can adjust. They can. He also puts goggles on a chicken, which I don’t think is a good idea.
image

The Contraption (1977, James Dearden)
Closeups of construction. What’s he building in there? What the hell… is he building in there? Turns out to be a giant mousetrap for our suicidal handyman. Dearden later made Matt Dillon thriller A Kiss Before Dying. Contraption-builder Richard O’Brien had lately been in Rocky Horror, would play Mr. Hand in Dark City. Tied for best short at the Berlin fest… this is pretty neat, but I wouldn’t have thought it an award-winner.
image

Cameras Take Five (2003, Stephen Woloshen)
Abstract hand-drawn animation set to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Liked it, not super busy, didn’t think people were doing stuff like this anymore.
image

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966, Hubleys)
John & Faith animate two short musical numbers to Spanish Flea and Tijuana Taxi. Not slick like the Doonesbury short, homemade-looking. Cute pieces though (predictably about a flea and a taxi). Beat out a Pink Panther short and an anti-smoking PSA for the oscar. Rough year for animation, I guess. Lost at Cannes to a documentary on Holland (not by Bert Haanstra).
image

The Tortoise and the Hare (1935, Wilfred Jackson)
Hare is kinda an asshole – supposedly his character was stolen by Warners as a prototype for Bugs Bunny. This plays like the other Silly Symphonies, not as good as the Three Little Pigs though.
image

A Perfect Place (2008, Derrick Scocchera)
Sharp b-w cinematography and two very dryly comic actors (Mark Boone Jr. of Memento & Thin Red Line and Bill Moseley of all the Rob Zombie films) make for a good movie. In the first second, MBJ “kills” an acquaintance who was cheating at cards, then they spend the next 25 min trying to dispose of the body. Not the usual over-the-top situations either, movie keeps it cool. I guessed early on that the cheat wasn’t really dead but that didn’t make it less enjoyable. Dig the theme song by Mike Patton.
image

MANT! (1993, Joe Dante)
Tracigally not a full feature. All the scenes shot for the film-in-a-film of Dante’s awesome Matinee were assembled into this short included with the laserdisc.
image

Three excellent shorts by Norman McLaren. Fiddle-de-dee (1947, painted to an upbeat fiddle tune), Boogie-Doodle (1948, drawn with pen to a piano boogie) and Serenal (1959, etched and hand-colored to a Trinidadian string quartet number)

Fiddle-de-dee:
image

Boogie-Doodle:
image

Serenal:
image

by ·Comments Off on The Wrestler (2008, Darren Aronofsky)

Supposedly Mickey Rourke’s big comeback film, but I first heard of Mickey Rourke in 2005’s Sin City, and I didn’t think three years was all that long a wait. Checking his imdb page, I’ve seen him in four other movies this decade so it’s not like he hasn’t been around. But these statements are made by the same kinds of people who didn’t see Johnny Depp in anything between Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean. Point is it’s a showcase film for Rourke, who’s rumored to be the same kinda washed-up aging broke druggie loser as his character. Does his acting shine in this? Oh yes: comeback achieved, awards deserved. Does the rest of the movie hold up? Not really, no.

First off, I knew this would be a smaller film after Aronofsky got himself into the shithouse with hyper-expensive personal epic The Fountain, but I didn’t realize he was following the new indie wave towards handheld follow-cam dramas. Seems about a sixth of the film was the back of Mickey Rourke’s head walking between rooms. There’s nothing here, not even in the Clint Mansell score, reminiscent of our ol’ Aronofsky. The man’s got a right to change, but by flushing his sense of style, he’s making it so the next time there’s “a film by D. Aronofsky” it’s not going to mean anything.

Written by The Onion’s Robert Siegel, and there’s some good comedy when Rourke’s supermarket boss Todd Barry is around, but the writing is kinda garbage overall. The attraction here is the performance, and less the acting and line-reading and emotion than the physicality, The Body of Rourke (oh, and the fine Springsteen song over the credits). Take that away, or give it to a lesser body (say, the early-rumored casting of The Body of Nicolas Cage) and you haven’t got a theatrical release, you’ve got something that dies on video… Jesus metaphors, stripper with heart of gold, overplayed/underwritten Evan Rachel Wood performance and all.

Oh, he dies at the end.

by ·Comments Off on The Animation Show 4 (2008)

Wow, remember the ambition of vol. 2? Those days are gone. I guess half of these were good, which is fine for a shorts program, but the bad ones were worse than ever.

A good one: oscar-nominated This Way Up:
image

Not worth going into: Corky Quakenbush’s claymation Yompi The Crotch-Biting Sloup and Dave Carter’s construction-paper Psychotown – each of which annoyed me the first time, then came back to annoy me two more times.

Voodoo:
image

Lame in the “let’s record a dull conversation then animate it” approach were Operator (man calls information and gets God’s number), John and Karen (relationship trouble between a penguin and polar bear) and Angry Unpaid Hooker (this and Psychotown are stupid enough to make me worry about The Animation Show’s future). Professor Nieto Show (class watches brazilian insects that play soccer) and Jeu (things spin and morph into each other kaleidoscopically, like a Gondry video but more pixellated) were pretty alright.

Blind Spot:
image

Bill Plympton’s Hot Dog is fine, but I’m ready for something new from him. Cocotte Minute (chickens race in a dangerous kitchen) and Blind Spot (old woman is blamed for deadly robbery because of poor security-camera placement) were inventive little violent-death shorts, and I liked Usavich (two rabbits take a totally mad car ride) much more than I should. Forgetfulness is an illustrated Billy Collins poem. I already can’t remember Burning Safari, something to do with monkeys and robots.

Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker:
image

My faves were Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker (cop arrives at an apartment for a noise complaint and gets confusing reactions from the residents), This Way Up (two undertakers have a hell of a time making their delivery – I liked the rube goldberg bit near the beginning better than the climactic trip through hell), Key Lime Pie (hardboiled tough guy with a weak heart is over the moon about pie) and of course PES’s Western Spaghetti.

Key Lime Pie:
image

by ·Comments Off on Chungking Express (1994, Wong Kar-Wai)

Movie seems to do everything you’re not supposed to do (shoot objects instead of the people who are talking, cast a superstar actress and never show her eyes, use tons of slow-mo without speeding up the camera, drop the entire plot and start a whole new movie halfway in) but does it with such romantic style that instead of being considered a wrongheaded failure, it influenced moviemaking for the next decade. Watched in gorgeous high-def (not represented by screenshots below).

Brigitte Lin had very different roles in this (in which she barely talks and never removes her wig and shades) and Ashes of Time in her final year as a film star before retiring. She’s a secret criminal here, helping foreigners pack their bags full of hidden drugs and get fake passports out of the country, getting threatened and chased, shooting a fella… it’s hard out here for Brigitte Lin.
image

Takeshi Kaneshiro (of House of Flying Daggers) plays sad Cop 223 (he’s the same sad cop in Fallen Angels), who got dumped by his girlfriend a month before his birthday, and plays a game involving nearly-expired canned pineapple imagining she’ll come back. He hangs around a fast food place chatting with the owner and hoping to catch a glimpse of Brigitte Lin, with whom he becomes obsessed without ever finding out about the criminal angle. Eventually Faye Wong starts working at the food joint and the movie shifts focus.
image

Tony “Tony 1” Leung (currently appearing in John Woo’s Red Cliff) is Cop 663 who also frequents the food stand, though we never see him and Cop 223 in the same scene, so they may as well have been the same character. He still has a girlfriend (a flight attendant, she gets some scenes) though he soon loses her. He certainly notices Faye Wong, talks with her, but only becomes interested in her towards the end when it’s too late.
image

Faye Wong was only in three films in the decade between this and 2046. She keeps herself busy being a billion-selling superstar musician. Here she bounces around filling orders to “California Dreaming” until she gets unhealthily obsessed with Tony 1, intercepts the keys his ex tried to return, and starts entering his apartment every day, cleaning, playing, accidentally flooding, dancing, hiding and substituting his stuff until he finally breaks out of his brooding fog and starts to notice. Soon as he does, she disappears to California for a year, returning for a sweet final scene at the food joint.
image

“Where do you want to go?”
“Wherever you want to take me.”

JULY 2019: Watched again, with Katy this time, on Criterion Channel, after I had “Dreams” stuck in my head for our whole HK trip.

by ·1 Comment

The Shooting (1967)

Awesome, mysterious western. Performances are understated except by Will Hutchins, who maybe tries too hard to be the stupid one, and Millie Perkins, who maybe tries too hard to be the unknowable badass.

Your comic relief: Hutchins of Merrill’s Marauders
image

Will is hanging out with friend Leland when Leland is shot to death by offscreen persons unknown. Later on, Warren “GTO” Oates rides up looking for Leland, and both of ’em get surprised by Millie, who hires ’em to come with her.

image

The movie never explicitly tells us that she’s looking for revenge on Warren’s evil twin brother and that the men are hired to help track him, and if it had told us it probably wouldn’t enjoy the same cult success. All the carefully hidden information keeps things exciting.

image

Fastest-gun-in-the-west Jack Nicholson trails them unseen for a long time, then rides openly with ’em after he’s discovered, just being a huge jerk. Starts to become clear that he and Millie are obsessed with something, and Warren and Will probably won’t make it home… then suddenly they’re hot on the trail of the brother, and a subliminal shootout leaves us wondering what just happened.

Kind of a haunting movie, well paced and shot by reliably weird cinematographer Gregory Sandor (Forbidden Zone, De Palma’s Sisters).

image

image

Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)

If you think about their relative effectiveness and beauty and straightforwardness of plot, this movie would seem like the cheapie add-on flick of the two (Hellman and Nicholson went into the desert to shoot a movie and exec-producer Roger Corman said “while you’re out there, why not shoot two movies”). But this one has more actors, more gunshots and more buildings burning down, so it was intended to be the real picture, and cult-classic The Shooting was the “aw hell, as long as we’re here” picture. Funny how things work out.

One of Harry Dean’s first credited movie roles:
image

Three plain ol’ regular-guy cowhands, not heroes or great gunfighters or brilliant problem-solvers, just plain-damn-ol’ guys, run into some bad dudes who just robbed a stagecoach. The bad dudes (led by eyepatch-sporting Harry Dean Stanton) concoct a story which our men see right through, but both decide to tolerate each other for the night. But oops, lawmen catch up with the baddies and assault their shack hideout assuming our fellas are part of the gang. Otis catches a bullet, so the other two, Vern (chewy Cameron Mitchell, then of Hell and High Water and House of Bamboo, later in Space Mutiny) and Wes (our writer Jack Nicholson, remarkably good at playing a regular guy) flee to the hills.

Otis (the good guy who gets killed) is played by the writer of sci-fi crap classic The Space Children.
image

The hills and the shack both prove hard to escape. Finally the shack is burned down, and the surviving criminals are hanged. Meanwhile, after some close calls with bullets and cliffs, our two guys find a ranch house populated by stump-choppin’ routine-livin’ dad George Mitchell (of Face of the Screaming Werewolf), his barely-there wife, and their daughter, 27-playing-18 Millie Perkins. Our guys hold ’em hostage planning to wait out the lawmen, trying not to offend or do harm while remaining threatening enough to be effective.

Rupert Crosse is credited as “indian joe” but I’m not so sure he’s Indian:
image

This is the best part of the movie, the tense waiting, since all the chases and gunfights are all pretty routine. Checkers are played, the horse stable is visited, and the family is told that our guys are gonna have to steal two horses to get away. When the lawman comes a-calling, George Mitchell tries to get sneaky, resulting in a final shootout which kills Mitchells George and Cameron (no relation?) and leaves Jack riding away (not into the whirlwind; there is no whirlwind).

image

by ·Comments Off on In Bruges (2008, Martin McDonagh)

“I hope your midget doesn’t kill himself. Your dream sequence will be fucked.”

Kinda darker than I thought it would be, even knowing it’s about hitmen. Lotta killing of kids, midgets and likeable main characters. Funny dialogue… can’t compare to Hot Fuzz, but what can?

Gleeson and Farrell are hit men hiding out (cuz Farrell accidentally shot a kid while killing a priest), sent to Bruges by boss man Raifffiennes, who it turns out wants Gleeson to kill Farrell. Gleeson decides to let him go and face the consequences, which are death by shooting then falling off a bell tower. A Raifff/Farrell shootout results in four bullets in C.F., one dead dwarf, one Raifff suicide, and a parting shot by Farrell guessing that if hell is like Bruges, he wants to live.

Along the way Farrell meets a pretty girl, wounds her skinhead boyfriend (star of L’Enfant, didn’t recognize him without all the blond), offends the landlady, and befriends the dwarf (rad, it’s the guy who played Howard The Duck). Dwarf is appearing in a local film with lots of dream sequences, Raifff has buncha dialogue about Bruges being a fairy-tale place, there’s some afterlife/purgatory business, and apparently it’s all a homage to Don’t Look Now, which I haven’t seen. Anyway, very enjoyable flick.

image