An early morning edition of everyone’s favorite blog column (well, at least no one has complained yet) with not much else to say, other than enjoy the reviews!

(February 13)

——The White Diamond (2004)——

Another Werner Herzog documentary, made previous to last year’s amazing Grizzly Man. This isn’t nearly as good as Grizzly Man, I think it captures a lot of the same magic that made Grizzly Man so damn entertaining to watch. Herzog always works with wonderful editors, structuring his stories in such a way to tell an amazingly compelling narrative through the non-linear aspects of life.

This movie is all about our obsession with flight, starting with a great, brief history of flight, followed by the story of a man who has created the White Diamond, a small airship shaped like a teardrop that he hopes will be maneuverable enough to easily navigate the treetops of the rain forest. He’s haunted by the death of a colleague in a previous airship, and one of the best tricks of the film is how Herzog holds back on telling us what happened until it is absolutely necessary to the narrative of the film. This is a very beautiful film, a very moving film, marred only by the fact that real life didn’t really leave the story with a very exciting climax. The airship works, the conflict disappears, and the focus shifts to the beauty of nature and of life. Which is great in its own right. Just doesn’t make this must see.

(SEE)

——The Matador (2005)——

Wow, is this movie fun! Pierce Brosnan is playfully fun and amazing, playing off of his James Bond persona as an international hit man who happens to be in the middle of having a midlife crisis. In Mexico City on a job he meets Greg Kinnear’s ordinary businessman in a bar and somehow manages to become with friends with him, making him the first friend Brosnan’s character has ever actually had. The movie is all about these two actors playing off of each other and just having fun, and boy do they and everyone else have fun.

Brosnan is a jerk, he’s funny, he’s obnoxious, he’s endearing. The direction and writing are both flashy and incredibly hilarious, spilling out one insanely amusing situation after another, surprising you with how far they will go for a great joke. Nothing feels forced, everything feels right. This is one of my favorite films of the year. It was kind of lost in the end of the year shuffle, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t search it out right now.

(MUST SEE)

(February 14)

——Scanners (1980)——

This is that David Cronenberg movie with the exploding head in the first fifteen minutes that made him famous. Like with all of his movie though, the grotesque gore is only what puts the butts in the seats. Cronenberg somehow manages to make his films so much MORE than just a scary effects show. Scanning is a genetic mutation that causes someone to be able to read the minds of others with such a force that prolonged exposure to “scanning” can cause nose bleeds, minor telekinesis and at the extreme, head explosion. One Scanner (oh, I love you, Michael Ironside) is going around killing all of the other Scanners as a sort of corporate assassin, while another one is recruited by the rival corporation to find and kill him. (Astute readers will probably pick up on the fact that there is more to this movie than meets the eye by my repeated usage of the words corporate and corporation.) Nothing is really as it seems, and as Cronenberg is apt to do this film is about our inner struggle with the outer world, the mental becoming physical and vice versa. A lot of good questions are asked, which I won’t really ruin for you here by going into greater detail about them. Just see the movie.

(MUST SEE)

——Sabata (1969)——

This is a fairly unspectacular Spaghetti Western starring Lee Van Cleef as Sabata, an amazing shot gunslinger, who stops a bank safe heist only to get wrapped up in the problem of who wanted it stolen and why. It hits pretty much all of the standard Spaghetti Western twists, turns and cliches without really adding anything new to the genre, even though it tries damn hard to be unique. Nothing, other than Lee Van Cleef’s acting, really did it for me. It’s kind of fun. It’s safe. It’s not exactly worth watching other than for mild amusement though.

(MISS)

(February 16)

——Coup de Torchon (1981)——

Every once and a while you blindly stumble into a movie that just completely knocks your boots off. Coup de Torchon I just impulsively bought on a whim based on a plot description that wasn’t more than a sentence long. Here is that sentence, which also appears on the back of the DVD case:

“An inspired rendering of Jim Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280, Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) deftly transplants the story of an inept police chief-turned-heartless killer and his scrappy mistress from the American South to the French West Africa.”

I think that’s a pretty damn good summary of the film, and yet it doesn’t even come close to letting you in on what you are about to experience. The film opens sadly comical with Lucien, our police chief, being the poor shlub whom everyone takes advantage of and takes a crap on. This could be because he has never actually arrested anyone, his jail is empty, his wife has a very oddly physical relationship with her “brother”, and because he lets the local pimps make fun of him and beat him because they kick back to him the bribes he lives off of. After about 30 minutes of this you start to get the feeling that this film is going to be really tragically sad, and then all of the sudden BLAM!, the movie hits you with one of those visceral surprises that I just live to see in film.

Lucien’s boss suggests that the solution to his problem with the two pimps is that if they push him, he just has to push back twice as hard. He does this while making fun of and mocking Lucien at the same time. So Lucien goes to the two pimps who are drinking on the banks of a river, pulls out his gun and makes them sing a bawdy song for him. Just when you think that that is his “revenge” against him the film pulls the rug out from underneath you. Lucien shoots them anyway, calmly pushes their bodies into the river, and then proceeds to let his superior implicate himself unknowingly for the crime. Lucien is suddenly a different man, getting back at all of the others who have walked over him.

That could be a pretty decent movie in its own right, right there. But what is amazing about this film is that the movie only starts there. Not everything that Lucien does is morally OK with the audience. Instead of being a harbinger of justice, Lucien is more like a product of the system of apathy and cruelty the colonial power of France has created in Africa. The moral justification comes from everyone’s contribution to a sick society, one that is destroying itself, and where no one is really safe from the ramifications, including Lucien himself. The actor who plays Lucien surprised me with his almost karma-like induced calm and quiet acceptance of how things are. This movie just unfolds with so many layers. It got me thinking quite a bit. I was just captivated by every minute of the movie. It’s humorous, it’s shockingly violent, it’s philosophically deep, it has something for everyone. This is a rare

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

(February 17)

——The Leopard Man (1943)——

The first of two Val Lewton horror flicks I’ve seen recently, I’d have to say as interesting and rich as this film is, it is the lesser of the two. That’s because the plot just doesn’t tie together that great and the conclusion is a little absurd. The film is about a panther (yeah, I know, it’s a panther, kept by a man who calls himself the “Leopard Man” of the title, which is really more symbolic of the film, as you’ll see later anyway) that escapes a poorly planed PR stunt in New Mexico and then kills a Mexican girl in the streets. More girls start dying, apparently by the same panther, but the PR guy who let the thing get loose in the first place believes something else is amiss (using much of the same logic that the Scooby gang does) and that foul play is afoot. And of course it is, because then there really wouldn’t be much of a movie now, would there?

The movie spends too much of its sparse 66 minutes following around a new girl before she ultimately dies and is replaced by another new girl, leaving little time for any real plot, character development, or story. What the movie really does get right is the details. On what is obviously a very low budget this little New Mexican town still manages to be richly detailed with all sorts of little things that build up the quality and tension of the film, things that to me now see to be Val Lewton touchstones of his films. Even if the story doesn’t really catch your interest the exotic details will, creating the feeling of a town you’ve never seen before and want to know more about (much like they do in several other of his films, most notably I Walked with a Zombie (1943) on a plantation filled with voodoo in the Caribbean and Isle of the Dead (1945) on a Greek Island beset by plague during the war). I really wish we did get to see a little more.

(MISS)

(February 18)

——Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess (1971)——

This was a very interesting film. As I started watching it I thought I would end up rating it a Miss. Then as I got further into it I was like, well, maybe a See. By the end of the film though I had no doubt in my mind that it was Must See. It was an odd progression of thought. At first I was disappointed because the movie wasn’t nearly as trashy as I was led to believe it would be. That sentence on its own can look a little weird. But I didn’t expect big things from this movie. I wanted crazy violence and loads of nudity. That’s what the description of the film set I bought (The Pinky Violence 4 DVD Collection) made it sound like. And I’ve seen some crazy, crazy Japanese girl violence pictures before. This wasn’t one of them. But as I got deeper into the movie I realized that it had a lot of heart. It was oddly moving in how well it was made. I really dug it.

Worthless to Confess was the fourth and last movie in Delinquent Girl Boss series, and according to the liner notes this was the best of the bunch. I have no idea what the whole title refers to, so don’t even ask. It was probably some exploitive title that looked flashy on a Japanese poster. The movie is about a group of delinquent girls who meet and become “sisters” in a juvenile detention center. The main character, Oshida, was given a toy figure from Katayama’s father to pass on to her, but Katayama refused to take it, so when she gets out Oshida returns the figure back to her father. He looking for a surrogate daughter to replace the one he’s lost and she looking for a father figure to replace her dead parents, she agrees to work in his auto repair shop. Meanwhile Katayama has become the girl of a worthless yakuza who is constantly losing money gambling, and she steals her father’s official seal in order to have her father pay off the debt. The mob meanwhile wants his business. Oshida tries to intervene but can’t prevent events from going into motion.

There are quite a few minor characters in the film and a lot of subplots I didn’t (and won’t) get into. Fortunately none of that feels like too much, as the subplots are deftly handled and the character actors chosen to play the numerous characters are all in their own way very memorable. I was amazed at how many of them stuck with me, and how many of them made me want to see other movies that they’ve been in.

Tragedy ultimately becomes the catalyst for the startling conclusion to the film, the only major action sequence in the whole movie. The five female friends join together to take revenge on the mob boss, strutting to his hangout in matching red dusters that they peal off to reveal wound bandage torsos and matching red cane swords. They then proceed to kill at least five times the number of thugs ever shown to actually be part of the gang. Doesn’t matter. The whole thing is just amazingly mindblowing. The whole movie just works together so well. This one is definitely

(MUST SEE)

——The Ghost Ship (1943)——

Interesting thing about this movie: that title? Yeah, there is not a single ghost in the entire film. Instead (and I love this) the Ghost Ship is a metaphor for the state of a crew whose captain has a homicidal fixation on “authority”. (I have to stop here to state that the name of the actor who plays the captain makes me giggle like a schoolboy every time I think of it. Richard Dix, AKA Dick Dix.)

There are a lot of parts to this movie that just don’t work very well. I’m thinking mainly of the very wooden dialogue that just sounds silly most of the time, no matter how serious you are trying to be. I mentioned that the captain had a fixation on authority? Yeah, you’d know that because he says the word authority like fifty times every time he speaks, and when other characters talk about him they can’t help saying the word authority fifty more times. This guy seriously has a hard-on for authority. The premise of the film is that he takes this fixation to homicidal degrees to prove that people will accept it because it is just a part of authority. The new fresh-out-of-school officer on board doesn’t agree, and that’s where the tension flares up. There is also a mute on board who we learn what he’s thinking through voice-over. Very silly, silly, silly voice-overs.

With all of that said, what this Val Lewton produced horror film actually does right is create oodles of tension onboard the ship. Even before things start going wrong, over the entire course of the film tension has been progressively been built and stored up. The tone is very creepy and claustrophobic. The pieces of the puzzle just fall together perfectly. So even despite all of the silliness, the film still worked for me. I’d recommend it.

(SEE)