(February 27)

——Pulse (2001)——

Pulse is a very scary Japanese horror flick that has been remade into an American film that will be out sometime this spring. This is definitely one of the better Japanese horror films I’ve seen, creating real fear not through gore or shocks but through mood and careful staging. The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, has an extremely good handle on space on and off the screen, building fear up by seemingly showing us everything in a room only to reveal something hidden we missed before.

The plot is about ghosts who come down to earth because there is no more room in heaven, who end up killing the living. They find people through the internet (then still a relatively new concept) shown walking around aimlessly in a lonely room, only to get into the head of the person watching and take over their will to live. The first third of the film is extremely well done, the second third can’t really top what it introduces, but the final third takes the film into an unforeseen apocalyptic finale that helps saves the film from being a minor work. A lot of the images are extremely striking and unforgettable (so much so that I suggest you close your eyes when the American trailer comes on) and this one definitely deserves a viewing for those fans of the genre.

(SEE)

——eXistenZ (1999)——

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this David Cronenberg movie, really up until the end. But what an end it is, one giant mindfuck that you’ll be talking about for a while.

This is another movie about reality and virtual reality, what is real and what isn’t real and how do we know the difference, coming out in the same year as The Matrix, which obviously got a lot more of the hype. Still, because this is Cronenberg, you’re in for a pretty good ride. The plot follows Jennifer Jason Leigh as a video game programmer who has just created a new game called eXistenZ, which seems to have marked her for death because of how real it is. Jude Law is the PR man/bodyguard who flees with her, but has never played one of her games before. Basically you get a port shot into your spine that links via an umbilical cord to the game pod, which is practically a living being. Law goes into eXistenZ with Leigh to see if her baby is still OK, and they get caught up in a noir-ish mystery that seems to spill over into the real world, making them question what is and isn’t real. And then there is that ending I spoke of.

It’s good stuff, and well worth a look.

(SEE)

——Vice Squad (1982)——

This is a surprisingly entertaining and well made exploitation flick about the vice squad in LA at the start of the 80’s. Our main character is Princess, a Hollywood hooker with a little girl she loves who is looking to get out of LA and start over in San Diego. One of the reasons for that is Ramrod, a vicious pimp who mutilates and beats one of Princess’ best friends to death with a pimp stick (a folded up metal clothes hanger). A good cop on the vice squad wants to bring Ramrod in and enlists Princess to trap him on tape so that they can arrest him. They end up getting him, but he breaks free of the cops bringing him in and goes out after Princess. All of the vice squad are mobilized to find either Ramrod or Princess before he finds her.

For a movie about pimps and prostitutes, this movie surprisingly has no nudity. It does have lots of sexually explicit dialogue and is quite brutal. It’s also a lot of fun for people who like this sort of movie. One sample line of dialogue has a black female member of the vice squad tell a pimp, “Blink, motherfucker, and you die in the dark,” as she points a gun to his head. I’d check this one out.

(SEE)

(February 28)

——In the Mood For Love (2000)——

While I greatly admire Wong Kar-Wai’s work (I’ve now seen this and last year’s 2049) it hasn’t quite hit me on a level where I love it. One thing I do have to say, his films are some of the most beautiful ever filmed. He has an incredibly good appreciation for color and composition, tricks like slow motion and music is always well used. He uses magnificent actors who bring quite some weight to their roles. Everything works well and is well made, and yet I just don’t love it. I don’t know why. Maybe I just need more time with the material.

The story is about a man and a woman who rent rooms next to each other, both married to distant spouses (who are revealed to actually be sleeping with each other). The two start out as just good neighbors and then friends, and finally they get to that place where they would normally become lovers, but they just can’t bring themselves to be cheaters, despite the fact that they both know that they are already being cheated on. They are too good a people, so they suffer in silence. Wong Kar-Wai uses his camera and cleaver editing to show their love for each other and show the barriers in between them, as well as to play with time and our perceptions of reality. We jump to false assumptions just as they are afraid their neighbors might. It’s worth checking out for anyone interested.

(SEE)

——Running Scared (2006)——

From the director of The Cooler (2003) comes this good enough noir thriller about a man trying to find a gun he was suppose to get rid of, one that had the mob had used to kill a crooked cop. The neighbor’s kid had seen him put it away and stole it to shoot his abusive, John Wayne loving Russian father. The kid goes on a perverse sort of odyssey through the cities dirty underbelly while our main character frantically follows his trail, since both the mob and the cops are after that missing gun. If anyone other than him finds it first, he’s done for.

The movie doesn’t always work, but at its heart it is just a fun, down and dirty B-movie moving at a million miles per hour. The movie doesn’t want to stop to catch its breathe, which is good, because if it did you might wonder if any of this was even remotely plausible. It doesn’t matter is the point. Having a good time at the movies is.

(SEE)

——You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man (1939)——

This is easily one of the worst films you could ever see. That is unless you want to see a movie for W.C. Fields comedic stylings, only to half of the plot and dialogue revolve around a ventriloquist and his dummy (who apparently was even in a feud with Fields!). If you don’t find ventriloquism creepy, there is just something wrong with you, and there is absolutely no reason why we need to see this much of it. Field seems to just barely be in his own movie.

The one bright spot in this film are those few places where Fields is allowed to just let himself go free. If you do ever feel the need to see this, it is probably because you want to see the sequence where he plays ping pong with another party at his daughter’s wedding. This was absolutely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Too bad that couldn’t be said about the rest of this train wreck.

(AVOID)

(March 1)

——At the Circus (1939)——

I was tempting fate to watch another comedy from 1939 about the circus so soon after watching You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man, but thankfully I wasn’t burned by the Marx brothers. This is one of their better films, very funny, where the plot is just there to give some framework to the brothers’ inspired wackiness. The direction by Edward Buzzell is quite competent and even beautiful at times, while the Marx brother’s just stick to what they’re good at, making this their best film since A Night at the Opera.

(MUST SEE)

(March 3)

——Pride & Prejudice (2005)——

No one is going to make me a poster boy for Jane Austin fiction. And yet, I loved this movie. Of all of the amazingly nice things I could say about this film, the first has to be Keira Knightley’s performance as Elizabeth Bennet. She’s witty, opinionated, stubborn, full of life and amazingly beautiful. Knightley was just made for the camera, and never before has this been more true than in this film. The rest of the cast is equally as wonderful in their walls, and props must go out to Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy, who manages to bring just the right amount of depth to the character to make him a cad and a romantic heartthrob all at the same time. The first shot of him in the film is just perfect. He’s walked into a party beneath what he is used to, filled with people he doesn’t know. He looks completely out of place. He reminded me a bit of an emo rocker, well dressed with unkempt hair, looking moody as hell.

Beyond all of that the film is just magnificently made. The cinematographer deserves an award for this one, because I was constantly in awe of how beautiful everything looked. There is a deftness and sureness to the camera movement that brings you right into the world of the film. I say this is one of the best films of the year.

(MUST SEE)

——The Ice Harvest (2005)——

Those looking for a pretty delicious modern noir to wrap their noodle around need look no further than this film, directed by Harold Ramis and starring John Cusack. An interesting noir setup, the film starts right after the job where Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton steal 2 million from the mob, leaving the actual film to deal with what Cusack does Christmas Eve during the ice storm that has put the hold on them immediately leaving with the cash. What that means is plenty of drinking, trips to numerous strip clubs, and just a dash of noir double crosses to keep things interesting and rolling along.

Cusack is a mob lawyer with the brain to plan the heist but not the balls. Thornton has the balls but not the idea. An uneasy alliance develops between the two of them, after Thorton convinces Cusack that he should hold onto the money for the night.

Cusack hits the town, pleased with himself, until he finds out that the mob is looking for him. Thus starts our noir-ish plot, the details of which I won’t ruin for you. I will mention that at one point in the evening he meets a drunk Oliver Platt in a bar, the man who married his ex-wife. What’s really notable about this is that instead of hating Platt’s character they’re more like best friends. It seems that Cusack has long ago forgiven him, because really Platt was the one who got the raw end of the stick. Platt plays the role perfectly, as the drunk jerk just having a great time being drunk.

(SEE)

(March 5)

——Ride the High Country (1962)——

This first entry in the recently released Sam Peckinpah’s The Legendary Westerns Collection didn’t quite grab me at first. It starts off a little quaint for a Peckinpah film and I was starting to wonder if this was just a wasted film before his later greatness. What hit me first was the soundtrack, easily the weakest part of this film and typical of so many American films in the 60’s before the American New Wave counterculture hit and soundtracks stopped telegraphing every emotion. Also, the first half-hour or so doesn’t even hint at where the film might be going. I at first thought the film was simply a tired retread of a standard story of two washed up ol’ timer cowboys on one last job in the dying days of the Western.

Silly rabbit. Even if this is an early Peckinpah film, it is still a Sam Peckinpah film. He manages to hide unsettling violence in places that even the Production Code of the time couldn’t do anything about.

So here is the story: An aging cowboy staying on the right side of the law gets hired to transport gold for the prospectors from a mine to the bank. He’s told there is to be a quarter of a million dollars worth of gold there. He needs help for this job, and in town he bumps into an old friend running a scam at the town fair. His friend suggests a third man, a young punk, also working scams, and quite taken with the ladies. The two of them plan on stealing the gold from the bank, but if they can they want to bring the first man in on it with them. So far the story is looking pretty predictable.

On their way up the mountain they camp down at a farm run by a bible thumping father that we discover married a harlot, and his beautiful daughter, who he doesn’t let out of his sight and makes wear her hair short to keep away undue attention from men. That doesn’t stop her from still being beautiful, something the young con man doesn’t fail to notice. The father, however, notices that. When the men leave, unsurprisingly the girl follows them, as she’s engaged to one of the prospectors.

That is where the movie gets interesting. The man she is suppose to marry isn’t exactly the nice guy she thought he was. They get married at a whorehouse, after which her new husband and brothers try to rape her. The young con man and our hero rush to her rescue and take her away, during which process the young man realizes that the old man might not really be that bad a guy. He still tries to steal the gold with our hero’s friend though (which has turned out to be more like $25,000 instead of $250,000). Tries being the operative word.

The brothers come looking for their bride, which leads to the brutal showdown and the revalation of what these men are really made of. It’s good stuff. I wouldn’t say this was as good as his later stuff, but this is still pretty fine filmmaking from Peckinpah.

(SEE)