(June 5)

——Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1974)——

This is quite the interesting addition to the women in prison genre. It promises a lot. And it pretty much delivers. Obviously this isn’t exactly a movie for everyone. Ilsa is the camp commandant of a Dr. Mengala type Nazi experiment camp. They use hot Jewish girls in experiments to test the human body’s limits when it comes to torture and disease. The men take care of the camp and occasionally are ushered into Ilsa’s bedroom, where any man who cannot satisfy her gets his balls snipped off.

Our two main characters (other than Ilsa, played to the T by Dyanne Thorne) are a woman who refuses to scream under torture (who Ilsa uses as an example in her test hypothesis that women can withstand more pain than men under torture) and an American who has the superhuman ability to control when he comes. His scenes are some of the funniest, mainly because of their blatant promotion of the virility of the American man. Patriotic music even starts playing when he describes his magical ability to the other men. Ilsa, surprised that he can outlast even her, gradually becomes his sex slave, instead of the other way around.

The inmates plan an escape. The Nazis torture lots of people for our amusement. And that’s the whole plot, folks! I was surprised though by the originality of concept for the movie and its ability to deliver on the goods. The torture sequences are quite realistic and gory, and the nudity is rampant and abundant. Everyone has big breasts, and they find numerous (unlikely) reasons to lose the shirts. Ilsa’s two Aryan henchwomen whip two prisoners topless for one scene. Why topless? Got me. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

(SEE)

——Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)——

The last part of Chan Wook Park’s Vengeance trilogy doesn’t disappoint, although fans who have only seen OldBoy might be a little taken aback at the slight change of style between this film and the last. Don’t worry, there are still some scenes of extreme violence in it. But this one is much more contemplative, spending just has much time worrying about redemption as it is vengeance.

A woman is imprisoned for kidnapping and murdering a little boy. Although she did have a part to play in the kidnapping the murder was actually done by another man, who threatened her own daughter with the same treatment if she did not comply. She spends 13 years playing the part of the youthful, religious innocent, all the while making friends on the inside that she will employ later for her vengeance on this man. It starts out with a pretty standard vengeance plot, not unlike Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion. Things get complicated though once she meets her daughter. Then she finds out what the man she wants to kill did during those years that she was imprisoned. Suddenly things are bigger than just her own sense of well being. I’m trying to write around the twist of the end without giving it away. I will say that there was one sequence that I totally wasn’t expecting that just twisted me up in knots. It was just truly heartbreaking.

I’m a big fan of OldBoy and the movies coming out of Korea right now. I was kind of expecting to be let down after how cool OldBoy was, but luckily my fears were not justified. This is a different movie, but no less good.

(MUST SEE)

——Fata Morgana (1969)——

I imagine that if you were hopped up on all sorts of drugs when watching this, like many were when it first came out, that you’d find it really interesting. Be warned though, this documentary from Werner Herzog is nothing like his later Lessons of Darkness aside from the fact that they have similar imagery and beautiful photography. This is a weird movie. It makes no sense. It’s totally avante garde and will definitely test your patience. The movie is called the mirage, but my sister and I were watching it, going “Where the hell are all of the mirages?” Instead you get lots of long shots of desert villages while 60’s folk music plays on the soundtrack and a weird narrator reads from the Mayan creation myth. Fucked up? Yes. Worth seeing fucked up? Hell no.

(AVOID)

——Tom Yum Goong (2005)——

Despite some of the worst action movie acting you are likely to ever see, including many sequences where Thai actors are forced to speak phonetically in English for no good reason, this semi-sequel to last year’s Ong Bak still manages to be one of the coolest frickin’ action movies I have ever seen. This movie takes action to a whole new level. This movie is just unbelievable. My jaw hit the floor so many times I lost count. If you like action you owe it to yourself to check this movie out.

The plot has Tony Jaa acting as protector with his father of two elephants, which have a special religious significance in Thailand. Some poachers kill his father though and steal the elephants, forcing him to Australia to find out where in the black market they have been taken. That’s about it for plot. Not too deep. It’s all the set-up you need though. These guys just keep raising the bar on what a stunt team can do, avoiding any and all use of CGI in return for doing as many live stunts as they can to keep it all as real as possible.

Here is a sample of what you will find: flying knees and elbows through doors and windows. A fight where Jaa breaks literally like 50 men’s arms and legs, piling up bodies all around him. A fight between himself and a crew of skateboarders, inline skaters, bikers, motorcycles and ATVs. A cool high speed boat chase. Fights against guys with swords, whips, cappeara fighting, and extremely tall muscular body building giants. And then there is my personal favorite. If you’ve seen Hard Boiled, you probably remember the remarkable unbroken shot where the heroes shoot their way through two floors of a hospital. Like that, there is a shot in Tom Yum Goong where Jaa fights his way up a giant spiral staircase, fighting dozens of men up five stories, without a single cut! There is a serious “oh crap” moment when you finally take in and realize what you just saw.

This is only available as a bootleg right now, but still, I think this is absolutely

(MUST SEE)

(June 6)

——Body Double (1984)——

This is one of those films you are either really going to get into or else you just don’t get it. Brian De Palma with this film gives us one of his most extreme Hitchcockian mash-ups, Rear Window and Vertigo mixed with Frankie Goes to Hollywood music videos and pornography. If that last sentence perked you up, then just maybe this movie is for you.

A struggling actor gets kicked off a cheesy vampire movie set because of his claustrophobia only to go home and catch his wife with someone else. His life is basically shit. A friend of a friend bumps into him, hears his story, and then mentions that he has a place that he agreed to house sit, but can’t, because he has an acting gig in Seattle. It’s a swank pad that just happens to have the best striptease view inside a rich woman’s house in the city. He becomes obsessed with the woman, only to notice a creepy Indian stalking around her. So he begins following her. Is he following for the woman’s own good, or is he stalking her because of the stalker?

Let’s just say that some bad things happen. Our actor friend then discovers a connection between all of this and a pornstar (Melanie Griffith), who he decides he needs to talk to. He doesn’t just walk up to her and tell her what he wants, though. No. That would be too easy. Instead he gets himself a role in, to my knowledge, the first (and only) porno music video. Turning yourself into a pornstar to crack a mystery? Now that’s dedication.

The whole thing is ridiculous and anyone familiar with Vertigo and Rear Window will probably be going crazy with how De Palma twists those familiar stories for his own film (if you have seen those movies, you can probably guess how it all is going to end (kinda) before too long). Except De Palma injects those formulas with all sorts of nudity and extreme violence (including one clever use of a giant drill). Heck, during the final credits De Palma even shows for those who still don’t know how a body double works, in all of its close-up glory. This is a wild wacky ride. If you generally like the other messed up stuff I recommend, you’ll probably love this.

(MUST SEE)

——The Good Thief (2003)——

Neil Jordan’s update of Melville’s Bob le Flambeur is a little bit different but equally as good, and for me on second viewing it becomes the equivalent of cinematic comfort food. It’s one of those films you watch for the pleasure of watching a film. It’s not deep or complex. It just gives you a quick jolt of extremely good feeling. It’s a tight, well made and fun heist movie that proves the old adage that it is not the destination but the journey that matters.

Bob (Nick Nolte) is a chronic gambler and heroin addict, at the end of his luck with both addictions. He’s not your typical addict though. He’s rather a pretty nice guy, all into saving a Russian girl from a life of prostitution and chum chummy with the cop that is trying to bring him in. When the ultimate heist of a Monte Carlo casino falls into his lap, Bob cleans himself up and pulls together an Ocean’s Eleven-type team to pull of the theft of the priceless paintings that line the casino’s walls. Unlike Ocean’s Eleven, even though the film seems to be all about the heist, it’s actually about something different all together. Le Flambeur translates to The Gambler, and that coupled with Neil Jordan’s title give you a little idea of what the film is really all about. This is a redemption tale for Bob, and the twist ending (which I won’t spoil here) revolves entirely on luck instead of on his skill in planning out every detail of the heist. The ending is just great. I guarantee you won’t see it coming. Bad luck can be good luck. Remember that.

Neil Jordan brings lots of skill to this fairly straightforward on paper movie, working with a great cinematographer that just fills the frame with all sorts of beautiful colors. The script is also pretty great, focusing deftly on the characters instead of the heist. There are all sorts of juicy things for Nick Nolte to do, giving him inconsequentially one of his career best performances. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a great movie.

(MUST SEE)

——Lacombe, Lucien (1974)——

This is only my second Louis Malle film, but I think he is fast becoming a favorite of mine. Watching this film, I think you will be startled by how effortlessly good it all seems. Malle does an amazing job of telling a balanced story about a very taboo subject in France: the role of the French as the Nazis’ secret police in Vichy France. His main character, Lucien Lacombe, isn’t an evil person, he’s a normal farm boy, but the film shows how such a boy (and in turn, many of his countrymen) could easily come to do evil things.

In a normal world Lucien would be quite content living the life of a farmer. He takes a little too much pleasure in killing animals, but it’s only out of his understanding of necessity that he does so. This wasn’t a normal world though, the height of WWII, and he has become bored with new life as a hospital orderly. He wants to see some action. He goes to his local Resistance leader, his old teacher, and announces that he wants to join up. The teacher turns him down, presumably because of his intelligence. Later he just happens to stumble into the barracks of the (German) police, where he rats out his old teacher, not out of anger or revenge but because he’s discovered that he knows something that the police don’t. Lucien is quite detached from the suffering that happens all around him. Like the slaughtering of a chicken for dinner, he just takes what’s going on around him as a fact of life. The police recruit him, seeing in him a willing worker.

When his mentor takes him to a Jewish tailor to get him his first suit, Lucien makes an odd friendship with the old man because of his beautiful young daughter. Lucien lacks any social graces, instead freely using his status as a German policeman in a hidden Jewish man’s house to do whatever he pleases. Lucien is such an odd character. He does horrible, evil things to his fellow countrymen. And yet Malle does everything but make him into a horrible, evil character. He has a boy’s mentality, not a man’s. He neglects to see that he is exploiting the Jewish family because he honestly thinks he’s in love, although probably not in the way most of the rest of us would think of being in love. He’s just a boy playing out a game. The inexperienced actor playing Lucien brings that quality amazingly to the screen. That inexperience shows in how he naturally reacts to things, without any of the trip-ups that a trained or more experienced actor might fall into. Just watching him act is a joy unto itself in this movie, a movie within a movie.

The film is spellbinding to watch. I couldn’t unglue my eyes from the screen. There are so many more levels to the film that I haven’t gotten into because I’m lazy and tired. I will say that this film is worth getting. You might as well just get the whole Criterion Malle boxset, though, because I really doubt that the other film that I haven’t seen yet is going to suck.

(MUST SEE)

——Coup de Grace (1976)——

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t quite dig my first Volker Schlondorff film. Maybe it was the wrong movie at the wrong time, maybe I just didn’t like it, I don’t know. It was all right, well made and all, but I didn’t really get into it at any point. I don’t really know what else to say.

The film is set in 1919 on the Eastern front as the Germans fight a losing battle against the Communists. Two officers make their way to a villa/castle, one of the men’s childhood home, where his sister great them. She’s been taking care of the soldiers stationed there while at the same time holding sympathies for the Communists, who are her friends. Her love is to her brother’s friend though, a sexually repressed soldier who wants nothing to do with love when there is work to be done. She constantly professes her love for him only to be rebuked again and again, forcing her into more and more dangerous behavior and sexual partners. At the end, the two of them meet surprisingly as enemies. And yet she still holds out her love for him.

The movie is shot beautifully in black and white, well acted, well written, and well directed, and yet I just didn’t get into it. Perhaps it was the film’s bleak atmosphere, seen too soon after another better war movie, being the eighth movie I’d seen in two days. The combination of all of those factors maybe just burned me out. I dunno. As of right now, though, I’d have to give this one a Ben M for

(MISS)

(June 7)

——Fearless (2006)——

Supposedly Jet Li’s final Kung Fu movie, if that is true, he goes out with a bang. The story is actually pretty standard Shaw Brothers stuff, filled out with great choreography and a huge production budget. The story takes place as the Europeans divide up China and destroy the national pride of its people. A tournament is set up to find the best fighter in the world, and Jet Li steps up to give China some of its pride back. That’s the frame of the story, but the film is really more about how he got there.

His father was a kung fu master who lost a duel for a reason the young boy couldn’t understand, as his father didn’t want him growing up to be a fighter. Of course he vowed to become the greatest fighter anyway, and in doing so achieved his dream at the cost of becoming arrogant and foolish, missing out on Spiderman’s great message of “With great power comes great responsibility.” There is a great accident of misinformation that causes him to go into self imposed exile, where he spends 10 years living namelessly with some humble farmers. This teaches him the lesson he needed to learn about what it really means to be a master of kung fu (of course) so that when he finally goes back to his hometown and starts fighting again, it is for all of the right reasons.

It’s one of those heartwarming redemption tales, that probably might feel a little trite if it wasn’t filled out with Jet Li’s impressive skills as a martial artist. After films like this and Unleashed, why is he retiring again? This guy is making some of the best movies of his career! Fans of kung fu movies watch these films for the same reason fans of Fred Astaire watch his films: for the perfect combination of the athletic and artistic. You want to see these guys do what they do because they make it look so effortless, and yet so impossible for the rest of us. Go out and pick up your bootleg copy before it (finally) comes to theaters in the USA, because for anyone who loves their kung fu, this one is

(MUST SEE)

(June 8)

——The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967)——

For a movie with the word “massacre” in the title, this film is remarkably dry and clinical. It goes through the events preceding the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre like a boring documentary would, with an announcer telling us all about the numerous characters in such a unexciting way so as to ruin any surprise the film might have had to its conclusion for anyone who didn’t already know the story. There are some good performances from some great character actors like Jason Robards as Al Capone and George Segal as a hitman, but it’s not enough to save the film. I couldn’t really care less by the end.

(MISS)

(June 10)

——Battle of Britain (1969)——

A few of the special effects are a little obvious. What do you expect though? This is way before Star Wars upped the bar. And there really isn’t much of a plot to the movie. It feels much more like a documentary than a rip-roaring yarn. What little story is developed is quickly pushed away when a new battle occurs. But what battles they are. Seeing a hundred planes all in the sky at once swooping in on one another will take your breath away. This movie has some of the most beautiful dogfights that I’ve ever seen.

The title of the film tells you exactly what this movie is about. It’s about how the outnumbered but stubbornly willing RAF held off the German invasion plans long enough to erase any thoughts of them crossing the channel. If the woefully unprepared UK was to fail at stalling the Nazis long enough all of Europe would become lost. And yet they achieved one of the most impressive underdog victories in history. This movie is all about their failures and then success. The plot is really just an excuse to put one more impressive dogfight on after the last. And they are impressive. Reason alone to see this movie.

As an added bonus it costars a very young Ian McShane, long before he went to Deadwood and started muttering cocksucker every other word.

(SEE)

(June 11)

——Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)——

Although there is a slight dip in quality from the last two stellar Lethal Weapon movies, this one carries the formula faithfully and true, remaining action packed and filled with humor. I’m still in awe at how cool these movies are. Danny Glover and Mel Gibson make for one of cinema’s all time great buddy teams. You can definitely see why two guys this different would still like each other. There is a real heart to these movies that you can’t ignore, stuck behind the jokes and explosions. Watching the two of them arrest a guy for J-walking is as good as anything else here.

I’m always amazed at how these two guys just manage to walk into crime scenes just going about their daily business. After being demoted for blowing up a building after not waiting for the bomb squad to show up, they walk around in their old uniforms for about five seconds before an armored car just happens to be robbed behind them. Because of their bravery/stupidity they are right back on the force, and by coincidences of all coincidences they happen to be tied to a much bigger fish in the sea. Enter Rigg’s female counterpart, played by Rene Russo, who knows how to kick butt better than any guy. There is a really hot scene between the two of them where they competitively compare battle scars, all the while stripping off their clothing. Steamy.

Even though there are slight signs of sequelitis in this one, the film still rocks the socks off of any number of similar films. And of course if you’ve seen the first two, you won’t refuse seeing the third. I mean, for crying out loud, they manage to make Joe Pesci’s extremely annoying character endearing. Anyone who can do that deserves to have their movie seen.

(SEE)

——Walking Tall (2004)——

I want to see The Rock become a big action hero. He needs more movies like this and The Rundown and less dreck like Doom. For an ex-wrestler, you’ve got to admit that the guy has screen presence. The Rock is right up there with my favorite action stars, making him the new Ahnold.

This remake of Walking Tall (that I originally saw as a midweek summer matinee with my mom) is actually pretty short in running time. The back of the box says 1 hour 26 minutes, but I highly doubt that, unless you are counting some unusually long credits. Which is OK. The movie is light on plot and high on kickin’ ass, which is fine by me because the plot kind of sucks and the kickin’ ass kicks some serious ass. Basically, a Special Ops soldier (The Rock) comes home after being away for 8 years, only to find the town’s main source of employment, the mill, closed down by the son of the owner (Neal McDonough), with a cheesy casino/strip club in its place. To make matters worse he’s selling drugs out of the casino and getting them in the hands of kids, all with the police tucked safely away in his pocket. After The Rock’s nephew OD’s, he goes to the casino to dish out some serious ass whoopin’. Even though he breaks quite a few laws in doing so, the town likes his can-do attitude so much that they elect him sheriff so that he can work on shutting them down the legal way. The film concludes with numerous sequences of ass kickin’.

If the above sounds appealing to you, you’ll probably really like this movie. There’s really nothing to the film, except that The Rock stands up for what’s good and right and breaks a lot of bones doing so. For some reason that really appeals to me.

(SEE)