C'est Non Un Blog

(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)

(April 24)

——Maitresse (1976)——

Put S&M and Criterion in the same sentence and, God bless me, I’m there. I can’t say no. I can’t look away. Because if Criterion puts it out then you know it will be perverse AND make you think.

A young hood, breaking and entering with a friend, happens upon a dungeon in a Paris apartment flat. The two of them become trapped in the room by the mistress’ dog. The hood is asked to participate in a humiliation roleplay by the mistress to get out of trouble. He does so, and aside from some initial reluctance, seems very interested in what is going on here. After they are free to go the friend leaves, but the hood stays. The two of them fall in love, but the controlled atmosphere of the dominatrix comes under attack when the two of them fight for control in the relationship. The both start living for the thrill of danger. Only in the final sequence do they find a startling way to coexist happily together, each being the dominator and the dominated.

The movie is very interesting, and quite intelligent. It’s not for the faint of heart, though. Aside from the obvious sequences of sadomasochism (one guy gets his dick nailed to a board) there is also a rather disturbing and real shot of a horse being slaughtered. Anyone in the animal rights parade might want to avoid this one. For anyone feeling more adventurous though, I think this is

(MUST SEE)

——Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)——

It’s been a while since I first saw this film. It actually held up better than I thought it would. I think I’ve probably matured a lot since that initial viewing, back in the days when seeing a movie was still a novelty and I didn’t yet like Westerns. Boy, have things changed. People aren’t kidding when they refer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the ultimate buddy movie. It is. No denying that. Some poorly educated intellectual schmuck might want to make arguments for the homosexual subtext in the film, but I think that they would totally be missing the whole point of the film. Yes, Butch and Sundance are unnaturally close, yes, closer than either of them ever seem to be with the sexual firecracker, Katharine Ross. She even leaves them at one point because she isn’t getting the love she needs. But Butch and Sundance have a man love that’s nothing like homosexual love. They would never think of that. There’s no Brokeback Bolivia here. Their just the bestest of buds. Two guys who truly understand each other, not actually too much alike, but two parts of the same mind. All the crazy shit they do is only because they trust completely in the other.

But enough about that. What about the movie? Everything is great about it. It’s filled with classic lines, classic moments. Like the scene where they use too much dynamite, or the Raindrops sequence, or the end. Great stuff. Newman and Redford feel like they were born to play these characters. They feel like lifelong friends. It’s great. And of course there is Conrad Hall’s amazingly beautiful cinematography. He puts all others to shame. If you’ve never seen this film, you owe it to yourself to put it in your BenFlix que.

(MUST SEE)

(April 25)

——Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (1971)——

Inspired by the same New Zealand murders covered more true to real life events in the Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures, director Joel Seria takes the core idea of two schoolgirls becoming instant obsessively close friends who then commit murder and takes a different spin at it, choosing as his target the Roman Catholic church he grew up in. These girls decide to dedicate their life to Satan and doing only bad deeds, like seducing men only to draw away at the last second or by cruelly killing a man’s pet birds that he loves more than life itself just to see his reaction. While the film doesn’t exactly endorse Satanism, it also isn’t kind at all to the Catholic Church, implying that all of the congregation are sheep, the nuns are all lesbians and that the Father is a pedophile (oddly enough, Spell Check doesn’t think that is a word). The girls conduct a black mass and then terrorize the countryside before finally slipping up and killing someone. They never completely get caught though, allowing them their final act of evil, which I won’t describe here because it is such an iconic scene that it makes the whole film worth seeing. Those last moments will burn themselves into your brain. It’s not the best movie in the world, but definitely interesting.

(SEE)

——Wolf Creek (2004)——

I’m really sad that I missed the opportunity to see this film in the theaters. It came out so soon after Hostel that when I brought it up to Harry as an option for us to go see, he said that he wasn’t quite in the mood yet for more blood and gore torture movies. I, of course, had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but we went to go see something else anyway. The next week Wolf Creek was gone and I had to wait until it came out on DVD to check out this gem from Down Under.

The cool thing about this movie, which is EXTREMELY rare in a horror film, is that if the three main characters never ran into the bloodthirsty psycho that wanted them all dead, this would STILL be a really well-made road movie. An Aussie guy meets two English girls on Austrailia’s west coast and they decide to all take together a road trip to a big party on the east coast, while along the way they see the Outback and check out one of the largest meteorite craters in the world at Wolf Creek. The first half has the typical beautiful vistas, flirting and ghost stories you’ve come to expect from one of those movies. But then when their car mysteriously dies at Wolf Creek they meet a helpful stranger whose reasons for such generosity are soon to be revealed much more sinister than friendly.

Everything about this movie I thought was very well made, from the acting to the cinematography down to how all of the gruesome events take place. What is really scary about this movie is that the main characters are given ample time to escape, but as they are lost in the middle of nowhere, they have no idea where to escape to. All of this is made all the scarier by the shear fact that it was apparently based on a real backpack killer, who killed nine in the Outback, making him one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers. I think for horror movie fans this one should be

(MUST SEE)

——Crooklyn (1994)——

I expected another Clockers from this Spike Lee film and was very pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful family picture in its place. I had no idea going into it, but I ended up loving this movie. It’s about the women in a poor black family in 1970’s Brooklyn. Alfre Woodard is just fantastic as the mother holding a family of five boys and a girl together with only her teaching job to support them all, as her husband (Delroy Lindo), a musician, is trying to make his own music his own way, but in the meantime is making no money. The kids are crazy, but in the way you know big families of siblings to be. They fight constantly, but they’re close. The story takes its perspective from the lone little girl, trying to keep up with her brothers and be a good woman at the same time, torn between two worlds.

The film is really no more than a series of anecdotes, but they are wonderful ones, and you can’t help get sucked into the film, enraptured by what is going on and how simple it all seems. What a beautiful film. There was only one thing I didn’t like about it. Towards the end of the film the little girl is sent off to her wealthy aunt’s house in the suburbs for the summer because they can’t afford to keep her home. To show how different the two worlds are, Spike squishes the picture distorting the image. This goes on for the whole sequence. At first I thought something was wrong with my DVD, that suddenly it lost its anamorphic transfer until I realized that if that were true the image would stretch in the opposite direction. It was extremely distracting and very annoying. Thanks a lot Spike.

It also had one of my most favorite shots ever, though, to make up for that snafu. In one part of the film, two kids (one of them played by Spike) sniff some glue and then go walking/floating down the street. To show how high they are, the camera pans with them down the street, except that they are upside down and floating while everything else is right side up. Simple but super funny. Aside from that one little image snafu, this movie is actually for me a

(DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH)

(April 28)

——Match Point (2005)——

I’ve already reviewed this (February 11). I still love it, and it looks great on DVD. What more needs to be said about this return to form for Woody Allen? See it! I’m already insanely late writing up these reviews, so I’ll leave it at that hardy recommendation.

(MUST SEE)

——California Split (1974)——

California Split is an odd little Robert Altman movie. Parts of it are very funny, while often dipping into the more serious. There is plenty of Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue. But it is also confounding picture. Like the ending. You either make peace with the movie or end up not liking it. I did like it though. I liked its little quirks.

George Segal and Elliott Gould are two hopeless chronic gamblers who manage to meet each other in a poker hall and immediately become friends, noticing a common bond between the two. They both love to gamble. On anything. On everything. They love gambling. Gould is the crazier of the two. One of the great moments of the film involves him crashing Segal’s apartment in a sombrero after pulling a disappearing act on Segal, making a spontaneous gambling trip to Mexico. Gould seems more at piece with his gambling, more anything goes. He gets robbed twice after winning big and doesn’t seem overly upset about the whole thing. On the other hand, Segal has gotten himself in debt big-time. He needs a run of good luck, desperately. He convinces Gould to pool all of their money to make one giant run at Reno.

Both actors are fantastic. You want to like these two misfits. The plotting of the film is pretty random, but also makes for lots of good scenarios. Like the fact that Gould lives with two prostitutes, but nothing is ever much made of that fact. They even scare off one of the girls weird tricks so that they can take the two of them out. Not for all tastes, but I think most will like this.

(SEE)

(April 29)

——Stalag 17 (1952)——

While being the inspiration for Hogan’s Heroes, Billy Wilder’s take on camp life in a German POW camp during World War II is decidedly darker than its sitcom counterpart. After two prisoners are killed during an escape attempt it becomes obvious to the members of Stalag 17 that someone is tipping off the Germans about their secret activities. All eyes go to Sergeant J.J. Sefton, played coolly by William Holden, the man who can get, and has, everything and also cares for no one or nothing other than himself. To get all of these goodies he is frequently seen trading with the Nazis, so surely he must be the traitor…

But of course he isn’t. Who would be that stupid? Thus Sefton faces the persecution of his fellow allies, all while trying to figure out a way to prove his innocence. While it is pretty obvious he isn’t the one tipping off the Germans, the great mystery is of who really is the mole. Anyone and everyone could be suspect. I didn’t guess it until the very end. Part of the reason for this is Wilder’s excellent characterizations of the multiple characters. Unlike some films with giant casts where most of the actors tend to blend right in with the other ones, or worse, they become gross caricatures instead of real people, Wilder manages to pull out all the stops in making these characters funny and surreal without overplaying his hand. Like most of Wilder’s films, this one is

(MUST SEE)

——Flirting (1991)——

As any reader of this column knows, I love blood, guts and sex in my movies. I make no apologies for that. What those readers who don’t know me that well probably don’t realize is that I’m also a big softy at heart. I like my chick flicks just as much as my Miike movies, it’s just that I have a slightly bigger prejudice towards chick flicks because so many of them just suck. No such fate for Flirting, however, an obscure Australian coming of age film I found by recommendation by a video store clerk on one of the many DVD blogs I regularly visit, starring a very young Thandie Newton and Nicole Kidman.

The film is about the inhabitants of two bordering schools facing each other but separated by a lake in 1960’s Australia. On the boy’s side is our protagonist, an intelligent, bookish young man with a slight stutter who is often picked on but doesn’t care, as he realizes that the other dimwitted boys need someone to pick on, and why not it be him since he doesn’t mind all that much? His life at the school is rather mundane until he meets a new arrival on the girls’ side, an Ugandan student played by Thandie Newton. As soon as she arrives she faces much of the same adolescent torture as her male counterpart because she is different, which probably helps explain why the two of them get along with each other so quickly. The queen bitch is played by Nicole Kidman, but in an odd turn of events breaking all cliches and conventions, she turns out to be not really all that much of a bitch after all.

For those sick of the same old teenage Hollywood garbage who are looking for something different, this movie will come as a breath of fresh air, dealing with real issues in a realistic way while keeping the surreal humor of adolescence intact. I’d never heard of it before, but now I’d recommend it to anyone.

(SEE)

(April 30)

——The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)——

The first thought that comes to any cinephile that watches this movie directed by Tommy Lee Jones are the similarities between this film and Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I started thinking about an entirely different source all together in the latter sections of the movie, though. My mind was brought back to Dante’s Purgatory. There is a certain theme in here of the bad (not evil) man first being punished for his sins, but then through his sufferings and labors finally being able to ask for forgiveness so as to make up for his past deeds.

The film, oddly, is about a man named Melquiades Estrada who gets buried three times after being killed. Melquiades is an illegal immigrant that came to the United States to be a cowboy so as to send money back to his family back home. The other key characters are Tommy Lee Jones’, as the cowboy/best friend of Melquiades, and Barry Pepper’s character, who is a Border Patrol guard who isn’t clued into his high school sweetheart wife’s needs and doesn’t seem to understand why it isn’t right to beat on the illegal immigrants they find trying to make it over the border. He isn’t an especially bad person, just a deeply flawed one. He accidentally kills Melquiades though, and when Jones finds out about it he kidnaps Pepper and takes him on a gruesome pilgrims’ trek through the wilderness of the Southern border to bury Melquiades back at his home.

The first half of the film has a fractured narrative that can be slightly confusing at times as you try to restructure the chronology of the story in your mind, but ultimately I think it works because it helps us identify with the human side of Melquiades while at the same time keeping the macabre aspect of the film always at the back of the audiences’ mind. It helps us see both cause and effect at the same time, which grounds the story in a way. Once Jones discovers the identity of the killer the narrative straightens out, but that’s when things just get really weird. It is quite the surreal experience, watching the latter half of the film in the theater. Is Jones’ character crazy, or is he just trying to prove a point? I started thinking of him as a more sadistic Virgil, leading his Dante through the trials of Purgatory until he finally accepts that which he has done and asks forgiveness. A very interesting film.

(SEE)