C'est Non Un Blog

OK, question for you: What the hell actually IS mucus, and why do I suddenly have so damn much of it?

Seriously, you go through your life, no mucus to be seen, then suddenly you get sick and all this shit comes gushing out of you like waterfalls. It’s like your body, freaked out by unwanted intruders, decides to purge all of the moisture from your body through your nose so that the infection can’t get at it. The infection decides that if they can’t have it, no one can, so they spill toxic sludge into it. I mean, really, what the hell is that all about? Where does this stuff come from? How the hell do I make it go away???

Well, the good news is that this morning I do feel better than I did yesterday. I’m still all stuffed up and sore, but the whole “I’ve just been hit by a bus” feeling has gone away. I did go to work yesterday, only to leave about halfway through the day. Somehow I had already managed to sell more than every one else in my condition. Then I got home and didn’t move from the couch all night, except to go to the bathroom numerous times because of all of the water I was pushing.

Let’s hope things just get progressively better from here on. At least I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.

My cold is worse. I probably have the worst cough I’ve ever had. It feels like my chest is trying to push my lungs out my throat.

…on the plus side, my skin is probably the clearest it has been in a very, very long time.

So I wake up this morning and guess what? I’m sick. Joy to the freakin’ world. Sore throat, and I feel all achy. At least there is no runny nose or vomiting or anything like that. Yet…

(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)

OK, I may be biased, as I already love Jon Stewart, but did he or did he not make one of the greatest Oscar hosts ever? He was extremely funny and just seemed be having a good time, and rolled with every punch the night through him. Everything after “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was priceless. The spoof of the Oscar campaign television commercials was priceless. He was just playing and having the time of his life out there. And of course one of my favorite moments had to be when he made fun of how many montage sequences there were in the show. Seriously, he wasn’t far wrong in saying that they were running out of clips to show. What the heck was that all about?

About the winners…well, not too many surprises there. I was a little surprised by how many awards Memoirs of a Geisha won. And it is always a little shocking when Best Director and Best Film go to different films (Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain and Crash, respectively). Other than that, yeah, not too many surprises. The films I liked the best didn’t win (or weren’t even nominated). That’s just how it goes.

[If I’m feeling really ambitious I might actually give you guys my thoughts on the best films of the year. Of course, that would be after writing up my Monday Movie Review, and you all know how into continued work on the computer I’ll be then. We’ll see.]

Quick, quick, gotta get it in before Monday’s over!

(February 20)

——The Seventh Victim (1943)——

This was my last title in the Val Lewton horror collection and a very good one, abet with a very strange story. A girl at a boarding school finds out that her sister has stopped paying for her schooling and in fact has gone missing. The girl goes to New York in order to find her, and the first part of the film plays as a nice solid mystery of the missing sister. When we finally do meet the sister though, well, that’s when things get weird. The sister has a fascination with killing herself. She’s joined a creepy Satanic cult, which now wants her dead for being unstable. Her husband hides these details from her sister and her psychiatrist hides her from both of them. The ending is both stunning and original.

What I most liked about the film though was the excellent use of noir-ish lighting. Shadows are used quite effectively to build tension and create suspense, but more than that the compositions have been created quite painterly. Several shots, like the one of a noose, the one of the sister trapped by the Satanists in a chair, or of the Satanists sitting in a circle just acting creepy, are amazingly well put together for a B-movie of this type. Val Lewton does it again, folks.

(MUST SEE)

(February 21)

——The Memory of a Killer (2003)——

This film reminded me a lot of another similar foreign crime film that got a lot of attention for how radical people thought it twisted the genre, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002). Mainly it reminded me of that film because, while they are both very good films, both were never quite as amazing to me as everyone else made them out to sound. Don’t get me wrong, The Memory of a Killer is a very good, very well made crime film. It just didn’t blow my mind like it apparently did some other people.

This Dutch film is about an aging hitman who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He is contracted to kill two people, one a corporate hit, the other a teenage girl. Our hitman refuses to kill kids though, and when he lets them know that he won’t do it they try to take him out. Like you’ve probably already figured out, they don’t complete their job and he goes on offensive against them, digging up their dirty secrets and wiping out the bad guys.

If that were the movie I probably would be raving about this one by now. The one misstep I thought was in adding the parallel cat and mouse game with a cop obsessed with the girl and finding the truth to his case. While in his story there are some pretty good scenes of comic relief, most of it seems silly and tears us away from what we really want to see, our killer of the title of the film. It was with his portion of the film that I thought the film lost any of the originality that it had. I like my noir grittier than that. While it doesn’t by any means ruin the movie, it keeps it from being great. Still, a good movie worth seeing.

(SEE)

——Class of 1984 (1982)——

The first two thirds of this film are essentially a punk 80’s remake of Blackboard Jungle (1955). After that though, the film turns much more violent and much less optimistic. That last act of the film is essentially a very violent (and very fulfilling) revenge opus. Anyone into that sort of thing or 80’s horror should probably check this out.

For those not familiar with the plot of Blackboard Jungle, Class of 1984 is about a music teacher who gets his first teaching job at a big inner city school. Punks, drugs, and violence have taken over. The movie was unfortunately very prophetic of how things were to become. In 1982 it was apparently very shocking for the students to go through a metal detector in order to get into the school. Anyway, some of the students are actually there to learn, but they are subverted in their goals by the punks who run the school, the main one actually being quite proficient at the piano but unwilling to go along with any school sponsored activity. The new teacher calls out the leader of the punks but gets nothing but trouble because of it. They start harassing him to such an extreme that it finally leads to the revenge fueled orgy of violence I mentioned earlier.

The film has a lot of very memorable images in it, but probably the most striking involves Roddy McDowall as the Science teacher who can’t get through to his students and befriends the new music teacher. He’s seen at the start of the film carrying a gun into school to protect himself from the students, and bemoans the fact that he can’t seem to get a single student interested in learning. After the punks skin and mutilate all of his lab animals to get back at him for stopping them from beating another student he pulls out his gun in class and forces the students to learn at gunpoint. The scene is extremely startling, both in how excited he gets when students correctly answer questions they were asked with a gun to their head, and for the look of pure fear in the students’ eyes. The movie asks a lot of scary questions, and at the same time is an extremely entertaining revenge film to boot.

(MUST SEE)

(February 22)

——Dune (1984)——

I’m a fan of Dune and more than that, a fan of David Lynch’s. And while this film has a whole lot of potential, that doesn’t stop Dune from being a whole lot of crap. I love the art direction in this film. I love a lot of the ideas. But man, does this movie suck. That stems mostly I think from the writing. Oh boy, does the voice-over in this movie suck. Lame, lame, lame! Only the most fanatic science fiction and David Lynch fans should even think about watching this. [Note: This is a review of the theatrical version of the film.]

(AVOID)

——Room Service (1938)——

Oh those Marx brothers. How can you not love them? This is kind of an interesting departure for them, as it gets rid of a lot of the tropes that their films had become famous for. Gone is that part of the movie where Harpo plays the harp and Chico plays at the piano, gone also is Groucho’s constant mugging for the camera, Chico’s struggles with English and Harpo’s mime sight gags. This film finally gets rid of a lot of the conventions that had followed them from their vaudeville days. For the most part I liked that this was more of a straight comedy narrative, but things definitely felt like they were missing. I really enjoyed this movie but it doesn’t come close in my mind to some of the comic genius that was a part of their earlier films together. You have a feeling that the studios might be taming their chaotic madcap energy. That said, the movie is still wicked funny, and a worthy addition to their film library. I’m curious to see where the films go after this one.

(SEE)

——Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)——

This was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. For some reason I remember not hearing the greatest things about it when it first came out, and then I quickly forgot about it, probably because it came out well before I became seriously interested in film. Francis Ford Coppola made one hell of a wild ride though with this film, the best part of which being the amazing cinematography. This film is just amazingly shot. I’d love to see this on the big screen just to see all the detail and color the way it was meant to be seen.

This version of the film for the most part closely follows the plot of the book before going much more dramatic in the final act. What I found really interesting about the film though was that this was really the first Dracula film I’ve seen where it was as much a love story as a horror film. Winona Ryder as Mina seems much more romantically interested in the more exciting and sexual Count Dracula (Gary Oldman, doing what he does best) than she does with her fiancee played by Keanu Reeves (yeah, we don’t blame her). As Doctor Van Helsing we have Anthony Hopkins, acting it up like this is the greatest film roll he’s ever received. What a delight it is to see him talking about decapitating and stabbing through the heart the women the men love. What a sick fuck he is, you say.

While non-fans of the genre might not get an equal kick out of this as, say, I do, I think it is still probably worth most people’s effort to check this out. This is probably one of the best vampire movies I can think of, and definitely the finest made one.

(SEE)

——Holiday (1938)——

Even though this is part of the brand new Cary Grant Box Set, this is really more of a vehicle for the always delightful Katharine Hepburn. Watch this one with Bringing Up Baby (also 1938) and enjoy a fantastic double header showcasing one of the greatest romantic/comic duos in screen history.

Holiday is about Cary Grant’s character meeting a girl and falling in love, only to find out that he might not have fully realized what kind of girl he got himself in with. See, he’s been working ever since he was a small child and has come to the realization that there is more to life than just making money. While he’s still young he wants to take an extended holiday and figure out life for himself, at which point he’ll go back to working for what he wants to work for. On one such holiday at Lake Placid he meets a girl, falls in love, and they get engaged. He goes to meet the family, only to learn that he has a lot more to learn about his fiancee. For one, she just happens to be part of one of the richest families in America.

In meeting the family he meets her alcoholic brother, beaten down by his father’s need to have him continue in the family business and her sister, played by Hepburn, an artistic dreamer stifled by her family’s money. She just wants to enjoy life. And surprise, surprise, she and Cary Grant (who does quite a few great rolls and tumbles I didn’t know he had in him) hit it right off. Hepburn thinks Grant is a great edition to the family and does everything she can to make things work between him and her sister, even though as the story goes on it becomes painfully obvious to everyone involved that they should be together instead of her sister. I’ll leave the rest of the good stuff to you, and I’ll tell you that this film is a delight well worth it.

(MUST SEE)

(February 23)

——Sabrina (1954)——

Is there a more beautiful or elegant creature than Audrey Hepburn? You’d be hard pressed to find any actress in Hollywood more glamorous in my mind, with the possible exception of Grace Kelly, especially after watching this film. And hey, you can’t really go wrong with a Billy Wilder movie that just also happens to costar William Holden and Humphrey Bogart.

Sabrina is about a skinny girl who grows up living at the estate of a rich family her father chauffeurs for. Her entire life she is in love with the younger of two brothers, a womanizing slacker playboy played by Holden, who also happens to completely ignore her until she comes back from a cooking school in Paris looking all Hepburn-esq glamorous. She uses her new ugly duckling that was never ugly turned swan status to create the picture book romance with him that she’s always wished for. One problem though: he just happens to be engaged to a woman that will bring about a huge corporate merger that his workaholic brother (played by Bogart) set up to start a new plastics company. Bogart works on getting her away from his brother and close to him so that he can ship her off back to Paris and out of the picture. Of course, love stories have a funny way of going away from plan…

This doesn’t really stand up with Wilder’s best films, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t a delight to watch. Hey, if I’m recommending a romantic comedy, then you know it can’t be bad.

(SEE)

(February 24)

——The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)——

This has been deemed by many to be one of the true film classics, and this new two disk DVD from Warner Brothers really proves why that is deservedly so. I haven’t watched any of the second disk yet (that’ll probably come some rainy day in the future) but I do have many wonderful things to say about the transfer of the film itself. It looks amazing! You seriously never expect a color film from the Thirties to look this good, but damned if they didn’t take that Technicolor process and squeeze every bit of color and detail out of it for one of the best damn digital transfers of an old movie that I’ve ever seen.

But on to the movie itself. This is an action/adventure movie for a time before irony became so prevalent in modern art. The good guys are good, the bad guys bad, the two lovers are meant to be together, yadda yadda yadda. Some parts can seem a little dated at times (although they are never actually called the “Merry Men” that’s definitely what they are, as everything other than a major action sequence warrants lots of gut busting laughter from them.) The plot isn’t really deep at all. The characters don’t have particularly deep motivations for what they do. But the whole thing is loads of fun anyways, just because. I read that they pretty much invented the modern action movie sword fight with this movie when the stunt coordinator decided that they shouldn’t fence on screen, but that it should look more like they were physically fighting. Errol Flynn just throws himself into the action sequences with quite some flair. He seems to be having a ball, just like Robin. That’s what’s really fun about this movie, that everyone seems to be having a great time. This is one of those big Hollywood movies that just works right. You don’t try to make sense of it or find deeper meaning in it. You just sit right back and enjoy the ride.

(MUST SEE)

You all probably recall my previous post pertaining to the 3rd Volume of 100 Bullets: Hang Up on the Hang Low. It was amazingly one of my most commented on posts that I’ve done since starting this blog almost three years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t really get the answer I was hoping for when I decided to post my troubles about trying to figure out this riddle. Or did I…?

One of the last comments I received (by a yet to be determined anonymous poster) jokingly referred to the fact that “hang low” was slang for a penis. I naturally brushed it off at first as just a funny comment. A couple days later I actually came across the term hang low in a noir novel, Pop. 1280. Then, as I was talking with Sara C. last night, she jokingly threw out that another slang term for penis is “the THIRD leg”! Could that possibly be the #3 connection? I don’t know. I like the idea of it, and yet in the back of my mind I’m saying, “no, that can’t be it.”

Thoughts?

I’ve got a riddle for you folks that I’ve been struggling with for a couple of weeks now, that I hope you can help me out with. I somehow figured out randomly that the titles of the trades of the 100 Bullets comic series directly relate to the number of the volume that you are reading. Let me show you:

1. FIRST Shot, Last Call
2. Split SECOND Chance
4. A FOREgone Tomorrow
5. The CounterFIFTH Detective
6. SIX Feet Under the Gun
7. Samurai (AKA SEVEN Samurai, get it?)
8. The Hard Way (with a series this obsessed with dice, this has to be The Hard EIGHT)

You might have noticed that I left off #3. That’s what I need your help with. For the life of me I can’t figure out where the number three fits into the title. Here it is:

3. Hang Up on the Hang Low.

Super brownie points to anyone who can help me figure this out!

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)