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10/10
Masterful debut feature of quiet feminist anger
11 December 2012
The first Iranian feature directed by a woman, though this has never screened (legally) in Iran; it's director left the country, smuggling the film out and finishing up the editing in the USA. I'd love to know more about that story, as the film was made before the revolution and as far as I know isn't any more radical or transgressive than some other works from the period which did get passed. Anyway, it's the story of a young woman struggling to find her own identity and some kind of freedom in a repressive, highly patriarchal ancient village. The village is made of mud and stone and looks like it could be a thousand years old, but it abuts a newer town that has cars, telephones, TV, etc, and the girl dreams of a way into that world - but seemingly has no way out of her life, which will soon include an arranged marriage.

This is just beautifully shot, using as far as I can tell all natural lighting (the indoor and night scenes are very, very dark) and the style and in some ways the content are reminiscent of Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" - which had only played commercially in Europe a year before this film was made. It seems hard to imagine that Nabili could have seen Akerman's work, but there is nothing else that comes to mind as a reference. Most of the film is composed of long, static shots, and the young woman's pain and struggle are almost entirely internalized, with rare moments of rapture when she is able to be alone, out in the green grasses and undergrowth by a nearby river. Apart from one remarkable sequence that symbolizes the peak of feeling and despair, the film is entirely in long or medium shots - no closeups. Like Akerman's film, it's "minimalist" in the sense that most of what we learn about the protagonist is going to come out of our own feelings and explorations - what is shown is very simple, on the surface. Near the end, there is finally a sign to others that all is not well, but it seems unlikely that anything will come of it...

A remarkable, poetic and beautiful debut film, this would be even better if a decent copy were available - as it is there is only a 20-year-old VHS that has a rather soft image and is possibly cropped. But still very much worth seeking out for those interested in Iranian or feminist cinema or in the conflict of old and new worlds.
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Yek atash (1961)
9/10
Important predecessor to the Iranian new Wave
11 October 2011
Ebrahim Golestan has been called the "lion" of Iranian cinema, and at 89 he is one of the last living figures from the country's first "New Wave". He has also, like all too many of his countrymen, lived in exile for a good chunk of his life, departing his homeland for the U.K. in 1967, returning briefly in the mid 1970s, and finally leaving permanently in 1975 after his second and last feature, "The Ghost Valley's Treasure Mysteries" was released to a not-so-positive reception. I've seen his first full-length film, 1965's "Brick and Mirror", a dark and noirish black-and-white Cinemascope feature about a cab driver's long night of the soul, and it's a great film which I'll be rewatching soon.

"A Fire", Golestan's first film, is one of four short documentaries he made at the beginning of his film career while working for oil companies. It concerns a protracted fire and the attempts over several weeks to put it out by various means, and the footage of the fire and the efforts of the men is all pretty compelling, but what's most interesting is the subtext showing how the lives of villagers and farmers nearby are affected; though there's no overt environmental message here, it couldn't be more clear how disruptive this modern industry is to traditional ways of life. The impressive editing is by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, Golestan's lover, who was to make her own impressive (and sadly, only) film "The House is Black" a couple of years later.
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8/10
It's no TAKE CARE OF MY CAT, but this skating melodrama deserves at least a little exposure
9 July 2010
Warning: Spoilers
I was completely blown away by South Korean director Jeong Jae-eun's debut feature TAKE CARE OF MY CAT (2001) when I saw it three years ago, and so being the consummate auteurist that I am, I had to hunt down her second (and to date, most recent) feature, 2005's THE AGRESSIVES. It took a while - the South Korean DVD probably went out of print not long after release and there is no other version apparently - but eventually I got a copy and I watched it tonight.

While the earlier film is about a group of teenage girls, just out of high school and unsure where to go in life, thinking about careers and college, this film focuses mostly on boys, and on a singular obsession: in-line skating. Soyo (Jeong-myeong Cheon) is fascinated by the world of skating, and the kids his age and a little older who practice and show off in public parks every day until the police show up. He's also fascinated by an aspiring filmmaker, Hanjoo (Yi-jin Jo) who is nice to him and encourages his skating - but not his advances. When his parents abandon him because of legal difficulties (somehow leaving him their nice apartment and enough money to live on for several months) he falls into the skating world hard, trying to catch up in experience - in more ways than one - with Moggy, Hanjoo's rather nihilistic boyfriend, and the slightly older Gabpa, seemingly the owner or manager of a skate park (it's never quite clear).

The first half or so of THE AGRESSIVES is relatively plot less and lyrical, mostly a string of skating sequences and little bits of the lives of the four main characters and a few other friends, as they skate, escape police, and find other places in the great urban wonderland of Seoul to play around in. Jeong shows here as in her earlier feature a remarkable feel for the textures of the modern city, it's architecture and colors and vitality, and the bright 'scope camera-work here is as inventive and lyrical as in TAKE CARE OF MY CAT, adding to it a powerful element of kinetic energy; the skating sequences, though mostly fairly brief, are pretty highly charged and there's a real youthfulness and sense of wonder to it all that really helps us connect to the mindset of these drifting - but generally carefree - kids. I like the cast a lot too; all of them seem relatively unaffected, none seem remotely star-like either in looks or in actions.

The carefree and directionless feel of the beginning gives way eventually to a more plot-oriented, and frankly conventional second half, in which the characters all start to realize that - guess what - they're growing up and probably can't keep doing this forever. Gabpa dreams of sending skaters to a World Championship in LA, but his mandatory army enlistment is always a moment away; and Moggy's carelessness eventually gets the whole group in trouble and causes estrangement. Though many of the developments feel organic and some resolutions (like the Moggy-Hanjoo-Soyo love triangle) are unexpected, still overall the film seems less cohesive and less interesting even as the plot becomes more central, perhaps because we haven't really gotten to know any of the characters beyond some very superficial surface brush-strokes. Still there are a couple of terrific lengthy skating scenes towards the end - one to a cover of The Beatles' "Across the Universe", and even when Jeong's ideas don't entirely work, her direction and command of the cinematic space, color and framing never falter. Though this doesn't come close to her first film - my favorite cinematic debut of the last decade - it's still fairly ambitious cinematically and generally successful on it's own terms I think, and THE AGRESSIVES confirms Jeong as one of the most exciting young directors working today. I sure hope this isn't the last we hear from her.
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Alice (2009)
2/10
Sadly this Wonderland is severely lacking in wonder - or quality of any kind
8 December 2009
Warning: Spoilers
First off, prospective viewers should know that this bears very little relation to Lewis Carroll's works; there are names and situations lifted from both "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass", but the plot only has the thinnest of similarities, and the characters are changed almost out of recognition. The dialogue has virtually nothing of Carroll's cleverness or punning, and the plotting is quite straightforward and conventional, with the ahead-of-its-time absurdist/surrealist flavor of the originals pretty much jettisoned. Now, I've got no real problem with "adaptations" that are very loose, particularly when they're of older stories like these that have already been turned into dozens of other films, TV shows, comics, etc; what's the point of doing "Alice" again if you aren't going to do something new and interesting with it? The question isn't whether it's "faithful", but whether it's good.

So then, if it's not a straightforward adaptation, what is it and what does it give us? We have Alice, a 20-something martial-arts instructor in New York with a boyfriend who tries to give her a special ring as a present, which she rejects as she's not that serious about him yet. He takes off, leaving it behind, and when she goes after him to return it she sees him kidnapped, follows and ends up going through the looking-glass into Wonderland - here mostly a series of skyscrapers with canals running between them and some vaguely steampunk-influenced technology. She quickly meets the Mad Hatter and goes on a seemingly endless series of chases trying to first find her boyfriend, and then defeat the nasty Queen of Hearts (who is of course Kathy Bates) who is stealing people from our world and bottling their emotions as happy drugs. Adventure, action and romance ensue, and lots of really terrible CGI, with the flying pink flamingos being the worst. The acting is mostly mediocre even from professionals like Bates, saddled with a British accent that comes and goes, and Tim Curry who is just there because, well, he's Tim Curry and he gets these kinds of jobs. The great Harry Dean Stanton is also wasted in his 5-minute walk-on as the Caterpillar. "Alice" Caterina Scorsone is good at looking pensive, annoyed and tearful; the only real saving grace here is Matt Frewer as the White Knight - he belongs in a much better film. I can't really blame the other actors much though, they aren't really given any opportunities to develop characters with any sense of reality, even the childish reality of the characters in the original stories.

This is another woeful example of the current throw everything-but-the-kitchen-sink at viewers mentality that seems to infest an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy films in particular. Enough FX and action and we'll forget the plot inconsistencies, poor acting, and half-assed storytelling - at least, one assumes that's what director/writer Nick Willing, the producers and SyFy were thinking. Use a popular, well-known and public-domain property like "Alice" (or "Oz" as in the same people's TIN MAN from 2007), make it "darker", fill it with cute lead actors and the tween girls and boys who are the most desirable demographic won't notice that there's really nothing there. Add in elements of other pop-culture detritus, like THE MATRIX (the Mr. Smith-like Suits, in particular), some 60s-type mod costumes and bright colors for the casino sequences, maybe a bit of BRAZIL and 1984 - or BRAVE NEW WORLD with its similar happy-drug 'Soma" - for the artsy cred, and you've got yourself a movie!

Well, no. You've got yourself a bunch of ill-fitting disparate elements in search of a real story, and I would think that even some of the younger viewers (espcially those who have read Carroll's originals) might see that. Matt Frewer's performance, and the eye candy of Charlotte Sullivan as the Duchess aren't enough to raise this more than a point or so. It needed a coherent, interesting plot and characters, some reason to exist beyond cashing in on Tim Burton's soon-to-be-released film also based on the story - and also featuring a grown-up Alice and a Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) who seems to have been rather influential on the look of the Hatter in this adaptation. But all glossy surface and no meat certainly isn't enough for this viewer, especially when the glossy surface, given SyFy's low budgets and the bland direction of Mr. Willing, isn't all that great to begin with.
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9/10
Tragedy, inarticulate and incomprehensible
10 November 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Ray (Tom Blair) operates a lumber mill in central Oregon; times are tough and he's facing a lot of hard decisions, such as whether to work out a deal with overseas investors to bring in foreign wood and mill it and then ship it back to Asia. He struggles with his conscience, finding solace in fishing trips up in the unspoiled back-country, the irony of the contrast between what he does for a living and for relaxation apparently lost on him. His wife Jean (Ellen McLaughlin) spends time with her friend Beth, discussing how the troubling economic situation is affecting Beth's family - her husband is apparently violent - Jean seems lucky; Ray takes her on his trips and seems the loving husband, if not particularly open about things. But then their daughter writes to explain that she can't come home for Thanksgiving - can't, in fact, ever see Ray again, because of what her father once did to her...

My initial thoughts on this, my 4th film from stunning American avant-garde director Jon Jost: it's just slightly disappointing, in that it's not so radically different from the three other films I've seen as they are from each other; or, I've now seen enough of Jost's tricks that I'm not as surprised anymore. But that's a small criticism. A larger "problem" would be that the denouement and ending are a little too obvious and set-up, but I'm not sure that's a criticism either; this is Jost doing a sort of Old Testament morality play in a sense, and if you look closely at how he films people at odd angle - hands - men at work - the fly fishing rod and line, but not the man casting it - water - you may be reminded of another OT moralist, Robert Bresson. This strikes me as a Jost parable of guilt that is part MOUCHETTE, part L'ARGENT - the innocent (never seen) corrupted by capitalism and the American male's inability to communicate, to articulate, to forgive others or himself, to open up, to love. This in turn is reflected in the contrasts between the beauty of nature and it's corruption and destruction in the mills. The fatalism of a late Bresson is certainly in evidence here, if not the overt Catholic religiosity and spiritual guilt.

As usual, it's strikingly photographed by the director/writer/editor; this is his second (and last, to date) film in 35mm and it is gorgeous; the water (in particular during the fishing sequences), but also the windows, the sawmill and other industrial sites, reflections in mirrors - the whole film seems to be about images and reflections, about the distortions in the way we see each other, distortions because of money, because of our obsessions with work, "getting ahead", because we don't really ever see each other clearly, because we can't, don't want to, don't even try to. I'm not sure that there are any scenes here of two people talking, seen clearly together in the same shot, everything is fractured or mirrored or seen from just one point of view. Even in the most impressive single shot of the film, a long and intricate track through a diner full of people, we don't see any serious conversations - everybody seems distracted, or trying to impress, or just not really thinking. Together - but not understanding.

The cast is exceptional; Blair is every bit as good as he was in SURE FIRE, and I think there's more for him to do here - the scene in which Jean confronts him and forces him to hear his daughter's words of accusation is particularly powerful, as Jean grows in power and Ray retreats, like a whipped dog, his face growing ashen and actually looking hollow, seeming to age years in just a minute. McLaughlin is excellent as well; this is probably the most potent role and performance for a woman I've seen in any of the director's fairly male-centric work.

It's a little too neat and concise in the end, and the quotation from Emerson seems a little over-the-top and unnecessary, so all in all this is not my favorite of the director's films at the moment, but it's a strong work and reconfirms my sense that this is one of our greatest filmmakers; would that enough people felt that way so that he felt he could continue to make features.
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Adoration (2008)
7/10
Typically provocative piece on lying and the nature of storytelling from a master
23 October 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Simon, a high school student, reads an essay in English about his parents - his mother, a good and naive young woman; his father, a would-be-terrorist. The Israeli authorities, questioning the woman - his mother - pregnant with him, years before. Simon's teacher, Sabine, reading the story, in his French class, of a thwarted terrorist attack, the week before. Simon it turns out is turning this story into his own made-up autobiography. His parents are dead - a car accident? A deliberate accident on the part of his angry Muslim father who can't handle the prejudice in his family? Sabine...encouraging the boy to keep with the story of his parents, the terrorists, to pretend it's real, to shock his classmates, and later a community of professors and "survivors" of the plane that never exploded, the attack that never happened. Simon's uncle, Tom, who raised him, who hated his father, who took the child and brought him up in the city, not being able to afford it working his job as a tow-truck driver, wrestling with selling Simon's violin, inherited from his musician mother, to pay their debts. Sabine, insinuating herself into the Simon's life, and later his uncle's.... the grandfather, dead several months, a presence in recorded video, angry at his son-in-law for being a radical, angry at his son for not being more like him, angry at the world and at the truth...whatever it might be.

So in a nutshell is Atom Egoyan's latest, another foray into lies, deceptions, half-truths, difficult generational issues, ethnicity and religion and identity. It's tempting to say, been there, done that, and I can't deny that temptation. This is all pretty familiar ground for Egoyan, and I'm not entirely sure that he offers much of anything that is really new and interesting here to those who have seen his work before - though it might seem quite novel to those who haven't. It's less sexual in orientation, less "perverse" I guess you could say than EXOTICA which it most immediately calls to mind; it's fairly strongly concerned with video and the Internet and how they widen and broaden the aspects of truth- or lie-telling, as was his early feature SPEAKING PARTS, but it never quite goes into the dangerous psychological territories that film explored. The only really striking aspect for me in this film was in the character of the teacher Sabine (Egoyan's muse, wife, longtime lead actress Arsinée Khanjian) who is so confused and messed up that she hangs just a thread away from being a parody - but is roped into reality by the fierceness and intensity of Khanjian's performance, possibly the best I've seen from her. It's more often Egoyan's male characters that tread the thin line over the chasm of despair and madness but here it is the female teacher, full of secrets and never quite articulated desires who registers most powerfully.

As usual for the director, this has a strong feel for place (Toronto, mostly middle-class areas) and the characters all seem very self-aware - too much so, often. I'd like to see a stupid or even just an average, clueless character for once, actually. It's pretty bleak stuff throughout, with violence and terrorism and racial hatred simmering but never quite boiling over in many scenes, and depression and lost hopes and desires filling much of the remainder of the space. Khanjian as I said is terrific, and she and Scott Speedman as Tom really hold the film together - they're solid nearly all the way through so I really have to blame writer/director Egoyan for some of the stupider scenes, like one in which a taxi driver and Tom get into a ridiculously escalating argument seemingly just to make a plot point that has nothing to do with the scene. There were several uneven scenes, and as good as Khanjian is she just can't quite overcome her character's limitation as someone who's just wacky - or sane - enough for whatever the scene requires; then again, even the scenes that struck me ass "off" were disquieting in an interesting way - one wonders often just how messed-up the director might really be. I also had something of a problem with the really overbearing use of music - slow, dirge-like violin music through much of the film (by regular Egoyan collaborator Mychael Danna) and a couple of too-loud pop songs dominating a couple of late scenes. The fact that music is an underlying theme in the film perhaps helps to explain these choices, but still it seems to me that quiet would have been more appropriate at a few points, but was never allowed to exist.

All in all then a mixed bag. If you've seen a lot of Egoyan like I have you'll certainly be familiar with much of what you see - whether you think it's more interesting or carried off better than I did is another story. Worth a look overall; if I seem to be highlighting my criticisms, it's probably because I expect a lot from this great director, one of Canada's most significant film artists. Were we allowed half-stars, this would probably deserve 3 1/2; it's harder than most to rate, because conflicted and irritated as I was by much of it, I'm still thinking a good deal about it.
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The Lion King (I) (1994)
3/10
"Hamlet" it ain't - good Disney, it ain't either, I'm afraid to say
13 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
For starters, I've been a big Disney and animation fan all my life; seeing Pinocchio at a pretty early age and "Robin Hood" on its initial release made huge impacts on me, and by the time this film came out I'd caught up with all of the Disney features. I loved - and still love - the early work, and have mixed reactions to most of the stuff from "Peter Pan" through "Oliver and Company" with a few exceptions. "The Little Mermaid" seemed like a return to form - and a return to the fairy tales that the company always seemed to do best with, and I liked "Beauty and the Beast" even more. "Aladdin" was alas a major step down - still pretty solid in the animation department, but Robin Williams' shtick was for me completely out of place and irritating. It was of course their biggest hit to that point, and they took some of the lessons they'd learned - less romance, more slapstick and gross humor, celebrity voices - and applied them to "The Lion King" with even more spectacular results.

For 15 years this film has ranked among my worst films of all time, and every time I mention that I get people reacting as if I told them I was the Antichrist. Seriously - I think more people will get bent out of shape if you tell them you hate "The Lion King" than if your feelings are negative about "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca", or "2001". It's always struck me as weird, because I know I'm not the only person to dislike it, and in fact none of the friends I saw it with when it came out liked it much - though none of them hated it like I did either.

I think that the main problem for me in 1994 is that the elements that I disliked from "Aladdin" in particular seemed amped-up several degrees here. I hated Whoopi and Cheech, hated the music, hated above all what I saw at the time was an infantilist assault on intelligence and wit - the smartest and coolest character in the film, Scar, also is pure evil, and all of the "good" characters are white-bread, boring, stupid. Dumb and strong triumphs over smart and clever; the songs sucked; the animation was coarser and less interesting than in the previous couple of films. I suspect that there were a lot of personal issues that contributed to my overwhelming hatred of the film, too, but those are lost to me at the moment.

I'm pleased to say on this re-watch that I don't HATE the film anymore. But I still don't like it. The issues with the treatment of Scar - not sure what I was thinking there, that was over-the-top on my part. Sure Jeremy Irons' voicing of him is in many ways a typical smart but venal character, a Godless intellectual I suppose - but it's not really that overstated or deliberate, it doesn't come off as anti-intellectual to me anymore. James Earl Jones' Mufasa may not be a genius, but he doesn't come off as a dumb noble-hearted brute either, and nobody can really beat Jones in that kind of role. The opening sequences are somewhat impressive, and the film is rarely boring. I actually sort of liked the shaman baboon character Rafiki (Robert Guillaume), and it's good that young Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas/Matthew Broderick) takes a fair amount of screen time to grow up.

But...I still hate the music; "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" I actually found tolerable in relation to the other songs, but even it was so cloying and just banal that I had a hard time not fast-forwarding. This is purely a matter of taste, I make no bones about it - I like very little of Elton John's post-1970s work and so it's not surprising really. I still find the hyena characters irritating, unfunny, and way over-used. The female characters are essentially just there to move the action forward - no, the film ain't obviously racist like I guess I thought it was (though it's rather confusing in its racial and ethnic undertones) but it's definitely a boys' film. Timon and Pumbaa are gross and annoying and the film as a whole just has no sparkle, no wit to me. The animation doesn't have the zip or the beauty of the previous few films; the direction and pacing seem more inevitable than exciting, the "spectacular" scenes like the stampede that kills Mufasa just don't come off as all that spectacular as the digital help is too obvious and cheap-looking.

In any case, it wasn't torture to watch anymore, and it's actually reawakened an interest in going back through the Disney feature canon, re-watching some of the ones I don't remember well and catching up with a few of the newer ones that I never bothered with after being disappointed by this and "Pocahontas" in succession.
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La doublure (2006)
3/10
tired, dull sex-farce without the sex, and without much farce either
13 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Basically the storyline is as hackneyed as could be: wealthy exec (Daniel Auteuil) gets caught in the company of a supermodel (Alice Taglioni) who is not his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas). To avoid scandal and the possibility of divorce and losing half his fortune, Auteuil and his lawyer concoct a scheme whereby an innocent bystander (Gad Elmaleh) who happened to be very close when the incriminating pictures were snapped will be paid to pretend that Taglioni is his girlfriend and living with him. Alas this complicates life for Elmaleh, a working-class valet, in his pursuit of his own true love, a struggling book store owner played by Virginie Ledoyen. And Taglioni gets more and more angry at Auteuil for dicking her around, promising to divorce his wife but clearly not wanting to.

This plot could come out of a screwball comedy from the 30s, Three's Company, any number of French or Italian sex farces of the 60s-70s, etc. That alone isn't necessarily a problem, but when you've got a really ordinary, simple storyline you've really got to work to make it interesting -- and alas writer/director Francis Veber doesn't do anything with the material that isn't highly predictable and dull. Auteuil spends much of his time mugging or getting over-the-top angry and becomes more and more of a scumbag as the film goes on - want to guess whether he and Taglioni end up together at the end? Scott Thomas is one-note severe, calculating, nasty - it's clear from the first that she and Auteuil deserve each other. Our lowly valet manages to prove his love for his bookstore owner ideal, the supermodel turns out to be the nicest and most mature person of the whole bunch, those that deserve to be happy are, etc.

There were some nice touches here and there - the valet's father is chronically sick, but the doctor who attends him is even sicker and the father ends up attending to his physician more than the reverse; I kind of liked the jag-off cell phone salesman who is also pursuing Ledoyen, at least at first, he's so over-the-top smarmy. But mostly this was by-the-numbers rom-com, and with a PG-13 rating it doesn't even get to have any sex to speak of - very mild and lacking in juice all around. And what was with the extremely bright, overlit cinematography throughout? It's Paris, not Cannes.

At least it was short.
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Scarface (1932)
9/10
Crime Doesn't Pay - forget the obvious lesson, enjoy the work of a master
13 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This is a film where you really have to talk about the beginning, at the beginning, as it sets the stage both formally and narratively in many ways. A street sign - a striking, brief pan past an obviously artificial, oddly angled and heavily Expressionistic street-alley, and then past a restaurant employee bringing in a sign for the night, into the restaurant and to rest on a group of men talking loudly, the remains of a party around them. The loudest man is Big Louie - he talks in a thick Italian accent about "having enough" and how satisfied he is...but his buddies tell him that, Johnny Lovo, apparently wants more; maybe he'll have to do something about that. We haven't been told that these men are mobsters, but we get the gist; they're fat and happy in the midst of the Depression, drinking the forbidden liquor that they doubtless control - but Johnny and more importantly his top lieutenant Tony Camonte want more, as Big Louie quickly finds out to his chagrin, gunned down as he tries to make a phone call, the sound of whistling as the camera pans from the silhouette of his assassin down to his dead body. One fantastic shot - I'd say one of the most impressive opening shots I've ever seen - lasting about 3 minutes and 20 seconds, giving us a prologue of much that's to come: the casual brutality of the whistling murderer, the lust for the good life, the impossibility of letting anybody else have a part of the pie.

Tony is played by Paul Muni in a ferocious yet rather pathetic way - he's tough, ambitious, street-smart, quick on his feet, yet so blinded by his emotions and passions that he dooms all of those around him and cannot stop, cannot ever have enough. Shortly after taking out Big Louie, he sets his sites on the north side gangsters, including Boris Karloff's wonderfully cynical Gaffney, and then it's only his own big boss himself, Johnny Lovo, standing in the way of him taking the town (Chicago, obviously, and in many ways Tony is Al Capone). We get the St. Valentine's day massacre, a half-dozen drive-by machine-gunnings...all the while Tony is becoming a big shot, scaring everybody, romancing Lovo's girl Poppy (Karen Morley), while trying to keep his younger and very anxious sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) away from any man but...himself? The undercurrent of incest is powerful throughout the film; I suppose one could try to come up with a psychological reading as to why Tony's forbidden desires turn him mad and towards a life of crime - there's no father in the picture and his mother though stern is completely ineffective - but I'm not sure it's really there. In any case, his "protection" of his sister is so extreme as to eventually cost him his best friend, Guino (a very charming, low key George Raft), and it's emblematic of the madness that never allows him to stop, seeming to ignore any possibility that he can ever be overthrown.

The film seems to alternate visually between the dark expressionism that we're introduced to in that first shot: the crazy action scenes which really are something for a film from that period, machine guns blasting and cars crashing rapid-fire for several minutes at a time, most memorably in the rat-ta-tat that accompanies months of dates in a calendar flying - and a brighter, smoother camera-work for a couple of ballroom scenes. Even in opulent surroundings at last, Tony is never sated. Even if you've never seen the film or it's dubious "remake", it's not hard to guess the fate that's in store for him, and the genius of the film is that though we may not be able to feel much for Tony, who is never anything close to sympathetic, we can at least care a little for those who surround him like moths near the flame. His "secretary", the illiterate Angelo (Vince Barnett) who brings the film down a little with some ill-judged and draggy humor that sounds straight out of the Marx brothers, even manages a touching death - faithful to the last.

This struck me as in some ways atypical of director Howard Hawks - at least, it differs from his later work in that the male relationships are nearly all antagonistic rather than comradely; this is a film revolving really around one man who is always alone in his obsessive need to rule and dominate, a man who never has equals in his mind, and at the end has no one but the sister whose life he ruined, and then...the only fate a gangster could have in a film that tries to be both sensationalistic (succeeding well) and moralizing (not really). The DVD offers the alternate ending as well, so you can see Tony both shot to death and hanged. Did you learn your lesson? With the caveats of the obvious and unnecessary "message" being pushed on the audience (really only overt at the very beginning and ending) and those lame bits of vaudevillian humor, this is pretty damn impressive and probably my favorite of the early 30s gangster cycle.
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9/10
Lessons from the masters, well learned in Eastwood's first western as director
13 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I've been a fairly big Clint Eastwood fan for 20 years - interestingly enough though, I'd only seen this, his second directorial effort and first western as director once, a long time ago. Seeing as how I was going to be re-visiting The Outlaw Josey Wales for a film club though, now was as good a time as any for a re-watch.

The plot couldn't be simpler, in many ways harking back to "A Fistful of Dollars" in its elegant, stripped storyline: A stranger (Clint) rides into the town of Lago, quickly getting into a shootout that he didn't start and besting the three gunfighters that the town had hired to protect them. The townspeople are afraid of another trio who had once been on the payroll also, doing time in prison for a crime committed a year before that the town is complicit in, and due back to wreak vengeance. Seeing as how their protectors are dead, they agree to hire the stranger at any cost, and he proceeds to wreak havoc on the town in more ways than one before proceeding on his way after filling his bargain in apocalyptic fashion.

If the plot's simple, the characters, style and symbolism of the piece are a little less so. The Stranger it seems is haunted by dreams - memories or visions, who can say for sure? of a man who seems to be him, the town's former marshall, whipped to death by those same three men riding back for their own vengeance. "Lago" means "lake" and the town sits on an unnamed body of water; the town seems brand-new, most of the buildings are still under construction and unpainted, though from what we learn it's been around for over a year; the townspeople are greedy and cowardly, and The Stranger is cold, merciless, in the end even demonic. Is he a figure of vengeance, a revenant or demon sent from the real Hell that he names the town after, and that the marshall is seen in one flashback as damning it to, as he orders it painted completely red before the killers arrive in town? Though nearly everybody in the town is unpleasant, a couple of more positive images do stand out - Verna Bloom in one of the two significant female roles is the hotel-keeper's wife, who seems at first to despise The Stranger but seemingly just because he's another brutal bastard - when she realizes that he's the only man in the town with guts she softens, and he beds her just before the showdown. A dwarf, Mordecai (Billy Curtis), is also treated more softly, with The Stranger proclaiming him sheriff and mayor, pumping him up to the point where he alone of all the townsmen shows any guts at the eventual gun battle. I suppose it could be said that Clint's vengeful figure is capable of some charity and feeling towards the only two positive and "good" characters in the film. Significantly enough the other female character, a single woman (perhaps a whore? it's never very clear) named Callie (Marianna Hill) who he rapes shortly after entering town, develops an ambiguous love-hate attitude towards him and it's left quite ambiguous as to how much has to do with the rape (which both The Stranger and other townspeople deny) or because he then ignores her for the most part, even after she betrays him at one point.

A town that seemed promising and new, fresh and full of vitality at the beginning of the film, perched on a cool lake and apparently prosperous, at the end has been half-burnt and decimated through a supernatural wrath, a vengeance for the greed and cowardice that killed a marshall and cowers before his redeemer - this is old-Testament film-making of a pure kind that Eastwood never really returned to in such an obvious way. There are certainly obvious odes to his spaghetti years, in the dirt and violence and unpleasantness of the townspeople and their souls, in Dee Barton's wonderfully eclectic, eerie score and of course in Eastwood's character; I also think it shares some kinship with the Don Siegel-directed Civil War film The Beguiled from 1971, another film with more than a touch of the supernatural, and few redeeming characters. But Clint makes it his own through the economy and his refusal to make things any more flashy or outré than the screenplay calls for (which is plenty). The cast is terrific, mostly made up of names that were second-tier at best at the time and are largely forgotten now. Bloom and Curtis are especially good Perhaps not one of the very best 70s westerns, and I'd certainly still put it behind "Josey Wales" and "Unforgiven" in Eastwood's western-ography, but it's definitely one of the weirder and more fascinating examples of the genre from America during the period.
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10/10
Once in every life....someone comes along
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Closeup on a mailbox: Mr. and Mrs. Richard Johnson. Behind it, a dusty road leading through green fields, a minivan coming towards the camera and a pan over towards an isolated farmhouse. It's the present, and Michael and Carolyn have come to settle some issues regarding their mother's estate. It seems that their mother wanted her ashes scattered from a nearby covered bridge, which startles her two grown kids, particularly the seemingly very conservative and religious Michael. Turns out that Francesca had her reasons, as they find out when they open her cedar chest and turn to the diaries contained within...

Late summer 1965, and Francesca, an Iowa housewife in her mid-40s is seeing her husband and kids off to the Illinois State Fair. They'll be gone for 5 days and she'll have little to do but be bored in a different way than she usually is, until the arrival the next morning of a lost National Geographic photographer, Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood). Kincaid is on assignment to photograph the covered bridges that the county is famed for, and Francesca tries to tell him the way to the Roseman bridge but quickly decides to show him the way personally instead. As they drive towards the bridge and make small talk, they seem uneasy at first - but when Robert mentions Francesca's accent, and she finds that he has visited the town where she grew up in Italy, something starts to click. He reaches for a cigarette from the glove compartment and brushes her leg...later he picks flowers for her....they have the same favorite radio station, playing blues and jazz. Francesca starts to see something special, exotic....Robert sees someone warm and real, centered but more than the simple housewife that she's let herself become.

So begins four days of falling in love, four days of uncertainty, secretive glances, shyness turning to boldness, feelings long-buried in both reawakened and examined by two people smart enough to know right away how problematic an affair can be, yet willing to cast aside the doubts and damn the consequences. For now. The brilliance of The Bridges of Madison County isn't in any kind of originality, and it isn't in the bits of Waller's strained prose that occasionally leech through LaGravenese's generally excellent screenplay; it isn't in Streep's accent, which I know some have problems with but which I barely even notice at this point; and it isn't in the framing story, which again has grown on me over time but is certainly not all that interesting itself. What makes the film magical is the chemistry, the feeling of absolute rightness between the two leads, and the slow building towards an inevitable yet still heartbreaking decision.

Clint Eastwood certainly must have seemed an odd choice to take on this film, which he co-produced and co-wrote the elegiac "Doe Eyes" theme for in addition to directing and starring - even to me, a big fan already at the time, it seemed odd. Robert Redford seemed to be everybody's idea of Kincaid, and Steven Spielberg got mentioned often as a possible director, but I doubt many people will have problems after they see the film. Eastwood's Robert is a sensitive guy, but he's not schmaltzy, a poetic man but not pretentious about it, and a man clearly as unsure about the concept of love and the kind of risk he puts himself into as the married Francesca. He's a traveler and a loner, but deep down there's something missing, something we can feel almost from the beginning, something seen in the long gaze out the window near the end, and as he stands in the rain, waiting and hoping, at the film's emotional climax. And Eastwood the director keeps things from getting out of hand sentimentally until the last half hour, when both he and the audience know it's time for the tears to flow.

But as good as Clint is - and this is surely one of his two or three best performances - Meryl Streep is just a marvel here. Overlook the accent - whether you like it or not, it really isn't terribly important here - and you see a less mannered, more natural performance than she's given anywhere else. She mentions a couple of times in the making-of piece that accompanies the film on DVD that she was uncertain at first of Eastwood's quick shooting style, but it does wonders for her, giving a spontaneity that she really needed for the role. So much of the film relies on us believing that these are two hesitant, uncertain people with a yearning that at first has no direction - it can't seem studied, and it doesn't. And for a film that is set mostly in a kitchen and around barn-like red covered bridges, there's an excitement and intensity that can't be matched in most romances shot under the Eiffel Tower or in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. The technical aspects - Jack N. Green's lovely September-October photography and the wonderful Eastwood-chosen musical mixture of Johnny Hartman and Dinah Washington, among others - are just about perfect as well.

What the film ultimately builds to - and much of it is on Streep's shoulders - is a powerful examination of regret and loss and a determination that there are no perfect choices in life, only choices that involve different kinds of sacrifices. The film doesn't comment on the rightness or wrongness of her adultery, but Francesca lets her kids know that whatever she's done, she's not going to beat herself up over it - and neither should they. At the end, we know that whatever choice she made would have been difficult, would have involved hurting herself and others; there's no easy answer, only a bit of hope for the next generation, as they at least have come to accept and understand, and Francesca's ashes scatter on the wind....
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Enchanted (2007)
9/10
A perfect title for the best Disney musical in years
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Giselle is a simple girl living in a cottage in the middle of the woods in the beautiful country of Andalasia, where she is friends with all the furry little animals who come and joyfully help her keep her cozy little home neat and tidy. One day the handsome, brave and rather stupid Prince Edward comes across her as he's engaged in his favorite activity, troll-hunting, and after saving her the two immediately fall in love. But alas, Edward's stepmother, Queen Narissa, has other designs - she doesn't want Edward to ever marry and have a child to take away her throne, and so when Giselle comes to the palace to marry, the Queen tricks her into falling down a deep well, eventually to land in....Times Square. And to leave the world of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty-style 50s Disney animation and enter the world of "reality." Kevin Lima's film attempts to walk an almost impossible tightrope - being a film that is both a parody of the traditional fairytale-animated film that has been Disney's bread-and-butter for 70 years, yet also holding onto the fairytale charm and warmth amidst the mockery. Somehow, he comes very close to perfection. No small part of this is due to the absolutely radiant presence of Amy Adams as the real-life Giselle, walking, dancing and (wonderfully) singing her way into the home of divorce lawyer and single father Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and his young daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey) - who of course believes that the princess is everything she in fact turns out to be, while daddy takes a little while longer to accept this mad, magical girl.

Life is further complicated when our handsome prince (James Marsden) appears on the scene as well to rescue Giselle and take her back to Andalasia to wed. By the time he finds her though, Giselle has started to learn that our reality is as interesting and wonderful as - if far less simple than - her cartoon homeland and when the evil queen (Susan Sarandon) finally makes an appearance in the flesh, it's clear that Giselle's human mind has started to dominate her animated heart.

I haven't experienced so much sheer joy and delight in a film in a long time; why oh why did I miss this in the theater? Adams is spectacular, funny and naive but so utterly convincing and "real" in her "unreality" - she really feels like an alien being through the first 2/3 of the film, so solid and literal and deliberately one-dimensional, and it makes her eventual transformation into a more real woman all the more special. Her songs are mostly wonderful - "Happy Working Song" is the best movie song I've heard in a decade at least - and the rest of the cast is more than solid. It's got all the adventure and thrills that the best of the Disney classics had, with loads of references both subtle and overt to such films as Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and especially Snow White, but it never feels particularly derivative or lacking in enthusiasm and verve despite all the cobbling it does from other sources. The soundtrack is mostly terrific, the choreography solid, the animation makes me long for the return of traditional Disney pen-and-ink work. I had a feeling I'd like it, but I didn't expect anything this excellent. If there's a flaw, it's that the ending feels a little too rushed, and some of the CGI just looks a bit weak compared to the traditional animation. But these are small issues, and I suspect I'll like this even more on a second viewing. Just wonderful.
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Best Friends (1975)
7/10
Surprisingly solid existential-psychological thriller is more than just exploitation fare
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Handsome (and frequently shirtless) young Jesse (Richard Hatch) arrives at an army discharge center with his fiancé Kathy (Susanne Benton) and her rather flaky friend Jo Ella (Ann Noland) to pick up his best buddy, Pat (Doug Chapin). Pat and Jesse have been friends since childhood as we see in the opening montage of B/W photos. Now they are both out of the army, an experience which (very subtly implied) seems to have affected Pat a bit more than Jesse. The two and their girls are going to drive across the desert with an RV and then Jesse and Kathy are going to get married and settle down. But Pat has some different ideas in mind....

This is definitely the most psychologically interesting, and best acted and overall most professional entry in this group of films (from the "Drive-in Cult Classics" DVD set) so far. Hatch and Chapin are both pretty solid, as the just-grown-up man starting to take responsibility, and his younger friend who refuses to and Ann Noland's Jo Ella is convincingly on-the-edge; only Benton's Kathy really comes up short. There's clearly a lot of homo-erotic subtext here -- though Pat keeps explaining that he just wants to screw around, pick up girls, that he doesn't want to settle down with Joe Ella or want Jesse to settle down either, it's obvious that he can't envision a life in which Jesse isn't his main partner, sexual or not. There's a fair bit of nudity here for the exploitation angle, but it's not really gratuitous, rather pretty ordinary as you'd expect with a bunch of young people on the road; even the strip club sequence where Jo Ella impulsively gets up on stage and starts taking it off in front of a bunch of mostly Native Americans on a reservation, leading to some momentary troubles, is very natural and feels quite realistic. Only at the end, as Pat goes really psycho and terrorizes the rest of the quartet on his motorcycle at night, resulting ultimately in an (apparently accidental) death does the film really falter -- it seems to be striving for some kind of existential ending on the one hand, and a more obviously satisfying and cathartic resolution on the other, awkwardly melding the two -- though the last moments I thought were pretty fine.

Offbeat and more serious than the typical Crown International drive-in fare, this has a nice instrumental score by Richard Cunha and some fairly dull country-rock songs interspersed; think low-rent Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers. The photography of the day scenes ranges from nice to excellent - the night stuff looks rather faky. Director Nosseck has kept busy doing cheesy stuff like this and a fair amount of TV work; this was his first film and shows a little bit of promise that he seems to have lived up to, but not really surpassed. Star Richard Hatch of course has played significant roles on both versions of Battlestar Galactica; this was apparently his first theatrical feature and though it's better than its reputation, it's not really something that was going to make him a star. At any rate, another fun entry in this fascinating cycle of cheesiness...
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7/10
Stylistically brilliant but dramatically muddled gangster rise-and-fall tale
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
At the time I first saw this, on original release, I had little or no patience for hip hop - the culture or the music - and I really didn't get the gangster genre. I'm not sure if I felt that the film glorified gangsterism, or if it was that it was mostly full of repellent characters...can't really say what, all told, turned me off so much, but my memory of it was very harsh.

Christopher Walken plays Frank White, the ironically-named gangster who is seen leaving prison in the opening shots of the film and heading back into New York City to regain control of his mostly black gang of drug dealers. One of his rivals gets rubbed out spectacularly in a phone booth, signaling that an era of (apparently) relative peace has ended as the charming, somewhat nutty, and very afro-centric Frank makes his return.

I haven't quite figured out what Ferrara and writer Nicholas St. John were aiming at by having Frank surround himself with African-Americans, being insulted at various points for being a "ni--er lover", adopting certain stereotypically black forms of behavior. It's interesting - for all his faults, Frank's not a racist, and in fact the film seems almost colorblind, apart from the other gang leaders who Frank intimidates and occasionally murders to show his power. Up against Frank and his two most trusted lieutenants Jimmy Jump (Larry Fishburne) and Joey Delasio (Paul Calderon) are Detective Roy Bishop (Victor Argo) and his two top men Thomas Flanigan (Wesley Snipes) and Dennis Gilley (David Caruso), and the film is at pains to portray the cops as almost as thuggish as - if a bit less lethal than - Frank and his goons. We also find out fairly quickly that Frank means to take a fair part of his drug money and leave it to a badly needed hospital in his neighborhood.

So there's an attempt here at showing a multifaceted, complex man who happens to be a murderous drug lord, but also has his human side. Except it doesn't - quite - work. There's no real sense of who Frank is, why he wants to build this hospital, where he comes from; it just seems like a personal quirk, and personal quirks that end up costing millions of dollars and lots of lives really need some explaining. None of the other characters register as anything beyond archetypes either (Caruso as the hot-headed Irish cop, Snipes as the cool cat partner, etc). Finally the film feels mostly like an excuse for its several excellent violent set pieces - a shootout at a big drug deal in a warehouse, an exciting street chase by car and then on foot in the rain, Frank's final confrontation with Roy - and some solid proto-gangsta styling from Schooly D.

The photography (by Bojan Bazelli) is absolutely stunning - this is one of the best looking nighttime-in-New York films I've seen, the actions sequences are exciting, and the performances mostly solid with Walken be compelling if a bit too enigmatic to make us really feel anything much about him. Perhaps that's the point? It doesn't seem like enough to me. But on the whole, the film works as a good stylish genre exercise with an interesting racial feeling. It's just something about nothing, ultimately.

Well I'm glad I re-saw this. Though I wouldn't call it great or anything, it certainly left me with a different feeling than it did 18 or 19 years ago.
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Limbo (I) (1999)
9/10
Brilliant multifaceted commentary on the power of Story
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This film is going to upset many of its viewers. Most people go into a movie with some expectation that it's going to get set up in the first few minutes to tell a certain kind of story, and stick with it. Exceptions might occur in some "art" movies - but this doesn't seem very artsy - or a thriller; there's nothing thriller-like here at all in fact - until halfway through, when it all changes 180 degrees.

Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is a 40is struggling singer playing a small coastal city in Alaska. At the beginning of the film she's at an outdoor wedding and she happens to break up with her boyfriend, a member of the band she's singing with, and needs a ride home which she gets from Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn) a somewhat older man who works for the lesbian couple that own the house where the wedding takes place. The low-key Joe and the more aggressive Donna form an uneasy friendship, that uneasily leads to a romance complicated by the fact that Donna's introverted teen-aged daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez) also has a crush on Joe, who she sometimes works with.

So this is a low-key drama about working-class people struggling and finding love in a remote town, right? There are several scenes set in a bar where Donna finds work after leaving her band, lots of dialogue about how tough the fishing is, how rough things are now that a canning plant has closed down - there are a couple of brief shots of the factory, cleaning up for a last time. We have Kris Kristofferson playing his typical menacing but charming adversary in the background, involved some way in Joe's questionable past; a sort of love-triangle, a difficult mother-daughter relationship, and the uneasy situation he finds himself in when his much-younger half-brother Bobby (Casey Siemaszko) shows up needing help with a little job...

At this point, as Joe and Donna and Noelle accompany Bobby on a boat trip to a remote island, the uneasiness starts to build - what exactly is Bobby up to? Why is he upset that Joe is bringing the two women along - but unwilling to tell him not to? On their first night, anchored in a small bay, we find the answer to these questions but they bring on more problems that carry through to the end of the film. Soon Joe, Donna and Noelle are stranded on the island, fending off starvation, cold -- and the possibility of murder. The low-key family/romantic drama has become a frightening survival-thriller with no easy or positive outcome in sight.

So we have one kind of film that quickly and surprisingly changes into another kind, but what is really remarkable about Limbo is that there's a third film lurking beneath the surface from the first moments to the last, that really makes itself known only near the very end - unless you're sharper at noticing what's going on beneath the pretty blunt and sometimes stereotypical dialogue and characters than I was on a first go-round. "Limbo" is about the very nature of storytelling, in all its forms - lying, exaggeration, the tricks that memories play, the stories we're told that end up being lies, and the lies we tell ourselves. In an old abandoned shack on the island, Noelle finds a hundred-year old diary, and reads from it every night for the couple of weeks the trio are stranded. The diary recounts hardships and privations, and joys at the wonder of nature; it also carries sometimes-subtle reflections of Noelle's feelings about her mother, reflected back when Noelle is informed that the stories she was told about her biological father have all been false. The revelations in the last few minutes, when we think about what they have to say about the characters we are watching now, on this little island, say just as much to us about the conversations and flashes of earlier histories that we've heard throughout the film, and we begin to question where and with whom real truth ever lies - and whether it matters as much as the stories we choose to tell, and the ways in which we embellish those truths, for good or ill.

I have some problems with "Limbo" that I tend to have with a lot of Sayles' films - many of the characters seem to be...characters; much of the dialogue is wooden and sounds written; many of the little touches he throws in (Noelle being vegan and her penchant for self-mutilation) seem obvious and generic. But the central performances are all so excellent (particularly Martinez, whose career seems to have alas gone nowhere), and the ending so elegant and so miraculous in its achievement of wrapping everything into a grand and beautiful inquiry into the power of myth-making and storytelling, that I can largely forgive the faults. Overall, a brilliant film with one of the very best endings I've ever seen.
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3/10
Future sleaze director Zalman King is the standout psycho in this cheese-fest
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Zalman King is known today, if he's known at all, as the purveyor (producer-writer-director) of sleazy softcore smut like Red Shoe Diaries - in the early-mid 90s a "Zalman King" film definitely had some meaning in the straight-to-video market, I can tell you.

But in the 70s, Zalman King was a struggling actor doing guest shots on network TV series, and appearing in cheesy low-budget exploitation films like Trip With Teacher. Here he's Al, very tall and hook-nosed but otherwise a near dead-ringer for Bono (well, for Bono 15 years later), a creepy and mentally deranged biker who with his more sane but no less unpleasant brother Pete (Robert Porter) is stuck by the side of the road at the beginning of the flick. The brothers have bike problems, but they're soon bailed out by nice-guy motorcyclist Jay (Robert Gribbin) who gets Pete's bike going well enough to get them to the next service station.

Along the way the three bikers come upon a school bus with several young women - coy waving and less-coy glances from the 2 brothers for a bit, then all stop at the gas station. I think you might be able to guess where this is headed....if it were made 10-15 years later you'd expect a bloody horror film, but back in these pre-Friday the 13th and Halloween days it's just going to be the two creepy guys trying to have their way with the cute girls and get rid of nice-guy Jay and bus driver Marvin (Jack Driscoll). It's all rather long and tedious - bus breaks down, bikers tow it to near a deserted shack, get rid of driver, seemingly get rid of Jay....and all fairly stupid and silly (how dumb are the girls, Jay and the driver that they don't see that the brothers are sickos? and sickos without any weapons apart from one switchblade...but overpowering them would have been too easy and we wouldn't have a movie and an excuse for some nude scenes) until the kind of cool ending as Jay comes back seemingly from the dead and shows that he's a Real Man after all.

The weakest of the three films on the "Drive-in Cult Classics" box set that I've seen so far, but worth it for the cool ending and for King's deranged and freaky portrayal of Al, with one of the creepiest snickering laughs I've ever heard.
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The Teacher (1974)
4/10
Bad, but really fun exploitation horror-sex flick with surprising finale
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This teacher-student seduction/psycho stalker tale starts out well enough that I actually thought it was going to be a genuinely good movie (as opposed to good sleaze) but is fairly quickly derailed by almost uniformly horrendous acting and some fairly idiotic plot developments. Still, the opening is memorable: a quick pan from a boat in a harbor with the name "Diane" to a dilapidated 3 or 4 story industrial building facing the docks, and a close-up on the crazy face of Ralph (Anthony James), closing up a red coffin that he keeps in a half-open room on the top floor. Ralph races downstairs to his white, circa 1960 hearse (the coffin/hearse thing are never explained) and off to stop outside of a school. There he witnesses Diane (Angel Tompkins) say goodbye to 2 boys, but Ralph only has eyes for the beautiful young teacher, as the title comes up and the terribly cheesy theme song "The Teacher", sung by Jackie Ward, makes the first of many appearances. Ralph waits for Diane to leave and follows her blue Corvette (Diane's got quite the lifestyle for a high school teacher) home, waiting outside her suburban house while she changes and then following her again. She notices at one point and stops, trying to confront him but he speeds past, soon arriving back at the industrial complex and heading to the top floor where he will spy on Diane in her eponymously-named boat sunbathing topless. Yes, Angel Tompkins' rack is the major draw here, and a fine one it is. But Ralph is interrupted in his salacious activity by the appearance of the two young men we saw a few minutes earlier, who hop off a motorcycle and make their way to his secret spot while he hides. Turns out one of them is Ralph's brother Lou (Rudy Herrera) and the other his best friend Sean (Jay North, not getting the best work since his halcyon TV "Dennis the Menace" days and looking very much like a smaller-framed John Schneider here); Lou has found the hiding place and the two proceed to spy on Diane until surprised by Ralph, at which point a shocked Lou falls to his death! Ralph blames Sean for Lou's death, and proceeds to chase him with a bayonet, but Sean gets away.

The rest of the film essentially alternates between Diane's seduction of Sean - who has graduated, so I guess that makes it a little more OK - and Ralph's attempts both the revenge himself on Sean and to get a little special time with Diane. Sean has a fairly stereotypical family life, with a father who wants him to be working all the time and an indulgent mother (both very, very bady acted) but somehow seems to have time to do the nasty with Diane as often as possible (more gratuitous nudity, please). There's one particularly fascinating scene where the two lovers go to a bar - Sean is obviously underaged but the bartender serves Diane multiple bottles of wine which she shares with him - and they are spied on by a couple of old ladies who are horrified at the "over 40" Diane (she's actually 28) seducing the kid. The two old ladies are played by the Katherine Cassavetes and Lady Rowlands, mothers of John and Gena, very bizarre, and the bar is just exactly the perfect 70s suburban bar. Both Sean and Diane are completely sloshed but manage to make it home in Diane's corvette with no acknowledgment that drunk driving is dangerous - this would never happen in PC 2009.

The ending is pretty cool too, though not very well shot or choreographed, as Ralph kidnaps Sean and takes him to his hideout, choking him to death, but is followed by Diane who allows herself to be raped on top of the coffin but in the middle of it grabs Ralph's bayonet and stabs him to death! I thought for sure that Sean would turn out to still be alive, but he's not and the film ends with Diane weeping - again, kind of atypical.

All in all, lots of fun with very bad easy listening/lounge/muzak instrumental score and the stupid theme song popping up several times, good SoCal suburban and industrial locations, and an interesting if not terribly talented cast making for an interesting slice-of-exploitation life circa 35 years ago.
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2/10
Weakly played...weakly rolled....weakly Dungeon Mastered....
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
You are faced with an excess of very unrealistic-looking CGI. The whole of the Empress' castle, not to mention the entire city, all of the dragons, most of the weapons, the fantastic landscapes, all look somewhat less beautiful and less real than the average Larry Elmore Dragon cover. You have 10 weeks and $10 million to try to make them better. What do you do?

You miss, sorry, the THACO on this attack was 6 and you rolled a 4.

There is a screenplay before you, filled with gaping holes in the action (why are they suddenly in an empty forest at least twice? why is the female magician unable to use magic except when it's convenient? why is our callow hero, Ridley, so special and the only one who can complete this quest, ad infinitum) and some of the worst dialogue you've ever heard:

Norda: How old are you? Snails: Twenty-three. Yeah, I know I'm a little young for you, but what if I get my hands on an aging potion, huh? I'll sacrifice a couple of years for you. Norda: I'm two hundred and thirty-four.

Not to mention an ending that's beyond pathetic.

This one doesn't look too hard to beat, go ahead and give it a shot...oh, a swing and a miss. Sorry you rolled a 1, you only needed a 2.

The actors are as miserable as the screenplay, before you are Thora Birch, a petulant child spouting modern notions of equality; Justin Whalin, dull as dishwater and less convincing than Brendan Fraser as our "chosen hero"; Lee Arenberg having no more conviction than most hyper 12-year olds that choose to play dwarven fighters; etc etc. Only Jeremy Irons seems to know what he's doing, and that's taking the money and running with it and having a fine time playing totally over-the-top - and totally off from everybody else.

Separate attacks please -- oh, miss miss miss miss miss...but you HIT on Irons; he's actually providing a good show!

How about the director? This all-seeing beholder-type monster has put his foot in almost every action sequence, directing in the most unimaginative ways possible, and paraphrasing (that's a kind word for "ripping off") Indiana Jones more than once, most notably in an awful fight in the thieve's guild. This one should almost be as easy as the script to knock out...

Sorry. Another 1. Although if it makes you feel better, the THACO here was 4.

A bonus for you, intrepid dungeoneer. As you've persevered despite your horrible losses, I give you a bonus. It is the Marlon Wayans monster, AKA Stepin Fetchit for the D&D crowd. Whether he's whining about doing the dirty work, wailing like a stuck pig, or spouting (PG) urbanisms even more out of place than most of the rest of the dialogue in this turkey, good ol' Marlon gives one of the most solid Uncle Tom performances seen in ages. Yassuh, give him a shot.

Wow. Miss again. You really don't know how to play this game, do you? Please start rolling up a new character....
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Sleepy Hollow (1999)
8/10
Fun pastiche of Hammer horror, Poe, Irving and others
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I used to love Tim Burton. Being a sf/fantasy/comics freak from childhood on, Burton was one of the few Hollywood filmmakers separate from the Lucas/Spielberg axis who was making stuff that I could always count on seeing with my non-film buff friends who were into the same sort of genre stuff I was. Loved "Edward Scissorhands", "Beetlejuice", and "Ed Wood", and always looked forward to what came next.

But in the past decade or so he's disappointed more often than not. His "Planet of the Apes" remake was an abortion, and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", while not terrible, didn't seem necessary or particularly necessary either. "Sweeney Todd" was a little bit better, but still didn't make me particular worry about having missed a couple of his more recent works. I caught up to one of those the other night though, and I'm happy to say that my fears were not (mostly) justified.

"Sleepy Hollow", first of all, has very little to do with the Washington Irving story which it is "based on" according to the credits. "Inspired by" might be more accurate, and the film takes equal inspiration from the works of Edgar Allan Poe (specifically his prototypical detective character, Dupin) and Hammer horror films from the late 50s and early 60s - going so far as to cast Christopher Lee in a small role at the beginning of the film.

The cast is certainly a big, big part of the fun here, with such wonderful character veterans as Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gough, Martin Landau and Christopher Walken all getting juicy (if generally small) turns in this story of a New York police constable, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), with "advanced" ideas being sent (more or less as punishment) to the small Hudson valley town of Sleepy Hollow to deal with a series of gruesome beheadings, in 1799. As the film develops, Ichabod believes there's a perfectly rational explanation for the murders, and it's to the film's credit and Depp's that as he gradually learns that in fact there is a fantastic, mystical presence behind them (Christopher Walken as the silent but deadly Headless Horseman), he continues to probe the secrets, never entirely giving up his rational belief system but also finding the ability to accept some of the religious/magical possibilities behind the horseman - while also coming under the spell of a young woman at the center of the horror (Christina Ricci).

It's all quite beautifully shot, excellently acted with perhaps the exception of Ricci (one of those actors I can never really accept in period roles), who isn't really bad, and it's a wonderful mixture of comedy, scares and thrills, and a bit of the mystic. My only real problem with it comes in the ending, which is too much like a Scooby Doo "aha, I've got you now" episode; most of the film managed to keep me guessing at least a little bit but the finale is all too typical. Oh well; this is certainly one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in a while, and there's even some interesting stuff below the surface - the whole colonial/witch-haunted/Protestant New England of the 17th-18th centuries brushing up against the coming of modern science and the Industrial Revolution and secularism is quite expertly handled, though it never gets in the way of a good old-fashioned story. Really, loads and loads of fun and probably my 2nd-favorite Burton film at the moment after "Ed Wood".
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6/10
typically classy, but stolid theatrical adaptation redeemed by some fine acting
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I knew that this was an adaptation of a play going in, and seeing Delbert Mann's name made it all the clearer that this was going go be one of those "classy" American films of the 50s about a "serious" subject that got a bunch of award nominations but appears stodgy and dull now. And I was more or less right in my assumption.

The characters for the most part struck me as one-note. It doesn't surprise me really that Deborah Kerr was nominated for playing the repressed, borderline hysterical browbeaten spinster daughter who forms a devotion to the (Oscar-winning) David Niven's exaggerated British military character - Kerr's role is the flashiest, along with Niven's, and the least interesting I think. I really did like Wendy Hiller as the hotel's manager - she brought real warmth and empathy to this rather understated role and she, too, won an Oscar for it - this one well-deserved I think. There's so much emotion there in the scene where she's telling the American writer who she loves (Burt Lancaster) that he needs to go to his ex-wife (Rita Hayworth, in maybe the best performance I've seen from her) because she needs him, needs him far more than the lonely but basically accepting hotelier.

Hayworth and Hiller bring this up to some extent from its dull, stagy direction and the rather obvious and predictable direction the characters are moving in, and the last scene with all the main characters gathered in the dining room as Kerr finally breaks (if only for a moment) from her domineering mother is also fairly powerful, so on the whole I can recommend this though I think you'd probably have to be a fan of some of the actors here to really get into it.
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Arson, Inc. (1949)
7/10
Solid if not really memorable cheap, speedy noir involving insurance scams
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Director William Berke specialized in cheapo jungle adventures but he worked in a variety of genres, churning out in 1949 alone 3 crime/noir films, a Jungle Jim adventure with Johnny Weissmuller, another jungle pic, and a western. Whew! It's amazing that this film is as good as it is given the necessarily brief shooting schedule, budget and no-name cast. Robert Lowery plays Joe Martin, a firefighter who in the opening scenes is promoted to a position as an undercover investigator in the arson department after he finds some suspicious evidence while fighting a fire at a fur warehouse. Turns out there's an insurance scam in the making, and Martin's investigation leads him both to a job with the insurance company exec - really a mobster who takes over businesses when the heat gets too tough for his clients - and a romance with a babysitter who he meets while waiting for the first people in the chain that will lead him to the mobster.

This is tautly and efficiently put together at 63 minutes and the acting is serviceable, though only character actor Edward Brophy as oily and garrulous henchman Pete, and Maude Eburne as the love interest's Grandma stand out. Nicely lit and shot by Carl Berger with some location work blending pretty well with the studio sets. Nothing to write home about but effective enough.
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De woekeraar (1952)
8/10
Excellent tough, low-budget noir should be better known
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Rather better than "Arson Inc" with which it's pared on a VCI DVD is "Loan Shark" which benefits from an obviously larger budget and something of a name cast, though it's still clearly a b-picture at heart. George Raft, rather old and perhaps a bit miscast at 57 and stiff and humorless is Joe Gargan, out of prison after a few years for assault and battery, trying to make a new life by getting a straight job at the tire factor his brother-in-law works for. But we know right away it ain't gonna be easy as the film opens with one of the most awesome quick, violent scenes in noir as an unknown man leaves his apartment and is quickly followed to an alley and brutally beaten within an inch of his life.

The beatings it turns out come courtesy of a loan shark ring that has much of the plant, and much of the unnamed city in thrall. The young workers get in debt, wanting to buy their wives nice things or betting on the horses, and they're led to the ring by an unknown stooge. Gargan comes to just get a simple job, but is recruited instead by the tire company president to investigate the goings-on and find out who is the stooge, and as much as he can about the operation. At first Gargan resists the notion, wanting nothing to do with this, but after his brother-in-law is killed he goes all in, even going so far as to infiltrate the loan shark operation by becoming the protégé of the group's leader at the tire factory, Donelli (the always wonderfully slimy Paul Stewart) and eventually working his way into starting a new operation with a dummy laundry service. By this point he's on the same page as Donelli, with only the big boss Phillips (John Hoyt, enormously charming and catlike dangerous) above him. Or is there someone else...we and he don't get to find that out until the nicely staged finale which culminates in a shootout in a theater.

Along the way Gargan starts a romance with a young lady who lives on the same floor as his sister, but loses her when he goes deeply into the mobsters' racket, even going so far as to beat up her brother for non-payment of loans. The romantic scenes are obvious reminders of one of the few problems this tough and exciting little picture has - Raft, who is definitely old enough to make his job prospects at the plant rather unbelievable and his romance with Ann (Dorothy Hart, about half his age) a little creepy. But beyond that, he's wooden and monotonal in a way that reminded me more of Charles Bronson 30 years later than Raft's own much better work 20 years earlier. Oh well, he does get the job done and he's still tough and mean-looking enough that he doesn't really detract from a nice little slightly off-the-beaten track entry in the cycle. A noir set in a tire factory? Who'da thought.
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Pick-up (1975)
4/10
mystical hippie sexploitation melodrama is all over the place
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
A couple of attractive young ladies lie in the tall grass by the side of a road. Handsome blonde hippie-type Chuck (Alan Long) stops his RV and offers them a ride. Dark, slightly exotic Maureen (Gini Eastwood) warns freer-spirited Carol (Jill Senter) that no good will come of this, as Chuck is an Aries...

So begins the bizarre mystical/sexploitation/hippie melodrama Pick-up, one of the stranger and most unplaceable films I've seen in a while. Chuck and Carol develop an attachment pretty quickly, Carol flirts with him and flashes a group of horny guys in a pickup truck that passes them....Chuck's driving the RV through Florida to Tallahassee and communicates with an irritable manager on the phone...Maureen does Tarot in the back and seems pensive. Eventually they get lost and the RV gets stuck in a swampy area, where the bulk of the film takes place. None of the characters seems to worry too much about getting out of being stuck, or getting anywhere in particular though Chuck is under contract. They're carefree, you know? Alternating odd and seemingly random flashbacks to the earlier lives of all three characters, Maureen's mystic pagan religious revelations, and Carol and Chuck's uninhibited lovemaking, this is a bizarre mesh of "art" film elements, exploitation, and really quite gorgeous scenic nature photography courtesy of director/cinematographer Hirschenson. After a while I basically stopped caring about what was happening, because none of it really mattered very much. It's nice to look at, both leading ladies are very cute and very naked much of the time, and the ending is pretty bizarre and nonsensical. This must have mystified most drive-in audiences; what the aims of the filmmakers were, I really couldn't tell you. Sit back, fire one up, and dig it, man.
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7/10
Interesting, complex structure doesn't entirely compensate for some thin elements
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Sidney Slumet's moralistic thriller starts out promisingly enough, with pasty, fat Philip Seymour Hoffman pounding totally hot (and 15 years younger-looking) Marisa Tomei from behind. They talk about how great things are on vacation -- and we get a sense that they aren't so great "back home." Soon, that's where we are, watching a very intense jewelry store robbery that, it turns out, is masterminded by Hoffman's character. The older woman who ends up shooting the robber, and getting shot herself, turns out to be his mother, and the driver of the getaway car, his younger brother. Hoffman and his kid brother (Ethan Hawke) are both in deep financial trouble, and figure an easy, painless way to get out of it is to rob their parents' store. It's insured, it'll be easy, no cameras, etc etc. But it doesn't work out that way.

This heads out on a good track, the performances are all solid, but somewhere along the line the structure (overlapping flashbacks) starts to betray some thinness; Tomei's character for example is crucial to the plot, but never really developed at all. Albert Finney, playing the father of the two sons, spends the movie trying to find out what happened; when he does we come to the very downbeat conclusion, which the film tries to prepare us for but ultimately, for me, fails to do convincingly. Still, it's solidly crafted for the most part and never boring.
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9/10
Infectious cheerfulness? Or masked sadness and misery.
25 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I saw this in the theater, on a weekday matinée when there was one other patron, a middle-aged lady sitting across the aisle from me who kept dropping things loudly. Somehow this added to the experience of the film, which is about a positively positive young woman, Poppy (Sally Hawkins, just brilliant) who just won't let anything stand in her way of enjoying her life and loving everyone in it as much as she can -- until she meets her anti-human match in Scott (Eric Marsan), a frighteningly angry, racist and sexist driving instructor who probably ought to be locked up, or at least not having such contact with the general public. Poppy's a working class girl in Mike Leigh's modern-day London, and that means full of quirks and foibles and not in the least bit glamorous or obvious; much of the charm in the film as in most of the Leigh films I've seen is in not knowing what's going to come next, except that it will be unusual -- but never untrue.

Poppy has a couple of sisters, a best friend, and the beginnings of a relationship to contend with along with her crazy driver training class (necessitated by the theft of her bike through typical carelessness in the first scene) and she navigates all of them with her chin up -- though never with her brain turned off. I'm sure there are some who will be very irritated with this blast of sun through the rainbow, but speaking as a depressive who typically hates Pollyanna characters -- I just loved her - and the film.

At the end, when Poppy and Scott have hit a point of no return, my emotions really went through the ringer - and I think I started to see what Poppy was missing, and that perhaps she knew that she was missing it. Her failure to understand misery is in some ways just as limiting to her understanding of other people and the world as Scott's inability to ever forget it, though it's much less destructive. As she goes for a boat ride I'm reminded of Jacques Rivette's "Celine and Julie Go Boating", a fantasy different in almost every respect from this dose of hard reality and broad humor - but I think that Poppy, like the characters in that film, knows that she's in some ways living in a fantasy world of her own making. And maybe, given some of the alternatives, that's not such an awful thing.
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