Zatoichi (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2003). The Zatoichi series was the longest-running and most perennially popular chanbara or period sword-film of the sixties and seventies, beginning in 1962 and running for some 27 installments, in which the itinerant blind masseur of the title uses his mastery of the cane sword on behalf of the common people he meets on his travels through late Edo-era Japan against brutal yakuza clans and corrupt feudal officials. The series populist appeal was what made it unique, then in the theater and now on video, so it was natural that someone, in this case Takeshi Kitano, whose stock is high both in the Japanese entertainment industry and among Western fans of Asian film, would try to revive the character. However, in spite of his success with the public at home and among festivalgoers, I wish I liked this film more. The script is very good; Zatoichi's cleanup of a rural town torn apart by rival clans of yakuza is very much in the tradition of the series, but Kitano as Zatoichi is a lot less approachable than Shintaro Katsu, who played the character in the series. The blind masseur was a mix of crafty peasant and lone outsider, played with more than a dash of self-deprecating humor, an everyman who just happened to be very good with a sword, while Kitano plays him more as a swordsman who happens to be a blind masseur, a shift in emphasis which makes all the difference. It's the supporting cast here, and some good, well-placed bits of slapstick, that makes up for Kitano's lack of likability, and the closing finale, a festival dance that combines Western-style tap dance, also helps warm up the film a little. And while it might be a tossup as to whether this film's CGI-enhanced violence or the pressurized blood-sprays of yesteryear were more realistic, the CGI here sticks out like a sore thumb. Avoid the optional English soundtrack on Miramax's DVD presentation and stick with the Japanese with subtitles: the pseudo-Japanese accents are embarrassingly lame.
Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli Spiriti, dir. Federico Fellini, 1965). Fellini's first color feature was not a success financially or critically on its release, but has showed staying power over the years since. Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina plays the wife of a philandering Mario Pisu coming to terms with her failing marriage, encountering spirits of the departed, and tempted by the decadent playmates of her hedonistic neighbor (Sandra Milo). As is so often the case with Fellini, autobiography is a strong element: both Fellini and his wife shared an interest in the paranormal, and Federico was a womanizer. Complicating things was the centrality of Masina's character in the film, the script's candidness about the state of the Fellini's marriage, and Federico's insistence that Masina "play herself" in the film. Well, she wasn't playing herself; she was playing herself as her husband imagined she should be, and doing so in a maddeningly passive way to boot. Still and all, Juliet of the Spirits is an impressive, extravagantly gorgeous film to watch, and Masina plays "herself" with a quiet inner strength notwithstanding her husband's stacking of the deck.
The Trip (dir. Roger Corman, 1967). Corman might not have invented "psychsploitation," (Vincent Price having injected himself with LSD in 1959's The Tingler), but this film, scripted by Jack Nicholson, certainly helped to establish psychedelia in the movies. The title pretty much says it: TV-commercial director Peter Fonda takes LSD for the first time and then spends the rest of this hour-and-twenty-minute feature tripping his brains out. Corman was seriously intrigued by the drug culture emerging at this time, took LSD himself as part of his research, and maintains a consistent neutrality on the subject, neither unquestioningly championing LSD nor unquestioningly condemning it. American International did not find this balanced position good enough and added a preface to the film that warned of the dangers of drugs, as well as a shattered-glass optical printing effect over the closing freeze-frame of Fonda's face. Of course there is no real way to capture the subjective experience of hallucinogens on film, but in trying to evoke it for the uninitiated Corman made use of the panoply of visual effects seen hitherto in rock clubs and in the West Coast underground film scene -- op-art and oil-and-water projections, mutiple exposures, diffusing filters and fragmenting lenses, combined with flash-editing and post-production optical printing -- more or less taking out the patent on the psychedelic style used in numerous films to follow.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Friday, July 06, 2007
Films of the week 3
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (dir. Robert Wise, 1979). After the cancellation of the original Star Trek television series in 1969, creator Gene Roddenberry made a number of attempts to revive Star Trek through the seventies. Finally, after an abortive attempt at a second series entitled Star Trek: Phase II, the script concept for the the two-hour series premiere was developed into a theatrical film with a full-on budget, and fans of the original series saw the starship Enterprise as they never had before. Production was on a tight schedule necessitating some cutting of corners, but when the film opened it was a hit, and Paramount soon realized that it had a highly lucrative franchise on its hands. The rest, of course -- ten theatrical films and counting, five spinoff television series, and innumerable additions to the Star Trek mythology -- is, as the man says, history. For fans, the Enterprise crew's mission to intercept a vast sentient machine before it reaches Earth is familiar territory, and serves well before it sort of evaporates into quasi-mystical gibberish at the end. In fact, this re-imagining of Star Trek has a lot going for it, but still had a way to go; the majestic largeness of the production tends to make the cast and its chemistry (always the show's main strength) look insignificant, and it took another sequel (1982's The Wrath of Khan) before the formula was just right.
Born in '45 (Jahrgang 45) (dir. Jurgen Bottcher, 1966). As a result of an action of the government of the German Democratic Republic banning a number of films that featured new styles, themes and techniques, this film did not see its premiere until after reunification, in 1990. Rolf Romer and Monika Hildebrandt are a young couple whose marriage is showing signs of strain, which causes Romer to leave his wife and drift through Berlin, trying to figure out his life and whether it will continue to have Hildebrandt in it. Director Bottcher and cameraman Roland Graf were heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism and what could be seen of the French and Czech new wave film in this poetic and realistic drama about young people in the GDR. Bottcher, who never made another narrative feature, was just one of many filmmakers whose careers were impacted by the government's ban (he became a documentarist and a painter), and the ban profoundly affected the subsequent development of cinema in Germany.
2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968). This is arguably Kubrick's best film, one that significantly influenced the genre of science fiction film, and always worth seeing again just one more time, though I find that this time it is mostly to see the favorite bits. Those who are mostly into space opera tend not to like the obscurity of the story, though summing up the plot is actually easy: an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence, through the placement of a strange monolith among a troop of prehistoic anthropoids, have spurred them to discover the use of tools, leading to the anthropoids evolving into modern humans and eventually to space travel, and have planted a similar monolith on the moon which, when discovered and unearthed by the humans, emits a signal directed to the planet Jupiter, where Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and the sentient computer HAL 9000 wend their way on the spacecraft Discovery to encounter a third monolith -- and possibly to an evolutionary leap more profound than the discovery of tools.
His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951). A straightforward film noir suddenly goes deep into left field when Vincent Price joins Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell at a fancy and moderne resort in Mexico. Mitchum has been sent there for a purpose unknown to him, but it involves a payoff of fifty grand and deported mob kingpin Raymond Burr. Russell is a self-styled heiress and Vincent Price is a star of Hollywood swashbucklers she is trying to snare. When Mitchum finally realizes the jam he's in, it's up to Price to swashbuckle his way in and save the day. Howard Hughes owned the studio, RKO, and put his name on the picture, so expect to see prominently displayed two of the tycoon's obsessions: airplanes and Jane Russell's cleavage.
Born in '45 (Jahrgang 45) (dir. Jurgen Bottcher, 1966). As a result of an action of the government of the German Democratic Republic banning a number of films that featured new styles, themes and techniques, this film did not see its premiere until after reunification, in 1990. Rolf Romer and Monika Hildebrandt are a young couple whose marriage is showing signs of strain, which causes Romer to leave his wife and drift through Berlin, trying to figure out his life and whether it will continue to have Hildebrandt in it. Director Bottcher and cameraman Roland Graf were heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism and what could be seen of the French and Czech new wave film in this poetic and realistic drama about young people in the GDR. Bottcher, who never made another narrative feature, was just one of many filmmakers whose careers were impacted by the government's ban (he became a documentarist and a painter), and the ban profoundly affected the subsequent development of cinema in Germany.
2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968). This is arguably Kubrick's best film, one that significantly influenced the genre of science fiction film, and always worth seeing again just one more time, though I find that this time it is mostly to see the favorite bits. Those who are mostly into space opera tend not to like the obscurity of the story, though summing up the plot is actually easy: an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence, through the placement of a strange monolith among a troop of prehistoic anthropoids, have spurred them to discover the use of tools, leading to the anthropoids evolving into modern humans and eventually to space travel, and have planted a similar monolith on the moon which, when discovered and unearthed by the humans, emits a signal directed to the planet Jupiter, where Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and the sentient computer HAL 9000 wend their way on the spacecraft Discovery to encounter a third monolith -- and possibly to an evolutionary leap more profound than the discovery of tools.
His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951). A straightforward film noir suddenly goes deep into left field when Vincent Price joins Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell at a fancy and moderne resort in Mexico. Mitchum has been sent there for a purpose unknown to him, but it involves a payoff of fifty grand and deported mob kingpin Raymond Burr. Russell is a self-styled heiress and Vincent Price is a star of Hollywood swashbucklers she is trying to snare. When Mitchum finally realizes the jam he's in, it's up to Price to swashbuckle his way in and save the day. Howard Hughes owned the studio, RKO, and put his name on the picture, so expect to see prominently displayed two of the tycoon's obsessions: airplanes and Jane Russell's cleavage.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Films of the week 2
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1972). You are not likely to find a film that lays out the themes and concerns of the late director (1930-2002) as straightforwardly or as powerfully as this one. Fukasaku (The Yakuza Papers, Battle Royale) was a teenager when Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, and his experiences in postwar Japan proved indelible and formed the creative wellspring of his career in films. Sachiko Hidari is a war widow who seeks our surviving members of her husband's garrison, and their conflicting, Rashomon-like accounts of the death of his husband (Tetsuro Tamba) illuminate the brutality and dehumanization of war and indict postwar Japanese society's denial of its past. Praised by Japanese critics as a superb antiwar film, the film goes beyond denunciation of war to confront issues that even today are close to untouchable in contemporary Japanese discussions of the war.
Phantom of the Opera (dirs. Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgewick, Ernst Laemmle, 1925). The was no real tradition of horror in Hollywood when this mystery-melodrama was made, but its dark mood and Lon Chaney's gift for transformation through makeup certainly nudged Hollywood -- and Universal Studios, where this was made -- into that direction. Gaston Leroux's story of a deformed man who inhabits the catacombs beneath the Paris Opéra and falls in love with a young singer is a potboiler, the performances of leads Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin often insipid, and principal director Julian's work less than inspired, and the film itself went through a number of rewrites, reedits and reshootings and was nearly shelved, and does not exist today in a definitive version. But Chaney is spellbinding, not only for his transformational talents but also for his surprising gift for movement, and Ben Carré's atmospheric set designs pioneer the Hollywood Gothic soon to be born. This Image Entertainment DVD release includes the 1925 original release and the 1929 sound rerelease version, the copy of which in the archives at the Eastman House is probably the best in existence. This last has been tinted, a special 2-color tinting process used for one scene simulated, and an experimental 2-strip Technicolor sequence restored. The whole is truly beautiful and gives an idea why this is one of the all-time great works of the silent cinema.
The Life of Oharu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952). Mizoguchi is commonly grouped with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa as one of the three finest directors to work in Japanese film, and his work is distinguished by his long, stately pacing and his special interest in stories about women. The story for this film was taken from a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku Ihara, about the decline of a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court who falls in love with a lower-ranking retainer, losing her post and disgracing her family. From there she becomes a concubine to a feudal lord, a courtesan, a lady's-maid to a merchant's wife, briefly wife of a small tradesman, and finally an impoverished streetwalker. At every turn Oharu's hopes for love and happiness are thwarted by social rank, male callousness, moral disapproval and the turns and twists of fate. Ihara's original story was a little more salty and earthy, but carried as well the Buddhist homily that only suffering and unhappiness are caused by attachment to the things of this world. This view comes through in Mizoguchi's more sympathetic retelling, but also a muted protest against the social constraints on women that is very much his own.
Wild at Heart (dir. David Lynch, 1990). Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are head-over-heels lovers who hit the road in search of a happily-ever-after in California, pursued by Dern's mother (Diane Ladd, who happens to actually be Dern's mother), who wants Cage dead. Lynch's visions frequently slam the giddily naive and wholesome together with black psychotic evil, and in this one he definitely had it down to a science: it's one of his most accessible films story-wise, with strong, steamy love interest, satisfyingly nasty villains and his left-field, stylish visual sense. More than a bit of camp, too, what with the references to Elvis and The Wizard of Oz. But subsequent efforts like Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire show Lynch has never felt the need to stay in one place at once.
After the Thin Man (dir W. S. Van Dyke, 1936) Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett, the Thin Man comedy-mystery franchise featured William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired gumshoe and his wealthy socialite wife who trade wisecracks, sip cocktails and solve murders; in this first sequel in the series it's the philandering husband of Nora's cousin. The chemistry between Loy's kittenish spunk and Powell's suave daffiness carry the picture, but the supporting cast, including Elissa Landi, Alan Marshall, Joseph Calleia, a young James Stewart and of course Nick and Nora's dog Asta, doesn't hurt either.
Phantom of the Opera (dirs. Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgewick, Ernst Laemmle, 1925). The was no real tradition of horror in Hollywood when this mystery-melodrama was made, but its dark mood and Lon Chaney's gift for transformation through makeup certainly nudged Hollywood -- and Universal Studios, where this was made -- into that direction. Gaston Leroux's story of a deformed man who inhabits the catacombs beneath the Paris Opéra and falls in love with a young singer is a potboiler, the performances of leads Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin often insipid, and principal director Julian's work less than inspired, and the film itself went through a number of rewrites, reedits and reshootings and was nearly shelved, and does not exist today in a definitive version. But Chaney is spellbinding, not only for his transformational talents but also for his surprising gift for movement, and Ben Carré's atmospheric set designs pioneer the Hollywood Gothic soon to be born. This Image Entertainment DVD release includes the 1925 original release and the 1929 sound rerelease version, the copy of which in the archives at the Eastman House is probably the best in existence. This last has been tinted, a special 2-color tinting process used for one scene simulated, and an experimental 2-strip Technicolor sequence restored. The whole is truly beautiful and gives an idea why this is one of the all-time great works of the silent cinema.
The Life of Oharu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952). Mizoguchi is commonly grouped with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa as one of the three finest directors to work in Japanese film, and his work is distinguished by his long, stately pacing and his special interest in stories about women. The story for this film was taken from a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku Ihara, about the decline of a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court who falls in love with a lower-ranking retainer, losing her post and disgracing her family. From there she becomes a concubine to a feudal lord, a courtesan, a lady's-maid to a merchant's wife, briefly wife of a small tradesman, and finally an impoverished streetwalker. At every turn Oharu's hopes for love and happiness are thwarted by social rank, male callousness, moral disapproval and the turns and twists of fate. Ihara's original story was a little more salty and earthy, but carried as well the Buddhist homily that only suffering and unhappiness are caused by attachment to the things of this world. This view comes through in Mizoguchi's more sympathetic retelling, but also a muted protest against the social constraints on women that is very much his own.
Wild at Heart (dir. David Lynch, 1990). Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are head-over-heels lovers who hit the road in search of a happily-ever-after in California, pursued by Dern's mother (Diane Ladd, who happens to actually be Dern's mother), who wants Cage dead. Lynch's visions frequently slam the giddily naive and wholesome together with black psychotic evil, and in this one he definitely had it down to a science: it's one of his most accessible films story-wise, with strong, steamy love interest, satisfyingly nasty villains and his left-field, stylish visual sense. More than a bit of camp, too, what with the references to Elvis and The Wizard of Oz. But subsequent efforts like Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire show Lynch has never felt the need to stay in one place at once.
After the Thin Man (dir W. S. Van Dyke, 1936) Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett, the Thin Man comedy-mystery franchise featured William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired gumshoe and his wealthy socialite wife who trade wisecracks, sip cocktails and solve murders; in this first sequel in the series it's the philandering husband of Nora's cousin. The chemistry between Loy's kittenish spunk and Powell's suave daffiness carry the picture, but the supporting cast, including Elissa Landi, Alan Marshall, Joseph Calleia, a young James Stewart and of course Nick and Nora's dog Asta, doesn't hurt either.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Films of the week 1
Well, I suck. I still have not solved my personal laptop problems, which hampers my ability to update this blog just as I would like. But, I still watch a lot of movies, take a lot of notes, and still want some sort of activity on this thing, so as a sort of compromise I am going to start listing the films I have seen on a recently, with some short and very tentative comments as appropriate. Your comments are welcome, don't forget to leave a comment, so here is some of my viewing over the past week.
Dracula, (dir. Tod Browning, 1931). Introduced Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi to the film public and defined to generations how a vampire should look, act and speak, and also inaugurated the classic era of Hollywood horror. The strange cadences of Lugosi's speech owed to his being taught his lines phonetically; the cape, evening dress, and old-world blueblood demeanor came from the popular stage play on which the film was based: Lugosi created the part on Broadway, but other actors originated the style when it toured Britain in the twenties. However, the strange charisma that Lugosi brought to the role was entirely his. Modern audiences may find the film a little creaky, Lugosi's performances a little hammy, but there is still a sense of dread, muted eroticism and the excitement of new ground being broken.
Solaris, (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this brings the pace and sensibility of art film to the genre of science fiction. Based on the novel by Stanislav Lem, the title refers to the distant planet being studied from a station over the planet's vast ocean, which may be an alien intelligence. A psychologist is sent from earth to the Solaris station to find it in disrepair, the remaining scientists prey to odd behavior and delusions, and discovers that the ocean is materializing his own thoughts and memories. More obscure by several degrees than 2001; Solaris is somehow also more humanly approachable; like a still-life painter, Tarkovsky shows the surroundings and the inanimate objects scattered in them as more eloquent than the characters themselves, giving this account of contact with alien intelligence a strong element of loss and nostalgia.
Zigeunerweisen (dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1980). Suzuki made his name directing action programmers for the Japanese studio Nikkatsu in the sixties until he was fired, after the release of 1967's Branded To Kill, for making films that, to paraphrase Nikkatsu execs, made neither money nor sense. A ten-year blacklist from the industry followed, broken in 1977 when he made A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, which was a critical and box-office flop, for Shochiku. But Zigeunerweisen, an indie project, turned Suzuki's fortunes around and inaugurated his "Taisho Trilogy," films set in the Taisho period (1912-26), Japan's tumultuous "jazz age" of radical political changes and rapid assimilation of Western culture. Based on a story by Hyakken Uchida, a writer of the time, the film follows two intellectuals, a staid professor and a bohemian wanderer, through their increasingly tangled webs of sexual betrayal with each other's wives. In his post-Nikkatsu career, Suzuki pushed his penchant for style and visual brilliance over narrative sense in ways Branded To Kill could only hint at, but the film is grounded in the atmosphere of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a current in literature that had its start during Taisho and much drawn upon since by many Japanese filmmakers, most famously Yasuzo Masumura and Teruo Ishii.
The Joke (Jaromil Jires, 1968). From the heady days of the Czech New Wave comes this dark comedy based on a story by Milan Kundera. A student's life is turned upside down when he sends a politically irreverent postcard to a girl he wants to woo and ends up spending six years at hard labor, and as a middle-aged man he attempts to revenge on the man responsible by seducing his wife. Bitter, gritty depiction of the Stalinist 50s in Czechoslovakia with an absurdist twist.
Dracula, (dir. Tod Browning, 1931). Introduced Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi to the film public and defined to generations how a vampire should look, act and speak, and also inaugurated the classic era of Hollywood horror. The strange cadences of Lugosi's speech owed to his being taught his lines phonetically; the cape, evening dress, and old-world blueblood demeanor came from the popular stage play on which the film was based: Lugosi created the part on Broadway, but other actors originated the style when it toured Britain in the twenties. However, the strange charisma that Lugosi brought to the role was entirely his. Modern audiences may find the film a little creaky, Lugosi's performances a little hammy, but there is still a sense of dread, muted eroticism and the excitement of new ground being broken.
Solaris, (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this brings the pace and sensibility of art film to the genre of science fiction. Based on the novel by Stanislav Lem, the title refers to the distant planet being studied from a station over the planet's vast ocean, which may be an alien intelligence. A psychologist is sent from earth to the Solaris station to find it in disrepair, the remaining scientists prey to odd behavior and delusions, and discovers that the ocean is materializing his own thoughts and memories. More obscure by several degrees than 2001; Solaris is somehow also more humanly approachable; like a still-life painter, Tarkovsky shows the surroundings and the inanimate objects scattered in them as more eloquent than the characters themselves, giving this account of contact with alien intelligence a strong element of loss and nostalgia.
Zigeunerweisen (dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1980). Suzuki made his name directing action programmers for the Japanese studio Nikkatsu in the sixties until he was fired, after the release of 1967's Branded To Kill, for making films that, to paraphrase Nikkatsu execs, made neither money nor sense. A ten-year blacklist from the industry followed, broken in 1977 when he made A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, which was a critical and box-office flop, for Shochiku. But Zigeunerweisen, an indie project, turned Suzuki's fortunes around and inaugurated his "Taisho Trilogy," films set in the Taisho period (1912-26), Japan's tumultuous "jazz age" of radical political changes and rapid assimilation of Western culture. Based on a story by Hyakken Uchida, a writer of the time, the film follows two intellectuals, a staid professor and a bohemian wanderer, through their increasingly tangled webs of sexual betrayal with each other's wives. In his post-Nikkatsu career, Suzuki pushed his penchant for style and visual brilliance over narrative sense in ways Branded To Kill could only hint at, but the film is grounded in the atmosphere of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a current in literature that had its start during Taisho and much drawn upon since by many Japanese filmmakers, most famously Yasuzo Masumura and Teruo Ishii.
The Joke (Jaromil Jires, 1968). From the heady days of the Czech New Wave comes this dark comedy based on a story by Milan Kundera. A student's life is turned upside down when he sends a politically irreverent postcard to a girl he wants to woo and ends up spending six years at hard labor, and as a middle-aged man he attempts to revenge on the man responsible by seducing his wife. Bitter, gritty depiction of the Stalinist 50s in Czechoslovakia with an absurdist twist.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)