The Stone Face

73. Much as I loved Lucky McKee's May, I can't say that I like the idea that he qualifies as a "Master of Horror" on the basis of a single film, however good it might be. But the way the series has shaken out, it's the guys that don't have the bona fides that have done the best work so far. Go figure. (As an aside: were I feeling unkind, I might make the same complaint about Tobe Hooper, even though he has a long career in the genre, but that's just sour grapes). In any event, McKee's entry, Sick Girl (2006), is very much in the mode of May, which the director himself describes as a romantic comedy gone horribly round the bend. May herself, Angela Bettis, is on-hand again as Ida Teeter, a lonely entomologist who is a stand-in for anyone whose love life has been stifled by their "geeky" pursuits. Ida is smitten with a girl who sits in the lobby of her building drawing pixies, and after an awkward introduction, they hit it off. Unfortunately, Ida has been sent an exotic bug that bites and infects her new paramour, and the story becomes an allegory for jumping into a relationship too fast, without knowing the darker side of one's chosen partner. This is very much the goofiest of the MoH entries, but it has a kind of charm and brutal honesty when it comes to relationships. McKee finds more horror in the emotional hurts of his characters than he does in gore and monsters, though he doesn't skimp on that, either.

74. The last act of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, directed by Charles Reisner and an unbilled Buster Keaton) is a cinematic tour de force. The hurricane sequence that buffets Keaton as he tries to rescue his father and girlfriend has some of the most jaw-dropping set-pieces you've ever seen. One wishes that the movie itself had the kind of existential dilemmas found in Keaton's best works, but that's quibbling. Entertainers used to have to be extraordinary, and Keaton uses the last third of this movie to show himself in the full flower of his enormous talents. The rest? It's all set-up, and it's not bad set-up, either.

75. I like to think that Keaton and director Edward F. Cline were in the game of one-upsmanship when they made "Cops" (1922), in which they top every Keystone Kop movie ever made. This is pure chase comedy, in which the individual against the state is taken to absurd lengths. It would almost be Kafka-esque were it not so achingly funny.

76. 10,000 B.C. (2008, directed by Roland Emmerich) made my brain hurt. I suspected, going in, that it was going to be a stupid movie. Emmerich specializes in stupid, after all. But in my wildest imaginings, I couldn't have guessed at the depths of the idiocy in which this film wallows. I suspect that the screenplay may have been written in crayons. I could feel my I.Q. drop just from watching it. Serves me right for not listening to that little voice in my head. The mammoths? The ax-beak? You can get that stuff on the Discovery Channel.

Current tally: 76 movies, 28 horror movies. I'm slipping. Time to kick it in gear.

Escapism

69. So, there's not an original thought in Neil Marshall's Doomsday (2008). It doesn't take a film historian to spot the source of the basic plot: a one-eyed anti-hero is sent in to a walled-off prison/quarantine area to find the Macguffin. Mix liberally with Mad Max, Aliens, and half a dozen other sources and you have a movie drunk on its own derivitive impulse. And while I have some qualms about Marshall's preference for the "run and gun" approach to action sequences, I give him props for taking on his sources on their own ground and adding his own brand of nastiness to them. There are a lot of decapitations in this movie. For all of that, I can't say I disliked it. Indeed, I walked out of it with a huge grin, because, of all the lessons Marshall has learned from John Carpenter, the timing and substance of Doomsday's punch line, when it comes, does his idol proud.

70. Speaking of Carpenter...1981's Escape from New York seems today a relic of another time. It's strange watching an action movie that hasn't even a hint of the Hong Kong action New Wave. In a way--and even for its time--it kind of plods. Still and all, it presents a pretty depressing future (now in the past) populated by vivid personalities, and it shows an admirable economy of resources. But if it remains interesting at all, it's because Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken is an iconic anti-hero. Russell holds the film together by sheer force of will. It's almost a pity Plissken never got a vehicle worthy of him. Alas...

71. One of the previews at Doomsday was for the new Jackie Chan/Jet Li movie, in which there appears a woman warrior with animated white hair. This is a figure that should be familiar to fans of Hong Kong action films, given that Ronny Yu's The Bride With White Hair (1993) is one of the signature fireworks displays of their glory years. Yu is best known in the US as the director of Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs. Jason, but even though it's not explicitly a horror movie, The Bride With White Hair is a better horror movie than either of those. Its intent is as a romantic fantasy, a kind of wuxia Romeo and Juliet, but it has such a high body count and so many instances of spurting arterial blood (often backlit for maximum effect) and a villain that is a palpable monster, it's hard not to see it as a horror movie, too. That's the nature of some of the best HK flicks, they defy genre convention by choosing their generic elements a la carte. In any event, the title character is played by the wonderful Brigette Lin, who can lacerate her opponents with an icy stare and a whip, while her beau is played by the dashing Leslie Cheung, who plays the wuxia warrior as slacker. This is the kind of movie that Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung did so often in the 1980s, but Yu's style is more brutal than theirs, and his flair for the grotesque is grittier, though it is by no means less outlandish.

72. For most of its running time, Stuart Gordon's first entry in to the Masters of Horror series, Dreams in the Witch House is pretty mundane. The original story by H. P. Lovecraft has one of my favorite opening sentences ("Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know"), which is disappointingly absent. Absent, too, is the feeling of antiquity in the eponymous house, along with its sinister history (elided, but not expounded). It seems a run of the mill boarding house rather than a decaying relic of a witch-haunted past era. Ezra Godden is the lead, a mathematician plagued by awful dreams about his new lodgings. He's pretty good; better, anyway, than he was in Gordon's Dagon, but the story doesn't give him much to do until the end. The end is memorably nasty and almost makes up for the relatively lackadaisical build-up. Of the MOH installments that I've seen thus far, this one is middle of the road.

73. Among the more improbable collaborations in movie history: Jess Franco and Orson Welles. Franco was a second unit director on Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965), which ultimately led to Franco asserting the moral authority to cobble together the fragments of Welles's Don Quixote. This, of course, is absurd. But I won't quibble. The second unit stuff on Chimes is nice. This was Welles's favorite of his own movies, and its probably my own favorite of Welles's movies, too. It's certainly my favorite Shakespearean film, though I sometimes waffle between this and Throne of Blood. It seems criminal to me that this film remains largely unseen. It's a masterpiece. In any event, during this revisiting, I was struck by how unpleasant a character Prince Hal really is, and by the fact that he tells the audience, and he tells Falstaff, exactly what his calumny will be late in the movie, with no one believing him. Anyone who buys into the notion that Henry V is militarist propaganda needs to see the first two parts of the Henriad to realize that the Bard cuts that notion off at the knees. One of the multifarious triumphs of Chimes at Midnight is the bitter irony it imparts on Ralph Richardson's narration from Hollingshead's chronicles, praising Henry V's reign as Falstaff's coffin is wheeled away. In any event, this remains one of the great sleight of hand acts in all of cinema, in which Welles concocts an epic from smoke and mirrors. He presents himself as a magician and a charlatan at the beginning of F for Fake, but this movie shows that the man was capable of miracles.

An Off Week.

A bit of an off week for me.

65. Dario Argento's second installment for the Masters of Horror, Pelts (2006), is more recognizable as the work of Argento. In terms of production design and mise en scene, it might as well have been signed by the director. In other respects, though, it has more in common with the late Lucio Fulci. This sucker is red meat city. Meat Loaf plays a furrier who comes into possession of the pelts of some mystical racoons. The pelts drive all who come into contact with them to a bad end. Some of these "bad ends" are, um, creative. I'm not entirely sure which is more gruesome: the guy whose face is bitten off by a bear trap or the denoument, which involves a vest of human skin. In any event, the whole thing is ridiculously over the top, which is probably wise, because the material is too silly to take seriously.

66. Gregory Wilson's adaptation of Jack Ketcham's The Girl Next Door (2007) is a grim, un-fun movie. It's not necessarily bad, but it's a relentless downer. And it's based on a true story, too. Lovely. Hide the razor blades. It's also vividly nasty. There's a scene with a blowtorch that suggested to me that I should turn off the tv and go for a walk. I didn't, but there was the urge. If the acting were better, it might well be unendurable, but every so often, someone would emote and I would be blissfully reminded that I was watching a movie. Take that however you like.

67. I've said some bad things about Goldfinger (1964, directed by Guy Hamilton) in the past, mainly concerning the influence it holds over subsequent Bond films, but in spite of that, it really is a marvelous film. Every piece fits together seamlessly. There are no throw-aways. In particular, I'm fond of the shot of Felix Leiter as one of the "victims" of Goldfinger's nerve gas--a knowing wink to the audience that things aren't playing to plan, if you catch it. And Goldfinger's plot to irradiate Fort Knox is second in my affections among supervillain schemes only to Lex Luthor's plot to sink California. Great fun.

68. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, directed by Nicholas Meyer) is the best of the Star Trek movies. Not coincidentally, it's the one with the least social commentary on its mind. It plays as pure adventure. Plus, it has what most of the Star Trek films lack: a terrific villain. Only Alice Krige's Borg Queen in First Contact survives a comparison with Ricardo Montalban's Khan, here re-invisioned as a refugee from a Mad Max movie. The battle between the Enterprise and the Reliant in the nebula remains one of the best such duels in science fiction movies, even if it IS a retread of every submarine film you've ever seen.

Two Week's Worth

49. Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941) contains one of my favorite Billy Wilder screenplays (with Charles Brackett). A reworking of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, this finds gangland moll Barbara Stanwyck hiding with a group of academics in the final stretch of writing an encyclopedia, led by linguist Gary Cooper, who realizes that his entry on slang is all out of date. The slang quotient of this movie is high and most of it is a foreign language these days, but that adds to the enjoyment as I imagine the Austrian, Wilder marshalling his relatively recent English skills in constructing this movie. But make no mistake, this is Hawks's movie. If you want to see an abject lesson in the primacy of the director over the writer in making movies, look no further than this. The words are great, sure, but the placement of the camera and the actors in the frame dominate this movie, particularly Hawks's penchant for constructing communities from group shots (including group shots that reveal character independent of the script) and his penchant for defining his characters by their professions. Excellent character work in this movie, by the way, especially from Dana Andrews as Stanwyck's gangster beau.

50. This year-long project of mine compells me to make genre distinctions for the tally of horror movies, which gives me fits when it comes to a movie like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger's Black Narcissus (1947). The last act of the movie plays a LOT like a horror movie, or, at the very least, like a full blown gothic, with the Himalayan convent turning dark and empty, like a vast haunted house. The movie provides the proverbial madwoman in the attic, too, in Kathleen Byron's deranged Sister Ruth. I'm not the only person to notice this association. Glenn Erikson's review at DVD Savant includes this observation:

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Some recent Savant reading unearthed the tale of English filmmakers Powell, Carol Reed and David Lean watching convoy-shipped rare prints of American movies during World War 2, personally bicycling one of their favorites, The Seventh Victim to screenings in a bombed-out London. This makes Savant want to connect Black Narcissus to the films of Val Lewton, particularly his I Walked With a Zombie. Before your eyeballs roll violently, think on the following: A sensual, distracting tropical ambiance created entirely in the studio, with seductive tracking shots and lighting effects that create a palpable feeling of fantasy. An interpersonal story that pits the political and religious ideologies of individuals against one another, in a land where modern Western ideas sit uneasily atop incompatible ancient beliefs and traditions, some of which are dangerous. The story is told less through action than (this right from the Black Narcissus DVD notes) 'a succession of small incidents and casual encounters' - precisely the way Joel Siegel described Lewton's narrative style in The Seventh Victim. Very similar to the zombie product of passion and repression in Zombie, Sister Ruth in Narcissus is transformed into a zombie-like harpy, a 'worldly woman' in a red dress and red lipstick, eyes blazing and hair akimbo, like a Fury. If this comparison does nothing for the appreciation of Narcissus, it will hopefully elevate the genre-bound graces of the Lewton and Tourneur's wonderful Zombie movie.

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So, screw it, I'm counting it, but don't expect the usual huggermugger of the genre if you decide to take this as a recommendation. What you WILL get is one of the great conjuring acts in movies, in which Powell and Pressburger and cinematographer Jack Clayton construct a Himalaya environment of dreams without ever leaving England. This is one of the high points of technicolor cinematography, which is amazing given the muted color schemes on display. Even the usual meddling of technicolor consultant Natalie Kalmus doesn't appear to have taken root in Cardiff's astonishing photography. Byron once claimed that half her performance in Black Narcissus was provided by the lighting, which explains why many actors prefer the stage as a true test of their ability.

Another problem with my year-long project reared its head this week, too. How do I want to count short subjects? And television projects? For the TV stuff, I think I'll count it if it's self-contained (opening the door for, say, Fanny and Alexander later in the year). For shorts? Hell, I don't know. Maybe I'll count them, and decide at the end what to do with them. I have another ten months.

51. The Cameraman's Revenge (1912, directed by Wladislaw Starewicz) is a perverse example of insect noir, in which a jilted cuckold takes revenge on his cheating spouse and vice versa, all animated by real insects turned into stop motion puppets by the genius (or madness) of Starewicz. Creepy and funny at the same time.

52. Destination Murder (1950, directed by Edward L. Cahn) is a second feature noir programmer through and through. It's not bad. But it's not good, either. Has a memorable use of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," but it's an otherwise rote variant on Cornell Woolrich's The Black Angel.

53. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (directed by Aditya Chopra) is one of the biggest hits in the history of movies--it had an eleven YEAR first run--but you'd be hard pressed to know it if you live outside of India. I mean, Titanic is friggin everywhere, but this film is barely a blip on the consciousness of Western pop culture. Actually, this film is a LOT like Titanic--minus the special effects, I guess. It is intended as a huge entertainment first, and as art only incidentally. I have to admit that I found the first seventy minutes or so to be a chore. Shahrukh Khan's "romantic lead" is so infused with the spirit of Jerry Lewis that I devoutly hoped that he would get hit by a bus. But at about the half way point, I started to groove on the rhythms of the movie. This thing is at its best when it is indulging in musical numbers, even towards the outset, though even as an outsider, I can get a feel for the alienation engendered by the Indian diaspora and expressed admirably in portions of this film. Indian starlets are gorgeous, by the way. Really gorgeous.

54. "Fetiche ("The Mascot," 1934, directed by Wladislaw Starewicz) finds the director's stop-motion artistry in full flower. The tale of a stuffed dog trying to bring a child an orange is simple enough, but the long dark journey through which this quest threads is a tour de force in cinematic ingenuity. This is one of my very favorite films.

55. I don't have a lot to add to what I've written about Forbidden Planet (1956, directed by Fred Wilcox) in the past, except to note that the Krell laboratories and planetary machines are still the coolest environments in all of 1950s science fiction. There's a real sense of awe in this set of reality.

56. It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987, directed by Larry Cohen) is occasionally funny, but it's the end of the line for these movies. Having exhausting a thin premise, this veers into the ridiculous. Even Cohen's frequent collaborator, Michael Moriarty, seems to know that this is pretty dire material. Cohen's ideas have always outstripped his execution, but this film finds the director's abilities and ideas farther apart than usual.

57. Justice League: The New Frontier (2008, directed by Dave Bullock) adapts an acclaimed graphic novel in a variant of Warner's current "superhero style" originally pioneered by Batman: The Animated Series. It's an uneasy mixture of Watchmen-style revisionism (see the scene between Superman and Wonder Woman in Indochina at the beginning of the film) and the goofy optimism and outre monsters of the original Justice League comics from the late fifties and early sixties. There's a lot to recommend, and fans will find lots of soothing nostalgia spotting the referrences in the background, but I wish the movie had been longer than its mere 72 minutes. It feels cramped, which tends to make the character development come to naught.

58. Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns (2005, directed by John Carpenter) has a creepy performance by Udo Kier as a mysterious film collector and some memorable gore, but at the end of the film (le absolute fin de film, as it were), this is a low-rent retread of Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, with it's insanity inducing horror movie standing in for an insanity-inducing book. And given that I hated In the Mouth of Madness for its anti-horror subtext (horror fiction turns people into degenerates and murderers, the film implies), I doubly repudiate THIS for repeating the same cannard with much diminshed elan. Crap, mostly.

59. Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005, directed by Don Coscarelli) is more like it. Mind you, I might take issue with the notion that Don Coscarelli is a "master," having made a bunch of Phantasm movies and Bubba Ho-Tep and not much else of note, but damned if he doesn't deliver with this. Coscarelli seems to be pretty self-effacing on the interview material on this disc--he knows, given the other filmmakers associated with MOH--that he's on notice to prove his bona fides. So where Argento and Carpenter seemed to be phoning it in and relying on their bearded reputations, Coscarelli gives his best effort, and I mean that literally. This is his best horror film. Another collaboration with writer Joe R. Lansdale (who legitimately IS a "master" of horror), this is a mean deconstruction of slasher movie conventions that turns a neat (if mildly predictable) twist of the tale at the end. It reminds me most of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 without that film's excesses and dodgy performances. This is more intimate than that film--it's a chamber version of the same material, if you will--in which the nature of monstrosity is given a going over. It's pretty damned good.

60. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2007, co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud) is another adaptation of a graphic novel, one of a much more serious bent. A chronicle of Satrapi's life in Iran before and after the revolution, and in Europe as a teen, this has a deceptively simple visual aesthetic, a particularly wry sense of humor, and an underlying humanism that transforms it into something universally accessible. Sony made a BIG mistake when they decided to market this to the art house crowd at the expense of the mulitplex, because teen-age girls would have made this an enormous hit if they had the chance to see it. Stephen Colbert was absolutely right when he asked Satrapi: "If you humanize your enemy, don't you make them seem more...human?" (If I had the wherewithall, I'd show this to everyone who was thinking about voting for John Bomb-Bomb-Iran McCain. Hell, I'd love to show it to McCain himself.) This makes great use of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." It's that kind of movie.

61. The Story of the Fox (1930, directed by Wladislaw Starewicz) is a full-length feature on which the filmmakers labored for more than a decade. The care shows in every frame. The story is standard fairy tale fare, in which the King of the Beasts orders the arrest of the Fox after receiving a multitude of complaints. But that's all incidental. What commands interest is the shear audacity and scale of what Starewicz puts on the screen. This is as technically intricate a stop-motion film as you will ever see, with each character clearly designed and performed. A wonderment.

62. "The Town Rat and the Country Rat" (1927, directed by Wladislaw Starewicz) is another technical tour de force, in which I found myself wondering how Starewicz was accomplishing his effects. Not my favorite of Starewicz's films by a long mile, but fascinating.

63. The Tragedy of Othello (1952, directed by Orson Welles) is a study in pure cinema. Stripping the play to its barest bones, Welles places his film in an expressionistic Venice where the angles and vast architectures mirror the ambitions and passions of the characters. Welles is an adequate Othello, but this is Iago's play even in this incarnation, and Micheál MacLiammóir is a more than admirable Iago. One wishes that the sound were better, but there's nothing to be done for it. We're lucky to have even this.

64. The Uninvited (1944, directed by Lewis Allen) retains some of the comedy elements of the ghost movies of the day, but it doesn't monkey around when it comes to the haunting itself. It's a pure gothic when it delves into the revenants that occupy its haunted house and haunted past. Think of this as a supernatural version of Rebecca. The initial manifestation of the movie's ghosts do an admirable job of ratcheting up the dread. Interesting lesbian subtexts are to be found the various supporting characters.

Into the Archives

I’ve accumulated a LOT of movies on VHS over the years. I’ve been weeding out the pre-records for a while now through eBay and other means, replacing them as I can with DVDS (or laserdiscs), but that still leaves me with the vast archive of movies taped from cable and other sources. Couple this with the fact that VCRs aren’t as durable as they used to be and aren’t as easy to find for purchase as they used to be and one can see a serious problem looming ahead. Our main VCR turned itself into a brick late last year, so we splurged for a DVD-R/VCR combo player for Christmas. The idea is to archive the archive on the next generation of media. This dovetails nicely with my mission for the year of watching 366 movies. Movies that have no DVD editions are the first priority, which is reflected somewhat in my viewings this week.

39. I commemorated the passing of director Kon Ichikawa by watching the new Criterion edition of The Burmese Harp (1956), which is as warm and humane a film as I’ve ever seen that contains valleys of burned and dessicated corpses. The film follows a Japanese soldier who has learned to play a harp native to the Burmese, and his platoon, in the final days and aftermath of World War II. His Captain--a music teacher in civilian life--has taught the platoon to sing as a means of lifting their morale as they march to escape the Japanese defeat, but they are cornered in a village by the British, who return their song with a chorus “There’s No Place Like Home.” The war is over, and the reconciliation must begin. Our hero, Mizushima, is asked to help bring the surrender of an entrenched battalion, but after he fails, he is left for dead to wander the countryside, where he sees the horror left by the war and vows to stay to bury the dead. The overall tone is elegiac and Mizushima’s spiritual transformation is unutterably sad. This is par for the course for Japanese anti-war films, which reach depths of emotion that similar American films have never been able to touch. Defeat will do that to a nation, I guess. Ichikawa is among the finest Japanese directors when it comes to composing the film frame and this film reflects that. Music is extremely important to this film--hell, it’s practically a musical--so it doesn’t hurt that it’s provided by the great Akira Ifukube.

40. In a different vein entirely--a jugular vein, as it were--is Severance (2006, directed by Christopher Smith), a postmodernist mash-up of the rural massacre movie with “The Office,” in which a group of employees for an arms manufacturer are participating in a “team-building” exercise in the wilds of Eastern Europe. Little do they realize that they’ve stumbled into the hunting grounds of a group of psychopathic murderers. The film plays a little bit like Southern Comfort or Deliverance, with its occasional jibes at corporate culture leavening things, but once the bad guys are revealed, the whole thing becomes a chore to finish. Until that point, however, it’s a pretty creative bloodbath, with yet another candidate for the Madame Defarge Humanitarian Prize for Cinematic Decapitation, this time from the unusual point of view of the victim. Beyond that, it’s pretty easy to spot the Final Girl from the get-go, which is a bit of a disappointment. In spite of the tongue-in-cheek attitude, this is pretty rote.

41. Convicted (1950, directed by Henry Levin is another one of those socially conscious prison melodramas from the film noir era (this doesn’t quite qualify as noir, it should be noted). It follows poor schlub Glenn Ford as he’s railroaded for accidentally killing the son of a prominent politician in a bar brawl, in part from political pressure, in part from the incompetence of his attorney. The prosecutor on the case, played with bluster by Broderick Crawford, wants to help him out, but his hands are tied. Later, after he becomes the warden, Crawford is able to throw Ford a line. Meanwhile, Ford falls for Crawford’s daughter, played by Dorothy Malone. Neither as brutal as Brute Force, nor as deranged as Caged (which came out the same year), this wears its heart on its sleeve. Ford is particularly masochistic as the universe conspires against him; he gives a relatively passive performance that opens the door for Crawford to ride roughshod all over him. Convicted is made eminently watchable by the superb character actors populating the background, particularly Millard Mitchell as Ford’s cell-mate. It’s not bad, but it’s not in the first rank of prison dramas, either.

42. I’ve given up looking for plots among the features made by comedians who came out of Vaudeville, and that’s a wise approach to W. C. Fields’s The Bank Dick from 1940, directed, or, rather, wrangled by Edward F. Cline. And while the film may not have a plot--it follows Fields as Egbert Souse through careers as a movie director and a bank detective in the course of a single day--it does have a theme: no bad deed goes unrewarded. A liar, a cheat, a conman, a drunkard, and a sloth, Souse nevertheless finds riches at the end of the day. I like to think that the whole thing is an elaborate put-on, intended to tweak the censors without giving them anything concrete with which to object. This is certainly not a good movie in the way we normally understand movies, but of course that’s not the point even if it does provide an excellent climactic car-chase like a conventional movie might. The point is to provide a showcase for the persona of W. C. Fields, cinema’s own version of Falstaff.

43. Speaking of car chases, the one that concludes Don Siegel’s mostly unseen The Lineup (1958) is a corker, flying through San Francisco ten years before Bullitt and coming to an abrupt end on an unfinished freeway long before The Blues Brothers or Speed encountered the same hazard. It’s a hyperkinetic ending for a movie that starts slow and builds. Siegel, a classical director if ever there was one, understood the concept of rising action better than most. The film follows a trio of criminals as they retrieve a shipment of heroin from a number of unknowing mules, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Dancer, the triggerman, is trying to improve himself, and bows to Julian, the brains, who in addition to correcting Dancer’s grammar, also records the last words of their victims in a little black book. Their driver is Sandy, a kid with a taste for the juice. All of this is mainly an excuse to wander through a variety of locations in San Francisco, a city Siegel would revisit several times. The locations are evocative. An unjustly neglected film, and at a terse 86 minutes, one that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

44. Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday (1955) is what you might get if you crossed Peyton Place with one of Fleischer’s own heist movies from his early career. It’s an uneasy blend, and the first 50 minutes or so can be trying. The last 30 minutes, though, more than justify the title of the film, featuring a brutal bank robbery, followed by the equally brutal siege of an Amish farm. Afterwards, the Sirkian melodrama from the first two acts is dramatically changed. It’s a nice trick. On the whole, the film is a discordant mix of elements, and I can’t help but wonder what the Amish think of Hollywood’s occasional depiction of them as “straw dogs,” if you know what I mean. But then, I guess they don’t see much of it. I don’t know what it is about Ernest Borgnine that makes casting directors think “Amish,” but he played a pseudo-Amish character in Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing, too. Terrific character work from a pretty good cast, especially Borgnine, Lee Marvin, and Sylvia Sydney, and lavished with that mid-Fifties Technicolor look.

45. David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986) finds the director summarizing the themes and images of his early films before turning to more esoteric idioms in his subsequent career. Cronenberg has always been a capable director of actors, but this is the first of his films where that element moves into the forefront. Sure, there’s all the gore and weird science that fans of his early films could ever want, but all of that takes a backseat to the melodrama and tragedy of the character arcs. This is possibly a function of quality actors finally becoming available to him. For that matter, the framing of the story is ideal for actors. You have what is essentially a chamber piece, with three significant characters. You could stage it for the theater on one set (and, as I write this, Cronenberg is directing an opera based on the film). This is, famously, a “re-imagining” of the original 1958 film, though that has been overstated over the years. The seeds of this film’s narrative can be found in the little-seen Curse of the Fly (1965), in which the teleportation gimmick is used to create host of deformities. Here, it’s given the sheen of twenty-odd years of biotechnological advances. But where that film--and the original 1958 film--are specifically about the gimmicks (characters are incidental), Cronenberg flips things around. This could be about any transforming disease. The director himself says it’s about aging, but you could just as easily view it from the perspective of a cancer patient or a man with Lou Gherig’s disease. Fortunately for the audience, Cronenberg isn’t interested in the usual emotional landscape of the disease of the week film. He’s more interested in examining the disease itself. It’s a “disease with a purpose,” he proposes, and it has a transformative effect on the afflicted. The changes themselves are interesting, and because his hero is a scientist, he catalogues the changes like a scientist, fascinated by the novelty of it all.

Jeff Goldblum has always received the lion’s share of the acclaim for his performance as Seth Brundle, our not so mad scientist, which is proper, I suppose. He’s good in a difficult role that requires him to emote through layers of prosthesis. But the spotlight on Goldblum has tended to obscure Geena Davis’s contribution to the film, which is considerable. The movie is ostensibly told from her point of view (Cronenberg is not particularly disciplined about this here, but as a general rule this is true). While we are certainly privy to Brundle’s transformation out of her sight, it’s worth keeping in mind that hers is the only character with an interior life that is laid bare for the audience. We see the point of view of her dreams late in the film. We don’t get that from Brundle. The story is a two-pronged tragedy: there’s the tragedy of Brundle’s disintegration as the fly takes over, and there’s the tragedy of Veronica Quaife, watching her lover deteriorate until she has to euthanize him herself. All love stories are tragic, Cronenberg once said of this film: one lover dies in the end, or they drift out of love.

46. Howard Hawks once said that no one should remake a good movie, but they should by all means remake bad ones. That principle is at work in Cronenberg’s The Fly. It is doubly at work in Chuck Russell’s sly remake of The Blob (1988). The original film isn’t very good. Let’s get that out of the way first. I’m not going to claim that the remake is a masterpiece, by any means, but not only is it a better film than its source, it’s a very interesting movie in its own right. , It’s an odd amalgam of several strains of 1980s horror, encompassing the teen horror comedy and the slasher movie (both of which it pokes with gentle and not-so-gentle parody), the techno-horror film, the government paranoia film, the fifties-era monster movie, and, finally, the apocalyptic horror film. On the surface, it’s the same damned film as the original film: the Blob falls from the sky and a group of teens have to rouse the adults and the authorities before it’s too late. But from there, it departs dramatically. The authorities are not to be trusted. Additionally, the mantle of hero is shorn from the big man on campus, and even from the rebellious troubled teen, and bestowed on the wholesome cheerleading girl next door, who goes from daddy’s princess to raging Rambette in the span of 85 minutes. It’s a pretty entertaining character arc, not just be cause it’s ridiculous, but because it’s unexpected. This is all well and good--kudos to director Russell and his writing partner, Frank Darabont for subverting expectation--but when you get right down to it, the audience for this movie wants special effects and gore. And here, it delivers in spades. This movie presents all the angry red slime anyone could ever want and serves it up in one ghastly set-piece after another. Particularly horrific is the fate awaiting Candy Clark’s restaurant owner, whose demise in a telephone booth is the film’s highlight. And then, after all is said and done, when the Blob and the evil government agents have been thwarted, The Blob gives a subtle flick of the tentacle at the end, becoming darker than a fun teen horror movie has any right to be.

47. I don’t really have anything to add to the dialogue about Casablanca (1942, directed by Michael Curtiz). I mean, this is ground that’s been plowed repeatedly by much more learned viewers than myself. My own experience with it is not even particularly unique. I put this movie on as a kind of comfort food at the end of the weekend. The only real thought I had while I was watching it was that the characters in Casablanca are all mysterious, but not enigmas. Why can’t Rick return to America? What’s Renault’s story, and who are the contacts that he claims at the end of the movie? What is the story behind Rick and Sam’s friendship? And, really, none of that matters. The audience isn’t asked to probe these questions because in the broad scheme of the movie, they don’t matter. They shade the characters, but they don’t define them. In any event, nothing that I can say about the movie amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy, mixed-up world.

Oil and Water

31. Though it was made in Mexico, Luis Bunuel's The Young One (1960) was the director's second and last English language movie. He would shortly return to Europe for his glory years, but you can see the director more or less in full command of his craft here. The story follows a black jazz musician on the run from a lynch mob after being wrongly accused of raping a white woman. He ends up on an island off the coast of North Carolina, where he meets with the caretaker of a game preserve (who instantly hates him with vivid racist zeal) and the girl in his care (who the caretaker is putting the moves on). The whole thing plays a bit like one of those Stanley Kramer pleas for racial tolerance from the period crossed with Tennessee Williams, and mixed with Bunuel's own cinematic fetishes. It's a combustible mix. Shot by the great cinematographer, Gabriel Figeroa, this looks better than similar Hollywood films, and being made in Mexico gives the filmmakers license to intimate more tawdry undercurrents in the relations between the characters. Bunuel, ever the mocking doubter, gets his digs in against religion, too.

32. Gran Casino (1947, directed by Luis Bunuel) finds the director returning to film from metaphorical exile. His first film in Mexico, it's a work-for-hire job and it shows. Still and all, there's an undercurrent of leftist rage in the film, and the musical form would seem to be the ideal vehicle for a surrealist artist.

33. The Orphanage (2007, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona) is a classical ghost story, so a certain amount of ritual can be seen in the film's construction. For the most part, it hews to the notion that haunted house stories are more about haunted people than ghosts, though there are certainly ghosts in this film. The story follows Laura, a woman who, with her husband and adopted son renovate the orphanage where she grew up with the aim of taking in special-needs children. Her son has multiple "imaginary" friends, who Laura comes to fear after her son disappears into the house without a clue. One "friend" in particular, a little boy with a burlap mask, terrorizes her. And what does the mysterious social worker who inquires after her boy want? There is nothing new under the sun in this movie (I think there needs to be a moratorium on children who make creepy drawings in horror movies), but that's to be expected in a subgenre as ritualized as the ghost story. It's executed to perfection, though, providing mood and atmosphere aplenty and at least one utterly horrifying shock to the system before settling down for a climax more filled with sorrow than with shudders.

34. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, directed by Robert Florey) is one of the more salacious pre-Code horror movies, in which mad evolutionist Professor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) attempts to mix the blood of humans with that of his ape. The imagery is particularly strong, especially the torture of the streetwalker Mirakle abducts in the early part of the film. For a film made so close to the end of the silent era, in which cameras became rooted to the spot to accomodate bulky sound equipment, this film shows a fair degree of visual imagination. Certainly, cinematographer Karl Freund stamps his genius all over this film, creating an unreal Paris of the imagination. The most striking shot in the film mounts a camera on a swing. The story? It's pretty silly, and shows evidence of being shuffled by the studio. It's amazing how anti-science the Universal horrors could be. This one is pretty lunk-headed about Darwinism, and even sets the film prior to Darwin's work. I guess Professor Mirakle was farther ahead of the curve than it seems.

35. The Black Cat (1934, directed by Edgar Ulmer) is the best of the Karloff/Lugosi teamings (the two appear together in The Body Snatcher, too, but that film is hardly an equal pairing). It's one of the few horror films from America to show the trauma of World War I so prominently. Lugosi is the nominal "good guy," though he's clearly insane and clearly ruthless. But not without cause, because Karloff, in a remarkably still and creepy performance, is even worse, an unreconstructed monster in modernist surroundings. There's an interesting suggestion that the sleek, art-deco world of the years between the wars are built on the bones of The Great War's victims: Karloff's character has built his Bauhaus temple on the ruins of a notorious prison camp, where Lugosi's character was once interred. Supposedly, this was made while the studio heads were in Europe, which explains the sheer lunacy of the proceedings.

36. Transfixed (2001, directed by Francis Girod) plays a little bit like a Brian De Palma film with the roles reversed. Its hero(ine) is Bo, a transsexual prostitute who is testifying against her father, who has been accused of child-molestation. She's reluctant to help the police because she still bears the scars of being ignored by them as a child. Unfortunately, there's a serial killer bumping off transsexuals, and her closeness to the victims draws her into the investigation. Further confounding things is her erotic obsession with Johnny, a thuggish gigolo who lives across the way from her. It's all very muddled, especially after the police decide that Bo is suspect number one. For all of that, one would hope for a more exciting film.

37. There Will Be Blood (2007, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson): short version, I didn't like this at all. Long version here: http://members.tranquility.net/~benedict/therewillbeblood.html

38. In The Raven (1935, directed by Lew Landers), we have Karloff and Lugosi squaring off again, with Lugosi hogging the limelight this time as a Poe obsessed surgeon who builds a dungeon in his mansion complete with pit and pendulum. Karloff, for his part, is the hired help, a disfigured criminal doing Lugosi's bidding in the hopes that his maimed face can be repaired. The object of Lugosi's obsession is the beautiful daughter of a judge. The ensuing rigamarole is a variant on the old dark house movie. Minor, for the most part. It's hard to believe that Poe fared better with Roger Corman, but there you go. "Poe! You are avenged!" Goofy.

Movies for the week of 1/28-2/3

25. For a guy who didn't make any kind of name for himself in horror movies, Lambert Hillyer made a couple of interesting ones. The better of the two is The Invisible Ray (1936)--the other is Dracula's Daughter--in part because it has a terrific, subdued performance by Bela Lugosi as the good guy. Karloff, for his part, is off his rocker in this movie and it's not much different than his "off his rocker mad scientist" in The Man Who Changed His Mind, save for the bad perm he wears in this movie. Lugosi is a revelation. It's the sort of change-up that Peter Cushing was later able to accomplish fairly often. Diabolical in one role, radiating kindness and warmth in the next. Frankly, I never though Lugosi was capable of it, and yet, here's the proof. And through a sinister goatee, to boot. The story is a bunch of improvisations surrounding Karloff's discovery and poisoning by the mysterious Radium X, which makes his touch lethal. Lugosi is a colleague who formulates a medicine to keep Karloff from burning himself up. It's all very routine, actually, though I'm amused at the notion that Africa is the source of Radium X; in real life, Africa has the richest uranium resources in the world. In any event, one wishes that Lugosi had been offered this kind of role more often.

26. Black Friday (1940, directed by Arthur Lubin), on the other hand, consigns Lugosi to a thankless supporting role, badly miscast as a gangster. Karloff is a scientist again (natch), this time with a radical brain transplantation technique which he uses to save the life of his best friend. To this end, he uses a gangster's brain, a gangster with the key to a half-million dollar stash of loot. Writer Curt Siodmak had a thing for brain stories. For the most part, both Karloff AND Lugosi are supporting players here, behind Stanley Ridges as the poor subject of Karloff's treatment. And that should tell you that the filmmakers were misapplying their resources wholesale.

27. Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948) was described by the director himself as the film where he found his style. On the surface, that style seems to be a combination of American film noir and Italian neo-realism, which seems to me to be unsynthesized by the director at the time of making this film. It is, however, the first of Kurosawa's collaborations with Toshiro Mifune, and in this, it's important. Mifune was a force of nature in this film: raging, forlorn, and impossibly handsome as a yakuza underboss who discovers that he has tuberculosis. The doctor who diagnosis him is Kurosawa's other favorite, Takashi Shimura, and this is really his film. His alcoholic doctor, laboring in a slum next to an open sewer, is miles and miles away from his wise samurai in Seven Samurai or his wise scientist in Godzilla. He's his own worst enemy, a flawed doctor who manages to find some redemption for himself, even though he can't save Mifune's character. It's a pretty good movie. I would hesitate to call it a masterpiece, even if one is inclined toward the medieval definition of that word. Kurosawa would later re-frame elements of this film--particularly the climactic knife fight in which both antagonists become covered in paint--in Stray Dog, a film that probably IS a masterpiece.

28. Luis Bunuel is most associated with Salvador Dali when it comes to artists, mainly on the strength of their collaborations in the 1930s, but the more I watch his films, the more convinced I become that his more natural antecedant is actually Heironymous Bosch. Bosch was simultaneously an irreligious mocker and devoted interpeter of Catholicism, often in grotesque terms. Bunuel is much the same. Bunuel's The Milky Way (1968) is perhaps a shade less caustic than Viridiana, but by exposing the various catechisms and heresies of Catholicism to a blank-faced examination, he finds a level of absurdity that his earlier film never approached. And in spite of this, Bunuel's version of Jesus Christ remains the most humane depiction in film. We see Christ laugh. We see him shave. We see him out of breath. And we see, at the end of the film, that he's clearly deluded. The movie follows two pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compestella, following the route of the so-called Milky Way. On the way, they encounter a series of unrelated scenes that enact various heresies against Catholicism, which causes them to examine their own understanding of Catholic dogma. They also seem to be travelling through time, encountering Biblical and medieval tableaux along with modern European ones. This is probably Bunuel's most overtly surreal film since his early career. The film's last image is the drollest joke in his filmography.

29. I was pleasantly surprised by Jason Reitman's Juno (2007). Behind its hipster dialogue, there's a closely observed humanity in this film that one rarely sees in comedies anymore. It's great fun seeing the film navigate its way away from expected stereotypes. While Ellen Page is terrific in the lead role, I'm pretty sure that I could watch J. K. Simmons read the phone book with some amount of pleasure and I seriously need to re-evaluate the talent of Jennifer Garner. Garner is NOT saddled with hip dialogue, it should be noted, and is set up as an object of ridicule in her early scenes. But damned if the movie doesn't detonate that expectation. I loved the end of this movie. Loved it.

30. As an example of meta-cinema, The Girl Hunters (1963, directed by Roy Rowland) is pretty weird. Adapted from one of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, the film casts the author himself as Hammer. But that's not all. One of the gripes that Spillane had with the film version of Kiss Me Deadly was that Hammer came off as kind of a douchebag. With the author himself in the role, Hammer comes off, again, as kind of a douchebag. Crazy. The politics Hammer and Spillane spew is hillariously over the top, with the author's right-wing paranoia given full reign. The story follows Hammer after a seven year bender, jumping on the wagon when word reaches him that his secretary, Velda, is alive. It's weird how this movie plays like a middle film in a series, but that's the way it goes. Spillane isn't completely awful as an actor, actually, though he is very, very limited. In Spillane's hatchet profile, one can see where Frank Miller got the design elements of his character, Marv, in Sin City. Even so, Shirley Eaton has no problem stealing the movie from him. But it's not much of a movie in any event. I like the score by Philip Green, and some of the photography is nice, but the story itself is one narrative blunder after another.

Movies for 1/21-1/27, 2008

19. Much as I love the Marx Brothers, no one in the world can convince me that they made more than two good movies. For the most part, the "good" movies are thought to be their early movies, but on the evidence of Animal Crackers (1930, directed by Victor Heerman), I must respectfully disagree. This sucker creaks. Oh, Groucho still gets in a few good ones as the redoubtable Captain Spaulding--and even he occasionally delivers his lines in a deadpan that suggests he'd rather be at the track--but the shenanigans surrounding the theft of a painting are woefully lame, and neither Chico or Harpo manages anything inspired. Was Zeppo even in this one? I guess he was, but he doesn't make an impression. On the plus side--or maybe the plus size--Margaret Dumont is at her most Margaret Dumontish.

20. Regarding Rambo (2008, directed by Sylvester Stallone), I have this to say: Red. Meat. City.

Sly has been looking at Eye-Talian cannibal movies, it seems.

I have a certain fondness for Rocky III. It's not the serious-minded film one finds in the first Rocky by any means, but when I saw it again for the first time in decades last year, I was struck by how absolutely perfect it was. In so far as it was calculated to manipulate the audience, it hits every calculated note. Stallone tried this out again with the sequel to First Blood, and lo and behold, it was a monster hit, too. Of course, this approach can only take you so far, and the blatant manipulation absent any artistic pretense of movies like Cobra and Rocky IV becomes risible over time. Stallone's career followed suit. Was Rocky III a fluke? As I was walking out of Stallone's first Rambo movie in twenty years, I came to the conclusion that I was looking at exactly the same kind of film. It's perfect of its type. It knows exactly what fans of the Rambo movies want in a movie and it provides it. All I could do was laugh at the audacity of it.

21. I fell asleep while I was watching Fred Niblo's silent Ben-Hur over the weekend, but when I woke up, the tape was queued up for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921, directed by Rex Ingram). This was one of the first blockbusters, a World War I epic in which a family finds itself on both sides of the conflict. This was the star-making film for Rudolph Valentino, whose nonchalant libertine in this movie was a fantasy for both men and women. The highlight of the film is a literal presentation of the four horsemen of the film's title.

22. Wild Side (2004, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz) finds a transsexual prostitute returning home to care for her ailing mother. With her come her two lovers, Mikhail, a Russian immigrant who speaks no French, and Djamel, a street hustler. This is, to say the least, awkward. But the film doesn't make excuses for these characters, each of whom is presented as damaged. They don't fit into the traditional relationship structures, so they're building structures of their own. There's a calculated existential desolation and loneliness in this movie, but I'll say this for it: if I ever make a film in which the human body is an object of the camera's gaze, I want Agnes Godard to shoot it. No one captures light on skin the way she does. I'm more than a little bit disappointed to see yet another transsexual who makes her living as a prostitute, but at least actress Stéphanie Michelini is herself a transsexual.

23. Harold and Maude (1971, directed by Hal Ashby) is one of my SO's favorite movies, but to my eye, it hasn't aged well. I think it's all the Cat Stevens. I like Bud Cort in this, but I've never really warmed up to Ruth Gordon. I just keep recasting her in my mind as Minnie Castavets from Rosemary's Baby, which is death to sympathy, methinks. Mind you, that's my problem, not the movie's.

24. Seven Seas to Calais (1962, directed by Rudolph Mate and Primo Zeglio) is a pretty lame Euro production that attempts to make a swashbuckler out of the career of Sir Francis Drake. Drake's biography would lend itself to a crackerjack swashbuckler, actually, but this film isn't it. Rod Taylor is pretty good as Drake, as is Irene Worth as Queen Elizabeth, but the story is flat, the film was edited with a chainsaw, and the comedy relief sequences among the native Americans were cringe-worthy. And can one stage the defeat of the Spanish Armada in a swimming pool? This film makes the attempt.

Stomp.

13. Yasuzo Masumura's Black Test Car (1962) is an indictment of capitalist backstabbing among industrial spies, and if it's less outrageous a film than Masumura's earlier Giants and Toys, it's certainly as scathing a criticism. The montage of the burning wreckage of the test car of the title is a neat summary of the movie as a whole.

14. Johnnie To's Exiled (2006) is more or less a remake of the director's The Mission, but where The Mission turned its back on the gonzo filmmaking of the Hong Kong new wave, this film embraces it fully. A quartet of gangland assassins duel over their intended victim, only to abandon their hit over dinner when the victim's new wife and child intercede. Unfortunately, the boss who hired them is none too happy about it. The opening movement of the film seems like To's ode to the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, while there are two apocalyptic gunfights later in the film that see the director interpreting the gunfights of John Woo or Ringo Lam in his own idiom. To loves to stage his mayhem in master shots where the combatants are close in on each other. A marvel of bullets and bodies in motion.

15. Big Trouble in Little China (1986, directed by John Carpenter) is one of those mid-eighties films where Hollywood tried (and failed) to catch the zeitgeist of the Hong Kong action films. My SO put this in the machine and immediately noted: "When I first saw this, I didn't know what 'wire fu' was." Kurt Russell is a picture of an incompetent hero, whose only real heroic act is to put an end to the big bad guy. It's been a while since I've watched this all the way through. This is the first time I realized that the "Masters of Death" were swiped from the second Lone Wolf and Cub film. This film was made at about the time that Carpenter's muse was beginning to leave him.

16. Cloverfield (2008, directed by Matt Reeves) doesn't have an original thought in its head, but damned if it doesn't work in spite of all of that. This film takes the classic mistake of Kaiju movies--emphasis on the human cast--and turns it into a razor sharp narrative gimmick. It's hard to believe that it's taken nearly ten years for someone to find the perfect use for The Blair Witch Project's technique of putting the camera in the hands of its characters. We still don't care all that much about the film's shallow, yuppie characters--which is good, otherwise their various deaths might overwhelm the movie--but seeing things from their ground-level point of view has a startling immediacy that I've never seen in this genre before, and that immediacy returns the giant monster movie resolutely into the realm of the horror movie. The film's best set-piece (involving a perilously leaning skyscraper) doesn't even depend on the monster. That all said, Cloverfield's most generous gift to the viewer is Michael Giacchino's faux Akira Ifukube "Overture" over the end credits.

17. Much as I like Hitchcock's original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), I understand implicitly why Hitch decided to remake it. He grasped that this original version ends at the wrong point. Instead of the vivid climax at the Royal Albert Hall, the bare outlines of which are present here, it ends with a big gunfight. It's kind of an anti-climax. Still, Peter Lorre is a superb bad guy even if Leslie Banks is a stiff as the lead.

18. I've sometimes expounded my theory about what I call "The Catherine Deneuve Problem." Essentially: if you have Catherine Deneuve in your movie, you have a problem because the actress is so inhumanly lovely that she can potentially ride roughshod over whatever your movie is about. There are, it seems to me, two solutions to this problem. The first is to submit to it and turn your picture into an adoration. This is how Jacques Demy approached it, for instance. The other solution is to defile her. This is the solution that Polanski used in Repulsion, but Luis Bunuel beat him to it in Belle de Jour, and repeated the experiment in Tristana in 1970. There was something about Deneuve that brought out the director's sadomasochism, and in this movie, he constructs a rigorous examinations of sexual power games, in which Deneuve's character submits to the older Don Lupe (Fernando Rey), only to turn the tables on him once she loses her leg to a tumor. This film is Bunuel at his most brutal, and the imagery is particularly grotesque.

Current tally: 18 movies, 9 horror movies.

Dark Pasts, Dark Futures

8. There is a certain shock of recognition found in watching Shinobi no mono (1962, directed by Satsuo Yamamoto), because many of its ninja set pieces were swiped wholesale by screenwriter Roald Dahl for You Only Live Twice. I found myself saying, "Hey, wait a minute..." quite often. The copious program notes confirm the influence (both films share the same advisor on all things ninja, too). Beyond that, this film is a labyrinthine historical piece in which two rival ninja clans are manipulated by their ruling masters against the rise of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Caught in the middle is ninja prodigy Ishikawa Goemon, who, through his inability to keep it in his pants finds himself an outcast under the secret direction of the master of his clan. This film has tons of plot--too much plot for one movie, probably--perhaps because almost all of the principle characters are actual historical figures and perhaps because the screenwriter had all sorts of interesting extrapolations to the historical record. Goemon (historically a Robin Hood figure) is played by the excellent Raizo Ichikawa, a matinee idol who died much too young. Other familiar character actors litter the movie, including Yunosuke Ito playing yet another scowling old man and Tomisaburo Wakayama as Nobunaga. I hope Animeigo picks up the movies that follow this one in series.

9. and 10. Witchfinder General (1968, directed by Michael Reeves) is such a bitter little pill that it's no wonder that its director committed suicide shortly after it was made. The film finds Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, a self-styled witch hunter scouring the English countryside for witches with his not so faithful assistant, for a price. In opposition is soldier Ian Oglivy, who vows to kill Hopkins after Hopkins hangs his mentor and rapes his wife. The whole thing comes to a brutally nihilistic end. There's a strong theme of generational strife in this film--a product of its time, no doubt--and it would make an interesting double-bill with Blood on Satan's Claw (1971, directed by Piers Haggard), which is the opposite side of the same coin. That film posits its young people as truly in league with the devil, demonizes Britain's pre-Christian past, and impales Satan himself on the end of a holy avenger sword in the hands of its witch hunter. It's almost as if the makers of this film were pursuing a reactionary answer to Reeves's film. Both films make superb atmospheric use of the English countryside, keeping the eye entertained even when there's nothing important happening on screen.

11. Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1986) is awfully funny, but its humor is leavened with such strong graphic violence that audiences can be forgiven for not laughing at it, I guess. That was my experience when I first saw it back in the day. I was the only person in the theater laughing. Some of the people near me gave me funny looks. Part Kafka, part Philip K. Dick, and part Dirty Harry, this remains the director's most satisfying work in English. He's helped by a committed lead performance by Peter Weller, by stellar character work by Kurtwood Smith, Ronny Cox, Dan O'Herlihy, et al., by superb design work by make-up man Rob Bottin and stop-motion artist Phil Tippett, and by Basil Poledouris's riveting score.

12. I originally saw The Terminator (1984, directed by James Cameron) the night it opened. Jesus, that was 24 years ago. I saw it with some high school buddies, and none of us had high expectations. My buddies mainly wanted to see action, and I can't say that I didn't want the same, but I knew that this was made by the guy who made Piranha II: The Spawning, which I had endured a few months before on cable, so I just prayed that it wouldn't suck too much. I mean, really, a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (fresh from Conan the Destroyer) as a killer robot? I think that all of us came out of the movie looking like we had been hit in the forehead by a two by four. This is a movie that laid the lumber to the audience like no other film in the marketplace at the time. It was unrelenting. I can even pinpoint the spot where I knew the movie was going to kick my ass: the scene where the terminator pops his eyeball out with an X-acto knife, revealing the electronic eye behind it.

In any event, I hadn't seen the movie in over a decade. Some perspective creeps in with time. One thing that is immediately apparent in retrospect is how much the "look" of the film is in line with other sci fi exploitation films from the same period. It looks very similar to Escape from New York or Galaxy of Terror, and, of course, there's a reason for this. This look was more or less authored by Jim Cameron when he was working as a special effects man. The other thing that I noticed about the movie was how bad the performances by its principles are. Both Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton are servicable and both of them are blown off the screen by Schwarzenegger, in spite of the fact that Arnold has a mere 16 lines of dialogue (the film is arguably stolen by two cameos: the redoubtable Dick Miller as a gun shop owner and Bill Paxton as a punk). It's also apparent that much of the film's forward motion is the result of creative editing, rather than elaborate set-pieces, a nod to the paucity of resources available to the filmmakers.

The arc of the movie's plot has the most in common with slasher movies: we have an unstoppable killer rampaging through the cast until we are left with only the final girl to confront him. There's even a hint of the moral universe of the slasher movie when Sarah Connor's slutty roommate and her boyfriend are killed by the terminator. Thematically, however, the movie most resembles Frankenstein, which Isaac Asimov once described as the story of a robot that turns on its creator. From a purely cinematic point of view, the lumbering injured terminator at the end of the movie recalls the Monster from the old Universal Frankensteins (especially Son of Frankenstein), and the electrical effects throughout the movie should be a dead giveaway. To an extent, this is the living end of the Frankenstein story, in which our creation and our hubris brings about a heavy metal apocalypse. And this, more than any other element of the movie, is what strikes a chord.

Cheers.

A Year-long Movie Argosy

I've been lazy about writing about the movies I've seen in the past year, so I thought I'd try to jumpstart my interest in it by setting myself a goal for the new year. Thus, my current project is a variant of the October movie challenge. It is my intention to watch at least one movie for every day of the year (and it's a leap year, to boot). At least half of them--183 of them--must be horror movies. I can only count any individual movie once for the year, though I am free to watch movies multiple times if I like (subsequent viewings just won't be counted). This is my goal. We'll see if I can get there without becoming barking mad by mid-year. As a result, the number at the beginning of my reviews this year will designate where I am on this project.

To start the year:

1. The Face Of Another (1966), a weird, weird portrait of alienation and shifting identity by Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. Slow, but visually arresting and creepy as all get-out.

2. MadHouse (1974, directed by Jim Clark), in which Vincent Price gives a committed performance beyond his usual hamming, in service to a screenplay that is entirely undeserving and to a director who is a clod. Still, it's nice to see Price share the screen with Peter Cushing.

3. A Bucket of Blood (1959), one of Roger Corman's three-day wonders, and better than any movie made in three days has any right being. Dick Miller is terrific as a hapless wanna-be hipster who finds his muse by encasing corpses in clay. Fun, and witty.

4. Bloody Mama (1970) isn't one of Corman's finer pictures. Shelly Winters is Ma Barker, and her brood of degenerates includes a very young Robert De Niro. Lots of sex and violence, but it suggests that Corman has looked hard at Bonnie and Clyde and seen only the exploitation potential without the rigor of the filmmaking. Corman was getting tired of directing by this point, and it shows.

5. Holiday (1938, directed by George Cukor) questions the pursuit of wealth. This film couldn't be made today--it's too openly critical of capitalism and class--but give it a couple of years. Cary Grant is superb as a young idealist marrying wealth, only to find the world of wealth to be stifling. Kate Hepburn is the free-spirited sister of his fiancee, who knows exactly what kind of gilded cage he's entering. This is sometimes billed as a comedy, but I can't for the life of me understand why. Good supporting parts from Henry Daniell and Edward Everett Horton (who always makes me think of Fractured Fairy Tales).

6. The Haunted Strangler (1958, directed by Robert Day). Interesting Karloff programmer in which Boris plays a writer obsessed with a strangler he believes to have been wrongly convicted. Unfortunately, Karloff himself--unbeknownst to his conscious mind--is the true murderer. Well mounted on a budget with relatively good performances from all involved. Karloff gets to screw up his face with aplomb when the strangler comes to the surface. Not great, but engaging at 80 minutes of length.

7. The Quiet Duel (1949, directed by Akira Kurosawa) follows a doctor who contracts syphillis while operating on a patient during WW II, and his life back home as he deals with the shame of it. In general, this is good, but not great. It plays like a first draft without the resources of, say, Red Beard. Still, there's a lot to admire. Kurosawa's regulars are fine, including an early performance from Toshiro Mifune and a fine appearance by Takashi Shimura, who I can always watch.

Current total: 7 movies. 4 horror movies.

Movies for the week of 11/26-12/2/07

I'm still mulling over my reaction to Johnnie To's Throwdown (2004), which seems to be a weird hybrid of his comedies and his crime films. It's shot in the Hong Kong noir style (as opposed to the bright, open style of, say, Yesterday Once More), but it's populated by lovable misfits and a sense of redemption that seems almost out of place in such a world. The story follows ex-Judo champ Sze-To Bo, who walked away from the sport to open a (failing) nightclub, where he seems to be drinking himself to death. Enter a young judo artist intent on challenging him, and a vagabond singer who's looking for a job. Mix well. The plot is almost entirely irrelevant. It's an excuse to watch these characters (and some others besides). My favorite character in the movie is the triad boss who is so competitive that he crushes little kids at air hockey. Louis Koo is pretty good in the lead, in a role that demands that the audience not know that he's blind until two thirds of the way into the movie.

On the other hand: To's Election 2 (2006, aka: Triad Election) is, if anything, even blacker than the style with which it is filmed. Picking up the threads from the first movie, we find Chairman Lok (Simon Yam) coming to the end of his term, and scheming to extend his rule contrary to triad custom. We also find Jimmy (Louis Koo) in the Michael Corleone role, a gangster who thought he was out, but who got dragged back in anyway. Having framed the romance of the Hong Kong crime film in the first two thirds of the first film only explode it in the end, To begins this film in a much darker mode. It's easy--poisonously easy--to see these films as a riff on The Godfather, but I think the true source is Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. In the first of Fukasaku's films, the director mocks the yakuza sacrifice of fingers as penance for transgressions against their bosses by throwing one of those fingers into a chicken coop, where it is promptly devoured. To goes that one better in a scene of baroque nastiness involving a dog kennel, a cleaver, and a meat grinder. If the audience was making the mistake of sympathizing with Koo's Jimmy, this sequence obliterates it. Everyone here is a soulless lowlife. And that's where the movie becomes most interesting, because in addition to the triad machinations, there is also the specter of the government. Jimmy doesn't want to be a gangster, but the authorities on mainland China WANT him to take over the triad. To is cagey--he knows the game of pleasing the censors while saying what he wants. This is a masterclass in that kind of gamesmanship.

Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984) is witty (the title, in addition to being Mozart's middle name, is a terrific verbal bon mot). But it's not particularly good. Oh, the movie covers for the fact with lush production values and all the Mozart you could ever want, but the performances are stiff and the resolution is ridiculous. Still and all, I was surprised to learn that the god-awful laugh that Tom Hulce invented for Mozart was based on historical fact (a contemporary described the real Mozart's laugh as sounding like steel rubbing over glass). File this in the category of entertaining bad movies.

Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005) is as shameless a love letter to a favorite movie as has ever been penned, but it's not an unreflected one. Especially in its extended edition, the movie echoes the original scene by scene (and occasionally frame for frame), but it manages the not inconsiderable feat of offering subtle, and occasionally scathing criticism of the original point by point. Consider, for example, the use to which Jackson puts Max Steiner's original score and the costumes worn by the natives in the original in a scene that lays bare the colonialist racism of the first film's natives. The film also difuses the weird (and racist) Freudian innuendo of the first film and places a character into the film that sympathizes with Kong as much as the audience does. But, of course, what's of real interest here is the dinosaur mayhem and the swarm of biplanes, and here, Jackson delivers in spades. Some viewers have called these scenes excessive, but when has Jackson ever delivered restraint? It's not in his nature.

Innocence and Experience

The way Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence (2004) is made shows a chilly kind of French discipline, which exaggerates the fact that it doesn't explain anything to the viewer. This discipline is on display from frame one, and the first five minutes of the film are a masterclass in menacing ambiguity. Set in a girl's school surrounded by a wall with no gate and staffed with adults who seem more servants than chaperones, Innocence posits a kind of prepubescent idyll. But why does our protagonist arrive at the school in a child's coffin? I'm classifying this as a horror movie, but it doesn't really fit comfortably in a pigeonhole. There's no violence in the movie, after all, but that menace that hangs over the film is unforgettable.

Anyone who doesn't know the intended direction of George Romero's zombie movies can be forgiven for looking at Andrew Currie's Fido (2006) and wondering where the hell that came from. Romero had intended to steer his series towards a new society where zombies are controlled by enclaves of humans, used as servants, and even used to wage wars. Fido is a logical extension of that, presenting a post-zombie world in which zombies are kept as pets. This is what you might get if you crossed Lassie (Timmy's in trouble! Go get help, Fido) with Land of the Dead and salted it with a generous helping of Douglas Sirk for good measure. Include a generous helping of good actors, including Carrie Anne Moss, Billy Connoly, Dylan Baker, and Tim Blake Nelson, and you have a recipe for a cult classic, right? Well, in theory, I suppose. It's all well and good to include a Sirkian subtext of frustrated sexuality in a stifling fifties sitcom world, but it's quite another to lace the entire movie with a not so subtle undercurrent of necrophilia. It makes for a creepy viewing experience. And not creepy in a good way. Plus, it's not as funny as the premise would suggest. It's not awful, but it's a misfire none the less.

Speaking of misfires, has it really been twenty years since Paul Verhoeven came to Hollywood? Jesus, what a waste. That waste is highlighted in his first film in six years (his last was the nigh-unwatchable Hollow Man), for which the director returned to his native Holland. Black Book (2006) shows why Verhoeven mattered in the first place, all the while giving license to the excesses that led him so far astray. The good stuff: Carice Van Houten is going to be a major star. Mark my words. She's the actress Verhoeven always wanted (in Sharon Stone or Renée Soutendijk) but never had before now. There's also a certain playfullness in the way the director and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman booby-trap the cliches of the WWII thriller, culminating in a bitterly ironic twist of the tail at the end. I mean, I can hear Verhoeven chuckling at the very notion that the Nazis could be heroic and that the resistance could be villainous (and overtly anti-Semetic). That's a perilous knife's edge that the film walks, especially given that the movie starts with the massacre of a boat full of Jews who have been betrayed to the SS. But, Verhoeven being Verhoeven, he can't resist a scene in which van Houten brushes her pubic hair with peroxide to dye it blonde. Nor can he resist the excessive defilement of his heroine when she's tormented as a Nazi collaborator. That all said, I'll give him props. This movie holds one's attention from scene to scene, and the film's running time unspools in a relative blink. I see that Verhoeven is heading back to Hollywood. Ah, well...

Early Hitchcock and Favorite Horror Movie Posters

I've been sitting on public domain collections of Hitchcock for a while now. One of my brothers, who seems to forget this every year, buys them for me at Christmas. Hopefully, I've nipped this in the bud, but I still have more than enough of them. The quality of the transfers is wildly variable, as you might expect, but they're watchable for the most part (I'll get to that further on). As I was watching Young and Innocent and Blackmail this week, I kept hearing Andre De Toth's dismissal of Hitchcock in Hollywood ("He got fat and lazy"--well, he was ALWAYS fat). I began to understand just what he meant.

Young and Innocent (1937) is an early variation on Hitchcock's "man wrongly accused on the run" movies, following on The 39 Steps a couple of years earlier. It's certainly energetic. Of the early British Hitchcock movies, this is the one that seems most like his Hollywood movies. Clearly, he had become a prestige director by this time, and the higher budget is on full display in two sequences: in the mine cave-in, which seems an arbitrary disaster like the plane crash in Foreign Correspondent; and the famed overhead shot of a ballroom that comes to rest four inches from the eyes of the killer (it's almost a reversed version of the final shot of the shower scene in Psycho, the one that dollies back from Janet Leigh's staring eye). But in a lot of ways, this movie isn't like Hitchcock's Hollywood films at all. Visually, it's loaded with quaint excressences the likes of which Hitchcock would strip out of his later movies, and some sequences show the director clinging to the visual shorthand of his silent movies.

Blackmail (1929) is a true sound/silent hybrid, and shows Hitchcock at his most inventive. There's a bold dynamism in his shot compositions and editing scheme in the silent portions of the film, and a kind of remarkable frankness in the sound material that would go underground during the director's long tenure laboring under the Production code. Hitchcock provides no title cards for the silent portions, but he doesn't need them (compare this to Rich and Strange, in which the sound portions are punctuated with title cards, perhaps tongue in cheek). With this film's climax, we find the first instance of the director staging mayhem in or near a monument as a means of contrasting order and chaos, a trope rumored to have been suggested to Hitchcock by Michael Powell. Unfortunately, the disc pixilated into a storm of digital noise at the end of the movie. The problem with the public domain is that you often get what you pay for, or, more accurately, when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

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I was reading a lament that the art of the movie poster was lost. While I can certainly understand this sentiment, I think there are still movie posters being made today that stand with the best posters of yesteryear. Two of my favorites are from horror movies made last year.

I love, love, love this poster for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer:

I love, love, love this poster for The Host:

But this may be my favorite horror movie poster. It's for The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre 2:

Which bears an uncanny resmblance to this poster from a beloved teen comedy from around the same time:

Priceless.

So I go to my local mom and pop video store to rent Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Wild Strawberries this weekend, neither of which I've seen in over a decade. I assumed, because they tend to get Criterion editions of most things, that they would have them both on DVD. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. "You don't have either of them on DVD? Really?" I asked, not hiding the incredulity in my voice at all. "Apparently not," said the guy at the counter. Mind you, they DO have the long versions of Fanny and Alexander and Scenes from a Marriage, so this was a surprise. My first impulse was to run out and buy them copies of both and trade them for X-number of free rentals, but I resisted this urge. In any event, their VHS of Wild Strawberries wasn't bad at all, really, but their VHS of Cries and Whispers was attrocious. The spindles were binding, the tape was de-gaussing--exacerbating a film that is already a victim of bleeding reds in pristine editions--and it was cropped and dubbed. I made it through, but only just.

One of the reasons I've always liked Bergman is because, of the major world directors, he's the one who seems the most like he's making horror movies. His ongoing conversation about the silence of god is fraught with horror, as is his assessment of the existential state of human beings in the face of that silence. It's commonly held that The Hour of the Wolf is the closest to a "pure" horror movie that the director ever made, but reaccquainting myself with Cries and Whispers makes me question that notion. Bergman's movies generally exist outside of genre, but many of his films have generic markers. If I were to "type" Cries and Whispers, I would call it a haunted house movie. Like the best such movies, it's a narrative that confines haunted people in a metaphorical microcosm. The dominant red of the house--Bergman calls it the color of the soul--suggests to me the interior of a body, like the house itself is an organism. The persistent use of disolves, in which the faces of the characters fade to red, subsumes the characters into the environment. And a fine cast of monsters we have in this film. Liv Ullmann's Maria cuckolds her husband and fails to lift a finger when he stabs himself over it. Ingrid Tullin's Karin is an island, incapable of human contact or feeling. Neither can bear the thought of death, as incarnated by their sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who they rebuke on her deathbed. Only their servant, Anna, seems fully a human being, and only she seems to have any faith in a god or in humanity. The others are bounded by Bergman's ever-present silence...or rather, the whispered voices from that silence--ghostly, or demonic, or psychological--that fill the interstices of the movie.

In comparison, Wild Strawberries seems positively antic. At one point, Bergman stages the conflict between atheisim and belief in God as a fistfight. The horror imagery is still there in the form of two dream sequences, but, like Scrooge on Christmas, our hero, old Professor Borg, finds both catharsis and human contact from his dark night of the soul. Still and all, it's interesting that he describes one of his dreams as "vivid and humiliating."

In any event, I need to visit (and re-visit) Bergman more often than I do.

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Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948) was first out of the box for me upon receiving the latest of Warner's film noir boxes. I've written a long review of this for my web-site, which can be found here: http://members.tranquility.net/~benedict/actofviolence.html

I also caught up with Caged (1950, directed by John Cromwell), a film that has been eluding me for some time. When I saw that this was being released as part of the "Camp Classics" sets, I lowered my expectations. I mean, if Warner considers this as being on the same level as Trog then it must be REALLY bad, right? Well, no. It doesn't belong in that set. It's a pretty damned good film noir, a refreshingly serious women in prison movie, and a showcase for Eleanor Parker. The arc of the story, in which Parker's virtuous, wrongly convicted Marie Allen is hardened into a femme fatale by the screws and inmates of her prison, is a distaff version of Nightmare Alley, which is no small compliment. I love Agnes Moorehead in this movie, playing against type. Given the subtle lesbian coding in the film, it amuses me that Moorehead should be the socially crusading warden. Funny.

Movies for the week ending May 6, 2007

I played hooky from work on Friday afternoon to go see Spider-Man 3 (2007, d. Sam Raimi), which was good fun. I like it more than the first film, but I'm clearly in the minority there (the first film is spoiled for me by the Green Goblin, if you must know, who looks like a refugee from a Japanese kiddie show and has very glaring plot holes surrounding him). I like to think that the first film is the Ditko-era Spidey, ungainly and charming by turns. The second film would be the John Romita Spidey, slick, angsty, and smooth. That makes the current film the McFarland-era Spidey, which is a mannerist kind of comics. Of course, this is where the analogue breaks down, because it's pretty clear that Sam Raimi doesn't like that era, nor does he like its signature villain, Venom. He'd rather be dealing with the classic Spidey villains--like The Sandman--which is sure to piss off the fans of Venom, but I can't say I disagree with Sam on this. Characters like Venom were a big reason I stopped reading superhero books in the first place. It's also pretty clear that Sam desperately wants to direct a musical. This film is as close to a musical as a superhero movie gets. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

For anyone who complains about how "bad" Spidey 3 is, I would direct them to one of the other films I saw last week, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2007, d. Ivan Reitman), about which I will have nothing further to say, except to note that nothing makes a good movie look better than an awful imitation.

I also finally got out to see The Host (2006, d. Bong Joon-ho), which has been described as Little Miss Sunshine meets Godzilla. While I won't dispute that characterization, it's better than that. A number of other reviews have noted that this is a movie that refutes the monster-movie playbook point by point, which is closer to the truth. For all that, I suspect that the true motivation behind the movie was a love of monsters and an impatience with how they are usually depicted. I'm sure you know the drill. A few teases early in the movie. A tail here, a footprint there, tease, tease, tease for a couple of reels before the big reveal at the beginning of the third act. Monster movies from The Beast from 20000 Fathoms to Dragonslayer use this same story structure. The Host says screw all that. In the first reel, you get more monster mayhem than many monster movies include in their entire running time, mayhem filmed in broad daylight, with the best "innocent crowd fleeing a monster" scene I've ever seen. It's a cool damned monster, too. It's not as good a film as director Bong Joon-ho's previous Memories of Murder, but it's close, which is high praise.

I also found The Professionals (1966, d. Richard Brooks) in the dump bin at Wal-mart last week for four bucks. This is one of my favorite westerns, with great performances by Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Ryan and a very yummy Claudia Cardinale. It's a film that blows sh t up real good, too. A total "guy" movie, one that reeks of testosterone. I've loved this flick since I saw it with my dad as a teen. I had very odd thoughts while watching it this week, though, largely inspired by the media furor over the VT massacre. This is a movie in which there are dozens of people violently killed on screen, whether from gunshots or explosions, and I got to thinking about how out-of-kilter our value systems are when it comes to depictions of violence, especially in comparison to horror movies. In The Professionals, we root for the killers and exhult in their actions. We WANT them to kill the bad guys. But let's compare that to, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in which there are only four people killed,in which the killers are impenetrable cyphers. The filmmakers consciously skew the movie so that not only is the audience NOT invited to root for the killers, their actions are designed specifically to inspire horror. And yet, a film like The Professionals is more socially acceptable than a film like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. TCM is occasionally thought of as a "sick" or "depraved" film, while no such criticism attaches to The Professionals. What does that say about our society? I don't know. I'm just speculating out loud.

Movies for the Week Ending 2/18/07

Leo McCarey was convinced that the Cary Grant persona was an impersonation of himself, learned by Grant on the set of The Awful Truth (1937). I doubt very much that this is wholly true, but I suspect there might be a kernel of truth to it. Grant, the chameleon, picked up bits and pieces of a lot of the people he worked with. But to my eye, the Grant persona was already in place as early as Sylvia Scarlet, two years prior to The Awful Truth. That said, it’s possible that The Awful Truth shows the Grant persona perfected. The movie itself is great fun, and Grant’s deft self-deprecation is one of the film’s main attractions. Watching him spar with co-star with Irene Dunne as they both try to wreck the other’s happy divorce is a delight. I used to love the Dunne/Grant pairings, but time hasn’t been kind to them. Dunne seems woefully out of her league, a creation of the 1930s, while Grant seems timeless. This probably works the best of them, though, and the look she gives Grant from her bed at the end of the movie is a look that I can imagine on the faces of a lot of women were Cary Grant to walk into their bedrooms.

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Most of the reviews of Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004) focus on the opening shot. It’s a great shot, so I’m not going to quibble with this, but the consensus seems to be that, outside of that shot, the rest of the movie is rote. I’m not so sure about that. There are two things in the movie that set it apart from standard Hong Kong actioners: The first is the sly, meta-cinematic reworking of Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984)--in both films, a gang of criminals is trapped by the police in one of Kowloon’s mammoth apartment blocks. It’s commonly thought that the satiric point of the movie is trained at the media--and it is--but it’s also trained at the history of the Hong Kong action film itself. Most viewers won’t catch this, or even care about it, but I liked it. The other thing that sets it apart is the measure of everyday life that our gang of criminals brings to their ordeal. They take a family hostage, discover that the father (To regular Lam Suet) cannot cook, and end up making a feast for the family. Both of our criminal masterminds dream of opening restaurants. It’s a totally unlooked-for flourish in a film that could be a routine programmer. We also get still more variations of the director’s obsession with cell phones, which marks this distinctively as a To film. To may be my favorite director on the Pacific rim right now.

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In the interests of full disclosure, here’s how I stand with Robert Bresson: I was indifferent at best towards both The Trial of Joan of Arc and Diary of a Country Priest. I hated Au Hasard Balthazar, which may be the most disgustingly misanthropic movie I’ve ever seen. I was quite content to let sleeping dogs lie. I have plenty of other interests without forcing my way to an appreciation. In steps my significant other, who collects Arthuriana, with Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974). Now, I don’t know what I was expecting. Much as I disliked Balthazar, I’ll certainly admit that it was impeccably filmed, so I wasn’t expecting Lancelot to be as unwatchably awful as it turned out to be. For a brief moment at the beginning of the film, I wanted to pop it out of the DVD player to make sure that we were watching the right film. The opening sequence, consisting of various slaughter and mutilation of knights, seems like a first sketch for a Monty Python skit, or a poor-man’s imitation of the bloodier chambara set pieces from Japan, only with blood pumps set to “ooze” rather than “geyser.” The feeling that this was a half-baked sketch was reinforced by the constant, annoying clatter of armor. The film’s other signature sound effect is the whinny of an off-screen horse. The film repeats this sound effect--the same, unvarying sound effect--at random throughout the movie--and, again, I began to think of Monty Python (the resemblance between this and Monty Python and the Holy Grail is too close to be an accident). The film has no interest in people, except, perhaps, to delineate how awful human beings are. Bresson communicates this through his zombie actors and by a desire to look at anything but a human face except when he can’t get around it. There are a LOT of shots of the feet of knights and the feet of horses in this movie, so many that it becomes ridiculous, even at an 80 minute running time. In his desire to deny the audience the pleasure of romance or spectacle--and I’m sure that this is the intent--Bresson elides anything that might be considered a set-piece, resulting an a completely disjointed narrative as the film comes to its climax. We see aftermaths, mostly, but we don’t see context. After we finished watching this movie, my GF said “Well, that’s two hours I’ll never get back.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was only an hour and twenty minutes. Such is the relativistic, time-dilating effect of really terrible movies.

I think I’m done with Bresson.

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99.9 (1997) is another film by Spaniard Augusti Villaronga, whose other films ambushed me late last year. Villaronga knows how to get under the skin. He knows how to give the knife a twist or two beyond what the audience thinks it can bear. He’s on speaking terms with horror in a way few directors can manage for long. This film is no different. It follows the host of a radio show as she tries to unravel the death of a friend who died under mysterious circumstances while conducting paranormal research in a small village in Andalusia. The plot has an Asian feel to it, on the surface. Parts of the film, detailing our heroine’s friend and his work, mine the videodromic dread of The Ring and its progeny. But unlike those films, the film ultimately has a little-c catholic view of horror and evil. Evil in Villaronga’s world is part of the air. It’s everywhere. It’s wherever you find it. That all said, this isn’t nearly as alarming a film as In a Glass Cage. Its focus is far too diffuse. Villaronga follows a number of narrative dead ends as a result. The film doesn’t add up, exactly, but when it is clicking, it remains as bruisingly hurtful to the audience as the director’s other films, only with less of a point. He’s traded scalpels for an aluminum baseball bat, if you will, but both will screw you up bad in the right (or wrong) hands.