Nine that Rip

So, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the recent Image disc for the Shaw Brothers film, The Magic Blade. Like most recent Shaw reissues from the Celestial catalog, this one was festooned with trailers. In addition to trailers for the other Shaw Brothers films in Image's Eastern Masters line, it also included a bunch of trailers for Hong Kong action films from the eighties and nineties. Most of the films in question are crap, though some of them have their highlights. What this mainly did was instill in me a jones for Hong Kong action films. I used to eat, breath, and dream HK action films when I was running a video store in the 1990s. They were part of our specialty, and our selection of movies landed us in one of the appendices of one of the earliest guides to HK action films, Sex and Zen and A Bullet In the Head by Steffan Hammond and Mike Wilkins. Sadly, the store has been defunct for years now, and this book is out of print, and the bloom is off the lily for HK action films, their style having been co-opted by other cinemas across the globe. But I still had that jones. Rather than waste it on some of the crappy films advertised on The Magic Blade--I'll get to some of those in the next few weeks--I thought I'd go straight to uncut shit and mainline it. The first part of S&Z&ABitH is a chapter called "Ten That Rip," which gives an outline of the best of the Hong Kong new wave. It's not a "best 10," which the authors freely acknowledge, but rather a jumping-off point. So what the hell, I thought. Why not go back to first principles?

The "Ten that Rip" are the following:

The Bride With White Hair (1993, directed by Ronny Yu)
A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, directed by Ching Tsui-Tung)
193. Full Contact (1993, directed by Ringo Lam)
194. Hard Boiled (1992, directed by John Woo)
It's Now Or Never (1992, directed by Kwok-Hei Chan)
195. Mr. Vampire (1985, directed by Ricky Lau)
196. Naked Killer (1992, directed by Clarence Fok)
197. Pedicab Driver (1989, directed by Sammo Hung)
198. Police Story III (1992, directed by Stanley Tong and Jackie Chan)
199. Sex and Zen (1992, directed by Michael Mak)

I own 9 of these films. The tenth, It's Now or Never, is a film I've never been able to track down. And believe me, I've tried.

Two things are immediately apparent from this listing. First: even though I say that I've fallen out with Hong Kong cinema over time, that's a lie. I've seen both The Bride With White Hair and A Chinese Ghost Story very recently. I've also been working my way through several Shaw releases. Second: 1992 and 1993 were VERY good years for Hong Kong cinema, perhaps the culmination of the Hong Kong New Wave. Certainly, pop cinema in Hong Kong has not reached such delirious heights ever since. The HK New Wave burned brightly, but it burned for a relatively short period of time.

One can quibble with some of these selections. I've never been particularly fond of Sammo Hung's Pedicab Driver, and I would happily replace it with his Eastern Condors, but that's just nitpicking.

Of the films I watched last week, I found Full Contact to be the most interesting. Maybe it's because I've been watching Shaw Brothers films recently, but the way Full Contact takes the sublimated homoerotic sadomasochism of Chang Cheh's films and makes it overt--Simon Yam's character fairly flames--makes this one jump out. And while it's as thoroughly aestheticized in its depiction of violence, this one makes it hurt a little bit more. The fight in the ice house is a good example of this, particularly when Chow Yun-Fat pins a man's hand to a block of ice with a butterfly knife. It's also possible that I noticed this one more because it has a meaty role for the ubiquitous Anthony Wong, who remains one of my favorite Chinese actors.

Hard Boiled, on the other hand, takes the aesthetic of the Hong Kong gun movie, established in John Woo's own A Better Tomorrow six year's earlier, and pushes it to its ultimate extremity. Woo films everything as if it's a set-piece, and eliminating anything that doesn't get the blood pumping. The long single shot in the running gun battle in the hospital is bravura filmmaking that even the director himself has been unable to match in the years since.

The anything goes attitude that characterizes these films reaches a kind of apotheosis in Police Story III (Supercop in America), which hangs on a couple of stunts that one-up almost all of the stunt films ever made. Watching Jackie Chan dangle in front of a train while suspended from a helicopter is crazy enough, but watching Michelle Yeoh drive a motorcycle onto the back of a moving train is beyond the pale. These people were just crazy.

Mr. Vampire is an example of a different kind of kitchen sink filmmaking, in which the film shifts moods at a whim from horror to romance to knockabout slapstick comedy. If you can get into these shifts, the movie is a lot of fun. Some viewers won't be able to make the leap. I quite like it.

Naked Killer is a remake of sorts of the Shaws' Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan. It adds a LOT of castration imagery and twists the motivations of the cop on the case. But it's all about a lesbian kung fu pas de deux in the end.

And then there's Sex and Zen, which defies easy description. It's a porno movie. It's a kung fu movie. It's a slapstick comedy. It certainly has striking production values. My own personal favorite scene shows Amy Yip practicing her caligraphy while holding her brush in her hoohah. It's that kind of movie, but it certainly makes a strong impression.

200. Away from Hong Kong, I took in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which the director famously transposes the blank face of evil against a serene small town but less famously begins to transform from his early, Fritz Lang-inspired style into the mature "Hitchcockian" style. The early parts of this film show the director exploring the same kind of cinematic "twinning" that he would later use in Strangers on a Train, both with character names (Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten both play characters named Charlie) and with how they are introduced (both are introduced lying on their backs on a bed, apparently afflicted with melancholia). One wonders if Hitchcock mightn't have embarked on his mature style a decade earlier had he not been reigned in by David O. Selznick, but that's useless speculation, given that he brought to Selznick more or less the same style he was using in England in the late 30s. In any event, as we were watching this, my long-suffering SO turned to me and said: "Hitch is sure making things creepy, isn't he?" To which I could only nod.

Calamari

I've put two new reviews on my main web site. They are:

Iron Man (expanding--to put it mildly--on the comments I made here a couple of weeks ago)

and

188. The Call of Cthulhu (2005, directed by Andrew Leman), which in abstract wonders about H. P. Lovecraft's relationship with calamari and lauds the D. I. Y. aesthetic that informs this particular vanity project.

During the course of last week, I also watched:

189. The Magic Blade (1976, directed by Chor Yuen), in which Ti Lung plays a wu xia swordmaster who falls in with his rival, played by the ubiquitous Lo Lieh. Both are pursued by the agents of Mr. Yu, who seeks to assert his complete dominance over the world of martial arts by laying his hands on the fabled Peacock Dart and by eliminating his main rival. Much intrigue and swordplay ensues. This is nowhere near as accomplished a film as some of Chor Yuen's other movies, and show signs of editorial tampering by the higher-ups at Shaw, but it's still entertaining as all get-out. In addition to the feature itself, the newish Image disc is festooned with 30-plus trailers for other Shaw films and other HK actioners in general. Many of these look terrible, but they still kinda sorta stoked a dormant appetite for stupid HK action films that I didn't know I still had. We'll see what comes of it.

190. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008, directed by Steven Spielberg) doesn't change the essential calculus of the Indiana Jones movies, which is to say that the series still consists of Raiders foremost, and then the other movies in various orders of preference. Personally, I liked this new film. It may actually be the best of the not-Raiders films, but I haven't seen the other two in years, so I may be talking out of my ass. Regardless of what flaws there are--and there are many--the movie is an agreeable entertainment by a director who used to be the best entertainer in the world. There are still sparks. There's an image of Indiana Jones staring up at a mushroom cloud in this film that may be the best shot in the entire series. My main complaint with this film is with Harrison Ford, actually. Not because he's too old for the movie--he's not--but rather that he doesn't seem like the same actor. The Ford of Star Wars and the first Jones movies had an edge of anger that is absent in this movie. I suppose it's reasonable that Ford has mellowed with age, so why not grant Dr. Jones the same license? Sure, but it's still jarring. My favorite part of the movie is how it suggests the adventures we didn't get to see in the intervening years since the last film. "Colonel Jones?" "Consultant at Roswell?" "Mission to Berlin?" Suggestive and tantalizing. I like that.

191. I don't have anything to add to the dialogue about The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola), except to note in passing that this is the first time I've really zeroed in on the influence of Luchino Visconti on this movie.

192. It's a strange quirk of fate that placed the classic film libraries of Warner Brothers and MGM in the hands of the same corporation, because they couldn't be more politically and sociologically different. Jack Warner was a New Deal liberal, and his films reflected that. Louis B. Mayer was a conservative plutocrat, and his films reflected that. It's oil and vinegar. I don't have a point here, but it's a thought that occurred to me while watching George Cuckor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), which is firmly set amongst the rich and idle. It also occurred to me that all of my favorite Cary Grant comedies--His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, this--are marriage comedies. Again, I don't have a point, except perhaps that it's a Shakespearean tradition carried forward (all of the comedies end in marriage). This is fun and witty, and the stars (not limited to the film's troika of Grant, James Stewart, and Kate Hepburn) are all charmers.

Look Ma, No Subtitles!

Staying away from the art house and the avant garde this week, I watched three fairly accomplished genre exercises.

185. And Soon the Darkness (1970, directed by Robert Fuest) is the work of several talents from The Avengers television show (Fuest, writer Brian Clemens), but you would never know it from the film itself. Absent are bizarre design excressences like Fuest occasionally used on that show, and later employed in baroque fashion on the Dr. Phibes movies. What you have here is an exercise in tightly controlled dread. And, for that matter, it seems like it was created on a bet. Given the title, you might expect the film to indulge in some kind of expressionist use of light and darkness, but no. There's not a single scene in this movie set after dark. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The filmmakers understand that some sunlit scenes can instill a feeling of existential dread just as effectively as the dark (other films that exploit this: The Hitcher, the first half of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). In its particulars: the movie follows a pair of English girls bicycling through rural France. After a tiff, they separate, with the vivacious blond choosing to sun herself in a clearing while her more sensible friend continues on. Then the blond vanishes, and her friend must trust in increasingly suspicious strangers to help her find her. This is all performed more or less bloodlessly, but there is a pall of menace that makes the movie seem better than it actually is. Pamela Franklin is excellent in the lead.

186. Serenity (2005, directed by Joss Whedon) ties up most of the loose ends from Whedon's ill-fated television series, Firefly. I like Firefly a lot--more than Buffy and Angel, that's for sure--so this was a welcome addition. It hits a lot of stock sci-fi archetypes (the preternaturally gifted child, the warrior woman), but it also borrows the Night of the Living Dead scenario for its climax, as our band of misfits is besieged by the cannibal "Reavers." Entertaining, and it doesn't spare the carnage among the regular characters.

187. The Westerner (1940, directed by William Wyler) won Walter Brennan an Oscar for his portrayal of Judge Roy Bean, who forms a friendship with Gary Cooper's drifter after Cooper convinces the judge that he knows the judge's idol, Lily Langtree, personally. It keeps Cooper from hanging on a false horse-thieving charge. But things turn sour when Cooper finds that the judge is burning out homesteaders, including the girl Cooper is sweet on. This comes to a head at the opera house where the judge buys the house in anticipation of a performance by Ms. Langtree. This is a strange transitional western. Stagecoach blew open the doors a year earlier, and this film follows its lead, but it still has some of the cornier elements of the horse operas of the day. Plus, it hasn't even a passing acquaintance with history, not that I care much. Cooper gives one of his best performances. The new DVD from MGM is a dramatic improvement over the old one, even when one considers the lack of extras.

Begone Dull Care

Just a quick round-up of last weeks movies. I didn't watch much in the way of features, but I worked my way through the second disc of Norman McLaren shorts:

166. Begone Dull Care (1949)
167. Boogie-Doodle (1940)
168. Dots (1940)
169. Fiddle-De-Dee (1947)
170. Hen Hop (1942)
171. Hoppity Pop (1946)
172. Lines Horizontal (1962)
173. Lines Vertical (1960)
174. Loops (1940)
175. Mail Early (1941)
176. Mail Early for Christmas (1959)
177. Le Merle (1958)
178. Mosaic (1965)
179. NBC Valentine Greeting (1939)
180. New York Light Board (1961)
181. New York Light Board Record (1961)
182. Serenal (1959)
183. Short and Suite (1959)
184. Stars and Stripes (1940)

I don't have much to say about this lot except to note my admiration at the experimental nature of all of it and to note, in passing that the filmmaker tends to repeat himself, I have to give a shout out to "Beyond Dull Care" (1949), which is jaw-dropping, a first-class work of genius. The entire thing was painted and drawn directly onto frameless 35mm film stock, and yet, it still manages the not inconsiderable feat of having a cinematic pulse in spite of being completely abstract. This leaps into my own personal pantheon of animated favorites. But don't take my word for it, you can watch yourself, though the quality is pretty crummy. You can still get the gist:



On the whole, these films fall into a few categories in which McLaren is varying the theme (it's not by accident that jazz plays a big role in a lot of these films). You have the animated abstractions drawn directly on the film itself with pen and ink (e. g.: "Boogie-Doodle"), animated abstractions etched onto the film (e. g.: "Blinkity Blank"), formalist experiments with an optical printer (Lines Horizontal, Mosaic), and the pair of deranged shorts painted on frameless film (the other is Fiddle-De-Dee).

It occured to me while I was watching these that my cinemania has drifted pretty far into obsession, because this stuff is way into the realm of esoterica.

Where's Donald Duck?

Mostly short films for me this week.

More Looney Tunes from The Golden Collection, Volume 5, disc 2: Fun-Filled Fairy Tales

135. Bewitched Bunny (1954, directed by Chuck Jones). Hansel? HAN-sel?
136. Paying the Piper (1949, directed by Robert McKimson). The cats of Hamelin are a little irked at Pied Piper Porky for putting them out of work. Droll, even with all the slapstick.
137. The Bear's Tale (1940, directed by Tex Avery). Fun mash-up of Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Bears.
138. Foney Fables (1942, directed by Friz Freling). A black-out cartoon featuring vignettes from Aesop.
139. Goldimouse and the Three Cats (1960, directed by Friz Freling). Pretty good late cartoon with Sylvester and Son. Sylvester's offspring was, perhaps, his best foil.
140. Holiday for Shoestrings (1946, directed by Friz Freling). Elves. Shoemaker. The potential for scathing social satire in the hands of a less conservative director. Still not bad.
141. Little Red Rodent Hood (1952, directed by Friz Freling). Another transposition. The Warners loved Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Bears almost to the exclusion of other stories. Pretty good mid-period Freling.
142. Little Red Walking Hood (1937, directed by Tex Avery). A precursor to Avery's later dabblings in sexualized fairy tale.
143. Red Riding Hoodwinked (1955, directed by Friz Freling). Sylvester and Tweety parallel the main story of Red and Grandma. Fun.
144. The Trial of Mr. Wolf (1941, directed by Friz Freling). The familiar tale told from the point of view of the wolf to a jury of his peers. Dig Grandma's sinister profession. One of Freling's best.
145. The Turn-Tale Wolf (1952, directed by Robert McKimson). Another familiar tale from the Wolf's perspective. This time it's the Three Little Pigs, and damned if they ain't a trio of evil bastards.
146. Tom Thumb in Trouble (1940, directed by Chuck Jones). Jones was still in his "cute" phase for this one.
147. Tweety and the Beanstalk (1957, directed by Friz Freling). "Fe Fi Fo Fat, I tawt I taw a putty tat."
148. A Gander at Mother Goose (1940, directed by Tex Avery). A series of short gags. Not Avery at his best.
149. Señorella and the Glass Huarache (1964, directed by Hawley Pratt). In feel, this is a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, only without Speedy. An ethnic reworking of Cinderella. Meh.

Interesting to note the relative absence of Chuck Jones on this disc (only two shorts). Conversly, Friz Freling is all over this one (and the Pratt short at the end is Freling by proxy).

Also, I waded into the Norman McClaren Masters Edition, disc one:

150. 7 til 5 (1933)
151. A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting (1946)
152. A Phantasy (1952)
153. Blinkity Blank (1955)
154. Book Bargain (1937)
155. Camera Makes Whoopee (1935)
156. C'est l'aviron (1944)
157. Là-haut sur ces montagnes (1946)
158. Love on the Wing (1939)
159. Mony a Pickle (1938)
160. News for the Navy (1937)
161. The Obedient Flame (1939)
162. La Poulette grise (1947)
163. Spheres (1969)

These films are either experimental films or short documentaries commissioned by the British Postal system. The documentaries are fascinating for their detail, occasionally enhanced by animation or slow motion photography. The experimental films, on the other hand, are all over the place in terms of style. McClaren's live action films--at least the ones on this disc--recall Dziga Vertov, while there is no single defining style to the animated films. Many of these are executed with lap-dissolving pastel drawings, occasionally placed on a multi-plane apparatus through which the camera zooms. Sometimes, the the drawing is done on the film itself, without benefit of camera. Sometimes, the intent is to illustrate the folk songs of Quebec. Sometimes the intent is a kind of moving painting. The range from representation to complete non-representation is wide in these films. McLaren's branch of filmmaking is to cinema as a whole as theoretical physics is to science. Leave it to the engineers to find practical applications. It's beautiful in and of itself in the abstract. For the record, I think my favorite among this first batch--the set has 7 discs of this stuff--is probably "Blinkety Blank," which stands out like a fireworks display on the fourth of July.

Also:

164. The Dirty Dozen (1967, directed by Robert Aldrich), because after several weeks of doing foreign films and experimental shorts, I wanted something without subtitles. In fact, I wanted something that blows shit up real good. Fortunately, this is chock full of fun characters, including Lee Marvin at his most Lee Marvin-ish, John Cassavetes earning the scratch for his own experiments, Charles Bronson as a bad-ass, and a whole bunch of other interesting faces. It sure is satisfying to see Telly Savalas get his at the end of this movie. Nasty character he plays here. It's odd to see a movie about instilling discipline remain so resolutely anti-authority, but that's Robert Aldrich for you.

165. I'll probably have more to say about Iron Man (2008, directed by Jon Favreau) when I write my review for my web site (I want to see it again before then, which is in itself a compliment). For the present, though, it should suffice to say that it's a terrific popcorn movie, and I mean that as a high compliment, because so many popcorn movies are crap even as junk food. I found myself watching with a certain amount of glee, a lot like the glee the 12 year old me derived from the movies that made me a film fan (and a comic book reader) in the first place. The casting is note perfect. I doubt the movie would work at all without Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead as Tony Stark, which bodes well for the future. The Iron Man of the comics has no Moriarty of his own, no Joker or Green Goblin. His most persistent enemy is himself and, of course, the best stories are those that explore the human heart in conflict with itself. Downey is a great fit for this kind of character arc. Oddly enough, this is the funniest movie I've seen in a while. In a lot of ways, this is a romantic comedy, though not the kind you see these days. It's more akin to the screwball comedies of the 40s than the chick flicks of today. It helps that it blows shit up real good, too, but it's entertaining even when it doesn't.

Merchants and Menace

118. The character of Shylock has come to dominate the discourse surrounding Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that it tends to obscure a couple of things about the play. First, the merchant of the title isn't Shylock. Second, the play is a comedy. Regardless, it's a weird, ungainly thing. Just as Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy with the structure of a comedy (with it's series of coincidences driving the action), The Merchant of Venice is a comedy with the structure of a tragedy. Were he but a little more sympathetic to Shylock--and given the attitude towards Jews in Elizabethan England, it's amazing that it's as sympathetic as it is--Shakespeare might have transformed the play into an outright tragedy, and none of the fiddling with a cast of largely odious characters. Michael Radford's movie version from 2004 reflects all of this. Al Pacino is an interesting choice for Shylock, and he acquits himself well enough in the role. Neither Jeremy Irons as Antonio (the title character) or Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio are well cast, but they serve well enough for being major characters shoved off the stage by the play's brighter lights. Lynn Collins is a sublime Portia, who acts as a bright, shiny balance to Shylock, especially in the courtroom scene (She's really a Texan? No way!). The "quality of mercy" speech is just as ineffectual as always (Shylock: "screw that, I want my pound of flesh"), but it sounds delightful here. Radford, for his part and like many an interpreter before him, tends to forget that the play is a comedy for long stretches, and punctuates this with a borrowing from The Searchers near the end of the movie. The Bard has fared much worse with far easier plays, so we'll call it good, I guess.

119. Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini (1999) is a fairly diagrammatic movie for all its cinematic freak out. A variant on the doppelganger theme, it's constructed out of flashbacks in a fairly conventional manner. What it does indicate, however, is that the influence of Seijun Suzuki on the Japanese horror films of the last decade is deeper and stronger than I had assumed. This movie seems like a lost fourth installment of Suzuki's Taisho trilogy, though it's not nearly as elliptical.

From The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, volume 5, disc one, "Bugs and Daffy":

120. "14-Carrot Rabbit" (1952, directed by Friz Freling)
121. "Ali Baba Bunny" (1957, directed by Chuck Jones)
122. "Buccaneer Bunny" (1948, directed by Friz Freling)
123. "Bugs's Bonnets" (1956, directed by Chuck Jones)
124. "A Star is Bored (1956, directed by Friz Freling)
125. "A Pest in the House" (1947, directed by Chuck Jones)
126. "Transylvania 6-5000" (1963, directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble)
127. "Oily Hare" (1952, directed by Robert McKimson)
128. "Stupor Duck" (1956, directed by Robert McKimson)
129. "The Stupor Salesman" (1948, directed by Arthur Davis)
130. "The Abominable Snow Rabbit" (1961, directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble)
131. "The Super Snooper" (1952, directed by Robert McKimson)
132. "The Up-Standing Sitter" (1948, directed by Robert McKimson)
133. "Hollywood Daffy" (1946, directed by Friz Freling(???))
134. "You Were Never Duckier" (1948, directed by Chuck Jones)

I don't really have a lot to say about this lot except that this disc seems to be less heavily weighted towards Chuck Jones than previous Bugs discs. Jones gets six cartoons to four each from Freling and McKimson, plus one from Arthur Davis. There's still a slant, but it's not as pronounced as in the past. A couple of the late Jones cartoons show a transformed animation style that barely resembles the cartoons Jones et al. were making a mere ten years earlier. A couple of these are pretty quotable ("Hasan Chop!"), but none are in the first rank of Bugs or Daffy cartoons. "Hollywood Daffy" doesn't have a director listed on either the print or the IMDB, but I'm pretty sure it's a Freling.

A Whole Lotta Tunes

84. The Ruins (2008, directed by Carter Smith) is destined to be one of those minor classics that litter the horror genre. It's not ambitious. It doesn't want to overreach its modest premise, nor does it pretend to deep philosophical underpinnings, and its lack of ambition will keep it out of the bright circle of horror's best movies. But for what it DOES want to do, it excels. This is a brutal little movie that distills horror down to a simple survival narrative. It doesn't pull its punches at all, either. The story finds a group of vacationing college kids trapped on an uncharted Mayan pyramid by hostile natives. Are they sacrifices? Is there some more sinister purpose? It all clocks in at about an hour and a half, which is exactly as long as B-Movies oughta run. While there is gore aplenty for those that want it, the most disturbing things in the movie to my mind are the flowers. This movie has the scariest inflorescent landscape this side of Oz.

-------------

Regarding my year-long project, I've been wavering on how to treat short films. I just got the fourth and fifth Looney Tunes boxes and working my way through them has seriously curtailed my time for features. And I have the Norman McLaren box waiting in the wings, too. For the time being, I think I'll stick to my guns and count shorts, given the amount of time I'm sinking into them. For the curious, I watched the Bugs Bunny sides of both boxes, the fairy tales and Bob Clampett sides of Box #5, and the Cats side of Box #4. The Cats disc was an unexpected treat. The fourth box was one I've been leery of from the start, actually, because it devotes an entire disc to Speedy Gonzalez. I don't much like Speedy, so the gilding was off that lily. Silly me: the other three sides are well worth the price.

Still heavy on the Chuck Jones, but it's nice to see discs devoted to Frank Tashlin and Bob Clampett, and there are more Robert McKimson shorts in these last two boxes than in the past. That's a good thing.

From The Golden Collection, Volume 4, disc one "Bugs Bunny Favorites:"

85. Roman Legion-Hare (1955, d. Friz Freling)
86. The Grey Hounded Hare (1949, d. Robert McKimson)
87. Rabbit Hood (1949, d. Chuck Jones)

It's interesting to compare the animation styles of these three shorts. Freling was always about comic timing rather than animation; his shorts (this one included) always seem cinematically flat, if you know what I mean, though his background artists (particularly Hawley Pratt) occasionally seem like they're out UPA-ing UPA on a larger budget. Jones tends to prefer static shots, too, but he uses them like snapshots of extreme emotions, the dramatic pause if you will. Jones was still wedded to the more traditional animation style of the forties, here, but he's pretty bold in violating that with an insert from The Adventures of Robin Hood at the end of this one. An mid-period example of Jones creating a self-referencing meta-cartoon. McKimson prefered a more "animated" style, in which things were in motion. He inherits the reality stretching tendencies of Avery and Clampett (for whom he animated most of their Warners output). I've always thought that if McKimson had wedded the intellect of Jones with his own aesthetic, he might have been the greatest of the Warners. In fact, I think McKimson's cartoons are the most consistently funny of the Looney Tunes, even if they aren't consistently great. I really like McKimson, and always have, because his delineation of the major characters fixes their overall "look" in my mind more than any of the other Warner directors.

88. Operation: Rabbit (1952, d. Chuck Jones)

Probably the most quoted Looney Tune cartoon. "Wile E. Coyote. SUPER-genius." Heh.

89. Knight-Mare Hare (1955, d. Chuck Jones)

One of the more minor Jones 'toons. Bugs really needs a better foil in this one.

90. Southern Fried Rabbit (1953, d. Friz Freling)
91. Mississippi Hare (1949, d. Chuck Jones)

The opening segment of "Mississippi Hare" is sheer poetry (where Bugs has his cottontail "picked" and he winds up in a bale of cotton on a riverboat in the Old South. Southern Fried Rabbit is another face-off with Yosemite Sam, this time as an unreconstructed Confederate soldier; it has a magnificent punch line. Unfortunately, when Warners disclaims about racist stereotypes on these discs, they might as well talking about these two cartoons. They're pretty obnoxious. Still and all, they're also pretty funny.

92. Hurdy-Gurdy Hare (1950, d. Robert McKimson)

Another McKimson gem. The design and animation of the monkey and the ape in this are terrific.

93. Forward March Hare (1953, d. Chuck Jones)

Jones also specialized in putting Bugs in outlandish situations (even more so than the other directors). Here, he gets drafted by the army.

94. Barbary Coast Bunny (1956, d. Chuck Jones)
95. To Hare Is Human (1956, d. Chuck Jones)

Mid-Period Jones, the first is average. The second re-teams Bugs with Wile E. Coyote, still convinced of his genius, to good effect.

96. 8 Ball Bunny (1950, d. Chuck Jones)

Coming after the cartoons from just six years later, this one is a stark example of what Jones left behind when he began stylizing his cartoons into abstraction. Here, Bugs escorts a lost penguin home. Humphrey Bogart makes a cameo.

97. Knighty Knight Bugs (1958, d. Friz Freling)

Freling was stylizing his cartoons towards abstraction, too, but still managed to make that abstraction look like a version of reality. Jones was an expressionist. Freling was a pragmatist.

98. Rabbit Romeo (1957, d. Robert McKimson)

McKimson seems to have held onto the classic designs of the Looney Tunes characters the longest, but you begin to see the influence of UPA even in his cartoons. You get the feeling with McKimson, though, that he uses that influence by choice rather than practical necessity. June Foray does great work in this one, by the way, doing a vocal prototype for Natasha Fatale. I'm glad that the Golden Collection discs have given...ahem...voice to the other voices that contributed to the Warner cartoons besides Mel Blanc.

99. Black Tight Killers (1966, directed by Yasuhara Hasebe) shows the deepening influence of Seijun Suzuki on Japanese pop cinema, but without Suzuki's talent or lunatic abandon. Girl-gang ninjas take on the criminal element to prevent them from retrieving a fortune in ill-gotten war profits. An amiable photojournalist gets caught in the middle. I like the ninja bubble gum. I like the 45 records used as throwing stars, but, Jesus, director Hasebe hasn't gotten the memo that Japanese film is supposed to aestheticize even its trash. Eh. Enjoyable, but no more than that.

100. All About Eve (1950, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz) wouldn't take much tweaking to turn it into a horror movie. Give the pathologically duplicitous Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) a homicidal streak and you have a classic horror movie set-up. Sadly, there's no body count and this is still one of the talkiest "great" movies out there. George Sanders is great, though. As always.

101. La Ceremonie (1995, directed by Claude Chabrol) is another of the director's Hitchcockian exercises. In this film, he adds a strain of class warfare as Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert turn on their bourgeoisie masters. The downside of this is that Chabrol seems to like his bourgeois straw family to the point where the thing turns into a bit of a muddle. I still find Chabrol to be cold fish. He takes the worldview of Hitchcock, but not the wit.

Catching up with the Looney Tunes Golden Collection. From volume four, disc four, "Kitty Korner," on which the Warners have put a bunch of cartoons involving cats. Most of them are stand-alones or feature characters who were only in a handful of cartoons. The line-up:

102. The Night Watchman (1938, directed by Chuck Jones), in which a young kitten fills in for his dad as a mouse catcher. Jones's first film as director(!) finds him emphasizing "cute." Jones would continue in this vein for several years. Historically important, I guess, but not very good compared to the contemporary films made by Clampett and Avery.

103. Conrad the Sailor (1942, directed by Chuck Jones). A dramatic difference, and recognizable as Jones's work. Seems a bit like a Goofy cartoon--certainly the voice of the title character sounds it--if Goofy had ever encountered an early iteration of Daffy Duck.

104. The Sour Puss (1940, directed by Robert Clampett), in which Porky and his cat go fishing and encounter a looney flying fish. In black and white, but closer to the Warners style of ten years later than to, say, Jones's early films. Not Clampett's finest hour; the wackiness seems a bit forced.

105. The Aristo-Cat (1943, directed by Chuck Jones). It's amazing how fast Jones became an expressionist. Though dramatically different in tone and content, this exercise in wild backgrounds is positively Caligarian. A pampered cat is left to fend for himself when his butler walks off. Two mice take advantage. Funny, but it's the visuals that make it.

106. Dough-Ray Me-Ow (1948, directed by Arthur Davis), in which conniving parrot Louie plots to do in "best pal" Heathcliff. Heathcliff takes the cake as the dimmest bulb ever to appear in a Looney Tune. "Breathe, stupid! Ya forgot to breathe!" For sheer comedy, this is one of the best.

107. Pizzicato Pussycat (1955, directed by Friz Freling) is another late cartoon to show the influence of UPA. Here we find a piano playing mouse being exploited by a cat for fame. It's interesting how abstract the backgrounds in this are, but they seem to fit the theme. They remind me of the album covers of certain jazz records from the period (think Brubeck).

108. Kiss Me Cat (1953, directed by Chuck Jones) A variant of the bulldog/cute kitten theme that Jones explored in the 1950s, in which the kitten needs to catch mice to keep his home and the bulldog tries to help. Some arresting shot compositions in this one.

109. Cat Feud (1958, directed by Chuck Jones). Another variant of the bulldog/cute kitten combo, this time on a construction site (yet another Looney Tunes descendant of Harold Lloyd). The character models in this one are drifting away from the classic Warner model sheets towards the kinds of model sheets Jones used for his television work in the 60s and 70s.

110. The Unexpected Pest (1956, directed by Robert McKimson), in which Sylvester has been too successful in catching mice, and has to find a ringer to help him keep his home. McKimson is in fine form, but the material doesn't overreach. Funny.

111. Go Fly a Kit (1957, directed by Chuck Jones). This is the one about the flying cat, who uses his tail as a propeller. Another one more in line with later Jones than with classic Warners.

112. Kiddin' the Kitten (1952, directed by Robert McKimson), in which McKimson channels W. C. Fields. Dodsworth the cat goes to absurd lengths to avoid doing actual work to keep his home free of mice. To this end, he swindles a kitten. Much to his chagrin.

113. A Peck O' Trouble (1953, directed by Robert McKimson). Dodsworth again, this time trying to get a woodpecker for breakfast without expending an effort. Fun.

114. Mouse and Garden (1960, directed by Friz Freling). Sylvester and his rival, Sam, duel over a mouse in a boathouse. Mostly flat. Freling seemed to be making dry runs for television cartooning at this time.

115. Porky's Poor Fish (1940, directed by Robert Clampett). Another reality-stretching Clampett toon. In black and white. Porky manages a fish store and the inhabitants must fend off a cat when Porky goes to lunch. Heavy on the "tune" part of Looney Tunes.

116. Swallow the Leader (1949, directed by Robert McKimson). When the swallows return to Capistrano, one cat tries to take advantage. This one seems like a lot of slapstick just for the sake of it. Characterization is at a minimum, but the gags are rapid fire. Funny and brutal. Or brutally funny.

I'll get back to Looney Tunes next week. That's not all folks...

117. Finally, I sat through Star Wars (1977, directed by George Lucas) for the first time in years. Man, that hasn't aged well. And I'm talking the original Han-shoots-first version. Only Peter Cushing seems to be in his element, but he made far more ridiculous movies than this one. The cinematography in the desert sequences is pretty good, too, come to think of it. And the "used future" production design. It's easy to see why Carrie Fisher thought she was making a turkey. The dialogue is excremental.

Quick and Dirty

I don't have much time this week, so some quick hits:

77. Ong-Bak (2003, directed by Prachya Pinkaew), in which Tony Jaa must retrieve the head of the local goddess from bad guys in the big city. Pretty much a lame plot, and not particularly adventurous as cinema, and none of that matters, because it's packed from the first sequence onward with more "OMFG did I just see that?" moments than any film I from the last ten years that I can name. Those people are amazing. And crazy as hell.

78. The silent comedians used to do crazy stunts, too, and Harold Lloyd's "Never Weaken" (1921, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer) plays like a first draft for his later thrill comedies. This is only a couple of reels, but the finale on an unfinished skyscraper packs in the jaw-dropping moments.

79. This sort of thing is perfected in Lloyd's Girl Shy (1924, directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor), in which the final third of the movie is a chase featuring just about every kind of land transportation known to man. For sheer thrills, this is hard to beat. In addition, the movie has a romantic sweetness to it, even when Lloyd's character is being a twit. Lloyd's face was the most expressive of the three kings of silent comedy, a talent put to amazingly good use here.

80. I've tried and I've tried, but I just can't warm up to John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). I still think it talks too damned much and indulges too much in didacticism. Cinematically, I guess it's notable for the way the faces fill the screen in its occasional close-ups, but the heist unfolds with surprisingly little suspense, and the aftermath, in which the crooks go to their various dooms, seems an anti-climax.

81. Ching Sui Tung's A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) seems to be fading into obscurity (it's not currently in print in North America), which is a shame. It's the kind of "inventing cinema on the fly" lunacy that helped Hong Kong action movies re-write the rules of action cinema. Its closest analogue in western cinema is Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, and it blows that comparison out of the water with a delirious romanticism and an unflagging willingness to put its ideas on the screen and damn the consequences. Favorite sequence: our heroes storm the afterlife to save the soul of ghost girl Joey Wang and are attacked by a swarm of flying severed heads that bite like piranhas.

82. I've written about Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972, directed by Chor Yuen) elsewhere, so I'll note in passing that it shares a lot of the characteristic of distaff Asian revenge movies familiar to fans of Lady Snowblood or Female Convict Scorpion, but the gender politics on hand, and the final fate of our lesbian antagonists, sets it apart. And its eroticism. That, too.

83. Watching Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) yet again, I was struck by how the film's most indelible images are divorced from dialogue. I'm thinking specifically of Harry Lime's face illuminated by a stray light, of his fingers clutching through the sewer grate, and Alida Valli walking past Joseph Cotten in utter indifference in the film's last shot. That last shot is one of the best long takes in cinema, and in film known for its expressionist design, it's amazingly subdued. I still hate the zither, though, and that may never change.

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.