So Tuesday I stayed in and watched the second disc in Arrow's Chang Cheh box - The Five Venoms & Crippled Avengers - that I'd started was back on the 2nd, since there was travel and stuff in between. They're both kind of classics, but for different reasons, with one sort of edging away from the Shaw Brothers formula and the other stretching it into weird new places.
Then on Wednesday night I headed down the Green Line for Better Man, since it seems to have kind of bombed in the USA (I don't regularly read box office stories, but I read "thing I've been seeing trailers for more or less constantly having showtimes cut like crazy in its second week" pretty well) and I was curious. It's fine, although I don't know that it's as much of a new twist on the music bio as it wanted to be.
Thursday night, back in the living room again, this time for another Film Rolls pairing - Yuen Wo-Ping directing Jackie Chan in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow & Drunken Master - which probably shouldn't have been on the shelf, since I'd already seen both films on the disc, albeit 12 years ago in different circumstances. Still, it's a thing that can be fun about the Film Rolls projects, in that I wouldn't necessarily have thought to juxtapose them with Tuesday's movies, but there's parallels in how the Hong Kong film business worked in 1978, with Chang Chen and the old guard at Shaw Brothers and these up-and-comers trying different things.
Friday night, I had plans for a nifty double feature - Last Year at Marienbad at the Harvard Film Archive and then down the Red Line to another French film at the Seaport Alamo - and figured 45 minutes or so between would be tight, but doable. Then, as the film was introduced, the programmer mentioned a special treat: "Souvenirs d’une année à Marienbad", a sort of video diary of the production, which she described as a featurette, would play afterward. "Featurette" rather than "short " meant I wasn't getting out in time unless they brought the lights up and gave folks a chance to flee in between, and while some folks sitting on the edges did that, my fondness for sitting in the center of a row and not wanting to stumble over people in the dark meant I was stuck.
Saturday was for staying in and hitting the comics shop and other errands, and then I did a relative rarity by coming home and not using some randomizer to pick a movie but just grabbing the 4K disc of Hellboy: The Crooked Man that Amazon had recently delivered. From the UK, as it seems to have topped out at Blu-ray here. Crazy that Amazon sometimes offers "free international delivery", although I kind of wonder if there's just a number of things they know Americans will order that they keep in stock on this side of the ocean.
Then, on Sunday, I finally got down to the Seaport for Night Call, which turned out to be a pretty great Franco-Belgian thriller. I might have been two of the five people who bought tickets for it all weekend - does reserving a seat with your season pass count as buying a ticket? - because it only had these two shows, and I don't know if Alamo promoted it at all. I've been to a number of screenings like that at that location, and I wonder if it's the Seaport or Boston in general that doesn't support them. I think it's the location, because the three-hour Count of Monte Cristo hung around for a couple weeks and played in Arlington, so it's not like we won't go for French-language action, but the Seaport seems to favor brand-names as opposed to attracting adventurous moviegoers. Which is kind of a bummer, at least for me.
As always, follow my Letterboxd account for first drafts written on the subway, if that sort of thing appeals to you!
Better Man
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
The unavoidable question about Better Man is whether its central irony is deliberate, accidental, or inevitable: For the whole film, you can see the filmmakers desperately trying to find a new way to tell its story of a self-doubting, substance-abusing musician who somehow pulls himself out of the spiral, but it starts and ends with Sinatra and hits all the inevitable stops along the way. We've seen this all before, and Robbie Williams is just the latest iteration, but his generation wants and needs for it to be their story, specifically, as well, and they've marinated in enough irony and spoofs that they maybe can't just settle for telling the story straight.
(And by "his", I mean mine, although as an American who isn't a big music guy, Take That and Williams were more things I was aware of than listened to - when someone mentioned the album title "The Ego Has Landed", I remembered hearing the name, but that was it.)
So Williams is portrayed on screen by a CGI chimpanzee, voiced by Williams but with one Jonno Davies apparently doing the on-set motion capture, and nobody really comments upon it but the idea behind it is alluded to toward the end. We meet his parents - mother Janet (Kate Mulvany) is practical, while father Peter (Steve Pemberton) left to pursue his own showbiz dreams when Robert was young, and his grandmother (Alison Steadman) dotes upon him - his best mate Nate (Frazer Hadfield), and Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), who is putting together a boy band and sees something in this 15-year-old's cockiness. Later he meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), a singer in girl group All Saints who is perhaps a bit too much like him to be a really good couple.
The details are fun for a while. Williams is an entertainingly snarky narrator with an arch recognition about what a jackass he was but not a huge reservoir of guilt, and his voiceover has some of the film's best jokes and begins to feel hollow at just the right time. I have no idea how exaggerated the Take That stuff is, but it's often hilariously homoerotic, cynical, and happy to wink at its own absurdity. The conceit of Williams appearing on screen as a chimpanzee is fun and works to symbolize a range of linked ideas. That the rendering isn't always perfect kind of works; it doesn't hurt to be reminded of the artifice in the world of pop music. There are striking scenes.
But, man, we've seen musicians do cocaine and be bastards to their loved ones before, and no amount of having a chimpanzee doing it makes all that feel less than rote. Once the movie gets into its second half, it runs hard into how familiar all this is and how life doesn't always fit a film's narrative structure, and by the end a lot of Williams's narration and the things meant to be emotional climax depict him learning lessons the film isn't trying to teach us - why are we getting a tearful reunion with his father, for instance, beyond some sort of feeling that such things are generally good, rather than it being something Williams needed to do?
The film is what it's got to be for Williams to be alive and able to narrate his life story with some detachment, and the filmmakers never find a way to make it more than that, no matter how much visual invention or smart-aleck narration they throw in.
L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2025 at the Harvard Film Archive (The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig, 35mm)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
I think it's the first time I've made it through without conking out, and it was kind of a weird experience, as I was agitated about something later in the evening, and then missed that thing because the Archive followed this movie up with a video production diary that kind of says too much by saying that there's not much to say.
Which is a bummer, because while Last Year can often be over-mannered, especially toward the start, it feels like it evolves into a fascinating ghost story where the fun is noting that ghost stories can have it both ways - is Delphine Seyrig's character a ghost, detached from her own life but kept from moving on by Giorgio Albertazzi's obsession? Or is it the other way around, with the latter desperate to be remembered but destined to become a half-recalled part of this fancy hotel's lore? Or did they both meet a tragic end, with the irony being that they're frozen as they were, never truly together?
None of these theories really line up with what we see, but that's because the aim here is mood above all, with Sacha Vierny's black-and-white cinematography giving the hotel a stark look without flattening the ornateness of the building and its grounds. Even if you don't look at it as a ghost story, perhaps instead taking it at face value as a man trying to woo a woman who claims she doesn't remember their previous meeting, the story is an intriguing puzzle. Seyrig's beauty may be telling the truth; or she may believe she is telling the truth because she repressed the previous years events. Or she may be lying, because the polite lie is the only weapon a woman has in this regimented castle of privilege, with a whole army of people dedicated to enforcing its norms.
It's gorgeous, and the main trio do a nice job of giving their characters personality even if they are deliberately lacking in history. There's no way of knowing whether the cast has created backstory for their characters, or if those stories would agree, but they feel like they have many possible stories that the environment won't allow to be told, rather than like the filmmakers are carefully choosing what they show to preserve their ambiguity.
I admittedly don't generally like this sort of carefully-constructed ambiguity, truth be told, but I suspect Last Year at Marienbad is the exception that tests the rule, constructed so well that it makes one give other movies like it a chance.
"Souvenirs d’une année à Marienbad"
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2025 at the Harvard Film Archive (The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig, DCP)
Buy the 4K disc at Amazon
Maybe an interesting special feature to put on a Last Year at Marienbad, though it is worth noting that the one on Kino's Blu-ray is "Memories" rather than "Souvenirs", though it may be the same thing, and there's another listing on IMDB for "My Year at Marienbad with Volker Schlöndorff" which may be this, that, or some third thing. It wouldn't surprise me, because "Souvenirs" is sort of a pure expression of an idea - the 8mm home movies that several people on set shot, notably actress Françoise Spira, presented in their entirety, with second assistant director Volker Schlöndorff's commentary, He doesn't mention it until halfway in, suggesting that this might be more interesting edited or intercut with the feature, and often falls silent.
I imagine watching this footage in a room with Schlöndorff might be interesting, especially if one can ask questions or go off on tangents, but without prompting we're just getting comments about how cold it was, how grateful Schlöndorff was for the opportunity director Alain Resnais gave him, and how wonderful and lovely star Delphine Syrig was in a way that occasionally nudges into creepiness. Sometimes there's an interesting look at how some problems were solved or shots were created (plywood painted to look like gravel laid on a gravel path, staging to elevate actors so that the decorations near the high ceilings would be in a widescreen shot), but the reel ends before he can talk in any detail.
I might, admittedly, have enjoyed "Souvenirs" more at another time or context, but aside from really wanting it to be less than 45 minutes (which feels like a lot of raw footage), it's also demystifying in a deflating way, spending a lot of time talking about how the performers were giving performances without character or backstory, and while that may be technically true given the careful obedience to a script that eschewed them, that's not exactly the experience of watching it - Resnais, Albertazzi, and Seyrig created such things whether they intended to or not, and talk of a deliberate emptiness is the last thing I wanted to hear before having a chance to sit down, roll over what I had found there and what it meant to me. And maybe there's never a good time to hear that, but right after seeing it for the first time, at least fully, is maybe the worst.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K British import Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the British 4K disc at Amazon
There's a sort of gambler's logic to the 2019 Hellboy movie that I understood: Mike Mignola weighed a third collaboration with Guillermo del Toro that probably would have been a modest success but also been a finale against a relaunch that could have spawned a BPRD Cinematic Universe, and where he would have had more creative control. He bet wrong, but I get it. This one, I just wonder if the production company decided they had paid too much for the rights to not use them again, but knew they'd have to go very cheap to make a profit likely.
It opens in 1959, with Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and BPRD agents Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) and Dennis Gates (Jonathan Yunger) on a train running through Appalachia, transporting a mystical spider creature. It escapes, with Hellboy and Song jumping from the train to follow it, but sidetracked by strange local goings-on, with local veteran Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) returning home to reunite with first love Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), whose neighbors call her a witch - though she's not the witch who gave Tom a look at the dark side (Leah McNamara) and sent him fleeing to the army.
The result brings to mind what I thought of Madame Web a year ago: This movie feels like something that would have been adequate as a made-for-TV or direct-to-video production a generation ago, but instead came out in 2024 with the intention of being booked in theaters. There were moments when I convinced myself that this was kind of the filmmakers' intent - a sort of pastiche of the movie that would have been made of Hellboy during the comic's early years, without a filmmaker as ambitious as del Toro taking interest - and I kind of dig the idea, if not so much the execution. There's charm to the lack of fussiness to the Hellboy makeup and costume, for instance, but not to the bland "the field is different from the library, isn't it?" dialogue. Director Brian Taylor and his co-writers pace it like an 80s/90s B-movie, a combination of padding and frenzy that's a good mix even if neither is as good as it can be. It's full of actors doing decent work with what they're given, but what they're given is sketchy as heck, thin characters we're expected to find innately interesting for being adjacent to the supernatural and the world we know from better Hellboy comics & films.
It's kind of interesting that this is touted as the adaptation most closely supervised by Mignola (he, frequent comic collaborator Christopher Golden, and director Brian Taylor write the screenplay), but like the previous Hellboy films, it takes on the style of its director, jittery and prone to digression but actually kind of plain in terms of lighting and atmosphere once the camera stops moving. It's also notable that, like David Harbour before him, Jack Kesy isn't quite imitating what Ron Perlman did in the first couple of films but close enough to it that deviations seem odd or wrong. Maybe there's just one way to play the character that's true to the comics.
There are some good bits to The Crooked Man, enough that I wonder what Taylor could do if Millennium wasn't trying to gross $101 on a $100 budget; his scrappy messiness seems to fit this world better than Neil Marshall's slick sadism. But, ultimately, it's hard to watch without thinking of the original work and better adaptations, and how it's come to this, than the actual folk horror tale on screen.
La nuit se traîne (Night Call)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 January 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the DVD at Amazon
This is a pro-frantic-race-through-European-city-thrillers blog, and Night Call is particularly good as those go, a tight little setup that lays out everything it needs early, does not stretch to make absolutely every single little detail critical, and tightens its screws with firm assurance. Just 90 minutes with no wasted time.
It starts with locksmith Mady Bala (Jonathan Feltre) breaking into a posh apartment before retreating to his van to study to return to college while waiting for the next call. It comes from Claire (Natacha Krief), who is just cute enough to make him waver on the rules of always getting the payment and looking at a photo ID first; he waits in the apartment while she runs downstairs to hit the ATM, only to have her call to say she's not returning, and to run. He's too late, though, and soon finds himself face-to-face with gangster Yannick (Romain Duris), who needs the money that Claire snuck out of that apartment under Mady's nose by morning, and sends Remy (Thomas Mustn) and Theo (Jonas Bloquet) to help him find this mystery girl
Writer/director Michel Blanchart does a lot well in his first feature, and I especially like how he finds a nice tug-of-war between pragmatism and amorality; part of the reason the film works is that the audience can see itself in Mady's shoes even when they think they'd make noble choices, and Jonathan Feltre is good at making Mady feel clever enough to improvise but not really villain-brained, so we're cutting him slack rather than critiquing his performance. The rest of the pieces moving around the board are good, too, feeling like guys whose believable choices got them there but not so gray that the audience gets detached.
The presentation is nifty as well. The mood is set with serial shots of Brussels at night that show reddish bands of activity threading a dark, sleeping city, with each little piece built to work as its own storytelling setting, the camera moving through in ways that feel unconstrained but highlighting how boxed in Mady is. The climactic chase maybe feels a little game-ish in the long shots but also has a sense of how rash and dangerous it is in a city like this.
Good stuff.
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