Film Rolls, Round 24: Piraha and … oh, never mind

I'm in a sort of ashamed awe at this post, which was nearly a year in the making - the first of the 9 movies intended to be included came off the shelf on 24 February 2023, the last on 19 November 2023, and while there's reasons, I'm certainly going to find ways to tighten this up on the next pass through.

But, it's the final round of the game! How does it play out?

Well, it starts with Mookie rolling a 9, which gets him to Piranha in 4K. As nutty as the choices for what gets put on 4K and what is let to languish on VHS/DVD can be, Joe Dante's first feature that caused people to sit up and take notice certainly seems like one that demands some attention.

Things got a little busy after that - March is Boston Underground Film Festival time, for instance - so it was April before get got back to this, excited about being close to the end. Bruce rolled a 12, and I honestly can't remember whether that got him to the first in the line of Kino Lorber's "Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema" box sets exactly, or if I just decided that the appropriate amount or over stopped you there. At any rate, it's a five-film box, and it seemed unfair to skew the results at the end, so, when I picked this back up in November (hey, there's Fantasia and other stuff in there!)...

Holy cats, Mookie rolled a six and ended up exactly where he needed to be! What are the odds? Okay, obviously 5%, but this picture was definitely staged.

It's been a whole year since then, during which I figured on re-watching the eight films noirs in order to write decent reviews but it just never worked out that way, so I'm going to treat those movies as bonuses and wrap this up. So I figured on not starting Season Two until I got this wrapped up, which means my shelf has been bloating all year, and isn't the idea to use this as a way to watch movies without hemming and hawing so much?

So, yeah, here's a quick wrap-up and a clean slate, mostly posted because I've wanted to take the photo at the bottom for at least a couple years.

Piranha '78

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Seen 7 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Available for stream/digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; 4K Blu-ray on Amazon

There's a moment or two during Piranha when some random old B-movie appears on a TV screen, and 45 years later, you can kind of laugh, saying it's just Joe Dante being Joe Dante, but I found myself kind of wondering if someone seeing it 45 years ago would wonder why Dante was reminding us that there were monster movies out there that were, if not necessarily better, at least more imaginative. I'm not sure what the term folks at the time would use the way we sort of dismissively say "content" in 2024, but that's kind of what Piranha is - producer Roger Corman cranking out a new movie to fill spaces on drive-in and grindhouse screens, or maybe play some late nights where a regular theater had a hole, but not really anything meant to last. It's got a fancy 4K disc not because it's particularly good or noteworthy, but because director Joe Dante and writer John Sayles went on to bigger and better things.

Which, it should be made clear, does not make Piranha bad; it does what it says on the box and does it in pretty capable fashion. Sayles gives Dante a script that includes everything a movie like this needs with the occasional fun variation or bit of dialog; Dante-the-director gets Dante-the-editor good material to cut together, and the cast could often maybe dial it down a bit - you can see a fun dynamic in Heather Menzies's headstrong skip-tracer and Bradford Dillman's grumpy local guide, except that they're too close to shouting when they should maybe be closer to bantering - but more often than not, it's the right people in the right roles and you can see them existing outside the movie. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's never great but solidly competent throughout - it's often very rought! - but Dante generally seems to get enough that's decent to put together.

The thing is, it's a Corman-produced movie from after he'd peaked, and there are times even a B-movie-lover like Dante seems frustrated with the spots he's got to hit, making sure that Menzies' Maggie is all "really?" about the nature of the distraction Dillman's Grogan suggests before flashing her [body double's] breasts, and there's an obvious need to hang a lantern on how cheap the fancy resort looks. There's a Phil Tippet stop-motion creature that they ran out of money for, but it's in the film because it cost money even if it doesn't go anywhere. Corman's clearly chasing a trend on a tight budget, rather than doing something that anybody involved finds particularly interesting or inspired by. Unlike a lot of those movies, it lucked into having just enough up-and-coming talent to remain watchable.


Okay! That makes the finale score before the Film Noir Box sets

Mookie: 81 ¼ stars
Bruce: 79 ¼ stars

Bruce was ahead until Mookie got that last film, but he would have had five movies compared to Mookie's three, so let's say it's too close to call!

Of course, if you do feel like calling it, here's how the pair stood up… literally!

Okay, that was fun! I'm going to try it again starting next week (next year!), once again trying to find a good balance between "it is a fun thing to do with a movie blog" and "you're not getting paid and have other hobbies, stop making everything a massive writing project!"" Which, if I specifically enumerated resolutions, would absolutely be my New Year's Resolution.

The Time Masters

Not much to say about the moviegoing experience up here because I mostly want to have a review up during the week it's at the Brattle in a pretty great-looking restoration.


Les Maîtres du temps ([The] Time Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, 4K laser DCP)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and perhaps elsewhere

My eyes bugged a bit at the trailer for The Time Masters when it played before another film at the Brattle a week or two ago - cool animated French sci-fi, looks a bit more accessible than Fantastic Planet, and, man those designs look like they could come straight from a Jodorowsky & Moebius… oh, wait, it actually is Moebius! How in the heck is this restoration 40 years later somehow the first real US release? Well, it turns out that it's a lot of ideas and not a lot of story; not really a drag, but not all one might hope.

It opens in zippy enough fashion, with a spindly wheeled vehicle racing across an alien planet, driver Claude (voice of Sady Rebbot) making an interstellar plea to a friend; his wife has been killed by the planet Perdide's murderous hornets and they need to be evacuated. Crashing in an area presumed to be safe, the dying man gives his transceiver to his five-year-old son Piel (voice of Frédéric Legros), saying to hide in the woods and do whatever the voice that comes out says; Piel doesn't quite understand that it will be someone far away talking to him, and not the device itself. On the other end, Claude's adventurer friend Jaffar (voice of Jean Valmont) doesn't get the message right away; he's been hired to smuggle Prince Matton (voice of Yves-Marie Maurin) and Princess Belle (voice of Monique Thierry) and half the royal treasury to a new world after Matton was deposed, but immediately makes plans: He will have to consult with old friend Silbad (voice of Michel Elias), an expert on Perdide, and use the gravity of the Blue Comet to make his way there. Along the way, they pick up a couple of telepathic gnomes (voices of Patrick Baujin & Pierre Tourneur) as stowaways - they don't like the smell of Matton's thoughts - and try to keep a scared child safe as they don't know exactly what he is up to.

That opening is terrific, a fast-paced dash across a thoroughly alien landscape with enough great Moebius designs to make one's eyes pop anew every few seconds augmented by a cool, synthy score, and director René Laloux (co-writing with Moebius, who also does the art design) isn't exactly shy about trying to build the entire movie on this feeling: When things start to drag, get on a new spaceship, go to a new planet, or have Piel discover some new piece of Perdide life that can grab a viewer's attention, and hang around that until it's time to do this again. It's the same principle that Moebius often brought to his science-fictional bandes dessinées, and his style works exceptionally well here: He's a perfect blend of cartooning and grit under most circumstances, but given a space mercenary trying to rescue a frightened child, it's even better, especially as the innocent antics of the gnomes on Jaffar's ship and the ominous creatures surrounding Piel tie the whole universe together.

You maybe need a little more than that, though: After that exciting opening, there really isn't a lot for anybody to do; there are a few bursts of activity, but a lot of time spent observing and explaining as opposed to doing, and that has its limits, even with as much nifty stuff to observe as this movie offers. It's not necessarily a surprise that the actual Time Masters don't show up - or even get mentioned! - until almost the very end of the film, although there are a couple comments toward the end that make me wonder if I'd missed a reference looking at scenery rather than subtitles. Still, it's not uncommon for French sci-fi to drop the audience into a weird milieu and half-explain it later. Stranger, though, is that there are at least two or three major sequences that happen off-screen or at the other end of the communicator, which you shouldn't have to do in animation.

And maybe Laloux had intended to, but couldn't because of what a fraught production this could be: The French producers outsourced much of the actual animation to a Hungarian firm, and by all accounts the two groups did not get on well at all and collectively were not up to the challenges this movie faced; they maybe just couldn't animate a large, complex action scene given the resources available; even simple facial work and motion is often stiff. Backgrounds, design, and a few big moments are fantastic, at least; what could be done was executed with incredible love and skill.

Which is why, in a few months, I'll buy this on the fanciest disc its distributor makes available and pull it out when I'm in the mood for something mildly trippy and easy to follow; it's fantastic when it's on target and isn't going to frustrate at 78 minutes.

The French Blockbusters of Christophe Gans: The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Beauty and the Beast '14

I've probably shared these anecdotes on this blog before, but they fit:

Back in 2001, the Boston Film Festival was a thoroughly different beast than it is now - it had different ownership, commandeered multiple screens in the Loews Copley Place (now a Saks Fifth Avenue), running a lot of things that played TIFF a few days earlier, and for the most part, things would sit on a screen for roughly a day - two evening shows, three matinees the next day. You could see everything. Anyway, 9/11 happened right in the middle of the festival, so there was some disruption to the festival, as you might imagine. My first film of the day was Sam the Man, a comedy starring Fisher Stevens (who I was kind of surprised didn't have the accent from Short Circuit) directed by Gary Winick (I thinkI'd liked his The Tic Code). However, the prints were in the wrong place, so when me and another handful of people sat down for that movie, we instead were served up Brotherhood, and if I hadn't been planning to see that next, holy crap! They eventually seated us in the right theaters and restarted the movies, but yes, that made Sam the Man feel even less impressive.

I would spend the next four months or so before its January release. If you want to dig, you can probably find reviews at either Ain't It Cool (I filed dispatches from Boston Film Festival one year under the name "Paul Revere", as one did then) or Home Theater Forum, but, well, there's better uses for your time and mine than finding them.

Flash forward a dozen years, and I'm in Paris, using some vacation time that won't roll over just before Christmas, spending some evenings watching English-language movies that may or not get released in the United States, and one of the trailers I get is for a version of La Belle & La Bete directed by Gans, and my eyes go wide like saucers, because, unimpressed as I'd been with Silent Hill, this looks amazing even if I'm only sort of half-comprehending the French-language dialogue. I'm not sure quite how much the Disney live-action remake is rumored versus set at this point, or if I knew Gans was doing this, but I figured it had to be getting an American release, right? Folks know Gans, they know Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel, it looks amazing, etc., etc.

It doesn't, at least not in Boston - apparently there was a very limited release in late 2016, two and a half years after it played France, and then it hit video the next year, when the Disney remake arrived. I ordered a copy, naturally, but the same thing happened as with most discs I order - it wound up on a shelf, sticking out slightly to remind me I hadn't seen it, and remaining there because most nights I go see something in the theater or watch baseball or am trying to catch up on something else. This week, I figured to watch something from my "seen before, new discs" piles, and hit on Brotherhood, and somehow came up with the idea of watching Beauty and the Beast as a pairing. This, it turns out, is a pretty good idea, since all the scenes of Vincent Cassel hunting a beast in flashback tie it even more closely to Brotherhood.

And it's fun! Maybe not quite the movie it could have been, but it's an enjoyable family movie (although one with a French level of ambient sexiness), and kind of fascinating in how Gans and company are taking a fairly well-known fairy tale and seeming to do as much as they can to distinguish themselves from the Disney version without doing the "we've got a horror guy directing this, let's make it twisted!" thing. Considering how Disney would soon be doubling down on every decision they made in the early 1990, and how that owes a clear debt to the Jean Cocteau version, seeing this now has everything a bit more exciting and unexpected.

Back in 2017, I kicked around the idea of getting my nieces the Cocteau & Gans versions and saying "hey, every other relative is going to get them the Disney versions, this is what I'm for". Chickened out, though. They've kind of aged out of that now, although I'm still tempted.

Between 2013 and now, though, there have been no new films from Gans; if the Silent Hill sequel shows up next year as expected, it will be ten years between new movies, which really seems like a lot. I'm not plugged into what's going on in French film to know if maybe he's got a reputation as a bad guy. Sure, that doesn't always seem like it would be a particular problem in France. I also don't know what the exact box-office calculus is in France; I could sort of see a situation where Brotherhood and Beauty are very expensive movies, relative to the local norms, but not exactly hits. Meanwhile, Silent Hill wasn't a hit either - it did well enough to spawn a cheaper sequel - so he's not making a leap in the USA.

On top of that, it's extremely hard to get a movie made, especially if you've got the sort of ambitions Gans has. He's been attached to various things - something called The Adventurer with Mark Dacascos, a movie based on the Fatal Frame games - and it's worth noting that Silent Hill is the only movie where he's worked from someone else's screenplay. If he's not taking work-for-hire, it's probably not hard to spend years developing something only to see it not pan out, several times. He would have been a great get for Marvel when they were doing canny buy-low moves to hire really talented people who hadn't quite hit it big or hadn't had a hit in a while, but that's not really their MO anymore, and who knows if Gans would be up for it?

So, here's hoping that Return to Silent Hill is good and he gets a chance to do something big again - these are fun movies, and for all that Gans wouldn't be the only one-hit wonder of this sort in cinema, it still seems very strange that someone could make this sort of international splash and then only make two other movies over the next 20+ years without much in the way of overt controversy.


Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Brotherhood of the Wolf is a bit flabbier than the non-stop thrills I remember from first viewing, and not just because some scenes have been added for the "director's cut" on the 4K disc (those, oddly, all feel necessary): There's a fair amount of not getting anywhere in the first hour which, coupled with the authentic casual racism of the 18th-Century aristocracy, awkwardly countered, can make one wince. Did this really knock me flat when I first saw it, just because I'd never seen that sort of French genre film before (because anything in French hitting theaters in Worcester, MA or Portland, ME was art-house stuff)?

Yes, it did, and still kind of does, because the things that make it awesome and cringe-worthy are more or less the same things: Christophe Gans approaches this movie like he hit some sort of lottery in terms of being able to make it and goes all-in as if he knows he might never get a chance to do this sort of grand pulp adventure again: It's got horror, martial-arts, heaving bodices, conspiracies, and more, a slick presentation of cheerily disreputable pulp material that never winks at the camera like Gans wants to make sure the audience is in on a joke - he is earnestly enthusiastic, whether punctuating a conversation by exploding pumpkins with various weapons or cross-fading from Monica Bellucci's breasts to a snowy mountain range. It's a Hammer movie being made by someone in the Raimi/Woo mold, but who is also very much French, bringing a different flavor of cool cynicism and sexual energy to the story.

It can be a little much, especially for an American for whom the conflict with royal and papal power seems like a lot of noise in the background, like there are more factions and conspirators than the movie really needs to make the action explode out of simmering conflict. When it does, though, Gans and his cast throw themselves into it, especially once Samuel Le Bihan's Fronsac has the whole thing spread out before him and ready to rampage. The filmmakers hit a nice balance between using the Beast sparingly and revealing it, keeping the story somewhat mythic - though I do wonder just how much FX work has been reword for the director's cut, as the Beast seems much more digital than I remember.

It's fortunate that Gans did put it all in this movie, because he really hasn't had much chance to do something similar. This may no longer be the surprise it was when it came out, but it's still a darn entertaining monster movie.


La belle et la bête '14 (Beauty and the Beast)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Christophe Gans's take on Beauty and the Beast is very much the take on this classic story that one might expect from the maker of Brotherhood of the Wolf, generally more for better than worse. It's great-looking, exciting, and makes a conscious effort to do things differently than other versions of the fairy tale, whether that means returning to the source or envisioning something new; it's also got enough going on that the simple beauty of the story can occasionally get buried.

Take the beginning, where we learn that Belle (Léa Seydoux) is the youngest of six children, and that her father (André Dussollier) was a wealthy shipping magnate brought to ruin when his three ships sink on the same voyage - well, by "ruined", forced to move from the city to their country estate, which suits Belle fine. An attempt to revive his business has the father fleeing town after a run-in with Perducas (Eduardo Noriega), whom gambling-addicted oldest son Maxime (Nicolas Gob) owes a great deal of money, winding up at a mysterious castle which presents him with a chest of treasure, but when he takes a rose for Belle, he angers the estate's beastly resident (Vincent Cassel), who gives him a day to make his farewells before being killed, lest the beast kill the whole family. Belle chooses to return in his place, and could be the key to breaking the curse upon the manor and its master.

That's a lot of story for a tale that is at its heart so simple that almost anybody can articulate its events and themes Belle's family is so large that I'm not sure if one brother got either a name or signature personality trait, and there's a whole thing about Perducas's lover Astrid (Myriam Charleins) having some sort of mystic abilities that kind of gets batted around in the finale but seems like an big thing to ultimately have so little impact. There is also a lot of work put into delivering flashbacks to Belle about how the Prince became the Beast, and some of that effort would likely have been put into looking at how he and Belle draw closer together, maybe differentiating Belle from his first great love (Yvonne Catterfeld).

When Gans gets down to business and focuses on the title characters, it's terrific. Vincent Cassel is at his cocky, roguish best in the flashbacks, making his younger prince a font of passion and charisma but possessed of enough selfishness that it is no surprise that he will need to be taught a terrible lesson. It's a nifty balance of him deserving this but still being redeemable, and while one might feel Cassel is under too much makeup as the Beast, there's perhaps some logic to it: He has, by this point, more or less been consumed by the worst aspects of masculinity, and Cassel doesn't hold back on the Beast being a monster until Belle can see him as otherwise.

The best thing in the film, though, is Léa Seydoux as a Belle who is at no point a naïve ingenue: She knows full well how apt her name is and is going to make the Beast work for her affection. Seydoux's Belle is playful and kind, but also sure enough of herself that she can bristle at the idea of being a replacement for anybody, whether it be her mother or the princess, and without getting into too-modern language, she presents a sharp contrast in her body language and attitude between when she's given a sexy dress to wear so that the Beast can look at her during dinner and when she's chosen something beautiful herself.

That last dress is a rose that envelops her, maybe impractical but certainly a great visual considering how important the flowers have been throughout the film. If there are times Gans and his crew are perhaps visibly trying too hard to avoid the choices of other adaptations, particularly Disney's animated classic, he's still got the eye for a striking image that often elevated Brotherhood (as well as carrying over a disdain for hunters who kill gratuitously) and horror-movie instincts that let him make the castle and its grounds scarier than one might expect from a family film, though there are times when the magical isolation enhances the fairy-tale quality as well. There's plenty of visual invention on display, and he's able to make the inevitable gut-punch at the end of the flashbacks work even though everyone in the audience knows where it must be leading.

Inevitably, Gans's version of this tale exists in the shadow of two masterpieces (the Disney and Cocteau versions), and for all that the filmmaker is not timid, one does occasionally wonder if he occasionally worked a little too hard at doing something different and so didn't give the actual romance of the title characters as much attention as he could have - as with Brotherhood, he might have figured this was his one shot at a family blockbuster and poured everything into it. Even with that, it's an impressive production that manages to feel modern but not anachronistic, and an interesting contrast to other takes on the story.

Film Rolls, Round 15: (De Niro + De Palma) x 4 and House of Cards

Since there's (currently) a five-month lag between me doing this and me writing it up,.I've been very curious to see just how this evens things out.

Mookie with the 20! It's his second, and exceptionally fortuitous because it lands him on the box set Arrow put out a few years back of the early comedies Brian De Palma made with Robert De Niro, and a real chance to make up some ground, because that's three movies, even if they're probably not great, and a chance to pick something good to go with it. The idea is to try and keep thematic, so I figured I'd go for another De Palma, initially not realizing that De Niro was in The Untouchables, which was on the "recent arrivals, have seen" shelf in a spiffy new 4K edition. So that was the rest of December sorted, with Untouchables finishing the year.

(It's kind of odd that the pair's paths only crossed again that once after those early films, given that they both spent the 70s/80s/90s in the same adult-focused crime/drama space. Is it a case of Hollywood being bigger than one may think or some friction?)

The year then starts with Bruce rolling a 9, squeaking just landing on a box set of his own, and landing on House of Cards.

A potentially interesting selection - but probably not enough to keep distance ahead of Mookie. Let's see!

The Wedding Party

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Brian De Palma may have still been in film school, or just graduated, when he contributed his part of The Wedding Party, and I'm mildly curious as to which part is his. The silent-movie slapstick? The portion where the groom's buddies are trying to get him to sneak out for a bachelor party? Or the seemingly contradictory material where they're trying to get him back after getting cold feet and connecting with the bride's little sister. None of it seems particularly like De Palma, but then, neither of the two other writer/directors made enough that one can use their styles to rule them out.

Not that it particularly matters, of course; the final result is what we've got to look at and that's just as all over the place as one might expect. You can sort of see what the trio (De Palma, Wilford Leach, and Cynthia Munroe) are going for, with groom Charlie (Charles Pfluger) initially eager to get married and be part of this large family that he'd never had before the whole thing becomes overwhelming, with visits from three exes played by the same actor (Richard Kolmar) not exactly helping in that regard. The preacher who will perform the wedding (John Braswell), is concerned that the groomsmen (William Finley & Robert De Niro) don't get into any sort of hanky-panky down at the tavern.

The big problem, beyond the stuff that kind of goes hand-in-hand with super-indie production, is that the filmmakers never really sell the transition from Alistair & Cecil trying to help Charlie escape to them trying to get him to the church on time. The whole back end of the film kind of collapses as a result, because for all that the bits with Charlie and Phoebe in the back half is maybe the most interesting part of the film, the middle is too slapdash to feel like everything would invert but just entertaining enough that we can't just throw it away. We can see why Charlie would flee, but not necessarily why his friends would stop him.

Sixty years on, it's kind of amusing to see who made it big and who didn't - of the directors, De Palma had a nice career, Wilford Leach (the others' film school professor) appears to have spent much of his time in theater, and Cynthia Munroe seems to vanish from the film world, as does star Charles Pfluger, though he's not bad at all. It's hard not to keep one's eye on De Niro now; he gives a more level performance than William Finley (who would pop up in De Palma's films every once in a while). Jill Clayburgh plays the bride, who really doesn't have much to do, though it seems like she'd be a bigger part of Charlie's angst.

The silent-comedy bits are fun, if odd fits with the rest of the movie, and one can see where the filmmakers are going most of the time. They are just very raw and learning as they go, not quite putting it together yet.


Greetings

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Much of Greetings was apparently improvised, tied together with a few repeated songs on the soundtrack, and like The Wedding Party notable fifty years later because it's Brian De Palma working with Robert De Niro before they hit it big, with the first-billed "star" someone who would not appear in another movie. It's more of an ensemble picture, though, and one can almost see De Palma and co-writer/producer Charles Hirsch zeroing in on De Niro as the one who could break out.

All three of the main characters are New Yorkers, just out of college, and, because it's 1968, subject to the draft, which they talk about avoiding by making themselves sound like racist anarchist communists on their intake. In the meantime, Paul (Jonathan Warden) goes on a series of computer dates; Lloyd (Gerrit Graham) becomes obsessed with the JFK assassination; and Jon (De Niro) matter-of-factly makes the jump from "aspiring filmmaker" to voyeur.

It's a flimsy sort of story, but this is the sort of film that is meant to be flimsy, a slice of life in an uncertain time with young men who can't particularly make any plans for the immediate future. Given its improvised nature, De Palma's most important role may not be as writer or director but as editor, getting these three sets of episodic stories to form some sort of whole even when they aren't crossing over. He finds a rhythm to this thing that doesn't necessarily make the bits reliably funny but does keep scenes moving to get them to a punchline that, while it may or may not deliver fully, is there and recognizable as a joke. De Niro is obviously the standout in the cast, often dry enough in his delivery that Jon actually being a weirdo can be kind of unnerving, while Gerrt Graham plays the opposite end of the spectrum, off the deep end early and blundering along. Jonathan Wisdom doesn't really carve something out in the middle of these two extremes, and his computer dates never really find the right balance between "this futuristic system is laughable and inhuman" and how he's a screw-up himself.

Paul's story is also poking at the future while the other two are reacting to the present, and that every single person is apparently on "the apps" kind of sets those scenes apart in terms of being dated. I sort of suspect that Greetings works better as a time capsule now than it did as something contemporary at the time; It's messy and amateurish, with no room to perfect a scene or setting, and goes off in weird directions, but it's also filled with uncertainty that is not paralysis. It's an example on how focusing on very specific strange cases can sometimes say more than finding the average situation that has the best story, especially when the times are chaotic.


Hi, Mom!

* * (out of four)
Seen 15 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

It's not the case that Brian De Palma never did comedy again after these three with De Niro and the Tommy Smothers vehicle that followed them, but once he showed he was really good at thrillers, he was doing them more or less full-time. As he should; he's really good at them, and the primary take-away from this movie is that comedy maybe isn't this guy's thing.

It's a sequel to Greetings, with De Niro's Jon Rubin back from Vietnam and picking up where he left off, trying to get paid for his voyeurism by calling it filmmaking but taking other entertainment-adjacent jobs to pay the rent and sort of leading one of his favorite subjects on about his true intentions. It's interestingly eyebrow-raising to see De Palma doing this, given the material that would define much of his later career; as much as he's acknowledging and unveiling his own fascination with this sort of behavior here, he and De Niro never really shrink from Jon being a kind of creepy weirdo, even if there's also a lot of "awkward guy who doesn't know how to interact with people properly after the war" there.

On the other hand, the film is also highlighting a lot of what De Palma does not do with the rest of his career - not just comedy, but social satire around racial issues. The last act of the film involves gleefully putting bougie white folks paying for an artistic experience through the sort of police brutality and profiling that Black folks get, and, man, is De Palma kind of not the guy to do this, even if he is genuinely outraged (and there's no reason to suspect he isn't), nor is De Niro's character the guy to center. It's a balancing act between spoofing the complacent white folks who want to consume art that says they're better than this and the radical artists who do their cause more harm than good, and the enthusiasm of De Palma and producer Charles Hirsch has them stepping on a lot of rakes.

Hi, Mom! is frequently a pretty funny movie, but where Greetings survives as an intriguing look back at the era's uncertainty, this one feels like the filmmakers defining themselves by trial and error all at once, and hitting more errors than you might expect.

The Untouchables

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

As mentioned earlier, it's kind of weird that it would be another 15+ years before De Palma and De Niro worked together again, and never again since, even though being one of Scorsese's regulars didn't keep the latter from working a lot. And De Niro's part, Al Capone, sort of winds up being a glorified cameo, a chance to orate and play to the balconies rather than seeming like he's really sparring with Kevin Costner's Elliot Ness.

It sort of takes a while to reveal that this is kind of the point; that while Costner's group is "untouchable" in terms of being immune to corruption, Capone is untouchable because he's risen so high and so integrated himself into Chicago's power structure, and Ness isn't exactly an unstoppable force compared to Capone's immovable object. For a while, the movie seems to be coasting on De Palma's exceptional craft and a bunch of entertaining supporting characters - Sean Connery won an Oscar for this and he's terrific, of course, but Charles Martin Smith and Andy Garcia fill out the team well enough to remind you this was a TV series and if Paramount took a fourth run at the franchise, they could do worse than try to build this sort of ensemble. Billy Drago is a great Frank Nitti. But Costner is kind of boring for a fair chunk of the movie, a flatter affect than usual, at least until it clicks that it's not Capone that's a threat to corrupt Ness, but Malone - that he loses more and more of his soul as he buys into Malone's perspective as law enforcement as war with no rules. He becomes a more effective cop, but maybe not a better one. De Palma, writer David Mamet, and others don't necessarily have an answer for that.

The filmmakers don't really wallow in that, though, creating a bunch of impressive action beats that impress the heck out of the audience while also being distributed in such a way as to make sure that the methodical nature of the police work isn't smothered by the rest (we all know that Capone was brought down by the tax code, and that's got to be part of it). It's a gorgeous-looking film staged meticulously, with a great Ennio Morricone score. For this watch, it's fun to check back in with De Niro and De Palma to see what they've become since their early years, and while this isn't typical, it's still plenty fun.

House of Cards '68

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Look through a Kino Lorber sale - either the big one or the ongoing "while supplies last page" - and you'll find a lot of movies like House of Cards - thrillers that never became classics, and were probably never going to, but were probably a lot of fun for their audiences at the time: Shot internationally, starring guys like George Peppard (who, between Breakfast at Tiffany's and The A-Team, was kind of a budget Lee Marvin type), giving work to European stars who might like to get some Hollywood money and letting guys like Orson Welles slum it a little because they're international draws. They're kind of forgettable, meant to do okay in a lot of places, play on TV, and be a line on résumés or a title in parentheses when folks go to their next job.

But they can be pretty entertaining, as this one is, a shaggy right-person-in-the-wrong place story in which Peppard's expatriate drifter Reno Davis is hired by a widow (Inger Stevens) to provide a masculine/American example to her son, only for it to be revealed that the family she married into is part of a Nazi cabal, leading them to flee to Rome with the help of some of Reno's disreputable friends in the hope of freeing the boy being held hostage and exposing the conspiracy. It's a mess, story-wise - the screenplay apparently excises the tarot cards containing a list of conspirators that gave the original novel its name - and both Peppard and Stevens were good-looking, amiable screen presences but not the sort of star that can overwhelm the story's absurdity.

On the other hand, everyone involved is very capable, including director John Guillermin, who was the equivalent of a dependable pulp writer, and keeps things moving, letting the cast show some charm but being occasionally vicious when called for. He makes good use of locations in Paris, Rome, and various other European locations for action that still look solid fifty years later. It's not necessarily a great movie, or one that you need on a shelf, but it would be fun to have show up on TV throughout the 1970s.


Mookie makes his move! How's it look?

Mookie: 56 stars
Bruce: 57 stars

And just like that, this is a game again.

Film Rolls, Round 13: Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain and Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy

Oops, I skipped Mookie and Bruce wound up going first this round! Not that it really matters, because this is not a real game as opposed to a game-shaed thing, but fortunately fate made it up to Mookie.

Bruce rolls a 17 and lands in the Tsui Hark zone, specifically Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. I don't tend to give a lot of thought to connecting the figures with the movies - maybe for "season 2", I'll try to have the figures be more in-character - but this did make me ponder that about five years separated Bruce Lee's death from Tsui Hark's first film as a director, and, dang, does that seem like a great what-if!

Mookie, meanwhile, rolls a 20! That gets him to Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy, which I was kind of annoyed didn't play Boston back when 3D was at its peak and Chinese film distribution in the US was just starting to take tis current shape. I was mistaken to feel that way.

The rule with 20s is that you get a freebie from the recent arrivals shelf, but I kind of forgot that, so Mookie benefits from a Halloween viewing of Army of Darkness.

So how did this weird round work out?

Shu Shan - Xin Shu shan jian ke (Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Even beyond Tsui Hark remaking this film 20 years later, it's fun to look at this and the big fantasy adventures he would make in the 21st Century and see how those are what he wanted to do all along - he did this right at the start of his career, and it's just taken circumstances this long to catch up, between Mainland Chinese financing and more accessible effects.

For as much as watching this forty years later is to imagine what he would be doing with modern CGI - he stages these scenes the same way modern directors do, a generation ahead of time - it often seems to take its inspiration from Saturday Serials as much as anything else, a regular barrage of action that tosses soldier Di Ming Qi (Yuen Biao) into a newer, crazier situation every fifteen minutes or so, teaming him first with an aloof master (Adam Cheng Siu-Chow) and then an equally overwhelmed monk (Mang Hoi). The pacing kind of feels like a serial edited down to a movie, a combination of zipping from one episode to another to sort of running in loops as the crew goes to and from the Ice Queen's Palace, the sort of quest that there are lots of stops on and a roundabout path that occasionally allows the good guys to fight each other.

The action's a ton of fun, though, starting with classic period swordplay done exceptionally well - Corey Yuen and star Yuen Biao are handling a lot of the martial arts, and Yuen gets to play off Sammo Hung in the early going - to increasingly crazy and abstract wire fu that Tsui and his crew put together well. For all that Tsui is anticipating later digital blockbusters, he's still building monsters with papier-mache and ingenuity, with a demon represented by a dyed-red sheet being stretched over faces and other shapes a standout for being exceptionally practical but nevertheless very cool. Effects have got to both communicate and look cool on screen. The martial-arts team does darn good meshing weightlessness and momentum throughout.

This is also about the right time to be a star-making performance for Yuen Biao, who previously seemed to be one of his classmates Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung's favorite sparring partners but got few lead roles; he's got a charmingly earnest persona here, a puppy dog audiences will happily follow who slips easily into screen fighting in a way that seems natural. He pairs well with Mang Hoi, a different sort of naive (there's a real delight in movies like this where the action feels like it's following sidekicks until they come through), while Adam Cheng and Damian Lau are a more abrasive odd couple as the masters. A lot of folks get underused - even with two roles, one wants more Sammo Hung, for instance, while Brigitte Lin doesn't show up until 45 minutes in and has little to do, which is also when Moon Lee makes her first appearance and makes the audience wish that the filmmakers knew what they had and gave her a bigger role.

Underneath, there's something going on about war wearing down the gates of Hell, making it possible for demons to escape, but Tsui's not looking to make something that deep, even if he does see how that might strike a chord with viewers. He's just trying to make the big wuxia action he wants to see on screen, and honing his chops for when he'll have the right tools.

3D Yuk po tuen: Gik lok bo gam (3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy)

* (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)

Look, I'm not going to tell you that the original Sex & Zen was a good movie - although it apparently played the Weekly Wednesday Ass-Kickings at the Allston Cinema (remember that?) just before I made this into a full-time movie blog so I don't have any record of what I thought, though I remember it as mostly good fun, a Category III film built to entertain as well as titillate. This reboot from 2011 is more porn-y, not much more than excuses to stitch its sex scenes together.

The main problem, though, is that it's mean. There's not much joy in its sex, just selfish lust and cruelty; though Ruizhu (Hara Saori) initially intends to learn from the Prince (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu), the latter is a despot and the former picks up his attitudes quickly enough, and the audience is left to get its vicarious pleasure in watching people be victimized, with the story taking increasingly violent as it moves toward the end.

The filmmakers certainly seem to be having fun with their 3D and virtual backlot tools, at least - this was during the period when folks were shooting with actual 3D rigs, and it's just professional enough to be watchable - the cast (many imported from Japan's adult film industry) understand their particular sorts of sex appeal and play to it, and while the non-digital scenery is not elaborate, it doesn't immediately strike one as cheap.

It's not fun, though. There may be some who get some thrill out of erotica leaving them feeling kind of gross, but that's not for me.

Army of Darkness

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Army of Darkness wasn't quite my first big cult film - I'm of the age that inhaled Monty Python and the Holy Grail in high school - but it hit me just right in college, and was probably my favorite movie for a long time. I don't know how many copies of it I've purchased - a VHS, probably 2 DVD editions, an HD-DVD, a Blu-ray, and now this Shout Factor 4K disc. This will probably be the last, unless I find a 35mm print at a yard sale somewhere, and what are the odds of that?

I occasionally worry that I'll outgrow it, but it never quite happens. The jokes are still good. Sam Raimi stages action and slapstick as well as anybody ever has, and has a unique ability to blend the two so that they both impress without undercutting each other (someone should have put him and Jackie Chan together at some point). Bruce Campbell taps into this unique dumbass persona that makes Ash weirdly relatable whether he's being a moron or weirdly competent. It's earnest in its love for old Harryhausen films but is its own thing rather than a slavish recreation.

Why? I think because it came at a very specific point in this team's careers. This was probably not not meant to be one last project right at the point where they were still folks screwing around but had just graduated to having a real crew, making a movie for fun before everyone got professional, but it sure feels like it exists at that turning point, and that's a large part of what makes it a blast. It's why even the studio interference works in the movie's favor; rather than sulk, Raimi made that absolutely bonkers ending.

I don't love it quite as intently as I did in college and soon thereafter; I can't. But I appreciate it as fun in a way that is awful hard to accomplish on purpose.


Mookie really lucks out with that 20, doesn't he?

Mookie: 43 ¼ stars
Bruce: 51 ¾ stars

Next up: A big jump forward in time, a couple more favorites, including a bit more 3D.

Film Rolls, Round 5: Luca and Stage Fright

The top row is a weird place, because there's a point where you jump from very early western movies to fairly recent ones, and then soon after you jump from very recent ones to reasonably early. Like so:

That ten gets Mookie right at the end of the first row, which was (at the time) basically "stuff that didn't make it into theaters during the pandemic". And, yes, I bought a copy of Luca even though I've got Disney+ and don't really figure on dropping it any time soon, although it's kind of messing with my thought process on this.

Meanwhile, Bruce was already on the second row (remember Dragonwyck?) and has rolled a seven, so he's just dipping his toe into the 1950 and a Hitchcock I hadn't seen yet, Stage Fright.

So let's see how that went!

Luca

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

That Pixar would, to some degree, become simply one of several quite impressive animation studios was probably inevitable, and arguably a good thing overall: We want a lot of people out there doing good work, even if the top dog is not so restrictive in tone and style as one might fear. So it's okay for Luca to be a pretty good movie rather than one which pushes the technology forward or has a brilliantly abstract premise.

And Luca is, in fact, pretty good; the designs for the undersea society are more complete and creative than a DreamWorks "like New York but _____" while the town above the waterline is the sort of period construction that seems beautiful and nostalgic but never quite crosses the line of too good to be true. There's nice chemistry between the three main kids, who are all smart and focused in their own ways but also volatile in the way that tweens can be. There are entertaining adventure bits, the inevitable Terrific Pixar Chase, and an earnest and upbeat feeling even through the sadder material.

Does it have the sort of surprising gut punch that Pixar is often known for, or the ability to sort of get more out of its metaphor through its fantasy elements? Not quite, I don't think: There's nothing like how "When She Loved Me" has a million different ways to gut-punch you in Toy Story 2 and the absence of Alberto's family never quite reveals itself as the sort of hole director Enrico Casarosa seemingly intends it to. The film is ultimately a little glossier than its makers perhaps intend it to be.

Which is fine - Pixar's allowed to make films that are pretty good, if not necessarily special the way their greatest successes have been. I can imagine kids enjoying this and their parents being fairly charmed as they watch alongside, and that's not exactly easy!

Stage Fright

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I was mildly surprised to realize that I hadn't seen this particular Hitchcock when it showed up for pre-order on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive label; Hitch is a staple of the local repertory houses, after all, and I try to camp out there whenever one has a Hitchcock series. This one, though, falls between the silence and early English talkies that get programmed as his early days and the point when he was so well-established that he got big budgets and star-studded casts, everything he did being regarded as a potential classic at the time, both temporally and in feel.

Indeed, it's possible that seventy years later, being directed by Hitchcock works against it; with some journeyman director, a viewer might more easily appreciate how it's got elements of both film noir and a sort of classic British mystery. You can probably draw a pretty straight line between Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady and this, and if Jane Wyman's amateur sleuth isn't quite the delight that Ella Raines is in that movie, Marlene Dietrich is enough femme fatale to make up for it and Alastair Sim is the sort of cozy character actor whose very presence smooths out some of the film's more convenient contrivances. Not a bad little minor genre film, but the Master of Suspense never really did much in the way of the cozy mysteries this often recalls; indeed, his tendency was almost always to play them as comedy, at least until it was time to put the screws to someone.

Which is why the final sequence is so surprisingly good; no longer worried about having the audience get ahead of Wyman's Eve, he spends the final scenes putting her in genuine danger from a killer freed to be monstrous, setting the whole thing in the bowels of a theater among all the costumes, props, and other materials actors use to create characters for our entertainment and which the killer used to hide in plain sight even as Eve used them to go undercover. After an hour or so of playing nice, we're suddenly in the middle of a psychological thriller where Hitch is playing with people presenting false faces for the purposes of good and evil while playing a vicious game of cat and mouse.

Maybe it's better that he holds back and sort of springs it on us in the last act, plunging the audience into a darkness that lurks behind their safe, comedic murder mysteries, but the fact that the film feels relatively ordinary for so long likely keeps people from really associating it with the classics that appear around it in his filmography (it's a couple years after Rope and one before Strangers on a Train).


So that's a pleasant couple days in April, although they're evenly-matched enough to not affect the standings at all:

Mookie: 20 ¼ stars

Bruce: 22 ¾ stars

Bruce still leads, both in accumulated stars and on the path:

The next round, though, has a pretty major effect…

Sam Raimi's Spider-Movies in 4K

When I did the 4K upgrade, I said I wasn't going to be rebuying many things that I already had on Blu-ray because those still look quite good and both the new TV and player do a good job of upscaling, so how much will new discs really get me? Anyway, I think you can guess how well that went after the first time I picked up a disc of something made on film and saw that, yeah, there's a difference. Amazon puts these movies on sale for $30 for the entire Sam Raimi Spider-Man series in 4K, and I'm all over that.

Anyway, the discs look great; movies were still being shot on film at this point and even if they were being edited and composited off a digital intermediate, Raimi is clearly a guy with strong ideas of how his movies should look, and he's not particularly worried about them having to exist alongside anything else, so there are bold colors and contrasts which absolutely benefit from an UltraHD/HDR presentation. It's a terrific upgrade.

It was also a real pleasure to just watch these movies again for the first time in years, because they're pretty terrific as a set and even the weakest of them feels interesting. A thing that really surprised me is how much my impressions of the first two movies have been a bit reversed from reality; I thought of Spider-Man 2 as the one that Raimi assert his personality and style more, in large part due to the memorable operating room massacre, but it's actually the one that nudges things closer to the mainstream after diving into the first like a guy who might never get a chance to do this again. By the time that the third comes out, it's not quite a movie that could have been made by anyone, but you can sort of see the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming. I enjoy the heck out of those movies, but there's no denying that for all that Marvel will give their filmmakers some room, there are clear boundaries and a sort of gravity that draws them back toward being able to all fit in an Avengers crossover without looking out of place. Sam Raimi and Ang Lee weren't really thinking along those lines, and it's kind of left their movies striking and memorable but also the last gasps before "counting" mattered in films the same way it does in comics.

Anyway, I was just going to log them on Letterboxd and move on, but, well, I went long enough to want these on my space as well.

Spider-Man

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 October 2021 Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

Coming back to this for the first time in a while, with two decades of other Marvel stuff since, it's amazing just how much Sam Raimi is in it. There are the same sorts of comic-inspired framings and transitions that he used in Darkman, crazy montage, and cameras that zoom in to make sure that the audience can't miss something important in the scene as he gleefully leans into what you can do with a movie when everyone knows and acknowledges that it's a movie rather than trying to make the audience a generic observer. The action owes a ton to Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness as he leans into how a fight between superheroes is going to have a bunch of slapstick to it. It's an approach that not many others have gone for, opting instead for grim intensity and rocket-powered smashing through walls, but just look at the way these things are staged as characters get thrown around like ragdolls and look bewildered while absorbing punishment that would kill a normal person: They're superhuman but they react in ways we understand without grounding the action too much. It's absurd and entertaining but always right near the line where someone could get hurt in a way that wouldn't be funny at all. All of that makes for a sincere embrace of the pulpy comic book roots. Back then, it seemed like Sam holding back a bit, making the comics more in line with the mainstream films he'd been working on, but compare it to what Marvel's doing now, and it's clear that he's doing much more to drag movies toward what comics do than drag comics to what people expect from film. It's not quite one guy with a vision going for broke, but it's probably closer to that than I thought at the time, so excited to see my favorite director put in charge of a blockbuster meant for everyone.

From the very start of this one, Raimi, writer David Koepp, the cast, Danny Elfman, and everyone else are going big but also filling in all sorts of great details. From the opening shots where the camera seems to be just checking out Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood, it feels specifically like New York, for instance, and the different family dynamics of the Parkers, Watsons, and Osborns all feel true. Some of the turn-of-the-century digital effects aren't perfect, but it's okay because of how Raimi isn't exactly gonig for realism anyway. They mesh with the style and tone so that it all fits.

The amount of dead-solid perfect casting is kind of amazing, too - aside from how Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire are just right as teens/young adults figuring themselves out (something Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben lays out as a theme beautifully), there's James Franco making Harry Osborn just the right sort of tragic figure and Willem Defoe so perfectly on Raimi's wavelength that it's kind of surprising they haven't done more together. Dunst is probably the unsung hero of this trilogy, even though I've seen people hate her Mary Jane Watson for one reason or another that often boils down to MJ not just being Peter's conscience but valuing herself. The movie is filled with people who have ambitions beyond being Spiday's supporting cast, and it helps make Peter a believable underdog as he's a little intimidated and finally ready to push back.

It's a great little movie. That the folks involved would (for many) top themselves a couple years later is its own sort of amazing.

Spider-Man 2

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

As much as this is considered the best of the series, I may like the first one more, having watched them in the past week. This one is striking more of a balance between the Raimi-ness of the first and something that feels a little more comfortably mainstream. Maybe that's what makes it strike such a chord - the movie lays what it's doing right out there with utter sincerity in a way that feels familiar, yet there's still enough style that you're definitely not just watching TV.

Which isn't to say that there's any single thing in this movie that doesn't work. It's more or less the same great cast with added Alfred Molina, for example, and while Molina has a little trouble making the leap from Otto Octavius being a mentor to him being a madman, he gets past it, and the confusion and difficulty works. This film's the most convincing and matter-of-fact go at playing Spidey as the hard-luck hero on the big screen - one always believes that the things which would make all his gifts snap into place rather than work against each other are just out of reach rather than playing as contrivances, even when they come in the form of cartoony Daily Bugle scenes.

And, of course, the centerpiece action sequences are terrific, especially the nightmarish bit with Ock's arms that seems tailor made for Raimi, not just because of the chainsaw but because those tentacles with cameras on the end are able to actually make the Sam-Ram-a-Cam part of the movie's text. The really surprising thing is that there aren't actually that many of them - the story has the confidence in itself to let the movie breathe between them. The most memorable part of the big hero moment is its aftermath, the big-city "just because we're all crammed together doesn't mean we're gonna get in your business" moment after Peter's lost his mask stopping a train from derailing.

It's a refinement of a bit at the end of the first, polished and presented to the audience rather than tossed off as one of a dozen things going on at once. There's still a lot of Raimi here, but he's playing to the bigger audience in a way that's tremendously effective if not quite his in the way that the first film was.

What I wrote back in '04

Spider-Man 3

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 October 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-Ray)

Arriving just a year before Iron Man, Spider-Man 3 almost feels like a test run for the Marvel Cinematic Universe - the 137-minute runtime isn't quite so compact as Raimi's previous films, Stan Lee shows up to say hi rather than being someone you spot in the crowd, there's more conscious attention to the film as part of an ongoing series, and Sam Raimi's personal signature is less prominent. It's common knowledge that Raimi was given less of a free hand on this movie than before (and it's interesting to watch a scene where J. Jonah Jameson is pitched new slogans for the Bugle and reminded to take his heart medications in the most stressful way possible in that light); watching it after the other two, you've got to wonder why so many people were trying to act like they knew this stuff better than Sam.

There is too much stuffed into this movie, but the thing is, there's so much that's good. After playing Peter as the hard-luck hero in #2, there's something very true in how this movie plays with him not actually handling success and popularity very well - he's not so much a bad person underneath, but staying humble and dealing with attention is a skill that he hasn't developed. Venom was by all accounts imposed on Raimi, but he and brother/co-writer Ivan do their level best to make him a metaphor for all the worst aspects of Peter coming out and scaring him; there's just not room in this story for the whole arc that includes Eddie Brock Jr. (one can mock the Tom Hardy Venom movies for avoiding Spider-Man, but it's a step something this size doesn't have the time for). That's especially true with the time given to Thomas Haden Church's Sandman, but I appreciated parts of his story more this time around - the origin sequence is beautiful, for instance, and while I scoffed at him roaring like a dumb kaiju when I originally saw the film, I get the guy literally trying to keep himself and his humanity together through sheer force of will a bit better now. Church has a lead character's arc crammed into a supporting role that's getting cut back itself.

At the time, I thought Raimi would do another despite the disappointment - there was more to do with the folks played by Dylan Baker, James Cromwell, and Bryce Dallas Howard, darn it! - but now I kind of think that he said his piece here. Spider-Man 3 is a movie about people trying to be their best selves, failing, and then trying again, and on and on, whether they're Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Flint Marko, or Harry Osborn (Brock just doesn't have it in him and becomes a monster for it). Anything else he does with the character is going to seem smaller. It's a shame that the movie is such a mess in so many ways, never able to juggle all of its pieces, feeling like maybe it should have been a limited series in structure, and never quite having enough of the Sam Raimi style to match the over-the-top action with heightened emotional stakes. It's got all the pieces to be a great cap on the trilogy, but seldom puts it together well enough to be truly satisfying.

What I wrote back in '07

Brotherhood of Blades x2

Back a couple months ago, I wondered if Lu Yang's Brotherhood of Blades movies were so big and great that he got carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with A Writer's Odyssey, because it sure felt like the sort of thing where producers were almost afraid to say "no" to whatever he asked for, and it turned out to be a relatively easy thing to find out, since Well Go has the rights for both and put discs out. I went with the import on the second, though, because why not encourage Panorama and other Hong Kong distributors to go the 4K route whenever possible? It's a nice-looking disc, although it's kind of funny: This is one of those movies with a lot of black costumes with detailed embossing that even a good Blu-ray can mess up, so it benefits from the format, but it also highlights just that scheme can feel simultaneously slick and boring.

I don't know how well these two did at the box office, beyond the first apparently being enough of a hit to get the second a budget upgrade, but you can sort of see why some folks might see Lu Yang as the next big thing or ready to break out, both domestically and internationally - as much as I've seen Shaw Brothers-style period action given more contemporary coats of paint over the past couple of decades, Lu and co-writer Chen Shu bring in some international genre sensibilities without making the movies seem less Chinese.

One thing that's interesting is that in doing this, he seems to be pushing what the censors will allow a bit; Shen's a far more corrupt hero than these movies often present, even when taking place in the past when you can at least use the excuse that the Ming Dynasty was corrupt. It's interesting, though, that the second movie explicitly references free speech and censorship as something tyrants do. Not that that sort of hypocrisy is unusual, but it's interesting that it's a theme that Lu would return to in Odyssey, that artists can be literally dangerous to authorities.

Interesting enough to keep an eye on, at least.

Xiu chun dao (Brotherhood of Blades)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-Ray)

A Shaw Brothers-style story told in thoroughly modern fashion, Brotherhood of Blades isn't the most intricate thriller of the most astounding kung fu, but it's an entertaining middle ground for those who enjoy the genre a bit of martial-arts action but can't get into the rhythms or cultural specifics of those movies. Filmmaker Lu Yang delivers some solid wuxia action, even if one is not inclined to learn terms like "wuxia".

As it opens in 1627, Emperor Chongzhen (Ye Xiangming) has recently ascended to the throne, and his first action is to send the Imperial Assassins after Wei Zhongxian (King Shih-Chieh), whose "Eunuch's Clique" had effective control of the court under Chongzhen's predecessor. After the team of Lu Jianxing (Wang Qianyuan), Shen Lian (Chang Chen), and Jin Yichuan (Ethan Li Dong-Xue) successfully eliminates one crony, they are sent after Wei himself, in part because, as secret police leader Han Kuang (Zhao Lixin) points out, they are too low in status to have been a target for corruption. But, of course, everyone in the capital has an agenda that the rich and influential Wei and those who oppose him can influence, including the assassins - Lu is angling for a promotion, Shen would like to buy the freedom of courtesan Zhou Miaotong (Cecilia Liu Shishi), and Jin is being blackmailed by Ding Xiu (Zhou Yiwei) about his criminal past - while all the scheming going on above them is certain to render them loose ends to be eliminated.

The script by Lu and co-writer Chen Shu is maybe not entirely efficient - looked at as a whole, it certainly has a fair amount of elements that the movie doesn't exactly need - but it's impressively well-balanced. The main trio, by and large, are all able to have their own things going on without one completely taking center stage at the expense of the others, the conspiracy has enough going on to be interesting without pushing the heroes off to the side, and the spots where things circle back around to link up don't feel cheap. As director, he keeps all of that moving at a comfortable clip and makes the climax satisfying, although it could maybe do without the one last action sequence, a classic "let's take the last fight away from the rest of the movie's context" deal.

That said, it's a pretty good fight, and by and large action director Sang Lin does nice work as he works with Lu to stage the action. With the assassins established early on as an elite force and not much room in the story for other characters beyond Wei's bodyguard (Zhu Dan) to be especially great at martial arts, they mostly go for "throw a small army at these three guys" and it by and large works; everyone seems to be able to handle a sword well enough to keep it moving and it keeps dogpiling to a minimum. Lu uses hails of arrows the way a more modern movie might use automatic weapons fire, but still has fun giving characters different weapons and seeing how they match up against each other.

He and his cast also hit on the right sort of gritty amorality to make the film feel hit differently from a Hong Kong period action movie (often about legends) or the typical Mainland one (where the characters often map to specific modern types and approved attitudes). Chang Chen, in particular, feels comfortable letting the audience see Shen Lian as a piece of work, seemingly more comfortable as an assassin than the soldier or cop he and the crew are also expected to be, with some cruelty in his introduction and later aloofness. Li Dong-Xue and Wang Qianyuan have a little of that too, but Jin gets to play romantic while Lu is frustrated by the everyday corruption necessary to get ahead. King Shih-Chieh is clearly having a ball as Wei, a villain with nothing left to lose as the walls close in, while Zhao Lixin, Nie Yuan, Zhou Yiwei, and others create an enjoyable snake pit.

There's a dirty cops versus grandly corrupt officials vibe to it, and that turns out to be a good way into this material, probably even more so if the typical Chinese palace/temple intrigue leaves one cold or confused. It may not have the best twists or the best swordplay, but it does everything it attempts wee enough to make for an entertaining couple hours.

Also at eFilmCritic

Xiu chun dao II: xiu luo zhan chang (Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 4K Blu-Ray)

What's a filmmaker to do when a movie leaves the bulk of its characters dead at the end but performs well enough that the studio wants a sequel? They can try surrounding any survivors with new characters and see how that works, or do a prequel, or what's been increasingly popular in Hong Kong lately and just say the movie with a number after it is the same filmmakers and actors getting together to do the same sort of movie again, all valid ways of giving the audience more of that thing they enjoyed. For his follow-up to Brotherhood of Blades, filmmaker Lu Yang seems to be doing all three, and it makes for a more muddled, less invigorating take on the genre than its predecessor, even if there's still some fun to be had.

It opens in 1619 as Han soldier Shen Lian (Chang Chen) crawls out from under the corpses of those slain at one of the many battles at Sarhu, soon rescuing some of his comrades about to be executed by the Manchus. One of them, Lu Wenzhao (Zhang Yi) looks at the carnage and despairs of finding another way to live. Eight years later, Lu is a commander of the palace guards and Shen a captain, the sort that's not quite corrupt enough to get ahead in the same way as Lieutenant Ling Yunkai (Jiang Wu), a nephew of the powerful eunuch lord Wei Zhongxian (King Shih-Chieh). Given a bonus that doesn't sit well, he spends it on some work being sold by a local monk on behalf of talented artist Bei Zhai, only to be sent to arrest the artist (now considered seditious) with Ling. When he's shocked to see that the only person at Bei's house is the girl (Yang Mi) who offered him an umbrella to keep the painting dry, he causes the whole thing to go sideways, and soon he is being partnered with shrewd detective Pei Lun (Lei Jiayin) to investigate the case on the one hand and blackmailed by swordswoman Master Ding (Xin Zhilei) to burn the Guards' archives. Is he a pawn in the plans of Wei, whose influence will likely wane with a new Emperor, or the prince (Yuan Wen-Kang) who nevertheless fears Wei's power?

One might be forgiven for not being sure that this is the same Shen Lian, given that this movie would seem to rewrite his backstory and features none of the other characters with whom he formed a tight-knit unit in the other film, and it sometimes seems that Chang Chen isn't quite sure what to do with what Lu and returning co-writer Chen Shu have given him. He gives Shen the same sort of weighted-down body language as before but never really figures out how to make it work with the broad streak of idealism that the story necessitates. He's a lot more interesting playing off Lei Jiayin than Yang Mi; Lei plays Pei Lun as a smart detective who enjoys seeing people squirm, while Yang Mi seldom gets to let the same sort of strong idealism guide her performance, mostly playing the vertex of a love triangle where she's never actually seen with her original partner.

The plot's a messier situation Shen faced in the first movie, although never quite so immediate, with so much happening above his pay grade while he's basically forced to be a better survivor than the schemers realize. Shen's closer to an honest cop in a dirty department than a dirty cop with some scruples here, and even with all the double-crosses and massive conspiracies going on (including a moment or two where the filmmakers do a surprisingly good job of making the trope of a character remembering something he saw on TV earlier in the film work in Eighteenth Century China), they still run out of twists fairly early, with the good guys on the run for long enough to draw things out until the big fight.

And if that finale with a rope bridge rickety enough that the horses want no part of it and a bunch of people with swords doesn't exactly go full Temple of Doom, it is nevertheless a bloody good time. The budget seems to be a bit higher this time around (the title cards certainly show more companies contributing to it!), and while some goes to things that are only superficially more impressive - the leather costumes manage to get blacker and slicker - Lu and action director Sang Lin often seem to have a little more room to work this time around. There are more close-in confrontations that let Chang Chen and Xin Zhilei, among others, confront each other without a lot of cutting or getting lost in hordes - although when there is a horde, the filmmakers do a nice job of highlighting the sensation of sort of force about to crush you, even if you're as good at fighting as Shen.

Brotherhood of Blades 2 has the same basic formula as the first, half sword wuxia and half cops & corruption, but where that film seemed to have the right half of each, this one brings a little more of the genres' weaknesses along. It's still an interesting mix of influences, especially if you decide not to worry about how it fits with its predecessor.

Also at eFilmCritic

Hot Take: The Indiana Jones Movies Are Good

A fun thing about Letterboxd (follow me!) is that I was able to see a few other people I know decided that last week was a good time to dig into that new 4K box set of the Indiana Jones movies that Paramount put out last month. There is, of course, never a bad time to watch them and the issues Paramount had getting enough discs pressed meant that some folks might just be getting them now, as my pre-order originally slated for mid-June got pushed out a month before winding up just a week or so late, but maybe it was just rainy enough up and down the East Coast without enough other things going on that folks said, yeah, I can commit to this for a few evenings.

As an aside, I'm trying to not read too much into the delays of this box set, the 4K Scott Pilgrim disc, and likely a few others beyond there still being a pandemic out there and that doing a number on manufacturing and transport, but I'm nevertheless hoping that places are being caught a little bit flat-footed by the demand for physical media going up, especially with people noting that Blu-ray looks better than most 4K streaming services and 4K discs looking almost theatrical at times. I've been reading stories about vinyl manufacturing not being able to scale up to the recent demand, and I'm hoping that the situation with Blu-ray discs and 4K discs might be similar, if less drastic.

The set itself looks fantastic, by the way, although I can't voice for the Raiders disc yet, as Paramount gave that one a 40th Anniversary theatrical re-release that maybe served as a reminder to order this box set and I went for that even though it meant going out in 95-degree-Fahrenheit weather. The joke about how I keep buying that one on disc but don't know why because someone will put it on the big screen still holds, apparently. I'm not invested in this sort of thing enough to see if Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are the sort of upgrades over the previous editions some people are raving about, but they do feel a bit different, like the lighting is a bit more subtly sinister than it was before. On the flip side, either my Last Crusade disc is defective or there's something up with my player (a Sony UBP-X800), because it consistently froze right around the halfway mark, almost surgically removing the motorcycle chase. I power-cycled, jumped straight to the chapter, hit fast-forward/rewind… Nothing. Just lost those three minutes. I gather almost every player has layer-change issues, but this one was a real bummer.

As for the movies themselves, there are folks who will argue against the premise that the four Indiana Jones movies are, collectively and individually, good, partly because people get weird about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in general, and partly because a lot of folks have little room between "great" and "awful", which combined with how Raiders of the Lost Ark is an all-time classic skews expectations for the sequels. People want different things from sequels anyway - more of the thing they liked, finding something else you can do with the same pieces, an explicit continuation of the story that builds on prior events - and what's kind of fascinating about this franchise is that they've done a little bit of each, especially when you include The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Even if you figure that the folks involved executed the plan well each time (which is about where I fall), there's a lot of room for people who loved Raiders to just not like the plan.

I must admit, of the other movies, I found that Last Crusade went down easiest for being the most like Raiders, I found myself more intrigued by Temple of Doom and Crystal Skull, for how they took Indy to different places and poked around the history of the sort of pulp/adventure fiction that inspired the character. There's a part of me that would be interested in them pushing against it a bit - both the Thuggee Cult and ancient astronauts are things that should probably be approached with a lot more care and skepticism even if there are fun stories to be built around them - but it's genuinely nifty how everybody involved takes a character who was designed for a fairly specific milieu and figures out how he fits into others, and also finds ways to give him history and future without destroying everything behind him the way so many others tend to.

Watching these made me a lot more enthusiastic for what James Mangold is doing with the new (and almost certainly final) movie shooting now. I'd kind of checked out, seeing as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were only going to have arms'-length involvement at most and how Harrison Ford is celebrating his 79th birthday on its set today, but if it takes Indy to a new place and era, and gives Ford a chance to wrestle with a man of action nearing his end (something director James Mangold has done before in Logan), there could be something there. My only worry is that the very fact that so much is different right down to a new director will lead Disney/Lucasfilm to be too cautious about going off-template.

In the meantime, we've got these four, they look great, and they're all pretty darn good.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 June 2021 in AMC Boston Common #10 (Fan Favorites, DCP)

Do I really have more to say about this movie that I didn't say eight years ago and multiple times since (and, heck, probably before)? Probably not. If it's not quite perfect in its construction, then the parts that are flawless are also the ones that help move one past missteps. The cast is terrific. Everybody involved seems to get what sort of a throwback it is but, unlike what would often be done in later years, doesn't necessarily need to underline it. I loved Ronald Lacey's Toht long before I had any idea that he was doing a bit of a Peter Lorre riff, and now appreciate how that's not the whole joke.

There are things you can nitpick about this movie, and the whole series, but part of the reasons why it goes well beyond "working anyway" is that the films play as being as nimble and improvisational as their lead character; they'll run into something that should stop things dead, but quickly work out a way around it or shake it off and move onto the next thing. Big action/adventure movies can't actually be like that, of course, but it helps when you've got Steven Spielberg at the helm and he's so good at seeing all the things that need to work together that it doesn't get weighted down.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

It's been a while since I've seen this one, although not quite such a length of time that the way it has not aged well on a pretty fundamental level takes me aback. Although... yeesh, has this not aged well.

That's the thing about this sort of pulp, though - it's tremendously fun, and part of it is the simplicity of its constructs and the purity of the emotion that comes from encountering something lurid and strange, but there's not much room left to feel that innocently, if there ever was. The imagery still works, though, as Indiana and his friends dive into a seemingly insane world.

But, man, that last half hour or so. The set-up doesn't always make sense physically, but Spielberg makes each little bit sing and moves from one to the next with smoothness and confidence that gives a viewer just enough time to breathe without the opportunity to look away. The climax sings after an opening that's not quite all it could be and a middle more reliant on gross-out bits.

Which isn't to say the rest of the movie's without merit. I think it's actually got my favorite characterization of Indiana Jones in some ways, with more James Bond in him than the other movies, with Ford playing a sly adventurer whose amorality is closer to the surface than it would be "later" (after Raiders). We see "Professor Jones" as a part of him he's able to weaponize as opposed to just a secret identity or the safe place he returns between adventures. It's a side of Indy that would have been fun to see more in the other films, the dark side he often as to explicitly overcome and also a reminder that he's smart and resourceful rather than just well-read and light on his feet.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Last Crusade is a bit of an over-correction toward what people liked about Raiders of the Lost Ark after the flawed Temple of Doom, bringing back a lot of familiar faces and style while also kind of full of shortcuts to get from one bit of fun stuff to the next, though occasionally teasing a couple of ideas that never quite get fleshed out, in part because they're contradictory. Watching Indy smash through the Venice catacombs like a bull in a china shop, just desecrating the heck out of bodies among other things, it feels like there could be more of a contrast with Henry Sr. and Marcus Brody as academics who, if they do go into the field, are setting up careful grids and excavating with toothbrushes. There's a part of me that really wants the theme of #5 to be Indy reckoning with how his treasure hunting has probably set actual archaeology back, because it feels like the sort of thing both creators and fans become more aware of as time goes by, with a smart franchise integrating that growth into the work.

Nevertheless, there's good reason for going back to basics - Raiders is near-perfect and the reasons why aren't exactly hard to get a handle on. Crusade takes that, shuffles it into new arrangements, and layers a story about Indy's contentious relationship with his father onto it that makes him more relatable even without being ordinary.

It pays off, too; I'm not necessarily sure that either Harrison Ford or Sean Connery have ever been as purely entertaining as they are in this movie, partly because they rarely seemed to have equals to play off once they achieved a certain status. They're enough fun to render almost everyone else unnecessary, although it's generally a nifty cast, from Alison Doody channeling period bombshell traits that I appreciate more now than I did back when I first saw it to Robert Eddison's grail knight who has something like two scenes in which he suggests his long time alone has made him a bit peculiar without undercutting the basic honor and dignity of what he represents.

Plus, obviously, Spielberg chases, which may just be the best things in cinema. Having read that the director was a big video game fan, I wonder a bit how much that bit on the train was him having fun with platformers while other pieces had the feel of the then-popular point-and-click adventures. There's also a nifty balance between the freewheeling and the grand throughout as Indy solves this problem he can get his hands on even though it's part of something bigger. For all that folks remember Indy's "Nazis; I hate these guys" and how Spielberg probably couldn't do cartoonish Nazis again post-Schindler's List, Henry's utter disgust at collaborators feels much more pointed than one might think. Henry telling a Nazi that goose-stepping morons should try reading books instead of burning them is pithy; the way he lights into Elsa as she cries while watching those books burn is harsh, nastily undercutting where a lot of movies would try to make this character looks conflicted or painted in a shade of gray. Henry's not having it.

It would be great if the film had a little more to say toward the end about some of its themes and wasn't so seemingly built to shut off the possibility of dealing with the Grail in the world, but the muddle is kind of appropriate - both Joneses are drawn to the past while having trouble dealing with the present, the tactile relics easier to deal with than intangible feelings, and that's a part of them that can't be resolved completely, even if they're in a better place afterward.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

As much as I liked Crystal Skull when it first came out, I wondered how much of it was just "holy crap, new Indiana Jones!" at the time, even as I loved the idea of how it was moving Indy from 1930s swashbuckling adventures to paranoid 1950s sci-fi (with nods to the wartime/Cold War adventures they skipped), something I hope tracks to the new one. Happily, I still find myself quite fond of it. The film is flawed, but flawed in the same way the others are, from Indy maybe not being quite so active as a critic's instincts say he's supposed to be to how the ancient astronaut stuff doesn't sit quite right these days with more talk about how it's often been a way for Europeans to deny the capability of other cultures historically. We just got older and wiser, and a film series not keeping up in some areas can be disappointing, plus or minus digital backlot being a little easier to spot than matte paintings.

Anyway, I still kind of love this one. There's a part of me that wonders if David Koepp just writes "Spielberg Chase" in some scripts and then lets the master take over or if he gives Spielberg more to work with than others (they also collaborated on Jurassic Park and its brilliant set pieces), but there are two or three very nice bits like that in here, and you can't go far wrong with Steven Spielberg doing chase scenes. It's nifty how the film both circles back around to Raiders to bring back Karen Allen but also serves as an interesting reflection of Last Crusade, with Indy both becoming his father by being more at home at the school and striving to be better when he finds he's now the elder.

And say what you will about what happens right before it - I love the twisted audacity of "nuking the fridge" and how Indy doing something kids were specifically advised not to goes right along with razing the plastic nostalgia Spielberg is mocked as loving too much - but that shot of Indiana Jones in front of a mushroom cloud is fantastic, a brilliant take on how pulp adventure changed in the Fifties. I'd forgotten the extent to which one of the last scenes in South America is a reflection of it, almost literally, with Indy on the other side of the screen as another cataclysm takes place around another defining image of Twentieth Century mythology and adventure. Tradition says he doesn't belong there, but he's an icon, so he fits, even if the world is moving on from hidden cities and ancient artifacts.

What I wrote 13 years ago