In a departure from recent form, the entire review for Touched will go here, since it's not actually in HBS's database yet. I'm guessing that's because it hasn't played any other festivals and hasn't gotten on any release schedules yet (I kind of think it's got "Lifetime TV-movie" written all over it), and there wasn't enough time to put BFF info onto that site before the festival actually started. Hey, when you don't announce your schedule until the week before (or how drastically the festival has been cut down), that's what's going to happen.
This got the sole premiere-night slot, which says something. Probably mostly because the filmmaker is local (from Newton), as I believe was one of the actors - Randall Batinkoff shouted out to a whole bunch of people in the audience. It's quite possible that not only was the festival's opening night film projected video (which looked pretty bad when it came time for long shots), but the audience might have been primarily made up of Close Personal Friends of the Cast & Filmmakers.
Speaking of which, the same thing happened tonight (or yesterday night, given that I'm posting this at 2am), only it wasn't just friends of the director. When Do We Eat? had Shiri Appleby as a co-star, and there were a bunch of young female Roswell fans in front of me. Ms. Appleby was pretty cool with them, and if they didn't take her repeated use of the word "cute" to describe them as patronizing, I guess it wasn't. They weirded me out a little, but, hey - I know I'll be acting just like them if Sarah Paulson shows up on Tuesday, even if I never set up a Jack & Jill web shrine.
Touched
* * (out of four)
Seen 9 September 2005 at Loews Boston Common #17 (Boston Film Festival) (projected DV)
Timothy Scott Bogart wants you to cry, and he is determined to make it happen. To that end, he supplies dead children, dead parents, brain damage, sad children, multi-year comas, mysterious aliments and miraculous recoveries. People of fragile constitutions should probably be very glad that none of the characters in this movie owns a dog.
The movie's not sad when it starts, of course; we see Scott Davis (Randall Batinkoff) happily about to bring his adorable five-year-old Kyle (Charlie Lea) to Kyle's mother's house for the weekend, but there's a terrible accident, and the next time we see him, he's been in a coma for two years, and is stuck in a long-term care facility, getting special attention from nurse Angela Martin (Jenna Elfman). Angela has problems of her own, mostly involving her older brother Thomas (Frederick Koehler), who has the mind of a ten-year-old and lives in a special needs facility. After Scott wakes up during a thunderstorm one night, his wealthy parents (Bruce Davison and Diane Verona) decide to bring him home to recover, despite the worrisome fact that he's having hallucinations of his son and that he has completely lost his sense of touch. Naturally, Angela is hired as the live-in nurse, so they naturally fall in love.
The loss of the ability to feel is, of course, a metaphor. It has to be, since the film doesn't spend much time dwelling on what it must be like to live without the literal ability to feel. Scott seems to be close to fully functional relatively quickly; I noticed he didn't look at his feet while climbing stairs, which strikes me as something of a necessity without tactile sensation. It is a useful metaphor for his inability to interact with the world as he emerges from his coma, literally numb to the situation. The trouble is twofold: It's an affliction that is difficult to visually illustrate without doing something obvious, like having him accidentally rest his hand on a stovetop, and it's also so unusual, that when there are are inevitable issues in the third act, the audience can't help but wonder why the hell he didn't have an MRI or a CT scan or any of the dozens of diagnostic tests Davis Sr. can afford. There's a flimsy rationale given, but it is, well, flimsy.
That's a sign of Bogart's relative inexperience. Another is the heavy reliance on cigarettes as a prop. Directors make characters smokers because it puts some motion on the screen during dialogue-heavy scenes, giving the actors something to do with their hands. They can fidget with it to indicate nervousness, let it smolder off to the side, or what have you. Even if an audience member isn't aware of this convention, it would be tough to miss considering how the smoking gets brought up in conversation. It calls attention to the technique, which is fine in moderation, but comes off as a crutch in regular use. At least they don't go to "I haven't had one of these in years".
The cast is nice, though. Jenna Elfman is mostly known for comedy, and it's easy to see why television networks have been trying to cast her in a new sitcom since [i]Dharma & Greg[/i] ended - she establishes a personality quickly, and it's an open, friendly one; it's easy for the audience to like her despite her flaws. She handles the heavier parts well, and is willing to let the audience find her interest in the coma patient a little creepy. Randall Batinkoff may not quite have convinced me in terms of portraying his infirmity, but his character work is solid. He reminds me of Mark Ruffalo before the mainstream found him; he does good big-hearted but hurt. Davison and Verona are solid as the parents; I particularly liked Davison's portrayal of being pulled in different directions trying to please everyone. Koehler does the mentally disabled schtick, and Samantha Mathis is almost invisible as Angela's co-worker and best friend.
There's an audience for weepers like this, and they'll probably be able to overlook its flaws. It pushes its buttons at the right times, and so what if they're mashed? It's a movie without villains - even the doctor who suspends Angela from her job recommends her to the Davises - featuring little in the way of gratuitous (or even non-gratuitous) sex, violence, or harsh language. It's got a likable, good-looking couple at its center who will end the movie in a heart-string-tugging way. It's got a lot of people crying at bedsides. There is a crowd - predominantly older and female - that responds to that in the same instinctive manner that many young men respond to things going up in flames.
But just as the presence of an exploding helicopter isn't necessarily indicative of the quality of a movie, neither is someone being nobly ill or emotionally damaged. Touched isn't an awful movie, but it's a formulaic one with frequently ham-handed execution.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
Big & Loud: Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Island, Brothers Grimm, A Sound of Thunder, Transporter 2
This hasn't been a really great summer for action movies, has it? Certainly, you won't find much better than Revenge of the Sith, and War of the Worlds was pretty sweet, but after that, it was kind of thin. The comic book movies were OK, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith has its charms, but that July/August time period was pretty barren. If we hadn't gotten Godzilla: Final Wars in Cambridge, it would have been even more dire.
I find it interesting that producer Luc Besson and director Louis Leterrier wound up bookending the season - Danny the Dog (aka Unleashed) back in May, and Transporter 2 Labor Day weekend. I wish more folks made action movies like Besson and company - straightforward good and evil with just enough detail to keep it interesting, and slick, exciting action. These movies are pure fun, and as such can get away with things that a Michael Bay, perhaps, can't.
And A Sound of Thunder? Still sucks and sucks hard.
Speaking of sucking and sucking hard, the next few updates will include dispatches from the Boston Film Festival. Man, has the IFFB rendered that festival moot.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2005 at AMC Fenway #11 (first-run)
Slick. There's no other word for this movie. Most of its pleasures are thoroughly superficial ones, and nothing that happens would likely hold up to much scrutiny. But it's tough to slice up; director Doug Liman applies a coat of teflon to everything, so complaints just sort of slide off, and one is left looking at how pretty the movie and its stars are, and at least enjoying it on that level.
The premise is ridiculous, of course - John and Jane Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) have been married five or six years, all the while unaware that the other is an assassin. Their marriage is having conventional difficulties as the movie starts, and things get much worse when they're both assigned the same target. They get in each other's way, the target escapes, and when each figures out that the other is responsible, the only way to stay in good with their mysterious employers is to take out their spouses. Gunplay and black comedy ensues.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Island
* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #9 (first-run)
I'm peculiarly loath to blame Michael Bay for The Island not being as good or successful a movie as it could and, perhaps, should have been. I've got no particular fondness for the man, as anyone who ever asked me my opinion of Armageddon will attest. But when you get right down to it, even though a great deal of this films many shortcomings can be reduced to "the director didn't do the job he should have"... I mean, come on, shouldn't the producers know better by now?
I mean, they've seen his films. Anyone who pays attention to the director's name should know Bay's strengths and weaknesses by now. The man does a damn good hero shot and has a real talent for composing the individual frames of a motion picture. He trusts his actors, sometimes too much (so Bruce Willis could sleepwalk through Armageddon), but he'll stay out of the way when he's getting a relatively solid performance. But he is absolutely, totally, completely inept at fast action. The Island is structured as a chase movie, and it is being steered by a director who simply does not have the necessary skills to direct a good chase scene. He shakes the camera too much, he jumps too fast, he doesn't let the audience follow the action. He's so bad at it - and always has been - that one wonders why, somewhere along the line, the money people didn't try to steer it toward a different director, or have a specialist brought in for the case scenes. After all, movies with martial arts action bring Yuen Woo-ping or Sammo Hung in to choreograph and shoot those scenes; why shouldn't Bay have a "chase specialist"?
Read the rest at HBS.
The Brothers Grimm
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2005 at Circle Cinema #1 (first-run)
You look at The Brothers Grimm, and you know what the producers were thinking. They've got this Ehren Kruger script, and it's set in pre-industrial times and kind of off-kilter. "Let's get Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam on this", they think. "They've got experience and their fans love this sort of thing. Guaranteed ticket sales!" So they hire Gilliam, and then freak out when he starts acting like Terry Gilliam - making things up as he goes along, making changes during shooting, and the like. It's as though they wanted Terry Gilliam's name and visual style, but not the sometimes torturous process that goes with it.
So there's a whole mess that happens - it becomes a "troubled" production, is rescued by a new studio whose heads decide to give a few more notes to a director who was hired for his quirky, individual track record. By the time everything is said and done, Terry Gilliam has made a decent enough film, a passable couple hours of late-summer entertainment. It's identifiable as his work, both on the surface and underneath. But even though it's not a completely hollow piece of studio product, it's also not his best work; it's not touched by the sheer mad genius that distinguishes 12 Monkeys or Brazil. It's a professional Terry Gilliam rather than a passionate one; despite the occasional bits of dark whimsy, one gets the sense that he's trying to repair any damage the collapse of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote did to his reputation, even as he'd really rather be making Tideland.
Read the rest at HBS.
A Sound of Thunder
* (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2005 at Loews Boston Common #14 (preview)
A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur".
Right now, a certain portion of the people reading this review are thinking something along the lines of "gorillasaur... I am so there!" I can't stop the people whoo have that sort of instinctive reaction; I admit, I might have a hard time resisting it myself. I can only remind you that Ray Bradbury's original story didn't include such beasts, and a group of writers that includes a man whose credits include a fair amount of porn written under the name "Hugh Jorgan" is unlikely to have improved upon the work of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. Not that it takes such an obvious group of hacks to butcher a classic story; Robert Silverberg, a respected author in his own right, took much the same route when expanding three classic stories by Isaac Asimov to novel length.
Read the rest at HBS.
Transporter 2
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
"The Transporter" is the kind of concept that is really ideal for a movie franchise: Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a mercenary driver who is in a new city each film, where his job of taking things from point A to point B no questions asked is interrupted by pesky moral qualms, requiring him to chase people in cars and beat them up hand to hand to keep his conscience clear. A few years ago, he was in the South of France rescuing a pretty Chinese girl; now, he's in Miami protecting a ten-year-old boy. The important thing is that there is plentiful high-quality vehicular mayhem and martial arts, with Statham serving as an appealing center for the action.
This would, perhaps, get old as a weekly TV show; it's one thing to trot out the same formula for an hour and a half every couple years, but today, the audience expects some sort of supporting cast and continuing storylines and complexity from their action/adventure TV shows, and the budget probably wouldn't be there for the big action set pieces. Animation might work, but mainstream America doesn't yet go for teen/adult-oriented action in that medium; besides, the "how'd they do that?" on a car chase is the same as the "how'd they do that?" on two people talking when you're dealing with ink and paint or RenderMan files.
Read the rest at HBS.
I find it interesting that producer Luc Besson and director Louis Leterrier wound up bookending the season - Danny the Dog (aka Unleashed) back in May, and Transporter 2 Labor Day weekend. I wish more folks made action movies like Besson and company - straightforward good and evil with just enough detail to keep it interesting, and slick, exciting action. These movies are pure fun, and as such can get away with things that a Michael Bay, perhaps, can't.
And A Sound of Thunder? Still sucks and sucks hard.
Speaking of sucking and sucking hard, the next few updates will include dispatches from the Boston Film Festival. Man, has the IFFB rendered that festival moot.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2005 at AMC Fenway #11 (first-run)
Slick. There's no other word for this movie. Most of its pleasures are thoroughly superficial ones, and nothing that happens would likely hold up to much scrutiny. But it's tough to slice up; director Doug Liman applies a coat of teflon to everything, so complaints just sort of slide off, and one is left looking at how pretty the movie and its stars are, and at least enjoying it on that level.
The premise is ridiculous, of course - John and Jane Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) have been married five or six years, all the while unaware that the other is an assassin. Their marriage is having conventional difficulties as the movie starts, and things get much worse when they're both assigned the same target. They get in each other's way, the target escapes, and when each figures out that the other is responsible, the only way to stay in good with their mysterious employers is to take out their spouses. Gunplay and black comedy ensues.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Island
* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #9 (first-run)
I'm peculiarly loath to blame Michael Bay for The Island not being as good or successful a movie as it could and, perhaps, should have been. I've got no particular fondness for the man, as anyone who ever asked me my opinion of Armageddon will attest. But when you get right down to it, even though a great deal of this films many shortcomings can be reduced to "the director didn't do the job he should have"... I mean, come on, shouldn't the producers know better by now?
I mean, they've seen his films. Anyone who pays attention to the director's name should know Bay's strengths and weaknesses by now. The man does a damn good hero shot and has a real talent for composing the individual frames of a motion picture. He trusts his actors, sometimes too much (so Bruce Willis could sleepwalk through Armageddon), but he'll stay out of the way when he's getting a relatively solid performance. But he is absolutely, totally, completely inept at fast action. The Island is structured as a chase movie, and it is being steered by a director who simply does not have the necessary skills to direct a good chase scene. He shakes the camera too much, he jumps too fast, he doesn't let the audience follow the action. He's so bad at it - and always has been - that one wonders why, somewhere along the line, the money people didn't try to steer it toward a different director, or have a specialist brought in for the case scenes. After all, movies with martial arts action bring Yuen Woo-ping or Sammo Hung in to choreograph and shoot those scenes; why shouldn't Bay have a "chase specialist"?
Read the rest at HBS.
The Brothers Grimm
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2005 at Circle Cinema #1 (first-run)
You look at The Brothers Grimm, and you know what the producers were thinking. They've got this Ehren Kruger script, and it's set in pre-industrial times and kind of off-kilter. "Let's get Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam on this", they think. "They've got experience and their fans love this sort of thing. Guaranteed ticket sales!" So they hire Gilliam, and then freak out when he starts acting like Terry Gilliam - making things up as he goes along, making changes during shooting, and the like. It's as though they wanted Terry Gilliam's name and visual style, but not the sometimes torturous process that goes with it.
So there's a whole mess that happens - it becomes a "troubled" production, is rescued by a new studio whose heads decide to give a few more notes to a director who was hired for his quirky, individual track record. By the time everything is said and done, Terry Gilliam has made a decent enough film, a passable couple hours of late-summer entertainment. It's identifiable as his work, both on the surface and underneath. But even though it's not a completely hollow piece of studio product, it's also not his best work; it's not touched by the sheer mad genius that distinguishes 12 Monkeys or Brazil. It's a professional Terry Gilliam rather than a passionate one; despite the occasional bits of dark whimsy, one gets the sense that he's trying to repair any damage the collapse of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote did to his reputation, even as he'd really rather be making Tideland.
Read the rest at HBS.
A Sound of Thunder
* (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2005 at Loews Boston Common #14 (preview)
A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur".
Right now, a certain portion of the people reading this review are thinking something along the lines of "gorillasaur... I am so there!" I can't stop the people whoo have that sort of instinctive reaction; I admit, I might have a hard time resisting it myself. I can only remind you that Ray Bradbury's original story didn't include such beasts, and a group of writers that includes a man whose credits include a fair amount of porn written under the name "Hugh Jorgan" is unlikely to have improved upon the work of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. Not that it takes such an obvious group of hacks to butcher a classic story; Robert Silverberg, a respected author in his own right, took much the same route when expanding three classic stories by Isaac Asimov to novel length.
Read the rest at HBS.
Transporter 2
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 September 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
"The Transporter" is the kind of concept that is really ideal for a movie franchise: Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a mercenary driver who is in a new city each film, where his job of taking things from point A to point B no questions asked is interrupted by pesky moral qualms, requiring him to chase people in cars and beat them up hand to hand to keep his conscience clear. A few years ago, he was in the South of France rescuing a pretty Chinese girl; now, he's in Miami protecting a ten-year-old boy. The important thing is that there is plentiful high-quality vehicular mayhem and martial arts, with Statham serving as an appealing center for the action.
This would, perhaps, get old as a weekly TV show; it's one thing to trot out the same formula for an hour and a half every couple years, but today, the audience expects some sort of supporting cast and continuing storylines and complexity from their action/adventure TV shows, and the budget probably wouldn't be there for the big action set pieces. Animation might work, but mainstream America doesn't yet go for teen/adult-oriented action in that medium; besides, the "how'd they do that?" on a car chase is the same as the "how'd they do that?" on two people talking when you're dealing with ink and paint or RenderMan files.
Read the rest at HBS.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Because sometimes, people just need to be warned
A Sound of Thunder is going to be in the next group of reviews I do ("Big & Loud"), but sometimes you see something so astonishingly awful, you feel the need to warn people. Such is the case with this bit of rubbish, supposedly costing $80M (though you'll never see it on screen) and being held back for a year and a half - which I don't get; a movie with awful effects isn't going to look more charming by delaying it so that the audience has already seen Sky Captain, Revenge of the Sith, and War of the Worlds beforehand.
So avoid this piece of junk. But don't hold it against Ray Bradbury. He's one of the greats, and deserves much better.
A Sound of Thunder
* (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2005 at Loews Boston Common #14 (preview)
A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur".
Right now, a certain portion of the people reading this review are thinking something along the lines of "gorillasaur... I am so there!" I can't stop the people whoo have that sort of instinctive reaction; I admit, I might have a hard time resisting it myself. I can only remind you that Ray Bradbury's original story didn't include such beasts, and a group of writers that includes a man whose credits include a fair amount of porn written under the name "Hugh Jorgan" is unlikely to have improved upon the work of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. Not that it takes such an obvious group of hacks to butcher a classic story; Robert Silverberg, a respected author in his own right, took much the same route when expanding three classic stories by Isaac Asimov to novel length.
Read the rest at HBS.
So avoid this piece of junk. But don't hold it against Ray Bradbury. He's one of the greats, and deserves much better.
A Sound of Thunder
* (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2005 at Loews Boston Common #14 (preview)
A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur".
Right now, a certain portion of the people reading this review are thinking something along the lines of "gorillasaur... I am so there!" I can't stop the people whoo have that sort of instinctive reaction; I admit, I might have a hard time resisting it myself. I can only remind you that Ray Bradbury's original story didn't include such beasts, and a group of writers that includes a man whose credits include a fair amount of porn written under the name "Hugh Jorgan" is unlikely to have improved upon the work of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. Not that it takes such an obvious group of hacks to butcher a classic story; Robert Silverberg, a respected author in his own right, took much the same route when expanding three classic stories by Isaac Asimov to novel length.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Summer Re-runs: Bewitched, War of the Worlds, Herbie
Too late to talk much about these remakes other than to say that War of the Worlds is the only one really worth it. But, we knew that last year, didn't we?
Bewitched
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
Movies like Bewitched get critics riled up, because you only have to hear "a movie based upon an old sitcom" in order to start railing about how Hollywood has no creativity and is strip-mining pop culture rather than coming up with something new and so on. I think that's just prejudice against television as a medium; you don't hear that so much when a movie is an adaptation of a novel or a play. Besides, one doesn't need that attitude to find Bewitched to be a soul-deadening experience.
For some, just seeing the Ephron name in the credits is enough. The Ephron sisters aren't inherently bad writers, I don't think, but I wonder if they've lost touch with their audience. This is a movie that displays no familiarity with the world outside their own circle. Everyone, it seems, is either in the entertainment industry or a witch/warlock able to make the world do his or her bidding at the snap of a finger. Only one or two characters in the film seems like anybody to whom an audience member might have some sort of point of reference, and while it's not strictly necessary for the audience to identify with the characters, those characters should be much more interesting than they are. Of course, that may not be an immediately apparent problem in Hollywood - after all, I'm sure Nora & Delia Ephron can relate to arrogant actors, pushy agents, and put-upon personal assistants just fine.
Read the rest at HBS.
War of the Worlds
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
I was of two minds when I heard Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise were doing an adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds set in the present day. The first was excited, because there aren't many directors around as good at science fiction as Spielberg is, but the second was kind of cranky. Orson Welles and George Pal had each updated the story, and doing it as a period piece might have been an interesting, different angle. Or, why not use more modern source material (Niven & Pournelle's Footfall has been begging to be adapted for nearly two decades now)? But War of the Worlds is what they did, and they did it very well indeed, hitting only one or two false notes along the way.
The script by Josh Friedman and David Koepp tackles the story not from the perspective of those fighting the war, but instead of a family caught in its path. Ray Ferrier (Cruise) has custody of his kids for the weekend, but it's contentious: Teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is openly hostile, while ten-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is developing tastes and attitudes that don't quite mesh with Ray's working-class sensibilities. Everything's just starting to feel good and uncomfortable when a freakish lightning storm hits. When Ray goes to investigate, he and a crowd of onlookers find that the bolts have blasted a hole in the ground. A gigantic three-legged machine climbs outand starts vaporizing people, few of whom act as decisively - and sensibly - as Ray in running away. They decide to head from New York to Boston, because that's where the kids' mother (Miranda Otto) is, and, well, you've got to have a destination, even if it's really no safer than where you're leaving.
Read the rest at HBS.
Herbie: Fully Loaded
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2005 at Arlington Capitol #5 (second-run)
I'm naturally inclined to like Herbie: Fully Loaded. I like most of the cast, some quite a bit, and the franchise itself is on my good side, even if I can't actually remember watching any of the movies except for the made-for-TV entry Peyton Reed did for The Wonderful World of Disney around eight years ago. I like that Angela Robinson and her screenwriters made a G-rated movie, rather than throwing in a swearword or something to bump the rating up a notch because looking too wholesome is uncommercial. But just because the audience may be inclined to like a movie doesn't mean the filmmakers shouldn't make some sort of effort.
The folks making Herbie don't make many false steps, but they also don't take many steps very far off the beaten path. Maggie Payton (Linsday Lohan) has just graduated from college and will be moving cross-country to start a job in New York in a few weeks. She's the first in her family to go to college, as the family business is racing cars - her grandfather was a legend, her father Ray (Michael Keaton) runs the team, and brother Ray Jr. (Breckin Meyer) is the team's driver, though not as good a driver as Maggie (who, of course, promised Ray she wouldn't race again after an accident in high school). When she finds Herbie at a junkyard, she's initially not impressed, but as we all know, the car has a mind of its own, and not only does Herbie love to race, he's also unable to resist nudging Maggie and Kevin (Justin Long), the mechanic she brings the car to for a tune-up (and a high-school friend), together. And, of course, there's a condescending rival driver (Matt Dillon) to contend with.
Read the rest at HBS.
Bewitched
* * (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2005 at AMC Fenway #13 (first-run)
Movies like Bewitched get critics riled up, because you only have to hear "a movie based upon an old sitcom" in order to start railing about how Hollywood has no creativity and is strip-mining pop culture rather than coming up with something new and so on. I think that's just prejudice against television as a medium; you don't hear that so much when a movie is an adaptation of a novel or a play. Besides, one doesn't need that attitude to find Bewitched to be a soul-deadening experience.
For some, just seeing the Ephron name in the credits is enough. The Ephron sisters aren't inherently bad writers, I don't think, but I wonder if they've lost touch with their audience. This is a movie that displays no familiarity with the world outside their own circle. Everyone, it seems, is either in the entertainment industry or a witch/warlock able to make the world do his or her bidding at the snap of a finger. Only one or two characters in the film seems like anybody to whom an audience member might have some sort of point of reference, and while it's not strictly necessary for the audience to identify with the characters, those characters should be much more interesting than they are. Of course, that may not be an immediately apparent problem in Hollywood - after all, I'm sure Nora & Delia Ephron can relate to arrogant actors, pushy agents, and put-upon personal assistants just fine.
Read the rest at HBS.
War of the Worlds
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #12 (first-run)
I was of two minds when I heard Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise were doing an adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds set in the present day. The first was excited, because there aren't many directors around as good at science fiction as Spielberg is, but the second was kind of cranky. Orson Welles and George Pal had each updated the story, and doing it as a period piece might have been an interesting, different angle. Or, why not use more modern source material (Niven & Pournelle's Footfall has been begging to be adapted for nearly two decades now)? But War of the Worlds is what they did, and they did it very well indeed, hitting only one or two false notes along the way.
The script by Josh Friedman and David Koepp tackles the story not from the perspective of those fighting the war, but instead of a family caught in its path. Ray Ferrier (Cruise) has custody of his kids for the weekend, but it's contentious: Teenage son Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is openly hostile, while ten-year-old daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is developing tastes and attitudes that don't quite mesh with Ray's working-class sensibilities. Everything's just starting to feel good and uncomfortable when a freakish lightning storm hits. When Ray goes to investigate, he and a crowd of onlookers find that the bolts have blasted a hole in the ground. A gigantic three-legged machine climbs outand starts vaporizing people, few of whom act as decisively - and sensibly - as Ray in running away. They decide to head from New York to Boston, because that's where the kids' mother (Miranda Otto) is, and, well, you've got to have a destination, even if it's really no safer than where you're leaving.
Read the rest at HBS.
Herbie: Fully Loaded
* * (out of four)
Seen 7 August 2005 at Arlington Capitol #5 (second-run)
I'm naturally inclined to like Herbie: Fully Loaded. I like most of the cast, some quite a bit, and the franchise itself is on my good side, even if I can't actually remember watching any of the movies except for the made-for-TV entry Peyton Reed did for The Wonderful World of Disney around eight years ago. I like that Angela Robinson and her screenwriters made a G-rated movie, rather than throwing in a swearword or something to bump the rating up a notch because looking too wholesome is uncommercial. But just because the audience may be inclined to like a movie doesn't mean the filmmakers shouldn't make some sort of effort.
The folks making Herbie don't make many false steps, but they also don't take many steps very far off the beaten path. Maggie Payton (Linsday Lohan) has just graduated from college and will be moving cross-country to start a job in New York in a few weeks. She's the first in her family to go to college, as the family business is racing cars - her grandfather was a legend, her father Ray (Michael Keaton) runs the team, and brother Ray Jr. (Breckin Meyer) is the team's driver, though not as good a driver as Maggie (who, of course, promised Ray she wouldn't race again after an accident in high school). When she finds Herbie at a junkyard, she's initially not impressed, but as we all know, the car has a mind of its own, and not only does Herbie love to race, he's also unable to resist nudging Maggie and Kevin (Justin Long), the mechanic she brings the car to for a tune-up (and a high-school friend), together. And, of course, there's a condescending rival driver (Matt Dillon) to contend with.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Superheroes: Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, and Sky High
Regular readers are probably mostly people that know me, and therefore know I like my comics. Maybe they've come here from a link in my signature on Newsarama. So my enthusiasm for these movies shouldn't be a surprise.
The funny thing is, since Fantasia and whatever disorder compels me to review everything I see has left a bit of time between me seeing these movies and writing about them, I find myself looking at the ratings I've jotted down on my little notepad, since that's what I thought coming out of them, and finding that the actual reviews don't quite match. For instance, Batman Begins originally had 3½ stars, and Sky High and even three. But as I sit down to write, I find myself recalling Sky High more fondly. My reservations about Batman were there when I saw it, but two months later, the stuff that made me somewhat giddy weren't coming to mind so quickly, whereas I was having a hard time recalling bits of Sky High that weren't kind of adorable.
I'm hoping for sequels from all three - Sky High because it is just that much fun, and Batman and Fantastic Four because with all the work they put into getting the origins set up, they deserve a chance to cut loose and just have some fun.
Batman Begins
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at Loews Boston Common #8 (first-run)
I have to admit, I kind of miss the Joel Schumacher/Adam West type of "Batman" story, if only because they are completely unconcerned with the question that stares you in the face when you see a "grounded-in-reality" comic book story like Batman Begins: If a man could combat crime effectively by dressing up like a bat and beating up crooks, why hasn't anybody tried it (successfully) yet? It's a peril that Christopher Nolan's film constantly flirts with: Fans want Batman dark, gritty and noir-ish, but they also want him fighting comics' best rogues gallery of colorful supervillains.
For this first installment, Nolan (along with co-writer and comic book specialist David Goyer) choose to emphasize the former, mostly building a solid framework with at least the appearance of realism while almost begrudgingly bringing the more fantastical elements in as the story progresses. This film's Gotham City isn't the gothic castle of Tim Burton's films or the four-color circus of Schumacher's. Aside from a few architectural oddities, it's just a city with a crime problem, and maybe a little bit more fondness for basic black style than one generally sees outside of a movie that wants to look cool. Batman's gadgets aren't so specialized and perfect as to raise questions like "seriously, did Bruce Wayne build a plane with just his butler's help?"
Read the rest at HBS.
Fantastic Four
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #5 (first-run)
From the American Heritage Dictionary, via dictionary.com: "fantastic: adj. (1) Quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance. (2) (a) Unrestrainedly fanciful; extravagant; (b) Bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange; (c) Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal; (3) Wonderful or superb; remarkable." The last definition is the most prevalent today, and the snarky one-liners about how Fantastic Four... isn't practically write themselves. But the real crime Fox's movie commits isn't one of execution; it's that it doesn't take the wild flights of fancy associated with these characters.
Sure, a lot of folks will tell you that the appeal of the Fantastic Four as a property is that they're a family, and that's undoubtedly part of it: When these characters first appeared in 1962, the soap-opera elements were a marked contrast to what DC's rather bland superheros were doing at the time. That was writer Stan Lee's doing, but just as important was what artist Jack Kirby would bring: A crazy new alien or supervillain or monster every month. You won't find much of that craziness here, though: No Mole Men, shape-shifting alien invaders, planet-eating giants, parallel universes, flying cars, underwater kings... Just a sadly predictable love triangle and a villain given too many shades of gray.
Read the rest at HBS.
Sky High
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #11 (first-run)
Movies like Sky High should cause Marvel and DC to worry. Sure, it seems like clever superhero movies doing well would only indicate more demand for their characters, but think about it - Sky High selling tickets and DVDs means that America likes superheroes, even if they don't have a forty-year publishing history. So licensing Spider-Man might be worth it, but why bother with the second- or third-tier guys when you can just create your own? In terms of pleasing the audience, you only have to worry about whether or not Sky High is a good movie (yes), not whether or not Michael Angarano gets Will Stronghold "right" (N/A).
Will, you see, is the son of two of the cities most popular superheroes, Steve "The Commander" Stronghold (Kurt Russell) and Josie "Jetstream" Stronghold (Kelly Preston). The trouble is, though, it's the first day of high school, and he hasn't had any powers manifest. This is a problem, since he's going to a private school for the children of superheroes, and as soon as he gets there, he's classified as a sidekick. He's cool with that, though - his friends are sidekicks, and it means he's not in classes with Warren Peace (Steven Strait), the son of his father's arch-nemesis. When his father's super-strength manifests itself during a fight in the cafeteria, he's transferred to the "hero" classes, and a pretty upperclassman girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes an interest in him, and that's not so bad, either. Unless, of course, he starts taking his true friends for granted, or there's something more sinister going on than just the usual high school rivalries.
Read the rest at HBS.
Next up: Summer repeats
The funny thing is, since Fantasia and whatever disorder compels me to review everything I see has left a bit of time between me seeing these movies and writing about them, I find myself looking at the ratings I've jotted down on my little notepad, since that's what I thought coming out of them, and finding that the actual reviews don't quite match. For instance, Batman Begins originally had 3½ stars, and Sky High and even three. But as I sit down to write, I find myself recalling Sky High more fondly. My reservations about Batman were there when I saw it, but two months later, the stuff that made me somewhat giddy weren't coming to mind so quickly, whereas I was having a hard time recalling bits of Sky High that weren't kind of adorable.
I'm hoping for sequels from all three - Sky High because it is just that much fun, and Batman and Fantastic Four because with all the work they put into getting the origins set up, they deserve a chance to cut loose and just have some fun.
Batman Begins
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at Loews Boston Common #8 (first-run)
I have to admit, I kind of miss the Joel Schumacher/Adam West type of "Batman" story, if only because they are completely unconcerned with the question that stares you in the face when you see a "grounded-in-reality" comic book story like Batman Begins: If a man could combat crime effectively by dressing up like a bat and beating up crooks, why hasn't anybody tried it (successfully) yet? It's a peril that Christopher Nolan's film constantly flirts with: Fans want Batman dark, gritty and noir-ish, but they also want him fighting comics' best rogues gallery of colorful supervillains.
For this first installment, Nolan (along with co-writer and comic book specialist David Goyer) choose to emphasize the former, mostly building a solid framework with at least the appearance of realism while almost begrudgingly bringing the more fantastical elements in as the story progresses. This film's Gotham City isn't the gothic castle of Tim Burton's films or the four-color circus of Schumacher's. Aside from a few architectural oddities, it's just a city with a crime problem, and maybe a little bit more fondness for basic black style than one generally sees outside of a movie that wants to look cool. Batman's gadgets aren't so specialized and perfect as to raise questions like "seriously, did Bruce Wayne build a plane with just his butler's help?"
Read the rest at HBS.
Fantastic Four
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #5 (first-run)
From the American Heritage Dictionary, via dictionary.com: "fantastic: adj. (1) Quaint or strange in form, conception, or appearance. (2) (a) Unrestrainedly fanciful; extravagant; (b) Bizarre, as in form or appearance; strange; (c) Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal; (3) Wonderful or superb; remarkable." The last definition is the most prevalent today, and the snarky one-liners about how Fantastic Four... isn't practically write themselves. But the real crime Fox's movie commits isn't one of execution; it's that it doesn't take the wild flights of fancy associated with these characters.
Sure, a lot of folks will tell you that the appeal of the Fantastic Four as a property is that they're a family, and that's undoubtedly part of it: When these characters first appeared in 1962, the soap-opera elements were a marked contrast to what DC's rather bland superheros were doing at the time. That was writer Stan Lee's doing, but just as important was what artist Jack Kirby would bring: A crazy new alien or supervillain or monster every month. You won't find much of that craziness here, though: No Mole Men, shape-shifting alien invaders, planet-eating giants, parallel universes, flying cars, underwater kings... Just a sadly predictable love triangle and a villain given too many shades of gray.
Read the rest at HBS.
Sky High
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2005 at AMC Fenway #11 (first-run)
Movies like Sky High should cause Marvel and DC to worry. Sure, it seems like clever superhero movies doing well would only indicate more demand for their characters, but think about it - Sky High selling tickets and DVDs means that America likes superheroes, even if they don't have a forty-year publishing history. So licensing Spider-Man might be worth it, but why bother with the second- or third-tier guys when you can just create your own? In terms of pleasing the audience, you only have to worry about whether or not Sky High is a good movie (yes), not whether or not Michael Angarano gets Will Stronghold "right" (N/A).
Will, you see, is the son of two of the cities most popular superheroes, Steve "The Commander" Stronghold (Kurt Russell) and Josie "Jetstream" Stronghold (Kelly Preston). The trouble is, though, it's the first day of high school, and he hasn't had any powers manifest. This is a problem, since he's going to a private school for the children of superheroes, and as soon as he gets there, he's classified as a sidekick. He's cool with that, though - his friends are sidekicks, and it means he's not in classes with Warren Peace (Steven Strait), the son of his father's arch-nemesis. When his father's super-strength manifests itself during a fight in the cafeteria, he's transferred to the "hero" classes, and a pretty upperclassman girl (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes an interest in him, and that's not so bad, either. Unless, of course, he starts taking his true friends for granted, or there's something more sinister going on than just the usual high school rivalries.
Read the rest at HBS.
Next up: Summer repeats
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The films of Harold Lloyd
Harold Lloyd, I figure, is a distant third when you rank silent comedians by how well they're known to the mainstream audience. Everyone knows Chaplin, of course - the Little Tramp's status as an American icon is well-deserved, and Chaplin was one of the first movie stars to write and direct his own pictures; being one of the founders of United Artists gave him even more control. Buster Keaton eventually gained a reputation among contrarian cineastes, as in "sure, Chaplin was very good, but Keaton was the real genius of physical comedy in the 1920s." It's not an indefensible position; there is a lot of sheer brilliance on his résumé, even if he's only credited as the star on most of his productions. He's not as well-known (I've seen someone miss a trivia question asking who starred in The General, Steamboat Bill Jr., and Buster Keaton Rides Again), but there's a little more awareness, especially after he was often cited as an influence on the likes of Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow.
Lloyd, on the other hand, flew under the radar for many years, despite the fact that his films out-drew Chaplin's and Keaton's during their heyday. Part of that is because he seems to have had a solid head on his shoulders, not getting involved in scandal like Chaplin or going broke like Keaton. He made good money on his movies, kept the copyrights, and was thus able to quietly retire to pursue other interests when sound film reduced the demand for his style of comedy. He married his co-star Mildred Davies and they stayed together until she died forty-six years later. He (and later, the Harold Lloyd Trust) never let his films lapse into the public domain, so there hasn't been a proliferation of cheap VHS tapes or DVDs.
Now, though, the Trust has signed a deal with New Line to distribute "The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection" on DVD in November (hopefully it'll show up in the Amazon link soon), and earlier this year, some of Lloyd's films played theaters in New York and Cambridge at the very least. I wound up basically living in the Brattle for a week, after the 3-D movies, with just a short venture downtown to see Batman Begins. And I kind of fell in love this these movies.
They're not all all-time greats, but only one or two of the silents is average. Even though the talkies don't quite work, there's something fascinating about watching Lloyd and company flail about as the movie industry changes overnight, and suddenly the form they had complete mastery of was obsolete. It's amazing and more than a bit sad, although Lloyd came through it better than some of his contemporaries (Buster Keaton had to rediscovered after doing local television in L.A., for instance). Frequent love interest Jobyna Ralston, for instance, became a star in these movies, got a high-profile supporting role in the first Oscar-winning film, Wings, and then saw her career die after just a couple of talkies (one a Rin Tin Tin vehicle) because of her lisp. Reminds me of one of my favorite books in elementary school, The Secret of Terror Castle (I'd link to it on Amazon, but apparently the only versions available have all references to Alfred Hitchcock replaced with some generic name. Bah!).
I didn't find out about the bomb that blew off Lloyd's right thumb and forefinger until midway through the series, and must admit to being impressed with how well he covered it up. The glove and prosthetic becomes more obvious in later movies, as film stock improves, but he still does some daredevil stuff without two of my favorite digits.
After my detour in Montreal, there was still one more night of this to see: The Harvard Film Archive ran The Freshman and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock back-to-back at the end of July. Well, almost - The Freshman was taken from a print of one of the compilation films, and had some of the more anachronistic humor cut out (such as the "radio liar" scene), while Diddlebock was the Mad Wednesday cut - looks like I'll have to get a DVD to see the whole thing. I think the HFA program was kind of sneaky about that - it never actually said that the full version was playing, but it certainly seemed to be implied. Still, one benefit was Yakov Gubanov doing one of his nifty, improvised live scores for The Freshman, a marked improvement over the scores on the Brattle prints (which seemed to be the same three pieces, and would start and stop mid-scene without rhyme or reason).
Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to the big box set in November, which will have everything reviewed here except Diddlebock (available in a bunch of public-domain versions) and Welcome Danger (rumored for next year, with both talkie and "unplugged" versions).
The Freshman
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd's films have, of late, languished in undeserved obscurity. Though his movies were every bit as funny and successful at the box office as the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd remains a distant third in terms of audience awareness, assuming the average modern filmmaker knows about silent comedians at all. America left the silents behind very quickly at the end of the 1920s, with only a few of the silent stars really thriving after the transition. Harold Lloyd wasn't one of them, although movie lovers would, for a time, remember him fondly. This 1925 film in particular was a favorite; good and popular enough that in the mid-1940s another cinema great, Preston Sturges, would lure Lloyd out of retirement to do a sequel.
In the film, young Harold Lamb (Lloyd) goes off to college, head full of mistaken impressions from the movies of what campus life would be like. His ignorance makes him a target for a campus troublemaker (Brooks Benedict), who seizes on the incoming freshman's naiveté to embarrass and impoverish him. The school's football star (James Anderson) and coach (Pat Harmon) also exploit Harold's desire to be popular by giving him the impression that he's a member of the school's football team, when in fact he is at best a waterboy and at worst a tackling dummy. About the only person not taking advantage of young Harold is Peggy (Jobyna Ralston), the pretty daughter of his landlady who also works in the coat-check of a local hotel.
Read the rest at HBS.
Speedy
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Most of Harold Lloyd films were set in California, by implication if not by explicit statement. For Speedy, Harold and company made the cross country trip to the Big Apple, which provides him with an environment frantic enough to keep up with Lloyd's brand of hyperkinetic chaos.
The title, aside from being Lloyd's own nickname (one which nobody who has seen him in a movie will dispute), is also what people call his character, Harold Swift. "Speedy" is a carefree fellow, not particularly worried when his lacksadasical ways cost him a job in this pre-Depression New York, because another is always just around the corner, and, besides, unemployment gives him more time to spend with girlfriend Jane Dillon (Ann Christy), if not more money to spend on her. His current job as a soda jerk is ideal, since the establishment has a telephone he can use to get updates on the play of his beloved Yankees.
Read the rest at HBS
Safety Last!
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Safety Last! is the film from which the retrospective of Harold Lloyd's films that recently played at the Brattle Theater takes its name, and is also the source of the general public's most enduring image of Lloyd: A man scaling the wall of a building, dangling from the face of a clock tower as his weight begins to pry it loose. It's a fine example of what Lloyd called a "thrill picture", a description that the audience would have a hard time disagreeing with.
It starts out innocently enough. A boy (Lloyd) from rural California sets out for the city to make his fortune so that he can marry his girlfriend (Mildred Davis). It takes a lot more work than he expects, and he winds up barely holding a job at the materials counter in a department store, quite behind his expected timetable for becoming president of the company. Despite the fact that he and his construction-worker pal (Bill Strother) are dodging the landlady, his letters home describe a grand success, so the girl decides to stop waiting for him to send for her and hops on a train. He hatches a plan to receive a bonus for staging a publicity stunt where his fearless friend climbs the wall of the building, but an angry policeman (Noah Young) is waiting for the pal at the building. Don't worry, he says, you just climb up one floor, we'll switch out at the second-floor window after I ditch this cop, and I'll climb the rest of the way.
Yeah. That'll work.
Read the rest at HBS.
Girl Shy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd is best known for his physical comedy and his daredevil "thrill pictures", and for good reason. Just as important a part of his appeal, though, is that there is often a genuine sweetness to his movies, and a great deal of chemistry with his leading ladies. Most slapstick comedies from this period have a girl for a love interest, but it's perfunctory. With Girl Shy, though, the Harold Lloyd Company makes a romantic comedy worthy of the title.
Harold Meadows (Lloyd) is terrified of girls, developing a terrible stutter whenever one is around. He's an apprentice in his grandfather's small-town tailor shop, but dreams of bigger things - he has written a handbook about how to make love, which he intends to bring to a publisher in Los Angeles (as the titles inform us, one studies what one fears, and the more Harold learned, the more frightened he became). Meanwhile, Mary Buckingham's car breaks down, so she and her little dog need to catch a train. Dogs aren't allowed, but Mary (Jobyna Ralston) gets help hiding him from the conductor from fellow passenger Harold (who doesn't immediately recognize that he's not stuttering around Mary) They don't expect to see each other again. But later she insists on swinging through the town when on a drive with gentleman friend Ronald De Vore (Carlton Griffin) - who is reluctant for reasons that will be clear later - and when they meet up at a picturesque riverbed, they're delighted. But when Harold finds out his book is a laughingstock at the publisher, he pretends he never loved her. A couple revelations later, though, and Harold is off to L.A. using every method of transportation short of an airplane to stop her wedding.
Read the rest at HBS.
Welcome Danger
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd) ("silent" version)
Welcome Danger is kind of a mess, as I expect many films were in 1929. The addition of sound to movies was a major change in the entertainment industry that happened almost overnight; the explosive growth of DVD and music downloads has nothing on how the talkies more or less killed silent film. A number of silent films such as Welcome Danger were reworked to include sound, and as such are not complete successes either as silents or sound films.
This was an ambitious movie to begin with; one cut screened for test audiences ran three hours. At nearly two hours, it's still one of the longest films Lloyd made, if not the longest. The plot is also relatively complex compared to the average silent comedy; while many of Lloyd's silents could be broken up into pieces and had scant few characters beyond Harold and whatever girl he was wooing, Welcome Danger thrusts young botanist Harold Bledsoe into an investigation of a series of murders and other crimes taking place in Chinatown, all masterminded by a mysterious tong leader known as "The Dragon". He's brought in because the late Bledsoe Sr. was San Francsico's police chief, and the current chief figures the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Harold turns out to be almost useless, though; he doesn't even know about fingerprints until he arrives at the police station, and then he gets on everybody's nerves by fingerprinting everybody, including (and especially) the cops. Still, he does meet a girl, Billie Lee (Barbara Kent), whose little brother Buddy has one of those mysterious movie illnesses. You know, the kind that show no obvious symptoms and can apparently only be treated by Dr. Chang Gow (James Wang), who has been targeted by The Dragon.
Read the rest at HBS.
Dr. Jack
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
The unconventional doctor is a popular character type because, if we're honest with ourselves, most MDs scare us. We see them when we're at our worst, and even the helpful ones scare us in ways that only people smarter than us who have information we need can. It's just as natural to be suspicious is such a situation as it is necessary to trust, which is the sort of paradox that births comedy naturally.
In this movie, the epitome of the doctor who uses his daunting acumen to intimidate his patients is D.r Ludwig von Saulsbourg (Eric Mayne), who has been treating anemic "Sick Little Well Girl" Mary (Mildred Price) for years even though, alas, she shows no sign of improvement. Her wealthy father (John T. Prince) despairs, but his lawyer (C. Norman Hammond) starts to become suspicious, especially after a return to his hometown at the behest of his mother's doctor. Mother is fine; the doctor has simply noted that she's depressed from not seeing her son often enough. The lawyer notes that a lot of the patients Harold "Dr. Jack" Jackson (Harold Lloyd) sees seem to have problems that can be resolved quickly and without medication, and asks him to take a look at his client's daughter.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Kid Brother
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
There's something almost feudal about the small town of Hickoryville, where the title character of The Kid Brother lives alongside his ox-like father and brothers. I don't know if that sort of small town, so dominated by one man or family's personality, could exist today, even if it could a century ago. Of course, it doesn't have to be real; this silent comedy is a riff on the story of the lesser prince proving his worth, and you need royalty for that.
In Hickoryville, the royalty is, of course, the Hickorys. Jim Hickory (Walter James) is the Sheriff and town leader, with sons Leo and Olin serving as deputies. Big, tough, burly men, they don't think much of youngest brother Harold (Harold Lloyd), a glasses-wearing dweeb more inclined to build a mechanical contraption to handle a task than to simply attack it with raw strength. Jim is especially annoyed when Harold tells a group of traveling performers who mistake him for the sheriff that they can set up on the town green, and sends him to get rid of them, even though it hurts Harold to break it to beautiful Mary Powers (Jobyna Ralston), daughter of the show's founder. Harold is humiliated, the show is wrecked, and soon after, the town treasury has been stolen after having been placed in the Hickorys' hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Hot Water
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Bratle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Anyone who has watched movies for a while and picked up trivia likely knows about reel changes, and the "cigarette burns" that signal them. Before platter systems became popular, most theaters had two projectors per screen, which the projectionist would manually alternate between, cuing up one 10-15 minute reel of film while the other played. I often wonder, when watching silent comedies like Hot Water, whether most theaters at the time only had one projector, resulting in there being something akin to a commercial break between reels as the projectionist readied the next one. Not just because I've seen intertitle cards with "Part 3" on other features, but because some silents (such as this one) seem so modular.
By "modular", I mean that even though there's something of a through line to the entire movie, each reel really seems to be doing its own thing, and could easily be watched as an individual short or spread out over multiple showings as parts of a serial and still be relatively complete experiences. After a brief prelude where a groom's best man (Harold Lloyd) comments to his friend that he'll never get the single life - and is immediately brought down by Jobyna Ralston's "soft-boiled eyes", we flash forward to a few years later, when "Hubby" and "Wifey" get a surprise visit from her busybody mother (Josephine Crowell), layabout big brother (Charles Stevenson), and destructive little brother (Mickey McBan). What follows are a few quick vignettes, including Hubby trying to get home on a cable car with a live turkey, a disastrous first trip in the couple's new automobile, and a peculiar family dinner and its aftermath: Hubby chloroforms his mother-in-law, believes he has accidentally killed her, and that he is being haunted when she is merely sleepwalking.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Cat's-Paw
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Give Harold Lloyd some credit; he not only accepted the march of progress, but he did his best to embrace it and help it along. During his later years, he was fascinated by 3-D photography, and many early tests of color filmmaking took place on his "GreenAcres" estate. And he didn't shy away from sound when that was introduced to film, or stubbornly try to make the same kind of film that made him rich after the public was no longer buying them. It's just a pity that he wasn't very well-suited to talkies.
For all The Cat's-Paw's faults, being too much like Lloyd's earlier movies isn't one of them. Rather than being a California everyman who can meet any challenge with a challenge of quick thinking and surprising athleticism, his Ezekiel Cobb is a raised-in-China missionary's son with a piece of wisdom from a Confucian philosopher for every situation. Indeed, the very fact that the character is named something other than Harold indicates that Cobb is more a character than a variation on Lloyd's "glasses" persona, though the spectacles remain. There's some similarities, but Ezekiel's specific background is far more of a factor here than it is in his other films.
Read the rest at HBS.
Why Worry?
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Why Worry? is silent comedy distilled into a powerful, concentrated form. Every one of its sixty minutes is packed with gags and absurdity, supplying jokes fast and furious in a style only matched by animated cartoons. Minute for minute, it's one of the funniest movies ever made.
The premise is fearsomely simple: Hypochondriac millionaire Harold Van Pelham (Harold Lloyd) decides to journey to Central America for his health, valet (Wallace Howe) and nurse (Jobyna Ralston) in tow. Unbeknownst to him, the country he's visiting is about to erupt into revolution, and after he and the servants get separated, he finds himself partnered up with the immensely strong - and just plain immense - Colosso (Johan Aasen), trying to make his way back to hotel for the relaxing sabbatical he'd been expecting.
Read the rest at HBS.
For Heaven's Sake
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd's "glasses" character would take many last names over the years, but the basics always remained the same - average-looking underdog-type, decked out in horn-rimmed spectacles and a straw hat, who succeeds through perserverence and quickness despite not looking like much. I must confess, though, that I have a fondness for the variation on this character he uses in movies like Why Worry and For Heaven's Sake: A rich man who lands in a situation outside his customary life of luxury and proves himself more capable of fending for himself than one's first impression would suggest.
The first we see of J. Harold Manners (Lloyd) certainly isn't much - he's a feckless fat cat whose response to a careless automobile accident is to cross the street and drop some cash at the nearest car dealer. His second or third wreck of the day involves a street preacher's soup table. Not really listening to the conversation, he writes the preacher (Paul Weigel) a check large enough for not just a new table, but the mission he dreams of running. When he reads about the mission - with his name attached! - in the paper, he's appalled, and dashes back downtown to at least take the sign with his name down (what millionaire wants to be associated with poor people?). There, he meets the man's daughter (Jobyna Ralston), and his decision to stick around is what must inevitably follow from meeting such a lady.
Read the rest at HBS.
Movie Crazy
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, so it's amusing to consider the central joke: That there's no way a Hollywood producer would hire Harold Lloyd (or, at least, his "glasses" character) to star in movies, despite the fact that the real thing was one of the biggest stars of the twenties. Of course, it's a false comparison, even if it's worth a chuckle - the real Lloyd was a very different animal than this film's Harold Hall.
Lloyd was, in fact, a good-looking guy; it's said that he was the inspiration for Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, for how a simple pair of glasses can, in fact, fundamentally change a person's appearance and perception. He was also quite sharp, an uncredited co-director and producer on many of his films, who not only retained ownership of his movies' copyright but preserved the negatives when many others failed to do so. His character isn't exactly a moron, but he is sort of a doofus, the kind who attracts trouble without meaning to.
Read the rest at HBS.
Feet First
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
It says something that within a couple of weeks of seeing Feet First in Cambridge's Brattle Theater, I would notice a couple of similar gags (a shoe salesman using the same patter over and over again) re-used in a Korean romantic comedy by the name of Please Teach Me English! at Montreal's Fantasia Festival. I'm not sure what it says - that Lloyd influenced filmmakers seventy years later in far-off reaches of the globe? That certain ideas are universal? That the human mind has an astonishing ability to manufacture connections where none exist?
I don't know. I wonder if maybe, in 1930, the first act of this movie felt fresh and exciting. Seventy-five years later, it feels limp, a familiar framework without enough jokes to make up for it. Things do improve after a slow start, and the film's middle act is fitfully funny, even if it seems to draw the premise out for much too long. Still, it gets the movie to the third act, and while that last act is a pretty transparent reprise of the famous Safety Last finale, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of artists go back to the same wells to do variations on a theme, and this second iteration of Harold climbing a building does offer some new thrills, if no clock faces.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Summer Double Features) ("Mad Wednesday" cut)
Preston Sturges was just what Harold Lloyd needed, seventeen years earlier. Lloyd was one of the great silent comedians, but his reedy voice and failure to acclimate to the different tempos of sound pictures caused his career to peter out; Sturges was an inventor-turned-playwright-turned-screenwriter who knew how to combine witty dialog and broad slapstick into screwball comedy. By the time Sturges's star had ascended during the sound era, though, Lloyd's had faded away. Nearly a decade passed between his last film for Paramount and this screwball comedy, which Sturges created to coax one of his comedy idols out of retirement.
And yet, initially, it seems like no time at all has passed. The film opens with footage of Harold's football heroics from The Freshman, and Lloyd doesn't appear to have aged a day when we see a newly-shot scene of the team in the locker room, where E.J. Waggleberry (Raymond Walburn), an excitable Tate alumnus (shots of him cheering had replaced Jobyna Ralston's bits during the game) offers him a job after graduation. Months later, Harold accepts, only to find out that Waggleberry offers a lot of sports heroes jobs, so even though Harold has ideas for the advertising firm, he'll start at the bottom, in accounting.
Read the rest at HBS.
Lloyd, on the other hand, flew under the radar for many years, despite the fact that his films out-drew Chaplin's and Keaton's during their heyday. Part of that is because he seems to have had a solid head on his shoulders, not getting involved in scandal like Chaplin or going broke like Keaton. He made good money on his movies, kept the copyrights, and was thus able to quietly retire to pursue other interests when sound film reduced the demand for his style of comedy. He married his co-star Mildred Davies and they stayed together until she died forty-six years later. He (and later, the Harold Lloyd Trust) never let his films lapse into the public domain, so there hasn't been a proliferation of cheap VHS tapes or DVDs.
Now, though, the Trust has signed a deal with New Line to distribute "The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection" on DVD in November (hopefully it'll show up in the Amazon link soon), and earlier this year, some of Lloyd's films played theaters in New York and Cambridge at the very least. I wound up basically living in the Brattle for a week, after the 3-D movies, with just a short venture downtown to see Batman Begins. And I kind of fell in love this these movies.
They're not all all-time greats, but only one or two of the silents is average. Even though the talkies don't quite work, there's something fascinating about watching Lloyd and company flail about as the movie industry changes overnight, and suddenly the form they had complete mastery of was obsolete. It's amazing and more than a bit sad, although Lloyd came through it better than some of his contemporaries (Buster Keaton had to rediscovered after doing local television in L.A., for instance). Frequent love interest Jobyna Ralston, for instance, became a star in these movies, got a high-profile supporting role in the first Oscar-winning film, Wings, and then saw her career die after just a couple of talkies (one a Rin Tin Tin vehicle) because of her lisp. Reminds me of one of my favorite books in elementary school, The Secret of Terror Castle (I'd link to it on Amazon, but apparently the only versions available have all references to Alfred Hitchcock replaced with some generic name. Bah!).
I didn't find out about the bomb that blew off Lloyd's right thumb and forefinger until midway through the series, and must admit to being impressed with how well he covered it up. The glove and prosthetic becomes more obvious in later movies, as film stock improves, but he still does some daredevil stuff without two of my favorite digits.
After my detour in Montreal, there was still one more night of this to see: The Harvard Film Archive ran The Freshman and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock back-to-back at the end of July. Well, almost - The Freshman was taken from a print of one of the compilation films, and had some of the more anachronistic humor cut out (such as the "radio liar" scene), while Diddlebock was the Mad Wednesday cut - looks like I'll have to get a DVD to see the whole thing. I think the HFA program was kind of sneaky about that - it never actually said that the full version was playing, but it certainly seemed to be implied. Still, one benefit was Yakov Gubanov doing one of his nifty, improvised live scores for The Freshman, a marked improvement over the scores on the Brattle prints (which seemed to be the same three pieces, and would start and stop mid-scene without rhyme or reason).
Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to the big box set in November, which will have everything reviewed here except Diddlebock (available in a bunch of public-domain versions) and Welcome Danger (rumored for next year, with both talkie and "unplugged" versions).
The Freshman
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd's films have, of late, languished in undeserved obscurity. Though his movies were every bit as funny and successful at the box office as the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd remains a distant third in terms of audience awareness, assuming the average modern filmmaker knows about silent comedians at all. America left the silents behind very quickly at the end of the 1920s, with only a few of the silent stars really thriving after the transition. Harold Lloyd wasn't one of them, although movie lovers would, for a time, remember him fondly. This 1925 film in particular was a favorite; good and popular enough that in the mid-1940s another cinema great, Preston Sturges, would lure Lloyd out of retirement to do a sequel.
In the film, young Harold Lamb (Lloyd) goes off to college, head full of mistaken impressions from the movies of what campus life would be like. His ignorance makes him a target for a campus troublemaker (Brooks Benedict), who seizes on the incoming freshman's naiveté to embarrass and impoverish him. The school's football star (James Anderson) and coach (Pat Harmon) also exploit Harold's desire to be popular by giving him the impression that he's a member of the school's football team, when in fact he is at best a waterboy and at worst a tackling dummy. About the only person not taking advantage of young Harold is Peggy (Jobyna Ralston), the pretty daughter of his landlady who also works in the coat-check of a local hotel.
Read the rest at HBS.
Speedy
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Most of Harold Lloyd films were set in California, by implication if not by explicit statement. For Speedy, Harold and company made the cross country trip to the Big Apple, which provides him with an environment frantic enough to keep up with Lloyd's brand of hyperkinetic chaos.
The title, aside from being Lloyd's own nickname (one which nobody who has seen him in a movie will dispute), is also what people call his character, Harold Swift. "Speedy" is a carefree fellow, not particularly worried when his lacksadasical ways cost him a job in this pre-Depression New York, because another is always just around the corner, and, besides, unemployment gives him more time to spend with girlfriend Jane Dillon (Ann Christy), if not more money to spend on her. His current job as a soda jerk is ideal, since the establishment has a telephone he can use to get updates on the play of his beloved Yankees.
Read the rest at HBS
Safety Last!
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Safety Last! is the film from which the retrospective of Harold Lloyd's films that recently played at the Brattle Theater takes its name, and is also the source of the general public's most enduring image of Lloyd: A man scaling the wall of a building, dangling from the face of a clock tower as his weight begins to pry it loose. It's a fine example of what Lloyd called a "thrill picture", a description that the audience would have a hard time disagreeing with.
It starts out innocently enough. A boy (Lloyd) from rural California sets out for the city to make his fortune so that he can marry his girlfriend (Mildred Davis). It takes a lot more work than he expects, and he winds up barely holding a job at the materials counter in a department store, quite behind his expected timetable for becoming president of the company. Despite the fact that he and his construction-worker pal (Bill Strother) are dodging the landlady, his letters home describe a grand success, so the girl decides to stop waiting for him to send for her and hops on a train. He hatches a plan to receive a bonus for staging a publicity stunt where his fearless friend climbs the wall of the building, but an angry policeman (Noah Young) is waiting for the pal at the building. Don't worry, he says, you just climb up one floor, we'll switch out at the second-floor window after I ditch this cop, and I'll climb the rest of the way.
Yeah. That'll work.
Read the rest at HBS.
Girl Shy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd is best known for his physical comedy and his daredevil "thrill pictures", and for good reason. Just as important a part of his appeal, though, is that there is often a genuine sweetness to his movies, and a great deal of chemistry with his leading ladies. Most slapstick comedies from this period have a girl for a love interest, but it's perfunctory. With Girl Shy, though, the Harold Lloyd Company makes a romantic comedy worthy of the title.
Harold Meadows (Lloyd) is terrified of girls, developing a terrible stutter whenever one is around. He's an apprentice in his grandfather's small-town tailor shop, but dreams of bigger things - he has written a handbook about how to make love, which he intends to bring to a publisher in Los Angeles (as the titles inform us, one studies what one fears, and the more Harold learned, the more frightened he became). Meanwhile, Mary Buckingham's car breaks down, so she and her little dog need to catch a train. Dogs aren't allowed, but Mary (Jobyna Ralston) gets help hiding him from the conductor from fellow passenger Harold (who doesn't immediately recognize that he's not stuttering around Mary) They don't expect to see each other again. But later she insists on swinging through the town when on a drive with gentleman friend Ronald De Vore (Carlton Griffin) - who is reluctant for reasons that will be clear later - and when they meet up at a picturesque riverbed, they're delighted. But when Harold finds out his book is a laughingstock at the publisher, he pretends he never loved her. A couple revelations later, though, and Harold is off to L.A. using every method of transportation short of an airplane to stop her wedding.
Read the rest at HBS.
Welcome Danger
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd) ("silent" version)
Welcome Danger is kind of a mess, as I expect many films were in 1929. The addition of sound to movies was a major change in the entertainment industry that happened almost overnight; the explosive growth of DVD and music downloads has nothing on how the talkies more or less killed silent film. A number of silent films such as Welcome Danger were reworked to include sound, and as such are not complete successes either as silents or sound films.
This was an ambitious movie to begin with; one cut screened for test audiences ran three hours. At nearly two hours, it's still one of the longest films Lloyd made, if not the longest. The plot is also relatively complex compared to the average silent comedy; while many of Lloyd's silents could be broken up into pieces and had scant few characters beyond Harold and whatever girl he was wooing, Welcome Danger thrusts young botanist Harold Bledsoe into an investigation of a series of murders and other crimes taking place in Chinatown, all masterminded by a mysterious tong leader known as "The Dragon". He's brought in because the late Bledsoe Sr. was San Francsico's police chief, and the current chief figures the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Harold turns out to be almost useless, though; he doesn't even know about fingerprints until he arrives at the police station, and then he gets on everybody's nerves by fingerprinting everybody, including (and especially) the cops. Still, he does meet a girl, Billie Lee (Barbara Kent), whose little brother Buddy has one of those mysterious movie illnesses. You know, the kind that show no obvious symptoms and can apparently only be treated by Dr. Chang Gow (James Wang), who has been targeted by The Dragon.
Read the rest at HBS.
Dr. Jack
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
The unconventional doctor is a popular character type because, if we're honest with ourselves, most MDs scare us. We see them when we're at our worst, and even the helpful ones scare us in ways that only people smarter than us who have information we need can. It's just as natural to be suspicious is such a situation as it is necessary to trust, which is the sort of paradox that births comedy naturally.
In this movie, the epitome of the doctor who uses his daunting acumen to intimidate his patients is D.r Ludwig von Saulsbourg (Eric Mayne), who has been treating anemic "Sick Little Well Girl" Mary (Mildred Price) for years even though, alas, she shows no sign of improvement. Her wealthy father (John T. Prince) despairs, but his lawyer (C. Norman Hammond) starts to become suspicious, especially after a return to his hometown at the behest of his mother's doctor. Mother is fine; the doctor has simply noted that she's depressed from not seeing her son often enough. The lawyer notes that a lot of the patients Harold "Dr. Jack" Jackson (Harold Lloyd) sees seem to have problems that can be resolved quickly and without medication, and asks him to take a look at his client's daughter.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Kid Brother
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
There's something almost feudal about the small town of Hickoryville, where the title character of The Kid Brother lives alongside his ox-like father and brothers. I don't know if that sort of small town, so dominated by one man or family's personality, could exist today, even if it could a century ago. Of course, it doesn't have to be real; this silent comedy is a riff on the story of the lesser prince proving his worth, and you need royalty for that.
In Hickoryville, the royalty is, of course, the Hickorys. Jim Hickory (Walter James) is the Sheriff and town leader, with sons Leo and Olin serving as deputies. Big, tough, burly men, they don't think much of youngest brother Harold (Harold Lloyd), a glasses-wearing dweeb more inclined to build a mechanical contraption to handle a task than to simply attack it with raw strength. Jim is especially annoyed when Harold tells a group of traveling performers who mistake him for the sheriff that they can set up on the town green, and sends him to get rid of them, even though it hurts Harold to break it to beautiful Mary Powers (Jobyna Ralston), daughter of the show's founder. Harold is humiliated, the show is wrecked, and soon after, the town treasury has been stolen after having been placed in the Hickorys' hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Hot Water
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Bratle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Anyone who has watched movies for a while and picked up trivia likely knows about reel changes, and the "cigarette burns" that signal them. Before platter systems became popular, most theaters had two projectors per screen, which the projectionist would manually alternate between, cuing up one 10-15 minute reel of film while the other played. I often wonder, when watching silent comedies like Hot Water, whether most theaters at the time only had one projector, resulting in there being something akin to a commercial break between reels as the projectionist readied the next one. Not just because I've seen intertitle cards with "Part 3" on other features, but because some silents (such as this one) seem so modular.
By "modular", I mean that even though there's something of a through line to the entire movie, each reel really seems to be doing its own thing, and could easily be watched as an individual short or spread out over multiple showings as parts of a serial and still be relatively complete experiences. After a brief prelude where a groom's best man (Harold Lloyd) comments to his friend that he'll never get the single life - and is immediately brought down by Jobyna Ralston's "soft-boiled eyes", we flash forward to a few years later, when "Hubby" and "Wifey" get a surprise visit from her busybody mother (Josephine Crowell), layabout big brother (Charles Stevenson), and destructive little brother (Mickey McBan). What follows are a few quick vignettes, including Hubby trying to get home on a cable car with a live turkey, a disastrous first trip in the couple's new automobile, and a peculiar family dinner and its aftermath: Hubby chloroforms his mother-in-law, believes he has accidentally killed her, and that he is being haunted when she is merely sleepwalking.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Cat's-Paw
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Give Harold Lloyd some credit; he not only accepted the march of progress, but he did his best to embrace it and help it along. During his later years, he was fascinated by 3-D photography, and many early tests of color filmmaking took place on his "GreenAcres" estate. And he didn't shy away from sound when that was introduced to film, or stubbornly try to make the same kind of film that made him rich after the public was no longer buying them. It's just a pity that he wasn't very well-suited to talkies.
For all The Cat's-Paw's faults, being too much like Lloyd's earlier movies isn't one of them. Rather than being a California everyman who can meet any challenge with a challenge of quick thinking and surprising athleticism, his Ezekiel Cobb is a raised-in-China missionary's son with a piece of wisdom from a Confucian philosopher for every situation. Indeed, the very fact that the character is named something other than Harold indicates that Cobb is more a character than a variation on Lloyd's "glasses" persona, though the spectacles remain. There's some similarities, but Ezekiel's specific background is far more of a factor here than it is in his other films.
Read the rest at HBS.
Why Worry?
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Why Worry? is silent comedy distilled into a powerful, concentrated form. Every one of its sixty minutes is packed with gags and absurdity, supplying jokes fast and furious in a style only matched by animated cartoons. Minute for minute, it's one of the funniest movies ever made.
The premise is fearsomely simple: Hypochondriac millionaire Harold Van Pelham (Harold Lloyd) decides to journey to Central America for his health, valet (Wallace Howe) and nurse (Jobyna Ralston) in tow. Unbeknownst to him, the country he's visiting is about to erupt into revolution, and after he and the servants get separated, he finds himself partnered up with the immensely strong - and just plain immense - Colosso (Johan Aasen), trying to make his way back to hotel for the relaxing sabbatical he'd been expecting.
Read the rest at HBS.
For Heaven's Sake
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd's "glasses" character would take many last names over the years, but the basics always remained the same - average-looking underdog-type, decked out in horn-rimmed spectacles and a straw hat, who succeeds through perserverence and quickness despite not looking like much. I must confess, though, that I have a fondness for the variation on this character he uses in movies like Why Worry and For Heaven's Sake: A rich man who lands in a situation outside his customary life of luxury and proves himself more capable of fending for himself than one's first impression would suggest.
The first we see of J. Harold Manners (Lloyd) certainly isn't much - he's a feckless fat cat whose response to a careless automobile accident is to cross the street and drop some cash at the nearest car dealer. His second or third wreck of the day involves a street preacher's soup table. Not really listening to the conversation, he writes the preacher (Paul Weigel) a check large enough for not just a new table, but the mission he dreams of running. When he reads about the mission - with his name attached! - in the paper, he's appalled, and dashes back downtown to at least take the sign with his name down (what millionaire wants to be associated with poor people?). There, he meets the man's daughter (Jobyna Ralston), and his decision to stick around is what must inevitably follow from meeting such a lady.
Read the rest at HBS.
Movie Crazy
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
Harold Lloyd was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, so it's amusing to consider the central joke: That there's no way a Hollywood producer would hire Harold Lloyd (or, at least, his "glasses" character) to star in movies, despite the fact that the real thing was one of the biggest stars of the twenties. Of course, it's a false comparison, even if it's worth a chuckle - the real Lloyd was a very different animal than this film's Harold Hall.
Lloyd was, in fact, a good-looking guy; it's said that he was the inspiration for Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, for how a simple pair of glasses can, in fact, fundamentally change a person's appearance and perception. He was also quite sharp, an uncredited co-director and producer on many of his films, who not only retained ownership of his movies' copyright but preserved the negatives when many others failed to do so. His character isn't exactly a moron, but he is sort of a doofus, the kind who attracts trouble without meaning to.
Read the rest at HBS.
Feet First
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2005 at the Brattle Theater (Safety Last: The Films of Harold Lloyd)
It says something that within a couple of weeks of seeing Feet First in Cambridge's Brattle Theater, I would notice a couple of similar gags (a shoe salesman using the same patter over and over again) re-used in a Korean romantic comedy by the name of Please Teach Me English! at Montreal's Fantasia Festival. I'm not sure what it says - that Lloyd influenced filmmakers seventy years later in far-off reaches of the globe? That certain ideas are universal? That the human mind has an astonishing ability to manufacture connections where none exist?
I don't know. I wonder if maybe, in 1930, the first act of this movie felt fresh and exciting. Seventy-five years later, it feels limp, a familiar framework without enough jokes to make up for it. Things do improve after a slow start, and the film's middle act is fitfully funny, even if it seems to draw the premise out for much too long. Still, it gets the movie to the third act, and while that last act is a pretty transparent reprise of the famous Safety Last finale, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Lots of artists go back to the same wells to do variations on a theme, and this second iteration of Harold climbing a building does offer some new thrills, if no clock faces.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2005 at the Harvard Film Archive (Summer Double Features) ("Mad Wednesday" cut)
Preston Sturges was just what Harold Lloyd needed, seventeen years earlier. Lloyd was one of the great silent comedians, but his reedy voice and failure to acclimate to the different tempos of sound pictures caused his career to peter out; Sturges was an inventor-turned-playwright-turned-screenwriter who knew how to combine witty dialog and broad slapstick into screwball comedy. By the time Sturges's star had ascended during the sound era, though, Lloyd's had faded away. Nearly a decade passed between his last film for Paramount and this screwball comedy, which Sturges created to coax one of his comedy idols out of retirement.
And yet, initially, it seems like no time at all has passed. The film opens with footage of Harold's football heroics from The Freshman, and Lloyd doesn't appear to have aged a day when we see a newly-shot scene of the team in the locker room, where E.J. Waggleberry (Raymond Walburn), an excitable Tate alumnus (shots of him cheering had replaced Jobyna Ralston's bits during the game) offers him a job after graduation. Months later, Harold accepts, only to find out that Waggleberry offers a lot of sports heroes jobs, so even though Harold has ideas for the advertising firm, he'll start at the bottom, in accounting.
Read the rest at HBS.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Okay, a wee bit more Fantasia stuff
Feature article on HBS.
Same thing on eFilmCritic, for you Australians or people who don't like swearwords in bold across your screen.
And The Place Promised in Our Early Years is playing at the Brattle this weekend as part of the New England Animation Bash.
Same thing on eFilmCritic, for you Australians or people who don't like swearwords in bold across your screen.
And The Place Promised in Our Early Years is playing at the Brattle this weekend as part of the New England Animation Bash.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Fantasia Addenda: Screeners and Godzilla at the Brattle
But wait! Just because I came back home to Boston doesn't mean that the Fantasia fun was over! In a great "hey, I'm a real member of the media" deal, I got my hands on three VHS screeners of movies that would play after I left, so that I could have reviews up on HBS/EFC when they opened. I wish one of them could have been GORA, since I don't think I've ever seen a Turkish film, let alone a Turkish sci-fi comedy, but they only had time to make a copy of it or Some, and as decent as Some was (and I was interested in seeing the other movies by the "guest directors" of Another Public Enemy), I wish I'd sent the email in time. Ah, well.
Also, Matt, Morgan, and I went to see Godzilla: Final Wars at the Brattle Friday, and it wasn't a totally unqualified success. I still loved it, but I apparently like the cheese more than Matt, and I think it's better in a big theater with all the bells and whistles - I love the Brattle, but this movie needed to be louder than they can handle (or that their restaurant neighbors will let them). I think it also becomes more fun if you already dig Kitamura and his style, or recognize bits of trivia like the "Tohoscope" open not having been used in thirty years and that the guy playing the Secretary General was one of the stars of the original Gojira.
Interesting to see the Fantasia opening before the Tohoscope one; I wonder if they just didn't remove it before sending the reels here or whether it's part of a deal worked out with the festival (Fantasia's Mitch Davis is one of the advisors to the Brattle's Boston Fantastic Film Festival).
So, anyway, this closes the book on Montreal. Now, to get back to the Harold Lloyd reviews and then maybe some current American movies.
Ghost House (Gwishini Sanda)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
It's easy to bemoan the Hollywood machine when confronted with the foreign and independent films which play boutique houses and festivals. While the multiplex fills with mediocrity piled upon junk, everything we see coming from France, say, or Korea seems to be exciting, daring, or exceptional. Of course, it's a biased sample, and we're generally only getting the most popular and/or lauded works from other countries' national cinemas; for every masterpiece like Memories of Murder in a Seoul multiplex, there's probably two or three movies like Ghost House - entertaining enough screen and time fillers, but well short of greatness or putting Hollywood to shame.
The story opens with Park Pil-gi (Cha Seung-won) buying his first home. It's beautiful and has a great ocean view, so if a construction worker like Pil-gi can afford it, there's got to be something wrong with it, right? But Pil-gi isn't thinking of that; he's just remembering how much he and his father (Yun Moo-sik) moved around when he was a child, mostly because of the elder Park's tendency to get in fights. Owning his own home was a promise Pil-gi made to his dying father, though, and there are tears in his eyes when he hangs his nameplate by the door. The catch, of course, is that he's not alone in the house, even when his girlfriend Soo-kyung (Son Tae-yeong) isn't around - he's got a poltergeist, and it wants him out.
Read the rest at HBS.
Some
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
The characters in Some seem to need an awful lot of help. There's a simple story hidden under its layers of complication, and yet it still takes an extra, unexplained fantasy device to fully move the plot along. I don't want to come out against genre films being challenging, but there's enough misdirection and stuff to keep track of that I found myself occasionally wishing that Some was a book, so that I could easily flip back and make sure I was square on what everybody's place in the story is.
The story starts at midnight, with Seo Yu-jin (Song Ji-hyo) getting her new apartment set up. A man comes to the door, clearly expecting someone else, but accepts Yu-jin's word when she says she'll deliver the package he has for Min Jae-il. He gives it to her, and she sets her alarm for four-thirty before heading to bed. Just as she's waking up to get ready for her job as a radio traffic reporter, Detective Kang Seong-ju (Go Soo) is engaged in a high-speed chase that ends when the crooks he's chasing crash their car. They, apparently, are the ones expected to have the MP3 player now in Yu-jin's possession, so both Kang and a group of toughs converge on her. She, however, thinks it's because she accidentally took a picture of the crooks while photographing a stray cat, and doesn't think to mention the MP3 player. To make things a little more complicated, Yu-jin is having flashes of déjà vu all day, seeing things before they happen. The movie covers a roughly twenty-four hour period, midnight to midnight, in October 2004.
Read the rest at HBS.
Survive Style 5+
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
It's a weird, weird world for the characters in Gen Sekiguchi and Taku Tada's Survive Style 5+. Like Robert Altman or P.T. Anderson with the strange turned up a notch, director Sekiguchi and writer Tada spend a half hour introducing five sets of characters before bumping their stories against each other in ways that may not always be unpredictable, but are predominately entertaining.
In story number 1, a man (Tadanobu Asano) has just killed his wife (Reika Hashimoto), but after burying the body, returns home to find her sitting in the kitchen - and not happy. In story number 2, television commercial director Yoko (Kyoko Koizumi) fancies herself a comedic genius, although as her lover (Hiroshi Abe) points out in about the rudest way possible, she's not; she's just strange. In story number 3, the Kobayashi family goes to see a popular hypnotist's show, but get more than they bargained for when the father (Ittoku Kishibe) is stuck thinking he's a bird after the performance is interrupted. In story number 4, a trio of small-time crooks (Kanji Tusda, Yoshiyuki Morishita, and Jai West) hang out together, with one making eyes at the second whenever the third isn't looking. And in story number 5, an English hitman (Vinnie Jones) asks everyone he meets, through his translator (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), what the purpose of their existence is.
Read the rest at HBS.
Also, Matt, Morgan, and I went to see Godzilla: Final Wars at the Brattle Friday, and it wasn't a totally unqualified success. I still loved it, but I apparently like the cheese more than Matt, and I think it's better in a big theater with all the bells and whistles - I love the Brattle, but this movie needed to be louder than they can handle (or that their restaurant neighbors will let them). I think it also becomes more fun if you already dig Kitamura and his style, or recognize bits of trivia like the "Tohoscope" open not having been used in thirty years and that the guy playing the Secretary General was one of the stars of the original Gojira.
Interesting to see the Fantasia opening before the Tohoscope one; I wonder if they just didn't remove it before sending the reels here or whether it's part of a deal worked out with the festival (Fantasia's Mitch Davis is one of the advisors to the Brattle's Boston Fantastic Film Festival).
So, anyway, this closes the book on Montreal. Now, to get back to the Harold Lloyd reviews and then maybe some current American movies.
Ghost House (Gwishini Sanda)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
It's easy to bemoan the Hollywood machine when confronted with the foreign and independent films which play boutique houses and festivals. While the multiplex fills with mediocrity piled upon junk, everything we see coming from France, say, or Korea seems to be exciting, daring, or exceptional. Of course, it's a biased sample, and we're generally only getting the most popular and/or lauded works from other countries' national cinemas; for every masterpiece like Memories of Murder in a Seoul multiplex, there's probably two or three movies like Ghost House - entertaining enough screen and time fillers, but well short of greatness or putting Hollywood to shame.
The story opens with Park Pil-gi (Cha Seung-won) buying his first home. It's beautiful and has a great ocean view, so if a construction worker like Pil-gi can afford it, there's got to be something wrong with it, right? But Pil-gi isn't thinking of that; he's just remembering how much he and his father (Yun Moo-sik) moved around when he was a child, mostly because of the elder Park's tendency to get in fights. Owning his own home was a promise Pil-gi made to his dying father, though, and there are tears in his eyes when he hangs his nameplate by the door. The catch, of course, is that he's not alone in the house, even when his girlfriend Soo-kyung (Son Tae-yeong) isn't around - he's got a poltergeist, and it wants him out.
Read the rest at HBS.
Some
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
The characters in Some seem to need an awful lot of help. There's a simple story hidden under its layers of complication, and yet it still takes an extra, unexplained fantasy device to fully move the plot along. I don't want to come out against genre films being challenging, but there's enough misdirection and stuff to keep track of that I found myself occasionally wishing that Some was a book, so that I could easily flip back and make sure I was square on what everybody's place in the story is.
The story starts at midnight, with Seo Yu-jin (Song Ji-hyo) getting her new apartment set up. A man comes to the door, clearly expecting someone else, but accepts Yu-jin's word when she says she'll deliver the package he has for Min Jae-il. He gives it to her, and she sets her alarm for four-thirty before heading to bed. Just as she's waking up to get ready for her job as a radio traffic reporter, Detective Kang Seong-ju (Go Soo) is engaged in a high-speed chase that ends when the crooks he's chasing crash their car. They, apparently, are the ones expected to have the MP3 player now in Yu-jin's possession, so both Kang and a group of toughs converge on her. She, however, thinks it's because she accidentally took a picture of the crooks while photographing a stray cat, and doesn't think to mention the MP3 player. To make things a little more complicated, Yu-jin is having flashes of déjà vu all day, seeing things before they happen. The movie covers a roughly twenty-four hour period, midnight to midnight, in October 2004.
Read the rest at HBS.
Survive Style 5+
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2005 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screener)
It's a weird, weird world for the characters in Gen Sekiguchi and Taku Tada's Survive Style 5+. Like Robert Altman or P.T. Anderson with the strange turned up a notch, director Sekiguchi and writer Tada spend a half hour introducing five sets of characters before bumping their stories against each other in ways that may not always be unpredictable, but are predominately entertaining.
In story number 1, a man (Tadanobu Asano) has just killed his wife (Reika Hashimoto), but after burying the body, returns home to find her sitting in the kitchen - and not happy. In story number 2, television commercial director Yoko (Kyoko Koizumi) fancies herself a comedic genius, although as her lover (Hiroshi Abe) points out in about the rudest way possible, she's not; she's just strange. In story number 3, the Kobayashi family goes to see a popular hypnotist's show, but get more than they bargained for when the father (Ittoku Kishibe) is stuck thinking he's a bird after the performance is interrupted. In story number 4, a trio of small-time crooks (Kanji Tusda, Yoshiyuki Morishita, and Jai West) hang out together, with one making eyes at the second whenever the third isn't looking. And in story number 5, an English hitman (Vinnie Jones) asks everyone he meets, through his translator (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), what the purpose of their existence is.
Read the rest at HBS.
Fantasia Day Ten/Eleven (16-17 Juillet 2005)
Saturday was kind of rainy, so not the best day to try and get pictures of the banner and spot where the festival was being held (but my attempts to get picutres of the auditoria looked much worse). This weekend was "Komikstok", featuring movies adapted from comic books - mostly manga, since there aren't a lot of as-yet-unreleased American adaptations coming out in a viewable state, and you could see Batman Begins or Fantastic Four at the local multiplex. It would have been cool if Disney had brought Sky High, but I guess this really isn't their crowd.
In fact, the only North American distributor that had any kind of real presence at Fantasia was Lion's Gate, and they're Canadian, so the festival is going to be more on their radar. The American presense came Sunday, when I hauled my luggage with me into a screening of "Square Jaw Theater", a bunch of superhero-themed short films. My favorites were two of the bat-themed ones: "New Times", a CGI production using Lego-people models and featuring Adam West as Batman, Mark Hammill as the Joker, and Dick Van Dyke as a surprisingly good Commissioner Gordon. Another using Hollywood talent (that doesn't appear on their IMDB pages) is "Robin's Big Date", with Justin Long as Robin and Sam Rockwell as Batman.Before I get to the reviews, one aside - I really do generally like Takashi Miike, and I can't wait to see his new movie which just opened in Japan yesterday (a big-budget family adventure, if you can believe it!). He was just the kiss of death for this festival, though. The sequel to one of his movies (One Missed Call 2) - stank. The one he directed (Izo) - sucked. And the one he appeared in (Neighbor Number 13) - just not good.
Anyway, here's hoping I get a chance to come back next year. It's a blast, the festival that the Brattle's Boston Fantastic Film Festival wants to be when it grows up. There's also many less nifty places to be in July than Montreal.
Dragon Head
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Komikstok)
How does one top the end of the world? The answer to that question is, generally, "it's not possible", so the decision to have it happen off-screen would be the wise one even if Dragon Head were about how and why the world ended and what could be done to set things back right. It's not, though - instead, it's about how someone deals with a strange, threatening new world. And on that count, it does OK. The subject's been handled better, but it's also (and more frequently) been done worse.
The world ended with a flash of red light, but Teru Aoki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) doesn't know this when he regains consciousness at the start of the story; he just thinks something has happened to his train on a class trip to Kyoto, and that he'll soon be rescued. Aside from killing everything it hit, the red light must have packed a heck of a wallop, because the tunnel his train is in has collapsed at both ends. Only a few others are left alive - classmates Ako Seto (Sayaka) and Nobuo Takahashi (Takayuki Yamada), along with one injured teacher, whom Nobuo kills in a mad rage. Teru and Ako escape before the tunnel completely caves in, but as they soon discover, what has happened is not just limited to the immediate area. Only some of the survivors they encounter are as overtly hostile as Nobuo, but that generally means that they are even more dangerous.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tetsujin-28 (Tetsujin niju-hachigo)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2005 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Komikstok)
There are two routes to go when adapting a comic book or cartoon for live action. Generally, with comics, the filmmakers try to bring the characters into our world. Certainly, there are exceptions (hello, Sin City), but look at how hard recent superhero movies have worked to tweak the costumes into something that can at least appear to exist in the real world. On the other hand, films based upon an animated property make much more of an effort to retain original designs and exaggerated aesthetics, even if they don't look "real". Witness the Scooby Doo movies, or George of the Jungle. Tetsujin-28 clearly falls into the second category, even if its original source material is print rather than animation.
Made to celebrate (roughly) the fiftieth anniversary of the original manga , Tetsujin features Shosuke Ikematsu as Shotaro Kaneda, a twelve-year-old new kid in town who is as surprised as anyone when pieces of a giant robot erupt from the ground and fly off into the distance, causing immense property damage. The worst is yet to come, though - the pieces return assembled, as the fearsome Black Ox. Luckily, the forces of good have their own giant robot, Tetsujin-28, which Shotaro learns was built by his own father - and which was designed for him to control! Unluckily, Shotaro is something of a scaredy-cat, and in their first encounter, Black Ox beats Tetsujin like a drum.
Read the rest at HBS.
Cromartie High School (Sakigake!! Kuromati Kôkô: The Movie)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Komikstok)
"Cromartie High School" is a hot property right now, at least in some circles. The three collections of manga that are out in the US sell pretty well, as do the anime DVDs. I'm not sure whether it's a franchise with longstanding popularity or a fad in Japan, but whichever it is, it's made the leap to a live-action feature film, and done so in a fairly entertaining manner.
It's a tricky leap, because while many manga are long, ongoing serials, Cromartie is a series of short vignettes which screenwriters Itsuji Itao and Shoichiro Masumoto have to somehow connect, expand, and embellish to form into an eighty-five minute movie. The basic gist is that Takashi Kamiyama (Takamusa Suga), a fairly bright 16-year-old, winds up in Tokyo's worst high school in order to help his best friend - who fails the entrance exam anyway. Being a resolute - and thoroughly naive - fellow, Kamiyama makes it his goal to clean up Cromartie, help the students make something of themselves. This will not be easy, since the students include Takenouchi (Yoshihiro Takayama), the tough guy with severe motion sickness, an obnoxious robot named Shinichi Mechazawa (voice of Shinji Takeda), and a gorilla. This is before Takeshi Hokuto (Noboru Kaneko) and his lackey show up, planning to "conquer" the school like the 18 private ones Hokuto's father has bought, or the ape-men from another planet arrive.
Read the rest at HBS.
Neighbor No. 13 (Rinjin 13-go)
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Komikstok)
Ah, revenge. It seems like such a simple thing - someone does you wrong, you turn it around, preferably making the other fellow suffer twice what you've had to deal with. Simple and straightforward in concept, although it seldom is in practice. And it doesn't do anybody any good in the end. And in some cases, the ones who suffer are the audience.
Juzo Murasaki (Shun Oguri) has ample reason for wanting revenge. Back in high school, a classmate spilled acid on his face, disfiguring him for life. Or so it would seem. His scars seem to have healed, but he's got a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde thing going, with his alter ego "Number 13" (Shido Nakamura) retaining the burns and channeling the anger, and sometimes seeming to act independently of Juzo. And is he ever going to be given a reason to come out and play, as the foreman at Juzo's new construction job is Toru Akai (Hirofumi Arai), the man responsible for Juzo's mutilation years ago. Along with his wife (Yumi Yoshimura) and child, he's also Juzo's neighbor, living just a few doors down in the row house development. And, apparently, he's still a right bastard.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Fantasia Day Nine (15 Juillet 2005)
On Friday, I spent the morning/early afternoon up in the old Expo grounds, mainly checking out the Biosphere because Buckminster Fuller-designed structures are highly cool. Didn't stay too terribly long, since the inside is a thoroughly kid-oriented museum on water and how we rotten human beings are abusing it. Not that there's no truth to that point of view, but it tends to bug me, since it often treats human beings as if we're some sort of alien invaders, laying waste to a planet not are own rather than a species that evolved here and builds things because it's part of our natural behavior.
Fortunately, it was free admission day, so I didn't feel the need to hang around too long. The display about Fuller on the top floor was cute, though, if, again, kid-oriented.Pretty thoroughly excellent day afterward. I wasn't too keen on Phantom Master, but the films surrounding it were some of the festival's best: Two Hong Kong action-thrillers, Love Battlefield and Breaking News, and the hugely entertaining Godzilla: Final Wars.
Hong Kong has sort of been in cinematic decline over the past decade, as some filmmakers and stars came to America but failed to work the same magic, mainland China exerted more influence, and folks like Jackie Chan just got old. Love Battlefield and Breaking News feature a new generation of actors, although the latter is directed by old hand Johnnie To. They're great big thrillers, though, with the hard edge to their action Hollywood often lacks.
And Godzilla... If you're in the Boston area, hit the Brattle this weekend. They've got Final Wars from Friday to Monday, and I can more or less guarantee that it plays better with a big crowd. Some folks on the Boston sci-fi marathon board didn't like it, but they clearly seemed to be judging it for what it's not, as opposed to what it is - giant monster goodness wedded to Ryuhei Kitamura insanity.
And, stop by Bartley's before/after for a burger and "godzilla-sized" milkshake. They had some good burgers and fries up in Montreal (really excellent), but I didn't visit any place that had both the great burgers and fun of Bartley's. That's my plan for the weekend.
Love Battlefield (Ai Zuozhan)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2005 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia)
From the way Love Battlefield starts, one would think that the title is metaphorical: Yui (Eason Chan) and Ching (Niki Chow), both from Hong Kong, meet cute vacationing in the country (Yui fishes her shoe out of the water). They connect, and what follows is a series of more-or-less random clips from their relationship over the next year, where we see them in love, but also ready to snap at each other over tiny, unimportant things. Things come to a head when their car is stolen just before they're about to leave on a European vacation that doesn't particularly excite Yui (the climate is too chilly for his taste). He says they should call the police, she says he's trying to get out of a trip he doesn't want to take. "We should just break up!", she yells, and there's something painfully final about it. Someone coming in cold, who doesn't know what these scenes are holding in reserve, might settle in for a drama about the two trying to mend their relationship. Boy, are they in for a surprise.
Because Yui decides not to go to the police station, and on his way back spots their car. But when he opens the back, he doesn't find their luggage, but instead a wounded man pointing a gun in his face, asking how long he's been an ER nurse. Soon, he's surrounded by men with guns, demanding he take them back to their apartment and treat the injured member of their gang. Soon, Ching will be the only one who sees that Yui has been kidnapped, and she'll be running from the police, too, as they think Yui is part of the gang and want to hold her for questioning. But the gangsters' leader, Wah (Zhiwen Wang), just realizes that it would be useful to have someone who knows some medicine along. He's right, too, and not just because they've already got someone going into shock. There's a lot of injuries coming up.
Read the rest at HBS.
Phantom Master: Dark Hero From Ruined Empire (Shin Angyo Onshi)
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia) (projected video)
I saw Phantom Master: Dark Hero From Ruined Empire the night after I saw Le Portrait de Petite Cossette, and here's the funny thing: Where I started Cossette's review with a comment on how it is not actually a movie, it nevertheless feels more like a movie than Phantom Master, which feels more like the first two or three episodes of an ongoing television series than a feature film. It introduces the setting, tells a pair of interesting stories, and finishes with the protagonist on his way to the next adventure, after only taking a step or two toward solving its central mysteries.
The setting is a post-apocalyptic one, some years after the fall of the Jushin Empire. Jushin mostly allowed its conquered lands home rule, but abusive leaders would attract the attention of the Amen-Oshi, wandering enforcers who can summon a phantom army to crush would-be dictators. Now, the last of the Amen-Oshi is Munsu, who still keeps to his mission while wandering in search of those who caused of the fall of Jushin. His first mission has a dual purpose, though, as he seeks to rescue Chunhyan, the captured (and formidable) girlfriend of Mon-ryon, a merchant who saved his life in the desert. After that, they investigate an island city where things seem peaceful, but they aren't quite right.
Read the rest at HBS.
Godzilla: Final Wars (Gojira: Fainaru Uôzo)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
If this is going to be Godzilla's last appearance for a few years, then the big guy is going out in style. The guest list for his going-away party reads like a who's who of Toho kaiju monsters, the whole world, from Tokyo to Sydney to New York to Antartica, is the setting, and wonder of wonders, the in-between scenes, the ones featuring scrawny humans going about their business until Godzilla and company smash their cities - they're fun. They've got excitement, action and humor. Director Ryuhei Kitamura was given twice the usual budget for a Godzilla movie, but he seems to do about four times as much.
Who directs a Godzilla movie is probably of as little interest to non-hard-core fans as who directs a Star Trek or James Bond movie, and generally really isn't terribly important - the studios tend to hire directors who are competent, but not idiosyncratic, the thinking being that something that stands out may drive people away - so Kitamura's name should make people stand up and take notice. Kitamura is one of Japan's most exciting action directors, having gained a worldwide cult following with his frantic, overstuffed Versus, and while that 2000 movie was flawed, it was still huge fun, his later movies to make it to America (Alive and Azumi) showed improvement. I guess Toho figured that if he screwed up Godzilla: Final Wars, well, they weren't planning to make another for five or ten years anyway, so what the heck?
Read the rest at HBS.
Breaking News (Dai Si Gein)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
The difference between Breaking News and many other siege movies is its use of the media. Typically, the role of the press in a story about a standoff is to get in the cops' way, revealing crucial information to the villains or otherwise presenting an obstacle for the characters to work around. Here, we see the police actively working to manipulate the press, with disquieting success. It's an intriguing idea for a movie, but ultimately Breaking News uses it as a sidelight, an interesting subplot to a rather familiar hostage drama. Fortunately, it's a well-made, exciting example of that subgenre.
As the movie opens, we're given a quick look at two of our drama's key players. Yuan (Richie Ren) and his crew are working a heist, not aware that Inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung) and his squad are tailing them. Their plan goes south when they are stopped by a pair of traffic cops, a situation that rapidly devolves into a shoot-out that leaves two dead, and becomes a public relations nightmare when the media shows up and captures not only the running gunfight, but continuously replays the embarassing image of one officer holding up his hands, begging the bandits not to shoot. As the incident leads the people of Hong Kong to start distrusting their law-enforcement, despite statistics showing it to be one of the world's safest cities, Inspector Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen) proposes an audacious response - when the gang resurfaces, the HKPD should mount an attack that is not only overwhelming in scale - a thousand uniformed officers - but which she will meticulously stage-manage so that the secondary goal of presenting a friendly, trustworthy and effective face for the Department is given almost as much importance as the first. She won't have to wait long, as Cheung quickly tracks Yuan down. What she doesn't expect is that Yuan proves to be pretty media-savvy himself, or that the building where he hides out and takes a family hostage contains a second group of criminals - this one a team of assassins.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Fantasia Day Eight (14 Juillet 2005)
After a thoroughly delicious late breakfast at Cocktail Hawaii (where I ate four or so times; highly recommended), I spent the late morning and early afternoon walking up Mount Royal, which reminded me a lot of going to Bradbury Mountain when I was a kid - paths that became stairs, lots of shady trees, and being just dripping with sweat when you reach the top. It was the day I didn't want to go too far afield because of the 3pm movie.
Anyway, the movies themselves were kind of a mixed bag at first - Hallucination and Le Portrait of Petite Cossette are both direct-to-video fare, and while not bad, really, neither is great.
The last movie of the day, Kamikaze Girls, is great. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Mean Girls, and more besides, although it's not quite hitting the same themes: It's less about "what girls go through in high school" than these two specific girls. It's right up there with Survive Style 5+ in terms of being visually stunning, and has a great pair of lead actresses. I'd seen Anna Tsuchiya a few days earlier in a similar (but smaller) role in The Taste of Tea, but didn't recognize Kyoko Fukada from Dolls at all.
The sad question you have to ask about these movies, though, is whether anyone outside of festivals (and the home country, of course) will get to see it. I think there's an audience for this - someone's buying all that shojo manga, right? - but will an American film distributor? I'm imagining a horrific cut/dub job if it were to head to theaters, and a difficult sell on video. I'd be interested to see what kind of muscle Paramount Classics and MTV could put behind it (same with Cromartie High School), but it's probably not on their radar , even though it apparently got a bunch of awards in Japan, even though it's basically a teen movie.
Hallucination (Genkaku)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia) (projected video)
What was once called a "B-movie" is now "V-cine". The former is an American term while the latter is Japanese, but the idea remains the same: Genre films shot quickly on lesser stock (where that used to mean 16mm or black-and-white instead of 35mm color, now that means video), with a low enough budget that profitability is almost guaranteed. They're the very definition of disposable entertainment - generally not great movies, but good enough when you're looking for something in the genre that you haven't seen before.
For Hallucination, that would be a combination of yakuza and horror. Tatsuya (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) is a low-level yakuza who is charged by "big brother" Sejima (Riki Takeuchi) to watch over his girlfriend Kumiko (Kimika Yoshino) as she detoxes in a secluded cabin. Along for the ride are a former nurse (Hitomi Miwa), a couple other gangsters at Tatsuya's level, and their hit-man guide, who is the only one who can lead them to the cabin (and presumably back again), but who is just a bit unstable. Kumiko starts seeing things and running off while they're still trudging through the woods, and their guide is inclined to abandon the party. It turns out that this area is a long-time dumping ground for bodies, who are not resting easy. They're not zombies, though - they're the sort of phantoms who prey upon interlopers' paranoia, encouraging them to eliminate each other and add to the ghosts' numbers. Which is surprisingly easy, when you consider that Kumiko isn't the only one with past or present drug problems.
Read the rest at HBS.
Le Portrait de Petite Cossette (Cossette no Shouzou)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia) (projected video)
I will keep this short because Le Portrait de Petite Cossette is not, in fact, a movie. It is, however, not far from being one; a couple hours in the editing room to remove the opening and closing credits between the three thirty-five minute "episodes" and maybe trim out some of the redundant recapping dialogue at the beginning of the second and third and Geneon would have a feature-length horror anime with decent, if not spectacular, production values and a self-contained beginning, middle, and end.
It probably wouldn't be a great horror movie, but it would be a good one. Eiri, a young man who works in an antique shop, is cataloguing new inventory when an eighteenth-century goblet from France catches his eye; it plays strange tricks with the light. When he looks closely, he sees a tiny, pre-teen girl. She is Cossette, and her soul was placed in the goblet by the mad artist who had painted her portrait hundreds of times. Eiri is the first one who can see her, which she claims means he is the reincarnation of the artist, and can free her by allowing her to drain his life-force.
Or something like that. In gothic horror, atmosphere is often more important than fitting all the details together, and Cossette has atmosphere in spades. Though conceived as a direct-to-video release before airing on Japanese television, the animation is excellent, especially during the sequences which take place in the limbo-space/dreamscape which Cossette inhabits. The use of lighting, for instance, is among the best I've seen in a primarily cel-animated work, and I imagine that many digitally houses would think twice before trying to approximate its candle-lit ambience. Cossette herself is an unnerving character, with her little-girl voice camoflaging the hardness that comes from spending two hundred and fifty years in even the most magnificent of prisons
The elements for a fine gothic story are there, but the medium gives it fits. I wonder if this was adapted from a longer manga, which would explain the unnecessary abundance of characters in Eiri's modern Tokyo - are two psychic shopkeepers actually needed? The repetition of events between the first and second parts fits with a serial, but with only three parts totalling under two hours and a "play all" function on the DVD, most will watch this in one sitting.
I probably shouldn't complain too hard about how a short serial doesn't quite work as a movie, but the festival program seemed to imply that it was a single unit, and that's the frame of mind I was in when I saw it. Cossette would be a pretty good movie with just a little work - probably even a better movie than it is a serial.
Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
The movies Hollywood markets to teenagers, especially teenaged girls, pay a certain amount of lip service to being one's own person, but when it comes right down to it, they still focus on acceptance by the group. The girl is revealed as a conventional beauty when her glasses come off, or the group's idea of what is acceptable expands slightly, or when they're feeling really hip and cynical, there's one or more murders that could have been avoided if only someone had paid more attention to these misunderstood kids. Happily, Nakashima Tetsuya's Kamikaze Girls isn't like that - it's a fast-paced comedy that celebrates individuality as much as friendship.
Momoko (Kyoko Fukada) is an individual, no doubt about that. Believing that she should have lived in Rococo 18th-Century France, she dresses in frilly dresses that most girls abandon by the age of eight or so, refuses to eat anything that isn't sweet (why should one's life contain both sweet and sour?), and practices embroidery in her spare time. She probably would never have met her classmate Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya) if not for the latter responding to an ad Momoko had placed to sell her father's knockoff "Versach" clothing; Ichiko is a tough-talking, kind of slow "Yanki" biker girl who starts hanging around for reasons Momoko doesn't immediately grasp (other than her grandmother's bike). Momoko isn't really interested in having friends, but Ichiko is maddeningly insistent.
Read the rest at HBS.
Anyway, the movies themselves were kind of a mixed bag at first - Hallucination and Le Portrait of Petite Cossette are both direct-to-video fare, and while not bad, really, neither is great.
The last movie of the day, Kamikaze Girls, is great. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Mean Girls, and more besides, although it's not quite hitting the same themes: It's less about "what girls go through in high school" than these two specific girls. It's right up there with Survive Style 5+ in terms of being visually stunning, and has a great pair of lead actresses. I'd seen Anna Tsuchiya a few days earlier in a similar (but smaller) role in The Taste of Tea, but didn't recognize Kyoko Fukada from Dolls at all.
The sad question you have to ask about these movies, though, is whether anyone outside of festivals (and the home country, of course) will get to see it. I think there's an audience for this - someone's buying all that shojo manga, right? - but will an American film distributor? I'm imagining a horrific cut/dub job if it were to head to theaters, and a difficult sell on video. I'd be interested to see what kind of muscle Paramount Classics and MTV could put behind it (same with Cromartie High School), but it's probably not on their radar , even though it apparently got a bunch of awards in Japan, even though it's basically a teen movie.
Hallucination (Genkaku)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia) (projected video)
What was once called a "B-movie" is now "V-cine". The former is an American term while the latter is Japanese, but the idea remains the same: Genre films shot quickly on lesser stock (where that used to mean 16mm or black-and-white instead of 35mm color, now that means video), with a low enough budget that profitability is almost guaranteed. They're the very definition of disposable entertainment - generally not great movies, but good enough when you're looking for something in the genre that you haven't seen before.
For Hallucination, that would be a combination of yakuza and horror. Tatsuya (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) is a low-level yakuza who is charged by "big brother" Sejima (Riki Takeuchi) to watch over his girlfriend Kumiko (Kimika Yoshino) as she detoxes in a secluded cabin. Along for the ride are a former nurse (Hitomi Miwa), a couple other gangsters at Tatsuya's level, and their hit-man guide, who is the only one who can lead them to the cabin (and presumably back again), but who is just a bit unstable. Kumiko starts seeing things and running off while they're still trudging through the woods, and their guide is inclined to abandon the party. It turns out that this area is a long-time dumping ground for bodies, who are not resting easy. They're not zombies, though - they're the sort of phantoms who prey upon interlopers' paranoia, encouraging them to eliminate each other and add to the ghosts' numbers. Which is surprisingly easy, when you consider that Kumiko isn't the only one with past or present drug problems.
Read the rest at HBS.
Le Portrait de Petite Cossette (Cossette no Shouzou)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia) (projected video)
I will keep this short because Le Portrait de Petite Cossette is not, in fact, a movie. It is, however, not far from being one; a couple hours in the editing room to remove the opening and closing credits between the three thirty-five minute "episodes" and maybe trim out some of the redundant recapping dialogue at the beginning of the second and third and Geneon would have a feature-length horror anime with decent, if not spectacular, production values and a self-contained beginning, middle, and end.
It probably wouldn't be a great horror movie, but it would be a good one. Eiri, a young man who works in an antique shop, is cataloguing new inventory when an eighteenth-century goblet from France catches his eye; it plays strange tricks with the light. When he looks closely, he sees a tiny, pre-teen girl. She is Cossette, and her soul was placed in the goblet by the mad artist who had painted her portrait hundreds of times. Eiri is the first one who can see her, which she claims means he is the reincarnation of the artist, and can free her by allowing her to drain his life-force.
Or something like that. In gothic horror, atmosphere is often more important than fitting all the details together, and Cossette has atmosphere in spades. Though conceived as a direct-to-video release before airing on Japanese television, the animation is excellent, especially during the sequences which take place in the limbo-space/dreamscape which Cossette inhabits. The use of lighting, for instance, is among the best I've seen in a primarily cel-animated work, and I imagine that many digitally houses would think twice before trying to approximate its candle-lit ambience. Cossette herself is an unnerving character, with her little-girl voice camoflaging the hardness that comes from spending two hundred and fifty years in even the most magnificent of prisons
The elements for a fine gothic story are there, but the medium gives it fits. I wonder if this was adapted from a longer manga, which would explain the unnecessary abundance of characters in Eiri's modern Tokyo - are two psychic shopkeepers actually needed? The repetition of events between the first and second parts fits with a serial, but with only three parts totalling under two hours and a "play all" function on the DVD, most will watch this in one sitting.
I probably shouldn't complain too hard about how a short serial doesn't quite work as a movie, but the festival program seemed to imply that it was a single unit, and that's the frame of mind I was in when I saw it. Cossette would be a pretty good movie with just a little work - probably even a better movie than it is a serial.
Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
The movies Hollywood markets to teenagers, especially teenaged girls, pay a certain amount of lip service to being one's own person, but when it comes right down to it, they still focus on acceptance by the group. The girl is revealed as a conventional beauty when her glasses come off, or the group's idea of what is acceptable expands slightly, or when they're feeling really hip and cynical, there's one or more murders that could have been avoided if only someone had paid more attention to these misunderstood kids. Happily, Nakashima Tetsuya's Kamikaze Girls isn't like that - it's a fast-paced comedy that celebrates individuality as much as friendship.
Momoko (Kyoko Fukada) is an individual, no doubt about that. Believing that she should have lived in Rococo 18th-Century France, she dresses in frilly dresses that most girls abandon by the age of eight or so, refuses to eat anything that isn't sweet (why should one's life contain both sweet and sour?), and practices embroidery in her spare time. She probably would never have met her classmate Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya) if not for the latter responding to an ad Momoko had placed to sell her father's knockoff "Versach" clothing; Ichiko is a tough-talking, kind of slow "Yanki" biker girl who starts hanging around for reasons Momoko doesn't immediately grasp (other than her grandmother's bike). Momoko isn't really interested in having friends, but Ichiko is maddeningly insistent.
Read the rest at HBS.
Fantasia Day Seven (13 juillet 2005)
No pictures from Wednesday; I went back down to the Porte Vielle and mostly just walked around before stopping into the archeology/history museum. Which was kind of neat, and I rather rushed through it toward the end in order to get back in time for Shaolin Temple, but I was okay with that because it got somewhat repetitive. Boy, they unearthed a lot of chamber pots.
Did have one heck of a good burger, though - crispy on the outside while tasting like a really good meatloaf, on a very nice roll. Bartley's-quality, it was. For a city that bills itself as a port town, there's not much seafood (you've got to be on the ocean), but it's got good burger-and-fries cuisine.
As to the movies, we've got a pair of interesting uses of inter-film continuity here: I wasn't aware that the Shaw Brothers movies formed a sort of coherent universe, and I imagine I'd like Shaolin Temple more if I knew more about it (kind of like how much of what DC Comics is putting out right now leaves me sort of cold because I neither know nor have particular interest in the DC Universe of fifteen years ago... but I digress). Ju-on: The Grudge 2, on the other hand, does a nice job of adding to its fantastic predecessor without crawling up its own behind or getting as meta as recent American horror movies can. I hope that Lion's Gate eventually puts out a complete Ju-on box set sometime, with the direct-to-video originals plus the two or three theatricals (if Ju-on: The Grudge 3 reall is in pre-production).
Shaolin Temple (Siu Lam ji)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
Some of the shortest reviews I've written are for movies like Shaolin Temple. In part, that's because they didn't really originate as reviews, but as blog entries - "saw Snake Deadly Act; didn't suck" - but part is because there's really not a whole lot to say about them. People learn martial arts. They fight. Some die. Then, they make another movie. In which people learn martial arts, fight, and die.
Or so it appears to the non-fan, like me. There is, apparently, a continuity to the movies Cheh Chang directed for Shaw Brothers, with Shaolin Temple tying threads together and providing background to popular characters. I didn't realize that any of the Shaw Brothers movies had continuity before reading this in the festival program, which means that I perhaps lacked the proper context for enjoying this movie, since I haven't seen one since the Coolidge discontinued the Midnight Ass-Kickings last year. Still, I'm not sure how many notches my estimation of this movie would have gone up even if I was more familiar with the background.
Read the rest at HBS.
Ju-On: The Grudge 2
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
When I saw it at the 2003 Boston Fantastic Film Festival, Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge was something of a revelation to me. I can't remember the last really scary horror movie I'd seen before it, and I started taking a greater interest in the horror coming out of Japan. That was, of course, before I knew what a cottage industry Shimizu was making of it. This follow-up to that movie isn't quite in it's class, but it's still good for a couple of jumps and one or two gasps.
As with its predecessor, Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (since there also exists a Ju-on 2 and The Grudge 2 is planned, abbreviation is problematic) is told out of chronological order, using character names as chapter titles and mostly keeping the focus on that character. The sequence of events becomes apparent pretty quickly, though - actress Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai), known as the "Queen of Horror", appears on a "Sightings" type of television show, visiting the infamous Saeki house along with host Tomoka Miura (Chiahru Niyama). This is not a wise thing to do, of course, as later that night ghost-child Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) appears in her car, leading to an accident that puts her boyfriend in a coma and ends her first-trimester pregnancy... Or does it? Meanwhile, everyone else on that shoot is also receiving visits from Toshio and his mother Kayako (Takako Fuji), and those seldom end well.
Read the rest at HBS.
Did have one heck of a good burger, though - crispy on the outside while tasting like a really good meatloaf, on a very nice roll. Bartley's-quality, it was. For a city that bills itself as a port town, there's not much seafood (you've got to be on the ocean), but it's got good burger-and-fries cuisine.
As to the movies, we've got a pair of interesting uses of inter-film continuity here: I wasn't aware that the Shaw Brothers movies formed a sort of coherent universe, and I imagine I'd like Shaolin Temple more if I knew more about it (kind of like how much of what DC Comics is putting out right now leaves me sort of cold because I neither know nor have particular interest in the DC Universe of fifteen years ago... but I digress). Ju-on: The Grudge 2, on the other hand, does a nice job of adding to its fantastic predecessor without crawling up its own behind or getting as meta as recent American horror movies can. I hope that Lion's Gate eventually puts out a complete Ju-on box set sometime, with the direct-to-video originals plus the two or three theatricals (if Ju-on: The Grudge 3 reall is in pre-production).
Shaolin Temple (Siu Lam ji)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
Some of the shortest reviews I've written are for movies like Shaolin Temple. In part, that's because they didn't really originate as reviews, but as blog entries - "saw Snake Deadly Act; didn't suck" - but part is because there's really not a whole lot to say about them. People learn martial arts. They fight. Some die. Then, they make another movie. In which people learn martial arts, fight, and die.
Or so it appears to the non-fan, like me. There is, apparently, a continuity to the movies Cheh Chang directed for Shaw Brothers, with Shaolin Temple tying threads together and providing background to popular characters. I didn't realize that any of the Shaw Brothers movies had continuity before reading this in the festival program, which means that I perhaps lacked the proper context for enjoying this movie, since I haven't seen one since the Coolidge discontinued the Midnight Ass-Kickings last year. Still, I'm not sure how many notches my estimation of this movie would have gone up even if I was more familiar with the background.
Read the rest at HBS.
Ju-On: The Grudge 2
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2005 in Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia)
When I saw it at the 2003 Boston Fantastic Film Festival, Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Grudge was something of a revelation to me. I can't remember the last really scary horror movie I'd seen before it, and I started taking a greater interest in the horror coming out of Japan. That was, of course, before I knew what a cottage industry Shimizu was making of it. This follow-up to that movie isn't quite in it's class, but it's still good for a couple of jumps and one or two gasps.
As with its predecessor, Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (since there also exists a Ju-on 2 and The Grudge 2 is planned, abbreviation is problematic) is told out of chronological order, using character names as chapter titles and mostly keeping the focus on that character. The sequence of events becomes apparent pretty quickly, though - actress Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai), known as the "Queen of Horror", appears on a "Sightings" type of television show, visiting the infamous Saeki house along with host Tomoka Miura (Chiahru Niyama). This is not a wise thing to do, of course, as later that night ghost-child Toshio (Yuya Ozeki) appears in her car, leading to an accident that puts her boyfriend in a coma and ends her first-trimester pregnancy... Or does it? Meanwhile, everyone else on that shoot is also receiving visits from Toshio and his mother Kayako (Takako Fuji), and those seldom end well.
Read the rest at HBS.
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