Fantasia Screeners: Synesthesia

The plan for this Red Sox road trip was going to be watching a movie at eight and reviewing it during the game, thus knocking off my four remaining screeners in rapid succession. That'll teach me to make plans.

The screener was the first anamorphic VHS tape I've ever had. Messed me up as I tried to get started - first I've got the TV in zoomed-in "TheaterWide" mode, but it's clearly cutting off picture along with the subtitles, then in 4:3 mode, which doesn't look quite right. Fortunately, in an early scene one of the characters pulls out what looks like a box of Lucky Strikes, and I figure out that the circular logo is distorted. I bet that this thing must annoy critics who don't have a 16:9 display, but if you like movies enough to be a critic, you've probably got one.

Synesthesia (aka Gimmy Heaven, Synesthesia Divine Thriller)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 August 2006 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screeners 2006)

Synesthesia is a neurological condition that can be described as sensory cross-chatter. A synesthete may see the letter "A" and process it as the color red; scrambled eggs may taste like triangles. If you did not know this before seeing Toru Matsuura's first movie, don't worry - you'll have it explained to you twice before the opening credits.

Even before that, though, we join Detective Shibata (Hiriji Kojima) at a murder investigation. Mari (Aoi Miyazaki), the adopted daughter of an electronics company's founder and chairman, finds him next to a peculiar stain on his floor with a knife in his back, and the police note that it's the third time her foster parent has been killed, though the police captured the previous killers. This crime scene isn't the only place where the symbol appears; while investigating something peculiar at one of the webcams he manages, Shinsuke Hayama (Yosuke Eguchi) spots it on on a bed and recognizes it as the mark of "Picasso", a mysterious internet figure who deals in snuff feeds and supposedly is able to induce murder and suicide with a hypnotic video game. A synesthete himself, Shin thinks the symbol is a message from one person with the disorder to another. It leads him to find Mari in an unlikely place, and while his best friend and business partner Takashi (Masanobu Ando) immediately falls for her, she has flashbacks that reveal a traumatic life even before her first foster parent was murdered.

Synesthesia is built from several intriguing premises, but is frequently frustrating in how it tells its story. We're told that Shin has synesthesia, and that the way synesthetes perceive the world makes them terribly lonely, but Shin seems far too well-adjusted most of the time. He's functional, lives with his understanding girlfriend, and doesn't even seem particularly eccentric. Matsuura opts not to show us anything obviously from Shin's perspective until the very end - at least, it seems that way on first viewing - so the concept remains very abstract. Making the disorder something we normal folks can't grasp may have been the intent, but if so, shouldn't it appear to have a more obvious effect on him; shouldn't he appear different?

There are also certain standard thriller deficiencies; the villain who seems omniscient, the storyline that seems to fall apart under a little bit of scrutiny, the unlikely master plan. The idea of a video game that drives people to murder is an old one, but it's probably implemented better here than in many other instances: The game itself looks kind of boring, the sort of repetitive thing that at least looks like it could induce a trance state. The use of web cameras starts out as an interesting hook, but the film goes a little too far with it after a certain point - why does the killer know to put cameras at a certain site?

And yet, the cast does a pretty fair job of winning us over. Yosuke Eguchi doesn't necessarily make his character's syndrome obvious, but his performance is at once human enough and generic enough to interpret as a veritable wall of coping mechanisms. He's got a nice, easy chemistry with Ando; they rag on each other like real best friends. Aoi Miyazaki's dialogue over the course of the film probably runs one or two pages max, but she manages to convey plenty of hurt and fear. We see her attraction to Shin even though she's not able to state anything directly. And when she does finally have some reason to smile, it's briefly uplifting, even if everything is going straight to hell around her. In smaller roles, Ryuhei Matsuda manages to be creepy as "Picasso", in part because he makes the audience wonder how much of his off-center behavior is legitimate and how much is affected, while Hiriji Kojima is a small pleasure as the investigating detective: her Shibata is attractive and has a distinct personality without being the tough chick or stuck in a romantic subplot. It doesn't sound like much, but it certainly seems rare enough to be worth noting. I think Konno, the yakuza investor in Shin & Takashi's business, is played by Minoru Torihada; whoever it is, it's an amusing performance that still implies danger.

Matsuura makes what seem like some questionable decisions, but the ones he gets right, he gets a hundred percent right. For example, there's a cut toward the end that tells a great deal of story in very little time.I like the way he has "Picasso"'s face quickly dip into view in one scene, eliminating the idea that he might be someone we've already seen, but still preserving the unease of not being able to look directly at him. And while he doesn't spend much time showing a synesthete's perceptions directly, he does find ways to play with our senses; for instance, he and cinematograper Kenji Takama find spots in the otherwise very busy Tokyo where large swaths of the landscape are a single color to unbalance the picture, or cut to a cityscape with lots of motion and images projected onto the sides of buildings after an explanation of synesthesia to suggest unrelated sensory input coming together.

When it comes right to it, though, I think the concept of synesthesia got away from Matsuura and writer Yuji Sakamoto. It seems like it should be a slam-dunk way to mess with the audience's mind, but the story winds up being rather ordinary, even as the cast and crew gives it their all.

Black & White @ The Brattle- Overlord and The Window

Doing the alpha-and-omega thing a little here, finishing up my reviews of the first night of the Brattle's "Rare Film Noir" program just after seeing the last in the series this Tuesday. For the most part, it's been a fun series, although it's a bit bummer for me as a fan of the theater to see attendence drop off between the start of the series and the end. Of course, part of that is likely becaues the last two weeks were single bills compared to the double features that started the series, so there could very well have been the same number of tickets sold, just distributed between multiple showtimes.

I think it was a pretty successful series; some of the movies weren't quite as good as others, but only one or two were really worth avoiding. Even those probably merit a video release just on the basis of their casts. There's got to be some way for the studios to step up their releases of old films on DVD (or the next-generation formats) and still make a profit.

Anyway, it's kind of fun in a perverse way to write reviews for HBS of movies that most people reading will have a hard time tracking down for themselves. So here's Pushover and Nightfall, which I saw back here. Enjoy.

Overlord

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)

This one is kind of an oddity. It was produced in 1975, but shot in black and white in a style reminiscent of the 1940s; this allows the filmmakers to integrate documentary footage rather than try to recreate battle scenes with special effects. The result is a film that blends the line between reality and fiction as well as many before and since. This is due in part to the astonishingly clean footage from the Imperial War Museum - it's footage filmed under very difficult circumstances that looks nice enough to have been shot on a soundstage.

The actual film may not be for everybody; it's more than a little arty, spending a lot of time on the monotony of training as it follows far-from-worldly young Tommy from sign-up to the invasion of the title. A lot of the archive footage is presented as connected to Tommy's story through his dreams, and maybe not even that. There's two converging things going on, Tommy's life and the war, and when they connect, it's initially unsatisfying, but also the kind of kick in the pants the audience might need.

The Window

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

The film opens with a quote from Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", and that's what you're getting with this movie. Bobby Driscoll gives a very nice performance as nine-year-old Tommy Woodry, a kid with a penchant for tall tales who witnesses a real murder. The film then gives us a totally believable look at how nobody believes him.

One thing I really liked here is how Driscoll looks and acts like a real kid, or at least, how I tend to think of kids looking and acting. He's not a little adult, or precocious in any way. He's small and skinny and has his limbs flying all over the place when he runs. There's also some very nice effects at the end, as the killers chase Tommy through a condemned building, with multi-story drops and collapsing staircases looking a lot more convincing than they do in many films with this provenance.

The week in movies: Between Midnight and Dawn, The Illusionist, Snakes on a Plane

I meant to see more at the Brattle this past week, catching all three repatory series that are running down the calendar, but it didn't quite work out that way. I wound up hanging around the comic shop long enough to miss the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth on Wednesday, and then stuck at work long enough that I would have been seeing Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on an empty stomach, and it looked just long enough that I figured I would rather not. Weak, I know, especially when I planned my Saturday around Snakes on a Plane.

I did stop in to get the new Brattle schedule on Saturday, though, and I like it. It's got Schwarzeneggar midnight shows, a week of Terry Gilliam, Mutual Appreciation, Azumi, Yellowbeard to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and Bruce Campbell introducing Bubba Ho-Tep. That last one may have to substitute for the traditional Halloween showing of Evil Dead 2, since at the end of the month, they're doing an almost-unheard of four-week series of new prints from the Janus Films library (Janus, remember, got its start at the Brattle).

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is also back for its fourth year, and its six-week run may (I think) be its longest yet. The really good news is that a preview screening of Tideland has already been booked for it. I'm really hoping that it's six days because Ned & company feel momentum as opposed to a six-day hole in the schedule; I'd like this festival to get within an order of magnitude of Fantasia.

So, I've been a bit of a movie-viewing slacker this week, but to tell the truth, it's been a weak summer anyway. I had to toss one of my AMC reward tickets because I didn't find something I wanted to use it on before it expired.

Between Midnight and Dawn (aka Prowl Car)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

The film opens by almost fetishizing cops in their prowl cars, delighting in the code numbers that the dispatchers read to the various patrolling units. We follow one that gets involved in a shoot-out and then has trouble getting a store-owner to testify against a tough running a protection racket. It's the latter that sets off the chain of events that consumes most of the movie, as Edmond O'Brien's Dan Purvis becomes obsessed with taking down this gangster, even as a new guy moves in from the East Coast and sets of a gang war. Mark Stevens's Rocky Barnes has a more benign obsession; he's smitten with the dispatcher's sexy voice and sets out to woo her.

Between Midnight and Dawn would be considered a set-up for a TV series rather than a movie now; it spends a lot of time setting up situations that might seem more fitting playing out over the course of a season rather than in a film. It also seems to lose focus a little, as it starts out as a thing about the front-line cops responding to 911 calls, and then becomes a higher-level story, about two patrol copsversus the mob. It's decent at that, and the cutesy romance isn't bad, either, but it would almost be better if Purvis and Barnes weren't so personally involved - make it truly about the beat cops.

The Illusionist

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #4 (First-run)

You'll have a hard time finding somebody less snotty about the use of CGI in films than me, but even I've got a line to draw, and that line is at a story of a stage magician. It's one thing to show things disappearing into thin air when Paul Giamatti's character is recounting the semi-legendary story of the origins of Edward Norton's character, but when he's actually performing on-stage? If you can't do it in-camera, you shouldn't be doing it. Peiod, end of story, because otherwise there's no real limits on what can be done with the inevitable rest of the movie.

Also, everyone is doing a silly-sounding Austrian accent - although, as seems typical, pretty young girls have accents that are less thick than the rest. I say, let them use their real accents as in The Grey Zone - after all, the characters are not speaking accented English, they're speaking (relatively) unaccented German, so the logical translation is to have them speak clearly. Edward Norton sounded very silly. So did Paul Giamatti, but he sold it better.

Snakes on a Plane

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #13 (First-run)

It's been a tremendously disappointing summer, but this little movie about snakes on a plane delivers the goods. It's a bunch of generic characters stitched together in something that would go direct to video without Samuel L. Jackson, but it's handled with wit and aplomb. And even if the vaunted marketing didn't put a whole lot of butts in seats, they were some of the most enthusiastic folks I've seen at a regular movie in a while.

Pre-Fantasia: À Double Tour, Lifeboat, and The Break-Up

It'd be tempting just to punt these three movies I saw before Fantasia and my new, more purely bloggish plan of making this a journal while HBS/EFC gets the full reviews. But, there's stuff that interests me here, even if I won't be writing about it directly - I noticed that À Double Tour was based on a novel by someone whose work was also adapted into a movie in the Brattle's Rare Noir series, I spotted that HBS does not have a review of Lifeboat... So I figured I'd try to catch up with these. Why not, right?

À Double Tour (aka Web of Passion)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 June 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight weeks of Film History)

As À Double Tour opens, the beauty coming from the Marcoux house is enough to make men trip over their own feet, so drawn are their eyes to the half-dressed girl in the window. Of course, as most have by now come to expect, it is just the trappings of their prosperous life that shine so brightly - Julie is not a member of the family, but the maid. So, in a way, the beautiful servant is just another extension of the beautiful garden outside the beautiful house; a trapping of Henri Marcoux's success that doesn't reflect the strain and dissatisfaction within.

Henri (Jacques Dacqmine), of course, has a mistress - a fabulous red-haired Italian girl named Léda (Antonella Lualdi) whose nearby home is filled with souvenirs from her life in the Orient. He's barely doing anything to conceal it, and his wife Thérèse (Madeline Robinson) is unwilling to divorce. Husband and wife both disapprove of Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the Czechoslovakian man their daughter Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie) has taken up with, especially since he has brought a friend (László Szabó) with him to their house - the friend is polite and seems uninterested in participating in Laszlo's freeloading, but it's the principle of the thing. Son Richard (André Jocelyn), meanwhile, is the kind of unfailingly polite young man that has to be hiding something, and his awkward attempts to flirt with Julie (Bernadette Lafont), the maid, might give the audience a good idea what it is.

This being a film by Claude Chabrol, there will be a murder, and a detective (André Dino) come to solve it. The detective, of course, will be largely irrelevant; this murder is a family matter, and the Marcoux family figures it doesn't have a whole lot of reason to be forthcoming. The prime suspect appears to be Julie's boyfriend, and for her sake they would like it to be someone else - especially if that someone else was Laszlo. Not that Thérèse and Henri plan to offer their daughter's fiancé up to the police on a silver platter - no, they must be more subtle.

Read the rest at HBS.

Lifeboat

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 June 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight weeks of Film History)

As I write this in August of 2006, there don't seem to be many Gulf War II movies being made aside from documentaries, which strikes me as a bit odd, considering that films like Lifeboat sprung from World War II in real time. Is it because the country is currently too divided for a film to appeal to everybody, or because of something more practical (films take longer to create and change potentially coming much quicker)? Whatever the reason, it's a shame that the present conflict doesn't seem to be spawning any films as topical, intelligent, and gripping as this.

The film starts with a Liberty Ship sunk, and one survivor, award-winning photographer Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead) in the lifeboat of the title. Soon, others are fished out of the wreckage - sailors John (John Hodiak), Gus (William Bendix), who is wounded, "Sparks" (Hume Cronyn) and George (Canada Lee), the only black man in the boat; industrialist Charles "Ritt" Rittenhouse (Henry Hull); nurse Alice McKenzie (Mary Anderson), and pregnant Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel). Also saved from the sea is Willy (Walter Slezak), part of the crew of the German sub which was also sunk in the battle. Many think he should be thrown out of the boat, but Constance plays the "we'd be no better than them" card. Which initially seems fortunate, because he seems to be one of the most capable people on the boat.

Hitchcock made several films which took place in relatively confined spaces - consider Rear Window, The Lady Vanishes and Rope, but Lifeboat is easily the most constrained. The lifeboat doesn't give people a lot of room to move around, but it's not quite so tight as you might initially think. As factions form among the survivors, there's just enough room for them to separate a little, and maybe even hide things from the others. There’s not enough room for the camera to go anywhere, though, and there’s no easy way to remove a character from a scene for convenience’s sake. It’s quite a challenge Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling (working from a story by John Steinbeck) have set for themselves, but it’s one they meet with alacrity. There’s a bizarre combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia at play here, as the characters have neither room to move nor bounds to their world. Hitchcock is free to move his camera around, but the irony is that even if we’re not locked into one view, we’re still seeing much the same thing.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Break-Up

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #19 (First-run)

The Break-Up feels genuine because it is comfortable with a basic truth: Well-meaning people can be complete jerks. People being ugly is not necessarily the most enjoyable thing to watch in terms of being entertaining in a straightforward manner, but every once in a while it's nice to see a romantic comedy's wacky hijinks exposed as not being particularly wacky.

The film opens with Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke Meyers (Jennifer Aniston) meeting at a Cubs game. Brooke's there with someone else, but Gary's aggressive, making the point that if she's not really enjoying the date, why see it through to the end when she has the chance to do something that really makes her happy? The credits roll, a photo montage of the next three years of their lives as they go out and move in together. On the other end of the credits, though, things aren't so rosy, as Brooke's preparing for a dinner with her family and Gary's not helping the cause. The dinner is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and they're soon splitting, but unable to come to a decision over who should keep the condominium they purchased together.

At this point, we probably expect The Break-Up to go in the general direction of The Awful Truth, and certainly the advertising points in that direction. Indeed, at certain points it seems reasonable to assume that The Awful Truth is Brooke's plan, but as we all soon learn, part of the fun of screwball comedy is in just how divorced from reality it frequently is. Being broken up and in the same condo makes it almost impossible to see what they loved about each other; their interactions are a long series of finding new and familiar ways to irritate each other. Indeed, as the film goes on, we find ourselves more and more having to strain to remember that photo montage, as it gets harder and harder to visualize these two not just in love, but even liking each other.

Read the rest at HBS.

Classic adventure: Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Adventures of Brisco County Junior

After heading north to Maine to celebrate the imminent birth of our first niece (if seven weeks is imminent) on Sunday, Matt and I threw the pilot episode to The Adventures to Brisco County Junior into the DVD player. It is, as the couple million of us who watched the show in its first run will tell you, kind of brilliant, and a nice companion to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen at the Coolidge the next day, and not just because the man who wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would rather co-create Brisco.

Both works are very deliberate throwbacks to the Saturday serial style of adventure, with one crazy escape after another. Both involve a search for a magical artifact of great power - one from a religious past, and one (as we later learn) from the distant future. Both give us iconic action/adventure stars - Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, Bruce Campbell as Brisco County Jr. - playing educated, intelligent men but more comfortable with a day's growth of beard, searching for something amazing away from the city. Both feature sly, self-deprecating wit.

Both also look really good. Sure, you expect it from Raiders, which has Spielberg and Lucas backing it and works hard to create its untamed 1938 aesthetic. It still looks great 25 years later. But Brisco was a production for what was still an upstart Fox network in 1993 - and back then, not only was Fox not a major TV player, but television in general didn't have a lot of money spent on it. As Matt commented, it doesn't look nearly as good as today's big-time adventure series like 24 or Prison Break. It does, however, look a lot like old Westerns; John Wayne or Randolph Scott wouldn't look out of place on its sets. Heck, much of it was shot on the studios' remaining "Old West Town" standing sets; Campbell and company may have been following in the footsteps of those legends in a very literal sense.

Indeed, it's one of the things I love most about both - the filmmakers are very aware of the genres they're working in, and throw winks to the audience (occasionally for Raiders, frequently for Brisco), but they work hard at recreating the pulp adventure environments they love, throwing a new coat of paint on it to keep things from getting too kitschy. These films aren't genuine recreations of 1930s/1940s serials - they're better, with more talented writers and directors than most of those ever could have had.

One more thing they've got in common - I would drop serious money if either were to get a six-inch toy line. I realize neither is exactly current, but maybe something Diamond Exclusive? It would seriously rock.

The Adventures of Brisco County Junior (Pilot Episode)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2006 in Jay's Living Room (Brisco!)

My college friends and I loved this show, and to this day we regret missing the pilot episode because we went out to see Demolition Man on opening night (which I also love, of course, but it could have waited another day). It's amazing how fully-formed the show is right from the start - favorite recurring characters Albert Wickwire, Pete Hutter, John Bly, Big Smith, Lee Pow, and, of course, Dixie Cousins, are all there. We're given a taste of anachronism and the paranormal to show us that this won't be a typical western, but enough to assure us that it will still feel like one. And the characters and their relationships are gently set on the paths they'll follow without it ever feeling coercive.

This show is a big deal to me - I discovered Bruce Campbell here, which led to Army of Darkness and Sam Raimi, which warped my taste in film in ways that have gone unrepaired to this day. It's also one of the few shows that managed to hit the sweet spot between grand serialization and entertaining done-in-one episodes; as good as television is today (there's a serious argument to be made that it's never been better), few series seem to have a premise that is flexible enough for a new story on a weekly basis while also being able to build up a larger narrative.

As much as I loved this show, I don't mind that it lasted just one year. It left no major dangling storylines or cliffhangers, and never suffered a quality drop as its writers ran out of ideas. It's twenty-eight great hours of television.

(That said, if I were a producer at Warner Brothers, I would absolutely reunite the cast for Brisco County Junior in the Valley of Gwangi.)

Raiders of the Lost Ark

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 August 2006 at the Coolidge Corner #1 (Big-screen Classics)

I've got this movie on DVD, but I might as well not, since I'm lucky enough to live in Boston, where both the Brattle Theater and the Coolidge Corner Theater run it roughly once a year. I may not make every showing, but I can see it on the big screen just often enough to sate my desire and for each viewing to be better than I remembered it.

Was Paul Freeman always that good as Indy's opposite number? Does Spielberg always have such good fight choreography in his action movies? How many other movies can slip from action/adventure to horror with such minimal effort? And Harrison Ford. Man, Harrison Ford; not even Bruce Willis can take a beating and still keep at it like Ford does in this movie.

Steven Spielberg is one of the world's great filmmakers because of movies like this, where he's able to get a thousand little details planned out and right while still having room to discover and improvise things on set. He's not always perfect, but his instincts never seem to lead him astray here. Oh, and he's got one of the greatest John Williams scores, too.

Fantasia Screeners: Junk

I'm doing something odd here, re-watching the film as I write the review. I watched it at eleven o'clock Friday night, went to bed right after, and didn't retain it that well. I remember the basic structure, but some of the details fled my mind. So, as I start to write this, it's eleven o'clock again, but Sunday night, and I've thrown it back in the DVD player to re-watch while writing the review. I figure I've got enough sugar in me to keep me up and get something movie-related done this weekend.

I kind of wonder if the Russian film industry could become an international powerhouse, like Hollywood. There's a population large enough that big-budget extravaganzas could potentially break even domestically, neighboring countries that speak either Russian or slavic languages close enough for subtitles to be a minor nuisance, and maybe an economy that is edging ever-closer to being robust enough to fund blockbusters without partnering with an American studio. Not today, but maybe in five or ten years. On the other hand, I imagine Hollywood may be enough of a juggernaut that it's not possible for Russia (or India or China) to even displace it a little.

Junk (Zhest)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2006 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screeners 2006)

There's something great to be said for misleading trailers. A subtitled preview for Junk must have played in front of at least ten movies that I saw in the festival's main theater over the first week, highlighting a bunch of characters and their roles - The Reporter, The Editor, The Cop, The Psychologist - implying that they'll have the same relative importance, even if they have different agendas. I got so thoroughly conditioned to expect that sort of movie that the turn it takes about half an hour in caught me completely flat-footed, which is a nice place to be in when watching a suspense film.

After an opening sequence with the incident that caused Pravda crime reporter Marina (Yelena Babenko) to quit the job, her former editor (and lover) Sasha (Anatoli Belyj) asks her to cover one last story - interview a high-school teacher who abused and killed several of his students. The mental hospital's head doctor (Sergei Shakurov) says to come back tomorrow, but when she does, the man has escaped. A Moscow cop by the name of Pavel Petrovich (Vyacheslav Razbegayev) leads the pursuit, with Marina tagging along. The fugitive flees into a dacha village, eighty square kilometers of mostly-abandoned houses on quarter-acre locks, filled with squatters and other dangerous men. Marina and Pavel wind up stranded there when Pavel crashes the car, and capturing the fugitive soon takes a back seat to just getting out.

It's a good basic adventure storyline, and the inevitable intersection of the various folks on the run - the killer from the police and the reporter from the criminal elements is reasonably smooth. Director and co-writer Denis Neimand occasionally gets a little too arty for his own good, though. Take the trailer's money-shot, for instance, with Marina jumping into a lake from an exploding house, with a flaming car landing behind her. Great shot, and then later it runs in reverse, and a pair of thugs we'd seen in the house (Yusup Bakshiyev and Igor Lifanov) show up alive and apparently unscathed to harass Monica. So, what is this - a director trying to have it both ways, a drug-induced hallucination, a comment that we can't know the whole truth from just one side of the story? Maybe all three, and it kind of works that way, but it also kind of confuses. The last act feels a bit sloppy to me, too, and not just because of some dodgy effects work in the final scene. Part of the idea, I know, is that Marina's seldom in control, but she becomes just a little too peripheral to the final action.

Read the rest at HBS.

Rare Film Noir: The Big Night and The Burglar

I didn't get to as many movies as I expected this week, just the Brattle's "Rare Film Noir" series. I worked late Monday and Thursday, so what I had planned didn't come off, and I wound up watching accumulated TV and soul-crushing baseball games. I'd really like to see the Sox go on a winning streak soon, since Arroyo's recent struggles and Wily Mo Pena's recent gigantic home runs are vindicating my claims that this was a darn good trade.

(Actually, I probably could have made La Dolce Vita last night, but it would have been close and I was kind of hungry when I got home, which meant I would have been really hungry by the time the three-hour movie ended)

I would have really liked if the Brattle had switched the movies' order (or I'd been able to bolt work in time to start two hours earlier); The Big Night is the shorter movie, and finishing at 10.45 rather than 11.00 with a half hour intermission rather than a forty-five minute one can seem like a world of difference. Still, this at least let me end the night on a better movie, as The Burglar is a whole lot more entertaining than The Big Night.

...

Just when I thought I'd finished Fantasia with Samurai Commando Mission 1549 and Train Man, they go and send me five screeners, two and a half weeks after the festival ended! But, hey, why not - filmmakers and studios get their films booked at festivals to get exposure, so if the festival does this, it's helping them, it repeats the Fantasia Festival name in the media a little more, and it gives me something to write about. Not quite as good for all of us as having reviews ready by the time they'll show at the festival, but we're all still washing each other's backs, even if I don't particularly like a movie.

Aaanyway, to get back to the reviews: See Train Man if you can. It's really good. As of right now, 0 Fantasia reviews to do, 23 others.

...

The Big Night

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2006 at Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

Somewhat below average noir with John Barrymore Jr. playing a teenager whose birthday party is interrupted by a sportswriter beating the crap out of his father. He wanders through the city looking for revenge and an explanation. Even at a short seventy-five minutes, though, the movie seems kind of flaccid - the stops between the initial beating and the confrontation with Al Judge just string the movie out; they don't really seem to build to anything. After that, it's cheap melodrama.

The Burglar

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2006 at Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

This, on the other hand, is a fun caper with Dan Duryea as a thief who pulls his crime off iwthout a hitch but has a little trouble with the getaway. It's got a ton of sex appeal from Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers, and a potboiler story that chugs along nicely. It's also got a neat opening, with a faux newsreel newsreel that the camera eventually pulls back from to reveal Duryea's character in the theater. I don't know that I've seen an earlier example of that kind of false start (the film was released in 1957), and it caught my eye.

It's really not that much deeper than The Big Night, but it's got a better cast, and you can start to see the start of later decade's more naturalistic styles here, even if it is still rather theatrical, too.

Weekend update: Pirates, Streets of Fire, The Night Listener

Low-key movie weekend for me. The films were good, of course, but I was kind of in a place where there were few things that I really wanted to see. Taking myself out of the new-release loop for a couple of weekends with Fantasia put me "behind", in a way, but also gives me a chance to examine just how much I'm really interested in certain movies, and how much I'm just sort of riding along. I just got around to Pirates of the Caribbean II, and it was just the one that fit my schedule that day better than Lady in the Water, divorced from "every website on earth is leading with this and you're seeing dozens of trailers and and and and..."

So I saw some decent movies, with the most fun winding up being the midnight movie at the Brattle.

Only a couple more Fantasia reviews despite the time between the recent posts, because they're the type of decent-but-not-exceptional movies that are hard to speak passionately about: Shinobi and Vampire Cop Ricky. The count now stands at 2 Fantasia reviews left, 21 others.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2006 at AMC Fenway #7 (first-run)

A fun sequel to a fun movie. I thought the first Pirates was an above-average time at the summer multiplex, and the team returns mostly intact, doing the quality work I'd expect. In a way, that's an issue - the same Johnny Depp performance that was fresh and full of surprises a coupe years ago became, well, the same Johnny Depp performance this time around, and still manages to wipe Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley off the screen. The first was an exciting blend of swashbuckling and the supernatural; this one amps up the supernatural but the characters are no longer shocked by it. And Bill Nighy is almost completely squandered.

But, it's got great set pieces - I loved the sheer exuberance of the hanging cage sequence, for instance. I dug the cynical black comedy as Sparrow tries to recruit a crew whose sole purpose is to be given over to Davy Jones. And the kraken is a cool effect. I must admit, I can't wait until next summer, when we get Chow Yun-Fat.

Streets of Fire

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2006 at Brattle Theater (The Late Show)

I'm a big fan of films that bring the crazy, and Streets of Fire has all kinds of crazy - its environment is a strange mix of eighties urban paranoia and fifties style; it's got Michael Paré, Amy Madigan, and Rick freakin' Moranis mouthing off to each other while on their mission to rescue Diane Lane; it's got Willem Defoe leather overalls being completely insane. People fight a formal duel with sledgehammers. And it's one of those "would like to be a muical but doesn't quite go there" deals - you know, where no-one breaks into song but there are a succession of stages where people can sing.

It's all in good fun. I dig it.

The Night Listener

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 August 2006 at AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run)

A nifty little low-key thriller with the toned-down, serious Robin Williams. He makes an interesting amateur sleuth, a writer and high-end radio personality trying to figure out if the precocious, dying child he's been speaking to on the phone actually exists. There's nifty ideas to it about the nature of truth versus fiction, and how we can blur the line between the two with enough massaging and repetition. It is not, however, a particularly exciting story, and once we've got the idea that Williams's character looks like the dangerous creep from certain perspectives, it kind of gets into a rut.

One chance: Talladega Nights, Nobody Lives Forever, Russian Dolls

A few one-night stands this week. Well, just one, really - Talladega Nights was a preview, and Russian Dolls was on its last night. But since I wouldn't be able to see Talladega free the next night or Russian Dolls at all, so I'll count that.

I also saw A Scanner Darkly on its last night at the Coolidge, but that thing knocked me out. I don't know if it's just an example of how incredibly hit-and-miss Linklater can be for me, or something about that movie that night. I'd found the style torturous during Waking Life, too, and while it had not bee a particularly hard or long day at work, Russian Dolls had sort of softened me up. Man, that movie needled me.

I am liking the Coolidge's new arrangement, with handicapped folks able to get upstairs and a larger concession stand and ticket bureau. I do kind of wonder how it works on nights when it's a busy show in the main theater - it seems like you'll have people trying to buy tickets and going in and out crowding past each other. There's a little more room in the lobby, but I I don't know if it's come at the expense of seats in the main theater.

More Fantasia is up: God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand; Meatball Machine; 3 Mighty Men; All-Out Nine

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #7 (Preview)

I'm still not sure about Will Ferrell. Matt suggests that Ferrell isn't really funny, but is good at surrounding himself with funny people. I don't think that's quite it. I think he's just not terribly good at playing a character who is simply stupid, and when the joke is that Ricky is a moron, the movie feels generic. When he does something weird, crazy, or surreal, the movie is about twice as good.

Nobody Lives Forever

* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

I honestly thought this was going to hit Dirty Rotten Scoundrels territory at one point. It kind of lives in the area between film noir and a caper film. It's a nifty combination, with the romantic fun of a con job along with a dark reminder that the characters aren't getting any younger. It's got a nice cast, with John Garfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Waltern Brennan, and Faye Emerson. Hopefully, Warner Brothers pulls it out of the vaults for their next film noir box set.

Russian Dolls

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (First-run)

Honestly, I'm not sure why I was interested in seeing this - I remember not being particularly fond of L'Auberge Espagnole, so why did I feel some sort of need to catch the follow-up. Maybe it's just the more indie than you thing: Sure, you may have seen that when it was being pushed as a big thing in the boutique houses, but have you seen the sequel? No? Well, then you're just a poser.

It's not a bad movie, but it could have about forty-five minutes cut out of it. Like, everything with Audrey Tautou, who had a miniscule role in the first one, but sucks up a whole bunch of the movie's first act only to disappear once the main story starts. Then comes another episode with Xavier's lesbian friend Isabelle pretending to be his fiancée. And then, just as in the first movie, things kick into gear when Kevin Bishop shows up as the boorish William, only here he's very likable as he romances a Russian ballet dancer, which kicks an actual story into gear. And from there forward, it's a pretty enjoyable movie. But, lord, you've got to wade through an awful lot of unnecessary stuff to get there.

Perfect Suspense: Body Double and Rear Window

Reminder for the future: Leave two hours before trying to see a movie at the furniture store. Getting there from Cambridge involves at least two of the commuter rail, subway, and bus... And at some point, the T will screw it up, even if you're catching every train really quickly.

So... No Ant Bully in IMAX 3-D last weekend. I wound up not going to the Birds/Jaws double feature because futility is kind of draining, and by the time I finished the ballgame, I knew I wasn't going to make it to eleven o'clock in a darkened theater.

But, nothing keeps me from Rear Window. Matt and I wound up staggering how we hit the double feature - I did Body Double at 4:00, he showed up for Rear Window at 6:30, and then I left him to watch the 9:00 Body Double. Because I just had to watch the ugly ballgame on ESPN.

Great stuff, though - Rear Window is one of Hitchcock's very best, and Body Double is a great example of Brian De Palma stealing all the right things from his idols and adding his own twisted sensibility to it. It's not often you get a four-star double feature, but when you do it's delightful.

More Fantasia is up: Necromancer and Frostbite

Body Double

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2006 at the Brattle (Hitchcock & Friends Thriller Weekend)

Brian De Palma will steal anything that isn't nailed down, and this delightful thriller borrows liberally from its double feature partner, and Vertigo, and probably a ton of others that I couldn't immediately identify. What he comes up with is a tightly constructed thriller that doesn't cheat the audience and reveals all its cards in good time. De Palma has a great pulp-like thing going on with the gleeful sexuality and violence, and isn't afraid to indulge in a little darkly comic winking at the camera when he has the chance to go over the top.

What De Palma does with the camera in this movie reminds us of why his new films are worth looking out for, even when he hasn't had a major success that was really his in around twenty years. No-one does a long, continuous shot like he does; someone really should give him a couple million to use today's digital equipment to make a film that's one continuous shot.

It's also fun to see what's happened with the cast over the years - two of the leads have more or less disappeared, Melanie Griffith probably never had another role as good (and has fallen off the map as women over 35 are sadly wont to do), and Gregg Henry has become a dependable character actor. Probably the most famous now is Dennis Franz, billed low as the director of the movie the main character is acting in.

Rear Window

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2006 at the Brattle (Hitchcock & Friends Thriller Weekend)

When this was restored and rereleased a few years ago, I got to know that trailer by heart. It's one of the best trailers of the past ten years, and the movie itself isn't chopped liver, either. Rear Window truly merits being called multileveled - it's enjoyable as an amateur-sleuth adventure, but it's also a delightful romance as James Stewart and Grace Kelly discover that they're not nearly so mismatched as they initially thought. You can also get all intellectual about what Hitchcock and company are saying about voyeurism and our acceptance of it, or all analytical about how he keeps the camera within Stewart's apartment at almost all times. It's rare to see a film so satisfying in so many ways.

And it's got James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Matt asked afterwards who the modern day Grace Kelly would be, and I really couldn't think of anyone. Scarlet Johansson came to mind as an impeccably constructed blonde beauty, but her flat voice doesn't just drizzle melted class over you the way Kelly's does. Maybe Naomi Watts or Olivia Williams, but, honestly, there probably won't ever be another one like her.

Rare Noir & The Hidden Blade

More Fantasia is up: Tokyo Zombie, SARS Wars, Blood Rain.

I like the Brattle. They know me there. When I went to Trailer Treats last week, some of the folks asked if I'd seen The Hidden Blade yet, and I had to say that I'd been out of town inhaling a whole bunch of other Asian theater. The way things worked out, I didn't get a chance to see it until Wednesday night, when it was down to one screening a night, and not much chance to give the last day a hard sell.

Still, that doesn't mean that the best part of Tuesday night's Rare Noir double feature wasn't seeing the Psycho trailer twice. Some of these things are rarely screened and not available on video because they're just not very good. The Captive City is mainly just overly earnest, Witness to Murder just invites a pun involving the use of the word "witless" for a tagline.

Hitchcock & Friends at the Brattle this weekend - I fully intend to make Matt come to Rear Window on Sunday, because it's Rear Window, darn it, and the boy has never seen it but liked Dial M For Murder in 3-D last year and more Grace Kelly is a good thing. Hopefully I'll be able to do The Birds and Jaws tomorrow. I have, to my shame, never seen Jaws. And I love Spielberg. So even if I don't particularly love The Birds... Yeah, I'll probably skip whatever I was planning to see after The Ant Bully at the furniture store. Hitchcock and Spielberg, after all.

The Captive City

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2006 at the Brattle (Rare Film Noir)

There's something almost quaint about this movie by cinematic chameleon Robert Wise. I can't imagine a movie inserting a member of the U.S. Senate so prominently and in such an unambiguously positive light as Estes Kefauver's cameo appearance here. The characters go out of their way to define what the mafia is, and their primary concern seems to be gambling. Mention is made of vice and narcotics, but only briefly. It's almost like the filmmakers are willing to scare the audience about the mob being in their town, but they're not going to imply the presense of prostitutes or drugs.

Still, pretty cut and dried. John Forsythe's reporter never seems to seriously think about backing down, so it's just a matter of time before we're back at the beginning, where he started telling his story in flashback - at which point the tension just dissolves.

Full review at HBS.

Witness To Murder

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2006 at the Brattle (Rare Film Noir)

Still, that's better than this thing. I mentioned the greatness of Rear Window earlier, and while this starts from the same basic premise - person sees a murder in the neighbor's apartment, but has no proof - but this just goes completely off the tracks. Stanwyck is clearly too old for the part, and the relationship between her and the detective played by Gary Merrill is just peculiar. How great a romance can you get when the man is constantly trying to convince the woman that she was just seeing things? It's weirdly paternalistic and vaguely mysoginistic, I think. Still, props to George Sanders as the oily villain of the piece, especially when he gets to go into Nazi mode toward the end.

Full review at HBS.

The Hidden Blade (Kakushi ken oni no tsume)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (First-run)

I came into this expecting to like it, but a little wary, because I figured that a lot of what made The Twilight Samurai was how self-representative it was; there was a clear line to be drawn between Yoji Yamada and his hero, both being loyal soldiers who finally, at the end of their runs, got to show what they really capable of (but regretted nothing becaues family came first).

Which meant I was very pleasantly surprised by the actual result. This is a sweet, lovable movie starring Masatoshi Nagase as a samurai whose sense of duty compels him to do more (and less) than obey orders. He loves Takako Matsu's Kie, but they can't be together because of the differences in caste. It's tragic but real, which makes the last scene just a thing of beauty.

I also love the way samurai are portrayed in these movies. They are, today, revered as a class of honorable warriors, but they're also just guys. Nagase's character can be a guy who is acknowledged as a great swordsman, but he and the other samurai aren't out of place in scenes teasing his little sister, finding themselves uncomfortable with new modern warfare, and the like. I can't think of many other movies which do such a good job of portraying characters both as noble warriors and regular guys.


The backlog: 11 Fantasia films, 13 from around here. It seems almost possible to catch up sometime in August or September.

Eight Weeks of Film History: 1895-1939 - Buster Keaton and other things

More Fantasia is up: The Art of Fighting.

If I've got any regrets about Fantasia, its that it and going back to Maine for the Fourth of July have resulted in me missing a whole bunch of the Harvard Film Archive's great "Eight Weeks of FIlm History" summer program, and the Brattle's vertical schedule will do a number on the rest. Last night was the first part of the series I was able to get to. Fortunately, the early cinema is playing Mondays, so I should be able to see a good chunk of that. Silent films are just delightful, especially comedies.

(Really, somebody ought to get Jim Carrey to do a silent comedy. Rock stars play acoustic sets, so why shouldn't movie stars do something like this?)

I would have liked more Buster Keaton and less Soviet strangeness, but it was a fun show. I love how people bring kids to silent comedies whenever they play in the area, especially when it's not a relatively expensive Alloy Orchestra show.

"Glumov's Diary" ("Dnevnik Glumova")

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

Uh... OK. This is five minues of clowns, often turning into other things. It's bizare and surreal, and I imagine it makes a lot more sense when seen as originally intended, as part of a play Sergei Eisenstein was directing at the time. As a free-standing thing... Uh, whatever.

A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaia Chast Mira)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

An interesting film, created by the director of The Man with a Movie Camera to sell Soviet products. As with a lot of Soviet propoganda, the message is rather heavy-handed, especially toward the end; I notice that early in the movie, a cross is shown without any comment, but by the end, the intertitles extolling communist virtues are saying "here, people are still trusting in Jesus" (and Buddha and Allah) with an almost-astonished air of superiority. I wonder if there was a tacit understanding between the filmmakers and audience that the indoctrination wouldn't come until the end, and you could slip out early if you wanted.

As I said, it's interesting - Dziga Vertov does some very neat things with editing, cutting between locations to call attention to both their distance and closeness. There's a very poetic structure to it, and it must have been a very daunting undertaking in 1926 to get documentary footage from the entire sweep of the Soviet Union. I seldom tend to think of Russia now or the USSR before as ethnically and culturally diverse, but it must be, just from the sheer amount and variety of territory it includes. Still, even at just over an hour, the poetic feel without a narrative is trying at times. It's a nicely assembled series of images, but it sort of goes on and on.

Full review at HBS.

"The Baloonatic"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

So, what's 23 minutes, two reels? Two reels of funny, that is. Buster Keaton strings gag after gag together, first at a boardwalk of hazardous amusements, then in a balloon that accidentally launched while he was affixing a flag to the top, and finally in the woods where he has trouble fishing and encounters a pretty girl out camping.

I didn't think about it at the time, but good job on faking the aerial bits. At no point did I think that the balloon was earthbound or shot against rear-projection, although I did occasionally notice some odd cropping. As great as Keaton was as a performer and gagman, he's also a darned good director.

(So, today, Buster's #1, Harold Lloyd's #2, and Caplin's #3. But that could change the next time I see one of their movies)

Shrelock Jr.

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

I don't know if this is as consistently and constantly brilliant as The General or Steamboat Bill Jr., but it's got arguably the greatest dream sequence in movie history. Consider how clear it is that Buster inserting himself and the rest of the cast into the movie his character is projecting is a dream sequence, and then try and remember how many other times you've gotten invested with the events in such a sequence. The dream/film-within-a-film in Sherlock Jr. matters to the audience even though we know intellectually that it will have no consequences.

It's also filled with some of the most brilliant slapstick of the tight forty-five minute film, from broad cartoonish set-ups to pool shark manouveurs. We're quite pleased to dispose of the plot in the real world and watch it play out in the dream instead. And, of course, Buster's moving in and out of the screen is great shooting and editing.

Full review at HBS.

Weekend update: 22-23 July

Went to the Brattle's "Trailer Treats" event on Thursday. It's kind of a good time, and the money raised goes to keeping the place open, which everybody who enjoys film wants to see happen. I wound up making out like a bandit - answering a trivia question (Crispin Glover starred in the remake of Willard) to win a Marx Brothers box set, and then literally minutes later being having my raffle ticket drawn to win the gift bucket full of crap (and a Coen Brothers box set). I wound up letting anyone who wanted to pick over it take what they want, and I'll probably wind up selling the movies I have duplicates of on ebay and giving the procedes to the Brattle. There's still a bunch of stuff I have no idea how I'll ever use them.

Still, Ned, Ivy and company must be taking my threats for what I'd do if I win their Guaranteed request raffle a little more seriously. Here's what I've come up with as double-feature possibilities:

Survive Style 5+ and Funky Forest: The First Contact - see just how much Japanese randomness an audience can take.

The Great Yokai War and Zebraman - someone's going to screen Yokai for me, since it ran in Cambridge when I was in Montreal and Montreal when I was in Cambridge, and another family-ish thing from Miike sounds like a fine companion. Or A Chinese Tall Story.

Crimewave and The Hudsucker Proxy - Raimis. Coens. Bruce Campbell. Good luck finding a non-sucky print of Crimewave.

SPL and One Night in Mongkok - two recent Hong Kong action movies I've heard excellent things about.

It's a Fantasia-centric list, which gives me an excuse to mention two more completed reviews: Black Kiss and Bad Blood. This leaves me with 15 Fantasia films and 8 others in the backlog. Forty movies in eleven days can really make getting caught up tough, as can seeing more movies than you right up in a four-day period. The three new ones are...

Monster House

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run) (digital 3-D)

I told Matt, hey, let's go see some cool technology yesterday morning, and Monster House delivered. The movie is a fun little scary story for kids, and if it relies on familiar gags when the kids are talking with each other, it's still full of energy. At one point during the big action finale I leaned over to whisper that this scene alone was worth the extra $2, and it was. The 3-D isn't quite so well-utilized as in The Polar Express, but it's a better story.

The same technology is used as was used with Chicken Little, apparently shooting video out at 144 frames per second (72 per eye), resulting in an exceptionally smooth picture. I generally avoid digital projection whenever I can, and still maintain that film looks better in most all situations, but this is something special.

Full review at HBS.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #5 (first-run)

There's a good chance others don't like this movie as much as I do, but I laughed from start to finish. Luke Wilson does great reaction shots, Uma Thurman is gorgeous and funny, there are no unfunny supporting characters who exist just to move the plot along. And there's the shark, which is even funnier in the movie than it was in the preview.

Also, I like its approach to telling a superhero story. Even comic books not allied with DC and Marvel often feel the need to create a whole planet full of superheroes when you probably just need one or two to tell the story you're interested in. It's been about ten years since G-Girl's first appearance, so we don't get a lot of how a superhero appearing upsets the world order; we just assume they've dealt with it. And they don't give her a spandex costume, but just let her dress in stuff that looks good and identifies her. I mean, really - does anybody really think a female superhero would just have the one costume? Yeah, it's a stereotype, but it works here.

Full review at HBS.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

I joke that I don't like the idea of electric cars - after all, I'm a pedestrian, and I wouldn't hear one of those silent things coming. I like the idea of a zero-emission vehicle a lot, though, and if I ever had to own a car, I'd like to think it would be something like the Saturn EV-1 which serves as the main focus of the movie.

I can't, though, since as filmmaker Chris Paine documents, General Motors not only discontinued the model, but took all the existing cars back and destroyed them; similar things happened with other EV models. The story of why and how this happens is almost too strange to be non-fiction, but is presented in a calm manner that manages to advocate without attacking the audience that's not already on its side. Paine relies on the famous and near-famous a little too much, and has to rely on stock footage because the cars had been recalled when he started the film to actually show the EV-1, but give him credit: This is the rare documentary that might actually convince somebody, rather than just repulse people on the other side.

Full review at HBS.

Rare Film Noir Week 1: Pushover and Nightfall

Rested Monday evening by watching the ballgame, but was back on the two-movies-a-night horse on Tuesday, as the Brattle started its summer "vertical" calendar wtih the first week of their "rare film noir" series, which they're pitching on the calendar as all-new 35mm prints. The two shown last night did look pretty darn good. Only two of the nine films in this series are available on video, and though I'd normally look at a bunch of new prints and say, well, they've got to be coming soon, right?, tonight's were from Columbia, and Sony really doesn't seem to be interested in exploiting their catalog like Warner does.

Pity; these are fun little crime movies. I don't know if there's really a place for movies like these two any more; they're designed to be part of a double bill, and are neither prestige pictures or event movies. They're simple crime stories, under ninety minutes, with a pretty girl and a definite conclusion. They're really almost too simple for today's film or TV, but they're an enjoyable watch.

Worth mentioning: This was the most crowded I've seen the Brattle for a "regular" series in a long time; as much as I love it when they have old movies, those generally don't seem to pay the bills nearly as well as the weekend special features or festivals. Last night, though, was pretty close to packed - I had people in one of the seats next to me and had to mill around to find a seat I liked. I don't know whether that's a result of it being ridiculously hot and the place having air conditioning or whether something not being available on video is a big draw. At any rate, good show.

Pushover

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

A nicely twisty story of a cop (Fred MacMurray) who falls for the woman he and his team are investigating as being connected to a bank robbery that left a guard dead. The crook barely appears; instead, we get Kim Novak in her first big role doing the femme fatale thing, corrupting MacMurray's detective to the point of murder.

The weird thing: The good cop working with MacMurray's Paul Sheridan, played by Philip Carey, winds up as the hero but he and the other cops watching Novak's apartment from across the way have their binoculars wander into other apartments an awful lot, particularly that of Dorothy Malone's neighbor. I imagine it must happen, although nowadays you'd probably use a stationary camera hooked up to a VCR and not leave a record of your peeping. Also, cell phones would completely destroy this plot, as I imagine they would for a lot of old suspense stories.

Full review at HBS.

Nightfall

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

There's something almost caper-y about this one, at least in a segment where Anne Bancroft, playing a model Aldo Ray's fugitive meets in Los Angeles, tries to warn him of imminent danger during a fashion show. Ray's a likeable protagonist, on the run from both the police and the hoods who killed his best friend and framed him for both that murder and a bank robbery; only Bancroft's Marie and James Gregory's insurance investigator seem to think he might be innocent, while Brian Keith and Rudy Bond are menacing as the men chasing him.

Unlike a lot of noirs, this one spends a fair amount of time in the "blanc", as the final sequence takes place in Wyoming, with the road just plowed enough for all the characters to find the stolen loot at an ice-fishing shed. This scene also features a potentially gruesome use of a snowplow, and I have to admit, a week and a half of modern genre film at Fantasia had me slightly confused when blood and guts weren't splattered all over the place.

Full review at HBS.

Speaking of Fantasia...

Reviews for The Woods and Tape 31 are up at HBS/EFC (the corresponding blog entries have been expanded a bit, too). So including the two movies above, I've got 17 Fantasia films and 5 "others" before I'm caught up.

Fantasia '06, Day 11: And that's a wrap (for me, at least)

Two from Saturday are up: The Gravedancers and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. Both of them are playing today, if you're lucky enough to still be in Montreal for the festival.

Got up, checked out, and stowed my big gym bag of laundry at the bus station before heading for my last taste of Cocktail Hawaii for another year and a full day of movies. I admit, by mid-afternoon, I was strongly considering seeing if their was an earlier bus; I think I could have slept through a half-hour of Vampire Cop Ricky without noticing I'd slept through a half hour of it (it's really back-loaded); the three featurettes from Japan that I thought I'd get through easily turned out to be trying in their own way. Maybe, I thought, arriving in Boston at 6.30am tomorrow and then heading straight to work is a bad idea I could avoid by going home now.

Fortunately, things started looking up from there. Samurai Commando 1549 was kind of a blast, as any combination of feudal samurai and twenty-first century tanks must inevitably be. And Train Man wound up being pretty darn adorable, almost as good as Viz's entry to the festival last year, Kamikaze Girls (which I still adore; I wish I could have made Friday's outdoor screening). And I think it was really good to end my time at the festival on a romantic comedy; I was just about completely serial-killer-ed out by the end of last week. Train Man is a delight, though - I hope Viz gets it more than the two screens Kamikaze Girls got.

Today's plan, if I were still in Montreal: The Red Shoes, Isolation, and Synesthesia. But I'm not and I've got no screeners. Stupid day job.

Vampire Cop Ricky (Heup-hyeol-hyeongsa Nadoyeol)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Vampire Cop Ricky opens with a scene that strikes me very funny - in a dark Transylvanian castle, Count Dracula's coffin opens and he rises to begin a night of terrifying the nearby village. But there's a mosquito buzzing around, and it's driving him nuts, sending him into a fit of rage when it bites. As the mosquito flies away, only the encounter an oncoming plane, we see Dracula howling in completely disproportionate fury. And I'm thinking, man, if the film can keep this kind of off-kilter vibe up for another two hours...

Of course, hitting the plane doesn't kill the mosquito - it is now a vampire mosquito, and as such is hardier than its non-undead breathren. In the meantime, though, we meet Do-yul (Kim Su-ro) - the "Ricky" of the title, though I don't see where that name comes from - on a raid to bust illegal betting kingpin Tak Mun-su (Son Byung-ho). But Tak's been tipped off - as we later learn, but Do-yul himself. Do-yul, of course, gets bitten by the mosquito, and starts to gain vampire abilities (and weaknesses) even as his corruption is uncovered. And as if Tak's gang and his fellow officers aren't enough trouble, the Vatican has dispatched a vampire hunter (Oh Kwang-rok) with an ultimatum - stop using your vampiric abilities right away, so that you can possibly revert to humanity, or get a stake through the heart.

There's a good deal of entertainment to be had in this movie, but it's got a fairly bloated midsection; one fellow near me took a thirty or forty-five minute nap and I really don't know if he missed anything particularly important. After the initial half-hour kicking things off, things settle down while the characters go through their motions until director Lee Si-myung and his three writers suddenly seem to remember that they pitched this movie as an action-comedy with about forty-five minutes to go.

Read the rest at HBS.

"The iDol"

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

"The iDol" comes in at a notch under an hour and still feels twice as long as it needs to be, with its meandering story of a toy given to a bum by an alien that eventually finds its way into the hands of a die-hard collector. The biggest laugh comes when a model confesses that she collects 1940s/50s Soviet propoganda items, especially ones which focus on Joseph Stalin. A few more moments of character absurdity and much less musical montage would have gone a long way.

"Sukeban Boy" ("Oira Sukeban")

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

The most exuberant of the day's triple bill, "Sukeban Boy" shoots for guilty pleasure and lands in that general area with a gender-bending plot about a boy with the face and voice of a pretty girl. His biker father sends him to a girl's school, where he soon finds himself plunged into a bizarre example of every schoolgirl-fetish cliché imaginable, and some that probably don't bear imagining. Plenty of nudity and over-the-top girls in schoolgirl outfits fighting, and, hey, who doesn't like pretty naked girls?

"Negadon: The Monster from Mars" ("Wakusai Daikaiju Negadon")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

This one has been getting a lot of praise, and the way it captures the cinematography of early Japanese science fiction is really kind of incredible. It stands alongside "Voices of a Distant Star" as an incredible example of what one person can do with CGI when he puts his mind and time into it these days. Unfortunately, Jun Awaku's story is not nearly as strong as Shinkai's. I get that it's supposed to be a tribute to classic kaiju, but it seems both too slow-moving and melodramatic for a 25-minute short.

Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (Sengoku Jietai 1549)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

If someone comes out of Samurai Command Mission 1549 disappointed, it is because the potential is so ridiculously good; I mean, we're going in with the potential for both samurai slicing their opponents up and helicopters exploding. That's two of the four basic action/adventure movie food groups right there. Not enough for a balanced diet, but certainly a tasty snack.

In 2002, an experimental force field developed by Rei Kanzaki (Kyoka Suzuki) failed to work as expected - it sent the armored division testing it back to the year 1547, where they are promptly attacked by a local army. Two and a half years later, in the present (2005), sunspot activity or whatever sent the project haywire may allow for a second trip into the past, and it's necessary - whatever Colonel Matoba (Takeshi Kaga) has done in the past is starting to have repercussions in the present - black nothingness with the potential to eat the world repercussions. So Kanzaki recruits Yusuke Kashima (Yosuke Eguchi), a former protege of Matoba's, and Shichibe Iinuma (Kazuki Kitamura), a samurai who was thrown forward in time by the same event that threw Matoba back, to make a trip back to 1549 and set things right. What they find is worse than they expected - Matoba has taken over the court of Nobunaga Oda, and intends to devastate and rebuild the country with modern technology, giving Japan a five hundred year head start on the rest of the world.

That's a lot of plot, and it's a little challenging for a westerner like myself who really doesn't quite know who Nobunaga Oda is (as it should be; I wouldn't expect a movie about people traveling back to the American Civil War to explain who Lincoln is just because someone in Japan may not get it). Since we're joining the story two years after Matoba has arrived, we've got to play catch-up along with Rei and Yusuke, and we may wind up holding on to their mistaken assumptions slightly longer than they do. It is worth noting that this film offers a great many places for the audience to be confused - it throws a great deal of technobabble, the history of feudal Japan, and a few pre-existing relationships at us - but does a pretty good job of keeping us up to speed without resorting to large swaths of expository dialog.

Read the rest at HBS.

Train Man (Densha Otoko)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Train Man has conquered the Japanese media quickly and thoroughly. It first captured the public's interest as a blog that was posted as the events took place; it soon became a novel, a series of manga, a television series, a stage play, and, of course, this film. It's not hard to see why - it's a sweet love story that can appeal to all ages, but it's also arguably one of the first movies to really get communications and community in the twenty-first century.

Takayuki Yamada plays the title character, a self-described "gaming and manga otaku" (computer/comic nerd, in American), and he fits the stereotype - he's a shy twenty-two year-old who has never been on a date, works in I.T. tech support, and goes home to an apartment filled with stuff but no other people every night. He's taking the train home one day when a drunken salaryman comes on board, and our otaku stands up and tells him to stop as he's starting to get really obnoxious to a willowy beauty (Miki Nakatani). The transit police take the drunk into custody and ask those involved to fill out a report. Amid his apologies for causing inconvenience, she asks for his address so she can send him a thank-you gift. He posts about it on a message board (signing the message "Densha Otoko", or "Train Man"), and when the gift is an expensive Hermes tea set (tagging the woman with the nickname "Hermes" or "Hermess"), the people responding to the conversation encourage him to pursue her.

Unless I'm mistaken, we never actually learn the characters' real names - they don't come up in the dialog, and they are simply "Train Man" and "Hermes". They're almost abstractions, with Train Man representing what is nerdy or socially maladroit in all of us and Hermes representing an ethereal ideal. But more than that, it's because Train Man's blog entries and the responses are a crucial part of the film - they expand the film's narration from a monologue to a chorus, even while we see things almost entirely from Train Man's perspective. It gives him a sounding board while still leaving him very much on his own. And it gives us a chance to examine the kinds of new, ad-hoc communities that the internet has had a large part in realizing.

The simple, traditional approach would be to point out that Train Man needs to stop looking for his social life on-line and start interacting with people in the real world. Certainly, the nervousness that borders on genuine terror that we see from him in his awkward first dates with Hermes suggests that important parts of his social development are woefully inadequate - although he is, maybe, not the saddest case we see. Most of the people we see responding to the blog aren't other nerds (a trio of gamers is the boisterous exception). There's Rika (Ryoko Kuninaka), a nurse; Michiko (Tae Kimura), a housewife; Hirofumi (Eita), a student; and Hiashi (Kuranosuke Sasaki), a businessman. We get only brief glimpses into their lives, but we learn enough to fill in blanks and to see that the social network they form benefits them all.

Read the rest at HBS.

Fantasia '06, Day 10: Oddness

First, check out some new reviews added for previous days: My Scary Girl and Wilderness.

Went to the office yesterday hoping to find someone in, didn't. I'm not too bummed about not getting screeners; although some of these films will likely be hard to come by unless Ned programs them for the BFFF this fall (or the Brattle in general), I'll have seen about forty movies by the time I go home tonight, and trying to take five more home with me would just be being greedy. Of the 36 I've seen so far, I've only written 17 reviews, so I'll probably be finishing these up through the end of July.

Breakfast was a crepe with strawberries, bananas and chocolate at Cocktail Hawaii, dinner was a combo special at Mr. Steer's. All else was movies.

Today's plan: Check out, stow my bag-o-laundry at the bus station, watch Vampire Cop Ricky, the "Sukeban Boy"/"The iDol"/"Negadon" collection, Samurai Commando 1549 and Train Man, then maybe find something to eat before catching the 11.15pm bus home. The idea is to sleep on the bus after crossing the border and be some sort of zombie at work tomorrow. I'm not claiming it's a good plan, but I'm stuck with it.

3 Mighty Men (3 dev Adam)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

For a long time, this movie was thought destroyed in a fire, and if I were the man investigating that, I would have checked to see if Stan Lee or Steve Ditko were anywhere near Turkey at the time. After all, it's bad enough that they just appropriated Captain America without asking, but you've got to think that making Spider-Man the villain of the piece would tick the folks at Marvel off that much more.

Okay, the villain is named "The Spider" and his costume features green instead of blue, but there's no mistaking who he's supposed to be. His plan is to sell stolen artifacts in the Western Hemisphere and then repurchase them with counterfeit cash. He's done it so much that it threatens to destabilize the world's economy, so when he runs to Turkey, three New World heroes follow him to form a special task force with the Turkish police: Captain America (Aytekin Akkaya), the United States's famous super-soldier; Santo (Yavuz Selekman), Mexico's greatest luchador; and Julia (Deniz Erkanat), a very pretty girl from Brazil.

The story, of course, is just an excuse to string together a few action scenes and stick colorful (and maybe recognizable; how popular were Marvel Comics in early 1970s Turkey?) images on the poster. It really doesn't make a lick of sense, and at times is almost contemptuous of the concepts behind it: When the man heading up the Turkish government's investigation asks Captain America why they wear colorful costumes, he snorts that Spider does because he has the mind of a psychotic child, though he himself does because it draws the insane man's attacks. And his is bullet-proof. The second half of the movie also suggests that there must be more than one Spider (though all have the same bushy eyebrows poking out of their costumes), but when a new one pops up immediately after the last one dies, the characters just seem to shrug it off as something that's to be expected, though they hadn't mentioned it. You'd think that if Spider was a criminal mastermind, the heroes would be interested in making sure that they captured the right one, rather than a goon dressed in the costume (or killed him; superheroes seem to have fewer qualms about using deadly force in Turkey than they do in America).

Read the rest at HBS.

All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares (Gyakkyou 9)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

I've got no idea what "Gyakkyou" literally translates to, but I appreciate the pun that Gyakkyou Nine's English title represents - are these players the "All-Out Nine" because of the all-out effort they put into the game, or because, in spite of that effort, they suck, and thus all make outs? That's about the closest thing you'll find to subtlety in All-Out Nine, but it doesn't matter. Sure, it beats you over the head with a hammer whose head is made of sports-movie clichés, but it's so over-the-top that it also functions as parody.

As the movie opens, Toshi Fukutsu (Tetsuji Tamayama), the captain of All-Out High's baseball team, is called into the principal's office. The principal (Hiroshi Fujoka) hands him some bad news - he's eliminating the baseball team and giving their meager facilities over to the soccer team. The news hits Toshi like a blow, sending him flying across the room, and he begs the principal for a reprieve - if he can lead the baseball team to the national tournament, surely he'll reconsider. The principal grudgingly allows him to try, and when they "win" a scrimmage against a regional powerhouse (there's a Biblical rain going on, and the other team opts to practice inside, forfeiting the game), there's hope... So the team is assigned a faculty adviser/manager who has, apparently, never seen a baseball game before. That doesn't matter to Toshi - after all, any obstacle in his path is sweet Adversity that makes his struggle all the more worthy!

This film is a broad, over-the-top comedy, quite frankly cartoonish in its slapstick and melodramatic reactions, not hiding the fact that it is adapted from a comic book at all. Indeed, it uses a lot of manga conventions (text-based jokes, a monolith with an accusation appearing in front of the characters, expositional flashbacks squirted at the viewer at lightning speed). The audience may be more accepting of it if they remember a few points about contemporary Japanese life going in: First, comic series based on sports are very popular in Japan, whether playing it straight, using the game as a backdrop to romance, or going for broad comedy as with Gyakkyou 9; which I presume is a relatively popular series. Second, the annual high school baseball tournaments occupy roughly the same place in sports fandom that the NCAA college basketball tournament occupies in the United States; the intensity with which the local community concentrates on the TV coverage of these games is probably not exaggerated that much. And, finally, Japan and South Korea co-hosted a recent World Cup, so that sport's popularity was probably at a very high level when the comics and film were made.

Read the rest at HBS.

Shinobi: Heart Under Blade

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

You know what? I've got no patience with Romeo and Juliet. Grow a pair of freaking spines, leave town, start a new life together, and don't make it complicated. Just friggin' DO it; you're only tragic because you insist on being tragic. Here, that story is transplanted to Japan at the end of the age of ninjas, with the Koga and Iga ninja clans serving as Montagues and Capulets.

As the film opens, Oboro (Yukie Nakama) of the Iga clan and Genosuke (Joe Odagiri) of the Kouga clan meet in an isolated spot and are instantly attracted to each other. Alas, their clans are deadly enemies, living in hidden villages, training in deadly techniques but forbidden from fighting each other or selling their services. They're able to see each other secretly, sending messages via bird when they aren't meeting. But things are about to change. The Shogun insists five of each clan's greatest warriors face off in a battle for the death, and aside from the star-crossed lovers, they're all too eager to test their skills to think, hey, maybe the Shogun is trying to weaken us so that we can be crushed and he'll have no obstacles between himself and absolute rule.

Freaking ninjas. Even the ones with super-powers are dumb, dumb, dumb. It's a reasonable enough stupidity, though - these clans have been waiting for an opportunity to wreak chaos for generations, and some of them have powers that are as much curses as gifts. Consider Kouga's Kagerou (Tomoka Kurotani), who has been fed poison since infancy so that now her very sweat can be toxic. She is not likely to accept either her clan's prince with an Iga girl or that her entire life has been spent making her a weapon that would never be used.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Gravedancers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
When you get right down to it, most supernatural horror movies are based on fairly stupid ideas. The Gravedancers starts from a particularly dumb premise (not just accidentally angering the dead by dancing on their graves, but really choosing the wrong dead people to anger), but throws itself into its story with zeal and humor which never does too much to undermine the thrills to be had.

Despite living in the same area, Harris McKay (Dominic Purcell), Kira Hastings (Josie Maran), and Sid Vance (Marcus Thomas) haven't seen each other for years; they only meet up now because a friend has died in a car crash. After the reception, they return to the cemetery, where they read a condolence card which suggests dancing and being happy in the graveyard. Really bad advice, as it's not long before things in their house start moving, they hear strange noises, and even small fires start appearing. Fortunately, Sid has seen and answered an ad (which promises a cash reward) from Vincent (Tcheky Karyo), a professor of paranormal studies, so he and research assistant Frances Culpepper (Megahn Perry) are on the case...

...and stealing the movie. The main characters are, really, kind of drab. Dominic Purcell is as dour and mirthless as he always seems to be, and Clare Kramer is just fine as his understanding wife. Josie Maran is nice enough as the old friend who still has a torch for Purcell's character, and I'll give the model some credit for spending most of the movie looking like an assault victim (she screams well when called upon, too). Marcus Thomas takes ne'er-do-well duty, at roughly 2/3 slacker and 1/3 schemer; he's basically harmless, although he's fun in that the way he acts isn't nearly as predictable as the others. They're fine, we like them, we don't want to see ghosts beat them, burn them, or chop them up with axes. But Vincent and Frances are more fun. They're initially coming at the situation from scientific curiosity rather than fear for their lives, and as outsiders they can look at the other characters' interpersonal issues as, well, someone else's issues. Tcheky Karyo is dry and witty; Megahn Perry is humorously detached, not quite aware she's a character in a movie, but still kind of sounding like she doesn't quite believe the coincidences even as she's being matter-of-fact about the supernatural stuff. That Meaghan Perry is the cutest girl in a movie with two more obviously glammed-up beauties is a bonus.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Hanai Sachiko no karei na shogai, aka Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Usually, if someone claims to admire the perversity of a skin flick, they mean it in a different way than the statement applies to The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. Of course, the standard definition works too, but let's face it, as a piece of soft-core pornography, what's remarkable about about this movie is just how unconcerned it is with getting its audience off.

We start with prostitute Sachiko playing a game of tutor-and-student with a client. She goes to the wrong café (in more ways than one) to meet her "boss"; instead of her pimp, she runs into a black-market sale gone bad, winding up with the disputed merchandise in her purse and a bullet hole in her forehead. This somehow leaves her brain supercharged (as opposed to hamburger), and she's soon become a philoophy professor's live-in mistress - they debate Chomsky during intercourse - and, as far as his wife is concerned, their son's tutor. It would be idyllic (though strange) except that the man who shot her wants what she has - a finger cloned from George W. Bush that can be used to launch a nuclear strike.

When director Mitsaru Meike took the job, he was probably given a to-do list with items like "2 ejaculations, at least twenty-five minutes of bare breasts, five panty peeks, symbolic penetration" on it. And he hits every one, though often in a perfunctory of self-mocking manner. Granted, the women in these movies get horny before the proverbial dropped hat hits the floor, but seldom when discussing Susan Sontag or Friedrich Neitzche. There's also something not quite satirical or ironic, but at least amusing, about how Sachiko's method of tutoring mirrors the role-playing session that opened the film.

Read the rest at HBS.