This is another movie that was either playing in Hong Kong when I visited last year or was being advertised, so I included it in a DDDHouse order when it came out there and kind of left it there on the shelf until I had a night where it slotted in well. It is, it turns out, a pretty nice quarantine movie - orderly and light, giving you a couple of hours in a luxury hotel without actually making you feel bitter that you can't go there for real.
I'm mildly surprised to see that it is based on a novel by the same author as The Devotion of Suspect X. Both, in their way, are mysteries that avoid the typical whodunit structure, although perhaps in opposite ways, with Devotion putting the solution right up front while Masquerade pushes the actual crime off as far as possible. Keigo Higashino appears to be hugely popular in his native Japan and much of the rest of East Asia - there are Chinese and Korean adaptations of Suspect X - but his work has only made it to the U.S. in piecemeal fashion. He's not limited to mysteries, either; I kind of suspect that I was able to get a copy of a recent Takashi Miike film that played Fantasia but didn't land here otherwise because it was based on a sci-fi/fantasy novel of his, Higashino is popular in Hong Kong, and therefore they made a Blu-ray of Laplace's Witch which just happens to be Region A and have English subtitles. Same with this one, which doesn't seem to have any American distribution either.
It's fun, though, especially for those that enjoy the sort of mystery which steps back from the life-and-death stakes a bit. It's worth noting that the Blu-ray on DDDHouse is roughly the same price as the DVD on Amazon, with shipping the major difference (and the fact that DDDHouse may not yet be shipping to the USA again, what with Covid-19 making international trade tricky). I advise buying a lot movies so that you've got plenty on your shelf to work through while you stay at home and so that the shipping cost per disc isn't too extreme.
Masukarêdo hoteru (Masquerade Hotel)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Masquerade Hotel is not, technically speaking, a murder mystery so cozy that there's no actual murder, but it's not far off. It's a whodunit built around a posh location, sleuths so focused on the business at hand that they are really only almost flirting, and a healthy dose of clues, codes, and red herrings, one which is all-in on the way mysteries can be puzzles and not terribly concerned with them being thrillers. It's not a route many films go these days, and it makes Masquerade Hotel a light, entertaining treat.
In it, a serial killer has been at work in Japan, their method varied and victims unconnected except for the cards featuring encoded coordinates for where the next killing will take place, with the fourth pointing at the Hotel Cortesia Tokyo. The police contact management and manage to place a number of officers undercover, most prominently Kosuke Nitta (Takuya Kimura), whose language skills and observational acumen place him at the front desk with concierge Naomi Yamagishi (Masami Nagasawa). Her instincts to accommodate customers immediately clash with his suspicious nature, and there are a lot of people coming in and out of the hotel who could be either the next victim or the killer: Demanding guests Takahiko Ayabe (Gaku Hamada), Ono (Takashi Sasano), Kurihara (Katsuhara Namase); red-flagged potential thief Furuhachi (Masahiro Takashima); blind Yoko Katagiri (Takako Matsu); bride-to-be Keiko Takayama (Atsuko Maeda); and Eriko Anno (Nanao), who may be fleeing a stalker. And then there's Nohse (Fumiyo Kohinata), Nitta's former partner who may not officially be part of the investigation but is going to check in anyway.
There are more people checking into and out of the hotel, and as a result in and out of the story, and given how screenwriter Michitaka Okuda and director Masayuki Suzuki take pains to keep the focus on the hotel rather than the previous three murders, there are times when those who approach a mystery by trying to solve a puzzle might get frustrated. It is the job of those telling a mystery story to keep which bits are important and which are not obscure, of course, but the set-up here almost looks a little too random, like the storytellers don't intend to use sleight-of-hand to keep the audience focused on the wrong thing but by giving viewers no reason to think anything specific could be particularly important. Eventually, they do manage to push things forward in ways that are more fair than not - a clever shift in perspective makes the larger mystery less random while still keeping the focus on the hotel, and bits of unrelated stories reflect each other in ways that work beyond putting an idea into one's head, since they kind of get at the idea of why people come to hotels at odd moments.
That's a fair direction of attack, in large part because Masquerade Hotel is as much a demonstration of there being value in work and business that can seem entirely commercial as it is a mystery. It is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon to have this sort of pride in one's job that even guests' services at a fancy hotel can come across as a calling, but from this side of the Pacific it's a level of earnestness that can easily tip over into mockery. It's impressive just how well Masami Nagasawa plays Yamagishi as genuinely devoted to making sure that guests have a peaceful stay and that the hotel runs smoothly; she is never just her job but she and the filmmakers are very careful that her moments of being funny or incisive or frustrated with Nitta never run counter to that attitude. She's in a technically-subservient position but never seems to put herself below anybody.
It means Takuya Kimura can't be too abrasive in serving as a complement; his (initially) opposing attitude shouldn't often be seen as mean. He handles the opposing bits of the character well - Nitta is the kind of smart that's both well-rounded and susceptible to blind spots, and as a result Kimura has to swing back and forth between being pushily confident and caught flat-footed without becoming a joke. He and Yamagishi have fun chemistry that is not pushed to be romantic when it doesn't need to be, and they've got a nice ensemble behind them, from Fumiyo Kohinata grinning just enough to make the audience wonder what he's really up to as Nohse to Nanao's believable tension as Anno.
Some are a little broader than ideal, and it's not just the performances; Suzuki has a tendency to let things sprawl. There are a lot of characters, and more than a few scenes that maybe go on a bit too long, right down to an epilogue that feels both unnecessary and obligatory, including a sequence that feels like it could be a title sequence but isn't quite stylized enough, and it adds up to a movie that's a bit flabby. It's a great-looking movie - the lobby set is a multi-level beauty and a neat contrast to the behind-the-scenes, areas, right down to the police setting up card tables and folding chairs in the basement. There's a tendency to lovingly examine a room which, when paired with Naoki Sato's chamber-music score, doesn't feel tacky, but maybe a little obvious, the very first thing that came to mind when someone in the production described the Cortesia as "classy".
That's not exactly a fault in this sort of film, of course; part of the appeal of this sort of mystery is that there is an order to things and that said order is good. It's an appealing, comfortable mystery to sink into for a couple of hours, and I certainly would not mind seeing the Higashino's second "Masquerade" novel adapted by this group as well.
Also on EFilmCritic
Friday, April 24, 2020
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 13 April 2020 - 19 April 2020
Another "honestly, what have I actually been doing?" week.
It hasn't been as completely quiet as it might look from that sparse page - I've been clearing some stuff off the DVR and catching up on finishing some reviews from the middle of last year's Fantasia Festival - here's a link!
The weird thing is that I've been starting stupidly late on the nights when I do watch movie - on Thursday, for instance, I started the double feature of Frankenstein Created Woman & The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires at around 9pm, which is only really smart if they're both something like 85 minutes apiece. I also waited until pretty late for The Booksellers on Saturday night.
Sunday, I actually started earlier with A Lifetime Treasure & A Beautiful Moment, but that still ran late enough that I decided to save Westworld and Killing Eve for the next night. It's weird; big stuff is happening on Westworld but it still seems like they've used up a lot of a very short season reintroducing characters and building a mystery around something I kind of took for granted at the end of last season while Killing Eve is so far very much in "new showrunners trying to do their thing but last year's writers left a messy freaking cliffhanger that you can't do much with" mode.
Part of it's what I said last week about just spending too much time scrolling at the end of the day, but there's also the fact that there's kind of a glare on my TV until the sun sets, and I kind of don't want to close all of my blinds, like that is the line between me being a weird recluse and a healthily socialized human being.
Anyway, this will probably get weirder before lockdown is over. Follow my Letterboxd page if you want the movie stuff without the looks inside where my head's at.
It hasn't been as completely quiet as it might look from that sparse page - I've been clearing some stuff off the DVR and catching up on finishing some reviews from the middle of last year's Fantasia Festival - here's a link!
The weird thing is that I've been starting stupidly late on the nights when I do watch movie - on Thursday, for instance, I started the double feature of Frankenstein Created Woman & The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires at around 9pm, which is only really smart if they're both something like 85 minutes apiece. I also waited until pretty late for The Booksellers on Saturday night.
Sunday, I actually started earlier with A Lifetime Treasure & A Beautiful Moment, but that still ran late enough that I decided to save Westworld and Killing Eve for the next night. It's weird; big stuff is happening on Westworld but it still seems like they've used up a lot of a very short season reintroducing characters and building a mystery around something I kind of took for granted at the end of last season while Killing Eve is so far very much in "new showrunners trying to do their thing but last year's writers left a messy freaking cliffhanger that you can't do much with" mode.
Part of it's what I said last week about just spending too much time scrolling at the end of the day, but there's also the fact that there's kind of a glare on my TV until the sun sets, and I kind of don't want to close all of my blinds, like that is the line between me being a weird recluse and a healthily socialized human being.
Anyway, this will probably get weirder before lockdown is over. Follow my Letterboxd page if you want the movie stuff without the looks inside where my head's at.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Fantasia 2019 Catch-up, Part 4: Dance with Me, Ode to Nothing, Fly Me to the Saitama, L'Intervention, A Good Woman Is Hard to Find, Black Magic for White Boys, The Father's Shadow, and Door Lock
Yeah, I'm looking at the dates I saw these movies and the dates I've posted full reviews on eFilmCritic and just kind of sighing. Insert the usual comments about how I need to commit to cranking through things faster, not working my day job during the festival, cutting down my caffeine intake to a point where I'm focused and alert but not jittery.
(Or we could talk about how I apparently take great notes and do good first drafts in the middle of a five-movie-a-day festival!)
I am kind of shocked that of the eight movies in this update, only one has actually become available to watch in the United States over the intervening nine months, at least from my searching on Prime Video and JustWatch (which seems like it could include some more services but I probably the best index of availability we have). It doesn't seem like too long ago that turnaround on what I saw at Fantasia was incredibly fast, and not just because some selections were effectively word-of-mouth screenings before the imminent DVD release! There were a lot more labels that could get material onto store shelves if not theaters, and I wonder to what extent VOD and streaming has changed the game in unexpected ways. When IFC Midnight buys the US distribution rights to something from Spain or Brazil, and instead of manufacturing a disc they can sell for $20 starts looking at rentals… Well, when I pay $7 to rent something on Amazon, what's left between what Amazon takes and what they send back to Canal+ or whoever? It feels like the margins on importing films are really thin these days, unless you're Amazon or Netflix, and then I wouldn't be shocked if foreign studios are uncomfortable locking themselves into that sort of exclusivity with no per-purchase money. And since the theaters with those big comfy chairs and almost an hour between screenings to include 20 minutes of trailers, 20 minute advertising package, and 10 minutes for cleaning just have fewer seat-times for everything, crowding smaller stuff out, and now things don't have the legitimacy of a theatrical release. The exception is Chinese and Indian films, but they're day-and-date so the festival circuit doesn't mean much.
What genre labels we do have these days seem more focused on getting older material out, which is great - Arrow, Shout!, Kino, Vinegar Syndrome, and the like are doing fantastic, necessary work. It just feels genuinely odd to me that some of the movies I saw last July which seem pretty appealing to people unafraid of subtitles (and were released in their home countries earlier), like Dance with Me and Door Lock, are probably going to hang around in limbo for a little longer and then maybe appear after you've scrolled down a search for a while with little fanfare because what festival hype they got is two years disconnected from a scattered release. Even now, when we've got all the time in the world to catch up on stuff, it's hard to know what to catch up on.
(sighs)
Anyway, you can (as of this writing) watch L'Intervention (though you may need to search for "15 Minutes of War"), and A Good Woman Is Hard to Find was scheduled for a May theatrical release, and who knows, maybe the distributor will make it available for indie theaters' virtual screening rooms. And it's looking even more vital to get to film festivals more when we've got film festivals again, because that seems to be the only way some of these movies will have a chance to snap their fingers in front of our faces and tell us they exist.
Dance With Me
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Movie and stage musicals are grandly and gloriously unreal in a way that little else in popular culture manages to be, and people can't handle it; almost every one made these days builds in some excuse for the songs rather than giving the audience credit for understanding that they are not what's literally happening. Dance With Me is no exception, but it does that well enough to make one want to see what filmmaker Shinobu Yaguchi and star Ayaka Miyohsi could do without making excuses, since they've clearly got the right screwball instincts and the film is ultimately about loving this sort of material whether it's realistic or not.
Miyoshi plays Shizuka Suzuki, a sensible office worker who does her sister a favor by looking after niece Nana while she's in the city for a day, agreeing just a little too hard when Nana disparages having to do a song for the school talent show. They stumble upon once-famous hypnotist Martin Ueda (Akira Takarada) at an amusement park, and the hokum he does to get Nana over her stage fright instead lodges in Shizuka's head, so that the next day, any music she hears, from her workout mix to a co-worker's ringtone, has her singing and dancing along like a character in a musical. Ueda has already skipped town, but the out-of-work actress who had been working as his assistant (Yuu Yashiro), decides to help her track him down - not only was she a part of this, but Ueda didn't pay her. Or the yakuza. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiking street musician (Chay) and hire a cheap private detective, but the odds that they find Ueda before Shizuka has to be back to work on Monday are looking slim.
The thing that mostly makes Dance With Me work is the thing that basically gives the game away; there are large chunks that the audience will not believe unless, at some point, the movie's heroine learned how to do all the singing and dancing, even if the trail of destruction she leaves as the result of her compulsion to make any song she hears into a musical number suggests that maybe she didn't, and once you've put that in her backstory, there's little doubt what she has to confront. Like a lot of meta-musicals, it's often conveying how characters bursting into song is great for conveying big emotions rather than just doing that, but Shizuka's story is eventually her own. How this will end is never in doubt, and is just a matter of making the path leading there crooked.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Oda sa wala (Ode to Nothing)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Films like Ode to Nothing aren't quite a genre unto themselves, but after a while one can be a bit jaded: It's sad, with a fanciful but eccentrically morbid premise, the sort of thing that's a bit transgressive and daring, but which is clearly meant to be taken seriously. They get made on a regular basis because there's something to it, and when someone has as keen an eye for where she's going with the idea as Dwein Baltazar does with this one.
She begins by introducing the audience to Sonya (Marietta "Pokwang" Subong), who runs a small funeral home, presumably passed down from her father Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), who mostly sits in the apartment above in silence, waiting for Sonya to prepare dinner, while she deals with people who want to haggle past the last minute. They're behind in rent and loan-shark landlord Theodor (Dido de la Paz) when a Jane Doe is dropped on their doorstep, and as time drags on, she starts to find the corpse more friendly company that her father, though she has her eye on handsome street vendor Elmer (Anthony Falcon).
It's kind of hard to grasp the level of loneliness on display in Ode to Nothing at first. It's right out front from the start, and it is fairly clear that this is what the film will be about from the start, but Sonya must sink deep into a genuinely frightening desperation before the full extent of how it's eating at her becomes completely clear, and that's when the filmmakers know that they can push the film somewhere else. They often choose not to, sinking further into despair, but the possibility was there. The audience still knows that a line has been crossed, that the characters have reached the next crossroads, but the fact that things clearly could change at these points but don't every time just emphasizes how difficult it can be to get out of such a hole.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Tonde Saitama (Fly Me to the Saitama)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
This may not be the most shojo movie possible, assuming I'm not being my manga categories mixed up, but even if I am, it's right up there in terms of just being absurdly, specifically Japanese, and regionally so at that. It shouldn't travel at all, even to a festival audience of people who love Japanese pop culture, and yet it got the biggest laughs of any film there, because for all that the jokes are specific, the spirit is not, and the way they're told is something anyone can laugh at.
The Saitama is a Tokyo suburb, described as the bits that were left over when Tokyo and Yokohama separated, and apparently not well-regarded by its neighbors. Teenage Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) is embarrassed to be from there, something of great consternation to father Yoshiumi (Brother Tom) and mother Maki (Kumiko Aso) as they take a road trip. Frustrated, Yoshiumi turns on a radio drama, set in a heightened Tokyo where Class President Momomi Hakuhodo (Fumi Nikaido), a stiletto-heeled monster from the very best family, rules her high school with an iron fist with the Saitamese basically servants living in hovels, though she is as immediately smitten with new transfer student Rei Asami (Gackt) as anyone - "you can still smell the America on him!" What she doesn't know is that before he went abroad, he lived in the Saitama, and has been sent to infiltrate high society and destroy it from within.
Though I can't recall ever seeing any of the manga Mineo Maya specifically, original series Tonde Saitama was published in a girls' manga magazine and director Hideki Takeuchi is clearly channeling the general style, with its elaborate hair and fashion, lean and androgynously handsome men, and generally exaggerated visuals represented and amplified on-screen. It's a somewhat garish style that often works better on the page than screen, but this is a story that lets the filmmakers lean into it; between the contrast with the modern simplicity of the car and the satirical intent, it's no leap for the style to be self-parodying. After a while, becoming more ridiculous is a big part of how Takeuchi and screenwriter Yuichi Tokunaga keep it light rather than mean.
Full review on EFilmCritic
L'Intervention (15 Minutes of War)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
From the subtitles, the English title for this film is "15 Minutes of War", which naturally leads to the question of what's going to happen for the other 80. The answer is a lot of simple competence, making for a very French take on the sort of military action film that, in American hands, often seems to be more likely to overflow with testosterone even when trying to be modest and self-deprecating. The differences are sometimes subtle and the end result is about the same, but it's still a good result.
It takes place in 1976; at the time, Djibouti was France's last colony, not necessarily a status that the people there and in neighboring nations were too fond of. In February, three terrorists - Barkhard (Kevin Layne), Morad (Andre Pierre), and Ilyans (Adbeladim Mazouzi) - hijack a bus containing 31 students and teacher Jane Andersen (Olga Kurylenko) and drive it to the Somali border. They wind up in a no-man's-land between the two, and while France dispatches a team of elite soldiers led by André Gerval (Alban Lenoir), the terrain is built for a stalemate and a move in the wrong direction could cause an even bigger international incident.
If you know the genre, you know the drill, but it's pretty pleasant, at least as military action movies go. This film is procedural, spending a fair amount of time on working out tactics, with the GIGN unit arguing with other groups on the scene and command back home in Paris, just in a somewhat less shouty manner. Meanwhile, having a teacher in the middle of the hostage situation gives the filmmakers plenty of chances to check in and make sure that the audience knows what the stakes are, and Olga Kurylenko slides into that role nicely, catching the way a character taking a job in this place necessarily has an adventurous side without being fearless and playing off everybody from the child actors to Kevin Layne's domineering mission leader well. Alban Lenoir, Michaël Abiteboul, Ben Cura, and that crew know the level of mission-focused confidence that stops short of cruelty that one wants the soldiers to show.
Full review on EFilmCritic
A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
A Good Woman Is Hard to Find starts as one sort of crime movie and evolves into another, and truth be told, it's the first half that seems to have the greater potential at first. Of course, a lot of the best genre movies are built around hidden potential both in the characters and story, and that's what makes this one sing - the right casting and some willingness to crank up the pressure can do wonders for even the most threadbare thriller plots, and this one's got some really good work from top to bottom.
The potential good woman in question is Sarah Collins (Sarah Bolger), recently widowed without much of a safety net; after a flash-forward, she's introduced carefully doing math in a Belfast supermarket as she shops for herself and her two children. Ben (Rudy Doherty) is six years old and hasn't spoken since his father was killed, and Lucy (Macie McCauley) is four. As if they haven't had enough trauma, their car is stolen and the guy who did so, Tito (Andrew Simpson), eventually decides to lay low at Sarah's house, since the very randomness of choosing their car means local crime boss Leo Miller (Edward Hogg) won't be know where to find the guy who stole his drugs. It is, naturally, a terrible plan for all involved.
The nifty casting turns out to be Sarah Bolger, who invests this young working-class widow with plenty of nerve when appropriate, a hard-earned variety that's convincing enough that the film has no need to open with or flash back to the events that put the family in its current position - the audience can see exactly how much she loved her late husband even if he wasn't perfect in the way she tenses up in every scene with her mother and in how she seems defiant in her survival. The script seldom makes her overconfident or timid, and she's got the right mix of courage and fear at all times, someone who knows her capability but recognizes real danger. Bolger always seems to recognize that she's in a crime movie even when being placed in relatively ordinary situations, always looking over her shoulder or otherwise paying extra attention.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Black Magic for White Boys
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
I'm not particularly curious to see the previous iteration(s) of Black Magic for White Boys, which got a fairly thorough retooling between its initial screening at Tribeca and when it played Fantasia two years later, including a time when it was retooled as a mini-series. I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised that this work still left it with obvious gaps and issues; it's a messy process but one that could have filled in all the gaps. It's still frequently funny in a charmingly homemade way; its seemingly effect-less effects and unrefined characters have the nice effect of Onur Tukel's film just laying what it wants out there.
It revolves around a small theater in Brooklyn, where "Larry the Magnificent" (Ronald Guttman) puts on an unimpressive magic show with the aid of assistants Lucy (Eva Dorrepaal) and Dean (Colin Buckingham), with a new intern in Alina (Deni Juhos) just brought in. Landlord Jamie (Jamie Block) is about to put them out of business with a 30% rent increase, but Larry has an ace in the hole - a line on real magic, the ability to make things disappear, although things apparently went wrong when he used it last - though, apparently, in a different way than his "freelance work" for Jamie. Meanwhile, Jamie's friend Oscar (Onur Tukel), who has been cheerfully living off a trust fund, is freaking out that girlfriend Chase (Charlie LaRose) is pregnant, while "pharmacist" Fred (Franck Raharinosy) is dispensing pills with nigh-magical effects to many members of the group.
This is the sort of quirky New York-based indie that can seem insular whether one is inside its particular bubble or not, since even such cockeyed enough versions of the fringe theater and arriviste worlds can still seem like a movie-length private joke, and writer/director/co-star Onur Tukel has been relatively prolific even if his films have been relatively small blips outside the festival circuit. Making that sort of movie puts a filmmaker in touch with a potentially pretty decent cast, even if Ronald Guttman is probably the only one whom most viewers will immediately think they've seen somewhere before. They are, by and large, playing people who are not quite so odd as to be interesting if one met them randomly but who can can drop a line that's selfish or oblivious or some combination of both so that it lands the right way as to give one a sense of who they are and have it not be completely awful, even when they have more or less accepted that they are kind of awful.
Full review on EFilmCritic
A Sombra do Pai (The Father's Shadow)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The Father's Shadow is the second film from Gabriela Amaral as writer/director and it's more or less what one would hope for in a second feature: It's got the style and intensity that makes it a piece with Friendly Beast but a story that is not any sort of repetition and the confidence to try something more emotionally ambitious. That "has she made anything else/oh I liked that/and this is even better" hit is one of the best parts of going to festivals or immersing oneself in less-heralded films long-term.
It's the story of Dalva (Nina Medeiros), a quiet ten-year-old girl in a small town whose mother has recently passed away and whose father Jorge (Julio Machado) is crumbling. Aunt Cristina (Luciana Paes) has been attempting to fill the gap, but her fiancé Elton (Rafael Raposo) is moving to the city and wants her to come along. Before leaving, she teaches Dalva some traditional magic, but it's not always of practical use as she tries to raise herself and look after her father.
It's immediately obvious that this film is going to live and die by how well the audience can connect with Dalva. That's no slight on the work Julio Macado and Luciana Paes do as the rest of her family - they impress - but it's clear right away that their jobs are to establish the child's environment as much as tell their own story. Happily, the young actress in this movie, Nina Medeiros, is genuinely amazing, and even if it's just a matter of casting the girl who could best give the movie what it needs most of the time - a skinny body seemingly about to collapse under the weight on the family stress put upon her hiding eyes that indicate almost frightening intensity - getting the right amount and focus in any given scene is no small thing. She's great and delivers exactly what the movie needs at every moment even when silent. It's a tense little performance that convinces the audience that anything is possible for Dalva, from collapse to genuine sorcery.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Door Lock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
It seems as though nifty movie ideas get passed around the world and redone for local audiences more than they used to, well beyond how folks used to complain that it was mainly Americans who didn't want to deal with subtitles. I think that I have seen the movie which inspired this film (Sleep Tight), but it's not like the case of another Korean remake of a Spanish thriller a couple years ago when I realized that I knew what's going to happen next about ten minutes in. It certainly feels like its own movie, and a thriller that doesn't mess around much to boot.
Door Lock opens with a bit of CCTV footage from outside an apartment very much like the one occupied by Jo Gyeung-min (Kong Hyo-Jin), a loan officer who is very on-edge about her personal safety - aside from seeming dizzy and dull in the morning, she notes her electronic lock behaving erratically, and eyes fellow passengers on the subway and a package delivered to bank where she works with suspicion. She's got reason to be worried, but only co-worker Oh Hyo-Ju (Kim Ye-Won) believes her without reservation, and in this sort of situation, it's not necessarily any easier to trust Detective Lee (Kim Sung-Oh) or okay-seeming supervisor Kim Sung-Ho (Lee Chun-Hee) than combative customer Kim Ki-Jung (Jo Bok-Rae) or custodian Han Dong-Hoon (Lee Ga-Sub).
Full review on EFilmCritic
(Or we could talk about how I apparently take great notes and do good first drafts in the middle of a five-movie-a-day festival!)
I am kind of shocked that of the eight movies in this update, only one has actually become available to watch in the United States over the intervening nine months, at least from my searching on Prime Video and JustWatch (which seems like it could include some more services but I probably the best index of availability we have). It doesn't seem like too long ago that turnaround on what I saw at Fantasia was incredibly fast, and not just because some selections were effectively word-of-mouth screenings before the imminent DVD release! There were a lot more labels that could get material onto store shelves if not theaters, and I wonder to what extent VOD and streaming has changed the game in unexpected ways. When IFC Midnight buys the US distribution rights to something from Spain or Brazil, and instead of manufacturing a disc they can sell for $20 starts looking at rentals… Well, when I pay $7 to rent something on Amazon, what's left between what Amazon takes and what they send back to Canal+ or whoever? It feels like the margins on importing films are really thin these days, unless you're Amazon or Netflix, and then I wouldn't be shocked if foreign studios are uncomfortable locking themselves into that sort of exclusivity with no per-purchase money. And since the theaters with those big comfy chairs and almost an hour between screenings to include 20 minutes of trailers, 20 minute advertising package, and 10 minutes for cleaning just have fewer seat-times for everything, crowding smaller stuff out, and now things don't have the legitimacy of a theatrical release. The exception is Chinese and Indian films, but they're day-and-date so the festival circuit doesn't mean much.
What genre labels we do have these days seem more focused on getting older material out, which is great - Arrow, Shout!, Kino, Vinegar Syndrome, and the like are doing fantastic, necessary work. It just feels genuinely odd to me that some of the movies I saw last July which seem pretty appealing to people unafraid of subtitles (and were released in their home countries earlier), like Dance with Me and Door Lock, are probably going to hang around in limbo for a little longer and then maybe appear after you've scrolled down a search for a while with little fanfare because what festival hype they got is two years disconnected from a scattered release. Even now, when we've got all the time in the world to catch up on stuff, it's hard to know what to catch up on.
(sighs)
Anyway, you can (as of this writing) watch L'Intervention (though you may need to search for "15 Minutes of War"), and A Good Woman Is Hard to Find was scheduled for a May theatrical release, and who knows, maybe the distributor will make it available for indie theaters' virtual screening rooms. And it's looking even more vital to get to film festivals more when we've got film festivals again, because that seems to be the only way some of these movies will have a chance to snap their fingers in front of our faces and tell us they exist.
Dance With Me
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Movie and stage musicals are grandly and gloriously unreal in a way that little else in popular culture manages to be, and people can't handle it; almost every one made these days builds in some excuse for the songs rather than giving the audience credit for understanding that they are not what's literally happening. Dance With Me is no exception, but it does that well enough to make one want to see what filmmaker Shinobu Yaguchi and star Ayaka Miyohsi could do without making excuses, since they've clearly got the right screwball instincts and the film is ultimately about loving this sort of material whether it's realistic or not.
Miyoshi plays Shizuka Suzuki, a sensible office worker who does her sister a favor by looking after niece Nana while she's in the city for a day, agreeing just a little too hard when Nana disparages having to do a song for the school talent show. They stumble upon once-famous hypnotist Martin Ueda (Akira Takarada) at an amusement park, and the hokum he does to get Nana over her stage fright instead lodges in Shizuka's head, so that the next day, any music she hears, from her workout mix to a co-worker's ringtone, has her singing and dancing along like a character in a musical. Ueda has already skipped town, but the out-of-work actress who had been working as his assistant (Yuu Yashiro), decides to help her track him down - not only was she a part of this, but Ueda didn't pay her. Or the yakuza. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiking street musician (Chay) and hire a cheap private detective, but the odds that they find Ueda before Shizuka has to be back to work on Monday are looking slim.
The thing that mostly makes Dance With Me work is the thing that basically gives the game away; there are large chunks that the audience will not believe unless, at some point, the movie's heroine learned how to do all the singing and dancing, even if the trail of destruction she leaves as the result of her compulsion to make any song she hears into a musical number suggests that maybe she didn't, and once you've put that in her backstory, there's little doubt what she has to confront. Like a lot of meta-musicals, it's often conveying how characters bursting into song is great for conveying big emotions rather than just doing that, but Shizuka's story is eventually her own. How this will end is never in doubt, and is just a matter of making the path leading there crooked.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Oda sa wala (Ode to Nothing)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Films like Ode to Nothing aren't quite a genre unto themselves, but after a while one can be a bit jaded: It's sad, with a fanciful but eccentrically morbid premise, the sort of thing that's a bit transgressive and daring, but which is clearly meant to be taken seriously. They get made on a regular basis because there's something to it, and when someone has as keen an eye for where she's going with the idea as Dwein Baltazar does with this one.
She begins by introducing the audience to Sonya (Marietta "Pokwang" Subong), who runs a small funeral home, presumably passed down from her father Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), who mostly sits in the apartment above in silence, waiting for Sonya to prepare dinner, while she deals with people who want to haggle past the last minute. They're behind in rent and loan-shark landlord Theodor (Dido de la Paz) when a Jane Doe is dropped on their doorstep, and as time drags on, she starts to find the corpse more friendly company that her father, though she has her eye on handsome street vendor Elmer (Anthony Falcon).
It's kind of hard to grasp the level of loneliness on display in Ode to Nothing at first. It's right out front from the start, and it is fairly clear that this is what the film will be about from the start, but Sonya must sink deep into a genuinely frightening desperation before the full extent of how it's eating at her becomes completely clear, and that's when the filmmakers know that they can push the film somewhere else. They often choose not to, sinking further into despair, but the possibility was there. The audience still knows that a line has been crossed, that the characters have reached the next crossroads, but the fact that things clearly could change at these points but don't every time just emphasizes how difficult it can be to get out of such a hole.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Tonde Saitama (Fly Me to the Saitama)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
This may not be the most shojo movie possible, assuming I'm not being my manga categories mixed up, but even if I am, it's right up there in terms of just being absurdly, specifically Japanese, and regionally so at that. It shouldn't travel at all, even to a festival audience of people who love Japanese pop culture, and yet it got the biggest laughs of any film there, because for all that the jokes are specific, the spirit is not, and the way they're told is something anyone can laugh at.
The Saitama is a Tokyo suburb, described as the bits that were left over when Tokyo and Yokohama separated, and apparently not well-regarded by its neighbors. Teenage Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) is embarrassed to be from there, something of great consternation to father Yoshiumi (Brother Tom) and mother Maki (Kumiko Aso) as they take a road trip. Frustrated, Yoshiumi turns on a radio drama, set in a heightened Tokyo where Class President Momomi Hakuhodo (Fumi Nikaido), a stiletto-heeled monster from the very best family, rules her high school with an iron fist with the Saitamese basically servants living in hovels, though she is as immediately smitten with new transfer student Rei Asami (Gackt) as anyone - "you can still smell the America on him!" What she doesn't know is that before he went abroad, he lived in the Saitama, and has been sent to infiltrate high society and destroy it from within.
Though I can't recall ever seeing any of the manga Mineo Maya specifically, original series Tonde Saitama was published in a girls' manga magazine and director Hideki Takeuchi is clearly channeling the general style, with its elaborate hair and fashion, lean and androgynously handsome men, and generally exaggerated visuals represented and amplified on-screen. It's a somewhat garish style that often works better on the page than screen, but this is a story that lets the filmmakers lean into it; between the contrast with the modern simplicity of the car and the satirical intent, it's no leap for the style to be self-parodying. After a while, becoming more ridiculous is a big part of how Takeuchi and screenwriter Yuichi Tokunaga keep it light rather than mean.
Full review on EFilmCritic
L'Intervention (15 Minutes of War)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
From the subtitles, the English title for this film is "15 Minutes of War", which naturally leads to the question of what's going to happen for the other 80. The answer is a lot of simple competence, making for a very French take on the sort of military action film that, in American hands, often seems to be more likely to overflow with testosterone even when trying to be modest and self-deprecating. The differences are sometimes subtle and the end result is about the same, but it's still a good result.
It takes place in 1976; at the time, Djibouti was France's last colony, not necessarily a status that the people there and in neighboring nations were too fond of. In February, three terrorists - Barkhard (Kevin Layne), Morad (Andre Pierre), and Ilyans (Adbeladim Mazouzi) - hijack a bus containing 31 students and teacher Jane Andersen (Olga Kurylenko) and drive it to the Somali border. They wind up in a no-man's-land between the two, and while France dispatches a team of elite soldiers led by André Gerval (Alban Lenoir), the terrain is built for a stalemate and a move in the wrong direction could cause an even bigger international incident.
If you know the genre, you know the drill, but it's pretty pleasant, at least as military action movies go. This film is procedural, spending a fair amount of time on working out tactics, with the GIGN unit arguing with other groups on the scene and command back home in Paris, just in a somewhat less shouty manner. Meanwhile, having a teacher in the middle of the hostage situation gives the filmmakers plenty of chances to check in and make sure that the audience knows what the stakes are, and Olga Kurylenko slides into that role nicely, catching the way a character taking a job in this place necessarily has an adventurous side without being fearless and playing off everybody from the child actors to Kevin Layne's domineering mission leader well. Alban Lenoir, Michaël Abiteboul, Ben Cura, and that crew know the level of mission-focused confidence that stops short of cruelty that one wants the soldiers to show.
Full review on EFilmCritic
A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
A Good Woman Is Hard to Find starts as one sort of crime movie and evolves into another, and truth be told, it's the first half that seems to have the greater potential at first. Of course, a lot of the best genre movies are built around hidden potential both in the characters and story, and that's what makes this one sing - the right casting and some willingness to crank up the pressure can do wonders for even the most threadbare thriller plots, and this one's got some really good work from top to bottom.
The potential good woman in question is Sarah Collins (Sarah Bolger), recently widowed without much of a safety net; after a flash-forward, she's introduced carefully doing math in a Belfast supermarket as she shops for herself and her two children. Ben (Rudy Doherty) is six years old and hasn't spoken since his father was killed, and Lucy (Macie McCauley) is four. As if they haven't had enough trauma, their car is stolen and the guy who did so, Tito (Andrew Simpson), eventually decides to lay low at Sarah's house, since the very randomness of choosing their car means local crime boss Leo Miller (Edward Hogg) won't be know where to find the guy who stole his drugs. It is, naturally, a terrible plan for all involved.
The nifty casting turns out to be Sarah Bolger, who invests this young working-class widow with plenty of nerve when appropriate, a hard-earned variety that's convincing enough that the film has no need to open with or flash back to the events that put the family in its current position - the audience can see exactly how much she loved her late husband even if he wasn't perfect in the way she tenses up in every scene with her mother and in how she seems defiant in her survival. The script seldom makes her overconfident or timid, and she's got the right mix of courage and fear at all times, someone who knows her capability but recognizes real danger. Bolger always seems to recognize that she's in a crime movie even when being placed in relatively ordinary situations, always looking over her shoulder or otherwise paying extra attention.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Black Magic for White Boys
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)
I'm not particularly curious to see the previous iteration(s) of Black Magic for White Boys, which got a fairly thorough retooling between its initial screening at Tribeca and when it played Fantasia two years later, including a time when it was retooled as a mini-series. I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised that this work still left it with obvious gaps and issues; it's a messy process but one that could have filled in all the gaps. It's still frequently funny in a charmingly homemade way; its seemingly effect-less effects and unrefined characters have the nice effect of Onur Tukel's film just laying what it wants out there.
It revolves around a small theater in Brooklyn, where "Larry the Magnificent" (Ronald Guttman) puts on an unimpressive magic show with the aid of assistants Lucy (Eva Dorrepaal) and Dean (Colin Buckingham), with a new intern in Alina (Deni Juhos) just brought in. Landlord Jamie (Jamie Block) is about to put them out of business with a 30% rent increase, but Larry has an ace in the hole - a line on real magic, the ability to make things disappear, although things apparently went wrong when he used it last - though, apparently, in a different way than his "freelance work" for Jamie. Meanwhile, Jamie's friend Oscar (Onur Tukel), who has been cheerfully living off a trust fund, is freaking out that girlfriend Chase (Charlie LaRose) is pregnant, while "pharmacist" Fred (Franck Raharinosy) is dispensing pills with nigh-magical effects to many members of the group.
This is the sort of quirky New York-based indie that can seem insular whether one is inside its particular bubble or not, since even such cockeyed enough versions of the fringe theater and arriviste worlds can still seem like a movie-length private joke, and writer/director/co-star Onur Tukel has been relatively prolific even if his films have been relatively small blips outside the festival circuit. Making that sort of movie puts a filmmaker in touch with a potentially pretty decent cast, even if Ronald Guttman is probably the only one whom most viewers will immediately think they've seen somewhere before. They are, by and large, playing people who are not quite so odd as to be interesting if one met them randomly but who can can drop a line that's selfish or oblivious or some combination of both so that it lands the right way as to give one a sense of who they are and have it not be completely awful, even when they have more or less accepted that they are kind of awful.
Full review on EFilmCritic
A Sombra do Pai (The Father's Shadow)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The Father's Shadow is the second film from Gabriela Amaral as writer/director and it's more or less what one would hope for in a second feature: It's got the style and intensity that makes it a piece with Friendly Beast but a story that is not any sort of repetition and the confidence to try something more emotionally ambitious. That "has she made anything else/oh I liked that/and this is even better" hit is one of the best parts of going to festivals or immersing oneself in less-heralded films long-term.
It's the story of Dalva (Nina Medeiros), a quiet ten-year-old girl in a small town whose mother has recently passed away and whose father Jorge (Julio Machado) is crumbling. Aunt Cristina (Luciana Paes) has been attempting to fill the gap, but her fiancé Elton (Rafael Raposo) is moving to the city and wants her to come along. Before leaving, she teaches Dalva some traditional magic, but it's not always of practical use as she tries to raise herself and look after her father.
It's immediately obvious that this film is going to live and die by how well the audience can connect with Dalva. That's no slight on the work Julio Macado and Luciana Paes do as the rest of her family - they impress - but it's clear right away that their jobs are to establish the child's environment as much as tell their own story. Happily, the young actress in this movie, Nina Medeiros, is genuinely amazing, and even if it's just a matter of casting the girl who could best give the movie what it needs most of the time - a skinny body seemingly about to collapse under the weight on the family stress put upon her hiding eyes that indicate almost frightening intensity - getting the right amount and focus in any given scene is no small thing. She's great and delivers exactly what the movie needs at every moment even when silent. It's a tense little performance that convinces the audience that anything is possible for Dalva, from collapse to genuine sorcery.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Door Lock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
It seems as though nifty movie ideas get passed around the world and redone for local audiences more than they used to, well beyond how folks used to complain that it was mainly Americans who didn't want to deal with subtitles. I think that I have seen the movie which inspired this film (Sleep Tight), but it's not like the case of another Korean remake of a Spanish thriller a couple years ago when I realized that I knew what's going to happen next about ten minutes in. It certainly feels like its own movie, and a thriller that doesn't mess around much to boot.
Door Lock opens with a bit of CCTV footage from outside an apartment very much like the one occupied by Jo Gyeung-min (Kong Hyo-Jin), a loan officer who is very on-edge about her personal safety - aside from seeming dizzy and dull in the morning, she notes her electronic lock behaving erratically, and eyes fellow passengers on the subway and a package delivered to bank where she works with suspicion. She's got reason to be worried, but only co-worker Oh Hyo-Ju (Kim Ye-Won) believes her without reservation, and in this sort of situation, it's not necessarily any easier to trust Detective Lee (Kim Sung-Oh) or okay-seeming supervisor Kim Sung-Ho (Lee Chun-Hee) than combative customer Kim Ki-Jung (Jo Bok-Rae) or custodian Han Dong-Hoon (Lee Ga-Sub).
Full review on EFilmCritic
Yeah, I had that shipped to me: A Lifetime Treasure and A Beautiful Moment
Remember back at the end of January, when all of the new release films for Lunar New Year were postponed and the theaters in an entire country of over a billion people were closed, based on what had sounded like an epidemic in one city? Yeah, we should have realized it was bigger and was only going to get bigger then.
It caught people flat-footed enough that it took a few weeks for one of the Hong Kong Lunar New Year films to show up here, and I gather Enter the Fat Dragon was kind of retrofitted into LNY release, with clips of the cast wishing everyone a happy new year tacked onto the end. The only "true" Hong Kong LNY comedy I remember getting here is Missbehavior last year, and that was also the new Pang Ho-Cheung; I gather the usual for those movies is to be zany and almost sketch comedy right up until the credits roll with the cast offering holiday wishes.
(Aside: How weird would it be if big movies scheduled for Christmas release in the West did that? Or would it be charming?)
These two are somewhat closer to that tradition, although I think that they, too, are more along the lines of "comedies released near the New Year". A Lifetime Treasure was still kicking around at the end of its run when I visited Hong Kong last year, and is one of a number of films that wound up on my shelf because I wound up with less time to see movies at the end of the day than I thought I would have but was curious about the films I missed. I apparently ordered A Beautiful Moment soon after getting home, and I'm kind of amazed to see that there was a full fourteen months between its HK theatrical release and Blu-ray release (presuming the dates on DDDHouse are the same as general availability). That seems kind of crazy to me, used to studios just habitually penciling the home release for the first Tuesday after the 90-day window.
The movies themselves… Well, neither of them are winners. I'm finding myself a little frustrated in that a lot of the films I'm watching over the past week or so seem to spend an hour screwing around before getting to the part where you can see why they even bothered. A Lifetime Treasure isn't quite so bad in this regard, but how the people involved with A Beautiful Moment didn't realize that Carina Lau and Simon Yam was the whole movie from the start…
Ah, well. The double feature helped me push the "general unwatched Hong Kong" section down to one shelf-section, so that's kind of a quarantine accomplishment.
Ru zhu ru bao de ren sheng (A Lifetime Treasure)
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
There's probably a listicle or three out there counting down the best "a bunch of movie stars have gotten old" films, hopefully not to grim in terms of how many great actors passed away soon after doing a movie that cracked wise about how they used to be sex symbols and are now the butt of jokes about peeing every ten minutes. Unless they're exhaustive, A Lifetime Treasure will probably not show up on many of those lists, and not just because it's relatively recent or because many overlook films not made in Hollywood; it's just not very good and a few of the folks involved have done it much better.
It takes place around the Oh Hoi Nursing Home, the only elder-care facility on one of Hong Kong's smaller islands, technically run by superintendent Yuen Luk Cheung (Andrew Lam Man-Chung) although he's addled enough that nurse Ching-Ching (Ivana Wong Yuen-Chi) is effectively in charge of the five elders there: "Uncle Dragon" (Bruce Leung Siu-Lung), a mute tinkerer who claims to have once been a secret agent; Richard Leung (Richard Ng Yiu-Hon), a former swimmer living on borrowed time; Jane (Tien Niu), who like to tell people she was once a nightclub diva; Ben Chow Tai-Bun (Teddy Robin Kwan), a diminutive former pickpocket; and "Uncle Crab" (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo), a wheelchair-bound ex-detective still obsessed with an unsolved case from 30 years ago. Elsewhere, Rainy Cloud Hung (Lam Suet), who dominates the Hong Kong nursing home business, is looking to purchase the site, and dispatches flunkies Chun (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung) and Lok (Bob Lam Shing-Pun) to sabotage the place.
They don't get very far with that - Lok is too smitten with Ching-Ching despite her eyes for hunky handyman Fai (Terry Zou Wen-Zheng) to keep his eye on the prize, and their attempts at disruption make for forgettable episodes. The most elaborate involves bringing the elders to the set of a zombie movie to work as extras in hopes of out-of-context photos causing a scandal only for them to (briefly) become celebrity heroes and is mostly enlivened by Siu Yam-Yam (aka Susan "Yum-Yum" Shaw) cameoing as a thoroughly disinterested film director, which is at once the most predictable thing in the movie - Siu has, by now, made nearly as much of a career out of playing the feisty granny as she did playing the sexpot in the 1970s and 1980s that informs those parts - and the funniest. Like many of the other episodic bits that make up this film's first half hour, it seems to start from nothing and lead to nothing, with many of the jokes nearly incomprehensible to my western head. This is, to be fair, not necessarily the fault of the filmmakers; between Cantonese being a language that allows for a lot of wordplay in both spoken and written forms and Hong Kong being compact enough that there's a really good chance that everyone in the audience gets a pop-culture reference that is completely opaque to an American 12 time zones away (on the other hand, characters getting teased for uniforms that look to be straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation may not play once you get 50 miles into the Chinese mainland). One can see evidence of such jokes, even as they fly way the heck over a western viewer's head.
It's probably not great that a lot of that running around doesn't wind up really mattering, as Rainy Cloud eventually just bursts in, forces the Chief to press his finger to a contract, and walks off, forcing the orderlies and elders to break into the headquarters Mission: Impossible-style, straight down to the harness in the elevator shaft. It's a pretty straightforward parody, but having these veteran performers play their characters as folks with something to do rather than just wandering in a fog lets them be funnier and easier to connect with. Richard Ng, especially, turns out to be a real treat, and Ivana Wong does a nice job as Ching-Ching, it's kind of hard for me to imagine an American film letting her character be weird and abrasive rather than sweet but she pulls it off.
Those noting Sammo Hung's name in the cast should maybe temper their expectations a little; the action-movie legend's Uncle Crab is in a wheelchair and doesn't get out of it for very long. There's still a bit of action or two toward the end that impresses a bit (and some physical comedy that uses the same sort of skills), but it's mostly in the hands of Bruce Leung Siu-Lung and Teddy Robin, and they're a couple of fairly capable hands, giving the film the chance to end on fast-paced, exciting note.
The thing is, Leung and Robbin and even Siu have done this before, almost ten years earlier, in a film called Gallants, which is pretty terrific and close enough to the general idea of this movie that the filmmakers got a shout-out in the credits. As much as it's great to see old favorites getting work into their later years, there's no reason to watch this one when Gallants is not that much more difficult to find.
Also on EFilmCritic
A Beautiful Moment (aka "My Rival is Son-in-law, My Lover is Son-in-law")
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong kong Blu-ray)
The neat idea that sells A Beautiful Moment is not close to being a wholly original idea - I feel like I've got the names of two or three other movies that play with the lead actor in romantic comedies often being old enough to have dated their opposite numbers' mothers on the tip of my tongue - but it's a fun one and potentially clever, especially with this cast. That's why it's so bizarre and frustrating that filmmaker Patrick Kong Pak-Leung spends so much time on doing other things.
It introduces Doctor Bo (Carina Lau Ka-Ling) using a mah-jongg game to treat three other women of a certain age, before shifting perspective to Simon Leung (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), a billionaire developer who berates his employees and carries petty grudges against rival Philip Lau Hak-Heung (Philip Keung Hiu-Man) to extremes. Bo has two daughters - Michelle (Michelle Wai Si-Nga), who she is pushing toward the other end of a breakup, and Kiki (Ivana Wong Yuen-Chi), a struggling actress who hasn't spoken to her mother in years. Chance has Simon and Michelle meet on Valentine's Day and they decide to start seeing each other, but little do they know that they've got more reason than usual to be nervous when Michelle brings her boyfriend to meet her mother.
For something like fifteen or twenty minutes in the middle, A Beautiful Moment lives up to its name; Bo and Simon spot each other at lunch and do all they can to verbally spar around Michelle. They eventually meet up and without her and while Kong initially seems to get too cute with how that goes, ham-fistedly having a parallel conversation with a younger couple going on at the next table, watching these characters smile because they know better and only have to sketch out part of their own conversations s terrific even if it is very much not the verbal jousting that one likely expected from the first encounters with the pair. Carina Lau and Simon Yam handle this downshift so well that it's difficult to understand why this isn't the entire movie.
It's not, though, and the process of getting there is kind of maddening. This main triangle is introduced in pretty specific terms: Simon is a bully; Bo is a gifted therapist but that same skill set also allows her to be tremendously manipulative; and Michelle seems to be the person she is trying to control most, the sort of behavior which drove Kiki away. There's something there, potentially, with Michelle being pushed into her mother's unhealthy patterns or Simon seeing a second chance, but Kong and co-writer Ja Poon Hang-Kei never really dig into it; Simon just seems to get nicer without being pushed with Michelle more or less flatly saying that she's decided to date him because he's wealthy and powerful. At the other side of the film, things just get shoved into different directions and arrangements out of the blue, so that even when it reaches the conclusion the audience wants, it's hard to feel anything as a result of something just happening off-screen.
And that doesn't even get to how the movie treats Ivana Wong's Kiki, who is eventually relegated to interrupting the rest of her family's thing with non-sequiturs despite the fact that the front half of the movie leans hard on the "acting" jobs she and her boyfriend take to make ends meet for its better comic pieces. Most of the comic set-ups in the movie are fairly mean-spirited, which is fair enough - it's about initially-selfish people - but some of them go on much too long at high volume, with the bits where Bo is trying to help Philip with his gambling addiction especially obnoxious.
As much as the movie can be frustrating, the cast does their best by it - I'd love to see Simon Yam and Carina Lau in a romantic comedy that delivers on the promise of their scenes together all the way through, Michelle Wai and Ivana Wong are both very funny when given the room, and as director, Kong is able to get everyone in the supporting and cameo-ing cast to squeeze the most out of the clumsy gags he gives them as the writer. It's a mess, but at least it's one with occasional high points.
Also on EFilmCritic
It caught people flat-footed enough that it took a few weeks for one of the Hong Kong Lunar New Year films to show up here, and I gather Enter the Fat Dragon was kind of retrofitted into LNY release, with clips of the cast wishing everyone a happy new year tacked onto the end. The only "true" Hong Kong LNY comedy I remember getting here is Missbehavior last year, and that was also the new Pang Ho-Cheung; I gather the usual for those movies is to be zany and almost sketch comedy right up until the credits roll with the cast offering holiday wishes.
(Aside: How weird would it be if big movies scheduled for Christmas release in the West did that? Or would it be charming?)
These two are somewhat closer to that tradition, although I think that they, too, are more along the lines of "comedies released near the New Year". A Lifetime Treasure was still kicking around at the end of its run when I visited Hong Kong last year, and is one of a number of films that wound up on my shelf because I wound up with less time to see movies at the end of the day than I thought I would have but was curious about the films I missed. I apparently ordered A Beautiful Moment soon after getting home, and I'm kind of amazed to see that there was a full fourteen months between its HK theatrical release and Blu-ray release (presuming the dates on DDDHouse are the same as general availability). That seems kind of crazy to me, used to studios just habitually penciling the home release for the first Tuesday after the 90-day window.
The movies themselves… Well, neither of them are winners. I'm finding myself a little frustrated in that a lot of the films I'm watching over the past week or so seem to spend an hour screwing around before getting to the part where you can see why they even bothered. A Lifetime Treasure isn't quite so bad in this regard, but how the people involved with A Beautiful Moment didn't realize that Carina Lau and Simon Yam was the whole movie from the start…
Ah, well. The double feature helped me push the "general unwatched Hong Kong" section down to one shelf-section, so that's kind of a quarantine accomplishment.
Ru zhu ru bao de ren sheng (A Lifetime Treasure)
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
There's probably a listicle or three out there counting down the best "a bunch of movie stars have gotten old" films, hopefully not to grim in terms of how many great actors passed away soon after doing a movie that cracked wise about how they used to be sex symbols and are now the butt of jokes about peeing every ten minutes. Unless they're exhaustive, A Lifetime Treasure will probably not show up on many of those lists, and not just because it's relatively recent or because many overlook films not made in Hollywood; it's just not very good and a few of the folks involved have done it much better.
It takes place around the Oh Hoi Nursing Home, the only elder-care facility on one of Hong Kong's smaller islands, technically run by superintendent Yuen Luk Cheung (Andrew Lam Man-Chung) although he's addled enough that nurse Ching-Ching (Ivana Wong Yuen-Chi) is effectively in charge of the five elders there: "Uncle Dragon" (Bruce Leung Siu-Lung), a mute tinkerer who claims to have once been a secret agent; Richard Leung (Richard Ng Yiu-Hon), a former swimmer living on borrowed time; Jane (Tien Niu), who like to tell people she was once a nightclub diva; Ben Chow Tai-Bun (Teddy Robin Kwan), a diminutive former pickpocket; and "Uncle Crab" (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo), a wheelchair-bound ex-detective still obsessed with an unsolved case from 30 years ago. Elsewhere, Rainy Cloud Hung (Lam Suet), who dominates the Hong Kong nursing home business, is looking to purchase the site, and dispatches flunkies Chun (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung) and Lok (Bob Lam Shing-Pun) to sabotage the place.
They don't get very far with that - Lok is too smitten with Ching-Ching despite her eyes for hunky handyman Fai (Terry Zou Wen-Zheng) to keep his eye on the prize, and their attempts at disruption make for forgettable episodes. The most elaborate involves bringing the elders to the set of a zombie movie to work as extras in hopes of out-of-context photos causing a scandal only for them to (briefly) become celebrity heroes and is mostly enlivened by Siu Yam-Yam (aka Susan "Yum-Yum" Shaw) cameoing as a thoroughly disinterested film director, which is at once the most predictable thing in the movie - Siu has, by now, made nearly as much of a career out of playing the feisty granny as she did playing the sexpot in the 1970s and 1980s that informs those parts - and the funniest. Like many of the other episodic bits that make up this film's first half hour, it seems to start from nothing and lead to nothing, with many of the jokes nearly incomprehensible to my western head. This is, to be fair, not necessarily the fault of the filmmakers; between Cantonese being a language that allows for a lot of wordplay in both spoken and written forms and Hong Kong being compact enough that there's a really good chance that everyone in the audience gets a pop-culture reference that is completely opaque to an American 12 time zones away (on the other hand, characters getting teased for uniforms that look to be straight out of Star Trek: The Next Generation may not play once you get 50 miles into the Chinese mainland). One can see evidence of such jokes, even as they fly way the heck over a western viewer's head.
It's probably not great that a lot of that running around doesn't wind up really mattering, as Rainy Cloud eventually just bursts in, forces the Chief to press his finger to a contract, and walks off, forcing the orderlies and elders to break into the headquarters Mission: Impossible-style, straight down to the harness in the elevator shaft. It's a pretty straightforward parody, but having these veteran performers play their characters as folks with something to do rather than just wandering in a fog lets them be funnier and easier to connect with. Richard Ng, especially, turns out to be a real treat, and Ivana Wong does a nice job as Ching-Ching, it's kind of hard for me to imagine an American film letting her character be weird and abrasive rather than sweet but she pulls it off.
Those noting Sammo Hung's name in the cast should maybe temper their expectations a little; the action-movie legend's Uncle Crab is in a wheelchair and doesn't get out of it for very long. There's still a bit of action or two toward the end that impresses a bit (and some physical comedy that uses the same sort of skills), but it's mostly in the hands of Bruce Leung Siu-Lung and Teddy Robin, and they're a couple of fairly capable hands, giving the film the chance to end on fast-paced, exciting note.
The thing is, Leung and Robbin and even Siu have done this before, almost ten years earlier, in a film called Gallants, which is pretty terrific and close enough to the general idea of this movie that the filmmakers got a shout-out in the credits. As much as it's great to see old favorites getting work into their later years, there's no reason to watch this one when Gallants is not that much more difficult to find.
Also on EFilmCritic
A Beautiful Moment (aka "My Rival is Son-in-law, My Lover is Son-in-law")
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong kong Blu-ray)
The neat idea that sells A Beautiful Moment is not close to being a wholly original idea - I feel like I've got the names of two or three other movies that play with the lead actor in romantic comedies often being old enough to have dated their opposite numbers' mothers on the tip of my tongue - but it's a fun one and potentially clever, especially with this cast. That's why it's so bizarre and frustrating that filmmaker Patrick Kong Pak-Leung spends so much time on doing other things.
It introduces Doctor Bo (Carina Lau Ka-Ling) using a mah-jongg game to treat three other women of a certain age, before shifting perspective to Simon Leung (Simon Yam Tat-Wah), a billionaire developer who berates his employees and carries petty grudges against rival Philip Lau Hak-Heung (Philip Keung Hiu-Man) to extremes. Bo has two daughters - Michelle (Michelle Wai Si-Nga), who she is pushing toward the other end of a breakup, and Kiki (Ivana Wong Yuen-Chi), a struggling actress who hasn't spoken to her mother in years. Chance has Simon and Michelle meet on Valentine's Day and they decide to start seeing each other, but little do they know that they've got more reason than usual to be nervous when Michelle brings her boyfriend to meet her mother.
For something like fifteen or twenty minutes in the middle, A Beautiful Moment lives up to its name; Bo and Simon spot each other at lunch and do all they can to verbally spar around Michelle. They eventually meet up and without her and while Kong initially seems to get too cute with how that goes, ham-fistedly having a parallel conversation with a younger couple going on at the next table, watching these characters smile because they know better and only have to sketch out part of their own conversations s terrific even if it is very much not the verbal jousting that one likely expected from the first encounters with the pair. Carina Lau and Simon Yam handle this downshift so well that it's difficult to understand why this isn't the entire movie.
It's not, though, and the process of getting there is kind of maddening. This main triangle is introduced in pretty specific terms: Simon is a bully; Bo is a gifted therapist but that same skill set also allows her to be tremendously manipulative; and Michelle seems to be the person she is trying to control most, the sort of behavior which drove Kiki away. There's something there, potentially, with Michelle being pushed into her mother's unhealthy patterns or Simon seeing a second chance, but Kong and co-writer Ja Poon Hang-Kei never really dig into it; Simon just seems to get nicer without being pushed with Michelle more or less flatly saying that she's decided to date him because he's wealthy and powerful. At the other side of the film, things just get shoved into different directions and arrangements out of the blue, so that even when it reaches the conclusion the audience wants, it's hard to feel anything as a result of something just happening off-screen.
And that doesn't even get to how the movie treats Ivana Wong's Kiki, who is eventually relegated to interrupting the rest of her family's thing with non-sequiturs despite the fact that the front half of the movie leans hard on the "acting" jobs she and her boyfriend take to make ends meet for its better comic pieces. Most of the comic set-ups in the movie are fairly mean-spirited, which is fair enough - it's about initially-selfish people - but some of them go on much too long at high volume, with the bits where Bo is trying to help Philip with his gambling addiction especially obnoxious.
As much as the movie can be frustrating, the cast does their best by it - I'd love to see Simon Yam and Carina Lau in a romantic comedy that delivers on the promise of their scenes together all the way through, Michelle Wai and Ivana Wong are both very funny when given the room, and as director, Kong is able to get everyone in the supporting and cameo-ing cast to squeeze the most out of the clumsy gags he gives them as the writer. It's a mess, but at least it's one with occasional high points.
Also on EFilmCritic
Sunday, April 19, 2020
The Booksellers
I made a comment the other day about how the Coolidge, whether by dint of starting ahead of other local theaters or seeming like a slightly larger organization or something else, seemed to have a bit more of a handle on the whole "running a VOD service" thing than other places, and for The Booksellers they've gotten to the point where they've actually got the film embedded in their own site rather than going to some other place. It's not perfect yet - I couldn't figure out how to get the navigation controls to disappear from my screen as I watched - but it at least seems like the start of a pretty decent system.
I wonder, a bit, if my attitude upon viewing this movie was a bit influenced by finally finishing up a specific Fantasia review immediately beforehand. Black Magic for White Boys is a different sort of movie but also one that can be kind of New York-insular, and there's a lot about The Booksellers that indicate it's not really considering the world outside its own bubble that much. I'm a happy big-city person with access to my hobbies now, but I hope that I won't ever forget what it was like to not have them in reach, and a lot of these people seem to be born into good fortune or at least able to be in orbit around the sort of money these hobbies require and seem to spend a lot of time talking about how this specific application of that privilege seems to be vanishing, with little time spent on how the younger booksellers seem excited about growing their audience compared to the older ones raging against change.
It is, now that I think of it, something of an interesting contrast with last year's IFFBoston selection Not for Resale, which featured video game retailers who, despite the way the industry's evolution was bad for their businesses, still seemed excited enough about the medium and interested in how to share it broadly rather than shuffling it from person to person with the price going up. I find myself rooting for the game-store people a lot more; they seem self-aware and more committed to grappling with the evolution going on around them rather than just stopping it.
It is probably also important to consider that I've come to be less enamored with collecting as I've grown older. I still accumulate like crazy and have trouble getting rid of stuff that's not actually unusable, but I'm bumping up against practical limits of where to keep it all and the difficulty of actually getting it from point A to point B even if I should find a bigger place once I run out of room, and I'm a little less interested in filling in the gaps in a collection than I used to be. I hear folks at the comics shop talk about grading issues or spending money to fill in the gaps or even upgrade the copies they have and kind of wonder what the point is; it's just not the way I interact with those things any more, if it ever was.
So, maybe I'm even less the audience for this movie than I thought, which is fine. I do kind of wonder if it started out talking more about used books and people discovering new authors they love at places that are more geared to readers than collectors but had its focus shift to the proprietors and customers of antiquarian shops because they were bigger and more colorful, since you can certainly see bits which focus more on readers than collectors at certain points, even if that's not the thrust of the final film.
The Booksellers
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
Movies like The Booksellers don't exactly backfire when, halfway through, certain viewers find that this film meant to celebrate a rare and vanishing breed of person is instead providing examples of just how that breed rubs them the wrong way. A documentary doesn't necessarily need to be convincing to be worthy, but at times there is enough self-satisfaction evident in this one to visibly crowd out the more dynamic stories that filmmaker D.W. Young could be telling.
You almost have to start from the back to see those stories. For example, while Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney have been relatively visible throughout the movie, young women amid a sea of faces that are older and/or male and tweedy, they only get their own focus toward the end, with one saying how she's full of ideas and enthusiasm when the old men in the business talk about the end of an era, and, with ten minutes left in the movie, there's not going to be much time to talk about how people like them are transforming the used and antiquarian book trade. It's not long after Syreeta Gates appears as part of a segment named for the bookseller and archivist she's working with, not even named on screen, but arguably giving the film the biggest jolt of energy it has yet had by talking about how her collection of hip-hop magazines and other writing started by necessity and grew into a resource. It's an immediate demonstration of the value of collecting that has been abstract through much of the film.
There's something like an hour and fifteen minutes before that, though, in which Young takes us to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, introduces a number of people operating antiquarian bookstores, and spends time talking about the decline in the sheer numbers of bookstores in the city, from how the famous Strand used to be one of many shops on "Book Row" to how younger people idly refer to "the old chain stores". As with many films of this type, it's able to coast on how full of colorful characters it is, from the sisters running the Argosy Book Store talking about how their father took care not to force them into the family business to a man who has an Escher-inspired private library. Young's interviews do a nice job of introducing people, sketching their history, and giving a sense of the obsessive, passionate nature that leads people to this sort of work, and some of the books and other artifacts they are able to display are astounding.
It's often just the very most surface impression of the community, more likely to divert into self-deprecating comments and trivia than any sort of substantive history or examination of the changing book market ecosystem. It name-checks A.S.W. Rosenbach as someone who "reigned supreme" in the rare-book world during the first part of the Twentieth Century but doesn't say more about what that means and how his influence affected the business in the decades since, and a quick digression to talk about Martin Stone, a guitarist who was nearly part of the Rolling Stones and became known as a "book scout" for his ability to find rare materials while on the road, feels like little more than a tease, both for the story of an interesting life or more examination of what an unconventional avocation that is.
Of course, the business doesn't need as many book scouts because Amazon and Ebay and the like have made rare or unusual books from around the world more visible in a way that has made things more difficult for used booksellers, and the lack of any opposition to this perspective is sometimes frustrating for those who don't live in a city that counts only having 79 used bookstores as a sign of decimation; the idea that perceived scarcity is gone and people can build a collection without a lot of effort is only looked at as bad for business rather than good in opening the pleasures of bibliophilia to more than just rich people who can easily travel to Manhattan. Moreover, aside from occasional cuts to authors Fran Lebowitz and Susan Orlean - like Gates, neither is named on-screen, with only Orlean given enough context to show why this passionate person's words carry weight - it's a long stretch before one gets any indication that anybody involved really enjoys reading. Instead, there are cheery profiles of people who talk about the thrill of the pursuit which winds up with them paying large amounts of money for something rare and then placing it in their literal warehouses, never to be seen again until they die.
It's not hard to imagine that these people would be disparaged as hoarders if they were a little less well-off and their collections a little more plebeian, at least until there was academic interest in a topic, as with one subject's L. Frank Baum collection. That seeming paradoxes of how that hoarding can become a valuable academic resource, or how less exclusivity can destroy an industry (or at least force it to change into something new) would be interesting ways to tie this material together, and it's somewhat frustrating that Young doesn't opt to do that so much as highlight personalities and show rooms full of beautiful but seldom-read books. The film is a testament to how such displays have an appeal, and there's nothing wrong with that sort of survey, but it's not a film that will do much for one who doesn't already look upon this group fondly.
Also on EFilmCritic
\
I wonder, a bit, if my attitude upon viewing this movie was a bit influenced by finally finishing up a specific Fantasia review immediately beforehand. Black Magic for White Boys is a different sort of movie but also one that can be kind of New York-insular, and there's a lot about The Booksellers that indicate it's not really considering the world outside its own bubble that much. I'm a happy big-city person with access to my hobbies now, but I hope that I won't ever forget what it was like to not have them in reach, and a lot of these people seem to be born into good fortune or at least able to be in orbit around the sort of money these hobbies require and seem to spend a lot of time talking about how this specific application of that privilege seems to be vanishing, with little time spent on how the younger booksellers seem excited about growing their audience compared to the older ones raging against change.
It is, now that I think of it, something of an interesting contrast with last year's IFFBoston selection Not for Resale, which featured video game retailers who, despite the way the industry's evolution was bad for their businesses, still seemed excited enough about the medium and interested in how to share it broadly rather than shuffling it from person to person with the price going up. I find myself rooting for the game-store people a lot more; they seem self-aware and more committed to grappling with the evolution going on around them rather than just stopping it.
It is probably also important to consider that I've come to be less enamored with collecting as I've grown older. I still accumulate like crazy and have trouble getting rid of stuff that's not actually unusable, but I'm bumping up against practical limits of where to keep it all and the difficulty of actually getting it from point A to point B even if I should find a bigger place once I run out of room, and I'm a little less interested in filling in the gaps in a collection than I used to be. I hear folks at the comics shop talk about grading issues or spending money to fill in the gaps or even upgrade the copies they have and kind of wonder what the point is; it's just not the way I interact with those things any more, if it ever was.
So, maybe I'm even less the audience for this movie than I thought, which is fine. I do kind of wonder if it started out talking more about used books and people discovering new authors they love at places that are more geared to readers than collectors but had its focus shift to the proprietors and customers of antiquarian shops because they were bigger and more colorful, since you can certainly see bits which focus more on readers than collectors at certain points, even if that's not the thrust of the final film.
The Booksellers
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
Movies like The Booksellers don't exactly backfire when, halfway through, certain viewers find that this film meant to celebrate a rare and vanishing breed of person is instead providing examples of just how that breed rubs them the wrong way. A documentary doesn't necessarily need to be convincing to be worthy, but at times there is enough self-satisfaction evident in this one to visibly crowd out the more dynamic stories that filmmaker D.W. Young could be telling.
You almost have to start from the back to see those stories. For example, while Heather O'Donnell and Rebecca Romney have been relatively visible throughout the movie, young women amid a sea of faces that are older and/or male and tweedy, they only get their own focus toward the end, with one saying how she's full of ideas and enthusiasm when the old men in the business talk about the end of an era, and, with ten minutes left in the movie, there's not going to be much time to talk about how people like them are transforming the used and antiquarian book trade. It's not long after Syreeta Gates appears as part of a segment named for the bookseller and archivist she's working with, not even named on screen, but arguably giving the film the biggest jolt of energy it has yet had by talking about how her collection of hip-hop magazines and other writing started by necessity and grew into a resource. It's an immediate demonstration of the value of collecting that has been abstract through much of the film.
There's something like an hour and fifteen minutes before that, though, in which Young takes us to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, introduces a number of people operating antiquarian bookstores, and spends time talking about the decline in the sheer numbers of bookstores in the city, from how the famous Strand used to be one of many shops on "Book Row" to how younger people idly refer to "the old chain stores". As with many films of this type, it's able to coast on how full of colorful characters it is, from the sisters running the Argosy Book Store talking about how their father took care not to force them into the family business to a man who has an Escher-inspired private library. Young's interviews do a nice job of introducing people, sketching their history, and giving a sense of the obsessive, passionate nature that leads people to this sort of work, and some of the books and other artifacts they are able to display are astounding.
It's often just the very most surface impression of the community, more likely to divert into self-deprecating comments and trivia than any sort of substantive history or examination of the changing book market ecosystem. It name-checks A.S.W. Rosenbach as someone who "reigned supreme" in the rare-book world during the first part of the Twentieth Century but doesn't say more about what that means and how his influence affected the business in the decades since, and a quick digression to talk about Martin Stone, a guitarist who was nearly part of the Rolling Stones and became known as a "book scout" for his ability to find rare materials while on the road, feels like little more than a tease, both for the story of an interesting life or more examination of what an unconventional avocation that is.
Of course, the business doesn't need as many book scouts because Amazon and Ebay and the like have made rare or unusual books from around the world more visible in a way that has made things more difficult for used booksellers, and the lack of any opposition to this perspective is sometimes frustrating for those who don't live in a city that counts only having 79 used bookstores as a sign of decimation; the idea that perceived scarcity is gone and people can build a collection without a lot of effort is only looked at as bad for business rather than good in opening the pleasures of bibliophilia to more than just rich people who can easily travel to Manhattan. Moreover, aside from occasional cuts to authors Fran Lebowitz and Susan Orlean - like Gates, neither is named on-screen, with only Orlean given enough context to show why this passionate person's words carry weight - it's a long stretch before one gets any indication that anybody involved really enjoys reading. Instead, there are cheery profiles of people who talk about the thrill of the pursuit which winds up with them paying large amounts of money for something rare and then placing it in their literal warehouses, never to be seen again until they die.
It's not hard to imagine that these people would be disparaged as hoarders if they were a little less well-off and their collections a little more plebeian, at least until there was academic interest in a topic, as with one subject's L. Frank Baum collection. That seeming paradoxes of how that hoarding can become a valuable academic resource, or how less exclusivity can destroy an industry (or at least force it to change into something new) would be interesting ways to tie this material together, and it's somewhat frustrating that Young doesn't opt to do that so much as highlight personalities and show rooms full of beautiful but seldom-read books. The film is a testament to how such displays have an appeal, and there's nothing wrong with that sort of survey, but it's not a film that will do much for one who doesn't already look upon this group fondly.
Also on EFilmCritic
\
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Hammer Time: Frankenstein Created Woman and Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
I'm not a big Hammer guy in part because I'm just not a big horror guy. I've grown to like horror movies well enough, and appreciate what you can say with them, but I've never quite gotten into horror for the sake of horror. I will watch your zombie movie if it helps me fill every slot at Fantasia, or if it looks like you've got style or a new twist or point of view, but I don't need endless sequels or mythologies or the like. I'm full up there with Marvel, Star Trek, etc.
As a result, I've never really done any sort of deep dive into Hammer, just sort of checked them out when individual films were part of other things that interested me, which is how these two particular discs wound up on my (somewhat) recent arrivals shelf: A Hammer/Shaw Brothers crossover is the right combination of logical and bonkers to be interesting, and I have loved gender-bending stuff since I discovered Ranma ½ in college, even if I do recognize that most of it kind of problematic at best (including and maybe especially the well-intentioned material). I will, by the time we are once again able to see movies in theaters like nature intended, spend a week going through various movies along those lines, but we are not there yet.
At any rate, I wonder if these oddball Hammer films do better for Shout Factory than the regular ones, because they attract niches that the other six Hammer Frankensteins don't.
Frankenstein Created Woman
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
It is roughly an hour into this 86-minute movie before Frankenstein creates woman, and it's not like that first hour is doing something terribly new on the way to that moment. The horror genre has certainly seen more wasteful slow burns than this, of course, and it's entirely possible that someone who had seen the previous Hammer Frankenstein movies would be more engrossed. Still, it's an odd thing to save the movie's central idea until the point where you can't do that much with it.
Having been caught up on the series might explain why Baron Fraknenstein (Peter Cushing) starts the film in some small Swiss village, hands damaged to the point where he must depend on local doctor Hertz (Thorley Walters) and assistant Hans (Robert Morris) to actually execute his experiments in cryonics and force fields and all manner of other things. Hans loves Christina (Susan Denberg dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl), the scarred and handicapped daughter of the local tavern owner, though she is the target of ridicule from three cruel toffs (Peter Blyte, Barry Warren, Derek Fowlds). Suspicion for the murder of Christina's father falls on Hans, due to his firey temper and executed father, and though Frankenstein's testimony at the trial hurts more than it helps, his latest experiments in capturing the soul may save Hans… in a way.
Given the title of the movie, you can see where the filmmakers are going with this, and while there's certainly a desire to move it along to the good stuff, there's also a certain perverse comfort on how writer Anthony Hinds (using the pseudonym "John Elder') and director Terence Fisher put everything in place. There's not a character that the audience doesn't recognize as horror stock right away, played broadly but generally a step or two back from actual ham, performed on sets that are cramped and garish rather than ornate, and maybe feel a little grounded and believable for that. It's meticulous in going through all the steps that must happen before Hans is in a new body and seeking revenge, and mostly does okay with that, with the admittedly large exceptions of Hertz seeming like the most empty-headed physician since Nigel Bruce played John Watson, the better for Frankenstein to explain things to him in a step-by-step manner that consists almost entirely of unfounded assumptions.
If the first hour is standard but capable, the last act is rushed but interesting. Sure, it's where all the exploitation raw meat is, the bloody murders and the costuming designed to remind you that, despite how Christina was presented earlier, Susan Denberg is very attractive indeed. It's also where Frankenstein's utter lack of human perspective as he tampers with the very stuff of life and death is presented at its sharpest - where, despite the monster being beautiful, this finally feels like a Frankenstein story. The filmmakers almost completely sidestep playing with the idea of a man's soul in a woman's body, which is probably for the best - a lot of more high-minded movies with fifty years' more perspective make a mess of this - often instead presenting the new Christina as a blank slate haunted and sometimes possessed by Hans's ghost. An interesting idea of itself, but not the film has much time to play with. Mostly, it lets the audience get a bit of a thrill out of how the men who actually killed Christna's father are now lusting over a woman with her body and the soul of a man they despised like cartoon wolves.
That's good stuff with a nasty, twisted kick to it, and the cast to its credit all seem to get what makes this a nifty cross between the traditional Frankenstein story and a revenge flick, but they could use more time to dig into it: Frankenstein's monsters, at their best, are intelligent enough to recognize and rail over how they don't fit into the world, and Christina doesn't get that sort of introspection. On the other side, the three targets of her rage are a dull, interchangeable bunch, her vengeance suitably bloody but not quite thrilling. It doesn't quite become a rote slasher movie, but it seldom lives up to what it could be.
Less interesting things have been done with both Frankenstein and avenging-angel flicks separately, and the folks at Hammer didn't really mess up the combination. You can see the good ideas and Hammer being a factory of sorts works in the movie's favor. They don't mess up lurid horror, even if they aren't exactly the guys to make it into something greater.
Also on EFilmCritic
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires was the only product of a mid-1970s team-up between Hammer Films and the Shaw Brothers Studio, but ill-fated action flick Shatter (coincidentally due for a home video release in about a week) likely doesn't have quite the same sense of being a crossover that this does. It's recognizable as both the sort of horror movies Hammer and Shaw Brothers made, with a healthy dose of the latter's martial-arts action, more for better than worse.
It opens 1804, with Kah (Chan Shen) arriving in Transylvania from China to beseech Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) for his aid in helping his village of Ping Kwei's seven golden vampires once again spread terror through the countryside, which the Count accepts, in his own way. A hundred years later, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is giving a lecture on vampirism in Chungking, hoping to learn of China's undead only to be dismissed by all but Hsi Ching (David Chiang Da-Wei), who has come from Ping Kwei to seek Van Helsing's assistance in destroying the vampires that still plague his village. It's an expensive expedition, but Scandinavian widow and adventuress Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege) is intrigued, and with a party including Van Helsing's son Leyland (Robin Stewart) as well as Ching's six brothers and sister Mei Kwei (Shih Szu), they set out, pursued by gangsters and heading toward monsters.
Christopher Lee opted not to return as Dracula for what is little more than a cameo rule (though John Forbes-Robertson as dubbed by David de Keyser is a fair substitute for a couple of scenes), and truth be told, this film would probably work better without him. Aside from how the story would seem to make no sense in established Hammer continuity, there's something downright charming about it as a sort of spin-off, with Van Helsing touring the globe and learning about the various legends of the undead that can be found outside of his central-European expertise. Those initial scenes play Van Helsing as an eccentric academic, with costumes and attitude that remind one as much of Peter Cushing's short-lived stint as Dr. Who as the hard-bitten vampire hunter of the early Hammer Draculas, with an enjoyable (if unfortunately noteworthy) respect for the Chinese setting, from how Cushing's first scene flips the script on the familiar trope of the European scientist lecturing superstitious locals to his genuine curiosity discussing vampires with Hsi Ching and the party later.
And he should be humble, because he is definitely in Shaw Brothers territory as much as Hammer turf. The seven vampires and their undead army are covered in an almost absurd amount of prosthetic makeup so that they come across as bizarre, uncanny monsters, with garish bat medallions just to make sure the audience gets it. On top of that, the Hsi family leaps into action like this was any other kung fu flick, and the fights are the real deal: Legendary Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh may be uncredited, but he oversaw much of the martial-arts scenes, with Tang Chia and Liu Chia-Liang (who would later go on to direct his brother in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and its sequels) choreographing the action. These battles are big and sprawling, with a great many fists, feet, and silvery weapons flying without it ever being too much. The violence in Hammer horror movies is always enthusiastic, but this movie drops big fast-paced battles in without missing a beat. They even do a nice job of making sure that Robin Stewart, presumably brought in as a younger Van Helsing to minimize the amount of strenuous work for Cushing, comes across as not skilled in the same way as the Hong Kong cast without looking like a fool.
For all that the Shaw Brothers action can be dropped into a Hammer horror movie without seeming out of place, neither studio tended to see these movies as a whole lot more than vehicles for sex and violence, which this one delivers, if often with as much glee as style. Peter Cushing and David Chiang Da-Wei are good enough in their parts to make scenes move smoothly, but the need to have a cast big enough that some can fall in battle means there's not really enough material for anyone to be terribly interesting individually, from the frequently anonymous brothers to how Julie Ege is mostly filling costumes until literally her last scene. Neither John Forbes-Robertson nor Chan Shen gets much chance to do much as a villain between the very start and very end of the film.
But if you're going to mash Hammer Films and the Shaw Brothers together, you can't exactly expect that which neither prioritized to suddenly be great. Instead, you just hope that each part brings something that they do well, and if 7 Golden Vampires winds up being just a good example of each label's product, that's a sort of success a lot of other crossovers don't manage.
Also on EFilmCritic
As a result, I've never really done any sort of deep dive into Hammer, just sort of checked them out when individual films were part of other things that interested me, which is how these two particular discs wound up on my (somewhat) recent arrivals shelf: A Hammer/Shaw Brothers crossover is the right combination of logical and bonkers to be interesting, and I have loved gender-bending stuff since I discovered Ranma ½ in college, even if I do recognize that most of it kind of problematic at best (including and maybe especially the well-intentioned material). I will, by the time we are once again able to see movies in theaters like nature intended, spend a week going through various movies along those lines, but we are not there yet.
At any rate, I wonder if these oddball Hammer films do better for Shout Factory than the regular ones, because they attract niches that the other six Hammer Frankensteins don't.
Frankenstein Created Woman
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
It is roughly an hour into this 86-minute movie before Frankenstein creates woman, and it's not like that first hour is doing something terribly new on the way to that moment. The horror genre has certainly seen more wasteful slow burns than this, of course, and it's entirely possible that someone who had seen the previous Hammer Frankenstein movies would be more engrossed. Still, it's an odd thing to save the movie's central idea until the point where you can't do that much with it.
Having been caught up on the series might explain why Baron Fraknenstein (Peter Cushing) starts the film in some small Swiss village, hands damaged to the point where he must depend on local doctor Hertz (Thorley Walters) and assistant Hans (Robert Morris) to actually execute his experiments in cryonics and force fields and all manner of other things. Hans loves Christina (Susan Denberg dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl), the scarred and handicapped daughter of the local tavern owner, though she is the target of ridicule from three cruel toffs (Peter Blyte, Barry Warren, Derek Fowlds). Suspicion for the murder of Christina's father falls on Hans, due to his firey temper and executed father, and though Frankenstein's testimony at the trial hurts more than it helps, his latest experiments in capturing the soul may save Hans… in a way.
Given the title of the movie, you can see where the filmmakers are going with this, and while there's certainly a desire to move it along to the good stuff, there's also a certain perverse comfort on how writer Anthony Hinds (using the pseudonym "John Elder') and director Terence Fisher put everything in place. There's not a character that the audience doesn't recognize as horror stock right away, played broadly but generally a step or two back from actual ham, performed on sets that are cramped and garish rather than ornate, and maybe feel a little grounded and believable for that. It's meticulous in going through all the steps that must happen before Hans is in a new body and seeking revenge, and mostly does okay with that, with the admittedly large exceptions of Hertz seeming like the most empty-headed physician since Nigel Bruce played John Watson, the better for Frankenstein to explain things to him in a step-by-step manner that consists almost entirely of unfounded assumptions.
If the first hour is standard but capable, the last act is rushed but interesting. Sure, it's where all the exploitation raw meat is, the bloody murders and the costuming designed to remind you that, despite how Christina was presented earlier, Susan Denberg is very attractive indeed. It's also where Frankenstein's utter lack of human perspective as he tampers with the very stuff of life and death is presented at its sharpest - where, despite the monster being beautiful, this finally feels like a Frankenstein story. The filmmakers almost completely sidestep playing with the idea of a man's soul in a woman's body, which is probably for the best - a lot of more high-minded movies with fifty years' more perspective make a mess of this - often instead presenting the new Christina as a blank slate haunted and sometimes possessed by Hans's ghost. An interesting idea of itself, but not the film has much time to play with. Mostly, it lets the audience get a bit of a thrill out of how the men who actually killed Christna's father are now lusting over a woman with her body and the soul of a man they despised like cartoon wolves.
That's good stuff with a nasty, twisted kick to it, and the cast to its credit all seem to get what makes this a nifty cross between the traditional Frankenstein story and a revenge flick, but they could use more time to dig into it: Frankenstein's monsters, at their best, are intelligent enough to recognize and rail over how they don't fit into the world, and Christina doesn't get that sort of introspection. On the other side, the three targets of her rage are a dull, interchangeable bunch, her vengeance suitably bloody but not quite thrilling. It doesn't quite become a rote slasher movie, but it seldom lives up to what it could be.
Less interesting things have been done with both Frankenstein and avenging-angel flicks separately, and the folks at Hammer didn't really mess up the combination. You can see the good ideas and Hammer being a factory of sorts works in the movie's favor. They don't mess up lurid horror, even if they aren't exactly the guys to make it into something greater.
Also on EFilmCritic
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires was the only product of a mid-1970s team-up between Hammer Films and the Shaw Brothers Studio, but ill-fated action flick Shatter (coincidentally due for a home video release in about a week) likely doesn't have quite the same sense of being a crossover that this does. It's recognizable as both the sort of horror movies Hammer and Shaw Brothers made, with a healthy dose of the latter's martial-arts action, more for better than worse.
It opens 1804, with Kah (Chan Shen) arriving in Transylvania from China to beseech Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) for his aid in helping his village of Ping Kwei's seven golden vampires once again spread terror through the countryside, which the Count accepts, in his own way. A hundred years later, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is giving a lecture on vampirism in Chungking, hoping to learn of China's undead only to be dismissed by all but Hsi Ching (David Chiang Da-Wei), who has come from Ping Kwei to seek Van Helsing's assistance in destroying the vampires that still plague his village. It's an expensive expedition, but Scandinavian widow and adventuress Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege) is intrigued, and with a party including Van Helsing's son Leyland (Robin Stewart) as well as Ching's six brothers and sister Mei Kwei (Shih Szu), they set out, pursued by gangsters and heading toward monsters.
Christopher Lee opted not to return as Dracula for what is little more than a cameo rule (though John Forbes-Robertson as dubbed by David de Keyser is a fair substitute for a couple of scenes), and truth be told, this film would probably work better without him. Aside from how the story would seem to make no sense in established Hammer continuity, there's something downright charming about it as a sort of spin-off, with Van Helsing touring the globe and learning about the various legends of the undead that can be found outside of his central-European expertise. Those initial scenes play Van Helsing as an eccentric academic, with costumes and attitude that remind one as much of Peter Cushing's short-lived stint as Dr. Who as the hard-bitten vampire hunter of the early Hammer Draculas, with an enjoyable (if unfortunately noteworthy) respect for the Chinese setting, from how Cushing's first scene flips the script on the familiar trope of the European scientist lecturing superstitious locals to his genuine curiosity discussing vampires with Hsi Ching and the party later.
And he should be humble, because he is definitely in Shaw Brothers territory as much as Hammer turf. The seven vampires and their undead army are covered in an almost absurd amount of prosthetic makeup so that they come across as bizarre, uncanny monsters, with garish bat medallions just to make sure the audience gets it. On top of that, the Hsi family leaps into action like this was any other kung fu flick, and the fights are the real deal: Legendary Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh may be uncredited, but he oversaw much of the martial-arts scenes, with Tang Chia and Liu Chia-Liang (who would later go on to direct his brother in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and its sequels) choreographing the action. These battles are big and sprawling, with a great many fists, feet, and silvery weapons flying without it ever being too much. The violence in Hammer horror movies is always enthusiastic, but this movie drops big fast-paced battles in without missing a beat. They even do a nice job of making sure that Robin Stewart, presumably brought in as a younger Van Helsing to minimize the amount of strenuous work for Cushing, comes across as not skilled in the same way as the Hong Kong cast without looking like a fool.
For all that the Shaw Brothers action can be dropped into a Hammer horror movie without seeming out of place, neither studio tended to see these movies as a whole lot more than vehicles for sex and violence, which this one delivers, if often with as much glee as style. Peter Cushing and David Chiang Da-Wei are good enough in their parts to make scenes move smoothly, but the need to have a cast big enough that some can fall in battle means there's not really enough material for anyone to be terribly interesting individually, from the frequently anonymous brothers to how Julie Ege is mostly filling costumes until literally her last scene. Neither John Forbes-Robertson nor Chan Shen gets much chance to do much as a villain between the very start and very end of the film.
But if you're going to mash Hammer Films and the Shaw Brothers together, you can't exactly expect that which neither prioritized to suddenly be great. Instead, you just hope that each part brings something that they do well, and if 7 Golden Vampires winds up being just a good example of each label's product, that's a sort of success a lot of other crossovers don't manage.
Also on EFilmCritic
Friday, April 17, 2020
Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 17 April 2020 - 23 April 2020
I used to write these Thursday evening and then leave them to post Friday morning, but now it's a lunchtime thing because (I suspect) the movie theater people aren't necessarily experts at running streaming services and are kind of making this up as they go along. But aren't we all?
I'm mildly surprised to see that there's actually been some turnover before I got to seeing films in the virtual rooms, so I'll try and be a little more conscientious about catching The Booksellers, The Roads Not Taken, and maybe Earth sooner rather than later, while also trying to get things down off my shelf at a good clip.
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre is the closest to having things moving relatively smoothly, this week adding documentary The Booksellers and former Goethe-Institut presentation Balloon (which had an interrupted theatrical run at the Kendall) to "The Best of CatVideoFest", The Times of Bill Cunningham, Saint Frances, Bacurau, and Fantastic Fungi.
It's not on the theater's page, but the After Midnight Crew will be hosting a Q&A with Greg Sestero about his Best F(r)iends movies on Saturday night at 9pm. This Week's Coolidge Education seminar ha Monica Castillo delivering a pre-viewing introduction to The Hitch-Hiker on Tuesday and leading an online discussion on Thursday. - West Newton Cinema adds Nikolaus Geyrhalter's documentary Earth to their streaming offerings; it visits a number of large excavation locations to view them as a sort of direct chipping away at the planet. The Roads Not Taken, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers continue.
- The Brattle Theatre would have been hosting a premiere for Other Music this weekend, but instead, the documentary on the famed New York City record shop is getting a virtual-screening-room release, and the Brattle is the local beneficiary if you follow their link. To tie in, this week's virtual repertory series is "Music Matters", a week of music-related films that they have played at some point. The recommendations are Shut Up and Play the Hits on Friday, We Are the Best! & Linda Linda Linda on Saturday, 20,000 Days on Earth on Sunday, Inside Llewyn Davis on Monday, Let's Get Lost on Tuesday, Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll & A Band Called Death on Wednesday, and (fittingly) The Last Waltz on Thursday.
"Y'Know, For the Kids!" is scaling down to making recommendations four days a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday); this week's selections have included Darby O'Gill and the Little People and Modern Times. #BreakYourAlgorithm continues to post Wednesday and Thursday, highlighting Bunny and the Bull and Starstruck this week. - Emerson's Bright Lights at Home selections are once again both on Netflix, with professor Kristin Lieb discussing Miss Americana at 7pm on Tuesday and director Rachel Mason talking about her film Circus of Books on Thursday. Remember to watch the films ahead of the usual 7pm start time and then join the discussion on Zoom.
- So far, no turnover on what's offered at The Somerville Theatre's virtual cinema - The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and The Roads Not Taken. The same goes for the virtual cinema of the The Capitol, still showing The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. The Capitol has the Popcorn Pop-Up this weekend, with pre-ordered popcorn, candy, and ice cream ready for pickup Saturday afternoon
- GlobeDocs has another lunchtime seminar planned for Monday - go to the event page, watch short film "In Love With You", and RSVP for the discussion.
I'm mildly surprised to see that there's actually been some turnover before I got to seeing films in the virtual rooms, so I'll try and be a little more conscientious about catching The Booksellers, The Roads Not Taken, and maybe Earth sooner rather than later, while also trying to get things down off my shelf at a good clip.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
This Week in Tickets: 6 April 2020 - 12 April 2020
I really miss movie theaters, guys.
Pretty decent run in my living room, though. I mentioned last week that I seemed to have trouble breaking the habit of scrolling through my Twitter feed or whatever during the evening hours, and managed to consciously break the habit this week. Not on Monday, apparently, but I pulled the genuinely weird The Bubble off the shelf on Tuesday, following it up with the gallery of 3D Kodachrome slides on the disc. Wednesday night, I hit the Virtual Coolidge for Saint Frances, and it was pretty decent.
On Thursday, I started in on a project to get all the comics that have built up in the couple years since I've moved here sorted and bagged and stored in an easily accessible way, although I think I may have out-clevered myself by ordering a bunch of legal-size Bankers Box drawers. Sure, it seems like the drawers will be better than wrestling long boxes in the future, but each drawer is the size of two long boxes, and that's pretty heavy when filled with comics. Plus, it's not like these corrugated cabinets have casters or anything to make them slide easy.
Friday, I started a weekend of double features with Supernatural & I Married a Witch, the former newly-arrived and the latter having been on the shelf for a while. Both are fun, and always make me wish that there were more fantastical films with major stars in them from this era. Saturday, I paired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 4K with sequel Sword of Destiny in 3D. Even without the weird bumps in the road I had watching the second, it's pretty clear that one is a masterpiece and the other is, well, not. Then on Sunday, I got the "3-D Rarities Volume II" disc and watched all of that. I came away intensely jealous of the decent flash and Kodachrome film the people with "Stereo-Realist" cameras had compared to my RETO.
Nothing on my Letterboxd page this week yet, but I'll probably change that later. I'm guessing the theaters won't open until Tenet in July at best, but there's still lots of the shelf
The Bubble
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The Bubble is a bad movie that almost manages a bit of camouflage; it's a disjointed mess that leaves important things out and never explains anything right up until the very end, but you can almost convince yourself that this is, if not deliberate, then at least a good way to show just how its characters are confused and frightened and maybe not processing the lack of information well. I think that's giving it a bit too much credit; there's absolutely some withholding to create unease but it seems likely that much of it is just doing whatever seemed like a good idea in the moment or with the resources available whether or not it comes together or contradicts itself.
Filmmaker Arch Oboler does deserve credit for some ambition; whether doing something specific or just slapping incongruous things together, the world under the bubble of the title is genuinely strange and gets more so as the couple stranded there explore it, with the carnival music pushed onto the soundtrack by the one ride in the middle of the town square only enhancing that for how it points out just how artificial and stitched-together the place is. Oboler doesn't exactly bury any subtext about contemplating man's place in the universe or feeling like everyday life is just a less-extreme version of these people who behave like tape recordings; it's right in the dialogue even if it's not something the characters really grapple with in action. He just doesn't show any particular willingness to react to it or follow things through.
The film maybe would have been able to escape its B-movie limits if Oboler gave signs of being a really good filmmaker, but the film is still burdened with a weak cast, or at least one Oboler can't get much from, and not much creativity in making the limited effects budget stretch. It has a tremendously weak ending and while the 3-D camera work is decent (the restoration looks nice), the filmmakers don't do much other than push things at the audience's face or do a couple other trick shots. As someone who likes both 3D and weird sci-fi, I found myself wanting to like this a lot more than I actually did.
Pretty decent run in my living room, though. I mentioned last week that I seemed to have trouble breaking the habit of scrolling through my Twitter feed or whatever during the evening hours, and managed to consciously break the habit this week. Not on Monday, apparently, but I pulled the genuinely weird The Bubble off the shelf on Tuesday, following it up with the gallery of 3D Kodachrome slides on the disc. Wednesday night, I hit the Virtual Coolidge for Saint Frances, and it was pretty decent.
On Thursday, I started in on a project to get all the comics that have built up in the couple years since I've moved here sorted and bagged and stored in an easily accessible way, although I think I may have out-clevered myself by ordering a bunch of legal-size Bankers Box drawers. Sure, it seems like the drawers will be better than wrestling long boxes in the future, but each drawer is the size of two long boxes, and that's pretty heavy when filled with comics. Plus, it's not like these corrugated cabinets have casters or anything to make them slide easy.
Friday, I started a weekend of double features with Supernatural & I Married a Witch, the former newly-arrived and the latter having been on the shelf for a while. Both are fun, and always make me wish that there were more fantastical films with major stars in them from this era. Saturday, I paired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 4K with sequel Sword of Destiny in 3D. Even without the weird bumps in the road I had watching the second, it's pretty clear that one is a masterpiece and the other is, well, not. Then on Sunday, I got the "3-D Rarities Volume II" disc and watched all of that. I came away intensely jealous of the decent flash and Kodachrome film the people with "Stereo-Realist" cameras had compared to my RETO.
Nothing on my Letterboxd page this week yet, but I'll probably change that later. I'm guessing the theaters won't open until Tenet in July at best, but there's still lots of the shelf
The Bubble
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The Bubble is a bad movie that almost manages a bit of camouflage; it's a disjointed mess that leaves important things out and never explains anything right up until the very end, but you can almost convince yourself that this is, if not deliberate, then at least a good way to show just how its characters are confused and frightened and maybe not processing the lack of information well. I think that's giving it a bit too much credit; there's absolutely some withholding to create unease but it seems likely that much of it is just doing whatever seemed like a good idea in the moment or with the resources available whether or not it comes together or contradicts itself.
Filmmaker Arch Oboler does deserve credit for some ambition; whether doing something specific or just slapping incongruous things together, the world under the bubble of the title is genuinely strange and gets more so as the couple stranded there explore it, with the carnival music pushed onto the soundtrack by the one ride in the middle of the town square only enhancing that for how it points out just how artificial and stitched-together the place is. Oboler doesn't exactly bury any subtext about contemplating man's place in the universe or feeling like everyday life is just a less-extreme version of these people who behave like tape recordings; it's right in the dialogue even if it's not something the characters really grapple with in action. He just doesn't show any particular willingness to react to it or follow things through.
The film maybe would have been able to escape its B-movie limits if Oboler gave signs of being a really good filmmaker, but the film is still burdened with a weak cast, or at least one Oboler can't get much from, and not much creativity in making the limited effects budget stretch. It has a tremendously weak ending and while the 3-D camera work is decent (the restoration looks nice), the filmmakers don't do much other than push things at the audience's face or do a couple other trick shots. As someone who likes both 3D and weird sci-fi, I found myself wanting to like this a lot more than I actually did.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
3-D Rarities Volume II, including El corazón y la espada
Another bit of "let's not even let new stuff make it onto the shelf as the pre-order gets delivered a bit late, but it's no big deal. You are probably not buying this particular Blu-ray unless you already have a ton of stuff on the shelf that you can enjoy.
A part of me is a little curious about the format and contents of this disc, although I wonder if it's just a matter of what the 3-D Film Archive can do with its distributors. They and 3-D SPACE crowdfunded a restoration of El corazón y la espada last year, but I suspect that this Mexican adventure film might be a little too niche for either Kino or Flicker Alley, although a "rarities" disc with it and a couple other bits of content that didn't particularly make a lot of sense as special features on other discs might be better branding. Meanwhile, it seems like the didn't quite accumulate enough content for a second rarities disc without a feature (my review of Volume 1 from back in 2017 notes that a second disc was planned for 2018 at the time, but it came out in 2020 and there's only a few short films on it, all strung together, with 3D photo collections that are presented as slideshows with narration rather than as galleries as was the case on The Bubble, one of them part of the big compendium of shorts and one on its own. It's not the most straightforward way to do it.
The fun thing about the photos was how much the Kodak "Stereo-Realist" camera used to take most of them looks like the RETO camera I got from a different crowdfunding campaign which I've been playing with for the past few months:
Though I haven't been back to Hunt's to pick up the two or three rolls of film I shot in New Zealand, so I can't speak for those, I'm intensely jealous of the results shown. Part of it is just that the process - the Kodak camera these people (including silent film star Harold Lloyd) used was generally built for slide film and developed to slides, while I'm using regular film and having the lab scan it, then screwing around with software to put them together despite the RETO camera taking vertical photos while every viewing device I've got (aside from maybe making a wigglegram meant to be viewed on phones) is horizontal, meaning I lose resolution. They're also using Kodachrome film, which helps a lot.
The slide shows are kind of neat, but the narration is odd, and I imagine it would drive me nuts on the second or third time through, like when you're going through a museum and there's no way to turn the audio guide off. Also, Mr. Lloyd's granddaughter seemed a tiny bit uncomfortable talking about his fondness for photographing naked ladies (though I seem to remember there were many more pictures like that in the collection of 3D photos included with the box set New Line released.
It's still a very fun set for those of us that dig the format. I may wind up turning the sound off for some parts or wish there were a bit more of a direct path to the best bits the next time I put it on, but I still enjoyed seeing these oddities.
"A Day in the Country" (aka "Stereo Laffs")
* * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Speaking of narration that fills every second and leads as much to cringe as actual laughs, let's talk about - or, at least, quickly and regretfully acknowledge - Joe Besser talking all over "A Day in the Country". I don't know whether it was shot silently with the idea of adding narration, the soundtrack was degraded in the ten years it took for the thing to get released after being shot, or if filmmaker Jack Rieger just looked at the footage and decided it needed a little something more because it was just a bunch of shots without a strong story (and both editing and reshooting would be tricky). However it got to this point, the result is not great.
It does come across as something of a weird beast, though, because the subject matter as well as the staging feels a lot like a 1910s/1920s silent short, although still somewhat off - it's like Rieger is trying to capture the sort of goofy comic pastoral Lloyd or Keaton might have made but isn't quite getting the impersonation right, and the camera angles used to enhance the 3D effect as well as the things thrown at the camera break the illusion. That they often hit the camera and send the picture to black feels a bit like a growing pain that other 3D filmmakers learned from - the flinch as something zips past works better than the head-on collision.
For an half-experimental short film at a time when this just wasn't something filmmakers and theaters were working with on a regular basis, a lot of the work is impressive, and there are some funny gags in it. Find a way to do it without the voiceover, and maybe it's more than an interesting curiosity, both at the time and years later.
"The Black Swan" '52
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The previews for various opera, ballet, and stage presentations in movie theaters seldom show 3D shows any more, and that feels like a real missed opportunity. Dance is a natural for the medium with how it uses three-dimensional space, and two of the more interesting 3D movies to come out during the current wave, Pina and Cunningham, were dance documentaries. It's no surprise, then, that "The Black Swan" is probably the most impressive thing on the disc, feeling very much like the spiritual ancestor to Cunningham, taken off a stage that needs to be built for an audience and into a somewhat more complex environment that that a camera can move around in it. It's still not realistic, but it's not quite stagebound.
The music and dancing are quite good to my decidedly inexpert eyes, although at 13 minutes it feels like something of a long short. I suspect that, to a certain extent, the way stereoscopic advisor Raymond Spottiswoode frames the shoot contributes to that - though the effect of a window seemingly floating in front of the screen is undoubtedly nifty and apparently erases flat bits at the edges, it tends to encourage one to lean forward and strain even when one doesn't need to. That is something common with a lot of 3D formats, which don't quite work as well as they should until one learns to relax while focusing.
"Games in Depth"
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The liner notes indicate that this was apparently created for Expo 1967 before being replaced with something else, which seems like a good call - it's a random-seeming montage of various play-related scenes melded with an often atonal soundtrack, but it never becomes hypnotic in the way this sort of installation can. There are nifty moments - shots of a high-school football game briefly give an idea of how 3D can be used in a sportscast - but by the time this was shot, its 3D effects weren't spectacular, and the imagery and music doesn't seem like something that will make people stop, put on glasses, and watch an entire loop as they walk through the American pavilion.
Prologue to La marca del Hombre Lobo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
It's listed as a "prologue" but feels more like a pitch reel; I'd need to see the actual movie (either the original Spanish La marca del Hombre Lobo or the American Frankenstein's Bloody Terror) to have some idea of how it actually works at its intended function. You can at least get a sense of how this thing would have looked, enough that I'd be interested if the film itself were part of "3-D Rarities Volume III".
Preview for The 3-D Movie
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Okay, I guess. The film, which never got made, would apparently have been a bunch of 3-D footage from various other films stitched together as a sort of documentary, and this is definitely a trailer for that. It's got that slow, early-1980s trailer feel where it goes on a bit too long,nothing ever seems the right length, and the voiceover sounds like it's over-promising but in actuality is just saying what you can see in front of you.
El corazón y la espada (Sword of Granada)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
El corazón y la espada (aka Sword of Granada) is the first 3-D film to be produced in Mexico and there's no missing that the third dimension was near the fore of everybody's mind as they made it; the new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive highlights every way in which someone making such a movie can push into and out of the screen. There's no other single piece of it showing the same sort of ambition, but despite that, it's a surprisingly entertaining film. This film knows what it is and has all of its parts pulling in the same direction.
As it opens, Pedro (Cesar Romero) and Ponce (Tito Junco) are sneaking across a Moor-occupied castle's courtyard, aiming to kill the Khalifa within (Fernando Casanova) and bring forth a revolution. They, it turns out, are not the only ones with that idea - they run into swordswoman Lolita (Katy Jurado) in the chambers of a captured priest (Miguel Ángel Ferriz). Aside from the Khalifa, the castle is rumored to contain a rose that confers eternal life and an alchemist who knows how to transmute base elements into gold - but though Pedro has a map to the various secret passages that litter the castle, every path seems to lead through the chambers of Princesa Esme (Rebeca Iturbide).
Secret passages are the sort of adventure-story trope that lies precariously balanced between being tremendously fun and being a tacky cliché - it's kind of like quicksand or swinging on ropes and vines that way - and this film is so full of hidden doors and tunnels and secret spaces behind walls that it's almost impossible for it not to be overkill. And while there are certainly times when the amount of sneaking around stone passageways that seem a bit too well-illuminated seems like it would be overkill, that never quite happens. The filmmakers build fake-stone sets that look like the platonic ideal of hidden staircases, and they turn out to be fun things to shoot and project in stereo - it creates a box for the characters to occupy behind the screen, staircases lead up and back, and tight spaces are suggested by foreground pieces that are clearly not in the same plane. It's never busy enough that it wouldn't work in 2-D, and the crisp black-and-white photography looks very nice even as it highlights that this is obviously a film set.
It creates an atmosphere of larger-than-life, admittedly simplified legends, and though there are plenty of moments when the filmmakers are more than a bit heavy-handed in creating a sanitized fifteenth century suitable to an audience of all ages in the 1950s, they're pretty good at setting things up so that's the path of least resistance rather than something that's ever jarring. They mostly do a good job in having enough action going on that the pace never particularly flags even when the raiders are captured and Esme is figuring out where she stands. The sword-fighting will likely not make anybody's list of the most technically-proficient and well-choreographed screen duels - there's a lot of swinging wildly at two guards at a time - but it's energetic and makes good use of the three-dimensional stage (even if the attempt to have blades push out of the screen shows you really shouldn't shoot that sort of thing head-on).
The cast is willing to throw themselves into this with enthusiasm as well, and it's a fairly impressive group. Star Cesar Romero was imported from America and seems right at home as the confident aristocrat, blustery but charming and comfortably occupying the center of the movie without anyone else appearing slighted. Co-star Katy Jurado would also crossover to some Hollywood success and has probably played a lot of roles like Lolita - firey and not afraid to make the likes of Don Pedro come to her - but she can make that familiarity funny without making it a joke. The writers seem to do the least amount possible to make their inevitable pairing-off happen, but the two of them know how to turn on the charm to the point where they sell it. They've got a brace of good character actors behind them, with everyone knowing their job - Miguel Ángel Ferriz's priest is the wise advisor, Victor Alcocer's Khalifa is cruel but not quite scary, Rebeca Iturbide's princess is ignorant but basically good - and making sure they entertain rather than just fill slots.
It doesn't exactly make for a classic - it's not entirely unjust that this movie fell into obscurity and was restored for a "3-D Rarities" disc rather than something with a broader audience. It's still a trim, entertaining swashbuckler even in two dimensions, worth stumbling upon even for those who can't view it as intended.
Also on EFilmCritic
A part of me is a little curious about the format and contents of this disc, although I wonder if it's just a matter of what the 3-D Film Archive can do with its distributors. They and 3-D SPACE crowdfunded a restoration of El corazón y la espada last year, but I suspect that this Mexican adventure film might be a little too niche for either Kino or Flicker Alley, although a "rarities" disc with it and a couple other bits of content that didn't particularly make a lot of sense as special features on other discs might be better branding. Meanwhile, it seems like the didn't quite accumulate enough content for a second rarities disc without a feature (my review of Volume 1 from back in 2017 notes that a second disc was planned for 2018 at the time, but it came out in 2020 and there's only a few short films on it, all strung together, with 3D photo collections that are presented as slideshows with narration rather than as galleries as was the case on The Bubble, one of them part of the big compendium of shorts and one on its own. It's not the most straightforward way to do it.
The fun thing about the photos was how much the Kodak "Stereo-Realist" camera used to take most of them looks like the RETO camera I got from a different crowdfunding campaign which I've been playing with for the past few months:
Though I haven't been back to Hunt's to pick up the two or three rolls of film I shot in New Zealand, so I can't speak for those, I'm intensely jealous of the results shown. Part of it is just that the process - the Kodak camera these people (including silent film star Harold Lloyd) used was generally built for slide film and developed to slides, while I'm using regular film and having the lab scan it, then screwing around with software to put them together despite the RETO camera taking vertical photos while every viewing device I've got (aside from maybe making a wigglegram meant to be viewed on phones) is horizontal, meaning I lose resolution. They're also using Kodachrome film, which helps a lot.
The slide shows are kind of neat, but the narration is odd, and I imagine it would drive me nuts on the second or third time through, like when you're going through a museum and there's no way to turn the audio guide off. Also, Mr. Lloyd's granddaughter seemed a tiny bit uncomfortable talking about his fondness for photographing naked ladies (though I seem to remember there were many more pictures like that in the collection of 3D photos included with the box set New Line released.
It's still a very fun set for those of us that dig the format. I may wind up turning the sound off for some parts or wish there were a bit more of a direct path to the best bits the next time I put it on, but I still enjoyed seeing these oddities.
"A Day in the Country" (aka "Stereo Laffs")
* * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Speaking of narration that fills every second and leads as much to cringe as actual laughs, let's talk about - or, at least, quickly and regretfully acknowledge - Joe Besser talking all over "A Day in the Country". I don't know whether it was shot silently with the idea of adding narration, the soundtrack was degraded in the ten years it took for the thing to get released after being shot, or if filmmaker Jack Rieger just looked at the footage and decided it needed a little something more because it was just a bunch of shots without a strong story (and both editing and reshooting would be tricky). However it got to this point, the result is not great.
It does come across as something of a weird beast, though, because the subject matter as well as the staging feels a lot like a 1910s/1920s silent short, although still somewhat off - it's like Rieger is trying to capture the sort of goofy comic pastoral Lloyd or Keaton might have made but isn't quite getting the impersonation right, and the camera angles used to enhance the 3D effect as well as the things thrown at the camera break the illusion. That they often hit the camera and send the picture to black feels a bit like a growing pain that other 3D filmmakers learned from - the flinch as something zips past works better than the head-on collision.
For an half-experimental short film at a time when this just wasn't something filmmakers and theaters were working with on a regular basis, a lot of the work is impressive, and there are some funny gags in it. Find a way to do it without the voiceover, and maybe it's more than an interesting curiosity, both at the time and years later.
"The Black Swan" '52
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The previews for various opera, ballet, and stage presentations in movie theaters seldom show 3D shows any more, and that feels like a real missed opportunity. Dance is a natural for the medium with how it uses three-dimensional space, and two of the more interesting 3D movies to come out during the current wave, Pina and Cunningham, were dance documentaries. It's no surprise, then, that "The Black Swan" is probably the most impressive thing on the disc, feeling very much like the spiritual ancestor to Cunningham, taken off a stage that needs to be built for an audience and into a somewhat more complex environment that that a camera can move around in it. It's still not realistic, but it's not quite stagebound.
The music and dancing are quite good to my decidedly inexpert eyes, although at 13 minutes it feels like something of a long short. I suspect that, to a certain extent, the way stereoscopic advisor Raymond Spottiswoode frames the shoot contributes to that - though the effect of a window seemingly floating in front of the screen is undoubtedly nifty and apparently erases flat bits at the edges, it tends to encourage one to lean forward and strain even when one doesn't need to. That is something common with a lot of 3D formats, which don't quite work as well as they should until one learns to relax while focusing.
"Games in Depth"
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
The liner notes indicate that this was apparently created for Expo 1967 before being replaced with something else, which seems like a good call - it's a random-seeming montage of various play-related scenes melded with an often atonal soundtrack, but it never becomes hypnotic in the way this sort of installation can. There are nifty moments - shots of a high-school football game briefly give an idea of how 3D can be used in a sportscast - but by the time this was shot, its 3D effects weren't spectacular, and the imagery and music doesn't seem like something that will make people stop, put on glasses, and watch an entire loop as they walk through the American pavilion.
Prologue to La marca del Hombre Lobo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
It's listed as a "prologue" but feels more like a pitch reel; I'd need to see the actual movie (either the original Spanish La marca del Hombre Lobo or the American Frankenstein's Bloody Terror) to have some idea of how it actually works at its intended function. You can at least get a sense of how this thing would have looked, enough that I'd be interested if the film itself were part of "3-D Rarities Volume III".
Preview for The 3-D Movie
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Okay, I guess. The film, which never got made, would apparently have been a bunch of 3-D footage from various other films stitched together as a sort of documentary, and this is definitely a trailer for that. It's got that slow, early-1980s trailer feel where it goes on a bit too long,nothing ever seems the right length, and the voiceover sounds like it's over-promising but in actuality is just saying what you can see in front of you.
El corazón y la espada (Sword of Granada)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
El corazón y la espada (aka Sword of Granada) is the first 3-D film to be produced in Mexico and there's no missing that the third dimension was near the fore of everybody's mind as they made it; the new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive highlights every way in which someone making such a movie can push into and out of the screen. There's no other single piece of it showing the same sort of ambition, but despite that, it's a surprisingly entertaining film. This film knows what it is and has all of its parts pulling in the same direction.
As it opens, Pedro (Cesar Romero) and Ponce (Tito Junco) are sneaking across a Moor-occupied castle's courtyard, aiming to kill the Khalifa within (Fernando Casanova) and bring forth a revolution. They, it turns out, are not the only ones with that idea - they run into swordswoman Lolita (Katy Jurado) in the chambers of a captured priest (Miguel Ángel Ferriz). Aside from the Khalifa, the castle is rumored to contain a rose that confers eternal life and an alchemist who knows how to transmute base elements into gold - but though Pedro has a map to the various secret passages that litter the castle, every path seems to lead through the chambers of Princesa Esme (Rebeca Iturbide).
Secret passages are the sort of adventure-story trope that lies precariously balanced between being tremendously fun and being a tacky cliché - it's kind of like quicksand or swinging on ropes and vines that way - and this film is so full of hidden doors and tunnels and secret spaces behind walls that it's almost impossible for it not to be overkill. And while there are certainly times when the amount of sneaking around stone passageways that seem a bit too well-illuminated seems like it would be overkill, that never quite happens. The filmmakers build fake-stone sets that look like the platonic ideal of hidden staircases, and they turn out to be fun things to shoot and project in stereo - it creates a box for the characters to occupy behind the screen, staircases lead up and back, and tight spaces are suggested by foreground pieces that are clearly not in the same plane. It's never busy enough that it wouldn't work in 2-D, and the crisp black-and-white photography looks very nice even as it highlights that this is obviously a film set.
It creates an atmosphere of larger-than-life, admittedly simplified legends, and though there are plenty of moments when the filmmakers are more than a bit heavy-handed in creating a sanitized fifteenth century suitable to an audience of all ages in the 1950s, they're pretty good at setting things up so that's the path of least resistance rather than something that's ever jarring. They mostly do a good job in having enough action going on that the pace never particularly flags even when the raiders are captured and Esme is figuring out where she stands. The sword-fighting will likely not make anybody's list of the most technically-proficient and well-choreographed screen duels - there's a lot of swinging wildly at two guards at a time - but it's energetic and makes good use of the three-dimensional stage (even if the attempt to have blades push out of the screen shows you really shouldn't shoot that sort of thing head-on).
The cast is willing to throw themselves into this with enthusiasm as well, and it's a fairly impressive group. Star Cesar Romero was imported from America and seems right at home as the confident aristocrat, blustery but charming and comfortably occupying the center of the movie without anyone else appearing slighted. Co-star Katy Jurado would also crossover to some Hollywood success and has probably played a lot of roles like Lolita - firey and not afraid to make the likes of Don Pedro come to her - but she can make that familiarity funny without making it a joke. The writers seem to do the least amount possible to make their inevitable pairing-off happen, but the two of them know how to turn on the charm to the point where they sell it. They've got a brace of good character actors behind them, with everyone knowing their job - Miguel Ángel Ferriz's priest is the wise advisor, Victor Alcocer's Khalifa is cruel but not quite scary, Rebeca Iturbide's princess is ignorant but basically good - and making sure they entertain rather than just fill slots.
It doesn't exactly make for a classic - it's not entirely unjust that this movie fell into obscurity and was restored for a "3-D Rarities" disc rather than something with a broader audience. It's still a trim, entertaining swashbuckler even in two dimensions, worth stumbling upon even for those who can't view it as intended.
Also on EFilmCritic
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
