Even if it's a $10 rental rather than a $5 ticket, I must admit, I kind of like having the whole weekend to see one of the German-language films that Goethe-Institut brings to the Coolidge rather than trying to get there at 11am on Sunday. The crowd would have been nice, but if the Red Line isn't running between Alewife and Harvard, it's just not happening. This may only be running on the Coolidge's site through Sunday (17 May 2020) evening, but if you're reading this Saturday night or Sunday morning, you can still catch it at its "proper" time!
I am, I must admit, a bit surprised that I didn't recognize the movie as it started, because usually with this sort of mystery thriller that gets remade across borders, I will have the moment where it starts to seem awfully familiar and then like a rewatch. I suspect that this didn't happen here because it's not really the twist or the mechanics that drives either Marshland or Free Country, but the setting of a place that has gone from dictatorship to democracy but doesn't necessarily trust it. It's a nifty dynamic that I wish Free Country exploited a little better, although, as I say in the review, maybe it does, if you're German. So often we see remakes that are either just franchising or otherwise banking on viewers not wanting subtitles, but if they're finely calibrating it to play for a given region, I find that fascinating and useful even if it tends to push me out rather than give me a chance to examine those differences.
Freies Land (Free Country)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
It's been a while since I saw Marshland ("La Isla Minima"), the Spanish film remade here, though I didn't recognize the connection as I watched the new version. It does, however, make sense in retrospect: Free Country plays like a story mapped and adapted to a similar situation, and does that well enough to work as a thriller but is perhaps not as incisive as the filmmakers intended it to be.
It takes place in 1992, soon after the reunification of Germany which has left the East in turmoil; it's no surprise teenage sisters Patricia and Nadine Kraft talked of leaving the town of Löwitz and going to Berlin. Their disappearance still must be investigated, with Patrick Stein (Trystan Pütter), recently reassigned from Hamburg in the West, and Markus Bach (Felix Kramer), from Görlach in the East, assigned to the case. They start by talking with parents Henner (Marius Marx) and Katharina (Nora van Waldstätten), and classmates including Nicole Liederbach (Alva Schäfer), who appears to be dating the "Handsome Charlie" (Ludwig Simon) that the older sister had been seeing. A so-called psychic provides one clue, but the investigation expands when new information comes to light.
Murder, after all, was the sort of crime committed in decadent capitalist countries, and swept under the rug in places like East Germany. Ideally, this would be the heart of the movie, with the squeaky-clean Stein having to deal with everybody in the area associating the police with the Stasi while Bach struggles with decreased authority, or directly confronting how the fall of communism and reunification has not necessarily made things better in places like Löwitz but instead given them capitalists who want to decrease their already-low wages while hiring Poles from over the border. To the extent that this is a factor, though, it seems to be one where a viewer might have to be a German of a certain age to see the nuances of it. Other than the most clearly-described instances, this tends to fade quickly into mismatched-cop territory, with a side of "city cop in a small town" - a clash of styles, but in the most familiar, generic manner.
With that the case, there's not a whole lot of room to make this more than a conventional "buried crime in the boonies" movie, and while the cast is good, it's an odd situation where trying to give them more to work with (some of it taken directly from Marshland) tends to highlight the thinness of the characters. Trystan Pütter and Felix Kramer are a good contrast as mismatched detectives, with Kramer seemingly more willing to dig into how these archetypes work better when played big, but the film too often sends them off in different directions rather than having them play off each other, and the little side-stories they get for character development feel a bit like busy-work. Most of the other characters floating around are fairly straightforward, although there's something interesting in Marc Limpach as the "journalist" who dreamed of being a reporter in a free country and now finds himself a crime-scene ghoul, even if he only rarely gets to lean into it. Some of the best work probably comes from Nora von Waldstätten as the girls' youthful mother - cowed somewhat by her husband but not timid and guilty that the desire for something more that she passed onto her girls may have gotten them killed. She tags along with Stein for little particular reason beyond having more of her in the movie at one point, and one wonders what this film might have been like had it focused on these two and how post-Cold War Germany was not what they'd hoped for.
The film is nicely put together in general, pushing through its somewhat workman-like police procedural methodically without ever getting bogged down or just doing it by the number, getting good, uneasy moments out of abandoned places while also using the spread-out nature of the area, much tied together through waterways rather than roads, to give the town character and make it feel like things can be just out of sight. Director Christian Alvart serves as his own cinematographer, and it probably helps the imagery to be a little more piercing than it might otherwise have been, serving up meticulously clean and tidy images of a hollow town.
It's quite possible that Free Country is a better remake than I can see because I am not the target audience - if Alvart and co-writer Siegfried Kammi took the original film and calibrated it precisely in such a way that it resonates with a German audience but not necessarily with an outsider like myself, then that's arguably exactly what they're supposed to do. It's still a decent thriller, even if I suspect that Marshland is the better version.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Friday, May 15, 2020
At the slightest provocation: Deluge (and The Back Page)
Some people, when they see a cool clip of New York City being taken out by a tidal wave from a movie early in the talkie era, watch it, say "cool!", and then, like, move on to the next hundred things in their Twitter feed. I, apparently, stop it after fifteen seconds, saying I should probably see the whole thing, and see if the movie is on disc. It is - on Blu-ray, even! - so I order that and, a week and a half later, sit down and watch the movie. Then, because it was only an hour, watch the second feature that was included.
There are better ways to spend an evening, I suppose, but because these were 1930s B-movies, it only took about two and a half hours, total, and that's including the three disaster-movie previews included: Hurricane looks like some severely ugly exoticism, Avalanche made me smirk because I suspect we're supposed to cheer for Rock Hudson to get the girl rather than Robert Forster, and Meteor feels a lot like either a trailer that had to be released way before the effects were done or one that put every bit of effects work in the trailer.
As not-great as the main feature is, I still kind of love having it. As I mention here and here, and probably a lot of times before, I love and am fascinated by early-twentieth-century fantasies and science fiction, and discovering things like this always makes me wonder what could have been if more people were taking cracks at it. In this case, it seems to be one of about five films listed as "post-apocalyptic" on IMDB from 1935 or before. One was a German silent, and three were versions of the same thing, with It's Great to Be Alive the sound remake of Last Man On Earth (with an Italian remake as well), comedies about some guy who winds up isolated from the "masculitis" which killed off the rest of the male population. They are probably dire but I'd like to see them anyway.
Speaking of looking stuff up there, let me just insert this little reminder to never read the bio when you discover someone from early cinema who has a five or ten year career with prominent roles concentrated toward the beginning. You almost never want to know how that ends.
Deluge
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Deluge was not the first film to offer up the end of civilization as we know it on screen, but may be the first to do so in such spectacular fashion, even if the film itself was not a blockbuster or major release. It is, in fact, not far off from the end of the world tales that would appear more frequently decades later, just done in early-talkie style.
The exact cause of the disaster is not exactly specified (or may just tough to suss out with the way the first act is presented with not-great sound) - some combination of earthquakes and massive tides from an eclipse - but the result is a flood of Biblical proportions, wiping out first the west coast, then Europe, then causing the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to overflow before a tidal wave finally hits New York. That's when the focus moves from frantic scientists to the likes of lawyer Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer) and his wife Helen (Lois Wilson), in a cabin upstate but thinking a move to a quarry would be safer; Claire Arlington (Peggy Shannon), who had been planning a record-breaking swim before the disaster; and then the likes of Jepson (Fred Kohler) and Norwood (Ralf Harolde), two toughs who find Martin's cabin later, or Tom (Matt Moore), the closest thing a small town has to a leader.
If Deluge is noteworthy for anything in 2020, it's the visual effects, but what's kind of fascinating is that it's in many ways an early primer on how to use them and where they may not convince. One may laugh at the miniatures which show the lines on which they will soon fall apart, but it's nevertheless fair work for the period, especially once a wave is in motion. The filmmakers are smart in how they deploy it, though, cutting to stock footage of actual fires and collapsing buildings and doing some strong matte work to get moving people in front of the destruction. The matte paintings and background work is solid throughout, in fact, enough to blend location and stage shoots better than other films that would follow later.
It also doesn't hurt that the film is pre-code, which not only means that Peggy Shannon can wash up on shore wearing nothing but her underwear twice, but that there can be a few bits of pretty nasty violence implied and shown. There's actually a fair balance between ruthlessness and sentimentality for a while, but eventually one has to give the film a lot of credit for what sort of novelty it must have been in 1933, because even by the standards of B-movie-makers not having a lot of practice, the script is a mess, throwing out a bunch of nasty villains and half-interesting ideas but not really having much idea of how to connect them other than happenstance, with the sort-of-interesting melodrama that the film has been building to eventually sputtering, like the writers didn't know what to do with a situation once they'd gotten there.
On top of that, this is one of those 1930s movies where the women are the first-billed stars but the filmmakers never really let them take control of the story. Peggy Shannon gets to play Claire as ambitious and brassy and is probably the best thing about the movie besides the special effects, and more than holds up her end of scenes with a baby-faced Sidney Blackmer, whose Martin is likably capable in action but bland through much of the film, especially when he needs to be feeling some sort of turmoil. Like much of the rest of the cast, he makes one appreciate how Fred Kohler makes Jepson an honest ogre.
Not bad for 1933 even if it's a novelty now, having been rediscovered after twice being thought lost. Its most impressive two minutes have been kicking around the internet recently, but the other 65 aren't exactly terrible, especially once you recognize that this came out mere months after the original King Kong and probably had less to work with.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Back Page
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Expectations were necessarily low for The Back Page - a feature film generally doesn't get relegated to the "special features" section of the Blu-ray of a film with whom it shares a cast member if it has a lot of individual merit - but I was unprepared for just how dull a bit of theater-filler this was. Even at just over an hour, it drags, and not just because I watched it as the back half of a double feature with disc-mate Deluge.
The funny thing is, it never feels like it has to be bad - the story of a reporter (Peggy Shannon) who gets fired from her big-city newspaper job and uses her ambiguous name ("Jerry Hampton") to get hired as the editor of a small-town paper and then uncovers the convoluted scheme to cheat the townsfolk out of the money they've invested in an oil well is a lot of material for a film that size, but not more than it can handle, and it only really feels sloppy when something loops around to suddenly connect the story Jerry was working on at the start to what's happening during the rest of the movie. It's absolutely one of those movies where more connects than necessary,
And yet, for having a halfway-decent script, the filmmakers don't seem to be confident in it. They spend precious time explaining situations that don't necessarily need it and, indeed, might be better if they just did the thing, like Jerry challenging her sexist boss and getting fired/blackballed for it, without a lot of pregaming. There's a whole lot of people explaining themselves rather than just showing how they feel or have changed over time, enough that it eventually feels like watching bad radio. Maybe the people who make movies for small studios like Pyramid Productions know what they've got to work with and are realistic about what they can get - and, maybe, what they can give. There's something to be said for clarity at the expense of style, but this seems to be an extreme case.
It starts to feel rough quickly, a bunch of stock characters playing off each other in uninspired fashion. Peggy Shannon hadn't necessarily felt like a star during Deluge, but she's weaker here, too desperate in her attempts to sound like a young go-getter and seldom able to find the sweet spot where we like Jerry rather than just relate to her, or think much of what she's got going with her boyfriend. The newsroom feels like types rather than personalities, a bunch of stock characters that never gel and could mostly be jettisoned. The story ends in a way that marks Jerry as clever but not the reporter who was too good and passionate for the big city.
Slogs like this are almost worse than disasters, because everybody just needs to be better, and not just a little better. Eighty years later, this is a Lifetime movie, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but even those just get the job done in a way this one doesn't quite manage.
There are better ways to spend an evening, I suppose, but because these were 1930s B-movies, it only took about two and a half hours, total, and that's including the three disaster-movie previews included: Hurricane looks like some severely ugly exoticism, Avalanche made me smirk because I suspect we're supposed to cheer for Rock Hudson to get the girl rather than Robert Forster, and Meteor feels a lot like either a trailer that had to be released way before the effects were done or one that put every bit of effects work in the trailer.
As not-great as the main feature is, I still kind of love having it. As I mention here and here, and probably a lot of times before, I love and am fascinated by early-twentieth-century fantasies and science fiction, and discovering things like this always makes me wonder what could have been if more people were taking cracks at it. In this case, it seems to be one of about five films listed as "post-apocalyptic" on IMDB from 1935 or before. One was a German silent, and three were versions of the same thing, with It's Great to Be Alive the sound remake of Last Man On Earth (with an Italian remake as well), comedies about some guy who winds up isolated from the "masculitis" which killed off the rest of the male population. They are probably dire but I'd like to see them anyway.
Speaking of looking stuff up there, let me just insert this little reminder to never read the bio when you discover someone from early cinema who has a five or ten year career with prominent roles concentrated toward the beginning. You almost never want to know how that ends.
Deluge
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Deluge was not the first film to offer up the end of civilization as we know it on screen, but may be the first to do so in such spectacular fashion, even if the film itself was not a blockbuster or major release. It is, in fact, not far off from the end of the world tales that would appear more frequently decades later, just done in early-talkie style.
The exact cause of the disaster is not exactly specified (or may just tough to suss out with the way the first act is presented with not-great sound) - some combination of earthquakes and massive tides from an eclipse - but the result is a flood of Biblical proportions, wiping out first the west coast, then Europe, then causing the Great Lakes and Mississippi River to overflow before a tidal wave finally hits New York. That's when the focus moves from frantic scientists to the likes of lawyer Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer) and his wife Helen (Lois Wilson), in a cabin upstate but thinking a move to a quarry would be safer; Claire Arlington (Peggy Shannon), who had been planning a record-breaking swim before the disaster; and then the likes of Jepson (Fred Kohler) and Norwood (Ralf Harolde), two toughs who find Martin's cabin later, or Tom (Matt Moore), the closest thing a small town has to a leader.
If Deluge is noteworthy for anything in 2020, it's the visual effects, but what's kind of fascinating is that it's in many ways an early primer on how to use them and where they may not convince. One may laugh at the miniatures which show the lines on which they will soon fall apart, but it's nevertheless fair work for the period, especially once a wave is in motion. The filmmakers are smart in how they deploy it, though, cutting to stock footage of actual fires and collapsing buildings and doing some strong matte work to get moving people in front of the destruction. The matte paintings and background work is solid throughout, in fact, enough to blend location and stage shoots better than other films that would follow later.
It also doesn't hurt that the film is pre-code, which not only means that Peggy Shannon can wash up on shore wearing nothing but her underwear twice, but that there can be a few bits of pretty nasty violence implied and shown. There's actually a fair balance between ruthlessness and sentimentality for a while, but eventually one has to give the film a lot of credit for what sort of novelty it must have been in 1933, because even by the standards of B-movie-makers not having a lot of practice, the script is a mess, throwing out a bunch of nasty villains and half-interesting ideas but not really having much idea of how to connect them other than happenstance, with the sort-of-interesting melodrama that the film has been building to eventually sputtering, like the writers didn't know what to do with a situation once they'd gotten there.
On top of that, this is one of those 1930s movies where the women are the first-billed stars but the filmmakers never really let them take control of the story. Peggy Shannon gets to play Claire as ambitious and brassy and is probably the best thing about the movie besides the special effects, and more than holds up her end of scenes with a baby-faced Sidney Blackmer, whose Martin is likably capable in action but bland through much of the film, especially when he needs to be feeling some sort of turmoil. Like much of the rest of the cast, he makes one appreciate how Fred Kohler makes Jepson an honest ogre.
Not bad for 1933 even if it's a novelty now, having been rediscovered after twice being thought lost. Its most impressive two minutes have been kicking around the internet recently, but the other 65 aren't exactly terrible, especially once you recognize that this came out mere months after the original King Kong and probably had less to work with.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Back Page
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Expectations were necessarily low for The Back Page - a feature film generally doesn't get relegated to the "special features" section of the Blu-ray of a film with whom it shares a cast member if it has a lot of individual merit - but I was unprepared for just how dull a bit of theater-filler this was. Even at just over an hour, it drags, and not just because I watched it as the back half of a double feature with disc-mate Deluge.
The funny thing is, it never feels like it has to be bad - the story of a reporter (Peggy Shannon) who gets fired from her big-city newspaper job and uses her ambiguous name ("Jerry Hampton") to get hired as the editor of a small-town paper and then uncovers the convoluted scheme to cheat the townsfolk out of the money they've invested in an oil well is a lot of material for a film that size, but not more than it can handle, and it only really feels sloppy when something loops around to suddenly connect the story Jerry was working on at the start to what's happening during the rest of the movie. It's absolutely one of those movies where more connects than necessary,
And yet, for having a halfway-decent script, the filmmakers don't seem to be confident in it. They spend precious time explaining situations that don't necessarily need it and, indeed, might be better if they just did the thing, like Jerry challenging her sexist boss and getting fired/blackballed for it, without a lot of pregaming. There's a whole lot of people explaining themselves rather than just showing how they feel or have changed over time, enough that it eventually feels like watching bad radio. Maybe the people who make movies for small studios like Pyramid Productions know what they've got to work with and are realistic about what they can get - and, maybe, what they can give. There's something to be said for clarity at the expense of style, but this seems to be an extreme case.
It starts to feel rough quickly, a bunch of stock characters playing off each other in uninspired fashion. Peggy Shannon hadn't necessarily felt like a star during Deluge, but she's weaker here, too desperate in her attempts to sound like a young go-getter and seldom able to find the sweet spot where we like Jerry rather than just relate to her, or think much of what she's got going with her boyfriend. The newsroom feels like types rather than personalities, a bunch of stock characters that never gel and could mostly be jettisoned. The story ends in a way that marks Jerry as clever but not the reporter who was too good and passionate for the big city.
Slogs like this are almost worse than disasters, because everybody just needs to be better, and not just a little better. Eighty years later, this is a Lifetime movie, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but even those just get the job done in a way this one doesn't quite manage.
Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 15 May 2020 - 21 May 2020
It's kind of weird to read about the big companies starting to do the watch-at-home-and-give-the-theater-a-cut thing, although I guess it buys the studio some goodwill later on and, hey, if your local screen is a multiplex, you probably want them staying solvent too. We're lucky to have indie-programming indies in Boston.
This week I plan on checking out Driveways, Free Country, Alice, and maybe On a Magical Night, Up From the Streets, Fourteen, and Born in Flames and Advantageous from the Brattle's sci-fi program.
- So let's start with them and, as usual, The Coolidge Corner Theatre, which adds three new pictures to their virtual screening room. Driveways stars Hong Chau as a single mother cleaning up her late sister's house so that it can be sold, with Brian Dennehy playing the man next door in one of his last roles. Director Andrew Ahn, along with the writers and composers, will be doing a YouTube Q&A on Sunday afternoon, which can be accessed through the Coolidge's site.
Also opening there this weekend is On A Wonderful Night, the latest from Christophe Honoré, with Chiara Mastroianni as a woman who walks out on her husband into the hotel across the street, with her room's window allowing her to see into the past. There's also documentary Up From the Streets, a documentary that recounts the history and culture of New Orleans through its music. Sticking around are Straight Up (with a filmmaker Q&A Tuesday night), What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, and The Booksellers around.
A few shows are only booked through the weekend, notably Geothe-Institut presentation Free Country, a thriller about German police investigating the disappearance of two teenage sisters in 1992, when most in the small formerly-East-German town distrust their likes even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The two New York International Children's Film Festival programs of Kid Flicks (one for those 3 and up, one for 8 and up) also continue through the 17th.
In addition to the other Q&As, the After Midnite crew has Akira Oni, who does a monthly drag-show introduction to their films, for their Saturday Night Instagram chat. The Week's Coolidge Education seminar has The Dying of the LIght filmmaker and Emerson educator Peter Flynn examining Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. Register, watch the introduction, stream the movie, and then circle back for a Zoom discussion on Thursday. - The Brattle Theatre opens Fourteen in their virtual screening room, which looks like an American take on SoulMate, following two young women who were best friends to start high school through the next ten years. The also keep Vitalina Varela, Thousand Pieces of Gold, Deerskin, and The Cordillera of Dreams.
Their "Women of Sci-Fi" series/watchlist began on Wednesday with Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin and a bunch of nifty themed double features recommended through Tuesday. "Y'Know, For the Kids!" is now offering recommendations Tuesdays and Saturdays, with the most recent suggestions being Whale Rider and The Princess Bride; #BreakYourAlgorithm updates Monday and Thursday, most recently suggesting Ganja and Hess and Dave Made a Maze. - The Capitol has a Popcorn Pop-Up on Saturday, and will even sell you a Capitol tote bag to go with your popcorn, beverages, candy, and ice cream if you call ahead. Their virtual cinema continues to offer Spaceship Earth, Dying for Gold, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. Over at The Somerville Theatre, the virtual cinema adds Alice, about a woman who enters the escort business after her husband's addiction to such leaves them broke, keeping Pahokee, The Whistlers, and Once Were Brothers around. Both are also participating in Magnolia's "A Few of Our Favorite Docs" series, where $5 both rents a movie and registers one for a Wednesday Q&A; this week's selection is RBG
- West Newton Cinema is also part of the Magnolia docs program (with links to pre-order Life Itself for next week in addition to RBG), and has tweeted out a message about their own curbside popcorn-pickup for Saturday. Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers continue in the virtual room, as does their GoFundMe campaign, and "Local Hero" advance ticket sales.
- The Regent Theatre has once again extended Fantastic Fungi through at least Wednesday the 20th, and has two other "virtual premieres": Dosed covers a larger range of psychedelic drug treatments, while IFFBoston alum WBCN and the American Revolution looks at the early days of the underground rock station; I'm guessing the $10.41 price refers to its original frequency. Both have filmmaker events planned for the coming weeks. They also would have been hosting the A-Town Teen Video Festival on Tuesday, but now their Facebook page will be one of the sites broadcasting/streaming the event.
- GlobeDocs has another documentary feature tied to a Monday Zoom discussion this weekend; RSVP for Rewind, in which director Sasha Joseph Neulinger uses home movies to reconstruct a history of child abuse.
- And, finally, back to those chains; Showcase Cinemas is kind of local (Massachusetts-based, at least), even if the closest locations to the city are a pain to reach on the MBTA, but the "Showtimes" tab on their website has links for The Mindfulness Movement, Capone, and Scoob!, if you'd like to kick a bit of cash to my employers during my college years.
This week I plan on checking out Driveways, Free Country, Alice, and maybe On a Magical Night, Up From the Streets, Fourteen, and Born in Flames and Advantageous from the Brattle's sci-fi program.
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Model Shop (and adieu to Twilight Time)
Aw, heck. Everybody sort of knew that Twilight Time Movies was not long for the world - the founder passed away a few months ago, and the imprint had dipped licensed quite a few titles from 20th Century Fox, in addition to occasionally having other retail arrangements with them - and there doesn't seem to be much recovering from that. They'll be shutting down at the end of June.
In the meantime, everything is on sale, with Blu-rays running from $4 to $12, and while a lot of these things that were (generally) pressed in limited editions of 3,000 are already sold out, there are still a bunch of interesting items to be found in there. I ordered 16 discs this weekend, and while some of my past purchases have been things that I'm sure will find their way to disc again sometime in the next few years - although, truth be told, I'm not sure how things shook out that Walter Huston's Beat the Devil and Ang Lee's Sense & Sensibility fell to them to release in the first place - pretty much my entire order this time sort of fell into the category of "sure, why the hell not?" There's usually someone notable involved with these movies, but mostly these aren't major works.
(And, truth be told, not always that great - Plan A was for this entry to be Dragonwyck, but I conked out trying to watch it as my second movie on Monday night, and didn't really feel like restarting it right away!)
I wish I'd found them earlier, if only for the two or three 3D discs they did that sold out before I got my hands on them (I think I found them via Inferno but never got the chance to order The Mad Magician or Man in the Dark). And I kind of wonder what other specialty labels like this are around, flying under the radar. There seem to be a number in the UK (Powerhouse, Network, Second Sight), although you've got to pay attention to region coding in those cases.
Anyway, so long, Twilight Time. You've helped me be able to see some movies I never would have even considered otherwise on a format that makes it easy to lend if they're good. Hopefully someone picks up the ball soon!
EDIT: Apparently Screen Archives is purchasing the label, and will take over distribution and the website in July. Odds of reprinting many of these titles seem low - the licenses may have specified only 3,00 copies - but, hey, who knows?
Model Shop
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I wonder, a bit, if certain potential viewers might be more tempted to watch Jacques Demy's 1960s films (and then maybe dig deeper into his work) by having them described as forming a "Lolaverse" of sorts than by talking about the French New Wave and his particular style, just as a different way to introduce this particular slice of film history. If so, Model Shop must seem an odd end to the cycle - picking up half a world away in another language and hinting at other tales - but maybe by the time a viewer gets there, they will be more intrigued by Demy's style than rotating cast of characters.
This particular film is built around George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), a 26-year-old who has quit his job at a Los Angeles architecture firm and shacked up with Gloria (Alexandra Hay), an aspiring actress who may come off as shallow but probably deserves better than how George treats her. As one day begins, the finance company is about to repossess his 1952 MG, but he pleads and gets the day to come up with the hundred dollars he owes. As he sets off to find someone to borrow from, his path crosses with a striking French woman (Anouk Aimée) twice, eventually following her into an establishment where one can rent a camera, room, and model to play at being a pin-up photographer, returning later after a bit of bad news.
Jacques Demy would make other English-language films in his career, but Model Shop is his only truly American film. It is, in fact, specific to the Los Angeles of 1969 from the very start, with George and Gloria living in a tiny shack with oil derricks on one side and the beach on the other, so that the world looks very different depending which window the camera is pointed at. From there, much of the action occurs in cars, with cinematographer Michel Hugo following along as Demy allows them to serve as avatars: The shiny MG that serves as George's identity on the verge of being whisked away, the white Mercury that matches Lola's dress, the fancifully-painted Volkswagen that a group of friends running a struggling alt-weekly pile into. Conversations are staged at stoplights or in parking lots.
The draft also hangs over George, an explanation at times for his impulsive, disconnected behavior; though he may later say that he never considered death before, it would make sense to suggest he had considered disruption. It's not easy to like George, and Gary Lockwood is not allowed to make him sympathetic for much of the film, highlighting the callousness and selfishness in the young man's distance. Even as he grows and gets some perspective by the end, it's uneven; he's been pointed in the direction of maturity but may have a way to go, and Lockwood's performance catches that. George doesn't change much, but Lockwood gives us just enough peek under the surface to give the viewer a sense of turmoil.
Anouk Aimée serves as a bit of a counterbalance; Lola is older and wiser enough to be wary of selfish young men but just lost enough herself to want what they can give her. She's properly magnetic but also a bit distracted; Aimée and Demy never let the audience forget that though she's further along than George, she hasn't figured that much out herself. Aimée and Alexandra Hay never share the screen, but there's an interesting comparison between their two characters, with Aimée's Lola calm and accepting even as she has little of her own and no clear direction while Hay's Gloria is intense and sometimes temperamental despite being in a better situation.
It's not material that overtly matches the fairy-tale imagery of Demy's most famous pictures, but he's certainly got a knack for how to use the environment to sort of crystallize Los Angeles for outsiders: There's information and context hanging in the air as the radio alternates between news about Vietnam, classical music, and pop by the band Spirit, who appear in the film as friends of George and thus serve as an early example of how not everyone his age is stalled-out. The plot is lightweight but never pushed as more than that, with Demy and editor Walter Thompson pulling off the neat trick of making the film feel like it takes place in real time even as it progresses from morning to night over an hour and a half. There's a nifty balance of cool and creepy to the model shop, especially as the familiar "girl walking guy down the dark passageway" shot leads to the fairly tame "bedroom set", though the focus on George hitting a button rather than composing a shot - does a nice job of showing how dehumanizing the activity is despite Lola's protestations.
Demy would not continue making films about Lola and the people in her orbit after this, returning to France and a decade of fantasies afterward. One wonders, a bit, how they would have fared, and what direction he might have gone had working with an American studio gone better (or, indeed, what direction film as a whole might have gone had he been able to cast Harrison Ford as George - would Ford have found a home in this sort of film and not wound up collaborating with a different George?). Those are intriguing questions that make Model Shop even more of an odd artifact, although one that still intrigues as his snapshot of this place and time.
Full review on EFilmCritic
In the meantime, everything is on sale, with Blu-rays running from $4 to $12, and while a lot of these things that were (generally) pressed in limited editions of 3,000 are already sold out, there are still a bunch of interesting items to be found in there. I ordered 16 discs this weekend, and while some of my past purchases have been things that I'm sure will find their way to disc again sometime in the next few years - although, truth be told, I'm not sure how things shook out that Walter Huston's Beat the Devil and Ang Lee's Sense & Sensibility fell to them to release in the first place - pretty much my entire order this time sort of fell into the category of "sure, why the hell not?" There's usually someone notable involved with these movies, but mostly these aren't major works.
(And, truth be told, not always that great - Plan A was for this entry to be Dragonwyck, but I conked out trying to watch it as my second movie on Monday night, and didn't really feel like restarting it right away!)
I wish I'd found them earlier, if only for the two or three 3D discs they did that sold out before I got my hands on them (I think I found them via Inferno but never got the chance to order The Mad Magician or Man in the Dark). And I kind of wonder what other specialty labels like this are around, flying under the radar. There seem to be a number in the UK (Powerhouse, Network, Second Sight), although you've got to pay attention to region coding in those cases.
Anyway, so long, Twilight Time. You've helped me be able to see some movies I never would have even considered otherwise on a format that makes it easy to lend if they're good. Hopefully someone picks up the ball soon!
EDIT: Apparently Screen Archives is purchasing the label, and will take over distribution and the website in July. Odds of reprinting many of these titles seem low - the licenses may have specified only 3,00 copies - but, hey, who knows?
Model Shop
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I wonder, a bit, if certain potential viewers might be more tempted to watch Jacques Demy's 1960s films (and then maybe dig deeper into his work) by having them described as forming a "Lolaverse" of sorts than by talking about the French New Wave and his particular style, just as a different way to introduce this particular slice of film history. If so, Model Shop must seem an odd end to the cycle - picking up half a world away in another language and hinting at other tales - but maybe by the time a viewer gets there, they will be more intrigued by Demy's style than rotating cast of characters.
This particular film is built around George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), a 26-year-old who has quit his job at a Los Angeles architecture firm and shacked up with Gloria (Alexandra Hay), an aspiring actress who may come off as shallow but probably deserves better than how George treats her. As one day begins, the finance company is about to repossess his 1952 MG, but he pleads and gets the day to come up with the hundred dollars he owes. As he sets off to find someone to borrow from, his path crosses with a striking French woman (Anouk Aimée) twice, eventually following her into an establishment where one can rent a camera, room, and model to play at being a pin-up photographer, returning later after a bit of bad news.
Jacques Demy would make other English-language films in his career, but Model Shop is his only truly American film. It is, in fact, specific to the Los Angeles of 1969 from the very start, with George and Gloria living in a tiny shack with oil derricks on one side and the beach on the other, so that the world looks very different depending which window the camera is pointed at. From there, much of the action occurs in cars, with cinematographer Michel Hugo following along as Demy allows them to serve as avatars: The shiny MG that serves as George's identity on the verge of being whisked away, the white Mercury that matches Lola's dress, the fancifully-painted Volkswagen that a group of friends running a struggling alt-weekly pile into. Conversations are staged at stoplights or in parking lots.
The draft also hangs over George, an explanation at times for his impulsive, disconnected behavior; though he may later say that he never considered death before, it would make sense to suggest he had considered disruption. It's not easy to like George, and Gary Lockwood is not allowed to make him sympathetic for much of the film, highlighting the callousness and selfishness in the young man's distance. Even as he grows and gets some perspective by the end, it's uneven; he's been pointed in the direction of maturity but may have a way to go, and Lockwood's performance catches that. George doesn't change much, but Lockwood gives us just enough peek under the surface to give the viewer a sense of turmoil.
Anouk Aimée serves as a bit of a counterbalance; Lola is older and wiser enough to be wary of selfish young men but just lost enough herself to want what they can give her. She's properly magnetic but also a bit distracted; Aimée and Demy never let the audience forget that though she's further along than George, she hasn't figured that much out herself. Aimée and Alexandra Hay never share the screen, but there's an interesting comparison between their two characters, with Aimée's Lola calm and accepting even as she has little of her own and no clear direction while Hay's Gloria is intense and sometimes temperamental despite being in a better situation.
It's not material that overtly matches the fairy-tale imagery of Demy's most famous pictures, but he's certainly got a knack for how to use the environment to sort of crystallize Los Angeles for outsiders: There's information and context hanging in the air as the radio alternates between news about Vietnam, classical music, and pop by the band Spirit, who appear in the film as friends of George and thus serve as an early example of how not everyone his age is stalled-out. The plot is lightweight but never pushed as more than that, with Demy and editor Walter Thompson pulling off the neat trick of making the film feel like it takes place in real time even as it progresses from morning to night over an hour and a half. There's a nifty balance of cool and creepy to the model shop, especially as the familiar "girl walking guy down the dark passageway" shot leads to the fairly tame "bedroom set", though the focus on George hitting a button rather than composing a shot - does a nice job of showing how dehumanizing the activity is despite Lola's protestations.
Demy would not continue making films about Lola and the people in her orbit after this, returning to France and a decade of fantasies afterward. One wonders, a bit, how they would have fared, and what direction he might have gone had working with an American studio gone better (or, indeed, what direction film as a whole might have gone had he been able to cast Harrison Ford as George - would Ford have found a home in this sort of film and not wound up collaborating with a different George?). Those are intriguing questions that make Model Shop even more of an odd artifact, although one that still intrigues as his snapshot of this place and time.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 4 May 2020 - 10 May 2020
A lot of "other stuff going on" this week
I believe I actually started the week early, watching "Das Foto-Shoot" and "Being Flat" in the morning before "commuting" to work at the other end of the apartment, probably figuring on actually getting the Deerskin review they were attached to written while waiting for queries to run or meetings to end, but even in sane times, everything takes longer and I miss writing on the bus and, yeah, I just sort of suggested that I missed taking the bus to work but, hey, it was a good environment for me!
And then, in the evenings… Not much movie-watching, because NESN was re-running the 2004 Red Sox postseason, and, hey, that was pretty great, although watching it fifteen years later in a more sane fashion - that is, not DVRing it, going to the Brattle for their first stab at a Boston Fantastic Film Festival, and then starting it when I got back to the apartment at 11pm only to discover that these games were five hours long - obviously wasn't the same.
One thing I found myself considering as I watched them was that the only editing they did was cutting out some ad breaks and skipping innings to get down to two hours, to the extent that they still had on-screen advertising for channel 25's newscast at points, which makes sense in one sense but in another, why do it this way? Sure, a lot of people want to re-experience it the way they did the first time, or the way their father did, but I found myself wondering what a good post-production staff could do with everything that Fox and MLB shot during the game, the best upscaling algorithms available, and maybe a scripted play-by-play that's not Joe Buck and Tim McCarver doling out generic patter, conventional wisdom, and incomplete analysis. The people who direct and produce the telecasts live events like these do downright amazing work, but it's obviously not the best possible version of it. Maybe letting top editors loose on the production would create something that feels fake, and I suppose that in normal times, there's little market for the "World Series Director's Cut" that it would be a money-loser, but I'd still kind of like to see it.
Which makes for an contrast with the night I didn't watch old baseball but instead caught The National Theatre's presentation of Frankenstein, which they were streaming on their YouTube channel for a week, with different productions taking the spot every seven days for the duration of the pandemic. I intended to watch both versions, but messed up dates and time-zone issues, so only caught the one with Johnny Lee Miller as the Creature and Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor. It's still a pretty great production, although you kind of need both to get the total experience.
Saturday, I caught Thousand Pieces of Gold, the first "virtual screening room" engagement that really made me regret that I wasn't seeing it on the place's actual screen. It's a fine restoration of a movie that seems to have been badly overlooked the first time around, one that I'm happily ordering on Blu-ray in addition to having kicked the price of a ticket the Brattle's way.
Sunday wound up being errand day, with laundry needing to be done and groceries needing to be fetched, and I was all excited to try out my pizza oven, but I had a comical time actually starting a fire using "firestarters" in this metal box designed to contain burning wood. Literally ran out of matches trying to light it and had to make a third trip out of the house of the day to get a lighter from CVS and I felt guilty by the time I was at Davis Square for having been out of the house so much. By the time the additional "conditioning" burn was done, there really wasn't time to make a pizza, so that would be a challenge for later in the week, and I just opted to try and get some stuff off the DVR that night instead.
Stuff's appearing here before my Letterboxd page these days, because as I said earlier, I miss the bus and the subway, which is where I would write up first impressions, but it's still fun to follow that and like stuff and put it on your to-watch list, if that is what you use the platform for!
NT Live: Frankenstein (Miller as the Creature, Cumberbatch as Victor)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (NT Live, YouTube via Roku)
As much as I've grumbled about wanting this on disc since first seeing this version in 2011, finally getting to watch it in similar fashion, though by streaming rather than physical media (2011 was a while ago; Netflix Watch Instant was kind of a new thing at the time), instead made me realize that it's kind of out of place in the living room. You're supposed to be in an audience for this, so that it can be larger than life or human-sized or…
Well, maybe we just have a tendency to calibrate "right" for these things to the scale at which we first experience it, even if we later see it in a different light at a different scale.
Either way, this is still a terrific production and one that I hope to catch in theaters again sometime. It's a pair of great performances and a nifty staging, and it cuts right to the heart of the themes that make Mary Shelley's work so memorable in all iterations.
What I thought seeing this version in 2011
What I thought seeing the version with the cast reversed in 2014
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Thousand Pieces of Gold
Dang, am I disappointed that we're all locked down and the Brattle is showing this virtually rather than giving it a weekend on the big screen, because this film is beautiful and terrific and I wish I'd been able to see it from their front row rather than my recliner. They're hosting a virtual Q&A with director Nancy Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace on Tuesday evening, which sounds quite worthwhile.
It's also one where the cast kind of surprised me in the best ways. I mostly know Rosalind Chao from Star Trek, and it gets me thinking about how strange show business can be, that she could do something this good as the star and just never have that sort of part again. She's worked steadily, but it's a heck of a thing. This also feels like the only thing I've seen Dennis Dun in aside from Big Trouble in Little China, which seems kind of crazy, since he's kind of critical to both. Meanwhile, I think this is the only time I've ever seen Michael Paul Chan with hair, and my brain had a hard time accepting Chris Cooper as ever having been this young.
Thousand Pieces of Gold
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, KinoNow via Roku)
It is sadly not surprising that Thousand Pieces of Gold is Nancy Kelly's only narrative feature, with just a few documentaries following in the thirty years since; it's a fine movie but women didn't always get a lot of second chances for anything other than immediate hits, and this wasn't one. It is, nevertheless, a terrific little movie whose honesty is often heartbreaking without ever being cynical.
It opens in 1880, with three years of drought devastating villages in northern China ultimately leading to one shepherd to sell his oldest daughter, telling Lalu (Rosalid Chao) to "serve your master or your husband" as she's loaded into a cart with three other women. That will be in a far off place - a boat takes her to San Francisco where "Jim" Li Pa (Dennis Dun) purchases her, only to tell her that he is only acting as an agent for another, and the boat to Oregon leaves in the morning. They bond on trail to Idaho, only for Jim to turn her over to Hong King (Michael Paul Chan), who means to have her work in the saloon he leases from Charlie Bemis (Chris Cooper), a heavy-drinking gambler who nevertheless can be particular about what is and isn't legal when it suits him.
Though the cycle of Lalu (or "Polly", as the white and assimilated folks call her) discovering some sort of bright side to her situation only to be crushed again will continue through much of the film, the first half-hour or so has it in concentrated form, with Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace (working from the novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn) nevertheless showing great care in how they build Lalu up before the disappointment. They'll take a moment to show that she made friends during the journey, or let her show some excitement at how fancy her room for the night is. It's a technique that could simply be cruel, but is a little more; though for all that beauty and opportunity in the West is real rather than just bait for a trap, the filmmakers are able to break Lalu's heart again and again and have it hit the audience anew every time.
It's a testament that Rosalind Chao is able to make it hit home and feel new each time, capturing Lalu as initially young and inexperienced in this place's ways, especially surrounded by people who seem completely alien to her. She's really good at trying to understand rather than just letting English bounce off her, and portraying the relief that comes from the moments when you can feel like an intelligent adult amid a background of only being able to express raw emotion and broken English. Lalu develops nicely, and it's something of a joy to watch her not just mature, but how she becomes Chinese-American, and how her version of it is different from but related to that of the other immigrants .
The use of the men in the movie is in some ways just as important as what is being done with Lalu, and how in many ways it stands out from other films that would have the protagonist find love in a hostile territory: It makes them earn it, not just by proving themselves to Lalu but by collectively examining their expectations in a way that is remarkably non-transactional for this sort of movie. Lalu may be sold to start the movie but she can't be bought to finish it with either money or deed, and it's interesting to watch Chris Cooper and Dennis Dun roll all that around, sometimes briefly and sometimes over time, not saying anything directly but showing how hard but necessary it is for men to get out of their own heads. There's good work among the rest of the supporting cast too, with even Michael Paul Chan given a chance to make something out of the film's least sympathetic character.
On top of that, Thousand Pieces of Gold is an impressively produced film from the opening, where a dead sheep blending into the landscape encapsulates the world Lalu is coming from, to the finish. The production crew creates a small, dense western town whose every detail seems authentic, while Bobby Bukowski's cinematography captures the beauty of the unspoiled West without it often seeming showy - with a few exceptions, it's something that can be taken for granted but also something that keeps people from giving up. Kenji Yamamoto does similarly basic but effective work as editor, something perhaps enhanced by just how well Kelly and Makepeace do at slipping little bits of dialogue and use of the changing seasons to make it clear that Lalu and the rest have time to grow.
A new restoration is sort-of-kind-of playing theaters (most shut down as of this writing but a selection in the virtual screening rooms of several), and it looks and sounds excellent, good enough to be a revelation for a film that never got a proper DVD release. For better or worse, the ensuing decades have only brought its themes into sharper relief, making this film's return a welcome second chance that it should have had years ago.
Full review on EFilmCritic
It's also one where the cast kind of surprised me in the best ways. I mostly know Rosalind Chao from Star Trek, and it gets me thinking about how strange show business can be, that she could do something this good as the star and just never have that sort of part again. She's worked steadily, but it's a heck of a thing. This also feels like the only thing I've seen Dennis Dun in aside from Big Trouble in Little China, which seems kind of crazy, since he's kind of critical to both. Meanwhile, I think this is the only time I've ever seen Michael Paul Chan with hair, and my brain had a hard time accepting Chris Cooper as ever having been this young.
Thousand Pieces of Gold
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, KinoNow via Roku)
It is sadly not surprising that Thousand Pieces of Gold is Nancy Kelly's only narrative feature, with just a few documentaries following in the thirty years since; it's a fine movie but women didn't always get a lot of second chances for anything other than immediate hits, and this wasn't one. It is, nevertheless, a terrific little movie whose honesty is often heartbreaking without ever being cynical.
It opens in 1880, with three years of drought devastating villages in northern China ultimately leading to one shepherd to sell his oldest daughter, telling Lalu (Rosalid Chao) to "serve your master or your husband" as she's loaded into a cart with three other women. That will be in a far off place - a boat takes her to San Francisco where "Jim" Li Pa (Dennis Dun) purchases her, only to tell her that he is only acting as an agent for another, and the boat to Oregon leaves in the morning. They bond on trail to Idaho, only for Jim to turn her over to Hong King (Michael Paul Chan), who means to have her work in the saloon he leases from Charlie Bemis (Chris Cooper), a heavy-drinking gambler who nevertheless can be particular about what is and isn't legal when it suits him.
Though the cycle of Lalu (or "Polly", as the white and assimilated folks call her) discovering some sort of bright side to her situation only to be crushed again will continue through much of the film, the first half-hour or so has it in concentrated form, with Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace (working from the novel by Ruthanne Lum McCunn) nevertheless showing great care in how they build Lalu up before the disappointment. They'll take a moment to show that she made friends during the journey, or let her show some excitement at how fancy her room for the night is. It's a technique that could simply be cruel, but is a little more; though for all that beauty and opportunity in the West is real rather than just bait for a trap, the filmmakers are able to break Lalu's heart again and again and have it hit the audience anew every time.
It's a testament that Rosalind Chao is able to make it hit home and feel new each time, capturing Lalu as initially young and inexperienced in this place's ways, especially surrounded by people who seem completely alien to her. She's really good at trying to understand rather than just letting English bounce off her, and portraying the relief that comes from the moments when you can feel like an intelligent adult amid a background of only being able to express raw emotion and broken English. Lalu develops nicely, and it's something of a joy to watch her not just mature, but how she becomes Chinese-American, and how her version of it is different from but related to that of the other immigrants .
The use of the men in the movie is in some ways just as important as what is being done with Lalu, and how in many ways it stands out from other films that would have the protagonist find love in a hostile territory: It makes them earn it, not just by proving themselves to Lalu but by collectively examining their expectations in a way that is remarkably non-transactional for this sort of movie. Lalu may be sold to start the movie but she can't be bought to finish it with either money or deed, and it's interesting to watch Chris Cooper and Dennis Dun roll all that around, sometimes briefly and sometimes over time, not saying anything directly but showing how hard but necessary it is for men to get out of their own heads. There's good work among the rest of the supporting cast too, with even Michael Paul Chan given a chance to make something out of the film's least sympathetic character.
On top of that, Thousand Pieces of Gold is an impressively produced film from the opening, where a dead sheep blending into the landscape encapsulates the world Lalu is coming from, to the finish. The production crew creates a small, dense western town whose every detail seems authentic, while Bobby Bukowski's cinematography captures the beauty of the unspoiled West without it often seeming showy - with a few exceptions, it's something that can be taken for granted but also something that keeps people from giving up. Kenji Yamamoto does similarly basic but effective work as editor, something perhaps enhanced by just how well Kelly and Makepeace do at slipping little bits of dialogue and use of the changing seasons to make it clear that Lalu and the rest have time to grow.
A new restoration is sort-of-kind-of playing theaters (most shut down as of this writing but a selection in the virtual screening rooms of several), and it looks and sounds excellent, good enough to be a revelation for a film that never got a proper DVD release. For better or worse, the ensuing decades have only brought its themes into sharper relief, making this film's return a welcome second chance that it should have had years ago.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Friday, May 08, 2020
Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 8 May 2020 - 14 May 2020
Got a notification on my phone this week from the Hong Kong theater app I while there last year and, folks, it's listing movie showtimes.
-- sigh --
Hopefully I'll get to Thousand Pieces of Gold, Straight Up, Capital, and a couple others this week, along with clearing some more shelf space.
-- sigh --
- The Coolidge Corner Theatre continues to keep as busy as a theater can during this period, adding indie romantic comedy Straight Up and documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael to their virtual screening room, keeping Deerskin, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, and The Booksellers around. They also complete the "Documentary Films of Lee Grant" series with a second double feature, "When Women Kill" & "The Wilmar 8" joining the pairing of "Down and Out in America" & "What Sex Am I"? and standalone feature A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's probably wise not to dawdle too much; I learned this week that they're starting to turn these over more quickly, with some of last week's selections already gone.
On the other hand, Geothe-Institut selection Lara is unexpectedly held over for another three-day run through Sunday, and the New York International Children's Film Festival has two programs of Kid Flicks (one for those 3 and up, one for 8 and up) supporting the Coolidge through the 17th. For special events, they are notably the local location of RZA's live commentary on Shaolin vs Wu Tang at 9:15pm Friday evening. The After Midnight crew hosts a Q&A with projectionist Nick Lazzaro on Saturday night, and will have a live YouTube broadcast with What She Said director Rob Garver on Tuesday. The week's Coolidge Education film is Johnny Guitar, with UMass Boston professor Sarah Keller recording an intro and hosting a Zoom discussion on Thursday - The Brattle Theatre adds two new features to their own virtual screening room: Vitalina Varela from Pedro Costa had a premiere at the HFA earlier and follows its title character (who shares a name with her character) as she travels from Cape Verde to Portugal too late for her ex-husband's funeral; Thousand Pieces of Gold is a restoration of a film from 1990 that appears to have been minimized (despite a great cast including Rosalind Chao, Chris Cooper, and Michael Paul Chan) with director Nancy Kelly only able to make documentaries since Kelly and screenwriter Anne Makepeace will join the Brattle for a Q&A session on Tuesday evening, though RSVPs are necessary. Deerskin and The Cordillera of Dreams also continue in the virtual screening room, which also has a special one-time screening & Q&A of Spaceship Earth on Sunday evening.
They haven't posted a new "Y'Know, For the Kids!" recommendation in a couple of weeks, but the list of things there is still worth checking out. #BreakYourAlgorithm is being rescheduled to Monday and Thursday, with the latest recommendation Sammo Hung playing his former teacher in Painted Faces. They also plan to team with "Strictly Brohibited" for a Women of Sci-Fi series starting on Wednesday, but details for that aren't up yet. - The Capitol adds Spaceship Earth to its virtual cinema offerings alongside Dying for Gold, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. Their friends at The Somerville Theatre won't open up Sunday for a 35mm Harold Lloyd double feature of For Heaven's Sake & Hot Water (doubly a shame as they are hard to stream), and have had to cancel their 70mm fest for later in the month, but they've got a pop-corn pop-up on Sunday, good for picking up snacks to eat with their virtual cinema offerings of Pahokee, The Whistlers, and Once Were Brothers
- The Regent Theatre has extended their virtual screening room runs of The Mindfulness Movement and Fantastic Fungi through at least Sunday.
- West Newton Cinema continue their virtual screening room programs of Earth, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers. Their GoFundMe campaign is still active, as is the "Local Hero" advance ticket sales with a matching ticket going to staff at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
- GlobeDocs is offering a free documentary feature this weekend - RSVP for Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools at the link, and they'll send a link to watch that and another for discussing the film a noon on Monday.
Hopefully I'll get to Thousand Pieces of Gold, Straight Up, Capital, and a couple others this week, along with clearing some more shelf space.
This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 27 April 2020 - 3 May 2020
I've got to find something to do to make these pages a little more interesting, just for myself looking at them. Maybe screenshot the theaters' virtual cinema pages or cut up the little advertising cards in some of the discs.
I kept a little busier this week, kicking things off on Monday with Pahokee from the Somerville's virtual screening room. It's the sort of documentary that may have you a little fidgety during the film but is pretty good stuff once you settle in and let it turn over a bit. It's a 2019 IFFBoston selection that I watched during the week we should have been at the 2020 edition, and the specific sort of film that makes one miss festivals like that.
On Wednesday, I hit up the Brattle's selections for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sticks a fun idea for a supernatural sex comedy at the end of a lot of stuff that's not that entertaining, especially 40 years later. That makes it kind of an interesting double-feature with A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the Coolidge's Lee Grant series, though: You kind of have to wrestle with what constitutes an acceptable sort of scoundrel now versus decades earlier to watch both.
I received a new Blu-ray in the mail during the week, and part of getting stuff off the too-watch shelf means not letting other things get there, so I did a double feature of Shatter & Call of Heroes (for two bits of Hong Kong action), and while the first not being a great Hammer/Shaw collaboration was a bit of a bummer, the second being more fun that I anticipated was a great surprise.
No more movies until Saturday, when I was back in the Brattle's virtual screening room for Deerskin, the latest from Quentin Dupieux and probably his most grounded, in that you can sort of track what's making its weirdo do weird things from real things rather than just being an artifact of being in a world slightly off-kilter. I also hit the grocery story to try and get good pizza-making stuff for my new pizza oven (it actually arrived in February, but who is setting a pizza oven up in the tiny backyard then?). Sunday afternoon, I discovered that I apparently can't start a fire in a metal container designed to hold burning wood chips that were marketed for the sole purpose of being set on fire, which is probably good for safety but leaves me with a lot stuff to make pizza in the fridge. Dejected, I went back in to watch the L.A. 3-D Space 3-D Movie Fest (and Ape). Some of that was rough, technically, but interesting, and, circling back around to missing festivals, it was surprisingly exciting to have to be at something other than a work call at a certain time.
Mostly quiet since then, but hoping for activity on my Letterboxd page this weekend.
A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant, Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room/internet)
Lee Grant's documentary from 2005 gets misty toward the end, figuring the end is likely near for 88-year-old Kirk Douglas, unaware that he's got another 15 years in him. Those are some hardy genes, especially considering how well Michael has aged in the meantime.
I can't recall any specific instance of Grant working with either Douglas as an actress, although I suspect it happened at some point. There's clearly enough familiarity there to get very relaxed interviews, and while one probably does have to be wary of whether documentaries about performers contain performance, there's a lot of enjoyable back and forth between the pair. I suspect that Kirk still not entirely being over Michael casting Jack Nicholson when producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had become a bit they go through on a regular basis, but even if it is, there's something genuine to it. I similarly wonder about them mentioning Lonely Are the Brave and Falling Down as respective favorite roles - it makes sense, as they're both striking movies with meeting parts, but they rhyme so well that it's almost too good, right?
There's also a bit of an issue in how to give the pair equal weight. For as much as both talk about how in many ways Michael might have had a harder time of it, trying to live up to how people saw Kirk, he almost comes across as too nice, too thoroughly adapted to his time and place to give half the movie a spark at points while the father can't help but hold on to some problematic aspects of his personality. The allegations that he assaulted a co-star were not well-known at the time of filming (though someone in Grant's position might well have been aware), but listening to him talk about women, it sounds uncomfortably plausible even as he seems to be quite a decent man in other respects. Even without that context readily available, it gives the audience something to unpack even in a doc that wears its fondness for its subjects on its sleeve.
I kept a little busier this week, kicking things off on Monday with Pahokee from the Somerville's virtual screening room. It's the sort of documentary that may have you a little fidgety during the film but is pretty good stuff once you settle in and let it turn over a bit. It's a 2019 IFFBoston selection that I watched during the week we should have been at the 2020 edition, and the specific sort of film that makes one miss festivals like that.
On Wednesday, I hit up the Brattle's selections for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sticks a fun idea for a supernatural sex comedy at the end of a lot of stuff that's not that entertaining, especially 40 years later. That makes it kind of an interesting double-feature with A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from the Coolidge's Lee Grant series, though: You kind of have to wrestle with what constitutes an acceptable sort of scoundrel now versus decades earlier to watch both.
I received a new Blu-ray in the mail during the week, and part of getting stuff off the too-watch shelf means not letting other things get there, so I did a double feature of Shatter & Call of Heroes (for two bits of Hong Kong action), and while the first not being a great Hammer/Shaw collaboration was a bit of a bummer, the second being more fun that I anticipated was a great surprise.
No more movies until Saturday, when I was back in the Brattle's virtual screening room for Deerskin, the latest from Quentin Dupieux and probably his most grounded, in that you can sort of track what's making its weirdo do weird things from real things rather than just being an artifact of being in a world slightly off-kilter. I also hit the grocery story to try and get good pizza-making stuff for my new pizza oven (it actually arrived in February, but who is setting a pizza oven up in the tiny backyard then?). Sunday afternoon, I discovered that I apparently can't start a fire in a metal container designed to hold burning wood chips that were marketed for the sole purpose of being set on fire, which is probably good for safety but leaves me with a lot stuff to make pizza in the fridge. Dejected, I went back in to watch the L.A. 3-D Space 3-D Movie Fest (and Ape). Some of that was rough, technically, but interesting, and, circling back around to missing festivals, it was surprisingly exciting to have to be at something other than a work call at a certain time.
Mostly quiet since then, but hoping for activity on my Letterboxd page this weekend.
A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant, Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room/internet)
Lee Grant's documentary from 2005 gets misty toward the end, figuring the end is likely near for 88-year-old Kirk Douglas, unaware that he's got another 15 years in him. Those are some hardy genes, especially considering how well Michael has aged in the meantime.
I can't recall any specific instance of Grant working with either Douglas as an actress, although I suspect it happened at some point. There's clearly enough familiarity there to get very relaxed interviews, and while one probably does have to be wary of whether documentaries about performers contain performance, there's a lot of enjoyable back and forth between the pair. I suspect that Kirk still not entirely being over Michael casting Jack Nicholson when producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had become a bit they go through on a regular basis, but even if it is, there's something genuine to it. I similarly wonder about them mentioning Lonely Are the Brave and Falling Down as respective favorite roles - it makes sense, as they're both striking movies with meeting parts, but they rhyme so well that it's almost too good, right?
There's also a bit of an issue in how to give the pair equal weight. For as much as both talk about how in many ways Michael might have had a harder time of it, trying to live up to how people saw Kirk, he almost comes across as too nice, too thoroughly adapted to his time and place to give half the movie a spark at points while the father can't help but hold on to some problematic aspects of his personality. The allegations that he assaulted a co-star were not well-known at the time of filming (though someone in Grant's position might well have been aware), but listening to him talk about women, it sounds uncomfortably plausible even as he seems to be quite a decent man in other respects. Even without that context readily available, it gives the audience something to unpack even in a doc that wears its fondness for its subjects on its sleeve.
L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online and Ape
The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education is an exhibition space/collection in Los Angeles which I'll have to visit if I make it out that way any time soon, most recently noted for crowdfunding the restoration of El Coranzon y la Espada (on the 3-D Rarities II Disc I reviewed a few weeks back. They've got monthly screenings, although that's obviously off right now. So, for Sunday's show, they had planned to show a selection of recent productions, and chose to do it online. There were options to stream it in anaglyph (red/blue) or side-by-side format, with the TV or projector un-compression the pictures so that they could be alternated, projected through polarized lenses, or the like (at one point, this was a way to distribute 3-D films theatrically, using a special polarized lens to project the two images atop each other).
You lose a bit of image quality that way, but it's not so bad, although with some of the selections being rough themselves, the effect can pile up. It's neat, though, and it's good to see that there are folks who enjoy 3-D enough to make new material. Is it better than the feature I popped in later, Ape? Well, some are, though I don't know if that's clearly a high bar (although upon hitting IMDB, I'm not sure what the knowledge that Joanna Kerns had a B-movie babe phase of her career before playing the wife of "Jason Seaver" on Growing Pains means to me).
The next one is set for the 21st of June, though I don't know whether that will wind up another livestream yet. One thing I found myself anticipating was the fact that it was a livestream - starting at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT, running for an hour, and then being more or less immediately set to private. With no sports, and no movies in theaters with ticketed times, everything can sort of be put off or piled up to pick up when one chooses, but this was a screening. Sure, it's not the only thing like that right now, but, honestly, it added more structure than the daily "stand-up" calls at work.
Yes, I've gotten to the point of missing almost being late for something. It's a weird time.
Fun discovery made while looking for Amazon links to break up the wall of text and maybe, someday, have someone click: The "best short soundtracks" album, which is a cool thing to have exist, although I'm not sure who would be buying a whole album as opposed to just the individual ones which impressed them.
"The Whole Picture"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
This one looks too new to have an entry on IMDB (or, heck, any sort of internet footprint), but it's a nifty little thing that changes aspect ratios and color and depth in its three minutes before it goes a different route. Looking at IMDB, it feels like it might be a sort of calling card for director Zsolt Magyar, showing what he can do as a cinematographer and director when much of his career has been working in sound.
"Ghosts of the Pastures"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Another one whose internet footprint is awfully small, and three days later, I can't remember a thing about it.
"Stimulation"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Uh… OK? A minute of home-movie footage which is nice for the folks involved and interesting as a time capsule later but which makes me feel like I'm intruding a bit when watching it.
"Zerynthia Expedition 2"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Kind of a 3-D screen saver in a lot of ways, fun as a tech demo or as the rough draft for a bit of world-building in a sci-fi movie. Nine minutes is kind of a lot, though, especially when you're waiting to get to the next.
"Feline Paradox"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
One of only a couple things in this program that feels like a real movie, but also one that shows what a toll doing good 3D can take on your production - would there have been more resources available for animation if filmmaker Benjamin Reicher wasn't rendering every frame twice? It looks a bit rough throughout, although part of it is that the models for the humanoid cat-people just don't ever feel quite right compared to the humans and the actual cat.
It's kind of fun, though - Reicher has a lot of fun with time travel paradoxes and looping around to the point where it gets a bit out of hand, especially with all the different versions of the main character that keep popping up. It stretches out a bit too long and doesn't necessarily land on the most clever possible ending. But it's goofy and inventive and willing to get weird on occasion, enough that I'll probably grin if I come across something else of Reicher's later and follow the links back here.
"LIttle Planet"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Another fun little thing that plays like filmmaker Takashi Sekitani is kind of fooling around with some tech and seeing what he can get out of it. Here, that seems to be walking around with a 360-degree VR camera overhead and flattening it out in such a way as to make it look like he's on a fisheye-lens planet.
No particular story, and I don't know Tokyo enough to really get a sense of the different perspective this offers, although I kind of like the effect of how people getting closer to the person at the center become stretched out and more important as the number of pixels increases. It feels like a cool visualization of something, even if the filmmakers have only wound up at the "looks cool" stage.
Ape
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
You think weird things watching a random B-movie like Ape, like how many of the giant-ape movies to come after it used CGI models based on real apes while the ones before used guys in suits or stop-motion and thus had human gaits, and this one often has its ape hunched over but not actually able to get its knuckles to the ground, like they kind of wanted to do better but, oh well, whatever. It's lazy and cheap, but sometimes just bizarre enough in how that pans out to kind of be fun.
It's flagrant in being a King Kong rip-off, although it basically starts with its 36-foot-tall ape chained up in the hold of a ship, being brought across the Pacific to be shown off at Disneyland. It wakes up early and angry, though, capsizing the ship and making its way to the coast of South Korea. Meanwhile, in Seoul, reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) is surprising his actress girlfriend Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) at the airport, having wangled the assignment to report on her first international role. It's not his first time here, which is fortunate, because it means he knows Captain Kim (Lee Nak-Hun) of the local police and can ride along as he and U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol) try and figure out what the heck you do in this situation.
Writer/director Paul Leder gets right to the movie's main draw first, as the nameless giant ape wrestles with a rubber shark and then stomps on some miniatures, and while it never looks close to real - and to make things worse, it's shot in 3D in such a way that one's depth perception immediately reveals the proper scale when viewed that way. This stuff is, nevertheless, still kind of a blast, the kind of kaiju destruction that the audience can enjoy just a bit more because it's fake enough to reassure one that nobody gets hurt even as the first glance makes it feel real. It's lazy and sloppy enough to be frustrating, but there's also a peculiar meta joy to it, where one snickers at the ape flailing at helicopters that just aren't there and thus feeling like it's a victory when one gets in range and he smashes the hell out of that toy.
The whole movie is that sort of mess, not just cheap but stupidly so, like when Tom is pointing things out to Marilyn without getting an B-roll, or the way none of the ape bits seem to be connected, or how nothing anybody does ever makes a lick of sense. It's so comfortable being a King Kong rip-off that it often doesn't need much reason to do something other than "they did it in that other movie", and the ape's fights with giant sharks and snakes make one wonder whether such super-sized mutations are common in the film's world or if the filmmakers just didn't think this through. The laziness is much more apparent with the miniature city demolished at the end, with all the signage in Chinese despite the film taking place in South Korea.
Luckily, there are enough people having fun with the thing that it doesn't become completely insulting, which is kind of impressive, because most of the time when people try to get clever despite messing up the basics just make them look worse. Leder at least makes a few amusing detours as he inserts himself as the director of Marilyn's film - I have no doubt that he has had to sincerely ask actors to be gentle while filming a rape scene - and the cast is in large part just good enough: Rod Arrants and Lee Nak-Hoon are are pleasant without being bland, Alex Nicol does a bit better than mailing it in, and Joanna Kerns (using maiiden name "Joanna DeVarona") does okay for the sort of B-movie most actresses will eventually try to ignore.
There are enough movies with giant apes wreaking havoc out there that this one is mostly of interest for 3D enthusiasts; it's just not good enough at anything else to really stand out. Ape occasionally gets cock-eyed enough to be entertaining, but not enough to be a major part of the kaiju canon.
Also on EFilmCritic
You lose a bit of image quality that way, but it's not so bad, although with some of the selections being rough themselves, the effect can pile up. It's neat, though, and it's good to see that there are folks who enjoy 3-D enough to make new material. Is it better than the feature I popped in later, Ape? Well, some are, though I don't know if that's clearly a high bar (although upon hitting IMDB, I'm not sure what the knowledge that Joanna Kerns had a B-movie babe phase of her career before playing the wife of "Jason Seaver" on Growing Pains means to me).
The next one is set for the 21st of June, though I don't know whether that will wind up another livestream yet. One thing I found myself anticipating was the fact that it was a livestream - starting at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT, running for an hour, and then being more or less immediately set to private. With no sports, and no movies in theaters with ticketed times, everything can sort of be put off or piled up to pick up when one chooses, but this was a screening. Sure, it's not the only thing like that right now, but, honestly, it added more structure than the daily "stand-up" calls at work.
Yes, I've gotten to the point of missing almost being late for something. It's a weird time.
Fun discovery made while looking for Amazon links to break up the wall of text and maybe, someday, have someone click: The "best short soundtracks" album, which is a cool thing to have exist, although I'm not sure who would be buying a whole album as opposed to just the individual ones which impressed them.
"The Whole Picture"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
This one looks too new to have an entry on IMDB (or, heck, any sort of internet footprint), but it's a nifty little thing that changes aspect ratios and color and depth in its three minutes before it goes a different route. Looking at IMDB, it feels like it might be a sort of calling card for director Zsolt Magyar, showing what he can do as a cinematographer and director when much of his career has been working in sound.
"Ghosts of the Pastures"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Another one whose internet footprint is awfully small, and three days later, I can't remember a thing about it.
"Stimulation"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Uh… OK? A minute of home-movie footage which is nice for the folks involved and interesting as a time capsule later but which makes me feel like I'm intruding a bit when watching it.
"Zerynthia Expedition 2"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Kind of a 3-D screen saver in a lot of ways, fun as a tech demo or as the rough draft for a bit of world-building in a sci-fi movie. Nine minutes is kind of a lot, though, especially when you're waiting to get to the next.
"Feline Paradox"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
One of only a couple things in this program that feels like a real movie, but also one that shows what a toll doing good 3D can take on your production - would there have been more resources available for animation if filmmaker Benjamin Reicher wasn't rendering every frame twice? It looks a bit rough throughout, although part of it is that the models for the humanoid cat-people just don't ever feel quite right compared to the humans and the actual cat.
It's kind of fun, though - Reicher has a lot of fun with time travel paradoxes and looping around to the point where it gets a bit out of hand, especially with all the different versions of the main character that keep popping up. It stretches out a bit too long and doesn't necessarily land on the most clever possible ending. But it's goofy and inventive and willing to get weird on occasion, enough that I'll probably grin if I come across something else of Reicher's later and follow the links back here.
"LIttle Planet"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (L.A. 3-D Movie Fest Online, SBS 3D YouTube via Roku)
Another fun little thing that plays like filmmaker Takashi Sekitani is kind of fooling around with some tech and seeing what he can get out of it. Here, that seems to be walking around with a 360-degree VR camera overhead and flattening it out in such a way as to make it look like he's on a fisheye-lens planet.
No particular story, and I don't know Tokyo enough to really get a sense of the different perspective this offers, although I kind of like the effect of how people getting closer to the person at the center become stretched out and more important as the number of pixels increases. It feels like a cool visualization of something, even if the filmmakers have only wound up at the "looks cool" stage.
Ape
* * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
You think weird things watching a random B-movie like Ape, like how many of the giant-ape movies to come after it used CGI models based on real apes while the ones before used guys in suits or stop-motion and thus had human gaits, and this one often has its ape hunched over but not actually able to get its knuckles to the ground, like they kind of wanted to do better but, oh well, whatever. It's lazy and cheap, but sometimes just bizarre enough in how that pans out to kind of be fun.
It's flagrant in being a King Kong rip-off, although it basically starts with its 36-foot-tall ape chained up in the hold of a ship, being brought across the Pacific to be shown off at Disneyland. It wakes up early and angry, though, capsizing the ship and making its way to the coast of South Korea. Meanwhile, in Seoul, reporter Tom Rose (Rod Arrants) is surprising his actress girlfriend Marilyn Baker (Joanna Kerns) at the airport, having wangled the assignment to report on her first international role. It's not his first time here, which is fortunate, because it means he knows Captain Kim (Lee Nak-Hun) of the local police and can ride along as he and U.S. Army Colonel Davis (Alex Nicol) try and figure out what the heck you do in this situation.
Writer/director Paul Leder gets right to the movie's main draw first, as the nameless giant ape wrestles with a rubber shark and then stomps on some miniatures, and while it never looks close to real - and to make things worse, it's shot in 3D in such a way that one's depth perception immediately reveals the proper scale when viewed that way. This stuff is, nevertheless, still kind of a blast, the kind of kaiju destruction that the audience can enjoy just a bit more because it's fake enough to reassure one that nobody gets hurt even as the first glance makes it feel real. It's lazy and sloppy enough to be frustrating, but there's also a peculiar meta joy to it, where one snickers at the ape flailing at helicopters that just aren't there and thus feeling like it's a victory when one gets in range and he smashes the hell out of that toy.
The whole movie is that sort of mess, not just cheap but stupidly so, like when Tom is pointing things out to Marilyn without getting an B-roll, or the way none of the ape bits seem to be connected, or how nothing anybody does ever makes a lick of sense. It's so comfortable being a King Kong rip-off that it often doesn't need much reason to do something other than "they did it in that other movie", and the ape's fights with giant sharks and snakes make one wonder whether such super-sized mutations are common in the film's world or if the filmmakers just didn't think this through. The laziness is much more apparent with the miniature city demolished at the end, with all the signage in Chinese despite the film taking place in South Korea.
Luckily, there are enough people having fun with the thing that it doesn't become completely insulting, which is kind of impressive, because most of the time when people try to get clever despite messing up the basics just make them look worse. Leder at least makes a few amusing detours as he inserts himself as the director of Marilyn's film - I have no doubt that he has had to sincerely ask actors to be gentle while filming a rape scene - and the cast is in large part just good enough: Rod Arrants and Lee Nak-Hoon are are pleasant without being bland, Alex Nicol does a bit better than mailing it in, and Joanna Kerns (using maiiden name "Joanna DeVarona") does okay for the sort of B-movie most actresses will eventually try to ignore.
There are enough movies with giant apes wreaking havoc out there that this one is mostly of interest for 3D enthusiasts; it's just not good enough at anything else to really stand out. Ape occasionally gets cock-eyed enough to be entertaining, but not enough to be a major part of the kaiju canon.
Also on EFilmCritic
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
Deerskin (and some shorts)
This movie didn't really land quite so well as I'd hoped, and one of the things I initially wondered is if it was because it was the first of Dupieux's films that I've seen at home, rather than in a theater, be it festival, midnight, or "regular" show. This one isn't quite of a piece with them, but with those other movies, there was a definite sense that having other people around asking what they heck they were seeing made them more fun. Everybody saying "what the heck?" together is an important form of having a shared experience!
I don't know if that's necessarily missing, though; if I saw this one with an audience, I might be just as focused on what he's trying to say as enjoying the ride and trying to fit it all together as some sort of collected commentary on mid-life crisis and impostor syndrome and overconfident mediocre men. There's a bit of a disconnect between the specific targets of the satire and the general feeling of strangeness, and I think that's where the difference lies.
After all, I watched the two Dupieux shorts I could find on line at home (a couple days later) and laughed just fine, although when I started writing afterwards, I saw a bit of a thread of how he seems to really dislike pretension in show business and art, and it's worth remembering that Rubber also opens with a comment on how this is all very silly and nothing happens for a reason. It seems, at times, like it must be tricky to be an absurdist (or, for that matter, in making EDM); there's a lot of crazy detail work in getting everything optimized right down to the fraction of a second so that it hits perfectly that I suspect makes one really distrust the people who stay in the abstract realm, especially since it's so easy to be conflated with them.
Le Daim (Deerskin)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
About six years and three features ago, when reviewing Quentin Dupieux's Wrong Cops, I joked that the director of some of the decade's most entertaining bits of cinematic nonsense was "only a few films away from doing something eccentric but basically sensible". Deerskin doesn't have him quite there, but it's grounded in a way Dupieux's other films are not, for better or worse. It's maybe more mature, but less zany fun.
He introduces the audience to Georges (Jean Dujardin), who has taken to the road to buy a fancy Italian deerskin jacket that the previous owner (Albert Delpy) hasn't worn in some time, paying well enough that the man throws a video recorder in. After that, Georges checks into a hotel, making apologies for being short of cash, putting on airs and passing himself off as a filmmaker. He soon finds himself having conversations with his beloved jacket, which apparently wants to be the only jacket in the world, dovetailing nicely with how he would like to be the only person wearing a jacket. Meanwhile, the server at the hotel bar (Adèle Haenel) mentions that she enjoys video editing as a hobby, so he hires her to work on the film. She's not exactly sure what to make of the seemingly random footage Georges is shooting - or maybe she's got a better instinct for it than he does.
It's not long before the audience learns that Georges's marriage has reached its end in what appears to be tremendously acrimonious fashion, and him being a regular guy in the throes of some sort of breakdown rather than an inhabitant of an inherently bizarre world is a different approach for Dupieux. The way that Georges reacts - a desperate but befuddled need to be seen as cool although only half-heartedly willing to work for it - is a clever take on a man completely adrift after being rejected, and Jean Dujardin slips into the part perfectly, amiably befuddled and kind of sad as he talks to himself, but just with the right whiff of arrogance to it. He's one of those characters where his blank-ness is part of the point, and while Dujardin captures that, it doesn't necessarily draw the audience in.
Instead, Dupieux seems more interested in poking at "emperor has no clothes" situations, with Georges in his deerskin jacket and other accessories eventually succeeding in part because he looks the part of an artist, a testament to how far somebody who doesn't know what he's doing can get, even accidentally, so long as he looks the part to the point where he seemingly starts to believe it. Adèle Haenel's Denise is an interesting complement in that she buys into Georges's bullshit, but she also knows what she's doing, and between her taking money out of the ATM, seeing something in the footage that isn't initially there (at least consciously), and trying to shape it into something that makes sense. The artist, in this case, is not so important as the person who corrals him.
Does that necessarily apply to Dupieux himself? Maybe, although he does serve as his own editor and cinematographer (although he no longer scores his films despite being initially known as a musician). While there's not really enough story to his script for even a 77-minute movie, he does a few nifty things, such as the scenes where he talks with his jacket and Dupieux never moves or cuts but changes focus so that when the jacket "speaks", one can see it's also Georges, but it's just blurry enough or at the margins that the viewer sees it as an in-between thing, both the reality and delusion visible. He does a neat job of shooting Georges's encounters with people on the street so that they feel real and improvised. A lot of that seems to be just saying, screw it, we shoot through the snow, but it works.
All of this makes Deerskin feel a lot more specific than most of Dupieux's other features, although it is still random and eccentric in many ways. It is, I suppose, fitting that this more focused fim integrates someone trying to make sense out of a would-be filmmaker's nonsense into the story, even if I don't necessarily want to see this as the first film of a new, more grounded phase of his career.
Also on EFilmCritic
"Das Photo-Shoot"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, Vimeo via Roku)
Hey, the model in this short is the lady from Rubber! Cool!
(And I guess the other guy is Marilyn Manson.)
This is kind of a one-joke film and the odds are good that you've heard that joke a few times before, but it's told pretty well - Quentin Dupieux may be poking fun at the idea of how a pretentious artiste gets a specific sort of idea in his head but can't truly communicate it, but he both gets the phenomenon well enough and how to get comedy out of repetition and sudden divergence well enough that it works. Manson plays the weirdo well enough and Roxane Mesquida nails the frustrated nonsense to this idiocy well enough to carry the short. The "hey, I have an idea, let's shoot this out back" vibe works but it never seems sloppy.
Simple bit, but it works.
"Being Flat"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, YouTube via Roku)
One of the fun things about finding and watching this short via YouTube is having other videos featuring "Mr. Oizo" (Quentin Dupieux's nom de musique) and Flat Eric, who I think is the puppet that is sitting in the audience, pop up as recommendations, and getting the feeling that it works just as well with and without that other context. I don't even know that I want to seek that other context out; I just like knowing that it's there.
It is, as such, Dupieux compressed into seven minutes: Non-sequitur humor that still kind of holds together because there's this general strangeness, objects becoming characters, slow-burn lunacy broken by genuinely funny punchlines, and a nifty soundtrack that, even as things are careening completely out of control and maybe getting kind of dark, keeps it fun.
Okay, maybe I'll look for the other Flat Eric stuff.
I don't know if that's necessarily missing, though; if I saw this one with an audience, I might be just as focused on what he's trying to say as enjoying the ride and trying to fit it all together as some sort of collected commentary on mid-life crisis and impostor syndrome and overconfident mediocre men. There's a bit of a disconnect between the specific targets of the satire and the general feeling of strangeness, and I think that's where the difference lies.
After all, I watched the two Dupieux shorts I could find on line at home (a couple days later) and laughed just fine, although when I started writing afterwards, I saw a bit of a thread of how he seems to really dislike pretension in show business and art, and it's worth remembering that Rubber also opens with a comment on how this is all very silly and nothing happens for a reason. It seems, at times, like it must be tricky to be an absurdist (or, for that matter, in making EDM); there's a lot of crazy detail work in getting everything optimized right down to the fraction of a second so that it hits perfectly that I suspect makes one really distrust the people who stay in the abstract realm, especially since it's so easy to be conflated with them.
Le Daim (Deerskin)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
About six years and three features ago, when reviewing Quentin Dupieux's Wrong Cops, I joked that the director of some of the decade's most entertaining bits of cinematic nonsense was "only a few films away from doing something eccentric but basically sensible". Deerskin doesn't have him quite there, but it's grounded in a way Dupieux's other films are not, for better or worse. It's maybe more mature, but less zany fun.
He introduces the audience to Georges (Jean Dujardin), who has taken to the road to buy a fancy Italian deerskin jacket that the previous owner (Albert Delpy) hasn't worn in some time, paying well enough that the man throws a video recorder in. After that, Georges checks into a hotel, making apologies for being short of cash, putting on airs and passing himself off as a filmmaker. He soon finds himself having conversations with his beloved jacket, which apparently wants to be the only jacket in the world, dovetailing nicely with how he would like to be the only person wearing a jacket. Meanwhile, the server at the hotel bar (Adèle Haenel) mentions that she enjoys video editing as a hobby, so he hires her to work on the film. She's not exactly sure what to make of the seemingly random footage Georges is shooting - or maybe she's got a better instinct for it than he does.
It's not long before the audience learns that Georges's marriage has reached its end in what appears to be tremendously acrimonious fashion, and him being a regular guy in the throes of some sort of breakdown rather than an inhabitant of an inherently bizarre world is a different approach for Dupieux. The way that Georges reacts - a desperate but befuddled need to be seen as cool although only half-heartedly willing to work for it - is a clever take on a man completely adrift after being rejected, and Jean Dujardin slips into the part perfectly, amiably befuddled and kind of sad as he talks to himself, but just with the right whiff of arrogance to it. He's one of those characters where his blank-ness is part of the point, and while Dujardin captures that, it doesn't necessarily draw the audience in.
Instead, Dupieux seems more interested in poking at "emperor has no clothes" situations, with Georges in his deerskin jacket and other accessories eventually succeeding in part because he looks the part of an artist, a testament to how far somebody who doesn't know what he's doing can get, even accidentally, so long as he looks the part to the point where he seemingly starts to believe it. Adèle Haenel's Denise is an interesting complement in that she buys into Georges's bullshit, but she also knows what she's doing, and between her taking money out of the ATM, seeing something in the footage that isn't initially there (at least consciously), and trying to shape it into something that makes sense. The artist, in this case, is not so important as the person who corrals him.
Does that necessarily apply to Dupieux himself? Maybe, although he does serve as his own editor and cinematographer (although he no longer scores his films despite being initially known as a musician). While there's not really enough story to his script for even a 77-minute movie, he does a few nifty things, such as the scenes where he talks with his jacket and Dupieux never moves or cuts but changes focus so that when the jacket "speaks", one can see it's also Georges, but it's just blurry enough or at the margins that the viewer sees it as an in-between thing, both the reality and delusion visible. He does a neat job of shooting Georges's encounters with people on the street so that they feel real and improvised. A lot of that seems to be just saying, screw it, we shoot through the snow, but it works.
All of this makes Deerskin feel a lot more specific than most of Dupieux's other features, although it is still random and eccentric in many ways. It is, I suppose, fitting that this more focused fim integrates someone trying to make sense out of a would-be filmmaker's nonsense into the story, even if I don't necessarily want to see this as the first film of a new, more grounded phase of his career.
Also on EFilmCritic
"Das Photo-Shoot"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, Vimeo via Roku)
Hey, the model in this short is the lady from Rubber! Cool!
(And I guess the other guy is Marilyn Manson.)
This is kind of a one-joke film and the odds are good that you've heard that joke a few times before, but it's told pretty well - Quentin Dupieux may be poking fun at the idea of how a pretentious artiste gets a specific sort of idea in his head but can't truly communicate it, but he both gets the phenomenon well enough and how to get comedy out of repetition and sudden divergence well enough that it works. Manson plays the weirdo well enough and Roxane Mesquida nails the frustrated nonsense to this idiocy well enough to carry the short. The "hey, I have an idea, let's shoot this out back" vibe works but it never seems sloppy.
Simple bit, but it works.
"Being Flat"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (more Dupieux, YouTube via Roku)
One of the fun things about finding and watching this short via YouTube is having other videos featuring "Mr. Oizo" (Quentin Dupieux's nom de musique) and Flat Eric, who I think is the puppet that is sitting in the audience, pop up as recommendations, and getting the feeling that it works just as well with and without that other context. I don't even know that I want to seek that other context out; I just like knowing that it's there.
It is, as such, Dupieux compressed into seven minutes: Non-sequitur humor that still kind of holds together because there's this general strangeness, objects becoming characters, slow-burn lunacy broken by genuinely funny punchlines, and a nifty soundtrack that, even as things are careening completely out of control and maybe getting kind of dark, keeps it fun.
Okay, maybe I'll look for the other Flat Eric stuff.
Sunday, May 03, 2020
Made in Hong Kong: Shatter & Call of Heroes
This week's entry in "don't even let the new arrivals make it to the new arrivals shelf" is Shatter, which I didn't even know existed until I was writing up Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires a couple weeks ago and saw that not only did Hammer & Shaw Brothers make a second film together, but Shout! Factory would be releasing it on Blu-ray in a couple weeks. Had to pre-order it at that point.
Maybe not quite worth the money, but how else am I seeing that oddity?
It's blessedly short, so I had time for another one off the shelf, and picked up Call of Heroes, which has been waiting to be watched for a couple of years, one of several discs I've ordered over that time trying to both grab bargains to pad out an order from Hong Kong and get 3D stuff before it went out of print. It's a freaking delight, and I really wish I'd had a chance to see it in a theater. It looks like it came out like a month too late to play Fantasia, didn't get US bookings because a couple other Chinese films were coming out at the time, and then wound up on the festival circuit before a home video release. I kind of get it - Wu Jing was just starting to break out as a superstar and Eddie Peng was in something like the same position if at a lower wattage, Lau Ching-Wan is a Hong Kong guy, and the mainland movies do better than Hong Kong ones.
Maybe not my favorite find during lockdown, but it goes on my list of things I'd like to program a 3D film festival with. Sure, a 3D martial-arts spaghetti western with Lau, Wu, Peng, and action direction by Sammo Hung is very specifically my thing, but I'm kind of suspicious of folks for whom it is not their thing.
Shatter (aka Call Him Mr. Shatter)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The second and final film in the brief collaboration between the Hammer and Shaw Brothers studios is easily overlooked; it doesn't quite so immediately announce itself as the fusion of their two styles as The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. The behind-the-scenes turmoil had Hammer eventually dumping the film, while Shaw seems to have provided production support without much attempt to put their stamp on it. It's not a bad bit of grindhouse fare, as such things go; although still most noteworthy for the odd place it occupies in genre film history.
It opens with American freelance assassin Shatter (Stuart Whitman) knocking off an African dictator and making off with the contents of his aide's suitcase. He arrives in Hong Kong to pick up the money he's owed, only to have banker Hans Leber (Antron Diffring) refuse to pay, British spy Paul Rattwood (Peter Cushing) informs him that his mission was not, as he believed, sanctioned by the CIA. Leber (or someone) tries to have him killed and Rattwood tells him to leave on the next flight, having some goons deliver a beatdown just to drive the point home. Fortunately, it's behind a bar and massage parlor that employs Tai Pah (Ti Lung) and Mai Mee (Lily Li Li-Li); not only are they willing to give Shatter a place to lie low, but Tai Pah has tremendous kung fu skills
It's worth noting that where 7 Golden Vampires was produced by both studios, Shaw Brothers apparently took a much less active role in Shatter, and one way this manifests is in nobody being credited as action director or fight choreographer. It's not crippling - between original director Monte Hellman and producer Michael Carreras (who took over about two-thirds of the way through), they are generally smart enough to stand back and watch Ti Lung go when it's time for that, and while the results aren't as strong as a real Shaw Brothers movie, there's never any doubt about why Ti was one of the studio's biggest stars. There's some quality martial arts, and while it's choppier than it could be, Ti's still a blast to watch.
The rest of the movie is kind of a mess, though, with a script that is not necessarily terribly convoluted but still on the dumb side far more often than necessary, all too frequently taking the laziest route from one plot development or fight to the next, with plenty of moment-to-moment sloppiness and people who maybe wouldn't be great actors even if they were working in their first language. The last act is kind of egregiously sloppy, and on the other end, there's something genuinely bizarre about how casually the people of Hong Kong shrug off violence, a bit of black comedy that's entertaining in moments but undercuts the ones where the audience is supposed to take Shatter's PTSD seriously.
Stuart Whitman may not have a lot of time to really play with that as Shatter, or anything else, but he's got the right sort of run-down energy for the part; the audience can see every questionable moral choice etched into him. He's a good hitman who is tired of this life but doesn't know how to do anything other than keep going, a useful contrast with Tia Pah's cocky clarity. Peter Cushing, in his last role for Hammer, gets billed as a guest star and adds just the right amount of sneering officiousness to every scene he's in.
This would be Cushing's last film for Hammer, and the studio itself would not last long afterward. In some ways, it's not surprising that Shatter sank; it's the result of a British studio trying to make an American B-movie in Hong Kong style, and only fitfully puts it all together. When it does get all of these personalities working together, it's kind of fun, and it happens often enough that the spots where the influences don't gel and start working against each other aren't the problems they could be.
Also on EFilmCritic
Ngai sing (Call of Heroes)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
It took me a shamefully long time to recognize what filmmaker Benny Chan Muk-Sing was up to with Call of Heroes, because while samurai movies and westerns tend to cross-pollinate in one way, kung fu usually mixes with westerns by having Chinese people show up in the American West. A movie like this - more or less a spaghetti western that has been picked up and dropped straight into Guangdong - is something else and a whole ton of fun.
It's 1914, and China is the scene of fighting between warlords, with Cao Ying the worst of them. Teacher Bai Ling (Maggie Jiang Shu-Ying) is leading a half-dozen orphans away to the capital of Guangzhou, but after being caught in a robbery at a roadside restaurant, they arrive at Pucheng, where Sheriff Yang Kenan (Sean Lau Ching-Wan) prevails on the villagers to let the refugees stay. Also arriving: Wang Meihu (Xing Yu) and his team of mercenaries hired by Boss Liu (Xie Ning), as well as wanderer Ma Feng (Eddie Peng Yu-Yen), who foiled the robbery - and, later, the warlord's sociopathic son, Cao Shaolun (Louis Koo Tin-Lok). Yang and the rest of his guardians arrest Shaolun for murder, but are delivered an ultimatum to release Shaolun or have Colonel Zhang Yi (Wu Jing) attack.
So you've got your sheriff, taunted by a lunatic languishing in a jail as the more competent member of his gang lays siege, the wandering fighter who rides in to serve as a wildcard, the pretty schoolteacher, a bar fight, something that can reasonably pass as a stagecoach, all that good stuff. It's the Chinese equivalent, by and large - nobody's wearing cowboy hats and only Shaolun favors the gun rather than martial arts - but there are no Shaolin monks wearing long queues or hidden martial arts schools. Director of photography Pakie Chan Chor-Keung (apparently working in native 3D) frequently goes to widescreen shots of Pucheng nestled in a green valley, and the score by Wong Kin-Wai shows more and more like Morricone influence as the film goes on.
The roles fit the all-star cast very well indeed. Louis Koo, for instance, is often at his best when he gets to be a bit nasty rather than an upright leading man, and he goes full psycho here, not just nuts but aware enough of his cruelty to twist the knife. He matches up well with Lau Ching-Wan, who gives Yang an unforced rectitude and handles the self-deprecating humor well. Eddie Peng is more there for martial-arts, but he's got an enjoyable, laid-back charm, and Wu Jing brings a great combination of menace and honor to Zhang. The film is also filled with fun work by actors in smaller roles - the film implies enough backstory for Yang's wife Zhou Susu (Yolanda Yuan Quan) for another movie, for instance, and gives everybody just enough individuality that the audience isn't waiting for things to get to the obvious groups to square off.
They will, of course, with action choreographed by Sammo Hung and his stunt team filling out the bigger battle scenes. Chan and Hung do a great job of making the fights creative and occasionally off-the-wall without quite leaving the bounds of reality - the immediate lead-in to a fight on a bridge savors the moment the audience spends asking why someone would ever build this thing that way before just jumping into it. It's fast-paced and clear in a way that really pops when watching this after a lesser action movie, striking a sweet-spot between larger-than-life and crazy wire-fu shenanigans. The movie gets mean on occasion, just enough to shock, but it seldom stops being fun.
And it's a lot of fun, the best parts of both freewheeling westerns and martial-arts action movies, with a pretty great cast and slick production. For some reason, it didn't get the sort of simultaneous North American release many big Chinese movies have received in recent years, and that's really too bad - it's a fun mash-up that feels like it would have been a real kick on the big screen.
Also on EFilmCritic
Maybe not quite worth the money, but how else am I seeing that oddity?
It's blessedly short, so I had time for another one off the shelf, and picked up Call of Heroes, which has been waiting to be watched for a couple of years, one of several discs I've ordered over that time trying to both grab bargains to pad out an order from Hong Kong and get 3D stuff before it went out of print. It's a freaking delight, and I really wish I'd had a chance to see it in a theater. It looks like it came out like a month too late to play Fantasia, didn't get US bookings because a couple other Chinese films were coming out at the time, and then wound up on the festival circuit before a home video release. I kind of get it - Wu Jing was just starting to break out as a superstar and Eddie Peng was in something like the same position if at a lower wattage, Lau Ching-Wan is a Hong Kong guy, and the mainland movies do better than Hong Kong ones.
Maybe not my favorite find during lockdown, but it goes on my list of things I'd like to program a 3D film festival with. Sure, a 3D martial-arts spaghetti western with Lau, Wu, Peng, and action direction by Sammo Hung is very specifically my thing, but I'm kind of suspicious of folks for whom it is not their thing.
Shatter (aka Call Him Mr. Shatter)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The second and final film in the brief collaboration between the Hammer and Shaw Brothers studios is easily overlooked; it doesn't quite so immediately announce itself as the fusion of their two styles as The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. The behind-the-scenes turmoil had Hammer eventually dumping the film, while Shaw seems to have provided production support without much attempt to put their stamp on it. It's not a bad bit of grindhouse fare, as such things go; although still most noteworthy for the odd place it occupies in genre film history.
It opens with American freelance assassin Shatter (Stuart Whitman) knocking off an African dictator and making off with the contents of his aide's suitcase. He arrives in Hong Kong to pick up the money he's owed, only to have banker Hans Leber (Antron Diffring) refuse to pay, British spy Paul Rattwood (Peter Cushing) informs him that his mission was not, as he believed, sanctioned by the CIA. Leber (or someone) tries to have him killed and Rattwood tells him to leave on the next flight, having some goons deliver a beatdown just to drive the point home. Fortunately, it's behind a bar and massage parlor that employs Tai Pah (Ti Lung) and Mai Mee (Lily Li Li-Li); not only are they willing to give Shatter a place to lie low, but Tai Pah has tremendous kung fu skills
It's worth noting that where 7 Golden Vampires was produced by both studios, Shaw Brothers apparently took a much less active role in Shatter, and one way this manifests is in nobody being credited as action director or fight choreographer. It's not crippling - between original director Monte Hellman and producer Michael Carreras (who took over about two-thirds of the way through), they are generally smart enough to stand back and watch Ti Lung go when it's time for that, and while the results aren't as strong as a real Shaw Brothers movie, there's never any doubt about why Ti was one of the studio's biggest stars. There's some quality martial arts, and while it's choppier than it could be, Ti's still a blast to watch.
The rest of the movie is kind of a mess, though, with a script that is not necessarily terribly convoluted but still on the dumb side far more often than necessary, all too frequently taking the laziest route from one plot development or fight to the next, with plenty of moment-to-moment sloppiness and people who maybe wouldn't be great actors even if they were working in their first language. The last act is kind of egregiously sloppy, and on the other end, there's something genuinely bizarre about how casually the people of Hong Kong shrug off violence, a bit of black comedy that's entertaining in moments but undercuts the ones where the audience is supposed to take Shatter's PTSD seriously.
Stuart Whitman may not have a lot of time to really play with that as Shatter, or anything else, but he's got the right sort of run-down energy for the part; the audience can see every questionable moral choice etched into him. He's a good hitman who is tired of this life but doesn't know how to do anything other than keep going, a useful contrast with Tia Pah's cocky clarity. Peter Cushing, in his last role for Hammer, gets billed as a guest star and adds just the right amount of sneering officiousness to every scene he's in.
This would be Cushing's last film for Hammer, and the studio itself would not last long afterward. In some ways, it's not surprising that Shatter sank; it's the result of a British studio trying to make an American B-movie in Hong Kong style, and only fitfully puts it all together. When it does get all of these personalities working together, it's kind of fun, and it happens often enough that the spots where the influences don't gel and start working against each other aren't the problems they could be.
Also on EFilmCritic
Ngai sing (Call of Heroes)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
It took me a shamefully long time to recognize what filmmaker Benny Chan Muk-Sing was up to with Call of Heroes, because while samurai movies and westerns tend to cross-pollinate in one way, kung fu usually mixes with westerns by having Chinese people show up in the American West. A movie like this - more or less a spaghetti western that has been picked up and dropped straight into Guangdong - is something else and a whole ton of fun.
It's 1914, and China is the scene of fighting between warlords, with Cao Ying the worst of them. Teacher Bai Ling (Maggie Jiang Shu-Ying) is leading a half-dozen orphans away to the capital of Guangzhou, but after being caught in a robbery at a roadside restaurant, they arrive at Pucheng, where Sheriff Yang Kenan (Sean Lau Ching-Wan) prevails on the villagers to let the refugees stay. Also arriving: Wang Meihu (Xing Yu) and his team of mercenaries hired by Boss Liu (Xie Ning), as well as wanderer Ma Feng (Eddie Peng Yu-Yen), who foiled the robbery - and, later, the warlord's sociopathic son, Cao Shaolun (Louis Koo Tin-Lok). Yang and the rest of his guardians arrest Shaolun for murder, but are delivered an ultimatum to release Shaolun or have Colonel Zhang Yi (Wu Jing) attack.
So you've got your sheriff, taunted by a lunatic languishing in a jail as the more competent member of his gang lays siege, the wandering fighter who rides in to serve as a wildcard, the pretty schoolteacher, a bar fight, something that can reasonably pass as a stagecoach, all that good stuff. It's the Chinese equivalent, by and large - nobody's wearing cowboy hats and only Shaolun favors the gun rather than martial arts - but there are no Shaolin monks wearing long queues or hidden martial arts schools. Director of photography Pakie Chan Chor-Keung (apparently working in native 3D) frequently goes to widescreen shots of Pucheng nestled in a green valley, and the score by Wong Kin-Wai shows more and more like Morricone influence as the film goes on.
The roles fit the all-star cast very well indeed. Louis Koo, for instance, is often at his best when he gets to be a bit nasty rather than an upright leading man, and he goes full psycho here, not just nuts but aware enough of his cruelty to twist the knife. He matches up well with Lau Ching-Wan, who gives Yang an unforced rectitude and handles the self-deprecating humor well. Eddie Peng is more there for martial-arts, but he's got an enjoyable, laid-back charm, and Wu Jing brings a great combination of menace and honor to Zhang. The film is also filled with fun work by actors in smaller roles - the film implies enough backstory for Yang's wife Zhou Susu (Yolanda Yuan Quan) for another movie, for instance, and gives everybody just enough individuality that the audience isn't waiting for things to get to the obvious groups to square off.
They will, of course, with action choreographed by Sammo Hung and his stunt team filling out the bigger battle scenes. Chan and Hung do a great job of making the fights creative and occasionally off-the-wall without quite leaving the bounds of reality - the immediate lead-in to a fight on a bridge savors the moment the audience spends asking why someone would ever build this thing that way before just jumping into it. It's fast-paced and clear in a way that really pops when watching this after a lesser action movie, striking a sweet-spot between larger-than-life and crazy wire-fu shenanigans. The movie gets mean on occasion, just enough to shock, but it seldom stops being fun.
And it's a lot of fun, the best parts of both freewheeling westerns and martial-arts action movies, with a pretty great cast and slick production. For some reason, it didn't get the sort of simultaneous North American release many big Chinese movies have received in recent years, and that's really too bad - it's a fun mash-up that feels like it would have been a real kick on the big screen.
Also on EFilmCritic
Friday, May 01, 2020
Next Week in Virtual Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 1 May 2020 - 7 May 2020
Normally, we'd be kicking off the summer movie season with something from Marvel on Free Comic Book Day Weekend, but… Well, you know.
I'm planning on checking out Deerskin, Capital, and The Etruscan Smile, but plans don't necessarily mean much. I will also be looking to try out the shorts program that LA 3-D Space will be streaming on their YouTube channel at 5pm EDT on Sunday.
- The Brattle Theatre opens the latest from two noteworthy filmmakers in their virtual screening room: Deerskin comes from French nonsense auteur Quentin Dupieux, with a cast that includes Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haene, in a story of a most bizarre midlife crises. Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera of Dreams is his third documentary about his native Chile, this one telling its story via the Andes mountains.
Though there is not a repertory series of recommendations this week, the theater is partnering with the Cambridge City Council for "Dinner and a Movie Night" tonight (Friday), with Ned & Ivy offering an introduction to the event at 6pm, with donations to the theater and take-out from local restaurants encouraged. Recommendations do continue, with "Y'Know, For the Kids!" most recently suggesting Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and #BreakYourAlgorithm having recommended The Wrong Arm of the Law and Double Happiness in its most recent Wednesday & Thursday picks. - The Coolidge Corner Theatre also opens Deerskin in its virtual screening room, the first After Midnight selection there since Bacurau. Also opening virtually are documentary Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Brian Cox & Rosanna Arquette in The Etruscan Smile, with Corpus Christi, Beyond the Visible: Hilma Af Klint, Beanpole, The Booksellers, and Fantastic Fungi sticking around. Their "Documentary Films of Lee Grant" series also continues, adding a twin-bill of "Down and Out in America" & "What Sex Am I"? to A Father… A Son… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Previous Geothe-Institut selection Lara returns for a three-day run, benefitting the Coolidge through Sunday, while there's a special premiere with MUBI of Ema on Friday only. This weekend's After Midnite instagram chat is with Mister Reusch, who has been designing the series artwork for twenty years, while series programmer Mark Anastasio leads this week's Coolidge Education seminar on Night of the Living Dead. - The Capitol has a Popcorn Pop-Up on Sunday, with popcorn, candy, and ice cream available for those who call ahead, ideally for snacking on while watching their virtual cinema offerings of Dying for Gold, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and Slay the Dragon. Their friends at The Somerville Theatre will almost certainly not be running Mars Attacks on 35mm with a burlesque pre-show tonight despite what their website still says, but their virtual cinema still offers Pahokee, The Whistlers, Once Were Brothers, and The Roads Not Taken.
- The virtual room at The Regent Theatre continues The Mindfulness Movement playing through 5 May.
- West Newton Cinema has their own curbside popcorn pickup on Saturday - call or email ahead and they will have a large popcorn waiting for you at from noon to 2pm, with a box in which to deposit your five bucks. They also continue their virtual screening room programs of Earth, The Roads Not Taken, Best of CatVideoFest, Once Were Brothers, Slay the Dragon, and The Whistlers; their GoFundMe campaign; and their offer to buy an advance ticket for when they open with a second going to staff at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
I'm planning on checking out Deerskin, Capital, and The Etruscan Smile, but plans don't necessarily mean much. I will also be looking to try out the shorts program that LA 3-D Space will be streaming on their YouTube channel at 5pm EDT on Sunday.
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