Sunday, January 30, 2022 The Man with No Name trilogy at January 30, 2022

 

Since I started this particular blog, I've tried my best to watch films that challenge me.  And nothing challenges me quite like Westerns.  It's one genre of film that I've never been particularly drawn to, and I always have to fight my natural tendency to tune out what I'm watching and pay attention.  Having said this, the 1964 Sergio Leone classic A Fistful of Dollars was one of the real gems of 30 Flicks (the review of which can be read rightchere).  If you've ever seen Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (and I have), you've seen this movie, where an unnamed stranger arrives in town and promptly plays two warring factions within said town against each other while lining his pockets with money from both camps.  It was a very simple concept, but the execution was almost perfect, with a kickass score and a kickass ending to boot.  Afterward, I was actually looking forward to watching the other two movies in this unofficial trilogy, with both ensuing films again directed by Leone and both starring Eastwood as the antihero whose dialogue is very sparse.

 

Released to Italian cinemas a scant year after A Fistful of Dollars, 1965's For a Few Dollars More opens just like predecessor - with an amazing credits sequence accompanied by Ennio Morricone's awesome music.  While he was known as "Joe" in the previous film, this time around Eastwood is addressed by the other characters as "Manco," and has graduated from being a rogue criminal to a bounty hunter.  The film tells the story of Manco's competition and eventual partnership with Colonel Mortimer, a fellow hunter played by Lee Van Cleef in an appropriately scenery-chewing performance.  The relationship between them is adversarial at first, eventually leading up to an admittedly goofy shooting contest that results in a grudging respect.  I can't quite make up my mind about whether I loved or hated a scene involving a character shooting a hat multiple times in the air before it hits the ground.  I lean toward the former.

The plot thread of the film is the two characters' search for Indio (Gian Maria Volente), brutal bank robber who has been broken out of prison by his posse.  The story leads Indio toward the cinematic "one big score" that a good deal of heist movies revolve around, with Manco infiltrating his gang and Mortimer in hot pursuit.  Director Leone throws in some excellent unconventional storytelling touches in the way he treats the character of Indio, including a running flashback that slowly explains the musical pocket watch that Indio carries with him.  He also mines the chemistry that Eastwood and Van Cleef share for all its worth; the film is a "buddy cop" movie before such a thing existed.

I did not find For a Few Dollars More quite as enjoyable as the original film.  The movie's theme of revenge that is gradually revealed to the audience is a powerful one, and the performances are appropriate to the material.  Leone's cinematography is again masterful, with his use of long takes standing out in this movie a bit more this time around.  The main problem that I had with this movie was its length.  At 132 minutes, it felt far too long for a movie of this nature.  A Fistful of Dollars felt lean and mean.  This film has execution that feels a bit sloppier, due to a story that occasionally meanders and takes perhaps one twist too many.  It's a minor complaint, but this film definitely has more faults than the original.  Fortunately, Leone would immediately get to work on the follow-up, and in 1966 we would get...

 

...The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  The execution is always sharp with this film - Quentin Tarantino's all-time favorite movie, no less.  After watching this movie, I can see the influence that it had the vast majority of his works.  The storytelling that constantly shifts gears, the group of principal characters who all have severe flaws, and the plot involving a major crime being committed are all things that seem right out of a '90s Tarantino film.  The setting, though, is wildly different.  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly takes place during the American Civil War and begins its opening chapters introducing its three leads who fit each of those monikers.  The Good is Eastwood, this time around known only as "Blondie."  The Bad is the awesomely-named Angel Eyes, with Van Cleef in a different role from the revenge-driven bounty hunter he played in For a Few Dollars More.  The Ugly is Tuco (Eli Wallace), an occasionally bumbling but very resourceful and cunning bandit.

 

The movie never looks back after the bursts of violence that establish the main characters.   The crux of the story here is $200,000 in Confederate gold that all three characters find themselves on the trail of.  The story flows with a very nice logic, as Angel Eyes is the first to learn of the gold's existence via a professional hit that makes him turn on his employer.  Blondie and Tuco, meanwhile, happen across the search by chance - the kind of chance that feels right at home in Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill.  The script has elements of escalation, with each act of violence and set piece topping the previous and the characters coming up with more ingenious ways to outfox the others.

 

Leone again tells an admittedly simple story through the eyes of multiple characters, but everything just feels grander and bigger this time around.  Tuco is really the glue that holds the movie together, as we get to meet his brother and find out why he became a criminal.  There are also elements of social commentary at play here as we are shown not only the prison camps on the Confederate side, but the Union side as well, and the futility of war is a theme that runs throughout the film's 180 minutes.  That is really my only complaint with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  It is simply too long - of those 180 minutes, I feel that the movie could have been trimmed by at least 30 minutes, likely even more.  A slightly leaner and faster-paced film would have likely made this movie very close to perfection.  As it stands, it is a very good piece of action cinema.

I suppose I should close this post with a few ruminations about the series as a whole.  While they are definitely not my favorite movies of all time by any stretch, there are many things to admire about this particular series of films.  First and foremost are the jobs done by its director and leading man - Leone is an amazingly skilled artist, endlessly innovative with this at times very narrow genre and guiding it through directions it had never gone before.  You can also see him become a better director with each film, with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly being a showcase for his talents via some very noticeable bird's-eye-view camera shots.  Eastwood is perfect in his role as the almost-silent protagonist, far from an angel but still possessing of a certain moral code that pours through his icy gaze.  These two men were what gave us the career of Clint Eastwood, which would kick off in a big way in 1967 when all three of these films were released in the States to rabid audiences.  The rest is history.

Review over.  Time to hand out the ratings:

A Fistful of Dollars - ***

For a Few Dollars More - ***

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - *** 1/2

These films definitely paint your wagon with things other than paint.

Sunday, January 16, 2022 The Antoine Doinel series at January 16, 2022

 

I've watched a lot of foreign films over the past six months of my life.  Doing so has afforded me the opportunity to gleam a very important observation.  You know, the cultures of the world all have their own things in the entertainment sphere.  America is a TV culture.  Italy has opera.  The British are all about the stage.  France has cinema.  Not movies, not film, cinema - the use of the moving picture as an art form.  French films can be pretentious as all get-out, but they're honest and have aims that go beyond cashing in on your nostalgia.  For that reason alone, I'm all about me some French cinema.

Of all the films in the 30 Flicks project, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows was definitely the one that surprised me the most with how much I enjoyed it.  I already did a full-length review that can be read here, but I'll do a brief refresher.  The film is the story of 13-year-old Antoine Doinel, a problem child before John Ritter had ever heard of such a thing who is constantly bucking his authoritarian teachers and his tyrannical mother.  The film ends with Doinel being sent away to a military academy in an ending that is both bleak and hopeful.  The movie, considered one of the best in cinema history, is perfectly self-contained.  I was shocked, however, to learn that the character of Antoine Doinel would appear FOUR more times, all in projects directed by Truffaut and all starring Jean-Pierre Leaud as the main character.  When it was all said and done, we would pay witness to some 20 years in the life of Antoine, beginning three years after The 400 Blows with a short film that was part of an anthology called Love at Twenty.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At a lean and mean 32 minutes, Antoine & Colette is the story of the first love and infatuation that the now 17-year-old Antoine has in life.  As the story begins, Antoine has managed to free himself of both the military academy and his parents, supporting himself by working as an LP manufacturer.  The object of his affection is music student Colette (Marie-France Pisier).  The story contained here is essentially the eternal struggle of the male stuck in the friend zone, as Antoine writes love letters to Colette and dotes on her hand and foot in an attempt to get her to fall in love with him.  Alas, she never does.  This isn't a story that you can watch and feel all warm and fuzzy about afterward, but it is no doubt effective at the message that it tries to convey.  Sometimes, life can kick you in the gut, and how you deal with that determines your strength as a person.  

Launch forward six years to 1968.  Antoine Doinel is back, no longer in black and white and now in living color, for Stolen Kisses.  As the film opens, Antoine is being dishonorably discharged from the Army due to frequently being AWOL (not a shock considering just how much skipping school he did as a kid).  Boiled down to its bare essentials, this movie is a screwball workplace comedy, as the suddenly unemployed Antoine goes from job to job to make ends meet.  He gets fired on no less than three separate occasions throughout the deft 90-something minute running time, finally finding some semblance of stability working as - of all things - a private detective.

It is with this film that the series focusing on Antoine as an adult finds it focus - the character's winding and very prolific love life.  As the film begins, he has a love interest of sorts in Christine Darbon (the gorgeous Claude Jade, who resembles a more innocent version of Catherine Deneuve), violinist who seems simultaneously very hot and very cold toward Antoine.  While romancing Christine, he becomes very enamored with his boss's older wife, who is flattered by the attention and readily seduces the younger man.  Taking in the film, I couldn't help but compare it to The Graduate, which has a similar story on paper but left me very cold - mostly because I found Dustin Hoffman's character to be insufferable.  Antoine Doinel is very similar to Benjamin Braddock in theory, but he is infinitely more likable, more humorous and at times downright goofy.  As the film comes to a close, with Antoine and Christine engaged and ready to face the future together, I was eager to watch more of this quirky character. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just two years later, Bed and Board would be released and expand on the themes explored in Stolen Kisses.  With a much shorter gap between stories, this one has much more direct continuity with its predecessor, with both Leaud and Jade lending their considerable chemistry to the characters as they face the rigors of a new marriage.  As the title implies, the couple are now married, living a charmed life in a tiny apartment.  Antoine runs a flower stand and works on his still-unfinished novel, while Christine gives violin lessons to children.  Truffaut does his best to convey the routine of married life in the once-again amazing 90-odd minutes that the film unspools in.  This is presented with perfect clarity in the repeated scenes of Antoine and Christine in bed, with both characters usually engrossed in reading material and occasional bits of humorous dialogue peppered in.  

Those scenes, with their funny level of sameness, also clue the audience in that there is trouble in paradise lurking just under the surface.  After the couple welcome a baby into the world, Antoine becomes enchanted by a mysterious Japanese girl (Hiroko Berghauer) who he eventually begins an affair with.  There is a bit of dialogue where Antoine describes the affair to the heartbroken Christine that his new lover is like a whole new world, bringing home the central theme of Bed and Board for the audience.  There is also commentary here about how a married couple having children only magnifies what lurks under the surface for the parents, both good and bad.

Nine years would pass between Bed and Board and the follow-up (and final) film, 1979's Love on the Run.  20 years after first playing the character, the age is starting to show on Jean-Pierre Leaud's face, a physical truth that makes him even more endearing.  As the film begins, he is waking up with his new lover Sabine (French singer Dorothee).  Antoine (who is now a published novelist) and Christine are in the process of finalizing their divorce, as their reconciliation at the conclusion of Bed and Board turned out to be only temporary.  The dissolution of this union is oddly amicable and almost heartwarming in a way, with Jade's singular smile serving as her stoic facade against the roller-coaster ride that Antoine taken her on.

I was admittedly a bit worried after the first 20 minutes of the film that Truffaut did not have a fresh direction for the character of Doinel to go.  The script salvages itself with the sudden reappearance of Colette, still played by Pisier and more gorgeous than ever.  Through a series of flashbacks to the earlier films and some very Citizen Kane-esque nonlinear storytelling, we see the complicated series of events that led to the divorce and the relationship between Antoine and Sabine.  As told to Colette by Antoine, of course.  There is much more than we initially thought going on here, both internally and externally.  The story of Love on the Run is one of fate and the wisdom that comes with advanced age, with a finale that feels absolutely perfect precisely because it is so low-key and understated.

This is a very entertaining, very unique series of films.  It starts with The 400 Blows, a not-quite deadly serious but still drab and dour exploration of a disaffected youth rebelling against his admittedly very poor parental figures.  The ensuing films could not possibly be any more different, but they are all very much a logical extension of the Antoine character from the time we first met him.  Francois Truffaut gives us three romantic comedy films that took the bold step of presenting them from the male perspective, which is very much rooted in infatuation and sexuality.  He amazingly did not take a side in this, merely showing us the very troubled love life of a once-troubled child and letting the audience make up their own mind.  A level of impartiality that modern film-makers could definitely learn a thing or two from.

I think the execution and the little character moments that each film gives Antoine is the key here.  In the hands of a lesser story-teller, Antoine could be an almost unbearable character.  He isn't unbearable; he isn't a whiner like Benjamin Braddock or Woody Allen's self-insert character in all of his films.  Instead, he is smart, articulate and boasting of a robust sense of humor.  Despite seeing the worst that this character has to offer, he is nonetheless endearing.  Watching the films in sequence, I REALLY wanted Antoine to have a happy ending and would have left severely disappointed if he did not get one.  Spoiler alert, I didn't walk away from the final film disappointed.  Should you seek these movies out as I did (and don't mind reading subtitles), I don't think you will either.

Rating time (out of ****):

The 400 Blows - **** (which was upgraded from *** 1/2 after rewatch) 

Antoine & Colette - positive

Stolen Kisses - *** 1/2

Bed and Board - ***

Love on the Run - *** 

Thursday, January 6, 2022 The Entertainment Buffet at January 06, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I haven't watched pro wrestling with any regularity for years now, but I still keep up with the business news aspect of it.  A photo circulated lately of an episode of RAW that was...rather sparsely attended.  Like, maybe 500 people in a 15,000-seat arena.  You can't blame it on the 'rona, either, because those NFL stadiums certainly look full on a weekly basis.  Something very interesting happens, however, when you take a look at this crowd and compare that image to WWE's quarterly business reports.  They're absolutely killing it, raking in more revenue and net income than they ever have.  Vince McMahon is truly a genius, first and foremost for the simple fact that he has managed to take a fake sport and sell it to so many people - myself included.  But the most genius thing this guy has ever pulled off in his long life of achievement has been figuring out how to be a profitable professional wrestling company...without fans.  

This led me to another epiphany:  this achievement can essentially be said for the entertainment world as a whole in 2022. 

Once upon a time, entertainment companies needed fans to be invested in their product in order to be profitable.  Attending movies, buying merchandise, contributing to a Nielsen rating so that the network could charge confiscatory advertising rates, all ways that a passionate fan could send money the way of the people responsible for making their entertainment.  Those metrics are all a thing of the past.  Despite box office numbers and TV ratings being historically low, what isn't low is the amount of content that these people produce.  Content is the name of the game in 2022, and the mammoth check NBC cuts to WWE every year for that holy content is the proof.  The advent of streaming has meant that they don't compete for hearts anymore.  They don't worry about convincing people that this movie is worth ten dollars of your money, or that this television show is worth sitting through 17 minutes of commercials.  All they need now is your click, and in the end, it doesn't even matter if they get that because they already have your $13.99 a month.

I'm a movie person, not a TV person.  As such, I'm definitely in the minority when it comes to the landscape these days.  Streaming services cater largely to fans of more episodic storytelling and binge-watching.  But the following analogy, culled shamelessly from the Red Letter Media crew, holds true for the streaming world.  The films and shows that you consume are like food.  There might be a film-maker with a pedigree of success that you've been a fan of for years with a new movie being released.  Going to see this film is like going to a five-star restaurant and ordering a $50 entree with a wine pairing.  Streaming is like the buffet.  A lot of it won't be touched, some of it might even be thrown out, but it's always stocked.  It's very convenient and difficult to resist, and I'm just as guilty as everyone else.  I currently subscribe to nine services.  I may not consume 95% of my watchlists, but it's certainly there if I ever decide to risk that B rating from the health inspector and take a bite. 

For decades, consumers were forced to be discerning with where they spent their money and time.  The world has changed, and if I give the current entertainment barons nothing else, they are smart.  They have figured out how to be profitable regardless of how people watch what they produce.  But if we can't be discerning with our money and time, we can be discerning with our clicks.  Do your research about that show that looks like it might be too woke for you.  You don't have to watch it!  Read up on that film that you're thinking about watching on a boring Sunday, and see if it sounds like it fits with your palate before pushing that button.  It's not the same as a ratings point, but those clicks do matter.  It's the reason that Cobra Kai, the lone TV series that I still invest my time and money in, hasn't taken a nose-dive in quality.  If Netflix started foistering their genius ideas on them, they have the click numbers to say, "screw you, we're taking this to Amazon Prime."  The same can be true for other series, or even films.  And films are my bread and butter.

We live in an era where icons on a screen have replaced movie theaters and cable boxes.  I know there's no going back to the way things used to be.  But I worry sometimes that we're never going to get another Citizen Kane, or another Apocalypse Now, or another The Shining, or another Pulp Fiction.  We might not even get another WrestleMania X-Seven.  Right now, the status quo is all we get everywhere when it comes to feature films, with the Marvel theme park rides being the only thing that people deem worthy of going to see in theaters and homogenized, PC claptrap being the norm when it comes to the internet originals.  I've already told people who are tired of superhero cinema and want something else to do what I've done since 2015 and stop going to them (and no, folks, you didn't accomplish anything by making Spider-Man: No Way Home a megahit; the only thing you did was tell them that nostalgia bait was what they have in their arsenal when they hit a wall and need to finance their next eight films).  When it comes to movies, pick and choose with extreme prejudice.  Dig deep and find the stuff that fits your personal definition of what is "good."  Make them WORK for your click - and if there aren't enough click-worthy items on *insert streaming service of the month*, cancel it.

Pass up on that lukewarm piece of chicken and go for the Wagyu steak.

Sunday, January 2, 2022 In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Brazil (1985) at January 02, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1967

Directed by Norman Jewison

Starring Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates and Lee Grant

All three of you who read my 30 Flicks reviews might remember that I repeatedly stated my love for the murder mystery genre.  There's nothing better when it hits.  So go figure that I was severely underwhelmed by the movies of this type that I watched for 30 Flicks.  The Third Man, Chinatown, Blow Out...I didn't HATE the movies, but they left me cold for wildly different reasons.  In the Heat of the Night is a murder mystery on paper, yes, but it has a well-earned reputation for being much more than that.  Based on that reputation, I decided to take the plunge and make the blind buy.  Was it a wise decision?  Let's dive in and find out.

 
After the awesome Ray Charles theme song that opens the film, the story begins with Sparta, Mississippi police officer Sam Wood (Warren Oates in an early scenery-chewing role) discovering the dead body of industrialist Phillip Colbert.  The murder coincides with the chance arrival of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), Philadelphia police officer passing through Sparta while visiting his mother.  After being arrested as a suspect by Wood, the script gives us the textbook 10-page meeting complication in the form of Sparta police chief Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), who immediately makes it clear to the outsider that his presence is not welcome.  Too bad Tibbs' superiors in Philadelphia think that it's a good idea that the homicide expert should assist the locals in solving the crime.

That's the setup of In the Heat of the Night, and it's a premise that is definitely four stars on paper.  In execution, I think that the movie loses a little steam at points when it comes to the leaps that the much more accomplished homicide detective Tibbs makes.  I don't feel the screenplay is as succinct as it should be in regards to explaining the flow of logic that lead Tibbs and Gillespie to their next destination, and the movie sometimes feels like a series of vignettes rather than a story that logically leads from one breadcrumb to the next.  In the end, it doesn't matter, because the content of those scenes is often electric stuff.  Like most residents of this 1960s small southern town, Gillespie is highly prejudiced, tossing around racial epithets casually and berating the educated black man as an uppity interloper.  The film combines its police procedural with plenty of social comentary, as Gillespie slowly sees how effective his unwilling partner is at pursuing the killer while facing pressure from the locals to run the interloper out of town.

Watching this film, it was again apparent to me how vastly different the movies of the past were when it came to dealing with  social issues.  These days, the villains in movies that tackle subjects like race tend to be cartoonish and one-dimensional.  Gillespie, as masterfully played by Steiger in a role that won him an Oscar, begins as an unlikable character but is never an out-and-out villain.  This character is the one who takes a journey during the film, as the stoic Tibbs remains relatively static throughout the 110-minute running time.  As a result, In the Heat of the Night is a movie that has stood the test of time.  I'm no longer a fan of the term "more relevant than ever," so instead I will say that this film is equally relevant, with its message of overcoming preconceived notions being something that we desperately need in 2021.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  For the performances (especially by Steiger and Lee Grant in an incendiary role as the murdered man's wife), the strong characterization and the setting, this flick is worth a watch.  The mystery is merely the backdrop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1985

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Starring Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan and Kim Greist

 

I have to preface this review by stating that I'm a HUGE fan of the Monty Python crew, the legendary British comedy troupe that director Terry Gilliam was a member of.  Well, at least the films that they made.  Seriously, is there a funnier movie in all of existence than Holy Grail?  If there are, there certainly aren't many of them.  It's a series of sketches all built around the central theme of medieval adventure films that all hit the mark with razor-sharp precision.  They would reach that same level of near perfection twice more in the ensuing Life of Brian and Meaning of Life films.  However, I've always found the Flying Circus TV show that preceded the movies to be hit-and-miss at best and damn near unwatchable at worst.  For every Parrot Sketch, there were ten sketches that started nowhere and just kept dragging on being painfully unfunny.

Brazil is structured almost like one of those Monty Python films, feeling more like a collection of skits than a coherent narrative.  Unfortunately, it's a movie that misses much more than it hits, and it does this for a very bloated 140+ minutes.  The story, as it were, concerns Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce), low-level bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy is the end-all be-all of what society is trying to attain.  In this movie, the world that director Gilliam creates really is the most important character.  It's a system where a form must be completed to do absolutely everything, where private sector employees essentially don't exist and everyone works for the government in some capacity.  It's not exactly a dictatorship or oligarchy in the vein of 1984-style dystopian fables.  Instead, we get a world where government red tape is the tool used to control people.  

There are some great gags in the movie.  The best is undoubtedly the sequence where Sam accepts a promotion and enters his tiny new office, engaging in a tug-of-war with the worker next door over their respective chairs.  Another great bit occurs in the first five minutes of the film, where a government hit squad invades an apartment by cutting a hole in the ceiling and then promptly tries to fix the hole with a nice punchline.  As Gilliam was given $15 million to make this movie, it also looks like a million bucks.  There is SO MUCH attention to detail shown in the way that all of these sets and settings were designed, with countless whirring machines and contraptions occupying nearly every single shot.  Looking at Brazil really does make me weep for the days when set designers were required to make films visually interesting rather than nerds on laptops.

The problem with this movie?  The story, to me, was not interesting AT ALL.  Notice how I really haven't talked about it.  There is no central goal for the character of Sam Lowery in this film; early on, there is a bit of a mystery angle when a random citizen is randomly killed by the government during the hole-in-the-ceiling scene, but that quickly gets dropped.  There are recurring bits where Lowery has fantasies of saving a damsel-in-distress played by Kim Greist, and his search for a fugitive who looks like said fantasy woman.  That gets dropped just before the third act begins.  The narrative is completely aimless, messy with its handling of the social commentary and managed in a way that made me not care what happened to anyone on the screen.  It's a shame, because there is a theme here about technology run amok and government overreach that could have been mined for much more relevance than it was.  For that reason, Brazil is a very frustrating film, one with limitless potential that ultimately gets wasted with a script that veers off in 27 different directions.

Rating time: * 1/2 out of ****.  I think the film would have been much better served being a straight-up comedy, and with at least an hour trimmed from its running time.  As it stands, Brazil is a bloated, sloppy film with occasional brilliant bits.  Avoid this one.

Sunday, December 12, 2021 Boat People (1982) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) at December 12, 2021

 

OK, kids, we're going to be taking a risk here today on the ol' blog - even though it shouldn't be a risk.  The theme of these reviews is a simple one: both films are written, directed by, and star people who...wait for it...don't look like me!  I know, in this day and age, this is considered to be sacrilegious, as we're all just supposed to stay in our pre-approved lanes, and if you stray from them, well, that's cultural appropriation.  I'm here to tell you that this belief is BS.  Cinema is supposed to be about learning, regardless of whether or not the people on the screen look like you.  And while I enjoyed one of these films more than the other, both definitely had lessons and situations that are rife for discussion.  They also show with crystal clear clarity that diversity existed in film before Black Panther.

1982

Directed by Ann Hui

Starring George Lam, Andy Lau, Cora Miao and Season Ma

Consider this movie a counterpart of sorts to my earlier review of Apocalypse Now.  That film was about the general horror of war, with its only message being how war takes people and turns them into monsters who are capable of anything.  Boat People is a film about a very specific kind of horror that came out of Vietnam.  Writer-director Ann Hui did a trilogy of films on Vietnam, and this is the third and widely considered the best of the three.  It's also a film that isn't afraid to take sides, so forewarning to any potential communist sympathizers out there.  This movie isn't kind to you.  The film is getting an upcoming Criterion release, and while I didn't LOVE this movie per se, I may give it a rewatch soon and consider adding it to my physical media collection.

The film takes place in the aftermath of the communist takeover, and tells its story through the eyes of a Japanese journalist named Akutagawa (George Lam), who is a guest of the government on what is essentially a sponsored propaganda trip.  The opening scene of the film shows a large group of singing children performing for Akutagawa in one of the country's New Economic Zones.  Only...something is off for our protagonist.  He can tell that the entire affair seems like too much of a facade, and he soon strikes out on his own away from his official government handlers to find some new images on the streets.  These images, as required by the script, are nowhere near as wholesome and fluffy as singing children.  For what it's worth, I thought Lam was excellent in the lead role, although I have to throw a caveat in here - I don't know if I can accurately judge performances in foreign films, because I can't gauge inflection and emotion quite as well when the spoken language is different from the one that I know.  Does anyone else have this problem, or is this just another thing that makes me a mutant?

The basic story of Boat People, as you would guess from the title, is an escape drama.  Akutagawa becomes close with a family in one of the rougher sections of Da Nang and begins documenting their lives.  This section of the movie gives us some very powerful stuff; the mother ( is resorting to prostitution as a means of supporting her children, while 14-year-old Cam Nuong (Season Ma) serves as both the mentor and surrogate parent to her two younger brothers.  They live in absolute squalor, with one of the more stirring scenes of the film showing how they scrounge for provisions among the dead bodies of people executed by the government.  This leads to the single most tragic incident in the film, one that I won't spoil for anyone who checks this flick out on their own time.  The element of surprise is everything here.  Suffice to say, these people need to leave the country.

The scenes and passages of the film that show the ugly side of Vietnam are some very powerful stuff.  This is effectively the first two-thirds of Boat People, and that span of the film is definitely four stars.  Unfortunately, the script introduces a new wrinkle about halfway through the running time in the form of another (mostly unrelated) character looking to escape Vietnam.  This character muddies the waters and takes the focus off of the main family, and it results in the screenplay structure meandering all over the place.  Undoubtedly, this one of my biases coming to the forefront.  I like my scripts and stories to be as tight as possible, and many critics consider this to be one of the best Asian-language films of all time.  Maybe it is.  Visually and technically, the movie is more or less perfect.  The story, minus the superfluous character, is also very engaging, if not a bit didactic and heavy-handed.  Sometimes more than a bit.

Rating time: *** out of ****.  This film still gets a recommendation from me, especially if you're into the long, bloody history of Vietnam and the refugee crisis that it created.  Check it out.

1990

Directed by Charles Burnett

Starring Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Carl Lumbly, Vonetta McGee, Richard Brooks and Sheryl Lee Ralph

This film was the perfect double feature with Boat People.  Both films were written and directed by film-makers that I had never heard of before, with research revealing that they were responsible for several little-known but highly-acclaimed past projects.  Both are about a very specific experience in the world that the director knows very well.  And both were discovered by me as a blizzard raged outside.  Ironically, a very different kind of storm was blowing over my house that day.  The film-maker in question this time is Charles Burnett, and To Sleep with Anger is considered his lesser masterwork.  Supposedly, the film that I absolutely must see is 1978's Killer of Sheep.  While I didn't like this movie as much as Boat People, it was a refreshing watch, because admittedly my previous exposure "black" cinema was 1990's films like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society.  This film is the complete polar opposite of those.

To Sleep with Anger is all about family.  Through the generations, and the relationships and tensions contained therein.  The first two characters we meet are Gideon (Paul Butler) and his wife Suzie (Mary Alice), an older couple who come from the south and now live in South Central L.A.  They have retained several of their southern customs, including raising chickens in their backyard.  Gideon and Suzie have two adult children - Junior (Carl Lumbly) and Samuel (Richard Brooks), both of whom have wives and kids of their own.  On the surface, the familial unit is close and loving.  But we can see just under the surface that there are some old tensions and resentments, likely simmering for many years.  Cue the arrival of old friend Harry (Danny Glover) to the house.

It would be a mistake to say that Harry is the villain of this story.  He is an old friend of Gideon's from the south, and he has the same likability, charm and manners of Gideon and Suzie.  But his affect on all of the characters is unmistakable, especially Samuel.  Harry sees that Samuel has a strong resentment for everyone else in the immediate family and is more than willing to push those buttons.  This gets compounded when Gideon gets struck with a mysterious ailment and is suddenly bed-ridden.  To Sleep with Anger is a movie that is very heavily reliant on dialogue and symbolism, two elements that I'm admittedly a little lacking with my already suspect analytical skills.  But my pea-brain was able to deduce that Harry and Gideon represent the past while Junior and Samuel (and their own families) represent the present and future.  Harry's presence is meant to provide the spark that makes them catch fire and, ultimately, coexist.

Most of this film is achingly slow.  While I enjoy films that take their time to tell a story, there's taking your time and then there's...well, slow.  Again, I really dislike the boring descriptor, and this film is not boring.  But I do think that 10-15 minutes could have been trimmed from the running time, and the message would have been delivered with much more focus.  Having said that, the performances are almost uniformly excellent, especially by Glover as the affable guy with a touch of danger.  The final act is also surprisingly satisfying, bringing everything together and wrapping it in a nice little bow in a way that I haven't seen from any film in a good long while.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.  This isn't quite enough for a recommendation.  However, if you've got a STRONG tolerance for long dialogue scenes, there is some good stuff to be had here.

Sunday, November 28, 2021 Citizen Kane (1941) and Apocalypse Now (1979) at November 28, 2021

Greetings, fellow humanoids.  First and foremost, I have to state that I'm a dirty liar.  In the 30 Flicks Epilogue post, I said the following: "I've just written 30 movie reviews, but I can't wait to watch more movies!"  Well, nothing could have been further from the truth.  I was extremely burned out on watching movies at the completion of that project and wanted to watch nothing other than stupid YouTube videos about cats when it was over.  Couple this with taking on a new job at my workplace and the travel and training required therein, and movies were the last thing on my mind.  At long last, though, I'm now entrenched in a new routine and ready to start taking in some classic movies again.  

I chose to start with two movies that couldn't possibly be any more different - but both are considered among the greatest films ever made.  I watched one of them once some 15 years ago.  I had never seen the other in my life up until this point.  We're not doing the usual eight-paragraph format here - I cut them in half to four.  Call these fun-size reviews, or something much less lame.  Grab your popcorn for Movie #1...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1941

Directed by Orson Welles

Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, Agnes Moorehead, Paul Stewart, Ruth Warrick, Erskine Sanford and William Alland

Now that we have the inevitable reference to Orson Welles' sterling late-stage career as a frozen foods pitchman out of the way, let's get to business.  Citizen Kane, the movie that Welles wrote, produced, directed and starred in, released in 1941, forgotten for years before being re-appraised and spending multiple decades being considered the greatest film ever made.  I remember reading the mammoth-sized Roger Ebert essay on this film in one of the video companions and thinking that this sounded like the most magnificent thing ever committed to celluloid.  Lo and behold, I rented a DVD when I was in college...and no sir, I didn't like it.  I RESPECTED it - I could see the technological innovations and the storytelling techniques that would be endlessly copied for the rest of time.  But I couldn't connect with the story or characters at all.  Thus, I forgot about the movie for a long time.  Roughly halfway through 30 Flicks, though, I was aware that I was liking films that I would not have liked even five years ago.  This realization got me curious about Citizen Kane once more, asking myself if I would like it better now that I'm a 57-year-old man.

So, what is Citizen Kane?  Essentially, it is a creative mix of drama and fictional biography, with a touch of mystery thrown in.  The film opens with the death of title character Charles Foster Kane (Welles in a powerhouse performance) and his last word: "Rosebud."  Based on real-life media mogul William Randolph Hearst, Kane was a highly visible newspaper magnate who lived the last years of his life in seclusion at a palace called Xanadu.  The script introduces the basic storytelling device of a newsreel team's search for the meaning of the famous last word "Rosebud," and we follow this investigation with reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) as he interviews the various characters in Kane's life, seeing snippets of his past at each stop.

The film becomes a study in both megalomania and the power of human ego.  Kane's news empire is built on the idea of standing up for the working man (back when that was actually a thing), and his ambition seems to know no bounds.  He marries the President's niece and eventually begins a political career of his own.  His downfall comes when he meets would-be singer Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore) and becomes determined to make her an opera star.  From a story perspective, the best stuff in the movie undoubtedly comes in the segments dealing with the fall of Charles Foster Kane.  These scenes also give us some admittedly stunning cinematography tricks, such as the scene where Kane signs away control of his business and walks to the background, revealing that the windows there were MUCH larger than the viewer initially thought in a move that symbolizes the power he has just lost.  There are dozens of shots like that in the film, subtle and not-so-subtle visual cues that become a character in and of itself.

There is zero doubt that Citizen Kane was a revolutionary film.  It was a technical marvel in 1941, with striking "deep focus" camera work, optical illusions and eyeless cockatoos dazzling the eyes of audiences everywhere.  It was also endlessly creative from a script standpoint; rather than slog from A to Z in a straight line as all films before it, it jumps in and out of the various time periods in Kane's life.  But these were all things that I knew on that first watch.  So the question is still there: did I care about the story more?  Yes, I did.  I was able to recognize this time that the story of Charles Foster Kane is a tragedy about wanting to be loved and being unable to buy or influence people into doing this, and this theme connected with me.  More than my initial viewing, I also appreciated the awesome performance by Welles, going from a full-of-piss-and-vinegar muckraking publisher to a sad, bitter, dying 70-year-old effortlessly.  Is it the greatest film ever made?  I don't know...but neither does anybody else with absolute certitude.  That's the beauty of art, people.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****.  Citizen Kane still isn't exactly my type of film, and it's not one that I will be able to pop in any day of the week.  But it's definitely worth another watch sometime in the not-too-distant future to see if even more details stick out to me.  Highly recommended.

With that, time for Movie #2...

 

1979

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper

"My film is not a movie.  My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.  The way we made it was very much like the Americans were in Vietnam.  We were in the jungle, there were too many of us.  We had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane."  These were the words of director Francis Ford Coppola to describe the extremely troubled production of Apocalypse Now, and more appropriate words have never been spoken about a film.  The budget nearly doubling during, actors dealing with addictions and insecurities, the extreme weather of the Phillippines rearing its head on multiple occasions delaying the shoot and destroying sets...you name it, it happened while this film was being made.  It was only from this kind of shoot that a movie like Apocalypse Now could eventually result.  This was my first time watching the film, and I was absolutely riveted.  When it was over, I felt like I had been run over by a truck, but strangely, I wanted to watch it again.  And I did.

As the movie begins, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is given the mission of traveling far up the Nung River to terminate Special Forces Colonel Kurtz, a rogue officer waging his own kind of brutal war in Cambodia.  The central story of the film may revolve around the would-be assassin Willard, but this is very much an ensemble piece, as Willard's mission requires the use of a river patrol boat crew.  Every soldier on the vessel is given a distinct personality and dramatic purpose, with a very young Laurence Fishburne being a particular standout as trigger-happy gunman "Mr. Clean."  Along the way, the crew has dangerous encounters with the hallmarks of the Vietnam war - Montagnards, Viet Cong ambushes, even an over-the-top USO special.  These scrapes with danger are gloriously filmed but never glorified, as personified in the village raid led by Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall).  Duvall puts in a tour-de-force performance in his brief role, an officer who believes steadfastly in American superiority to the point that he makes his soldiers surf on the conquered beach after dropping the Napalm - which smells great in the morning, by the way.

The film is a perfect marriage of visual and script storytelling.  From a conventional standpoint, it is extremely well-structured, with narration by the obedient and single-minded Willard giving us brief glimpses into the life and times of his quarry Kurtz in various intervals as the boat gets closer to its destination.  Each episode on the river plays out like a vignette, with events that have consequence on the story moving forward ranging from an encounter with a tiger to character deaths.  I have indeed read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novel upon which this film is loosely based, but that was many years ago; from memory, I don't recall the source material being as effective as Apocalypse Now.  Visually, however, the film is definitely a Heart of Darkness.  Sometimes, the jungle is shown as green, vibrant and full of life.  Sometimes, it is dark, drab, and monotone.  And sometimes, most notably in the film's climax, it is almost unreal and abstract.  This is a movie that rewards you for watching, even when very ugly things are happening.

At one point, I had this pegged as one of the films that I would review for the 30 Flicks project.  It fit every criteria; it has a reputation as masterpiece, it has something to say, and I had never seen it before.  I ultimately decided against it simply because I already had six films from the '70s on the list and I wanted more balance when it came to the cinematic decades.  Had Apocalypse Now been included in 30 Flicks, it would have undoubtedly been my favorite film on the list.  It instantly became my favorite film about war, because it is only briefly concerned with blowing stuff up.  The film is about morality, about a character in Kurtz who makes eloquent arguments for committing atrocities and another in Willard who seems to have no philosophy at all but needs a mission like a drug.  In these two characters, the audience sees the effect that war has on the human psyche, and this theme was never represented better than it was here.  Lastly, I initially watched the film in its 2019 "Final Cut" version, which clocks in at just over three hours.  I followed this up by watching the original theatrical cut, and this was actually my preferred version.  Leaner and meaner, the film's 1979 cut maintains a steadier pace and tone.  It also does not contain the much-debated French plantation sequence which almost grinds the movie to a halt just before act three in the Final Cut.

Rating time: **** out of **** with very little internal debate.  Unforgettable, powerful, well-acted and beautifully shot, this flick immediately launched onto the list of my favorite movies of all time.  Although I'm still waiting on that musical version:

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 Epilogue at October 13, 2021

 

 

It's over?  It's really over?

What you've just read wasn't the result of a lack of effort.  I'm going to estimate conservatively and say that the average length of the 30 Flicks was two hours.  Right there, that's 60 hours.  It takes me roughly 90 minutes to plan and write a review, so that's an additional 45 hours, bringing us to a grand total of 105 hours to create this here blog.  That's just a hair short of four days of my life, people, and I did it in just a hair under two months.  I love watching movies and I love writing reviews for people, but I would do one review a week for my previous blog.  By my standard, this was a sprint.  Right now, I never want to look at my keyboard again, but I must attempt to put a nice little bow on this whole thing.

I suppose I should open up the curtain about what led to me taking this project on.  It probably goes all the way back to last summer, when I made it a point to buy a ticket for Christopher Nolan's Tenet.  I've never been the biggest Nolan fan, finding his movies to be all brain, no heart, but I wanted to support this film as it was the first big-budget movie to be released in theaters since the Coof came along and made everything illegal.  To make a long story short, I hated this movie, finding it to be the personification of everything wrong with modern cinema.  I mean...the name of the protagonist in this movie is Protagonist.  If that alone doesn't tell you that character and investment are secondary to blowing shit up in modern films, I don't know what will.  I walked out of the movie somewhere around the halfway point.  To me, this was unwatchable, a new low even in an era where endless franchises, sequels and reboots are all we get spoon-fed.

This incident got me thinking about the last time that I was truly blown away by a modern movie, and it likely goes back to Zodiac and Gran Torino, the last two films that I saw more than once in theaters.  With the knowledge that the new slate of movies just isn't for me anymore, I knew I had to go back to the past to find what I wanted.  This realization is what led me to the Criterion Channel streaming service in June of this year, at which point the rough outline for 30 Flicks with Lick formed in my brain.  I could review classic movies in my classic dumbass way, occasionally digging deeper when a movie connected with the analytical part of my brain and giving my interpretation of what a particular film and/or film-maker was trying to convey.  I then went about selecting the films, finding 20 of them on the Criterion Channel and going out of my way to purchase the remaining 10 on physical media.  It was hard to fall back into my Lick Ness Monster rhythm, but I eventually settled in to a nice regimen of three films a week.  Finally, after plenty of blood, sweat and tears, the reviews were written and I'd beaten my self-imposed October deadline.

For me, watching these films was an enjoyable experience.  On the classic Ebert scale that I've never strayed away from in my entire history of reviewing movies, three stars and up equals a "Thumbs Up."  By that definition, I would give 19 of the 30 films a positive review.  The average star rating at the end of it all was 2.83.  One thing that I was very curious about when this started was whether or not any of the films I saw would crack my all-time 50 favorite films list.  Alas, one did - True Stories, the truly wonderful, truly unique look at small town living from David Byrne that wound up being one of the most entertaining films I've ever seen.  It wears the crown as champion of the 30 Flicks, followed closely by Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mystery Train, the three other films to get the coveted (in my own mind and no one else's) four-star rating.  If I was to list the films in order of preference, it would go like this:

True Stories
Walkabout
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Mystery Train
Barry Lyndon
The 400 Blows
Minority Report
The Last Seduction
Dark City
Gone With the Wind
Blood Simple
A Fistful of Dollars
Chinatown
Gosford Park
In the Mood for Love
Great Expectations
The Seventh Seal
Five Corners
Eraserhead
Clueless
The Brood
Belle de Jour
Blow Out
Godzilla
The Graduate
The Hidden Fortress
The Third Man
The Adjuster
8 1/2
Casino

And now for a few words about what I've learned from the 30 Flicks.  I intentionally picked films that sounded like they would challenge me, taking me out of my comfort zone of '70s and '80s horror films that I've watched almost exclusively for well over a decade now.  They say that you're not learning if you're not fucking up, and films that fuck your world up are the ones that make you learn.  I touched on this in my Overture post, but it bears repeating: modern cinema isn't challenging.  It is completely safe and politically correct to a point that I can't believe any of the auteurs of the past who made it a point to thumb their nose at conventional thinking could possibly approve of it.  Modern film and television is amazingly shallow.  They're safe products designed to not offend people and turn a profit...and that's pretty much it.  There were elements in every one of the 30 Flicks that went deeper than the surface; even in the ones that I strongly disliked, they made me think.

Good cinema is timeless.  They can teach us things seemingly from beyond the grave, with subsequent generations finding meaning in them that could not possibly have been gleamed from the audience they were designed for.  There were times where I saw parallels to today's world in some of these films, and this discovery confirmed a suspicion that I've had for the last few years that yesteryear's progressive thought has now turned decidedly regressive.  The same people who were once champions of blue collar workers, free speech and color-blindness are now all about corporate power, censorship and diversity quotas.  In addition, virtually all of the messages being conveyed in entertainment today are carefully engineered.  In the films that I watched, the themes and points were enjoyably subtle.  They left things up to the viewer for interpretation, presenting us with characters and situations that garnered audience empathy as a way for the film-maker to say what they wanted to say.  So this goes out to everyone who argues with memes on Facebook - embrace art, not politics, because art changes minds.  Politics just destroy your soul.  The proof?  It has destroyed entertainment.

Finally, these 30 Flicks reinforced something that I learned a long, long time ago, starting with the Roger Ebert books that set this entire story in motion:  pay attention to a movie's opening credits, particularly to the name that comes after "Directed by."  I'm a big supporter of actors; when I dislike a film, the actors are usually the last people I'll blame, because they do the best they can with what they're given.  But a director, a film-maker, is the person who makes a film what it is.  The director has the vision and executes what is laid out in the technical document known as a screenplay, adding their own personality and flair.  I have something like 200 films on my Criterion Channel watchlist right now, and the ones that I'm seeking out first are the works of Jim Jarmusch, Peter Weir and Francois Truffaut.  I've just written 30 movie reviews, but I can't wait to watch more movies!

My horror blog wasn't heavily read.  Odds are this one won't be, either.  But if it encourages anyone, whether they be family members, my sparse group of friends, or total strangers to venture  beyond the safety of modern content and challenge themselves, I'll call this project a success.  Just because something is old doesn't mean it sucks.  I've lived by this, and it's led to some great discoveries.  Challenge yourself, make some of your own discoveries, and thanks for reading!