Thursday, September 30, 2021 Blow Out (1981) at September 30, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Brian De Palma

Starring John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz

I have a lot of precious movie memories.  One of the best is undoubtedly watching Pulp Fiction for the first time.  I read all about this flick in one of the Ebert companions, knew all of the secrets, almost every plot twist and even a few key sequences of dialogue by heart.  The film did not disappoint, due in no small part due to leading man John Travolta's layered, greasy-cool performance as assassin/philosopher Vincent Vega.  This is the guy who first came to prominence on a dumb TV show, and since then we've seen him rise and fall...rise and fall...fall further, and then somehow rise again!  How could he survive The Fanatic?  He's not human, I tell ya!

One of the joys of the cinephile life is noticing which acting crew tends to pop up with certain directors.  This was Travolta's second collaboration with director Brian De Palma, a man who has directed two of my favorite horror films of all time with Carrie and Dressed to Kill, the latter of which was released a scant year before this one.  He has also been behind some films that I'm not particularly fond of, first and foremost being Scarface, primarily because I'm not a huge punker for gangster movies in general and secondarily because Pacino had the worst fake accent in the history of cinema in it.  Some things just can't be unheard.  Coming into this film, I knew that he undoubtedly had a huge hard-on for Alfred Hitchcock as seen in the camera-circling prom dance scene in Carrie and almost the entire running time of Dressed to Kill.  Here, he introduces political intrigue and Giallo influence into the mix.  The result is a film with fascinating parts, but the sum of its parts is a mess when it comes to structure and execution.

No matter what else I'll say about this film, it has an amazing opening sequence - a long, Halloween-style POV tracking shot as a killer stalks a female dormitory, complete with every trope in the book in this time period when slasher movies ruled cinemas.  The scene turns out to be a movie within a movie and out introduction to Jack Terry (John Travolta), movie sound effects expert who is told by the director of the generic horror film to find better wind sounds.  Jack heads out into the Philadelphia night, and much like many a hero in a Dario Argento Giallo film, his sound equipment catches the explosion of a car tire just before a car careens off a nearby road into the river below.  Jack dives in, spotting a dead male occupant and rescuing a live female.

The car wreck is the linchpin event that sets the story in motion.  The script introduces some higher stakes with the identity of the guy who didn't survive the plunge - the Governor of Pennsylvania and the man who almost certainly would have been the next President.  The girl is Sally Bedina, played by frequent De Palma leading lady and his real-life wife Nancy Allen.  The film gets its title from the sounds that Jack recorded that fateful night, with a gunshot coming just a split-second before the tire blow out that caused the car to spiral toward its doom.  In this way, the movie definitely shows its Giallo influence; in many Italian thrillers, we get a the man who works in an artistic field witnessing a murder and summarily becoming obsessed with solving it.  This movie is De Palma's version of that story.  You can definitely rip off worse things than Dario Argento.

The film does not have the singular focus of an Argento film.  Instead, it begins throwing paranoia in every direction.  Paranoia is the word in Blow Out, as characters ranging from police officers to politicians to unscrupulous photographers (one of whom is a classic weasel played by Dennis Franz) show up connected to the death.  We do get elements of characterization for both Jack and Sally as both have past actions that they are not exactly proud of.  There is a long flashback sequence involving Jack in a previous job working to bring down police corruption where he inadvertently causes the death of a co-worker.  Sally, meanwhile, is slowly revealed to be one of the conspirators, and her presence in the car was no coincidence.

The entire movie has this layer of deprecating, almost bitter cynicism toward everyone in authority.  Like Chinatown, it is an enjoyable and refreshing idea in these days of being told to just appreciate our overlords and accept authority at face value.  However, it can get tiresome when we're given no motive, no suspects, no reason to believe the bad guys are beatable.  That's what the real world is for.  In the world of Blow Out, the villains are wraiths, with one exception - Burke (John Lithgow), the assassin whose job is to snuff out all of the loose ends that Jack is keeping out there with his off-the-record investigation.  Lithgow, as always, is awesome in his role, but I just believe that we need more of an onscreen threat than one man.  As the film nears its appropriately bleak ending, I found myself invested, but not particularly surprised at the way things turned out.  There was no hope in the previous 100 minutes, so why should the last five be any different?

The central motif of the film is cinema itself.  To the end that the movie's protagonist works in the film industry, De Palma once again throws out all the stops when it comes to visual techniques.  One scene in particular is very impressive.  It occurs when Jack arrives at his apartment after Burke has just erased all of his sound recordings.  The camera rotates around the room in kaleidoscope fashion as a frantic Jack begins throwing tape after tape in his machine, panicking that his life's work is gone.  The movie also contains fantastic use of night-time footage, a conscientious decision that no doubt contributes to the film's overall pessimism.  However, there is also one bit that is much too showy for its own good, a murder scene in a construction area filmed with loud, distracting musical stingers that would have been much more effective in near silence.  Less is more, people.

I enjoyed Blow Out for its technical elements and for Travolta's turn as the tortured hero, but I did not find it as enjoyable as the other De Palma films that I mentioned.  The overall negative tone of the movie cannot be blamed for this; Carrie ends on a downer, but it contains moments of absolution for its central characters and is as emotionally satisfying as a film gets.  Ditto Dressed to Kill.  This film lacks those moments for its main characters. It is negative just for the sake of being negative.  Lastly...I have to say that I found Nancy Allen's performance as Sally to be pretty bad.  The character should be the emotional heart of the film, but she comes across as a one-note ditz.  I like Allen as an actress - she's great as the meanest of the mean girls in Carrie and the hooker with the heart of gold in Dressed to Kill.  This role, though, was a misfire.  You can't win 'em all.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.  The fantastic visuals and references contained in Blow Out definitely lend to its credence as a cult favorite.  I just feel that there are movies that fall in within its various genres that are far better.  Seek some of those out.  #DarioArgentoIsGod

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 The Brood (1979) at September 29, 2021

 

Directed by David Cronenberg

Starring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds

Here we go - an honest-to-goodness horror movie!  This is my wheelhouse.  I've loved this genre ever since my grade school days when I checked out the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books over and over from my grade school library, which led to me discovering Stephen King later on and a lifelong obsession that continues to this day.  To date, I own 426 horror films on physical media and still watch 2-3 horror films a week, regardless of whether I've seen them or not.  Suffice to say, if you never read my previous blog (and let's face it - 99.999999999999% of the world didn't), I'm always more than ready for a good creepy time and a smorgasbord of stage blood.

Thus, I'm a little disappointed to report that The Brood - the one horror film that I selected for 30 Flicks - failed to impress the fuck out of me.  It bums me out, because I was extremely jacked to see it.  The director is David Cronenberg, who gave us one of the two best remakes in cinema history with 1986's The Fly, along with Videodrome and A History of Violence.  This is a trio of movies that I'm very familiar with and have seen multiple times, and I know his reputation as a guy who makes bizarre movies with plenty of balls.  "Killer kid" movies are an entire subgenre of horror, and a film of this nature with Cronenberg at the helm seems like a can't-miss proposition.

The movie isn't exactly Village of the Damned, for better or worse.  For much of the running time, this is actually a very conventional horror story, which was the exact opposite of what I expected.  The story presented in The Brood serves as an extended metaphor for the dissolution of a nuclear family built around three principal characters.  There is Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), the severely disturbed wife and mother under the care of a shock psychiatrist.  There is her husband Frank (Art Hindle), a fairly colorless guy who essentially serves to move the plot forward at the audience's convenience.  And there is their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds), girl of few words who thankfully doesn't play into the trope of movie children who have insight and dialogue skills way over what their abilities should be.

The star of the show, however, is Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), the man overseeing the recovery of Nola after a breakdown that may or may not have been caused by her estrangement from Frank.  I was more than familiar with Reed before this movie.  He is a veteran of many classic Hammer horror films and was always fantastic in the dashing beefcake role.  Here, he gets to go way over the top and have fun.  He has good material to work with in this regard, as Dr. Raglan is a fringe psych expert who specializes in something called "psychoplasmics."  To demonstrate, the first scene of the film shows Raglan berating one of his male patients and acting like a paternal figure, causing the poor guy to disrobe and reveal welts and sores all over his body.  The general idea is that he causes physical changes in his subjects to get them to face their demons.  Admittedly, it's an out-there and somewhat unbelievable concept, but no more than Split.  It can be forgiven.

The story arc of The Brood consists of a series of slow burns leading to kill scenes.  If you've seen John Carpenter's Halloween, you've seen this movie when it comes to the slicing and dicing.  Various people in the film who have done real or perceived wrong to Nola are the targets, with her abusive mother and neglectful father being the initial targets.  The people doing the killing are also a subject of interest, deformed dwarves who vaguely resemble Candice.  Gradually, we learn that these creatures are a sort of asexual clone, lacking the sign of placental birth.  Who, and what, are they?  This becomes the question of the movie at roughly the two-thirds mark, and it's a good thing, because there are a LOT of scenes featuring Frank walking around asking people questions that barely kept my attention.

As far as horror climaxes go, you can definitely do worse than The Brood.  We get all of the answers we're looking for and an effective showdown/chase sequence.  The ending contains one moment in particular that got a legitimate "oh shit" reaction out of yours truly, followed by some stomach-churning stuff that will stick with me for a while.  I don't know what it is, but visuals in films that deal directly with childbirth always get under my skin.  I can watch Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers slice people up into pastrami with machetes without blinking an eye, but show a birth sac and I have to turn my eyes.

The biggest flaw that I noticed while watching the film is that it focuses most of its attention on the Frank character.  With the right screenplay and the right actor, this character could be very compelling.  As it is, he's just kind of a boring schlub, who isn't helped at all by a performance from Hindle whose one default expression is mild concern.  Perhaps it wouldn't stand out so much if it wasn't opposite the great turns from not only Reed as Dr. Raglan but also Eggar as the wife.  The script is ambiguous when it comes to just what led to her being in Raglan's care; was it something in the marriage, or something from her traumatic childhood?  We never find out.  Nola Carveth is a character that we want to spend more time with.  Her scenes with Raglan are electric - just two people talking, but chock full of emotion and resonance.

My biggest complaint with The Brood is that I did not find it to be an effective horror film.  It is certainly an interesting film from a psychological standpoint, but it lacks the flair that a John Carpenter or Wes Craven would give to their subjects.  Those words are surprising for me to type, considering how much memorable, sick stuff was present in The Fly.  The death scenes are choppily edited and uninspired, and our hero character doesn't give us the sympathetic punch that you typically need in the final act.  I remember reading in the past that Cronenberg had actually just went through a bitter divorce of his own before writing this film.  Keeping that in mind gives the movie a bit more weight while also making it simultaneously funny on a certain level.  This has got to be the most fucked-up way of dealing with a breakup ever put on film.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.   The ending serves as a good payoff to a pedestrian build-up, but most of this movie just didn't grab me.  Chalk it up to being a jaded horror fan.

Tuesday, September 28, 2021 Eraserhead (1977) at September 28, 2021

 

Directed by David Lynch

Starring Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates and Judith Roberts

Here's a rare example of a movie that I didn't hear about for the first time in an Ebert companion.  This time, it was An Album of Modern Horror Films, by some random person whose name I can't even remember.  This particular book was well-worn and had been checked out something like 17,000 times from my middle school library, and it mentioned a surrealist body horror film called Eraserhead somewhere in its mustard-stained pages.  For the record, that book is also where I first discovered Prom Night, Love at First Bite, and Alice, Sweet Alice, so huzzah for this priceless tome.

I don't know if that book was being entirely accurate, because Eraserhead is anything but a horror film.  It's occasionally quite gory, but it is more a bizarre drama about anxiety than anything else.  Of course, the film-maker in question is David Lynch, a guy who I've seen a decent amount of films from (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet to name a few) and also a guy who has a reputation for being strange.  This was his first real movie, a passion project that he pursued for five years while he was working at the American Film Institute.  The film kept running out of funding, putting the filming on pause, but Lynch stuck with it and the result was this - a movie that was in and out of theaters in a heartbeat but gained serious steam in the ensuing years playing the midnight movie circuit, to the point that it is now considered one of the best films of all time.  Is it?  In my book...not quite.  But a film doesn't acquire a story like this without some merits.

Warning - this isn't going to be one of my typical reviews, where the following few paragraphs focus exclusively on the plot.  Why?  This isn't a typical movie.  The first thing that needs to be conveyed about Eraserhead is that it is an atypical watch.  For starters, there is very little dialogue.  I don't have exact statistics for you, but I'd be willing to bet that the film's characters don't speak more than 300 words.  Instead, Lynch tells this story in an intensely visual way, with characters skulking about decorated sets and locations for long stretches of silence with somber, moody music as the backdrop.  Sound and sound editing also play a big role in telling the film's story, with the more disturbing things that occur featuring loud screeches that get turned up to 11 on the sonic oscillator.  +2 points to you if you get that reference.

The movie's protagonist, as it were, is Henry Spencer, factory printer (a job that all cool people have, by the way) who inhabits a beauty-free industrialized world and lives in a one-room apartment adorned with stacks of dirt and dead vegetation.  The symbolism of this escapes me - perhaps it represents Henry's lifeless existence?  Spencer is played by Jack Nance, and man was this guy a trooper - he kept the haircut you see in the movie poster above for all five years that this movie took to film in its varying intervals.

The narrative hinges on Spencer's girlfriend, the shy and strange Mary X (Charlotte Stewart).  An early dinner sequence with Mary and her family establishes that Mary has recently had Henry's baby.  We then are introduced to the baby, a mutated creature with a worm-like appearance.  It mews like a human baby, with surgical tape wrapping its body.  The constant noise of the baby soon drive Mary away from the house, leaving the frazzled Spencer to take care of it by himself.  There is a curious incident not soon thereafter where he repeatedly attempts to leave his apartment only for the baby to start crying as soon as he opens the door.  Not soon thereafter, it becomes sick and develops black marks all over its face.

If you haven't gleamed it by now, this isn't a film that unspools with first, second and third acts.  The story plays out in a repeated series of fantasy and dream sequences.  We get more than one appearance of the Woman in the Radiator (Laurel Near), operatic singer with massive cheeks in Henry's radiator who appears desperate to please a nonexistent audience.  The first character we see in the film is another one of these apparitions - the Man in the Planet (Jack Fisk), who frantically pulls levers inside a black planet that I'm fairly certain is meant to be an allegory for male sexual urge.  If you keep those two things in mind, the movie becomes infinitely easier to understand, particularly in the late stages when the spoken words become even more sparse and the movie starts hurtling blood at you.

The movie plays out as an extended metaphor about the fear of fatherhood.  The baby's monstrous appearance is the most obvious tell on this, as such a dependent creature must appear to a new father.  The Woman in the Radiator at one point stomps many smaller versions of the baby; considering the ending of the film, this character seems to be Henry's dark, tempting side.  Speaking of the ending, if you keep in mind the symbols that I've laid out thus far, it really is some pretty sickening stuff.  More sickening than what we see on screen, even.

David Lynch has an entire filmography of weird movies, but this is probably the magnum opus of weird.  Believe me, no matter how weird this movie may seem to you having read the review thus far...they top it.  There's a bit in the dinner sequence with Mary's family where Henry carves a chicken that starts to move in time with Mary's mother moaning in apparent sexual ecstasy.  I'm not going to lie...I considered turning the movie off and trying to find an easier-to-understand 1970s film instead.  Obviously I stuck with it, and while I don't consider this an enjoyable movie, Lynch has created something here that everyone should check out once in their lives.

Rating time: *** out of ****.  I really did like this movie, but not in the way that I would ever want to watch it again.  And since the Woman in the Radiator sings about how in Heaven everything is fine, I figured that...

Monday, September 27, 2021 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) at September 27, 2021

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Peter Weir

Starring Anne-Louise Lambert, Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse and Margaret Nelson

One particular Roger Ebert review that I vividly remember reading is the one for this movie.  I was a little older than when I first discovered the 1987 book at the Worthington public library; by this point, I was reading from the 1996 edition, just flipping through it one night for something to do before going to sleep.  I saw four stars next to this title and thought, "eh, why not?"  Even though the film in question wasn't a horror movie, the premise and Ebert's description of it spooked me the hell out.  I was also listening to "The Battle of Evermore" at the same time which only augmented the creepiness.  Needless to say, I was intrigued.

To make a long story short, the film was indeed very awesome.  It's not exactly a terrifying film, but I didn't expect that.  It is, however, an unnerving film, with film-making techniques being employed that seem designed to get under your skin.  Also, and very surprisingly for a film that's predominantly about the residents of an all-girls' college in Australia, I found myself really invested and interested in the rather large cast of characters that are presented to us.  And what happens to them?  Let's find out.

The film establishes an early mood of dread with its opening title card, of which I won't spoil quite yet.  The setting is Appleyard College in the year 1900, with the opening scenes establishing the feel and stature of this prestigious institute.  Most movies that take place in an affluent school establish a feel of authoritarianism in the teachers and administration, but this one really doesn't - everyone involved with running the college seems to be fair-minded if not a little stuffy.  One relationship in particular is singled out for observation, with the shy Sara (Margaret Nelson) seeming oddly obsessed with her popular blonde roommate Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert).  It's a connection that we will see through to the bitter end.

The title of the film comes from a field trip that Miranda and a few other students will be taking on Valentine's Day to a local geological formation known as Hanging Rock.  The sequence at Hanging Rock is undoubtedly the best stuff in the film.  Some people consider the film a mystery, but I believe this to be a mistake, as the events that take place here are not meant to be clues.  Instead, everything here is designed to gradually trap you in as Miranda and her friends slowly ascend the Rock toward its strange summit with a huge monolith overlooking them.  This segment of the film concludes with a genuinely disturbing scene that shows the students' alleged final moments before disappearing into the nothingness.

From here, the movie becomes an exploration of the impact that the disappearance of Miranda, her two friends and a chaperone have on the school.  Obviously, everyone at the college is devastated by the entire party not coming home safely.  But it's the WAY that they disappeared, completely without a trace and seemingly with no idea as to how it occurred, that seems to be most devastating.  One of the last people to see the girls alive eventually becomes obsessed with finding the students, taking a trip on horseback up to Hanging Rock and shockingly finding one of the missing girls alive.  The kicker?  She has absolutely no memory of what happened.

The third act is essentially a tragedy, as all of these events come to a head at the college.  The narrative begins to increasingly focus on Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts), the school's headmistress who has done her best to deal with the situation.  Cracks begin to appear in her icy facade, however, especially in a stirring scene where she rehearses a speech to a student about her overdue tuition and cries after delivering the news.  The events that conclude Picnic at Hanging Rock are not shocks; they're extensions of where the story has taken us thus far carried out the nth degree, like the best stories should do.

This film is all about atmosphere.  To that end, Peter Weir (who would later go on to direct classics like Witness, The Truman Show and Master and Commander) does one of the finest directing jobs I've seen in any movie.  He is a film-maker with a decisive vision, and he is able to make that vision stick with an audience.  Here, he decides to go with a "less is more" approach.  The movie has a very slow, deliberate pace that lulls you in to its jagged edges and posh schools.  The Hanging Rock scenes in particular are outstanding in their execution, with the streams, trees and animals also welcoming the characters in while the giant rocks at the summit lord over them like Gods.

One line that I vividly remember from the Ebert review actually centered on a criticism from a contemporary, who said that this movie is "too damn impenetrable for its own good."  It is true that we never find out what exactly happened to the four women on Hanging Rock.  This is appropriate.  Sometimes, the unknown is more satisfying than any explanation that can be given.  It is not a subversion; rather, it is an emotionally fulfilling decision, because the story ultimately is not about solving the mystery.  It's about the effect that the events have on everyone, dealing with loss and the power of grief.  And grief has some kind of power by the end of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Rating time: Here it comes again...**** out of ****.  One major takeaway from 30 Flicks with Lick thus far has been that Australia's new wave of cinema (see also the earlier Walkabout) kicks ass.  Check this one out.

Sunday, September 26, 2021 Barry Lyndon (1975) at September 26, 2021

 

 

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Diana Koerner, Gay Hamilton and Leon Vitali

 

There was no film-maker past or present who challenged the viewer quite like Stanley Kubrick.  He was a relentless auteur who picked stories and subjects that seem tailor-made to do didactic message movies - from war (Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket) to technology (2001: A Space Odyssey) to the dissolution of nuclear family (The Shining) - and he had the bravery to present them to the audience in a way that doesn't proselytize them.  He often also did this in the most out-there, trippy way that could possibly be conveyed.

1975's Barry Lyndon was the film that came directly before The Shining on Kubrick's filmography, and the only one of his major films that I hadn't seen.  Its lackluster reception at the time is what led to him picking a horror film as his ensuing project.  It's easy to see why this movie was a hard sell to the general public.  It was historical fiction, for starters, a genre that doesn't fare very well at the box office unless you have a Harlequin Titanic-style schmaltzy love story attached.  It also has a very slow pace, a three-hour running time and that trademark Kubrick opressively cold atmosphere that keeps every character at an arm's length.  Having said all of that, it is also an immensely engaging watch with deeply layered storytelling, a mix of different themes, and plenty of amazing sights to behold from a film-making standpoint.

Like many tragedies, the story of Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) starts with ill-fated love.  The setting is 18th century Ireland, and Barry is infatuated with his cousin Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton).  While the romance starts off promising, it soon spirals when Nora catches the eye of a British army officer and agrees to marry him.  This leads to Barry challenging the officer to a pistol duel and winning, a move that results in his banishment and travels all around Europe.  Regarding the structure of this film, it is indeed loose, but every scene has a purpose and seems to lead directly into the next.  For a movie that clocks in at 187 minutes, the script feels lean, due in no small part to an ever-present voice-over from a narrator who is never seen as an onscreen character.

The next phase of Barry's life centers around his entering the military and service in the Seven Years' War, a move that seems merely convenient at the time due to his status as a wanted man.  He begins the war in the British army but eventually deserts before being recaptured by the Prussian forces and forced to join their ranks.  There are some great scenes in this section of the film, particularly a long, unbroken shot of musket after musket being inserted into a sniper's hole and firing their payloads.  Barry is a brave soldier, saving his commanding officer (and Prussian abductor, no less) and gaining enough trust to engage in an espionage mission when his military service has concluded.  This move is what brings him to Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee).

The second half of Barry Lyndon is a difficult watch, far less entertaining than the first but no less engaging.  In that way, it is very similar to Kubrick's later war opus Full Metal Jacket, which began as a funny, angry and heartbreaking film about basic training and ended as a Vietnam war thriller.  I also noticed many similarities to Gone With the Wind, with a character doomed by early love who makes it their mission to acquire riches by any means necessary.  Barry sees those means as a result of his association with the Chevalier and their standing in high society, noticing the Countess Lyndon (the beautiful Marisa Berenson) along with her elderly husband and young son.  It isn't long until the Countess' husband has passed on, leaving Barry wide open to swoop in, marry her, and claim her last name as his own.

The final act consists of the fall of this character.  The newly-minted Barry Lyndon has a son with his new wife who later dies in a horse-riding accident; yup, just like Gone With the Wind, although the novel this film was based on predates that one by almost a century, so no ripoff here.  What the story focuses on, however, is Barry's relationship with his stepson Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali).  To put it mildly, this union is tempestuous at best, with the kid holding a great deal of enmity for the rogue after his family's titles and riches.  The conflict eventually builds up to the film's climactic and quite unpredictable duel scene, which ranks only slightly behind this in all-time best cinematic duels:

Barry Lyndon is yet another visual feast from Kubrick.  The film's interior shots are masterworks of set and production design, with the night scenes often being filmed utilizing only natural lighting in a technique that Kubrick had to create for the film.  The exteriors are no less memorable, with the lush Irish countryside serving as the stand-in for not only Ireland but also England and Prussia during the war scenes.  In short, 300 principal filming days of prime, ridiculous, obsessive-compulsive disorder Stanley Kubrick on display in glorious 4K resolution if you're willing to shell out thirty bucks for the Criterion Collection Blu-ray.

Speaking of the Criterion Blu-ray, the back of the box admittedly made me laugh, describing the movie's message in no uncertain terms at all as a repudiation of opulence, aristocracy and riches.  You know...in every interview that Stanley Kubrick ever had, he became extremely annoyed if the interviewer asked him, "what does this mean?"  He didn't WANT to spell out the meaning of his films.  He was all about ambiguity and leaving everything up to interpretation for the viewer, and this film was no different.  My take-away from this film is that people are not good at heart.  We're all selfish assholes who seek creature comforts and material things for superficial pleasure, and it takes concerted effort and application to be better.  You can argue that this is confirmation bias on my part, and you wouldn't be wrong, but that's the beauty of Kubrick's works.  You're free to take anything from art that you want, and this is what great art - and great cinema - is all about.

Rating: *** 1/2 out of ****.  While I didn't feel an attachment to any of the characters (and wasn't meant to), this was an endlessly fascinating and eye-popping story where I couldn't wait to find out what happened next.  Check this one out.

Saturday, September 25, 2021 Chinatown (1974) at September 25, 2021

 

 

Directed by Roman Polanski

Starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, Perry Lopez, Burt Young, Roy Jenson and John Huston

I love the mystery genre.  There's something about hard-boiled detectives, sex jazz music and sultry dames that I've always loved.  This love reached an apex with the early-to-mid-'90s Joe Eszterhas "Murderotica" thrillers.  Basic Instinct, Jade, Sliver, the Silk Stalkings television series, I love that stuff.  Why did this particular little sub-genre die out, anyway?  Is it because of Hollywood's general aversion at a certain point when it came to selling sex appeal to audiences?  Some of the most profitable movies of all time fit this mold, so it's hard to believe that it was purely a business decision.

My love for mystery is what brought me to Chinatown, a movie that I was more than familiar with via a few parodies and magazine articles but had never seen before.  It also marks my third film by director Roman Polanski.  For the record, the previous two were Repulsion, which I initially disliked and later loved upon rewatch; and Rosemary's Baby, which I also initially disliked and still disliked the second time around.  Where does this film rank?  Somewhere in the middle.  I liked it, but didn't love it.  It was certainly entertaining and even riveting at points, but overall I found Chinatown to be lacking the depth present in Walkabout or Picnic at Hanging Rock that blew me away earlier in the project.  By my estimation, everything in this film is essentially on the surface.  Fortunately, that surface has some pretty good stuff, so without further adieu let's get to looking at what it has to offer from a plot standpoint.

The setting of Chinatown is prime film noir territory.  It's the late 1930s in Los Angeles, with a private detective whose office looks like the space that my dentist still has to this day.  The private detective the movie centers on is Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), and the first time we meet him he has just proven to a suspicious husband (Burt Young in his pre-Paulie days) that his wife is having an affair.  It's a quick scene that establishes in show-don't-tell fashion the kind of character this man is and the kind of clientele he happily takes on.  Not soon thereafter, Jake is hired by a mysterious woman to tail the L.A. head honcho of water under suspicion of adultery.  Cue moody music.  It's all the sort of stuff that lends itself to late nights reading pulpy novels, and Polanski has a field day with all of it.  From an atmospheric standpoint, we've got an A+ on our hands here.

While Jake Gittes is the protagonist of Chinatown, the heart of the movie is Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the soon-to-be-widowed wife of the L.A. water honcho.  Yup, the guy that Jake was following turns up dead from apparent accidental drowning.  I noticed immediately upon watching that Evelyn doesn't seem terribly bothered by her husband's sudden passing, but this is an intentional move; everything gets explained in due time.  While Nicholson is aces in this movie as always, the movie really does belong to Dunaway, whose performance carries a ton of emotional weight.  These were two actors here who had recently become superstars and, amazingly, they were still at the top of their game.

The script throws us tons of paths, riddles and red herrings for Jake and Evelyn to uncover throughout the story.  The motive for the murder is linked to a proposed dam that the city wants to build in the midst of a severe drought, and this dam has no shortage of people linked to it.  First and foremost is Evelyn's own father Noah Cross (John Huston in a great slimy performance), a guy who also happened to be her deceased husband's old business partner.  There is security chief Walter Mulvihill (Roy Jenson), who slashes Jake's nostril open in the first act in a fairly bloody scene.  There are the various shady police officers involved in the story, first and foremost an old coworker of Jake's named Escobar (Perry Lopez).  Even Evelyn herself isn't beyond suspicion.  The writer didn't put her in the story just to be a love interest, folks.

By the end of the film, we do get definitive answers about just what led to the initial murder and why all of the various dangerous people are now after Jake Gittes.  It does not necessarily lead to a conclusion that wraps up into a nice little bow and a sunset ending.  Like many popular, acclaimed films of the 1970s, Chinatown is deeply cynical, suspicious of everyone and everything that holds power.  Regardless of how much I may or may not like them, it really is exciting to watch films from this time period, when cinema was proudly anti-everything.  It's such a juxtaposition to today, with Presidential First Ladys appearing like Big Brother's proverbial face at the Oscars to a thunderous ovation and the overpowered Christ-like Marvel superheroes lording over gracious civilians no matter how many times their actions lead to their deaths.  We are now told to shut up and just be thankful that such smart, capable people are in charge. Give me '70s paranoia any day.

Let's get to what I liked about the movie.  First and foremost were the performances by Nicholson and Dunaway, who both dive right into their characters and, for brief moments, made me forget that I was watching two of the most celebrated actors of all time and gave the story a documentary feel.  Polanski seemed to view it that way, as well, as long shots follow Nicholson from just over a shoulder, granting the audience a voyeuristic look into the life of this sharp, somewhat crude detective.  In recent years there has been more than a little controversy about Polanski's personal life (just type his name into Google if you don't know).  If you can separate the art from the artist, there is a lot to admire about his film-making style.  The score by Jerry Goldsmith is also fantastic, radiating danger at all the right moments and setting the tone in scenes where characters simply talk and smoke cigarettes.  Which happens quite frequently, by the way.

I actually felt like this was rather pedestrian as a mystery.  It definitely does leave the viewer wondering whodunnit, but the Columbo-style flow of logic, the moments of discovery, and the genuine shocks that the genre is noted for are noticeably lacking.  No doubt this was an intentional subversion by the screenwriter; the '70s was the decade of subversion, after all.  But it does baffle me why this is considered an outstanding mystery.  My takeaway from this film was that it is a serviceable mystery elevated by some truly great elements - the performances, the directing, the score.  The elements are almost as great as those found in this undisputed masterpiece:

Rating time: *** out of ****.  For Nicholson, Dunaway and the music alone, this movie is definitely worth a watch.  All other enjoyment you get out of Chinatown is gravy.

Friday, September 24, 2021 Walkabout (1971) at September 24, 2021

 

Directed by Nicolas Roeg

Starring Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpili and John Meillon

I first heard about this movie way back in 1997 on "Siskel & Ebert" when the director's cut was initially released on home video.  The concept certainly piqued my interest enough to keep watching - survival stories are almost always interesting if nothing else, and this one looked like it belonged in a class of its own.  The movie took on a certain mythic status in my brain as I read reviews of the film, first in the Ebert companion and later as part of the "Great Movies" subsection of his website.  Years later, I discovered some of the scenes that the film's leading lady Jenny Agutter performs and...wow!  Ms. Agutter is absolutely gorgeous, as anyone who has seen Equus or An American Werewolf in London will testify, but she never looked better than she did here.

I'm pleased to announce that Walkabout is a movie that lived up to the hype.  The journey that this movie took to gaining a wide audience is almost as epic as the story itself; initially premiering at the 1971 Cannes film festival, it was then subsequently forgotten about for a long time.  Eventually, a grassroots campaign of people who saw it on its initial showings were enough to get a video release.  It was at this point that the film was re-appraised by film critics and stamped as the classic that it is known as today.  What is it with Walkabout that makes it so special?  Let's dive in to the specifics.

The film is unconventional to put it lightly, very reminiscent of a Stanley Kubrick movie at times with its jarring editing and a story structure that jumps around from peak to valley at the drop of a hat.  Put simply enough, it is the story of life and death that wastes no time getting going.  None of the characters in the film are named; there is simply a teenage girl (Agutter), her younger brother (Luc Roeg - director Nicolas Roeg's own son, no less), and their father (John Meillon).  The father takes his children deep into the Australian wilderness for a picnic but begins firing a gun at them.  The kids manage to escape, and the father kills himself, leaving the girl and the boy alone to fend for themselves.  The movie gives no concrete reason for the father doing this; an early scene at their residence suggests that the father may have some incestuous designs on his daughter, but beyond that his motivations are a mystery.

The early stages of the story are fairly predictable, but engaging nonetheless as the siblings begin traversing the desert.  They have only a radio and a few items of food from their picnic as supplies, and it doesn't take long for their journey to turn into despair.  It is at this early breaking point when they are found by an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpili) on his Walkabout - a solo adventure that members of his tribe must take to enter into manhood.  After solving the problem about how to draw water from a dried-up pond, the boy and the girl tag along with the Aborigine on his trek.

A major point in Walkabout is communication.  In the scene where the Aboriginal boy refills their water supply, it is the younger brother who manages to break through the barrier with body language.  This is a theme that continues from this point forward, with the girl seeming to make no effort past cosmetics of trying to talk to the Aboriginal boy.  She is practical, holding on to her city life aesthetics and customs.  Her brother is able to let go and adapt to the situation far easier.  He learns some of the Aboriginal words and becomes a close friend of their strange new companion, a development that comes across remarkably well considering a key choice that Nicolas Roeg makes here.  There are no subtitles for the Aboriginal boy's speech - we the viewer are just as perplexed as the kids trying to make it back to civilization.

The best movies demand that you watch closely and reward the viewer for paying attention.  Walkabout has several moments and scenes that serve as prime examples.  Seemingly out of nowhere, the Aboriginal boy is seen walking past a previously unknown woman.  It is gradually revealed that this woman runs a nearby plantation, but the Aboriginal boy returns to his companions and does not take them there.  Did he deliberately hide this?  Has he met this woman before?  Nothing is explained, less is more.  There is also great juxtaposition as it becomes clear that the Aboriginal boy is taking notice of the girl's beauty, interspersed with scenes of a nearby weather research team's male crew trying to sneak glimpses at the comely female scientist.  It's a cultural universal.  There is a similar juxtaposition as the girl swims in a billabong, cutting in and out of shots of the Aboriginal boy hunting wild animals.  This no doubt represents the provider role that the Aboriginal boy is taking with the girl, which leads up to the climactic courtship dance scene that marks the film's second turning point.

No doubt, this was a difficult project from a film-making perspective.  Long shoots during the daytime in one of the more uninhabitable regions of the world were the norm on this film.  Great demands were put on the cast, with Agutter, the younger Roeg, and David Gulpili being virtually the only actors we see for 90% of the running time.  But the elder Roeg has an improvisational style as a director that served the production well; they ran across many things during filming that suited the themes they were exploring, especially the countless examples of the animals whose only purpose of existence was existence.

I'm sure that a common theory as to what the film is trying to say involves the rustic living that the surviving girl and boy are forced to take on as a means of staying alive...

...is superior to the civilized life that they left behind and are now attempting to get back to.  Me...I'm not so sure.  In a way, I think this film is kind of an anti-Gran Torino.  Where that movie was about characters who come to realize that they are much more alike than they think under the surface differences, Walkabout is more about people who are unable to find those commonalities.  It plays out mainly in the film's closing moments, which are tragic and sad, yes, but also completely appropriate.  This isn't a movie that is going to leave you with the overwhelming urge to watch it again immediately, but it will stick with you long after the final frame.  

Rating time: Wait for it...**** out of ****.  Walkabout is a must-watch that ignites the analytical part of your brain, for reasons that have nothing to do with Jenny Agutter's nude scenes.  Although those certainly don't hurt.

Thursday, September 23, 2021 The Graduate (1967) at September 23, 2021

 

Directed by Mike Nichols

Starring Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross,William Daniels, Murray Hamilton and Elizabeth Wilson

 

I can recall my college days vividly.  Without a doubt, going to college qualifies as the single biggest mistake of my life.  Sure, it wasn't all bad.  I wound up with a couple friends that I still have, I worked a couple of fun jobs and I was in a city that had some pretty damn good restaurants.  Overall, though, it was 4 1/2 years that I want back in the worst way.  I spent $20,000 on a degree that I'll never use, majoring in something that I didn't care all that much about and wondering why everyone else seemed so sure about where they were headed with their overpriced pieces of paper.  And now I'm way happier running factory equipment for eight hours a day.  So...stay in school, kids!

As a disaffected college graduate, you'd think that this movie would be tailor-made for me.  I'd seen and enjoyed director Mike Nichols' previous film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and this came just a year later.  Nichols was pretty much on top of the world at this time, being at the helm of the top-grossing movie in consecutive years, a record that must have given him J.J. Abrams power in 1967.  So with a subject matter that I can relate to and a skilled director, I was ready to be entertained...and I couldn't connect with this movie at all.  My contrarian gland is acting up again.

Our lead character in The Graduate is Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, who sounds remarkably like Jimmy Stewart in his first major film role), recent college graduate who seems unsure about what comes next in life.  To an annoying degree.  The character is nigh insufferable from the first time we meet him, complaining to his parents about his graduation party.   It is at said grad party that the viewer is also introduced to our other main character, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), family friend who insists that Benjamin drive her home.  If you're at least mildly familiar with film history, you know what comes next, as the nervous Benjamin is put upon by Mrs. Robinson in a scene that contains some pretty legendary dialogue.

Make no mistake, Mrs. Robinson is the best thing about this movie.  Bancroft plays the role to perfection, underacting the early scenes where she lays out her interest in Benjamin and bringing the audience along for the ride.  Of course, Benjamin eventually decides to take her up on the offer, renting a hotel room every night under an assumed name and wasting his summer away at his parents' backyard pool by day and shagging Mrs. Robinson by night.  Eventually, Mrs. Robinson lets it slip that she has been trapped in a loveless marriage for a long time, a result of getting pregnant in college and giving up her own dreams.  I was really expecting the story to stick with the Benjamin-Mrs. Robinson dynamic from this point forward, but unfortunately the good stuff is about to end.  

So what leads to the movie diving off a cliff?  Well, the other key adults in Benjamin's life - from his own parents (William "Mr. Feeny" Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson) to Mr. Robinson (Murray "Mayor of Shark City" Hamilton) - are attempting to set him up with the Robinson daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).  Mrs. Robinson expressly forbids this, but we know how Pandora's Box stories usually end.  Reluctantly, Benjamin takes Elaine out on a date that starts out awkwardly but gains momentum as it goes along.  Not quite the kind of momentum that merits what comes from this point on, but momentum nonetheless.  This leads to Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Robinson being found out by all parties, blowing up all of the main relationships the film has established.

This is also where Benjamin enters full "creep" mode.  He becomes borderline obsessed with Elaine, following her back to school and going so far as to propose marriage after the initial argument scene.  Mrs. Robinson essentially disappears from the film bar a couple scarce appearances at this point.  Our substitution is loads of melodrama as Benjamin attempts to woo Katharine, first away from a lie that her mother told about the affair and later from a rival love interest.  How does that end up?  Fun experiment: type "canceled wedding" into an IMDB plot keywords search and see how many titles pop up.

A film doesn't wind up with a 50+ year legacy and a spot in the National Film Registry without some good qualities, and The Graduate has plenty.  The performances are all top notch, and the direction by Nichols is unconventional and skillful.  The movie contains several long takes rife with dialogue, and the actors do a grand job popping out the lines in quick succession.  This movie also gives me an excuse to go on another side diatribe about something missing from today's films - thought-out soundtracks from a single musical artist rather than a typical film score.  In the case of The Graduate, it's the music of Simon and Garfunkel, which serve as bumpers for all of the main plot points.  These songs combined with the artful editing elevate the material, keeping my interest even when I thought the movie went from a fascinating coming-of-age story to a disaster.

This is another example of a frustrating movie in "30 Flicks with Lick."  The first half was great; I wanted the entire film to continue exploring the relationship between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson.  Along the way, we could find out more about both characters' respective backgrounds and grow to like them better.  However, once Benjamin's pursuit of Elaine becomes central to the plot it loses all believability, with all of the characters becoming cartoons.   I didn't care about them in the slightest at a certain point, and it's a shame, because there's a lot of talent involved in bringing them to life.  No matter how good an actor is, it can't make up for what they're scripted to do and say.

Rating time: ** out of ****.  There are some iconic lines and scenes in The Graduate.  It would be a mistake to say that they go to waste, but the second half of this movie doesn't do them justice.  If you're looking for a movie that really defines The Sound of Silence, though, take a look at this:

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 Belle de Jour (1967) at September 22, 2021

 

 

Directed by Luis Bunuel

Starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michael Piccoli, Genevieve Page and Pierre Clementi

The first paragraph of the reviews in this marathon usually consists of me telling a banal story about how I first learned of the film-maker, my pre-watch expectations, and in general what led to me choosing the movie in question.  Well, this time, the answer to that is pretty simple.  I had never even heard of this movie before, but I was perusing the selections on the Criterion Channel and saw the certifiably gorgeous Catherine Deneuve greeting me with that seductive, innocent smile you see above.  I then read the plot description and thought this one would be a winner.  In short, I was ready for some sexy time.  There used to be something in my previous blog called the Skeevy Paragraph, and while that has been retired (because THIS blog is all about class, or something), my motives on watching this movie were pretty simple.

I wasn't wrong in that assumption.  The movie IS sexy, especially by 1967 standards.  It features a pretty damn good and somewhat layered performance from Deneuve, who I really liked in Roman Polanski's Repulsion.  By the way, if you want to read one of my reviews that I couldn't disagree with more in hindsight, click that hyperlink, because I've since re-watched that film and now think it's one of the best horror movies of all time.  I also respect the hell out of Deneuve for her controversial-by-2021-standards stance that men accused of sexual harassment should still be entitled to due process.  Good on you, Miss Deneuve.  #BASED

In the film, Deneuve - who by this point was a superstar in European cinema - plays Severine Serizy, demure and beautiful housewife married to respected Doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel).  The couple are loving and affectionate, but Severine has difficulty performng sexual acts with her husband.  This is established with the movie's first scene, which caught me off guard and initially very unsure if this was a flashback or a fantasy.  The movie is filled with similar trippy asides, some of them daydreams, some of them showing incidents from Severine's troubled youth.  They give depth to her character in ways that no conversation can.  Show don't tell, screenwriters of the world!

The plot gets put into motion by side character Henri Husson (Michael Piccoli), sexual libertine who has no qualms talking about his propensity for visiting brothels.  The topic of prostitution had come up in previous scenes, with Severine finding out that one of her former friends has turned to the profession and seeming thoroughly repulsed outwardly at the prospect.  Early on in the film, we know where this is going, with the prim, proper and repressed Severine gradually making the leap into becoming a prostitute.  It is because of Husson that this leap happens, conveniently talking out the address of the Madame that he prefers to visit and giving Severine the place to hand in her application.

Make no mistake, the best stuff in Belle de Jour (which takes its title from the pseudonym that Severine takes as a working girl, an expression that translates as "beauty of the day," since she has to be home by five every day to greet her husband) occurs after our heroine makes her first visit to residence of Madame Anais (Genevieve Page).  The scene with her first client is very tense, with Deneuve's acting making her character's apprehension fly off the screen.  There is also a very curious episode with a man that Severine meets while sitting in front of a museum who pays her to come home and pretend to be his deceased daughter.  It's very David Lynchian, and it's fascinating in the best kind of weird way.  All the while, Severine loses her inhibitions, both at her afternoon job and at home with Pierre.  These are scenes of genuine power, and you're unable to look at anything else while they are happening.

The script introduces an element of danger roughly halfway through the film in the character of Marcel (Pierre Clementi), small-time thug who immediately takes more than just a passing liking to Belle de Jour.  This section of the movie is a little weak.  Marcel becomes jealous and possessive of Severine, at one point finding out where she lives and setting up a confrontation with Pierre that goes about as you would expect.  It's a familiar Fatal Attraction plot, done twenty years earlier and nowhere near as skillfully.

What is the theme of Belle de Jour?  I had a great deal of difficulty trying to gleam meaning out of what I was watching.  That isn't a negative, exactly, but this movie is very much a thinker.  It takes no sides as to the debate on prostitution, as Madame Anais is portrayed as a likable character, if not slightly heavy-handed.  The two other women that Severine works with are also friendly and accepting.  On the surface, the story seems to be one of chance and ill-fate, as it is Severine's acquaintance with Husson that leads her to the path of eventual ruin.  After sleeping on it, though...I believe those flashbacks to Severine as a child are more important than their brief screen time.  Much like Repulsion, the film seems to serve as an exploration of the effects that childhood trauma and sexual abuse can have on someone throughout their life.  The deviant sexuality that Severine prefers, in both fantasy and practice, seems to be a byproduct of it.

I was entertained by this film, but I don't know if I would exactly recommend it.  It's frustrating, because parts of Belle de Jour are fantastic.  There are also parts that don't work at all.  First is the obvious logic bomb in the form of Severine going to Madame Anais, a.k.a. the exact person whom the snakey Husson said he visits.  So, why exactly is she surprised when Husson shows up?  But the movie's biggest weakness is the plot involving Marcel.  The character is not particularly well-acted by Pierre Clementi, but it goes deeper than that.  I feel like this character was inserted solely to give the movie a violent, melodramatic ending.  I know it's difficult to convey in review form, but trust me, it's  VERY jarring to see a film about sex based largely on understatement and introspection, and then see a finale featuring stakeouts and gunshots.  Despite its relative predictability, Severine being uncovered by Husson would have provided for a perfectly satisfying finale, with the tension coming from whether or not Husson would tell Pierre about his wife's infidelities.  But what do I know?  I'm just a rhyme-sayer.

Rating time: ** 1/2 out of ****.  It's definitely worth watching for the awesome middle act and the tour-de-force performance from Deneuve.  There are parts of the film that definitely merit ****.  Sadly, it loses a lot of steam in the final 15 minutes.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021 A Fistful of Dollars (1964) at September 21, 2021

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Sergio Leone

Starring Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Josef Egger, Wolfgang Lukschy, John Wells, Daniel Martin, Carol Brown and Jose Calvo

There's zero doubt in my mind that Westerns are the genre of film that I'm the least fond of.  A few years back, I made a list of my 50 favorite movies of all time.  While it's been tweaked and altered a bit over the years, there is a grand total of one Western on the list - 1994's gambling comedy Maverick, although I'm well aware that this is due more to sentimentality than anything else since I watched it something like 6,487 times as a kid.  It's also the genre that I've given the least amount of chances to.  Maverick, High Noon, The Searchers, 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit (both versions), Young Guns I and II...and then it gets pretty murky.  No exaggeration, I don't think I've seen more than a dozen Westerns in my life.  

Until now, I had also never seen any of the Sergio Leone "Man With No Name" movies.  Hell, I'd never seen ANY Clint Eastwood Westerns, and this project seemed like just the thing to rectify this.  I knew OF them; Biff Tannen was watching one of these flicks in his bathtub and Quentin Tarantino has a massive hard-on for them, so +2 cool points there.  While Mr. Tarantino considers The Good, The Bad and the Ugly his favorite movie of all time, I chose to go with the first movie in the series for obvious reasons.  100 minutes later, I had taken in A Fistful of Dollars, and while I wasn't blown away I walked away with a healthy respect for revisionist Westerns that play with the conventions of the genre.  There's very little in the way of heroism or romanticism here, just bleakness, violence and the pursuit of money.  And I kind of dug that.

Stop me if you've heard this one before - a nameless stranger rides into town, eager for a drink and a meal.  Well, that's exactly how A Fistful of Dollars begins, with the hot, beating sun and a violent town called San Miguel on the U.S.-Mexico border.  The stranger (Eastwood, of course) finds a Hatfields and McCoys situation in town, with two powerful families of smugglers at war with each other.  In the early parts of the story, the stranger has a friend in innkeeper Silvantino (Jose Calvo) to relay much of this exposition to him.  For what it's worth, we get this talk-don-t-show part of the script in increments, so it never quite goes into exposition overload.

A massive chunk of the narrative for this movie consists of a series of incidents that get staged by the ever-cunning and wily stranger as he plays the two sides against each other.  He witnesses the seemingly more powerful Rojas family of liquor magnates in action firsthand as they massacre members of a visiting Mexican cavalry in order to steal their gold, then returns to steal a pair of dead bodies from the scene to coax the Rojas into fighting with their mortal enemy Baxter gun-running clan.  This leads into a double abduction, with a member of the Baxters winding up in Rojas custody while the stranger is able to spring Marisol (the gorgeous Marianne Koch) from her prison where she is lorded over by the vile Ramon (John Wells).  What does the stranger get out of this?  $500 from each family, of course.

The film does have a heart, as it were, in the character of Marisol.  When I watched this movie, I assumed "love interest" from the first time that she locked eyes with the stranger.  But nope, she's merely a pawn in this bigger game, the property of the Rojas after a bad poker game and taken away from her husband and young son.  The stranger sees this situation and actually decides to take a magnanimous action to rectify it in what is perhaps the movie's most emotional moment.  I'll also admit to being genuinely tense as he instructs Marisol and her family to get the hell away from the house with the fast-approaching Rojas thundering toward their location.  Great stuff.

I again assumed that the movie would repeatedly take this unconventional approach to storytelling into its final act, but I was wrong.  A Fistful of Dollars does contain a low point for the character of the stranger here as he is found out for his action, taken prisoner and summarily tortured.  It leads into a very conventional final act (in a good way), with the "stand up" script beat and a final showdown where I finally got to see the context of the AFOREMENTIONED Biff Tannen stand-up-and-cheer scene.  

There are a lot of admirable qualities to the film.  The cinematography is top-notch, and the score by Ennio Morricone (whose work I know well fro several Dario Argento horror films) is absolutely kickass.  This subject also gives me a reason to pontificate on something that I've been looking to comment on: the lost art of the opening title sequence.   Title sequences with a lot of time and thought put into them have all but vanished from modern cinema, and I can only surmise that it comes from the belief that audiences will be bored if they're not seeing CGI explosions from the first second of screen time.  I think this is a shame.  A good title sequence won't make a movie, but it can do WONDERS for getting you in the mood.  I would also argue that title sequences, complete with catchy theme songs, are a BIG part of what led to the success of the James Bond franchise.  I was not particularly looking forward to watching this movie, but after seeing this...

...I'll be damned if I wasn't jacked to see Clint Eastwood shoot some SOBs up.

It goes without saying that Eastwood was also aces in this role, one that he would play two more times and characters pretty similar to it in many other shoot-'em-ups over the years.  At a certain point, he even stepped behind the camera and started directing himself in these roles.  Having said all of this, the movie isn't perfect.  I thought that it had some fairly wonky plot moves; the stranger seems to have some Joker in Dark Knight ability to read people's minds and predict their actions.  Many of his schemes also seem to depend on people reacting to things in a very specific way in order for them to work.  In the end, it doesn't derail the movie, because this flick is about fun, not trying to be some high-minded epic where everyone has a convenient speech for the hero.  Take that, Christopher Nolan!

Rating time: *** out of ****.  I wouldn't consider A Fistful of Dollars to be an all-time great, but it was a damn fun ride.  And yes, I will be checking out the remainder of the "Man With No Name" trilogy.

Monday, September 20, 2021 8 1/2 (1963) at September 20, 2021

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Directed by Federico Fellini

Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Guido Alberti, Madeleine Lebeau, Jean Rougeul, Caterina Boratto, Annibale Ninchi and Giuditta Rissone

 

Here's a truly obscure story for the blog.  My introduction to Federico Fellini came not from some scholarly lecture on Siskel & Ebert, not from a film-making book...but on a little seen and long-forgotten USA network sitcom called Campus Cops.  The show was about a pair of loser college rule enforcers and their Police Academy-style misadventures, and one of them involved inviting a bunch of hot chicks on campus for what they dubbed the "Fellini in a teeny weeny bikini" trivia contest.  Highbrow stuff, I know.  But it made me remember the name of this director, so I guess it worked.

I'm a huge fan of Italian cinema.  At least Italian horror cinema.  On my previous blog, I made something like 678 references to my love for a certain horror subgenre from Italy known as giallo thrillers, which were in essence gory slasher films with a heavy emphasis on mysterious, black-gloved killers.  I found out the hard way that I am not a particularly big fan of Fellini.  8 1/2 got its title as it was Fellini's eighth (and a half) film.  It is a sort of autobiographical fiction, which is a type of movie that I've rarely enjoyed.  To me, it always comes off as very masturbatory.  So get ready to read all about how I kind of hated what is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time.

No matter what else I'm going to say about this film, I absolutely LOVED the first two scenes.  The first depicts its main character seemingly choking to death in the middle of a traffic jam.  The second shows the character flying a human kite.  This character is Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), a famous film director who is going through a severe case of creative blockage on his new science fiction project.  The opening scenes convey this perfectly in about 90 seconds, which is a level of efficiency that isn't matched in any way, shape or form for the remainder of the film's 2+-hour running time.  Especially once this guy heads to a posh spa to be pampered and spoiled for the rest of the story while pontificating about life.

The first thing that any first-time viewer should know about 8 1/2 is that it has a pretty damn big cast of characters.  How big?  There are two characters with the first name of Mario.  And much like how I gave up on Game of Thrones after about two episodes when I found myself asking if this was that one guy with long hair and a goatee or that other guy with long hair and a goatee, I found myself quickly becoing numbed by the interchangeable rotating set of instant names and faces.  There are all of the people associated with Guido's film, from producers to writers to actors, all of whom growing increasingly frustrated with his unwillingness to share details of the movie.  

And then there are the women of Guido's life.  The central theme of the movie is the stable of women that Guido knows, and he knows a lot of them.  There's Luisa (Anouk Aimee), his wife of 20 years, but there's also his mistress (Sandra Milo) and the constant presence of his fantasy ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), who appears sporadically in scenes that exist only in Guido's mind.  Or do they?  This character has big-time issues with women, and it reaches its zenith in an extended fantasy sequence with Guido lording over a harem of women who banishes them upstairs once they reach a certain age and WHIPPING them back into shape once a mutiny starts.  Now, I'm well aware that Guido isn't necessarily meant to be a sympathetic character, but...yeesh.

Much like the previous film The 400 Blows, this is a movie with a loose structure.  But while that film felt like it still had a clear purpose and singular pursuit, this one felt, to me, like it was constantly going nowhere.  The climax as it is consists of Guido attending the screen tests for his movie and seeing actors read for the real-life characters of his life, followed by a press conference and extended circus metaphor that rival anything I've seen on Twin Peaks in terms of sheer bizarre.  Maybe this is just some exquisite European art that I'm too dumb to understand.

I can acknowledge the influence that this movie no doubt had on the history of cinema.  It is one of the best-known movies about the actual experience of making a movie, paving the way for everything from Ed Wood to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  The narrative, which constantly throws in flashbacks, fantasies and perspectives from a questionable story-teller, were no doubt major contributors to the styles of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino.  And the music, from existing classical pieces to its original score, is top notch.  What is about Italian films and always having kickass scores?  It must be glandular.

But man oh man, did I find this to be a tedious watch.  It was tedious enough that I fell asleep once and had to rewind 20 minutes.  Not because the movie was boring - as I've mentioned already, I try my best to avoid that word when describing films.  It doesn't even have a slow pace; in fact, it moves along pretty fast, jerking you around for its extended distance.  What 8 1/2 did not do, at least for this reporter, was engage me.  Once again, I'll mention 400 Blows and how satisfying I found that film to be with its series of vignettes leading to a conclusion that served as a great release; this movie left me completely cold toward its characters, situation and story, especially as the final credits began to roll.

Rating time: * out of ****.  Cleanse your palette with this, MY kind of Italian film:

Sunday, September 19, 2021 The 400 Blows (1959) at September 19, 2021

 

Directed by Francois Truffaut

Starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, Albert Remy and Claire Maurier

Here's yet another film-maker that I'm at least mildly aware of.  This time, it's from a book that my late brother was nice enough to bring home for me from his college library.  Knowing that I had a massive hard-on for Alfred Hitchcock, he picked out Hitchcock/Truffaut, an exhaustive interview conducted by Francois Truffaut and diving headlong into the long career of Mr. Hitchcock.  I read the whole thing but wore out the pages dealing with Psycho, a chapter that still qualifies as some of the most insightful stuff I've ever read in the world of cinema study.  

At the time, I knew that Truffaut was a pretty influential film critic but had no clue that the guy (or didn't recall from reading it in seventh grade) was actually a burgeoning director in his own right when the interview was done.  In fact, he has a long, storied filmography, and is one of the very few people to make the successful leap from the guy nitpicking the stuff on the screen to the guy making the stuff to be nitpicked.  Folks, it's sentences like that last one which serve as definitive evidence as to why I was able to procure something like 10 subscribers in the decade that my previous blog existed.  At any rate, Truffaut is proof that hard work pays off; his knowledge of film history, theory and camera techniques is all well on display in The 400 Blows, which would be the film in question today.

The film, released in 1959 and one of the first in the cinema verite world of French new wave, tells the story of Antoine Doinel.  Antoine is an adolescent boy, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud in what is safe to say is one of the best child performances in the history of film, and he has one defining characteristic that follows him throughout the entire running time: a propensity for being a cutup.  The film wastes absolutely no time building up this character trait, showing (and not telling) Antoine annoying his French instructor and writing on the classroom walls.  It is the first of many such instances that will plague this troubled youth throughout The 400 Blows.

Anyone who has read my reviews before knows that I'm a big structure guy - I like my scripts to have a clear, concise break between first, second and third acts and eventually build to a crescendo.  There are exceptions, though - and this film would be one of them.  The 400 Blows has a very loose structure, and a great example of this comes early on when Antoine skips school for a day.  He inadvertently pays witness to his long-suffering mother in an adulterous embrace, an incident that would no doubt be part of an overarching plot in any other film.  Here, though, it's merely a snippet, another slice of life in an existence that doesn't wrap up in a nice little bow.  This story has its focus on Antoine Doinel, and from that singular purpose the narrative never wavers.

The troublesome behavior of Antoine escalates throughout the film.  It starts with his mother offering him a bribe of sorts to get a decent grade on a French essay.  In response, Antoine begins reading the works of Balzac for inspiration.  Again, I was dead certain that the movie was headed a specific direction at this point, that it would essentially turn into "Antoine the gifted writer."  But nope, he is caught for plagiarizing his idol in class and summarily runs away from home.  While out on his own, Antoine eventually is caught stealing from his father's print shop and sent to a juvenile detention center.

A mood of icy realism sets in from here on out.  We get more snippets of Antoine's plight, spending a night in lockup with prostitutes and making friends at an observation center for troubled children.  The final scenes of The 400 Blows aren't cathartic, but they are oddly emotionally satisfying, containing one truly heartbreaking final scene between Antoine and his mother and a moment of absolution that Nelson Muntz himself would be damn proud of.

I've talked before in this little project about scenes that call attention to themselves.  There are several in this film.  One involves Antoine riding a carnival attraction; it's the sort of scene that I expected to be over and done in about five seconds as part of a montage, but it lingers, and lingers, and lingers, with the scene turning into a truly surreal spectacle in a way that I never would have expected.  The other standout is the climax, which I'm almost certain was in the back of one of the Roger Ebert books as one of his top 100 scenes in movie history.  Francois Truffaut, with his breakthrough success, showed himself to be a man with loads of film-making prowess, building on things that his idol Hitchcock did while also adding his own flair.

It's strange; this seems like the kind of movie that I definitely would not like on paper.  It's cold, it's stark, it's even frustrating at times to watch Antoine make mistakes over and over.  But the execution is almost perfect; emotionally, I was able to connect with this character and go along for the ride.  I also haven't even mentioned the performances of the actors playing Antoine's parents - Claire Maurier is ideal as the tired, dissatisfied and (spoiler alert) slightly evil mother, while Albert Remy is fittingly affable and oblivious as the father.  The elements of film are all on display here, from the direction to the cinematography to the script to the acting.  There are movies that you don't expect to enjoy as much as you do, and this qualifies as one of them for yours truly.

Rating time: *** 1/2 out of ****, and I'm genuinely excited to eventually check out the FOUR ensuing films featuring the Antoine Doinel character, all directed by Truffaut and bringing back Jean-Pierre Leaud in the lead.  Gimme some French fries, dammit.

Saturday, September 18, 2021 The Hidden Fortress (1958) at September 18, 2021

 

 

 

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Starring Toshiro Mifune, Misa Uehara, Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara

I was very excited to see this film.  Akira Kurosawa is yet another name that casual cinephiles like myself who wish to become actual cinephiles are very aware of.  Hell, the one film class that I took in college had a textbook with an entire chapter on the guy.  He has a filmography that touches on a lot of different subgenres within samurai stories, and his influence continues to be felt today in the endless epic movies that populate the multiplexes...wait, that's an outdated reference in 2021...the epic movies that populate the streaming services.

There are a whole bunch of Kurosawa films on the Criterion Channel, but I decided to go with The Hidden Fortress because I knew from past research that it was a strong influence on everything from Star Wars to Indiana Jones.  And...I didn't especially like it.  I didn't dislike it, but this was another film much like The Third Man that I found myself intermittently sighing to myself and wondering about things like those weeds that I haven't pulled out of my landscaping yet.  I really, really hate the "boring" descriptor when talking about classic movies, and this movie isn't boring.  But boy oh boy does it move at a slow pace.  With that preliminary backbiting out of the way, let's get to the show.

It didn't take long for this movie to really start showcasing some of its Star Wars vibes.  Much like the original 1977 George Lucas film, The Hidden Fortress is told through the perspective of the serfs.  In this case it's not a galaxy far, far away but instead feudal Japan where we meet Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), stumbling bumbling peasants who left their homes to join the Yamana clan in battle only to discover that they were late for the fighting and are now stuck wandering home through the Japanese countryside.  Yup, those are the kind of characters we're dealing with here.  For what it's worth, the characters are likable, funny and even well-acted, even though at times they're very reminiscent of this:

The titular Hidden Fortress shows up when Tahei and Matashichi discover gold in a nearby river.  Said gold is watched over by Rokurota (Toshiro Mifune), the General of the defeated Akizuki clan and protector of Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara).  Of course, we don't know any of that yet; it's given to the audience in little snippets in these early stages of the film.  Rokurota had actually been planning on killing the duo but decides to spare their lives when he learns of their plan to head to a neutral territory by crossing over into the Yamana land first, thus evading a much more heavily-guarded border.  It's way more simple than it sounds, believe me.

That's your basic setup - Rokurota is tasked with moving Princess Yuki to a safe area along with the Mr. Derp peasants to carry the gold.  Once we get there (and it takes a good 45 minutes), the movie gives us some excellent stuff.  The screenplay has some fun with Tahei and Matashichi; they're not quite hero characters, always looking for ways to sneak away with the gold or turn over their captors to the enemy for a big payday.  There is also an excellent chase sequence with Rokurota hunting down a group of soldiers who almost find their hidden gold stash, leading to a well-choreographed fight scene with the Yamana General.  By 1958 standards, it's Hagler vs. Hearns.

Unfortunately, the best stuff in the film is followed by the worst.  I don't know what it is about these early films in the 30 Flicks project with the Act Three drop, but that theme continues with The Hidden Fortress.  R2D2 and C3PO run away from the party for what feels like the 17th time while  Rokurota and Yuki are captured once again by the Yamana, leading to an endless song number and a slightly underwhelming final twist and action scene.  Having said that, it does have a satisfying conclusion, so +2 Fonzie cool points to the movie there.

There were things I liked about the movie.  It doesn't have much of a theme to analyze; it's a pretty straightforward adventure tale, to the point that I'm not the only critic (amateur or otherwise) out there to think this is one of the lesser Kurosawa films.  It's a very skillfully shot film, with the opening sequence that follows the droids through the expansive nothingness and the fight scene between Rokurota and his rival as standout moments that call attention to themselves.  It's also got a memorable score, and the humor in the film - through both dialogue and physical comedy - is surprisingly effective and on point.

Unfortunately, the pacing of this movie is all over the place.  Kind of like this review.  It starts off fast, slows to a crawl, speeds up again, slows to a crawl, and ends in a short burst.  I also think that Misa Uehara's portrayal of Princess Yuki isn't good; she brays all of her lines in a slightly abrasive yell, with her physical acting coming off as contrived and forced.  When reading through the credits of this film, I thought that the name Misa Uehara sounded familiar and it was bugging the hell out of me before I realized that I HAD seen the name before - in Ju-On, my favorite horror movie of all time, featuring a very different Misa Uehara (of no relation to this one) getting a particularly good Kayako kill.

 

 

 

 

 

With that long, unrelated aside out of the way, it's rating time: ** out of ****.  I love Japanese horror films, so I'm actually a little bummed that I didn't love either classic Japanese movie in this project.  Call it glandular.