Sunday, September 30, 2012

Panic Beats - Paul Naschy


Paul Naschy is pretty big deal in Spanish Horror. This is a perfectly serviceable low budget horror film. Reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe. The intrigue is a bit much, but I like intrigue more than I like straight horror, so it’s a welcome dose, and the demand for suspension of disbelief is not too rigorous. Plus this has a good ending, where the real ghost comes along and slaughters the last conspirator standing. Makes good use of diaphanous nightgowns and naked women as well, making this a nice example of a sexy and low-key horror film from the era (70’s to early 80’s). Grade B.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Serial Mom - John Waters


This is John Waters at his finest, and John Waters at his finest, see “Desperate Living,” is a brilliant film maker. Kathleen Turner is hilarious in this. The concept of making the traditional June Cleaver mom into an insane serial killer was brilliant. There’s a sensibility here that I don’t remember having been developed at this point in the early 90’s. Stereotypical sitcom mom’s were being questioned by shows like Roseanne and Married with Children, but I don’t recall effective parody of the sitcom style. I think John Waters was the first to do this. It’s more commonplace now.

The celebration of Serial Killers as celebrities is sort of less effective to me. That sort of social commentary is intrinsically off-putting to me, but Waters isn’t preachy or opinionated in any apparent way, and so the absurdity and the spectacle provide entertainment and off-kilter humor and it never irritates with didacticism.

Waters seems like too genuinely a warm person with a generous view toward people to get too serious to have fun. He laughs at the hangups of the straight-laced and revels in the weirdness of the truly weird, but it always seems to come from a place of genuine affection for humanity that I really admire, and wish I could share. I suppose this is as close to a horror movie that Waters will ever get, and I love that it’s so playful and funny. Grade A.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Yo-Yo Girl Cop


This was an unremarkable Japanese comic book movie. It’a genre I usually like, but this was light on the action and light on the fun. First hour or so is pretty unremarkable. Lots of gothy Japanese school kids. The ending is pretty good and almost redeeming, but the villain is completely nonsensical and literally comic book silly. I didn’t like the sequel Yo-Yo Sexy Girl Cop much either, but at least in that one, all of those Japanese school girls in their Japanese-school-girl costumes were put to a titillating use. Grade C.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Death Walks At Midnight


This movie is pretty convoluted in the end. The plot barely holds together, and you might describe the villain’s evil plan as implausible. Nonetheless it’s a pretty engaging and suspenseful giallo. Also apparently in Italy, when you call the police and the specific police officer who you ask for isn’t there, you don’t bother talking to any of the other police officers, no matter how urgently you might need the police. That’s a slight presumption on my part. One can imagine a more urgent police need than the one in the scene to which I’m referring. But I think a reasonable person might consider that watching a man you saw murder someone get roughed up by a couple of hoods a situation of relatively urgent police need. At least a reasonable American would. And here I give the movie the benefit of the doubt, for it’s possibly just as strange an omission in Italy as it is in America. I may never know. Nonetheless, I liked this movie. Grade B.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Sabrina - Billy Wilder


You really have to hand it to Billy Wilder. Did he ever make a movie anything less than great? This starts off kind of slow, and has some weaknesses due to the theatrical nature of its source material. But shit, I thought it was going to be one kind of cliched romance, but it turns into a different kind of cliched romance, but the clichedness does not matter because of the absolute mastery in the telling of the cliche. Audrey Hepburn is just stunning. Her beauty is painful to gaze upon at times.

Also a great performance by Bogart in what is a multifaceted role and which must have required much delicacy to effectively pull off all of the aspects and countenances. On the one hand, the man has to be a cold-blooded businessman ruthless and heartless in motivation, but he must also be able to pull off the misty-eyed love interest well enough to make the final sentimentality effective. We need to believe in both characters at the end. His character evolves, but does not transform. The movie would not work if we could only believe in him as one character but not the other.

Extraneously, William Holden seems a little old for his role. Not that Bogey doesn’t, but Bogey’s age is acknowledged by the movie. This’d be a good movie to stay in and watch with a girl on a rainy Saturday night. Grade A.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Shock - Mario Bava


This movie is pretty damn good. It starts off seemingly like a rather pedestrian Italian giallo, distinguished only by a notable oedipal creepiness. A woman and her son and his stepfather (her second husband) move back into the house she lived in with her first husband (his father) who died by suicide seven years prior. The house may be haunted, but also the woman may be crazy. She isrecovering from a breakdown of her own tied to her husband’s death. Also the boy may be possessed by demons or the ghosts that haunt the house or whatever.

The boy subtly at first and then more manifestly begins to terrorize his mother. There is a blatant eroticism to this haunting. At one point, he appears to dry hump her. He caresses her in her sleep. He steals a pair of her underwear and then tears it to shreds. But then again the mother may also just be crazy. Again, the movie seems like a rather pedestrian giallo at this point, slowly building in tension and atmosphere.

But then shit goes nuts with a big twist, and we climax with a frenzy. The last twenty minutes are pretty damn bad ass. It’s maybe not quite as gripping as the end of “Vertigo,” but it’s not crazy to draw parallels. This is the second Mario Bava giallo I’ve seen, along with “Blood and Black Lace,” and I’m hugely impressed with both movies. Based on this, I place him above Argento, and with Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi as the top tier directors of giallo. Grade A-.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Hidden Fortress - Akira Kurosawa


This wasn’t really that similar to Star Wars. I wasn’t totally engaged by this and it was very long. There were some cool parts, but my mind wandered and I could have paid more attention. Doubt I’ll rewatch soon though. On the Criterion disk there’s a George Lucas interview, and he has a really fat neck. I’m not sure if that fact is disguised by or accentuated by his beard. Grade B-.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Pickup on South Street - Samuel Fuller


This is basically anti-communist propaghanda, but at the same time so very…stylish. I love film noir done well, and this is a fine example at its toughest and leanest. I recalled Richard Widmark from Jules Dassin’s excellent “The Night and the City,” and this is another great performance. The women who played Mo is also great.

What helps elevate this above anti-communist silliness is the fact that Widmark’s character is such a louse, such a two-bit low-life, instead of some kind of boy scout. This allows the femme to play the real hero of the film. Widmark never even really has that formulaic Bogey-in-Casablanca turn from cynicism to patriotic idealism. He is shown to have a sentimental side however, with Mo’s death and the femme.

There was a moment when the dirty commie shoots the girl when I thought this might be the bleakest movie I had ever seen, but this one gives us a happy ending which I am of two minds about. I like the ending, but the final moments are a little cornball. That’s okay though. The stylized dialogue and engaging tautness of the preceding eighty minutes more than make up for it. Grade A.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Moonrise Kingdom - Wes Anderson


Seen in the theater for the first time in September 2012.

Over the last decade I’ve grown to loathe discussing Wes Anderson films with people. Wes Anderson is, to my way of thinking, sort of the John Hughes of my generation. He makes nice entertainments, fluffy and inconsequential in the end, but if you’re of the right age and of the right class and educational background, they seem to speak of something shared. Frustratingly then, so many of the people of this generation seem to embrace him as an important filmmaker - someone to be discussed in the company of the likes of Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen (never mind if these two themselves deserve to be discussed in their own company).

This creates a kind of alienation in me of many different sorts. For one, I’ve just come to loathe being outnumbered in these discussions by smug twits, who in all honesty, lack the breadth and depth of my consumption of cinema. And two, it gets lonely. And it reminds you of the unbreachability of that loneliness. You search for kindred spirits, and all you can find is laziness and parochial mindsets in one form or another. You’re lucky if you can find a few people who won’t sneer at something in black and white.

At one time, before “Tenenbaums,” enthusiasm for Anderson’s films was perhaps an indicator of kindredness. Here was someone who was at least exposed to film outside of the mainstream stuff playing at the multiplex. That changed with “Tenenbaums.” The whole damn generation embraced the aesthetic. And the thing is, Anderson’s films were good, but not that good. When you meet enough people who, with a straight face, will tell you that “Tenenbaums” and “Amelie” are among the 100 best films of all time, and yet have never heard of Billy Wilder nor seen any Fritz Lang or Truffaut, than the gears get to grinding.

I don’t like to rant. I don’t think its a good look. I think its a particularly bad look when discussing creative endeavors. But you have a few drinks and an Anderson fan starts talking and sometimes it’s hard to resist the hyperbolic scorched earth that makes you sound like you hate something that you actually kind of like well enough for what it is. Look, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is basically a precariously constructed tower of portentious gestures built upon a bed of whimsy. The fact that it teeters but does not fall is nothing short of a marvel. But those portentious signifiers actually leave the viewer dissatisfied in the end. It’s nothing if not a dissappointing movie.

Moonrise Kingdom on the other hand abandons all of those portentious gestures and leaves us with a whimsical frolic. There’s nothing more portentious in this film than a troubled marriage, which I think is right at Wes Anderson’s pay grade. But I’ve realized something new about all of those Wes Anderson fans of my generation. I used to think that they were duped by those portentious signifiers. That they thought that they were getting opera, when what they were really getting was just a little harmless whimsy. But no, it was the whimsy that they loved all along. I misunderestimated them. They knew that what’s-her-face’s attempted suicide and Gene Hackman’s death were just emotional spectacles, crude emotional manipulations in a fairy tale universe. And they thought that was greatness, which is fair enough.

So the question I ask now is, why does my generation love whimsy so much? Is it this daydream nation we’ve somehow grown up in? The overeducated materialism of which is not even threatened by the specters of AIDS and terrorism. Those peripheral threats, of which we are barely cognizant, lurking out there somewhere and happening to somebody else. It’s my best guess. When you’ve known little of suffering and deprivation beyond maybe your dad moving out and a new guy moving in, or watching some towers crumble on television, whimsy seems like maybe a fine and comforting way of being diverted. And what can be more important, if this is your life, than being diverted?

I don’t hate whimsy. I really, in fact, enjoyed Moonrise Kingdom. A lot. But I’m constitutionally unable to think of whimsy as great, as striving to reach the highest pinnacles of artistic endeavor. Anyway, Anderson’s last two movies have been essentially kids films. I feel like he’s found his calling. The visuals by the way were great. Grade A.

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

Read for the second time in September 2012.

Upon finishing Palm Sunday, I decided to embark on a reread of Vonnegut’s works. I chose Sirens of Titan, because although I didn’t remember it as the best, I found the idea behind the story the most compelling. That idea being that the whole purpose of the human race was to deliver a replacement part for a spaceship to a stranded messenger from another galaxy, stuck on one of Saturn’s moons. I recall fondly the playful way Vonnegut told this tale with a nihilistic whimsy and I remain impressed by it.

Vonnegut also invents a new religion here. I think this is something he was fond of doing early in his career. The gist of this religion is that god is indifferent to human beings. You take care of each other and I’ll take care of myself is the message of this religion’s god. As presented by Vonnegut, it seems like an inarguably great religion, an improvement for humanity if we had the ability to embrace it. But I lack Vonnegut’s talents, and it sounds depressing in my own words.

Another thing about this religion is that people handicap their advantages, and this leads to people forgoing the desire to take advantage of others. I’m not 100% enthused by the invented religion in execution, but I’d prefer if it, and not scientology, had succeeded into having real world converts.

There seems to be a strange breach of logic when one character tells another character to pay attention to his future son’s good luck object, and then that same character sees to it that that character’s memory is erased. That conversation must be their for the reader’s benefit. Tsk Tsk.

I remain convinced that the world would be a better place if everyone read and studied Vonnegut. But I also realize that human nature being what it is, people would still be shitty to each other. It’s not as easy as making up a new religion. It’s not religion’s fault that people are shitty to each other; religion is merely an excuse or a pretext. Everything has a material explanation.

That’s what religion blamers don’t really understand. Religion isn’t even really a comfort for people, but a coping mechanism, and probably one is as good as another. The human mind needs something with which it can negotiate for control over all of those things it can’t control. I don’t think Vonnegut understood this at this point in his career or that he ever would. But that’s okay. It’s not really a flaw.

But Vonnegut’s great strength is in recognizing the perspectives that makes human beings do tiny small-minded things that increase the unhappiness in the world. He tries to shift our perspective, so that we might recognize them ourselves and behave in a way that increases the happiness in this world. I think with this book about man’s search for meaning and usefulness, Vonnegut is at his very best in this regard. It’s probably Vonnegut’s most ambitious book in terms of big ideas and probably his most underrated. It belongs on the same tier as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle.

Ultimately,I think nobody has written more useful parables for the human race since Jesus Christ himself. And let’s face it, a whole lot of Jesus’s parables aren’t really that useful once you realize that the kingdom of god isn’t a real thing.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Read for the first time in September 2012.

“Journey to the End of the Night” was a slog to get through. There is so very much scene setting and so very little story. I wish that Celine’s protagonist nihilistically ranted less and narrated more. The book seems to span around 15 years for no particularly good reason. Why flit from WWI to Africa To Detroit and back to France, constantly setting the scene at each place for thirty pages or so and then leaving without ever telling a story about it. This book should either be 2000 pages or it should be 200, as it is, it’s a bloated 430 some odd pages, most of them tedious in their unrelenting air of soliloquy.

Beside yourself, long after having given up on enjoying this meandering bloat, but driven to finish it in an eat-your-vegetables state of mind, you find yourself briefly immersed in a flash of story. The business with the old lady and Robinson and Madelon is legitimately engaging. You wish that Celine had spent 200 pages just telling this story, fleshing it out, giving us more brilliant bits like that argument in the taxi-cab. Eh, but no, we get the book Celine has given us… like life itself… amusing at times… even playful… but filled with wretchedness and misery… and ultimately unbearable… though we bear it anyway due to our own sorry vanity.

Even Celine’s dour outlook is too much, once you’ve accepted his point of view. How many pages and different ways do you need to read the man rant about the misery and suffering and out-and-out wretchedness of humanity. It gets tedious after a while. And I want to like it more than I do for purely ideological reasons, if nothing else. Americans are essentially taught to laugh at guys like Celine before we ever even encounter them, so that they’re rendered harmless lest we seriously consider their ideas. At most an adolescent gothic phase is perhaps indulged and seen as something to be grown out of before we put on a cheery costume of being a great big money-making success of material comfort. A person like me wants so very much to like Celine, but he spends the whole novel saying and not showing, to reference what is considered a maxim of good writing.

An interesting thought is that the one decent character in the story, a sergent Alcide, spends his life in sacrifice for the benefit of his niece. This is the only example of a positive view of humanity capable of generosity and compassion in the entire book. I wonder if it is a coincidence that its basically an inversion of Dostoevski’s hypothetical of making a community of people happy at the cost of torturing an innocent child. I think, either way, Celine has the better and truer to life formulation. In a world where everyone is miserable and suffering is inevitable, a selflessness to the benefit of the innocent is the only noble path available to a person. Celine says to Dostoevski that his formulation is silly. We can’t be happy, but maybe the children can be.

One can imagine how this book filled not only with fatalism and excretions might have been received upon publication. I bet well-bred people found it thoroughly unpleasant. And there must have been great value in that. Though it hasn’t aged usefully. In a similar vein, I feel as though the viciousness and the pettiness and the misery and the suffering has not translated across the decades and the culture into America in 2012 either. People are still mean and unhappy, I suspect, but “Journey to the End of the Night” does not speak to today’s miseries and pettiness and cruelty. Not in my opinion.

It’s anyway, a relief to be finished.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Alucarda


This was a Mexican horror movie from the 1970’s directed by a guy named Moctezuma. It’s entertaining enough though it drags in parts. Basically, two orphans are possessed by the devil in an orphanage run by nuns. This is not as good as “Don’t Deliver Us From a Evil,” of which it seems a relatively close relation, nor is it as good as post-“Exorcist” Italian exploitation “Malabimba: the malicious whore.” But it is good and entertaining. Much of it seems very staged in a theatrical way. The actual exorcism rite in this movie was more disturbing and titillating than the actual satanic ritual featuring a mass orgy, which is cool and funny in its way. Could have done more with the blind girl, and corruption of innocence themes, but overall this was a pretty well-done, atmospheric horror with some nice high schlock moments. Grade B.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Pieces


A dubbed Spanish slasher film from 1982, I inadvertantly watched this with the track of audience noise from a 2002 screening. What sounded like a laugh track of maniacal laughter during seemingly random parts of the movie produced a disconcerting but interesting effect. Once I realized what was going on, I found the movie a little less interesting.

A kid’s mother finds him doing a dirty jigsaw puzzle and flips her shit over his smut collection. He kills her and then grows up to kill nubile coeds and stitch their bodies together. This is competent if unexceptional work and would be improved by more and better T&A. Enjoyable though, and it strikes the right tone throughout. Grade B.