It's that time of the year where I list some of the movies I've seen... again. Mostly obscure stuff on this one too.
I forgot to write on here that I watched
Live by Night in theaters as well. It was also really good, actually. Very solid gangster movie. Really episodic, though. So this guy swears revenge yet spends half-a-decade doing other stuff? That said, I scratched my head when, suddenly, out of nowhere! The Klan emerges! Because it's the South you see!
Keeping up with the fairly new stuff, I watched Eastwood's
J. Edgar. Attention-capturing performance by DiCaprio. I sort of liked the early parts better though, where his "mommy issues" and closeted sexuality were hinted at rather than becoming the focal point. I'm not certain where Eastwood wanted to go with the J. Edgar Hover biography. Was he in the right? Was he a necessary evil? Was he a corrupter of America? Is it a statement that people who are right early on can, in their inability to see change, become evil with time? It's difficult to tell since everything is from Hover's viewpoint and he's an unreliable narrator, and all viewpoints seem to have some support in the narrative. I also found it weird that, while Hover has these fascist tendencies to talking about the Unamerican activities of his enemies, his own "unamerican" inklings (homosexuality, illegal surveillance, bypassing democratic institutions) have little focus to how they would be a problem in the society which he lived in.
Remaining in that approximate time period,
Sullivan's Travels! A good movie times two! Can't say I thought it was very funny but it was an engaging story. The point of it all started to dawn on my near the end. Sullivan wants to make "message movies" yet learns that escapism has a value of it's own since it comforts the poor and downtrodden. However, on a meta-level, the film
Sullivan's Travels is about how film can be both escapism and a message-movie at the same time, since it's supposed to provide low-brown entertainment and simultaniously inform us about the value of having empathy for said poor and downtrodden. Harkoning back to my B-movie roots, this narrative device sort of reminded me of what the 1985 horror movie
House did. Which is about a horror writter who laments that no-one is interested in his serious Vietnam story about his personal experiences and trauma. But
House the horror movie, is about how a film can be a horror story and on a subtextual level deal with how people relate to wartime trauma.
And that Veronica Lake dame...
Know which director Sullivan's Travels name-dropped? Ernst Lubitsch! Know what else I watched from the 30's?
Trouble in Paradise! While not reaching the dramatic heights of
Shop Around the Corner it was a really heartfelt story. Rich people acting rich and sophisticated! Dat posture on Herbert Marshall though. It's like he's the embodiment of aristocratic manners. Can't recall ever seeing such a dignified face or frame before... though I suppose George Sanders could give him a fight in the highborn portrayls. Also interesting that the movie gave us more sympathy for Kay Francis, the person being seduced, than Miriam Hopkins the wife. Which made Marshall's eventual decision a lot more impactful and harder to fortell.
Talking about dudes acting all aristocratic and shit,
Waterloo! Rod Stiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Lord Wellington. Those field-battles were grand and epic at a level unrivaled in film. Just thousands of identically uniformed men marching in formation, officers aplomb and stylish as hell. Definitively something you won't see anywhere else. Bondarchuk's beautiful depiction of aristocrical splendor (and underlying meaness) is one of the few things that can be legitimately compared to
Barry Lyndon. Stiger's portrayl of Napoleon is... well... genious mind trapped in a tortured body and all. But his anxieties and physical weaknesses are so... emphasised by Stiger that it starts seeing weird that the whole of France would follow him so willingly (the movie also has enough internal-monologue voice-overs to give me
Dune flashbacks). Also, much of the movie is a series of historic pastiches, short-scenes meant to capture some historical event or moment, which makes the plot feel more like a series of events rather than an organic narrative.
*Intermission Time*
Unfortunately,
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with Richard Burton failed big time. He tried creating some sort of grim, cynical statement about Cold War politcis but in excecution it just felt bland, dry and unpedagogical. It was one of those films that just reeked of an actor searching for academic respectability, a yearning to be seen as serious an actor. The film is just dominated by everyone talking in hushed tones
about the intecracies of spy-work and it's inumerable amoral faccets. But Burton acting all scraggly and wizzened for almost two hours just doesn't work for the most part. It's the same tone from hither to thither, making it so that nothing feels emphazised or highlighted. Like most of these films it sort of elevates itself near the ending, but overall
Spy Who Came in From the Cold was a definitive dissapointment.
Hey do you know those types of movies that center around a duel between two awesome stars but unfortunately ends up being really bad? Those always sucks, don't they? Well fuck those movies because I watched
Death Hunt with Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin motherfuckers! Shit was legit aweomse. Both of them lodged up in the snowy Canadain mountains playing stoic, grim-faced badasses, with Marvin as a policeman on a manhunt after Bronson. They only share about 15 seconds of screen-time togheter but in that short moment they play off each other so amazingly that it's effect ripples through the rest of the film, really laying an undercurrent for the proceding manhunt that follows. The movie was sort of mediocre up until that moment and I was getting a bit worried there for a while, but yeah, in the end, Bronson and Lee Marvin really delivered.
Keeping up on the positive note, dear God
All That Heaven Allows looked amazing. Those were some pretty colours. The only other Douglas Sirk movie I've seen is
There's Always Tomorrow but I noticed his mastery of pristine visuals in that production too. I'm usually not a sucker for these mid-life drama pictures but I would be lying if I wasn't a tiny bit touched by all that transpired. With subjects matter like this one it's very easy to roll your eyes and mutter phrases like "oh please" or "rich-people problems", but Barbara Stanwych really nailed the emotional agony going on inside her character. When her son rolled in the TV things became peculiarly nightmarish. And talk about throwing shade on Television! That bloody box is likened to becoming a frigid, cloistered nun or something!<45>
Reaching back to the silent period, I saw Fritz Lang's
other sci-fi epic,
Woman in the Moon (yes, not
ON the Moon,
IN the Moon). Supposedly it's one of the first "hard science-fiction" films ever released. But, really, the movies downfall is a lack of cohesion. Two hours pass before the bloody rocket ceases being earthbound. Before that, a lot of time is spent on build-up, a sub-plot about an international cabal of scientists who want to hijack the voyage (the leader obviously being an evil American). There's also a melodramatic love-triangle including the protagonist and his assistant. The hard sci-fi stuff is... uhh... lovably quaint? They attach straps to the floor of their rocket which one can insert ones instep into so to negate the effects of zero gravity, for instance.
But yeah, all these clashing tones drags
Woman in the Moon down. It's really slow-paced too. Fritz has some smile-inducing silent cinema ticks going. It's still a good movie though... just nowhere near as good as your fantasy could make it.
That title is just baffling, btw. Based on it I went in expecting something like
Vouge to the Moon featuring the cave-dwelling amazon women! Especially considering those-kinds-of-movies prominence in later days (like in the 50's there was lovable stuff like
Queen of Outer Space, Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon (probably the best one). And of course in the 80's there was that segment of...
Amazon Woman in the Moon). But actually... I was instead baffled by how feminist this movie was. During the aforementioned sci-fi heydays of the fifties, female characters inevitable commented in some way on their "traditional, domestic, feminine" position in society. They were starship secretarys or housewives in space. There was a very delimited gender policy, basically. Here the female lead is a straight-laced science-type in her own right, and even wears men-clothing as if it was perfectly natural! She's a bit
saintly, a moral focal-point, but it's really remarkable how progressive her portrayl is in light of how conservatively the genre would develop on these issues for almost 40 years forward.
Lastly, (boy this was a long one), disappointing sequel time. I mentioned way back around Christmas seasons that I got the
Lady Snowblood sequel, and I finally watched it. The first Snowblood production was great, a really iconic and awesome chambara film, weighted-down a tad by it's strange 70's stylings. The sequel is... another example of shoehorning a character into a completely unrelated story. Meiko Kaji's character is basically irrelevant until the action scenes. It develops on the first film though, in depicting a Japan where a certain segment of the population has adopted Western cloths and mannerism, giving it sort-of an interesting look. It's an alright film.
And no... they don't explain how the hell Snowblood is supposed to be alive considering she was killed in the ending of the first movie.
Another disappointing follow-up was....
Dr Phibes Rises Again. Which is especially hard to admit since it's stars
my Lord and Savior Vincent Price. But it's basically the ur-example of a speedy cash-in. The first one was a really witty and funny proto-Saw movie. It proved definitively that Price is the only actor capable of giving an awesome overacting performance without even moving a facial muscle or saying a word!
While Phibes was a mastermind in the first film, in this one he seems dumb and shortsighted, his plans making no sense (but to be fair the other characters are also atrociously handled). In the first film you thought you saw the products of years of planning. In this one he just pulls stuff out of his ass, having an army of robots hidden around every corner! And there is to much of him and Vulvania just faffin about. He has a score of pointless, long monologues that were really effective in the first film but here totally lose their sense of specialty by how frequent and irrelevant they are to what is going on. He's basically narrating a summary of what has happened every 15's minute! But hey... at least it has Vincent Price.
The End
Oh, and Woo's
Last Hurrah for Chivalry is now one of my favorite martial-arts movies, right up there with stuff like
Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, Enter the Dragon, and the best Jackie Chan stuff. Fantastic fighting and Woo's heroic bloodshed fetishes work marvelously in the martial world. Just needed to get that in.