Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Movie Review - Goodbye South, Goodbye

Nanguo zaijan, nanguo (1996)
directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Sometimes I feel like Jim Broadbent staring at the Japanese fans in Topsy-Turvy, but any time an Asian film involves food, I get an enormous appetite. In "Goodbye South, Goodbye," the protagonist's fatigue is mirrored in the length of shots and scenes, and Hou - like me & Truffaut - loves the front-on shot of things in motion: locomotives, motorcycles, cars. Those tracks just go and go, until you're far enough away from the picturesque rural train station to see how ordinary a town it occupies, and what an eye someone needs to show that to you.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Movie Review - Scarlet Street

Scarlet Street (1945)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

It's Ikiru meets The Blue Angel! And I mean that in the worst way possible: simpering old man, bitch of a girl, ham-fisted moralizing. And a haunting isn't a haunting when it's only your conscience running its mouth - Mabuse taught you better, Fritz.

Movie Review - Lost Highway

Lost Highway (1997)
directed by David Lynch
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

I was wrong. The Long Voyage Home deserves five cravats, and so does "Lost Highway." It's the way Patricia Arquette's frightening audition plays out in 35mm - Lynch's luxurious, romantic eye - that squares this masterpiece with the Twin Peaks universe. Not even Mulholland Dr. feels as rich or as seedy. Or sounds as good.

"You'll never have me."

Pick of the week.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Movie Review - Desperately Seeking Susan

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
directed by Susan Seidelman
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I didn't like Patricia Arquette until Lost Highway. In the last three days I've seen her sister Rosie in two of the roles she's proudest of. They're both great. What's next? Friday night with Eight Legged Freaks? Who knows. "Desperately Seeking Susan" works like a musical - so much that's fantastical it's easy to lose track of how ordinary the emotions are. But we're all right there with Stephen Wright when he falls for the half-sawed magician's assistant.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Movie Review - The Wicker Man

The Wicker Man (1973)
directed by Robin Hardy
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

"The Wicker Man" reminds me of one particular production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Sunken Garden Amphitheatre in San Antonio, years ago, when after dark felt late to me. Strange masks of animals' faces, the same early evening light. The way the seaplane floats above those islands at the edge of the world - drifting, drifting - feels just like a childhood memory.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Movie Review - After Hours

After Hours (1985)
directed by Martin Scorsese
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

25 years after Peeping Tom, and 5 years before his death, Michael Powell apparently stalked the set of "After Hours" and talked Martie into what, in retrospect, everyone must have agreed was the best/only possible ending. Nightmares are confined to dreaming, in turn a part of sleep. It's hard to sleep well in the big city, but however bad it gets, you can always count on daybreak and hope for a sense of humor.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Movie Review - La Collectionneuse

La Collectionneuse (1967)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

With color you inevitably grow out of the love stories that make black & white movies so romantic. The games become a little crueler, the ronde more superficial, but goodness gracious this one looks beautiful - a long summer in the back pocket.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Movie Review - The Long Voyage Home

The Long Voyage Home (1940)
directed by John Ford
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from B. Sweet

As grim and as great as anything Bull Feeney made. Toland's light and fog sway, slink, and crowd, but the camera stays easy as you please through a four-part storm made eerier by native nights but never more than sad.

This week's superlative: one of the best last shots in movies.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Movie Review - Love In The Afternoon

L'Amour l'après-midi (1972)
directed by Eric Rohmer
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from Black Lodge Video

Long remembered by me as the least consequential of the contes moraux, but I think I'd forgotten the great fantasy sequence at the prologue's conclusion. Like Guido the lion-tamer robbed of his malaise, Frédéric imagines a street corner where each passing beauty succumbs to his smile. All but young Béatrice Romand, free even from dreamers. "You won't talk me into it," she tells him. "He's the only one I love."

Friday, August 11, 2006

Movie Review - Time Indefinite

Time Indefinite (1994)
directed by Ross McElwee
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

McElwee's documentaries, however much they feature family and friends, are also about movies: the first discovery of a long-dead face in the full flush of youth on some good day when the light was just right. If it was Greta Garbo in that footage, and not his parents on the morning of his baptism, his joy - and ours - would be about the same. You could argue that McElwee's technique diminishes fiction, but it's better to think of a kind of universal elevation - the contiguous sofa, screen, and heart.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Movie Review - La Bête Humaine

La Bête Humaine (1938)
directed by Jean Renoir
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

This is first and foremost a movie about trains: motion, bridges, tunnels, stations, and yards. As gorgeous as Gabin's goggled, bobbled head out the window of a locomotive, but with a suicide romanticism that sidesteps those fatalistic Hollywood heroes who fuck up but have to keep on living. Only the French.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Movie Review - Meeting At Midnight

Charlie Chan in Black Magic (1944)
directed by Phil Rosen
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from As Seen On TV

Sidney Toler's Charlie Chan, in spite of being Swedish, isn't particularly racist. He's hero to local law enforcement and friend of justice and criminologists - more or less a pleasure to watch. The same can't be said for Birmingham Brown, the black manservant scared of "spooks" and unable to keep his composure among scientific minds. A mangled plot, too, but some gloomy séance-room light and shadows for atmosphere. Maybe I'll read up on this series and report back with a better episode.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Movie Review - Viridiana

Viridiana (1961)
directed by Luis Buñuel
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Buñuel made great movies that transcend most of the usual superlatives - even Alfred Hitchcock's. I think I would have enjoyed talking to him, and I can't say that about too many people.

Movie Review - Spirits of the Dead

Histoires extraordinaires (1968)
"Metzengerstein," dir. by Roger Vadim
rating: no cravats
"William Wilson," dir. by Louis Malle
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
"Toby Dammit," dir. by Federico Fellini
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda both belong together - in Sleepersville - and Malle saddles Brigitte Bardot with a wig so constraining it hurts me to see her wear it, but "Toby Dammit" is as essential as Juliet of the Spirits, as funny as 8 1/2, and my favorite Terence Stamp role since always.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Movie Review - Ride In The Whirlwind

Ride In The Whirlwind (1965)
directed by Monte Hellman
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

It should be no surprise to any of you that this three-star western earned its fourth cravat in Millie Perkins' sideways glance at Jack Nicholson. If the attraction in Hellman's existential method is what's left unsaid, "Ride In The Whirlwind" is as full of romance, violence, and myth as anything by Peckinpah. What you see is a single, succinct storyline, told in 82 minutes, full of implications.

Movie Review - Hallelujah I'm A Bum

Hallelujah I'm A Bum (1933)
directed by Lewis Milestone
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on VHS from As Seen On TV

David Thomson is wrong, Frank Capra wasn't a manipulative cynic, and "Hallelujah I'm A Bum" should be seen by every pessimist and every movie lover in America. What a country!

Pick of the week.

Movie Review - A Real Young Girl

Une vraie jeune fille (1976)
directed by Catherine Breillat
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

For a movie about the awkward strangeness of female adolescence - or male culture's exploitation of it, either way - I don't think my uncomfortable reaction - plenty of sharp, vocal intakes - to a very physical, very naked anti-Virgin Suicides was inappropriate. But Breillat can be ugly, too, in a way that makes her cruel and makes me not like her much at all.

Friday, August 04, 2006

TV Review - The Sopranos

The Sopranos (1999)
Ep. 5 - "College," dir. by Allen Coulter
Ep. 6 - "Pax Soprana," dir. by Alan Taylor
Ep. 7 - "Down Neck," dir. by Lorraine Senna Ferrara
Ep. 8 - "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti," dir. by Tim Van Patten
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD at JL's

In Tony's dream, he sings along to the soundtrack while Dr. Melfi fellates him in bed. And the smile on his face is so big that you're not even sure you remember it in his waking life. But when Tony's mean to Dr. Melfi later on - when she tells him she's afraid - we're with the doctor 100%. The moral relativism makes sense, and so does the anger, and so do the happy dreams. All the inherent consequences of great characters. That said, I'm not sure Dominic Chianese isn't Larry David's doppelganger.

He is Larry, eager for fun. He wears a smile. Everybody run!

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Movie Review - The Saragossa Manuscript

Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (1965)
directed by Wojciech Has
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

All these stories within stories conclude at the gallows, where turbanned bandits twist and cackle in the high Spanish wind. But what's strange and unnerving - the haunts and evil spirits, wine from the skull, Satanic pacts - only emphasizes how all of it - the fear, duels to the death, pretty women - is the great privilege of being alive.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

TV Review - Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars (2005)
Ep. 17 - "Kanes and Abel's," dir. by Nick Marck
Ep. 18 - "Weapons of Class Destruction," dir. by John T. Kretchmer
Ep. 19 - "Hot Dogs," dir. by Nick Marck
Ep. 20 - "M. A. D.," dir. by John T. Kretchmer
Ep. 21 - "A Trip to the Dentist," dir. by Marcos Siega
Ep. 22 - "Leave It To Beaver," dir. by Michael Fields
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

The Chinese box approach to Veronica's rape - with each revelation, the perpetrator is revealed as a closer and closer acquaintance! - really (a) annoyed me, and (b) summarized the series' imperfectly realized themes. The show begins with a line I liked - "The people you love will always let you down" - but more often expressed that disappointment with gimmicks - Duncan was drugged, too! by Logan - instead of something more sincere (like the episode when the valedictorian takes his scholarship loss in stride, which felt pretty good). I don't know. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Movie Review - Wild at Heart

Wild at Heart (1990)
directed by David Lynch
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from JL

I like the Technicolor rinse to the landscape. I like that Sailor and Lula don't ever remind me of criminals - that they're not just a substitute Bonnie and Clyde, that Lula never breaks the law. And I like how fun it is: flying witches, fake teeth, that kickstart two-step off a Thunderbird's frame.

But I love that the romance is unconditional, terror-clipped and desert-spooked, but always, always true.