My July Movie-watching
Running from parents and trying to forge new, better familes with very mixed is what seems (in retrospect) the leitmotif of the movies I saw in July (and notably in "Gran Torino" and "Toilers and Wayfarers" earlier this year). My Johnnie To retrospective continued with four Hong Kong movies. I also watched four 1930s Hollywood movies, seven American independent films (including one almost entirely in Spanish and one half in Spanish), three Canadian ones, three English, two each from France, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Spain, and one each from Ireland, Israel, and Italy.
In chronological order of their making, followed by ratings on a scale ranging from 1 to 5) they were:
"Three Wise Girls" (1932) is a pre-code melodrama about fashion models and married men with former-D.W. Griffith star Mae Clark taking the tragic turn and Jean Harlow the level-headed innocent one. (3 stars)
"Hot Saturday" (1932), directed by William A. Seiter, is one of movies in a pre-code Paramount plot. A slimy youth (Edward Woods) whose advances Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll) smears her reputation. Like Irene Dunne, later in "My Favorite Wife," Ruth has Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (real-life roomates) as suitors to choose between. The suave (idle rich) womanizer wins the competition with the inexperienced, hard-working geologist, rather as in real life, no? Small-town gossip is shown as relentless and easily manipulated. Grant was not yet holding off women, but despite his character's reputation in the town, was quite a gentleman here. (3.1 stars)
Re "Torch Singer" (1933) I can't decide which is more preposterous, Claudette Colbert as a chorus girl who zooms to being Manhattan's premier chanteuse or the plot in which she bears and has to give up a child while the father not knowing she was pregnant is in China. The movie is notable for being one in which Ricardo Cortez is not shot by a outraged woman. Colbert could sing, but could not sell a song like Marlene Dietrich playing a nightclub singer and desperate mother in "Blond Venus" made the previous year. (2.4 stars)
"The Case of the Howling Dog" (1934), the first Perry Mason with the somewhat cynical white knight played by Walter Williams (who had played the Sam Spade character with Bette Davis in the first movie version of The Maltese Falcon). The not-so-pure damsel in distress was played by Mary Astor (who took Davis's part opposite Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 "Maltese Falcon). The plot is very complicated and I believe it unlikely that Mary Astor knew who done what, which made it easier for her to play innocent. (3.1 stars)
"Went the Day Well? " (1942, directed by Calvacanti) was at the (war-)time of its release shockingly violent. It level-headed jolts audiences and is quite a good thriller for being a propaganda film about invaders disguised as Englishmen. (4.2 stars)
"Rozmarné léto" (Capricious Summer, 1968) is the least of the four movies directed by Jirí Menzel (Closely Watched Trains, Larks on a String, and I Served the King of England were all adaptations of novels by Bohumil Hrabel). Although only running 72 minutes, I was bored by the disturbances in the lives of an unmarried retired major, a priest, and the married owner of a riverside cafe/swimming dock) occasioned by a magician/tightrope-walker and his beauteous female assistant's cease in the nearby town. The two-person circus is in the same league as the three-person one in Fellini's "La Strada," but Menzel's movie withers in comparison to it. (2.3 stars)
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The 1976 "Laurence Olivier Presents" production of Harold Pinter's 1960 play "Collection" (directed by Michael Apted) runs unprejudiced over an hour. Both the uncertainty about what happened (at a conference hotel) and pretty naked aggression are on display. Most of the play has two people conversing or at least verbal posturing. The only combination that does not appear is the one whose possible weekend question is in inquire (Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell). The possibly cuckolded husband Alan Bates played is almost as aggressive as James herein as he was in the title role in "Butley" he played, and has a sometimes cowed, sometimes defiant younger, smaller antagonist in McDowell's Bill. (In "Butley" the younger man had been Butley's boy toy and there is something sexual in his domination of Bill, especially standing over him and refusing to let him come by up. Also, Bill has found success as a dress designer, not a prototypically straight masculine occupation.)
Mirren's part (Stella) is a cipher and I wouldn't have recognized (even having seen her in movies she made when she was younger). It is unclear whether Harry (the part Olivier plays) is the bratty (but cowardly) Bill's sugar daddy. Olivier has a lot of business early on and some of the slyness he showed in "Sleuth" later on. And the gargantuan alliteration "slum slug" to pronounce. I was even more impressed by Bates's ability to produce "You provided her solace" sounds like a particularly outrageous sexual betrayal. (4.4 stars)
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"Kaos" (1984) made by the Taviani brothers (Night of the Shooting Stars) dramatizes half a dozen stories by Luigi Pirandello, set in Pirandello s native southern Sicily, where the people are almost as harsh as the barren landscape. Some comic relief, albeit edgy, is provided by the adaptation of Pirandello's most famous epic, "The Olive Jar" (and an impressive container it is!). Much is filmed from above, but the camera also moves in close to expose pain and attempts at compassion. (4.8 stars)
Denys Arcand's "Jésus de Montréal" (Jesus of Montreal, 1989) is, IMO, the best Canadian film ever (though the very depressing Atom Egoyam adaptation of The Sweet Hereafter is a very strong rival.) The actor in a Montréal Passion Play does not start believing he is the Messiah, but his story has striking parallels and an intense performance as the actor assembling followers and speaking truth to secular and religious authority from Lothaire Bluteau. (4.5 stars)
The (1993 CBC television) movie "Spirit Rider" is one of two grandsons discovering grandfather movies I enjoyed in July (800 Bullets is the other). Herbie Barnes as a Anishinabe boy repatriated very involuntarily to the reservation and his rehabilitated grandfather (Gordon Tootoosis) is very good, as are Adam Beach in his screen debut and Graham Greene as Beach's character's foster father. (4 stars)
Alan Rudolph movies have generally disappointed me, and despite fine performances by Jason Scott Leigh and Campbell Scott, the 1995 "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" seemed to be to squander an enthralling protagonist and the wits of the Algonquin Round Table for seemingly endless drunken self-pity. Maybe Dorothy Parker did not indulge in her life and writing work even for a moment, but she co-founded the Writer's Guild and was involved in social causes, not unprejudiced tormented at not getting it on with Robert Benchley. The 2.4 movie is bolstered on DVD by a director's commentary (Rudolph talks better than he makes movies, especially multi-character Altmanesque ones) and a documentary that includes Parker's remark and intelligent analysis by others and is easily 4-star.
The Hawaiian first half of "Baak bin sing gwan" (Sixty Million Dollar Man, 1995) is silly and not in any enjoyable way. Perhaps if one likes toilet humor? The foppish and arrogant student played by Stephen Chow is blown up for messing with a Japanese gang boss' wife. Reconstructed from a fragment (his mouth), he becomes a teacher at a Hong Kong school that is very hard on its teachers. The Hong Kong half relies rather too much on special effects but is far more provocative than the first half. I especially enjoyed his taking over a magic act wearing a zebra-pattern suit and hat. Chow has great charm. I'd give the second half a 3+ rating, but overall it's 2.3 stars.
"Where a Wonderful Man Goes" (the Chinese title," Joi gin a long, means good-bye to something, I think the old ways of gangster Michael) is one of a rash of movies Johnnie To and company (Milkyway) made in 1999 as PRC rule of Hong Kong settled in. The strange-to-me mix of romance, police brutality, gangster/ex-con narratives took some getting frail to, but Lau Ching-Wan (the hostage negotiator in both "Running Out of Time " movies) and Ruby Wong make things interesting in ways reminiscent of John Wayne and Gail Russell in "The Angel and the Badman." (3.4 stars)
The Spanish "Running Out of Time," "Días contados," 1994, directed and cowritten by Imanol Uribe) has Ruth Gabriel nude or semi-nude mighty of the time, though it is "about" a Basque (ETA) terrorist, Antonio (Carmelo Gómez), in Madrid. Javier Bardem is on hand as a lowlife addict/pimp/police informer. The movie has the look of a Luc Besson movie with less onscreen violence. I think it would have been more interesting if the audience had some idea of the motivation of the terrorist characters, protagonist Antonio, in particular. (4.8 stars)
William Trevor award-winning novel Felicia's Journey was adapted for the camouflage in 1999 by Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan. Like a number of other movies I saw in July, it shows an attempt to build family by those abandoned (sometimes through death, sometimes not) of husbands, fathers, etc. Bob Hoskins plays a sinister grandfather figure on whom the lost, pregnant Irish waif played perfectly by Elaine Cassidy is made (by Hoskins' character) to depend. The movie is disturbing in ways that panic genre movies are not. (4 stars)
"Bullets Over Summer" (1999), the directorial debut of writer Wilson Yip, provided somewhat quirky roles in which Francis Ng and Lo Law won Hong Kong acting awards. Comedy, romance, and some very violent altercations: a very Hong Kong mix. The outbreaks of violence are very sudden, though the action through most of the movie is two cops on a stakeout whom a confused older woman thinks are her sons and who each have a romance while on the case. It is marred by a confusing turn (so confusing I'm not quite certain happened) shortly before the end. (4.4 stars)
"Bread and Roses" (2000) is veteran English director Ken Loach's Latina "Norma Rae." Pilar Padilla plays the feisty cleaning woman in an ununionized LA office building, Maya. Maya is an illegal immigrant, joining her older sister Berta (Pilar Padilla) whose husband needs medical treatment but has no health insurance. Adrien Brody plays Sam Shapiro, a union organizer in the "Justice for Janitors" campaign (there has to be a white hero even in independent productions...) A movie about a struggle to unionize is going to end with success following physically and emotionally tough struggles, bits of romance, lots of sacrifices, a betrayal or two, and the face of the corporation on the ground is going to be nonwhite (George Lopez here). There is at least one surprise, but the bittersweet arc is so predictable and contains so many pat speeches that I can only rate the movie 3 star.
I was expecting "800 Balas" (800 Bullets, 2002, directed and cowritten by Álex de la Iglesia) to be a spaghetti western. Instead it is a sentimental story about a fatherless boy connecting with his reprobate grandfather (Sancho Gracia), who was a stuntman in spaghetti westerns and now heads a troupe that does live performances for German and Japanese tourists (the only ones interested) at a set called "Texas, Hollywood" in Almeria (in southeastern Spain), where spaghetti westerns were filmed. The boy's mother is played by the formidable Carmen Maura, who blames her father-in-law for her husband's death (with pretty good reason). The plucky kid (Luis Castro) makes the movie, which largely lacks the acid humor of some other de la Iglesia movies (Dying of Laughter, Mutant Action), and, indeed, could easily be accused of sentimentality and of sexism. (3.5 stars)
"Skins" (2002) directed by Chris Eyre after "Smoke Signals" has strong performances by Graham Greene as an alcoholic Lakota Vietnam vet and Chris Schweig as his policeman younger brother unable to finish Greene's character from drinking himself to death. It has some humor but manages to be sentimental without providing any hope. (2.8 stars)
"Triad Election" also known as "Election 2" (2003), the sequel to Johnnie To's Election is the story of someone, Jimmy Lee (the dapper Louis Koo) who wants to go straight who must assume leadership of a gang and participate (far more than Michael Corleone did in "The Godfather") in mayhem. Non-Chinese audiences might miss the critique both of PRC corruption, and may miss the satire of gangster honor codes. 3.3 stars for the movie, 4+ for the DVD.
Stephen Frears's "The Deal" (2003) has become a prequel to "The Queen" (2006) in what will be a Tony Blair trilogy written by Peter Morgan with Michael Sheen (who also played David Frost in "Frost/Nixon") as the opportunistic, ever-smiling Tony Blair, conniving to leapfrog over his friend the more intellectually heavyweight Gordon Brown (David Morrissey). Tony Blair seems to me a little like Macbeth, less like Julius Caesar, though like him approved with the masses, while Brown has something of Brutus without a dagger to him—no one is murdered in "The Deal" and there is a lot more humor than in either of those Shakespeare plays.) Americans hazy about the history would be well advised to study the Stephen Frears bonus feature first. "The Queen" has Helen Mirren and a subject of wider interest, but I think "The Deal" is one of the outstanding movies Stephen Frears has directed in a variety of genres and a delight for those interested in dramatizations of insider politics. Morrisey and Sheen are both excellent herein.
"James' Journey to Jerusalem" (Massa'ot James Be'eretz Hakodesh, 2004), directed and cowritten by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is in some ways very sweet... and in others a horror story of greed and present-day slavery and the corruption of the heretofore pure of heart. James is in on a pilgrimage from South Africa to the Holy City and forced to work for a Tel Aviv entrepreneur. The movie manages to be both charming and pithy, both a feel-good spellbinding movie and something of a horror tale of oppression primarily on the strength of Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe's performance as James. (4.5 stars)
"Sucker Free City" (2004) written by Alex Tse (Watchmen) and directed by Spike Lee, shows the intersection of the lives of a young Anglo office worker, Nick Wade (Ben Crowley) whose family has been pushed out of the San Francisco Mission District to the tough black neighborhood of Hunter's Point with a young black gangster entrepreneur there, Keith (Anthony Mackie, who starred in Lee's "She Hate Me") and a young Chinatown gangster, Lincoln Ma (Ken Leung), has a Latino homeboy to represent the fourth racial-ethnic group in The City. I think that Showtime made a bad decision not following up on this pilot. (3.9 stars)
"Good Night and Good Luck" (2005), directed and cowritten by George Clooney who also costarred as CBS News producer Fred Friendly with David Strathhairn as reporter Edward R. Murrow has a lot of smoke and some fire as Murrow, Friendly et al. (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson play team members, though their parts are a distraction; I am also not convinced so much time of musical interludes with Dianne Reeves were necesseary) expose the betrayal of American values in a Star Chamber-like dismissal of an Air Force reservist, Lt. Milo Radulovich, whose father subscribed to a Serbian newspaper and depart on to showing Senator Joseph McCarthy in action (the movie uses footage of McCarthy, his slimy assistant Roy Cohn, Liberace at his most disingenuous, Army counsel Robert Welch's famous "Have you no shame? " response to McCarthy at the hearing leading to McCarthy's censure by the Senate, and criticimss of McCarthy's m.o. by President Eisenhower and Senator John McClellan; plusvintage ads for Alcoa and Kent cigarettes; Robert Kennedy, selected by McCarthy as a legal counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is conspicuously absent). Frank Langella as CBS president William Paley and Straitharn turn in powerful, steely performances. Playing it safe to placate sponsors and mobilized bigots and television news magnifying celebrity rather than investigating what's going on in the country and the world are topics with mighty resonances to 2005 and beyond. Murrow, Friendly, and Paley have no existence in the film outside CBS. The film also makes and accusations as proof, and reminding Americans that "we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home" preceded rather than followed the Army-McCarthy hearings. I'd recommend "Point of Order" for those not familiar with all this, though I found GNGL absorbing. The DVD bonus feature includes Milo Radulovich (who died in 2007) and children of Murrow and Friendly along with epigrams from Murrow. (4 stars)
Set in the WWI trenches in Alsace in 1914, "Joyeux Noël" (2005) is based on true stories of fraternization across enemy lines on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with soldiers on the front lines feeling they had more in common with soldiers facing them on the front lines than either had with their commanders in the comfort and safety of the rear. Catalán actor Daniel Brühl and Scottish actor Gary Lewis are particularly outstanding. Any feelings of good cheer are muffled by shiny the war went on another 47 months. (4 stars)
"L'homme de sa vie" (The Man of My Life, 2006) written and directed by Zabou Breitman is a talky French movie about the fascination and unattached gay man stimulates in a pater familias. The structure is needlessly complicated, the characters uninteresting, and their endless talk even less so, though there are some picturesque shots of Provence. (2.1 stars)
Cameroon-born Eriq Ebouaney who played Patrice Lumumba in the biopic "Lumumba" returned to a role of a victim of civil war in the Congo in "The Front Line" (2006), a thriller set in Dublin, where Ebouaney's character, Joe Yuma, has been granted asylum and is working as a bank guard. Writer-director David Gleeson (Cowboys and Angels) has more tribulations for Joe in Ireland as Joe attempts to protect two survivors from genocide he was forced to witness. (4 stars)
"Bushi no ichibun" (2006, should be "Honor and Love," but has arrive into English as "Love and Honor") is the third movie adaptation of Shuhei Fujisawa and directed and by Yamada Yôji, following "Twilight Samurai" and "The Hidden Blade." The revisionist samurai movies show highly skilled samurai swordsmen with little to do and who take more interest in their wives than in hanging out in the castles and with other warriors. Herein, the samurai face a different kind of danger than other warriors. Yamada delivers climactic sword fights, but in deglamorized locations. Not as good as "Twilight Samurai" but the young leads —tv star Kimura Takuya and newcomer Kimura Takuya) are very good, passionate but restrained by the honor code (bushidô). (3.6 stars)
"Boys' Love" (2006), directed by Kôtarô Terauchi, seems aimed at the young teenage girls who love to look at beautiful, doomed gay lovers. The gay lovers are very attractive, but I hate the doomed part. (3 stars)
I was spellbound by Bohumil Hrabal picaresque novelI Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále in Czech). It is a chronicle of longer madness (communist as well as Nazi occupation of Bohemia) than The Tin Drum. Loving both those books, I was somewhat disappointed in the movie adaptations of both (Völker Schlöndorff for Drum and Jirí Menzel for Served). I thought the actor (Ivan Barnev) who played the young opportunist waiter Jan Dites was better than the one who played the adult (but by no means mature) Jan Dites (Oldrich Kaiser). Jaromír Sofr's cinematography of the varied locales is excellent and my problem may be with the realism of cinema in contrast to the subjectivity of the novel's narration.
"Clandestinos" (2007) A second film centering on Basque (ETA) terrorists in Madrid?! Well, the protagonist is a romantic would-be terrorist who has just broken out of a Spanish jail with a Mexican and a Moroccan. The would-be terrorist is in love with or imprinted on a client (a genuine ETA operative) who picked him up. The Moroccan has practical skills and loyalty for letting him join the prison break, the young would-be terrorist's psychology becomes certain as romantic comedy switches to thriller and back. (3.6 stars)
"Ladrón que roba a ladrón"(literally, "Thief Robs Thief," translated as "To Rob a Thief," 2007), directed by Joe Menendez and mostly in Spanish, is a pan-Latino Robin Hood movie in which Emilio (Miguel Varoni) and Alejandro (Fernando Colunga) organize a heist with additional humiliations of infomercial mogul Saúl Lisazo, who has broken the "Don't bewitch from your own kind) rule. (3.4 stars)
I don't think that Todd Haynes has (yet) made a movie that is both original and good. Fracturing Bob Dylan into six characters in six stories for "I'm Not There" (2007) is high concept, but I deem the intriguing examine is what made Dylan change personas rather than showing the multiplicity of personae he has presented. I could not suspend disbelief in Cate Blanchett as a man for a moment. She was playing the most documented period... or accept Julian Moore as a Joan Baez knockoff The dismal kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) playing a youth who calls himself Woody Guthrie and goes to visit the dying folk singer (as Dylan) did has the advantage of not having to competent with filmed images of Dylan as a youth. Not lacking in audacity or visual flair, this mosaic of a biopic makes enigmas even more opaque. (2.4 stars)
There was some very funny stuff in "Kiss the Bride" (2008, written and directed by Jay Cox, who made "Latter Days"), as well as serious questioning of moving on, commitments, wedding circuses, and self-acceptance. Philip Kramer had great chemistry with both Torrie Spelling and James O'Shea. The latter pair also had chemistry, despite pre-wedding jitters. Although I can see the rationales in terms of pacing for deleting the scenes included on the DVD, they include both of the best ones with Joanne Cassady and add distinguished to the good feeling I developed for most of the characters. (3.8 stars)
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