Oddball (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Oddball (2015) – S. McDonald

Aito and I ventured out to the cinema today to see this Australian family film that tells the story of a Maremma sheepdog who gets the job of protecting Fairy Penguins from foxes on Middle Island near Warrnambool, Victoria.  (Fortunately, the animals don’t talk). I guess family films may need to be evaluated using a different set of criteria; that is, they need to be judged according to whether they satisfy the target audience.  Aito said “5 stars”! Although adults may find the story predictable, this may actually be a strength for the 5 year old audience.  But there is enough local colour for the adult audience too, with beautiful ocean vistas (including the famous Twelve Apostles) and the gentle comic stylings of Shane Jacobson (as Oddball’s owner “Swampy” Marsh).  Sarah Snook, as Swampy’s daughter, a park warden responsible for the Fairy Penguins’ survival, and Coco Jack Gillies, as her daughter, keep the story human (but one wonders why family films often deal with incomplete families – maybe so that a love interest can provide more tension? Or to reach out to kids in the same position? Some of this was lost on Aito).  Afterwards, we were able to look up the true story on the web and we talked about the penguins that we will likely see in person someday. So, we are happy to offer our thumbs up!

Killer’s Kiss (1955)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Killer’s Kiss (1955) – S. Kubrick

Kubrick’s second feature is a straight film noir, albeit at the tail end of that genre’s heyday.  But you can see his creative spark in the film’s style -- or perhaps he’s crossed the line into ostentatious style for style’s sake?  In this way, the film draws from Orson Welles (perhaps especially The Lady from Shanghai for the final fight to the death).  However, the low budget and the New York City locations also bring Cassavetes to mind (although this film is clearly scripted whereas Shadows was…less so).  Down and out fighter Davey Gordon (played by Jamie Smith) falls for his neighbour Gloria (played by Irene Kane) who is in a mess of trouble because of her involvement with dancehall mobster Rapallo (Frank Silvera).  There’s a pretty brutal boxing scene, a nice tracking shot in the dancehall, a few optical special effects, and that scene with the naked mannequins at the end.  In fact, there’s a few nods to voyeurism along the way which serve to increase the tension (sex plus violence).  Worth a look, especially if you think of this as a student film.

The Navigator (1924)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Navigator (1924) – D. Crisp & B. Keaton

Early Buster Keaton two-reeler that is sporadically funny, picking up speed as it goes along.  Keaton accidentally finds himself on an abandoned ship, alone with the girl he hopes to marry, who has also accidentally gotten on board the ghost ship (pushed out to sea as part of espionage). The two muddle out how to cook a meal, find bunks to sleep in, and fix a leak under the ship (which involves Buster in a real deep sea diving suit that eventually fills with water…of course).  They are nearly rescued and nearly captured by cannibals.  Part of the thrill offered by any of Keaton’s comedies (short or long) is from knowing that he invents all his own gags and does all his own stunts, which often involve a high level of acrobatic skill in the service of looking clumsy as hell.  Not really up there with The General or Sherlock Jr. (although others seem to think so) but damn fine nonetheless.

This Land is Mine (1943)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

This Land is Mine (1943) – J. Renoir

I still find it astonishing to watch the impassioned films of the early 1940s that offer sermons admonishing people to fight the Nazis and to defend freedom.  Having escaped from France himself, Jean Renoir (like so many other European émigré directors) was personally invested in this message.  This Land is Mine vividly and theatrically tells the story of an unknown country under German occupation and the choices people make to resist or not to resist.  Charles Laughton, a school-teacher, is too meek to know what to do, but he is influenced by his colleague, Maureen O’Hara, her brother Kent Smith, and the principal of the school (Philip Merivale) to know what is right. They are opposed by Walter Slezak, the charismatic German major, and George Sanders, the self-loathing collaborator.  As events play out and members of the resistance are caught and shot, Laughton becomes galvanized.  And then it happens, the movie stops dead and allows Laughton to speak at length against occupations both general and specific (in words written by screenwriter Dudley Nichols, who wrote many Hollywood hits).  This is pretty rousing stuff and you don’t hear it every day.  Perhaps we should.   Of course, this break from the film (and from Laughton’s character) does disrupt the original story – but for this decision, I’m giving it an even higher rating than if it stayed small and kept its social influence strategy implicit.

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Squid and the Whale (2005) – N. Baumbach

Well, I found it almost unbearably intense which probably has less to do with Baumbach’s film about his parents’ divorce and more to do with the fact that my own parents were divorced in the early 1980s (a bit before the time period of the movie – 1987).  Probably none of the events in the movie relate to my own experience (most facts of the situation are different) but somehow the idea of the thing and the emotions that are in play touched some kind of a nerve.  So, is it a comedy?  I couldn’t see it that way.  Instead, it shows a bunch of real people having a lot of trouble with their relationships and the feelings that they have toward each other, past, present and future and basically experiencing sheer torment.  Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney enact the parents well, but Jesse Eisenberg seems a bit constricted as the older son. I couldn’t quite grasp his reactions to the divorce and subsequent events – maybe he is supposed to appear disrupted and confused.  The younger son’s externalizing behaviour seems a bit cliché (and gross) but yeah well these are probably realistic reactions for someone.  So, without blaming my own parents, I’m not sure I really enjoyed watching this movie or recalling these events from my life.  I don’t think I’ll re-watch Kramer vs. Kramer either.

The Small Back Room (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Small Back Room (1949) – M. Powell & E. Pressburger

After their run of amazing classics (including Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, I Know Where I’m Going! and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) throughout the 1940’s, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger retreated to this darker almost noir look at a man struggling with himself, disability, and drink.  David Farrar (who played Mr. Dean in Black Narcissus) stars as the wartime scientist who has lost his foot and struggles with pain and the need for whisky to stop it.  He is loved by his office’s main secretary (Kathleen Byron, the mad nun also from Black Narcissus) but he doubts that he is the right man for her (she doesn’t).  The script is intelligent and adult, dealing with these real issues as well as a plot that looks squarely at office politics in the context of a military decision to adopt a new gun.  Powell and Pressburger never dumb things down for the audience. Farrar is finally tested when he has to defuse a German booby trap on a pebbly beach after a night of heavy drinking (that includes a surreal nightmare sequence) in a tense 17 minute sequence that decides his fate. A bit more grim and less magical than the Archers’ best but still strong.

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Z Channel:  A Magnificent Obsession (2004) – X. Cassavetes

You probably have to be from Los Angeles to best appreciate this doco about a forerunner of movie cable TV channels that started out there.  Apparently, it ran an eclectic mix of arthouse and cult movies, often organized into mini “film festivals” from the mid-1970s until the mid to late 1980s and fended off HBO and Showtime for that long.  This film by Cassavetes’ daughter Xan focuses on Z Channel programmer Jerry Harvey whose efforts led to wide acclaim but who was a tortured soul who eventually killed his wife and himself.  So, half the movie focuses on Z Channel and its appeal (with talking heads such as Robert Altman, James Woods, and Theresa Russell singing its praises) and the other half focuses on Harvey and his problems (with an ex-wife, former girlfriend and many Z Channel colleagues chiming in).  There are a heap of movie clips (a surprising number of which feature nudity, making films like Andrei Rublev seem a lot more sexy than they really are) and this keeps things interesting for the first half.  But as the movie gets darker and longer, the heavier concentration of interview footage becomes a bit tiresome.  Still, it’s a fascinating slice of our cultural history.

Possessed (1947)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Possessed (1947) – C. Bernhardt

Joan Crawford has a psychotic break from reality when the man she loves (Van Heflin) spurns her for first, a job, and then, another much younger woman.  As directed by Curtis Bernhardt, however, Crawford doesn’t entirely garner audience sympathy.  Well, you want to care for her, but she begins to act paranoid, imagining that she has harmed others or that others are intentionally trying to hurt her.  It is a pretty good performance that ends (or actually starts, because this film is told in flashback) in a catatonic stupor in a mental hospital.  Of course, the psychology is not quite right, but it doesn’t really offend -- except in the way that the noir tone of the film brings violence and mental illness together when the actual relationship is tiny.  But this isn’t really a noir, more of a melodrama or “women’s picture” (as they used to be called).  Audiences of the 40’s loved to watch Joan suffer (see also Mildred Pierce fro 1945) and suffer she does.

The River (1951)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The River (1951) – J. Renoir

Renoir’s take on Rumer Godden’s novel is part colonialist  narrative and part documentary footage of the real India (Bengal) of the time. To me, it is an uneasy blend – but in glorious color.  The film is narrated by Godden’s adult alter-ego but she recounts her early adolescence and the arrival of a disabled ex-soldier who was her first crush.  He is the American cousin of a British man next door who had taken an Indian wife (now deceased) and raised a multi-racial daughter.  The film reflects on her status as one who doesn’t belong anywhere but her angst is not very palpable nor is the treatment of her by others very negative -- so Renoir doesn’t hit this theme very hard.  Instead, the mood is more of an extended reverie on childhood and its events; there is one great fantasy scene told by Godden’s stand-in Harriet who is a budding writer.  In this scene, there is birth, a wedding, and rebirth plus Indian music and dance.  The film also includes death in the endless cycle that mimics the river’s flow.  All things must pass, including this moment in time (for both India and the characters in the story). 

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) – R. Bresson

Although he hadn’t yet developed his mature visual style (focused on hands and feet engaged in action), in this, his second feature film, Robert Bresson had already identified his key theme of transcendence through suffering.  True, many of his later characters were pure, naïve, and innocent, and their suffering lends a spiritual dimension to those films (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette, Au Hasard, Balthazar, etc.) whereas here we see a victim who has sinned herself and needs to be forgiven.  However, the plot is much more intricate than this simple theme might suggest.  Indeed, there is a deviousness of purpose that sets the plot into motion, courtesy of Maria Casares who tricks her ex-lover into wooing the heroine and former cabaret girl (i.e., prostitute) without his awareness of her checkered past.  Yet, somehow true love triumphs over all (and the dialogue by Cocteau surely helps to highlight this romantic theme).  Nevertheless, as the film fades out, Bresson’s intense focus on the moment of release from sin prepares us for his substantial body of work yet to come. 

La Rupture (1970)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

La Rupture (1970) – C. Chabrol

The late ‘60s-early ‘70s psychodramas from Claude Chabrol ranging from Les Biches (1968) to Just Before Nightfall (1971) – six films – all have something to offer.  La Rupture (The Breach) is a particularly weird one, starring (again) Stephane Audran (Chabrol’s then wife) as a young mother whose child is injured by her (depressed substance abuser) husband.  She seeks a divorce but the husband’s parents want custody of their grandchild; to discredit the mother, they hire a childhood friend of the husband (played by Jean-Pierre Cassel) to follow her and possibly to attempt to put her in a compromising position.  So, these characters are placed in some extreme situations (accented by intense electronic music) and viewers can expect to experience emotional stress at times.  This film is less Hitchcockian than some of the others from this period of Chabrol – perhaps we never quite expect Cassel and the in-laws to succeed so suspense isn’t built.  Yet, there is enough oddness here to hold your attention, especially if you have gotten the taste for Chabrol.

’71 (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

’71 (2014) – Y. Demange

A British soldier gets stuck in the Catholic section of Belfast and has to escape or die in this searing and intense action flick.  It is a “confused situation” to be sure, and we are privy not only to the soldier’s experiences but also the backroom conversations of members of the IRA and the Ulster Rifles.  Our soldier (Jack O’Connell) becomes a bloody pawn in the political machinations of the times.  And those times are very nicely recreated with cars, outfits, hairstyles, furniture and wallpaper.  In some ways, what we have here is the inverse of Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) which saw injured IRA man James Mason passing the night (and from life to death) on the run from the law/Brits also in Northern Ireland.  Similarly, we meet an array of characters and situations as O’Connell moves from location to location in and around the Catholic tenement flats but the focus in ’71 is less on creating a parable and more on gritty pulse-pounding action done well.

Design for Living (1933)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Design for Living (1933) – E. Lubitsch

The Lubitsch touch was a certain wink-wink naughtiness put forth in a sublime comic way that kept things elegant rather than crass or raunchy.  Or at least that’s my interpretation.  Here, Gary Cooper and Frederic March are best friends, a painter and a playwright, who fall in love with Miriam Hopkins.  However, she can’t decide which she prefers and instead they decide to live together as a threesome – but no sex allowed.  Of course, this doesn’t quite work out (or does it?).  Edward Everett Horton is the fuddy-duddy foil to the merry three -- although somehow he is less funny than in the Astaire/Rogers films.  In fact, the whole package is somewhat less delicious than other Lubitsch hits (Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner, Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait, To Be or Not To Be) – this may be a result of the screenwriter, Ben Hecht, who excelled in a different kind of comedy (His Girl Friday, Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century).  Nevertheless, Design for Living crosses many lines in its review of the plausibility of the menage a trois (something the censor would never allow a few years later) and it has a distinct feminist flair with Hopkins definitely in control.  Not quite a revelation but never less than enjoyable. 

Greetings! (1968)

☆ ☆ ½

Greetings! (1968) – B. De Palma

It’s hard to know what to make of this early film from Brian De Palma – it’s sort of a cross between those Godard films where everyone just delivers monologues to the camera and those Warhol films where non-actors sit around and talk about or engage in trashy behaviour.  And it’s a comedy or filmed in a comic vein that is pretty easy-going and never really boring.  Three guys try to get out of going to Vietnam by flunking their draft physical, debate the Warren Commission results, engage in computer dates, and create films that peeping toms might love.  But mostly they just talk.  Some of their monologues are dirty and some are funny.  You feel like you are with a bunch of goof-offs who are pretty good at enjoying themselves.  One of the guys happens to be Robert De Niro (in his first film).  Allen Garfield has a good bit as a smut peddler.  But, yeah, De Palma seems to have been a pervert from the start.  Godard and Warhol may have had more to say.    

The Black Pirate (1926)

☆ ☆ ☆

The Black Pirate (1926) – A. Parker

Doug Fairbanks leaps and bounds and slides down the rigging in this early two-strip Technicolor swashbuckler.  Sure, it has a bunch of pirate clichés (buried treasure, walking the plank) and lots of swordplay but it also seems to lag sometimes.  The early color processing leaves things a bit more red and green than we are used to – especially in the outdoor shots.  Doug swears to defeat the pirates after they capture his ship and kill his father, so he does what anyone would do – he joins up to defeat them from the inside.  In the process, he also has to rescue Billie Dove who is on the next ship they capture – of course, he marries her in the end (when they are both revealed to be royalty).  A bit of fun for Doug’s fans but nowhere near as good as The Thief of Bagdad (1924).  

All Night Long (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆

All Night Long (1962) – B. Dearden

British director Basil Dearden shot this “modern” retelling of Othello in a one room set for the jazz set.  It’s a big London warehouse with a couple of side rooms where an all night party (featuring Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and others) is happening.  The party is in honor of Rex and Delia, a jazz pianist and singer, respectively.  She has halted her career because he wanted her to and his controlling nature allows the film’s Iago, drummer Johnny Cousins (played with an odd American accent by Patrick McGoohan), to set the couple against each other, with the aid of not too bright sax player, Cass.  The camera whirls around the party, following different players when necessary (usually tracing Johnny’s steps as he hatches his plan to get Delia to join his band), all the while observing the swinging jazz gig that is also punctuating the soundtrack.  The B&W cinematography is all high contrast and almost noirish at times.  McGoohan excels at pathetic but the plot machinations are a little too overt and one wonders why he doesn’t get exposed earlier. A few surely controversial elements (pot-smoking, inter-racial relationships) are treated as non-issues. Yet in the end, the whole thing feels suspended in amber, not quite authentic, not quite artificial, not quite present, not quite past.  

Mystery Street (1950)

☆ ☆ ☆

Mystery Street (1950) – J. Sturges

Solid police procedural (shot with noir lighting by John Alton) starring Ricardo Montalban as a Cape Cod detective who needs the help of a forensic scientist from Harvard when a skeleton turns up on the beach.  Of course, we already know who the victim is (a local “B” girl) – and some of her scuzzy wrongdoings that have ensnared Marshall Thompson (as the typical noir fall guy plucked by the fickle finger of fate).  Playing like a long lost episode of C. S. I., the film relies heavily on the forensic evidence (hair, bones, bullet fragments) as well as a bit of legwork and luck.  Elsa Lanchester has a good turn as a shifty rooming house owner.  Very nicely paced throughout and worth a look for mystery aficionados. 

Enemy (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆

Enemy (2013) – D. Villeneuve

History professor Jake Gyllenhaal sees a local film where an extra bears a strikingly similar (OK, identical) resemblance to him and decides to find that man (played by Jake Gyllenhaal).   I’m tempted to call this The Two Jakes…but I won’t; instead, they are Adam and his double, Anthony.  Although Adam is somewhat insecure and detached, Anthony is more assertive and aggressive.  Once they make contact, Adam is threatened and begins to fall apart.  Still, when Anthony attempts to steal his girlfriend, Adam finds himself drawn to Anthony’s pregnant wife.  Gyllenhaal does a solid job playing the two characters so they are distinguished only subtly rather than broadly.  The director, Denis Villeneuve, who made the topical thriller Incendies (2010), seems here to be deliberately trying to create a sense of foreboding and confusion (and the movie’s color scheme – yellow -- and Orwellian buildings of Toronto bear this out).  I’m not sure I was able to fully identify with the horror felt by Adam at finding his double nor “catch on” that he perceives Anthony to be his Jungian shadow (a reflection of his darker unconscious and sexual impulses, which seems plausible in retrospect).  And then, giant spiders.

Topper (1937)

☆ ☆ ☆

Topper (1937) – N. Z. McLeod

Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are killed in a car accident and become ghosts.  For their “good deed” (in order to get into heaven, one surmises), they decide to help an uptight old banker and his wife loosen up.  Since it’s the thirties, Grant and Bennett are the party all night types and the film has aspirations of screwballsiness.  However, it never quite takes full flight (although the scene in the Seabreeze Hotel with Eugene Pallette as the house detective very nearly gets off the runway).  Somehow, the gimmick of the ghosts being invisible holds things back (even though it is the origin of some of the funnier bits) – objects floating in the air just aren’t that humorous after the first few times.  But Bennett and Grant are especially good and Roland Young plays the banker as all spluttering reaction shots.  Not bad but not up there with the best comedies of this era.

  

Tension (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆

Tension (1949) – J. Berry

Richard Basehart is the poor sap married to unscrupulous tough gal Audrey Topper.  She fools around while he works his night job as a pharmacist and she has no interest in his dreams of a house in the suburbs.  In fact, eventually she leaves him for a cashed up liquor salesman in a fancy car.  Well, this makes Basehart want to get even and he even develops a plan to murder the rich bastard.  First, he gets some contact lenses (huge and hard) and he changes the way he dresses.  Then, he rents himself a new apartment and introduces himself to everyone using an alias.  Of course, he meets a new love (Cyd Charisse) during this time.  Still, he intends to go through with the murder until he gets there and realizes its pointless.  Except someone else subsequently does kill the liquor salesman and then Basehart is the number one suspect.  And his wife returns, making things worse.  The whole thing is narrated by a savvy homicide detective (Barry Sullivan) who explains how he breaks suspects by applying tension to them.  Indeed, he gets right into the plot, even leading Totter to believe that he loves her and will take her to Acapulco.  So much for ethics…but this is film noir.

  

Proxy War (1973)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Proxy War (1973) – K. Fukasaku

This third installment in Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Papers series seems to take up where the first film (Battles without Honor & Humanity) left off, with barely an acknowledgement of the second film (Deadly Fight in Hiroshima).  Maybe that’s because many or most of the characters in the second film were dead by the end.  Or perhaps the filmmakers wisely chose to place the cool Bunta Sugawara (playing Shozo Hirono again) at the center of the action – he’s charismatic and his own man, despite declaring loyalty to his former boss the grovelling and untrustworthy Yamamori yet again.  Indeed, no one really can be trusted in the yakuza world and there are plenty of double (and maybe triple) crosses here.  In fact, as with the other two films that preceded it, most viewers of Proxy War will be hard pressed to keep the players straight.  Suffice it to say that the Muraoka family merges with the Yamamori family but the Akashi family still dominates the Hiroshima scene – it looks like there isn’t room for everybody and a battle begins.  However, it must take place in the next film.  So Proxy War is something of a transition piece, but it still has lots of style (and lots of blood) to keep viewers engaged.

Act of Violence (1948)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Act of Violence (1948) – F. Zinnemann

Superior noir that grapples with blame, shame, and existential angst while still functioning as a solid thriller.  Robert Ryan (one of the all-time great heavies) is stalking Van Heflin, a successful builder, with the aim of killing him.  Everywhere you look there are shadows and darkness (as a result of omnipresent low-key lighting design).  Heflin doesn’t immediately let on why this is happening to his wife (impossibly young Janet Leigh) but eventually we discover that he betrayed his own men in a Nazi POW camp and Ryan is one of the few survivors who has finally tracked him down.  Although Heflin’s dedicated himself to doing good for his community, Ryan doesn’t let him off the hook and Heflin can’t forgive himself either. Things take a few dark turns when Heflin runs into the night and into a tired scamming Mary Astor who leads him to a shady lawyer and hit-man.  As you can tell, many of the generic elements of film noir are in full flourish here. And, of course, it doesn’t end well. 

Pigs and Battleships (1961)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Pigs and Battleships (1961) – S. Imamura

Imamura’s films are hard to predict; from my limited exposure to him, it seems that he doesn’t use genre (or formula) as a starting place for his films.  Pigs and Battleships was his first big hit and it is a savage comedic look at a post-war Japanese seaside town located adjacent to an American naval base (Yokosuka).  We follow an odd gang of chimpira (junior yakuza) who arrange a deal with a Japanese-American from Hawaii to buy food scraps from the base to support a pig farm (since pork prices are rising).  The unlucky loser among this bunch, Kinta, has a girlfriend who wishes to break away from the town and its symbiotic relationship with the Americans.  I say symbiotic instead of parasitic because Imamura is clear that it is the Americans that are exploiting and corrupting the Japanese (who may be willing participants, he suggests); in fact, the Americans are uniformly treated as brutal lugs here, seen mostly in brothels.  Gradually the film focuses in on Kinta and Haruko and their fate.  We hope they escape – but in an Imamura film, you never can be sure. 

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Splendor in the Grass (1961) – E. Kazan

Elia Kazan (with playwright William Inge) brings us melodrama of an almost Sirkian kind – although Sirk typically took things much further, emotionally and sociologically.  True, Natalie Wood does allow sexual repression to drive her to hysteria (and the sanatorium).  And Warren Beatty can’t come to terms with his own impulses.  And Kazan does take aim at the late 1920’s Kansan context and the way that nice girls didn’t and bad girls go to hell (and what’s a poor boy to do).  But in comparison to a film like Written on the Wind, it feels as though Kazan is holding back.  Having watched this directly after Palo Alto (2013) with its depiction of kids running rampant and no urge really restrained suggests that there are both differences (actual behaviour) and similarities (pressures to “become” something) in the experience of high schoolers across films/generations.  The one exquisite emotion that Kazan’s film is able to achieve spawns directly from the title (and Wordsworth’s poem): a bittersweet nostalgia for previous episodes in our lives that used to mean so much but which have now faded gently away.

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

☆ ☆ ☆

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – A. Litvak

Re-imagining this as the radio play it once was is instructive.  The film could easily dispense with the visuals, which add nothing at all, and perhaps it would be more harrowing alone in the dark with just the soundtrack.   And perhaps Agnes Moorhead, the original victim of this noir tragedy, would have been better and more shrewish (Barbara Stanwyck’s sultry portrayal in Double Indemnity stands out a bit too much in memory to reconceptualise her in this role). The plot involves Stanwyck overhearing a murder plot on a crossed telephone line and then we (and she) learn about the possible crime’s backstory through flashbacks.  Of course, she’s in trouble (a woman in peril again; see also The Two Mrs. Carrolls from the previous year). Burt Lancaster and William Conrad are, unfortunately, sorely neglected here and, all things considered, this is a pretty creaky show.  Next time, I might turn off the screen and turn out the lights.       

  

Palo Alto (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Palo Alto (2013) – G. Coppola

It is probably trite for me to call this a cross between “Kids” and “Valley Girl” but somehow that’s what kept coming to mind (particularly after I stumbled across the latter film on cable TV in the US last year and was rather dumbstruck by it).  Of course, recalling Altman’s “The Player”, maybe this really could have been “the pitch” that got the film sold/made.  Or more realistically it was James Franco’s doing, because the script is drawn from some of his short stories (somehow I shudder to think of them), he plays a bit part (as a soccer coach on the make for his high school girl players), and he also served as executive producer.  Director Gia Coppola is, yes, Francis’s grand-daughter but much like her aunt Sofia, she does seem to have inherited some talent (or at least learned from the family traditions).  The film follows a handful of teens as they fill up their bored lives with parties and emotional problems -- so much so that I worried about their self-esteem for most of the movie.  Much of their feelings remain implied rather than shown, however. And the languorousness of things (including the stylish cinematography) is only occasionally punctuated by abrupt reckless behaviour, creating a sort of tension that, instead of leading to some sort of screenwriting arc, ultimately dissipated leaving me, the viewer, to wonder what the point of this all was. 

Ex Machina (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ 

Ex Machina (2015) – A. Garland

High-concept, near-future sci-fi that I thought I would like more than I did.  Possibly this is due to the fact that I watched it on the tiny screen on an airplane.  However, maybe it was because this genre is starting to feel too pat, too self-satisfied, too ready to use flashes of violence or sexuality to spice things up (or to attract the teenage male viewers).  Ex Machina is being talked about as more “intelligent” than most of its ilk, probably because the plot hinges on the “Turing Test”, the challenge a computer (or robot in this case) must beat in order to be determined to have artificial intelligence. True, you never quite know whether Oscar Isaac, as a computer genius “dude”, is telling the truth (but he probably isn’t) to the young employee he brings in to test his sexy robot -- and this creates some suspense.  But something authentic seems lacking and, in the end, intelligence is scrapped for dimestore psychology and the usual conventions of the thriller. Others liked this better.

The Steamroller and the Violin (1961)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Steamroller and the Violin (1961) – A Tarkovsky

This was Tarkovsky’s student thesis film, clocking in at about 45 minutes and in the rather glorious color that films shined with at the time.  A small boy learning the violin is teased by other bigger kids but finds a protector in a local worker who is operating a steamroller on a nearby building site.  Their unlikely friendship plays out in a series of anecdotes culminating with an agreed upon plan to go to the movies – which the boy’s mother subsequently prohibits. Somehow I kept expecting the violin to be smashed flat by the steamroller, but it didn’t happen.  That wouldn’t be Tarkovsky’s way, I’m sure, and instead he seems to be focusing on the relationship between workers and artists in the communist regime.  Can’t they be friends? Stalin rode roughshod over the arts bending them to his will but again Tarkovsky looks beyond that grudge to think more carefully about the role of art in a society and its contributions. The film contains dazzling poetic shots that must have led everyone to believe that this student would one day become a master filmmaker – and he did (Andrei Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, etc.).

El Bruto (1953)

☆ ☆ ☆

El Bruto (1953) – L. Buñuel

After his collaboration with Dalí at the height of surrealism, Luis Buñuel laid low and then re-emerged in Mexico where he slowly rebuilt his career with a series of commercial films for local producers.  Some of these films are now recognised as important parts of his oeuvre (Los Olvidados, The Exterminating Angel) but many remain virtually unknown.  El Bruto falls into the latter category.  Clocking in at a trim 80 minutes, it is basically straight melodrama.  Although Buñuel’s usual interests (surrealism, feet, insects) are absent, there is a strong Marxist undercurrent which aligns with his political orientation.  A rich landlord hires El Bruto, more brawn than brains working at a slaughterhouse, to help him evict some poor tenants who are organized to fight.  Poor Bruto punches a sick old man who later dies; even worse, he falls in love with the man’s daughter who freaks out when she discovers Bruto is responsible for her father’s death.  All the while, the landlord’s wife is virtually throwing herself at Bruto.  Well, it doesn’t end well for any of them.  Worth a look but not up there with Buñuel’s masterworks by any stretch of the imagination.