Morocco (1930)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Morocco (1930) – J. von Sternberg

Was it Josef von Sternberg who claimed that he was “painting with light” in his pictures?  If so, Morocco (his second film with muse Marlene Dietrich) really fits the bill.  His Morocco is all dappled alleyways and shafts of light piercing latticework to create patterns on walls.  As in his earlier silent films and the ongoing work with Dietrich yet to come, style is paramount here.  The romance between cabaret singer Dietrich and French Legionnaire Gary Cooper is melodramatic, perhaps schematic, but everything is heightened by the sets, the mise-en-scene, the costumes and the lighting, that brings the fantasy to life (nothing on location here, nor does it need to be).  Dietrich is already her own woman, strong and compelling (particularly on stage, where, yes, this is the film in which she wears at tux and kisses a girl), but able to give herself up to Coop (only after he has made it clear that his womanizing is a front to protect himself from being hurt by her when she seems to be giving in to the amorous advances of rich Adolphe Menjou).  It is easy to drift through this film, taking in its splendours and exoticism (as seen from the vantage point of the 1930s), and not worry too much about whether Dietrich and Cooper will end up together (we know they will) and whether Menjou will nobly accept this (we know he does).  This may not be the pinnacle of the von Sternberg-Dietrich oeuvre but it shows them on the way up.

The Magnificent Butcher (1979)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Magnificent Butcher (1979) – W-P. Yuen

Old school Kung-Fu directed by Woo-Ping Yuen, who also directed Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) and Drunken Master (1978) which were Jackie Chan’s breakthrough hits.  Here, Sammo Hung takes the “loser” role previously occupied by Jackie, although truth be told, Sammo was in the industry a lot longer and apparently assisted Jackie to get his first parts (earlier they had both been part of the same Peking Opera troupe as children).  Sammo plays “Butcher Wing” who finds himself in a mess of trouble when the evil son of a rival kung fu school kidnaps his long-lost brother’s wife. Fortunately, Sammo has a strong ally – the “Beggar King” (according to imDb) who was supposed to be played by Simon Yuen (the drunken master himself, the old man in both of Jackie’s earlier films, and the father of director Woo-Ping Yuen) but he died of a heart attack during this film.  Fortunately, his replacement, Mei Sheng Fan, is pretty great in the trickster role as well.  The film is filled with fantastic hand-to-hand combat, replete with amazing and strange falls/jumps/punches with animal names/farts in the face etc.  There are some epic battles between the heads of the schools and also their strongest pupils.  Sammo, who was always overweight, holds his own, comically but effectively (later he went on to be an established director and producer in Hong Kong and then a star of his own American action show, Martial Law).  So, the film is great fun and funny too – until it isn’t. There is a problematic scene where the bad guy kills one of the lead female characters in the midst of an attempted rape.  Of course, this establishes him as really bad and perhaps reminds us that all this kung fu fighting (with fake blood and all) is actually pretty violent and bad.  But playing rape and murder for laughs isn’t right and although the scene is just a couple of minutes in an otherwise enjoyable film, it rankles.  It makes you wonder about our culture (not just HK culture) then and now – certainly there were plenty of harsh horror films that contained similar material.  Was it acceptable?  Is it OK to look away and recognise that this is/was just play-acting?  Since the evil act was punished, is it okay to have been included?  These are deeper questions than the Magnificent Butcher is able to answer.  Perhaps it is better simply to watch Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow or Drunken Master instead.

Tales from the Crypt (1972)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Tales from the Crypt (1972) – F. Francis

With its title drawn from the EC Comics series of the 1950s and its five stories also taken from the pages of that comic or one of its siblings, this Amicus Productions portmanteau film is actually pretty good.  When touring an ancient burial crypt, five people get side-tracked into a secret cave where they are confronted by the Crypt Keeper (played by Sir Ralph Richardson) who then details to them their future deaths, based on his knowledge of their secret (evil) intentions.  So, we are treated to five episodes where the protagonists (including Joan Collins, Nigel Patrick, Ian Hendry, Robin Phillips, and Richard Greene) commit some evil act and then meet with a horrible doom.  Peter Cushing guest stars in a rather atypical role in one of the tales.  And, although some of the acting seems middling at times, the horror is actually pretty memorable and the scenarios stayed with me after the film ended (some of them are quite gruesome in fact).  I’ve seen a couple of other portmanteau films from Amicus that were not as good as this.  I won’t spoil them for you but each one is short and sweet, packs a punch, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) – P. Greenaway

Director Peter Greenaway’s first big success takes place in 1694 in the time of William and Mary of Orange at a posh estate in Kent.  Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins) is commissioned to make 12 drawings of the estate in 12 days by the lady of the house (Janet Suzman) who wishes to use the drawings as gifts to secure a rapprochement with her husband, the lord of the manor, who has departed to Southampton for a fortnight.  In order to ensure that the light remains the same, Neville sits at the same time of the day for an hour or so in 12 different locations around the estate.  He claims to only paint “what he sees” and not “what he knows”, so he includes everything that happens to be found within the frame (despite warnings to the resident noblemen and women and their servants to vacate each successive location).  In way of payment for the drawings, the draughtsman’s contract requires £8 per drawing and a daily sexual tryst with the lady of the manor.  So, he is a rascal and he manages to endear himself to the women in the house (including the lady of the manor’s married daughter) but antagonise the men.  Aside from the draughtsman himself, all of the characters wear the most outlandish (and tall) wigs as well as pompous finery of the era.  Greenaway, a trained artist, supplied the drawings himself and also uses his painter’s eye to frame each (mostly static) shot of the film, save for a few slow travelling shots (that presage his later work in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, 1989, as I recall it).  There are some strange elements to the film (a living nude statue, for example), that may have been properly explained in the original 3 hour cut of the movie.  But more intriguingly, the film also poses a mystery of sorts for viewers to figure out – “extra” items that appear in the drawings suggest that the lord of the manor has been murdered (and soon his body does turn up).  I may not have been vigilant enough to figure this out or the British accents ultimately befuddled me, but there is a twist of sorts at the end that I won’t spoil here.  Suffice it to say that the film is a bemusing art object (with pulsating Michael Nyman score) rather than a gripping thriller and I suspect that Greenaway is not everyone’s cup of tea (but he is at his most mild here).   

Dogville (2003)

☆ ☆ ☆

Dogville (2003) – L. Von Trier

There’s a perennial question, about the artist whose choices in their personal life are so unspeakably bad that they contaminate appreciation of their art, that is increasingly relevant (or in the news) today.  However, I’m not sure a distinction can be made when it comes to Lars von Trier, whose choices in the artworks themselves are so questionable, even despicable, that the fact that he might also be a jerk personally seems beside the point.  His latest film at Cannes drove over 100 people out of the theatre because of its extreme violence toward women and children (and this, after he was only just allowed back to the festival when his banishment for appreciating Hitler ended).  His cultivated image is of “the provocateur” but he seems more of a poseur to me.  So, why did I give Dogville a chance?  Perhaps because of its reputation as an experimental film, with its sparse warehouse set, representing a small Colorado town with just a few pieces of lumber and some chalk outlines for houses on the floor (think Our Town).  That’s about all I knew.  As the film began and I found out that John Hurt narrates the entire film, alternating with some spoken dialogue from the characters, I found it sufficiently intriguing to keep watching.  Nicole Kidman plays a woman, fleeing from mobsters, who takes shelter in the town.  They have a community vote to decide whether to let her stay (after a two week trial where she works for each family to try to impress them).  Of course, she does get to stay but as the mobsters and the police close the dragnet, the “costs” of keeping her in the town and the price the townsfolk demand from Kidman increases.  Eventually, Kidman becomes the target of abuse, since she isn’t from there.  So, misogyny charges against von Trier are more or less fulfilled (again).  Kidman said she wouldn’t work with him again to boot.  And it isn’t quite clear where the experiment took us (the viewers) -- some read this as “anti-American” (since von Trier refuses to come to the US) and the use of David Bowie’s “Young Americans” over the ending credits seems to bear this out.  I saw it as a sadistic game of “chicken”, taunting the audience about just how far he was willing to go (to shock), and a sardonic repudiation of Dogme 95 trying to be as artificial as possible, as if to poke a finger in the eye of anyone who bothered to take him seriously back then (when he issued his philosophical filmmaker’s manifesto).  Although there is no denying that he has a certain degree of artistic know-how, let’s hope no one bothers to take von Trier seriously again.

Gimme Danger (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Gimme Danger (2016) – J. Jarmusch

A master filmmaker, such as Jim Jarmusch, can really take a well-worn genre, such as the music doco, and enhance it.  The result is even better when the focus, The Stooges, is so clearly loved by the director and so clearly deserving of attention (I have their three original albums:  The Stooges, 1969; Fun House, 1970; and Raw Power, 1973).  So, even though a big proportion of the running time is Iggy Pop’s talking head, he is charismatic enough to carry the weight (as one of rock’s elder statesmen, surprisingly). Jarmusch and his team work some magic in the editing room, ladling on ace concert footage, old photographs, unusual video or musical clips (virtual asides that spring from Iggy’s comments), and even animated sequences showing The Stooges and their adventures.  We do hear from Ron and Scott Asheton (guitar and drums) and Steve Mackay (sax) who died before the film was released and from James Williamson (guitar on Raw Power) who became a Silicon Valley exec in his second/actual career.  In an interesting choice, Jarmusch opens the film with the band’s downhill slide into oblivion in the mid-70s, pre-opening credits, and then returns to tell the tale from the beginning, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and onward to Detroit and then their major label recording contracts (both Elektra and MainMan/Columbia), their dissolution, and then “reunification” (as Pop calls it) in the mid-2000s to widespread acclaim with Minuteman Mike Watt on bass (their Live in Detroit DVD is pretty great). The rapport and friendship between Jarmusch and Iggy Pop (who featured in Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, 1993, and had a bit part in Dead Man, 1995) very likely created a climate which helped to boost this beyond your usual rockumentary.  Right on!   

Chandu the Magician (1932)

☆ ☆ ☆

Chandu the Magician (1932) – W. C. Menzies & M. Varnel

Previously a radio serial, the titular magician (who learned his trade from the yogis of the East) is called to Egypt to stop evil Roxor who has stolen the plans for a death ray and plans to use it! Bela Lugosi makes a great diabolical Roxor but Edmund Lowe is just serviceable as Chandu (though not for lack of trying).  The direction by art department stalwart William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come, 1936) and Marcel Varnel keeps things moving with some surprises (secret doors and the like) and only a few dull moments.  Special effects boost the scenes where Chandu uses his magic and the sets are better than average.  There is a love interest (Irene Ware) and also a teenage daughter (June Lang) who gets kidnapped and put up at a slave auction (remember this is “pre-code”).  There are a lot of white people playing Egyptians or Indians and, if there weren’t some on both the good side and the bad side, the racism might be a bit more overt.  But fortunately, everything is played with good humour and the main source of comic relief is a drunken British ex-soldier, now servant (played by character actor Herbert Mundin, also seen in The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1939).  All told, an okay adventure story with elements that elevate it beyond the standard for the usual b-pictures of the day.

Lion (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆

Lion (2016) – G. Davis

Based on a true story, a moving uplifting story that is meant to bring tears of joy to your eyes.  Except mine.  Perhaps the film was over-hyped leading me to have high expectations. Or perhaps it suffered from a contrast effect since I’d watched an intellectually stimulating film the night before.  Or perhaps it just felt like it was trying too hard (with sweeping musical cues to tell me when to feel moved).  Whatever the reason, I wasn’t grabbed the way others have been.  That isn’t because scenes of poverty and kids in distress in India don’t affect me – Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favourites.  Here, Sunny Pawar is adorable as the boy (who grows up to be Dev Patel) who is accidentally lost thousands of kilometres from home and then adopted from an orphanage in Calcutta by a Tasmanian couple (played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham).  But Patel himself seems somewhat constricted, probably because the script has him ruminating about finding his real mum (a rural labourer) for a good chunk of the running time, pushing aside girlfriend Rooney Mara in the process.  Finally though, Google Earth is there to save him (and indeed Google pitched in to sponsor the film) and we get the ending we’d been advertised.  I’m sure this was incredibly dramatic when it happened to the real Saroo Brierley, but I found the narrative to be rather simplistic (even with the brother Mantosh subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere).  True, there are some beautiful Australian and Indian vistas to behold and if you aren’t curmudgeonly like me, you might feel exalted by these vistas, the music, and the stirring emotional story.

  

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) – S. Chow

In opting for Kung Fu Hustle, I was hoping to be transported back to those days of the early 1990s when I first discovered Hong Kong cinema (Jacky Chan, at first, but then Chow Yun Fat and Jet Li).  But I guess you can’t go home again.  Technology has removed the wires that some stars (but not Jacky) formerly used to deliver flying kicks, replacing them with CGI miracles.  I never was a big fan of CGI.  However, I have to say that director and star Stephen Chow seems to have realised that the only way to use it is boldly, brashly, and in the most cartoonish way possible; in other words, what we have here is a Chuck Jones short populated by actual humans.  And that makes all the difference.  The plot is as zany as you would guess from that description.  Chow and his partner Tze Chung Lam pretend that they are part of the Axe Gang in order to try to squeeze money out of a poor community – however, they are quickly challenged by the real Axe Gang who, to their chagrin, discover that there are three aging kung fu masters retired in the town.  Or maybe there are four kung fu masters.  Or perhaps five.  Things do get out of hand (especially when the Axe Gang bring in some notorious ringers to combat them).  There are some well choreographed and over-the-top fight scenes (directed by Woo-Ping Yuen and Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, both immensely famous in their own rights) and some silly or slapstick comedy.  Things do get bloody as well (so this isn’t for kids). Yet for all those things that Kung Fu Hustle gets right, I still felt a hankering for the old school.

The Window (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Window (1949) – T. Tetzlaff

A film noir to scare kids, based on “The Boy who Cried Wolf” (attributed to Aesop).  Bobby Driscoll (star of Disney’s Song of the South, 1946, and Treasure Island, 1950) is a kid who tells tall tales but then witnesses a murder – and no one will believe him.  Possibly an inspiration for Rear Window (1954) since Driscoll, aged 9 or 10, sees the murder while voyeuristically spying on the neighbours (from his NYC fire escape).  And, as in the later film, they eventually come to get him.  Despite the presence of the earnest child actor (who later came to a bad end), director Ted Tetzlaff doesn’t pull any punches (nor does Paul Stewart playing the menacing neighbour, who socks Bobby in the back of a cab).  There is some real tension here and you do believe that Driscoll could get killed.  Quite the surprise, since the rest of the ensemble, parents Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale and some assorted cops, play this like a family drama.  Naturally, in the end, the kid learns his lesson.

American Honey (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

American Honey (2016) – A. Arnold

I wonder if the title American Honey (2016) has anything to do with A Taste of Honey (1961) which I just happened to watch a few weeks ago?  The earlier British film follows a teenage girl who, due to neglect by her mum, ends up having to make her own way in the world, navigating the onset of adulthood (including sexual relations and then pregnancy) as best she can.  The director of American Honey, Andrea Arnold, is British and (although the new film does include a song of the same title by country group Lady Antebellum) I suspect that the use of the word honey here is no coincidence.  After all, the new film also follows a teenage girl who, seemingly abandoned by her parents and living in a kind of hell in Oklahoma, must find her own way in the world.  She joins a circus-like “mag crew” (door-to-door magazine sellers) made up of other lost kids, headed by Riley Keough (Elvis’s granddaughter), only a few years older but a tough businesswoman.  But maybe not a successful one, because it doesn’t seem as though these kids actually sell many magazines.  Instead, their life is one continuous rather chaotic party (with hip-hop the music of choice, despite the title track).  Our heroine, Star (played by newcomer Sasha Lane), observes everything with a bit of distance, some querulousness, some disdain, but a genuine desire to belong.  She is especially thunderstruck by Jake, the chief sales-dude played by Shia LeBeouf, who seems really to have no moral compass.  Indeed, Star herself displays some very poor judgment, often willingly entering situations that contain real risks, especially for a young girl.  But director Arnold passes no judgment on these kids and this is not really a cautionary tale.  The (handheld) camera hovers around Lane, detailing her reactions in close-up, allowing the viewer to soak up the sensations she experiences (and this is a very sensual film, with heightened sights and sounds).  The acting is sometimes impressive and sometimes wet-behind-the-ears.  But the film is also too long (at 157 minutes) and, if it is really meant to be a snapshot of the American experience at this point in time, emphasising the under-class (as did the British Kitchen Sink films of the 1960s), then it seems rather narrow in scope.  In the end, both sad and exhilarating.

I, Dalio (2015)/Debra Paget, For Example (2016)/Our Stars (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

I, Dalio (2015)/Debra Paget, For Example (2016)/Our Stars (2015) – M. Rappaport

You may remember video essayist Mark Rappaport from his ‘90s features, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) or From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), in which he used film clips to investigate a certain thesis (for example, that Hudson’s films often hinted that he was gay) or to review an artist’s work as a way of gathering insight into the culture as a whole (as he does with Seberg).  Well, Rappaport has been very active again lately (in his 70s) creating a series of short essays, that use an actor as a starting place for a certain premise and then digress all over the place.  Of the three that I watched last night (each about 30 minutes long), I, Dalio (2015), focussing on French Jewish character actor Marcel Dalio, was the best.  Rappaport’s premise is that Dalio’s Jewishness meant that he was channelled into outcast roles (such as stool pigeon, hoodlum, etc.) in France before WWII but then when he fled to the US during the war he was typecast instead as French and was granted more positive roles (such as Frenchy in To Have and Have Not (1944) or the head croupier in Rick’s Café in Casablanca, 1942).  Returning back to France after the war meant a return to villainous parts – until he was old enough to be typecast simply as “old”.  Only the great director Jean Renoir had Dalio explicitly play Jewish roles in both The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), where his Jewishness is openly discussed and reflected upon (just before the war).  So, Rappaport’s point is that identity is a function of context and the career of Dalio is a case in point.  The premise of Our Stars (2015) is that Hollywood pairings of stars that worked during their first cinematic incarnation cannot work again years later because they can only demonstrate that the stars have aged and that their chemistry has dissipated.  He uses Gregory Peck & Jennifer Jones, Barbara Stanwyck and both Gary Cooper and Fred MacMurray, and Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster to illustrate the point.  Debra Paget, For Example (2016) seeks to use the 20^th Century-Fox contract actress of the 1950s as an example of the careers of those on the second rung who never crashed through to stardom.  Neither of these latter two films seemed as rich or deep as I, Dalio but they were still never less than entertaining, with well chosen “knowing” clips and digressions that were sometimes more interesting than the main focus.  Rappaport narrates each essay himself or instead uses actors who pretend to be the central protagonists, speaking in first person about what they might have been thinking. Of course, it’s all a fiction (or a blend of fact and fiction) but thought-provoking if film is your thing.

Theory of Obscurity: A Film about The Residents (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆

Theory of Obscurity: A Film about The Residents (2015) – D. Hardy

The main reaction I had to this documentary about The Residents is a wish that the band had made the film themselves.  But, of course, they may have, because director Don Hardy appears to have had access to a lot of presumably unseen footage from the early years of the 40-year-old band and members of the Cryptic Corporation (that oversee the business dealings of the band) were actively involved in editing and in front of the camera.  Of course, we still don’t know who the Residents actually are – but some of the old guys being interviewed sure seem to know a lot about their history.  My regret is not really with the content shown (which is often truly weird) but instead with the rather formulaic approach taken here – this is really just another one of those music docos where you’ve got talking heads (including with fans/accomplices) interspersed with short clips of the band playing.  There are some great clips but they never show you enough.  Why can’t the makers of these types of documentaries understand that fans would really want to see an entire song?  Especially in the case of the Residents where the visual and multimedia aspects of their show are so astonishing!  There are a couple of songs from the Commercial Album played on the 2013 fortieth anniversary tour that do run their full (short) length but that tour seems stripped down in comparison to earlier tours.  Of course, if the band’s output really is 60 albums (plus all sorts of other ephemera), then no single 90-minute film is going to be able to do justice to any one aspect of their career.  But we do learn a lot about those eyeballs.  Check their records, folks!

  

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – Y. Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies are exceedingly strange, partly because they tend to feature highly stylized sometimes affectless acting, partly because they are staged and shot in a chilly clinical way, but mostly because the plots hold things back, gradually offering up unusual events or “underlying principles” as though they were normal when clearly they are not.  His previous film was The Lobster (2015) which featured a world in which it is illegal to be single (and if you cannot find a spouse you are turned into an animal of your choosing).  That one starred Colin Farrell, as does The Killing of a Sacred Deer.  Here he plays a surgeon who has a friendly relationship with a teenage boy that he seems to be keeping from others. Later, we discover that the boy’s father died on the operating table, so the friendship seems to be Farrell’s way of expressing sympathy (or reducing guilt).  The boy (played by Barry Keoghan) seems friendly toward Farrell, if not a little needy (as is his now single mum).  That is, until he places a curse on Farrell’s family.  The rest of the film shows the family (including wife Nicole Kidman) coping with this predicament, which unlike the characters in previous Lanthimos films, they don’t accept as matter-of-fact but instead take a long time to come to grips with - and the movie sort of lopes along as they struggle.  Sure, there are lots of weird and inappropriate moments (particularly odd sexual disclosures) that make this more than your usual family-menaced-by-evil-outsider flick but it isn’t entirely out-of-this-world – instead everything is basically made as mundane as possible, so it’s our world but somehow off-kilter.  The alien soundtrack and unusual camera choices add to the effect.