The Wind (1928)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Wind (1928) – V. Sjöström

Lillian Gish is a naïve Virginia girl who moves west to stay with her cousin’s family, no doubt dreaming of a better life – but instead she discovers howling winds and a jealous wife who is anxious to get rid of her as soon as she arrives.  A charming businessman seems the perfect suitor to take her away from this plight – but he turns out to be married and a creep on the make.  So, she ends up with a cowhand who she doesn’t love and becomes increasingly distraught, spending her days alone with that howling wind.  In fact, the wind is virtually another character in the plot, beating at the windows, blowing through the doors, making clothes and hats flap, and undoubtedly adding to the stress and tension of life and driving Gish out of her mind.  Director Victor Sjöström (who later played elderly Professor Isak Borg for Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries) keeps the melodrama moving with a relative minimum of inter-titles, some spooky special effects (super-impositions of white horses representing the northerly winds) and excellent use of Gish and her expressive eyes for maximum impact.  Yet, yet, I enjoyed Sjöström’s earlier films, The Phantom Carriage (1921) and He Who Gets Slapped (1924), a bit more, despite the fact that, for many, The Wind is a masterpiece of silent cinema.  I wonder then whether the musical accompaniment I experienced (seemingly of Italian origin on my copy) showed the film in its best light; perhaps I should watch it again in a different version.

The Brothers Rico (1957)

☆ ☆ ☆

The Brothers Rico (1957) – P. Karlson

To me, Richard Conte seems the epitome of the noir villain, probably due to his evil role as the crime boss in The Big Combo (1955).  So, when he shows up as a mob accountant turned small business man named Eddie Rico, you aren’t quite sure where he stands.  As it turns out, he’s on the straight-and-narrow – but his younger brothers are still involved with the mob.  And when a once-fatherly mob kingpin asks Eddie to find his brothers (who have gone missing) so that they can be “protected”, Eddie naively helps out (persuading his aging mum to tell what she knows).  Of course, mob kingpins are never that generous and nefarious ulterior motives soon appear; Eddie’s safe family life (he and his wife are about to adopt a child) is soon jeopardised.  Director Phil Karlson doesn’t do anything fancy visually with the material (and Martin Scorsese notes this in his introduction to the film, arguing that this makes it come across tougher); but he’s an old hand at noir and it shows (previous films include Scandal Sheet, 1952; Kansas City Confidential, 1952; 99 River Street, 1953; and The Phenix City Story, 1955).  This isn’t top tier but it’s solid.

  

Words and Pictures (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆

Words and Pictures (2013) – F. Schepisi

On the up side, Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche inhabit their somewhat clichéd characters and bring them to life.  He plays against type as an alcoholic English teacher, nerdy enough to love word games but feeling more and more like a fraud with his poetic inspiration long departed.  She shows us a character it seems like she has played before, a cold professional with high standards who has a secret soft and lovable side, struggling with rheumatoid arthritis that threatens to destroy her art career.  On the down side, these two actors/characters are stranded in a plot that tries to combine Dead Poets Society with, I don’t know, some romance movie (which is not a genre I tend to watch a lot).  They work for a private high school in the US (the film is in English and Owen sports an American accent) and he comes up with the (sophomoric) idea to have a “war” between words and pictures that pits his Honours English class against her Art Honours class (although they do share students).  It doesn’t take long before someone utters the “A picture is worth…” phrase.  There are a few predictable plot arcs (e.g., how long before his self-destructive behaviour threatens his job, his relationships, etc.?) and we do get the expected happy ending (more or less).  And the kids, you know, they get inspired.  I blame director Fred Schepisi who had a string of mainstream hits in the 1980s (Roxanne, Plenty, A Cry in the Dark) but not much of note since.  There may have been something promising here at the start, and some little moments do work, but the whole enterprise ends up rather embarrassingly middlebrow. 

  

Possession (1981)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Possession (1981) – A. Zulawski

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill go insane as a couple experiencing a messy divorce.  And in fact, I’m not quite sure whether the real actors weren’t losing it too, given the obvious commitment to extreme experience that they demonstrate here.  There is a scene in the Berlin subway where Adjani seems to be having a seizure that is almost too much to bear. Both she and Neill spend much of the film covered in blood (the film was banned in several countries as a “video nasty”; although brutal, it isn’t sadistic torture porn or anything).  Basically, there appear to be two parallel narratives – the actual objective “facts” of the divorce and the subjective psychological experience of the couple that is somehow literally projected into reality as something horrible.  There is a monster that has taken possession of Adjani and she moves to a new apartment with it; some commentators think this monster represents her guilt for having an affair while Neill was away on business (he appears to be a Cold War spy).  Neill meets Adjani’s exact double (except with green eyes) who is apparently the school teacher for their young son, Bob.  He begins an affair with her – some think that she represents his ideal fantasized version of a wife/partner.  Eventually Adjani’s monster transmogrifies into another version of Neill.  It is all pretty WTF and intensely emotional – the plot is beside the point, just a series of encounters between Neill and Adjani and Heinrich (the man with whom she had the affair) as well as the detectives that Neill hires to follow her.  So, the objective narrative is pretty mundane but director Andrej Zulawski is more interested in the gut-wrenching subjective experience and unless you want to have one too, I’d be wary of this film.    

As Tears Go By (1988)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

As Tears Go By (1988) – K.-W. Wong

Wong Kar-Wai’s debut feature takes place in the well-known world of the Hong Kong triads (well known to those who enjoyed John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, 1986, and scores of other similar HK gangster films).  So, the plot is largely familiar:  Big Brother Wah (Andy Lau) has trouble keeping his impulsive Little Brother Fly (Jacky Cheung) under control and they have conflict with Tony (Alex Man) a rival gang leader; meanwhile Wah is falling in love with his cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung) but knows that he is wrong for her.  It all ends up in tears.  What is different here is Wong’s stylistic choices and chances (although John Woo was also no schlub in this department).  Not only does he throw in some unique shots (as many directors could or would) but he dares to film an entire fight scene in some sort of slo-mo rotoscoping.  Moreover, the use of colour (filters as well as art direction) is splendid and adds to the mood (as befits the director of In the Mood for Love, 2000).  Although Maggie Cheung has little to do, apparently this was her breakout dramatic role (after starring in lighter comedic roles, such as Jackie Chan’s Police Story films).  But in the end, this has got to be one for fans of the genre (and the macho ultra-violence it entails), as Wong’s style is laid on top of the plot (livening it up) rather than integrated well with it (as he was later to achieve, though still favouring style over substance).

Appointment with Danger (1950)

☆ ☆ ☆

Appointment with Danger (1950) – L. Allen

Run-of-the-mill noir that sees Alan Ladd as a postal inspector (a.k.a cop) who is brought in to solve a colleague’s murder but ends up stumbling onto a gang planning a heist (targeting a mail truck, of course).  Ladd plays a tough guy who no one likes but his dealings with the key witness, a nun (Phyllis Calvert), soften him up a bit.  Nevertheless, he’s hard as nails when it comes to playing the dirty cop in order to get in thick with the gang led by Paul Stewart.  Jack Webb and Harry Morgan (later of Dragnet) are on hand as a couple of not-so-bright hoodlums.  The cinematography by John F. Seitz (who also shot Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd, and The Lost Weekend) is better-than-average with some stark night shooting.  Certainly not the place to start with film noir, but not bad.

  

Seduced and Abandoned (1964)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Seduced and Abandoned (1964) – P. Germi

It’s a righteously angry…comedy… about Italian law and hypocrisy.  A bleak satire that focuses on men’s double standard for women, wanting to seduce them (and hoping they will comply) but then rejecting them for marriage because they are no longer virginal.  Remember this is the early ‘60s – a lifetime away from the present and it’s Sicily where old fashioned views may have survived longer.  Worse, although men could be jailed for seducing an underage girl, if they subsequently married her (a.k.a. shotgun wedding), the charges would be dropped.  How the women in question felt about all this, particularly those in the latter situation (raped and then encouraged to marry the rapist), doesn’t seem to have been usually factored into the equation.  This is the focus of Pietro Germi’s film, which finds young Stefania Sandrelli giving in to Aldo Puglisi’s advances and then finding herself rejected by him, but pregnant.  Her perpetually apoplectic father, played by Saro Urzì, thinks of the family’s honour first and foremost, doing his utmost to shift the blame for the predicament onto Puglisi and to cover up any sexual relationship at all (the problem lies in the fact that Puglisi is already engaged to Urzi’s other older daughter).  In typical comedic fashion, worse turns to worst, as Agnese (Sandrelli) rejects this plan (and another one which sees her brother shooting Puglisi in a staged crime of passion) and instead brings in the police and courts.  Everyone is frantic about their family honour and things begin to get over complicated.  There are some humorous moments but the feel of the film is generally unsavoury (and not as blackly funny as Divorce, Italian Style, 1961, Germi’s earlier hit) – there are few sympathetic characters and even the ridiculous ones (a hapless and poverty-stricken Baron brought in to marry the older sister in lieu of Puglisi) sometimes do questionable things. But the film looks great in crisp black and white, the acting is strong, and the message is on target. Nevertheless, I hope this film is hopelessly dated.

Lost Highway (1997)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Lost Highway (1997) – D. Lynch

If we are to rank David Lynch’s films, then Lost Highway falls somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre – if we are being generous, then in the top half below the masterworks of Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr (2001) and not quite as rich or scary as Inland Empire (2006).  (It has been too long since I’ve seen Eraserhead, 1977).  Indeed, the art direction and dream/nightmare imagery here are on par with the best Lynch has offered – but the plot and the mystery (wherein saxophonist Bill Pullman somehow morphs into Balthazar Getty) may leave slightly not enough to hang your hat on, despite the movie eking its way toward a too long run-time.    Patricia Arquette plays a dual role.  First, she is the wife of Pullman, possibly cheating on him and possibly murdered by him.  Then, she is the moll of gangster Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia) who starts an illicit affair with Getty (shades of Wild at Heart, 1990, but less icky than that film), spending half the movie naked, exploited by Mr Eddy and probably Lynch as well (onscreen not off).  By the film’s conclusion, we may come to believe that Pullman and Getty have been housed in the same person seeing that Pullman finally does emerge to reclaim the narrative in the film’s waning moments.  Perhaps the most “straightforward” analysis here (if such a thing is even possible with Lynch) is that Pullman has made a Faustian bargain with the Devil (Robert Blake with his eyebrows shaved off is very Mephistophelean) in order to avoid punishment for murdering his wife, with his soul entering another’s body in a sort of fugue state; perhaps that bargain also involved Arquette being granted new life or this could be the Devil’s sly joke, a fly in the ointment which is meant to disrupt the smoothness of the plans.  At least that’s what I’ve got this morning – no doubt there are other interpretations.  However, Lynch remains resistant to such cogitating (and perhaps it is best not to even try), instead he hits us in the subconscious with images (from his subconscious?) and music (from This Mortal Coil to Lou Reed to Nine Inch Nails, though not Hank Williams’ relevant title track) that evoke schematic shades of primitive, psychological, sociological, and cinematic knowledge, hanging together serendipitously…or not.      

Pushover (1954)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Pushover (1954) – R. Quine

Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak are better known for other roles (in Double Indemnity, 1944, and Vertigo, 1958, respectively) and those other roles haunt this late noir.  For example, MacMurray plays a cop who decides to commit a crime with a suspect/femme fatale and Novak, in her debut, plays a woman complicit in an earlier crime who becomes the target of the male gaze (a stakeout) and the object of MacMurray’s obsession.  Pushover can’t match those top ten noirs but it does rise above a lot of other B pictures through its careful plotting which finds Novak always under surveillance by the cops and MacMurray on the stakeout constantly surrounded by his unsuspecting peers.  Their game is to kill Novak’s boyfriend and steal the proceeds of his recent bank robbery and somehow get away with it, taking advantage of MacMurray’s position.  Of course, there are a few complications and, in the end, not everyone behaves rationally.  Worth a look, especially for film noir aficionados.

The Trip to Spain (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Trip to Spain (2017) – M. Winterbottom

This is the third in a series of films (edited from the respective TV series) directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing “versions” of themselves on a tour of restaurants sponsored by The Observer newspaper (in the UK for The Trip, 2010; then The Trip to Italy, 2014, and now in Spain).  As before, the two comics poke fun at each other -- with Coogan’s supposedly fragile ego creating the main emotional dynamic of the film.  He defensively promotes himself (his Oscar nomination for writing Philomena, 2013, figures prominently), puts Brydon down (though the latter is good natured about it, while still getting some good digs in), and deals with crises in his professional and personal life.  But the centrepiece of the film is the visits to various Spanish restaurants and out-of-the-way tourist stops and the non-stop banter between the two men.  Half of the running length seems to be impressions of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Marlon Brando, the cast of Monty Python (“no one expects the Spanish Inquisition” of course), and more.  It’s absurd and ridiculous and made me laugh (which few “normal” comedies do these days).  Of course, there’s a fairly good chance that this is particularly funny to me since another emotional undercurrent has to do with guys turning 50.  You never can tell though how much of this “reality” show is reality and how much is scripted (for example, wives and girlfriends here are played by actors); even the references to Coogan and Brydon’s own careers might contain only enough truth to give us the illusion of reality.  But enough is funny and “true”(probably half-assed and half-improvised) that this is an enjoyable hour or two away from the real reality watching these guys joust with the windmills of their minds.

Train to Busan (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Train to Busan (2016) – S.-h. Yeon

If you are looking for Korean zombie action, look no further!  Director Sang-ho Yeon moved from anime to debut in this live action flick that follows the conventions of the (modern) zombie genre, including fast moving zombies who are the result of some biological lab accident.  This time, the epidemic seems to have covered most of South Korea – except the southern coastal city of Busan.  A seemingly amoral businessman played by Yoo Gong is travelling there to bring his primary school daughter (Su-an Kim) to see her mother, his ex-wife.  But when the zombie outbreak infects the train, he needs to learn to make some moral decisions.  There are a fair few character-types on the train, including a no-nonsense and buff married man (charismatic Dong-seok Ma) and his pregnant wife (Yu-mi Jung), some baseball players and a girlfriend/cheerleader, an evil corporate leader, the conductor, some old women, cabin attendants, and so on.  En route to Busan, they have to fight a lot of these very hyperactive zombies (who also apparently can’t see in the dark) and also navigate interpersonal tensions among the survivors.  As you would expect, not everyone survives.  But it is ripsnorting action throughout, with only a few pauses to play up the pathos and let us catch our breaths.  Yeon controls everything smoothly and the art direction/set design/effects are all top notch. Nothing too important here, of course, but a lot of fun and not as gory as you might expect.  So, if zombies are your thing, this is a treat!

mother! (2017)

☆ ☆ ½

mother!  (2017) – D. Aronofsky

After hearing that it was shocking and could be the worst film ever, I was excited to see director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film.  After all, Black Swan (2010) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) were certainly full on and intense and unforgettable and Pi (1998) was a great debut.  The Wrestler (2008) was a surprisingly good Mickey Rourke comeback film. However, I remember being less enamoured of The Fountain (2006) and I guess I must have skipped Noah (2014), not even realising it was Aronofsky.  So, my expectations were high for Mother!  However, I found it extremely pretentious (once I watched the special feature that clued me in to the allegory undergirding the plot).  I’m not sure things would have been different if I “got it” earlier but this was rather deadly dull for the first ¾ or so.  I hoped for some supernatural element to appear (given the poster’s evocation of Rosemary’s Baby) and the decision to keep the camera close to Jennifer Lawrence’s head and shoulders, making it difficult to see what she is looking at or what is around her, led me to think that there would be horror afoot.  Her relationship with Javier Bardem – and his suspicious behaviour – also seemed ominous.  When rude guests Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer show up, it’s threatening – but also pretty annoying.  And the film progresses from there, with Lawrence increasingly bewildered and irritated.  And so was I – my expectations were dashed.  Aronofsky may have had a fever dream from which the script emerged but it feels a lot more heavy-handed than it should (pretentious and trying vainly to shock).  Yes, there’s a message here but it’s simplistic and incoherent in the main.  Too bad.