Quinoa1984 Reviews

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

Funny and pleasant, with Lombard excellent and Montgomery pretty good

[7/10 · 24 May 2025]

It is common knowledge to anyone who has read one of the many Alfred Hitchcock biographies (or a cursory check of Imdb trivia) that Hitch took on directing the film as a favor to his friend Carol Lombard. There are worse ways to get a job, and looking at the chronology of what he was up to at this time - just off the one-two punch of Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, which put him into the league of major Hollywood directors with the former getting best picture at the Academy Awards (for Selznick, natche) and before Suspicion - maybe he wanted to flex his muscles and show the studios that he could do a For Hire project while bringing in some visual flair that was his metier.

On that score, mission accomplished, and what you get many decades on is a pretty good sorta-screwball romantic comedy that particularly showcases how brilliant Lombard was. I did wait to come to watching this in part because of that relatively "minor" distinction, but also because I was not that blown away by Robert Montgomery when seeing him in, say, the Lady in the Lake (nothing wrong with that movie, it's also pretty good, but he is largely not even on screen for much of it). Or maybe it is because I have been slow to watch some of those Hitchcock films that are not seen as (cue the lights on the marquee, Jim) HITCHCOCK! Films (The Ring and Juno and the Paycock for another day... good evening, I'm Jack Digresscock).

But with it playing along with nearly every other major feature (and imitators and inspired-by sort of films) at the Paris Theater in New York city for the next few weeks, on 35mm no less, it seemed time to give it a shot thr way it was meant to br seen. I was more entertained than not by the film, even as it is largely driven more by the charm and (yes) dramatic chops of its leads (and Gene Raymond playing drunk one scene where he is given too much for his character Jeff, aka "that southern fried piece of chicken" as described by David).

The script is actually more like more modern romantic comedies than one might think, as in there is a contrivance of a sort - because of that whole "we are not actually married, so... phooey to you!" and how much Ann is so stubborn about not going back with David despite all of his moves to make clear to her that he does love her. The inciting incident is damning for him, though, where before we find out about this marriage not on-paper being real when Ann asks David if he would rather be married or not married what he would want and he says nay. Look at Lombard's face in that moment and you see someone who is totally crest-fallen, and it is all the worse because seconds later she has to act like what he said was "fine, really."

In one sense it does fit a little into Hitchcock's body of work - or, ala Scorsese and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (also a studio assignment) he finds what will keep him going in the material - since it is about how much a relationship is shaped on truth and deception, and often times how someone in the relationship needs to understand what they want from themselves just as much as the other (maybe an odd thought, but this paired with Rear Window and the Stewart/Kelly thing in that film could be interesting). David in this film knows he messed up and loves Ann, but Ann is so (rightfully) upset about it that she won't see how much she still loves him.

And around and around we go for 90 minutes till that shot of those ski-shoes are up in the air (perfect innuendo). I don't want to make this sound like it is greater than it is since the script is fairly standard when it comes to dialog and certain scenarios, ie the nightclub set piece where the dinner dates for David are stereotypes and not the compelling kinds that usually populate Hi/chcock films (amusing, sure, but forgettable). While Montgomery gives a strong comedic performance here, especially when he is playing sick in bed at the ski lodge, I do wish Lombard had Cary Grant or William Powell or someone to give this a little extra boost. Luckily, Lombard has so many amazing reactions and bits of timing, like when Ann is with Jeff watching him be stumbling drunk, and up on that ride at the fair that gets stuck.

Definitely watch it if you are going to do the whole oeuvre of the Master of Suspense anyway, and putting it outside of the whole Auteur discussion it just works as a pleasant rom-com that is probably more amusing than laugj out loud funny. I left it being like "that's a good Smile kind of movie... no, not that kind, the genteel kind."

Friendship (I) (2024)

Very funny; kind of an absurdist-surrealist satirical thriller about male alienation

[9/10 · 24 May 2025]

A thought that kept at me for at least a quarter or a third or whatever of Friendship: this is like another of the great comedies of the 2020s, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, in one sense, which is that it is a vibe and even if you do not get on it you have to acknowledge that the commitment to this particular tone and sensibility makes it a wholly special experience. Andrew DeYoung in his feature debut recognizes that if he is to set out and make a film with Tim Robinson in the lead, and to let him just go off with a dozen different "I think you should leave" moments (and those words are spoken in the film for more than one discomfiting and uproarious situation), it has to have that tone for everyone.

If it were just a little more, shall we say, normal, like if only Tim Robinson's Craig were off and odd and just so maladjusted even as he so much wants to be accepted by Austin (Paul Rudd in peak hipster mode), it wouldn't work. But so many of the characters in this film, pretty much anyone with a significant speaking role, outside of maybe Craig's boss and the Mayor of the town of Clovis, USA (no state given, I checked the mail label since it is so obvious for us to see), has some peculiar things that are spoken in almost every scene. It has that feeling though of being naturally delivered, so it is a film walking a tightrope between aburdism and almost Bunuelian surrealism, like how we have to accept the uncanny aspects of the dialog because of how everyone still seems sort of tethered to our reality.

Take it from being a man in a modern American suburban plane of existence, it sucks to try to make new friends and it really sucks when you feel like there's someone who is so cool that you can't get to their level of "oh, wow, you have that, and know how to go into that sewer to get to that roof-top, and etc etc, cannot wait till you get that car of your dreams, too." (So, of course, it helps to just... not have many friends and be happy with that, sigh... but I digress) DeYoung understands how it is also so much funnier to have the distinct energy levels Robinson and Rudd naturally have in these parts to play off each other; even though Rudd's Austin is a dork/loser, he's got a cool job and a band and theres a freedom unlocked in Craig with that.

Yet he does something really interesting: this is not what the trailer might make you think entirely, ie a new The Cable Guy with Robinson in the Jim Carrey part of a "I just want to hang out, no big deal" stalker since, frankly, Rudd's Austin is not all that sympathetic, he does make things weird by having like play-boxing-fighting (which is what goes too far), and is kind of an a-hole to the happy oddball lapdog that is Craig. When he says to Austin when he freezes him out that he came on too strong... he has a point!

So when we get into the rest of the story, as Craig's life and relationship to his wife unravels (Kate Mara, with a tougher role to play because she has to be the more "straight" character to react to Robinson's strangeness, is really good here), we should want to almost be on Craig's side... except, nah, he is nuts and going off his own kind of sad deep end, too. We should be more with Austin, but he is the character who is so far apart from Craig and, eventually, the subject of his ire (while still with a fascination and a need to repeat his acts, hence the "adventure" through the tunnel where Tammy gets lost).

So many characters here are equally "off" but kind of wonderful in their off-putting nature (take a shot every time *Marvel is mentioned and it is blotto time), like the kid at the phone store with the toad that sets Craig on his uh... "trip" that is not really that (just a few minutes! And he made a sandwich!) The film is a series of cringe encounters and conversations and breakdowns of sanity, and yet it is always about things that will make us laugh, and hard, because we still can recognize how maintaining any social situation is just, well, who needs it?

Robinson is particularly spectacular here because his Craig should start to veer off into unbelievability, but he makes him a vulnerable and simple creature - he just wants to accomplish eating that Navy Seal Team 6 special meal (the one they had after icing Bin Laden, after all) - and you just want to see what fresh hell he will get himself into next.

And it is very, very, very, very funny. Friendship is one of the most unique films of the year and, as of the halfway point, one of the most memorable.

Avanti! (1972)

Very good, breezy, ultimately bittersweet if flawed minor gem for Wilder, Lemmon and Mills

[8/10 · 20 May 2025]

I could be mistaken, but I believe this features cinema's only Deux ex State Department-ina (?) That sounds silly until you watch this and see how so many twisty buearocratic snafus get sorted out with one call to an aging - and unlike Juliet Mills actually fat - white guy (Edward Andrews, very funny in that oblivious way that Billy Wilder characters have) with deep connections and intel on what's going wrong in this or that country in a not-at-all bigoted under-current tone. Thankfully, this co-writer and director relishes in making that character that shows up to straighten out everything into a total maroon.

Let me make mention of that again, uh, do we call it a "running gag" of "hey, Miss Pigett Juliett Mills is so fat ::insert line you remember from recess here:: I think it is the part of the film that has aged about as well as my Billy Joel t shirt from high school that has permanent sweat stains, but I am fascinated by why it was in the movie to begin with. This script was based on a play, so I have to wonder if the actress originally in that first production was actually overweight (whatever that even is these days), and oddly enough Mills put on 25 pounds prior to shooting. I know the joke is on the Lemmon Ambruster character since he says it and is meant to look foolish... but did the audience at the time see it that way, or actually see her as fat?

It isn't a major part of the film, but it is there, and it calls to mind how IRL culture does get down women, like say Kate Winslet in the 90s or Jennifer Lawrence in more recent times, for not looking rail thin (but still being objectively hot and sexy and here I go revealing my hetero bonafides). The shame is when these bits sort of stop the movie in its tracks, albeit it is kind of funny when she pulls out the apple as all she'll be having for the fancy dinner that she and Ambruster are having to repeat their respective mother and father's Italian dinner tryst routines. Mills is, one should also note, really good in the movie and has a liveliness that is not lost on the serious moments, as her character is grieving, and when she is shot nude by Wilder she is shot to look... good, actually, and the plus side is Wilder knows it and the audience should as well.

Most of Avanti is a Farce, but Wilder is smart enough to keep the types and tropes just silly enough to only be like fifteen years out of date (if it wasn't already then), and the story keeps throwing problem after problem and the tightrope Wilder and co writer IAL Diamond come across (what a monster burger of a name by the way, just had to point that out) is it could fall into Sitcom cheapness, like where is the emotion and something like reality here. But what Wilder has is Lemmon and by this point that wasn't nothing, on the contrary he is elevates the material and every scene he's in, especially with Milld and Clive *Revill. He has that way of taking a scene up and down and sideways and his looks and pauses are one of the great joys of mid 20th century American comedies.

By the mid point of the movie, when Miss Pigott strips down to have that morning skinny dip and bathe out by the Italian coastal rocks (you know, like the baby seals do) and Lemmon follows in his huff and then strips down as well (losing his underwear as he swims because why not) and then connects on a deeper level with Mills on those rocks, Wilder and Lemmon and everyone have found the groove to tap into here which is that sense of "yeah, the world is kind of messed up as were our parents, might as well make the best of a bad lot." Moreover, Wilder captures that odd but pleasant feeling of being away somewhere on a vacation, and the Italian locations do a lot of work on their own.

Lastly, dont take for granted how Wilder, even on a film that is good but not great, manages that tone of bittersweet throughout, and not only with Ambruster and Piggott and their misunderstandings (ie wait where did she take the corpses? Oh, wait, nevermind, it was that one Trotti son with the bad eye, superb casting of the locals by the by). There's the whole crux of... our father and mother have died, and the grieving time is taken seriously and has some depth when it's shown, but in the story we understand, as Ambruster has to come to slowly but surely, that the affair his well to do business magnate dad had with this working class British lady was what he needed to be happy, and sometimes carving that happiness is necessary in a life that has to be shaped and molded by Capitalism.

So, good stuff right there, even if you have to wade through "but she is not fat but oh wait the movie will say she is anyway" lines.

(*Yes, the voice of the Emperor in the original version of Empire Strikes Back. Random)

Nobody Knows (2004)

Kore-eda's great and affecting story of childhood resilience and little moments of drama

[10/10 · 17 May 2025]

Kyoko is likely among top worst mothers in modern cinema. Not a question. Let the darn kids go to school and at least leave a phone number or forwarding address or something; do you really want those low propensity voters in your little apartment? That high animated-style voice can only get a cute Japanese woman so far. And yes, some people just are not equipped to have children and shouldn't. But once the kids are here, well... What can one do with those squeaky little shoes for little Yuki?

Kore-eda has a seemingly intuitive understanding, probably one that comes from just observing these kids and other kids throughout his life, that little moments can build and build incrementally and for a story like this either that way or overpowering melodrama is the way to go. He is not exactly a Vittorio De Sica kind of Neo-Realist filmmaker (not a shade meant on him, of course, he's great), and he is in the same sort of swimming pool dramatically speaking when it comes to showing the shame and sadness of everyday living for young characters who have little chance in this world to make it based on the circumstances.

His style is not at a remove from the characters, on the contrary he has a cinema verite kind of ideal with the camera operators and editors, and there's natural light as much as possible. He has the courage of a dramatic filmmaker to let us observe and watch based on behavior, primarily that of the boy Akira (Yagira, so exceptional at seeming so mild when he has to be fuming when not trying to just get his young family by each day and night), and to let us figure out how he's feeling or how we feel about this increasingly sad and dire situation.

Everything seems so ordinary and every day in the children's experiences, and that's what makes what happens- ie when yhe other boys come over to play and Kore-eda cuts to a close up of one of the kids doodling on an overdue gas bill- all the more engaging. Everything we are seeing here, from the kids at play to fingers making marks on the windows to Akira's looking at what is never there in front of him- his mother coming home- accumulate. It is a long film, but Kore-eda doesn't waste or or make things stuck in tedium, maybe because tedium is what these kids are stuck in and without much help (and I'm reminded of Parasite as a "smell" from their house ends up othering Akira and the kids).

I get now why this is ranked so highly among Kore-eda's most affecting works since it is so equally unassuming in its style that it keeps us wondering what bad times or suffering Akira will face next (or me I will say me, but you know it'll be you when you watch it), so that it makes all the shall we say nice moments (ie the kids going out to buy their food and play in the playground) more of a balance.

To say that Kore-eda's mastery is deceptive sounds like he's putting one over on us and that's not what he's doing; his heart is with these kids and this awful situation they're in, and he gives these characters so much room and space to be... kids. Thats the thing about it and what makes this great, the depictions of natural resilience and that this capability human beings have (kids sometimes miraculously) to persevere and still try to enjoy themselves despite their abandonment.

A Man and a Woman (1966)

Da da da da da (etc etc)- romantic, satisfying, but is stuck in its time

[7/10 · 16 May 2025]

Once again one of those times where I dont not think that Pauline Kael was a little tough in her short review of this at the original release, while at the same time being on to something with her closing remark about that there is a "gauzy enchantment that makes it a good make-out movie, which is the best thing you can say about it." A Man and a Woman, which I kind of like more than she did, is a romantic film that does have characters going through grief while also going through that initial burst of a connection to a new person. That is a captivating part about the film, but at the same time it is also what gets Lelouch into some slippery moments as a filmmaker in regards to show vs telling.

He does do much more of the former throughout the story, dont get me wrong, except when he doesn't. An example I think about hours after seeing the movie is with Jean-Louis's (Trintignant) late wife Valerie; we finally see the back story about his wife more than halfway into the film, when finally Anne (Aimee) asks him in a quieter moment when she's feeling closer to him, enough to ask anyway, about who his wife was. We see the flashback when he was in a bad car crash, nevermind exactly how, but the key aspect is he was very messed up and more or less in a coma.

Lelouch shows us Valerie in the hallway at the hospital, pacing back and forth, feeling anxious, and it is good to see how her character cares for him and is anxious about what his condition is. Then a radio voice comes on (we've heard it a couple of other times telling us about the progress of races, or will hear later), and we find out from him that his wife got into a nervous breakdown and ended her own life upon the news that he was in a stable condition. And... that's it. That is the last we will see of her in this story. And she is barely an element in what Jean-Louis has to think on.

The whole choices with Jean-Louis and Valerie point to how there isnt quite the level of equality in what we see with the couples and their histories; meaning that we see plenty with Anne and her late husband, once stunt-man Pierre, in particular when she is deep in a moment of malaise at just the moment when she is with this new love. Maybe that is by design, that Jean-Louis has moved on much more (we know that since we see him, in one scene, with another woman he is just having a fling with), but it also makes the exploration of grief one sided and, more importantly, not getting to see more of Valerie like we do with Pierre seems more like a flaw in filmmaking than just a deliberate artistic choice.

What I also want to get at is that Lelouch is very good at creating atmosphere while at the same time telling a story that is a little, well, shallow perhaps. Or, that may not be totally fair, but I think that the leads here, Aimee and Tringingnant, are doing a heckuva lot to add a chemistry and even chemical charge between the two characters that builds slowly over the film and so by the final act when there's that back and forth regarding their love affair and how it will turn out and Anne's love for her husband.

I do think there is one phenomenal scene when it comes to natural acting and writing and direction all coming together which is the meal the couple has with their respective kids (the boy going between French and Spanish and what they want to eat or dont eat and ths conversations that unfold). I almost wonder how much was scripted there, but it is so crucial to making us root for them as a couple and how they each see what humanity is in one another (or more literally Anne knows Jean Louis is good with kids). This doesn't necessarily mean it makes for a fully great film, but it is what kept me hooked in to see more scenes like it. And... not so much.

A Man and a Woman is a soft and tender and emotionally alive art film that I would recommend, while at the same time it feels a little more dated in its style; I dont even mean the changes from color to black and white (though that is certainly a choice, whether due to budget constraints or what have you) as much as the editing and camera movements where documentary realism in like the racing scenes (and boy are there a lot of those) is taken away by how much Lelouch moves the camera. And my goodness are some of the songs here just not my cup of tea.

Perhaps there's some of a "my problem not a you problem" like I can get why this has and still resonates with audiences so strongly, but I also come to see this at long last having watched dozens of other French New Wave films (Lelouch came in later than Godard and Truffaut and the rest but not by much) and I find the playfulness and dramatics of those films endures more than the style over substance feeling here. In other words, gauzy + enchantment, and it is nearly 60 years later and there's been a little better since (and surely worse).

Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Happiness, truth, and French society at a key moment in this rough but memorable social document

[8/10 · 12 May 2025]

Chronicle of a Summer is dated in some, maybe more than some, aspects like in parts where Rouch and Morin just have regular people sitting around talking about the racial disparities of the day (actually some of this may be more topical than I admit), but the person of the psychologist surveyor Marceline, who is also a concentration camp survivor with the numbers on her arms (some of the men at this table scene don't know what it means, though eventually someone mentions they saw Night and Fog), is a particular stand out since she is the one who starts off asking questions to random persons on the street and then becomes a subject herself. But what does stand out is the central question they keep coming back to: Are You Happy?

That whole idea helps to keep a through line of a sort to what is a documentary full of digressions both in subject matter and style - when the filmmakers show characters walking around on occasion it seems oddly staged given how this one of the first Cinema Verite works (that is the term the filmmakers used, in full disclosure) while at other times like the work seen in the factory those moments have a (scuse this word again) reality that sticks.

That question is deceptively simple; some can say they are happy on the surface level, but what they are happy about, and subsequently very much not happy about, has to come out when they need to give examples to support their points. So when we see Marceline at one point, trembling like a hundred leaves in a major windstorm, talking about why she is not happy, and there is that move to show her numbers (at this point we hadn't seen them yet and nothing about her past as a survivor), it hits like a brick.

I can't quite say that every interview kept me totally riveted, and that could be because (not entirely the filmmakers fault if that's even the word for it) this was so new and the roughness was going to be baked into the process and one is more accustomed to either true Fly on the Wall approaches to lives like these ala the Maysles or with more pointed inquiries into the lives of the subjects like Apted with the Up series. But what does stick out and make the film substantive despite frankly being a little draggy even at 90 minutes is how the filmmakers are looking for a kind of anthropology to feelings, if that makes sense, and how that reflects both reality and a sort of "created" reality that some of the subjects (with reason) can't stand.

In short, this was made a the right time with the right subjects and the idea of happiness and how it is what you can make of it - and as someone points out with a clear wisdom that grief and unhappiness are not one and the same and it's important to distinguish those things - stretches beyond 1961 for as long as we have human civilization.

Pigs and Battleships (1961)

Shohei Imamura's "Im So Bored with the USA" -

[9/10 · 10 May 2025]

As context always matters, Imamura makes it not only clear, not subtext but the tex itself, that the Japan of Pigs and Battleships is under an occupation that is a form of Gangsterism. There is a reason the troops are there - they won the war - but the extent to which they are still in Japan 15 years later is not about keeping any kind of peace but a form of taking and taking (Americans = Gangsters? I wasn't born yesterday).

The shots of the battleships bookends the film, and Americans are in the story mostly on the sides, except at one key point about midway through as sexual assaulter brutes who make Haurko (a heartbreaking and very good Yoshimura performance throughout) and young woman who is only with them because she's lost her way and looking for quick money. So, if this is a Crime melodrama, Imamura means to say, involving low level thugs and bad deals involving pigs and their feed and other bad crimes, you can't look at that without seeing what surrounds them all - and more distressing is that (some of) the Japanese citizens *like* the American influence and presence.

This isn't so blunt that Imamura hits us over the head with the message because he couldn't make a dishonest or sentimental turn if he tried. Pigs and Battleships is primarily about Kinto (Nagato), one of those young dudes that can't seem to stop moving his body even when things are (relatively) ok, like there's a low to much higher level anxiety that pervades his mind and spirit. He wants to rise in the ranks with a group of local gangsters, but it doesn't sink in that he'll be the Fall Guy (or maybe it does and he just wants to get all the money he can).

This position he's in doesn't sit well with Haruko, who loves him completely against her better judgment and wants him to go away with her. If she had seen a movie before she might know better, but it doesn't look like many (good) movies play around them, but I digress. Point is, Kinto is the kind of screwed that he doesn't fully know it, and his descent into criminality is more pathetic than tragic until it goes beyond that stage, while Haruko goes through her own foolish acts like with the American sailors. Meanwhile, the Boss of the group is for much of the story thinking he's dying - stomach cancer, but its really an ulcer - and is the one part of the story I'm still thinking about (as in, is it meant to be funny or just kind of sad or whatever).

All of this is shot in continually immersive and impressive long takes and wide shots where Imamura not only knows but cares about how we are seeing people in the frames; often these are when Kinto and Haruko are in a room with others who are using them, be it Kinto with his gangster (would be) pals or Haruko with a group of prostitutes who are in their own form of exploitation. He moves it when he has to and when he does you can be sure that its meant to keep us dramatically or thematically hooked (I liked the one shot that is wide for a few minutes and then moves in on the boy reading about Japanese history, it just feels impactful on some level I have to keep thinking about it a good way).

As I said, the only part that didn't quite work for me is the subplot with the Boss and his cancer-not-cancer, but it doesn't take away from what does. The kind of character of Kinto is sympathetic, even when he puts himself deeper into this group who would love nothing more than to see him go to jail to cover up their crimes and to not be seen again, and when we think he's lost he comes back with his declaration that he'll finally quit... but of course he has to do One More Thing and we all know that never goes well. But what's so incredible is where Imamura takes this in the final act, as those trucks of pigs get taken along on a chase that leads to the red light district, and that's where I have to stop typing to give away what brilliant chaos you have to see for yourself.

Pigs and Battleships has a kind of cunning to ot because Imamura is using the sort of cinematic grammar that I'd expect more in Western/American films, such as those long wide shots (I thought of John Ford only he'd never make something as gritty as this), and he's using that language in a film that is directly about how much Japanese citizens have lost their souls to another kind of Imperial rule. The black and white cinematography is dark and brooding, like Film Noir stretched at points into a nightmare of itself. And as the film goes into its final reel, Nagato makes his Kinto into this damned creature with that machine gun and there's a wildness and abandon that is only extreme in what he ultimately does, but he is still painfully human and damaged. This is a scathing social critique and a highly entertaining crime melodrama with a few really big laughs.

After Dark, My Sweet (1990)

A film about brutality, disassociation, morality and an act that isnt an act. What a Noir

[9/10 · 9 May 2025]

This isn't quite on the level of Masterpiece as far as a Neo Noir from this time period in American cinema goes (Blood Simple or even Red Rock West might take that title). But this was really, really good, mostly my kind of jam when it comes to not even about the crime so much as how relationships and trust gets built on shaky ground and continue to keep building until it all comes crashing to the ground. I also come to this having read the book, and while that has its own place as a work of its time (1950s versus 1989/90, hence why you have the prominent Doctor supporting character here, which I'll come back to), what's so terrific is that Foley gives it it's own shape and psychological edge not separate from Jim Thompson so much as complimenting him.

This is dusty, sweaty, nervy stuff, all about how broken down someone can get and what how that brokenness can be appeal. That's what Collie recognizes from the jump with Faye and Uncle Bud, and he does remind them quite clearly that he's not stupid (but not in that frantic Fredo in Godfather 2 way, more like they shouldn't take his grungy appearance (or if he's cuckoo) and mindset for granted. By the very end we do have to call into question how much Collie really let on Faye, but what I love about the film and this was with the book as well is that it's not about pulling the rug out from under the audience- we should've guessed it, it doesn't change our perception of him as a loose cannon with violent tendencies- so much as it is about pulling it under Faye.

That's something that I don't see so much of in modern thrillers where it's more about the Gotcha for those watching; sometimes it's more impactful how it matters to the characters in the story and Thompson as well as Foley leave it up for us to figure out what the fall out is from there. But up until then, what we have is a series of power struggles between these main three - Patric in particular impresses me so much here, and I haven't had a strong opinion about him before this one way or the other (as in he's always been fine, even in Narc or other he's not the stand out in other words), and Ward gives as good as she takes from him, especially how Faye does goad Collie on for much of the first half, goes for the full seduction, and then is somehow shocked when he can and does snap at her.

Meanwhile, Bruce Dern is always there, trying to play the "cool" one of the three and do that "hey hey, easy now" kind of talking that Dern does with more natural conviction than any other actor I can think of. It's not exactly what I pictured from the book, which had an Uncle Bud that felt a little more brawny and aggressive (in my Goodreads review of the book I noted how I pictured, since it was set in the 50s, Lee J Cobb or Ernest Borgnine as Uncle Bud to give an idea what I mean). Dern takes this man who is also not truly who he says he is, or at least what connections he purports to have as a former detective; he's a low-life who happens to have a keen plan with this kidnapping, and he never does tell Collie or us how much this ransom would be (does it matter). But Dern doesn't play the low life part of it so much as this steely face that's masking more or less the desperation. Great turn from Dernsy.

The boxing flashbacks were thr only time I wasn't immersed in the nearly seamless sort of storytelling and Foley's terrific sense of putting us in Collie's point of view - which includes many tracking shots and "oners" that don't call attention to themselves but are important for keeping us locked in (as in Collie may say at the end what he's been doing with Faye, but his actions still show us a man who can't help himself but go about a house room to room to try and get into Faye's pants like a hurricane). They just felt more stock in how they are presented and don't have that visceral shock that may be needed for us to see what was so bad in his past that he's spent years trying to forget.

Luckily these are brief enough that they don't take away from the impact that the present tense story brings, which goes back to what Film Noir at its most uncompromising and richest in substance and style can be about: degradation of morality, how someone holds on to it if for dear life, what that means in practice more than in thought (hence that moment where you almost think Collie may kidnap the wrong kid, and then why he goes through it all to get the insulin when the actual kid is sick). I may have neglected to mention how good George Dickerson is in his scenes as the doctor - someone who may have made more sense in a story back when mental illness and asylums were less talked about than 35 years later - as there's a subtlety and humanity that is necessary to give everyone else shape and greater dimension.

After Dark, My Sweet, featuring expressive and expert direction and a script that understands what made the book tic and pop (and maintains enough narration that keeps you locked in) is about taking on an "act" but it's very easy to become that act the more you look for that distortion, be it a Down on His Luck kind of protagonist or a dangerous Femme Fatale or an older guy who, as Collie observes with every bit of acid he can muster, just has a crappy face to look at and hear words tumble out that don't mean a thing.

Come Drink with Me (1966)

A lot of fun, with top notch fights featuring the great Cheng Pei Pei and Elliot Ngok Wah

[8/10 · 6 May 2025]

Come Drink With Me doesn't have any kind of groundbreaking story - it's about a young man who gets kidnapped by sone punks and happens to be a son of governor and the brother of the powerful Golden Swallow (one of the phenomenal martial arts stars of hers or any generation, Cheng Pei-Pei, what a screen presence and what equally graceful and sharp skills as a fighter on film) and what happens when she goes up against these bad guys to get him back. But you don't necessarily have to watch this to get something all that deep or profound, and director King Hu knows that.

Sometimes there is the pleasure in seeing great attitudes on the faces of these actors who trained their asses off to perform well and to what specifications were needed on the sets and in the fights (camera and editing tricks are used only at minimum and Hu favors longer takes and wide compositions whenever he can, so it's mostly of the time), and Come Drink With Me gives the audience so much pleasure in watching Pei-Pei mess up a whole lot of dudes and then as well the full-of-calm-swagger star Elliot Ngok Wah (sadly both of them are no longer with us) as the Drunken Knight. Just his scenes with Pei-Pei in the second half, particularly where he goads her into throwing that giant rock at him, are wonderful and intense alone.

I do think if you want Hu at his very best Dragon Inn and his epic Touch of Zen are superior, but that doesn't take away from Come Drink With Me as a classic of its own kind when it comes to the many times fights and sword battles break out, everything is clear and dynamic and when the pointy ends hit the flesh it's intense and only sometimes completely blood-and-squib soaking mayhem.

Lastly, I was also impressed by the overall spirit of the story, and that for like five or ten minutes it becomes a Musical with a group of signing small orphan children with the most delightfully weird patches of hair. It adds an innocence to a story that is a little bogged down in some details that aren't as strong. As one small critique: if that Drunken Master could do *that* with his hands at his adversaries before, why not do it a little more? Maybe it was to save on budget, I guess.

The Eagle (1925)

Valentino as the Black Eagle. Fun and has plenty of excitement, even if a weak ending

[7/10 · 1 May 2025]

Overall, The Eagle I'm sure was evem more spectacular for its time and it has some fun moments of adventure a century later - my favorite set up and payoff was with the bear in the cellar and how that attack unfolds when our Black Eagle under duress fights back very easily against it (bearly you might say...) - and it's simplicity in the main bones of the story is its charm. Brown also has some clever lighting effects and staging at times, like when we see the Black Eagle framed in a room as he's entering and his shadow casts a pall over the figure in the bed he's going in to attack.

The thinness of the narrative does make it a little less than a classic, at least for me, and the acting from much of the supporting players (like the guy playing Kyrilla) is rather broad and hasn't held up so well over time. And the ending isn't quite so believable given what we've seen and know about at least one key character. But Valentino is dashing and entertaining and suave and all the things that come with a name like, well, Valentino (doesn't that already sound like someone who comes packing with a romantic adventurous swagger?) Not to mention it isnt just resting on the looks or mannerisms, it's a real performance with layers of physicality and in how he shifts between his created personas.

I don't think I'd seen a film with him in the lead before, and this was not a disappointment as far as a vehicle in being different figures in one film (as the fallen Russian lieutenant, as the vigilante and as another character, seemingly... a French Count!) The more I think on him and the movie as a whole the more I like it. Also, that shot, and you know the one as it's around 40 minutes into the film and because of the seemingly seamless and spellbinding power of the moving camera as it goes over that dinner table that has around 30 people end to end, is one of the truest examples of why cinema is its own distinctive medium (and a darn good one at that)! 7.5/10.

Corridors of Blood (1958)

A good man turns to "Vitriol" in one of Karloff's finest performances

[7/10 · 1 May 2025]

Corridors of Blood (which is so good I'm surprised it isn't a title used repeatedly as a fake movie that other characters go to see like in a Slasher or something) is driven by Boris Karloff's mesmerizing performance as a man with a conscience who becomes consumed by his addiction and his obsession with the potential of his experiments. It's entirely on how he shows through so much of his training and experience as a performer that makes this more than just the B movie curio it purports to be; while a number of the other performers are fairly standard for this material (not counting for sure Christopher Lee or Adrienne Corri), Karloff takes this character and makes him fully tragic and pitiable.

The title may even be somewhat misleading to make this like another of his Horror films - and why not, it was his bread and butter and he was one of the guys on the Cereal Box - but what's important to remember is that Karloff was classically trained as the best of them and found his niche in the world of the Gothic and suspense. And this film, while not so great when it focused on some of the secondary characters (ie I didn't care that much about the younger doctor and his romance with Dr. Bolton's daughter), it almost doesn't matter because of how he gradually and incrementally peels this man down to a knub, even as he is still at heart and good doctor and man.

I also need to note about Christopher Lee, who does also take this up a notch every time he's on screen. At the same time he appeared as Dracula he also performed as this character, and while the Count is the more notable figure forever and ever for genre fans his Resurrection Joe may be the more intense performance; he never lets you have a second where you can relax watching him, and since he's very much a human being as opposed to an undead wine/women/music connoisseur it makes his deeds and attitude all the more ugly and sinister.

Bottom line, it's pretty cool it's something you could just get from a Criterion Closet to boot. That said, any time Lee in this as "Resurrection Joe" gets his hands on a pillow of death I just recoil completely. 7.5/10.

Fedora (1978)

Billy Wilder's The Substance! Kind of!

[7/10 · 29 April 2025]

So, let's start with the Twist Reveal That Isn't Really: what this ends up being revealed is like... The Substance in the scope of an older woman star who decides to have a "younger" version (err daughter) of herself to continue making films (or I suppose for the time one could also say Seconds since that came out before this), though with a spit-shine of Sunset Blvd "we can make this improbable project but hey there's something kooky going on) (only with 1970s cynicism instead of late 1940s Golden Age cocked-eye satire), only if the way that the old replaces herself with the younger version of herself is... Wait, who in society would buy that she is Fedora and just by the hands and, oh, never-mind.

And yet saying all of this does not mean that it makes for a bad movie, really! I can't say with a straight face that Fedora is Billy Wilder at his peak, and in its plotting and how it doubles back with this flashback and that flashback it goes into being grandiose and Melodramatic, sometimes with some real spark and clever dialog and acting (the scene where we see a young "Detwiler" ho ho that's a name but anyway when she meets Fedora on the set and covers up her scantily clad naked body on set), and other times seeming like out of real exploitation pulp (when Fedora asks ala Batman for a MIRROR to see herself post surgery).

It's maybe the closest I can think of with Billy Wilder that could be called "Camp," except that I have to believe he knew what he had in this story and then in the adaptation takes it into much more of a (heh) wild mystery than anything like Sunset Blvd, though there is a similarity that is striking. Once again there is an aged star who sinks into an insulated world and keeps this tight control over what she has even as she is disconnected from the larger industry, except this time it's not an unlikely creative-cum-lover, but a reshaping of the Younger Item to keep the illusion alive (both films also look at aging with a very cynical lens, though in Fedora it has a Gothic, albeit sun-filled, tableau and setting).

I'm reminded of a line from a Woody Allen movie, maybe paraphrasing, our life consists of how we choose to distort it. Wilder is saying, late in his career, it isnt as simple as actors will do whatever they can to put up an IMAGE, but that the audience is culpable in buying it. At the same time, this may be even weirder than The Substance in one sense; imagine if in that Elizabeth Sparkle was (at least initially) really happy for Sue and a collaborator really in taking on this younger and more lively role, like when Henry Fonda appears as... Henry Fonda, natche, to give Fedora a special Oscar at her cilla.

This doesn't mean Wilder has the same innovation in mind as like a Coralie Fargeat; this is largely classically shot and presented, and the second half of the movie is really all about explaining things and thank goodness Michael York pops up to add a little extra life in the last half hour. I think the thing to know about Fedora overall is that you probably shouldn't come to this until you've seen a few of Wilder's other social commentaries that are as if not more laced with boiling acid on the brain, but it is entertaining and has something to say about an industry that will be fine with admitting it's full of bs *up to a point* and that's what sticks out so many decades since.

Until Dawn (2025)

Good enough, but also mid

[5/10 · 26 April 2025]

Until Dawn has a few inspired moment of gore and creature effects (unfortunately my gorehound lovely wife informed me when I went to use the bathroom was right when the spontaneous combustion went off, which I caught some of), and Ella Rubin makes for a pretty good lead (almost, not quite for obvious reasons here) Final Girl, not to mention the always welcome presence of Peter Stormare taking the "It's got a Death Curse" old guy trope character from slashers and becoming the main bad guy. But this is not much more than what the trailer shows.

I want to like this a little more than I do given David F Sandburg's pedigree (Lights Out was impressive and made horror and metaphor come together nicely, and of course Shazam), and he knows how to do a jump scare. It may just be a limitation with the concept and where there was more potential (I haven't played the game and frankly a movie isn't a game, etc), ie (minor spoiler?) All of the horrific things that are killing the characters are coming from the Clover character, and yet a) it would make for more variety if it was like every one of the teens had different fears and manifestations come out to kill them and b) are they also all the former dead/victims of the mining town and this whole time loop death plot, so...

Maybe I'm putting too much thought into this, and for what it means to be as no-frills goopy Saturday matinee horror it is fine and has some real shocks of suspense, if ultimately it is forgettable. One can think of this for right now as a decent if standard appetizer from the slash-o-clock menu as we await the main 3 pound beef of a meal that will be the next Final Destination movie... but if one may be less inspired because we still have the behemoth that is Sinners in our brain, that is to be expected.

56 Up (2012)

Life's little snippets

[9/10 · 24 April 2025]

Peter is back! (He hasn't appeared since 28 Up) I know he's here in some large part to promote his band, but I'd rather have something like that where it's more creative and artistic than when John appeared in 35 just to promote his wife's charity (gosh that felt like the closest this series got to a minor scandal haha). The other great surprise here is Suzanne and Nick together (not romantically but still!) That was really wonderful to see them come together for this, and such lively and candid conversation.

Perhaps it can't be helped by the time you get to the eighth of these films, but there is so much Archival footage by this point from the previous entries that it probably does weigh the new scenes by like 40/60. That is a fairly minor complaint though given the scope of how life's changes are now about the next generations and the younger subjects do a lot to emphasize what is the same/different about the men and women who are still taking part in this (and all but like one or two are still here).

I'm also struck by something Michael Apted said to Roger Ebert in an interview back in 2006 around the time of 49 Up, which is that politics, or just points of view when it comes to how life itself and relationships have political dimensions, come out in the choices that are made about what to do with a life, financially speaking and also with a life in work or retirement (or in Jackie's case on disability).

The financial crash of 2008 also still hangs over at least a couple of the participants, and there is a comment (though think about how much Apted chose to show or leave out) about how far to the right the country has gone in the years since the 60s and 70s and you can see how a framework that keeps people working, keeps people in a system (or who are still doing manual labor like Symon) and then those who can break free of those systems make this really engaging. Even Andrew talking about global warming, though what's great is that this doesn't come with Apted pushing some agenda or something. The reality of what everyone is dealing with speaks for itself (and there's a revelation about John that... how did we not know this till now?! Dead parent!)

What's so special about these films is how much Apted has direct and simple questions that have to do with what being 56 is like, and in the scope of the series up until this point and how the personal and larger macro sense of what this series has meant is in a deeper philosophical sense. 56 Up isn't quite my favorite entry in the Ups, but that's more of a personal quibble (I also kind of wish Apted had kept to the sort of structure of who he was presenting since he stuck to showing like Tony first and Neil last and now it's sort of reversed for seemingly no good reason), but it need not matter much when the interviews are still so revealing and frank and Apted keep it being this great thoughtful gift for the audience intact.

My reaction to Peter, in other words, seems like I am reacting to a return of a comic book character in a Marvel movie, but that's the level of intimate connection that the series has done so well.

49 Up (2005 TV Movie)

Life, love, children, regrets, jobs, grandkids, and the spectrum of highs and lows appearing in an Up film

[10/10 · 23 April 2025]

By the time one gets to 49 Up, more and more it isnt simply about how the subjects are growing or changing in front of us, though there are life changes and some drawings with losses and career upheaval and how much the parts of England they've lived in (or moved away from) have changed as well. You also understand how for at least some of the adults who were once seven and have now appeared in seven of these films that what Michael Apted has done with these films has affected them to an extent.

For some like Tony, it has led to some career opportunities (he was trying to break into bit parts as an actor and lo and behold he got a few jobs thanks to his appearances and producers being fans of the program); for others like Jackie (Jacqueline) there is some anger at Apted for what any subject in a documentary has to reckon with which is how they're depicted in something that has to be edited down to reflect a vision and point of view.

She probably comes down the hardest on the director; he claims to enjoy how she argues with him (I have to think he's dealt with much worse on movie sets with primaddonna actors and the like), though I wonder how true that is but that's also his perspective and who can judge or change that. Because of what has been shown in the films about her struggles to be a mother, of her children, and she wishes that there was more positive things that he showed or this or that or the other thing, there is nuance there. She and others see that there is an intrusive element to just being on camera and being asked questions and having a camera follow them for however many days or weeks it takes to make these things.

That is a tricky point which is that it's not about reflecting the full life stories of these people but about how and where they are in their lives at that moment: have they settled into adulthood or become parents (by now grandparents for some), have they changed careers or found something new to do, have they somehow (in the case of Neil, possibly the most inspirational figure despite his own mental health issues) become much higher in rank in society, or found love or lost it etc. That is a lot to put into a film even if it was just a single subject for an hour and a half or two hours and Apted has around a dozen subjects to go over (one of them, Charlie, stopped appearing in 21 Up but will still get a mention, maybe the one odd point by now that maybe Apted could have dropped after four of these).

In other words, I get Jackie's point, but then again Charlie himself shows (or John who will appear in one and then back out and then come back for the next and back out again) no one is twisting and arm to appear in the film, it is by choice. But then that choice still can't help but make some anxiety about how they will be perceived or how maybe a point of view will cause a clash as Jackie has done with Apted.

On the other hand, I can ponder the sides of the ethics of it all, or even how like for the case of Nick and how he's always going to be better known for the Up films than his books, but it all comes down to this for the audience (and this is just my perspective): Apted is editorializing, but there doesn't seem to be exploitation or a crafting of a narrative for some craven purpose. One of the more captivating bits here is Nick taking a more fair and balanced looks at what appearing in 49 Up and other Ups is like as he sees how important it is and how important it is to others, but that it is still "incredibly hard" and even extends some empathy to Apted and how "wrenching it is to do the interviews."

Ironically by this point in 2005, reality TV was really overcoming media in the US and in the UK, and something like 49 Up is an excellent antidote and a strong contrast to what was and still is much more calculating and crude. This film, which is much closer in style and approach to like News Magaine programs like 60 Minutes, feels revealing and intimately crafted and a camera is showing the lives of the kids who have been adults for a long time and (sometimes) their kids and spouses and so on, but it also feels honest and the questions are meant to be revealing not for salacious details but about mind sets and perspectives and the idea that we can be sitting watching this in a theater or at home and then reflect on our changing lives is a precious and awesome thing.

A Special Day (1977)

"I dont think Im an anti-fascist. If anything, fascism is anti-me"

[10/10 · 21 April 2025]

A Special Day is about a moment in history, a black-cloud hanging-over-society kind of moment where it seems like 99% of people are on board with the worst possible people and the few who aren't on board have to sit and be quiet about it (before possibly escaping the country, that is), but it's also about something more intimate and deeper feeling which is how one moves and has space to think in a room that is normally occupied full of "loved ones" (and I use quotes because Antoinetta loves her children like... well, just barely enough really), and what it means to connect fully with a person who has a soul and a mind about them.

That goes for Gabriele in his way, even though he knows that his neighbor Antoinetta (Mastroianni and Loren in career-best work) is just coming by to his place because her bird has flown off to his spot and that she has a scrapbook that keeps a log of the rough dos and don'ts of capital-F Fascism at the time, for what women should be like and men as well.

The context of them meeting matters, of course, since she is at home to clean up and tend to the apartment (what else would a dutiful wife and mother of 6 - and as we find out of she gets to lucky number 7 they'll get a tax credit or something apparently, guess that was a thing then) and he is an ex radio announcer who was let go for... reasons (and those having to do with him presumably being a homosexual, though it's hard to say if that or the Anti-Fascism has a blacker mark against him to those who know).

But what matters more is that there's something that simply clicks for them, and as much as this is a political film, as it can't not be with the sound of that I'll Duce/Hitler Wrestlemania main event on the radio on non-stop play through the windows of the apartment building, the real political substance is a little less obvious at first but is even more meaningful. What it means for Antoinetta and Gabriele to meet and talk and have coffee and for each to find out more about each other gradually (ie Gabriele's "fascism is anti-me" line) is that they have an intimacy that is less about romance - though there is an attraction for her to him, even if he may not reciprocate - but about a meeting of heart and mind that is antithetical to fascism and the roles that are set in place for men and women.

This probably has more in common in other words with Before Sunrise or Brief Encounter than some other 1970s set in 30s political film; there's conversation, the more Antoinetta opens up the more Gabriele does, though the difference from those films are the darker points this gets to - when Antoinetta briefly but harshly rejects him and he responds with a fierce recrimination that is volcanic - and there's the occasional appearance of the nosy old lady neighbor with too much facial hair who tells Antoinetta to beware of him like the plague. But like those films as well, while there may be a lightness to their connection at points (ie when he shows her how he practices dancing, also an act that has a freedom to it against fascism in its way), there's the sad knowledge that... this won't last. It can't.

Scola in other words has a daringly and almost secretly complex script to play out here, and his leads are really game for it (did I mention John Vernon by the way? He's in this too, that seems just as if not more random than him popping up in Sweet Movie, I didn't get it but what do I know). He also has a brilliantly washed-out, sort of gray-brown look to the film and yet it is not black and white; it's like a photograph that had faded so very much, but you can still see the life in the eyes if you know where to look.

Mastroianni got the Oscar nomination, which is great, but Loren (who claims she was closer to this kind of woman in real life, introverted and all) is heartbreaking as well; she appears sans make up and one might say "well, she's dressing down" but as Pauline Kael pointed out she's still one of the most gorgeous creatures in existence at the time, but that night make one not see how much subtlety and repression she brings out on Antoinetta, how this is a woman who has bought into a system (and a husband) that sees her as another cog in their machine. She also knows how unfaithful her husband has been (with a teacher no less, that stings), and there's much hurt and pain that's played out between the two actors.

At the same time though as depressing as I'm making it sound, I didn't leave saddened at the end of the film. It is left in a place where they are not together, but Gabriele made the point clearly some scenes earlier: she gave him a real special day, unlike what everyone else had in this grotesque Nationalistic spectacle in the central part of the city (which Scola was wise not to film a frame of; we only see some newsreel footage at the start and that's all), and he gave her a book of adventure and action, and they'll have this memory of each other which is good... even as we know how bad things are about to get in the years to come. A special film about the power of the individual against a system!

Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)

Very good, if more intellectually stimulating than emotionally - Volante brilliant as always

[7/10 · 20 April 2025]

Christ Stopped at Eboli is a captivating film experience (or do we call it a series given its in 4 parts on ah let's not split Southern Italian hairs, shall we now), mostly for how it raises so many ideas and has the time to explore them, though it is so episodic and gradually moving in many ways that it's sort of disappointing that one doesn't connect so much on any kind of emotional level to the men and women and occasional children that Carlo Levi meets and grows closer to and helps as a doctor (and sometimes cannot) over his year in exile as an anti-fascist in 1935 Italy.

There is one conversation that Carlo and the Mayor of this village near Eboli (hence the title), though this mayor speaking tries to do so not as the Mayor vut as a friend, and which stems from a letter Carlo was intending to send out from town to a female friend up North. The letter is telling about how he sees the peasants and townsfolk as not really being this or that but are there own people, and the Mayor Luigi gently but firmly says this isn't so and that the peasants just want more land (and tries to argue that conquering other lands like Italy tried to do in Africa) will accomplish that, and there are other ideas bounced back and forth between the men.

It's possibly one of the times in the film where there's a sense of conflict, and that it is all over the ideas presented - about who the peasants claim to be or who they are and how Fascist ideology spreads and is easy to detect but difficult to eradicate (you can see it right here in America right now, this is where I'd usually say I digress but no, this is a key point), and that one has to really rethink what 'The State' may be as an entity, and if it has to be rethought and changed entirely, to address so many issues that come about with like Nationalism and Pride and that feeling some who have almost nothing that if they, say, go off and fight in a war and come back as a hero it's worth it even at the risk of death, or that othering others and closing ranks with their own is so natural as breathing air, that's what may need to be done.

I may also be including in these observations what Carlo himself comes to understand by the time he's home years later and is talking with other intellectuals who think it's more cut and dry. I really was engaged with these scenes and any time really that Rosi and his writers were having people talk about such things- whether they were these exact conversations in reality or Levi was simplifying things for his book and by proxy the film, I'm pretty sure is the case but can't say for sure- and they are when I leaned forward most to pay attention to the film. I only wish much of the rest of the story/stories, at least for me, engaged me a little more emotionally speaking.

This isn't to say there aren't a couple of characters who have an impact, or at least impress upon Carlo just what life is like in the village: the mother who Carlo stays with (and says she's had 17 pregnancies, and she is really mother and father to all of her children since no one has stayed or have gone to America) and the one Priest who can't seem to reach anyone in the village (they decisively call him a drunk, though is it because they're such crappy people he drinks, one wonders) who Carlo also connects with somewhat, are two such examples. Other times there are some charming and interesting scenes where characters speak on their superstitions and other such issues, and there are some gorgeous shots of the landscapes and scenery (one should say it's due to the skill with finding the right light and tones for DP De Santis that it is so, not just what it is) and the musical score by Piccioni is lovely.

While Carlo does become certainly by episode 4 so emeshed in the community (it helps he has a pretty good track record as a non-practicing but well-learned doctor in a place where the only other medical help sucks, leave to being the Luke Wilson in Idiocracy effect one supposes, now I do digress), it doesn't mean we get a sense that Carlo has grown close particularly with any one person really. This has a pretty terrific reputation, so I looked at some of the less charitable reviews of the film and, putting aside the "it's boring" takes which don't help much, it did ring perhaps more true than not for me that the film does stand at a place (and I don't know if this is the case with the book since that's another medium altogether) where it is at an intellectual high ground, in other words the sort of peasants this is about... would they sit and watch a film like Christ Stopped at Eboli, or is it for us cineastes and art-house film buffs to sit and chew over?

I think Christ Stopped at Eboli benefits most of all if nothing else from being (I hate this coopted dumb phrase but I'll use it anyway) fair and balanced look at how someone who has his own ideas about society and fascism and anti-fasicsm is ironically put into instead of a prison and exile situation where he has to see how "they" live. I think after years of like the NY Times style pieces of "What do the people in diners *really* think" when it comes to looking at "them" and political leaders which are often not genuine, it is good to see a work of art that does try to look at people like this simply and plainly and, through a POV actor as gifted and compelling like Volante when largely listening and observing.

I just wish I felt more shaken on a more profound level by the sense of something more... poetic, perhaps (as a useful comparison, Tree with Wooden Clogs, which I thought this might more resemble, comes to mind). It is beautiful and well made, and yet it is like going to and having a really gigantic mutli-course meal at a restaurant, you'll remember to leave a nice tip and a good rating online, but will one come back to it? Hmm. 7.5/10.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)

Sweet, a little slight, loved the ending

[7/10 · 19 April 2025]

Ballad of Wallis Island may be a little too cute or repetitive in its awkward/uncomfortable one-liners for its own good overall (Charles having a pun or joke at the end of 85% of the lines like a slightly less obnoxious Michael Scott), and the Michael character is a little too conveniently just there to ask for something in one scene and then much later (after he went off on a... Puffin sightseeing trail sure) berates our bearded flawed Male Lead.

But there is worthwhile pathos and reading just a bit in-between the lines makes it a deeper and richer experience - Basden and Key wrote the script by the way so that makes sense - about loss and finding some semblance of peace with the present and/or future, with Tim Key endearing himself I'm sure into a good several supporting roles in years to come. And the ending makes it all work (even though you kind of expect what he'll do with all the money). The location itself sells the idyllic isolation as well; tweak this script about 50 degrees and you'd have one heckuva horror movie.

35 Up (1991 TV Movie)

Life goes on and adulthood means responsibilities and familial loss

[9/10 · 16 April 2025]

Life continues; a parent's life ends (and it is never one that ends too early and you never get over it);; new life is created and comes into family; one of the subject (Tony's) wife takes up some extra work duties and it is clear she has to run the house; life springs some horses to ride around and feel merry; life is a little more awkward when a figure gets recognized in public (though "you get the odd one who is rude..."); life leads you sometimes to Bangladesh (what a mess) or Wisconsin (there are deer, surprised); life is harder because the government under Thatcher was (lightly put) a grave disappointment; another parent died and you can see every bit of the devastation in their eyes and the 30s is the time when people start losing their parents; and life is going to keep going on even if things looked grim (or quite good) for the particular subject at hand.

I find 35 Up to be as on par with the absorbing feeling and interest into this series as the rest - when it comes to absorption and the Up films, just call me a big pack of paper towels - but one of the fascinating parts here is how some of the subjects (like Nick) look back on the previous Up film and how they thought, or really the spouses thought, they came across made it so they were not sure to want to appear in the next film. Charles doesn't appear here at all, a shame as he was one of the more low-key captivating ones from 21 and 28 Up (working for the BBC perhaps ironically he didn't want to appear on TV in this film).

Sometimes seeing oneself on film can do that, and I think that it is remarkable just how many of the subjects agreed to be in the series up till 35 much less than this continued for decades afterward. And in the case of John, of course, they didn't appear in the previous entry and that means we are seeing then go from 21 to 35 and that is also another sort of jump (he didn't even get interviewed by Apted due to a falling out, who knows why, and he's speaking with an assistant here) as he makes his case for Bulgarian charity. Because who doesn't want to give to... Bulgaria!

I'm not sure what else I can add that Roger Ebert didn't touch on in his multiple write-ups on the films in this series, and I'm sure there will be even more to get out of seeing how these adults and their spouses and (if they choose to be included) the kids in 42, but this segment in particular is so striking because of how these children are not only in full adulthood but now, more or less, parents and losing their parents and finding that living any decent life means finding peace in one's work and social situation and, moreover, responsibilities.

Take it from someone who knows: when you're 14 or even 21, you literally don't know how much you are going to bristle and smile and maybe look away from how you were at that age by the time you're 35 (or, if you have kids which I don't, you'll see those qualities in them). That's the power of this series and 35 Up in particular.

Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (1945)

Fair to middling... until that sequence

[7/10 · 7 April 2025]

Just when you think the film will be fine, Kurosawa takes his team and major players onto a snowy mountaintop, and for a few minutes he pulls out such sublime and absorbing choreography with the camera and fighting that you want to believe you're seeing a film not only on par but better than the first film... but you have to then remember the rest of the film exists.

It has been a while admittedly since I've seen the first entry in this dual-film series (back in, wow, 2007, when the first Early AK box set from Eclipse came out, those were my back when I had hair glory days, but I digress), but I have a recollection that there was more going on with Fujita as the title character and Sanshiro as a whole as a character with a purpose on a journey to learn Judo in that very good (if not great) first film by the great director.

The main problem this time is that Sanshiro is rather dull in his characterization because he has a sort of one-track mind: American boxing is bad, Judo has to be the dominant form of marital arts of Jujitsu, rinse wash repeat. And though once or twice Fujita may break out into a smile in a less tense moment, it's not someone that gives this more than one dimension for 80 percent of the runtime. This doesn't mean the movie isn't watchable or even entertaining since it is Kurosawa directing and he has a cast of supporting actors and characters who are more engaging and pick up the slack (Kono as Genzaburo, who is the crazy one of the Judo bunch, is ths most memorable).

I think I came into this perhaps even expecting something worse since, frankly, this film and The Most Beautiful from the year before were somewhat notorious as being the works Kurosawa had to make under Japanese wartime propaganda conditions. Although there is some almost playful American bashing in the opening scenes - I'm reminded of just how bad English speaking actors can be in the Korean melodramas my wife watches when those shows have equally atrocious and stiff English-language day players - this is rather tame by today's standards when it comes to being anti-Western (you mean Boxing is "not a sport"? I can never believe in anything ever again...)

And yet, despite the slight sense of tedium in some scenes, there are times where you can still feel Kurosawa pushing to make this forced-sequel to be more compelling, like when Sanshiro speaks to one of his mentors and they meditate, only for it to cut to the next morning when he has slumped over asleep and wakes to see his master has fallen asleep while in position.

I have to also stress again just how bad-ass the climactic fight on that snowy mountaintop unfolds; you can tell that this is where the director and the cinematographer and if there was one a choreographer really went all out to make a sensational sequence, and the actors come ready to give it their all as well. If we cared a little more about Sanshiro at this point in the story, the movie would be even stronger for it, but that doesn't take away from the sheer kinetic power of the style that is shown shot to shot.

In other words, this is lesser work by the director, but if you stick with it, and as much as the print that's available via Criterion is completely *un*restored to say the least, you can still experience one of the most assured and marvelous artists of the 20th century pulling out a little magic for the audience (ironically at a time when things were at their grimmest for the country).

The Kid Brother (1927)

Harold Lloyd: a hero to the (four-eyed) everyman!

[10/10 · 6 April 2025]

What makes Harold Lloyd so special and, in fact, a cool kind of comic hero for his time, and set apart from the droopy-faced Keaton and the combustible mix of playful and sincere that was Chaplin, is that he's more of an every-man.

Or, one should note, a kind of Every-Man that was sort of progressive in a way for the mid 1920s. Lloyd and his collaborators, in the case of The Kid Brother at least but also The Freshman and to an extent Safety Last as well, understood that Lloyd's appeal was that he looked bookish with his glasses (today we'd throw the term "nerd" carelessly but not without some standing), and for all the guys who can't be so Big and Large and ready to throw their weight around, he had a good space to take up with his often shocked expressions and nimble comic timing.

The Kid Brother has a great many exceptional set pieces and gags - there's even a little monkey friend that helps him at one point, won't say how (if you know you know) and that manages to be funny and cute - with the capper the fight on the boat. What makes that set piece so suspenseful is once Harold knows that the man can't swim it gives him a goal towards how not only he has to pummel him, he has to get him into water and find some creative ways to do so and to restrain him. It's a different level of slapstick than one might expect from Safety Last or Speedy, but there is still a brilliance and bravura to the choreography between those two and how long Lloyd and director Ted Wilde keep it going building momentum.

The story itself is also quite good, and if it feels familiar it may simply be that it's about hundred years on and we've had so many scenarios like these; in a strange way one might see this as like reverse gender Cinderella, though Harold is a child by blood, he has a dad that thinks he's a weenie and his brothers think he's a joke, only for this traveling medicine van and the arrival of this girl Mary to be the spark that changes ignites some change in him ala the magic moment he needs.

It also has a clear message at heart that Mary communicates when Harold is down which is... be confident in yourself and how good and capable you are will come out. By this point in the story Harold has shown this to a good degree - look how he hops with a lighting quickness out of that one window, and does that trick with the hand acting like it's a lady's - so there's a clear path for the characters to go on in his journey.

I might still find the high-wire finale of Safety Last to put that a little above this as Lloyd's best, but this is still sensational entertainment from start to end, particularly in how it continues to mock the "ideal" of masculinity since Harold's brothers spend much of the film, especially in the middle section, trying and failing to corner Harold only for him to find moment after moment to wriggle his way out or trick them into just being total jackasses. It's also quite smart to have the stakes raised with the missing money since it makes the call to heroism (not sure how else to put that) for Harold all the more clear (but then again... it was a different time and all, Sheriff's star being All). The only character that fell flat for me was the guy who's sort of controlling Mary, but that's a minor detail in the scope of this story.

That final shot and moment is also rather... poetic really? 9.5/10.

Hell of a Summer (2023)

Not quite what you may expect from the trailer, and that's not a bad thing here

[7/10 · 5 April 2025]

One could say that it has an alternate title in it, like say.... In a Slacker Nature (ho-ho). And that's the thing about Hell of a Summer that does make it distinctive in a sea of smart-aleck post modern horror comedies (albeit a pretty weak-sauce title that no one can remember, I even forgot it right before logging it here): this is a comedy first that is very shaggy and loose, and that is what makes the movie so entertaining and different. Think if Richard Linklater - when he is in this mode - tackling this kind of material and you get the idea.

It isn't harshly taking the piss out of all the tropes of the Friday the 13th camp-counselor slasher movie or movies like it (there's also the Burning or Madman, maybe Wolfhard and Byrk saw those maybe not), but it is personality-centered and it's there the filmmakers have their focus. I don't think the movie is ever scary, but it also isn't trying to so the charm is more in how off-key the characters react to their fellow counselors being offed.

A lot of it hinges on Fred Hechinger, who can be in different modes in performances for sure (Fear Street is *not* Gladiator II is *not* Eighth Grade etc), and his amiability gives this an energy where you just like him despite his sort of conflict at the camp: he's way too old for this, he probably knows it somewhere but he also loves the camp so, and... well, you know how these things go, killer (or killers) in the night and now he has to take charge even as he is, everyone else points out to him, not really in charge (he just feels like someone... has to be?)

I think it helps sometimes to have perspective close to another viewing experience; earlier this week I saw an 80s slasher/mystery/whodunnit called April Fool's Day, and it was so dispiriting as a movie where the filmmakers clearly thought the audience were idiots and didn't bother to make it funny as well as not scary and were far too clever for their own good. Hell of a Summer is funny consistently, often in such an off-handed way that feels improvisation-driven (maybe once or twice overwritten may be one knock) that you just want to see where it goes and can feel the filmmakers, both very young and giving great comic performances in this to boot, having a great time and want the audience to as well.

There are a few issues here and there in the script (why one person is shown being killed makes no sense when reflecting back given what we find out about them later in the story) and the lighting (a few nighttime scenes are too dark, maybe my theater's fault), but these are relatively minor. The young cast is really engaging and hangs this together, especially Abby Quinn (good charming kind of hang-out scenes throughout with Hechinger is what adds to the Linklater feel for me) and Gravele, Saremi and Matthew Finlan among the rest, and that attention to their performances, young as everyone is, gives it (again going back to this catch all) personality. And a lot of movies like this don't have it, so... take good things where you can!

Influenza (2004)

Holy mackerel, Bong!

[9/10 · 5 April 2025]

Classifying Influenza as a horror film, now that I ponder on it, makes the most sense. It's not about necessarily any character build up because Bong Joon-Ho knows there isn't time for that in his manifestation of the randomness and bizarre state of how murder and crimes happen in the world.

There is no explanation sometimes for why someone will just go berserk and just start pummeling another person on the street, though here there is the fact that the man who we see on this downward trajectory us joined by a woman who is equally cuckoo for cocoa-puffs early on, and his film is just a series of horrific acts that is impactful not because of the visceral nature but because Bong never forgets the cinematic form.

Notice how much he wants, as De Palma does when he is getting his voyeuristic side on, to make us see perspectives and spaces and how we have to understand the full geography of a space to get how awful these acts become. There's those split screen images of the man being taken off of the subway, and we don't know at first what is going to happen but our eyes are watching for any sudden move... and then there is LOTS of it.

The longer this goes on it is only one CCTV angle, and now that Bong has in his way trained the audience to know what to look for one recoils especially because of how long he let's some moments play (the guy who gets knocked with the bat in the garage and then gets up and fights back and how that unfolds is the prime example).

But Bong being Bong, there is play in how the tone shifts as well; you know this is an artist who can't help but shift into absurdity as the one guy finds himself in the bank - about to rob it, about to attack, we are waiting in suspense - and it turns out that the bank has a surprise for this man as he is the 20th customer of the day on the bank's 20th anniversary and there is a big celebration (ironically it seems just like the kind of moment Candid Camera made it's bread and butter generations ago). How the guy reacts to that is hilarious - I mean, how else would you react to that?

But then right after this is the punishing climax of the short, which ends in an agonizing act because of just how much Bong is playing around still: how much do the people outside know what's happening is real or staged? Does anyone know? When will someone pop in and say "ah, just kidding, we are filming a short on the security camera." So many of these scenarios play out in very public spaces, and the daring is making us question what we might do if we were seeing such chaos break out.

Or... I mean, a truly macabre work that is only marred by a little confusion early on by something we are meant to see that isnt clear. I'd love to see this in a movie theater one day; watching it via streamed casting from Criterion Channel is one thing, but with excellent picture and Dolby sound? What a filmmaker.

Early Spring (1956)

Infidelity, marriage, and the space between; a "lesser" Ozu is still pretty great

[9/10 · 29 March 2025]

Early Spring is a potent example in cinema where the script is one thing that works well enough and the execution of that material on set is another. This starts off seeming like this story could be Yasijiro Ozu's Revolutionary Road, about a suit and tie Salary-Man (one of those you see in long lines walking/trudging to work and then waiting for the train), and that the story leads to the male lead having an affair and creating suspicion in his marriage.

However, that sense is only, at best, in the first half hour (and of course this has much more drunken Japanese bits of business with the husband and his friends). What this does have is Ozu's equally sensitive and honest look at human behavior, and how he tells this story of infidelity is what is not said as much as what is between this husband and wife, who have already as we discover endures the worst tragedy (a son died years before, though we never are told how or how young he was).

What the tone also has here is an extension of something I think he was already showing in Tokyo Story - this was his long awaited follow up by the way, this being three years since that smash hit - which is how life is full of disappointment and how one can endure it is the thing. It is a long film (perhaps a little too long in some spots, though I would've been loathe to try and tell Ozu where to cut), but that may be to a benefit in one sense which is how much Shoji has to live with his mistakes and doesn't grasp at all what he's done to Masako even when she confronts him.

But like Tokyo Story as well, what is so disarming is just how much humor there is in the story, or at least how much we may find ourselves laughing seeing behavior and reactions at points; a highlight for me is the awkwardness (almost bordering on cringe) when Shoji brings home a ciuple of inebriated war-time friends after a reunion to his home at night to stay over and the wife Masako can barely deal with them (she reminds him they are going to visit their son's grave the next day) while one of them drunkenly asks if she'd like to buy a ceramic bowl he's made. There are lines that throw you off for how much Ozu understands irony and sarcasm and even wit, and one can be forgiven for thinking going into his filmography that everything is so classical and staid it can't have a pulse.

I also really admired how Ozu wants to convey so much about the distance between Shoji and Masako in their physical spaces - notice how far apart they often are in their home, how Shoji looks away from Masako and can't look at her in the eyes when he says where he's been (even if it is a true thing he still has somewhere in the back of his mind a lie that is there and Masako knows it, thanks lipstick on the shirt collar). And these are remarkable performances for the restraint that comes through and it feels apiece with the time it's set in; Awashima is often very placid in his demeanor and doesn't show much (why "Goldfish" his bright eyed co worker as she's nicknamed even goes for him is anyone's guess), and Ikebe as well, though for her she is constantly simmering with a rage that just can't come out.

We feel for her even as Ozu doesn't make it about "sides" exactly, since we spend so much time with both of them that we understand why they are so disconnected (and the dead son, who Shoji admits only briefly to someone else that he couldn't stop crying when he died in context of why this other guy will love a child, hangs over always in the background). And I didn't even get to mentioning how much Ozu wants to depict the sort of sterile world of the work place as a "Salaryman" and why it is so tenuous- there's a telling bit of conversation where Shoji even admits to a friend of his who works making things that he would be in trouble if he was fired because "I can't do anything else"- even as this is related to his married life: his privilege is so taken for granted that nothing has challenged it... till this move to a new town and that darn "Goldfish."

Some of Early Spring is the most captivating dramatic work that Ozu got to; he was moving off from his usual terrain, of squarely on parents and their children and "will you get married already" that was his usual bread and butter, and I think it was probably good for him to go for a modern infidelity tragic-comedy. I did feel the length of it all in the last twenty minutes or so - how many goodbyes can you have, my man - but it all does work and it comes together at the end, as the couple have bridged that distance emotionally and physically, in this ending that... well, the train that Masako and Shoji watch will go on. 9.5/10.

World in Action: Seven Up! (1964) Season 2, Episode 28

Captivating as a short documentary on children

[10/10 · 27 March 2025]

Anyway, give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you a man (or woman I would add). But how many of us are really that at seven? I was lucky I knew how to tie my shoes! This is a group of charming and articulate young little tykes, who get asked about many things, from their interest in girls and boys, in how many kids they want one day, what they do when they go home from school, if there should be appointments or elections in parliament (how do they even know to answer that, wow).

It all makes for an enlightening viewing, even as it is more of a short documentary (at 39 minutes), since all of the kids want to be able to answer what they are asked; it is when they have to think and come up with an answer that their shared humanity comes through. Of course it may not all be things we may understand watching today, like when they are all eating around the table and have a bell to tell them when to stop and start.

Then of course the kids are asked about prejudice and money, and the thing is they are... just as bright and have really good answers (probably more on point in some ways than you and I would answer on camera). And you cant help but laugh when the one kid responds to another asking why someone would go to prison: "becauae you've been spending too much!" You are struck watching the kids that they are learning things about the world very quickly and even if they don't process it or put through a lot of critical though (after all they are... seven) there is the sense they may change over time.

But the world of these kids is one where you can feel that they have the whole world in front of them, regardless of whether they're coming from rich or poor backgrounds. This is a wonderful little start to this series - mostly because there was no thought this would continue in this way for the over half a century it has thus far (will there be a 70 Up some day, even minus Michael Apted? We shall see). The point is if you watch this and don't go any further you still can enjoy it as a window into the world of growing minds in England.