Youth of the Beast: (1963) – a Yakuza movie that is mercifully unlike many others from that time – or even of the more recent vintages. Very fast moving, great colors, and a kind of double-cross by way of Last Man Standing / Yojimbo. But it also has the frustrations of trying to figure out a friend’s murder ala The Big Sleep, complete with a crushing ending. It also features a gay pimp with a switchblade, a sadist gangster wearing horn rimmed glasses cradling a cat as if he was a James Bond villain, and a zillion other stylish visual features. I’d recommend this very highly.
Short Cuts: (1993) – I was curious how this would hold up. When I last saw it, I had just moved to Los Angeles, and its depictions were nothing at all the city that I was living in – other than the helicopters.
It looks rather dated now, and the BIG NAME actors rarely transcend their own personalities to really inhabit the Carver short stories, except for maybe Lori Singer, and even there her big advantage is being not a hugely iconic actor. And since they are all short stories, there’s just not a whole lot of meat in any of the individual stories, at least as far as running a film on them goes. I like Carver’s stories though.
I hated the singing – and the songs – back then, and I still don’t like them. “She’s just not very good” is what Dayna said about Annie Ross huge number of songs, and I’d agree. Jack Lemmon was on a real comeback roll I seem to remember (Glengarry Glen Ross), but his little turn here is melo-dramatic and unpleasant.
There’s a lot more to pick apart here, and a lot to admire, but I don’t have a lot of time. I still enjoyed it, and watched the whole 3 hour thing, but I don’t think it’s great. Tim Robbins’ character bothered me immensely when I first watched it, but this time I thought he was incredibly funny, and maybe my favorite character in the whole thing. Still, compared to their previous work in The Player, I’ll chose that as my favorite every time, even if it does have Whoopi Goldberg.
I agree about Youth. In fact, I agreed here.
I think Arnab should watch Short Cuts again, and re-assess.
Ahh yes, so you did. Yeah, I also kept thinking about Le Samourai while watching it, but you did a fine job of summing up the different tacts taken by the directors that might seem at odds with their place as “French” and “Japanese” directors. I find it odd that in your post from several weeks ago you made no mention of Short Cuts. Why is that?
Tried to do a repeat director double feature this past weekend with Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute and Altman’s Secret Honour. I got an hour into Prositute and about half that into Secret Honour before giving up on them.
Though it was made two years later, SoaP is show in B/W instead of the amazing color from Youth of the Beast. It’s dreary, annoying, melodramatic. Ugh. Apparently at some point something explodes, which would have been nice. I know this b/c on the DVD itself there is an image of an explosion, but it didn’t happen in the first hour.
I knew that Secret Honour was a one-man show performance on a single stage, so that didn’t bother me, but frankly I didn’t care for the hysterics of Philip Baker Hall, with his pauses and “you knows” and “cocksuckers” put into places in speech that even an Alzheimer patient would find needlessly awkward.
SoaP is supposed to be Suzuki’s masterpiece, but I just found it too tedious and trite to finish.