Author: reynolds

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Just watched his “Seance,” an updating of a ’60s English film I never saw. The plot: a medium and her husband get entangled in a kidnapping plot. Enough said.

This isn’t great Kurosawa, but it is a fine little thriller–exploiting (recent) conventions of Japanese horror (spooky hair and claw-like hands), and a reasonable little psychological suspense thriller, as well.

That’s where Kurosawa excels. One, his horror films–more than any other filmmaker working today–rely upon careful composition, evocative silences, and slow steady narrative progression to evoke dread… and that neat feeling of the “uncanny,” the anxious sense that some awful horror doesn’t just displace but underlies the everyday.

This is particularly important because (two) Kurosawa’s horrors seem resolutely social. Perhaps his best film is “Cure,” made not long after the Aum Shinrikyo subway gassing, which follows a serial-killer case… but again the genre is obliquely cited/reiterated, then subtly shifted. It’s spooky and smart.

League of Gentlemen

NOT the bowling flick, nor another terrible adaptation of Alan Moore’s comics. Instead, a very fine sort-of-sketchy, sort-of-Sherwood-Andersony comedy from Britain. Like other great sketch groups, a trio of performers enact every recurring character; unlike those shows, there is a loose plot (a man stranded in forlorn Royston Vasey, a rural town somewhere in the wilds of England) and the fun is all character-/setting-driven. There’s an undercurrent of dread and horror to the comedy that is peculiarly, brilliantly evoked.

Mark first cued me into these guys, and I saw the first series from a dvd at my library. I write simply to advise that the next two seasons come out on dvd in the next few weeks. Very much recommended.

Lemony

Got around to watching Lemony Snicket’s long title. Did someone post about that previously?

Well…. I am not going to hash around much with the film overall; it sort of works, sort of doesn’t. I think at age 12 I’d have been in love, but I’m not sure at 37 I could get past the crude stitching of slapstick to dry bitter irony.

But my god it looked good. Without aping Gorey, the film’s production (and the animation on the dvd, and in the film’s credits) was equally baroque, brutal, wondrous. I think it’s worth seeing if just to revel in that look ….

Male hysteria –> Stewart –> Hitchcock

(continuing from here.)

Stewart’s an emotional wreck in much of Hitchcock’s stuff. While Cary Grant maintains a kind of icy hauteur through the thick/thin of those thrillers, Stewart bubbles with barely-repressed confusion and turmoil. So–my wrongheaded snipe about melodramatics is completely, thoroughly wrong.

(I read an interesting little tidbit about Stewart yesterday in Jonathan Lethem’s collection, _The Disappointment Artist_–which I can’t recommend highly enough as a model of smart, personal criticism about art. He was noting how a biographer of Stewart had wondered how the “gentle” actor of early pictures turned, after his service in WWII, into the dark troubled soul of later pictures. And Stewart’s war record was, in part, sealed–protected as confidential. The biographer wondered if Stewart had been part of the Dresden bombing raid….)

There’s a project in here somewhere: Action films as male hysteria.

Shiri (and action-melodrama)

Shitty.

You liked this, Arnab? The camera did so many 360 turns I thought they had it rigged to a toilet. Okay, it wasn’t awful. But it wasn’t good, either. I don’t like it when there’s so much crying in an action movie. Suck it up, you fuckers. Sublimate your sadness in a good old-fashioned ass-whupping, like the rest of us.

I far prefer the action of “Nowhere to Hide” and the thriller politics of “J.S.A.” (and Park’s later films–“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “OldBoy”–are even better).

“Robot Stories” & Race

Anyone else seen this? Or heard of it? Low-budget anthology, all circling around “robots” introduced into an archetypal human experience (birth, love, and two about death). It’s a fine small film; smart, funny, compassionate. My favorite segment is called “The Robot Fixer,” and a distant mother grapples with her son’s comatose state by fixing up his collection of cheap quasi-Transformer toys.

And, okay, I admit: the film caught my eye first for its geeky premise, then for its almost entirely non-white cast. This cast is quite good, but it is striking–a sad commentary either on my own habits as a viewer or on the state of American film, or both–that I was/am surprised that a film so careful to cast predominantly Asian-American leads never mentions race, doesn’t bother to define race as central to the stories, doesn’t even hint at the ‘difference’ from mainstream cinema.

So my question out to all: is it racist to read the “robot” focus as in some way allegorical, or at least analogical, to the representation and experience of non-white racial identity in America?

Or–how about this: is this an “Asian-American” film? Debate.

Or don’t. Regardless, it’s a good flick.

Extremes

Recommended (pretty highly):

An anthology of … well, more “Disturbing” than Horror films: “3 Extremes,” by Chan-wook Park, Takashi Miike, and Fruit Chan. None will completely astound you–the plots are a little thin in each case, suffering from an anthology-movie mundaneness–but they each are quite impressive in catching a tone (or, in Chan & Park, a variety of shifting tones) with gorgeous compositions. They also all have lots of cool crackling squishy overly-loud sound effects, to highlight things being eaten, ghosts moving broken necks, etc. I wish I had a foley artist following me around all day. A foley artist following me around would make me appreciate the little things in life.

Beats me where you’ll find this. But if/when it ever pops up, check it out. It made me want to find some stuff by Chan (whom I don’t know), and it will hopefully encourage you to check out some stuff by Miike and Park, both of whom deserve your attention.

Scenes, more than films

In the last week, I’ve been catching up. (School’s ended.) Saw three flicks–oddly similar, in terms of content–that I’d recommend, but primarily because they offer up two, three scenes apiece that… well, in terms of acting and dramatic complexity, astonish. The films then often go a bit awry, but why quibble when there’s some unexpected perfection, midway through?

The films: P.S., Birth, The Woodsman. I’ll handle ’em in that order: Continue reading Scenes, more than films

Kung Fu Hustle

I saw this, and I recommend it thus: funny, eccentric, energetic, Sith-free fun.

There are some beautiful moments, some fantastically funny shtick, some repetitive fighting (a must in most any Kung Fu film), and more gee-whiz pizzazz to the pleasures of its CGI than any filmmaker outside of Pixar’s stable.

I want to emphasize: the writer/director/star Chow has a real eye–not just Jackie Chan’s or Sammo Hung’s, for choreography, but for the look of film. There’s a loving homage to “Top Hat” (of all films!) midway through, and it never settles into some kind of fight-shot/edit groove, instead consistently altering the manner in which the big showdowns get put together. Very fun.

And maybe it’d be worth stepping back to unpack the film’s smorgasbord of generic influences, or to compare it to the local talent doing the same thing (primarily Tarantino), but… someone else can do all that.

David Gordon Green

I was just going to pipe up that “Undertow,” a Southern gothic about boys (including an excellent Jamie Bell) threatened and chased by a nasty death-dealing uncle (Josh Lucas, who resembles John Bruns with a handlebar moustache), isn’t so great.

It has an outstanding credit sequence: Bell and a young woman share a tender moment, then the film flips forward and we see him outside her window, throwing a rock through it. Then he’s chased by her gun-wielding, gun-firing father, and the film deploys all kinds of tricks stolen from ‘seventies genre flicks … and it’s just thrilling to watch, as narrative and as a flashy play of technique.

Once the film starts it slows to a crawl, but even that’s okay: watching Bell in the family dynamics with his father (Dermot Mulroney) and his brother (some very cute frail thin kid, who looks like a little Mark Mauer) — it’s odd, touching, surreal… quite wonderful.

It all goes kind of to hell when Uncle shows up. Continue reading David Gordon Green