Category: likey

Big Man Japan, Hatsuhiro Matsumo’s stone-faced documentary about the lonely, tedious life of one of Japan’s last monster-fighters, is among the most cussedly determined comedic visions I’ve seen in some while. It’s not always terribly funny, it’s pacing is more long-range Tati than zippy & slapsticky, and the locus of its concerns (avoiding the larger cultural context except as implied by conversations with hero Masaru Daisato) remains frustratingly parochial. Yet–whether as antidote to Hollywood or just deadpan pop-culture remix–it is a dizzy, idiosyncratic vision.

Daisato seems to be at the tail-end of way too many bong hits, slowly and dazedly talking to his interviewers about his expanding umbrella, his daughter. He doesn’t really give answers about, and the film doesn’t really investigate, what his isolation might mean, or how to interpret his alienation. And yet he’s mostly the only talking head, his interviews stitched together around his encounters with a series of lovely huge grotesques. The movie avoids the typical mockumentary conventions, where the film’s thesis comes through its deployment of “experts” (or just a range of voices) to underline the satirical vision. I’m not even sure this is satire. It’s more like a perfect alternate/cover version of a familiar set of cultural tropes. I particularly liked the protagonist’s constant brushing of his long hair off his face, and his impotent screaming at the equally-bellicose and -deadpan Stinking Monster.

This entry in the Harry Potter franchise constitutes four-fifths of a great film. The good? First, the art direction and special effects are excellent. The sequences involving the pensieve and the “liquid memories” are gorgeously unsettling. There is a Quidditch match which looks fantastic, and an early sequence in what appears to be a ramshackle manor house is playfully fun. In terms of art direction, David Yates seems to have cast a thick veil of coal smoke over everything. Hogwarts has never looked so dilapidated and distressed. More impressive, Yates ratchets up the emotional angst and agony, capturing strong performances from all and delivering one of the most ominously creepy installments of the series. Continue reading Half-Blood Prince

Mood, timing, context? This movie hit me just right. Or, rather, these movies–as this is another anthology loosely arranged around a city, emphasis on “loosely.”** Each is a fable, tone and approach very much tied to the sensibilities of each director (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho). Gondry follows a young couple fresh to the city, struggling to adapt–until one finds an intriguing, bittersweet way to conform to the city’s design. Carax is easiest to summarize and the the looniest, loosest, and least coherent of the fables: a (white, red-bearded, crazed) man emerges from the sewers and raises havoc. Bong focalizes around a young hikikomori, a form of agoraphobic retreat, who finds himself enraptured by a pizza deliverywoman. I just loved them all, with a caveat: scratch the surface and they aren’t perhaps rich or deep in complex subtext. Continue reading Tokyo!

Based it on Jim Thompson’s _A Swell-Looking Babe_. Elias Koteas chews up the scenery, and he’s pretty much a kick to watch. Philip Baker Hall wanders in and out of a few scenes bigfooting it as Tacoma’s crime king Mr. Ish. It’s too long, and a little too strangely stylized (like its art designers all came off work on “The Red Shoe Diaries”), and it has an absolute aggravation in the form of a) a mentally-handicapped brother for Koteas’ sad-schlump protagonist and (I hate that kind of bullshit plot device, especially when) b) the actor playing the role is flat lousy. But then every few lines there’s some strange bit of Johnsonian absurdity, like William Blake drank a lot of Mad Dog and watched 34 hours of Looney Tunes and bam: I enjoyed it. Hit Me.

This came up as a stray comment on some other post, but HBO’s In Treatment is a fine, fine show — the premise is that each season (I’m just about done with Season 1, and 2 is on now) follows one therapist (the excellent Gabriel Byrne) week by week in his sessions with four different patients (and in his own session with his therapist, the quite good Dianne Wiest). Listen, it’s therapy — if you find the psychoanalytic tedious, then the show may grate, as it can be a bit schematic in the long-run structure of these separate treatments’ story arcs. But the acting, oh lord, the moment-by-moment fascination and allure of such great conversation, such subtle and sharp attention to how people LISTEN to one another… it’s great. And we just watched an episode, late in season 1, where the father of one of Byrne’s patients comes in, and it is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. Glynn Turman plays the father, and some of us will recall him as The Wire‘s first outsized corrupt fox of a mayor Royce…. It would be impossible, I suppose, to just rent disc 8 and watch this show, but if you commit to the season, which is itself worth the time, this episode will astound you.

Back in the bad ol’ early ‘eighties, as I slowly began sampling further afield than the big-Hollywood classics frequently shown on basic-cable superstations and the crazed range of sleazy D-movies sprinkled in between the new releases at the local video shop, the first art-house theater opened in Rochester. Taken by an ambitious French teacher to see Le Dernier Combat–ironically, a film with almost no spoken dialogue, somewhat defeating the purpose the teacher had in mind–I was taken by the movie posters and started going back. Somewhere in there I saw Betty Blue.

Betty wasn’t the first French film I saw–I think my friends and I had done the new enthusiasts’ obligatory scouting over Truffaut and Godard, what little we could find–but it was the first to blow me away, one of the first films I saw that I felt confident engaging with as a filmlover, and like that great band no one knows or that obscure novelist who is yours and yours alone, I felt like Beineix’s crazed, lush, outsized Tragic comic Romance was *mine* in a way that those other French auteurs’ work hadn’t been.

Continue reading Jean-Jacques Beineix

About as perfect as a ’70s B-movie thriller could be, Mr. Majestyk is nothing fancy but gets the job done. Charles Bronson is a tough, reasonably (but, in the Bronson manner, enormously understated) smart-ass melon farmer with a history and a deep anti-authoritative streak. He ends up tangling with mob hitman Frank Renda (the absurdly-inflated and -mustachioed Al Lettieri). He is cool. He says a little of this, but not too much. He takes a while to throw a punch, warns you it’s coming, and when it comes it’s over fast. The action is exciting, but the film is paced casually. It’s well-shot. Richard Fleischer directed. And Elmore Leonard wrote the script, so it’s smart and shorn of fat and silly exposition. I saw at least part of this on television some years ago, but worth the repeat showing. Good stuff.

Interestingly, imdb says Lettieri died in ’75, but then appeared in a few films/shows up ’til ’85. I will have to take a looksee at how undead Lettieri compares.

Two big openings this weekend, each living up to the hype. I won’t say much–no need to prod you, as infotainment about these films is at a fever pitch. They’re both damn fun. Continue reading First to Hell, then Up

Some day in the future, someone will write a treatise on the many conventions of the commercial blockbuster in the era of globalization, and they will hit on key elements of the formula: a mash-up of violence with sexual overtones; a heroic protagonist who seeks answers to and resolves that central violence, living on the outside of conventions, and looking damn cool; product placements for McDonald’s, Coke, Red Bull; a seepage of American “cool” aesthetics into everything, everywhere.

And then that someone, basking in the glow of their treatise’s Asimovian precision in explaining all film, will come upon Takashi Miike. And they will see all of the requisite conventions, and the film will still defy any and all commercial sense. Detective Story may somewhere deep down be a conventional serial-killer narrative, but even deeper down it’s got the loony heart of Hammer horror films and its protagonist channels the spirit of Robert Mitchum on mushrooms and while never being horribly gruesome or traditionally gory nonetheless features pureed organs and layers of viscous blood and urine. It is about 1000 times funnier and more enjoyable than every Saw film put together. It isn’t top-drawer Miike, but even as a toss-off its lunatic precision and constant small goofball details and tactics would keep most filmmakers in milk and honey for several films.