kennelco film diary

(1954) dir. Akira Kurosawa
viewed: 10/17/08

After watching Rashômon (1950) just recently, I decided that I’d waited long enough to watch the some of the great films of cinema, hoping to see them initially in an idealized environment, on the big screen, with a nice clean print, rather than on DVD.  I decided that I’d waited long enough to have these experiences.

Seven Samurai is one of those experiences.  One of the most well-known “foreign” films in America, in the Western world, in which cinema is still dominated by America, not just by English language film.  Also, being a film that has inspired so directly such other films as The Magnificent Seven (1960), and quite frankly so many big action films.  Whereas Rashômon is still such an avant-garde and contemplative film, Seven Samurai is the template for the big action film.

Much like the Western in American cinema, the samurai film is a combination of archetypes and standards, social criticism and social history, and a landscape seemingly bared naked for the cinematic experience.  I only recently have delved in any depth into this genre, starting this year with Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom (1966) and Kill! (1968), recommended by a friend.  Though not my first foray into the genre, this venture this year is my first real serious foray into it.  It’s profound, fun, and completely engaging.

Seven Samurai‘s experience is profound.  Though like much of the most influential cinema, it’s modern day profundity is only truly comprehensible in context.  So many tropes, techniques, and characteristics are not only adopted, absorbed, infused, but just plain part of the language of cinema, the invisible language, the standards and traditions, the types of things that one wouldn’t notice at face value.  Kurosawa’s innovations are more invisible to a modern, contemporary audience.  Yet, this film is pretty fucking rock and roll still.  It hold up.  It holds up big time.

In my research, such as it is, that I do in preparation of writing here, I’ve found that in the post-WWII era in Japan of cinema, of samurai genre films, this film was still quite early and no doubt influential.  Kurosawa is cinema.

I read many years ago, as I was getting re-inspired in film that Nicolas Ray was once analogized to being “cinema”.  “Nicolas Ray is cinema”.  Well, “Alfred Hitchcock is cinema”.  “Akira Kurosawa is cinema”.  There are indeed those auteurs from all over the world whose reputation is not simply well-earned, but pretty much a fucking fact.  Kurosawa is a fact.  Kurosawa is as important a director as there is.  Like D.W. Griffith, like Emil Cohl.  Like Buster Keaton or John Ford.  Cinema would not be cinema in our contemporary understanding without Kurosawa, without Seven Samurai.

Art. Commerce. Hybrids.  The 20th century.  What history, long-term history, if such a thing comes to exist and to constrain and understand our own lifetimes, will think of him, to this day and age, his work stands its ground, his work has earned its place.  And while open to political and social criticism that changes with period and knowledge, his achievements are absolutely obvious.  No more so, no less so, than in Seven Samurai.  A film not at all unlike The Magnificent Seven (1960) or The Great Escape (1963), the kind of cultural artifacts that are not yet artifacts, the kind of cultural artifacts that are still cultural activators, still cultural traits and truths, still something with great influence and potentiality in our world.

Pretty fucking rock.

(2007) dir. Dario Argento
viewed: 10/15/08

The notable director Dario Argento’s most recent film, Mother of Tears, is supposed to be a third and final installment of a trilogy about evil witches, and it stars his daughter, Asia Argento, as the reincarnation of good witchcraft that overcomes the evil.  This trilogy began with Suspiria (1977), one of his best-known and best-appreciated films, followed by Inferno (1980), but only wraps with this film, more than 25 years later.

I’ve never been able to appreciate Argento’s films for some reason.  I think that long ago, in the 1980′s, I did see Suspiria and I think I did like it.  I think I also saw it again in the early 1990′s and quite frankly, I can’t remember what I thought.  I think I also managed to see his film Phenomena (1985) when it was released as Creepers, but again, I don’t really have much sense of ever really thinking much of his work.  But working as he has in both Horror and Giallo, the pulpy, violent crime genre of Italian cinema, he fits well into the areas of interest for me, so I keep thinking I need to give him another chance.

When this film hit the theaters, not so long ago, it got decent reviews.  Why, I don’t know.  It’s awful.

While there are some orgyistic scenes of witches covens and some rather well-effected moments of gore, the story is lame, other effects are cheap and horrible, and the overall effect is of something far more campy than scary, more hammy than engaging, and actually quite often, downright lame.

As all the witches converge on Rome, it turns out that they all are essentially goth-chicks who like to party.  Okay, so that makes sense, but as far as costuming goes, it’s very silly, especially with their preening smiles and leers.  None of it is effective.

As for Asia Argento, I have always found her attractive and she holds the screen.  No one else in this film except for Valeria Cavalli is hardly worth having around.

Although it’s always enlightening to see someone strangled with their own intestines, I have to say this movie was pretty damn lame.  If I journey further into Dario Argento’s more well-praised work, this movie certainly did nothing to push me along that road.

(1981) dir. Lou Adler
viewed: 10/14/08

An anomolous little early 1980′s “grrrl-power” movie, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, is a fun, grungy critique of media manipulation and the power of identity, with a good dose of punk rock. 

This film was one of the films on rotation on the USA network’s great 1980′s late night show, Night Flight, along with Rude Boy (1980) and Liquid Sky (1982).  Somehow, I never watched it back then, which is a shame because I think it is a pretty cool movie.

Starring the unbelievably beautiful (and unbelievably young) Diane Lane along with Ray Winstone as a low-rent Joe Strummer, and an also very young Laura Dern as the Stains’ bassist, the film is crammed with interesting folks.  Winstone’s punk band is pretty all-star, featuring Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon of the Clash, they play some authentic-sounding English punk tunes and ride the tour bus with Fee Waybill of the Tubes, who plays the washed-up 1970′s metal rocker.

The film opens on a television studio set with a host who is looking retrospectively at Corrine (Lane), interviewing her as a rebellious kid whose mother has just passed away.  The film is very much about the media, and starting off by seeing Corrine through the media lens, it’s clear the she already knows how to manipulate the camera and the audience, playing up to the questions with snarkiness.  But also what is interesting is the feel of her character, with her sister and cousin (Dern), these small-town teens, who want to escape their world, but not by “putting out”.  They only join the bands on tour as a band themselves, a band that has only practiced a couple of times and doesn’t even have a percussionist.

Corrine turns out to be a true provocateur, capable of striking chords with the audience even when the Stains’ music is almost less than rudimentary.  As she gains confidence and style, she begins to eclipse the world-wisened Winstone and his band the Looters.  Director Lou Adler and writer Nancy Dowd show the capriciousness of popular culture along with the power that comes with the manipulation of it.  Alont with Waybill’s washed-up rocker, Barry Ford’s Lawn Boy, a down and out reggae musician who doubles as bus driver and tour manager is another glimpse of the music industry, older and wiser, but with his best pal in jail.  There is a lot going on in this world of critique.

And if that was all there was, it might be a bit preachy, but along with that, there is the empowerment of girls, by self-creation, self-awareness and individuality.  Corrine might fall into the traps that lie within the media, becoming a product and losing herself to an extent, but she walks away from it all having changed things for some girls, making the statement that “every girl should be given a guitar when she turns thirteen”.  And it’s kind of cool that the music that the Stains play isn’t purely rock’n'roll, but a bit odd with their percussionless guitars.  It’s not a bad message, and one that could still resonate today.

But also, one of the films charms is in its visual settings.  It’s always raining.  It’s always on the wrong side of the tracks.  It’s 1981, for goodness sakes, and Diane Lane looks like she’s 13.  Man!

(2007) dir. David Mackenzie
viewed: 10/08/08 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, SF, CA

Mister Foe is the American release title for the Scottish film, Hallam Foe, which is, as I’ve read before, a much better title for this film, simply because it is the name of the primary character.  Adding “Mister”, I suppose makes it a little more recognizeable as a person name to Americans not familiar with the name Hallam, nor familiar with the surname Foe.  Whatever.

What started out to feel a bit like a Scottish-style independent oddball romantic-comedy-drama, potentially contrasted with Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Juno (2007), even with an animated title sequence like the latter and featuring a low-key off-beat soundtrack of softly alt-pop tunes.  But really, Foe is much more dark at its core and a bit more “realistic” with its less-than-perfect ending.

Hallam Foe is a seventeen year-old voyuer, with an oedipal fix which includes wearing his dead mother’s make-up, jewelry, and dresses.  Clearly acting out against his well-to-do architecht father and his sexy step-mother, Hallam is sent from the country to Glasgow, where he finds a doppelganger of his mother, the lovely Sophia Myles, who he stalks, spies on, and ends up becoming employed by in the hotel that she works at.  At one point, drunkenly, she tells Hallam that, “I like creepy guys.”  A match made in heaven.

Actually, it’s not panderingly nicey-nicey like Juno and Lars, but it’s not entirely as harsh as reality can be.  What is creepier anyways?  A man who treats an online-ordered sex doll as a real woman or a peeping tom who is in love with his mother?

Hallam is played by Jamie Bell who I had last seen as a young boy in Billy Elliot (2000), another young boy with a yen for things that don’t match societal norms.

Glasgow is nicely captured here visually, as seen from the rooftops and clocktowers that Hallam finds himself in as he peeks in windows.  It’s an under-represented city in cinema, I would say, yet quite striking in its own way.

Mister Foe is not a bad coming of age film.  I know people who will probably like it.  And I did, though not perhaps as much as others might.

(2008) dir. Anthony Leondis
viewed: 10/05/08 at Century 20 Daly City, Daly City, CA

Designed like a poor man’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and not terribly far off from that film conceptually, Igor is a poor kids movie, lacking much flair, originality, or anything to really recommend it.

The story is one in a world of Malaria (pronounced as if it was a country, not a disease), in which everybody is an evil scientist or an evil scientist’s henchman, an “igor”, which turns out to be the name of every hunchback in the world.  It’s kinda odd to name a movie after a character for whom the name is a generic that sounds specific.  Anyways, every year the scientists compete to come up with the most evil invention of the year to blackmail the rest of the world into paying them off for not using it.  Though this sounds a bit like nucular proliferation, the film just ain’t that deep.

Even with voice talent like Steve Buscemi and John Cusack, the film is just not all that cleverly written nor animated.  In fact, at times, it’s really a little complicated.  Buscemi’s character is a suicidal rabbit who is unkillable.  Which sounds funnier than it is.  When the titular Igor creates his evil project, the giant Frankenstein monster-like Eva, she ends up becoming programmed to want to be an actress and spouts all kinds of lines about method, agents, and lots of cultural references that probably make no sense to anyone under 10.  Not that animation has to be for kids, you know I don’t believe that, but I do believe that this movie is meant for kids.

The humor is so weak and unispired, I found myself thinking that this one character who is a brain in a bowl on wheels got a lot of lines that sound like either Roger or Hans from American Dad, the sort of pathetic dumb-dumb asides, just in this case, largely not so funny.

Not that I thought it looked great, but it did look better than Fly Me to the Moon (2008) and Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008), the only other kids movies out in the last month or so.  The kids didn’t like it too much either.  Felix laughed once or twice, but they weren’t that entertained either.  So, a good time was had by none.

(1963) dir. John Sturges
viewed: 10/04/08

I suppose if you are the director of such classic favorites at The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape, whether you’re considered one of America’s auteurs or not is kind of beside the point.  Maybe if you were sitting with Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard, or someone of note in the studies of cinema, something more either political or revolutionary might be the thing that you lacked to be considered one of American cinema’s “greats,” but when those two films are the films that we’re talking about, we just need to recognize the multitude of tiers of greatness.

Populist cinema has its heroes.  In fact, they either make a ton of money or get a lot of Academy Awards or both.  The question of artistic intent isn’t really leveled at them in the same ways that one might look at someone like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock.  At the same time, this whole thing is a crock if you really think about it.  Cinematic joy and pleasure is in some ways contraposed to its more active intellectual activators, but it’s also the be-all, end-all of populism.

Growing up with a distaste for War films, I never had seen The Great Escape.  But after seeing The Magnificent Seven a few years back, I was sold on John Sturges, on his big, epic adventures with sprawling casts and big time fun.  It’s kind of surprising that it actually took me this long to getting around to seeing the former.

Packed with a brilliant cast including Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasance, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and a litany of others, the film is in many ways quite the partner film of The Magnificent Seven.

Based on a true story, though highly modified, it tells the tale of an escape from a Nazi prison during WWII, a prison built to hold the most experienced escapees from the British and American militaries, officers whose sworn duties were to try to escape or wreak as much havoc as possible.

With an iconic soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, whose similarly iconic music for The Magnificent Seven helped carry the uniqueness and specialness of that film, again offer the heightened mythos in The Great Escape.

It’s populist, iconic cinema, totally enjoyable and fun, though perhaps not as much as The Magnificent Seven for me.  Perhaps it’s the ideology of the “good fight” against a villain of “true evil”, a forum for nationalism that lacks irony.  The film itself is such good fun, and tempered with its levels of success and bitterness of defeat…it’s almost really enthralling.  But the pluckiness of the Brits and the “indominatable” nature of the American human spirit (as so wonderfully embodied by Steve McQueen) is a cliche, probably a cliche the day it was made, doubtlessly a cliche that many can happily buy into, but still a cliche, still a motif, still as system of belief that is ultimately best at least in question, at least pondered, rather than offered at a level of complete and utter truthfulness.

Still, it’s fun, brilliant, entertaining stuff, the kind of thing you’d have to be of some serious fogeyness to poopoo utterly.

It’s fun.  Largely.

(1971) dir. Richard C. Sarafian
veiwed: 10/01/08

Vanishing Point was the film that Quentin Tarantino cited as the inspiration/touch point for him making his car race movie Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), and while Tarantino’s film sucked horribly, I was still curious to check out the film that he had liked.  One of the things about Tarantino is that he may be whatever you think of him as a screenwriter and director (and actor), but the guy has pretty good taste in both movies and music.  His soundtracks are sometimes better than his films, and for a while, when he was attaching his names to re-releases of films for distribution and DVD promotion, the things he liked were often worth the inspection.

Vanishing Point fits into the groups of films that I have seen that fell under Tarantino’s promotion.  Like Breathless (1983), Jim McBride’s misbegotten remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), and Switchblade Sisters (1975), Vanishing Point is a crossing of the art film and the B-grade or lower genre or exploitation film.  Pop-culture muddled with art house aesthetics.  So you can have your fun and still contemplate it later.

Actually, Vanishing Point is pretty interesting in some ways.  It’s the story of a guy who is driving a car from Colorado to San Francisco as a delivery, but he drives the car like a maniac, racing up the long highways, running cars, people, and police off the road.  And the question perpetually is: “why?”

With snippet-like flashbacks, the audience is only given glimpses of the backstory, so there are a lot of holes to fill in.  At one point, he was a racecar driver, then a cop.  And then he lost his hippie girlfriend in a surfing accident.  So, what is his motivation?  Well, the other indicator that is given is the running hep commentary by Cleavon Little, playing a blind deejay in a small town radio station, who is tuned into the police scanner and is proselytizing about the rebel car driver, the last great individual, fighting against the system, against “the man”.  Of course, the police don’t take too kindly to this, and the radio station is attacked in racially-motivated violence.  But the connection between the two, the radio station and the driver…huh?

The driver, Barry Newman, is on a quest, and when he rides out into the desert, he meets with a snake-wrangler and some singing hippie born-again Christians who are quite unfriendly and meant to be read as kooky.  He also has an odd interaction with a gay stick-up couple.  I am guessing that there is social commentary or allegorical stuff going on here, but I’d be stabbing in the dark to say that I totally get it.

Like the other films that Tarantino champions, this moderately obscure cult film is more interesting than a lot.  The cinematography of the roads and highways and car chases and crashes is neat.  The use of the faces of the extras and crowds helps fill in a background world against which the action happens.  But much the rebel without a cause, it’s hard to sympathize with the driver.  The pointlessness of his actions, no matter that he doesn’t actually injure anyone, is merely reckless, selfish, and inscrutible.  And the film, for its style and its nihilism, isn’t all that amazing or moving.