There are, specifically, two things I want to write about in regard to this film. The first one is the acting of Joan Fontaine. It was no surprise to me that she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, as this was an extremely difficult part to play. She’s a nameless protagonist (seriously, she is never addressed by name in the film), a shrinking violet weighted down by the shadow cast by the film’s absent-due-to-death main character, Rebecca. The pressures on her character are manifold, and all that she is not is reflected in what others tell her Rebecca was. Fontaine does an amazing job molding her posture, facial reactions and behavior to emphasize this dramatic tension. At heart though, her character is happy and eager to please, and each blow to her self-esteem so obviously wears down this basic goodness that the film becomes emotionally torturous in the style of the gothic novel. She walks to the very precipice of madness.

Secondly, I want to talk about the ways that Hitchcock thwarts the Hays Code; something he was apparently very fond of doing. The Hays Code (or Production Code) were basically a set of censorship rules about things you were allowed or not allowed to depict when making a movie. If you do show something like a murder, the murderers must be punished by the end of the film. Hitchcock manages to use the narrative structure of the mystery to hint at things that he can’t actually show. It’s an amazing use of psychology; viewers will try to figure out how the pieces fit together and reach conclusions based on the cues Hitchcock provides that are both incorrect and in violation of the Hays Code. If you read between the lines, there are implications of marital infidelity, suicide, homicide, homosexuality and incest. They mostly all evaporate by the denouement.

This, the first of Hitchcock’s American-made films, is a very good movie, It’s no surprise that it was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and picked up two of ‘em, including Best Picture. Like most Hitchcock films, there are a lot of balls in the air, but he’s a masterful juggler and ensure that each ball comes down at the right time, and in the right order.

At first watch, this film is more comedic and less compelling than Yojimbo. At its essence, this is a buddy flick, but Sanjuro has a double handful of impetuous idiots to wrangle instead of just one. Because of this, Sanjuro’s utmost capability stands out at all times. He comes across as an ubermensch ronin who’s so bored with being a badass that he helps out these bumblers just to enliven his day. This might actually turn the film from a comedy into a satire.

I would make the argument that there is an implicit critique of Japanese social structure here, all the mundane samurai are the medieval equivalent of modern salarymen and they all want to be like the bossman, Sanjuro. He, on the other hand, is self-priming and autonomous. Because of this, he is filled with a kind of whimsical contempt toward the other samurai who place worth on things external to themselves. This is a lonely place for Sanjuro, and would irrevocably darken the tone of the film if not for the presence of Mutsuta’s wife. She’s the only other non-villainous character who has the same sort of self-possession, and her peace with herself is a marked contrast to Sanjuro’s discontent. He recognizes this, and the refinement of her personality gives Sanjuro a foundation from which he can launch his fury.

The recipient of this ire, and the only other character Sanjuro instinctively respects, is the other autonomous actor: Hanbei Muroto. Though forced to kill him, Sanjuro has no desire to do so, and the film ends as he continues his search for a group of his equals.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #40: Michael Bay’s Armageddon.

Despite the laughable fact that this movie is included in the Criterion Collection; and the almost certain financial & business-tactical reasons for its inclusion, I’m going to try to review this film in good faith. This Michael Bay blockbuster came out in 1998, and that’s important, because I can’t imagine a film like this being made at all post-9/11. Yeah, I went there. The film is a self-congratulatory projection of America at the height of its pride, but before it had gottenth to the fall; an America that fancied itself so invincible that it could kick a Texas-sized asteroid’s ass in 18 days. An America with no problems. This is a movie made in an America that had forgotten what it is like to be humbled. (And if you think it’s just coincidence that the asteroid is “Texas-sized”, you’re an idiot).

Despite the not-so-laughable fact that the entire world is threatened by the asteroid, the only ones who can save the day are Americans. Americans who are arrogant dicks. (Redundant, I know.) America is the theme of this movie, not cosmic annihilation. Most noticeably, there are flags draped everywhere, they are like sacred tapestries, and nearly every scene is constructed to honor or promote American-ness in some way. Plus, Bruce Willis; probably the most stereotypically “American” action hero. There’s nothing original here, the film is basically a HGH version of the played-out “can we disarm the bomb in time?” trope.

Armageddon might be the most quintessentially American movie of the post-WWII era. Its genius is that of an idiot savant, but because this movie lacks anything approaching self-awareness, the glory of its bravado & obvious tackiness capture what it means to be American in the purest of terms. Michael Bay set out to make a blockbuster about America’s big balls and succeeded, but in his quest to present us with two hours of subconscious masturbatory zeitgeist-stroking (thereby turning us into lab rats who don’t even have to hit the crack button) he managed to remove anything vaguely approaching a compelling narrative.  The movie is pablum; there is no there there, and that is the only reason it is possible to make the grandiose claims I’m making about this film. If you are a thoughtful person, letting the tits, explosions, & smart-mouthed dialogue flow through you is like sitting zazen and penetrating through the impenetrable mu of the American psyche through the force of sheer bafflement. You will grasp for any sort of meaning and come up empty, and at the uttermost depth of your despair, when you surrender to the idiocy; enlightenment. This film is the archetype.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #28: Paul Morrissey’s Blood For Dracula.

Blood for Dracula is little different, in essence, from it’s partner, Flesh for Frankenstein. I guess if I had to pick, I’d say I enjoyed this movie better, mainly due to the ridiculously gratuitous nudity, hot lesbian make-out scenes and a scene that reminded me of the Black Knight from Monty Python & the Holy Grail. Shlock has its redeeming qualities, as long as you’re not concerned with maintaining a certain level of snobbery.

Blood for Dracula stars the same folks, in virtually the same roles. Udo Kier is Dracula instead of Baron Frankenstein, he still has the same creepy assistant (more kempt this time around), and Joe Dallesandro remains Joe Dallesandro, fucking anything with a pulse. This film was shot back-to-back with Flesh, so it probably wasn’t hard for any of these actors to stay in character. (If you can consider Dallesandro to be capable of acting. He doesn’t even try to feign an accent. Probably no point.)

There’s quite a bit of heavy-handed proletarian revolutionary talk in this film, and the fact that Dallesandro as stableboy cum stud ends up owning the manor with a harem of three nubile sisters who’d love nothing more than to spend their days shirtless outdoors and nights watching each other get porked by Dallesandro, and, well then.

The high aristocratic body count is Warhol-generation wish-fulfillment, only 36 years later, Joe Dallesandro’s character appears just as morally bankrupt as everyone else. The film remains as a good record of what a certain group of people thought about at a certain time, but with age has become no longer compelling.

Tangentially, all three films since I’ve started back in on watching the Criterion Collection have all had some messed up sexual politics going on. I’m ready for a change-up.

Supplemental Materials

• Criterion Collection essay by Maurice Yacowar
• Not Coming to a Theater Near You review
• Trailer:
• Opening Credits:
• First Bite Scene:

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #27: Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein.

Also known, for obvious marketing reasons, as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, this film only uses the name “Frankenstein” as a pop culture reference to go along with the other clichéd horror tropes; mad scientists, castle laboratories, sundry chunks of corpses, creepy assistant, etc. This film isn’t a horror film, it is gore-comedy, like Dead Alive (Braindead) with side helpings of nudity and sex fetishism. It is high-brow deliberately acting low-brow; an antithesis to Sam Fuller films, which are low-brow serendipitously becoming high-brow. The twisted Teutonic (even though he’s Serbian, are Serbians considered Teutonic? I couldn’t manage to find an answer…) sexual monomania present in the Baron is one large piece of the puzzle, and Nicholas, the nearly amoral stableboy cum stud (this could also be written as “stableboy cum-stud” for added flavor) is the other. The rest of the characters flesh out (I should stop with the puns already) additional angles on what clearly becomes the point of the film; we’re all violent, sexual sociopaths in one way or another. The Baron says: “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in the gall bladder!” right after he has done just that.

Well, okay, but what then, or what else? There isn’t really an answer given, unless it is present in the voyeuristic incestuous offspring of the Baron and his sister/wife. The film begins and ends with them involved in torture, first at play, but fully realized at the last. If anything, the children are even less human than everyone else. They (almost?) never speak, and offer no justifications for their acts. No matter how debased or existentially dead any of the other characters are, they always speak their piece before contributing to a body count that would do a Shakespearean tragedy proud.

Like the tank of piranha that we see occasionally, the children have been reduced to bloodthirsty beasts, who act as their nature demands, and feel no need for sophistry to justify themselves. If there’s a moral here, it’s that the absence of empathy and altruism is compounded generationally. Your obsessions can become your childrens’ and more likely worse.

Supplemental Materials

• Criterion Collection essay by Maurice Yacowar
• Eccentric Cinema Review (with plenty of stills)
• 1000 Misspent Hours Review

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #17: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Chances are you won’t like this movie. Even if you do enjoy it for its cinematic and allegorical value, you won’t like it. If you do like it on anything approaching an emotionally satisfying level, please seek professional help immediately. This film is based on the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, adapted to fit neatly into fascist Italy in 1944. Fascists kidnap some kids and brutalize them to death. The film is boring, disgusting and depraved throughout. Everything, everybody, and every body is dehumanized; both torturers and tortured.

This is the point.

Pasolini wants us to examine just what it means to be dehumanized. What’s the mechanism? What are the motivations? It boils down to something I can really only explain in a religious context. Hell is sometimes considered as the absence of God’s love; an emptiness. That’s sort of what’s going on in this film. The torturers are empty of all love, and thus perverted by all of their other desires. They hunger to strip love from everything that has it, the more innocent and pure, the more they want to corrupt.

The cinematography is the diegetic proxy of the audience in this film, and it wholly participates in this dehumanization. You know what that means? Yup, we viewers were willing participants in the torture. Sitting on our asses and letting the camera do the work makes it easy to be evil. The shot selection is predominantly front-and-center, alternating heavily between long shots and close-ups, and just about always at eye level. It’s almost like you’re there, man! (And it’s brilliant.) That’s why if you don’t come away from this film feeling unclean, you need some help.

The heavy use of cubist art also adds to the quiet violence of the film, and emphasizes the twisted-ness of what’s going on. You’re not supposed to like this film, and Pasolini has pulled out all the stops to make sure you don’t. He wants you to see evil, feel evil, and then wonder what that means and what you can do to make sure that you aren’t or won’t become evil.

Other Links

• Criterion Reviews (scroll down a bit)
• Fearful Symmetry
• A PDF of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom
• Salò at the British Film Institute
• Senses of Cinema
• Trailer at Dailymotion
• The final minute on YouTube

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #42: John Lurie’s Fishing With John.

As a fisherman, watching Fishing with John was quite an experience. Walleye and pike are only mentioned once, by Tom Waits; the rest of the time the fishing was much more exotic than what a Midwesterner like me is used to. However, throughout most episodes, you’re lucky to see more than one [usually tiny] fish. The enjoyment comes from the over the top narration and the confounded aspects of John Lurie’s celebrity [read 'buddies'] guests. A couple of them [namely Waits and Willem Dafoe] actually seem to know a thing or two about fishing.

Most of the rest of the time is devoted to hijinks of one sort or another, usually at the expense of both the locals, Lurie & his cohorts. They send up the mystic mannerisms of the seasoned fisherman by doing a fish dance and experience all manner of trouble actually getting to where the fish are supposed to be, but I get the sense that, despite the put-upon bumbling, everyone actually enjoyed the fishing.

The way the locals from around the world are treated troubled me a bit, especially because they don’t seem to know that they’re the butt of the jokes. I definitely got a “we’re idiot American tourist” vibe from the Lurie, Matt Dillon, et al. but I can’t tell whether even that is deliberate or not. The episodes tread a few fine lines, scripted versus improvisational, with a difficult blandly tangential humor, and non-obviousness seems to be the goal of most of the episodes. It is easy to feel a bit of fremdschämen throughout the series. I wouldn’t say these episodes are for everyone. I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them if I hadn’t had a fishing backround (and familiarity with fishing shows). If you’re a fan of Jim Jarmush, John Lurie, or Tom Waits, Fishing with John is probably right up your alley though.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #116: Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.

Well it has been 9 months since I last reviewed a Criterion Collection film. I suppose having a 7-month old will do that to you. I had a chance to sit down last night and watch The Hidden Fortress. I might be a bit rusty, but this film didn’t seem as high-quality as most of Kurosawa’s output. The only character who exhibits any development is Princess Yuki, and although she’s the focus of all of the action, as a character she’s pretty secondary. The two peasants, Tahei and Matakishi, are in the fore throughout the film, and their slapstick kept the film from delving into the deeper conundrums that bound around in the wings.

Everybody is trying to find or save Princess Yuki, the last surviving member of the Akizuki clan. Our two boors buffet about due to the tides of war and their own avarice, seeking either the Akizuki gold or Yuki Akizuki, as their whims dictate. Toshiro Mifune [playing Toshiro Mifune as Rotokura Makabe] ropes them into hauling the gold and the princess through, across, around [and various other prepositions] enemy lines. Every plan Tahei and Matakishi ‘devise’ fails immediately, and they try to run off with the gold almost as much as they fight each other. There is one 10 minute Toshiro spear-fight showcase showdown in which Mr. Mifune’s whittled forearms are the main scene, but the rest of the film pretty much consists of folks bitching up and down [and various other prepositions] myriad roads.

This is not to say that the film is without value. Kurosawa’s eye for the right framing and subtle phrasing is as on the mark as it ever is; stopping at an inn for the evening we find out that with 5 pieces of silver you can either buy a good horse or a prostitute [permanently]. The ham-fisted peasants live in sty-squalor and are herded about by porcine petty lords and their pig-headed vassals. The objective eye indicates that all parties are a bit absurd in their humanity. Everyone is happy with status quo except Princess Yuki, who gets her first taste of how the other 99.9% lives and gains the righteous indignation on the behalf of her inferiors that hard-time-fallen nobility always seem to exhibit in fiction. She does have nice legs, however.

I guess what sank the movie for me was the way the constant breaks for a bit of levity undercut the drama at the same time that Mifune’s furrowed disapproval killjoyed the clowning slapstick [which I'm not really a fan of anyway]. Toss in a plot that isn’t all that compelling or original and 2D characters with unchanging motivations and the result is that I might have enjoyed this movie if I had seen it before Star Wars [Lucas claims The Hidden Fortress as an inspiration for that universe, but there are only very basic and tangential relations between the two]. The story probably won’t keep you going, but the hope for the next exceptional shot will.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #420: Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur.

After quite a long hiatus from watching Criterion Collection films [and an abortive reentry with Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming], I got back into the swing of things with this charmingly menacing film by Agnès Varda. Foremost, the film is beautiful to watch, with shifts in color signaling shifts in theme, and a subjective cinematography that further refines the viewer’s attention to exactly the bits that Varda is interested in us being interested in. Often a series of zip cuts will alert us to a character’s state of mind by showing us at what they are looking. For the most part those swift bits of ephemera are exactly what the character isn’t paying attention to, like the first time François visits Emilie’s apartment, he looks at everything but her, though we know she’s the only thing on his mind. A similar tactic with a different result is used the first time they go on a date. He stares at her chest while all else is out of focus and she speaks to him, he is out of focus while talking as she observes the couple behind him.

But for all of the quick cuts and strange uses of focus, the film proceeds at a stately pace and seems to cover much more diegetic time than one short summer. I think much of this feeling is accomplished through the editing, short scenes that consist of long takes result in cuts that elide time only, leaving space to be filled by the moments on screen. At one point a series of extreme close-ups illustrate the ping-pong progression of François from wife to mistress and back. The grace of the editing is further enhanced by the use of still lives. shots are framed and held in such a way that the mise-en-scène becomes a character; a rumpled bed, a kitchen window, a flower arrangement, all are signifiers for the true state of things. Lastly, an entire paper could be written on the use of Mozart; he isn’t a character in the film, but his music serves as narration and underscore for the emotional aspects of the storyline. I’ll leave it at that. It is better experienced than described.

The story starts out in mundanity and continues in this vein for the majority of the film. This focus on everyday activity is the strongest emotive force; it sucks the viewer in with recognition and betrays the viewer with the insidious same. It is a story about a happy family and the happy husband/father who happily starts a happy affair because he is so filled with happiness. It eventually all comes out in the wash, with fairly predictable consequences, but the final few bits of the film turn the mundane into a psychological horror show for the viewer [but not for the characters]. This masterstroke acts something like a warning for those who are looking for one, but seems more akin to documentary than morality play to me.

• Drought de Seigneur – by Carloss James Chamberlin
• Gerald Peary interviews Agnès Varda
• Criterion Collection Database info
• Agnès Varda European Graduate School Lecture [6 parts]

While this is another Seijun Suzuki gangster film, it is vastly different from Branded to Kill on just about every point. Most notable is the use of bright swathes of single colors in different scenes; the same set might be yellow, then fuchsia, then white at different points in the film, and the color often changes in response to actions from the characters. The film is less gritty and psychologically compelling than Branded to Kill, with more of a 1960s pop-culture vibe, complete with its own mawkish pop ballad that various characters sing throughout the film. Despite this much more lighthearted tone, there is still significant tension surrounding the main character’s role in a complicated gang war.

This film is a good data point for making an argument that Yakuza films are just updated samurai flicks. The main character, Tetsuya, is the equivalent of a ronin, except that while he thinks he’s left his gang, he’s still being used by it as a lightning rod to undermine other gangs in places outside of Tokyo. This is fairly superficial to the main focus of the film, which is Tetsuya’s process of self-actualization, but the twain meet in the final shootout. The film’s excellence is due to how stimulating each scene is, due in large part to the aforementioned color schema, and fleshed out with the constant plot twists, musical interludes, stylized battles and preternatural abilities of the various gunmen in the film.

The complications of the plot are revealed in snippets much like manga or anime, the rapid changes and reversals are confusing, but slowly congeal into an emotional tenor that reflects Tetsuya’s growing cognizance and disgust with his status as a pawn of the crime lord he looked to as a father-figure. It gets a bit confusing at times, there is another assassin, who looks a bit like Tetsuya, named Tetsuzo [both of them are called Tetsu at various times in the subtitles] which made me think that there was a weird multiple personality subtext going on. This film’s place in the Criterion Collection fits a specific niche of Japanese filmmaking that is usually overlooked. It is easy to see how Suzuki drove his studio’s batshitinsane, his stylized creations are awesome, but a definite trend away from the sure-shots that studios usually like best.

• Criterion Essay by Manohla Dargis
• The Criterion Contraption Review
• KFCC Review
• Deep Focus Review
• Love HK Film Review