5/29/21 (Sun)
A tear-jerker about two gay guys in Taiwan who can’t quite come out. It’s just after the military government was ditched in favor of democracy in the late 1980s, and attitudes towards homosexuality are still evolving, including the arrest of a gay activist, gay bashing in the school and family issues. Continue reading
5/28/21 (Fri)
Robert Altman’s 1971 follow-up to his smash hit M*A*S*H. McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides confidently into an output out West (way west – Washington State), hardly a town yet, and hits the saloon. After first confirming the location of the back door, the cooler-than-cool dude brings out his cards and sets up a poker game. Seeing an all-male environment, he gets the idea of opening a brothel. He drags in three bedraggled countrywomen from a nearby town and sets them up in shoddy tents, which manages to attract business. Then Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) arrives in town, a young cockney widow reduced to selling her body to survive. (Not quite clear what a cockney is doing out in the Far West, but those were adventurous times.) She distinguishes herself right away by charging $5 for her services, more than three times the going rate – and gets it. She figures that the brothel could make a lot more money if it went upscale, and badgers McCabe into joining hands, telling him he knows nothing about women or hygiene or business. The worldly wise Mrs. Miller clearly has the upper hand in the relationship, undermining McCabe’s sense of his skills. That’s where the fun starts.
5/22/21 (Sat)
Now this is how black comedy should be done. In Robert Altman’s 1970 classic, three male surgeons arrive at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) in Korea during the Korean War and proceed to turn life upside down. The macho nature of the film feels perfect given that these guys are working in the middle of a brutal conflict, as if the only way of fighting the insanity of war is with more insanity. (The film was made during the Vietnam conflict, the obvious reference here.) The injured keep coming in as fast as the doctors can stitch them up, and the juxtaposition of the men’s zany exploits with the gory surgical scenes highlights what’s really at stake here. The doctors have to develop a fairly thick skin; in one case, a doctor dryly demands the help of a priest who’s declaring last rites on another patient: “I’m sorry, Dago, but this man is still alive and that other man is dead, and that’s a fact. Now hold this with two fingers.” A nurse screams at one point that this is “an insane asylum”, and in a way she’s right.
5/22/21 (Sat)
Milos Forman’s 1967 farce was his final film in then-Czechoslovakia before absconding to greater glory in Hollywood (Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, Hair, Larry Flynt). Firemen in a small town are putting on a ball to honor their retiring president, which falls into turmoil due to their petty individual concerns and paranoia all around. At the opening, a worker putting up a banner is left hanging dangerously from the ceiling when his colleague, distracted by a trifling argument over a stolen cake, takes his hands off the ladder. Others run over to help, but we find that they are less concerned with the desperate man than with the banner and the party’s image. That sets the tone for the film, which is one rapid crisis after another until the last ironic image. It is really about the bureaucratic mindset of the organizers and crumbling values of society under the Communist regime. Continue reading
6/7/21 (Mon)
Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1946 work on the famed ukiyoe artist was evidently one of the first movies to be approved after the war by the American occupying forces. Mizoguchi is widely said to have seen himself in the story of the devoted artist, which here involves censorship and female issues, but the same can probably by said for any film about a struggling artist from Lust for Life onwards. Given the director’s usual concern with the difficulties of women in Japanese society, I had assumed the female half of the title would be the film’s centerpiece.
In fact, though the five women dominate the narrative, the thematic focus is Utamaro’s obsession with his art. Continue reading
6/6/21 (Sun)
After Imamura Shohei’s previous work, the madcap Pigs and Battleships, I was ready for anything. This 1963 film – the literal Japanese title is a more clinical Chronicle of Japanese Insects – followed an effective two-year ban of the director by Nikkatsu for his over-the-top and over-the-budget Pigs. Still, Imamura, unbowed, held nothing back in his new piece about a ruthless woman who does whatever she can to survive. The brutal results ironically became the biggest-grossing film in his career, which presumably mollified the studio’s concerns.
6/1/21 (Tues)
The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.
5/19/21 (Wed)
Juraj Herz’s long-banned film of 1969 was part of the Czech New Wave, which largely disappeared when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the previous year. The setting is the 1930s just ahead of the Nazi takeover of the country. The head of a crematorium adheres to the Tibetan teaching that death helps end human suffering and open the way to a new future life, making him feel good about preparing people for their end – both the dead bodies entrusted to him and the living humans that he took it upon himself to “liberate”. Continue reading
5/14/21 (Fri)
This film actually won an Academy Award?? A bit of exotica from 1959 surrounding a love affair in a Rio favela during Carnival based on the Orpheus-Eurydice legend. Continue reading
5/11/21 (Tues)
A 1966 Czech film by Jiří Menzel set in a small Czech town toward the end of the war. Continue reading
5/9/21 (Sun)
I was browsing through Criterion’s selection of Best Foreign Language Oscar winners and chose this 1965 Czechoslovakian film by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos without knowing much about it. It turned out to be a Holocaust comedy, not a crowded category, set in 1942 in the newly created Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. The Tiso regime has accepted the Nuremberg Race Laws, setting off the conflict that drives the drama.
4/29/21 (Thurs)
An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.
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