Prima Facie (NT Live)

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  • Prima Facie (NT Live), 8/25/22 (Thurs)

This one-woman show by Suzie Miller, originally presented in her native Australia, had received extremely strong reviews in its London debut, and the NT Live film itself set new records (though the play itself wasn’t an NT production – not sure how that works). Jodie Comer, apparently a young television star, won raves for her work. I’m usually wary of one-woman pieces since they tend these days to be self-centered rantings about female empowerment aimed at female audiences. Still, Fleabag worked out pretty well, so I decided to chance it.

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Destry Rides Again

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  • Destry Rides Again, 8/20/22 (Sat)

Was the west ever this wild? In George Marshall’s 1939 romp, the son of a legendary tough sheriff is called in to bring law and order to an anarchic town controlled by a corrupt rancher after the previous sheriff mysteriously disappears. He attracts ridicule when he emerges from his carriage with a parasol and birdcage and no weapons, but his unorthodox methods and persistence, with help from a voluptuous saloon manager who shifts loyalties, gradually bring the villains to heel.

The film is a parody of a Western from the very opening, when a massive brawl, one of many to come, is taking place in front of the Last Chance Saloon (a name that itself signals a lampoon). Marshall handles crowd scenes with great skill, culminating in the hilarious final scene where the wives, fed up with the men’s uncivilized behavior, do some cleaning up of their own. That in turn nicely sets up the murder scene of two key characters, the final in a number of shooting deaths throughout. The superb script, which reportedly veers sharply from the source novel, offers an abundance of fascinating characters and keeps all its plot strands adeptly in play to the end. Very well filmed and choreographed.

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The Thin Man / After the Thin Man

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  • The Thin Man, 8/12/22 (Fri)
  • After the Thin Man, 8/13/22 (Sat)

W.S. Van Dyke’s hit 1934 comedy/mystery The Thin Man was made only a few years into the sound era, but I don’t think dialogue at this level, written by husband/wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, was ever better. And it helps that the endlessly quotable script is delivered to perfection by William Powell and Myrna Loy as the iconic Nick and Nora, one of the best screen couples ever. Based on a Dashiell Hammett novel released the same year (which I now plan to read), it’s worlds away from Sam Spade in a genre all its own, an American restoration comedy.

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The Hole (洞)

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  • 洞 (The Hole)

8/3/22 (Wed)

An apocalyptic musical, not a crowded genre, by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. It was made in 1997 as part of a French series envisioning the upcoming millennium, when the big talk was the Y2K bug that was supposed to upend the world economy. Tsai instead imagined a full-on viral pandemic traced to cockroaches that turns victims into bug-like crazies who crawl on their hands and knees and shun the light. The radio says that French scientists have termed it the Taiwan Virus (in the days before you could be canceled for such). The vision of a viral outbreak is the polar opposite of that in the later Contagion, where people were swarming chaotically in a brutal battle for dwindling resources. Here the focus is the loneliness of quarantined individuals and the need for connection. From the perspective of the past two years, the Taiwanese film proves more prophetic.

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Mystery Train

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  • Mystery Train

7/27/22 (Wed)

Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 flick is an omnibus with three self-contained stories that share a location in a seedy hotel in Memphis, Elvis portraits and his rendition of “Blue Moon”, foreigners (Japanese, Italian, British), and a gunshot. All stories are haunted by the spirit of Elvis to an extent, one quite literally, as a virtual symbol of the city.

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Les Enfants Terribles

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  • Les Enfants Terribles

7/21/22 (Thurs)

The masterful Le Samouraï made me curious to see more from Jean-Pierre Melville, so I picked this widely praised 1950 flick written by Jean Cocteau based on his novel. I had thought that this was based on the Cocteau play I saw years ago starring Kathleen Turner, but that turns out to have been a completely different work called Les Parents Terrible – apparently the writer doesn’t mind recycling titles (he made his own film of that work two years earlier in 1948). It’s hard to imagine anything further from Cocteau’s fantastical style than the austere approach shown in Melville’s later film, and I wondered how they would make that mesh. Not very well, it turns out.

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Le Samouraï

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  • Le Samouraï

7/17/22 (Sun)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 take on a noir thriller. Alain Delon plays a cooler-than-cool killer-for-hire, dapper in his trench coat and stylish hat, who plays a cat-and-mouse game with the police after his murder of a nightclub owner. He is a taciturn type who lets his gun do the talking and has carefully set up alibis before carrying out the job, but he is spotted by a witness, a jazz singer in the club, upon leaving the scene. He refrains from killing her and quickly leaves, and she responds by denying to the police that this is the man she saw. Contradictory evidence complicates the picture for the police, but the noose eventually tightens. Delon moves ultimately to fulfill a final contract, which involves killing the singer. He goes to the club in a tense scene for a surprising ending.

A better title for the film would be “Le Yakuza”. Delon’s actions are not the behavior of a samurai, who is devoted solely to his master and would never stoop (at least ideally) to monetary gain. Continue reading →

Baby Broker (ベイビーブローカー)

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  • Baby Broker (ベイビーブローカー)

7/23/22 (Sat)

Koreeda Hirokazu’s latest offering, filmed in Korean, is a reexamination of themes on the notion of family that he explored to such great effect in Shoplifters. (The actual English name appears to be simply Broker, which may also be an attempt to play on the word’s meaning of poor. But that’s a terrible title, so I’ve gone with the Japanese, which uses the English wording.) It involves a “baby box”, a place set up at churches or hospitals allowing women to drop off unwanted newborns safely and anonymously. The concept was developed in Japan but has not taken real hold – only one box exists in the entire country, and only a bit over 100 children have been left there since it opened in 2007. (The situation wasn’t helped by a scandal soon upon opening when one father left a three-year-old boy, prompting censure from the prime minister.) It proved much more popular in Korea, where thousands of women have taken advantage of it, leaving the facility to find adoptive homes or orphanages for the toddlers. That situation could reflect the greater spread of Catholicism in Korea, which might put greater psychological pressure on women having to choose between abortion and abandonment. In any case, I had assumed that this was the reason the director chose to set the film in Pusan rather than Japan, but it turns out that he mainly wanted to work with Song Kang-ho, the actor best known for Parasite. Which, it turns out, is a good reason.

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The Other Side of Hope (Toivon tuolla puolen)

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  • Toivon tuolla puolen (The Other Side of Hope)

6/4/22 (Sat)

In Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), an older working-class man losing his wife to cancer encounters an African migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. In his The Other Side of Hope (2017), an older working-class man losing his wife to divorce encounters a Syrian migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. The setting shifts from Le Havre to Helsinki and the language from French to Finnish/English/Arabic, but the big change is the shift in focus from the rescuer to the rescued, who is drawn more sharply and plays a more active role in the latter film. Significantly, the first film is about ensuring that the migrant leaves France and reaches the UK, while the second is about welcoming migrants into the society in question.

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Seconds

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  • Seconds

6/5/22 (Sun)

A bizarre SF offering of 1966 by John Frankenheimer that is known popularly as the last of his “paranoia trilogy” with The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. The film was not a success on its initial release – it was actually booed at Cannes – but has gained growing cult status over the years. A tired banker receives a call from a friend who he thought had died. The friend reveals that he has been given the chance at a “rebirth” by a mysterious company — known as The Company — that offers a new appearance and identity through plastic surgery. He  raves about his reenergized life and offers to introduce the banker as well. The banker reluctantly accepts. Having been an amateur painter, he is given the identity of a noted artist and relocated to an upscale community in Malibu. He meets a beautiful bohemian woman and initially enjoys a wild ride. But, as these things go, he soon discovers that not all is as it seems and wants out. Unfortunately, that proves easier said than done. A shocking betrayal at the end brings his dream to a vicious close.

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Ginza Cosmetics (銀座化粧)

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  • 銀座化粧 (Ginza Cosmetics)

6/11/22 (Sat)

The Japanese title of Naruse’s 1951 film, terribly rendered in English, suggests the makeup that women wear to burnish their image, as in the glitter of the ritzy Ginza area covering up the less attractive reality beneath.

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