Category: Film

I recently bought the CyberHome CH-DVD 300 player at Best Buy for a whopping $32.99, primarily since it plays PAL discs as well as NTSC and can be made, through a few menu buttons, completely Region Free. Now I have repaid my good luck by writing a review of it for DVD Beaver. I will not let any capitalists tell me what I can or cannot watch, based on where I live.

Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev
2003
A startling debut from Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, “The Return” is a family drama stuctured and shot as suspense/mystery. Two boys, Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) and the older Andrej (Vladimir Garin), are surprised to find their father (Konstantin Lavronenko), who they barely remember, has returned after a long absense. The father takes them on a long fishing/camping trip, where the two brothers come into conflict with his authortarian behavior. By the time they take a small motorboat out to a deserted island, Ivan begins to suspect his father isn’t who he says he is.
Zvyagintsev’s film is enthralling, and by turns surprising and inevitable in its fateful tale. Neither child is correct about their father, and the father isn’t an ogre. We get a sense that the father was stationed at this island during his time in the army, but what happened there we never find out. His strict nature feels like the only way he can understand relationships. We also see that, having been raised by an overprotective mother, the two kids are coddled and don’t understand their father’s behavior at all. Ivan feels persecuted.
Andrey spends a lot of his trip taking photos, and in his own silent protest (unlike Ivan’s stubborn nature) excludes his father from the frame. It’s understandable, but this tactic comes back at the end of the tale to devastating effect, as do several small plot points, such as failing to follow their father’s instructions. Zvyagintsev never hammers these points home, wisely, but drops a few red herrings.
Limited in release, most of us will have to wait for the DVD release, though the small screen may not do justice to the 24-hour sunlight the filmmakers shot in (up near the Finnish/Russian border).
(A side note: The elder of the child actors died not long after filming, drowning in the lake where most of “The Return” was filmed.)

Dir. Toshiya Fujita
1973
A fast-paced samurai revenge picture with a female in the title role, “Lady Snowblood” has received this release due to Tarantino referencing it (and using some of its soundtrack) in “Kill Bill.”
Wide-eyed Mieko Kaji (who played the title role in Female Convict Scorpion) stars as Yuki, whose mother died in childbirth, and raised by a hard-assed martial arts-teaching priest. She is raised to complete her revenge against the gang of four who killed her family and raped and tortured her mother. Yes, she has a list, just like in Kill Bill, but things get more complex. Death number one was completed by the mother before her death in prison. Death number two comes easily. But when Yuki tracks down Number Three, she finds a headstone. Seems like he died some time back. However, a young reporter seems to know about her story and a tenuous relationship develops.
All this is set against the Meiji era of Japan, and a climactic fight scene is shot inside a very Western costume ball, where British Admirals dance with Japanese ladies.
If anyone thought the violence in Kill Bill was cartoony or gross, Lady Snowblood has plenty more limb-choppin’, blood spurtin’ action. No matter where Yuki hits with her sword, she is guaranteed to hit a main artery, the result a hissing, arcing fountain o’ blood. Great fun, as is the wah-wah pedal-heavy, jazz-rock score, but Toshiya Fujita plays it straight. It was made in 1973 after all.
This is a very good DVD release by Animeigo, which though it lacks in extras, makes sure that every single thing in Japanese is translated, with multicolored subtitles helping the sometimes speedy dialog. Very few Japanese DVDs have such extensive subtitles.
Japanese film fans won’t be surprised to know Yuki dies in the end, but they may be surprised to see that Yuki came back the next year for a sequel. Did she punch her way out of her six-feet-under coffin? No idea.

Dir: Richard Brooks
1967
I read Truman Capote’s novel during my first year at 6th Form in England, over the course of a month of bus rides to and from campus. It still stays with me, and I finally saw the 1967 adaptation by Richard Brooks the other night.
Brooks shot the murder scenes in the actual house where it occured, and wisely removes all music from this sequence, just letting the wind howl around the house.
With Robert Blake in the main role as killer Perry Smith, the film can’t help but reflect on his own trial and incarceration. Not only that, but much of the film reminded me of Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” from the night shots speeding along the road to the scenes in the cell. Maybe we’re seeing chapters of a megamovie where Robert Blake, frustrated movie star, kills his wife, and transmogrifies into a young, sexy Perry Smith, who then goes on to kill again and wind back up on death row. As the psychologist in the movie says, “Separate they were harmless, but together they made a third person who killed” (I’m paraphrasing). That third person shaved his eyebrows, lives in a roadside shack, and urges men to kill.
There’s even more intertextual hoohah when we see Perry in flashback as a little Mexican-American kid helping his mom out at the rodea. An early Blake role was as a little Mexican kid who sells Bogart a ticket in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. That movie and Bogart are referenced several times in “In Cold Blood.” Some film student is bound to have a field day with this…
Missed in several online reviews I read of the film was the rather obvious suppressed homosexual relationship between the two killers. Dick Hickock, the other killer, talks of their friendship like marriage, and Perry seems quite co-dependent. The rage that sets him off on the killing spree in the Clutters’ home starts when he stops Dick from raping the young girl, a sort of jealous rage. (Add in the father issues as well, and there’s a whole heap o’ problems here).
Strangely enough, a writer by the name of J.J. Maloney was the first to advance the homosexual jealousy idea, not Capote, in 1999. But didn’t he get this idea from the film? Somebody’s out of chronological order here. Either way, you can read about that ideahere.

Dir: Quentin Tarantino
2004
Forgot to post my thoughts on this here, as I had posted them over at a mailing list I’m on. Here’s pretty much what I said there.
On the Jackie Brown DVD, QT talks about how JB “proved” he could make an intelligent, mostly dialog-driven film. And he had done it as his third film, early in his career. He goes on to say that maybe the next film will just be a movie-movie, just stupid fun, but craaaaazy.
So that’s how I take KB. The trouble with QT is that we have to wait so bloody long between films that the expectations outweigh the eventual release.
A friend of mine made a comparison between 1 and 2 in that they reflect Kurosawa’s tactic with Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Yojimbo is all blood ‘n’ guts; Sanjuro has little of that, and when violence does arrive it doesn’t conform to our expectations. Big baddies are dispatched quickly and without flourishes, where we expect big set pieces.
Over on the P5 list, where the convo is about sampling, Paul’s Boutique has been mentioned a few times, and I feel that KB is a bit like that–QT has made a sampladelic movie, no more no less. He’s just throwing everything out there on the table–all the movies he loves, reconfiguring it, tweaking it.
I admit it’s light and superficial, but I had some laughs along the way: Sonny Chiba’s sushi chef scene, Gordon Liu’s segment, the massacre of the Crazy 88s.
Who knows what QT will do for a follow up? My sense is that it will be something more like Jackie Brown. There’s been this WWII movie that he’s been wanting to make. Maybe he’ll pull a David Mamet and do a drawing-room drama like The Winslow Boy. Really, it could be anything. Only by the next film will we really know how to see KBII.

This is a pretty good Tarantino interview from before KBI came out. It made me think of the landscape of Kill Bill, how each “land” is made up purely of films and film references. Not a big revelation, as this is a post-modern film at its grandest, but how the rules change from location to location are, I think, particular to this film (instead of being a free-for-all).

Dir: Stephen Shainberg
2002
A fabulous performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal and a typically weird one by James Spader, in this tale of a socially backward girl who comes into her own under the weird dominating presence of the lawyer, Edward Grey, she works for. The critical consensus of the film is that the ending falls apart, or suggests that much was cut to keep the third act from leaving its near-literal hothouse atmosphere. I felt this way too, that Lee (Gyllenhaal) finds her freedom through becoming a submissive, and so the end, where the two consummate their love in a very straight, hetero way (naked rumpy-pumpy) feels like it’s against everything that’s come first. Surely, the desired outcome for Lee would be more of the submissive game.
A few days later, I came up with an alternative to just dismissing the ending. Perhaps what we’re seeing is Edward’s assertion of dominance over the narrative. How can Lee, a submissive, wind up being the hero? Wouldn’t that make her dominant? So, think about the orchids, Edward’s prised possession. They are cloistered, doted on, but stuck in an artificial “natural” environment.” We also see Edward plant a photo of Lee in the garden. What if the lawyer’s office is the nursery, and marriage/life in a suburban house is the end location/result? Lee becomes a flower that is transplanted into Edward’s life. When they finally make love, it is on a grass bed. A following shot shows Lee strapped to a tree during sex (the last image of bondage we see). Is the ultimate bondage domestic servitude? Is the final shot of Lee, as she looks into the camera with all sorts of emotion washing over her face, damning? A cry for help? Acceptance? She has spoken to us thorughout, but now Lee just looks. Is the film a very subtle and/or vague version of “The Collector”? How complicit is Lee in her fate? How should we feel about this?
Looking at the film this way, it may not be so hard to dismiss.

Dir: Francois Truffaut
1968
Francois Truffaut’s sequel–if you discount the short made in between–to “The 400 Blows”, following the young adulthood of Antoine Doniel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as he goes from crummy job to crummy job (hotel night clerk, detective (!), shoe salesman, TV repairman), falling in and out of love, and getting into a little bit of trouble.
It’s an incredibly light film, surprising as it was made during May 1968, as the Nouvelle Vague protested the Langlois affair and shut down Cannes. In the Criterion Collection DVD extras, the film is said to almost have been made as a way to relax from the political pressures of that year, with filming happening in a scattershot fashion with loads of improv.
The various detectives in the film (in typical trenchcoat, and always shadowing someone) are classic American Noir (Truffaut had just finished his adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black before this film) rendered comical by their transplanting into French society. The young, sometimes girlfriend of Antoine, Christine (Claude Jade), is tailed all the way through the movie, only to find the detective confessing his love for her at the end in a strange closing scene. Hey, it’s France, vive l’amour!

Dir: Tom Hooper
2003
Has it really been six years since the last Prime Suspect? This series along with Cracker show how differently the British and the Americans see their police dramas. Although Prime Suspect is clearly Detective Tennyson’s show, the fleshing out of her fellow squad members and of the victims and suspects really give the show a novelistic touch. Detective Supt. Tennyson is not a super-genius, but we thrill at her bullheadedness and determination, while her moments of self-doubt and even defeat round out her character humbly.
There are very few chases–the ones that happen resolve themselves quickly (suspect escapes, suspect caught)–very little gunplay, though there are guns. Tennyson wanders around potentially dangerous areas without a gun drawn, confusing the American viewers. Major clues are not exclusively the domain of the lead–often a member of the team finds them.
Steadily, steadily, the case is built, in this case around an obvious suspect in the murder of a Bosnian Muslim women who immigrated to England 10 years before only to find the war followed her. Interrogations don’t produce immediate results. The media is out of the investigation’s hands and ruins leads. And one major tactic that PS does over and over to some effect is never allowing the audience any release through the protagonist. As stones are lain in her path, Tennyson gets more and more frustrated, but very little do we see her exploding in anger. Instead another, sometimes disconnected, scene begins and we carry over that emotion with us. No wonder the show is so bleedin’ tense.
Helen Mirren is great, just great, a real hero, always thinking.

Dir: Yasuo Masamura
1958
Absolute complete insanity from Masamura and all sorts of props go out to Fantoma DVD for bringing this out of obscurity. Imagine a mix of Willy Wonka, Network, and a 1940s screwball comedy, driven by a soundtrack like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and you have a little sense of this film.
The setting is modern Japan in the late ’50s. Three caramel candy makers declare an all-out consumerist assault on society with a series of campaigns that begin to look a bit like war. We focus on one company, World Caramel, that hires a very common looking girl (Hitomi Nozoe) to be their spokesmodel, all the while trying to second-guess the other two companies on its way to complete market domination. At what point does decency and humanity go out the window and when does the race for a bottom line turn into a nosedive?
Furious in pace and devilishly funny (I particularly liked the earthy, sleazebag photographer) the film has to be experienced not described. In fact, though modern filmmaking looks fast, it often drags drags drags. Masamura just keeps blasting along, scene after scene, breathless, throwing people together, watching the sparks. He also employs a weird montage strategy involving the mid-level boss’s cigarette lighter. Some sort of family heirloom or gift, it takes about 50 strikes to get it to work. The incessant strikes are the gateway into several montages, one showing the candy being made, the other the marketing of the spokesmodel. Once the montage finishes (and it is usually double exposed with a close up of the lighter), Masamura returns to the scene and carries on. This is so strange (are we supposed to see the montage as happening concurrently or in the past?) that I can’t think of a single film before or since that has does such a thing.
On top of that, the film stops near the finale for a 4-minute dance sequence, featuring the now-successful spokesmodel and a chorus of men dressed up like savages.
After this film, and with memories of his similarly wacky “The Key” and “Blind Beast,” more Masamura films need to be released.