Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.1

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of over 900 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV.

Men Behind the Sun (1988) — 3/10

This is the story of a Japanese biological-weapons experimental camp/base. This is a film like Saló, that tells of the horrors of WWII. Like that other film, it’s just not very well-made. It straddles the line between documentary and drama somewhat awkwardly, including factual elements but mixing in ham-handed dramatic elements that don’t fit very well. The experiments that the Japanese performed on the Chinese are frankly nearly unbelievable. However, with the recent half-assed apology that Japan made for the systematic rape machine they built with hundreds of thousands of Korean “comfort girls”, it’s much more believable that they would do clearly idiotic and highly immoral experiments on “foreigners”. The story is a terrible one and the information worthwhile, but it doesn’t make the movie worth watching, unfortunately. Saw it in dubbed English, which made it even worse and it was a relatively poor print (not sure if that’s just how it is).

Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985) — 9/10

The film starts with two boys searching a beach in 1943 Russia, searching for rifles on an old battleground, so that they can enlist and fight for the Soviet Army. The older of the two Flyora finds a whole rifle and this is sufficient to allow him to enlist, much to his mother’s plaintive chagrin. Flyora gets to the army camp, but is abandoned when the regiment pulls off to fight. He befriends the similarly abandoned girlfriend of the commander and they suffer an ensuing attack on the emplacement together.

This movie places no shine on war or heroism, instead pointing out the futility of war and battle as Flyora is accepted in the military purely as cannon fodder and then abandoned just as quickly when a more experienced soldier needs his boots. Both Flyora and the young woman are nearly deafened by a subsequent attack. After the confusion, he builds a lean-to out of pine boughs to hide them until they can flee back to his village. The next morning, though, the attacking soldiers have moved on and they play in the rain, bathing and dancing, escaping from the horror of the attack.

Back in his village, though, everyone is gone and they find only the flies and waste and rot of an abandoned village. The constant buzzing of flies belies the truth, but Flyora runs off claiming to know where they’ve all gone. Glasha (the girl) looks back and sees the pile of corpses piled up behind one of the larger buildings. She follows him through muck and mud to “the island” though she knows the truth, but cannot bring herself to tell him. They find what remains of the village’s population, but Flyora’s family is not among them.

In a surreal sequence, four of the survivors (including Flyora) detach from the village refugee camp to rob a warehouse. They carry with them an effigy of an SS soldier, carrying it a ridiculously long way before setting it up to “guard” a crossing. Their travels thereafter are fraught with dumb peril—they are bombed, they stumble into a minefield, people die, their contingent of four is reduced to two. It is war, senseless and brutal, with the remaining soldier and Flyora taking their laughs where they can, often from a dark place.

In a long sequence, first his companion and then a cow they’ve stolen are killed by the encroaching Germans. Flyora wakes in the field alive, and encounters a farmer who will help hide him from the omnipresent Germans. Not only can he not bring the dead cow to his villagers, he’s now swept into a different town, robbed of his barely-there soldier identity and given a new family, to hide him. Flyora looks on in horror as he watches helplessly from among his new family as the Germans invade his newly adopted village—much as they must have invaded his own before slaughtering everyone that they could catch. The blind horror and uncaring coldness of a country at war is infinitely less harsh than the deliberate brutality of the occupying force. And Flyora watches everything with wide-eyed horror.

This movie is also about the horrors of WWII, but rendered much better than Saló or Men Behind the Sun. It’s a bit slow at times, but the artistry is better and the pathos of war is no less horrible for being more subtly portrayed. Or perhaps more realistically: the former (Saló) felt too staged and ludicrous—it was a bad metaphor—and the latter (Men Behind the Sun) was more realistic, but so badly done as to seem campy. This film also has its campy moments—especially during the scenes of excess near the end—but it’s understandable and in the context of a well-rendered, ongoing horror. It feels real, not staged, like it could have happened.

After a truly horrific scene of pillage from which no-one—attacker or attacked—emerged unscathed, things become increasingly surreal and Flyora’s impending madness colors everything. The Germans have themselves been ambushed and the destruction continues. As the Russians consider what to do with 11 German soldiers and collaborators that they rounded up, the translator looks directly into the camera and translates, “With the children it starts all over again. You have no right to exist. Not every people has the right to a future.”[1]

Recommended. Reminded me of a bit of Schindler’s List, but perhaps more comparable to Apocalypse Now. It is better than either of them at depicting war, where you can feel the living envying the dead. Saw it in Russian and German with English subtitles.

Place Beyond the Pines (2015) — 5/10

The first hour of this movie deals with the two-bit life of Luke, a stunt-bike rider with nary any brains in his head who falls for his baby-mama and, despite all her protestations, tries to provide for his son. This goes all kinds of wrong—predictably, because he’s really a HUGE dumbass—ands up with him out on bail for assault on her live-in partner. He has also hit upon the idea of robbing banks to provide for his son, using his mad motorbike skills and decides to do one big blowout double bank-robbery to really show the world that it should have loved him better. He does everything wrong, forgetting his mask, getting a flat tire, crashing into a car, taking hostages, etc. I can’t decide whether Ryan Gosling is terrible here, or just very good at playing a terrible moron. Act I ends with him playing a very dead moron.

In the second act, we meet Avery, a young cop played by Bradley Cooper, and the one responsible for Luke’s condition at the end of Act I. He is in the hospital because he was shot by Luke after he surprised him and shot him out the window. Of course, all the shooting could have been avoided if he hadn’t stormed the house alone, even though he knew only the suspect was in the house anymore. But that’s not how the police roll, I guess. Anyway, he’s a hero because he killed a bank robber and got shot in the process. Then he gets interviewed by an investigator—because a man was killed.

Next, we are introduced to Ray Liotta, who is in 100% slimeball mode as a fellow officer, DeLuca. He and his buddies show up to take Avery on a search to find the money that Luke stole and gave to his son. They force their way into the house without a warrant, find the money and “confiscate it”. They give the money to Avery because “he’s a hero” but he tries to give it back, then finally turns it in to the police chief, who yells at him for ratting out his fellow officers.

Now we’re talking about a police-corruption movie. He goes to the DA next, who tells him he’s “too smart for [his] own good.” But that’s not the impression that Avery makes: instead it’s that everyone else around him is so bone-stupid.

Act III continues many years later with Avery running for DA and his son a teenager. Apparently nothing happened as a result of him having ratted out the whole police department 15 years ago. So this isn’t a bank-robber movie, about a sad-sack who can’t get his life together, and it’s not the police-revenge and cleanup movie (well, the arrests are almost anticlimactic) and now it’s a movie about him reconciling with his son? The looseness of the plot feels almost like Terence Malick wrote and directed this. Also, only the kids look 15 years older.

Nope, Act III is about Luke’s son and Avery’s son becoming friends. Neither of them sounds like they come from upstate New York, not even close. They make friends, they break up, Avery’s son uses Luke’s son for drugs, Luke finds out who his dad is, challenges him, nearly breaks Avery’s son’s fist with his face. I’m not really invested in any of these characters. Michelle Rodriguez is utterly wasted by having her make sad, wrinkle-faced looks for the whole movie. She’s not the only one: pretty much the whole cast was wasted. Never cared about any of the characters. Not recommended.

Lovelace (2013) — 7/10

This is a biography of Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried), the original porn star from the 1970s breakout film, Deep Throat. She’s a bit of a lost soul, a young girl who moves with her parents to California because she’d gotten pregnant and had to give up the baby.

She meets Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who sweeps her off her feet and they get married. They quickly run into money problems and Chuck comes up with the brilliant idea of trying her out for movies—but she doesn’t know what kind of movies.

As in the real biography, her husband Chuck very quickly shows himself to be the worst guy she knows—the other guys on the film seem much nicer. He was absolutely horrible to her, though, after the brief initial courtship: he was the prototypical abusive and manipulative husband who pimped out his wife.

It’s told quite well by showing the rosy side of the movie production—where everything goes pretty well, with a few problems, but nothing big. Next, we see her six years later taking a lie-detector test for the publisher of her tell-all biography and we see the same story shown again, but darker, with Skarsgaard showing Traynor’s evil side very well and how terrified she was the whole time. Everything she does makes him mad—he seems to hate her and punishes her for every little thing. He also rents her out for gang-bangs—definitely husband of the year.

The cast is great: Bobby Cannavale and Hank Azaria as porn producers, Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick as Linda’s parents and James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It’s a semi-biographical movie about the life and times of a porn star, set in the 70s, and that’s what you’re going to get.

Bad Lieutenant (1992) — 7/10

Harvey Keitel plays a bad human being. He’s a lieutenant in the NYPD, but really he’s a receptacle for every form of drug he can find. Half an hour in and he hasn’t been in his right mind yet. He’s also involved in three-ways and pretty deep into gambling with money that he doesn’t have.

His job is mostly incidental. The first case we see him working on is investigating the rape of a nun. He visits the hospital and spends a few long seconds leering in at her naked body as she lies waiting for the investigation to be completed. Next up is a couple of girls who he stops for a broken taillight. This escalates into a “payoff” for their transgression, which is terrible but not as bad as I expected it to be. He ends up humiliating them so that he can pleasure himself, right out in the middle of the street.

He continues drinking, then ends up at the church where the nurse was raped. He stumbles through the crime scene, then passes out in the church, waking up when the police crime-scene photographer pops his flashbulb (not phrasing).

The next scene defines him completely: he’s in traffic, driving, snorting cocaine, swigging vodka (or grain alcohol, for all I know), listening to the World Series game on which he’s bet $15,000 that he doesn’t have, listening as Darryl Strawberry hits into a double play. He shoots out his radio, then starts his siren to mask it and weaves off into traffic, crying, swearing and out of his mind on drugs and booze, siren blaring and swearing to double down on the next game.

It’s ironic that he’s always listening to the game when Strawberry’s up to bat—a player who had a lot of trouble with cocaine, just like the bad lieutenant. He needs money, though, so he picks up the money he’s owed for evidence he stole and heads off into a stuperous night, drawing his gun on children when they come crashing up stairs he’s heading down. Disaster averted. I like the baseball game playing in the background as the thread that ties the movie together. Harvey Keitel is very good.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009) — 8/10

Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer are partners, cops, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They both start off as assholes, laughing at a prisoner trapped by the rising water, making guesses on how long he’ll last. Cage dives into the water to rescue the guy, injuring his back in the process. Six months later, he’s addicted to Vicodin and sundry related narcotics.

This movie is immediately sadder than Bad Lieutenant—the poem by one of the slain young girls at the first crime scene, about a fish kept in a water glass for lack of a bowl, is heartrending. Director Werner Herzog is already threading his special touch through the film—there is a water moccasin in the first scene and now a fish features in the second. Reptiles and fish feature throughout.

The major points roughly follow those of the Harvey Keitel version: investigation of crime scene, snorting cocaine off the hand outside, etc. The scene in the parking lot where he stops the young couple could be compared to the one where Keitel stops the two young ladies in the stolen car. Except this is even darker because the girlfriend then switches out and willingly takes on the Lieutenant in the parking lot while her boyfriend is forced at gunpoint to watch. The way Cage mutters dirty talk to himself is the same as Keitel, though. This, though he has Eva Mendes at home—although she seems to “entertain” clients of her own, so it’s probably a footrace to see who’s going to give who STDs first.

We see McDonagh (Cage) go through his day, scoring drugs, taking witnesses and trying to fix tickets, then hooking up with an old cop friend (Fairuza Balk) who can hook him up with even more dope from the property room. Their introduction is accompanied by an alligator that we see eying a corpse from the highway accident she was investigating.

Next, in the stakeout, there are two iguanas on the coffee table in the foreground that are just bugging McDonagh the fuck out. Things keep getting better for him, with his gambling debts piling up and his pimping of Eva Mendes becoming his only source of income.

Where Bad Lieutenant is a more stylized and nearly plotless mood piece about a corrupt cop, this movie has more meat on its bones plot-wise, although Cage’s overacting sometimes threatens to throw it off the rails. That Xzibit as “Big Fate” comes off as decent and nuanced says quite a lot, I think. It’s a decent crime drama with a lot of interconnected twists and turns and schemes—almost like Mamet wrote it. Careering toward the end and all at once, everything comes up roses for McDonagh—and he doesn’t even know why.

The film ends where it began: he meets the prisoner whom he’d rescued and he offers to help McDonagh finally break his addiction. They end up in an aquarium together, sharks and large fish rounding out the film’s menagerie and Cage chuckling, probably at an answer to the question he’d posed, taken from the little girl’s poem, “do fish have dreams?”

The Holy Mountain (1973) — 7/10

This is an absolute surrealistic drug dream. The sets are impressive: elaborate and original. The acting is pretty terrible and there is little to no dialogue to speak of. The music, while appropriate, is nothing special. The film supposedly has something to say about materialist, consumerist culture. There is so much left up to interpretation that it can only be enjoyed for the visuals, which are, as I said, quite good.

There are animals everywhere (a stork, a hippo, lizards and toads, etc.).[2] It also reminded me a bit of El Topo but with better production values. Such a loosely defined movie, filled to the brim with symbols can only be a mirror—a film from which the viewer finds and takes what he or she wants. No wonder this reminds me of El Topo: it’s the same director, Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The first act involves a Christ-like figure who ascends to the top of the Alchemist’s tower. The second act is almost a separate movie, with the Alchemist taking the Christ-like figure on a tour of several materialists, each with their own story and lush details. This part is accompanied by a voice-over as well, thankfully with each materialist taking care of their own, which is worlds better than Jodorowsky’s terrible accent. My favorite so far is Sel, who towers above all of her tiny, old, factory workers as they produce war toys.

There are some really nice visual moments—the nicest so far is when the seven materialists plus the Alchemist, his assistant and the Thief all file into a room that looks like an eye, filmed from above. With the alchemist’s tower and the Pantheon Bar, Jodorowsky plays with inner space that is vaster than the appearance of the outer building, much like the Tardis in Doctor Who. The imagery as the travelers climb up the Holy Mountain is lush and hallucinatory, like Fellini or Buñuel, with much blood and nudity, but also a man inexplicably covered in tarantulas. There’s also a Don Quixote-like man with lactating breasts made of jaguar heads and a beard that covers only half of his thin face. And always the seemingly normal, pretty prostitute with the chimpanzee from the first act follows, though snow and storm.

Visuals aside, the plot and dialogue and voice-overs are pretty hackneyed. For example, “concentrate on this starfish. When you see the size of an elephant, you will never miss the target.” Definitely something lost in translation there, but probably less a translation from Spanish to English and more one from the psychedelic, astral plane where this thought made perfect sense to our own, more prosaic world.

It would be unbearably pretentious if it wasn’t so earnest and innocent. Plus a few stars for scope and vision and sheer number of ideas and amount of work that went into it. The second half is much better than the first. At the very end, he reveals that he was playing a joke on us all along—that for those who took all the symbolism so seriously, “We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners! We shall break the illusion. This is magic! Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.”

Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) — 6/10

This is a black-and-white, low-budget, quick-cut, industrial, techno, Japanese, dialogue-free movie about metal fetishism? The first scene shows a man surrounded by metal—nicely filmed, actually—who is obsessed with laying metal into his body (in the most gruesome manner). His wound festers, he runs outside and is hit by car. His demise (or not?) leads to him getting the power to haunt others and infect bodies with metal, including the businessman who hit him. The metal fetishist is also still around somewhere, somehow, but where he is isn’t clear—it’s only clear that it looks cool, the way they show his thin back, covered in metal, trapped in a welder’s paradise.

It is certainly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it’s best described as what Cronenberg would do with metal if he weren’t so obsessed with biology. But the camera angles and cuts are much bolder than David’s more staid and measured ones. I can’t believe how good the metal suit looks.

The movie’s from 1989, so the old phone, the old TV, the black-and-white film, it all lends the movie an old-school Japanese horror-flick look. It doesn’t all work, but a lot of it—enough of it—does.

Don’t skip out before the reversed-gender metallic-tentacle–rape scene. I know it sounds awful, but it’s really well-done. It’s campy, but combined with enough cinema chops to make it good rather than cheesy (IMHO).

I was very skeptical at first, but then enjoyed very much trying to keep up—the aesthetic and driving soundtrack—and, honestly, the one-hour length, which could have been good even at ½-hour—combined to make an interesting film that I would actually watch again. Recommended for horror/cult/steampunk/thriller fans. Saw it in Japanese with English subtitles (about ten words or so, starting with “Stop!”). Minus one star because it goes on a bit too long.

House of Games (1987) — 6/10

It’s 1987 so everyone wears a terrible-looking blazer and smokes all the time, including the female lead, who also sports a very 80s short haircut. David Mamet’s direction is slow (careful?). It’s a decent flick about cons, both short and long, starring Joe Mantegna as the main con-man and the utterly terrible and unexciting Lindsay Crouse as the lead mark, who Mamet has written as almost a little too oblivious. Perhaps that’s just because I figured it out pretty early. Card sharp Ricky Jay is also in the group. Crouse is really a terrible actress, and her mannish looks are totally throwing me off, especially when combined with her botoxed acting skills and the seemingly deliberately terrible wardrobe. The con is pretty interesting, but it takes too long, it’s filmed very statically and in a pretty boring manner. The foreshadowing for her “cracking out of turn” was pretty good.[3] Not recommended, though.

Repulsion (1965) — 7/10

Roman Polanski directs this black-and-white film about a beautiful young French woman Carol (Catherine Deneuve) living and working in London. She’s very shy, lives with her sister and fends off advances right and left. All of the men so far are Lotharios. One is particularly persistent, hitting on her and not taking no for an answer until she kinda/sorta/but not really agrees to dinner.

Another is her sister’s boyfriend who blows off the sister’s hard work on preparing dinner with a casual offer to just go out. He continues to be a relentless asshole until he is no longer capable (spoiler). After they’ve gone out for dinner, Carol spends an evening at home alone, only to be woken up later by sounds of love-making next door, coming through the chimney flue.

The story kind of dinks around there for quite a long while, with Carol’s seeming depression getting worse. It’s honestly unclear what her exact problem is, but it seems to be depression. Polanski is a great director and has great framing and shot selection, so it’s a visually interesting movie, even when not very much is going on.

Carol spirals increasingly further down the rabbit hole. No pun intended. The rabbit that her sister never cooked was still in the refrigerator, so she took it out. Left it out. Rotting. Potatoes on the counter have huge eyes. The rabbit does not. Because its head is in her purse. Rotting. She keeps seeing cracks appear in the walls—cracks that don’t exist. The mere mention of a man by her friend makes her nearly physically ill.

Deneuve’s acting during the murder scene is utterly unconvincing. You’d think she’d never hit anything with a candlestick before. Otherwise, she plays quite well, torn between her reality and her fantasies and her depression. There really are some spectacular shots: when Carol grabs one (former) suitor’s hand to drag him down the hall, rolling the carpet up into the camera. So nice. As well, though not nice, the rape dreams she has are very well depicted, with closeup camera revealing detail and our indication that it’s not real coming from the utterly silent soundtrack. She wakes as if from an all-night bender, mostly disrobed, lying in the doorway to her bedroom, the apartment in an ever-increasing state of disarray.

The postcard she gets from her sister and Michael tells her not to “make too much Dolce Vita”, which is a play on the fact that her sister starred in the classic Fellini film of the same name.

It’s creepy in the way that Psycho was creepy (e.g. near the end, when she’s ironing without the iron plugged in, we know she’s well and gone and lost her marbles) It’s an interesting film, but one could argue that the interesting bits are too few and far between. On the other hand, the pacing and boredom are there to put us in her world and it’s not a happy world. It’s a world of madness, in full flower by the end. Beginning and ending shots are the same, for closure. A well-made film.