In short: Skinamarink (2022)

1995. Two children, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kalyee (Dali Rose Tetreault) find themselves trapped in their family home. Their father seems to have disappeared, and there’s something wrong with their mother as well. Windows and doors disappear, shrouding the home in perpetual night, often only lit by the old cartoons playing on the TV.

Some kind of…entity is with the children, something which appears to be able to shift and change the children’s surroundings and even their bodies.

All of this is shot by writer/director Kyle Edward Ball in a consciously experimental style built from grainy footage, disquieting close-ups of objects connected to childhood and low angle shots of floors, ceilings, and the sort of darkness where you think you might barely be able to discern…something. We nearly never see faces, or the full bodies of the children; in fact, most shots suggest somebody has just left them. From time to time, the camera takes on a curious life of its own that suggests POV shots from the point of view of something that sees the world quite differently than we do. There’s not really a plot, but rather, the film expects the audience to attempt to stitch together the meaning of single shots on our own, though it turns all elements of normality strange by twisting the conventions of visual narrative. If we’re really brave, we might even try to put our various ideas together into a larger whole, though we might – in the classic tradition of the Weird – not like what we find there.

Obviously, the film’s approach will drive some viewers batty (or simply annoyed) in an evasiveness that could be read as obtuseness, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for that; others, like me, will feel in turn frustrated, fascinated, mystified and disquieted by a film that portrays feelings of isolation and helplessness and perhaps the awe/terror-inspiring numinous in a way that befits the way such feelings can’t quite be put into language. If you’re tuned into Skinamarink, you might also find some sequences genuinely creepy.

Do I want to be every film to be like this? Of course not, but I absolutely do love this specific film for being like it is.

Music Monday: Makems Edition

Death Force (1978)

aka Vengeance is Mine

aka Fighting Mad

aka The Force

Doug Russell (James Iglehart) and his war buddies Morelli (Carmen Argenziano) and McGee (Leon Isaac Kennedy) are planning on using their return trip from Vietnam via Manila to at least get something out of the war for themselves with a bit of drug smuggling.

Doug, a usually very straight guy, really only wants to do this one time and then get back to his girlfriend Maria (Jayne Kennedy) and their little son. His partners, on the other hand, are in the drug business for the long run. Because they are not just pushers but also assholes (and because McGee has the hots for Maria and has no moral compunctions against anything, ever), they decide to just murder Doug. Knifing him and throwing him into the ocean doesn’t kill our hero, however. Thanks to a twist of fate/the script gods, he washes up wounded on a small island only populated by two Japanese soldiers who have been purposefully stranded here since the end of the war. Unlike your typical Japanese army throwbacks of the movies, these two are very well aware the war is ended, but still continue defending their island against whoever goes there.

Doug, however, they help and want to keep. They are rather old by now, after all, and a young, strong helper like the American would be rather useful. After various cultural misunderstandings – turns out goading guys like these with tales of and Americanised Japan does not lead to joy and happiness and Americans of Colour don’t really hold much with slavery – the officer type of the two Japanese (played by Filipino actors, obviously) takes a bit of a shine to Doug and teaches him a weird B-movie version of the code of the Samurai, as well as some awesome sword fighting techniques.

While this is going on, we regularly pop in with Morelli and McGee, who work their way up the ladder of Los Angeles crime one burned down house and murder at a time. McGee also attempts to put his very special kind of moves on Maria, but she knows a slime ball when she sees one and repeatedly rebuffs him. Because he’s just that kind of guy, he then stealthily torpedoes her career as a singer, to somehow get her into his bed by virtue of economical pressure. Maria still doesn’t bite, and McGee becomes increasingly more of a physical danger to her.

Fortunately, Doug does eventually make his way back home and goes on a bit of vengeance rampage with his newfound sword fighting prowess.

I am as often down on the movies of Filipino low budget maestro Cirio H. Santiago as I am up. His blaxploitation (and Japaneseholdoutsploitation, and so on) epic – nearly two hours long in the complete “director’s” cut I watched – Death Force however is nothing anyone who likes 70s exploitation fare could possibly sneeze at. Sure, the movie’s structure is a bit rough, and its running time perhaps a bit too epic for its own good, yet it is also stuffed full of awesome elements that come together to form a very special kind of crazy. Santiago certainly doesn’t stint on exploitational values for a second: when you’re not watching McGee and Morelli making their violent career, you get scenes of Doug getting taught a highly dubious version of already highly dubious warrior philosophy by an actor (Jo Mari Avellana?) who puts his all into being fake-Japanese in a way that transcends the offensive so effectively, it turns beautiful.

I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the sequences concerning Maria’s suffering that take on an appropriately Catholic quality and allow her to show a strength of character you don’t usually get from The Girl in this kind of affair. That Kennedy’s portrayal of McGee is quite so perfectly vile – even Morelli seems put out by some of his behaviour - does enhance that aspect even more, for standing up to this jerk takes quite a bit of personality. All of this also provides the hope for a reunion between Maria and Doug with a certain degree of emotional heft, so much so I found myself mentally cheering at the sappy family reunion montage Santiago of course is not ashamed to provide. And good for him.

The film’s action starts out competent and relatively straightforward and increases in intensity and general weirdness once Doug hits Los Angeles, cutting his way through the gang of his former friends, Iglehart always making as good an impression in his fight scenes as he does in the rest of the film. Particularly the final battle is a bit of a paradise for the friend of decapitation, as well, so our timeless lack of good taste is well provided for as well.

Finally, there’s a “what the fuck” to end all “what the fuck” endings that left even me speechless for once.

Add all of this up, and Death Force turns out to be one of Santiago’s masterpieces.

Three Films Make A Post: The gun that became the law of the land !

Pickpocket (1959): The arthouse crowd loves to recommend this short crime drama with a prologue scroll explaining it isn’t a crime drama as a comparatively easy in to the world of French director Robert Bresson’s “minimalist, “austere”, “hypnotic” etc style. So I thought to myself, why not try it, for I do find quite a bit in at least a third of the films recommended thusly. It’s certainly easy to see the artfulness of the filmmaking, the intensity and elegance the film comes by exactly because Bresson is so aesthetically focussed. I’m much less sure about the rest of the style: emotionally and intellectually, this does very little for me. Bresson’s moral viewpoint seems completely disinterested in complexity, so is frankly rather boring for my tastes; I also find it hard to emotionally connect to a central character who mostly spouts half-cooked mock-existentialism about the superman. Add to this Bresson’s habit of casting non-actors in the main role to get “authentic” camera performances (or as I call it “the jitters” and monotonous line reading) which is something I absolutely loathe, and I think I’ll pass on Bresson’s films for the next decade or so.

The Mourning Forest aka Mogari no mori (2007): This also arthouse crowd approved tale of what I assume to be a care-giver (Machiko Ono) at some sort of retirement home (the film doesn’t do exposition) getting stranded in a forest for several days with one of their patients (Shigeki Uda) and working through their respective griefs, as directed by Naomi Kawase on the other hand, does quite a lot for me. It does appear rather loose and unfocussed at the beginning, but that’s really Kawase opening up the world of her characters for the audience without comment, opening up an approach to her grieving people’s endless complexities that may make things difficult, and not always obvious, but which also makes it possible to understand much more about them once one has tuned into things in the right way.

Colt .45 (1950): This Edwin L. Marin western with Randolph Scott as a salesmen for new-fangled colts finding himself set against the evil and somewhat perverse Zachary Scott (no relation) is a bit rough around the edges. There are certainly some great moments and ideas in here, but Marin isn’t quite the director to make the most of them.

So expect Scott teaming up with the local native American tribe in a nicely progressive turn, but also expect their portrayal to be even more awkward than typical of the era, and whose problems only start with their Chief being played by Chief Thundercloud, who was no chief of any tribe, and most probably not a Native American. There are huge (these things look as phallic as all get out, so I use the word on purpose) suggestions of the colts’ psychosexual influence particularly on our villain but they never quite gel in the end. Also worth mentioning are a pretty juicy part for Ruth Roman as the wife of a secondary villain (Lloyd Bridges in his young and buff phase) turning to Randolph rather quickly; a corrupt sheriff and other elements that make this unmissable on paper.

In practice, it’s just not that good of a movie (though not a bad one, either).

Short Film Friday: Heck

In short: Faces Places (2017)

Original title: Visages Villages

Together with photographer JR (who is credited as co-director), Agnès Varda goes on a road trip through the French countryside to meet, interview, and photograph an assortment of (predominantly) women who don’t usually get the starring roles in anything. As part of JR’s modus operandi, and certainly fitting perfectly with Varda’s approach to people in her documentaries, the duo and their assistants then plaster giant photos of their subjects on walls (and others things). There are side trips and distractions, of course, for these two clearly find the world and the people populating it endlessly fascinating and interesting. Because this is a late period Varda movie, the encounters are presented with an emotional directness that always threatens to border on the twee but rarely if ever devolves into it.

Instead, all of this feels kind and human and genuine in all the right ways. Thus the film can also encompass themes like our heroine’s blurring eye sight, aging, and threatening mortality, JR’s fixation on wearing sunglasses probably even under the shower (and what it may mean – a Godard fixation?), an encounter with his grandmother who is basically glowing with love for her grandson, and a non-encounter with fucking Godard that leaves Varda in tears and provokes JR to show her the whole of her face in a moment that feels staged and genuine at the same time. This last bit only puts further fuel on the fire of my thesis that late period (really, post-60s) Godard and late period Varda are artistically antithetical in their documentaries – he consumed by concepts and words and so completely disinterested in people or the world we live in, he can’t conceive of things like kindness as anything but abstracts; she, finding something of interest and worth in the practical lives of everybody she meets, and going out into the world to share this even when she’s old, tired and half blind. If you think I’m making an implicit value judgement here, you’re absolutely right, for I am unfortunately not as kind as Varda in her late films (though I am trying).

In short: I, the Executioner (1968)

aka Requiem for a Massacre

Original title: Minagoroshi no reika

A killer, a man going by the name of Kawashima (Makoto Sato) begins raping and murdering women belonging to a small clique of friends, for reasons which will turn out to make a lot of sense, at least to him.

In turns, we follow the exploits of Kawashima in his role as a killer, the police’s efforts at catching him – which means first realizing that the women he kills share a dark secret, and Kawashima’s romance with waitress Haruko (Chieko Baisho). Because this is not a Hollywood movie, that last part of the film will not collide with the first one in the most dramatically obvious way yet carry all the more dramatic heft and meaning for it.

I know that I, the Executioner’s director Tai Kato is well-loved as a filmmaker of various Yakuza and Samurai movie sub-genres; despite my interest in those genres, I haven’t seen many of Kato’s films, for some reason. Going by this film, I’m rather missing out.

At first, the I, the Executioner’s formal structure is somewhat confusing: the giallo-esque scenes of Kawashima as killer, the police procedural and the Japanese melodrama that takes over in the scenes with Haruko feel at the beginning only connected through Kato’s striking and individual-peculiar visual style. Kato nearly completely eschews long shots, prefers close-ups – sometimes of objects instead of people – and usually builds a frame within the frame of the screen by placing characters between or behind objects. He does this so intensely and continuedly, suddenly seeing a character’s whole body, or a shot that leaves space around characters takes on immense emotional weight. It’s a style so uncommon even in the world of brilliant stylists that was Japanese studio cinema of this era, it can’t help but suggest quite different ways our common filmic language might have developed and still be as emotionally affecting.

In the film at hand, this style at first causes a feeling of dislocation and claustrophobia, feelings Kawashima, his victims and the police share to various degrees. The longer the film goes on, the more it becomes clear that Kato also uses his style to connect the apparently disparate parts of the film, showing emotional connections nobody could tell; he’s also making subtle differences between the different strands – the murder scenes are the most claustrophobic whereas the scenes with Haruko suggest a larger, if not brighter world (that will of course eventually be drenched in rain).

In short: The Price We Pay (2022)

A trio of criminals – Stephen Dorff as the sensible one, Emile Hirsch in a risible performance as the kill-hungry psycho and some guy whose name I’m too lazy to look up as the soon to be dead one – and a hostage (Gigi Zumbado), fleeing the results of their bloody assault on a mafia-run pawnshop, end up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Sensible One and Psycho would be bound to murder one another sooner or later, but the dark and unintentionally funny secret below the farm is going to make that rather unnecessary.

Even working with little money, Ryuhei Kitamura only seldom can resist being a show-off, still loving tacky editing tricks and crap practical effects to bits. I would like him, and probably more of his movies, for this, but most of them end up lacking the sort of charm or aesthetic individuality that would make them work for me as the kind of cool exploitation fare they are so clearly supposed to be. To my eyes, most of his films are nearly totally lacking in this regard, as well as in decent scripts, with a couple of exceptions where I always assume somebody behind the scenes managed to channel Kitamura’s bad taste in the right directions to present his actual talents as a filmmaker.

This is not one of those movies, but rather an increasingly stupid mix of would-be post-Tarantino crime movie, torture porn, and a lot of annoyingly edited gore, mostly taking place in ugly, fake looking sets and of course a patch of desert. Dorff and Zumbado do their best with what they are given, but since the script by Kitamura and Christopher Jolley shows little idea of how to work clichés productively, and Hirsch is actively working against them, they are pretty much left alone.

Which leaves a couple of decent gore gags I’d probably have more patience for in a film made by someone working out of their family garage. So, hardly a movie at all.

Music Monday: What Kind of Breakdown? Edition

M3GAN (2022)

After her sister and her sister’s husband die in an eminently avoidable car accident, toy company robotics engineering wiz Gemma (Allison Williams) finds herself suddenly in the role of guardian for her little niece Cady (Violet McGraw).

Not feeling (or acting) terribly well cut out for her surprise mother job, Gemma decides to let technology solve the problem. She retools the shelved project of a life-like robot doll she calls M3GAN, and somehow develops a rapidly self-teaching AI for the thing. At first, thing’s work out crackers: M3GAN is so human, she quickly takes on the roles of mother, best friend and only peer for Cady, while Gemma’s bosses recognize a monumental breakthrough when they see it and market the shit out of the project from the go. Nobody does waste even a second to think about security and safety concerns or the impact on children’s mental development, of course.

Until Gemma realizes two things, we the audience have been clued into rather a lot earlier. First, M3GAN will do absolutely anything to protect Cady’s well-being as she interprets it, which is a problem in something nobody has clued in on Asimov’s Rules of Robotics, and she’s utterly deranged by human standards. Secondly, perhaps having a crazy robot as her only attachment figure is not terribly good for a little girl’s psychological health.

If you see it predominantly from the direction of sense and logic, Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is a terrible film. Everything that happens in here could have been avoided if anyone involved in the plot had just stopped for a second and thought about the consequences of what they’re doing at all. Now, particularly after these last couple of years, you might argue that this sounds a lot like real-world human behaviour, but even compared to our daily work of self-destruction, the laissez faire attitude of Gemma, her bosses, her colleagues and so on is absurd; by all rights, this film’s world shouldn’t exist anymore because every nuclear reactor would have blown up already, taking everyone in it with it.

Also not great is the film’s treatment of the by now traditional horror movie themes of grief and family trouble, mostly because its approach to them is so rote and primitive and too obviously meant to emotionally manipulate its audience into believing there’s any actual heft to this tale of AI development, robotics and replacement parenting going very badly wrong. Some of the beats at the start where Gemma wavers about what she actually wants from life and how Cady might fit into this, with Gemma clearly understanding she can’t let the poor kid down, but having trouble not letting herself down, actually feel somewhat genuine, but everything that comes afterwards is really just a mix of pap to get us to the killer robot, and the sort of nonsense contemporary screenwriters love to put into their scripts to demonstrate their “relevance” and “emotional depth”. Really, the only thing that saves this part of the film is how seriously Williams and McGraw treat the shit they are peddling, and Johnstone’s genially sardonic sense of humour that manages to play many a scene with cloying sentimentality and sardonic humour at the same time. But then, in the end, all of this is only meant to get us to the monster anyway.

And what makes M3GAN actually a really, really fun movie to watch despite it being so stupid and rote in many regards, is how much intelligence has been put into its life as a surface level horror movie.

The design of our killer robot, the way CGI and the work of Amie Donald (body) and Jenna Davis (voice), turn it into a believable and believably corporeal presence, the clever way it steps into the Uncanny Valley – all of this is brilliant and extremely effective, turning M3GAN into a very memorable monster (perhaps to be ruined in the surely coming sequel, because we all know by now how Blumhouse loves to operate in this regard). Where much of the rest of the writing here can feel a bit robotic, M3GAN the killer robot doll’s quips and dialogue sparkle with just the right mix of the groan-worthy, the sinister and the actually intelligent. Not surprising from the guy who directed Housebound, Johnstone has a lot of fun with this aspect of the film.

He’s also great at general suspense and specifically the murder set pieces. These aren’t just efficient little suspense machines – and pretty funny to boot – but also show how creative a film with a PG-13 certificate can actually get when it puts its imagination to use. So while there’s little here for the gore hounds, there’s nothing harmless about the murders and the violence.

So, if one can survive the most idiot of idiot plots, and doesn’t kick the film into the sun for its bad jabs at emotional heft, there’s an immense amount of fun to be had with M3GAN as a pure crowd pleasing horror movie. Seen this way, I’d call it close to perfect, ironically enough.

Three Films Make A Post: No soul is safe.

The Offering (2022): Oliver Park’s attempt at using Jewish Orthodox mythology productively for horror is a rather frustrating outing. If treated right, this tale of a rather horrible demonic entity, familial guilt and pregnancy could have been quit the thing, subtly exploring human and inhuman depths, as a sort of somewhat higher budget sibling to the brilliant The Vigil. Alas, the film wastes most of its potential on trying to be some kind of low-rent Conjuring affair (as if those weren’t already trite enough), so expect a film that appears to believe that horror is the genre all about making sudden loud noises. The jump scares are often nearly comically badly placed, turning moments that should be creepy or meaningful or sad into nothing but an idiot shouting boo at the wrong moment.

I’m also not exactly fond of Nick Blood’s central performance that too often feels like he’s out of his depth with the emotions he’s supposed to portray. Of course, the rest of the movie offers no help whatsoever to him.

Departures aka Okuribito (2008): Somewhat puzzlingly, this drama/comedy by veteran director Yojiro Takita won the Oscar for the best foreign movie when it came out. Well, it’s not too difficult to see why the film’s mixture of earnest but superficial pondering of death and a guy growing into a new life did go over great there, what with the award’s propensity for films that treat serious themes, but never so deeply they might actually hurt, but usually eschewing honest entertainment. This doesn’t make the film at hand good, though. Rather, it’s a movie that never goes to places you won’t expect, can never quite hit the emotional notes it goes for honestly, and when in doubt, will add another scene of our cellist turned funeral man scratching away at his instrument emotionally. Particularly the latter scenes did raise the question if this perhaps started as a parody of the kind of films it shares its half-empty head with.

Carnifex (2022): In the realm of the misguided and the awards-baiting, this perfectly serviceable nature-in-form-of-a-cryptid strikes back movie is king, at least of this particular post. Sean Lahiff’s movie takes a degree of care with the characterization and makes the comparatively slow pacing work okay, while the actors are likeable enough and the monster at least something we haven’t quite seen this way before.

Alas, there’s something lacking in the movie, a bigger spark of life, enthusiasm or simply excitement, so this is more the sort of thing you’ll watch once on a rainy evening and forget soon after, never to think of it again.

Short Film Friday: My House walk-through

In short: Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi File 04: The Truth! Hanako-san in the toilet (2013) & Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! Preface: True Theory, Yotsuya Kaidan, the Curse of Oiwa (2014)

Not to be dissuaded by comas, kappa possession and curses, director Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama) and camera guy Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow yet another viewer tape into trouble. First, an exploration of one of my favourite urban legends, Toilet Hanako, quickly leads into an epic, cheap and confusing tale of time travel and parallel dimensions. Then, our protagonist take on the curse of Oiwa.

It’s at this part of the Senritsu Kaiki File series where Koji Shiraishi truly hits his stride for me. Both films are jam-packed with a very Shiraishi mixture of off-beat humour, Japanese folklore and folk culture, weird history High Strangeness and scenes of people running around like chicken with their heads cut off (which also happens to be how you can travel through time, apparently). There are quite a few moments in here where the director/writer (and so on) seems to have feverishly scratched down a number of crazy high concepts and ideas, realized that he’d need a Marvel budget to actually get them on screen believably, and decided to just go with them as far as he can get with some ultra cheap CGI that makes parallel dimensions look surprisingly close to the animations in Monty Python sketches (and I’m pretty sure he knows this), a handful of locations and actors, and a whole lot of crazed enthusiasm. Despite Shiraishi actually being a technically perfectly accomplished director, there’s obviously very little that is slick about the resulting films, but they are wild, raw and energetic, full of ideas – good, bad and absolutely bonkers – and feel a lot as if they were made in the spirit of punk rock.

Rather regularly, Shiraishi hits on an image or a scene that’s more creepy than crazy, as well, adding some genuine horror into a series that’s otherwise more interested in the capital-w Weird. Which is not a complaint from me, either way.

In short: Violent Night (2022)

Santa Claus (David Harbour), in a somewhat bitter and cynical mood as apparently absolutely everybody is these days, runs into a spot of bother when doing his gifting biz in the “compound” of a stinking rich family. For a guy who likes Christmas-themed codenames (clearly for ironic reasons, because he’s that kind of asshole) and goes by Mr Scrooge himself (John Leguizamo) has chosen Christmas Eve for heisting the hidden millions of the family with his gang. Turns out Santa has quite a bit of combat experience from his time as a Norse raider, and properly motivated by the mandatory little girl (Leah Brady) who really really believes in the spirit of the season, he’ll go Bruce Willis on quite a few people. The resulting combination of brutal violence and speeches about the spirit of Christmas are apparently the ideal way to bring a family of rich nogoodniks back together as well as renewing our hero’s belief in his role.

Yup, Violent Night as directed by Tommy Wirkola and written be Pat Casey and Josh Miller is indeed a conscious attempt at getting back to the old “Die Hard but…” formula. I’m usually pretty fond of this particular rip-off sub-genre, and it’s particularly difficult to complain about a film that goes about its work this honestly and this enthusiastically. Because that’s clearly not enough for the filmmakers, they don’t just use Old Saint Nick as their action hero, but let him bring all kinds of clichés and tropes of Christmas movies to the table Bruce Willis didn’t have to cope with. Given the contrast between the fun – and often wickedly funny – violence, you might at first think the film’s actually trying to satirize these clichés.

However, Violent Night’s treatment of childish wonder and the power of belief™ is as gratingly earnest as you’d find in any good(?) Christmas special, giving a film full of cynically funny violence a strange air of naïve earnestness. I’m not at all sure if this is the sort of thing I wanted from this particular film, but I found myself buying into its nonsense quite well while watching it, so I’m not going to complain, and instead just continue to look a bit puzzled, humming Christmas tunes in February (because that’s of course when German distributors put a Christmas movie onto streaming services).

Easier to comprehend is Wirkola’s still sure hand in staging funny violence and snarky family troubles while having things look slick as hell, as are Harbour’s and Leguizamo’s often very funny performances. The humour, pretty much a given in a film of this style, whatever style that actually is, is of course about as subtle as Santa’s hammer (it’s a whole thing), but anyone going into a Wirkola Die Hard movie about Santa expecting subtlety will be lost anyway, and will most certainly not enjoy themselves as much as I did.

In short: Something in the Dirt (2022)

Levi (Justin Benson), a guy with no social life whatsoever, has just moved into an old apartment building in Los Angeles, into an apartment that has stood empty for years. His neighbour John (Aaron Moorhead) doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d become his friend, but after they observe a curious light phenomenon – and possibly some freaky shit with the local gravity – they decide to team up to shoot a documentary about whatever the hell is going on. John’s attempts to explain the High Strangeness become increasingly byzantine and conspiratorial, while Levi just lets himself get dragged along.

This movie is what happens when house favourite filmmakers Benson & Moorhead get antsy during lockdown. They get a script and a couple of friends together and simply make a movie that’s small in scope but big on everything else, a thing full of little twists and suggestions, intelligent as well as clever ideas.

It’s actually rather complicated to describe the film properly, really, for it is at once an odd couple buddy movie with sinister elements, a meditation on the lure of the strange and the conspiratorial, a meta movie about filmmaking and morality and a serious character portrait of the friendship (or not) and betrayal between two very differently fucked up men. It is also probably one of the most genuinely capital W Weird movies around, finding its Weirdness in the modern folklore around High Strangeness while also criticizing the trajectory too much of this kind of folklore takes these days.

Oh, and it’s also an LA movie, because why the hell not, and what’s stranger than that city?

Through some strange and improbable kind of alchemy – for once, I have little idea why any of this works as wonderfully as it does – all of these themes and elements come together into a film that is at once peculiar, personal, and speaking to more universal things. This little wonder was made on enthusiasm and friendship, yet still looks pretty damn fantastic. It is edited and structured like an intricate multi-level puzzle that includes the counter-arguments to its theses, puts ambiguities and precision exactly where they are needed, while grounding its ideas and high concepts in a believably portrayed, complex humanity. It’s also pretty funny.

That all of this is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea is quite obvious, but going by the filmmakers’ body of work, it’s really not supposed to. To me, Something in the Dirt feels rather like it was made with me as an ideal audience in mind, which doesn’t happen every week.

Music Monday: Kentucky Blue Edition

Tora-san’s Dream of Spring (1979)

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo: Torajirô haru no yume

Having dipped a foot into the long-running, audience-favourite British comedy series of Carry On for one movie some months ago, I’ve now decided to also take a look at a film from a very different, and even longer series of Japanese movies who were just as pleasing to their local audiences. The “Otoko wa tsurai yo” (“It’s Hard to be a Man”) movies, typically just called the Tora-san films for their main character, the somewhat hapless, not particularly bright or emotionally adult, peddler Torajiro Kuruma (always played by Kiyoshi Atsumi), were a going concern between 1969 and 1995, usually with two films coming out each year. As I’ve been told, they are all not terribly different plot-wise, with Tora-san leaving home in a huff, nearly finding love, returning and having various encounters and misadventures, while his family’s life slowly develops and changes around him through the years. Thus, the films take on one of the joys of soap operas or the private lives of detectives in long running mystery series.

The film at hand, the 24th Tora-san movie, and like nearly all of them directed by Yoji Yamada (who somehow still managed to make more than a few other movies as well) concerns itself with a luckless American vitamin salesman (Herb Edelman) with no knowledge of the Japanese language taking (or really, stumbling into taking) a room in the household of Tora-san’s family, having various mishaps of cultural difference, and falling in love with our hero’s wonderful (and married) sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). At first, relations to Tora-san, who turns out to be rather anti-American, are strained, but this being the kind of film it is, they don’t stay that way, particularly because both men are peddlers and fools in awkward love. For at the same time, when he’s not involved in innocent shenanigans, our hero does fall in love unhappily himself, which underlines how the film quietly makes rather a lot of the very different yet very comparable ways this sort of thing plays out for someone socialised in American or Japanese culture.

All of this is generally told in a quiet, sometimes quite melancholic way. Throughout, there’s the feeling of looking at people living a way of life that’s not quite in tune with that of the audience watching their adventures anymore, made to produce a feeling of nostalgia – not the angry kind that believes that the past was simply a better place, but the one that carries with it the acceptance of change as well as the knowledge that the past never was quite as happy as we want it to be.

The film’s humour is generally gentle and dominated by a kindness and generosity of spirit. Small human foibles, particularly as shown via Tora-san as well as his American counterpart, are treated as reasons for mirth, but a mirth lacking cruelty; rather, even if we’re laughing at them, we’re laughing at those parts of them we also know to belong to ourselves. This may sound or feel somewhat harmless to some sensibilities, but I find a film that’s at once trying to be honest about the fallibility of human nature but also kind about it rather refreshing in our highly judgmental present.

Particularly these days, it’s also genuinely lovely to watch a film that insists on kindness, the importance of understanding the flaws in others and oneself with kindness, as well as the importance of accepting certain differences as much as this one does.

Add the fine performances – Atsumi pretty much lives the role, Edelman is the perfect foil for him, and Baisho’s turn is often surprisingly emotionally complex for the sort of film this is – and the quiet assuredness of Yamada’s direction, and you have quite the film.

Three Films Make A Post: There's something in the snow…

Emily the Criminal (2022): This fine crime movie about what living in a capitalist hell hole can do to a person’s moral self (which makes it something of a neo noir, now that I think about it) by John Patton Ford (who also scripts the film) was a bit ignored when it came out last year, unfairly so, I must say. It’s not an outwardly spectacular film, but one that follows the downwards drift of its protagonist (Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance) with an observant and careful eye, finding tension as naturally in the set of Plaza’s shoulder as in the slowly evolving plot, and doing so brilliantly.

Project Wolf Hunting aka 늑대사냥 | neuk-dae-sa-nyang (2022): Kim Hong-seon’s South Korean action horror movie on the other hand only ever wants to do things that are outwardly spectacular. Mostly, this combination of “Die Hard without a proper protagonist on a prison transport ship”, a zombie super soldier, various conspiracist plot twists and so on, manages to do this quite entertainingly. I’m convinced the production sucked up all the movie blood in Korea, bloody and gloopy as things get. Kim shows himself as quite adept at finding new ways to deliver carnage for the full two hour runtime, so he deserves all the blood he can buy.

Apart from the typical outrageous and pretty nonsensical plot twists you’d expect (which are fortunately delivered with verve and proper earnestness), there are also a couple of very South Korean moments when the film shifts and twists a little against genre rules, killing off the “wrong” characters at the “wrong” times to keep the audience on their toes.

Winterskin (2018): How much one will appreciate this predominantly cabin-bound movie by Charlie Steeds, working with his usual coterie of actors, may very much depend on one’s tolerance for fake American accents, done badly. For this tale of a young man looking for his father in the wilderness and getting stranded in a cabin with an old woman of dubious mental health is a cornucopia of dubious American accents whose horribleness it is difficult to ignore. If a viewer can make their peace with them – I did, though perhaps with some cursing and gnashing of teeth particularly during more dramatic sequences involved – they may very well appreciate how much good Steeds does in other regards: how tight and interesting his framing of the central log cabin sequences; how much a film taking place in a fake American snow wilderness uses ideas of the macabre that belong very much in the US tradition of someone like Bierce; how cleverly the film escalates its threats and gore to the over the top yet still on budget climax.

Short Film Friday: Hunter of Hyperborea

In short: In Your Eyes (2014)

I’m not completely happy with Brin Hill’s Fantastika Romance based on a script by Joss Whedon, perhaps because I expect a bit more than this film’s finale based on artificial outside threats that really doesn’t fit the calm tone of the rest of the narrative very well.

There’s also the sad presence of one of these generic indie rock soundtracks too many indie romances suffer from, you know the kind, where every song is just as characterless as any given piece of truly bad charts pop. Which would be less of a problem if the film didn’t push the music on its audience quite as hard as this one does at times.

On the positive side, and despite the music, the film’s first two thirds are often quite lovely, with many a scene that’s clever and emotionally honest, and fine acting by Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David. But even here, the film’s missing something, be it whimsy, be it depth, that would turn it from something comfortably watchable into something a bit more emotionally involving. I’m not so much looking for nihilist philosophical monologues here (though I’d certainly be game for that), as for any sign the film actually has a philosophy, or emotional politics, beyond what the genres it belongs to ask of it. It looks like the comparative glut of more or less quirky indie romances with fantasy plot base that went on when this was made has resulted in heightened expectations from me for these films to go beyond well-made button pushing and highly competent filling of expectations. I suspect if this had been made a decade earlier, and I would have seen it then, I would not have the same complaints about In Your Eyes.

In short: Below (2002)

I have repeatedly seen somewhat confused or annoyed comments online regarding the general disinterest towards this particular submarine-set horror film, given the involvement of general well-regarded people like David Twohy as director and co-writer, Darren Aronofsky as one of the writers and Bruce Greenwood and a cast of talented faces in it. Personally, after today’s re-watch I’m not very surprised, for while Below is a highly competent little horror film it is neither a very memorable nor a very deep (sorry) one, with little that’s thematically interesting about it, nor much about its scares that gives them staying power in my mind beyond the film’s running time. This is a particular problem if one keeps in mind this was made after the central films of the big late 90s/early 00s Asian horror wave hit, films that were much more memorable and often quite a bit more complex, so Below just looks a bit mediocre and conservative in comparison.

This isn’t to say Below isn’t good for a hundred minutes of mildly spooky, pleasantly claustrophobic fun, it’s just so traditional in its approach to its ghost story, you basically know everything that’s going to happen in it and how it’s going to happen once you read the film’s basic set-up of “haunted submarine during World War II cursed by its murdered captain (or is it)”. There are no surprises, little about the characterization that goes beyond the obvious, and little about the film’s thrills that doesn’t carry a slight whiff of staleness. I’m tempted to describe Below as “competent, yet lacking soul or an actual personality”, and look here, I just did.

In short: Sleepless in Seattle (1993) & You’ve Got Mail (1998)

These probably aren’t the sort of film anyone expects to find around here, but when it comes to writer/directors who continued the tradition of the romances of the studio era in Hollywood without just being retro, Nora Ephron at her best – and she certainly was in these two films - probably was the best too, dropping as many nods and smiles in the direction of other films as Quentin Tarantino. Of course, because being a woman in Hollywood still sucks, and the film genres Ephron was involved in usually don’t even get the cult credits of the sort of film I’m usually talking about here, only a handful of critics ever cared. Not that this blogger is an exception, mind you, for I’ve been turning up my nose at most romantic comedies for quite a few years, as well. Chalk this up as another thing about which I have been wrong.

What makes these two films special is not just Ephron’s ability to construct a romantic comedy that never is too sappy while still tugging on a viewer’s heart strings. Rather, Ephron here gives us a complete package full of perfectly timed sequences, dialogue that’s clever and sharp and flows so naturally you never stop and think that nobody talks this cleverly in real life, and direction that is much more imaginative in its approach than it lets on. Add to that an excellent cast (remember Tom Hanks when he wasn’t completely in thrall to the illusion he’s a great dramatic actor or, Cthulhu help us, a director, and when Meg Ryan wasn’t kicked to the curb side with Hollywood’s obsession not with youth but with people over forty looking like thin pressed sausages?), the director’s excellent taste in the use of music, and I don’t see how I couldn’t like these films.

Sure, I disagree with Ephron’s idea of romantic love, and certainly can’t help but raise my eyebrows at the absence of non-rich people in these films, but then, I also don’t believe in ghosts yet still enjoy a good ghost story told by fussy old upper-class academics.

Music Monday: Tender Years Edition

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

1830. A West Point cadet dies in what at first appears to be a suicide. Somebody breaking into the morgue the evening after to very literally steal the corpse’s heart does make the place’s leadership change their minds about that, though, and they call in a retired New Yorker policeman living in a cabin not too far away from the Academy. Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is a gifted investigator, but he’s not too happy to be drawn into his old profession again. He lost his wife and later his daughter some years ago, and would really rather prefer to drink himself into a stupor and wallow in his grief; he’s not too keen on West Point as an institution either, for reasons that will become clear later. However, he is also fascinated by the case and its macabre circumstances, something that will only increase once further murders happen. Landor acquires a kind of assistant among the cadets in form of one Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Poe is an outsider among his peers thanks to his combination of romantic weirdness and intelligence as well as his predilection for poetry and the weird. He also has a brilliant mind made to solve puzzles and ciphers, which will stand everyone involved in good stead, especially once things take a turn into the occult.

Going by what I’ve heard, Scott Cooper’s historical mystery with a touch of the Gothic seems to be a bit of a marmite movie, with any given critic either bored to tears or really fascinated by the film and its general mood. I’m part of the latter group, but then, the former seems to believe this in many ways very traditional mystery with an occult bent – and some more modern touches for the last act – to be a procedural. Everyone watches a different movie, apparently.

Be that as it may, I’m not usually terribly font of mysteries that enrol a random famous person from history as a detective; often, because little in these persons’ works or life suggest any interest in these matters (sorry, Oscar Wilde). Poe, on the other hand makes a lot of sense in a detective role, as the father of the modern detective story as well as through his public fascination with puzzles and hoaxes. Cooper, providing his own script from a novel by Louis Bayard makes great use of this, as well as of Poe’s macabre and grotesque and romantic (in the traditional sense of the word) side.

Melling is a great as Poe as well, finding mannerisms and language that makes him feel eccentric and emotionally overblown in many regards, but never drift into caricature. Rather, this Poe is a complete human being, and it makes perfect sense that this version of Poe and Landor begin hitting it off like a strange father/son duo. That Bale’s great doing the very standard “detective haunted by the past” bit should come as no surprise. In fact, he’s so good at it that later developments that could strain belief make perfect sense.

Add to this the film’s wintry mood of rural, US gothic, the various occult shenanigans, and Cooper’s calm, un-showy but often quietly intelligent direction, and a cast so full of great actors (there are Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Lucy Boynton and Gillian Anderson, for example) it can throw away someone like Charlotte Gainsbourg on a minor role, and you’ve pretty much made a film so centred around various of my favourite interests, I’m bound to love it.

As a matter of fact, The Pale Blue Eye does quite a bit more as well. This is very much a movie about how the failure of all figures of authority and respect at just doing their damn jobs and treating their communities with respect and fairness destroys first single members of these communities (in ways that can be lethal, spiritual, or mental) and then the community as a community, without most of these men of authority ever even understanding what is truly happening; one might think because they do not want to see it, though the film isn’t really telling.

Apart from that, there’s also a much more personal story here, about grief, justice, and the things that might come after, but getting further into this would lead us into unnecessary spoiler territory.

Three Films Make A Post: Reap what you sow.

I Want to Go Home (2017): This sixty minute documentary by Wesley Leon Aroozoo about Yasuo Takamatsu, a man whose wife was swept away in Japan’s 2011 tsunami, and who is still diving nearly every week in the coastal town where he lost her in hopes to find her body is a quietly moving, respectful attempt at looking at the greater impact of the tsunami on Japanese society by focussing on the experiences of one man. Its treatment of Takamtsu is delicate, respecting the distances the man wants to keep yet still portraying some of the depth of his grief. There’s a quiet, gracious kindness on display throughout the film – by Takamatsu as well as Aroozoo – I found deeply moving.

What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? (2022): Despite a basic idea that seems readymade for clever satire or original meta-science-fiction, this tokusatsu comedy by Satoshi Miki suffers from a bad case of not knowing what it wants to be. It shifts between broadest comedy, slightly subtler stuff, and misguidedly shot earnestness in awkward ways I’d call amateurish coming from an inexperienced director, but can’t explain from someone who is as good at this sort of thing as Miki often is. Most of the time, the whole thing comes over as a bad attempt at shooting a parody of Shin Godzilla for idiots, which is just a sad waste of a good idea.

Petite Maman (2021): This shortish feature by the great Céline Sciamma is a rather wonderful bit of fantasy, as filmed by a director steeped in the French arthouse tradition who is always turning the visual language of it around to fit her own ideas and interests. Here, she takes on the experience of childhood, specifically a girl’s experience of childhood, putting the feelings of wonder, awkwardness, sadness, and confusion into patiently staged scenes that manage to be beautiful as well as meaningful.

It’s also a portrayal of the connections between mothers and daughters, distance and closeness, and as quietly touching a film as I’ve seen.

Short Film Friday: Real Gods Require Blood

In short: Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! File 02: Shivering Ghost & File 03: Legend of a Human-Eating Kappa (2012)

In File 02, Director – I actually assume that’s his first name – Kudo (Shigeo Ohsako), assistant Ichikawa (Chika Kuboyama), and their camera man Tashiro (Koji Shiraishi) follow a new viewer’s video that supposedly shows a ghost haunting an abandoned school – all schools in the series seem abandoned, and look rather a lot like the same school. This quickly evolves into the search for a disappeared young woman, her curious relationship to an older man, and the occult significance of the Tokyo Skytree, culminating in a bit of High Strangeness.

File 03 leads our heroes into the countryside, where the search of what may or may not be a man-eating kappa ends up in a pretty ineffective banishing ritual.

The basic things I said about the formal cleverness and ultra-low budget creativity of the first Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi as well as my admiration for writer/director/actor Koji Shiraishi still apply. Both of these films actually seed quite a few concepts that will be important later on in the series, turning the whole series also into a bit of an Easter egg hunt once you’ve seen all of it.

These two are also the least effective films of the series seen without the context of the later films. File 02 suffers from being structured like an actual investigation, which means the moments of excitement here are surrounded by some scenes of the characters just observing or waiting around, something you simply can’t make look terribly exciting with the very low budget filmmaking technology Shiraishi has to work with here; however, Shiraishi being Shiraishi, there are also some suggestions of mind-blowing high concepts the rest of the series will heroically triple down on, a great no-budget climax, and moments of actual, simple strangeness that make this very much worthwhile.

File 03 is for my tastes the weakest part of the whole series. Apart from our protagonists, there’s no important connection to the rest of the series, and the kappa hunt tale itself is simply not all that interesting, even though I did appreciate how much stock Shiraishi puts into the importance of cucumbers. This film also has a fun enough final act with said banishing ritual, but most of what comes before is just too thinly stretched not to become a little bit dull.

From here on out, however, dullness is not a problem the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi! series will suffer under, because now, Shiraishi is going to be doing his crazy dance of High Strangeness, low budget, peculiar humour, can-do-even-if-can’t-afford spirit full-time.

In short: Casting the Runes (1979)

Apparently, the great Lawrence Gordon Clark, the main driving force behind the initial run of BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, couldn’t quite let go of ghost stories, or the works of M.R. James, even after the BBC did, so we got this James modernisation made for ITV – curiously enough broadcast in April, but then, TV programmers do tend not to understand how these things generally work.

Unlike Clark’s modus operandi in those of the Ghost Stories that were adaptations, this updates the plot of the tale into then contemporary times, so instead of Academic journals, we get a TV documentary raising the ire of Mr Karswell, and our not terribly antiquarian protagonist is actually (gasp!) a woman (Jan Francis in a fine performance with the right mix of disbelief, desperation and courage). Pleasantly, all of Clark’s updates make very good sense for the tale at hand, making it more modern without lessening its core joys and Francis’s Prudence Dunning is a believable heroine for the tale – provided with slightly more character as was James’s style, of course – whereas Iain Cuthbertson really hits the right note of sinister self-centeredness for Karswell.

Working on a TV budget in 1979, this is of course not as great a movie as Tourneur’s Night of the Demon but it is a closer adaptation of the story, despite the changes and some omissions. This being a Gordon Clark joint, there are some surprisingly effective scenes of horror, some very well chosen landscapes for the exterior locations, and a general sense of being in the hands of a filmmaker of pleasant intelligence working for the old pleasing terrors. That the interiors simply don’t look terribly good in the manner of contemporary 70s British TV, and that some of the special effects have aged somewhat badly doesn’t really change anything about that impression.