As a notorious latecomer

I've only now been hit with my first bout of Corona. Might not be as dangerous as it once was, luckily, but still, blogging duties will have to wait for a week or two, while I learn a lot of new things about my body I never wanted to.

Three Films Make A Post: The Business Of Killing Just Got Personal

After Blue aka After Blue (Paradis sale) (2021): At times, Bertrand Mandico’s pretty bizarre women-only weird science fiction epic is one of those films that just too desperately want to be a future cult item, putting so much effort into being out there it becomes more than a little exhausting and off-putting, suggesting a pose of eccentricity more than genuine one.

At other times, this is the weird, candy-coloured, gender-fluid and ever so lovingly messed-up freeform science fiction epic of my dreams. It is certainly of beautiful artificiality throughout, and not a film that should ever bore anyone.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992): Why you'd dig up the old franchise eight years after the first movie only to then come up with this abomination is beyond me. As it stands CotC II: TFS could as well have been called "Generic 90s horror movie". The film takes all the cool and interesting elements of the first movie and throws them away to then become something encapsulating all that was bad about 90s horror. So you have the bad yet boring acting, creepy kids who aren't creepy at all, a teenage love story that makes you want to bleach your brain, boring protagonists, a boring series of supernatural deaths which are neither as funny nor as clever as they seem to think they are, and a plot delivered with so little panache you can't help but start thinking about plot holes and continuity errors between this and the first film. On the positive side, that way lies at least madness instead of the boredom David Price's film offers without it.

The Devil’s Mask (1946): I didn’t find this second movie after the I Love A Mystery radio show quite as entertaining as the first one, which I wrote up ages ago. Sure, Henry Levin’s direction is pacy, often moody, and surprisingly elegant, but the film’s mystery isn’t as crazy and convoluted as that in the first film, leading to the always tiresome situation where the audience has long figured out what’s going on and why, yet the supposedly crack detectives still stumble around in the dark, following the wrong suspect. It’s also a bit problematic that the film’s favourite wrong suspect is one based on classist resentment that probably was easier to buy for a 1946 audience, and that our heroes’ reaction to him makes them look like authoritarian asshats instead of intrepid adventurers.

Still, thanks to Levin’s efforts, there’s more than a modicum of fun to be had here; it’s just a bit of a disappointment after the very pleasant weirdness of the first film.

Short Film Friday: Fishwife

In short: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)

Warning: spoilers for a movie older than most people who will read this!

Colonialist stud Rock Dean (John Bromfield), a guy so 50s macho, he’s having a smoke while he gets vaccinated, runs a plantation in Brazil. After a series of killings the locals believe to have been committed by a monster known as the Curucu, his workers flee the plantation deeper into the jungle. Our porn-star named hero doesn’t believe in monsters, but he still mounts an expedition to its supposed hunting grounds to regain the trust of his (former) wage slaves.

Apart from the colonial stand-by of the native carriers, he is accompanied by chieftain’s son turned “civilised” Tupanico (Tom Payne) and Dr Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland), looking for a head-shrinking drug that just might help shrink cancer as well (seriously). The good doctor is one of them thar independent wimmen, but this being a 50s adventure movie, you know how that’ll turn out.

I call Curt Siodmak's Curucu an adventure movie and not a monster movie for a reason, for while there are a couple of scenes concerning the titular monster, the film spends most of its time not on the tropes of bad monster movies but rather those of bad adventure movies. The monster will turn out to actually be a man in costume, anyway, which at least excuses how bad that thing looks, but even if it didn’t, this would still be much more of a film about actors reacting to archive footage of animals than one about monsters. And certainly more than about actual adventure, as well, for even though this was actually shot in Brazil, Siodmak seems to go out of his way to not use this opportunity for anything but two or three scenes that really make use of the landscape. Otherwise, this might as well have been shot on a soundstage in California; in fact, Siodmak (who really could do much better) shoots the whole affair as if it were.

On the narrative level, this is a talky mess in which very little of interest happens, and the best bits – like an actual dramatic climax – seem to happen off-screen. The film’s racial and social politics are dubious, though not interesting enough to go into them in detail, its plot plods along slowly, and there’s only a sense of adventure if you’re deeply into scenes of actors being threatened by small animals that are never on screen with them at the same time.

So there’s very little at all to recommend Curucu to anyone but the colonialist adventure movie or Beverly Garland completists among us.

The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

aka Swordsmen in Double Flag Town

Original title: 雙旗鎮刀客

A teenage boy named Hai Ge (Gao Wei) travels through the deserts of Northwest China to a village known as Double Flag Town. On his deathbed, his swordmaster father told Hai Ge about the girl that’s supposedly been promised by her father to marry him. She’s the daughter of an old companion of Hai Ge’s father (the film actually uses the term “uncle” to describe the man, but everybody here’s called “uncle” or “sister” by basically everyone else, so he’s probably not an uncle by blood), but the only things our protagonist actually knows about her is that she must be about his own age, has a father with a lame leg, and a mole on her butt. This not being a comedy, Hai Ge concentrates his search on the thing with the leg.

It isn’t actually all that difficult to find the two, even for a shy and naïve young guy like Hai Ge. Other problems arise, though: both Lame Uncle (Chang Jiang) and his daughter Hao Mei (Zhao Ma-Na) start out deeply unimpressed by the young man. Though Uncle does give him a job and a place to stay, he’s not willing to marry off his daughter to a nobody she very much doesn’t want to marry, at first. During life in the closed-off little community that is apparently regular visited by duelling swordspeople, and is dominated from afar by the murderous Lethal Swordsman (Sun Haiying, I believe), Hao Mei’s heart softens towards Hai Ge.

Before things can properly develop there, the little brother of the Lethal Swordsman attempts to rape Hao Mei. Hai Ge uses his surprisingly great swordsmanship to defend her, killing the would-be rapist. Alas, killing the brother of a guy like the Lethal Swordsman is not a healthy thing – not only for Hai Ge and Hao Mei, but for the village as a whole as well. It is doubtful that Hai Ge can win a duel against a swordsman this, ahem, lethal, but running away might mean the end of everybody else in the village.

Far too few wuxia films use the Chinese Northwest or a Silk Road setting, so I’m always happy to stumble over one, especially when it is as interesting a movie as – recently deceased – He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town. Officially taking place in the Chinese West, this is as much influenced by Westerns, particularly the more abstract of the Italian Westerns, as it is by wuxia cinema of its time.

So instead of long, artfully choreographed, non-realistic martial arts battles, this is a film where scenes of guys eyeing one another – in Hai Ge’s case often as fearfully as befits him being a kid and not a grown-up – end in short explosions of quick violence. He Ping loves to hide those behind quick cuts, or, in the finale, a dust cloud, until the slow dropping of a body explains who actually won the fight. Which does of course also have parallels in Japanese cinema.

Where wuxia is traditionally colourful and set in clean – at worst artfully cobwebbed – locations and sets, everything here is realistically grimy and dusty; people look like people eking out their living in the desert do probably look, so there’s a decisive lack of glamour.

Still, the film never feels like one of those dreaded attempts at making a “realistic” wuxia (or western, or chanbara). Rather, it uses what could be flags of realism as its own way of stylizing things when it then shoots them in a surprisingly slick early 1991 visual style, where a synthesizer score doing slightly shifted westerns score riffs feels absolutely appropriate.

On a narrative level, this is a rather minimalist work that eschews huge backstories and monologues in favour of suggestion and archetype efficiently as well as effectively. This is not a film of many words, or one that wants to explain its philosophy to you, but rather one that knows a viewer will understand its morality as well as the emotional price characters here pay for decent actions without it emphasizing any of this.

So often, this feels more like a mood turned film than a detailed narrative, a minimalist, but elegant picture that demonstrates the moral parallels between Western and wuxia by working exactly where these genres meet.

In short: Corsage (2022)

Quite a few filmmakers approaching their material the same way as Marie Kreutzer does in this art house darling concerning a highly fictionalized version of the last year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or as anyone in a German language country who has seen a certain 50s film trilogy will know her by, “Sissy”, would end up with a film that seems rather too in love with its own eccentricity.

Kreutzer is a much too controlled director for her to let things slip out of her hands that easily, so her flights of fancy, the conscious use of anachronistic elements – sometimes in genuinely funny ways – her sardonic humour as well as the film’s genuine humanity and care for its characters feel rather more of a piece than you’d expect when reading up on the film. In fact, even though it doesn’t at first appear so, this is an absolute masterpiece of directorial control over spiky and complicated material. Thus, Kreutzer – helped by a riveting central performance by Vicky Krieps – can take all her film’s seemingly disparate elements – the commentary on star cult, on the treatment of aging women, loneliness sexual, emotional and intellectual in a world where a woman is supposed to repress the first, not show the middle, and lack the last, depression, the satire of KuK clichés and so on – and turn them into a movie that is absolutely of one piece. In fact, as Kreutzer uses them, all these elements and directions turn out to be not so disparate at all but absolutely necessary parts in talking about her complex interests.

That Corsage is also often wickedly funny, or sad, and staged with enormous power is one result of this approach.

Music Monday: Principia Edition

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983)

Original title: I sette magnifici gladiatori

The narrative takes place in what I believe is supposed to be a fantasy version of Ancient Rome, though it could of course also be a very low effort secondary world. Evil bandit leader Nicerote (Dan Vadis) is making regularly raids on a small village, using the physical invulnerability somehow bestowed on him by his mother (whom he blinded as a thanks) with astonishingly little ambition and imagination. By now, the village is only populated by women, children, and the elderly. Fortunately, there’s a helpful prophecy concerning the village’s favourite relic, a magic sword only the true hero meant to save the place will be able to hold going around. So the rest populace put the sword in keeping of their most attractive women. They go to Rome and proceed to ask every random passers-by they meet to grab that sword. They do eschew any warnings that the weapons rather likes to burn the hands of the unworthy, because that’s village morality for you. Still, eventually, the blade ends up in the hands of gladiator-on-the run Han (Lou Ferrigno) who is apparently a proper hero and not burnable by sword. After some business with the crazy bug-eyes making emperor (Yehuda Efroni) I only mention because his performance is so spectacularly hammy, Han goes off to do some village rescuing, picking up enough gladiators, Sybil Dannings and rogues to make for the full titular complement of seven.

You really know the rest.

If you’re like me, you probably expect something mind-blowing and weird when going into an Italian 80s sword and sorcery movie that also wants to be a gladiator movie and Magnificent Seven rip-off, particularly one made by the terrifying/awe-inspiring duo of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Even better, one made on Cannon money, which must have felt like Marvel money to an indie filmmaker of today.

Alas, this is by far not as crack-brained as one would hope it to be. Sure, Fragasso’s script is as awkwardly structured as was his wont, and a lot of what happens is somewhat nonsensical, but there are only a few moments in the script that don’t feel comparatively competent and sane, at least for the kind of movie this is.

Mattei for his part even manages to create a series of perfectly okay looking scenes, though he is of course completely incapable of giving any of the copious character deaths any emotional weight, something certainly not helped by Fragasso’s messing up of the Magnificent formula by simply not spending enough time on creating characters with at least one discernible character trait. These Seven seem to consists of Sybil Danning, four beefcakes and three rogues, and that’s it. In general, one can’t help but think that Fragasso didn’t quite get why certain scenes like the training of the villagers are in practically all movies of this sort, including them just in case but trying to get through them as quickly as possible. This does rob the film of any of the emotional resonance it should have.

From time to time, the old, loveable, idiocy of the Mattei/Fragasso pairing does come through. I’m particularly fond of the fact that the magic sword isn’t actually, as you would think, magically able to get through Nicerote’s invulnerability the normal way when wielded by the proper hero, but really only kills him when he grips it himself. Which rather suggests that the whole rigmarole with finding the proper hero could have been avoided by simply presenting the sword to the guy as a treasure. But hey, what do I understand of these things?

Because many of the actors here are rather experienced in fake-hitting stuntmen with swords, most of the fights look rather more competent than you’d expect of a Mattei joint; I wouldn’t go so far as to call them exciting but they are certainly surprisingly watchable in a straightforward movie matinee way. The wagon race looks a bit as if Michael Bay had fashioned his car chases after it, though.

All of this makes for the more than a little confusing experience of watching a Mattei/Fragasso film that feels mostly competent – by the standards of Italian sword and sorcery fare - instead of insane. If you know the body of work of this duo, you’ll realize how mind-blowing the concept of competence is when applied to these filmmakers. Which does bring up the question who or what might have been responsible for this particular kind of insanity never before or after beheld in these men’s works. I, for one, blame Golan and Globus.

Three Films Make A Post: If you have to scream, cover your mouth

Sick (2022): I’ve seen this sometimes pretty brutal home invasion movie directed by John Hyams described as some kind of comeback for writer Kevin Williamson – who co-wrote with Katelyn Crabb – but I can only see it as a much weaker follow-up to Hyams’s brilliant Alone that’s failing mostly because of Williamson’s and Crabb’s limp script. As a director, Hyams is still fantastic at directing classical suspense and thriller scenes, but where Alone’s deceptively straightforward script earthed these scenes in great character writing and tense plotting, the film at hand falters at creating characters whose destiny you’d actually be interested in and can only understand suspense scenes as set-pieces instead of intricate parts of a greater whole. That the killer’s motivation come right out of the wet dreams of an anti-vaxxer forum doesn’t make things any better either.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2022): To continue grumping about movies, this Evil Children affair by Roxanne Benjamin is just not a terribly interesting film for most of its running time. Benjamin is clearly a competent filmmaker, but not one so good – or simply so experienced, this being her second feature – she can work around the fact the child actors she has to depend on can’t consistently hit the notes of required creepiness, which is pretty much the death knell in a film about kids acting creepy. The script can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to do something clever with shifting the usual role of the “woman who realized early on there’s bad shit going on, but nobody believes her because she’s mentally ill” on a man, or somehow talk about female scepticism of becoming a mother, tries both at once, and manages to do neither in a satisfying way.

It’s not a terrible movie, just one that’s perfectly forgettable.

Baghead (2008): As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, I am not an admirer of the mumblecore canon as a whole (mostly not even in particular), with an aesthetic that never convinced me this is more than film school grad wank of the highest degree. Having said that, I do have a small place in my heart for this horror/hapless indie filmmaker comedy by the Duplass brothers. Mostly because this, like their other films, doesn’t feel trapped in its aesthetics like too much mumblecore does for me, but actually uses them intelligently. Even the – most probably in large parts improvised – dialogue comes to sensible points and shapes emotional beats instead of simply stumbling around, amounting to nothing.

Quite a bit of this is obviously thanks to the cast – Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller – as well as what I assume is judicious editing, but there’s also a pleasantly non-wanky sense of self-irony, as well as an abundance of heart (the genuine kind sometimes found on sleeves) on display that makes the film impossible to dislike for me.

Short Film Friday: Unedited Footage of a Bear

In short: It’s Hard to be a Man (1969)

aka Tora-San, Our Lovable Tramp

Original title: Otoko wa tsurai yo

Twenty years after he left his family following a fight with this father, street peddler Torajiro Kuruma (Kiyoshi Atsumi), usually called Tora, returns to what’s left of it – his uncle and aunt and his half-sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). After some moments of happiness, Tora begins to cause all kinds of chaos in the lives of the family, ruining a marriage meeting for Sakura by getting boorishly drunk, and typically showing all the emotional maturity of a child that loves to pretend a dignified grown-up; though, as his saving grace, also a lot of natural kindness and a lack of actual meanness. While he’s ruining Sakura’s love life, he’s also falling in love himself, unhappily and slightly ridiculously.

Having watched a movie right out of the middle of the series, I thought why not start of the beginning of Yoji Yamada’s long-running and much beloved Japanese comedy series and have a look at how its beginning played out. As it turns out, most of what I’ve said about the later movie fits this one as well, for the characters and their relations to one another are pretty much fully realized right from the start, details and elements of the background apparently shifting and growing over time in slow and organic ways. There’s a clear appeal in that, particularly when it is combined with Yamada’s gift for creating a sense of place and time (even if it is an idealized place and time), which also helps emphasize how much everyone here is part of a community, seen and unseen.

Many of the elements here will apparently repeat throughout the whole of the series, which might become a bit tiresome over time. Or not at all by virtue of the simple universality of some of these elements, like Tora’s inability to feel fully at home when he is at home but his sentimental longing for that very same home when he is away, the way side characters have fully developed life of quiet tragedy or happiness we only get glimpses into, and so on.

The humour here is generally gentle. The film pokes fun at Tora’s mix of foolishness and braggadocio, but clearly likes him and everyone else on screen as well. This is a film that smiles at foolishness and quietly shakes its head at it rather than shaking its fist, which feels absolutely right for what this tries to be. So I’m not at all surprised at the amount of love the series got in its time.

Shin Ultraman (2022)

For some time now, the members of a government organization known as the SSSP have fought off one kaiju attack on Japan after another. The danger and weirdness of the attacks only seem to increase over time. Fortunately, a giant silver guy quickly dubbed Ultraman – there’s a running gag about a politico coming up with kaiju names on the fly - appears and begins fighting the kaiju.

As it will turn out, SSSP member Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh) has died and somehow melded with the alien Ultraman, who now sees it as his responsibility to protect humanity from alien menaces while driving Shinji’s body, or a version of Shinji’s body. Ironically enough, Ultraman’s appearance might actually worsen the situation, putting a cosmic spotlight on our (self-)destructive species.

After doing their very clever and fun version of Godzilla (which I apparently haven’t written up here), Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno continue their renewal of classic Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu franchises. This time around, Higuchi is solely responsible for the direction, while Anno – who was apparently working on the eternal return that is his perpetual rejiggering of Evangelion – “only” directed, produced and edited. Tonally, this doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the political satire as the duo’s Godzilla movie did – though there certainly is some satire here – nor is the main story quite as serious. Rather, this one aims at being as fun as possible, throwing an astonishing number of monsters and fights and so much plot at the audience, you could make one and a half seasons of most streaming shows out of the material. There’s a sense of lightness to the film even once its plot escalates and it starts talking about the self-destructive nature of humanity and becomes something of a parable of the colonialist mind-set. With this lightness comes a willingness to take the silliness of its set-up seriously without being over-earnest, embracing the silliness without shame or irony.

It is also full of jokes that are actually funny.

The film is suffused by a palpable love of the original Ultraman series (and the franchise that became of it), not the sort of fanboy love that deems everything about the old material perfect and sacrosanct, but one that has identified which elements of the original it loves and then doubles down on them while being fully willing and able to discard those elements that were simply mirrors of its own time. Which to me seems like the obvious and best approach to this kind of project, avoiding slavishly tying oneself to elements that simply wouldn’t play to anyone but a tiny percentage of the most fanatic fans of a franchise, while also keeping the doors open for all kind of fanservice of the good kind, as well as people who might have been excluded from earlier iterations of the series. So why not make the original suit actor of Ultraman your mo-cap actor for this one? Why not have credits that show the SSSP minus Ultraman fight off half a dozen or so kaiju from the original show? But also why not give your female main character (Masami Nagasawa) actually something to do?

When it comes to the copious kaiju action, Shin Ultraman doesn’t falter, either. I’ve seldom seen CGI that not only shows such an understanding of what is awesome about suitmation traditions, but that also manages to integrate this knowledge (and some actual suitmation) this well, thus realizing kaiju fights that are inspired, awesome, dramatic and often also quite funny. And because the film is much pacier than basically anything else coming out right now, there are five or six big fights in here, one better than the next, until things culminate in the sort of psychedelic space shenanigans that reminded me of nothing so much as 70s cosmic Marvel comics, in form as well as in pop-philosophical subtext and heft. That, by the way, is one of the highest compliments I could make any piece of media.