Maintenance Phase

I’m going into blog hibernation mode for a week. Expect normal service to return around July, 7th. If you can’t live without my opinions about movies – fat chance – you can always watch me give really high star ratings but write no reviews on Letterboxd.

The First Omen (2024)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers for this as well as for Immaculate!

1971. Young Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), raised as an orphan by the Catholic church, is sent to Rome to take her vows as a nun in a convent-orphanage. After early moments of genuine female companionship with the other nuns and an invitation to the pre-vow wild life by the place’s other novitiate, the not terribly nun-like Luz (Maria Cabellero), Margaret’s time at the nunnery turns increasingly nightmarish.

There appears to be something very wrong with one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), and the older nuns’ treatment of the child seems rather extraordinarily strange and cruel, particularly when you compare it to their usual behaviour towards the children in their care. Margaret herself is increasingly plagued by visions connected to creepy demon fingers touching her, bad sexual experiences and pregnancy; nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to keep apart.

When the rogue priest Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), contacts Margaret with a highly unlikely tale about what’s really going on at the orphanage, our protagonist isn’t quite ready to believe him yet, but she’s certainly beginning to look at the things that might be hidden in plain sight all around her.

Apart from movies about spiders, this is apparently a year for movies about young women having to fight the not so tender attentions of Catholic Church breeding programs (one would be tempted to defend the Church against horror scriptwriters, but given its history, it has to fend for itself there). Though only one of the latter movies has a scene where a woman smashes the little baby Jesus, second edition, with a rock. The movie at hand is not that movie.

But seriously, even though The First Omen does share quite a bit with its out of wedlock sister film Immaculate – namely the feminism, the Church breeding program and the palpable love for the weirder corners of 70s horror – it does have a feel of its own.

Mostly, that’s because director Arkasha Stevenson’s visual imagination quickly transcends the quotes from the original Omen, numerous stylish Italian horror films, and 70s horror in general, and instead starts using the visual elements taken from there to create a language of horror that feels personal to her as a filmmaker.

Stevenson has an indelible eye for the freaky shot, for short, metaphorically loaded tableaux, a command of mood that drags her protagonist – as well as at least this viewer - ever further in the direction of dread and the weird. The big horror sequences don’t just work as set pieces, but are always also metaphorically loaded for bear, creating the kind of film that does little of its metaphorical work through plot or character work and instead puts all emphasis on mood and style as carriers. Again, very much in the spirit of the era of horror filmmaking it builds much of its aesthetic grounding on.

I wouldn’t say the film’s subtextual interests are terribly original: a young woman trapped in a system that only sees her as a breeder for the men that are going to be really important; a sense of paranoia where nearly every paranoid thought our protagonist has is based on truth, and where even her own identity doesn’t truly belong to her; childbirth as a form of body horror. However, the way it puts these interests into movement, colour, and sound makes them feel like things you’ve never seen or heard about before quit this way. Which is quite the trick in a prequel to a franchise that on paper really didn’t need one.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.

Three Films Make A Post: Give the devil his due.

Under Paris aka Sous la Seine (2024): Apparently, there was a a clearance sale for shark movie clichés in France, and Xavier Gens managed to catch them all. He also brought all of the screenwriters, for he shares various writing credits with six other people here. Given that the whole film plays out like a shark movie as written by ChatGPT (no surprise some film company suits believe replacing writers with AI is a near future prospect), that’s some kind of achievement at least.

As is how unoriginal and culturally unspecific a movie about sharks in goddamn Paris can feel if the filmmakers only not apply themselves properly to their craft. For much of its running time, this isn’t even stupid fun, for the film lacks the energy needed to pull that off, as it does apparently lack the intelligence to realize how silly it is.

This last problem actually turns into a virtue in the final twenty-five minutes or so, when a degree of entertainment manifests – most probably through the magical power of the script’s impressive amount of accrued bullshit becoming sentient.

The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957): It is curious to compare Ishiro Honda’s alien invasion movie with its temporal genre siblings from the USA. Both strands do share a – in Honda rather surprising – today uncomfortable trust in institutions and the military – the latter even more surprising in Honda – but where the Americans most often feel rather po-faced and stuffy, there’s a poppy playfulness surrounding the Japanese film I find irresistible.

This is often a question of design: not only the film’s colours – which do indeed pop – but the colourful and silly-awesome environment suits with capes the Mysterians wear, how the kaiju the aliens use looks a bit like Ro-Man’s cockroach brother, and so on. There’s very little here that doesn’t align itself with a certain idea of directness, brightness and fun.

The Hangman (2024): For at least half of its scenes, Bruce Wemple’s (written by Wemple and lead LeJon Woods) movie is an exemplary piece of low budget cinema, with a sense of mood and forward momentum, and a good idea of the kind of ambitions it can actually pull off, budget-wise. The other half of its scenes tend to meander through ideas, tone, and way too much exposition, and action movie one-liners that have little connection to the emotional core about fathers, sons and trauma, leaving a film that’s generally competent enough to be entertaining but could have used quite a bit of tightening to fulfil its eminently reachable deeper ambitions as well as one would have wished it to.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Original title: Gojira -1.0

During the last stages of World War II, kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) decides not to throw away his life for nothing and lands at a small island base for repairs to his not actually damaged plane.

At night, a large lizard creature that looks much smaller than the Godzilla we know and love attacks the base, killing everyone but Shikishima and the mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki). Because he freezes up during a moment of danger that may or may not have been decisive, Shikishima adds another dollop of guilt to the bag his not having committed suicide by plane has already filled rather heavily. It certainly doesn’t help that Tachibana puts everything on Shikishima, leaving him with the family photos the other mechanics on the island were carrying with them as a goodbye gift.

After the war, returned to a destroyed Tokyo, with all of his family or friends dead, Shikishima drifts until he meets Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who has taken it upon herself to take care of an orphaned baby named Akiko. When Noriko with the baby simply follows him home, he just as simply lets them stay.

Eventually, Shikishima manages to get a dangerous but comparatively well-paid job on a wooden mine clearing ship that will pay for the found family’s survival. There, he also finds his first actual close human contact apart from Noriko and little Akiko, in form of the ship’s captain Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), former military engineer Noda (Hidetaki Yoshioka) and the very young – so young he wasn’t drafted into the war and gets starry-eyed about something everyone else on board ship wants to forget – Mizushima (Yuki Yamada). He’s not exactly close to anyone, mind you, for his sense of failure and guilt as well as good old PTSD do tend to make him keep everyone around him at an emotional remove. Yet there is a degree of loosening up happening for him.

So slowly, Shikishima appears on the way of healing, until Godzilla, now mutated and made even angrier and much larger by US nuclear tests, and basically indestructible by any conventional means, re-emerges and begins to attack Japan. This shortly after the war, the Japanese Defence Force lies in the future, and the US are at a stage in their dance with the Soviet Union where they’re afraid to provoke the latter by any military moves, so the Japanese people find themselves unprotected and underinformed. Eventually, Shikishima, his trauma raw again, will become part of a somewhat crazy civilian plan to destroy Godzilla; though he also has a plan of his own to make up for his “failure” as a kamikaze.

But, and that’s important, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is not at all a film that condones the kind of “heroic” sacrifice its protagonist is attempting, but rather one that argues that there’s something wrong with the glorification of young men throwing their lives away on the battlefield. Like in Honda’s initial Godzilla, the film at hand, while enjoying the spectacle of warships and arms, does argue against the idea of war as a glorious or even just politically sensible thing – here, war is a waste of humanity that leaves behind broken people populating a broken country, and actual heroism is people doing dangerous things out of their own free will not because their potential death will be glorious but because they have to be done.

Minus One explores these thoughts, as well as Shikishima’s specific trauma, with a surprising love for complexity and depth for a film that could get away with being a nostalgic monster mash or just a bit of silly fun without anyone complaining. Instead, this focusses on ideas and on its characters to a degree that is often dangerous in a kaiju movie – we are, after all, here to watch everyone’s favourite lizard smash Tokyo, and not for watching traumatized men (this is a film predominantly about men, which is the movie’s only weakness) in a traumatized country. However, the writing is so strong, the film’s conviction in its portrayal of people, places and time so great, and Yamazaki so effective at staging emotional moments that mostly don’t feel manipulative but just somewhat larger than life to make life clearer, there’s none of the dreaded “waiting for the monster” here.

Godzilla really isn’t the main point of the film, but a catalyst that drags the inner lives of the characters and their country to the surface, exploring what’s wrong and what’s worth saving, and why.

This doesn’t mean that the kaiju scenes aren’t effective. In fact, Godzilla’s rampage through Ginza is one of the most impactful scenes of its kind I’ve seen – and I’ve seen most of them – emphasising the horror and the trauma of the event, the human cost, and the awesome (in the old meaning of the word) impact of Godzilla on Japan not as an abstraction called a country but as a conglomerate of individual people.

Apart from its insistence on actually being about something and its ability to pull this off, there are many little things to admire here: for example the way the soundtrack keeps away from the classic Ifukube themes for nearly the first half of its running time and then uses it score that horrifying Ginza scenes, recontexualizing them as much as those scenes of chirpy pop playing to something particularly unpleasant in a horror movie do; or Yamazaki’s incredible ability to pace narrative and emotional arc of the film while also creating scenes of real suspense and interest.

Despite its two hour running time, its long-ish time scale, and its general vibe of being a slick, big production with all that comes with that sort of thing, this is also a wonderfully lean film. There’s no bloat here, no scene that doesn’t help carry the film’s weight – there’s nothing here that is not in service of Godzilla Minus One’s specific goals as a narrative. It is a rather astonishing film.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Having broken his back during an accident, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman to the insufferable star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), does recover bodily, but finds himself in lowest of spirits. During his recovery he has driven away his girlfriend, budding director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), and has decided to park cars for a living instead of jumping canyons in them.

However, Ryder’s manager and producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) lures Colt back to stunt work by the simple expediency of telling him Jody asked for him to work on her directorial debut Metal Storm, a SF epic about the power of love, violence and cheesy speeches, that does, alas, seem to lack Jared Syn. What the film also lacks is Tom Ryder, for he has gone missing – possible on a drug bender – which wouldn’t be atypical for the guy. Gail wants Colt to find him before anyone else notices he is gone (most people on set don’t). All the while, Jody is rather nonplussed to find her ex-boyfriend suddenly working on her movie – she certainly didn’t ask for that.

Soon, Colt will need all of his considerable stunt person superpowers to survive his surprisingly dangerous search for Ryder; in between being drugged, getting run over by cars, and so on, there’s also a bit of a possibility to restart the relationship with Jody he so efficiently sabotaged after his accident on a more equal footing.

Saying I went into David Leitch’s The Fall Guy with low expectations would be selling them rather high, even though I loved Leitch’s Bullet Train. The combination of modern high budget action comedy, a needless revival of a mildly beloved old IP (shudder), and Ryan Gosling (whose general unwillingness to express emotions via facial expression or body language simply isn’t my idea of acting except in very specific circumstances) did not promise a good time.

But here’s the thing: Gosling emotes! Well, that’s one of several things, as a matter of fact. Instead of the completely empty pap I expected, this is a lovely cross between two genres that only very seldom meet – the romantic comedy and the action comedy, and one where both genres are equally important to the film.

That Leitch does absurd action very well is no surprise; his expert sense of romantic timing very much is. But then, Drew Pearce’s script goes out of its way not to reproduce the way relationships are usually treated in action movies, nor does he fall into the trap of many a male-centric romcom where the protagonist’s girlfriend-keeping character change feels self-serving and dishonest. Colt Seavers isn’t just working out his bullshit, he’s also genuine about his feelings and going through that whole parallel action comedy plot at the same time; Blunt’s Jody is never just a prize but has some actual agency, as well as dreams and hopes that belong to her. Blunt’s also as fun in the Romcom stuff as she is in the more action oriented bits of the film. In fact, the way romcom and action comedy collide and change one another’s clichés is one of the most surprising elements here – much of the film can be read as meta commentary on the differences and parallels of genres that are typically female and male-coded, and suggests some things they might learn from each other.

The absurd action for its part is as expected: fun, fast, often very clever with the stupid jokes and very much centred on actual stunt work instead of CG, as is only right and proper when it comes to a film about a stuntman. The film’s also genuinely well plotted, with a central mystery that works and an eventual solution to our heroes’ problems that very consciously uses movie magic to come to a proper movie solution.

Because that’s what The Fall Guy is as well: a paean to genre films, the absurd things we are willing to love, the clichés we embrace and those we embrace while laughing about them, the things we want to believe in movies, the special moment when something preposterous and artificial touches one’s heart just as if it were the real thing, only better.

Three Films Make A Post: Your fate is in the cards.

Tarot (2024): Don’t screw around with tarot readings, kids, lest you be dragged into a terrible Final Destination rip-off (as if some of those sequels hadn’t been bad enough) where tarot/astrology crossover prophecies are turned into painfully literal murder set pieces.

The characters are as dull and generic as the actors are pretty, the direction by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg has never met a horror cliché it doesn’t want to regurgitate in the least creative way, and our old buddies mood, tension and suspense have taken the week off.

The tarot monster designs aren’t half bad, admittedly.

Baghead (2023): While it is far from being perfect, Alberto Corredor’s film is quite a bit more effective and interesting than Tarot. It is also a lot more ambitious, trying to handle the old horror one-two of grief and guilt by way of weird occult folklore (including a neat little fake occultist backstory). In a couple of scenes – mostly the early meetings with its very peculiar monster – there’s a genuine, delightful strangeness to the supernatural threat that only suffers from some thematic parallels to the brilliant Talk to Me the film at hand simply can’t beat at its own game.

Later, things become somewhat more generic – with not exactly unexpected hallucinations and fake-outs – but even in its less interesting moments, this is always at least a decent, character-driven horror film with a very neat monster, as well as a very respectable central performance by Freya Allan.

Infested aka Vermines (2023): There are certain parallels to Attack the Block in Sébastien Vanicek’s French apartment building horror film, mostly in its focus on young, working class, brown people surviving by sliding around the borders of legality, but how it focusses is as driven by its time and and country as that of Joe Cornish’s was – so the comparison is more caused by the fact that there are still very few horror films focussing on characters of comparable circumstance in the way these movies.

In any case, Vanicek’s film isn’t a dry exploration of poverty and the quieter tensions of racism but rather one where that exploration is made by way of a fantastic animal attack movie full of brilliant set pieces, bits of body horror and some of the most effective suspense scenes I’ve seen in quite some time. Because the film spends time and care on its characters, there’s a larger weight to the horrible things that happen to some (well, most) of them, which in turn makes the suspense as well as the film’s subtext about people having to cope in a society that doesn’t give a crap about them more potent.

Suffer Little Children (1983)

Based on a true story, apparently! That sounds completely plausible.

To wit:A mute little girl with a “please take care of me” note in her hand appears on the doorstep of a small orphanage in what I assume to be a city in the UK. She seems quiet and pleasant enough, but in truth, she’s possessed by SATAN (caps contractually obligated). After turning two other girls into her servants in a zombie picnic dream, she bides her time with minor bouts of terror and violence.

Mostly, we watch people do very little of interest, while most of the dialogue is completely drowned out by a repetitive score that does pop up some metal riffs whenever the action becomes properly SATANic.

Until, eventually, finally, the boredom culminates in a twenty minute freak-out of kids in an attic bowing before our satanic child queen making jazz hands, scenes of kids with knives (apparently a decades-old British nightmare, though they do miss hoodies) piling onto grown-ups and each other until blood spurts, bizarre yet excellently cheap editing effects and an appearance of the Lord Jesus himself (note to SATAN: don’t crucify pop stars), who points his (holy, one supposes) finger at possessed kids while cheap laser pew-pew noises play. It’s pretty fantastic.

Apparently, the smaller British arm of SOV horror, here exemplified in the efforts of Alan Briggs, Meg Shanks and their kid and teen acting school pupils, felt a need to demonstrate to their American colleagues in horror how to properly do that very shot on video horror thing of two interminable acts of nothing followed by one incredibly bonkers and entertaining climax. Consequently, apart from the zombie picnic and an unfortunate death or two, Suffer’s first two acts are a pain to get through, with dull people shot dully in dull locations talking for hours through dialogue you mostly can’t even hear (what you do manage to hear suggests you’re better off that way anyhow). It’s truly excruciating, even though the viewer does get to gawk at some top early 80s UK fashion.

Of course, all that dullness does turn the eventual freak-out of cheap, hilarious violence and utter mind-blowing strangeness not just highly entertaining but also somewhat shocking. Not because some of these kids are rather painfully good screamers – they are - but because at this point in proceedings, nobody could have expected these particular filmmakers to get their acts together enough to create scenes this loud, peculiar, bloody and fun.

Which only goes to show that all those Hollywood movie who taught us to never give up hope did know what they were talking about. I’ll never doubt again (lest Jesus shoot me with his finger guns).

In short: Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Original title: Gojira no gyakushû

While scouting for tuna for their employers, two airplane pilots stumble upon a second Godzilla, fighting another giant monster, a supposed ankylosaurus SCIENCE dubs Anguirus. When the kaiju aren’t fighting, they are threatening Osaka. Fortunately, the JDF and the tuna scouts are there to save the day, eventually. Turns out Godzilla doesn’t take well to being buried under an avalanche.

Ah, if Doctor Serizawa had only known.

This second Godzilla movie, a clear quick shot trying to cash in on the success of the first one, is often said to prefigure much of the rest of the Showa era cycle of Toho’s Godzilla films.

I can’t really say I agree with that particular assessment, for while this does completely ignore the metaphorical level of the first movie and introduces the kaiju against kaiju fight, there’s nothing of the feel of the best – or even the mediocre - of the later productions in Toho’s first cycle. No joy, certainly, no quick cleverness, no silly and fun ideas, no bits and pieces of subtext peeking out at those looking for them.

Instead, this feels like a film made by people who really didn’t care for the material they were working on – Motoyoshi Oda’s direction is professional but also utterly lifeless, and he has learned nothing from Honda’s staging of the original movie. Of course, behind the scenes, there’s only about half of the talent that made the first film what it was, and particularly the lack of Honda and Akira Ifukube is felt deeply. Speaking of the latter, there’s a curious lack of music in many of the scenes – the footage taken from the first film early on for example plays completely silent – that turns the dullness even more dull. When the score by Masaru Sato does come in, it never lives up to what Ifukube did.

Raid not living up to the first film is made even more obvious by its repeated mistake of pointing out its superior successor. That silent footage of Godzilla rampaging early on is so much better than what Oda does, and dragging Takashi Shimura out again for one scene of dignified exposition only makes more obvious how much lesser the characters in here are.

Philosophically, the first film might as well not have existed for this second one; for what’s come before, but also for the often very silly yet also very excellent films that came after, Godzilla Raids Again might as well not have, either.

Not of This Earth (1957)

A rather peculiar fellow going by the - totally not the pseudonym of an alien invader - name of Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) ambles through Southern California. He has a very particular form of blood disease that calls for rather intense blood transfusions, but also the ability to hypnotically convince his doctor to be rather helpful about his medical troubles and his preferred solution to them.

Mr Johnson moves into a nice suburban house, hires himself a former ne'er-do-well as a caretaker and a private nurse (Beverley Garland). Occasionally, he communicates with his alien superiors about experiments meant to save his radioactively irradiated race, and ambles along to kidnap people for some rather radical experimentation which leaves them rather dead.

As a director, I particularly love Roger Corman for his Poe cycle made some years later, but even when he made short and very cheap variations on alien invasion and monster movie models, his films typically had something to recommend them.

In the case of Not of This Earth that something is the very specific type of contemporary Southern California hipness used to fill in the holes in budget and script, like Dick Miller’s short turn as a salesman taking a bad end not unfitting to his profession, the absurd teen patois used in another scene, the general late 50s grooviness of what’s going on, and the immensely quotable dialogue (“If I do not receive blood within four chronoctons of time, I will have no need of emotion”), that feels like the sort of thing Ed Wood was trying to achieve but lacked the sense of humour to reach.

Because of the general scrappiness of the production, this has an often very improvisational feel through scenes that just seem to have popped into the crew’s mind and then directly to camera. Only a couple of years later, this would culminate in little masterpieces of skewed wit like Bucket Full of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, but even in its embryonic form, Corman the pseudo-beat is a fine thing to remember the man for, among many other achievements.

Big Time Gambling Boss (1968)

Original title: Bakuchiuchi: Sôchô Tobaku

Tokyo 1934. The boss of the city’s clan specialized in the gambling business suffers from a stroke while he’s refusing a plan to help unite the yakuza groups into some kind of national front that will bring drugs and prostitution to “the continent” (read “China”).

The succession to the now bed-ridden and mute man’s position is fraught. The best candidate would be the deeply honourable Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), but he’s refusing the role because he came to Tokyo as a refugee from an Osaka clan following trouble with the law there. Apparently taking on the leading role in his adopted clan would be against the Code of the yakuza. Anyway, going by Nakai’s interpretation of things, the designated successor to the position of boss should be Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), Nakai’s sworn brother.

As a matter of Code and honour, Nakai may even be right about that. Yet right now, Matsuda is imprisoned for his role in an attack on a rival gang that left that gang not much of a problem anymore, but also saw some of Matsuda’s own young men dead. In general, while nearly as traditionally honourable as Nakai, Matsuda is a bit of an emotional powder keg, leading from the front with quite a bit of violence. So he is somebody the clan as a whole doesn’t really want in its highest leadership position.

Prodded by shifty advisor Senba (Nobuo Kaneko with the most astonishing bit of Hitler facial hair), the clan decides to make the boss’s son-in-law, the somewhat lower-ranking and sweaty Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa) the successor, clearly not the strong choice.

Ishido’s ascension ceremony is to take place during a big gambling do for the highest-ranking yakuza in the country.

At this point, Matsuda has been released from prison and is less than happy with the situation. To his sense of personal betrayal comes the fact that not the obviously ultra-competent Nakai is to be the group’s boss, but the weak Ishido. And Matsuda is not the kind of man who can play the diplomatic game, even if it means burning all bridges.

Soon, the plot becomes a complicated machine of obligations, honour, friendship, and betrayal, full of relationships that are much more complicated than they at first appear to be, and violence that is less than cathartic.

When it is spoken about at all in the West, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss – actually the fourth film of a series, though one that usually has not continuity of plot or characters between films – has the reputation of being one of the greatest yakuza films of the ninkyo eiga style. I can’t disagree with this assessment at all – this is pretty much a perfect film, one that stretches the possibilities of the ninkyo style to its absolute limits. That its writer Kazuo Kasahara would go on to script Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series seems just the logical consequence of where this one goes.

Certainly, Gambling Boss shares the later films’ tendency to turn an in theory very simple plot about yakuza intrigue into a web of duties, obligations and interpretations of a code of honour where one’s human feelings only further complicate things. Nearly every single character here has to come to grips with their own conflicts between the supposed honour of their societal rules and their actual humanity – Nakai’s and Matsuda’s internal and personal conflicts are the film’s main thrust, but the younger yakuza that take on the role of Nakai’s replacement sons, and the two men’s wives all go through the same struggles.

Nakai’s wife Tsuyako (Hiroko Sakuramachi), to take an example, at first seems to only fulfil the genre role of the dutiful wife, but one second act conflict suddenly reveals her inner life and the struggles she goes through while keeping up appearances, providing the film not only with a sudden jolt of “wait, that’s not how ninkyo eiga work!” but also emphasising one of the film’s thematic undercurrents: the utter destructiveness of a way of life that knows no compromise and lets problems grow and fester until they are only resolved in the most violent and destructive ways. Every character in the movie goes through this, or something comparable, and all of them end up destroyed or dead – and the film clearly isn’t applauding this as the only honourable way to exist but treats it as the tragedy it is.

There is indeed a great deal of compassion for its characters in the film, not the sentimental kind yakuza movies (and their fans, me not excluded) generally prefer, but one that feels more humane, sadder and more subtle.

In large part, this effect of greater emotional nuance is enabled by Yamashita’s restrained and intensely focussed direction. This is a film without any distractions in staging, tight framing that is meant to keep the viewer as close to the characters as possible, and not a second of material on screen that isn’t important to the characters or the plot. This means none of the actors can afford to overact or fall back on the simpler tricks in their toolkits – every moment of drama is earned through their complicated portrayals of complicated feelings and relationships. Even Wakayama, not an actor who appeared to like to be subtle (and whom I usually love for it), follows suit, and gives one of the most nuanced and human performances I’ve ever seen from him. Consequently, the film develops an uncommon emotional pull, a feeling of witnessing a genuine tragedy evolve, instead of a series of ritualized scenes that end in an explosion of violence.

Even here, at the climax, the movie refuses the sure-fire way to please the audience of its genre. Instead of showing is the mandatory showdown between Nakai and a large group of enemies, the film cuts away from it. It makes sense too, for the violence that’s actually important for Nakai came before and will come after that fight, and that violence is brutal, and short, and looks the exact opposite of fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.