07/30/08
Woman is a Woman, A (1961)
Jean-Luc Godard
A woman (Anna Karina) decides she wants to have a baby but when her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses she decides to turn to his best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). It's no secret that I've had a love/hate relationship with Godard and this one here was somewhere in the middle. I thought the opening forty-five minutes, as strange and surreal as they were, were entertaining and the weird nature of the movie kept me going but then the movie just hit a wall with me and was never able to recover. What I liked about the opening half was Godard's (apparent) spoof of Hollywood melodramas as our beloved stripper goes on and on about stupid topics that, in a melodrama, would take thirty-minutes to go through and would end up with a big finale with overdramatic tensions building up and eventually exploding. The way Godard handles this stuff through the music, the surreal scenes and the constantly moving camera was very well done and it was working on me. I'm really not sure what happened after that but there's a scene inside the strip club where the boyfriend and his friend are sitting with a couple women and the woman is with another man. Once again we get a very good scene with the camera floating back and forth between the parties but right after this the movie just fell apart. I guess I finally got tired of its cuteness and self-indulgent ways. I really had a hard time caring or following the woman and her choices. I thought the three leads all gave very good performances but that didn't save the movie for me.
Day in the Country, A (1936)
Jean Renoir
Incredibly touching and extremely beautiful film from the French master Renoir. A Parisian father takes his wife, mother-in-law, daughter and future son in law on a trip to the country where they plan to have a picnic. While the men fish two gentlemen with not-so-innocent plans take the women on a canoe ride. I've been looking to see this film for quite sometime even though the reviews I've read have been rather mixed. I personally found this film to be incredibly beautiful and I'd probably put it as the greatest French film I've seen. The peacefulness of the country that Renoir brings to the screen is quite breathtaking and he really does capture the freeness of being out in the middle of no where surrounding by silence. I thought all of the characters were very well written and the dialogue suited each of them perfectly. A lot of times all the characters sound the same but I was very please to see how different each of them were. The film runs a very short 40-minutes but Renoir throws everything into the picture. This includes terrific laughs and some very heartfelt moments towards the end of the movie. The film also features some very beautiful cinematography including a terrific sequence near the end where the river is shown with rain drops hitting it. Another great sequence comes early on when the two men are inside the diner and push the window open to reveal what's outside. This scene works even better thanks in large part to the terrific score by Joseph Kosma. All of the performances are great but Sylvia Bataille is the real standout as the daughter who is going to encounter and lose love over the span of a short evening. Jacques Borel is also worth mentioning as the womanizer who adds a lot of the comedy to the film. I've heard various stories about the short running time. It seems Renoir never go to finish the film but to me the running time is perfect and it's amazing what the director does capture and show in the short time.
Private Collections (1979)
Just Jaeckin, Shuji Terayama, Walterian Borowczyk
Three erotic film directors come together to make an anthology and like most films of this type the end results are rather mixed. Jaeckin's "Island of the Sirens" borrows heavily from the Robinson Cursoe story and has a sailor fall off his boat and wash up on what he thinks is a deserted island. Within days he comes across a beautiful woman (Laura Gemser) and her sisters. At first it's all pleasure with non-stop sex and food but then the sisters change form. Terayama's "The Glass Labyrinth" has a young man searching for a missing part of his childhood, which centered an a poem his mother told him about a nymph who lost her mind while waiting for her true love. Borowczyk's tale centers on a lonely man who walks into a brothel and offers a woman twice her salary if she's stay the night with him so that he can forget his loneliness. All three stories contain high and lows but in the end the film is just too uneven to really work. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to pick the best one then I'd go with the first story since it does have a little charm, non-stop nudity and a rather funny ending, which seems to have been influenced by Joe D'Amato. Not to mention we get Gemser and a very nice and erotic scene by a waterfall. The second story is perhaps the weakest because it tries so much in its running time and the final project just becomes confusing and really doesn't make too much sense. Borowczyk's story comes last and that's probably a good thing because I think a lot of people will enjoy it the least. There really isn't too much nudity and the film is overly talky with some no-so-good dialogue. There's a twist in the film but I'm sure most will pick up on it rather early. The cinematography in this episode really sticks out as does the handsome costume design.
Soufrière, La (1977)
Werner Herzog
German documentary has Herzog taking his film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that a volcano is about to erupt and people there aren't wanting to leave even though it might cost them their lives. To be more point on, the entire town has evacuated except for three people who all believe that the volcano is God's will and that when it's their time to go they shouldn't fight it. This is yet another great documentary from the master director. Running just under 30-minutes the film gives us all sorts of great shots of the volcano firing up but in the end, for reason's scientist don't understand, the thing never went off. Herzog narrated the action and at one point he describes the empty and silent city as something you'd see out of a science fiction movie. That's a good way to describe the film because it really does look like something you'd see in a science movie just because of the beauty of the island that is now empty due to a looming threat. We also get a back story of the same volcano erupting in 1903 where 30,000 people were killed. There was only one survivor and how he managed to live is something I won't spoil.
07/31/08
Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, The (1973)
Carlos Aured
Spanish giallo has Paul Naschy playing an ex-con who gets out of prison and winds up in a small town looking for work. He finds work at the house of three sisters; one disfigured, one crippled and the other a slut. Soon a serial killer hits town killing blonde women with blue eyes. I saw this film years ago under the American title
House of Psychotic Women and really hated it but I gave it another shot since I've become more familiar with Naschy's work. Time did very little to help this thing because it falls into the territory of various other Naschy films in the fact that it doesn't deliver. Being a giallo you expect a lot of style, gory kills and a good mystery but none of those aspects are found here. The movie is half way over before we see the first kill and it's poorly done with bad special effects. There isn't any style to speak of and in reality the movie looks extremely cheap and dull. As for the mystery, you should be able to spot the killers very early on in the picture. For the majority of the running time we have lover boy Naschy trying to get in the pants of two of the sisters as well as a nurse who shows up. We get constant dialogue scenes with some of the funniest lines I've ever heard in this type of film. The one good thing in the film is Naschy who actually delivers a nice performance. None of the violence in the film gets too gory with the exception of one scene where a live pig is slaughtered on camera. As is to be expected, there's a twist at the end but it comes off very forced, faked and safe.
Comizi d'amore (1965)
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini travels around Italy throwing a mic into various ranges of people asking frank and honest questions about sexuality. Various topics ranging from homosexuality, prostitutes, divorce, sexual freedom and even asking kids where babies come from. The type of people range from college students to the rich and poor and to women who normally can't speak openly. I'm sure this film was more of a sensation when originally released but I think it holds up quite well today for several reasons. For one, it's interesting to look back over forty-years ago and see how young people at the times thought about sex but also how the older people back then looked back on the moral and religious rules of their youth. The film also holds up well today because things really haven't changed too much whenever you really break down the groups of people like Pasolini did. I'm not sure is there was a point to this documentary as it seems like the director simply wanted to know what the country felt on certain issues. There's a lot of humor to be found in the film but most of this comes from the answers the children give about where babies come from. The most interesting thing, knowing that the director was gay, is him asking people about homosexuality and the answers they give him. Most people reply with disgust and I kept wondering if the director would crack and say something but he never does. I think the film goes on a bit too long but it's an interesting look at sexuality on moral and religious aspects.
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
Ishiro Honda
A princess is flying into Japan when something hits her plane making it blow up right in the air. A little time later her ghost is spotted warning the good people of Japan that the Earth is about to be destroyed. She's right as the three headed title character comes along to do damage but thankfully Mothra, Godzilla and Rodan put their troubles behind and team up. You know, I'm really not sure what the appeal of these movies are just I guess people get a kick out of them just like I get a kick out of Ed Wood films. The part that bugged me the most about this film is that once again we have to sit through a hour worth of stupidity to get to any of the real monster action. We have to sit through incredibly silly scenes with this ghost telling us what's wrong with the world, we have to watch scientists try and figure out what's going on and then we have to sit around and wait for it all to take place. The special effects are a rather mixed bag. The scene where the plane explodes is among the worst thing I've ever seen in any movie as the effect comes off so fake looking. The men in the suits are somewhat better but that's not saying too much. The effects here are good enough to carry the film and the final battle is pretty good if too short. The cinematography is good as is the music score but both are usually ruined with incredibly bad extras screaming their heads off. There are some funny scenes with the highlight being one where Rodan and Godzilla are fighting because they don't want to save the people and Mothra has to try and calm them down. The site of Rodan taking rocks off the head were pretty funny as well.
