Category Archives: Movies

First Noir of the Year: The Killers

First Noir of the Year: The Killers

There are so many lauded classic noirs that I haven’t yet seen and on Sunday evening one more was scratched off the list with The Killers.

Directed by Robert Siodmak and debuting Burt Lancaster The Killers is adapted from a short story by Ernest Hemingway though as is par for the industry the screenplay differs significantly from the source material. With additional stars Edmund O’Brien and Ava Gardner, The Killers is a taunt exploration of a man’s life following his violent murder. With its fragmented flashback construction, the film is very nearly a noir Citizen Kane but with a more definitive conclusion.

The film opens with a pair of hired killers, including a wonderfully menacing performance by William Conrad, arriving in the early morning hours into the town of Brentwood New Jersey.  Locating their target, the ‘Swede,’ they gun him down in his boarding house room and though warned of the assassins’ approach Swede neither flees nor fights for his life but seemingly accepts his murder as punishment. The rest of the film follows Insurance investigator Reardon (O’Brien) as he tries to discover the murdered man real identity and the reason for his killing. An investigation that reopens old crimes and romances prompting fresh threats.

Released in 1946 The Killers is a wonderful example of film noirwith its morally ambiguous central character played by then unknown Burt Lancaster, its dark moody cinematography, and its sharp punchy dialog the films deftly explores the underside of American life and how closely intertwined the criminal world was with the rest of society. In addition to launching Lancaster’s career the film also propelled Gardner from relative obscurity to star with her compelling and captivating performance as Kitty, the obsessive interest of both the Swede and one of the city’s gangland bosses.

Nominated for a slew of Academy awards in 1947 including best Director, Editing, Screenplay, The Killers has been included in the National Film registry.

The Killers is available for rent via VOD and is currently streaming for free on the Roku channel Film Movie Classics.

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First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

It is said that every movie is made three times, first when it is written as a script, second when it is photographed, and third when it is edited. In principle the stages allow for revisions the bring the final film closed to the ideal that had propelled the project but often diverging voices, power struggles, and a lack of focus allows the stages to muddy the waters and create chaos instead of coherence. This appears the be the case with Wonder Woman 84.

Except for a prolog set in the indeterminate time when Diana was a child, and really this sequence would have been better and easier to suspend disbelief for had they portrayed her as a young teen instead, the film takes place 66 years after the close of the previous entry in the franchise. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) lives as a historical expert at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. still mourning the loss of her love Steve Trevor in 1918. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva a cliche version of a woman overlooked and ignored by the world while Pedro Pascal plays Max Lord the central villain of the piece conman and television personality the propels what passes as the central plot of the movie.

Drowning itself in the period’s clothing and style, Wonder Woman 84 is a mess. Elaborate and expensive sequences take place that have no function in furthering the plot or developing the characters. No thought is present for the actual consequences of the choices the writers made when they crafted the script. The special effects suffer from the issue that the digital characters seem to lack weight and float when they should not and perhaps worse of all the plot suffers from that most horrid comic book trope Powers ex machina, with Wonder Woman developing sudden abilities that exist solely to resolve an immediate plot complication and are then discarded.

I found it impossible to surrender myself to the story and was constantly reminded the artifice with repeated errors of the type. Wonder Woman I found to be charming and fun though far from perfect and its sequel, though far from the dour, depressing, Objectivist works of the Snyder Batman and Superman films, I cannot recommend at all.

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Season’s Review: Rare Exports

Season’s Review: Rare Exports

There are loads of traditional Christmas films that people watch each year, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Die Hard to name just a few but in our household one of the movies on the season’s playlist is the charming Finnish Horror/Comedy Rare Exports.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Rare Exports is a Christmas film from which Christmas cannot be removed without destroying the story and yet the film in absolutely not about the story or moral of Christmas in either the religious or secular senses. There is no learning to love your fellow man, no hearts grow three sizes larger, no understanding of the value of your life and all that it touches but rather to the simple tale of a young boy who discovers that origins of the winter holiday is much darker, much more fearsome, than the fairytale he had been told and that the Americans digging in the mountain are about to awaken ancient spirits that will descend upon the naughty.

Set in an isolated Sami border town in the frozen reaches of Lapland Rare Exports follows Pietari a young boy in the days before Christmas. Explosive excavations atop the nearby mountain of Korvatunturi has upset the local ecology and the reindeer herd that the Sami rely upon for their income is devastated threatening everyone’s livelihood including Pietari’s father Rauno. When Rauno’s illegal wolf pit captures something else the films turns from family dram to horror and the discovery of something monstrous in Mt. Joulupukki threatens more than just income.

Rare Exports is that exceptional film able to blend comedy, drama, and horror seamlessly into one story. Some have found the film to have jarring tonal shifts but that is not my experience. Each development of the story leads organically into the next as the characters are drawn into more dire and desperate actions trying to save their town and themselves. With gorgeous cinematography by Mika Orasmaa the film looks stunning and the now dated CGI effects match the tone and style of the photography perfectly. Director Jalmari Helander manages to make his budget of 1.8 million Euros look like a much more substantial production.  The bulk of the film is in Finnish with subtitles that as is common with Finnish production anytime characters of different nationalities are speaking English is the default tongue spoken.

I heartily recommend Rare Exports which is currently streaming on Shudder and Hulu.

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Thinking About Stakes

When crating fiction a common bit of advice to ‘raise the stakes.’ This is a suggestion of magnify the penalty for failure for the protagonist making the eventual success or failure that much more impactful for the reader or audience. However, this is usually or at least often interpreted as threaten more lives, make the potential explosions larger, the potential death toll higher but that is too simplistic a way to think about stakes.

In franchise material there is what I call the ‘Bond Effect’ where each adventure has to have more on the line than the previous adventure. Very quickly the writers find themselves in the situation where Bond has to save the entire world, from nuclear annihilation, a murderous madman with a secret orbiting space station of death, what have you, and once he has saved the world saving it again has less entertainment value We know there is never going to be a Bond film where the world dies, not even the 70s got that bleak so the combination of an assured outcome and devalued victory makes each world save less thrilling until they become boring. For this effect magnified beyond look to the UK program Doctor Who where the stakes have been repeatedly raised to the entire universe sometimes destroying and recreating the universe as their climatic conclusions.

What all this misses is that stakes are most potent when we are emotionally invested in them. Setting aside the ‘save the world or universe’ trope the protagonist is they fail should suffer deep emotional coast and or loss. This is a lesson well learned in dramatic fiction and too often not in genre stories. Marvel studios did this particularly well in a couple of films, notably Captain America: The Winter Soldier where after saving the world we got to the real stakes for Steve Rogers, saving his friend Bucky Barnes from Hydra’s mind control and Captain America: Civil War where the world was never in danger but rather at its heart it is the friendship between Steve and Tony Stark that is in danger and in that story ultimately lost. The cost of failure is the emotional damage to the characters, these are very high stakes that are intimately personal and emotionally compelling for the audience.

It’s easy to craft plots with larger and larger death star threatening planets and entire star systems it is harder but more satisfying into dive deep into character and find the thing that matters most to them as a person and make us the readers and the audience share in the terror of losing that thing. Then you will have stakes that really matter.

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A Substandard Giallo: The Corruption of Chris Miller

The streaming services Shudder added a number of Giallos to their line-up in recent weeks and my sweetie-wife and I put several on the queue for watching. This week it was 1973’s The Corruption of Chris Miller starring Jean Seberg.

Two women, Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg) and her stepdaughter Chris, live in an isolated Spanish estate when a passing vagrant who had slept in their barn, and I’m not making this up, named Barney, is taken in as a handyman and live-in lover for Ruth. Chris suffers from some undefined terror that when it rains causes her to turn violent stabbing everything in sight. Halfway through the film’s running time we are told that there are unsolved vicious murders in a 100-kilometer radius around the village and Ruth and Chris apparently leap to the conclusion that it’s likely Barney that is the culprit.

The Corruption of Chris Miller is meant to be a taunt thriller filled with mystery and dread, but it fails on all fronts. The flashback sequences leading up to Chris’ violent outburst make clear why she reacts the way she does, the languid pace builds no tension and the discord between Ruth and Chris is never fully explained of explored. Frankly by the end of the film I could not tell you how Chris was ‘corrupted’ as she and Ruth both exit the story pretty much the same characters as they entered.

While many giallos fail logic tests they usually possess a strong sense of style to carry mood and atmosphere but this fails there as well and I cannot recommend it anyone.

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Quick Hit: A New Podcast Discovery

I discovered a new podcast a week or so ago Cult 45 is a podcast devoted to cult and exploitation cinema. The name is a play on name of the malt liquor Colt 45 which of course is a play on a firearm so just from its title the podcast is meta.

The podcast is hosted by and comments on from an American black perspective and it is highly entertaining. So far, I have listened to episodes about the films The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Re-Animator, and a double episode on The Wicker Man commenting on both version of the movie. (And righteously they revere the original and mock the re-make.)

Here is their episode on the classic horror film that launched a franchise Night of the Living Dead.

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Revisiting: Planet of the Vampires

Italian Director and Cinematographer Mario Bava, best known for giallofilms such as Blood and Black Lace and horror movies like Black Sunday, in 1965 released the stylish is somewhat misnamed science-fiction horror film Planet of the Vampires.

A pair of spaceships, the Argos and the Galliott arrive at the planet Aura investigating signals that may signify intelligent life. When the ships, after being unable to observe the plant’s surface due to a constant impenetrable could layer, attempt to land they are subjected to a mysterious increased in gravity that renders all of the crew except for the Argos’ commander Mark (Barry Sullivan) unconscious. As quickly as it arrived the mysterious forces dissipates the Argos lands perfectly but when the crew awake, they are overtaken by violent impulses and nearly kill each other. With their wits gathered the Commander must locate and rescue the Galliott and discover the terrifying secret of planet Aura before everyone is killed by the planet’s mysterious force.

I first saw Planet of the Vampires, and there are no traditional vampires anywhere in the story, when I was a young teenager. A late night ‘creature feature’ broadcast the film, particularly its ending, stayed with me from the 70s through the 2000s when I obtained first a DVD and then later a Blu-ray release. While the characters are threadbare serving plot rather than dramatic functions the film is immensely stylish and unforgettable in its beautiful cinematography. All the more impressive when it’s known that the entire budget was less than that of two episodes the original Star Trek series. There are very few optical effects in the film with most of the ‘special effects’ captured in-camera and yet quite credible and lovely. Set design, though impractical for an actual starship, is modern, for the mid-60s, and immersive.

It’s difficult to accurately judge the acting of the movie. Planet of the Vampires was produced in the International Style used by many Italian productions of the period where the multinational cast all delivered their lines in their native languages, often without know what the other characters were actually saying, and then the rest of the cast would be dubbed into various language for other markets.

Based on an Italian SF short story One night of 21 hours the movie’s ending, which I will not spoil here, is one of the scenes that managed to stay stuck in my memory over the decades. Even during the years when the film’s title had faded from recall the ending remained.

This film is not to everyone’s taste, you must be able to accept style over plausibility, but if you do you will be rewarded.

Planet of the Vampires is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Documentary Review: Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist

This doc is exactly what it says on the tin, it is an hour and forty minutes of director William Friedkin speaking on The Exorcist the 1973 film he directed that terrified a nation and a world.

With supplemental footage from the movie and production documentarian Alexandre Philippe constructs an intimate discussion by Friedkin about one of his most well-known and iconic films. Friedkin’s voice, with the exception of one off-screen question from Phillippe, guides us through not only some of the production of The Exorcist including casting that was eventually discarded after Jason Miller convinced Friedkin to hire him as Father Karras, but also explores the artistic and musical influences that has motivated his long and controversial career.

Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist is an interesting, moving, and personal voyage into the artistic process. For people fascinated by art and artists and who consume Blu-ray bonus material by the hour this documentary currently streaming on Shudder is a can’t miss.

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Returning to Bond: Goldeneye

A few years ago I started re-watching, and in some cases watching for the first time, all of the canonical Bond Movies starting with Dr. No. This was done via the Netflix DVD in the mail program which allowed access to the bonus materials on the Blu-rays. When I canceled my DVD in the mail account the Bond re-watch fell by the wayside.

Last night my sweetie-wife, who had participated and enjoyed the series suggested we continue, and we streamed the next one from where we had left off queueing up Goldeneye, the debut of Pierce Brosnan as Bond.

After disappointing box office returns for the two previous films in the franchise which had attempted a grittier and darker tone for the series follow the lighted hearted turned brought by Roger Moore the producers opted to U-turn and bring a level of levity back to the films.

Dealing with a collapsed, corrupt, and capitalistic Russia Goldeneye has Bond chasing down a Soviet-era EMP weapon subverted by Russian and British traitors. The film boasts the usual array of gadgets and gals, plenty of action that is quite over the top, and serious attempts to be relevant with computers in a slightly pre-Internet period. I literally did laugh when the ‘good Bond girl,’ playing the part of someone about to spend serious coin o desktop computers listed the 500-megabyte hard drives and 14400 modems as requirements,

In the film Bond at one point steals a Russian tank and uses it in a chase which reminded me of the deranged man who the same year as this movie’s release stole a tank here in San Diego causing serious damage but luckily, other than himself, no loss of life.

Overall I found Goldeneye a tad too comical, too aware of the camera and still prefer the Current series, with all it faults, to the comedic Bonds.

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Streaming Review: Blood Vessel (2019)

With a cast as inauthentic as the movie’s painted prop gold bars Blood Vessel disappoints.

Hailing from the land down under, Blood Vessel is the story a small group that has survived the sinking of their ship during WWII and find themselves aboard a German warship, whose crew has met mysterious and gruesome deaths. An intriguing premise the film fails almost straight out of the gate. The survivors are a collection of cliched and cardboard caricatures instead of living breathing characters. At no point throughout the films 97-minute runtime does a single character present any sort of inner life, growth, or surprising turn. They are all exactly who they appeared to be when we met them floating in raft in the cold frigid waters of the North Atlantic, presumably in the winter of ’44-’45.

The lack of care or attention to detail in this film might be best typified by the scene where the greedy, brassy, and loud-mouthed character from New York discovers a cache of gold bars presumable looted by the NAZIs from their Romanian allies. Examining the gold, he lifts the bars easily even turning in the light while grasping it with just two fingers.

Had the characters been fleshed out and developed that film’s slow pace and attempts at building tension during the first half of its runtime may have worked. A derelict and deserted ship, particularly an enemy one, would make for a rich and atmospheric setting to explore characters and conflict but if you populate it with tired cliches then the lack of action becomes a drag and not a slow burn.

While watching Blood Vessel it was impossible not to think of similarly themed and flawed films such as 1980’s Death Ship. It isn’t until the third act that the monstrous cause for the carnage that befell the crew is revealed and released forcing the characters into a desperate fight for survival, but by this time it had become impossible to have any emotional stake in their escape or victory and the enjoyment comes from predicting which horror film tropes will rule the script and its ending.

I can’t but also feel that the cinematography also fails the film. While the sequences are well shot and atmospherically lit, there is something in the crispness of the images that works against the story’s period setting.

While some may enjoy the basic monster fight nature of the film, particularly its final act and resolution, I cannot recommend Blood Vessel as a movie worth your time.

Blood Vessel is currently streaming exclusively on Shudder.

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