The Hole (1998)

By / / 1990s, 1998 / Leave a Comment

From the opening, The Hole seems awfully familiar. A global pandemic, quarantines, masks, disinfections, toilet-tissue hoarding. It’s so 2020.

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The Hole (1998)

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Yet, The Hole was made 22 years ago.

If you’re expecting a moderately-paced movie, you should look elsewhere. Director Tsai Ming-liang takes his time with this one.

And it’s a curious one that you continue pondering long after it’s over.

In a nutshell, The Hole is about two residents who live one above another in a Taiwanese apartment complex, and the relationship that grows between them due to a hole in their floor/ceiling. Lee Kang-sheng plays the man upstairs, while the unnamed woman downstairs is played byYang Kuei-mei.

But that summary doesn’t really do the movie justice.

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Double Indemnity

By / / 1940s, 1944 / 2 Comments

Double Indemnity is one of those movies that I’ve seen countless times, and will happily watch again.

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Double Indemnity

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For many of us, Fred MacMurray was the easygoing father, Steve Douglas, in the long-running TV show My Three Sons. In Double Indemnity, he’s the fast-talking, unsmiling insurance salesman Walter Neff, who is easily pulled into a scheme with a woman he’s fallen for, Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), to murder her husband for the insurance money.

Visually and plot-wise, Double Indemnity is a film noir, but the dialog is straight out of hard-boiled detective fiction. It makes sense since the script was co-written by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler was one of the “Black Mask Boys,” a group of crime-fiction authors lured by editor Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw to the pulp magazine. Black Mask introduced readers to hard-boiled detective fiction with the short novel “Three Gun Terry,” by Carroll John Daly, in its May 15, 1923, issue. The main character, Terry Mack, was a smart-alecky private detective who talked tough and in the vernacular of the streets, unlike the drawing-room detectives that had been familiar to readers.

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

By / / 1980s, 1986, Re-Released Review / Leave a Comment

Originally published: June 14, 1986

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off may turn out to be the hit of the summer.

From when the alarm clock wakes Ferris up on his “day off” until after the last closing credit, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off proves to be the funniest movie since 1984’s Ghostbusters.

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

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Matthew Broderick (who you may remember from WarGames and Ladyhawke) plays Ferris Bueller, a high-school senior who appears to be majoring in cunning, persuasion, and charm rather than the usual college-prep courses. With only weeks left before graduation, Bueller decides to play sick and enjoy a holiday.

After successfully faking off his parents (explaining how to do just that in an aside to the audience), Bueller wrangles away two friends (played by Mia Sara and Alan Ruck) from their suburban Chicago school and sets off for a day in the big city. They visit the Chicago stock exchange, a Cubs baseball game, a posh restaurant, a German heritage parade, and the Chicago Museum of Art.

Lots of fun and no problems, right? Fun, yes. No problems, no.

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Five Corners

By / / 1980s, 1987 / Leave a Comment

Despite going to the cinema two, sometimes three, times a week in the 1980s, I have no recollection of Five Corners.

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Five Corners

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The 1987 film, which stars Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, John Turturro, and Todd Graff, spans roughly two days around a few blocks in the Bronx in 1964.

It’s a curious film. Directed by Tony Bill, Five Corners is set in a stylized New York populated by quirky, yet stereotypical, characters. It’s humorous one minute and dark the next — as well as darkly humorous at times.

Turturro is particularly outstanding as the sociopathic Heinz, who’s just gotten out of prison for the attempted rape of Linda (Foster) and returned to the neighborhood still obsessed with her. He’s backed by solid performances by Foster, Graff (who plays her boyfriend, Jamie), and Robbins (her pacifist protector, Harry).

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Charade (1963)

By / / 1960s, 1963 / Leave a Comment

Charade is the perfect movie for a relaxing evening. Stir up a cocktail, settle into your comfy seat, and be swept away on a romantic adventure in Paris. And who better to join you there than Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and rubber-faced Walter Matthau.

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"Charade" (1963)

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It’s not the least bit realistic (particularly James Coburn‘s accent). But who cares?

The cast (aside from that accent) is strong; the photography is lush, both in the studio and on location in Paris; and the story moves along briskly, with just enough mystery to keep you guessing.

I know it sounds cliche, but I’ll say it anyway: They don’t make movies like this anymore.

Just before watching Charade, I had finished up what you might consider a present-day equivalent: Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. But Bodyguard (like its shorter-named predecessor) is violent, vulgar, and vastly over-the-top, with action from start to finish.

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Shoot the Piano Player

By / / 1960, 1960s / Leave a Comment

French New Wave films are an area that I’ve woefully overlooked.

While I’ve seen a handful — La Jetée, Bob le Flambeur, Alphaville, and (thanks to film club) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — I haven’t seen the essential movies.

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Shoot the Piano Player

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(Curiously, one list of New Wave films included François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the movie, but don’t consider it New Wave.)

So much has been written about the New Wave and Shoot the Piano Player that it doesn’t make sense to rehash things. But a few thoughts came to mind while watching the movie and an accompanying interview with Truffaut from 1965.

During the chase at the end of the movie, one of the gangsters, Momo (played by Claude Mansard), twirls his pistol before firing a fatal shot. It’s incongruous with the seriousness of the scene.

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Cobra

By / / 1980s, 1986 / Leave a Comment

Originally published: June 14, 1986

In Cobra, Sylvester Stallone stoops to a new, silly low.

It was bad enough having a semi-coherent Rambo roaming the screens, but now we’ve got Marlon Cobretti, a.k.a. “Cobra,” who speaks even less and when he does it’s just stupid

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Cobra

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Example: In the first sequence of the film, Cobra confronts a crazed gunman who threatens to blow up a supermarket, along with its shoppers. Cobra responds, “Go ahead. I don’t shop here,” in his best deadpan, growling voice. Then rumbles, “You’re a disease, and I’m the cure.”

Fine.

If that’s not enough. Cobra’s out to wipe off the map a legion of axe-clanking slashers who want to create their own society. Conveniently, Cobra’s police bosses won’t believe the legion exists, and Cobra doesn’t have the smarts to prove it exists without slaughtering the whole gang and destroying a large part of a small town in doing so.

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Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell

By / / 1970s, 1972 / Leave a Comment

My pick for this week’s Criterion Channel movie club was a no-budget short, Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell, from 1972.

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Zorgon: The H-Bomb Beast From Hell

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Why a short? After everyone has had a movie pick, our Friday night film club has a short-film festival, as it were. Before starting a new cycle of picks, we have an interstitial week where everyone suggests a short film, typically no longer than 15 minutes.

The silent Zorgon runs about 9 minutes, so it gets right to the action. Someone — or some thing — is killing people in a Southern California valley. When the police aren’t acting quickly enough, neighbors band together to find the killer. A la Scooby-Doo, the villain is a throwback humanoid with legs that awkwardly split into feet and tentacles.

According to IMDB, the movie was a class project for director Kevin Fernan, who also played one of Zorgon’s first victims. (It also appears that this was his only film production.)

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Across 110th Street

By / / 1970s, 1972 / Leave a Comment

Say “New York City in the 1970s,” and I immediately think of the gritty, blighted city that was the backdrop for movies such as The French Connection, Serpico, Report to the Commissioner, The Seven-Ups, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

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Across 110th Street

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As a teenager in a mid-size city in the South at the time, that New York had a certain appeal. It was familiar, yet very different. Bustling, lively, multicultural.

I had a chance to pinch-hit and pick this week’s movie for film club. Shaft (1971) had been on my short list several weeks ago, but it left the Criterion Channel at the end of March.

Looking for something similar, I came across the trailer for Across 110th Street. It had the vibe I was looking for, plus it starred Yaphet Kotto.

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Blue Velvet

By / / 1980s, 1986 / Leave a Comment

In David Lynch‘s eye, normalcy is a thin veneer on reality. A smiling firefighter waving from the side of a red firetruck. The green yard between the white picket fence and the middle-America house in a quiet neighborhood.

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Blue Velvet

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Move the camera in closer to that little crack in the veneer — closer and closer still — and you see the dark rot of reality, such as early in Blue Velvet when Mr. Beaumont (Jack Harvey) has a seizure and falls to the ground as he’s watering the lawn. While the dog snaps at the stream of water shooting from the hose in Mr. Beaumont’s hand, Lynch’s camera looks to the right and moves toward the lawn, then closer to the blades of grass, then between them to the earth that teems with loudly munching beetles.

I saw Blue Velvet — this week’s club pick — when it first came out 35 years ago, and haven’t rewatched it in its entirety until now. I remembered the premise and a few key scenes, so it was almost like watching it for the first time.

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