Drama

Woman in the Dunes

By / / 1960s, 1964 / Leave a Comment

Watching this week’s movie pick leaves you feeling as if you need a shower to wash off all the gritty sand and the mundane existence clinging to every pore of your sweaty body.

Now Showing

Woman in the Dunes

Where to watch: Just Watch

Woman in the Dunes keeps you scrambling to understand what’s going on.

For the first 30 minutes or so, I thought director Hiroshi Teshigahara‘s Woman in the Dunes involved a Town With a Dark Secret. I expected something along the lines of The Wicker Man or Get Out. It was more than that.

School teacher Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada) goes to the dunes in search of a new species of beetle, hoping to make a name for himself in the field of entomology. However, after missing the last bus home, he accepts an offer from villagers to stay the night at the home of a woman (Kyôko Kishida) at the bottom of a sand pit. The next morning, he discovers that he’s been trapped and is expected to shovel sand in exchange for rations.

Woman in the DunesPlease click to continue reading…

Shanghai Express

By / / 1930s, 1932 / Leave a Comment

Now Showing

Shanghai Express

Where to watch: Just Watch

If there was ever a “star vehicle,” Shanghai Express is it.

Marlene Dietrich is the centerpiece of this movie. And director Josef von Sternberg makes it clear from her first veiled appearance to the final embrace.

Dietrich, as well as her co-star, bulldog-faced Clive Brook, deliver their lines rather stoically; her expression and screen presence is more important and tells more of the story than the tone of either of their voices. Her looks speak volumes.

Shanghai Express is a road-trip story. While Dietrich is the draw, there’s still an interesting story going on as the train travels through civil-war-divided China.

Shanghai ExpressPlease click to continue reading…

The Tarnished Angels

By / / 1950s, 1957 / Leave a Comment

It was my turn to pick the week’s movie, and it was harder than expected.

Now Showing

The Tarnished Angels

Where to watch: Just Watch

I had a few in mind — a 45-minute Florida documentary, a three-hour Russian science-fiction film, the first in a series of Japanese samurai pictures — but none seemed right this week.

The Criterion Channel had a relatively new collection of four movies by director Douglas Sirk that looked interesting. The Tarnished Angels, in particular, caught my attention.

The Tarnished Angels was based on one of William Faulkner‘s lesser-known novels, Pylon. Faulkner’s novel was well-reviewed by The New York Times, but not well remembered by most of us.

As expected, the movie takes liberties adapting the 1935 novel to the screen. In the novel, racing pilot Roger Shumann, parachute jumper Jack Holmes, and Schumann’s wife, Laverne, are a love triangle, with the father of Laverne’s son uncertain. Mechanic Jiggs plays a pivotal role but isn’t involved romantically with Laverne. And there’s the unnamed reporter, described by Faulkner as six feet tall and 95 pounds.

The Tarnished AngelsPlease click to continue reading…

Dogtooth

By / / 2000s, 2009 / 1 Comment

Inscrutable was the first word that came to mind after watching Dogtooth. As the closing credits rolled, I sat there wondering what I had just witnessed, similar to the first time I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

Now Showing

Dogtooth

Where to watch: Just Watch

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ conundrum of a film is a hard one to pin down.

Dogtooth poses a lot of questions and answers almost none. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou leave it up to you to parse everything you’ve watched and decide what it all means.

Why are the parents keeping their almost-grown children isolated — essentially captive — from the world beyond their small rural compound? Why are they teaching them alternative meanings to words of things outside their compound (e.g., sea: a leather armchair with wooden arms; motorway: a very strong wind; excursion: a very resistant metal used to construct floors)? Why is the son allowed conjugal visits, but the daughters aren’t?

Your list of questions grows and grows.

DogtoothPlease click to continue reading…

Clara Sola

By / / 2020s, 2021 / Leave a Comment

Costa Rican/Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén tweaks the coming-of-age genre in her feature film debut, Clara Sola.

Now Showing

Clara Sola

Where to watch: Just Watch

Unlike in most such movies, Clara (played by Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is older, a 40-something-year-old woman from a small Costa Rican village. She’s different, mysteriously different.

Her mother (Flor María Vargas Chavez) has overly sheltered Clara because of her severely curved spine, but also because of Clara’s ability — thanks to a vision of the Virgin Mary — to heal others, though apparently not herself.

Clara’s monotonous, lonely life is thrown into turmoil when a young man, Santiago (Daniel Castañeda Rincón), arrives to take care of her horse. Santiago is quickly attracted to Clara’s 14-year-old niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza), which fires Clara’s repressed sexuality.

Clara SolaPlease click to continue reading…

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

By / / 1940s, 1943 / Leave a Comment

Movie-going friends often hear me complain about how so many movies these days run close to three hours. I think it’s to justify the increasing price of tickets.

Now Showing

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Where to watch: Just Watch

Avatar: The Way of Water and superhero movies, I’m thinking of you.

Ninety minutes to two hours is the sweet spot. It keeps the storytelling taut but leaves time to delve into character and background.

That said, there are certainly movies that can break that notion without any padding or filler. We’ve watched several in our film club: Red Beard and Andrei Rublev jump to mind right off.

Add to those The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, this week’s pick.

Without going into a full-blown review, I just want to touch on a few thoughts that came to mind after watching the movie.

The Life and Death of Colonel BlimpPlease click to continue reading…

Chameleon Street

By / / 1980s, 1989 / Leave a Comment

This week’s pick for our Criterion film club was Chameleon Street, a 1989 independent film about an imposter who poses as a reporter, a doctor, and a lawyer, among other roles.

Now Showing

Chameleon Street

Where to watch: Just Watch

I thought this would be a film like Catch Me If You Can, the 2002 film about con artist Frank Abagnale Jr., or similar films. But that was completely wrong.

Wendell B. Harris Jr. wrote, directed, and starred in Chameleon Street, his first — and as of now his only — feature film. It’s an impressive debut. But everyone in the club was surprised that Harris hadn’t been able to turn it into a thriving film career, either as an actor, voice actor, or filmmaker.

The film is based on real-life con artist William Douglas Street Jr., with a bit of Erik Dupin mixed in. It’s so much more than just a con artist film.

Chameleon StreetPlease click to continue reading…

Blue Collar

By / / 1970s, 1978 / Leave a Comment

Sorry not to have posted the past couple of weeks. Things have been crazy. I missed the movie (Mississippi Masala) and film club two weeks ago. I watched last week’s pick (Hedwig and the Angry Inch — which was terrific, btw), but just didn’t have time to do much thinking about it or posting on it.

Now Showing

Blue Collar

Where to watch: Just Watch

Things haven’t slowed down this week (maybe just the opposite). So I thought I would be brief about this week’s movie, Blue Collar.

I thought that I saw it when it came out in 1978. While elements were familiar, I can’t say that was the case.

Blue Collar stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto. If you expect this to be a comedy because of Pryor, think again. The casting signals the film’s mix of humor, drama, and violence.

Director Paul Schrader‘s film — three autoworker buddies, put upon by their bosses and taken advantage of by their union officials, break into the union’s safe where they find just a handful of cash, but a ledger detailing union corruption — is humorous at times, rough at times, and ultimately bleak. The trio tries to stick it to the man but ends up stuck by the system instead.

Thematically, Blue Collar has many similarities to film noir: It’s gritty, its characters are marginalized, and it ends in hopelessness.

Blue Collar is a bit uneven and unpolished, but still makes its point.

Bernie

By / / 2010s, 2011 / Leave a Comment

Bernie didn’t ring a bell when I heard it was this week’s pick for film club, but after looking it up, I recognized the poster for this 2011 movie.

Now Showing

Bernie

Where to watch: Just Watch

I assume that after the previous year’s abysmal Gulliver’s Travels, I immediately disregarded Bernie when I saw that it starred Jack Black. I should have paid attention to the other two headliners in the cast (Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey) and to the director (Richard Linklater).

Black could easily have overplayed real-life mortician Bernie Tiede, but his restraint endears you to the character, even after he’s shot wealthy widow Margie Nugent (MacLaine) and hidden her body in a Deepfreeze. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, yet has touches of humor (such as when Black cheerfully — maybe a bit too cheerfully — sings “Love Lifted Me” as he drives along as the opening credits roll).

MacLaine is equally restrained, but maybe too much, as the hard-hearted Margie, who slowly grows fond of Bernie until she becomes overly possessive of him and his time.

BerniePlease click to continue reading…

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.

Now Showing

Double Indemnity

Where to watch: Just Watch

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.

Double IndemnityPlease click to continue reading…