The Ballad of Narayama: Shōhei Imamura

I hate, hate, hate the fact that I first saw Shōhei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama on a small TV set with a rinky, faded DVD. This is such a powerful, rich, deep, remarkable film that it deserves to be seen on the big screen. The film's general thesis seems to be that the senicidic act of ubasute where elderly people were abandoned in the mountains to die when they got too old was merely a continuation of the cycle of life and death in ancient Japan. This is highlighted with repeated inserts of animals and nature in all its stages: mating, birth, death, decay. There are moments of great kindness and great cruelty--one scene where a family of food thieves gets buried alive by the other villages is one of the most harrowing things I've seen in a while. But it all seems to be a part of the grand plan of nature. Morality doesn't count here. The continuation of the community and the family unit does. I must see this film again on the big screen.

9/10

On the Run: Alfred Cheung

Alfred Cheung's On the Run was the last film shown in a 12-hour Hong Kong marathon I attended. And wow, what a downer to end on. Even though both heroes survive and the bad guys die, it was an emotional Pyrrhic victory. The film is desperately sad and even nihilistic. Filmed during a time when Hong Kong began its transition from British to China control and everyone was trying to emigrate abroad, it follows a police officer and the hitwoman hired to kill his wife fighting back against a ruthless homicide division that runs a heroin business on the side. Nowhere is the brutality more poignant than a scene where the two discover that the police officer's young daughter had been killed during a chase. Ghastly stuff, but it's a necessary look into a culture in painful transition.

7/10

Kickboxer's Tears: Da Wei Shen

As far as cheesy action movies go, Da Wei Shen's Kickboxer's Tears scratches an itch. The plot's pretty simple: a famous kickboxer gets killed in the ring, his sister (the legendary Moon Lee) decides to avenge him, challenges a number of Triad-controlled kickboxers, and ends up getting involved in a shootout in an abandoned building. The movie is touted as being part of the "Girls with Guns" sub-genre, but at most there's only a girl with a gun in a single scene. You watch this movie for Moon Lee kicking butt, but also for a skinny nerd character who hulks out in the climactic shoot-out and kills the main bad guy. Fun stuff. But the film isn't particularly interesting visually and features mediocre acting. It's entertaining, but nowhere near essential viewing.

6/10

Cheap Killers: Clarence Yiu-leung Fok

Clarence Yiu-leung Fok's Cheap Killers is the most insanely over-the-top, scuzzy, grimy, and cheesy action film about gay hitmen I've ever seen. Not that it's a big list, but it's definitely at the top. Not just that, but it's now officially one of my favorite Hong Kong movies ever. Where else could you see a hitman get anally-raped by over a dozen men, become catatonic, get nursed back to health by his "best friend," and then go on a shooting rampage against his female ex-lover who's become the head of the local triad? Where else can you see a seduction scene ripped right out of a softcore porno involving a garden hose, a bucket, and white clothing? Where else can you see somebody get harpooned through the chest yet still keep fighting? Nowhere. It also helps that the film has one of the most gloriously triumphant final frames of its decade.

8/10

Expect the Unexpected: Tat-Chi Yau

Tat-Chi Yau's Expect the Unexpected is a painfully mediocre film that's basically Friends with the Hong Kong police. It's practically a soap opera where the various cops fall in and out of love while navigating a brutal group of armed robbers. In between the twee romantic interludes we see shockingly gruesome scenes of murder and death, the most significant being a scene where the cops discover one of the gang's old hideouts: an unassuming residential apartment. When they enter, they find that they had raped and murdered the occupant: a new mother. Not just that, they had thrown her newborn infant into the washing machine and turned it onto the spin cycle. The only reason why I'll remember this film is the ending, a scene that comes out of nowhere where all the happy cops get brutally gunned down in a street shootout with the surviving gangsters. What a twist?

5/10

Fong Sai-yuk: Corey Yuen

Corey Yuen's Fong Sai-Yuk has one of the most gloriously over-the-top villain deaths in cinematic history. The government stooge trying to kill the heroes--members of the Red Flower Society, the ethnic-Chinese secret society striving to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty--gets killed himself by having an arrow stuck with a stick of lit dynamite that had been kicked towards him by a second fighter nail him in midair. It's gloriously over-the-top and ridiculous, but so is the whole film. Jet Li is at the top of his game here as the eponymous Chinese folk hero. The fight choreography is superb and there's a delightful lesbian subplot where the wife of a royal official falls in love with Li's mother while dressed in drag. The scene where Li's mother literally sweeps her off her feet and the wife looks up in rapturous awe is one of the best in the movie, a not insignificant feat considering how incredible the rest of the movie is.

8/10

Organized Crime & Triad Bureau: Kirk Wong

If there's one thing I learned from Kirk Wong's Organized Crime & Triad Bureau, it's that due process and procedure for cops is for wimps! If you've nabbed a suspect you know if part of a triad, then beat him, assault him, strip him naked and torture his genitals. Who cares? You gotta do what you gotta do! In all seriousness, as a police procedural the film is decent yet laughably disposable when compared to other procedurals of its era--the police are basically superheroes, as best shown in one scene where a hitman tries to kill a witness at a court hearing and two of the cops jump their way across the room like wuxia heroes, flipping and kicking the idiot into submission. But it is a pleasing piece of entertainment. And there are even occasional moment of beauty, like when the lead gangster and his girlfriend discover a tarp filled with rainwater while on the run from the cops. They poke holes in the bottom of the tarp and dance around in the water, laughing and smiling like we've never seen them do before.

7/10

Crazy Famous: Paul Jarrett

This piece was written and filed before the announcement of Audiences Everywhere's untimely demise. So I'm posting it here in its entirety.

Overview: A fame-seeking mental patient gets pulled into a clandestine plan to assassinate Osama Bin Laden…in 2017. Gravitas Ventures; 2017; Not Yet Rated; 78 minutes.

Smile for the Cameras: Paul Jarrett’s Crazy Famous opens with a scene of a mentally compromised young man stripping to his tighty-whities and gleefully trampolining over a fence into Camp David. It ends with a scene of the same mentally comprised young man gunning down a small army of Islamic terrorists in the woods alongside Dr. Phil in brownface. The first scene is played for laughs. The second is not. Great filmmaking can bridge the gap between outlandish tonal differences and hyper-violent absurdism. As I like to remind our readers, the Coen Brothers have spent their careers doing just that. But Crazy Famous lacks the necessary vision to make such films work. As such, Jarrett’s film stumbles about as confused and incoherent as the very mental patients it populates itself with.

This Ain’t the Salem State Hospital: At first Crazy Famous seems like an introspective character study of Bob Markus (Gregory Lay), a young man obsessed with becoming famous. Deliciously awkward scenes from his troubled youth reveal an oppressive upbringing by fame-crazed parents. His father tried to make him a sports star, his mother a child actor. He even had a disastrous stint as a competitive eater in high school. Somewhere along the way he figured out that fame and notoriety were the same thing, so he began a string of preposterous attention-grabbing stunts climaxing in the Camp David fiasco. After getting arrested, Bob’s shipped off to a mental institution where he falls in with an assorted gaggle of misfits and morons: Larry (Victor Cruz), a rage-junkie with a short temper, an eating disorder, and a laundry list of crippling neuroses like agoraphobia; “Dr. Phil” (David Neal Levin), a cheery fellow who believes he’s the eponymous television star and waddles around the psyche ward bestowing pop-psychology drivel; a suicidal young woman so inconsequential I’m not even sure she has a name who spouts off bizarre bon mots like a disaffected middle schooler going through her goth phase. (When she learns Bob’s name she replies “You’re a palindrome? Talk about karma.” Wait, what?); Mr. Smith (Richard Short), a nervous conspiracy theorist who believes the CIA is lying about Bin Laden’s death and personally knows his actual location. Spoiler alert: he’s right, he’s been institutionalized by other agents, and he organizes a break-out with the other inmates—except for the suicidal woman—so they can hunt Bin Laden down. Who of course now lives in a log cabin in…I’m gonna guess the Appalachian Mountains or the Adirondacks.

From there the film decays from character study to unfocused procession of comedic set-pieces and poorly executed action scenes. Mr Smith gets tortured by CIA agents, Larry gets a face-full of Dr. Phil penis as they try to climb into the hospital’s air ducts, the gang robs a gun store, Dr. Phil gets painted brown so he can infiltrate Bin Laden’s base, a car chase gets resolved when Mr. Smith discovers the car he’s squirreled away for his escape has a James Bond oil-slick button. These scenes don’t flow together, but even worse the more you think about them the less they make sense. If Mr. Smith wants to kill Bin Laden, why wouldn’t he tell the CIA where he actually is? Why does robbing a gun store for a small army’s worth of firearms not result in the National Guard getting called on them? And what on earth is Bin Laden doing in the Appalachian/Adirondacks? The film has little interest in these obvious questions; it’s more interested in how its characters respond to them. However—with the exception of Levin’s turn as Dr. Phil, a character who’s so obliviously stupid he’s actually enjoyable—none of the other characters are interesting enough for us to want to follow them. Bob starts the film as a fascinating, damaged human being but by the end he’s been pushed to the periphery in favor of Mission Impossible shenanigans.

Closing: The more one thinks about Crazy Famous, the more frustrated one becomes at it. What was it trying to do? Was it trying to be a commentary on America’s obsession with fame? Was it trying to be a silly road-trip movie featuring mental patients? Was it trying to be an irreverent spy thriller? Perhaps Jarrett was trying to do all these things at once. And in doing so it becomes none of them. All we’re left with is a strange, nonsensical plot and mental patient minstrelsy.

Grade: D

J. Edgar: Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar labors under the weight of something, a certain something that degrades an otherwise mediocre, unfocused film into a laughably bad one: about 5-10 pounds of prosthetics and make-up used on actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer as the elderly versions of J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. They look less like old people makeup, but a comedy sketch's idea of old people makeup. They look like Ken dolls! Anyhow! The film continues Eastwood's odd pattern of conservatively-minded films with an unmistakably liberal bent towards social issues: he sees some merit in J. Edgar's totalitarian, fear-mongering tactics, but sees the humanity in his homosexual relationship with Clyde, even beauty. But otherwise it's uneven and forgettable.

5/10

Humor Me: Sam Hoffman

Sam Hoffman's Humor Me is painfully, woefully mediocre and contrived. It's another run-of-the-mill story about a sad sack author who travels back home and rediscovers himself by rediscovering his family. The twist this time around is that the writer has to go to a fancy retirement community and gets roped into helping a trio of old biddies put on a show of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. It's a sad film that wastes the considerable talents of Jemaine Clement--even more so the talents of Elliott Gould. But it finds a way. The best scenes involve rude jokes and recited shtick, several pieces of which I plan on using myself in the future (particularly one routine involving a flower vase...). But the rest is the kind of stuff best promptly forgotten.

5/10

I, Tonya: Craig Gillespie

The first half of Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya is a Scorsese-esque drama about a scruffy young nobody trying to break into a glitzy professional world despite their impoverished upbringing. In this case, it's Tonya Harding, a working class figure skater who became one of the best skaters in the world despite her unorthodox costumes, music choices, and bellicose temperament. It even boasts a similar hyper-kinetic stylization. The second half is a Coen Brothers caper film about idiots trying (and failing) to pull off idiot schemes. A number of people found this tonal whiplash. But I for one felt it worked perfectly for the kind of story it was trying to tell, one of a take-no-prisoners innovator and screw-up who wouldn't take no for an answer.

8/10

American Sniper: Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper is fascinated with violence, but it gives mere lip service to why violence happens and what inspires men to go to war. The main character Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) joins the Navy Seals out of rage in response to the 1998 United States embassy bombings and a vague need to "protect people." That's apparently enough to make him devote himself to serving four tours in the Middle East after 9/11. We never explore why the Middle East collapsed into violence after the American occupation of Iraq. And we never see Middle Easterners as anything other but bloodthirsty savages. It's explorations of PTSD only really become apparent in the last third, and even then it seems undeveloped when compared to other military dramas about veterans. Yes, it's well-shot, well-acted, and well-directed. But it buys too much into its own gun-ho patriotism without interrogating it.

6/10

Brutal Tales of Chivalry: Kiyoshi Saeki

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/a-romantic-brutal-tales-of-chivalry/?utm_content=buffer19517&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer.

7/10

Desert Hearts: Donna Deitch

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/criterion-discovery-desert-hearts/.

7/10

The Commuter: Jaume Collet-Serra

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/film/115115/the-commuter-review-liam-neesons-latest-is-a-flashy-and-fun-ride/.

7/10

Subarnarekha: Ritwik Ghatak

After searching for LITERALLY 5-6 years, I've finally found a copy of Ritwik Ghatak's SUBARNAREKHA (1965). This film has the austere beauty and pictorial tranquility of Satyajit Ray as well as an earnest emotionalism that seems shocking even today.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) January 9, 2018

I mean, I wish this copy didn't have WHITE SUBTITLES that disappeared into the characters' costumes and the foreground, but beggars can't be choosers.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) January 9, 2018

ANYHOW

One of my favorite details in this film is the pervasive knowledge among its cast that the rest of the world is moving into the future while post-colonial India struggles to revive itself: Germans are reinventing engineering, Soviets are putting men in space, etc, etc.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) January 9, 2018

7/10

Proud Mary: Babak Najafi

Whatever studio executive who wanted to kill Babak Najafi's Proud Mary by burying its release date in January, refusing to let critics see it in advance, and giving it a limited release is a stupid idiot who hates money. Not because it's good. In truth, it's aggressively mediocre: a tired plot, tired action choreography, otherwise great actors giving poorly directed performances. But the audience I saw it with loved it. People were cheering in their seats--shout-out to the one guy who screamed "I love you Mary!" to rapturous cheers. People laughed during the funny scenes, gasped during the twists, and applauded during the action scenes. This film is a bona fide crowd-pleaser. Their loss, I guess.

6/10

Archangel: Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin's films are always a hallucination of films and cinematic techniques past, and Archangel is no exception. The film is an odd, mesmeric tale of amnesia, lost identity, and memory set against the Bolshevik Uprising of 1919. Strange, wonderful images abound: rabbits falling into war trenches, a severed leg being passed around a peasant family, a man strangling enemy Bolsheviks with his own intestines. But the film is hard to watch, mostly because it insists so much on its labyrinthine plot which you need a spreadsheet to follow and understand. As a purely aesthetic and ecstatic experience, it's wonderful. But it fails everything else it tries to do. But I'd be willing to give this film a second shot in a movie theater. Who knows? That might be the only proper way to appreciate it.

7/10

Spider Baby: Jack Hill

I saw Jack Hill's Spider Baby at a midnight showing at the Nitehawk Cinema. And honestly? It was an amazing decision. Spider Baby is not a good film, but it is a self-consciously silly and trashy one. The film involves two insane teenagers being taken care of in a rickety old mansion by a too-good-for-this-movie Lon Chaney. Lawyers show up and stay overnight and madness, cannibalism, and one hilariously uncomfortable dinner party ensue. The film knows it's stupid--see the scene during the dinner party where they start talking about the Universal Monster movies and Lon Chaney says "It's going to be a full moon tonight!" My favorite scene, though, is an admittedly horrifying one where a lawyer gets caught in the basement by the two girls. At first we only see them in shadowed silhouette. But then when light shines on them we see they both have demoniac grins. Screaming, they charge at him. Delightful stuff.

6/10

The Green Fog: Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin

The Green Fog is a reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) made up of clips and found footage from films that are not Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's the kind of mind-bending concept art piece that you can't really understand until you see it for yourself. But it's well worth the search. It would be a miracle if it ever got a wide release; I'm not sure if the directors would be able to clear all of the samples they use. But this is definitely a film that should be sought out. What's fascinating--other than the clips they use--is how the film has a kind of frame story where we watch a bunch of stuffy old men in a screening room essentially putting the movie together, a bit which becomes hilarious when the film tries to reconstruct the redwood forest sequence and the stuffy old men come up with nothing but an old NSYNC music video to use (Hello!! The forest moon of Endor, anyone??). Other highlights: shots of the slow-motion chase sequence in Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) during the opening rooftop chase; plates of shrimp signifying the film's spiral motif; Chuck Norris in An Eye for an Eye (1981) during post-fall catatonia scenes.

8/10

Wanda: Barbara Loden

I don't know if I've ever admired and enjoyed a film with such terrible audio. I get that Barbara Loden's Wanda was one of the first great indie films in an age when indie films weren't really a thing. And it's a powerful, dreamlike look at lower class alienation and ennui like Jon Jost's superlative Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977). But I couldn't understand over half the dialogue because the boom mic was too far away from the performers and the audio mixing kept what was picked up drowned out. But I'm willing to accept that maybe my DVD of the film was in bad shape. Anyhow, the film is devastating in its quiet power; it's one of the most powerful cinematic portrayals of a woman beaten down by decades of emotional (maybe even physical?) abuse. Michael Higgins is terrifying as the possessive, mentally unstable petty thief Mr. Dennis, and Loden gives one of the best female performances of the second half of the twentieth century. And that cinematography is perfect: deliciously grainy 16mm projected into 32mm.

9/10

Raw: Julia Ducournau

Just like the other films of the French New Extremity, Julia Ducournau's Raw falls apart and becomes stupider the more you think about it. Yes, the gore is disgusting and shocking and it's a powerful metaphor for sexual awakening and blah blah blah. But after a while it just becomes silly and ridiculous. Also--and I hate to be this guy especially since I've grown to hate this form of criticism--but the plot has too many holes. Why would the parents let their girls go to college if they knew they were violent, murderous cannibals? Why wouldn't a school expel the girls after the morgue video got leaked? Did the police really never become suspicious that so many random cars were crashing in that conspicuously empty country road? The whole allegorical concept of the plot falls apart in the wake of these holes! Gah!

5/10