All Slights Deserved

Martial arts film are, it must be confessed, something of a blank area for me. Many years ago I recall being challenged by a friend when I suggested that Enter the Dragon was the best of this genre ever made. "You've never seen any others though," he pointed out. It's true, and until now I haven't made any attempt to redress this. So let's start with a double bill produced by Hong Kong's most famous studio, the redoubtable Shaw Brothers. The name is synonymous with Kung Fu and martial arts cinema, almost representing a genre within the genre, cranking out dozens of films a year during their heyday in the seventies. Modelled on the old Hollywood studio system, right down to the company logo (imitating that of Warners'), the company kept a stable of stars and directors under exclusive contract. It worked highly effectively although as the decade progressed Shaw would be eclipsed by a rough-and-ready rival, Golden Harvest, who launched the careers of...

Few national cinemas can boast the wealth of directing talent that Japan possessed between the forties and sixties. Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Masaki Kobayashi were all active during this golden age, producing some of the classics of world cinema. Mizoguchi, director of Sanshō Dayũ , is still something of a grey area for me as I've thus far only watched this and (his own favourite work) The Life of Oharu (1952). It shares with the theme of all fall from status, yet while Oharu's is partly of her own doing for the hapless characters of Sanshō Dayũ their fortunes are constantly governed by the fickle hand of fate. Taking place - like so many Japanese films of this vintage - during the feudal era, the story begins with the exiling of a virtuous governor to a far-off province. When his wife and children attempt to make the long journey to visit him they are tricked and find themselves sold into prostitution and slavery. The children, Anju...

There's a gimmick that's gained prominence in cinema over the past decade that I find increasingly irksome. It cropped up in La casa muda just last week and here it is again, albeit Haute Tension preempted the Uruguayan film by several years. Let's call that gimmick EYTYKIW: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong. Now EYTYKIW is a somewhat different creature to the twist ending, which has been with us ever since cavemen began sitting around the fire telling stories. Twist endings are the final snap in a story, a little surprise to muse over afterwards. By contrast EYTYKIW typically comes at some point during the third act and gleefully exposes the artifice of narrative; those logical assumptions we've made while reading or watching a story. The interesting thing about EYTYKIW is it can be effective without necessarily being that much of a surprise. Anybody with a passing knowledge of old school psycho-thrillers won't have been taken aback by Scorsese's Sh...

Although regarded by some as South Korea's finest ever film, Obaltan is very much a product of the changes cinema underwent across the world in the post-war years. Fittingly therefore it's a film about readjusting to civilian life after wartime, although here the war in question is the military conflict that shook Korea between 1950 and 1953. Falling somewhere between The Best Years of Our Lives and the plaintive bleakness of Italian neorealism, it relates the story of two brothers who live in poverty in the ravaged slums of Seoul. The elder, Yeong-ho (Kim Jin-kyu), works for a pittance as an accountant to support his wife and young children whilst tormented by chronic toothache. His younger sibling Cheol-ho (Choi Mu-ryong) is a former war hero who spends his time hanging out his fellow veterans and promising, but always failing, to find a job. As events progress things go from bad to worse for the brothers. Cheol-ho is reunited with a nurse who treated him in hospital a...

So you're the deputy leader of an ostracised communist state who also happens to be something of a cinephile. It would be wonderful if your country could actually produce some quality films of its own but sadly there's a dearth of talent. What do you do? Kidnap some talent of course! That's what Kim Jong-il did when he wanted to give North Korean cinema a boost. The lucky abductee was Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean director and producer who was forced to work on the other side of the 38th parallel between 1978 and his eventual escape in 1986. One of the last films he made during this period was Pulgasari , a monster movie in the Godzilla tradition. Very few North Korean films enter circulation outside of their homeland and the general consensus seems to be they're not all that good. Unsurprisingly there's a strong propagandistic flavour although - as I commented with regard to The Fall of Berlin recently - that doesn't mean they're not of value as cultur...

Seven Beauties is a film I feel I ought to have liked, or at least appreciated, more than I did. It's an epic, picaresque satire that touches upon subject matter that was still sensitive at the time, but there's an ugliness to it which I found difficult to reconcile. After an introduction that soliloquises ironically about the rise and fall of Mussolini and the indignities of the Second World War over old wartime footage, the story begins in somewhere in Germany shortly after the collapse of Italian fascism. Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) and Francesco are two Italian soldiers fleeing the Nazis. During conversation Pasqualino reveals that he killed a man before the war and the narrative shifts into flashback of his earlier life as a hustler and dandy in Naples, where his life revolved around protecting the honour of his seven sisters. After killing a man who attempted to pimp one of these 'beauties' (they're anything but beautiful) he evades execution by feign...

I was commenting just a couple of weeks ago (with regard to Sexmission ) how eastern European comedy comes across as very broad and affected to western sensibilities, at least during the Cold war era. Probably the closest we've seen to an English language film done in the same style would, for obvious reasons, be Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers , which for all its visual flair and Komeda's wonderful score falls rather flat with the slapstick pratfalls. As I mentioned last time the prominence of this kind of humour probably owed a lot to the censorious climate, where more subversive wit was usually frowned upon. A good example of this is Milos Forman's The Fireman's Ball , which although not especially radical by our standards was criticised in Czechoslovakia for its veiled attack on the petty bureaucracy of communism. No such ire was directed towards Lemonade Joe , which was released a few years earlier; perhaps because it does precisely the opposite ...

The opening to Duncan Jones' second feature film is classic Hitchcock, and not just because Chris Bacon's rousing score evokes Bernard Herrmann in his pomp. Helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens on a passenger train sitting opposite a woman (Michelle Monaghan) who seems to believe he's somebody else. More worryingly still when he checks a mirror the face that looks back is not his own. Yet before he's had a chance to try and understand what's happening a bomb on the train explodes, killing everyone. Since Gyllenhaal is the star and this is a science fiction movie you know it's only the beginning. He reawakens to find himself strapped into a sealed, cockpit-like cabin where - via a monitor - an air force officer (Vera Farmiga) explains to him he's part of an experimental programme that allows subjects to travel back in time to enter and control the thoughts of the last eight minutes of a dead person's life. Capt Stevens' mi...

Gustavo Hernández's supernatural horror attracted some attention on the festival circuit by virtue of its principal gimmick: it was filmed in a single unbroken handheld shot and takes place in real time. There's nothing new about this; Hitchcock ostensibly did the same thing with Rope (albeit cheating due to the technical limitations of the time) and more recently Alexander Sokurov deployed it with his Russian Ark . It's probably more useful to consider The Silent House in the context of horror's ongoing flirtation with vérité techniques in the pursuit of more authentic and visceral frights; a tradition that stretches from Night of the Living Dead to The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity . Yet despite that the plot harkens back the golden era of Victorian supernatural fiction, with a certain Henry James novella being a particular influence, I suspect. Loosely inspired by real-life events, it tells the story of Laura (Florencia Colucci ), a young woman ...

Day 100, and what better way to celebrate my centenary than with some more Soviet cinema? Well, there are numerous better ways but just recently it's been a real strain to keep this thing going at all, so this will just have to do. I actually learnt of The Fall of Berlin courtesy of the use of brief extracts in another film I've viewed this year, Diary for My Children (AFED #83) and it's precisely the kind of full-blown propaganda cinema I've been keen to track down for a while. By their very nature these films tend to be forgotten when the winds of change sweep in and are sometimes lost forever, but as historical documents they're invaluable. The Fall of Berlin is an epic account of the Soviet Union's war against the Nazis; detailing in particular their invasion of the German capital at the climax of WWII. It's notorious for the romanticised depiction of Stalin (as portrayal by Mikheil Gelovani), whose wise and benevolent rule as shown here was some...

Billed as "the Spanish Clockwork Orange ", Eloy de la Iglesia's film makes no attempt to disguise the influence of its more illustrious predecessor. Not only does the story feature a subplot of behaviour modification experiments and similar kitschy production design, the earlier movie is even playing on the television when a gang of ersatz 'droogs' mount an identical home invasion (although, being Spanish, these guys favour black leather and bullwhips). The Kubrick connection is further enhanced by the casting of his Lolita , Sue Lyon, in the lead role. For those in the audience too dense to make the connection - and in truth she was much changed in the years since her breakthrough role - there's a scene in which Lyon is even depicted reading the Nabokov text. It's fair to say that subtlety is not one of the films strong points. And yet Murder in a Blue World actually aspires to be something more than a shameless ripoff, treating A Clockwork Orange...

Every now and again I'll hear of a hitherto unknown film that sounds so fascinating that I feel compelled to see it as soon as possible. Although Blue Sunshine only received a cursory reference in a passage about drug-related exploitation movies in Jonathan Ross's The Incredibly Strange Film Book I wasted no time in ordering a copy. And it's a great idea: years after they've graduated a number of college kids begin experiencing some unusual side effects from a type of LSD called Blue Sunshine. It opens with a series of cryptic vignettes of various characters who have been either behaving strangely or experiencing hair loss. The story then begins in earnest with a party in which one of the guest's, apparently perfectly normal, suddenly loses all his hair (it pulls away like a wig) and runs off into the night like a maniac. A short while later he returns on a mindless rampage, killing anybody who crosses his path. In classic thriller style one of the other gu...

I wish I knew more about Ida Lupino, or at least had the time to research her career more thoroughly. I wasn't even aware until a few minutes ago that she was British by birth, and even trained as an actress  at RADA before heading to the States in the thirties. After working her way diligently through the ranks she progressed to more significant roles by the end of the decade, whereupon she began referring to herself with self-deprecation as "the poor man's Bette Davis". Perhaps her greatest legacy though was as a pioneering woman director whose modest output blazed a trail for future generations. After a handful of earlier issue-based pictures The Hitch-Hiker represented her first directorial foray into film noir, a genre she'd already graced in a number of films as an actress. It's a taut little thriller that utilises that mainstay of genre and exploitation cinema: the perils of travelling by car. I've touched upon this before, in relation to H...

I like Ben Stiller. He may not possess the virtuoso comic talents of some of his SNL alumni but manages to both funny and amiable, at least in those films I've seen. Sometimes, as with Meet the Parents and its sequels it allows him to serve as a foil to other performers, while the excesses of There's Something About Mary would have been dark and vulgar but for his sympathetic turn in the lead role. Greenberg represents the almost obligatory foray for any middle-aged Hollywood star into quasi independent or less mainstream territory. Over the years this has yielded some fascinating results, from Burt Lancaster's dip into art cinema with The Swimmer to Bruce Willis's career-reviving role in Pulp Fiction . The great thing about such projects is there's nothing to lose; if the star's performance is lauded then it enhances their reputation, if not it's soon forgotten. Fittingly then it's the story of a fortysomething man who's arrived at a cross...

I'll be honest with you, I'm struggling badly with my motivation for this blog at the moment. Compared with similar efforts it seems hopelessly lightweight and superficial, lacking in both style and substance. The only way to resolve this is an altogether more delligent and clinical approach but my confidence is shot to pieces. My conviction's gone. I've nothing to say.

Just a short review here... I guess if any country was going to produce a horror comedy about genetically engineered vampire sheep then it was going to be New Zealand. What's more surprising is that it's actually not at all bad. Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister) returns to his family's farm fifteen years after the tragedy that left his father and Henry with a pathological fear of sheep. In the intervening period his ruthless older brother Angus (Peter Feeney) has expanded the estate and, with the assistance of some scientists in his employ, has been conducting some dodgy experiments with his livestock. Henry is all set to sell his share of the farm to Angus and return to his comfortable city life, but when animal rights activists release a mutant vampire lamb they set in motion a train of events that will make Henry's darkest nightmares terrifyingly real. The results are some predictably gory, gruesome and anarchic fun. Given the budget presumably didn't exceed...

Is Shampoo a paean to Warren Beatty's naricissism or a parody? Most likely it's both but the star was assuredly in on the joke. The inspiration for his character, dim-witted bed-hopping hairdresser George Roundy, has been attributed to a number of real life personalities on the sixties L.A. scene; most notably Jay Sebring, who was murdered along with Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family. According to writer Robert Towne George was based on another Berverly Hills hairdresser, Gene Shacove, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Beatty's antics during his prime can draw the obvious conclusions. Despite the involvement of Towne and maverick director Hal Ashby it's incontestably Beatty who was its guiding creative force. Beatty's relatively slim output over the years makes it difficult to appreciate just how big a player he was during the late sixties and seventies. Bonnie and Clyde proclaimed the arrival of the new Hollywood and perhaps best encapsulate...

I mentioned Sexmission in passing a few weeks back as an example of how films can be massively popular in their country of original yet comparatively unknown elsewhere. A few years back it was adjudged to be the best film of the last thirty years by Polish filmgoers, much to the bemusement of more highbrow critics. Sexmission is a sci-fi comedy; a sub-genre that proved surprisingly successful in eastern bloc during the communist era, as evidenced by such works as the cult Czech film Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea . Yet far from being an anomaly it makes perfect sense; science fiction - particularly that of the more dystopian variety - is often a means of commenting allegorically on the current milieu and dressing it in humour is a means of deflecting criticisms of being overtly political. Which is precisely how Sexmission operates; serving up a lampoon on the absurdities of totalitarianism which would have resonated strongly at the time and the skewed nostalgia...