Tag: A Century of Cinema

My film watchlist has achieved truly preposterous dimensions over the years, and especially over the last year or so as I’ve started getting back into film-watching and accruing a bunch of new things that have just blown the watchlist up even further. I need to start making some inroads into it, and I need to start being a bit more methodical about it… to which end I’m going to go through some box sets and other collections I’ve started but haven’t finished, of which I have several… I mean, I bought four such boxes in the last Severin sale, each of which had four titles in it that I haven’t seen, and I’ve got forthcoming two sets of early Hitchcock (though at least I’ve previously seen some of those), a bunch of other Imprint boxes I’ve barely glanced at, giallo sets from Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome, and a shit ton of martial arts stuff, mostly in those big Shawscope collections from Arrow…

So I’ve acquired an awful lot over the last year or so, and, let’s face it, I’m still doing so… I mean, if the companies are going to insist on putting out stuff that grabs my attention, I’m not going to tell them not to. Vinegar Syndrome’s putting Alraune out? How can I refuse? And I have a ton of stuff I want to rewatch, too, on top of the stupid amount of unseen stuff, so there’ll be more of that too as I upgrade some older holdings. But getting the list of unseen titles down is much more important, so I’ve got to focus on new watches over rewatches. Maybe a one-in one-out type thing, only one rewatch for whatever number of new ones, so I can try and get the list back down to marginally less unmanageable numbers.

Accordingly, I’m also declaring an end to the Century of Cinema challenge. It’s been directing almost all my viewing this year, apart from a handful of titles I did rewatch independent of the challenge, and frankly it’s been getting in the way… cos I kept feeling like I should be pursuing that first, but I have so much other stuff that wouldn’t count towards it and which, frankly, I’d rather have watched instead. So that kind of reached the point where I’d go for days not watching anything, only watched two things in all of September. So Century of Cinema is over at about 60% done. Unfortunate but I think it’s the only way ahead. My own fault, of course, cos I should’ve remembered how shit I am at this sort of thing… I mean, I suppose this project to cut my watchlist down is a challenge of that kind, too, but it’s self-imposed and there’s no real guidelines I need to stick to…

So just how many unseen titles are we talking about? As of right now… 2138, per the spreadsheet where I keep track of these things. Fucking hell. On the plus side, a substantial chunk of those are actually shorts, so I suppose at least those won’t take too long to finish off? And a similarly big chunk is stuff I’ve downloaded that I may never actually watch and should probably cross off the list. Sigh. Anyway, at least I’ve made a public record here of just how bad the watchlist is at this point, and once I’ve added the things that should be here in the next few days I need to let it never get that bad again…

“What is the point?” our shitty “hero” shouts at one point during a fight with his wife, a question I found myself asking throughout this film. I likely would never have watched this had it not been in the 1001 Films book—I vaguely recall reading director Jon Jost’s name somewhere but otherwise knew bugger all about his work—and would have missed nothing… I was, as you probably don’t recall, pondering a while ago the lack of “respectable” cinema on my list for the Century of Cinema project, so I decided to go for “serious and arthouse” again tonight, and strike another title of the 1001 Films watchlist while I was at it. It’s one of the harder films to obtain on the list and it was not worth the effort. Our aforementioned shitty “hero” is Tom, a truck driver who’s out of work and not trying too hard to find new work, which is pissing his wife off cos he leaves her behind for weeks at a time on his nominal trips to get a job, and the film ends with him murdering another man for his money, and I suppose we’re meant to assume this is how he’s been surviving without a job. I gather the whole thing is meant to be a critique of how capitalism ruins the lives of people like Tom, and JESUS FUCK WHO CARES, cos Tom is so unlikeable and uninteresting that I don’t give a fuck for his plight and how capitalism has driven him to to point he’s at. He is such an absolute bore that the film, telling a story (barely) about emptiness, just becomes vacuous itself. Last Chants was a famously cheap production, clocking in somewhere between two and three thousand dollars; I admire to a certain extent how Jost worked around those limitations but not the end result. I will say that Jost, who also wrote and sang the songs scattered through the film, is a reasonably good singer. Beyond that, I don’t think I have any further use for his other work; happy to leave Jost as a one-time thing.

Another film that landed in just the other day, so I haven’t taken too long to get to it either… I thought this might be the first animated film in this project, but forgot I’d already watched Adventures of Prince Achmed and the most recent Wallace & Gromit film, so it’s nothing of the sort; it is, however, a markedly different prospect to either of those. I think the story is well enough known that I don’t need to explain it, except that director Jiri Barta drew upon a somewhat different version of it by another Czech author; in this instance, Hamelin is sorely beset by rats, but they really deserve it, even before the piper shows up the burghers of Hamelin come across as, frankly, kind of scummy. (There’s no intelligible dialogue in the film, just a sort of vaguely “Germanic” gibberish, but you don’t need words to understand how godawful the people are.) This is an astonishing piece of design; Barta avowedly drew on German expressionist style, and if the human characters in Caligari had looked like the buildings in that film, I imagine the result might’ve looked like this:

An amazing thing to look at, as you may tell from these screenshots I took, albeit a bleak thing too; there’s a bit of sexual violence in this I don’t think you get from the more child-friendly versions of the tale. But what really stops me being more enthusiastic about what is, otherwise, an obviously remarkable piece of work, is, well, the animal cruelty (the human figures might’ve been puppets, but the rats are the real thing for the most part). I don’t actually have evidence that there was any during the production, but… well, just look at the film, there’s quite a few scenes that I can’t imagine were achieved without at least some. The rats might’ve been real, but I doubt they were all alive while they were on screen. It’s obviously not on the level of Italian cannibal cinema, but somehow I feel a kind of unpleasantness about the whole thing that goes beyond the film’s inherently sour tone… and the film is really good and worth seeing; I’d just feel better knowing the rats were OK…

I’m counting this as a first time watch for this project, because it may as well be… I first saw it on DVD around maybe 2007 or 2008 when Siren were still handling the Shaw Brothers catalogue here; this was a particularly inadequate disc, because not only was it non-anamorphic (never a good thing, but even less so with a proper ‘Scope film like this) but the fucking disc jammed at some point so I never saw it in full. So this is technically the first time I’ve really seen it, in blu-ray form, anamorphic and complete, and GODDAMN it was worth waiting for that ending (disc only arrived in the mail today, too, so I’ve been unusually quick to get to it)… Don’t know much about director Sun Chung, other than that I have another one of his films in one of the Shawscope boxes, but I saw an IMDB reviewer claim he was an unsung hero of Shaws as an action durector, but never got as good a story to work with as Chang Cheh or Lau Kar-Leung. Our story involves a couple of rival martial arts masters in a Chinese town, one of whom hires an former enemy of his (Lo Lieh, making his second appearance in this project) to help him beat the other at the forthcoming lantern festival; the latter, however, has a more vested interest in gaining revenge on his new client. The film is never quite as lurid as I wish it was, though it certainly is that; the blood is plentiful and of a redness that Herschell Gordon Lewis might’ve called unnatural, and a couple of scenes are still kind of grisly and unpleasant. But it’s the martial arts action that works best here, especially in the aforementioned ending which is just 15 minutes of the characters going berserk. This is one I think will reward repeat viewings.

Um… yeah. If I characterised our previous film as “berserk”, how can I not say the same thing about… whatever the fuck this was? This, it should be said, is considered one of the defining works of Japanese cyberpunk cinema, so it was pretty much bound to be one of the damnedest things I’ve ever seen; I have read descriptions of other extreme Japanese horror films next to which Tetsuo may seem comparatively mild, but on its own terms… yeah, I don’t think I’ve seen much else that was quite this out there. The story, if you can call it, revolves around two men, a “metal fetishist” and a salaryman who runs him over in a car accident; the latter gradually finds his life turning more metallic as it becomes clear he should’ve made sure the metal guy was in fact dead before trying to dispose of him. It’s actually more coherent than some critics seem to think it is, basically being a particularly fucked kind of supernatural revenge story, but the story’s not the point, the style is… indeed, Tetsuo is a pretty astounding case of style as substance rather than just over it. I feel like the budgetary constraints on the film (which only cost about $100,000), having to shoot on black and white 16mm film and so forth, actually make the film what it is, this would’ve been an entirely different film in 35mm and colour (like its sequel) because the grotty b/w visual just define the tone so much. Tetsuo is all about those visuals, the editing, the sound and music design, and especially the startling use of pixillation; throughout the film you can see it visibly fighting its limitations. It does get kind of wearing before the end—this is a somewhat long 67 minutes—but once I got into its peculiar vibe I enjoyed it a fair bit. Really should see more of Shinya Tsukamoto’s stuff.

OH, isn’t it a grand thing to rewatch a film you haven’t seen in over a quarter of a century and discover that, not only is it as berserk as you remember it being, but even more so? That was the somewhat astounding position I found myself in tonight… I believe I’ve only seen The Wicked City once, back in the late 90s when I was first exploring Hong Kong cinema; it was on SBS and for some reason I don’t think I taped it in the way I did with pretty much all the other HK stuff SBS showed back then, so I haven’t had an opportunity to see it since then (and if I did tape it, I don’t have a VCR to play it)… I did watch the anime on which this was based a long time ago too, but I haven’t seen this live-action version of it since way back when. And I mostly remembered it being, as I said, berserk. Our story is laid in Hong Kong which is kind of connected to the world of demon-like creatures called Rapters; a drug from the latter’s world that makes humans evaporate has started to appear in ours, and the anti-Rapter agents must find the source and stop it. How this story is told, though, is what matters, it’s the bizarre details and the way some things just… happen, for want of a better word, especially in rhe second half. And, as I said, it was even MORE berserk than I remembered it being, cos I’d somehow forgotten some of those details, like the agents suddenly manifesting their own unexplained telekinetic and magnetic powers, the astounding wirework battle, the, er, pinball machine… I was terrified it wouldn’t live up to my increasingly dim memories of something I saw once in the late ’90s, but it actually exceeded them and I can’t complain about that. Really should rewatch the anime some time, too…

I first (and last) watched this about 15 years ago, at which time I was so perplexed by it that I was tempted to just make the review of it on my old film blog “what the fuck” and noted that repeat viewings would evidently be necessary. I am only slightly less perplexed by it now, having finally undertaken that repeat visit 15 years later. If I try to sum it up, the best I can do is “a teenage girl has her first period, then there’s vampires, and other things happen”. I understand that it comes from surrealism, I know it’s from a novel by Vitezlav Nezval, who was one of the main movers of the Czech surrealist movement in the 1930s, and I get all of that. (On which note, the introduction on the old Second Run DVD I watched reckons it’s not actually a surrealist film as such, just one that employs surrealist techniques. If you insist.) I’m still left perplexed by what I’m supposed to do with the damn thing or how to respond to it. It is, obviously, a thing of beauty to actually watch and listen to, the visuals are amazing and so is the score, but beyond that I don’t know if I even like it or not. And I have experience with properly non-narrative avant-garde cinema, it’s not that I can’t cope with that sort of thing; I could still tell that I liked Zorns Lemma but kind of hated The Hart of London, to name two of Valerie’s contemporaries. Valerie herself just left me kind of bereft of even that little. I suspect I do like it more than I don’t, but… yeah. It was like that.

I don’t feel like I have an awful lot to say about this one. It’s an anthology film, director Julien Duvivier (sitting out the then-current war in Hollywood) had just had some success with a similar production the year before called Tales of Manhattan, and evidently felt more of the same was in order… this time there was no connecting theme (the earlier film having revolved around a topcoat and what happens to it over the years, cf. Winchester ’73) but each story would have a kind of supernatural twist. The end result was not quite what Duvivier planned; Universal rearranged the story order and cut the opening story entirely (eventually turning it into a film in its own right by shooting more scenes), adding in its place a sort of odd wraparound with Robert Benchley… and though it was a Universal production (overseen by Duvivier and star Charles Boyer), it’s not exactly a “Universal horror”. Tale number one is a sort of moral fable, I suppose, about inner beauty, a fairly tedious trope hampered by the fact that its putatively ugly lead (Betty Field) was bugger all of the sort (lighting and makeup fixes everything, apparently), and number three revolves around a highwire circus performer who dreams about a woman and then meets her in real life, which makes for some charming romance between Boyer and Barbara Stanwyck but is nearly as slight otherwise. That leaves tale number two to save the film, which it fortunately does… adapted from Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” (so it has a good pedigree), Edward G. Robinson is the man told by a fortune teller that he’s going to kill someone, and has to decide what to do with this information; while the whole film looks great (Stanley Cortez and Paul Ivano were on camera duties, so obviously it does), it looks especially so in this segment, pulling out the film noir stops, and I loved the conceit of Robinson’s subconscious conversing with him from mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Best part of the film by some length; shame the rest is kind of negligible.

As titles go, The Invisible Man Appears certainly is, well, oddly contradictory, but never mind that… this is actually a reasonably historic film in its way, having been one of the first tokusatsu films, with effects by technical pioneer Eiji Tsuburaya; the latter had been doing this sort of thing since the 1930s, but after the war was over he’d been blacklisted from the studio system by the occupying American forces for working on wartime propaganda films. But Daiei took him on nonetheless for this film, inspired by the Universal Invisible Man of 1933 and to be that film’s superior. Um… it wasn’t. Fortunately it doesn’t lean too heavily on the effects, which is good because some of the effects shots are decidedly rough compared with James Whale’s rather older film, and Tsuburaya’s ascendancy as the master of his art would have to wait a few years for a certain city-smashing giant reptile to come along…

Anyway, the plot revolves around a formula for invisibility developed by a scientist which draws the interest of a criminal organisation looking to employ it for their own crooked ends. Unfortunately for all involved, including the poor bugger forced to become the titular invisible man, there’s no way to reverse the effect, and the formula will also turn the subject increasingly violent and mad… This is not a great film by any means despite its relative historical importance; as I said the effects are kind of rough at times and the unfolding of the plot is not the most coherent; still, there’s some imagination involved in some of the “invisible” business, and even if it’s not exactly a masterpiece it’s still interesting to watch, and I like that it’s out there, especially given that it took 60 years for it to get a western release. And, for what it may be worth, this is film number 50 that I’ve watched for the Century of Cinema challenge. Getting there slower than I’d like, but kind of impressed that I’m still sticking with it…