Thursday, May 30, 2019

Something Borrowed

We queued up The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) for a couple of reasons. First, we felt like watching something from Studio Ghibli. Even though this was directed by Yonebayashi, and Miyazaki only wrote it. Second, I was a big fan of the Borrowers books when I was a kid.

Borrowers are tiny people, a few (inconsistent) inches high, who secretly live in our houses and “borrow” items for their daily lives. Our hero, a young boy named Sean, first catches a glimpse when he is sent to his aunt’s house in the country to rest up for his health. There is a rustling in shiso bush, drawing his attention and also a cat’s. After he’s left, we see that it was Arrietty, a young borrower girl who is out collecting herbs. Shiso, by the way, is a Japanese herb with an indescribable savory flavor, in the same way basil has. It gave this scene a very homey, sensory feel, so very Studio Ghibli.

Arrietty lives with her nervous mom Homily (voiced by Amy Pohler) and her dad, the stolid Pod (Will Annette). She convinces her dad to take her borrowing. This is what I loved as a kid - the trips through the giant house, using staples in the wall as ladders, a pin and thread as a grappling hook and so on. But Sho is awake in bed and he sees them, so they have to flee.

In fact, now they have to move. Even nice people are a danger to borrowers. And we find out that his aunt suspects they exist, and her maid (Carol Burnett) plans to capture one of them. So even though Sean tries to help them by giving them a dollhouse kitchen, they must leave. Pod also meets a wild borrower - dressed in a pelt, with face paint, a noble savage kid. He can lead them to other houses, other borrowers, and maybe someday be her mate. Sean, who expected to die from a heart problem, sees them off and their courage inspires him to live.

I’m not sure this is a great Studio Ghibli movie, but it is a lot of fun, especially for fans of the Borrowers. Arrietty is one of those great, competent female heroes, like Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle. We enjoyed it.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Strange Climax

The Climax/The Strange Door (1944/1951) is one of those great Boris Karloff double features. I’ll start with the better one.

The Strange Door starts with Richard Stapley getting into a drunken brawl and shoots a man, with a pistol that is suspiciously close to hand. He flees and is lead to a house with a strange door. He is let in and his pursuers are foiled. The house belongs to an odd nobleman, Charles Laughton, who wants him to marry his niece, Sally Forrest. It seems he has a grudge against her, and wants to shackle her with the worst degenerate he could find.

There’s a touch of the Count of Monte Cristo here, and it all ends with the good old walls-closing-in gag. Karloff plays Laughton’s butler, and has some good scenes, but this is really Laughton’s movie. In one scene, he leans on a table and winds up reclining on it with his legs propped up on a chair. It’s a wild piece of over-acting, and not the only one. This is great fun.

The Climax is much stranger. This really does star Karloff as the doctor at a Mittel-Europische opera house. We see him slouch around distractedly - the diva he loved is dead, and he has never been the same. But then he hears Susanna Foster singing, and it reminds him of his dead love. But, guess what? He’s mad. He killed the last diva and now he doesn’t want anyone to share the voice of this one. Her dresser, Gale Sondergaard, is the only one who suspects.

So now he is taking an interest in Foster. Under the pretext of a throat exam, he hypnotizes her into losing her voice. It seems that only her love for her fiancé, Turhan Bey (!!), can save her.

This is a lovely movie, in Technicolor, using some amazing opera house sets. The cast is certainly interesting. The main problem is that there is a ton of light opera in this supposed horror film. It’s worse than Night at the Opera. Since I haven’t seen any version of Phantom of the Opera (except DePalma’s), the combination just seems silly to me. I’m not saying you should skip this side of the double feature, but it’s probably best to watch it as an oddity.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Abysmal Deep

The Abyss (1989) is the second in our undersea monster movie series (after Deep Rising). It’s a whole other kettle of fish. This is a slick, big budget James Cameron production.

It starts with a nuclear sub going down in deep water. The government commandeers an underwater drilling platform to use as the base for a SEAL team to perform rescue/recovery. They’ll need to hurry, because a hurricane is coming. The platform is manned by the usual crowd of eccentric roughnecks, led by captain Ed Harris. We particularly liked Todd Graff as “Hippy”, a sweet conspiracy theorist with a pet rat, and Kimberly Scott, the black submersible pilot who wears a straw hat and bib overalls. Her nickname is “One Night” which I just found out is because her full name is Lisa “One Night” Standing.

Also, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio has demanded to be allowed to join the mission, because she designed the platform. Everyone thinks she’s a bitch, and Harris is her ex-husband, so this may not seem like a great idea, but she does know the most about the platform.

The gang goes down to check the sub, they find nothing but corpses and nuclear missiles. But Mastrantonio in one of the submersibles sees some funny lights zooming around - just as all the subs systems go on the fritz. Of course, there’s no photos, but she starts thinking she’s seen an alien.

The SEAL team have been talking with the Pentagon and getting very sketchy orders - arm a nuke and blow it if it looks like anyone else is going to get the missiles. They take one of the submersibles and head to the sunken sub. But that means they can’t disconnect the umbilical from the ship above which is getting battered by the hurricane. It finally breaks off, and almost crushes the platform - then almost pulls it into the trench. And through all of this, it is getting clearer that the head of the SEAL team is getting the underwater willies and becoming (more) paranoid

I’m going to leave out the desperate dive that kills Mastrantonio (semi-spoiler) and the final descent into the abyss, breathing oxygenated fluid and losing mental function as the depth increases. Also, the alien water face - advanced CGI for the period.  But this is an altogether cool movie, with a lot going on, much derring-do, some neat effects (mostly practical) and dive tank work. I feel like it’s the movie Pandora should have been. It holds up.

Monday, May 20, 2019

Beast Mode

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) is slightly out of our comfort zone, but we had to watch it. We were living in Tallahassee when they were filming it, and even though it was made in Louisiana, it had a hometown feel. So it finally floated to the top of the queue.

It stars 5- or 6-year old Quvenzhane Wallis as Hushpuppy, a little girl who lives in the Louisiana bayou country, in a place called the Bathtub. She is a curious, self-sufficient kid, who spends her days hanging out with her pigs and chickens. She lives in a mobile home jacked up on stilts by herself. Her father, Dwight Henry, lives in another stilted-up trailer near by and calls her for “feed up”, a goose taken from a cooler and popped on the grill.

Her daddy isn’t much of a father to her. One day, he is just gone, and he doesn’t come back for a while - when he does, he’s wearing a hospital gown and he’s very angry. Her mother doesn’t seem to be in the picture at all. Quvenzhane goes to school on a houseboat, where her teacher tells her about the ancient aurochs frozen in the tundra, and how they will soon be released by global warming.

When a hurricane hits, they ride it out with neighbors, mostly drunks and reprobates. When it’s over, the Bathtub is flooded, and as the days go by, it looks like the waters aren’t going down. So some of the locals decide to blow up the levee - and Quvenzhane pulls the trigger. But saltwater has damaged the land, and even if it dries out, it won’t be fertile.

The government steps calls a mandatory evacuation and drags everyone off to a sterile processing center, but they soon break free and return. Quvenzhane and her friends swim out to catch a boat to the floating whorehouse and casino where she thinks she might find her mother. One lady there picks her up and she thinks, “I’ve only been picked up twice” while flashing back to her father carrying her as a newborn. But she has to go back to “take care” of her father.

He has been sick for a while, his “blood has turned against him” (leukemia?). When he dies, the town builds a pyre for him, and sets off in his boat, made from a pickup truck bed.

This is an interesting movie, but no question that little Quvenzhane makes it. She is sweet, fierce, independent, and strong. She is not in a good situation - the watery land of the Bathtub is beautiful, but it is not at all safe. She burns down her trailer, maybe on purpose, and she fights with her father a lot - and he isn’t tender. But he teaches her to be strong, to be a beast, to never surrender to man or nature. Her teacher may know more about the sun, the moon, and the herbs than about reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, but she also teaches pride and care for the earth.

So, the story kind of meanders, and there’s more than a bit of poverty porn in the movie. But seeing a little black girl showing her guns and screaming defiance at the world is beautiful, and I’m glad we got to see this.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Proper English

Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English series may not be great, but the third, Johnny English Strikes Again (2018), may be the best - and very good.

It starts (as some many spy movies do), with the cover of all the spies in MI7 being blown. They are going to have to re-activate some of their retirees. Cut to Johnny English (Atkinson), playing ninja in a darkened wood. But it turns out to be a training exercise - for the school children in his geography class. But he gets the call and must head for London.

There he is one of four spies - the other three are suave, debonair and competent. But English accidentally blows them up, and so he will have to do. First of all, he needs a Boffin - good old Bough, played by Ben Miller (Death in Paradise - one of our favorite series). Then he gets a classic Aston-Martin, and ditches his phone and all digital gadgets. They’ll come in old-school, and the cyber-criminal will never see him coming.

They head, of course, to the south of France, where they meet Olga Kurylenko, zooming around the Corniche. They soon figure out that the villain is the high-tech billionaire Jack Lacey. The Prime Minister, Emma Thompson, has been wooing him to solve England’s problems, not realizing that he’s also causing them. It’s always the tech guy these days - Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey.

There were three basic gag types here:
  1. Straight physical comedy, of the sort Atkinson excels at.
  2. Gags with long payoff times, like when someone mentions checking the gas, you know they’ll run out - but you don’t know when
  3. Tributes to this or that. I noticed this in the last Johnny English movie, but it’s still present here. The geography glass has a touch of Harry Potter, for ex, and the last scene has Atkinson in armor, like in Black Adder.
Also, there’s a very good extended scene where he confuses the real world for a VR training scenario, which doesn’t quite fit the scheme above. Oh well.

We laughed all the way through this. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest comedy of the year, and maybe it didn’t break any new ground. But sometimes you just need a well-made, goofy movie.

Also, I should admit that I had a bit of a fever that night. But that doesn’t necessarily make movies seem more funny.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

OK Go

My Darling Clementine (1946) is a great western, a great John Ford film, heck a great movie generally. It’s got some real racist clangers though.

Henry Fonda is Wyatt Earp, driving a herd of cattle to California with his brothers. He meets up with Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) who tries to buy the herd, then suggests they go into Tombstone, over yonder. They leave their youngest brother to watch and head into town for a shave and maybe a drink.

The fussy barber doesn’t get much done when bullets start flying. A drunken Indian is shutting up a saloon, and the Marshall retires rather than try to arrest him. So Earp takes him out and gets offered the job. He turns it down and heads back to the cattle.

But when he gets there, the cattle are gone and his brother has been killed. Now he will take that badge, make the other brothers deputies, and stick around long enough to bring the killers to justice.

Of course, he locks horns with the big gambler in town, Doc Holliday (Victor Mature). Holliday has a spicy Mexican girlfriend, Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), but his hometown honey, Clementine (Cathy Downs) shows up as well. She’s a genteel type, and Doc doesn’t want her dragged down to his level. It kind of looks like she might be more of Earp’s type. But first, they have to find out who killed the youngest Earp, and probably have a shoot out. Maybe at some kind of corral.

Let’s get the drunken Indian and Mexican spitfire ladyfriend out of the way. You’ve just got to note it and move on. Like John Wayne, Ford was a mix of racist and not so racist. For example, he shot the movie in Monument Valley partly for the look, partly to put a little money in the local Navajo economy.

Of course, it’s weird seeing Tombstone in Monument Valley, but I suppose geography wasn’t so advanced in 1948. It does look great though. Also looking great are all the actors, with plentiful close ups or two shots, often from below, as if looking up from belt level. I guess I should make a small exception for Henry Fonda, who gets his haircut, shave and spritz of cologne at last. He looks kind of silly, and I think it’s intentional because of a running joke - someone will start rhapsodizing about the beauties of the West, and how you can smell the cactus flowers, and Fonda interrupts, “That’s me. The barber...”

Monday, May 13, 2019

House Hunting

Again, I’m not sure why we queued up The House of the Devil (2009). There was some kind of list of movies that looked interesting, and this was one of the only ones available on Netflix DVD. Anyway, it’s directed by Ti West (The Innkeepers), which was good enough for us.

It starts with college student Jocelyn Donahue looking at an apartment in a nice looking suburban house. The landlady seems sweet and is willing to waive the deposit if Donahue can give her the first month’s rent. Could this be the House of the Devil?

Donahue doesn’t have the money, and is desperate to move out of her dorm room, where her roommate spends all her time in bed with boys. She sees an flyer for a babysitting job (among all the posters for the upcoming lunar eclipse), and calls. The man who answers is a little weird, but seems to really need a sitter. Her friend, Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) drives her out to the job, deep in the dark woods, in an creepy old mansion - OK, this is the House.

The guy offering the job is Tom Noonan, a distinguished but slightly weird older man. But it isn’t really a babysitting job, it’s elder care for his mother. He assures Donahue that he’ll pay triple (enough to pay for the first month’s rent) and she probably won’t even see mom. She finally agrees, and sends Gerwig home, expecting to get picked up at 12:30. So no matter what happens, at least she has that for back up. Or does she?

So Noonan and his wife, Mary Woronov (wish she had a bigger role) take off, maybe to go to see the eclipse. Donahue puts on her Walkman and starts bopping around the house to the Fixx - did I mention that this takes place in the 80s? This is the creepy middle act. We’ve seen a little horror, but mostly it’s just Donahue poking around, either oblivious under headphones or nervous or both. Things don’t get really bad for her until the last act.

I’ve mentioned this takes place in the 80s. It was filmed in 16 mm, with obvious grain and the camera techniques of the period. The story has a lot of references to horror of the period as well. The babysitting job from Halloween, for ex. Also, Gerwig’s character is the kind of stoner-type that Nancy Loomis plays in that movie. Not to mention the Rosemary’s Baby -SPOILER!- ending.

In conclusion, my only complaint was the lunar eclipse. Before the eclipse, the moon seemed to be around a quarter full - but lunar eclipses only happen on full moons. Then the eclipse started, but there was none of the spooky redness you see before totality. Come on, a blood moon! And it could have been done with a filter or some stock footage. So unrealistic.

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Ace is Wild

Wild Zero (1999) is another entry into our rock ‘n’ roll horror comedy festival. This was originally metal horror comedy, but we’ve included indie and hair metal, so now we’re doing Japanese punk.

It starts with a Japanese news program where the hosts are joking about the flying saucers in the area. Then we meet the protagonist, Ace (Masashi Endo). He is a rockabilly greaser with a leather jacket and a pompadour that he combs ritualistically. He’s at a Guitar Wolf show and he’s trying to get up the courage to meet them. They are a punk-a-billy trio, Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf. By the way, they are a real band, and their songs are pretty rocking.

The band goes to get their money from the manager, a sleazeball called Captain, and find him abusing a woman, so GW draws a gun on him. Things are getting tense when Ace walks in, letting GW get the upper hand. In appreciation, he gives Ace a whistle to blow when he needs help.

We now switch over to three oddballs driving around in a car. They stop at a gas station and one of them suddenly decides to rob it. But there’s nobody there, but zombies, so they take off. The zombies must be related to the flying saucers seen in the area.

Ace happens to be passing through on his bike (moped) to see the next Guitar Wolf show, when he runs into a beautiful (SPOILER!!!!) boy, dressed like an average Japanese girl. I thought it was a boy right off, but Ms. Spenser was fooled until the Crying Game reveal. Ace falls in love with her, but lacks the self-confidence to tell her.

That’s almost everyone - there is also a beautiful arms dealer hanging out on a country road by a humvee, for some reason. She wears a kind of Burberry leotard, and turns out to be a friend of Guitar Wolf. She will come in handy when they have to fight the zombies and Captain.

If you get the impression that this is kind of a scattershot movie, you’re spot on. It’s sort of the Ramones meet Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s mostly trashy, goofy fun. But Guitar Wolf is the best - BW and DW stand back to back, combing their quaffs, while GW guzzles beer and makes wise pronouncements. Like when Ace tells him he is in love with a man, GW shouts, “Love has no nations, boundaries or gender! Rock and roll!” Wise words indeed.

The sound track has a lot of obscure (to me at least) international punk, and it’s all great. Oddly, the movie is set in Asahi Japan (Nowheresville), but was filmed in Thailand, and it shows.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Aqua-Wan

We went into Aquaman (2018) expecting something better than the sorry run of DC comic movies and we got it. But that’s a low bar to clear.

It starts with the keeper of a lighthouse (Eddystone?) Temuera Morrison (a kind of Mark Ruffalo looking guy), meeting and marrying a mermaid, Nicole Kidman. They have a son together, Arthur Curry. She has run away from her kingdom under the sea because they were trying to marry her off to some noble jerk. One day, the jerk sends an squad of well-armed sea dwellers to bring her back. Even though she fights them off, she decides to return to protect her husband and son.

Years later, after being intermittently trained by undersea vizier Willem Dafoe, Curry is now Aquaman (Jason Momoa). We see him rescuing a submarine full of advanced weapons from father and son weapons dealers and pirates Michael Beach and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. He doesn’t kill or apprehend these guys, but pointedly leaves Beach trapped to die, so that Abdul-Mateen can swear vengeance. That about completes the set up. Actual movie starts now.

When Kidman went back to her kingdom, she married the king and they had a son, Curry’s half-brother Patrick Wilson. He plans to unite the undersea kingdoms and attack the surface world, because of pollution. OK, valid point. He has the allegiance of King Nereus (Dolph Lundgren) but not his daughter, Mera (Amber Heard). So when Wilson unleashes tidal waves of garbage on the land, Heard goes looking for Momoa.

The rest of the movie is a series of somewhat random quests - for the clue to the map to the other clue to the magic trident. It’s kind of arbitrary, but does have Momoa and Heard bickering and fighting, which is fun. There is also all kinds of underwater scenery, also fun. It ends with Momoa finding his mother, then defeating the Karathen (voiced by Julie Andrews) by talking to her nicely, and getting the trident McGuffin.

Then there’s a big fight. Momoa already fought Wilson for the kingship and lost (shades of Black Panther) but I guess he gets a do-over. I mainly enjoyed this fight because Aquaman rides a sea horse and manages not to look (too) goofy.

It all ends happily ever after, except for Abdul-Mateen, who got his hands on some Atlantean weapons. He will now (or in the sequel) be known as the Black Manta! Aren’t all mantas black?

I enjoyed watching this a lot - Ms. Spenser less so. And after a while, I could see why. There’s not much there. All the scene setting, the computer game quest of the middle, the worn out Chosen One plot (hey, his name is Arthur, get it?). At least he has mommy issues instead of daddy issues.

Actually, his dad may have been the best part - just a simple lighthouse keeper, deeply in love with a mermaid.

It seems a little funny that James Wan directed this - of Saw, Insidious, Conjuring, and other super-scary franchises. I feel like he is most famous for low-budget, atmospheric horror - none of which are on display in this. Then I remembered he directed a Fast and Furious.

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Silence is Gould

I got the recommendation for The Silent Partner (1978) from a podcast called Movies That Made Me, the official podcast of Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell. Sadly, I forget which episode. See if you can find it!

This very Canadian production stars Elliot Gould as a teller in a bank in a Toronto mall. He seems a little quiet, keeps to himself, but does flirt a little with one of the other tellers (Susannah York). In fact, while flirting, he finds a discarded stick-up note, and begins to suspect that the bank may be robbed. Later, he notices that the mall Santa has a sign with the same handwriting, and figures that he is the robber.

The next day, he brings a lunchbox to work, and throughout the day puts money from transactions in the box, not his drawer. Then, when the bank is robbed, he hangs over a small amount and trips the silent alarm. The robber takes off, and he takes the cash home. A perfect crime.

Except the robber is Christopher Plummer, and not the nice Capt. von Trapp. Here he is a hip sadist, looking a bit like Anton Chigurh. And he knows where Gould lives.

Now this is the good part. Gould is terrified of Plummer, but instead of panicking, he comes up with a plan and turns the tables on him. He is just a bored, ordinary guy who collects tropical fish and plays chess, but he’s not going to back down on this.

After this, the movie takes a kind of turn. Time goes by, Plummer is in jail, Gould’s father dies. At the funeral, Gould meets one of his father’s nurses, the sexy Celine Gomez. You can see that he’s thinking of taking her into his confidence and running away with her, to start a new life as a new man. But is he really safe from Plummer? And what of Susannah York?

As a tricky caper movie, this is good to very good. As a psychological thriller, it’s interesting. There’s a lot about what happens to boring, old bank teller Gould, when he gets into an adventure. In fact, I imagined several alternative movies:
  • The meek teller is robbed, and becomes a minor celebrity, with all the women coming on to him, just because he’s associated with danger.
  • Same as above, but with the twist that he was in on the caper.
  • Same as above, but the twist is that the money fell into his briefcase accidentally.
  • ...
Something I wasn’t clear on was Elliot Gould’s looks. He’s referred to as “that handsome teller” several times. Is he supposed to be good looking? He looks like a tired basset to me. Maybe that’s the idea - that an ordinary man looks sexy when something interesting happens?