Category: Film Page 34 of 101

Blindspot: Sanjuro (1962)

On March 26, 2014

My difficulty getting into Japanese film is no big secret, but I’m chipping away at it, film by film. I enjoyed Yojimbo a couple of years ago (even though I was in a too-tired frame of mind and really need to rewatch it), so I had hopes that Sanjuro would follow in its footsteps.

I won’t deny that the opening had me fearful – it drops us right into the middle of a somewhat heated discussion, with one man telling a bunch of other men that his uncle wouldn’t agree to help them take down some corruption, which is seen as a great betrayal, but that the superintendent would. It’s all a bit abrupt and you’re left wondering exactly who the uncle is, how this government is formed, what place a “superintendent” has in it, what the power relationship between the uncle and superintendent is, who exactly the men think is corrupt and why, how that corruption is affecting them, who they owe their allegiance to, what their status is (are they samurai, or just regular guys who happen to carry swords around – other reviewers are calling them noblemen, which makes sense), etc. Most of this is never really answered, so either it’s just a total McGuffin, or it’s assumed that the viewer has a knowledge of Japanese social and government structure that I lack. You do learn that the uncle is a chamberlain, which is presumably a higher position than superintendent, but with the chamberlain and the superintendent the only officials really mentioned, it’s unclear where the noblemen originally thought the corruption was coming from.

The good news is, Sanjuro (an apparently assumed name, played to perfection by Toshiro Mifune) pops out of the next room pretty quickly and takes the situation in hand. He’s a ronin, which I DO know what is – a Samurai who has lost his master, so he’s roaming around without clear allegiance. It’s not really an honorable position to be in, but it does leave Sanjuro free to do whatever the hell he wants, which, thankfully for our hapless noblemen, is help them out of their predicament. He immediately clues into the fact that it’s probably the superintendent that’s corrupt rather than the chamberlain, and he carries out a series of plans (most of which are screwed up by the impatient and highly unstrategic noblemen) to catch out the superintendent and rescue the uncle, whom the superintendent has had arrested and framed for corruption.

Adventures in Flickcharting: Mars Attacks!

By Jandy

On March 21, 2014

In Film

Sometimes I see a movie that I don’t really feel that inspired to write about (usually because I liked it well enough but didn’t feel too strongly about it), but this year I want to make a conscious effort to write more for the blog and I also have been wanting to incorporate Flickchart more into my posting somehow. Flickchart is a website for ranking movies: it gives you two movies and you choose which one is better (or which one you like more – the best vs. favorite discussion is an old standby among die-hard Flickcharters and one I won’t get into just here except to say that I personally rank on Flickchart according to what I like/enjoy the most, not according to what I think is the best). Over time and many rankings, it builds a list of your favorite movies based on your rankings. One thing I really like about Flickchart is how it presents you with two films that you never would’ve thought of in the same context at all and forces you to really think about them in relation to each other. I don’t really believe anymore in the value of the minute rankings it ends up with, but as a macrocosm of taste and as a method of thinking about films in a context you otherwise wouldn’t, it has worth.

With due props to my friend Travis McClain who has pitched this format and uses it sometimes for his own reviews, I’m going to try this series charting how a newly-watched movie enters my Flickchart. When you add a movie to Flickchart manually, it goes up against a series of films strategically spread throughout your chart. For example, in the first ranking, it will go against the film in the very middle of your chart. If the new film wins, it will go against the film equidistant between the top and the middle. It continues like this until it finds its correct spot in your list. In my case “correct” is kind of a general term, because my chart is kind of messy once you get below about 500. But the point of this approach in this series is to compare the new film with the existing films as I go along, which will hopefully give me something to write about those films that I don’t have too much to say about.

First up – Tim Burton’s 1996 alien invasion parody Mars Attacks!

The Film

In this spoof on low-budget science fiction films of the 1950s, especially Ed Wood’s infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space (from which the Martian spaceships are directly lifted), spaceships clutter the sky over Earth. The US President (Jack Nicholson) attempts several diplomatic meetings, each one agreed to by the Martians, who then proceed to blow everything to hell. Eventually the situation devolves into all-out zany war.

When we watched this, I thought it was the last film standing between me and seeing all of Tim Burton’s feature filmography. But I forgot about Dark Shadows. So I’m still one dubious film away from adding Burton to my 100% Club. I enjoyed Mars Attacks!, mainly for the anarchic glee the Martians seem to take in shooting everything up. You’d think after the first time, the humans would’ve realized that the Martians couldn’t be taken at their word to honor diplomatic procedure, but nope. I also enjoyed seeing pretty much every actor in Hollywood cameo in this thing – it’s really ridiculous, and I didn’t know most of them were going to be in it when we started. I should point out that I also have a lot of fun with the kind of bad sci-fi this film is sending up, including an un-ironic love for Plan 9.

How It Entered My Flickchart

Mars Attacks! vs Branded to Kill

The first matchup is the most important – it determines whether a film will move its way up in the top half of the chart or drop into the obscurity of the bottom half. That said, moving into the bottom half of my chart isn’t that bad a deal, because I watch far more films that I like than that I don’t like, so the middle of the chart isn’t really the tipping point between liking and disliking for me. Branded to Kill is a Japanese New Wave film by Seijun Suzuki, one of three Suzuki films I’ve seen and definitely the weirdest so far. It’s like a cross between a gangster film and Un chien andalou. I don’t get it, but I do like it, and it gets a lot of style points, which help it beat Mars Attacks! Mars Attacks! is a lot of goofy fun and it’s more narratively comprehensible, but I can’t pass up the evocative style of Branded to Kill.

Branded to Kill wins, and Mars Attacks! gets an initial ranking of #2951 (out of 3375).

The Fog of War and Noir

By Jandy

On March 13, 2014

In Film

I’ve been wanting to start up a screenshot series for a while, but have been trying to think of a different spin to do on it. The easy way, and the way I’ve done on Row Three in the past, is just to find a striking shot and post it with minimal commentary. But anyone can do that, and I have to make things harder on myself than that. At least I have to try – it may devolve to that before long. My friend Ryan at The Matinee does a great job of using a screenshot to lead into a critical point about the film as extrapolated from that one shot in his Freeze Frame series – I want to do something like that but not EXACTLY like that.

So we come to this. I’m going to pick TWO shots. It’ll either be two shots from the same film and I’ll talk about how the two shots together play into the meaning of the film, or two shots from different films and I’ll talk about how they echo each other or play into a comparison of the two films.

Endings: Casablanca (1943) and The Big Combo (1955)

Spoilers for both films.

When I watched The Big Combo recently for the Movie Club Podcast, I was struck by how obviously the last scene echoed the end of Casablanca. Both films end in airport hanger, in the fog, with the final confrontation between two groups of people, one trying to arrest or kill the other. Yet the way we read these scenes and the people in them is completely different.

Blindspot: The Goonies (1985)

By Jandy

On March 5, 2014

In Film

When I posted on Facebook and Twitter that I was currently watching The Goonies for the first time, the incredulity was palpable. I’m not particularly well-versed in the ’80s films that my generation considers essential, but for some reason, this one has been coming up more and more often lately, so I bit the bullet even though I didn’t expect to get a lot out of it. For some reason ’80s movies often rub me the wrong way, or at least I have trouble buying into their particular brand of goofiness. The fact that several people I know who didn’t watch it until they were adults reported not really caring for the film didn’t help.

Well, I don’t know if it was those low expectations, or my overall positive frame of mind this year, or if I just have a huge soft spot for adventure films, but I pretty much loved this. The set-up of the kids’ families about to be kicked out of their homes had me a little confused at first (who’s moving? why? how will money help?), but once I realized that it’s basically a McGuffin, I was fine. The rest of the plot, following a group of kids following an old treasure map to try to find pirate treasure is right up my alley (and the backstory was just enough to give the story stakes – if they don’t find the treasure, they lose their homes; it’s more than just fun and games, though of course it is that as well). It’s like Indiana Jones meets Home Alone, what with the bumbling criminals always one step behind the kids.

Watching with Karina: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

By Jandy

On February 27, 2014

In Watching with Kiddos

My first thought when I found out I was pregnant (after “OMG OMG OMG OMG”) was how much fun I’d have showing her movies, seeing her reactions to them, and getting to experience my favorites movies again with fresh eyes. I figured I wouldn’t get to start this until she was three or four, but she has developed an incredible love for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (that’s the 1977 Disney film which is itself a compilation of three previously released shorts), and we watch it just about every day. Thankfully, I also love Winnie the Pooh, but I’ve also found myself making a ton of random observations throughout the many viewings to keep myself sane.

Here are some of those observations.

The Piglet in the opening looks way different than the Piglet in the actual film. Piglet isn’t actually in the first section at all; he’s replaced by the made-up speech-impaired gopher for some reason (“I’m not in the book”). They did include Piglet in the second short, which was originally released a few years later. They apparently didn’t update the Piglet in the opening to match the Piglet they ultimately used in the second two shorts.

Christopher Robin only sometimes knows how to spell “howse.”

EXORCIST POOH.