Hello, and welcome to another addition of Five Cool Things. I did good this time as I’m posting this just one day after it hit Cinema Sentires. This time I’m talking about Kagemusha, Port of Shadows, Five Star Final, Face/Off and a new movie trailer. Come on over to Cinema Sentries to read all about it.
In my first post of this series, I talked about the very first cassette tape I owned. This time I’m going to talk about the very first CD I bought.
The truth is I don’t really remember any other cassette tapes that I owned before I got a CD player. I’m sure there were some. I remember owning some kind of compilation album that had lots of 1950s-era hits on it – artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. I think I had the Stand By Me soundtrack and maybe cassette singles from Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.
Things get muddled a bit because even after I owned a CD player for my home stereo, I still had a cassette player in my car. Sometimes I’d record my CDs to cassette for listening in the car, and I often bought used cassettes at the local head shop. My memory of which tapes I bought before I owned a CD player and which tapes I bought just for the car gets muddled.
I just looked it up, and there were only five years between when Europe’s Final Countdown (my first cassette tape) came out and Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (my first CD). That’s not a huge period of time for me to have built up a big cassette collection, especially since I was fairly young during that time period.
Not that any of that matters; it’s just the way my brain works. I had intended for this series to be more or less chronological, and the fact that I can’t think of another cassette tape I bought before CDs came along bugs me.
I have a very specific memory of being in a Wal-Mart with my mother and my older brother Neal. He was trying to convince Mom that he needed a CD player. These were fairly new at the time, and he was excitedly extolling the virtues of this new technology. About how the sound quality was so much better, about how they lasted longer, and most importantly, you didn’t have to fast forward and rewind a CD, you could just press skip.
Mom wasn’t having it. She’d been through vinyl albums, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes. She didn’t want to have to buy all her old albums on yet another format. She argued that in a few years some new technology would come along and he’d have to buy everything once again. Cassette tapes were good enough.
My brother saved up and bought himself a five-disc CD changer. Some time after that, he joined the Navy and moved away, leaving his CD changer behind. I can’t remember if he actually gave it to me, or if I just started using it after he left. But I was so excited by it.
Truth be told, I can’t remember if For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the first CD I bought. It might have been U2’s Achtung Baby or Queensrÿche’s Empire. But whatever, the Van Halen disc was an early purchase. I thought the 5-Disc changer was awesome. I remember putting the first couple of CDs in it and wondering what I’d do when I got a sixth one. Then I’d have to decide which discs stayed in and which one had to wait. This was a big deal to me at the time.
Honestly, I was never a huge Van Halen fan. I absolutely loved “Jump” and enjoyed songs like “Hot For Teacher” and “Runnin’ With the Devil” but I’d never bought one of their albums and didn’t follow them in any way.
I bought the album primarily because I loved the song “Right Now” and I loved that song primarily because of the video. It is weird to think about how much time I spent watching MTV back then.
The video channel is gone now, but it was a long running joke to say that you remembered when Music Television actually played music. Like so many channels, they drifted in later years to mostly airing reality TV.
But the truth is, they played non-music-related stuff relatively early in their history. I remember a comedy show with Julie Brown, the game show Remote Control, and of course The Real World, which essentially launched the reality boom we are still living in today.
But they did play a lot of music videos, and I watched those all the time. Every day I watched their Top 10 countdown, but I’d also sit and just watch random videos whenever there was nothing else on to watch. Music videos were awesome. Not only did you get the great music, but they often did interesting visuals to match. I know people like Taylor Swift are still doing interesting videos for YouTube or whatever, but the late 1980s/early 1990s feel like the heyday of great music videos. Or maybe that’s just when I watched them.
Anyway, “Right Now” had a great video. They used big block letters running across the screen to discuss various social and political issues from the time. They’d say things like “Right Now No One Is Safe From Loneliness” and “Right Now Our Government Is Doing Things We Think Only Other Countries Do.” Behind the words were visuals that brought home those messages.
Watching it now, I find most of the messaging fairly simplistic, but at the time I thought it was amazing. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw it, so political messaging in a music video felt revolutionary. It touched on things I was thinking about. It. made me feel like Van Halen really understood me.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the album. I think I liked it, but didn’t love it. I certainly didn’t listen to it like I listened to Achtung Baby or Empire. At a guess, I’d say it was the first album that got taken out of the disc changer when I bought my sixth CD. Though I’d certainly pop it back in every now and again.
It is an album I haven’t listened to in a very long time. Listening to it now, I find it to be just okay. I still love “Right Now.” “Poundcake” is pretty good, and I like “Runaround” quite a bit. The rest of it is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.
Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant technical guitar player, but I’ve never really connected to him. I don’t want to say he lacked soul, but I don’t tend to connect to music that relies on technical prowess without having something deeper and more meaningful inside. It doesn’t help that a lot of Van Halen’s music focuses on frat boy antics and base sexuality.
But I don’t want to argue about that. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand all the technical stuff. I just like what I like. I connect to what moves me, and I don’t know how to explain it. But I also have no problem with those who connect to things I don’t like.
In the end, this is not an album I’ll probably ever listen to again. I didn’t add any of those songs to my playlists. Except for “Right Now” that song still rocks.
Welcome back to Westerns in March. This is my fourth year doing this theme, and I’ve come to really enjoy it. There is something wonderful about this genre with its wide-open spaces, its barroom brawls, and its shootouts. So let’s get started.
Director John Sturges made Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957 with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. It is a darn good film. It ends with the titular gunfight.
Ten years later Sturges revisited the story with this film, a sort of sequel with James Garner in the Earp role and Jason Robards as Holiday. It begins with the gunfight at the OK Corral and then deals with its aftermath.
An opening title notes that “This picture is based on Fact. This is the way it happened” and Sturges did strive for more historical accuracy than is usually told with these stories, though, of course, he still changed quite a bit to suit his needs.
Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) survived the gunfight (something he did in real life but did not in the previous film) and is now taking our heroes to court. He claims his men were unarmed and had raised their hands in the air when Earp and his men shot them dead.
Clanton loses the court case but sets up his own personal war with Earp, his brothers, and Holiday. Some of them get shot, some of them get killed. Wyatt is determined to stop them, but his moral code demands he do it legally. But his stubbornness makes him bend the law to suit his needs.
Robards is terrific as Doc Holiday. This is a very different performance from Val Kilmer’s portrayal in Tombstone, but it’s still real good. I never really buy James Garner as Wyatt Earp. I’m so used to him playing rascally wiseacres that it is difficult to buy him as the deadly serious man he’s playing here.
Robert Ryan barely has any screen time, and when he does, he isn’t nearly menacing enough. He’s the main villain, and he’s far too tame to be threatening. Which is a weird thing to say about Robert Ryan, who is usually so good at playing scary dudes.
Sturges’s direction is steady but not memorable. Ultimately, the film is worth watching for Robards’s performance and if you are interested in what happened after the famous gunfight.
I watched 35 movies in February. 23 of them were new to me. 22 of them were made before I was born. It was Foreign Film February, and I watched 9 films that were not in English.
It was a good month. I’ve been trying to do more official reviews for Cinema Sentries. I mean, I always do quite a bit, but I’m trying to step up my game. I like writing whatever random reviews I do just for this site, but I get distracted, so I figure making requests where I have to review will get me even more in the habit, and maybe that will lead somewhere.
But that does mean I won’t have as much time for watching whatever I want. This has always been the struggle for me. I’ll get a bunch of official reviews, and they stack up on my desk. I have to watch and review them all, which means I can’t watch whatever else I want. I get tired of that and stop making requests, then I really wish I was getting the cool stuff in the mail. Back and forth. Back and forth. So I’m trying to lean into the real reviews, and we’ll see how it goes.
Which means there is less time for Foreign Film February and whatever. But still I did pretty good, nine films for the monthly theme isn’t bad.
My most watched actors list got shaken up a little. James Stewart got bumped by Spencer Tracy. I had another one of those boxes that put Tracy up front with 5 films. Walter Brennan is tied in second place with four films, and Robert Ryan jumps into things with three films watched.
My director’s list finally has a couple of names on it. As this is Westerns in March month, I suspect we’ll see John Ford take a few leaps forward, but who else will join him?
That’s it. Here’s the full list:
Crime 101 (2026) **1/2
Port of Shadows (1938) ****1/2
Five Star Final (1931) ****
The Astronaut (2025) ***
Bad Moon (1996) *
Somewhere in Time (1980) ***
Scream 7 (2026) **
Wolfs (2024) ***1/2
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) ***1/2
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) ****
Doctor Who: The Hand of Fear (1976) ****
Kagemusha (1980) ****
The Pyx (1973) ***1/2
Face/Off (1997) ****
The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) ****
Mogambo (1953) ***1/2
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) ***
Iphigenia (1977) ****1/2
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) ****1/2
Doctor Who: The Masque of Mandragora (1976) ***1/2
Northwest Passage (1940) **
Libeled Lady (1936) ****
Fury (1936) ****
All That We Destroy (2019) **
Dillinger (1973) ***1/2
2 Minutes Late (1952) ****
The Naked Jungle (1954) ***
Borderline (2025) **1/2
Pierrot le Fou (1965) ****
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) ****1/2
Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) ***
The Five Venoms (1978) ***
Wild People (1932) **
Red Dust (1932) ****
The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) ***1/2
I watched The Rider at the Circle Cinema in Tulsa. That’s our cool little arthouse theater. They show all kinds of films – new independent films, silent films, classic noirs, and midnight movies. I love the place. I caught The Rider because my family was out of town and I wanted something to do. I don’t think I knew much about it at the time but was knocked out by it.
It was directed by Chloe Zhao, and she immediately became someone to watch. Her next film was Nomadland, and it is really great as well. Then she made The Eternals, a Marvel movie that is hated by just about everyone. One assumes she did it because she got paid well and that money will help finance future films, but who knows? I didn’t see it.
Her latest film is Hamnet, a film about William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, as they deal with the loss of their young son, whose name is the movie’s title. That grief is generally said to have motivated Shakespeare to write Hamlet, perhaps his greatest play.
The reviews for the film have been very good and it is up for an Oscar next week. I missed it in the theater but I’m excited to watch it now and happy to make it my pick.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
Piranha: Joe Dante directed this low budget thriller about some government-modified piranhas that accidentally escape and attack a summer camp. It is a film that used to air on cable TV back in my day, and I’m sure I watched at least parts of it multiple times, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you anything about it. Shout Factory is giving it the Steelbook anniversary treatment.
Cobra Kai: The Complete Series: I’ve not watched any of this series that brings back many of the characters from the Karate Kid films, but I know a lot of folks that love it.
The Swordsman Trilogy: Trio of wuxia films is getting a boxed set from Shout Factory.
Chainsaw Man: My daughter has been getting into manga over the last few years. One day I saw this book in the store and jokingly recommended it to her. Because what could be cooler than a dude with chainsaw hands? She didn’t want the book but has since seen some of the series. Now there is a film. It is about a kid who makes a deal with a demon and gets those crazy hands.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 3: My wife and I started season one of this series, but have yet to finish it. I like it, but we got distracted. It follows Captain Pike, who helmed the Enterprise before Kirk took over.
The Running Man: Oh, I wanted this to be really good. Edgar Wright directing a Stephen King book should have been awesome. Instead it was just okay. Glen Powell stars as a man who signs up for a game show in a terrible future where he has to survive for several days without being caught. If he’s caught, he’ll be killed. If he survives, his family will get some much-needed money.
Zootopia 2: The first film was a fun little romp about talking animals trying to solve a crime. This time around more animals will try to solve a different case.
I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”
I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.
There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.
Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.
The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films.
Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox. Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.
I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.
The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.
Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).
Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film. Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).
There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film. There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.).
They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it. Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.
Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3).
But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.
I’m a big fan of Radiance Films. They put out really cool releases of relatively obscure films. My understanding is that one of the guys who used to run Arrow Video now runs Radiance, and that checks out. Arrow made a name for themselves by doing some very nice restorations of low-budget cult films and giving them loads of cool extras. Radiance is doing the same but with obscure arthouse European films.
I try to get as many of them as I can, and I’m never disappointed.
Iphigenia is based on a Greek legend about Agamemnon having to sacrifice his firstborn child in order to win the war with Troy. It is a really beautiful, wonderfully made film, and I’m so glad I watched it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
The 1970s were a difficult decade for Akira Kurosawa. In the late 1960s, he spent years working on two projects that never came to fruition – Runaway Train was cancelled after months of prep work, and he was fired from Tora! Tora! Tora! after three weeks of shooting.
He struggled to gain financing for another picture, but with the help of some friends, he made his first color film, Dodes’ka-den, in 1970. It was a commercial failure.
He attempted suicide in 1971.
He only made one other film in the 1970s, Dersu Uzala, and that had to be made in Russia with Russian financing. It did relatively well both critically and commercially, but he would not make another film this decade.
With the help of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, he was able to make Kagemusha in 1980. In some ways it feels like a warm-up for the director’s next film (and his last truly great movie), Ran. Both films are set in the Sengoku period of Japan’s history and feature epic battles, political cunning, and samurai.
Ran tends to get all the glory, but don’t sleep on Kagemusha.
A petty thief (Tatsuya Nakadai) is set to be executed by crucifixion, but when Takeda Nobukado (Tsutomu Yamazaki), the brother of Takeda Shingen (Tatsuya Nakadai), the daimyo (or warlord) of the powerful Takeda Clan, realizes that the thief looks a lot like Takeda, he stays his execution and uses him as a double, or political decoy: a kagemusha – or shadow warrior.
While laying siege to a castle, Takeda is mortally injured. Before he dies, he tells his generals to keep his death a secret for three years. Much of the film is spent with the generals trying to fool everyone – Takeda’s grandson, his mistresses, his enemies, and even his horse – that the thief (who is never given a name, so we’ll call him Takeda from now on) is the daimyo.
This proves surprisingly easy, and the double is quite good at impersonating the real Takeda. At first the grandson recognizes he is not the real Takeda, but the double is so much kinder and more playful than his real grandfather that the boy quickly takes to him and soon doesn’t care if he is real or not.
The mistresses either don’t notice the differences or are smart enough to realize that if they make a fuss, they will likely lose their jobs or their lives. In a meeting the double proves himself sly, besting the son in words when he balks at the whole scenario.
Most of the clan and their enemies have never seen their leader up close, and since he is careful to wear the full daimyo armor in public and is only seen at a distance by most, nobody seems to realize they are being duped.
Over time, Takeda begins to think he is the real deal. He starts to give orders as if he is truly boss, much to the chagrin of the generals. As part of the real Takeda’s orders, the clan was supposed to suspend all fighting and keep to themselves for a time. But the double starts pushing toward war. The film ends on a poignant and utterly devastating note.
At 180 minutes, the film runs long. I found myself struggling to keep up somewhere in the middle. The story is a bit difficult to follow. Many of the characters are based on real people, and I have no doubt that many of the historical and cultural nuances went straight over my head.
Where the film excels is in its visual storytelling. There is a great scene where the rifleman who shot the real Takeda demonstrates how he was able to do it, shooting with a rudimentary gun at a great distance in the dark. It is Kurosawa storytelling at its best.
The film used hundreds, even thousands, of extras for the battle scenes. Kurosawa was a master at staging, and he does so brilliantly here. Sometimes there will be long lines of horses that march across the back of the screen, then the middle, and the foreground. Between them are foot soldiers marching in opposite directions. It must have been quite a feat getting them all to move in the way that looks visually interesting.
His use of color is astounding. There is one scene where all of these soldiers are marching. The sun is setting behind them, and it is so stunningly beautiful I almost cried.
Famously, there is a dream sequence where the fake Takeda faces the real one. Because it is a dream, Kurosawa paints it with vivid colors. The background is a psychedelic landscape of primaries, the ground is the stuff of fantasy, and it ends with Takeda staring at himself in a mirror like pool of water.
Every moment of this film is beautiful to look at.
I just wish the story held my attention more. In the end, this isn’t top-tier Kurosawa, but there is so much beauty to be found I must highly recommend it.
Pretty much whenever I watch a movie, I internally review it. More often than not, once the movie is over, I’ll spend some time mentally writing a review. Sometimes that makes it onto the page, and I post it here or elsewhere. Sometimes I get distracted, and it never goes anywhere.
Every once in a while I’ll mentally write a review and think that I have actually posted it only to discover, later, that I never did write it out. This is one such occasion. I sure thought I had written a review for this film, but alas, I have not.
The trouble is I watched this a couple of weeks ago, and the plotting details are already foggy. And because this is a fairly obscure Norwegian film from 1952, there aren’t a lot of details of the film online.
But it is still Foreign Film February, and I wanted to write something about it, so here goes.
The Criterion Channel is running a little collection of Nordic Noir, and I’ve been enjoying it. The first two films I watched weren’t all that noirish, to be honest. There were hints of noir in there, but you have to stretch the definition a little bit to categorize them as such. But 2 Minutes Late is straight-up noir, and I loved it.
Max Paduan (Poul Reichhardt) is married to the nervous, clingy, and extraordinarily jealous Grete (Grethe Thordahl). She’s even jealous of her sister Beth (Astrid Villaume), thinking her friendship with her husband might be something more.
One day Grete goes to an old bookstore to find something to read while she’s getting her hair done. She accidentally leaves her purse behind. When she returns, she finds the owner has left for lunch, but a little push on the door and it opens. She smells something strange in the store but shrugs it off, grabs her purse, and leaves.
Later she’ll learn someone was murdered in that store right around the time she was in it. Suspicions fall on Max, and it is Beth who does some investigating to find out who really did it. The plot gets all sorts of twisty, and it’s filled with lots of interesting little details. This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I don’t remember exactly where it all goes, but I do remember I quite liked it.
If you like film noir and have the Criterion Channel I highly recommend it.
I freaking love me some Peter Lorre. I am a huge film noir fan. Stranger on the Third Floor stars Peter Lorre and is often cited as the very first noir. Several times now I’ve gotten all sorts of excited thinking about that and put this movie on only to be disappointed by it.
It isn’t a terrible film, but it is definitely a B-movie that never expected to be talked about some seventy years after it first appeared on screens. And Peter Lorre is in it for less than ten minutes. He’s great, and there is a pretty cool dream sequence in the middle, but other than that it is kind of dull. Anyway, you can read my full review here.
themidnightcafe.org 