I can’t believe I didn’t even mention Mandy Patinkin in my review of this show. If I recall he’s great in it (he’s great in everything.) While my review is mostly positive I stopped watching the series after this season. Has anybody seen the third season?
You can read all my thoughts here.
I’ve watched enough Shaw Brothers kungfu flicks at this point to recognize that their plots are all mostly the same. There is usually a good clan and an evil clan. The evil clan picks a fight for one reason or another which leads to lots of drama and even more fight scenes and it all ends in a climactic big final battle. There is sometimes a love interest, usually a training montage, and often the Master is killed. There are variations on this, but more or less that’s what happens in all of them.
Sometimes they are funny or really goofy, and sometimes they are deadly serious. Mostly the scenes between fights is utterly pointless, but the best ones at least keep them interesting. But the real reason to watch is the fight sequences. When they are good, there is nothing better, when they aren’t so good they are at least entertaining.
Five Shaolin Master’s fights are just ok. The story is worse.
Some Qing soldiers burn down the Shaolin Temple. Five dudes survive and vow their revenge. They work out a series of secret codes to tell each other apart. This makes sense once they start enlisting other people who are sick of the Qing soldier’s evil deeds. They also learn that there is a traitor in their midst and suss him out.
Our heroes are no match for the Qing fighters and get their collective arses handed to them. They regroup, train heavily for several months, and come back for a final showdown. It is all mostly dull with the fight scenes being merely adequate. The final, big battle is pretty fun with eyes getting snatched, testicles being destroyed, and lots of jumping and flying about.
But other than that this one is utterly skippable.
Last week I did a My Weekend in Movies post. This week I thought I’d expand it to the entire week. I’ll skip the movies I watched last Sunday since they are covered in the last post. And some movies I will have already talked about it, but maybe this will be a way to briefly discuss the other movies I watched. Because I know you all just can’t wait to hear about what I’m watching.
One On Top of the Other (1969): Italian horror maestro makes a sleazy noir. Results are mixed. I talked about this one in my Foreign Film February post.
The Brasher Doubloon (1947): An early adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. Here’s what I wrote on Letterboxd:
I’m a pretty big Raymond Chandler fan so I’m always excited to see an adaptation of his work that I haven’t seen before.
This sticks pretty close to the source material though they simplify Chandler’s complicated story quite a bit. The direction is adequate in that you can always tell what is going on and it looks nice, but there is nothing all that stylish or interesting about it.
It is clear that it was influenced by Howard Hawk’s take on The Big Sleep and John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon (which of course was written for the screen by Chandler). It feels like a low-rent version of those films, but it is passable in that regard.
The real problem is George Montgomery whose take on Phillip Marlow is bad. He’s too friendly for Chandler’s wisecracks to really snap as they should, and he’s not charming enough for the romance to work. He feels like he’s in a high school stage production rather than a Hollywood movie. The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better though Nancy Guild does ok as Merle and Florence Bates is decent at the old villain. But the guys acting like Peter Lorre are just pale imitations.
Crimes of the Future (2022): David Cronenberg started out as a low-budget horror director who used a lot of body horror to make a point. Then he moved on to bigger budget dramas that have earned various awards. Crimes of the Future (the second film he’s made with the same name though neither has much to do with the other) is a return to body horror with lots of weirdness. Viggo Mortenson stars as a man whose body keeps developing new organs. Léa Seydoux is his partner who makes performance art out of the surgery she performs on him to remove those extra organs. It gets weirder from there. I’m not sure I loved it, but I do love that guys like Cronenberg are still stretching their boundaries in films like this.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974): I’ve been on something of a Sam Peckinpah kick lately, and I had never seen this one before. It begins with a pregnant woman who is brought before her Mexican gangster of a father who demands she tells him who the father of her child is. After some light torture, she says it was Alfredo Garcia. The father says the title of the film and then he sends some of his men to do just that.
They scour the country looking for him and run into Bennie (Warren Oates) a piano player at a dive bar who says he might know where Garcia is. Turns out Garcia is already dead, but Bennie needs to collect his head in order to prove the man is dead and collect his reward. The film takes a lot of turns and it never goes where I thought it was going. It becomes a treatise on capitalism and how the rich always get what they want, and the poor turn themselves inside out trying to get rich. It is funny, strange, sad, and brutal.
Capricorn One (1977): A classic 1970s conspiracy film that spoils the conspiracy from the get-go and winds up being kind of dull. Three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and OJ Simpson) are pulled from their space shuttle just moments before it launches on the first manned flight to Mars. They are told that there was a problem with their life support system, but that if the launch doesn’t go off as planned Congress will scrub future missions. So the shuttle launches without them and they are to shoot some video of them pretending to land on Mars and fool everybody into thinking they were really there. They play along for a while but James Brolin starts to have his doubts and wants to tell the truth.
A journalist (Ellliott Gould) suspects foul play and begins asking the kind of questions that will get him into trouble. It all turns into a big chase where the government goons want to kill the astronauts and Elliott Gould seeks out the truth. Most of it didn’t work for me. Had they kept the secret a secret to the audience and made the film about Elliott Gould trying to uncover the truth I think this could have been a classic. But as it is, it just wasn’t very thrilling.
Titane (2021): This weeks Friday Night Horror movie was disturbing, freaky, and quite fascinating.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967): My wife loves big Broadway musicals. I can take them or leave them, more or less. I have to be in the mood. I was in the mood on Saturday and we sat down to watch this one. It is a bit dated, especially in terms of its sexual politics, but the music is good and the dancing is great, and the sets are fantastic. A young Robert Morse plays the lead and I’ve only ever seen him as a much older man in Mad Men. So it was really fun seeing him sing and dance.
The Osterman Weekend (1983): Another Peckinpah. This one is a mess. It’s about a group of old friends who get together every year for a fun weekend. Except for this time, one of them finds out that the rest of them are Russian spies. He’s charged by a secret US agent to try and turn one of them into a double agent. Or something. The plot is all over the place and there are all sorts of twists that just muddle everything even more. They say the studio took it over from Peckinpah and edited it into oblivion. And it shows.
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While I obviously like horror films, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a super fan of the genre. I’m no horror hound who goes to see every horror film as soon as it is released. I’m not exactly a snob about it either, as there are plenty of really terrible horror films that I love. But for most of my life horror wasn’t necessarily something I set out to watch on a regular basis. I watched new horror films that were getting good reviews, and I tried to watch the classics, but weeks or even months would go by sometimes between my viewing of that genre.
Then sometime in the last few years, I started watching horror movies on Friday nights and that became the Friday Night Horror Movie and now I am seeking horror films on a regular basis. More than ever before I’m actually seeking out new horror films to watch. That’s allowed me to not only watch some of the classics that have been on my list for a while, but to find new films, or to dig deeper into certain directors’ catalogs.
Lucio Fulci is one of the godfathers of Italian horror. I’ve now seen 18 of his films. I wouldn’t consider any of them masterpieces. Some of them aren’t very good at all. They mostly slide into that good, but not great category, with bonus points being given to the great practical effects he uses for the large amounts of gore he likes to add to his films.
One On Top Of The Other is more of a crime film than a horror one. It feels like his attempt to remake Vertigo as a film noir with a copious amount of sleaze and a terrifically wonky jazz score.
A wealthy doctor has a sick wife and a pretty girlfriend. The wife dies and he gets a large insurance settlement. An anonymous tip leads him to a strip club where one of the dancers bears an incredible resemblance to his recently deceased wife. The police have been following him due to the insurance money and when they discover the doppelganger, well, things start to get hairy for our hero.
There are a lot of cool twists and turns in the story and it all looks and sounds good. But Fulci seems more interested in watching the women take off their clothes and get sexy with various men than he is in paying attention to the story. This is too bad because there is a pretty great film hidden underneath all the sleaze.
I watch a lot of movies and it is very rare that a movie genuinely surprises me. When you watch movies like I do you get used to the way most films work, the way they hit certain beats and behave in certain ways. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, sometimes it is comforting. But when a movie does come along and does something completely different it makes it all that more rewarding.
Titane completely knocked me out. It is completely and utterly surprising. I genuinely had no idea where it was going to go next. I’m not sure I loved where it always went. I’m not sure I didn’t, either. It is a film I’ll be thinking about for a few days to figure out what exactly I thought of it. But I loved not knowing what was coming next.
It is a film worth coming into not knowing anything about, so I won’t say much. It involves a girl who gets into an accident as a child and has a metal plate inserted into her skull. As an adult, she works as a dancer and after a rough night she goes on a long journey that takes her places you cannot believe.
It has been compared to a David Cronenberg film and that’s apt, but it is also very much its own thing. I watched Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future directly before watching Titane and let me tell you they make for one freaky double feature.
Agathe Rousselle gives an absolutely astonishing, brave, bravura performance in the lead and Vincent Lindon is quite spectacular as well. He plays, well I’d get into spoiler territory if I said who he plays, but he’s really good.
It is a film that is exciting and repulsive – sometimes I couldn’t turn and other times I had to close my eyes. This is something I don’t want every film to do to me, but it sure is exciting when they do.
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Over the last couple of years, I’ve really gotten into kung fu movies. That’s something I loved when I was a kid but had completely gotten away from as an adult. Somewhere during the pandemic, I started watching old Shaw Brothers’ films and that has rekindled my love of the genre.
While the Shaw Brothers made a lot of movies filled with kung fu action, sword fights, crazy costumes, and ridiculous storylines, they never did make a movie with Bruce Lee. I’ve not actually watched a lot of movies with Bruce Lee. I did, however, recently purchase a boxed set of Bruce Lee movies from the Criterion Collection, so maybe I’ll remedy my deficiency soon. The other day I watched Fist of Fury, which I sadly found to be not that great.
Lee plays Chen Zhen, the best kung fu student at his school. When his mentor and the master of the school dies, Chen thinks it must have been murder. He blames the gang of Japanese dudes that have been harassing his school for weeks. The rest of the school urges Chen for restraint, as their master always preached that kung fu was not to be used for revenge.
But Chen cannot restrain himself. He goes to the Japanese dojo and kicks some serious ass. The action scenes are pretty good, but they are far from the best I’ve seen in a kung fu movie. But they are definitely worth watching. But everything around the fights is utterly dull. Kung fu flicks aren’t exactly known for their great drama, but the best ones are at least interesting, or funny, or something. This one is utterly forgettable. You really are just biding your time until Bruce Lee takes his shirt off and gets down to business.
Jesús Franco was a prolific Spanish filmmaker who dabbled in a lot of genres (including hardcore pornography) but is mostly known as a horror director. He’s one of those guys whose name I’ve heard for years, but that I’d never gotten around to watching.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead is what you might call an erotic horror film with a gothic setting, a dreamlike plot, beautiful visuals, and, yet, lots of naked flesh. It is also pretty good.
It focuses on Christine (Christina von Blanc) a young woman whose mother died when she was very young. As a child, her father sent her away to boarding schools where she stayed, even through holidays, so that she doesn’t even really know who her father is. But when she’s notified that he has died she returns to his home in a small village.
Almost immediately we know things are strange because when she arrives in the village and informs some townspeople that she will be staying at her father’s manor, she’s told that no one has lived there for some time. But Christie just knows she has other family members living there. When she arrives she is greeted by her relatives, an odd bunch one and all (including the director himself as a drooling, sniveling mute).
As the title implies, and you’ll probably figure out pretty quickly, these relatives aren’t exactly what they at first seem to be. They might be the living dead, or they might be some manifestation of her deranged psyche. It all gets pretty weird and pretty confusing, but Franco imbues it with enough beautiful imagery that you won’t mind, at least I didn’t.
It isn’t quite good, but it is definitely not boring and it for sure made me want to watch some more films from the director.
themidnightcafe.org 