Natalie Merchant has a new album coming out and she’s just released the new single from it, and it is a good one.
Autumn Sonata (1978)
I have not yet watched an Ingmar Bergman film for this year’s Foreign Film February. I really should remedy that. I bought a big boxed set of his films from the Criterion Collection a couple of years ago and haven’t begun to really scratch the surface of it. Bergman films tend to be very weighty, which sometimes makes them difficult to watch. They are often rewarding, but the effort it takes to watch them often makes me put them off. Foreign Film February is always a good excuse to make me make that effort, but I haven’t yet.
Goals!
I did watch this one several years ago and reviewed it here. It is definitely a rewarding watch.
Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection
Prime Suspect is one of my all-time favorite detective television shows. Helen Mirren stars as Jane Tennison, one of the few female Detective Chief Inspectors in London. The series follows her as she fights against institutionalized sexism, her own destructive personality, and solves some pretty gnarly crimes. It is incredibly well made and Mirren is absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend the show as you can see from the review I wrote of the complete series that came out on Blu-ray a few years back.
Foreign Film February: Tampopo (1985)
When I was a teenager, or maybe in college my brother asked me if I had seen Tampopo. I’d said I’d heard of it, probably seen it while flipping channels, but hadn’t watched it. He said it was really weird, but kind of awesome. He admitted that the plot – about a little restaurant that made noodles, something really foreign sounding to us Oklahoma boys – sounded goofy on paper, but that it was really funny and cool. I made a mental note to watch it and then never did. Until this last week.
It is funny how those things go. Why do I remember my brother telling me about a silly noodle movie from decades ago? Why does it seem like I’d told similar stories several times lately? I seem to be watching a lot of movies that made an impression on me as a teenager lately. Don’t ask me why.
Tampopo is really weird and absolutely delightful. The main story is about a couple of truck drivers who stop off at a run-down noodle shop owned by a pretty divorcee, with a young son. They decide to help the poor lady out and enlist some friends – a noodle connoisseur, an interior decorator, etc – to make her noodle shop the best dang noodle shop in Japan. This part of the film is very sweet and silly and wonderful. One of the drivers is sweet on the woman and they innocently flirt. The men spend much of their time trying to help her learn to cook the very best bath of noodles ever and that gets really fun.
Interspersed through all this is a series of vignettes about food and love often intersect. There is a husband who demands a woman rise from her deathbed to cook him one last meal, a lowly office worker who shows up his superiors with his vast knowledge of French cuisine, and an etiquette class that teaches its Japanese students how to properly eat spaghetti. The longest, strangest, and funniest is one involving a couple who use food in a variety of sexual ways. The vignettes are interesting and very silly, but I mostly enjoyed the film for its main story.
But the whole thing adds up to a big dish of delightful.
Doctor Who: Spearhead From Space
Doctor Who
Spearhead From Space
Season 7, Story 51
Originally Aired: January 3-24, 1970
My answer to the question as to who is my favorite incarnation of The Doctor is usually answered by which Doctor I most recently watched. But if pressed Jon Pertwee is often my definitive answer (when it isn’t Tom Baker, or David Tennant, or Peter Capaldi…). But Pertwee is a great Doctor.
Spearhead From Space was his first story, it was also the first Doctor Who story to be shot in color and the first to be released on Blu-ray. I reviewed the disk when it first came out and you can read my thoughts here.
Detective Inspector Irene Huss
I’m a sucker for crime shows. The plots can often be cliched, as is the case with Irene Huss, but the execution can be really great. Also the case with Inspector Irene Huss as I wrote in my review.
Annika Bengtzon, Crime Reporter: Episodes 1-3 and 4-6
Over the last decade or so there have been some really great crime thrillers to come out of the Scandinavian countries, both in print and on the screen. Unfortunately, Annika Bengtzon was not one of them. At least according to my review. I don’t actually remember watching the series at this point.
Bob Weir Joins Joe Russo’s Almost Dead on “Jack Straw”
Foreign Film February: Nostalghia (1983)
Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky directed seven films in his all-too-short career. I’ve now seen all seven and everyone is brilliant, several are masterpieces (I still haven’t seen the Steamroller and the Violin the short film he made in school). His films are known for their beauty, spirituality, and long takes. Nostalghia has all that in spades. It also has a pretty confusing plot, but don’t let that bother you, for this is, as Martin Scorsese will tell you, cinema.
The story is about a Russian man who visits Italy in order to research an 18th Century Russian composer who also visited Italy and committed suicide upon his return to his homeland. That much I understood. The rest of it was pretty much lost on me. Reading the synopsis on Wikipedia just now I honestly had no idea that what they say happens in the plot actually occurred. Not that this mattered in any way, it certainly didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the film.
The film uses dream sequences and memories to create a fantastic tableau of images. Tarkovsky is famous for holding an image on the screen for a long time allowing us to truly digest everything we’re seeing on the screen. Here he uses subtle changes in lighting to shift our focus. There is one scene set in a bedroom. We see a man lying on a bed in the middle of the room, it is raining outside, and there is a bathroom in the corner. The camera holds the shot. Our focus shifts from the window to the bed. The man seems to disappear. Rain now seems to be puddling on the floor. A dog appears at the bathroom door. For several minutes we stare at this bedroom. Nothing happens, and yet we are mesmerized. Or at least I am.
Tarkovsky does this over and over. He is like a great painter and film is his canvas.
He uses rain, puddles, and water to great effect. Water drips from ceilings. Characters wander in cave-like structures filled with water. Reflections abound. The setting here often looks a great deal like The Zone in my favorite of Tarkovsky’s films, Stalker. It is very earthy. Organic.
I’ll need another viewing or two (or three) to get a real grasp on the story and what Tarvkosky is trying to say, but with this initial viewing, I was just mesmerized by the pictures he painted.
My Weekend in Movies
I watch a lot of movies over my weekends. I watch movies during the week, but with work and family, and other obligations, I don’t always get to watch one every night. But on the weekends, I squeeze in as many as I can.
I don’t really have the time or energy to write full reviews so I thought it would be fun to do a weekend wrap-up.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
After watching Hellraiser (2022) Friday night I had a little more time before sleep came crashing down so I threw on this little French horror flick from Jess Franco. It is surprisingly good, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. A young woman comes home when she learns her father has died. There she finds an assortment of oddballs and freaks who either want to seduce her or kill her or both. I hope to have a real review of this for my Foreign Film February segment later this week.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
On my way to the convenience store Saturday morning for my usual 32 ounces of Dr. Pepper, I heard Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” playing on the radio. Realizing it was from the soundtrack to this Sam Peckinpah film and that I happened to own a copy of it on DVD, and that I had never seen it caused me to rush home and pop it in.
It’s terrific. There are actually a variety of cuts of this film out there, and I’m not entirely sure which one I saw. This is one of those revisionist westerns that were popular in the 1970s. Pat and Billy are old friends, but Pat Garrett (a wonderful James Coburn) can see how the county is changing and has decided to be on the right side of the law, whereas Billy (a fascinating Kris Kristofferson) can’t do anything but be an outlaw. Neither of them wants the inevitable confrontation to come, and the film prolongs it for as long as it can in the most interesting ways. Dylan not only did the wonderful soundtrack but he has a small part too. It is a lot of fun watching him on the screen.
Fist of Fury (1972)
The Criterion Collection put out an excellent little boxed set of Bruce Lee Blu-rays sometime ago and I bought a copy last year. But I’ve been putting off watching them for one reason or another. So I decided to watch this one this weekend. I was disappointed in it. The story is forgettable. A gang of Japanese dudes keeps harassing Bruce Lee’s club. Naturally, Bruce Lee has to kick their asses. The action sequences are mostly great, but there is a lot of dull padding to get through between each fight scene.
Cujo (1983)
When I was a young teen we didn’t have cable television. Or maybe we just didn’t have the pay channels like HBO and Cinemax. Whatever, my mom’s friend Beverly had everything and she was willing to tape anything I wanted on VHS and give it to me. Each week I scoured the TV Guide looking for interesting movies for her to tape for me. One time she taped Cufo for me. I only remember this because I let my friend Justin borrow the tape and he raved about the film. I can’t remember now if he never gave me the tape back or if I just never got around to watching it, but it went unseen by me until this weekend.
I actually bought a special edition DVD of the m movie last year based on that memory. I don’t know why I decided to put it in this weekend but I did and I’m glad for it.
Like a lot of Stephen King books this film takes its time getting started. It gives us a feel for its setting. It spends time with its characters, letting us get to know them. Unlike a lot of Stephen King books this film never makes me care for any of that. I just kept waiting for the rabid dog to trap the lady and her kid in that junky old Pinto. Once the dog does trap the lady the film gets pretty terrific, but it takes it a long time to get there.
Mr. Wong, Detective (1938)
Boris Karlof plays Mr. Wong, a Chinese detective that was clearly invented to cash in on the Charlie Chan craze at the time. There is absolutely no other reason for him to be Chinese in this film, which makes it doubly unfortunate from a modern perspective. The story is rather dull.
Dark Alibi (1946)
Another white guy playing a Chinese detective. This time it is Sidney Toler playing Charlie Chan, a role he would play more than 20 times to great success. This one is actually quite good. The mystery is standard stuff but Toler is fun as the brilliant detective who throws around a lot of silly bits of wisdom and constantly puts down his son and chauffeur.
A Study in Scarlet (1933)
I guess I couldn’t get enough detective movies this weekend. This is an extremely loose adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story. So loose in fact that it has nothing at all to do with the book other than the title. Apparently, the producers could only afford to secure the rights to the story’s title and the use of the characters, but not the actual story. Reginald Owen is so forgettable as Holmes I kept forgetting which actor was playing the character while watching. I only put it on because Anna May Wong is second-billed, but she appears in it for less than ten minutes. Completely and utterly forgettable.
themidnightcafe.org 