I Know Where I’m Going (1945)

i know where i'm going

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are known for their large scale, brilliantly shot in technicolor productions such as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, but they also made much smaller production such as this film. I’d honestly never heard of it until I got a copy of it on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, but I found it to be just lovely.

It is about a woman who goes to a small village in Scotland to meet her fiancee and get married but instead she falls in love with the local villagers and meets another man. That’s sound like every other romantic comedy out there, but in the hands of masters like Powell and Presssburger it is wonderful. You can read my full review here.

The Wages of Fear 4K UHD is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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The public library in Bloomington, Indiana is an amazing place. I lived near there for a time and I always loved visiting. It was larger than any public library I’d ever been to before and it was well stacked with all sorts of books. Even more impressive was their collection of movies and music. Rumor had it that they had purchased all the movies some local video rental store had when that store went out of business. That must have been some cool rental store as the movies the library had were awesome.

They had foreign films, arthouse films, lots of cool British TV, and a solid collection from Criterion before I even knew what the Criterion Collection was. I became a true cinephile in that library and I’m forever grateful for it.

One of the movies I borrowed from there was Wages of Fear. I’m embarrassed to say that I did not finish it the first time I borrowed it. The film is one of the tensest films ever made and I have to admit I found it boring. In my defense, it does take a while to get going. There is a long section in the beginning that introduces our characters and the setting and it is intentionally paced slow.

But once it gets going oh man does it ever get going. In some backwater South American town, four desperate men drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin across treacherous mountain roads. It is a suicide mission but the men have no other choice. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot fills every second of their journey with fear and tension.

It is a fantastic film and the Criterion is releasing it on 4K UHD. I can’t wait to see it.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Akira 4K UHD: One of the greatest animated movies ever made is getting the Ultra High-Def treatment from Crunchyroll.

Gladiator II 4K UHD: The original Gladiator film is a terrific bit of sword and sandal fun with some great action sequences and a fantastic performance from Russell Crowe. The sequel is a big fat dud. At least Denzel Washington appears to have had fun making it.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXIV: Everytime Kino Lorber puts out one of these sets I always think that they must surely be getting close to running out of films they can release and then they put out another one. This one has three films – Union Station / Jennifer / The Crooked Circle.

Play it Cool: Arrow Video is releasing this Japanese melodrama about the exploits of a Geisha.

No Country For Old Men 4KUHD is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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I’m a little late with this. I assume pretty much all of you follow my other blog and have heard my tales of illness and woe. Short end of it is I have pneumonia. I’m on the recovery end of it, but it was a rough go of it there for a bit.

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are always bountiful with new releases and this week is no exception. The Coen Brothers are one of my favorite directors and No Country for Old Men is one of my favorite films of theirs. The Criterion Collection is releasing a 4K UHD disc this week so naturally it is my pick, but there are lots of other cool things coming out too which you can read about in my article over at Cinema Sentries.

I Walked With a Zombie/The Seventh Victim is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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Val Lewton was the producer of low-budget movies for RKO during the 1940s. But while his movies were made for very little money, they never looked cheap. Many of them are true classics.

The Criterion Collection is releasing two of Lewton’s best films in a nice little double-bill. I Walked With a Zombie is one of the first films to feature the walking dead, though they are decidedly different here than they would become in the films popularized by George A. Romero. Here they are bound up in a story about voodoo and melodrama.

The Seventh Victim finds a woman looking for her lost sister and discovering a satanic cult. Both films are pretty terrific and Criterion has loaded them with their usual extras.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

A Quiet Place: Day One: A Quiet Place is a pretty terrific horror film in which John Krasinski and Emily Blunt battle aliens with super hearing. This is the third film in the series that shows us the initial invasion. But instead of the quiet farm in which the first two films take place, this one is set in New York City. Lupita Nyong’o stars.

MaXXXine: The third film in Ti West’s X trilogy (X and Pearl being the other two). Once again Mia Goth stars as Maxine a porn star with dreams of crossing over into Hollywood. In X she was just getting started but here she’s found success in the X-rated industry but has yet to get a shot at making mainstream films. But there is a killer on her trail and things get weird. This is still a fun film, but it doesn’t lean hard enough into its 1980s setting and three films into the series, and things feel more adrift than ever.

Late Night with the Devil: Pretty good little horror flick about a late-night TV host who unleashes evil into the world (don’t they all?) You can read my full review here.

Sleepy Hollow: Tim Burton’s underrated The Legend of Sleep Hollow story has Johnny Depp in the Ichabod Crane role. Paramount Pictures is giving it the 4K UHD treatment for its 25th anniversary.

Kinds of Kindness: Yorgos Lanthimos is the maker of eccentric, funny, utterly bizarre films. His latest tells a trio of stories that I don’t want to know anything about. I find it is best to go into these things not knowing. It stars Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons, and Willem Dafoe.

Robot Dreams: Animated film about a dog that builds a robot companion. I’ve been hearing good things about it.

Thelma: Delightful story about an elderly woman (June Squibb) who is conned out of a bunch of money over the phone and sets off to find the culprit.

Subservience: Megan Fox is an evil robot helper. You can read my full review here.

Persona (1966)

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I am not a great intellectual. I’m not even that smart. When I talk about movies I try to impart at least some sense of their themes and meaning, but I’m not very good at it.

I tend to connect to movies with my gut not my brain. I talk about them from an emotional standpoint not necessarily an intellectual one. I don’t know if that’s good, or bad, but that’s the way it is.

I love Ingmar Bergman’s films. He is, perhaps, one of the most intellectual filmmakers to have ever made a film. I do connect to them emotionally, but I have a difficult time understanding why. Persona is one of his most difficult films to understand, and yet I love it still.

I struggled with my review over it because I felt I needed to talk about it from an intellectual point of view, and yet I’m not sure I understood anything about what it means. You don’t have to. It stands on its own as a beautiful mystery.

Master of the House (1925)

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I wrote my review of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Master of the House in 2014. I admitted then that I had not seen many silent films and struggled with how to watch them. I’ve seen quite a few more now, but I still struggle with them.

When the story is full of excitement and intrigue, and when the camera is used in interesting ways, I can get into a silent film. But when it is more of a family drama, and when the camera stays pretty static my mind tends to drift.

Dreyer uses his camera well, and the set design is impeccable, but I found the story rather dull and struggled to get through it. You can read my full review here.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2008)

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I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Wes Anderson. It is mostly love these days as I think he has grown as a filmmaker, but there was a period in the mid-2000s when I worried he was going to become a director who was more style than substance.

The two films that caused this worry were The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited. Upon initial viewings I was unimpressed. They were very clever and stylish, but their stories left something to be desired. Or so I felt back then. I’ve since revisited and reassessed, but at the time I was disappointed with them.

With The Royal Tennenbaums and Rushmore he had become one of my favorite directors and so that disappointment was huge.

Then came The Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was magnificent. It is a stop-motion film based on the Roald Dahl story and both the story and the animation fit Anderson’s sensibilities to a “T.” It is clever and funny, beautiful, and a wee bit touching.

The Criterion Collection put out a magnificent version of it on home video a few years back and you can read my review here.

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968–1978 Is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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I’m a little late with this. I wrote it for Cinema Sentries on time, but they were having a little trouble with their hosting service and so it just now got posted over there.

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian director whose films have been highly praised and that I’ve never seen. This new Criterion set looks like a good place to start. You can read all about that and some other interesting Blu-rays out this week by clicking here.

Don’t Look Now is the Pick of the Week

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When I talk about horror movies I suspect a lot of people think of harsh violence and heavy gore. For sure some horror movies specialize in that type of thing, but many of them do not. To tell the truth, as I get older, and especially now that I have a young daughter, I find I have less tolerance for the ultra-violence on screen. Especially sexual violence.

But horror doesn’t have to include that. I love eerie haunted house movies and movies that terrorize you with the threat of something awful happening. I love a good psychological horror.

Don’t Look Now is a film that has very little on-screen violence. In fact, it has very little violence at all. But it does have horror, mostly coming from a sense of dread and grief. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a young couple who recently lost their son due to a tragic accident. Sutherland’s character has taken a job in Venice and they are both using it as a way to escape. But you can’t escape that kind of grief. It is a beautiful, powerful, and yes horrific film. Criterion has just released it in a new 4K addition and it is my pick of the week.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Prey: Predator is a ridiculously dumb 1980s action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who goes to the jungle to fight a killer alien. It is also kind of awesome. It somehow managed to launch an entire franchise. I haven’t seen all of them, but I’ve seen quite a few of them and they are definitely a mixed bag. Prey is really freaking good. It is basically the same premise as the first one except for this time the alien lands on Earth some 300 years ago and a Comanche Indian has to fight it with primitive tools.

Talk to Me: I’ve heard good things about this horror film about a group of friends who conjure spirits using an embalmed hand. They become hooked on it, go too far, and unleash the spirit world upon them.

Evil Dead Rise: The original Evil Dead is a low-budget horror masterpiece. The sequel, Evil Dead II, took the same premise (dumb teens go to a cabin in the woods and unleash evil) and turned it into a slapstick horror/comedy masterpiece. That spawned another sequel (Army of Darkness, not as good, but fun) and eventually a TV series (Ash Vs Evil Dead, I’ve only seen a few episodes, but I liked it). Then came a soft reboot which went back to its roots (dropped Bruce Campbell and the humor). And now it has a sequel. That’s a lot of words to say that I have no real desire to see this. I saw the reboot and didn’t much care for it. Like I said earlier, hard-core violence just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

It Came From Outerspace: Very silly-looking 1950s science fiction flick gets a nice release from Universal Studios.

Blood Money: Four Classic Westerns is the Pick of the Week

Over the last few years, my movie-watching has increased by a large margin. I’ve gone from watching around 120 movies a year to over 300. One of the things I’ve tried to do with this increase in viewings is to increase my overall cinematic knowledge. I try to watch films from different eras and genres, films that I might otherwise not see. I don’t want to just watch the latest blockbusters but to allow my movie watching to increase my understanding of film history. I think that is obvious just from the movies I’ve reviewed on this site.

The Western is a genre that I mostly ignored for large swaths of my life. I didn’t dislike Westerns as much as I just wasn’t interested in them. It didn’t help that my formative years were a time when the genre had mostly gone out of style. But I’ve come to love the genre over the last few years.

I love the wide open spaces of the genre and the gunfights. I love how the films are about expanding and living in a new world, about starting a new country, about etching out a living in a harsh, brave world.

The Italians got into the Western business about the time they were dying out in America. These so-called Spaghetti westerns played with the standard tropes of the genres and made it their own.

Arrow Video is doing what they do best this week – releasing a boxed set of relatively obscure genre films and loading them with extras. Blood Money: Four Classic Westerns includes four Italian Westerns (Mátalo!, Find a Place to Die, Vengeance is Mine, $10,000 Blood Money) that were made from 1967-1970. I don’t know anything about them, and I don’t have to. I want to buy this box and learn about them as I watch.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Soundies: The Ultimate Collection: Around the time of WWII little jukebox type machines started showing up in bars, honkytonks, and night clubs. For the drop of a coin you could watch what amounted to an early music video (or burlesque shows, or any number of other things). Kino Classics has put together a big collection of the music videos which star folks like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Hoagy Carmichael, Doris Day and a ton of others. Sounds cool.

Paint: I would have bet you a lot of money that this comedy starring Owen Wilson was a weird biopic of Bob Ross, and I would have lost. Apparently Wilson’s character just looks like that painter of happy little clouds (and paints for a public television station), but that’s were the similarities end. Or something. The reviews have been terrible so I’ve not bothered to dig into it more.

The Broadway Melody: The first sound film to win an Oscar is also generally regarded as the first proper movie musical.

The War of the Worlds: This sci-fi classic from 1953 is getting a big 4K release for its 70th anniversary.

One False Move: Criterion is releasing this neo-noir classic about a police chief awaiting the arrival of some killers in a 4K set.

Chucky 4-7: Shout Factory presents this collection of Chucky films (Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, and Cult of Chucky) in a new 4K boxed set. I’ve never seen any of the Chucky films so this probably isn’t the place to start, but for fans it looks pretty cool.