Foreign Film February: The Third Murder (2017)

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Our second film in this year’s Foreign Film February is a Japanese legal thriller that starts out strong but quickly gets muddled and ultimately wound up kind of boring me.

In the opening scene, we see a man bludgeon another man to death and then set him on fire. Then the film moves forward in time with the killer, Misumi Takashi (Kōji Yakusho) under arrest and being questioned by his defense attorneys.

He fully admits to killing the man but his story regularly changes in regards to what actually happened and why he did it. His attorneys argue over the best way to defend their client and keep him from being executed.

The devil, they say, is in the details, and while there are a lot of details in this film, I had a difficult time caring about them. This is a film that makes quite a to-do over whether he should be charged with Robbery-Murder or Murder-Robbery. The difference being in his intentions. If his intentions were robbery and the murder came after then his motive is greed, but if he murdered him for some other emotional reason (such as anger over being fired – for the dead man was his boss) and robbed him afterward then the jury might be more sympathetic.

That’s an important legal distinction, I guess, but not one that makes for compelling cinema.

It is well-acted and well made and some of the revelations are interesting, but overall I found myself ready for it to be over long before it actually was.

Foreign Film February: The Vanished Elephant (2014)

the vanished elephant

Welcome to Foreign Film February 2025. I started the month off with a bang, watching three movies over the weekend. Then I got busy and distracted and forgot to actually write about them. Here we are nearly one week into this, the shortest of months, and I have neither watched any other movies nor written anything.

Hopefully, the rest of the month will go better. But considering…well *waves hands frantically in all directions*…everything else going on in the world, I wouldn’t count on it.

The Vanished Elephant is a beautiful, strange, moody, and confounding neo-noir mystery that questions the very fabric of the story it is telling the longer it is spun.

Edo Celeste (Salvador del Solar) is a successful crime writer who has decided to end his long-running detective series. Naturally, as these things go, a real-life mystery forms. New clues have come to light which might let him understand what happened to his fiancee who disappeared several years prior.

He keeps finding packages full of photographs which, when placed together in a certain order will reveal a much larger picture. There is a whole complicated procedure that I did not at all understand that led him to figure out in what order to place the photographs.

Some murders happen. He investigates on his own despite the real police constantly telling him not to. Eventually, he will become a suspect.

As the film progresses this fairly standard mystery formula begins to dissolve to be replaced by an even bigger mystery about the nature of story and reality. To say more would be to spoil its many surprises.

Ultimately, it didn’t work that well for me. I found it more unintelligible than mysterious. It is definitely a film that will work better for the viewer on a second viewing as you’ll likely discover details that will help you understand what it is doing. I’m just not sure I care enough to give it another go.

It is well-made and quite beautiful to look at. It reminded me a bit of David Lynch’s movies, but that might just be because he just died and I’ve been thinking about him of late. But it does have that beautiful weirdness about it.

Foreign Film February: Les 3 Boutons (2015)

les 3 boutons

Agnes Varda was a titan of French cinema. She was a member of the French New Wave and a pioneer of using location shooting and non-professional actors. She made narrative films and documentaries. I’ve only previously seen Cleon From 5 to 7 but it is a masterpiece. My wife adores The Gleaners and I.

I keep telling myself I need to watch more foreign language films this month, and I keep finding other things to watch, but before February comes to a close, I wanted to watch something. Something short. Because it has been a long day and I’m tired.

Luckily the Criterion Channel has a bunch of short films and they even categorize them by their time frames – Under 60 minutes, Under 30 minutes, Under 15 minutes…

Les 3 Boutons (The Three Buttons) is an eleven-minute film from Agnes Varda. It was commissioned by the fashion house Miu Miu. It stars Jasmine Thiré as a young goat farmer who goes on a magical journey.

A postman brings her a package. Inside the package is a large red-looking tarp. When she unfolds it the tarp becomes an enormous red dress. The girl walks inside the dress and finds herself in a cave. When she spies some school girls walking down a lane her own clothes turn into the same dresses they are wearing. Suddenly, she’s on a city street. When she spies some kids having ice cream she reaches inside her pocket and finds her own cone. It is a stream-of-consciousness fable.

Varda infuses this very simple story with a playfulness and joy that is a delight to behold. There isn’t much to it, and so I don’t have a lot to say about it. But if you have the Criterion Channel (or Mubi) and you have 11 minutes to spare I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Shin Godzilla (2016)

My daughter has started to get into Japanese culture, including Anime so I got her a subscription to the Crunchyroll streaming service. I noticed that Shin Godzilla was included in that service so I gave it go. I’d say I am a fan of the Godzilla movies, but I’m not hardcore about it. I’d been meaning to watch this one since it came out, and the reviews for the new one – Godzilla Minus One have been really good, so today seemed like a good day to watch a lizard monster attacking Japan. Godzilla Minus One isn’t a true sequel of Shin Godzilla but I still wanted to watch it before Godzilla Minus One.

Crunchyroll had two audio options. I could watch it in the original Japanese with English subtitles or I could watch an English dub. In general, I prefer to watch movies in their original language and so I chose that option. Unfortunately, the sync was off which meant I got the subtitles appearing on my screen about three seconds before the characters actually said them. This was especially true during the more frantic action sequences in which the dialogue is rapid-fire. It was very confusing so after about an hour I switched to the English dub. It was a very bad dub, but somehow I survived.

Made in 1954 the original Godzilla served as a metaphor for Japan’s post-war fears of another nuclear holocaust. Shin Godzilla is at least partially concerned with the ways in which bureaucracy stalls decisive government action in a time of crisis. Making it a metaphor for the Japanese government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Just off the coast of Japan, an eruption of some kind occurs in Tokyo Bay. The water begins to boil and an underground tunnel ruptures sending water flooding into traffic. The government meets to discuss the issue, they call in top scientists to figure out what is causing the eruption, but they do nothing.

Soon a tail emerges then a large lizard thing (with hilarious googly eyes. But not to worry, the scientists say, it probably can’t come on land. It’s legs are too small. Then it does come on land and mutates into something more Godzilla-like. More government discussion, but little action. They have to have meetings, you see, and decide what the laws say they can and cannot do during this crisis that no one in the history of the world is prepared for.

Some low-level agents form a secret board of folks willing to actually do something, and they (eventually) save the day. But not before Godzilla destroys most of the city with his super-awesome fire breath and lasers that shoot out of his scales and tail.

It is a curious mix of dudes in offices arguing over the correct procedures, other dudes in other offices actually trying to find a real solution, and some crazy Godzilla action.

Honestly, I was mostly bored during the office scenes. I got what it was trying to do within the first ten minutes or so and after that, it just felt redundant. But the Godzilla attacks stuff is pretty great.

Foreign Film February: The Ear (1970)

the ear

I’ve been a little slack in my Foreign Film February watching. It seems like I’m always slack these days in whatever I’ve decided is the movie theme of the month. I still like the idea of the themes, but some days (most days) I like to watch whatever I’m in the mood for.

I do love foreign language films, but they can be difficult to watch. I don’t mean difficult thematically or that the style is obtuse or whatever (though that can be true), butthe act of reading subtitles creates extra work. Normally, I don’t mind that little bit of work, but increasingly my eyes are going bad. I used to have excellent eyesight but as I get older that is less and less true. These days they are dry and tired. That little extra work of reading what I’m watching is sometimes just too much. When I watch a film at the end of a day I want to relax, to rest, not have to give my eyes a workout.

Weekends are better and this is when I watched The Ear. It is a Czechoslovakian film that was made in 1970 but was banned by the Communists until the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. It was part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave, and I realize I don’t think I’ve seen any of those films. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie from Czechoslovakia. This is why I love Foreign Film February.

A married couple, Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) and Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) return home from a political party to find their gate unlocked and their front door open. The power is out and the phone doesn’t work.

Ludvik becomes increasingly convinced he is about to be purged by the government. He is a mid-level bureaucrat and in flashback, we see that his boss and several others were disappeared at the party. His wife, drunk and belligerent, continually speaks loudly about things she ought to keep quiet about.

It is well known by everybody that the government is listening. The omnipresent “Ear” has been placed in various rooms in everybody’s house. Rumors abound about it. They say that they won’t listen to you in the bathroom or the kitchen (but they love to listen to what you do in the bedroom).

They see men standing outside the house across the street. Ludvik begins flushing notes he took at various meetings. Things that might not look good to the new administration. When the toilet clogs he burns them, destroying his toilet seat in the process.

As the night rolls on the tensions increase. As do the cracks in their marriage. It is clear they haven’t been happy in a long time. Anna doesn’t seem to understand how serious it all is. She yells at the ear and continues drinking. Ludvik is convinced he’s going to prison or worse.

Reminiscent of 1984, The Conversation, and even Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Ear is an intense, meticulously crafted bit of paranoia. The stark black-and-white photography increases the fear by not allowing any warmth in. In the flashback sequences, we often get POV shots from Ludvik’s perspective which increases the paranoia as really we’re seeing what he sees from his memory, and he’s increasingly convinced things are as bad as can be.

It ends almost ironically. I won’t spoil it, but it is a slap of reality as to how truly insane totalitarian governments can be.

Foreign Film February: Battleship Potemkin (1925)

battleship potemkin

There are some films that loom so large in a cinephile’s imagination that they are almost impossible to watch. These are films that have been so well-praised, that are so influential, so important that they sometimes seem less like movies than cinematic gods.

Or something. I’m getting a little carried away with my bloviations. Battleship Potemkin is considered one of the greatest movies ever made. It is famed for its use of editing, creating montages to elicit an emotional response. Director Sergei Eisenstein believed that you could juxtapose two unrelated images and create an entirely new idea. What he did in Battleship Potemkin was revolutionary and those techniques are still used today.

The “Odessa Steps” sequence is one of the most influential scenes in all of cinema. It has been paid homage to, and outright stolen from, and parodied countless times. I first heard about it from Brian DePalma’s film The Untouchables which has a very similar sequence involving a baby carriage on some steps.

All of this hung over my head years before I ever watched it. I put off watching it because its reputation was too great, its influence too wide for me to ever be able to sit down and take it all in.

To be honest, I really just thought it was going to be dull. I’m learning to appreciate silent films, but it is a struggle.

Turns out Battleship Potemkin is a real banger. It is fast-paced, full of incident and action, and an utterly enjoyable watch.

It is about a historical event in which some sailors revolted against the officers of the ship and took it over. They then port in Odessa where the citizens celebrate the liberation of the ship and bring them food, all before being slaughtered by the Army. It was an important part of the 1905 Revolution and the film was made as a bit of propaganda celebrating the 20th anniversary of the event.

It is propaganda. It is utterly designed to make you side with the revolution and ultimately the Communist State. I find that modern reviews of the film ultimately fall on where one’s political views are. None of that matters to me. It is a magnificent, wonderful film with never a dull moment. It is a movie I’d show to people who have never seen a silent movie.

Foreign Film February: Fox And His Friends (1975)

fox and his friends

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a German screenwriter, dramatist, actor, and director. He was one of the driving forces of the New German Cinema. He reminds me a bit of Lou Reed as he was prolific in his art, a counter-cultural icon, and an absolute terror in his life.

He is just as known for his incredible amount of output (in his short 37 years of life he wrote/directed some 40 films plus plays and television series) as for his bountiful drug use, alcohol consumption, and sexual liaisons. That’s not to mention his controlling, abusive relationships with just about everyone.

His films run the gamut from experimental art-house fare, to ribald comedies, and confrontational crime thrillers, but he is most known for a series of elegantly styled, incredibly tender melodramas made in the vein of those old Douglas Sirk films. It’s like how Lou Reed could make both Metal Machine Music and “Pale Blue Eyes.”

Not all of his films are great, or even particularly good. I’ve not seen all of them, only a small portion really, but I’ve seen most of his “important” works. I added to that stack just the other day with Fox and His Friends.

Fassbinder also stars in this one as Franz Bieberkopf an uneducated, working class gay man. He begins the film working as Fox the Talking Head in a low-rent circus. When the owner of the circus is arrested on charges of tax evasion Franze starts hustling. He picks up Karlheinz Böhm a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer. Before their tryst Franz makes Max stop off and purchase a lottery ticket. Franze buys a lottery ticket every week and he’s just sure he’ll win this time.

In fact he does win this time, a whopping 500,000 Deutche Marks. When Max’s friend Eugen (Peter Chatel) learns of this windfall he immediately goes from berating Max for introducting Franz into their group of friends to turning Franz into is lover.

Eugen is handsome, well educated, and sophisticated, but he’s also broke. His father’s paper company has hit hard times and if they don’t do something fast it will go bust.

Pretty quickly we realize (though Franz doesn’t) that Eugen is only interested in Franz for his money. He cajoles Franz into letting his company borrow 100,000 Marks, then gets him to buy an expensive apartment and furnish it with expensive things. Meanwhile when they go out in public Eugen is constnatly berating Franz for his lack of education and unsophistication.

You don’t have to have a crystal ball to know how it will all end. Fassbinder wasn’t a great actor, but he gives Franz a deep meloncholy. It is as if he knows that Eugen is taking advantage of him, but at first he doesn’t care because it is giving him access to something he’s never had before – status – and then he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

A couple of times Franz tries to assert himself, he thinks he has an ace in his hand, but always Eugen outsmarts him, and makes him feel even less.

All of this is good. But what I find fascinating about the film is it is a snapshot into a certain type of gay culture, specifically from 1970s Germany, but perhaps universally, that I don’t have access to. As a straight man who grew up in a rural, deeply conservative part of America that culture simply did not exist in my circles. There may have been a gay underground in Tulsa when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s but I certainly didn’t know about it.

Even now when my social circles have broadened, I’m not a part of any gay scene. I’m not really a part of any straight scene. Or any scene, really. I could use a friend.

So finding this scene detailed is interesting to me. Its like watching any old movie that has a lot of exteriors in a city. You get a snapshot of what was like at that specific time.

The characters are explicitly gay in the film, something surpriisng from a Germany film from the 1970s. It was controvesial at the time. It would be controversial if it was released in America today. But interestingly nobody inside the film makes a big deal about their sexuality. True, it mostly takes place inside gay bars, gay bathhouses and the like, but still there isn’t a hing of homophobia anywhere.

Fox and His Friends isn’t my favorite Fassbinder film, but it is an interesting one and a fascinating time capsule.

Foreign Film February: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

young girls of rochefort poster

Jaques Demy was one of the great French directors. He was an instrumental part of the French New Wave. Early in his career, he wrote and directed two back-to-back musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). They are considered essential classics. Some many months ago my wife wanted to watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and so we did.

I didn’t love it.

I like musicals, more or less, but they aren’t my favorite. That’s not a genre I turn to all that often. I once tried to make musicals my theme of the month and I only watched about three of them.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a type of musical that has very little dialogue. Almost everything is sung. I’m not a lyrics guy so musicals are always a little problematic in that I tend to miss plot points when they are sung. When everything is sung I get lost pretty quickly. That’s apparently even true when they sing in French and there are subtitles.

But also there weren’t any showstoppers. The music was nice but there wasn’t a single song that left me humming after it was over. There was no “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'” or “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” or whatever.

It was a perfectly fine film, but I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

When my wife wanted to watch The Young Girls of Rochefort I was none too excited, but I relented because I love her and I enjoy watching films with her.

I liked this one a lot better. There is quite a bit of actual dialogue which allowed me to follow the story more closely. The story itself is more interesting to me. It is light and frothy and a delight. It follows two sisters (real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac) as they look for love in the titular coastal town of France. Little do they know their true love is closer than they think.

Much like Umbrellas, The Young Girls of Rochefort is full of bright, pastel colors, and the costumes are very 1960s and very beautiful. It feels like this one is full of real songs too. Songs you’ll leave the theater singing. It also has Gene Kelly who is always a delight.

Loads of people love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg so I probably need to revisit it at some point. I suspect knowing what I’m getting into will help me enjoy its charms more. But for now I tip my hat to The Young Girls of Rochefort and delight in it fully.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: House (1977)

house poster

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a massive worldwide hit in 1975. Naturally, studios from all over tried to find ways to replicate that success. The Japanese studio Toho was no exception and they hired Nobuhiko Obayashi to write something Jaws-like. What he came up with was one of the strangest, incomprehensible films I’ve ever seen.

The basic plot, if you want to call it that, is actually pretty simple. A teenaged girl nick-named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) (most of the characters in this film have goofy names like Kung Fu, Fantasy, and Sweet) invites several of her friends to spend summer vacation at her Aunt’s (Yōko Minamida) house. Strange things begin happening almost immediately once they arrive. It seems the house is haunted.

But any type of plot outline will do nothing to explain just how completely nuts this film is. Criterion describes it by saying that it’s like if an episode of Scooby Doo were directed by Mario Bava. I’d add that it’s a psychedelic cartoon turned into a live-action nightmare.

There is a floating head that bites one girl in the butt checks, a piano that eats people, an evil cat, a murderous futon, and so much more. The sets’ backdrops are gorgeous and intentionally designed to call attention to their fakeness. Obayashi uses fisheye lenses, superimposed images, freeze-frames, matte paintings, periodical animation, and every other cinematic trick at his disposal.

It feels both thrown together and tightly scripted. It is more comedic than horrifying, and more bizarre than thematically satisfying, but it truly is a film worth watching.

It is one of those films I’ve been hearing about for ages. The Criterion Collection got ahold of it a few years back and it’s been talked about ever since. But for one reason or another, I kept putting off watching it. I like weird films but I feel like I need to be in the mood for them, and I rarely feel like I’m really in the mood. But I needed a foreign language horror film and was struggling to find something so I put it on.

I’m so glad I did.

Foreign Film February: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

smiles of a summer night

Several years ago, probably during one of their semi-annual 50% off sales, I bought the Criterion Collection’s big boxed set of Ingmar Bergman’s movies. Ingmar Bergman is a titan of cinema. He’s widely considered one of the world’s greatest film directors, having helmed many of the greatest movies ever made.

His films are intellectual, somber, sometimes experimental, and almost always challenging. He made movies about life and death, spirituality, and religion (he made an entire trilogy from the Silence of God). As such his films are often difficult to watch. I love many of his films and yet this boxed set has set on my shelf mostly gathering dust. Bergman films are a bit like “Dark Stars” from 1969 – infinitely rewarding, but you’ve got to be in the right head space and you’ve definitely got to pay attention to what they are trying to do.

Since it is Foreign Film February I knew I wanted to watch a Bergman (I think I said the same thing last year and didn’t manage to do it). The Criterion set doesn’t present the films chronologically, but rather as one might if you were creating a film festival for the director’s works. Previously, I randomly picked films out of the collection to watch but this time I decided to begin at the beginning, the Collection’s “Opening Night” selection, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

Smiles was made at a difficult time in Bergman’s life. His previous two films had not done well and the studio essentially told him if his next film wasn’t a success he was done. His personal life was in turmoil and, according to the liner notes included in the Criterion set, he decided he was either going to make a new film or commit suicide.

So, Ingmar Bergman, a director famed for his sober, austere films about the meaning of life, during one of the lowest points in his life made a light comedy.

And honest-to-God it is funny.

When I read Bergman had made a comedy I figured it would be more like Shakespearian comedies, meaning that it wasn’t a tragedy – that it didn’t end in the death of everybody. But no, it is a laugh-out-loud, full of clever wordplay and incident comedy.

It is a comedy of manners. It reminded me of the works of Moliere or Oscar Wilde or some other writer I studied in school and have long since forgotten.

The dialogue is clever and droll, and Bergman uses such a light touch that one sometimes has to stop and wonder where all this fancifulness came from.

Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand) is a successful, respected, middle-aged lawyer. He’s married to the much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). It is his second marriage, his first wife died some years ago. Before he met Anne he was involved in a torrid romance with Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck), a famous actress.

When he learns that Desiree is in town starring in a show, he gets two tickets and decides to take his wife. But before they go they take a nap together (as one does). While sleeping he reaches over and caresses Anne. She’s pretty excited by this because even though they’ve been married for a couple of years they’ve never had sex. He doesn’t want to spoil her or some such nonsense. So he’s caressing her and getting all sexy and stuff and then he says her name, and how much he loves her. Except the name he says isn’t Anne, it’s Desiree.

Oops.

They go to the theater, but Anne is understandably upset. When she realizes that the star is named Desiree and that her husband keeps looking at her through the opera glasses, she feigns illness and goes home. Once he’s settled her into bed he slips back out and goes to the theater.

They go back to their place where they barb, jab, and argue over why they broke up in the first place. Frederik solicits help from Desiree for his marital strife, but it is clear they both still have some feelings for each other.

Then Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Jarl Kulle) shows up. He’s Desiree’s current lover and he’s insanely jealous. He’s also married. To a girl named Charlotte Malcolm (Margit Carlqvist). At one point without a bit of irony, he utters the line “I can tolerate my wife’s infidelity, but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger.”

Naturally, the five of them wind up together at a dinner party before the film ends. Plenty of mix-ups, double entendres, and verbal jousts ensue. It really is astounding just how light and effervescent this film is. It is hard to believe that the same man who directed this film would go on to direct The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries just two years later.

That isn’t to say everything is carefree and happy in this film, it is still a Bergman after all. There is a duel in which two characters play Russian Roulette. And one of the film’s best gags comes at the end of a suicide attempt.

One can’t help but wonder what cinema would be like had Bergman gone on to make delightful romantic comedies. Who knows what else we might have gotten. Instead, we got a plethora of serious dramatic masterpieces. I’ll certainly take that any day of the week.