1968 - BAKENKO: A VENGEFUL SPIRIT aka The Cursed Pond

In medieval Japan, an evil lord desires the wife of a Japanese warrior.  He has the warrior killed and the grieving wife and her kitty cat drown themselves in a pool near the lord's estate.  The spirit of the wife and the kitty cat come back and possess another kitty cat who in turn wreaks her vengeance on the lord and his servants when the kitty turns into a killer cat woman.

To be honest this film was not really my cup of saki.  Maybe it's a cultural thing but to this Westerner there is nothing particularly frightening about being scared by a cute little kitty no matter how many close ups they film of the snarling cat.

The film goes down the expected road as the cat turns into the cat woman who kills a lot of people.  Naturally the cat woman is immune to all the arrows the Japanese warriors puncture her with.  This movie marches to its expected conclusion.

Well the best I can say about this film is that it's shot in black and white which does give it a kind of creepy mood.  The film looks like it was entirely filmed on studio sets, nothing wrong with that.  The cat seems very cuddly at times

The film was written by the director Yoshihiro Ishikawa, the running time is 87 minutes.

1984 - KAOS, an excellent presentation of some Italian short stories.

Two brothers, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani were a couple of talented Italian filmmakers.  They had a number of good to great films to their credit.  Although recognized as outstanding filmmakers they didn't exactly receive the kind of fawning recognition of a Fellini or De Sica.

Kaos is a film which consists of four short stories set in Sicily in the early 1900's.  The films are based on stories from an Italian author, Luigi Pirandello.  The films range from the tragic to the humorous and are made with a high degree of film making skill.

 

The titles of the films, The Other Son,  Moonsickness, The Jar and Requiem are all tied together with an appearance of the author Pirandello at the end of the film.

Really to discuss this film would be a disservice to the excellent presentation of the stories and the Tavani Brothers.  This is one of the better films I've seen in a while and would give it a very high viewing recommendation.

Written by the Taviani Brothers, the running time is188 minutes.

1958 - LETTER FROM SIBERIA, early film from Chris Marker

Chris Marker who is generally considered part of the French "New Wave'" filmmakers that showed up towards the end of the 1950's, didn't exactly fit in with that bunch which included Truffaut, Goddard, Rivette and Chabrol.  Marker was interested in more than just making films.

Marker was essentially an artist working in different types of visual media.  One of his interests was the short form essay, not exactly a documentary and not exactly a fictional film.  Letter from Siberia is a fascinating film made early in his career.

 

Traveling to Siberia, Maker documented Siberian life which at the time was considered a vast mysterious and foreboding expanse barely inhabitable.  Maker's film shows an area which indeed was vast but he also shows the lives of the inhabitants which range from reindeer riding Siberian cowboys to workers constructing gigantic power plants and cities in order to harvest the natural resources of Siberia.

 

Marker's presentation with the omniscient narration, spoofs of animated cartoons, pet bears and satires of western advertising is very witty.  Marker continued to work on and off in the film world.  His best known film is his clever time travel story  La Jetée which was later turned into the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys.

 Written by Chris Marker, the running time is 62 minutes.

1998 - OUT OF SIGHT entertaining sexy crime thriller

Cast a couple of very hot stars, put them in a crime thriller, hire a top screenwriter and get a stylish director to blend it all together and you have the very entertaining Out Of Sight.

George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez are on the opposite sides of the law, he's a bank robber and she's a Federal Marshal.  After getting arrested for a failed robbery Clooney breaks out of prison and ends up being pursued by Lopez. One thing leads to another and Clooney and Lopez end up getting locked in the trunk of a stolen car.  Sure enough sparks fly between this hot couple and after her escape from the car Lopez is on the trail of fugitive Clooney who is planning a big heist in Detroit.

Out Of Sight was adopted from an Elmore Leonard story and it has the usual twists and turns he brings to his crime novels.  Leonard's stories always seem to have a bunch of odd ball characters who are usually cops and crooks and this story is no different.

Soderbergh is a clever director and he excels at these kinds of crime films  He knows how to show off his stars and he gets some great chemistry going betweenClooney and Lopez, like they needed any help.

 

A lot of credit should also be given to the screenwriter Scott Frank who has always been a talented reliable guy particularly in the crime thriller genre.  it's actually entertaining to see a group of talented people come together and create a smart and fun thriller for a change.

The running time is 123 minutes

2015 - PIXELS, stunningly bad comedy

Invaders from outer space in the form of early arcade video games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders, for reasons to ridiculous to explain come to earth to destroy it.  Only some loser video game players from the 70's and 80's can stop them.

Why write about a film that was a critical and commercial flop?  Because it's yet another example of the downfall of Hollywood commercial film entertainment. The film is essentially a ripoff of Ghostbusters without any of the cleverness or humor that film had.  Pixels is so obviously trying to copy the Ghostbusters formula.  However the lack of humorous situations and characters completely kill this film. 

 

Adam Sandler's production company was behind the origin of this film.  The director Chris Columbus a one time protege of Steven Spielberg had clearly seen better days.  His specialty was making safe mainstream films like Mrs Doubtfire and Adventures in Babysitting.  Where he got in to trouble was when he took on projects like Rent and Bicentennial Man.  Clearly Pixels was an attempt at a mainstream action comedy with strong commercial potential.

What can you say about this cast? Adam Sandler plays the old slacker video game expert. His part was clearly modeled after Bill Murray but without the sly humor in Ghostbusters. A so called comedian named Josh Gad goes from one unfunny piece of business to another he is very tiresome and seems to be in every scene. They even have a computer character named Q Bert who is modeled after Slimer.  Michelle Monaghan has the thankless role as the romantic interest for Sandler.  There's even a little kid who is in the film to manipulate the audience's emotions. 

The computer generated special effects are good, but so what. The film was not the super box office success everyone was looking for and the critics deservedly killed it in the reviews.  As they say imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery, it's stealing.

The film was written (if that's the word) by Tim Herlihy and Tim Dowling,  The running time is 106 minutes,

2016 - THE LAST KING, a very entertaining action film

 This film is set during the Norwegian civil war of 1240.  Like most people in the United States and probably most of the world I wasn't aware the Norwegian's had a civil war.  The Birkebeinars, loyal to the King of Norway have to rescue his infant son the future ruler of Norway after the King is assassinated by some evil Norwegians.

 

The film is an extended chase with the men assigned to protect the infant king from the evil Norwegians being pursued for much of the running time of the film.  Interestingly the chase is mostly on some wacky long skis with one long pole used to steer these damn things. Just getting people to ski on these things is almost impressive as watching the exciting action scenes.

 

Also impressive is the location shooting in the snow and cold probably nobody's idea of a good time.  Bottom line, a great adventure film in an unusual setting.  You don't need to know Norwegian history to enjoy this film.

 

Written by Ravn Lanesskog, the running time is 93 minutes.

1970 - LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS, a fun 1970's comedy

 A very entertaining 1970's rom/com. This film has a real feel for the time and cultural attitudes of that screwy period.  A young couple who have been living together out of wedlock (or in sin) as they used to say, decide to make their arrangement legal by getting married.  This brings the two families of the bride and groom into the planning of the wedding.  There are a lot of humorous subplots involving brothers, mothers, fathers and boyfriends sorting out their goofy relationships which the wedding seems to bring out.

 The cast is a group of actors soon to be very popular, Bea Arthur, Richard S. Castellano, Gig Young, Diane Keaton, Cloris Leachman, Anna Meara, Jerry Stiller, Bonnie Bedelia and perennial character actor Harry Guardino.

 

The film featured a hit song "For All We Know,"  which I swear I heard at about every wedding I got dragged to in the 1970's.  That song was alternated with the love theme from The Godfather which I heard at every other wedding I got dragged to.

The funny screenplay was written by Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor who really didn't write many comedies for some reason.  The running time is 104 minutes.

1956 - WAR AND PEACE, King Vidor's film of Tolstoy's novel on a very epic scale.

One of those big 1950's epic films.  Photographed in Italy for the most part and featuring a cast made up of Italian and American actors.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis as they liked to say in the film's advertising "spared no expense."

Apparently six credited screen writers were involved with the director King Vidor also doing rewrites during production.  England's top color cameraman Jack Cardiff was responsible for the photography of the film. For the time supposedly 18,000 Italian troops were hired to re-stage the battle scenes, primarily the famous Battle of Bordino.  Director King Vidor had handled complex productions in the past, The Big Parade, Hallelujah and Duel in the Sun with out losing sight of the personal stories of the characters but this film might have gotten away from him in this instance.

If the film had problems it was in the mixed cast.  Henry Fonda was all wrong as the pivotal character, Pierre Bezukhov, his American Midwestern affectations seem completely out of place for a film set in Russia.  Audrey Hepburn who was cast as Natasha Rostova at least looks the part of a Russian Countess.  However Hepburn insisted at the time that her husband Mel Ferrer play Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and he's kind of hopeless.

How's the film?  Well it's long, the color photography is good.  The sets are on a massive scale.  The battle scenes are well staged as is the burning of Moscow.  Frankly the mixed cast of Italian, British and American actors is kind of jarring at times. There is a lot of dubbing that had to occur to get everyone speaking in the same language, in this case English.  The sound has kind of a hollow reverb quality to it which can get fairly distracting.

 

This version of War and Peace is usually compared to the 1967 Russian version. But I think that this is a little unfair.  The two films were made at different time periods and are really two different interpretations of the same story.

 

Here we go, the film was written by Bridget Boland, Mario Camerini, Ennio De  Concini, Gian Gaspare Napolitano, Ivo Perilli, Mario Soldati, King Vidor and Robert Westerby.  The uncredited writers were, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Sergio Amidei and supposedly Irwin Shaw and King Vidor's wife Florence Vidor.  The film is 208 minutes.

1995 - FRENCH KISS, a very lame romantic comedy

I suppose it's kind of a tribute to Meg Ryan that she was asked to repeat her annoying Sally character from When Harry Meet Sally.  Ryan is so full of weird personality ticks in this movie it's unsurprising that her boyfriend dumps her by phone while he is on a trip to Paris.  After many scenes of Ryan being afraid to fly, she takes a plane to Paris to win her boyfriend back from a French woman he has fallen in love with.

 

 

While on the plane, Ryan meets French guy Kevin Kline who just happens to be a jewel thief and a would be wine maker.  Naturally they will get together, Meg Ryan the spunky goofy American and Kline the smooth talking French master thief who must have chemistry  together per the screenwriter.  After what seems like hours of "cute" adventures,  true love wins out and the two of them get together.

 

The director is Lawrence Kasdan for a while could do not wrong in Hollywood.  He wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi, The Big Chill and The Bodyguard.  His hot streak finally ended with films like Silverado, Wyatt Earp, Mumford, Dreamcatcher and Darling Companion, a film about a dog and his best friend Diane Keaton.  The mighty had indeed fallen.

 

Anyway, this dreary film completely fails as a romantic comedy.  The usually good Kevin Kline can't save this show.  I've seem better romances on the Hallmark Channel and that's not exactly a high bar for this genre.  However French Kiss did make money although the reviews weren't the greatest.

The film was written by Adam Brooks, the running time is 111 unending minutes.

1983 - FIRE AND ICE, an animated fantasy epic.

Probably looking for a commercial hit after the success of Arnold's Conan the Barbarian. The director Ralph Bakshi along with the comic book artist Frank Frazetta dreamed up this story of muscle bound heroes, nearly naked buxom babes, evil magicians, scary monsters and did I mention nearly naked buxom babes.

To save money on animation Bakshi and his crew rotoscoped the main characters. This is a technique which involves tracing over live actors to make them look like comic book people.  The now animated characters are then placed in exotic backgrounds  The result is interesting if a little jarring at times when viewed.  Bakshi had used this technique on several R rated cartoons notably Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic.  He had uneven success in Hollywood as R rated animated cartoons didn't exactly make for a family night at the moves.

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Fire and Ice is loaded with lots of fighting and entertains as an action film although the story is really nothing special.  The good vs evil fantasy stuff had been done before and in better films.  Fire and Ice is at best an okay time killer.  The weird looking animation does give it an interesting look.

The film was written by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, a couple of comic book writers.  The running time is 81 minutes.

1982 - KOYAANISQATSI - life out of balance = pretentious

Astutely described by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as a "glorified music video."  Koyaanisqatsi is a silent film with music and at times stunning photography.  The film according to its creator, Godfrey Reggio is about "how we live technology," whatever that gobbly gook means.

 The film starts out with stately images of the American Southwest desert where all is calm and mellow.  As the camera moves past these images the viewer gets a lot of time lapse photography of human beings racing all over a Metropolitian city like a colony of ants on speed.  

 

It all comes to a crashing end with stock footage of a rocket blowing up as the camera follows pieces of it falling back to the earth.   What does it all mean?  In the end should we abandon our fast paced and out of control lives for a more simpler existence in the southwest desert trying not to get bit by scorpions? Or is the film just a bunch of interesting locations tied together by at times stunning photography and editing that achieves a visual impact on the viewer?

One thing is for sure the minimalist film score by composer Phillip Glass is an important contribution to the film and kind of saves the day.

The film was written such that it is by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio and Alton Walpole.  The running time is thankfully under 90 minutes.  A little of this stuff goes a very long way.