1978 - FINGERS, well it's certainly unusual

For a while in the 70's and 80's,  James Toback was a hot screenwriter.  Toback wrote The Gambler which got a lot of favorable reviews from the critics. As is usually the case, Toback moved into direction with as they like to say "mixed results."  Fingers certainly fits that description.

The film is about a concert pianist hopeful who is getting ready for an audition at Carnegie Hall.   The pianist is played by Harvey Keitel in a very intense performance.  It's safe to say he out acts Robert DeNiro's Taxi Driver weirdo character Travis Bikel .  Anyway as a favor to his father who is some kind of gangster the Keitel character is also a debt collector when his father's customers don't pay their loans back and he's a very violent debt collector at that.

 

 

In addition to all of that stuff,  Keitel is pretty good at getting sex out of women.  He screws a very young Tanya Roberts in the women's restroom in a kind of repellent scene.  However his chief obsession is with an artist played by the actor Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia).  The Farrow character is also involved with a character played by Jim Brown named Dreems.   In this film women in general appear to be attracted to Jim Brown's character and Brown pays them back by bashing their heads together in a brutal scene.  Toback must have been channeling  Brown's real life issues with women,  Brown at the time had a very extensive history of domestic violence.  

It's hard to know what to make of this film.  Frankly there are so many strange and pointless story lines The whole thing just comes off as a confusing mess, or make that a violent and confusing mess.  Keitel really doesn't seem like the concert pianist type although there is no denying he really gives it his all portraying this very strange protagonist. 

 

I'm impressed James Toback was able to raise the money for this film because as a main stream film it certainly wasn't going to appeal to the public.  Toback himself is what people call an "interesting character."  He is a Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (highest honors) and as of December of 2022 he was charged with the sexual abuse of 38 women.

Fingers runs 89 minutes and as they say no one probably wished it a minute longer.

2003 - SARABAND, Ingmar Bergman's final film.

At 84 years old Ingmar Bergman comes out of retirement and writes and directs this father /daughter drama and photographs it with a high definition video camera hardly the work of an old fuddy duddy.  In the supplemental content on the DVD, Bergman a man in his mid 80's is quite alert and spry.  In fact he looks better than Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann playing two of the four leads in this film.

Saraband has been called a sequel to Scenes From a Marriage but that's probably pushing it a bit.  True Josephson and Ullmann  are playing Johan and Marianne the names of their characters from Scenes From a Marriage but they don't really seem to act like the same people from that film.   Johan and Marianne are more observers than active participants in  this film.  But I suppose having two of his closest collaborators was important to Bergman for this film.

 

Saraband is basically focused on Johan's son Henrik and Henrik's daughter Karin.  Henrik is mentoring Karin on the cello in order for her to get a scholarship to a music academy.  However Henrik seems to have what they call an unhealthy interest in his daughter.  Henrik is also one of those tormented Bergman characters who you would probably call a loser.

 

This is a good Bergman film and I don't think anyone needs to make apologizes for Bergman's age.  Bergman was always good at portraying his characters thoughts, desires and insecurities throughout his career and this film is no exception.  There is also a prevailing feeling of death throughout the film which I suppose is not surprising coming from Bergman at this point in his life.  Saraband is an interesting and good film to wrap up his impressive film career.

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 112 minutes.

1991 - SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, so be it.

 Junk is junk and it doesn't get much more junky than this film.  The director Mark L Lester had made the amusing B-movie Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger knocking heads, shooting people and cracking one liners like a Las Vegas comedian as he tried to save his daughter.  If it were possible to make a movie that was even dopier than Commando, it would probably turn out to be something like this thing.  Showdown in Little Tokyo has the poor man's Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren as the action star.

Dolph's your typical big city detective who doesn't follow the rules and doesn't want a partner.  Of course all the tropes are going to be carefully observed.  His boss sticks him with Brandon Lee, (son of Bruce) as a cop and Asian American who doesn't like Asian culture.  For some reason Swedish born Dolph does embrace the oriental world.  He has a collection of samurai swords and lives in a Dojo.  What they have in common is that they are both a couple of kick-ass martial arts guys who don't mind beating the stuffing out of any bad Asian gangster who gets in their way.

Let's go to the recap.  Dolph and Brandon are on the trail of a really bad Asian guy.  You know he is bad because when they capture one of his henchmen the guy breaks his own neck rather than inform on his boss. The big bad guy called Yoshida is so bad he kills the owner of a nightclub which he takes over and turns it into a perverted restaurant which probably doesn't even have takeout.  Naked women lay on tables while their bodies are used as nude placements. This is where his gang eats sushi off of the naked women placemats   Into this evilness comes Dolph and Brandon who rescue the lead singer played by Tia Carrera, 24 years old when she made this film.  She becomes Dolph's love interest and there's lots of nudity between the two of them, although close inspection reveals they are using a body double for Tia.  

 

It all comes down to a big duel with samurai swords between Dolph and the evil Yoshida, but there's really no question how this will all turn out.  I guess the best you can say about this film is that the action pieces are fairly well staged although I've seen them done better in other films.  Dolph has his shirt off a lot and he has sure been hitting the weight room at the YMCA.  Sadly Brandon Lee died young which was unfortunate.  He projects a winning personality and probably would have went far in the B-movie action genre.

 

The film was written by Stephen Glantz and Caliope Brattlestreet.  The running time is 79 minutes, apparently the studio took the film away from Mark L. Lester and significantly reedited it.

1956 - THE SEARCHERS - on the big screen.

John Ford's The Searchers is back in a new restoration and making the rounds at revival theaters.  This was probably John Ford's best film since The Quiet Man and probably his last masterpiece.

Ford certainly had his high and low points during the 1950's but with this film he finally had his best story in years,  Ford as was his custom loaded up the cast with a lot of his favorite actors, the famous John Ford stock company as it was called.  Ford also had John Wayne as the lead.  Ford and Wayne had been working together since Ford's silent film days.

 

Just as important as the cast was Ford's film crew.  Winton C. Hoch wsa a master technicolor cameraman who had worked on and off with Ford.  At times Hoch and Ford had a fairly stormy relationship since Hoch was a perfectionist when it came to cinematography but the results were certainly worth it.  Writing the screenplay was Frank S. Nugent who had worked with Ford starting in the 1940's.  Most importantly was the producer Meriam C. Cooper who found the property, raised the money for the production and brought Ford into it.  What all these men had in common was their ability to deal with the cantankerous and a times abusive director. not always an easy task.

 

Ford filmed much of The Searchers in Monument Valley Arizona a location he was very familiar with.  By this time in his career he knew every place that would feature the best locations while filming.  The on location photography is certainly spectacular. 

Although The Searchers is a western, the themes of racism, the treatment of Native Americans and miscegenation are present in the film.  In one of the only times in his career John Wayne  played a racist.  This was fairly tough stuff for the 1950's.  In many ways The Searchers was a career peak for John Ford who probably should have retired after this film but continued to work into the 1960's

The Searchers is not a perfect film but it is a great one. The running time is 119 minutes.

1995 - LOVE IN THE TIME OF TWILIGHT, a love story among other things

A big favorite of this blog, Tsui Hark films a love story/fantasy/comedy/ghost story/time travel film.  Hark mashes together about every film genre he can think of.  The main plot seems to be a love story about a young couple who can't stand each other but will eventually fall in love in the future.

 How do we know this?  Nicky Wu plays a bank teller named Kong who meets a woman who is a member of the Peking Opera.  The woman is Charlie Yan playing a character named Yan-Yan.  Early in the film Kong is killed during a bank robbery but comes back as a ghost who needs Yan-Yan to help him relive the last two weeks of his life so he can prevent getting killed. Since this is a Tsui Hark film, this is just the jumping off point for him and this story.

The film has a crazy time travel plot which probablaly puts any of that Back to the Future time travel stuff to shame.  Hark also indulges in some weird low brow humor involving toilets and vomiting.  The sets are colorful and the actors appear to enter into the spirit of this nutty story.

 

Needless to say Hark brings that dynamic and sometimes overly dynamic style of his to this film.  This is yet another entertaining film from the master director who appears to be having fun orchestrating all this chaos

The running time is 103 minutes the writers were Sharon Hui and Tsui Hark

1944 - MADEMOISELLE FIFI, producer Val Lewton's World War II propgranda films.

You weren't a Hollywood studio or producer worth your salt if you didn't crank out a propaganda film or two during World War II.  One of the oddest propaganda films to come out of RKO studios was from classy low budget horror movie producer Val Lewton.

Rather than kicking out another Allies vs the Nazis film with actors like Erroll Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and especially John Wayne.  Lewton and his director Robert Wise chose to film something a little more subtle.  Using the same source material as John Ford and his writer Dudley Nichols used for Stagecoach, Mademoiselle Fifi has a group of people with different backgrounds all riding a stagecoach.  In this case the stagecoach happens to be in France during the late 1800's when it was occupied by Prussians aka Germans.

The cast is a group of character actors which I can assure you no one has ever heard from.  John Emery (Rocketship X-M, The Girl Can't Help It), Kurt Kreuger (Sahara, Unfaithfully Yours) and Alan Napier ( Alfred in the original Batman TV series) to name a few.  Probably the biggest name in the cast was French actress Simone Simon who had a very spotty career in Hollywood in the 30's and 40's before she returned to France.  Simone Simon is remembered for her role as Irena in The Cat People.

 

Mademoiselle Fifi is essentially a rather talky drama about the role the French people had in dealing with the Prussian invaders occupying their county.  Simone Simon plays the only character who has the guts to stand up to the Prussians.  The film is very obviously a not so subtle comparison of  the Nazi occupation of France in the late 1940's.

 

The film is interesting especially if you are a fan of Val Lewton's films.  The dialog is literate and Robert Wise does a fairly good job making this very talkative script cinematic. Val Lewton always aimed for something a little more different than the regular movie stuff that Hollywood spit out during the 1940's.

The film was written by Josef Mischel and Peter Ruric although Lewton probably had his hands in it as well.  The running time is a brisk 69 minutes.

1994 - BARCELONA, the second film from Whit Stillman

The second film from Whit Stillman a less than prolific filmmaker is another quirky comedy much like his first film Metropolitan.  In Metropolitan, Stillman set his story in the world of the debutante ball season in New York.  His main character got himself mixed up with a bunch of fairly self absorbed preppies.  It was an offbeat and amusing film  looking into a world few people knew about and it got Stillman attention as a filmmaker to watch.

His next film Barcelona  had a bigger budget since he was now associated with a film studio and it is almost a chamber piece.  The film focuses on a couple of cousins living in Barcelona, Spain.  It follows their involvement in relationships with some Spanish women and their adjustment to Spanish culture particularly at a time when the United States was not very popular in Europe.

 

This film like Metropolitan also has a lot of that dry humor that was already a characteristic of Stillman's films and this was only his second time behind the camera.  The performances are interesting if at times on the dry side and when the film starts to get a little to dramatic Stillman slips in a couple of  humorous lines and situations to lighten the mood.

 

In the world of Whit Stillman, all of the Spanish women are beautiful and basically jump into bed with our American characters on a minute's notice.  The men are self aware if rather on the neurotic side but not in a debilitating way.  Barcelona is a minor if entertaining comedy, I suppose in the good old days they would call this a "civilized entertainment.

Written by Whit Stillman, the running time is 101 minutes.

1968 - THE BASTARD or I bastardi

This rather oddball Italian euro crime feature is set in Arizona but the credits acknowledge that the film was shot in New Mexico, whatever.  The plot involves two criminal brothers who are basically robbing and shooting people all over the American Southwest.  One of the brothers  ( Giuliano Gemma) is betrayed by his current girlfriend to the other brother (typically scary actor Klaus Kinski) who steals his suitcase full of jewels and injures him for life.  The film turns into a revenge story from that point on with Giuliano Gemma out to kill his brother Kinski.

There are lots of shootings, car chases and a couple of gorgeous women one played by Margaret Lee.  In addition onetime James Bond leading lady Claudine Auger who was Domino in Thunderball, shows up in this film.  Also in the cast is legendary 40's glamour star Rita Hayworth as the drunken mother of the two brothers.  Hayworth suffered from dementia towards the end of her life but I don't know if that affected her performance in this film, she is supposed to be playing a drunk.

 

The director is a guy named Duccio Tessari an Italian writer/director who worked in the "Spaghetti Western", euro crime, and war movie genres, a versatile fellow.  You can give him credit for moving the story along and making it interesting and watchable.  He has a good eye for staging action scenes and picking locations.  Having two gorgeous women as costars doesn't hurt this film any.  The Bastard is a decent watch if you are into crime films.  I have to say that the film does have a rather odd ending.

 

The film was written by Mario Di Nardo, Ennio de Concini and Duccio Tessari.  The running time is 102 minutes.

1993 - GREEN SNAKE, a visually stunning film from Tsui Hark

The producer/director and writer Tsui Hark takes an ancient Chinese legend and applies his dynamic style to it for another incredible film.  This fantasy involves two giant snakes, a white one and a green one who can assume the form of  beautiful women.  The white snake falls in love with a human while the green snake attempts to understand the human emotion of love.  But this is just the jumping off point for some amazing visuals as only a director like Tsui Hark can stage them.

The snake women are played by Maggie Cheung and Joey Wong and Hark really cranks up the eroticism that these two women give off.  No wonder the human played by Wu Hsing-kuo is unable to resist them.

 

Hark and his production team also integrate some excellent special effects which for a change serve the story instead of being allowed to overwhelm the film.  Something that has been a major problem with American special effects films for some time.

  

 Green Snake also combines sensual photography and impressive set design which adds to it's  unique mood.

A fascinating Chinese fantasy film from one of Hong Kong's most creative directors.

The running time is 99 minutes.

1993 - SUPERCOP 2, sequel to Supercop with focus on Michelle Yeoh

Sort of a sequel or followup or offshoot or something of Jackie Chan's Supercop which featured Michelle Yeoh as his action partner.  After taking an extended break, Yeoh was restarting her film career and was lucky enough to hook up with Jackie Chan who turned out to be her perfect action partner.  Supercop 2 was clearly an attempt to showcase Yeoh and her action and stunt skills.

Yeoh is a superb action hero in this film, unfortunately it's not much of a film.  Yeoh plays police inspector Jessica Yang whose ex boyfriend has become the leader of a gang of bank robbers in Hong Kong.  I suppose what could have been an interesting plot line about love vs duty is for the most part a fairly pedestrian and uninvolved story line.

 

The chief draw of Supercop 2 are the action sequences as only the Hong Kong stuntmen could do them back in the 1980's and 90's.  Lots of gunfights, car chases and especially martial arts action which in particular shows off Yeoh's skills who was a former dancer now turned stunt woman and Yeoh is a  rather petite woman which is all the more impressive.

Jackie Chan shows up at one point in the film in drag of all things. He's in another broad comedic scene that he likes to include in his films.  In this film it's kind of stupid.  The film is directed by Hong Kong action veteran Stanley Tong who was certainly an experienced hand at making these kind of films.  Again, not much of a film but the real show is watching Michelle Yeoh in her prime as an action hero.  Supercop 2 is on YouTube in a decent English dubbed version if you want to take a look.

 

The film was written by Stanley Tong and Sandy Shaw, the running time is 104 minutes. 

1999 - AN IDEAL HUSBAND, is Oscar Wilde updated for the modern audience

 If you are going to read or watch a play or movie written by Oscar Wilde you can't help but be impressed by all the witty one liners sprinkled throughout his writing.  You can drive yourself crazy trying to remember his best quotes

The writer /director Oliver Parker has streamlined the play a bit for modern audiences and added a love scene but the plot remains the same.  Sir Robert Chiltern would seem to be the perfect person.  An incorruptible politician and faithful husband particularity worshiped by his wife Lady Gertrude Chiltern.  Little does anyone know especially Lady Chiltern, Lord Chiltern has a dark secret in his past.  Enter Mrs. Laura Cheveley who knows about Lord Chiltern's past and wants some political favors in exchange for her silence.  Will Chiltern betray his principals to keep his good name or will he risk being exposed? That in a nutshell is the plot.

 

However in spite of this plot the real focus is on Chiltern's friend Lord Arthur Goring who is the consummate playboy. Lord Goring gets involved in helping Chiltern with the assistance of lots of amusing one liners that would make Woody Allen jealous.  Here is a sample:

"My dear father, when one pays a visit, it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time and not one's own."

"Well, there's nothing I like more than to be congratulated, though invariably I find the pleasure immeasurably increased when I know what for."

"Excuse me a moment. I'm in the middle of my performance of the attentive son."

"My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.” 

Well you get the idea.  You can have all the great dialog in the world but it takes a great performance to put it over.  In this case the actor Rupert Everett as Lord Goring steals the film even from gifted performers like Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Minnie  Driver.   As good as they are, they not a match for this guy.

 

The film is very elegant to look at and Oliver Parker doesn't draw things, out the film comes in at 97 minutes.

1976 - ST. IVES, a Charles Bronson murder mystery

 Coming a few years after Charles Bronson's movie star making hit Death Wish.  St Ives is a change of pace film for a middle aged star who made his career shooting up lots of movie bad guys.  Bronson somewhat improbably plays a writer who gets involved with a shady businessman (crook?) who uses Bronson to get back some ledgers that will incriminate him to the police.  The businessman is played by of all people John Houseman.  Houseman's associates are played by Jacqueline Bisset in the femme fatale role and Maximillian Schell.

One thing leads to another and a simple exchange of money for the ledgers leads to lots of murders and double crosses.  Bronson is the smooth thinking and talking courier trying to figure things out.  Actually Bronson who doesn't waste a lot of people for a change does a good job playing the writer. The director J. Lee Thompson whose best days were behind him does a competent job putting the film together and the cinematographer Carroll Ballard was an old Hollywood professional who gave the film a nice noir look to it.

 

St. Ives has a good cast,besides the already mention leads.  Character actors, Harris Yulin, Harry Guardino, Dana Elcar and everyone's favorite 1940's actor Elisha Cook Jr. show up.  Bronson had been kicking around Hollywood since 1951 as a character actor himself.  By this time in his career all that experience had made him a very good film actor.

 

The mystery itself is no great shakes, it's the typical mix of obscure clues, lots of dead bodies and the usual withholding of information to the viewer until the very end making it essentially impossible to solve until Bronson explains everything.  Not a great film or a great mystery, however with this cast it's worth a look

The film was written by  Barry Beckerman, the running time is 94 minutes.

1977 - MR BILLION, the American film debut for Terence Hill

This should have been a slam dunk for director Jonathan Kaplan.  The Italian actor Terence Hill (aka Mario Girotti) made his American debut in this extremely lightweight action comedy.  The plot is very simple.  Hill has inherited millions of dollars and must travel to Los Angles from Italy to receive it in three days or else he forfeits it.  Into the picture comes crooked Jackie Gleason who is determined to cheat him out of his inheritance.  The film is a series of chases across the continental United States.

The cast is fairly decent.  Scene stealer Jackie Gleason does his amusing stuff and really he is about the only reason to sit through this film..  Valerie Perrine is the woman hired by Gleason to stop Hill but falls in love with him instead.  Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong and Dick Miller show up, had they been given decent material to work with this group would have been entertaining.

 

The problem is that the script is not very clever or funny. In Italy Terence Hill usually played a rather lovable con man type.  In Mr Billion the writers and producers have decided to make him the innocent abroad, a role that does not suit him. And let’s face it audiences probably missed seeing him with partner Bud Spencer (aka Carlo Pedersoli).   The film stumbles from one uninteresting chase scene to another and really none of these scenes are particularity exciting or funny.

This film was a critical and commercial flop.  It sent Terence Hill back to Italy where he continued to make the entertaining slap sticky kind of comedies with his partner Bud Spencer that audiences enjoyed seeing him in.

The film was written by Ken Friedman and Jonathan Kaplan, the running time is 89 minutes

2018 - Wes Anderson's tribute to Japanese film , or a dog ate my film.

Wes Anderson is nothing if not quirky.  This is the second time he is involved in a stop motion film.   Previously he produced, directed and wrote (along with Noah Baumbach),  Fantastic Mr Fox.  Nine years later he was at it again with a stop motion film set in Japan about an island full of abandoned dogs.  Fantastic Mr. Fox was at least based on a story by Roald Dahl, so there was a way into that film.  Isle of Dogs was an original story with a lot of writers and seemed to be loaded with lots of cliches about Japanese life and dog fights for some reason.  It  also is a rather lopsided tribute to Akira Kurosawa even using music from one of his films at one point.

The primary story line is about abandoned dogs stuck on an island who are infected with some virus.  They are all exiled to a trash heap of an island to fend for themselves.  Onto the island lands a Japanese kid who befriends the dogs and helps them return to main stream Japan after they find a cure for this dog virus.  The whole film with fighting dogs, evil politicians, robot dogs and a dog love story just never comes together in this mishmash of a story line.

As in all of Wes Anderson's movies, there is a very formal visual look to his films.  In this film the animation while carefully composed, is rather on the stiff side.  After a while, one longs for the days of  Ray Harryhausen or Phil Tippet who could have at least made the puppets seems a little more natural in what is already an artificial setting and situation.  This style of animation may play on old TV Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus but over an hour of watching this gets pretty tiring.  

 

As with the latest Wes Anderson films, he loads it up with lots of celebrity voices, so here we go.   Bryan Cranston,  Bill Murry, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDonald, F. Murray Abraham, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balabn, and Greta Gerwig.  I'm sure I missed  a few.

I usually only list screenplay credit but in this case I think it's important to see how many hands were involved in writing this film.  Wes Anderson takes the screenwriting credit.  But the story is credited to Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Norma.  That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

  The running time is 101 minutes.