Linoleum (Colin West, 2023): 2/5

An adolescent and dumb script slams together Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jones, Donnie Darko, Garden State. I prayed for it to be over, despite its short length, but also got pretty emotional once the film revealed all—and hated myself in the morning. 

 

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield, 2023): 2.5/5

I really enjoyed Spontaneous, the other movie by this writer/director, but the best thing about this sci-fi horror film is its commitment to having no dialogue whatsoever. In theory, this is something I would love, and I did! But the action was uninspired, and I did have some questions about the narrative that certainly could have been cleared up with a couple of brief sentences exchanged between characters.

 

Chelsea Girls, 3h30m (Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, 1966): 3/5

Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997): 3/5

Killing time with trashy misfits. I think what the audience is feeling here (or wanting to feel) is simply an encounter with the real, in all its grotesque boredom. Which makes me think about a third title…

Champions (Bobby Farrelly, 2023): 3/5

The Bad News Bears, but basketball and starring developmentally disabled young people. I always enjoy developmentally disabled performers. Their line-readings are often unstable, and they’re not exactly acting—but rather, at best, being themselves, being real. Indeed, isn’t that what all the best acting is (and other profound thoughts about documentary vs. fiction).

 

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936): 3/5

Strange structure. For 98% of the film, it’s just the story of a guy writing western tall tales for a magazine and falling in love. Then in the last 8 minutes, out of nowhere, he is driven to a crime. The end. 

 

French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955): 3/5

A broad, colorful and silly bonbon packed with singing, dancing, light romance, charming sets recreating a dream Montmartre, and Jean Gabin acting out the very definition of savior faire. It’s full of unusual, surprisingly adult emotional moments. Still, the glib and cartoonish surface is quite a turn-off. Ends with 20 minutes of performance within the Moulin Rouge, which I was little amused by.  

 

The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1974): 3/5

Existential French hippies, full of anhedonia. “I don’t want to die. I hate life, but I also hate death. I find it appalling.” This is so clearly in the Bresson/Schrader wheelhouse—as if the priest from First Reformed had all the suicidal ideation and none of the lust or environmental activism.

 

Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967): 3.5/5

Ridiculously entertaining and well-paced tale featuring a series of escalating sword fights, one on one, one on six, whatever. Lots of expert bad guys and good guys (including a hot, bad-ass woman). Stillness within fights reminds one of—and is possibly influenced by?—Leone. 

 

Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003): 3/5

If Dragon Inn is one of Taiwan’s great action movies, Goodbye Dragon Inn is one of its great in-action movies. The cruising men (and one handicapped woman) shuffle through the aisles, hallways, balconies and bathrooms of a rundown movie palace playing King Hu’s Dragon Inn. They seem like ghosts, haunting the theatre and perhaps the film itself—extending the metaphor to include all of us spectators, peering passively at films all day and night. No matter how much you lust after them, they just stand there, smoking their cigarettes. Only three lines of dialogue but each of them nails the themes of the film. Contrasts between the two Dragon Inn films are relevant: teamwork v. solitude, day v. night, fast v. slow, triumphant v. elegiac.

 

Rififi, rw? (Jules Dassin, 1955): 3.5/5

We are told (in song) the title means “rough and tumble,” and indeed this heist movie lacks the elegance and savior faire of the Oceans movies (for example). These are petty, sweaty and mean people. In fact, with its street photography and its tragic irony, this has a lot more in common with The Killing. 

  

Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998): 3/5

Middlebrow story of an older lady accompanying a recently orphaned nine-year-old boy to find his estranged father. Are Hou Hsiao-hsien movies (and other recent slow cinema) turning me off of routine plot beats?

 

Mother and Son, 1h5m (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997): 4/5

Intimate and surprisingly sensual portrait of a son taking care of his dying mother. Distorted lenses and vivid colors make for an unusual, artificial, storybook-like and often ravishingly beautiful experience. Hypnotic and hallucinatory. 

 

Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, 1950): 4/5

Really the story of a whole town, with four or five narrative threads playing out in a proto-Altman, Winesburg Ohio way. A preacher and a doctor are slight rivals in a good-hearted small town with occasional greed and racism. Sob sob sob at the beautiful sincerity about the value of community at the climax, akin to the bank speech at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. 

 

Xala (Ousmane Sembène, 1975): 2.5/5

Begins with satiric scene where African businessmen kick out the French off the board of the African national bank with a speech about the African future of Africa—but the French immediately give each of the businessmen a suitcase of cash and remain standing in the back of the room. The movie proceeds to follow one of the businessmen’s marriage to his third wife (a status symbol) and subsequent impotence. A cure for the impotence is pursued at such length that one forgets the first scene until the final scene where it comes around again. In the end, the whole film just comes down to the first and last scene—with quite a bit of tonally shaky and questionably essential material between.  

 

L’Amour Fou, 4h12m (Jacques Rivette, 1969): 1.5/5

A young, callow theatre director is in the middle of rehearsals for a production of Racine (basically the French equivalent of Shakespeare), but his girlfriend feels neglected, bored and empty and occasionally expresses suicidal and murderous thoughts. There’s some fun in connecting this drama to that of the play that is being rehearsed, but mostly it’s a long, long slog. 

 

Abraham’s Valley, 3h32m (Manoel de Oliveira, 1993): 1.5/5

Ema grows up, gets married, takes lovers, and engages in tedious, self-satisfied philosophic and poetic conversations full of epigrams that remain completely out of my grasp. Here’s an example from the narration: “Ema had the extraordinary power to make a radiant desire run like a bush fire over corpses of legendary virility, stubborn virility.” Uh huh. It’s based on a book by Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa-Luís, whose work (which Oliveira adapted four times) is described this way: “notions of time and space become vague, and planes of reality flow together, dimming the sense of a logical order of events.” Uh huh.

 

The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965): 4.5/5

The first hour and a half is perfectly perfect perfection. The last hour is a completely different film, often beautiful and gripping but slower, more serious, more internal. Actual sex and violence is heavily implied. It’s a kids movie! 

 

Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957): 3/5

A man’s wife leaves him, and he begins to wander from town to town, job to job, girl to girl, never finding anything of value. Five Easy Pieces vibes, but even more mud, fog and meaninglessness.

 

Jurassic Park, rw (Steven Spielberg, 1993): 4.5/5

More brutal than a typical modern action movie (cow v. dinosaur is especially upsetting, then and now) and completely effective, with one action set piece after another, cascading. Effects still mostly good due to high practical content. 

The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971): 3/5

George C. Scott takes one last gig as a getaway driver—and it’s a death trip, baby! 

 

The New Centurions (Richard Fleischer, 1972): 3.5/5

An L.A. cop story, with the verisimilitude that Joseph Wambaugh brings to the table, but shaggy and in an episodic CHiPs mode (but a billion times more cynical and suicide-ish). It even features a young Eric Estrada, but the real draws are George C. Scott and Stacy Keach, both excellent. 

 

Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975): 4/5

One of the most lurid and upsetting movies I’ve ever seen—and, taken on its surface, one of the most racist. The slaveowner protagonists spend most of the movie enacting the most degrading slave dramas on the black characters, reminding me of 12 Years a Slave or even Salo at times. It takes a shocking amount time for any of the black characters to demonstrate a personality or a desire for agency. The second half of Django Unchained seems to be an explicit corrective.

 

Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci, 1966): 3.5/5

Outstanding double feature with Mandingo, both very much on the side of their non-white characters while still prominently featuring a lot of upsetting racism (among the characters coded as bad). I can’t help but appreciate and admire how front and center the confrontation and discussion of the reality of actual horrible racism is (it’s just the depiction that is rough). This film is the one Burt Reynolds made with the second-best spaghetti Western director as his TV work was drying up, just like Rick Dalton! And Reynolds is great here, in a feral, physical and acrobatic performance.

 

The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967): 4/5

The best non-Leone spaghetti western I’ve seen (which admittedly isn’t saying much). Clever plot has Lee Van Cleef—grey-chest-haired but steely eyed—pursuing a bandit accused of a horrific crime (but innocent). The gag is that Van Cleef keeps catching him (like five times or more) but the smart and likable bandit keeps escaping and otherwise wriggling out of it. Traditionally entertaining. 

 

Coogan’s Bluff (Don Siegel, 1968): 2/5

Almost no police work is on display here. Mostly it’s a grotesque, comic fish out of water where a rapey/traditional-values Arizona lawman is confronted with a bunch of acid-soaked New York hippies. Whoever wins, we lose. 

 

 

Hou Hsiao-hsien Film Fest

Hou’s movies don’t really have plots, whether they take place over a summer or over most of a century. Nor do they have much non-diegetic music nor real closeups. They can feel more like flipping through a book of photos, but the photos are complicated and, in their own way, emotional (like looking at emotion through a telescope). His most revered work (and subsequently the ones I had seen before this deep dive, here represented just by titles and previous score) are his most glacial, ponderous and monotonous. But his early works are more traditionally eventful, and his 2000s run beginning with Millennium Mambo are gorgeous and modern-feeling films about young people—and a great pleasure. Nothing from Hou since 2015, but Letterboxd includes this description of an upcoming, undated) project called Shulan River: “Taking place in modern-day Taipei, Hou Hsiao-Hsien focuses on a lonely river goddess whose waterways have now been covered by modern roadways.” I’m in.

 

The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1983): 3/5

Hou called this his “first real film” (it was his fourth), and indeed it already pokes at Hou’s lifelong interests in rural vs. urban life, the passage of time, and how our lives are shaped by the larger-world events we are caught up in. It was also the first of his films written by Chu Tien-wen (a woman), who will write or co-write nearly all of the rest of Hou’s works. The first half hour is like Fellini’s I Vitelloni, with four restless post-high-schoolers fighting, gambling and drinking in a tiny fishing island off Taiwan. Then they decide to move to the mainland, where they each pursue different paths. The last half hour is a romance involving the most thoughtful of the lads, until the girl moves to Taipei—setting the Hou archetype for Taipei representing a different, dreamed of, life. 

 

The Sandwich Man (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1983): 3/5

Hou directed the first part of this triptych of three separate stories set in Taiwan in the 60s; his section is entitled “The Son’s Big Doll." It’s a simple, almost neorealistic story of a young father who must dress up as a clown and wear a sandwich board to earn his money. Indeed, it’s hard to make money and retain one’s dignity. 

 

A Summer at Grandpa’s (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1984): 4/5

Anecdotal but still compelling thanks to plenty of incident, a gentle tone, and serene landscapes. A small boy and his little sister visit the country and are confronted with a world that is more complex than previously imagined—and which they don’t really quite understand or have agency in—including a couple of inconvenient pregnancies, developmentally disabled young people, crime and, uh, hemorrhoids. Similarities to My Neighbor Totoro, including setting, tone, sick mother and the ages of the children, can’t be a complete coincidence. 

 

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985): 3.5/5

 

Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1986): 3.5/5

A boy and girl growing up in a mine town kinda like each other. They both move to Taipei to get nothing jobs, and their affection grows. But when he’s drafted, she marries a postman. As is typical with Hou, the characters are always being told by older people how much better they have it now, but in all times, the fates of these characters remain determined by the movements of history that flows around them. 

 

Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1987): 3.5/5

Like the story of The Godfather if Connie was our protagonist. Her brother and husband are both criminals, increasingly, then whacked. As in Mean Street’s our protagonist is kind of a peeper, the drama unfolding just beyond her ken. Narratively, it’s a bit outside—and merely in the current of—the essential drama of the situation. Relatively light in tone. 

 

A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989): 2.5/5

The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993): 3/5

 

Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995): 3/5

The final film in Hou’s “Taiwan Trilogy,” along with the above titles. In a way this is a microcosm of Hou’s entire project—contrasting the sacrifices and hardships of Taiwanese young people in the past century with the idleness and narcissism of today’s young people, wasting their lives on trivialities. On the other hand, the modern characters and scenes are so much more vibrant and interesting than those in the past, which Hou shoots in an ugly, grey-green monotone. 

 

Goodbye South Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996): 3.5/5

A small-time hood and businessman pulls one job involving 3,000 pigs but mostly gambles and hangs out, occasionally dreaming about moving to Shanghai and opening a restaurant. Reminds, again, of Mean Streets, right down to the wild-card younger character, here named Flathead or Flatty.  

 

Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998): 2.5/5

 

Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001): 4/5

A beautiful, narcissistic young couple go to clubs, have sex, do drugs, fight—to a techno beat. Jaw-dropping compositions and colors, especially blues and oranges. Our first encounter with the ravishing Shu Qi, Hou’s later-day muse who also stars in Three Times and The Assassin.

 

Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003): 5/5

Simple half-story (she’s pregnant) beautifully told, featuring lots of long, long hang-out scenes over meals, etc., highlighting group dynamics and ensemble performances. It’s set in Japan and is supposedly a tribute to Ozu. Indeed, family dynamics are gracefully portrayed, and our protagonist is a daughter in relationship with her (here amazingly silent) father—not to mention all the trains. But what Hou really gets right about Ozu is his tranquility. 

 

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005): 4/5

Three stories: one in the 60s, one in the 1910s, and one set in the “present”—each told referencing typical kinds of “love” stories of the time as well as the film styles of the time (the 1910 story is silent (except for music), with intertitles). There’s more vibe than dialogue, so it’s all about the graceful visual storytelling—with a tendency for reverie or to just hunker down and calmly watch how all the characters interact. And then there’s those next-level visuals: The dark green pool table, her sea green pants and olive checked shirt, the lime green sliding doors, the plants seen through the window.

 

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007): 4.5/5

 

The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015): 2.5/5

I have no idea who anyone is in this movie nor why anyone acts the way they do. The colors are pretty, but I have the same problem with this movie that I do with Hou’s much-lauded Taiwan Trilogy: once the film decides it’s just about the display of the very limited behavior allowed by custom, it feels stuffy and dead to me.