Flipside Movie Emporium

[the night watchman]

[Jim Harper]

[Jim Harper]

08/01/06 - 15/01/06

World Apartment Horror (dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, 1991)

Suicide Manual (dir. Osamu Fukutani, 2003)

The Twilight Samurai (dir. Yōji Yamada, 2002)*

The Ring Virus (dir. Kim Dong-bin, 1999)

Jack the Ripper (dir. Jess Franco, 1976)*

Dr Jekyll vs. the Werewolf (dir. Leon Klimovsky, 1972)*

Rasen (dir. Joji Iida, 1999)

The Discarnates (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1988)

The House with the Laughing Windows (dir. Pupi Avati, 1976)

I?m Not Scared (dir. Gabriele Salvatores, 2003)*

The Lady in White (dir. Frank LaLoggia, 1988)*

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (dir. Hiyao Miyazaki, 1984)*

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943)

The Leopard Man (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943)*

Ring 2 (dir. Hideo Nakata, 1999)

Not a bad week's viewing. Twilight Samurai was very good indeed. I've resisted watching it for a while now, but when I gave in it was surprisingly entertaining. Jack the Ripper was another surprise; normally I get tired of Franco after about 10 minutes, but I actually enjoyed this one. It's no masterpiece, but Franco manages to actually wheel out some talent (a rare occurence), and Kinski's always fun to watch.

Neither The Leopard Man or The Lady in White were as good as I'd been lead to believe, although they were far from bad. Sadly Dr Jekyll vs. the Werewolf falls solidly into the 'bad' category.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds isn't Miyazaki's best, but even average Miyazaki is considerably more entertaining than most.

[mfritschel]

Broken Flowers (Jarmusch, 2005)

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Derrickson, 2005)

Dark Water (Salles, 2005)

Broken Flowers is by far the best of the group, although it seems to have come out a year too late for we already have a Bill Murray looking for meaning in his life type movie in Lost in Translation. Besides of the comparisons the movie kept brining up in my mind, it was rather entertaining, most notably by having its own sense of entertainment and leaving the viewer never quite sure to expect next. As far as the other two, Exorcism kept me quite enthralled, but seemed to fall short in parts and Dark Water developed a great sense of mood and place with solid performances, but again left me looking for more at the end.

[Mark Dujsik]

Crash (Haggis, 2005)

Good Night, and Good Luck. (Clooney, 2005)

Hostel (Roth, 2006)

Kung Fu Hustle (Chow, 2005)

Reefer Madness (Gasnier, 1936)

The Ringer (Blaustein, 2005)

Tristan & Isolde (Reynolds, 2006)

Wedding Crashers (Dobkin, 2005)

Good week in terms of numbers. Where to start?

The Ringer and Wedding Crashers had me leery with their premises early on, but I ended up liking the former a bit and the latter a little bit. Ringer certainly wins out, as it has a good heart and still is quite funny, while Crashers falls into the trappings of romantic comedy near the end.

Kung Fu Hustle is one of the best times I had watching a 2005 movie.

Crash and Good Night, and Good Luck. are huge critical successes of the year, and I liked but was underwhelmed by both. Crash has a few too many script contrivances and Bendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock's characters are pretty much useless to the story, and Good Night is very lean filmmaking--in a good way. The downside is it overlooks a lot about McCarthyism in the process.

Tristan & Isolde is solid. Working on a review very soon.

Now the two really bad ones. Reefer Madness is hilarious, as if you didn't know. On the other end, I absolutely despised Hostel.
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"Film lovers are sick people."

--Francois Truffaut

10 Best Films of 2006

Mark Reviews Movies

[beltmann]

1/9 ? 1/15/06

Good week. In preferential order:

Fear and Trembling / Corneau / France / 2003

Walk On Water / Fox / Israel / 2004

The Beat That My Heart Skipped / Audiard / France / 2005

Caf? Lumiere / Hou / Taiwan / 2003

Mean Creek / Estes / USA / 2004

Tropical Malady / Weerasethankul / Thailand / 2004

Gabbeh / Makhmalbaf / Iran / 1996

Trading Places / Landis / USA / 1983

The Devil?s Rejects / Zombie / USA / 2005

A Hole In My Heart / Moodysson / Sweden / 2004

Fear and Trembling is the funniest movie I've seen in six months.

For those interested in Munich, I'd also recommend the Israeli film Walk On Water, which shares with Spielberg's film certain thematic and philosophical qualities. It concerns a young, present-day Mossad agent who hunts down and kills former Nazis. But when he's asked to befriend the grandson of an aging Nazi officer who may or may not still be alive, the agent's nationalistic convictions (and his preconceptions about his duties regarding the past) are challenged. As an artist Fox is the real deal; I'd also highly recommend his earlier Yossi & Jagger, which, in its story of soldiers in love, predates Brokeback Mountain as a gay romance set within a traditionally "macho" genre.

I'm really tired of movies that are enamored with the "exoticism" of the underworld, but The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a French remake of Toback's Fingers, still has considerable merits: Romain Duris (looking like a young Daniel Day-Lewis) capably suggests the internal struggle of a thug trying to balance criminal life with his dream of becoming a concert pianist; his love affair with his best friend's wife has some fire to it; and the tense-funny scenes with a Japanese piano teacher who speaks no French convey the violence of artistic desire. I definitely liked it more than Audiard's earlier Read My Lips.

Mean Creek is a mildly interesting teen drama with a very interesting soundtrack--although I think it's rather unlikely that these particular kids would be listening to Eels, Wilco, and Spoon, among others.

In terms of style and craft, The Devil?s Rejects is a major advance for Rob Zombie?but that doesn?t make it any less reprehensible or boring than House of 1000 Corpses. Zombie does make an interesting choice at the midway point: Having asked us to feel sympathy for a group of travelers cruelly, pointlessly tortured by the ?rejects,? Zombie then turns the tables and asks us to feel the same sympathy for the torturers once they are in a similar position. Still, rather than a ?bold? statement about how the vengeance-seeking sheriff?s hypocrisy is the greatest evil of all, I?d argue that what mostly comes across is Zombie?s tiresome, amoral aesthetic: He?s really just interested in stupid hillbilly jokes and hideous imagery for their own sake.

A Hole In My Heart is quite dreadful, and quite disappointing--it's the first Moodysson film that I haven't loved.

Eric
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"When I was in Barcelona they showed pornography on regular television. I'm assuming it's the same way in Mexico since they also speak Spanish." - IMDb user comment

[Michael Scrutchin]

[Danny Baldwin]

1/9 - 1/15

Not a single one. When the semester ends, I'll surely be ready to watch a lot of stuff, though.
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Danny Baldwin

View My Reviews

[the night watchman]

Carlito?s Way: Rise to Power (Michael Scott Bregman, 2005) - Flat, paint-by-numbers gangster movie that does a disservice to the original. It must be said, however, that things pick up when Luis Guzman is on screen. He?s the Christopher Walken of this flick. And, by golly, the gag real is actually funny.

Be Cool (F. Gary Gray, 2005) - Yeah, I laughed. But the movie?s far too self-reflexive to work. In Get Shorty I believed in Chili Palmer. In this one, I only see John Travolta playing Chili Palmer.

Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) - Great movie that reminds me of Casablanca with the psychosis of Vertigo. I loved the loaded dialogue in the first third that reveals character and back story while always moving the current story forward. The only flaw is the disappointingly pat ending, which forces the three leads to transform into stock movie characters for the last five minutes. Still, I think this one?s going on my all-time favorites list. Yeah, it?s that good.

I also picked up the three volumes of Lovecraft-based movies from Lurker Films. Here are the most notable that appear on the discs:

the feature presentations

Out of Mind: The Stories of H. P. Lovecraft boasts an interesting premise that manages to loosely adapt a few of Lovecraft?s stories within an original narrative. The whole thing is well-made and well-acted, with an amazing performance by Christopher Heyerdahl as the gentleman from New England himself. It only stumbles at the end, when it simply seems to come to a hault rather than provide an actual ending. Still, a must for admirers of HPL.

Cool Air is a very good adaptation and expansion of its source. Jack Donner?s performance as the strange recluse with the weird machine in the upper story of a boarding house is remarkably fully-fleshed out and well rounded. Stumbles occasionally, but is still quite good.

Rough Magick is a pilot for a series that the BBC decided not to pick up. No wonder, its production values are about as good as a Doctor Who episode from the 80s, the first third is made up almost exclusively of expository dialogue, and the cast over-acts shamelessly through the whole affair. The premise is based on the Delta Green expansion rules for the Call of Cthulhu RPG, which I?ve never played but strikes me as the Cthulhu Mythos as written by Tom Clancy. Never thought it was a terribly good idea in the first place.

shorts

Nyarlathotep faithfully adapts the prose poem, and though it has many of the faults you?d expect from an amateur film, it's still pretty good and worth watching anyway. I would have preferred if they?d kept the narration (a word-for-word reading of the text itself) off the soundtrack and focused on a purely visual telling.

An Imperfect Solution, a loose adaptation of the middle chapters of ?Herbert West--Reanimator,? takes itself too seriously to be much fun.

The Terrible Old Man is actually a good idea, done poorly. A modern-day update of the story, a trio of post-Tarrantino criminals on the lamb* decides to rob the wrong old guy?s house. Could have worked beautifully, but the dialogue is unwieldy and the cast delivers it awkwardly. The work by the DP, on the other hand, looks remarkably slick and professional.

* EDIT: Not to give the wrong idea of the movie, the criminals were actually on the lam, not the lamb. Of course, that might have added the extra edge the movie needed.
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"If you're talking about censorship, and what things should be shown and what things shouldn't be shown, I've said that as an artist you have no social responsibility whatsoever."

-David Cronenberg

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

[beltmann]

[the night watchman]

[beltmann]

[beltmann]