Movies watched in January 2012
The movies are ranked and rated according to my affection for them.
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11 titles
- DirectorHenri-Georges ClouzotStarsLouis JouvetSimone RenantBernard BlierA flirtatious wife runs off to meet an older man and the husband closes in with intend to murder him, but finds the deed already done.9/10
A fantastic thing from many points of view. - DirectorNeil JordanStarsBob HoskinsCathy TysonMichael CaineA man recently released from prison manages to get a job driving a call girl from customer to customer.8/10
The main problem I had with this movie was the main character: he was way too surprised, kind and thin-skinned for the world around him. Hell he's not very far from Chaplin's Vagabond, exuding unbearable amounts of vulnerability and puppy-eyedness (the faces he makes when Simone whips him, or when he tells Mortwell that he's happy!!). Now, apart from the fact that this made us, the audience, feel equally vulnerable (we were in his shoes, with only his own meager defenses between ourselves and the mean world), it was also not quite believable. I understand that big changes may have occurred during his 7 years in jail, but even so, he already used to live in a shady world (does it really make such a big difference whether it was the world of drugs, or whatever was the former business, or of prostitution?), and he had spent the last 7 years in a goddamn prison, not at a nunnery! On the other hand, indeed he had gone to jail for 7 years for something Mortwell had done, which *is* a sign of artlessness or straightaway naivety, so maybe before jail he had only been a small fish in a small fish business. Besides, maybe there *are* such candid people even in the nastiest layers of the criminal underworld...
A thing I liked about the movie was the depiction of this underworld. It really felt like it was underground, somewhere very low with unbreathable air, among trails and creatures who were awkwardly imitating the streets and humans from the world above, but every now and then the masks slipped and unspeakable, monstrous features were showing. The slowly revealed fact that those monsters were still human beings only made them more distressing. And a large part of this feeling was generated specifically through the exposed, defenceless state of the main character, who was, in spite of his criminal background, anything but a fish in his waters. He was constantly nauseated by the sights and sounds around him - and I mean really nauseated, not using a high-ground moral disgust against them as a pretext to unleash his personal demons, like Travis Bickle. We are looking at King's Cross through his eyes, and we shiver with ugly alienation. When one of the sickening inhabitants of that world pulls his head through George's car window and Simone yells "DRIVE!", we yell it too inside our heads and desperately jerk imaginary pedals to the floor. When the car finally drives away, I had a distinctive feeling that we had just escaped the pits of hell:
[link]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47XgrOokDYw [/link]
Apart from this, the mysteriousness of Simone, the black femme fatale, only added to the general menacing feel of everything. Especially since, together with George, it's never clear what is mysterious about her: she is a prostitute, she meets clients, that much we know from the very beginning. We find out later that she used to work the King's Cross too, where she had a very nasty pimp and a sorry younger friend and colleague, but she escaped and promoted herself to some kind of upper-class prostitution. So what could be mysterious about her? Whence this aura of something else underneath, although she seems to be completely exposed to us?
Well, this is the second weak point of this very remarkable movie (after the excessive and hardly justified artlessness of the main character): the source of the aura is being revealed, and it is enormously unthrilling . I was really hoping for something haunting, or at least for a mysterious mood undisturbed by revelations. Yes we knew what she must have been doing, but we never really saw it, and somehow it didn't fit with the elegant and reserved air of the character; she always looked like the nasty work done by her body was happening elsewhere, and that there was something, somebody inside her, untouched by the muck, untouchable by anybody, George included. She does say "Having me is nothing. Any prick can have me", but somehow that sounds like "No one can have me, there is a place deep down inside no one can touch". Well, it turns out that the actual message was , which really feels like an easy way out of the mystery.
I was also a little annoyed by some mild bumps in the plot, but that's nothing compared to the other wonders and frustrations of this movie. On the whole, although it could have been better, this was still another memorable Neil Jordan film experience.
Wait, one more thing: the song "Mona Lisa" certainly pulled a The Long Goodbye on us, popping up everywhere in the movie, in all sorts of renditions and styles. - DirectorCarl FranklinStarsDenzel WashingtonTom SizemoreJennifer BealsA Black war hero is hired to find a mysterious woman, and gets mixed up in a murderous political scandal in 1948 Los Angeles.7/10
I didn't like the movie quite that much, but I can think of at least 3 non-movie related reasons for this: 1. I didn't see it alone, and this always distracts me; 2. I have watched in close proximity to Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, which was a very moody and remarkable movie; 3. this is more movie-related, but still not completely on topic: I don't really like Denzel Washington. There's always something about him so self-justified, completely confident in his own values, un-doubting of himself that is just tiresome. And this thing (I don't know how to call it) is present in him regardless whether he's playing a thug, a detective, an upright member of the society or a gangster. It's not just pride and elegance (he's got those too), it's something slightly else, a constant complete confidence in his own rules and perspectives, which started to feel tiresome after I met it in several of his movies. Well in DBD this factor was very low, almost non-existent in the beginning, but from about the last third on it came across in full force. Of course, this thinned the atmosphere, as we were not fearing for the character anymore, he had lost his vulnerability. Then again we stopped fearing for the character as soon as Mouse stepped into the story :D.
But aside from this, the movie was unquestionably good and indeed thrilling. The story was very well woven, the monologues were lovely - and even the dialogues, I so loved it when Mouse told Easy that Frank had cut a smile on his neck! Then again, I certainly liked the hell out of Mouse, with his psychotic innocence and metal-tooth grinning loyalty. As to the abruptness and brutality of violence - it jumped at me even more fiercely as I was watching it on my projector, image as large as the wall and faces as large as me. Thing is that this does thin down once Easy decides to fight back and Mouse makes his appearance, which is a pity - but it also came as a breath of air after the previous tension.
I also had a slight problem getting a grip on the story line in the beginning, which distracted me from feeling the mood. Made me think of opening that little notebook that I use sometimes while watching jidai-geki-s with complex plots, to write down the names of the characters and the relationships between them (is this a very nerdy thing to do?). - DirectorAkio JissôjiAtsushi KanekoHisayasu SatôStarsTadanobu AsanoYûko DaikeChisako HaraThis four-part anthology takes its cue from the short fiction of legendary horror writer Edogawa Rampo.6/10
6 is the average, pulled down a notch by "Caterpillar", which contained way too much body horror for my taste. The others were thrilling, interesting, and sickly funny. - DirectorBob RafelsonStarsDebra WingerTheresa RussellSami FreyFederal investigator Alexandra Barnes tracks down gold-digging woman Catherine Peterson, who moves from husband to husband in order to kill them and collect the inheritance.6/10
- DirectorHrafn GunnlaugssonStarsJakob Þór EinarssonEdda BjörgvinsdóttirHelgi SkúlasonAn Irish man seeks vengeance against the vikings who killed his parents.6/10
Nice atmosphere, weapons, places and faces, silly main character: the Yojimbo shrewdness in that primitive setting felt just sad. - CreatorMatthew GrahamAshley PharoahStarsPhilip GlenisterKeeley HawesDean AndrewsAfter being shot in 2008 while investigating DCI Sam Tyler, DI Alex Drake wakes up in 1981.6/10
Cute, but often a missed opportunity. - DirectorTai KatôStarsTeruhiko AoiYoshiko KayamaTomisaburô WakayamaAn author of mystery stories gets ensnared in a real murder case. An industrial tycoon and husband of his biggest fan lies dead and one of his colleagues, a successful but antisocial writer may be involved, too -- as well as a mysterious Englishwoman and a chambermaid behaving very suspiciously.aka "Beast in the Shadows"
5.5/10
It is not comfortable to dislike an obscure movie directed by a high quality obscure director, but when it happens it happens. This movie was awfully stilted, and not just because the direction and acting didn't try to imitate real life: the narrative line was not fluent, the story, motivations and personalities jolted all over the way. My suspicion is that this was due to a failed attempt to imitate some Occidental, exotic style / way of life / mentality / cinematography. I will have to take a look at the director's jidai-geki movies to check this. For now, all I can say is that the BDSM scenes meant to look odd only looked stilted and forced, the "subtle deductions" were either too obvious or suddenly extremely complicated - and still arrived at the conclusion we had reached after the first 20 minutes of plot, the music was awfully loud, and the characters just jumped from one state (say, polite discretion) to another (lustful submissiveness, or eerie coldness) so abruptly that I could almost hear a "click". Many camera angles were 'abnormal', but they created impressions unrelated to what was going on in the movie or to the general feel of the story, so they looked more like random experiments instead of new-wavish expressions. What I did like was the more coherent first third of the movie, and the idea of a mystery writer inscribing a detective novel in real life instead of paper (the action itself was not new, but I liked the semantic interpretation proposed). And, of course, the fact that this movie got me acquainted with Edogawa Rampo (remains to be seen whether I'd like his stories as much as I liked the writings of his American namesake :) ). - DirectorLee TamahoriStarsNick NolteMelanie GriffithJennifer ConnellyIn 1950's Los Angeles, a special crime squad of the LAPD investigates the murder of a young woman.5/10
Smooth and with a few surprisingly off-beat moments, but just a few days later and I already had to check its IMDb page to remember what it was about. So it was nice, but nothing memorable. - DirectorDominic AncianoRay BurdisStarsRay WinstoneJude LawSadie FrostThe film opens with the cast gathering after the funeral of Jude to see a film he had been working on for two years. It turns out that the film is secret videos of all those gathered together in their most despicable moments including thievery, spousal abuse, adultery, etc. The revelations remove the masks from the so-called close friends.5/10
- DirectorDennis HopperStarsDon JohnsonVirginia MadsenJennifer ConnellyUpon arriving to a small town, a drifter quickly gets into trouble with the local authorities - and the local women - after he robs a bank.4/10
Very nice atmosphere and music, at least in the beginning; because the story (and the main character along with it) was so clumsy that it felt at times like a long and increasingly louder screech.