After L’ucello dalle piume di cristallo , Argento felt somewhat comfortable doing that kind of films and he continued with a second entry in what later was know as The Animal Trilogy. The movie was called Il Gato a nove code and even though it is a weaker effort than L’Ucello dalle pime di cristallo it still features the Argento signature.
This is...
... Giallo!
Good cinematography, some tits and violence here and there mix altogether in this giallo, even though in this case the cast is very good. A blind man played by Karl Malden is joined by a young James Franciscus, who will put eyes and strength to the brains of his pal.
The plot is as stupid as it gets, being the weaker element in the cocktail. It involves companies doing genetic stuff with the recent theory (back then in the 70s) that related psychopaths to XYY chromosome variations. That said there are the usual plot twists Argento likes to play with, specially at the end.
As I said, the Argento recipe makes wonders and one will find plenty of great moments. Keep an eye to Catherine Spaak playing a femme fatale role. Oh… and the milk… the milk! Here come some screenshots I found interesting enough.
A nice beer garden places our love due in the skyline of... Rome?
You never know when you might need some milk
Argento hints that women might drink milk after sex as well
In the blog, I already mentioned some Italian exploitation films from Joe d’Amato, a genre that seemed to have its own market in the Europe of the 70s. The father of all this movement is said to be Mario Brava, even though most people claim that the movie that started everything was L’ucello dalle piume di cristallo, from Dario Argento. Giallo was just born.
Giallo diegetic: any hint of a breast is an univocal sign that the killer might appear
Giallo (yellow in Italian) originally refers to the color cheap paperbacks were edited back in the days in the transalpine country, making an instance reference to the quality and theme of the flicks. However, in this case, the film is not that cheap like following movies made ended being.
L'ucello
L’ucello dalle piume di cristallo is a mix of a psychological thriller with terror elements. Sam Dalmas, an american writer is spending his last days in Italy upon returning to the States when all of a sudden he becomes the unwilling witness of a crime. Being a witness but also helping the poor lady being attacked, he develops an attachment to the events that bring him to start chasing the killer. The plot is simple, but the way everything is told will make the viewer take fake leads to the final interpretation of who the killer is.
Photography-wise the film has brilliant moments. Dario Argento was the son of a famous and talented Cinematography Director and that shows. Colors are perfectly combined, with the right accent in the right moment to bring extra diegetic information and will always be a part of the plot from beginning to end.
Rosso
Giallo
Nero
Marrone
Then there is the use of the camera. Combining the first (subjective), second (shoulder) and third person modes (objective), the director gives us several points of view on what’s happening and why is happening. That makes up for several intentional confusions that the director has planned for the viewer so he can be brought to the grand finale.
Who is the victim?
All in all, the movie is still worth seeing for two reasons: first, the plot is still fresh and will surprise even the brightest mind in the sofa; and second, like most Giallo films it provides enough flesh to keep your eyes wide open (ahhh the Italian women). Soundtrack is said to be from Ennio Morricone and that should be a good point, but I believe that the score is too classic for the movie; when compared to soundtracks from other Giallo films (those composed by Goblin for instance) one wishes it had a faster pace.
John Cassavetes has the dubious honor of being mentioned by Jean Luc Godard as one of the few hopes American cinema had for the future. The fact is that Cassavetes ended being a lot more than this thanks in part to the uniqueness of his films and the way he pioneered in distributing them. When in 1974 he released a Woman Under the Influence, starring Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands (actually his wife), Cassavetes called one by one all the theaters in the US to see if they would be interested on showing his new movie: the term independent was born. A Woman Under the Influence is a movie that converts routine into surrealism, not because the use of weird and strange paranoias, but because reality always beats fiction and a Woman Under The Influence breaths reality from start to finish. With Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands improvising their acting, Cassavetes gets closer to reality than if he pretended to have it scripted. To sum it up, it’s a movie I encourage all of you to watch even though some had a hard time.
Anyways, today I’d like to talk about Gloria, a movie directed by Cassavetes in 1980 and far away from the concept A Woman Under The Influence was 6 years back in time. First, it’s an action flick, then it was distributed by a major, and finally everything seems to be staged an scripted; the only thing in common is that both have Gena Rowlands on it.
Cassavetes and Rowlands teamed up in more than one film, a collaboration that can only be explained by the confidence John had on her; still, and after seeing a couple of flicks, one realizes that Gena has it. Even though Rowlands was a beauty with no rival on her prime, her best films started on the decade of the 70s, just when the first wrinkles appeared on her forehead but… who cares about that when you have talent?
You can't beat the system
Rowlands plays the role of Gloria, a middle-age prostitute who finds herself in the middle of a little kid and the mob trying to kill him. Our heroine will protect him to death while an actual relation develops between the two. That’s the plot used by Cassavetes to show us a woman in search for redemption. Needless to say that Rowlands destroys any other presence in the film, a thing noticed by the Academy and that reported her the 2nd Oscar Nomination (she also received one in 1974 for a WUTI) but that wasn’t enough to steal it from Sissy Spacek (please somebody explain that to me) the year that Goldie Hawn was also nominated thanks to Priv. Benjamin (let’s not talk about credibility, please). Worth seeing? Hard to say, even though the scenes showing us an impeccable-dressed Rowlands in a dirty New York city offer a bizarre contrast.
Years later, a remake was produced, starring Sharon Stone and directed by Sidney Lumet.
Beat Takeshi (ビートたけし）or simply Takeshi Kitano is a director I started following after his late works became iconic in Europe. I won’t lie if I admit that the first film from him I saw was Zatoichi, not his best piece indeed, a movie he did in a clear homage to the classic action films done during the 70s and that brought us masterpieces like “Lone wolf and cub”. After seeing Zatoichi, I saw other movies of him like Hana-bi (花火）, which reflected the personality of the author, a man of few words but with an incredible sensibility for art, music and life itself. Sonatine is perhaps the movie that finally gave international credit to Kitano and when compared with previous and later films, it’s just another slab in his cinematographic discourse.
Boutade and violence in a single shot
Sonatine’s plot revolves around the life of a Yakuza chief who has finally become conscious of how miserable his existence is. Far away are the years when he began the profession and now he sees himself as a rich yet lonely and disarrayed man. When the organization asks him to go to Okinawa to settle up some confrontation between local chiefs, he finds himself in the frontier between the Yakuza life to its full extent and the peaceful life he would have had he chosen another job.
That said, Sonatine follows the Kitano formula, with long shots where nothing apparently happens, sudden cuts or scenes that seem to have almost no relation with the main plot and explosions of violence suddenly following a calm scene. Some say Kitano is the true successor to Kurosawa, but I’d rather see him like a Japanese Godard (The shot above will actually remind the viewer of Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou).
It’s also worth mentioning the soundtrack of the film, scored by Joe Hisaishi, which creates a nice and relaxed atmosphere to contrast with the violence of the characters. Because at the end, the movie is a reflection of how violence resides in ourselves and how it bears no relation with the kind of person you are or you wish you were: violence is part of human nature.
One scene: the yakuza gang playing sumo in the beach.
Saura continued his colaboration with Chaplin for almost 10 years, through different movies with a common subject: the portrait of a decaying middle and high class.
Ana y los lobos is a good step in that diection. Depicting the inners of a wealthy yet weird family living in a rural area and placing Chaplin into that strange equation, Saura does a perfect portrait of the 3 Franco regime’s heads. The militar, the men and the church become the 3 wolves Ana has to face in that excentric family where an awesome Rafaela Aparicio plays the role of the mother.
Colorwise the movie will remind the viewer of Peppermint Frappé but the plot here is a lot more acid, weird and strange thanks to the story writer, Rafael Azcona in this case. Azcona is the man behind Placido’s and most of Marco Ferreri’s movies done during that era and you can only salute him when the final scene of Ana y los lobos takes place.
Ana y los lobos is a perfect portrait of a world full of conventions, symbolisms and weird characters. The world Spain used to be 40 years ago.
Unfortunately for the Spanish cinema scene, its image will be always linked to Almodovar and the cheap movies done during El Destape starring Alfredo Landa and Antonio Ozores but the truth is that there were awesome directors, actors and scenario writers that did a great job during the 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s. They were young guys, most of them with good families behind, that tried to do something critical with the situation Spain was living in those years but that at the same time could be approved by the standards of the severe regime. If Marco Ferreri did his best with El verdugo or El pisito, Berlanga also produced some great works like Plácido, and then we had Bardem with some neorrealism-esque film in the works of Muerte de un ciclista. Then there is Carlos Saura, younger than the preceding I believe but also more clear in trying to depict something in his movies.
Carlos Saura started doing movies in the 50s, but perhaps his best appears in the 60s and 70s when working with a young girl called Geraldine Chaplin whom he also dated for 10 years.Peppermint Frappe is one of the fruits of that great collaboration and is a movie that needs to be seen twice or three times in order to see what’s going on.
The main plot tells us Julian’s story (José Luís López Vázquez), a middle-aged man who has spent all his days working as a doctor in Cuenca. His life could be seen as modest, simple, without pretensions: plain boring. But everything changes when an old friend of him (Alfredo Mayo) comes back to Cuenca (where the action takes place) in order to introduce him his brand-new wife (Geraldine Chaplin).
Brand new is the perfect definition of that woman since she is treated by both of them like a toy, like most of the games they used to play in the past, just that this time, Julian wishes her like he never wished anybody. The final character in the movie is Julian’s assistant, also played by Chaplin, who is merely an unpolished diamond that Julian tries to make as similar as he can to his friend’s bride. Humiliated by the couple, Julian will prepare his revenge with just the aid of his favorite cocktail: Peppermint Frappe.
Those are the ingredients of the movie but as I mentioned things go a lot deeper. Peppermint Frappe is the reflection of a frustrated society, more worried about appearance than about the real substance, full of desires that can’t be accomplished.
The photography depicts Cuenca and its surroundings during autumn, with great attention to the city itself but also to the remains of a past that will never come back. Soundtrack by Los Canarios will also put us back into the days of that Spain, a country fighting for a bit of freedom in a whole ambience of ruins and unburied past. When you see Geraldine dancing along “The Incredible Miss Perryman” while Julian takes pictures of her and her husband preparing an old game of theirs you immediately grasp what’s going on.
I’ve always been a huge follower of Refn’s films. Specially, I loved the whole universe he build around Coppenaghen’s slums in the Pusher trilogy with tons of action, bad sounding words and epic scenes. Refn felt comfortable in Denmark and the whole movies are a whole reflection of somebody that knows his turf and the bad guys that inhabit it; but, for some reason, he needed more and decided to jump outside the frontiers of his country. The result was Bronson, which even though had that classical Hollywood flavour, it also kept the Refn touch thematically and in an artistic way: in other words, tons of violence.
Then, one day, Cannes 2011 announces that Refn will take part in the competition with a movie called Drive. My first reaction was that the guy was in need of fast cash and decided to take part into a “cheapo” production but then I remembered we were talking about Cannes (like if that meant something nowadays).
Well, I was totally wrong because Drive has something. The filmmaking method used by Refn is there: cameras that move super close to the characters, shadows and more shadows, broken takes and everything we saw in other Refn’s films. Iconically, we will see a universe full of losers that pretend to be winners and winners that are actually losers, just like in Pusher II, but this time with the mandatory Hollywood sugar dose. Sure that Drive has a few scenes that will shock the viewer (specially if he doesn’t know Refn) but all in all the film is pretty mild.
One thing I particularly love about Refn is that he achieves what others just dream off: he makes you believe that the crap going on the screen is real. I am stating this, because the whole plot behind Drive is very similar to the one in movies like Jean Pierre Melville‘s Le Samourai or Jim Jarmusch‘s Ghost Dog and you can sense some kind of homage here: the solitary guy that almost doesn’t talk, a plot he ends involved in without almost knowing and the grand finale. However, Refn states that the homage is paid to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which personally I will have a hard time finding out why…
That said, Drive is a solid movie with a solid cast (Brian Cranston from Breaking Bad plays a fantastic role), solid scenes and a great synth-pop/electro soundtrack made by french artist Kavinsky. When Nightcall pops up during the opening credits in purple you will be like WTF but trust me: you’ll love it.
One thing I particularly love about the BFC (British Free Cinema) is how real and authentic everything looks. From the looks of the actors, to the lines, to the locations where the action takes place, everything breathes REALITY. Tony Richardson is one of the biggest exponents of the movement and along with Lindsay Anderson or Joseph Losey he helped to define the basis of the movement.
Today I am going to talk about The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, an awesome allegory to the society that was building up during the 50s and 60s and that we still live on. Today’s days of crisis may help the viewer to feel kind of close to the roles of the main characters, but that’s not the point. The film goes beyond that.
Centering around the life of a young and poor cockney that has just been sent on probation for a petty crime, Richardson tries to explain the circumstances that brought the young lad to the action itself. It was not money itself, nor the family context (though it may have helped) but that whole society starting over after WW2. This is the main concept that Richardson will take and recompose into a race between the reformatory and an elite school; that way, the director places our young cockney into a the dilema if either winning and getting this way into the society that so badly treated him or if to stay true to his class and condition.
Just like This Sporting Life or The Servant explore the brutality of the low classes towards the upward ones, The Loneliness of the Long Distance runner does that along with the sketching of a youth that has to take a role that doesn’t want to take. Not bad for a 1962 film. At the end you’ll also see a very young James Fox in the role of the main character rival.
Michelangelo Antonioni is considered by many the first example of modernity in cinema. It’s not just a scene here and there like in some Rosellini’s 50s films or like in the first movies of the french Nouvelle Vague, no, Antonioni represents modernity to its full extent in every single scene of any of his movies. At least, that’s what they say.
Well, Blow-Up is not one of his first films but an effort in the middle of the 60s and his first English-spoken film. Using as a basis a Julio Cortazar short story, Antonioni develops a full story around the world of photography in a colorful yet sad London. Times of contrast, between the new pop culture and the always sad reality behind it, are perfectly represented in this movie where the main protagonist resists to loose focus on that reality. Because people can vary its points of views on the reality, missing what is actually happening in their contemporary times, but the camera never misses the point. That’s the important factor to remember when following the steps of the main character, a photographer in between two fronts: the social reality and the fashioned and stylized reality magazines and trends try to portrait.
Miscommunication can only be avoided by not speaking nor listening.
The Talented Mr. Ripley was a 1999 movie in which Jude Law, Gwyneth Patrol and Matt Damon played an adaptation of Patricia’s Highsmith novel. End of story. I’d like, however, to change the title of the movie to The Talented Mr. Ripoff. It’s not a big secret that since the end of the 70s the American Industry ran out of ideas and started looking back to the European cinema in search for directors, ideas and even stars. In this case, the inspiration could have been (aside of the novel which also this movie takes ideas from) 1960′s René Clement Plein Soleil (Purple Noon in English).
What could I say about the movie?
Since I am pretty sure than most of you have already seen the American effort, it’s not that the plot is going to be a very big surprise. The mise en scène, however, is. You have the feeling of watching a succession of real events, specially because the scenes are filmed closely and without any kind of gimmicks. The movie has a lot of contrasts, like most of the PRE/DURING Nouvelle Vague-age films of the time, and the colours in the character’s clothes always have something to do with their psychology. Among them, there is a scene in a fish market where Alain Delon (yep, Matt Damon‘s role is taken here by Delon) walks through a fish market, paying atention to different details and linking them with his current situation. Everything is very subtle, so the viewer doesn’t feel anything but it’s definitely there. What more ? Well, there is Nino Rota in the score and a very brief appearance of Romy Schneider at the very begining. Solid as hell and a LOT more intriguing and enjoyable than the 1999 counterpart.
