So I’ll start with a nod to the extremely lengthy delay in getting anything posted around here lately. I’ve had a series of kidney stone-related surgical misadventures over the past couple months, so haven’t had the energy or spirit to do much in the way of writing. I have done plenty of lying around in a half-drugged stupor and watching movies, though! I figure the end of October is a great time to recap flicks I saw last August, right?
I actually have seen quite a few really great flicks since last I posted, some of which I’m sure I’ll be covering in my year-end favorites list (Beat Kitano’s mesmerizing Violent Cop, low-key 70s mob flick The Friends of Eddie Coyle, taut French submarine thriller Les Maudits…). Rather than go on about them twice, I have included notes on some other interesting, but maybe less great, flicks I’ve been watching. So. Now that I’m finally (mostly) out of the woods, here’s some stuff about some stuff…
So I only saw 13 movies during August, but wow, were there some great ones in there! Very few duds in that batch, with the exception of the terrible dystopian Rutger Hauer vehicle Split Second and the risible nonsense of Iceman: The Time Traveler, a sequel that basically rewrites the story of the first film without actually making any more sense or even having any decent action scenes.
The Complete List for August (first-time viewings in bold):
Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Blind Fury (1989, Phillip Noyce)
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974, Brian Clemens)
Exiled (2006, Johnnie To)
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, Peter Yates)
Hollow Triumph (aka The Scar) (1948, Steve Sekely)
Iceman: The Time Traveler (2018, Wai-Man Yip)
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (2010, Andrew Lau)
Les Maudits (The Damned) (1947, Rene Clement)
Split Second (1992, Tony Maylam & Ian Sharp)
Subway (1985, Luc Besson)
Summer of Soul (2021, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson)
Violent Cop (1989, Takeshi Kitano)
With the news of his death, the beginning of September saw me go on a short Jean-Paul Belmondo spree, watching or rewatching a handful of his films. More on that later. Low points from that month included the reprehensibly sexist Fritz Lang noir Human Desire and Penn and Teller Get Killed, a shockingly poor combination of unfunny schtick and smug self-satisfaction. Pity, normally I like those guys. Anyway, onward and upward…
The Complete List for September (first-time viewings in bold):
Borsalino (1970, Jacques Deray)
Boss Level (2021, Joe Carnahan)
The Brothers Rico (1957, Phil Karlson)
Cloudburst (1951, Francis Searle)
Drive a Crooked Road (1954, Richard Quine)
Hell Bound (1957, William J. Hole Jr.)
Hitch-Hike (aka Death Drive, Autostop Rosso Sangue) (1977, Pasquale Festa Campanile)
Human Desire (1954, Fritz Lang)
The Hunger (1983, Tony Scott)
Iron Monkey 2 (1996, Chao Lu-jiang)
Le Magnifique (aka The Man From Acapulco) (1973, Philippe de Broca)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston)
Le Marginal (1983, Jacques Deray)
Meet Him and Die (1976, Franco Prosperi)
The Melies Mystery (2021, Eric Lange)
Mister America (2019, Eric Nortanicola)
Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989, Arthur Penn)
Le Professionnel (1981, Georges Lautner)
The Suicide Squad (2021, James Gunn)
Tequila Sunrise (1988, Robert Towne)
That Man From Rio (1964, Philippe de Broca)
Best of the Bunch:
Summer of Soul (2021)
Like I said, I saw some really great flicks over the past few months, but I’m gonna go with Questlove’s labor of love as the best of an incredible batch. It’s basically a rediscovery of the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of free concerts held in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park that drew nearly 300,000 fans during the summer of 1969. The concerts featured some truly legendary performers, from Sly and the Family Stone and Nina Simone to Gladys Knight and Hugh Masakela, and were all filmed for possible broadcast or theatrical release. It turns out that no one in a position of power at the time was interested in a Black cultural festival, so the footage was shelved and the event faded into obscurity—even as the much whiter Woodstock festival from the same summer was deified as a cultural touchstone. Luckily, Questlove got his hands on the discarded footage and used it to create a dynamic, stunning tribute to the event. There’s some truly incredible concert footage here, from Stevie Wonder shredding out a drum solo to Simone’s powerful rendition of “Backlash Blues.” Maybe the best thing that Questlove manages to pull off, though, is to put the whole thing in its proper context. He intercuts the concert clips with short excursions that help flesh out and define what Harlem and the world were going through in 1969. The result is a fantastic reclamation of a groundbreaking event that was in danger of being forgotten completely. Plus, the footage clearly demonstrates that the Urban Sombrero was in wide usage in late 60s’ Harlem, which is another historical tidbit that seems lost to history…
Other notes:
On the Death of Jean-Paul Belmondo
The September death of French film legend Jean-Paul Belmondo was a big loss, although he hadn’t really been making films for several decades, since suffering a stroke in 2001. As a fan of the man, I must say I was generally appalled at the tone of the “tributes” that various film critics trotted out upon his passing. First, the headlines tended to lean toward calling Belmondo a “French New Wave icon,” which is half accurate but hardly reflective of why he was actually a big star globally. Sure, he became a star with his performance in Breathless, Godard’s cornerstone of the New Wave movement, but it’s not like Belmondo made a career of arthouse films. While Breathless is what film critics remember him for, what the actual French and international movie-going public remembers him for is his string of wildly popular adventure/action flicks like 1964’s That Man in Rio—flicks that showcased Belmondo as the proto-Jackie Chan, a superstar who would engage in wild, seemingly dangerous stunts like riding on the wing of an airplane or tumbling down a crumbling hillside while large (real) boulders rolled over and around him. I can’t tell you how many films there are in which he walks on top of a train or subway, but it’s quite a few. The critics’ “tributes” generally nodded toward the popularity of these films, but with a tone of disappointment.
This sly slam from Dan Callahan’s piece on RogerEbert.com is pretty typical. He calls out the (boring) 70s historic drama Stavinsky as “a rare venture into something more refined in this period, and a signal that he might still be drawn to movies where the primary interest wasn’t just shooting off guns or jumping out of planes.” Callahan then jumps right past Belmondo’s successful run of late 70s/early 80s French action flicks and instead leaps forward to 1987, when Belmondo “returned to the theater and played the actor Edmund Kean and Cyrano de Bergerac.” The obvious subtext here is “Oh, what a career Belmondo could have had, if only he’d confined himself to the art films and serious dramas that I prefer, instead of sullying his talents with the action movies that audiences loved and he preferred making.” As if there’s something inherently more noble about being Philip Seymour Hoffman than Jackie Chan. Spoiler alert: there isn’t. Belmondo made the films he wanted to make and that he enjoyed making, and his fans ate them up and made them substantial hits, for the most part. Looking down your nose at the films Belmondo actually made while pretending to pay tribute to him is frankly worse than just saying nothing at all, in my book. So that’s my rant for the month.
Other quick thoughts:
Meet Him and Die (1976) Thoroughly enjoyed this fun, trashy Italian Eurocrime flick from the mid-70s—partly because it has way less violence against women than most of the genre. Of course, that could be because there’s pretty much only one woman in the cast, 70s game show icon Elke Sommer, whose out-of-nowhere appearances at a few key points really put the Ach! in deus ex machina.
The Hunger (1983) As a loud and proud Tony Scott fan, I jumped at the chance to check out his first film when it popped up on HBOMax a few weeks ago. I saw it way, way back in the day when I was a teenager, but only really remembered that Bauhaus was in the opening club scene. Anyway, I really kinda liked it—a dreamy modern-day vampire flick that owes more than a bit of its ambiance and atmosphere to Scott’s brother Ridley’s Blade Runner of the year before. Having seen that flick about a million times, I think Tony was trying to create his own vampire-noir in the mold of Ridley’s sci-fi-noir, sharing some of its fascination with death among non-human beings. It doesn’t work as well as Blade Runner, of course, but The Hunger has some strong points. The strongest is the central performance of a young Susan Sarandon, who throws herself completely into the role of the unwillingly-seduced vampire in thrall to ageless Catherine Deneuve. For my money, it’s one of her best performances, because it calls on such a crazy range of emotions and styles—from playful flirting with Deneave to her spasmic, junkie-like withdrawals as she turns into the undead. Great stuff in a decent enough flick.
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January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
April 2021
May 2021
June/July 2021
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