Killer's Kiss

Stanley Kubrick
1955

One of Kubrick's first features "Killer's Kiss" shows early hints at the famed director's penchant for precise visuals as well as his coldly unsentimental take on character. A washed up boxer gets mixed up in the affairs of a go-go dancer and her lecherous boss. The boxer and dancer fall for each other and make plans to skip town and return to the simple life, but the spurned nightclub owner won't leave well enough alone. The performances are definitely rough around the edges with a hurried and unconvincing love affair, but unsurprisingly the visuals are razor crisp and noirish, with deep focus and deeper shadows. Even more impressive is the epic final showdown in a mannequin maker's workshop. This extended fight sequence takes full advantage of the off-color locale, and offers a uniquely unstylized fight with the two combatants swinging away at each other (and usually missing) with any available weapons on hand. It's also a hoot to watch Stanley Kubrick try and put forth a traditional happy-ending, definitely not one of the director's strong suites.

The H-Man

Ishiro Honda
1958

This is a largely disappointing Sci-fi effort from Toho's monster movie dream team of Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya. Gangsters, cops, and a sultry night-club singer clash over a hood's mysterious disappearance. Nuclear radiation, that most hallowed boogeyman of 50's fright fare, seems to be the culprit again, liquifying it's victims and turning them into an unstoppable assimilating menace. The picture is slightly reminiscent of "The Blob" (1958), but has little of it's impact as the blue gooey H-man doesn't grow in size with each new victim, instead tending to take it's meals one at a time. Also, "The H-Man" suffers from a painful amount of filler with it's snoozefest gangster angle. The effects, with a few choice examples late in the film, are largely lackluster except for a few extreme "liquefaction" shots. There's a nice nautical scene about midway through that introduces the creature with a great deal of suspense and atmosphere. It's a shame the picture couldn't keep things running at that level throughout.

Kelly's Heroes

Brian G. Hutton
1970

My buddy tried to get me and a couple other friends to watch this back in high school. The premise and casting certainly seemed attractive, but overall we just couldn't get into it, and gave up. I definitely enjoyed getting reacquainted with the picture, but a lot of it's inaccesability is still apparent. Taking a realistically cynical view of WW2, "Kelly's Heroes" is full of tired soldiers desperate for booze and horny for broads. Clint Eastwood stumbles on a tip that there's a veritable shit-ton of Nazi gold stashed in a bank just behind enemy lines, and with a small outfit headed by bulldog Sergeant Telly Savalas, a stereotypical Jewish shyster (Don Rickles!), and a gypsy-loving nut job with three Sherman tanks (Donald Sutherland), the group decides to liberate the gold for themselves. The morally iffy setup and narrative is fascinating when one takes into account how many tried and true war-film tropes are applied. It's as if years of Hollywood tradition couldn't be completely erased by the previous decade's radicalism and revisionism, and it works to the film's advantage. The depiction of U.S. GI's as something other than 100% altruistic must have certainly resonated with the Vietnam-era counterculture, and Donald Sutherland's tank commander, while never shown explicitly, is clearly a skewed caricature of 60's drug use.

Marty

Delbert Mann
1955

Ernest Borgnine barrels about the screen as the titular lunk in this early marriage of teleplay writing and cinematic production. Regular Joe Marty is a simple butcher with a realistic streak. Resigned to bachelorhood after a youth's worth of painful rejections Marty politely brushes off his mother's pleas for "settling down with a nice girl," and his pal's skirt chasing schemes. Of course when Marty finally does snag a gal his friends dismiss her as a dog, and his mother fears being cast off if Marty marries. The blue-collar Brooklyn milieu gives the picture charm to burn with beer-swilling, ballgame-watching guys and little old Italian women butting into their grown childrens' business. Borgnine's ability to convey both Marty's vulnerability and effervescent boyishness is the kind of stuff that wins awards, so it's little surprise that this movie took it's fair share.

House of Games

David Mamet
1987

David Mamet is nothing if not a writer, and a hammy one at that. In this, one of his most celebrated films, his mannered dialogue and blunt ideas are thrust on the screen with all the strenuous specificity of a stage play. Shrink-come-author Maggie Ford gets mixed up with an ace con-man and his grifter pals, soon finding seductive allure in deception while learning greater truths about her own nature along the way. The main attraction here is the interplay between con and reveal, and some of the tricks are downright thrilling. Unfortunately the artifice behind film's major "job" is surprisingly and painfully obvious - if the audience gets it by this point it seems that Dr. Ford should also. The absolute lack of naturalism in the dialogue comes off as hokey with dollops of hyperbole and deliberate metaphors spewing back and forth between partner/victim/lovers. The picture is worthwhile for it's stunts and mischievous tone alone, but certainly retains it's stage-like quality to a fault.

Summer Hours

Olivier Assayas
2009

Olivier Assayas departs from his hyper-modern globalization-heavy thrillers ("Boarding Gate" (2007), "Demonlover" (2002)) to show his range as a director with this little bourgeoisie drama about memory and moving on. Three siblings debate what is to be done with the family's summer house, filled with valuable paintings and furniture, upon the death of their Mother, the house's guardian and curator. One brother is on the verge of relocating to China, and the sister has already expatriated to New York, leaving the eldest brother no choice to but to give up the house and mourn it's loss. The picture is exceptionally low on conflict, instead relying on character study and a quiet, contemplative emotionalism. The petty disagreements with quick resolutions are handled in a wonderfully realistic manner by the director, and the performances convincingly suggest rock-solid sibling ties. The final surrendering of the house creates a link to Assayas's modern films, with the family giving up tradition and provincialism for the pursuit of global capitalism. Instead of grandchildren running around Grandma's desk, school tours will view the desk in a cold museum.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

Sam Peckinpah
1973
Second Viewing

This was a welcome revisit to one of my favorite Peckinpah films. Steely sad-sack Pat Garrett (a world-weary James Coburn) sets out to kill old pal Billy the Kid (barn-broad jughead Kris Kristofferson) at the behest of big ranching. Garrett's heart and soul may belong to yesterday's wild west but his tired body sides with the taming tide, making Billy an outlaw anachronism. Peckinpah will always be associated with screen violence and this is the apogee of his craft. In "Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid" violence is a hallowed undeniable fact - Billy is forced to duel an old acquaintance who's gone law in an accidental encounter, an unfortunate caveat of frontier life. Shootouts are given the lavish slo-mo treatment with tough-guy survivors glossing over the horror with a little humor or profanity. The thick gunsmoke is mercifully cut, and contrasted, with Billy's carefree attitude and lusty indulgences as he gorges on tortillas and mex women. A knife-wielding Bob Dylan appears as one of Billy's cohorts, appropriately named Alias. Apparently He and Peckinpah didn't get along too well on set, though his music for the film is pretty solid.

The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch
2009

For me there's nothing more exciting, and in this case compelling, than a new Jim Jarmusch picture in theaters. I was a touch disappointed with his prior "Broken Flowers" (2005), feeling it fit too snugly into the time's twee and melancholy zeitgeist, erected by Wes Anderson and copied by many. This time around Jarmusch eschews any type of familiarity, offering a picture that is strongly abstract, symbolic, cerebral, and visual. A permanently smooth Isaach De Bankole is the hired gun in this most pared-down of mission films, encountering a series of colorful and distinctive operatives on his way towards a concrete goal. The reigning champion of purposeful casting, Jarmusch is able to lend weight to mere cameos through an actor's personality and physicality alone. John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and Gael Garcia Bernal all float in frame, say their piece, and float back out carried aloft by quirks and costuming. Christopher Doyle's cinematography is the red-blooded heart of the picture, which is interesting considering Jarmusch's predilection for total auteurism. The imagery, heavy on contrast, saturation, and natural light, helps create the alien landscapes and ghost towns the director coaxes out of his Spanish locales.

A Nightmare on Elm St. 3: Dream Warriors

Chuck Russell
1987

This third nightmare is only the second installment I've seen in the franchise, but stands up admirably to the first. Youthful patients sequestered in a mental asylum are preyed upon by child-killer Freddy, with the kids' institutionalization providing another degree of deniability for the clueless adults. Heather Langenkamp returns as the veteran "final girl," and both Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne make welcome appearances, not to mention John Saxon's triumphant return as a sad-sack drunk. Like the original, the kill scenes are creative and fantastic with the special effects gaining plenty of leeway from the hallucinatory nature of the setpieces. A couple highlights are the jalopy apocalypse John Saxon is subjected to, and a mental patient with a heroin past attacked by Freddy's syringe fingers. After this one, I'm definitely willing to go a few more rounds with Mr. Kruger in following sequels.

Prisoner of Shark Island

John Ford
1936
You'd be hard pressed to hear me say anything bad about a John Ford picture, but I must admit I prefer another prison-break film the director would go on to make only a year (and a remarkably prolific four pictures) later: "The Hurricane" (1937). This one celebrates the life, and cruel imprisonment, of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country sawbones jailed for fixing-up presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth's leg while he was on the run from a quickly tightening Yankee dragnet. The positive depiction of Southern slavery is an eyebrow-raiser that leads to a wild buddy-picture element when master and servant are hunkered down on the eponymous island. The special-effects depiction of the moat circling sharks are a hoot , and there's plenty of thrilling gunfire during the escape sequence. But Ford really hits his signature groove when malaria strikes: institutionalism fails where individualism succeeds, and former enemies become fast friends. Particularly bold/amusing is the inclusion of Mudd's father-in-law, a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate gentleman, blustering about the screen in a flurry of Rebel resentment.

The World's Greatest Sinner

Timothy Carey
1962
If you watch a lot of old movies you've probably seen Timothy Carey even if you don't know him by name. First to come to mind are his oddball supporting roles in the Stanley Kubrick pictures "The Killing" (1956), and "Paths of Glory" (1957). An unrepentant weirdo on and offscreen, "The World's Greatest Sinner" is the flatulence-obsessed actor's only directorial effort. It's a truly bizarre, quasi-experimental rise of an average Joe (Carey) from mediocrity to fascistic rock 'n roll infused mega stardom. The whole thing would be generally laughable were it not for Carey's conviction and singular auteuristic focus. Many of the scenes come off as amateurishly broad brush-strokes with Clarence Hilliard's mephistophelian deal leading to gross indulgence: megalomania and sexual abandon being the big corner stones. Still, it's this amateurish nature that makes the picture interesting - rough around the edges with all the charm of a handmade Valentine, and a dose of Kenneth Anger's daring.