Sunday, March 29, 2020

letterboxd backup (30)

See China and Die, Larry Cohen, 1981

Supremely pleasant. Cohen stays comfortably within the tv mystery formula, but at the same time manages to unobstrusively include a number of completely different, more cinematic images/affects: an inner city blaxploitation chase scene, claustrophobic Pakula paranoia, slasher thrills...

Of course, he makes the most of the black maid as sleuth hook as well. In other words: A film that manages to embarrass KNIVES OUT both aesthetically and politically.

Against All, Andrew Lau, 1990
While very young Nick Cheung and Jacqueline Ng aren´t the most charismatic screen couple, Lau knows how to place them effectively in nighttime lighting schemes, and all the teen male bonding / macho posturing stuff is also done with a bit more attention to detail than usually. Cheungs antagonist (played by someone with the wonderful name Lam King-Kong, now a busy tv actor, according to wikipedia) is especially memorable.

Nothing prepared me for the absolutely stunning last 10-15 minutes, though, a miniature heroic bloodshed masterpiece tacked onto a solid programmer. Probably the work of action director Stephen Tung, although around 1990, ad hoc genius like that could pop up almost anywhere in Hongkong cinema.

Adventurous Treasure Island, Herman Yau, Ha Sao Hin, 1996

A neat package I guess, and somewhat sweet at times, so maybe I just wasn´t in the right mood for it, to me it was all way too uniform once they got sucked into the game, a flow of automatic motions with nothing to cling to and a terrible soundtrack.

Sonnenschein und Wolkenbruch, Rudolf Nussgruber, 1955

Not completely without wit, although things start to get stale after the first 30 minutes. Nussgruber spends way too much energy on the "straight couple" instead of on Nicoletti, Vogel and various loony sidekicks. Jester Naefe´s red hair gets a few glossy shots, but in the end these timid attempts at glamour only make it all the more clear that we are far away from hollywood, here.

I´m amazed just how many of these mistaken identity featuring some sort of royalty set in grand hotels films there were in 1950s german and austrian cinema. Not just one genre among many, but almost the default modus of filmmaking.

Ghost Lantern, Andrew Lau, 1993

Andrew Lau seems to be more interested in the glossy flashbacks than in the sketchy present-day scene, and he also doesn´t seem to have much feel for horror. Tony Leung and Chingmy Yau are both sweet and full of energy, though, and there´s enough Wong Jing vulgarity around to keep me engaged.

The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell, 2020

Forceful, almost lush genre cinema. Whannell isn´t all that inventive when it comes to the monster himself, the frequently used "pans into nothing" almost feel a bit ridiculous... those might be ok in ghost films, invisible man films, on the other hand, were never interested in invisibility itself, but in the cinematic ways to overcome it. I always liked the scenes in which the invisible man dresses up, complete with make-up / bandages and sunglasses. No such thing here.

The film is very good though when it comes to exploring the space around Elisabeth Moss. Basically all of it is built around close-ups of her face, in a completely different way a indie drama would be, though. It´s not about her projecting her interiority into the film / onto us, but about the camera checking in on her once in a while in order to register the imprint the film makes on her. As if for reassurance: Is Elisabeth still on board with all of this?

Some of the close-ups actually are either a little bit too close or last a little bit too long, just as the whole thing could move along a bit faster at every single stage. No reason a film like this must be >100 minutes. Each step is carefully articulated, sometimes a bit too much so, but luckily Whannell always chooses thrills over smartness and even allows itself a few weird digressions. That Storm Reid "celebration dance", wtf.

As Good As Dead, Larry Cohen, 1955

"You don´t have to be anybody but yourself." Still, what drives the plot is the opposing desire, the never clearly articulated, always implicit desire to really be, for once, someone else, to escape destiny and family. Almost like in a 19th century gothic novel (Crystal Bernard would make a great Wilkie Collins heroine), only that here, the whole thing doubles as a critique of the shitty american health care system.

Smart and playful all around. The Traci Lords parts in the beginning are especially effective, she´s much more alive than anyone else and her death steeps everything afterwards in melancholy.

Brahms: The Boy II, William Brent Bell, 2020

The last days of cinema: Until recently I caught as many analog film screenings as I could, because who knows how long that will be possible; now that I moved to a place without a repertory scene I watch lots of mediocre programmers at the theater, because who knows how long _that_ will be possible...

A bit less than mediocre in this case... although it´s not quite as big a bust as Bell´s THE DEVIL INSIDE a few years back. As long as the film sticks to a limited playing field, it has its charmes, thanks to Holmes and the really rather creepy kid. Domesticity and its discontent: something american cinema still is reliably good with. Once Holmes walks into the stupid mansion next door, though, things fall apart completely.

Heroes Shed No Tears, Chor Yuen, 1980

Red smoke on the horizon. Only that there never is any horizon, but always just another beautiful soundstage. A tale of arrogance undone by (the slowly encroaching realization of) mortality.

Ip Man 4: The Finale, Wilson Yip, 2019

The first Ip Man film that left me almost completely cold. It´s extremely silly, but that´s not the problem, in fact, the silliest parts (the cheerleader storyline, Scott Adkins as an almost literally fuming racist) are the most fun. What´s mostly missing is the sentimental side of Ip Man´s pathos. Why is his sickness treated as an afterthought? Should´ve been front and center. Everything boils down to just one competently executed, but never truly spectacular and always a little bit too tightly delimitated hand-to-hand rumble after another.

The Mermaid, Kao Li, 1965

Very nice Huangmei opera, although rather small-scale and neither as accomplished as Li Han Hsian´s contributions to the genre nor as twisted as MADAME WHITE SNAKE, with which it shares some surface similarities. THE MERMAID is much lighter. Here, the fantastic elements aren´t tied to sexual jealousy and misogyny, but rather, quite on the contrary, to a liberating erotic curiosity. Ivy Ling Po is, once again, fabulous, she just nails celibate male naivety like no one else.

All of a Sudden, Herman Yau, 1996

A Joe Eszterhas style erotic thriller, two love triangles cancelling each other out, sexual desperation transformed into potboiler gloss, fired up by fierce, syncopic Hong Kong pacing, a more direct approach to exploitation (including the jarring windshield splash 10 minutes before the end) and a wonderful Dayo Wong doofus cop performance.

Might´ve been stronger with a clearer focus on Irene Wan (so many somewhat obtrusive shots of her caring for the baby... of course all those picture postcard motherhood moments totally make sense once the windshield splash hits) but never a dull moment nonetheless.

Evolution of a Filipino Family, Lav Diaz, 2004

History is not captured, but slipping away in front of our very eyes.

Samurai Wolf, Hideo Gosha, 1966

Quite similar to all those 60s / 70s jidaigeki film serials in its primacy of style and dynamic action over pathos, but much more minimalist than most of them. No gimmicky pop-art extravaganza, just a quick, bare-bones study in violence.

Away, Gints Zilbalodis, 2019

Ghibli-style figures inserted into cgi wastelands, barren textures only very narrowly brought alive by a few selected sound markers. The crudeness of the world-building is at the very heart of the film, and the same goes for the once again extremely narrow gameplay linearity of the plot. A digital arte povera, but completely removed from politics. Images bearing witness to a pure subjectivity drained of all content, pushing towards musical, hypnotic overdrive.

I still don´t quite know what to make of it, there´s certainly a rather tiresome element of arthouse-sweetness lurking around somewhere in those images, too, and sometimes it threatens to overtake the whole thing. Still, I´m intrigued, this really feels new.

Joke With a Sorrowful Heart, Masaharu Segawa, 1985

Japanese lacrima movie with Takeshi Kitano as the father of a child diagnosed with brain cancer. Completely straightforward in its emotional approach, but at the same time quietly elegant and controlled: a film of affect and its various inhibitions and nothing else. Music is a door to the heart, but it closes once the song (or the marvelous main theme) ends.

The most beautiful scene has Kitano and the dying child travelling to Sydney, were the boy´s mother is starting a new life away from the eternal juvenile prankster Kitano. When they arrive at her home, they find her preparing for her wedding. Only while looking in on a life both of them are no longer part of, father and son are able to find a true connection - a moment of pure melodramatic acceptance on par with the final scene of STELLA DALLAS.

As much as I love some of his directing work, JOKE WITH A SORROWFUL HEART makes it obvious that Kitano the actor lost something once he retreated into his deadpan cynicism routine. I´ve never seen him even half as soft and malleable. Here, he still is involved in a constant, if mostly dysfunctional dialogue with the world. A few years later, he just unilaterally cut off all channels of communication. The cost of becoming an auteur...

Bokura wa aruku, tada soredake, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2009

Fragments of small-town life, lingering moments instead of solid, fulfilling arcs, intimate indie framings of unusual precision. Every memory points towards loss. How to account for a form of existence that always defines itself by what it is not? Maybe Barthes is right and photography really can do just that.

At times, this almost feels like a preliminary study for IT´S BORING HERE, PICK ME UP, but then again, I just have to watch more Hiroki to find out. He´s clearly major.

Emma., Autumn de Wilde, 2020

In a way comedy of manner is a question of perception: it immediately (and only) comes into being once you decide to read the life around you as one. As does, of course, Emma in Austen´s book. In the film, too, she is the creator: the magnificent Taylor-Joy rules by way of eyebrows, gloves and fingertips, while everyone else plunges into caricature, some more enthusiastically than others.

Moving from posture and interiors to faces and light, de Wilde almost directs with a bit too much bounce. Her film is best when there´s just prose, gestures and bodies, but it always comes from a place of love for Austen and in the end that is what counts.

Superexpress, Yasuzo Masumura, 1964

Modernisation as revolution: a restructuring of society, urban space, desire and mise-en-scene by capital. A constant scaling and re-scaling of bodies in cramped spaces, almost a bit too schematic at times, but once sex enters the equation, everything acquires a deeper sense of urgency. Jiro Tamiya (who is also in the quite similar, if more over the top BLACK TEST CAR) is perfect as the hard-boiled underdog in an overcapitalized zero-sum-game. The long scene of him being attacked by payed thugs who very methodically kick him in the stomach for what feels like eternity will stay with me.

Tiger Cage, Yuen Woo Ping, 1988

The prolonged action scene in the beginning sets the bar high, escalating not towards chaos, but towards abstraction, with bodies being inserted into a grid of ramps, stairs, pedestrian crossings, a 3d shuffle, agil, opening up a new spatial configuration every few seconds. Yuen action films are often as much about making use of the environment as about body techniques, and here, he constantly searches for new ways of involving the city in the gunplay.

The film slows down a bit later on and turns into a slick enough pulpy procedural (Yuen probably would´ve been a good Canon director in the 80s, too) with dynamic bursts of action and grizzly kills. Carol Cheng´s precise, detached performance between lots of male mugging is a nice touch.

Es flüstert die Liebe, Geza von Bolvary, 1935

The direction of the reliable von Bolvary is better than the material, with quite a few quirky touches like the frequent tracking shots of Fröhlich and his sidekick walking towards a receding camera, like a pair of wizards opening up a world for us. This time I even kind of liked Fröhlich, who loses some of his signature herrenmensch-snide once he meets the also very good Elma Bulla. Still, the grand-hotel shenanigans never quite pick up the necessary speed and the last act back in Hungary is really terrible. Hard not to see the shadow of nazism looming over this kind of autocratic pastoral idyll.

Virus, John Bruno, 1999

Cinemas only and of course rather blunt weapon against the virus (as a reality or, like here, as a concept) is visibility: where the cause is categorically hidden, the symptoms bloom all the merrier. VIRUS, for example, is a frenetic tech-fest, alternating between positivist adoration of stuff that moves and a post-humanist death wish. Another interesting, strictly technological schism: While the alien life-form floating through air in the beginning of the film is a jarringly artificial cgi cloud (a poisoning of the image), its later manifestations are mostly analog, oily, steamy contraptions insisting on their physicality.

VIRUS is not what most people would call a good movie. It´s sub Michael Crichton trite with rather random steampunk and 80s splatter imagery thrown in, but also quite interesting in its crudeness: cold war resurfacing as cyborg takeover. The new front-line is artificial intelligence vs profit motive which in the end turns out to be just two different kinds of stupid cancelling each other out.

Between all of this a few lost souls acting out a fast-moving thriller plot, with not much directorial control beyond the mechanical parts. Everyone in the cast is free to discover and then cultivate his or her own kind of crazy.

Virus, Kinji Fukasaku, 1980

The cold war both finalized and sublated by a killer virus - only to return, zombiefied and now devoid of any human subjectivity, for a second, even more devastating round. Extremely dark and twisted, especially for a project of this scale. The rare disaster film choosing, at least in a few key scenes, the vantage point not of survival but of death.

Glenn Ford in the Oval Office, illuminated by twilight´s last gleaming.

"We need a new approach to human sexuality."

Virus, Allan A. Goldstein, 1996

The hidden elegance of bottom of the barrel action filmmaking: Brian Bosworth trying to extract his feet from knee-deep mud while flirting with Leah Pinsent at the same time. So inept that it isn´t failed mimesis any longer but rather real-life awkward slapstick. Generally it´s strange that Bosworth is even more clumsy in the action scenes compared to the "psychological" ones.

Nice touch to end a film that never seems to leave / think beyond the same few acres of woodlands with a geopolitical "one world" summit.

Virus, Armand Mastroianni, 1995

[insert joke relating to recent events; buzzwords: cdc incompetence + government corruption + toxic masculinity; shouldn´t be too hard]

Thanks to an energetic Sheridan and a well-adjusted tv cast this is surprisingly watchable for a while. Later on derailed by accumulating stupidity.

Märkische Gesellschaft mbh, Volker Koepp, 1991

A void that´s about to be filled but the film doesn´t know that yet.

Söhne, Volker Koepp, 2007

Makes a lot out of a biographical approach to historiography and even manages to point towards its limitations once or twice.

Mädchen in Wittstock, Volker Koepp, 1975

"Kein Kommunikationssystem kann ganz davon abstrahieren, daß Menschen leiblich beteiligt sind (...)"

Berlin- Stettin, Volker Koepp, 2009

Some scenes are extremely affecting but I´m not sure if a directly autobiographical approach like this really fits Koepp´s method. The self-questioning turns into a determining force that leaves the more open parts of the film hanging in the air.

In Sarmatien, Volker Koepp, 2013

Blown away. A cartography of loss and displacement, an alternate history of europe by way of a geographical decentering.

Seestück, Volker Koepp, 2018


Impressive as a travelogue inspired by the nautic tradition in european romantic paintings. Otherwise, it left me rather cold. The discussion of Rousseau points towards a dialectical argument about the relationship of nature and civilization which the film as a whole isn´t really interesting in pursuing. It doesn´t have to, of course, but without it SEESTÜCK feels like a strange compromise between the detached cross-sectional style of someone like Geyrhalter and all those straightforward activist documentaries denouncing globalisation. (My main problem might be that I don´t care much for either of those modes.)

Schuldner, Volker Koepp, 1971

A straightforward propaganda piece, and at the same time maybe the most illuminating film I´ve seen about daily life in the GDR. A paternalistic-collectivist nightmare, hitting all the harder because the camera stays on the side of power the whole time.

Also points towards a more ambivalent perspective on film history (not only regarding the GDR; in some ways, BRD cinema was subject to similar schisms). While the implicitly dissident, realist documentaries celebrated today indeed provide access to gestures, ways of speaking, subjectivities completely absent in the "official" propaganda images, they in turn hide the totalizing claim and the accompanying violence of state ideology. Films like SCHULDNER and the Wittstock films are necessary correctives to each other.

Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, Volker Koepp, 1999

Maybe true historiography always has to be an unlikely conversation, an image against the odds of history.

Märkische Heide, Märkischer Sand, Volker Koepp, 1990

Crazy how much the Märkische Trilogie feels like a full-blown historical epic. Despite being shot over the course of not much more than two years, all of the three films speak from different, distinct, clearly delimited points in time, hermetically closed off from each other.

Neues in Wittstock, Volker Koepp, 1992

With the social matrix being ripped apart, the gaze wanders, away from the worker´s community as a time-space-contimuum towards individuals scattered through physical space and biographical time. The first Wittstock film to show real interest in the empirical Wittstock, NEUES IN WITTSTOCK has lots of street scenes, random observations, the fresh veneers of capitalism, not yet truly integrated into urban space, more like another layer of reality, a new coding, still very much bug-infested.

It´s also the first Wittstock film to explicitly present itself as the story of three women. Three lifelines, three separate entries into history. What has changed is the relationship between individual and history. Koepp´s film embodies this change rather than reflecting upon it, which isn´t necessarily a bad thing.

Bila nemoc, Hugo Haas, 1937

A film about two doomsday machines feeding and commenting on each other. Some of the implications of its strange plot might not be completely thought through, and some of its stylization might´ve worked better on the stage, but the film adaptation is always ambitious, heartbreaking and directed with lots of quirky touches. In one scene the camera pans three times from one figure to another, connecting first their feet, than their torsos, than their heads. In a way the whole film is like this, an excess of rhetorics, born from desperation.

Wittstock, Wittstock, Volker Koepp, 1997

The Wittstock series has a tendency to be a bit too much in love with its own gimmicks, especially since switching to long form with LEBEN IN WITTSTOCK. Here, the gimmicks are threatening to take over the whole thing, turning the film into a delivery system for hard-earned melancholy and those playful, flirty looks into the camera. As sheer accumulation of embodied history this still is impressive, though.

Die Hamburger Krankheit, Peter Fleischmann, 1979

The real viruses criticize the filmed ones and this one here feels like a fraud.

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