News You Can Bruise for 2014 June 2

Mon Jun 02 2014 09:37 May Film Roundup: Ready for "Wacky Wednesdays" here at News You Can Bruise? Here's the deal. We got five movies in the May roundup, but only three of them I actually saw in May! One is from April and one I saw yesterday. Also, it's not Wednesday.

• THX-1138 (1971 2004!!!) I saw this in April and forgot to write about it, and then I remembered it and I was angry! Because guess what? George Lucas went in to this movie in 2004 and George Lucased it, and that's the version the museum showed us, under the pretense that we'd be seeing a 35mm print of the 1971 original. Fortunately, I don't think there were any substantial changes, because—and this is the official Crummy.com Opinion Of George Lucas—Lucas wouldn't know a substantial change if he made one by accident. He goes in and re-edits his first movie, not because the studio meddled with it, but because he now has the technology to make the car chase look cooler? Gimme a break. I'm sure it was fine.

  The thing is, this movie's really edgy and disturbing for a 1971 sci-fi flick! I really liked it while I was watching it, and I would still like it if I weren't so angry about the editing. The plot is awful but, to damn with faint but sincere praise, I consider George Lucas to be one of the world's great art directors. There's a lot of eyeball kicks (I loved the opening scene), deliciously overwrought dialogue, and bizarre details and conundra.

  For instance, why are all the holograms played by black actors, and why are they the only black characters in the movie? Is it mere artifice, an allegory that we see but the characters don't? Or is it a horrible reality within the world of the movie? With another director you could debate this point, but with Lucas, why bother? We've seen what he considers an artistic decision, and it's nowhere near this level. We've also seen that he frequently puts super racist stuff in his movies, so maybe it's best to back away slowly.

• The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945): The museum is on a serious Mizoguchi kick (I believe they call it a "retrospective"). I never heard of the guy, but I figured I'd see a sampling. This is a bit of rally-round-the-emperor wartime propaganda that's full of low production values and sword-slashes that clearly don't connect and battles that are choreographed like kids roughhousing in the backyard, and overall it's not very good. But given that the Americans were firebombing the country while it was being made, I'm not in any position to complain.

  In an interview Mizoguchi said making this film saved him from being drafted, so yay this film.

• Altered States (1980): This movie brings a lot of intellectual firepower (screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky!) to a subject that can't support it. It's like if Aaron Sorkin wrote a Godzilla movie. And not one of the tentpole Godzilla movies, but, like, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla. The dialogue is snappy, the scientists talk more like real scientists than movie scientists, and there are quiet moments of yelling between the action scenes where it turns into something really special; the sort of good movie you made up in your mind when I said "Aaron Sorkin wrote a Godzilla movie," just to prove me wrong. But overall it's a mess, too ridiculous to even be pretentious.

  Also not a good picture from an animal cruelty perspective. It's my non-expert opinion they actually killed the cute lizard (or a cute lizard, anway) used in the first hallucination sequence. Maybe you think I'm a fool and it's all Hollywood magic, but Cannibal Holocaust also came out in 1980, and William Hurt hits an elephant at one point, so who's gonna stop them killing a lizard?

• Lady Oyu (1951) Original title "Oyû-sama". More Mizoguchi. Three people spend their whole lives being miserable because the alternative is... doing something impolite. Just bite the bullet and do the impolite thing! A sad, sad movie.
• My Love Has Been Burning (1949) Original title "Waga koi wa moenu". Here's a confession, folks: I didn't originally intend to see Altered States or Lady Oyu. I saw them because twice in a row I showed up at the museum at 6:55 hoping to see My Love Has Been Burning, and twice in a row I'd misread the schedule and the 7:00 movie was something else. It doesn't help that the museum's website illustrates almost every Mizoguchi film with a screenshot of a woman looking unhappy. You think I'm joking? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and the one happy woman.

  Anyway, I kept coming back for this movie because it sounded awesome, and let me tell you, it delivers! Kinuyo Tanaka gives an incredible performance for a character whose emotional options never open up past a) put up with shit, or b) quietly refuse to put up with shit. Much worse things happen in this movie than in Lady Oyu, but because the stakes are so high it feels like a political thriller, not angsty or exploitative (even when at one point it literally becomes a women-in-prison movie). It's preachy and didactic, but when virtue and right are repeatedly trampled, preachiness serves as a rallying cry.

  I didn't think much of the first two Mizoguchi films I saw, but My Love Has Been Burning takes him all the way into James Tiptree "are we sure this is by a man?" territory. Like The Famous Sword Bijomaru, this film is propaganda: it was produced during, and to some extent for, the American occupation of Japan. But as Lori Spring wrote in 1983 (courtesy of the museum's handout flyer): "there has not been, to my knowledge, any film produced in the American popular cinema from the 40's to date with nearly as direct and radical a feminist intent as that of this film produced under American supervision."