News You Can Bruise for 2024 June

Wed Jun 05 2024 22:11 May Film Roundup:

Rollerball (1975): The film that dares to showcase the dangers of relying on centralized archives for cultural memory. LOCKSS, people!
If the megacorps really wanted to turn their bloodthirsty audience against Rollerball, they should have gotten Jonathan to take a knee during the corporate anthem.
I do have more than jokes, let me check my notes. Oh yeah, I was spellbound by the bits of this movie that are just people setting up the arena for a fictional sport (e.g. the first few minutes). Unlike most fictional sports, Rollerball has consistent rules that make perfect sense. The Rollerball scenes are shot like a sporting event, not a feature film—it reminds me of footage of stock car races and the like. The only reason Rollerball isn't played in real life is that the creator refused to sell the rights to people who didn't get that it's a satire, you dolt, on the "sickness and insanity of contact sports and their allure." All of that's pretty unique, even if the film is a little slow.
Mr. Thank You (1936): A.k.a. 有りがたうさん, which I can now read and understand thanks to my progress learning Japanese. This movie dares to combine lighthearted fun with the darkness that pervades the human experience, which is what you'd expect from an honest slice-of-life movie made in Depression-era Japan. It's enjoyable...? Like, it really is very enjoyable, but there also all these time bombs ticking in the background. Wikipedia says "Mr. Thank You marries the daughter to save her from her fate," but that's not the impression I got at all.
This is filmed on the Izu Peninsula, where Laid-Back Camp also takes place, eighty years later. Both have shots of cars driving on the same seaside cliffs. I've seen lots of old movies filmed in vanished versions of places I've lived, New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I've never been conscious of so much difference in the way life has changed than when I compare Mr. Thank You and Laid-Back Camp.
A Star Athlete (1937): In the runup to war, Hiroshi Shimizu has now gone into making full-fledged if half-hearted propaganda movies. There's a sequence in this movie that's apparently very impressive for cinematographers. They can have it, I say. I knew it was coming, I've seen a few movies, and I couldn't even tell you where it started or ended. A couple jokey town-vs.gown bits, and then we're back to the half-hearted propaganda. The scene at the end where the con artists think they're being hunted down by the students they cheated is a funny sequence.
Some Like It Hot (1939): Watched solely for the title. Between this and The Ghost Breakers (1940), Bob Hope has a tremendous knack for almost starring in great movies. This one's nothing special, but it does show the frantic Tinpan Alley hustling behind those elegant club floor shows you see in 1930s movies.
A Thousand Clowns (1965): At last, the true story of Balatro can be told. Really enjoyable, and inspirational if you're in that mood. The montages are like a capitalist version of Man With A Movie Camera. Other actors can't really share the same space with the overly charming lead.
Jake Berendes sampled a couple of lines from this movie for his song "What Is The Mind", notably the absurd "I'll have a hamburger and a flashlight." I just about jumped out of my seat when that line happened, I tell you. Also it took me a while to figure out it was one of Jake's songs, because originally I thought I was thinking of "Where Is My Mind?" by The Pixies. I'm not a big Pixies fan, is what I'm saying.
The kid in this movie is like a young Robert de Niro. As in, if De Niro was a child actor in 1965.
Repo Man (1984): "Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate 'em." This has a lot of first-movie problems, but I can see why it's a cult classic. A ton of weird stuff happens, the filmmakers get a lot of cool images on the screen, but all of the jokes and commentary are at the approximate level of a Frank Zappa song (which, I admit, I used to be super into). I thought it was cheesy, but I ended up missing the cheese when it turned into an action movie.
I grew up with those Ralphs generic brand products (you see an updated version of the design in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski), so I had trouble distinguishing between the items that signified frugality and the ones intended to be satirical. Also, what kind of liquor store stocks so many grocery products? Anyway, I don't think I'm going to join the cult, but it was a fun movie.
Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw (1976): Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to make their low budget post-Bonnie and Clyde nihilistic road trip shootout movie. The only mystery about this one is how they got Linda Carter to not only star in this movie, but show her boobs. That sold a few tickets, you bet. I guess the movie was released just as Carter's career took off—she doesn't have top billing on the movie poster.
There are a couple really good scenes in here, or at least scenes with eloquent dialogue, but they're disconnected from the rest of the story. I think the screenwriter had a few little pearls of genius that he stuffed into the screenplay because otherwise they'd never see film. Smart move, in my opinion. The editor couldn't cut them because the movie's only 89 minutes long as it is.
The Kremlin Letter (1970): I thought this was going to be a serious thriller, and it sort of was, but I was misled by some goofy James Bond shit near the beginning, then further misled by a scene where the boss spy yelled at the new recruit: "You think this is going to be like your fancy spy college? Here on the streets it's nothing but goofy James Bond shit all day long!" It got a little more Le Carré-y after that. All in all, a decent popcorn thriller.
Actually I just looked up the release year to put at the beginning of this entry, and it's a very good spy thriller for 1970. I've revised my opinion upwards at the very last moment. What a thrill ride!
Heathers (1988): Gonna rain on the parade of this all-time classic, or at least the second half of the parade, after the big bands have come by and it's just the Shriners and the Boy Scouts marching past. The first half of this movie is amazing. I loved the snappy dialogue, the psychological manipulation, the bleak view of humanity. Then the second set of killings happened and, like Repo Man before it, it changed from something special into an action movie; in this case a slow-paced thriller about stopping a serial killer before he strikes again.
Basically, we had a very girly murder comedy, and then a guy ran away with it and it became all about the guy and his emotional needs. To me the through-line of Heathers is encapsulated in the line "I've cut off Heather Chandler's head and Heather Duke's head has sprouted back in its place." You can't change a social structure by replacing the people who enforce it. I think if (say) Tina Fey had written the Heathers screenplay, it would have stayed on that track.
Incidentally, I decided to watch Heathers because one of the beta readers for The Constellation Speedrun referred to one character in the book as "such a believable boyfriend-in-Heathers skeeze" and I had no idea what she was talking about. Now I understand!