Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.

Three Films Make A Post: All they had was a skill for violence and nothing to lose but their lives!

The Stranger (2014): This Chilean film concerns s a very interesting variation on the right now second-most overused horror monster, and, if nothing else, proves you can do something worthwhile with it still; at least if you’re the film’s director Guillermo Amoedo. Amoedo not only manages to do something interesting and at least half-way original with his monster but also finds a place where the naturalistic portrayal of pretty shitty lives and a dream-like mood aren’t mutually exclusive approaches.

The fact that the film, mostly cast with Chilean actors speaking their English with more or less obvious accents, takes place in what seems to be supposed to be a US small town (I think), actually furthers the weird mood of proceedings for my tastes, locating the film not in a place as in the idea of a place. However, it is, like The Stranger’s somewhat peculiar pacing, certainly a point that’ll annoy some viewers to no end.

The House of Hanging aka Byoinzaka no kubikukuri no ie (1979): Kon Ichikawa is one of the big Japanese directors outside the pure arthouse realm I often find myself having the most trouble with. It’s not that I don’t think some of his film’s are masterpieces, but he seems – at least for my tastes – to have rather more films like this adaptation of one of the adventures of private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (in this case embodied by Koji Ishizaka) than I’d like. Films that fluctuate in tone so heavily and so (in)consistently – in this case between stuffy comedy and handwringing melodrama – it becomes difficult to ascertain what tone the director is actually going for; films where for every brilliantly and complex staged scene there’s another one bland, boring and lifeless, and a further one where Ichikawa just seems to be showing off; films where contrasts neither rub productively against one another nor seem to have another reason to be there.

In House of Hanging’s case, these problems are exacerbated by one typical flaw of late 70s biggish prestige productions from Japan, needless length that makes a film feel rather bloated and slow, particularly one which really could have been improved mightily by having various scenes of “comically” inept cops removed, and various plot strands tightened.

Mystery on Monster Island aka Misterio en la isla de los monstruos (1981): I don’t loathe Juan Piquer Simón’s family adventure movie quite as much as parts of the Net do, but then, that’s because I’m trying very hard to ignore the odious comic relief taking up half of the film, the idiotic twist ending (which actually is Jules Verne’s fault as author of the novel the film adapts), the plodding pacing, the expected (because nobody in his right mind will expect a production like this to actually afford many shooting days from these gentlemen) underuse of Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp, the film’s dubious racial politics, on account of this being a rather naive children’s film I did indeed enjoy when I was a kid.

For us grown-ups, even for those of us used to “bad” movies, the whole thing just might be pretty unpalatable, but then, it isn’t actually meant for us.

Technorati-Markierungen: chilean movies,japanese movies,spanish movies,horror,mystery,adventure,comedy,guillermo amoedo,kon ichikawa,koji ishizaki,juan piquer simón,peter cushing,terence stamp