Red Desert (1964)

Original title: Il deserto rosso

Having spent some time in an psychiatric clinic, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a higher-up at a local plant, now walks through life and the industrial wastelands of rural Italy between fugues and moments of intense activity, confused, alienated and sad. She drifts into something of an affair with businessman Corrado (the most clean-cut I’ve ever seen Richard Harris), who isn’t quite as fine with the world as it is as everyone else around them, and feels drawn as much to Giuliana’s pain and alienation as he is to her body – or he might just be very good at pretending thus.

This might sound as if Michelangelo Antonioni’s arthouse classic Red Desert has something like a traditionally dramatic plot, but there’s very little interest in that sort of thing on display here – as in most of Antonioni’s films I’ve seen. The bits and pieces of plot are really only there to have things for Vitti to react – or not react depending on her mood – to or pull away from in anguish. Vitti performs the kind of inner turmoil that can’t really be expressed in its inescapable, near-spiritual totality, a suffering for and against the world in ways I found touching and sometimes deeply disturbing – this feels much more like real “mental illness” than most movie versions of it do.

Aesthetically, Vitti’s work is couched in the most striking visual depictions of an industrial waste you’ll ever get to see, pictured in ways that always emphasise Giuliana’s alienation, but also never shy away from the beauty and fascination of our destruction of the natural world, while the soundtrack prefers abstract drones to a traditional score. There’s an ambiguity to how the film views Giuliana, and it is never quite clear how much it shares her alienation and anguish at the modern world; most probably because living in a man-made world instead of forever standing outside of it, in pain, also suggests certain beauties to the filmmaker and the audience Giuliana can’t grasp, as much as the rest of the world cannot, will-not come to share her perspective fully.

Three Films Make A Post: More frightening than Frankenstein! More dreaded than Dracula!

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021): If you want to know how not to make historical slow horror, this film written and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti should be a great teaching tool. It steps into all of the traps this sort of film can find its way in, starting with the belief that if you want to portray a period and society that’s all drab and dreary, your film needs to be drab and dreary too, and ending on pacing that’s leaden for no good reason whatsoever.

The film also never manages to bring its all too obvious thesis of “historical oppression of women and homosexuality by men was bad and killed the women struggling against it” to actual human life, never letting its concept become an actual story about actual people. It’s too concerned with hokey would-be authentic dialogue, lots of whispering, drab and dreary candle light like Barry Lyndon gone ridiculous to find anything genuinely human. And if all it has to say can be summarized in one easy sentence, what’s the point?

Trojan Eddie (1996): Whereas this Irish crime movie and very dark comedy by Gillies MacKinnon is all about things genuinely human. So it seeks and finds some kind of living spark even in the most oppressive idiots, and can be sympathetic without becoming bathetic. It is often very funny in the bleakly Irish style and very sad at the same time, never shying away from the brutality and pettiness of even its more sympathetic characters; yet it also never treats these as the only things they are. A cast full of people like Stephen Rea and Richard Harris certainly helps there, too.

In direct – and perfectly unfitting – comparison between this and Vitaletti’s movie, I can absolutely believe this film’s Ireland of the mid 90s as a place and time populated by actual human beings, where Mary’s is one in dire need of being fleshed out and taken beyond simplistic ideas about the past and the way people lived in it.

Shiva Baby (2020): Speaking of black comedies that are utterly sympathetic towards their characters even when they are treating them rather rudely and making them the butt of the joke, Emma Seligman’s tale of a shiva going very unpleasantly indeed for young Danielle (Rachel Sennott), what with all the lies she tells others about her life collapsing around her ears in public, is simply a fantastic film.

It is sharp, observant and often cutting without ever becoming cruel, using specificity of time, place and characters in a way that can’t help but produce insight even in viewers not sharing them. Seligman’s a very precise and visually interesting filmmaker, using camerawork and blocking as tellingly and elegantly as a great martial arts film/musical.

In short: Orca (1977)

After an encounter with an orca whale, Irish fisherman in Newfoundland Nolan (Richard Harris) decides to catch one of these lovely mammals to sell it to a marine park. The project goes very wrong indeed when Nolan becomes responsible for the death of a pregnant orca and her little orca foetus. Her mate clearly has seen a couple or ten revenge flicks and, after a bit of crying, uses his superior intelligence and physique to make Nolan’s life a living hell before it will eventually kill him.

Michael Anderson’s Orca is the kind of nature strikes back movie one really can’t imagine having been produced by anyone but Dino De Laurentiis, and really shows all the hallmarks of the guy’s admirable willingness to throw money and talent at idiotic projects. The script’s (credited to Sergio Donati and producer Luciano Vincenzoni) attempts at making a vengeance flick where the vigilante is a whale are as bizarre as you’d expect, with mind-boggling moments like that shot that looks rather a lot like a crying orca eye and all sorts of additional nonsense.

In good old Dino tradition, this is packaged into a wonderfully looking film, with beautiful surface and underwater photography by J. Barry Herron and Ted Moore, a score by Ennio Morricone (that does indeed include what I can only interpret as a love theme for two whales), and a pretty great cast. Richard Harris is of course soused and very Irish, Charlotte Rampling tries to trump the general weirdness of proceedings by doubling the intensity of every single line reading (I’m particularly fond of her hilariously dramatic exposition bomb in form of a university lecture), Will Sampson provides the mandatory Native American whale wisdom that saves exactly nobody, and the rest of the cast do their best with what they are given.

The thing with Orca is, if you are willing and able to either buy into its set-up emotionally or at least can accept it, shrugging, it can be a highly entertaining film, full of suspense scenes you haven’t quite seen staged this way before, as well as some moments – particularly in the Arctic last act – breathing a nice atmosphere of doom. It’s also a film against all reason convinced of its deep emotional resonance, the sort of thing that’s at once a bit admirable and embarrassing, and certainly never the kind of film you’re bound to forget, which goes a long way with me.

The Heroes of Telemark (1965)

Nazi occupied Norway during World War II. Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Strand (Richard Harris) ropes scientist Rolf Pedersen (Kirk Douglas) into his attempts to destroy the German production of Heavy Water for their H-bomb projects. Pedersen would really rather spend the occupation tending his own garden and being a bit of a playboy, usually arguing that the Nazi repressions following an act of resistance aren’t actually worth what something like a destroyed Nazi truck wins. Obviously, this particular case is something different, so he at first reluctantly, then later somewhat heroically, helps in Strand’s struggle.

And wouldn’t you know it, turns out Pedersen’s ex-wife (Ulla Jacobsson) and ex-father-in-law are part of the resistance too.

The problem with the whole affair is that the Germans take their project as war-changingly serious as it is, so it is exceedingly difficult to destroy the heavy water production without getting a lot of innocent people killed.

Which, apart from being a World War II resistance adventure, is where the main interest of Anthony Mann’s Heroes of Telemark rests. In fact, much of the film’s running time does its best to work against the “hero” word in its title, talking about the decisions people in war time feel compelled to make, and exploring, horrified, fascinated and knowingly the kinds of inhuman equations these people believe they need to follow.

Again and again the film returns to this, showing its protagonists weighing up how many lives their mission is worth, whose lives it is worth, and how one can – and even if one should -compartmentalize the responsibility for the innocent lives destroyed in a good cause. It doesn’t come to any pat or simple answers here, never falling into the “The Cold Equations” style trap of embracing inhuman solutions wholeheartedly yet still finding itself as helpless as its characters not to use them. Though it is also clear that the film knows and understands but can’t fully approve; there’s a reason why the film’s most heroic act is in its final set piece when the protagonists risk their own lives to mitigate the cost in civilian lives their final desperate plan calls for. Inhumane decisions, the film argues, still need to be mitigated by actual humanity, if that humanity is costly, or not.

Mann practices a bit of humanity himself by not letting the characters fall into the obvious patterns you’d expect, so Pedersen may treat his life in his occupied country like a bit of a moral coward, and is often more careful in his approach, but the film does suggest that much of this is part of him looking at the cost more clearly than the more traditional man of action, Strand. And Strand for his part is actual softer and less ruthless than Pedersen when he has made a cruel decision he deems necessary. Nobody here’s just the asshole of the film, even though both men do act like one at times.

That Mann, pretty much at the end of his career here, is a rather sure hand at action sequences and their intelligent staging doesn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone who knows his body of work. That he manages to integrate the action and the moral and ethical concerns of his script and his characters without weakening either side isn’t a surprise either. I found myself particularly impressed with the first, stealth, attack of the Norwegians on the Nazi production facility, a long sequence that is indeed shot only with the few natural noises the word “stealth” suggests, without dramatic music, only driven by tension, and all the more exciting for it.


And really, that’s The Heroes of Telemark for you, showing thought and care even in its big action set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: Ruled by a female Svengali, he tortured women with his world prophecies!

Skin Strip(p)eress aka Sexy Ghost aka The Skinned Ghost (1992): What starts out as a mostly harmless (unless you're the snake who is squeezed to death or the frog who is eaten alive) piece of CATIII horror morphs into a just as harmless Lam Ching-Ying vehicle after half an hour or so. Both parts of the movie are definitely watchable - a Lam Ching-Ying vehicle does after all contain Lam Ching-Ying - but don't include anything I haven't seen done sleazier, nastier, funnier or just plain more creative in other movies.

99 and 44/100% Dead (1974): Sometimes you encounter films that are utterly inexplicable. Directed by John Frankenheimer with a cast led by Richard Harris, you'd expect a film to be at least watchable, but this gangster comedy (parody?) fails on every imaginable level as well as on levels the human mind wasn't meant to imagine. Ironically, the film's problem is not a lack of ideas but rather that it has a multitude of them, none of which is good, or clever, or funny. The film feels like nothing so much as like one of those pseudo-Tarantino movies made by directors totally unable to understand what makes Tarantino's movies work, which is quite an achievement for a film made twenty years before Tarantino's time.

If the film's aggressive tendency to laugh about its own, unfunny jokes weren't enough, there are also scenes that go on and on and on for no good reason but for Frankenheimer's wish to make the same, unfunny, joke three times in a row and horribly annoying acting that reaches from undead (Ann Turkel) to a mugging version of Michael Caine cool (Harris). It's so crap you could fertilize a farm with it.

Heaven and Hell aka Wong Jorn Pid (2012): As far as Thai horror anthologies go, Yuthlert Sippapak's and Tiwa Moeithaisong's (of whom I'd expected something better than this) film doesn't go very far. There are some misguided attempts by the directors to make their simple stories more complicated by adding either a wrong-headed stylistic conceit (hey, why not make an intensely talky story where all dialogue is delivered via intertitles!) or tonal shifts that seem random and ill-advised at best. The problem is, if the basics of your story aren't interesting enough to keep an audience's eyes open for half an hour, adding random crap to the story won't help.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,american movies,thai movies,in short,horror,martial arts,comedy,lam ching-ying,john frankenheimer,richard harris,yuthlert sippapak,tiwa moeithaisong

Three Films Make A Post: Their Form Is Human But They Have Crossed Over ... Is There Sex After Death?

Corrida pour un espion aka Code Name: Jaguar (1965): This Spanish-French-German co-production directed by perfectly decent director Maurice Leblanc starring perfectly decent Ray Danton in a curiously non-globe-hopping, perfectly decent adventure is a perfectly decent romp, unless it suddenly turns on the torture and the chauvinism a bit much for about five annoying minutes. From time to time, the film's more humorous moments are even better than perfectly decent. And that's really all I can say about a perfectly decent Eurospy movie.

Juggernaut (1974): Richard Lester's bomb disarming thriller on the other hand is quite a bit more than just decent. It's also a very strange film compared to the way a thriller is generally supposed to be built. Instead of being based on obvious dramatics and twists, Lester's movie is an experiment in building ever-mounting tension through the most laconic presentation, a precise, unhurried narrative tone, and brilliant actors consciously being as little overtly dramatic as possible; even Richard Harris is game to working against his usual approach to any given role.

Unlike some experiments, Juggernaut actually works too, consequently pointing out a completely different direction the thriller as a genre could have taken.

ParaNorman (2012): Despite all its technical accomplishment and its stylistic deftness, this piece of animation mostly reminded me of everything I already hated about US family-centric animation when I was a kid. It's a film willing to betray its charm, its humour, its willingness to engage with the unpleasant sides of childhood, and its few moments of subversion for patronizing - the only way the film knows to talk to children seems to be to talk down to them - and deeply hypocritical moralizing at a moment's notice. The film belongs to that part of children's entertainment that seems to think doing everything else, like being honest and not pretending that everything in life will work out with a smile and/or an ascendancy to heaven is bad for children, even in a film whose story really screams for a more complex solution.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,spanish movies,french movies,german movies,british movies,eurospy,ray danton,maurice leblanc,thriller,richard lester,richard harris,animation,comedy

Ravagers (1979)

The world has ended again, though it's not quite clear if in a bang or a whimper. Be it as it may, what's left of the world is rather brown and barren. Nothing grows anymore; men and animals have become barren too.

What's left of humanity largely falls into two camps - there are the "flockers", who hide away in remote places, seeking safety in numbers, and then there are the "ravagers", whose hobbies seem to be quite self-explaining.

Our hero of the day, Falk (Richard Harris, laying it on even thicker than usual with him, probably to make up for his character being a total non-entity without a past beyond the one we see being made at the beginning, and without any discernible character traits) does not belong to either of these groups. At the beginning of the movie, he leads a scavenging nomad life with his wife who dreams of better days and things beginning to grow again. They have been lulled into a sense of security by things going rather well for them, and practice some good old-fashioned domesticity. Alas, the couple's happiness is short-lived. A group of ravagers led by a very tenacious man without a name (Anthony James) discovers them, and rapes and kills Falk's wife, while Falk manages to escape.

Falk ferrets out the hiding place of the gang, kills one of their members and then goes a-wandering through the wastelands again. For some reason, the nomad gets a minor entourage, first in form of an old soldier (Art Carney) taking him for his commanding officer. Later, Faina (Ann Turkel), a young woman from one of the flocks gets rather keen on our hero. Falk doesn't exactly want to travel with others, but it's not as if he could stop them. While the trio has not exactly riveting post-apocalyptic adventures, the ravagers follow Falk for no good reason at all wherever he goes, this being the sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where following people is easy.

Things finally come to a head when Falk and his friends come to a not quite utopian community led by Rann (a wasted Ernest Borgnine) and the more sympathetic Brown (an equally wasted Woody Strode).

See that word "finally" I used in the last sentence? That's Ravagers problem right here. While I don't expect every film - not even my post-apocalyptic adventure movies - to be a fast-paced and exciting from beginning to end, Richard Compton's film puts even my patience to the test with one of the most uneventful post-apocalyptic travelogues I've seen.

The lack of outer events would be less of a problem if the film had anything much to say, but thematically, this neither adds to nor subtracts from the expected of the end of the world. If the film has a thesis, it's "people need hope, and they'll even turn to the most boring man alive - Richard Harris's character - to project it onto". Which would possibly work out better for the movie if Falk ever did anything at all to make everyone else's fixation on him believable. It's possible he is meant as the empty page everyone can project his on ideas onto, but it's not as if the film would do anything to explore that besides looking po-faced and having dramatic music (the only actually dramatic thing on screen, I'm afraid). From time to time, Falk and the ravagers meet again, but Compton does his humanly best to film these run-ins in the least exciting or disturbing way possible; and of course, he never answers the question why the ravager leader is so damn obsessed with Falk, because his actions go far beyond vengeance for a dead gang member.

The film's not a total wash, though. The photography is moody, and does its best to milk some dilapidated buildings and many different shades of brown for the proper post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Even though there isn't anything of interest happening on screen, at least the film looks like a proper non-generic end of the world happened. The other aspect I found well thought out and well done is how differently the body language of many of the film's characters is - the new world after the end has made most people visibly afraid and insecure, remembering how living as animals must have been, and their bodies show it.

It's just unfortunate that there is no story, no thesis, no interesting character to make any use of these flashes of something better in Ravagers. Watching it is like waiting for the actual film to happen. Alas, it never starts.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,post-apocalypse,richard compton,richard harris,ann turkel,art carney,ernest borgnine,woody strode,anthony james