Tag Archives: Cult Film

Saturday Matinee: From Hell

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“From Hell” – Plakatmotiv

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

One day men will say I gave birth to the 20th century. — Dialogue by Jack the Ripper I’ d like to think Darwin has a better case, but I see what he means. The century was indeed a stage for the dark impulses of the soul, and recently I’ve begun to wonder if Jack didn’t give birth to the 21st century, too. Twins. During 10 weeks in autumn 1888, a serial killer murdered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London. The murders were linked because the Ripper left a trademark, surgically assaulting the corpses in a particularly gruesome way. “I look for someone with a thorough knowledge of human anatomy,” says Inspector Abberline of Scotland Yard. An elementary knowledge would have been sufficient.

The story of Jack the Ripper has been fodder for countless movies and books, and even periodic reports that the mystery has been “solved” have failed to end our curiosity. Now comes “From Hell,” a rich, atmospheric film by the Hughes Brothers (“Menace II Society“), who call it a “ghetto film,” although knowledge of film, not the ghetto, is what qualifies them.

Johnny Depp stars as Inspector Frederick Abberline, an opium addict whose smoke-fueled dreams produce psychic insights into crime. The echo of Sherlock Holmes, another devotee of the pipe, is unmistakable, and “From Hell” supplies its hero with a Watsonoid sidekick in Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane), a policeman assigned to haul Abberline out of the dens, gently remind him of his duty, protect him from harm, and marvel at his insights. Depp plays his role as very, very subtle comedy–so droll he hopes we think he’s serious.

The movie feels dark, clammy and exhilarating–it’s like belonging to a secret club where you can have a lot of fun but might get into trouble. There’s one extraordinary shot that begins with the London skyline, pans down past towers and steam trains, and plunges into a subterranean crypt where a Masonic lodge is sitting in judgment on one of its members. You get the notion of the robust physical progress of Victoria’s metropolis, and the secret workings of the Establishment. At a time when public morality was strict and unbending, private misbehavior was a boom industry. Many, perhaps most, rich and pious men engaged in private debauchery.

The Hughes Brothers plunge into this world, so far from their native Detroit, with the joy of tourists who have been reading up for years. Their source is a 500-page graphic novel (i.e., transcendent comic book) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, and some of their compositions look influenced by comic art, with its sharp obliques and exaggerated perspectives. The movie was shot on location with the medieval streets of Prague doubling for London, and production designer Martin Childs goes for lurid settings, saturated colors, deep shadows, a city of secret places protected by power and corruption.

We meet some of the prostitutes, particularly Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), who is trying to help her sisters escape from the dominance of the pimps. We see Abberline and Kelly begin a romance that probably would have been a lot more direct and uncomplicated at that time than it is in this movie. We see members of Victoria’s immediate family implicated in whoring and venereal mishaps, and we meet the Queen’s Surgeon, a precise and, by his own admission, brilliant man named Sir William Gull (Ian Holm). The investigation is interrupted from time to time by more murders, graphically indicated, and by forms of official murder, like lobotomy. Sir William is an especially enthusiastic advocate of that procedure, reinforcing my notion that every surgeon of any intelligence who practiced lobotomy did so with certain doubts about its wisdom, and certain stirrings of curious satisfaction.

Watching the film, I was surprised how consistently it surprised me. It’s a movie “catering to no clear demographic,” Variety reports in its review, as if catering to a demographic would be a good thing for a movie to do. Despite its gothic look, “From Hell” is not in the Hammer horror genre. Despite its Sherlockian hero, it’s not a Holmes and Watson story. Despite its murders, it’s not a slasher film. What it is, I think, is a Guignol about a cross-section of a thoroughly rotten society, corrupted from the top down. The Ripper murders cut through layers of social class designed to insulate the sinners from the results of their sins.

Saturday Matinee: Brainstorm

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By Moe

Source: Cup of Moe

The 1983 sci-fi thriller “Brainstorm” stars Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood. This forward-thinking science fiction romp presents virtual reality (VR) in its early stages and evolution. Although the Douglas Trumbull-directed film isn’t perfect, it’s a neat look at VR with superb acting, a magnificent score, and excellent effects.

A scientific group led by Michael Brace (Walken) and his estranged wife Karen (Natalie Wood), along with Michael’s colleague Lillian (Louise Fletcher) invents the computer and brain interfacing device. Their creation not only allows for virtual reality experiences but allows feelings and sensations to be recorded on tape. In this way, others may experience those as well.

After their initial success, CEO Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson) instructs Brace et al to offer a demo of their device with the intent to secure financial backing. It’s during this exhibition that the group realizes the true power of their device: its ability to record human emotions. Michael uses the device to record memories with emotions, and thereby influence the real world. But whereas Michael employs this as the utility to reconnect with his estranged wife, previous colleague Landan Marks (Donald Hotton) aspires to use it for military applications.

When Lillian suffers a heart attack, she puts on the headset and records her death. Michael later discovers her recorded memories. Eventually, Michael realizes the insidious intent to use his creation for warfare when he uncovers “Project Brainstorm.” As such, Michael and Karen team up to thwart efforts to use their technology to perpetuate the military industrial complex.

“Brainstorm” offers an intriguing and groundbreaking look at VR. There’s an exploration of not only virtual reality experiences but the effects on the user. This manifests in the ability to record emotions as well as memories. I like the way “Brainstorm” touches on humanity’s influence of tech, and the means through which tech shapes humanity. Moreover, “Brainstorm” presents an accurate portrayal of tech advancement. Early in the film, Terson instructs his team to make a smaller version of their helmet. Similarly, a trend in real-world technology is constant innovation in creating smaller devices.

I quite enjoy the helmet design and the effects are top-notch. The 1983 movie has aged pretty well with its fish-eye lens shots and well-crafted animation sequences.Trumbull worked on effects for films such as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Silent Running,” and “Blade Runner.” It’s evident that Trumbull understood the genre and he infuses mesmerizing special effects, particularly at the end.

Cinematography is fantastic. The film is set in North Carolina and uses several NC scenes as prominent backdrops. Notably, the Wright Brothers National Memorial plays an important role. Plus, there’s a neat shot of Duke Chapel. Locations even appear futuristic. The Burroughs Wellcome building offers its then high-tech looks as the main office for Michael, Karen, and Lillian. A gorgeous Chapel Hill, NC home with its parallelogram angles and solar panels was used as well.

Acting is phenomenal. Walken lends an inspired performance, and Natalie Wood is captivating in her final cinematic appearance. But it’s Louise Fletcher as Lillian who completely steals the show with a tour de force acting job.

It would be remiss to discuss “Brainstorm” without touching on its superb score. Renowned composer James Horner provides the musical backing which is replete with the timpani Horner became best known for. Horner’s “Brainstorm” soundtrack features elements from his “Wolfen” score. Later, in the 1986 sci-fi hit “Aliens,” Horner continued this trend. But it’s a formula that works.

Unfortunately, “Brainstorm” doesn’t quite end as well as it starts. The finale is admittedly a muddled moment which will leave you wondering “what?” as the credits roll. Michael plays back Lillian’s tape and watches the afterlife playing out, even glimpsing hell for a moment. Departed souls in the form of bioluminescent butterflies flow peacefully into heaven. Though the effects hold up fine, this sequence falls flat in lacking the poetry of similar scenes like the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Still, it’s tough to hold the abrupt and admittedly cheesy, ending against the movie. Wood’s tragic and mysterious death led production to halt. Eventually, Trumbull rewrote the script and used Wood’s younger sister as a stand-in for her remaining shots.

I especially enjoy how “Brainstorm” probes the relationship between tech and humanity, presenting complex concepts like computer-brain transference. “Brainstorm” may not carry the legacy of sci-fi flicks like “Blade Runner,” “Alien,” and “The Matrix.” However, its stellar cinematography, acting, score, and effects plus forward-thinking portrayal of tech make this 1983 movie a smart, lasting thriller.

Saturday Matinee: Three Days of the Condor

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Three Days of the Condor

A thriller for thinkers probing covert activities within the CIA.

By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Source: Spirituality & Practice

Joseph Turner — code name Condor — works at the American Literary Historical Society in New York City. The organization is actually a branch office of the CIA. He and his youthful coworkers read, analyze, and computerize various spy stories, mysteries, and periodicals for the CIA’s mammoth intelligence gathering operations.

One rainy day while Turner is out to lunch, the rest of the staff is brutally murdered. Scared out of his wits, he contacts the CIA and is told to go into hiding. When he does arrange a meeting with the CIA, he is fired upon and his best friend, along to help identify the contact, is shot by another agent. Terror grips Turner. He abducts Kathy Hale, a photographer, and in her apartment in Brooklyn tries to unravel the mysteries surrounding the executions.

Three Days at the Condor works on two levels: as an examination of the covert activities within the CIA and as a somewhat curious look at the development of a relationship through shared stress. Robert Redford is just right as the paranoid Turner, a bright young man unexplainably put in a harrowing situation. Did the slaughter of the American Literary Historical Society staff stem from his inquiry to CIA headquarters about a mystery novel only translated into Dutch and Arabic? Perhaps someone in higher places was doing unauthorized intelligence work and Turner stumbled onto his scheme. Can Turner now determine who’s out to silence him? Director Sydney Pollack, (The Way We Were, Yakuza) orchestrates the zigzag storyline into a labyrinth of effective scenes, revealing Turner’s fright and his own special brand of grace under pressure.

Faye Dunaway gives a well modulated performance as the woman who is kidnapped by Turner at gunpoint and forced to serve as his host. Her initial fright turns to anger as he brutalizes her. But then, through the bizarre intermix of their wants and needs, the two develop an uneasy relationship. Sex is one part of the bond drawing them together; intelligence the other. She helps him solve the mystery and come to terms with his conscience. He helps her to a new understanding of her loneliness. Faye Dunaway, moving from her standout role in Chinatown to this notable performance, proves that she is one of our better actresses.

Also featured in this gripping suspense story are Cliff Robertson and John Houseman as two Central Intelligence Agency officials and Max Von Sydow as a hit man used by the CIA on various contacts. In the wake of Watergate and the recent probes on the CIA, Three Days of the Condor has a resonance with the general mood of public uneasiness about secrecy in high places. We can empathize with these characters and their paranoia. Although it doesn’t really make any sophisticated political commentary on the activities of the CIA, this movie does work as a thriller for thinkers.

Watch Three Days at the Condor here: https://m.ok.ru/video/9819443366575

Saturday Matinee: The Wicker Man

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Copyright HAG ©2008

By Berthold Gambrel

Source: RuinedChapel.com

Picture this: a movie that takes place mainly during the day, on a picturesque Scottish island. There is very little action in the movie; it’s mainly a police procedural, with a stony-faced, prim and proper policeman questioning the local population. The film contains almost no violence, except for a very brief scene towards the end. Indeed, what earns it its “R” rating is nudity; a few scenes of naked women dancing. Other than that, it could air on broadcast television with no cuts. 

Moreover, did I mention this film has a number of songs? It’s not exactly a musical, but there is fast-paced nursery rhyme-like patter, a few ribald drinking songs, and a ballad performed by one of the aforesaid nude dancers. 

There’s almost no blood, no sinister torture chambers, no howling dogs on desolate foggy moors; instead there is only a quaint little village in a quiet part of the world. I ask you, with such a setup, can a film really be scary?

Comes the answer: this is possibly the scariest movie I have ever seen.

It follows Sgt. Neil Howie, a devout Christian police detective, who is dispatched by seaplane to the remote Summerisle to look for a missing girl. The townspeople are not unfriendly, but not exactly helpful either, referring Howie to Lord Summerisle, the nobleman whose family has administered the island’s affairs for generations.

During Howie’s investigation, he sees odd things. Strange rituals out of centuries past, like maypoles and disturbingly explicit fertility rites, quite at odds with his conservative Christian beliefs. When at last he meets Lord Summerisle, he confronts him about the unsettling things he has witnessed, and Summerisle acknowledges that, as part of a program to revive the island’s agricultural output, his grandfather gave the people back their ancient, pre-Christian folkways, to entice them to believe in the Old Gods of the Harvest.

Howie is appalled and horrified, and in view of everyone’s refusal to aid him in finding the missing girl, begins to suspect that she has been sacrificed to their Old Gods in some sort of bizarre druidical ceremony. 

I really liked Howie, who is played perfectly by Edward Woodward. His refusal to compromise his beliefs, and unwavering resolve to find the missing child no matter what stands in his way, make him easy to root for. And also perhaps easy to… but no, that would be saying too much. This is not exactly an unknown film, but it would be wrong to spoil it.

The late, great Sir Christopher Lee is also fantastic as Summerisle. Offhand, I’d say it’s his best role. In fact, he said it was his best role. Of course, playing a charming but sinister aristocrat was pretty much Lee’s standard, but the devil is in the details, and it’s how he plays it that makes this interesting. He seems relaxed, almost easygoing, compared to the straight-laced Howie. But, let’s just say he has another side to him…

Okay, but what makes this movie so scary? I did say it might be the scariest film I’ve ever seen, after all. I can’t spoil it, but if I’m going to make such a bold claim, I have to try and justify it somehow.

Those of you who made it all the way through the sprawling post I wrote about the Metal Gear Solid 2 book a while back may remember that I made reference to a non-fiction book called The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. Blackmore is a student of Richard Dawkins, the well-known evolutionary biologist. Dawkins coined the word “meme” as an analog for “gene” in the realm of culture. A “meme” is a unit of information; a word, a phrase, a song, a mannerism, a belief, that is transmitted through human culture, by a process not unlike evolution.

Dawkins derived his neologism “meme” from the Greek word mīmēma, which means “imitation.”  And just as Dawkins described genes as “selfish,” memes likewise seek only to replicate themselves, so much so that we can analogize memes as if they were beings with conscious desires.

It’s all quite interesting, and Blackmore takes Dawkins’ idea and runs with it, arguing that the human brain evolved as a kind of super-powerful meme replicator, and our capacity for imitation of memes allowed us to evolve into the dominant life-form on the planet.

As she explains: 

Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us… they are selfish like genes, and will simply spread if they can.

Elsewhere, Blackmore proposes the following thought experiment:

Imagine a world full of hosts for memes (e.g. brains) and far more memes than can possibly find homes.

Of course, as Blackmore takes pains to point out, it’s not as if these memes are literally flying around the world, taking over human brains and using them to replicate themselves. It’s just that, ah, they might as well be. It’s not literally true, but it’s a good model for approximating the behavior we see in the world. (Anyone who has studied Economics will be familiar with this sort of thing.) 

However… there is something curious about all this. Because there is another Greek word Dawkins might have used instead, that describes much the same phenomenon. The Ancient Greeks tended to model human thought as the work of external entities—e.g. inspiration being given from Apollo, lust from Eros, and so on. 

The Ancient Greek word I’m thinking of is daimōn, from which we get the modern word “demon.” “Meme” and “demon” even sound somehow similar, with the same phoneme as the central component.  Now consider Blackmore’s hypothetical rewritten:

Imagine a world full of hosts for demons (e.g. brains) and far more demons than can possibly find homes.

In an instant, we have transformed the work of modern scientists (one of whom is famously an atheist) into something that sounds like what the wrinkled old woman living in a strange cabin in the woods tells the horror movie protagonist.

And this is what I find curious: the superstitious ancients described the world as inhabited by invisible spirits that took hold of people’s minds. The modern memeticists describe the world as inhabited by invisible memes that take hold of people’s minds.

If I tell you that I got an idea for a story when “out of the blue, it just popped in my head,” you would nod understandingly. If I said I got the idea when “the God of Fiction whispered it in my ear,” you’d think I was a bit of an oddball, at best. Yet, for practical purposes, the two are the same.

So if you say someone is possessed by a demon, it seems strange, but being possessed by an idea is totally normal. 

Coming back around to The Wicker Man, this is what makes the film so scary. At the end, we see people who are possessed by something. We could argue all day about whether it is some true supernatural force or merely certain memes which they have learned to imitate; memes handed down from an ancient tradition dating back millennia. The film, like all great horror, leaves much to the audience’s imagination.

Practically speaking, it doesn’t much matter, does it? The fact is, there is something—call it a demon, a meme, an idea, a fashion, a spirit, whatever name suits you—that can take hold of human minds and compel them to do things that seem unthinkable to those immune to the phenomenon. 

And that’s the ultimate horror of The Wicker Man.  Here, in this bucolic setting, we gradually uncover the darkest impulses that lie in the hearts of human communities; primitive urges predating everything we call civilization. A base need for rituals that give meaning and provide a sense of power, of grandeur, even, to those craving it.

Unnerving, unsettling, disturbing and uniquely memorable, The Wicker Man is one of the greatest horror films ever made.

Watch The Wicker Man on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100010483/the-wicker-man

Saturday Matinee: Dark City

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Discovering human nature

By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

Dark City” by Alex Proyas resembles its great silent predecessor “Metropolis” in asking what it is that makes us human, and why it cannot be changed by decree. Both films are about false worlds created to fabricate ideal societies, and in both the machinery of the rulers is destroyed by the hearts of the ruled. Both are parables in which a dangerous weapon attacks the order of things: a free human who can see what really is, and question it. “Dark City” contains a threat more terrible than any of the horrors in “Metropolis,” because the rulers of the city can control the memories of its citizens; if we are the sum of all that has happened to us, then what are we when nothing has happened to us?

In “Dark City” (1998), all of the human memories are newly fabricated when the hands of the clock reach 12. This is defined as “midnight,” but the term is deceptive, because there is no noon. “First came darkness, then came the Strangers,” we are told in the opening narration. In the beginning, there was no light. John Murdoch, the hero, asks Bumstead, the police detective: “When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?” Bumstead is surprised by the question. “You know something?” Murdoch asks him. “I don’t think the sun even exists in this place. I’ve been up for hours and hours, and the night never ends here.”

The narration explains that the Strangers came from another galaxy and collected a group of humans to study them. Their civilization is dying. They seek to find the secret of the human heart, or soul, or whatever it is that falls outside their compass. They create a vast artificial city, which can be fabricated, or “tuned,” whenever they want to run another experiment.

We see the tuning taking place. All humans lose consciousness. All machinery stops. Changes are made in the city. Skyscrapers are extruded from the primordial materials of the underworld, architecture is devised, rooms are prepared for their inhabitants, props are set in place. Aided by a human scientist, the Strangers inject memories into the foreheads of their test subjects. When humans awaken, they have no memory of the day before; everything they remember has been injected from a communal memory bank. If a man commits murder one day and then is given a new identity, is he still capable of committing murder? Are men inherently good or evil, or is it a matter of how they think of themselves? The Strangers need to know.

Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) has developed an immunity to the devices of the Strangers. His latest memory injection was incomplete. It was administered by Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), a scientist who works for the Strangers but has no love for them. Murdoch wakes in a hotel room with the corpse of a dead woman; the script for the day has made him a serial killer of prostitutes. Schreber warns him he is the subject of an experiment but has proven resistant to it. The Strangers are coming for him, and he must flee.

That sets the story into motion: Murdoch wanders through the city, trying to discover its underlying nature; Detective Bumstead (William Hurt) tries to capture him, but will gradually be won over by Murdoch’s questions (he is programmed as a cop, but not a very good one; he keeps complaining, “no one ever listens to me”). Then there is the torch singer, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), who remembers that she is John’s wife and loves him, and that they met at Shell Beach. Everyone says they know how to go to Shell Beach. But no one seems able to say exactly where it is.

The Strangers occupy the bodies of human cadavers. Most of them are tall; one is in a child’s body but is no child. The alien beings themselves, living inside the corpses, look like spiders made of frightened noodles. They can levitate, they can change the matter of the city at will, they have a hive insect organization, they gather in a subterranean cavern to collectively retune the city. This cavern has visuals reminding us of two Fritz Lang films: the underworld mechanisms in “Metropolis” (1927) and his “M” (1931), with the pale faces of criminals rising row above row into the gloom.

In October, I went through “Dark City” a shot at a time for four days at the Hawaii Film festival, with moviegoers who were as curious as I was. We froze frames, we dissected special effects, we debated the meaning of the film, and our numbers even included a psychiatrist who told us of the original Daniel Schreber, a schizophrenic whose book on his condition influenced Freud and Jung.

Sometimes during the shot-by-shot analysis, we simply froze a frame and regarded it. Some of the street scenes echo paintings by Edward Hopper or Jack Vettriano. This is not only a beautiful film but a generous one, which supplies rich depth and imagination and many more details than are really necessary to tell the story. Small wonder that the name Bumstead appears, perhaps in honor of Henry Bumstead, one of the greatest Hollywood art directors. The world created by the Strangers seems borrowed from 1940s film noir; we see fedoras, cigarettes, neon signs, automats, older cars (and some newer ones — the world is not consistent). Proyas wrote the screenplay with David S. Goyer and Lem Dobbs; the screenplays Dobbs wrote for “Kafka” and Goyer wrote for “Batman Begins” contain some of the same notes sounded here.

Proyas likes deep-focus compositions. Many interior spaces are long and narrow. Exteriors look down one street to the vanishing point, and then the camera pans to look down another street, equally long. The lighting is low-key and moody. The color scheme depends on blacks, browns, shadows and the pallor of the Strangers; warmer colors exist in human faces, in neon signs and on the billboard for Shell Beach. “I am simply grateful for this shot,” I said in Hawaii more than once. “It is as well-done as it can possibly be.” Many other great films give you the same feeling — that their makers were carried far beyond the actual requirements of their work into the passion of creating something wonderful.

I believe more than ever that “Dark City” is one of the great modern films. It preceded “The Matrix” by a year (both films used a few of the same sets in Australia), and on a smaller budget, with special effects that owe as much to imagination as to technology, did what “The Matrix” wanted to do, earlier and with more feeling.

The poignancy of “Dark City” emerges in its love stories. At a crucial point, John Murdoch tells Emma, “Everything you remember, and everything I’m supposed to remember, never really happened.” Emma doesn’t think that can be true. “I so vividly remember meeting you,” she says. “I remember falling in love with you.” Yes, she remembers. But this is the first time they have met. “I love you, John,” she says. “You can’t fake something like that.” And Murdoch says, “No, you can’t.” You can inform someone who they love, and that is what the Strangers have done with their memory injection. But what she feels cannot be injected. That is the part the strangers do not understand. Emma has a small role but it is at the heart of the movie, because she truly knows love; John has still to discover it — to learn about it from her.

The Strangers are not evil. They simply proceed from alien assumptions. They are not even omnipotent, which is why Murdoch, Bumstead and Schreber have relative freedom to move about the city. At the end, we feel a little sorry for them. They will die surrounded by happy beings whose secrets they could not discover.

Notice an opening shot that approaches the hotel window behind which we meet Murdoch. The window is a circular dome in a rectangular frame. As clearly as possible, it looks like the “face” of Hal 9000 in “2001.” Hal was a computer that understood everything, except what it was to be human and have emotions. “Dark City” considers the same theme in a film that creates a completely artificial world in which humans teach themselves to be themselves.

Watch Dark City on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100017001/dark-city

Saturday Matinee: Killer of Sheep

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By Mr. Arkadin

Source: The Silver Screen Oasis

“You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man. Start learning what life is about now son.”

Killer of Sheep is that rare film that eschews plot and story lines for human experience. The movie opens in the past with a reprimand to young Stan, and to us as well. We join Stan in the present, his wife and children in the seedy Watts section of Los Angeles. We will live with them for only eighty-three minutes, but in this short time, director Charles Burnett will present us with life in all its flawed beauty. What we learn is up to us.

The origins of KOS are well known. While studying at UCLA, Burnett began making ample use of the universities film lab and equipment. Dismayed by Blaxploitation film, which dealt with stereotypes (most of them criminal), Burnett drew inspiration from Neorealism and the work of Vittorio De Sica whose work explored the lives and emotions of the everyday man. Non-actors fill most of these roles in true De Sica fashion. Burnett had originally envisioned a three film series about Stan and his wife, but limited funds and equipment use (UCLA wanted their lab back) has only left us with a small portion of Burnett’s epic.

Raising a family in deteriorating Watts, Sam is a man of much mileage who has long since run down. Despairing of personal hopes and dreams, he works at a nearby slaughterhouse where cool detachment has become his way of life. For Stan to admit his total desperation would be suicide. Instead, he is a sleepwalker doing the things he must to survive. Insulated and isolated, Stan is almost unreachable by those who love him.

Burnett got his start in photography and much of KOS is just that—pictures and music. We are observers of a certain kind of life here and perhaps the most touching thing about this film, is the fact that Burnett trusts us with his vision. We walk around his neighborhood taking in the sights, making up our own minds about what we see. Many of these wordless scenes can be viewed as small vignettes or parables that attempt to explain black life as a whole: A child laying under a train while another playfully steals his shoes, Kids jumping across rooftops heedless of danger, or Stan’s lonely dance with his wife as they are unable to connect physically or emotionally.

If pictures tell stories, Burnett’s choice of music provides context and commentary on his social backdrop. Sheep hanging in the slaughterhouse suggest it is “A Mean old World” (Little Walter) indeed. Paul Robeson’s “That’s America To Me” underscores the harsh reality that the American Dream is only a fantasy for the impoverished. Earth Wind and Fire’s “Reasons” is a record played by Stan’s child who sings along while Stan’s wife puts on makeup, arranges her hair and dress for her man who has long since lost interest. Burnett shows his genius here by cutting between the two rooms, showing us daughter and mother listening to the same song, which has a different meaning for each of them. When Stan’s wife looks in on their child it’s a bittersweet moment. Here is a little girl singing along to an adult-themed song about love. When Stan’s wife appears in the frame we wonder if she is the embodiment of what this child will become. Will her fate be the same as her mother?

Although the movie has its share of bleak moments, if Stan were merely a miserable man, this wouldn’t be much of a film. His refusal to admit his situation (“We ain’t poor! I give stuff to the Salvation Army!”) belies his inability to climb out of it. A man can live without many things, but honor is not one of them. There’s also humor in Stan’s son, who is always in trouble (he likes a little bit of cereal with his sugar and milk), Stan’s adventure buying the used motor, or the gang drinking in the windowless car. There is a tenderness as well. Stan loves his daughter. She is the only thing that can still touch his heart. When he plays with her, you know that beauty and love still exist for him—even in the darkest places of his soul.

Although Killer of Sheep owes much to De Sica and the Neorealist movement, it is fundamentally different in the fact that there is no crisis that changes Stan’s outlook. In Bicycle Thieves (1948) or Umberto D. (1953), crisis creates change. KOS provides no such easy outlets and we are left pondering hard questions with no easy answers. At the end of the film Stan’s circumstances haven’t changed, but he has. His view is not one of acceptance or understanding, but determination.

As Stan drives the sheep to the killing floor, we realize there is no hope for his situation. It’s for his children that he does these things now, in hopes they will leap across the void that separates these separate American existences. Is he a defeated man? Perhaps. That’s a question Burnett wisely leaves in our hands, rather than moralizing. Stan might not have the stars to play with nor the moon to run away with, but he has some things money cannot achieve—namely his community and the love of his family.

When new life comes to the neighborhood, it grows at the personal cost and sacrifice of others to sustain and nurture it. We see this in the death of the sheep and perhaps the death of Stan’s hopes and aspirations, which are unfulfilled. Stan does have hope for his children, and this hope has returned him to the human race and drives him on. These things, like the sugar that sweetens his son’s cereal, temper his life and help him to see that perhaps his journey on this earth is not so bitter after all.

Watch Killer of Sheep on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/movie/killer-of-sheep-henry-gayle-sanders/18383114

Saturday Matinee: The Sorcerer and the White Snake

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By Vern

Source: Vern’s Reviews

After I watched DR. WAI IN “THE SCRIPTURE WITH NO WORDS” for the specific reason that it was a Jet Li movie directed by Ching Siu-Tung, I realized I should watch the more recent movie that fits the same description. THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE (2011) is another fantasy martial arts romance, outlandish in a different way than the other one because it’s based on a Chinese legend about animal demons.

Li plays the titular sorcerer, a truck trying to carry explosives across a shaky rope bridge, and of course Whitesnake play themselves, performing many of their hits as well as debuting songs from that year’s album Forevermore. At least I assume that was what Ching intended, but he caved to the bean-counters, so instead Li plays a skilled Buddhist demon hunter called Abbott Fahai, and early in the movie we are abruptly confronted with the sight of two beautiful human lady torsos with scale-covered breasts and giant snake body lower halves, rolling around sexily on top of each other. It’s one of those things where I’m kind of icked out by it but also very happy for whatever number of people there are out there who are into snake ladies and are sorely underserved by mainstream cinema. Merry Christmas, you pervs.

Anyway, they seem to be going at it, but I guess they’re supposed to be sisters frolicking. The green snake is Quingqing (Charlene Choi, THE TWINS EFFECT, TWINS MISSION) and the white snake is Susu (Eva Huang, KUNG FU HUSTLE, DRAGON SQUAD). They’re spying on some humans climbing a mountain to find herbs, and Quingqing decides to go play a prank on them – appearing in giant snake form to hiss at young herbalist Xu Xian (Raymond Lam, SAVING GENERAL YANG), scaring him so bad he falls off the mountain into the water.

Susu has a conscience and/or thinks Xu Xian is a cutey, so she switches to human form and resuscitates him in the form of a romantic underwater kiss. And then it becomes a thing where she comes into civilization in human form and courts him, but he rejects her at first, thinking he’s in love with this person he doesn’t quite remember who saved his life. (Rather than tell him “That’s me, stupid” she knocks him into the water and does it again.) Tagging along, Quingqing befriends Abbott Fahai’s assistant Neng Ren (Wen Zhang, THE GUILLOTINES, THE MERMAID), who luckily is bad at using his little dial that detects demons.

Well, maybe not lucky, because he doesn’t notice the ENTIRE BOAT FULL OF LADY BAT DEMONS that Quingqing casually points out to him. This leads to one of the better action sequences, when the Abbott flies in and leapfrogs across a succession of boats, including several canoes that are mid-air after being launched by a big wave. He and Neng Ren battle a swarm of humans with with bat wings as well as a more monstrous digital character. That part seems kinda like a Hong Kong take on VAN HELSING.

Xu Xian and Susu end up getting married, but he doesn’t know she’s a snake demon, and those type of secrets are not good for marriages. So the scene where Fahai attacks her and she turns into a snake and he sees it is kind of like somebody walking in on their wife straddling some dude. Luckily he forgives her, but only after accidentally stabbing her with a magic dagger (you know how it is) so it becomes a quest to get a rare magic root that will heal her.

The style of the movie is a little schizophrenic. Much of it has a very clean digital look that seems chintzy compared to Hollywood movies. For example, in the opening scene Abbott Fahai and Neng Ren step out into a blizzard and battle an ice harpy (Vivian Hsu, THE ACCIDENTAL SPY) and it’s all extremely green-screeny, with an FX-based battle where Li and his doubles are spinning a staff around and doing moves, but the frame drops, flying and ice beam FX make it seem like it’s pretty much an animated movie. (It’s also one of those movies that is very clearly designed to take advantage of 3D.) But then it cuts to some beautiful actual locations, and the lantern festival sequence looks like a huge set on a soundstage – it kind of feels like a Disneyland ride, which is a compliment.

I love the unashamed way movies like this present their mythological reality – it’s so different from the west, where artists fear straying from realism and the literal. Ching, of course, has no such hangups. Not long after he’s given us “Yes, they are sexy half lady/half snakes who can turn into a snake or a lady, fuckin deal with it, buddy,” he also has a computer animated turtle, rabbit and mouse just walk in (upright, but they’re regular animal sizes and not humanoid at all) and start talking, like it’s normal. I wasn’t sure if they were also demons and could turn into people, but they never did, so I decided they were just animals. The mouse continues to be a major character throughout the movie, treated as a peer with the demons and humans. (He should get a spin-off buddy movie with the puppet rat mutant from DR. WAI.)

Apparently there’s some part I didn’t pick up on with a “Chicken Devil” played by the great Lam Suet. I don’t know if this means I wasn’t paying enough attention or if it’s one of those Easter eggs. They don’t have Easter in Buddhism, though.

The story spends more time on the melodrama of the young lovers than on the Abbott, but Li’s performance is good and it’s a pretty interesting character. Rather than killing demons he catches them in little pots like he’s an ancient Ghostbuster, and he keeps them imprisoned in his pagoda, with the promise that if they meditate and improve themselves they can be freed. This seems pretty enlightened at first, but when we meet the snakes we realize that it’s still unfair to assume that every demon is evil and deserving of this kind of punishment. They’re just creatures trying to live their lives, and they should be able to slither around doing what they want, they shouldn’t have to hide out at Midian or something to be safe from guys like him. So, while being well-intentioned, he sort of becomes the antagonist.

And SPOILER due to these events he does learn that his attitude toward demons has been too rigid. I like that it ends on a sweet little character moment – Fahai throwing Neng Ren an apple and talking to him as a friend even though he’s been turned into a bat-demon.

Much of this movie looks beautiful, and some of the stuff that looks cheesier is bizarre enough to still be appealing. But there are definitely points where the digital look is off-putting to me. I can imagine myself being much more drawn into its operatic emotions if it was one of those soft-focus ‘90s Hong Kong fantasies like THE BRIDE WITH THE WHITE HAIR. (I guess I’ll have to check out Tsui Hark’s GREEN SNAKE, a 1993 variation on the same legend.) Still, I gotta respect a movie with the line, “Before I met you I meditated for a thousand years, but those thousand years were worth less than a moment with you.” That’s some passionate love shit only a snake demon could say. I bet you don’t get that in, like, a Nicholas Sparks movie. (I don’t think I’ve seen any, though, so correct me if I’m wrong.)

Watch The Sorcerer and the White Snake on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/15557900

Saturday Matinee: Prisoners of the Ghostland

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PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, Leave Sanity at the Door

Nicolas Cage. Sofia Boutella. Sono Sion. Need we say more? Yes.

By Eric Ortiz Garcia

Source: Screen Anarchy

More than 30 years after his first film, Sono Sion has established himself as a brilliant, prolific and chameleonic director.

In the past decade alone, you can find some of his best work: a hilarious tribute to guerrilla filmmaking and 35mm, with yakuzas, samurais and martial arts, Why Don’t You Play in Hell?; brutally violent and sordid films, Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance; dramas alluding to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Himizu and The Land of Hope; a crazy hip hop musical, Tokyo Tribe; and an emotional kaiju and Christmas film with catchy rock songs, Love & Peace.

On the other hand, Nicolas Cage became one of the most prolific Hollywood actors, finding in recent years memorable roles in genre cinema that, beyond subversive, are absolutely delirious. Mandy and Color Out of Space are enough to forget his abundant jobs-for-hire.

Considering that, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono’s highly anticipated English-language debut starring Cage, is insane. Truly insane.

Sono has excelled in building his own worlds. When I interviewed him in 2015 about Tokyo Tribe, he revealed that he wasn’t interested in using real locations in that city, because he wanted to “make up a whole fake world.” Prisoners of the Ghostland, one of his productions with the biggest budget, isn’t contained in that regard. Its two main universes – or rather, prisons – come to life and are wonderful madness.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Western and his return to samurai cinema, two genres that he feels affection for like his contemporaries: Miike Takashi (Sukiyaki Western Django) and Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill, Django Unchained). A group that shares influences: Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, Sergio Corbucci, Bruce Lee, Fukasaku Kinji, Fujita Toshiya, among many others.

In Sono’s “Old West”, West and East coexist, the mystique of the cowboy and the samurai. In fact, it’s set in “Samurai Town.” The iconic sheriff is an obese, long-haired Japanese cowboy, an Elvis Presley fan. The town’s true “boss”, the Governor (Bill Moseley, in a performance to remember), is a “gringo” with a Southern accent who runs a geisha place. He’s accompanied by his favorite heavy: the skilled samurai Yasujiro, played by Sakaguchi Tak himself, “Bruce Lee” in Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and more recently the protagonist of Crazy Samurai Musashi, the exciting and bloody one-take sequence based on an idea by Sono.

The hybrid and extravagant iconography extends to the town, practically an alternate universe where all kinds of people live together regardless of age (there’s a good number of children). It’s a clash between the traditional and the modern: a classic Western/Oriental town adorned with electronic signs, with interiors worthy of a stylized futuristic movie. Well, the Governor travels in a modern car! It’s the cinema of cool at its most striking expression.

Who better to lead the cast than an actor with a perfect understanding of this type of cinema? Is there a better vehicle for Cage than a film where his character is described as “so cool, so badass”?

The actor has been enjoying himself big time. “Personally I find his stylish performances extremely enternaining,” said Richard Stanley when I interviewed him about the Lovecraftian Color Out of Space, “they say it’s campy and over-the-top, that how can you make a serious but pretty fun movie. That’s just what I love about Nic, he’s capable of being funny and serious at the same time.”

Cage maintains that style in Prisoners of the Ghostland, bringing the classic unnamed antihero to life, although unlike those almost silent figures in the Spaghetti Western – Kurosawa Akira’s samurais were a big influence for Leone– Nic held nothing back. The movie is full of hilariously absurd dialogue and moments. It’s a territory that Sono dominates: just remember the hilarious yakuza leader secretly in love with the daughter of his rival, famous for a jingle that the criminal continues to dance, in Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

The plot of Prisoners of the Ghostland is quite simple: the Governor’s “granddaughter”, Bernice (Sofia Boutella), has disappeared; she’s actually a prostitute who managed to escape from her “prison.” The man with no name is imprisoned in Samurai Town and could regain his freedom if he fulfills the mission of bringing Bernice back.

The sequence that exposes the conflict is an extremely enjoyable display of the iconography around Cage’s character. The best example? The high-tech suit that threatens to blow the antihero to pieces if he treats Bernice badly (a comment from Sono about the supposed “misogyny” of his cinema?), or if he doesn’t fulfill the mission in the allotted time by the Governor.

Ok, maybe that doesn’t sound that crazy, how about adding a couple of explosives to the protagonist’s testicles? And we know that Sono wouldn’t add that detail if it wasn’t going to… explode at any moment!

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Mad Maxian post-apocalyptic film. A world in ruins with old mannequins everywhere, a recurring figure in Sono’s filmography, as in Exte: Hair Extensions and in that twisted crime scene in Guilty of Romance. At the center of the stage is a crumbling tower topped by an immense clock, owned by a defunct nuclear empire.

After the Fukishima nuclear disaster in 2011, Sono hasn’t stopped showing concern about it in his cinema. There’s Himizu with its characters who lost everything and went on to live in destitute circumstances. In The Land of Hope, the director imagines that an earthquake and a tsunami cause a new nuclear catastrophe in another area of Japan. It’s a harsh criticism of the actions of the government and of the population with little memory, who forget the pain of ordinary people whose life will never be the same again.

In The Land of Hope, Sono thought of the threat of radiation as inherent in his country. Then, in Love & Peace, he used the frenzy for the imminent Tokyo 2020 Olympics (which haven’t happened yet, of course) as a reflection of a country that has forgotten Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Not for nothing the filmmaker continues to insist: the mythology of Prisoners of the Ghostland, explained in a stylized dreamlike sequence, is another comment on this topic.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is made up of a lot of elements. This post-apocalyptic world, and its background, is a hybrid. To avoid exploding into pieces, Cage’s character must enter a mythical land of ghosts, inhabited by figures distinguished by their distinctive samurai armor; they wander among men dressed in prison clothes, whose leader is a monstrous type, antagonist halfway between horror and exploitation.

The fate of those who cross the road of ghosts is the nuclear ruins. There’s no way out of this place, where an extravagant but well-meaning tribe lives. Some of these characters –like the charismatic Rat Man, a fanatic of vehicles and fuel-gatherer– might very well inhabit a fantastic adventure in a galaxy far, far away. In Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono again turns his attention to the outcast; to children who have grown up without water or clean air, to ghosts that end up representing the aftermath of worldly horror, nuclear horror.

Prisoners of the Ghostland was filmed in Japan because Sono suffered a heart attack during its pre-production and, although the Japanese auteur doesn’t appear among the writers, the theme of reincarnation and redemption drives the film. Cage’s character is initially painted as a criminal of the worst kind, worthy of the Wild West of Corbucci. One of the ghosts that haunt him is an innocent Japanese boy, who had the misfortune of witnessing a disastrous bank robbery in which many of the characters and elements present in the story participated.

Prisoners of the Ghostland follows the man with no name until he earns the right to appear as a “hero” in the end credits. It’s an always insane absurdly entertaining redemption. Cage doesn’t stop, not even when he has to give the motivational speech as the “chosen one” that will make the impossible possible.

This is a quite violent film, although without reaching the most brutal, horrifying and controversial Sono of Cold Fish; there are stylized duels, sword thrusts, bullets and, of course, blood spurts. Prisoners of the Ghostland is absolutely bonkers and one of the most satisfying efforts by the great Sono Sion.

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Watch Prisoners of the Ghostland on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100041245/prisoners-of-the-ghostland