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Brokeback Mountain ***½
USA: Ang Lee, 2005
What did I think of Brokeback Mountain, which garnered three Oscars, including Best Director, and a plethora of adulation? As is so often the case, the answer is good, but not as good as the praise would lead you to believe. However, first and foremost I think something should be cleared up: in this so-called "gay cowboy movie", neither one of the two main characters is gay, and they herd sheep, not cows. However, "bisexual sheepboy movie" doesn't have quite the same zing to it, so I can see why the less factually correct pseudonym became the generally accepted one. When it was initially released, many viewers and critics remarked, with both surprise and admiration, that, despite featuring a relationship between two men, this wasn't a "gay" movie. I think I know what they mean: it doesn't treat the gender of the pair as particularly remarkable (although that's not to say that the social stigma attached to it is never an issue). "It could just as well have been a man and a woman," many people said. And that, for me, is both the film's strength and its weakness. Yes, it's impressive to see a Hollywood movie treat this sort of subject matter with respect, but at the same time, make one of the two cowboys a woman and I strongly doubt that it would have attracted nearly as much attention (although the scene in which they beat each other up might have raised some eyebrows). This is a rather conventional tale of forbidden love, and the characters, despite offering some insight into the personas they construct for themselves in order to fit into a conservative society, are really not massively interesting. It's all quite nicely shot and competently acted, but I don't see this as a masterpiece by any means; on the contrary, it has a lot in common with those daytime made-for-TV "dramedies" (to borrow a word I detest) that Channel 5 shows most afternoons.
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Slaughter Hotel *
Original title: La Bestia Uccide a Sangue Freddo
Italy: Fernando Di Leo, 1971
A hooded assassin armed with an axe is trawling the corridors of a mental asylum for troubled (not to mention oversexed) women located somewhere in the countryside. It's the sort of asylum that's run by the shifty-eyed Klaus Kinski and stocked will all manner of medieval weaponry. The sort of asylum where the curvaceous inmates sleep in the nude with their bedroom doors wide open and the lights on full blast - in other words, the usual kind. Who could it be? (Hint: it's not Klaus Kinski.)
There are some interesting colour-tinted opening titles which introduce the key cast members. These remind me somewhat od the opening titles for Zimmer 13, and manage to be quite atmospheric, suggesting that the film which follows them will be of a similar standard. Unfortunately, Slaughter Hotel turns out to be a flatly shot and annoyingly ludicrous affair, combining elements of the giallo with soft-core (and even, at times, borderline hard-core) pornography, neither to good effect. With its theme of insanity and its attempts to marry the modernism of the giallo with a gothic aesthetic, it recalls Emilio Miraglia's considerably more effective (although still deeply flawed) The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, but here any attempts to develop an engaging plot fail miserably and are jettisoned in favour of scene after scene of sex and/or bloodletting.
What's surprising is that all of this could have been pretty entertaining in a "so bad it's good way", but the film kills any potential for this by moving at a snail's pace and generally dragging out each scene well after its limited potential has been exhausted. There's nothing particularly appealing about an ineptly-staged lesbian scene between two uncomfortable-looking actresses going on for minute after minute. The characters themselves are not particularly interesting, although the various "cures" suggested for the inmates' "ailments" should raise an eyebrow or two - Rosalba Neri's character, committed, it would seem, because she likes having sex, is immediately ordered to take a shower, an act which has the effect of causing her to writhe about orgasmically and rub herself against the walls (this particular act is set to some amusingly sinister music courtesy of Silvano Spadaccino, whose score is, for the most part, dull and uninteresting).
This is ultimately the sort of giallo that makes Strip Nude For Your Killer look well-made and intelligently scripted. As a murder mystery it fails to work, and as a slice of cult sleaze it's hardly any more effective. I'm just slightly surprised that such a sexually explicit giallo was made as early as 1971 - I'd previously assumed that this particular trend didn't emerge until closer to the middle of the decade. In the end, it's all very silly but also rather boring. Deep Red this ain't.
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Footprints on the Moon ****
Original title: Le Orme
Italy: Luigi Bazzoni, 1975
Some films are so completely nutty that the only way of understanding just how nutty they are is to see them for yourself. This is certainly the case with Footprints on the Moon, which also goes by the names of Primal Impulse or just Footprints (its original Italian title is Le Orme, which translates as "the tracks", i.e. footprints). This 1975 piece was made by Luigi Bazzoni and his regular cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who in 1971 had collaborated on a giallo called The Fifth Cord, which was very impressive to look at but rather inremarkable in the script department. Footprints on the Moon is generally referred to as Bazzoni's "other giallo", but in truth I think that label is somewhat tenuous. The word "giallo" conjures up different things for different people, but I think it's fairly self-evident that anyone expecting the usual black-gloved serial killer affair, as popularised by Dario Argento, will be slightly disappointed by this film. Likewise, even those whose definition of the giallo is broader will probably find the content of the film a bit surprising. The nearest point of comparison I can think of is The Perfume of the Lady in Black, another Italian thriller from the same period which dealt with the similar subject matter of a woman whose sanity is crumbling.
Florinda Bolkan (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) stars as Alice, a translator being haunted by nightmares of a rather creepy black and white sci-fi film starring Klaus Kinski as the sinister Blackmann. She believes she remembers seeing the film once, but the dreams are incredibly vivid and seem almost real. Following one of these dreams, Alice awakens to discover that she has forgotten the events of the past three days. Initially led to believe that she has actually been asleep for this duration of time, she becomes suspicious when various clues lead her to the Turkish island of Garma, where various locals clearly remember her having visited only a few days ago - an event of which Alice has no recollection. Even more strangely, they all address her as Nicole.
Footprints on the Moon is considerably more avant-garde than its predecessor. While The Fifth Cord was essentially the work of an experimental crew saddled with a conventional script, this one makes absolutely no attempt to be "normal". Right from the start something seems to be off: there is a sense of distance and artificiality, conveyed by the careful camerawork and set dressing. The washed-out pan and scan transfer of my copy makes it difficult to appreciate the cinematography, but even so Bazzoni and Storaro's fascinating use of angles and geometric architecture is readily evident. Likewise, there use of primary colours recalls their work on The Fifth Cord, with night scenes where the entire screen is bathed in blue and a slow motion climax with pumped contrasts and heavy colour tinting. As befits a film in which the protagonist's mental faculties are being called into question, we're never quite sure whether what we're seeing or hearing is real or all in her head.
There's a sense at times that the imagery is just a little too crazy to be entirely successful: the use of the aforementioned sci-fi movie is, to an extent, explained at the end, but it doesn't exactly fit the tone of the rest of the film, and much of it tends to be a little on the cheesy side. I'm also not sure I'd call the film as good as The Fifth Cord - its narrative is certainly considerably more imaginative, but it does at times overstep the mark and end up simply being weird for the sake of weirdness. In balance, The Fifth Cord was more successful because it was less ambitious in its intentions. Still, Footprints on the Moon is a unique, atmospheric, and visually arresting film that really needs a legitimate DVD release so that these qualities can be fully appreciated.
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(*) Lost in Translation ****
USA/Japan: Sofia Coppola, 2003
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The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire *½
Original title: L'Iguana dalla Lingua di Fuoco
Italy/France/West Germany: Riccardo Freda, 1971
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(*) Run Lola Run ****½
Original title: Lola Rennt
Germany: Tom Tykwer, 1998
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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan ***½
USA: Larry Charles, 2006
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(*) North by Northwest *****
USA: Alfred Hitchcock, 1959
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(*) Alice in Wonderland ****
USA: Clyde Geronimi/Wilfred Jackson/Hamilton Luske, 1951
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Zimmer 13 ***½
West Germany/Denmark/France: Harald Reinl, 1964
Zimmer 13 (Room 13) is my first encounter with the krimi movement, a series of thrillers produced in Germany during the late 1950s to early 1970s based on the writings of British novelist Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. These films are often compared to the Italian giallo movement, and indeed many gialli were marketed in Germany is krimis - for example The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, What Have You Done to Solange? and Seven Bloodstained Orchids. Compared with their Italian counterparts, these films tend to emphasise professional detectives and organised crime rather than amateur sleuths up against lone madmen, while the (70s) Italian modernism favoured by giallo directors tends to be eschewed in favour of an image of what appears to be a pre-World War 2 England.
I'm feeling in the dark here, so bear with me. The plot focuses on a private detective, Johnny Gray (Joachim Fuchsberger, who also appeared in Solange, further emphasising the krimi connection), asigned to protect Denise (Karin Dor), the daughter of Sir Marney (Walter Rilla), who finds himself owing a favour to the wrong crowd and fears for her safety. There's also a razor-wielding maniac on the loose, and a maverick ganster named Joe Legge (Richard Häussler), planning a grand heist with his lackeys in the ominous Room 13.
The strongest element of the film, and its most giallo-like part, is the mystery surrounding the identity of the razor killer. I didn't guess the outcome, and it came as significantly surprising, although I tend not to think too analytically about a killer's identity the first time I watch a film. The heist itself, as it happens, is not particularly interesting or remarkable - the whole thing is made out to be intricately planned, right down to the second, but in reality it's just a run of the mill train robbery. The ominous-sounding Room 13 also turns out to be anything but - it's just a room in a club where the gansters meet (given that the film is named after it, I was expecting a little more).
Still, the film is nicely-paced, and the monochromatic Scope photography, by Ernst W. Kalinke, is rich and evocative (I always considered a shame that so few gialli were shot in black and white, with Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much being pretty much the only one I can recall right now). Elsewhere, Fuchsberger makes a reasonably effective lead, even if he's not particularly convincing as a "brilliant" detective - a failing of the script rather than his performance. Karin Dor is also a sympathetic heroine/damsel in distress, cut from the Nora Davis (to again reference The Girl Who Knew Too Much) mould - vulnerable, but not completely gutless. Some attempts at comic relief, most involving bumbling police scientist Dr. Higgins (Eddi Arent), don't work particularly well, given that they tend to crop up at the most inappropriate moments - usually immediately following a death.
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Movies
Welcome to the movie checklist!
This section is an archive listing every movie I've seen from January 1 2005 onwards. Films I have already seen are included and will be marked with a (*), but probably won't be reviewed except under special circumstances. I will be including a rating for each film (in stars, out of 5), and hope to be able to include a brief 1-2 paragraph review of each film, although due to time constraints that won't always be possible.
Archives
Films Viewed This Month
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