the Lost Patrol (1934, John Ford)
Posted in 1934, Film Review on 04/07/2010 by johau
John Ford doing remakes: wtf? The Lost Patrol is now the earliest film I’ve seen from the man’s filmography (increasing my total to a whole 7 out of over 100 films) and though not my favorite I can honestly say that I can’t find a bad thing to say about it.
Clocking in at a brisk 73 minutes it sort of feels like one of those books that are a collection of various samples of an author’s works, The Essential Poe, A Bukowski Read, inside there might be some fantastic stuff, like Karloff’s performance & lite surface deep meditations on both the existential dilemma of choice and living with the consequences & the madness that overcomes an individual when searching for a meaning & purpose with too much fervor.
Eventually these dilemmas lead to basically every man in the company to some degree or another of madness as seen most blatantly in Karloff’s character, who in the end marches to his death, in christ like garments carrying a giant makeshift cross. implying that if there is a god he doesn’t care about the activities of man.
July, 2010
Posted in Viewing Log on 02/07/2010 by johau- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford) 9.25/10
- キッズ・リターン [Kids Return] (1996, Takeshi Kitano) 8.75/10
- the Lost Patrol (1934, John Ford) 9.25/10
June, 2010
Posted in Viewing Log on 26/06/2010 by johauBall of Fire (1941, Howard Hawks) 10/10
Pickup on South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller) 9/10
トウキョウソナタ [Tokyo Sonata] (2008, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) 8.75/10
Les statues meurent aussi (1953, Chris Marker & Alain Resnais) 9.5/10
Ici et ailleurs (1976, Godard, Gorin & Miéville) 9.25/10
Westworld (1973, Michael Crichton) 7.25/10
Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer) 10/10
Mr. Arkadin (1955, Orson Welles) 9.5/10
Monkey Business (1952, Howard Hawks) 8.75/10
the Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller) 10/10
監督ばんざい! [Glory to the Filmmaker!] (2007, Takeshi Kitano)9.25/10
Takeshis’ (2005, Takeshi Kitano) 10/10
Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities] (1974, Wim Wenders) 10/10
Falsche Bewegung [the Wrong Movement] (1975, Wim Wenders)9.25/10
Mirrors (2008, Alexander Aja) 7.5/10
30 Days of Night (2007, David Slade) 4/10
A City of Sadness (1989, Hou Hsiao-Hsien) 10/10
Teeth (2007, Mitchell Lichtenstein) 3/10
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989, Hayao Miyazaki)8.5/10
Bronson (2008, Nicholas Winding Refn) 8/10
La Planète Sauvage [Fantastic Planet] (1973, René Laloux) 10/10
The Steel Helmet (1951, Samuel Fuller)
Posted in 1951, Film Review on 26/06/2010 by johau“Dead man’s nothin’ but a corpse. No one cares what he is now.”
This, among a few others, is one of the standout lines of dialogue in Fuller’s 1951 film about a group of soldiers fighting in the Korean war. You’d find yourself fairly hard pressed to find a film that better proves that Sam Fuller was ahead of his time; in 1951, 6 years after the end of world war II, nobody wanted to talk about the fact that Japanese American citizens were locked up in camps during the war (let alone the fact that the most honored group of American soldiers were Japanese men who were taken out of the camps & fought in Italy), then there’s the other elephant in the room; blacks are fine if they’re serving their country, but they’re shit out of luck if they want equal rights in ’51. Nobody else in American cinema would dare to have mentioned these things in their films, and Fuller handles it with such a blunt and sincere truth that there isn’t a hint of pretense or self-importance. I could play the jaded ass and say that the film is stating obvious things: war doesn’t care about children, religion is a pointless charade, war never ends (as is suggested by the title at the end declaring “There Is No End To This Story.”) but this isn’t the case, because these are truths that will never fade and I hope that, finally, one day this film finds its way into world wide acclaim and a place alongside the regularly cited greatest war films of all time.
10/10
Slayer – God Hates Us All (2001)
Posted in Music with tags God Hates Us All, Slayer on 13/05/2010 by johau
To be completely blunt, I don’t even know where to begin. This is pretty much the metal equivalent of Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room” Okay, I know. Slayer have never really been known for having the greatest lyrics, but at least they had held some degree of interest, “oh, this is about the holocaust”, “oh this is about Ed Gein”. The most interesting thing about this album is that it was released on September 11th, 2001; that’s it, that’s all, anything else that could interest one in this album is purely for comic relief.
With God Hates Us All Kerry King had to have handed over the lyric writing responsibilities to a 13 year old who gets their kicks by “shocking” their parents by saying the most blatantly obvious things that only they find shocking or offensive. There’s no speed here, and King proves that he’s a one trick pony on the guitar. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, maybe in this case instead of not fixing it, then maybe they should have simply walked away and avoided this absolutely worthless album.
They’d been going downhill for quite sometime, but not quite at the breakneck speed Metallica found themselves, so the fact that this is almost as bad as a Limp Bizkit album really shouldn’t have surprised anyone. If you’re familiar with Tommy Wiseau’s film “The Room” you know how horrendously bad it is; it fluctuates from cringe worthy to outright unintentionally hilarious, that pretty much sums up Slayer’s album; the last new Slayer album I bothered with. It gets a 5 solely because its barely better than a Bullet for My Valentine album.
5/100
Cracked Psyche: Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Posted in 1945, Film Noir, Film Review on 11/05/2010 by johau
Nobody likes an unreliable narrator in any form of story telling, and Ulmer’s 1945 Noir masterpiece gives us one of the most questionable purveyors of facts the genre has seen.
Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, the man who we’re supposed to entrust for the truthful retelling of recent events in his life, but aout halfway through the film one can’t help but be at least somewhat suspicious of Roberts’ recounting of his tale of the cruel indifference of fate.
Its like this: when a chil does something wrong and they know they’re going to get into some deep trouble for it they’ll go to great lengths in order to make up a story so as to make them, the guilty , seem like an innocent person, while those around them were the ones conspiring against their well being. Roberts is arguably the same way: the story is told from his perspective, and if one adheres to the idea that he is, in fact, mentally unstable then everything that we’ve seen has been a lie in order to cover up for the murders for which he is guilty. A detour, not from Al’s trip of getting from A to B, but from sanity.
The edition of the movie that I saw was part of a Film Noir combo pack so the quality was piss poor (complete with alterations from black & white to some sort of blue tint, and plenty of hissing audio.) but even the detracting qualities of the DVD could not hinder the brilliance of Detour.
10/10
“No choice….” Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Posted in 1982, Film Noir, Film Review, Science Fiction with tags Blade Runner, Ridley Scott on 11/05/2010 by johau
Yesterday I watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner for what must be the 8th or 9th time. One would think that after so many viewings over the course of only about 6 years that by now I’d be weary of it, but upon every single viewing the film seems just as fresh & intriguing as the first time I saw it over half a decade ago.
What is it that makes me want to come back to this film time & time again? The same reason I can watch Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs without a moment’s hesitation; the ideas at play within the film. Where as Peckinpah’s film is quite possibly the most misantrhopic film ever to be produced within the US Scott’s film is one of the most intriguing Science Fiction films, right up there with Solaris & 2001, to be made in the past 30 years.
Can you think of another Sci-Fi Noir film that came before it? Yeah, neither can I. (Okay, Alphaville….)
The film has been lauded for its achievements in style, but like I said its the ideas in the film that make me come back time & time again. (that, & I’m on a personal quest to have the vast majority of the people I know view this film before I die.) Death is inevitable, and there is no way to escape it. This is a simple fact of life. We can turn on those nearest to us in some futile attempt to prolong our existence, as Roy does to his creator in one of the most moving scenes of the film, but what it boils down to is that struggling against the inevitable at times brings nothing but destruction and misery. “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?”
The idea of free will is also played with in regards to the whole being of the Replicants; they think, at least in Rachel’s case, that they possess free will, that their memories are their own & that they are their own person. This turns out is not the case at all; so, the film asks the audience, what is it to be truly human, if some mega corporation can replicate the experience to a T?
And, finally, yes, Deckhard is a replicant, there’s no denying it, don’t be a retard.
