I've been catching up on some movies I own in box sets that I haven't seen yet, so my excursions into Netflix weren't nearly as frequent since the last post. It's just as well. I wasn't particularly impressed with most of these movies.
The Man Without a Past -- Aki Kaurismaki
This was recommended to me by a coworker whose main interests in movies are blood, boobs, and babies dying (OK, the last one is optional), so I wasn't really sure to expect from a movie about a man who loses his memory and, according to the Netflix description, "finds love with a woman and discovers values he had never known." It didn't live up my coworkers main interests, so I was hoping that it was going to be a legitimately great movie, but it was OK. Certainly a movie that will leave you feeling good, but everyone is kind of sleepwalking through life and the grief the main character gets for having amnesia is repeatedly ridiculous. It's not bad, but I'm not really interested in diving into the rest of Kaurismaki's catalogue.
Women in Fury -- Michele Massimo Tarantini (as Michael E. Lemick)
This is the perfect movie to watch with an audience. There's a jailbreak, nudity, gunfire, all sorts of stuff you look for from an exploitation movie. Just tons of stuff to have fun with. Watching it alone, it's kind of uninteresting, but I can't hate it because I know it could be fun. This is the first "women in prison" film I've seen and I know there are supposedly classics in the genre and I don't know where this one falls, but it's not a bad start when all is said and done.
Nighthawks -- Bruce Malmuth
Nighthawks is all kinds of awesome. It's got Sylvester Stallone before he decided that he was going to solely as a beefed up cartoon. Rutger Hauer in his first American role as the terrosist, Wulfgar. Billy Dee Williams as the only kind of useful partner of Stallone. Tons of fun with a great foot chase through the subway system in NYC and a sweet standoff on an air tram. It is unfortunate that the female characters exist purely as a plot point and an exposition source, but it was the '80s. That's hardly as bad as misogyny got during that era. Highly recommended.
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus -- Terry Gilliam
I'm not in the best position to accurately assess this movie. I'm a total Gilliam mark. I'll even defend The Brothers Grimm (to an extent). I love the world's Gilliam creates the darkness that runs through them. Parnassus isn't his best work, but it's still pretty good, if different from what I expected. It's hard not to think about what it would have been like had Heath Ledger not died during filming though it's interesting how they handled it. My biggest beef with the film is how reliant it is on CGI. I know it's the easy way to do things these days and Gilliam almost went bust making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but there's a bit of magic lost when the fantasy world is clearly not tangible. Still, I respect the man's vision and no one even tried to make movies like Gilliam. And Tom Waits makes a great devil.
Santa Sangre -- Alejandro Jodorowsky
Jodorowsky's films have a way of staying with me. I didn't love Holy Mountain, but I liked it a lot and it's visually astounding. El Topo is a very cool surrealist western. I was very excited when I got Santa Sangre in the mail because by all accounts, it's a Jodorowsky horror movie. Much to my dismay, it's a fair amount of uninteresting punctuated by some fairly bizarre scenes which aren't enough to sustain the film for me. Probably my biggest problem with the film is that it takes place in modern times (the '80s) and Jodorowsky's films feel like they exist out of time. Any introduction of modern elements is jarring and feels out of place. I was really hoping Jodorowsky would take another step closer to being one of my favorite filmmakers, but that's not going to happen with this Santa Sangre.
She Killed in Ecstacy -- Jesus Franco
I talked about this film a little here and there's not much more to say. Franco is an inept filmmaker and can't even make sex interesting. Done.
3 Extremes II -- Peter Chan, Jee-woon Kim, Nonzee Nimibutr
I watched Three... Extremes a few weeks ago and I liked it. There was only one stand-out (Chan-wook Park), but they were all good. Pleased with this experience, I was eager to check out the second and I wasn't really prepared for the difference between the two. Three... Extremes varies its tone and pace amongst the shorts, but 3 Extremes II is deliberate and solemn throughout the entire run-time. Perhaps most disappointingly, this collection feature the first film I've seen of Jee-woon Kim's that I haven't been fond of. It's easy to see that he filmed it around the time of A Tale of Two Sisters as the tone and subject matter are similar, though this is much worse. I don't really have much to say about the other two shorts because not a whole lot of note happens. Of all three segments, Chan's is the best. Something of note is that during Nimibutr's film, I was trying to figure out what country it was from, not recognizing the sound of the language or the names of the cast and crew. A quick search on IMDB told me it's from Thailand, a country of which I'm not very familiar with their films. It's good to have that in my back pocket, now.
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