Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)

Adam Driver in Star Wars: Episode VIII -- The Last Jedi

Luke Skywalker: Mark Hamill
Leia Organa: Carrie Fisher
Kylo Ren: Adam Driver
Rey: Daisy Ridley
Finn: John Boyega
Poe Dameron: Oscar Isaac
Snoke: Andy Serkis
Maz Kanata (voice): Lupita Nyong'o
General Hux: Domhnall Gleeson
C-3PO: Anthony Daniels
Captain Phasma: Gwendoline Christie
Rose Tico: Kelly Marie Tran
Vice Admiral Holdo: Laura Dern
DJ: Benicio Del Toro

Director: Rian Johnson
Screenplay: Rian Johnson
Cinematography: Steve Yedlin
Production design: Rick Heinrichs
Film editing: Bob Ducsay
Music: John Williams

Fun but just a little bit frustrating. As I said in my comments on Episode VII: The Force Awakens, we need more backstory -- about Ren's fall to the dark side, about Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rey. We get snippets of Ren's story, including Luke's threat to kill Ren when he sees him going bad, and of Rey's, including a revelation that her parents were no one in particular -- which may be unreliable information on both counts. Poe and Finn go their separate ways in The Last Jedi, essentially into subplots that add texture but not substance to their stories. Instead of establishing Poe, Finn, and Rey as the heroic triad comparable to Luke, Leia, and Han, which is what The Force Awakens might have led us to expect, The Last Jedi makes them seem relatively ineffectual. I think the episode suffers a bit from "middle film" syndrome, the need to continue a story without providing the resolution that presumably will arrive in Episode IX.

The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003)

The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001

The Two Towers, 2002

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood in The Two Towers

The Return of the King, 2003

Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and Ian McKellen in The Return of the King

Frodo: Elijah Wood
Gandalf: Ian McKellen
Aragorn: Viggo Mortensen
Sam: Sean Astin
Pippin: Billy Boyd
Merry: Dominic Monaghan
Legolas: Orlando Bloom
Gimli/Treebeard (voice): John Rhys-Davies
Arwyn: Liv Tyler
Elrond: Hugo Weaving
Gollum (voice and motion capture)/Smeagol: Andy Serkis
Bilbo: Ian Holm
Saruman: Christopher Lee
Galadriel: Cate Blanchett
Boromir: Sean Bean
Eowyn: Miranda Otto
Theoden: Bernard Hill
Denethor: John Noble
Eomer: Karl Urban
Faramir: David Wenham
Haldir: Craig Parker
Wormtongue: Brad Dourif

Director: Peter Jackson
Screenplay: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair
Based on a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cinematography: Andrew Lesnie
Production design: Grant Major
Film editing: John Gilbert (The Fellowship of the Ring), Michael Horton (The Two Towers), Jamie Selkirk (The Return of the King)
Music: Howard Shore

There is a clarity of narrative and action in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings that seems to me to be lacking in the blockbusters that have followed in its sizable wake, even those that have been scaled down for serialization on television, like Game of Thrones. (And even, I might add, in Jackson's own attempt to expand J.R.R. Tolkien's much more modest novel The Hobbit into a similarly epic film trilogy.) Some of this clarity lies in the source, in Tolkien's vividly characterized and shrewdly plotted novel. But Jackson and his team also display an ability to stage action sequences like the Helm's Deep scenes in The Two Towers and the assault on Minas Tirith in The Return of the King while both keeping things exciting and making sure we know where the characters we most care about are in the thick of things. Too often, especially in recent superhero films, the big battles of action movies seem to be either taking place in the dark or are simply a blur of quick cuts, with the revelation of who's up and who's down taking place after the dust clears. In The Lord of the Rings, there's a logic to what's taking place, and an awareness of peril and triumph that threads through the action. This is the more to the good because Jackson makes us care about Tolkien's characters, even the ones who seem less vulnerable or lovable than the small beings who bear the burden of the Ring. I think the special effects have begun to show their age: The group shot of the fellowship, for example, in the first film in the trilogy, feels awkwardly tricksy, with the hobbits and the dwarf obviously "pasted in" along with the human-sized characters. But the great vast project of bringing Tolkien's book to the screen remains a landmark and a stunning success.

Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997)

Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy

Holden McNeil: Ben Affleck
Alyssa Jones: Joey Lauren Adams
Banky Edwards: Jason Lee
Jay: Jason Mewes
Silent Bob: Kevin Smith
Hooper X: Dwight Ewell

Director: Kevin Smith
Screenplay: Kevin Smith
Cinematography: David Klein
Production design: Robert Holtzman
Film editing: Scott Mosier, Kevin Smith
Music: David Pirner

The treatment of sexual identity in movies and on TV becomes a more sensitive topic every year, so it's nice to see that Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy hasn't dated as much in the past 20 years as it could have. Just hearing that the plot involves a love affair between a straight guy and a lesbian sets off all sorts of alarms about misconceptions of sexual orientation, including the old canard that the "right guy" (or woman) could "convert" someone to heterosexuality. Actually, even in 1997 that idea would have been derided and protested off the screen, but there is sometimes a sense in Chasing Amy that Smith is walking on eggshells. What we have instead is a thoughtful portrait of the complexities of youthful sexual experimentation along with a scathingly satiric one of the ways in which men misunderstand women, gay or straight. The penultimate scene in which Holden (a deliciously Salingerian choice of name) attempts to prove his bona fides to Alyssa is brilliantly, cringingly, painfully funny. 

Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev, 1974)

Anna Prucnal in Sweet Movie

Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada: Carole Laure
Potemkin Sailor: Pierre Clémenti
Capt. Anna Planeta: Anna Prucnal
El Macho: Sami Frey
Mrs. Abplanalpe: Jane Mallett
Jeremiah Muscle: Roy Callender
Mr. Kapital: John Vernon
Mama Communa: Marpessa Dawn

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: France Gallagher, Dusan Makavejev, Martin Malina
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Production design: Jocelyn Joly
Film editing: Yann Dedet
Music: Manos Hatzidakis

In the 1933 decision that lifted the ban in the United States on James Joyce's Ulysses, Judge John M. Woolsey dismissed the charges of obscenity, though he found that "in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic." I've never found anything to be "emetic" in Ulysses, certainly not on the level of some of the more queasy moments in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie, which exploits every orifice known to be possessed by human beings, especially in the orgiastic scenes featuring Otto Muehl's commune. As for obscenity, that lies in the eye of the beholder. To my mind, Sweet Movie dallies on the brink of it in the scene in which Anna Prucnal's Captain Anna, scantily clad to say the least, makes what appear to be sexual come-ons to a group of boys aboard her boat called Survival. At moments like this I snap out of the trance of make-believe into which art lures us, and into a realization that the boys in the scene are pre-pubescent actors. There's a layer of child sexual abuse in staging such a scene that I can't quite rise above. Beyond that, however, Sweet Movie does precisely what Makavejev wants it to: It surprises, startles, shocks, overturning most of our expectations of what a movie can and/or should show us. It's valuable for that reason alone. Whether it illuminates or provokes thought in its even-handed assault on both capitalism and communism is another question. It has begun to feel dated, as many avant-garde satires tend to do. But it's also done with a great deal of verve and chutzpah, which never really grow old.     

Spirits of the Dead (Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Federico Fellini, 1968)

Metzengerstein

Jane Fonda in Spirits of the Dead: Metzengerstein

Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein: Jane Fonda
Baron Wilhelm Berlifitzing: Peter Fonda
Contessa's Advisor: James Robertson Justice
Contessa's Friend: Françoise Prévost

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Pascal Cousin
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Claude Renoir
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov
Music: Jean Prodromidès

William Wilson

Alain Delon in Spirits of the Dead: William Wilson

William Wilson: Alain Delon
Giuseppina: Brigitte Bardot
Priest: Renzo Palmer

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle, Clement Biddle Wood
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Production design: Ghislain Uhry
Film editing: Franco Arcalli, Suzanne Baron
Music: Diego Masson

Toby Dammit

Terence Stamp in Spirits of the Dead: Toby Dammit

Toby Dammit: Terence Stamp
Priest: Salvo Randone
TV Commentator: Annie Tonietti
The Devil: Marina Yaru

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Production design: Piero Tosi
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nino Rota

Of the three short films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories collected here under the title Spirits of the Dead, only the third, Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, a freewheeling version of Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," really works. Roger Vadim's Metzengerstein is simply cheesy, with his then-wife Jane Fonda sashaying around in supposedly period costumes that are designed to reveal as much flesh as possible. The casting of her brother, Peter, as the man she loves, is obviously there to elicit a frisson of some sort, but it doesn't. Louis Malle's William Wilson stuffs a little too much of Poe's doppelgänger fable into its confines, and despite the presence of a cigar-puffing Brigitte Bardot, manages to pull whatever punches the story may have had, ending up rather dull. But Toby Dammit is a small gem, a concentration of Fellini's usual grotesques and decadents into a bright satire on celebrity: It's almost impossible to watch another awards show without recalling Fellini's acid-bathed take on it. Only the conclusion of the film really retains much of Poe, which suggests that Vadim and Malle might have been better off devising contemporary riffs on the material, as Fellini does.

Black River (Masaki Kobayashi, 1957)

Tatsuya Nakadai and Ineko Arima in Black River

Shizuko: Ineko Arima
Nishida: Fumio Watanabe
Killer Joe: Tatsuya Nakadai
Landlady: Isuzu Yamada
Okada: Tomo'o Nagai
Okada's Wife: Keiko Awaji
Kurihara: Eijiro Tono
Kin: Seiji Miyaguchi
Sakazaki: Asao Sano

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama
Based on a story by Takeo Tomishima
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Ninjin Kurabu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable slice-of-life drama Black River takes place in a slum near an American army base. It's a festering dump, inhabited by a variety of people, from lowlifes attempting to make a living by exploiting the soldiers to dead-enders with no place else to go. Into this morass wanders a naïve university student, Nishida, in search of cheap lodgings, who tries to make a little money as a used-book seller. He falls for a pretty waitress, Shizuko, who longs to escape from the slum, but their attachment puts him in the line of fire of a swaggering young gangster called Killer Joe, who has his own designs on Shizuko. Presiding over everything is the landlady, who has plans for the property that don't include its tenants. She's played to a fare-thee-well by the great Isuzu Yamada, perhaps best known as the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957). Here she's outfitted with a snaggly golden-toothed grill, a fitting correlative for the concealment of the moral rot within. But the real scene-stealer of the film is Tatsuya Nakadai as Killer Joe, in one of his first major film appearances, perfectly blending the charisma that would make him a star with the menace that would allow him to play memorable villains as well as heroes.

The Thick-Walled Room (Masaki Kobayashi, 1956)

Torohiko Hamada in The Thick-Walled Room

Yokota: Ko Mishima
Yamashita: Torohiko Hamada
Yoshiko: Keiko Kishi
Yamashita's Sister: Toshiko Kobayashi
Kawanishi: Kinzo Shin
Kimura: Tsutomu Shimomoto

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Kobo Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Shizuo Oosawa
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The resonant phrase "just following orders" hovers silently throughout Masaki Kobayashi's scathing The Thick-Walled Room. It's a portrait of postwar Japan more critical of all concerned, from the militarists who caused the war to the forces that occupied the country after it, than most of the films made by Kobayashi's contemporaries, which is why it was held from release for three years after it was made in 1953. The film focuses on the class-B and -C war criminals held prisoners by the occupying Americans -- and then by the Japanese -- for crimes they were ordered by their superior officers to commit. Meanwhile, many of those superior officers have been released and have returned to civilian life and even to important positions in business and government. The prisoners are both haunted by the things they were ordered to do and resentful of the injustice of their situation. They also remain ignorant of the way the outside world has changed. Yokota, for example, dreams of his girlfriend, Yoshiko, unaware that she has become a prostitute. The screenplay by novelist Kobo Abe is psychologically rich, and Kobayashi's direction makes the most of its subtleties.

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Karl Scheydt in The American Soldier

Ricky: Karl Scheydt
Rosa von Praunheim: Elga Sorbas
Jan: Jan George
Doc: Hark Bohm
Cop: Marius Aicher
Chambermaid: Margarethe von Trotta
Gypsy: Ulli Lommel
Magdalena Fuller: Katrin Schaake
Singer: Ingrid Caven
Ricky's Mother: Eva Ingeborg Scholz
Ricky's Brother: Kurt Raab
Prostitute: Irm Hermann
Police Chief: Gustl Datz
Franz Walsch: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenplay: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cinematography: Dietrich Lohmann
Film editing: Thea Eymèsz
Music: Peer Raben

Is The American Soldier an hommage to American film noir or is it a satiric glance at the ongoing European fascination with that genre? I like to think that it's the latter, Fassbinder's snarky take on the movies' hard-drinking anti-heroes who, like Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) for one example, affect trenchcoats and fedoras as they go about their murderous business. Surely Ricky's sharply angled hat and his omnipresent bottle of Ballantine's are tongue-in-cheek allusions to those cinematic predecessors. The American Soldier isn't up to much else. Fassbinder is playing around with his usual company as well as giving himself another opportunity to play a character named Franz Walsch, which he did in Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) before handing over the role to Harry Baer in Gods of the Plague (1970). The film's real highlight is its loopy, nonsensical ending, in which Ricky's brother wrestles with the dying Ricky as their mother looks on impassively. Otherwise, it's really for Fassbinder completists.

The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Ballad of Narayama

Orin: Kinuyo Tanaka
Tatsuhei: Teiji Takahashi
Tama: Yuko Mochizuki
Kesakichi: Danko Ichikawa
Matsu: Keiko Ogasawara
Mata: Seiji Miyaguchi
Mata's Son: Yunosuke Ito
Teru: Ken Mitsuda

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Matsunosuke Nozawa

Keisuke Kinoshita was so prolific a filmmaker, so freewheeling in his choice of subject, so willing to try something different with each film, that it's tempting to dismiss him as a kind of dilettante. And too often, his attempts at pathos come off as sentimental, even banal. But if he has a masterwork in his oeuvre, it's The Ballad of Narayama, a highly stylized account of life in a medieval Japanese village in which old people, when they reach the age of 70, are taken up the mountain and left there to die. I know nothing of kabuki, but the style of the film is often likened to that traditional Japanese theater. What I do know is that Kinoshita is one of the few directors who have managed to make film feel theatrical, to give us the intimacy of theater with the flexibility of film. The Ballad of Narayama is carefully, deliberately staged, using sets that are obviously on soundstages with trees and plants that emulate nature but are clearly artificial. I kept being reminded, oddly, of the MGM musical Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954), which was originally planned to be filmed in Scotland, and later on the Monterey Peninsula in California, but was moved into a Culver City soundstage thanks to budget cuts. Kinoshita, who had often made spectacular use of actual Japanese locations, wasn't forced by the budget to give his film such an artificial look but rather chose it. And it works: There's a formal quality to the film that suits its story, a distancing that makes the harshness of its fable so effective. The film also benefits from the performance of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, whose dignified acceptance of her fate becomes heartbreaking. Her own grandson, Kesakichi, scorns her as just another mouth to feed, and mocks her with a song about a woman with demon teeth, whereupon Orin takes a rock and smashes her own teeth to demonstrate her good intentions. Tanaka makes this horrifying scene plausible, as she does the final submission to the abandonment at Narayama. She's well supported by Teiji Takahashi as her grieving, dutiful son.

The Rose on His Arm (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

Yoshiko Kuga in The Rose on His Arm

Kiyoshi Akiyama: Katsuo Nakamura
Keiko Hase: Yoshiko Kuga
Kiyoshi's Mother: Sadako Sawamura
Masahiro Hase: Akira Ishihama
Kaoro Akiyama: Noriko Arita
Yoko: Hiroko Sugita
Choshichi Tsuji: Shinji Tanaka
Masahiro's Mother: Kuniyo Miyake
Masahiro's Father: Ryuji Kita

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita '
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The only real distinction accruing to The Rose on His Arm is that it was cited as one of the best foreign films by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in its Golden Globe Awards for 1956. Otherwise, it's a rather plodding entry in the "troubled youth" genre, very much outshone even in the year of its release by Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit, which exploited with greater finesse the audience's fascination with the postwar generation. Kiyoshi is a sullen, rather spoiled young man who resists his mother's attempts to find him gainful employment in a factory, and instead falls into the clutches of would-be yakuza Masahiro, not to mention the arms of Masahiro's pretty sister, Keiko. Keisuke Kinoshita and his usual behind-the-camera collaborators never quite lift this one out of predictability.