Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

Yoshiko Okada and Ureo Egawa in Woman of Tokyo

Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Ureo Egawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryo. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Hideo Shigehara. Art direction: Takashi Kanasu. Film editing: Kazuo Ishikawa. 

Woman of Tokyo, which runs only 45 minutes and was shot in nine days, shows Yasujiro Ozu moving toward the economy of narrative that marks his mature style. In it, Ozu also pays homage to one of the master directors who influenced him: Ernst Lubitsch. In the middle of the film, Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka) goes to the movies with her boyfriend Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa), and we see a bit of the movie they're watching: the 1932 anthology film If I Had a Million. It's the segment directed by Lubitsch featuring Charles Laughton as an office worker who, upon being given a million dollars, celebrates the windfall by razzing his boss. The Lubitsch segment has nothing to do with the plot of Woman of Tokyo, other than that the central character, Chikako (Yoshiko Okada), works in an office, which doesn't pay her enough to support herself and her brother, Ryoichi, a university student. Chikako resorts to prostitution as a result, and the plot turns on the revealing of her secret occupation. If I Had a Million was a talkie, but Lubitsch's segment is virtually silent, and I think Ozu alluded to it in Woman of Tokyo, which is one of his late silent films, as a kind of homage to visual narrative, at which Ozu would continue to excel. 

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones, 2015)

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock/Truffaut

Cast: Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Bob Balaban (voice), Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Peter Bogdanovich, Arnaud Desplechin, David Fincher, James Gray, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Richard Linklater, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese. Screenplay: Kent Jones, Serge Toubiana. Cinematography: Nick Bentgen, Daniel Cowen, Eric Gautier, Mihai Malaimare Jr., Lisa Rinzler, Genta Tamaki. Film editing: Rachel Reichman. Music: Jeremiah Bornfield. 

I urge anyone who's interested in movies, and not just interested in Alfred Hitchcock or François Truffaut, to see the terrific documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, beautifully put together by Kent Jones and Serge Toubiana. Although the focus is on Hitchcock, and to a lesser extent on Truffaut, the film constitutes an invaluable lesson on how to make a movie, particularly what a director does to grab hold of viewers and manipulate their thoughts and emotions. Hitchcock's techniques were unique, of course, derived from his own interests and obsessions as well as from his experience as someone who began his career directing silent movies, which taught him how to tell a story through images. But the comments in the film by contemporary filmmakers like Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Richard Linklater on Hitchcock's techniques, particularly Martin Scorsese's analysis of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), open a new perspective on their own works. 

Ravenous (Antonia Bird, 1999)

Guy Pearce in Ravenous

Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, David Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, John Spencer, Stephen Spinella, Neal McDonough, Joseph Runningfox, Sheila Tousey, Bill Brochtrup. Screenplay: Ted Griffin. Cinematography: Anthony B. Richmond. Production design: Bryce Perrin. Film editing: Neil Farrell. Music: Michael Nyman, Damon Albarn. 

When the only thing critics can agree on is that your movie has a distinguished music score, you kind of have to admit that the film's a botch. Ravenous is an interesting botch, however: a horror Western about cannibalism, a topic that tantalizes anyone who has ever heard the story of the Donner Party. It has a strong cast, filled with actors who are gifted at playing baddies and weirdos, like Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies, and Neal McDonough. The cannibalism in the film is based on the Algonquian legend of the wendigo, an evil spirit that possesses humans and turns them into killers with a desire for human flesh. Yet the movie comes off scattered and sometimes clunky, with the grisly violence arriving without the buildup of suspense. The central character, Capt. Boyd (Guy Pearce), is given a confusing backstory. During the Mexican-American war, he tasted flesh, sort of, when he was wounded, heaped in a pile of corpses, and, unable to move, swallowed the blood of one of the men stacked above him. It gave him a brief surge of strength, during which he struggled out of the pile and performed the act of heroism for which he was honored. But when the commanding officer realizes Boyd is really a coward, he punishes him with a post in an isolated fort located in the Sierra Nevada. The fort is staffed with misfits, and soon falls prey to a mysterious stranger named Colqhoun (Carlyle), who claims to be the survivor of a wagon train that got lost in the mountains and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Colqhoun is not what he seems, of course, and the rest of the business is bloody. Some of the movie's disjointedness stems from the disagreement between the original director, Milcho Manchevski, and the producers and a subsequent conflict between his replacement, Raja Gosnell, and the cast. Finally, Antonia Bird was hired to complete the film, but even she had problems with the producers and was critical of the cut that was released. Critics generally disliked the movie, but everyone seems to have been pleased with the innovative score by Michael Nyman and Damon Alborn, which relies on instruments from the historic period in which the action takes place and echoes of hymns and patriotic anthems.   

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader. 

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.  

Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (Ernest R. Dickerson, 1995)

Billy Zane in Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight

Cast: Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Thomas Haden Church, C.C.H. Pounder, Brenda Bakke, Dick Miller, Gary Farmer, John Kassir (voice). Screenplay: Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris, Mark Bishop. Cinematography: Rick Bota. Production design: Christiaan Wagener, Gregory S. Melton. Film editing: Stephen Lovejoy. Music: Edward Shearmur. 

I was going to say that failure to access the 10-year-old boy in me kept me from enjoying Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight, but then I remembered that when I was 10 years old I thought the Tales From the Crypt comic books were repulsive trash. So maybe I really enjoyed it more than that 10-year-old would have, which isn't saying much. It's still trash, but I've seen many movies that repulsed me more. There's a tongue-in-cheek element in its slimy rotting horrors (if there's a tongue to put in a cheek or a cheek to put one in) that doesn't exactly redeem it, but at least kept me watching. And it suggests that we have come to a point in the post-Christian era that what would once be regarded as blasphemous is now only a plot device: namely, the use of the blood of Jesus as a horror movie gimmick. Mostly, it made me feel a little sorry for the actors who have to go through their paces, trying to act but knowing that anything they do is going to be chopped up in the editing and stirred into a mess of special effects. Billy Zane as the demonic Collector and William Sadler as his heroic antagonist are the nominal leads, but Jada Pinkett Smith comes off best as the ex-con on work release who labors in the boarding house where most of the action takes place. She manages to create a character we can root for, which is all the otherwise well-worn plot needs. The frame story in which the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) introduces things is unnecessary and mainly serves to promote the HBO series from which it's a theatrical spinoff. 

For Me and My Gal (Busby Berkeley, 1942)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, Martha Eggert, Ben Blue, Stephen McNally. Screenplay: Howard Emmett Rogers, Richard Sherman, Fred F. Finkelhoffe, Sid Silvers. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: Roger Edens.

Gene Kelly became a star on Broadway by playing a heel in Pal Joey, so it's fitting that he made his movie debut playing a heel who becomes a hero in For Me and My Gal. Initially, he was too much of a heel for preview audiences, who indicated that they wanted Judy Garland to wind up with George Murphy instead of Kelly. So some additional filming and editing (eliminating a lot of Murphy's role, even though he was billed second below Garland and above Kelly) made Kelly's Harry Palmer more likable. The movie doesn't free up Kelly to do the kind of show-off dancing that he would later become famous for. It's a story about vaudeville, and the songs were nostalgic oldies even when the movie was first released. Harry Palmer is an ambitious hoofer and comedian who will stop at nothing to get to the top: the Palace in Manhattan. He muscles into the spotlight, breaking up with partners and stealing musical arrangements, to wind up teaming with Jo Hayden (Garland), whose ambition is similar to his but restrained by a conscience. When World War I starts, Harry breaks his hand to keep from getting drafted just as they're about to play the Palace and she tells him off, leaving the act. Naturally, the plot hinges on Harry's redemption. Busby Berkeley's direction keeps things lively, though the film doesn't feature the kaleidoscopic production numbers he became famous for at Warner Bros. and in three of MGM's "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musicals with Garland and Mickey Rooney. There's a subplot involving Harry's flirtation with a star called Eve Minard, played by Martha Eggerth, a Hungarian soprano famous for her performance in operettas. She was signed by MGM possibly as a replacement for Jeanette MacDonald, whose career as the studio's house soprano was ending. Eggerth sings splendidly, but she photographed less well, and the house soprano job went to Kathryn Grayson. For Me and My Gal is full of historical interest -- it was also the first movie for which Garland received top billing -- but it feels a little canned and unoriginal in comparison to the Freed Unit classics that followed.  

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995)

Lili Taylor in The Addiction

Cast: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Paul Calderon, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, Michael Imperioli, Robert W. Castle. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Mayin Lo. Music: Joe Delia. 

Blood looks bloodier in black-and-white. In color it too often looks like ketchup or cranberry juice or corn syrup with red food dye. But under the lens and lights of cinematographer Ken Kelsch in The Addiction it turns black, flat and dry like an aging wound or glossy like the spill of an unsavory substance. And there's a lot of it in the film, which turns vampirism into a metaphor for not only drug addiction but any other self-destructive obsession. When Kathleen Conklin (the terrific Lili Taylor) is turned vampire, her attacker (Annabella Sciorra) tells her to resist, and after Kathleen is addicted, she makes a similar offer to her own victims: They should tell her to go away. Except "victims" is maybe the wrong word here. The film is about something as banal as responsibility or yielding to temptation: It almost devolves into a "just say no" moral treatise, except that it also exposes the inanity of that maxim. Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has managed to get his bloodlust under control, except that we can see the price he has paid doing so. As Macbeth put it, "I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Admonitions against self-destructive behavior aside, The Addiction is a fable with rich intellectual content, a meditation on human appetite and attempts to control it. That it's also a pretty damn good horror movie is only part of it. 

The Lady and the Beard (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Tokihiko Okada in The Lady and the Beard

Cast: Tokihiko Okada. Hiroko Kawasaki, Satoko Date, Choko Iida, Ichiro Tsukida, Toshiko Iizuka, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Tatsuo Saito, Takeshi Sakamoto, Sotaro Okada, Yasuo Nanjo, Ayako Katsuragi. Screenplay: Komatsu Kitamur, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Minoru Kuribayashi, Hideo Shigehara. Film editing: Minoru Kuribayaski, Hideo Shigehara. 

The Lady and the Beard is one of Yasujiro Ozu's silent comedies that, like I Graduated, But... (1929), I Flunked, But ... (1930), and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932), center on college students and their postgraduate life. The protagonist, Kiichi (Tokhiko Okada), affects a full beard and old-fashioned dress, which his fellow students tolerate laughingly, but which opens him to mockery when he goes home with a friend who invites him to his sister's birthday party. The young women at the party shun him. Worse, when he graduates, he discovers that the beard is an obstacle to getting a job. So he shaves it off, and suddenly finds that he's not only employable but also a magnet to marriageable young women. He rescues Hiroko (Hiroko Kawasaki) from being mugged by Furyo (Satoko Date) and her thuggish companions, and winds up attracting the attention of both women. Later, he encounters Furyo again at the hotel where he works: He thwarts her in a con job involving a piece of jewelry, but that doesn't deter her interest in him. It's a likable little comedy with an endearing performance by Okada. I occasionally had trouble following some of the narrative, whether because of cultural differences or missing footage -- the print shows signs of damage. As often with Ozu's early films, he shows his inspiration in the form of movie posters on the characters' walls: Kiichi's room has a poster of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Ozu credits himself, under his pseudonym James Maki, as the film's gag writer. 

In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)

Julie Carmen and Sam Neill in In the Mouth of Madness

Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, Charlton Heston, Frances Bay. Screenplay: Michael De Luca. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Production design: Jeff Ginn. Film editing: Edward Warschilka. Music: John Carpenter, Jim Lang.

A box office failure in its theatrical debut, John Carpenter's cleverly recursive In the Mouth of Madness has since gathered an enthusiastic following. I'm not one of the enthusiasts -- I find it much too frantic to be very scary, entertaining, or thought-provoking -- but I see what they like about it. It's partly a satiric look at the popularity of horror fiction and its movie spinoffs, centering on an obvious target: Stephen King. In the film, the horror writer is called Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), who lives in New Hampshire (next door to Maine, where King lives). Maybe to avoid any legal problems, the analogy is made explicit in the movie: King is name-checked several times. The other obvious horror writer target is H.P. Lovecraft, who isn't mentioned, but he's dead and can't sue. One reason for my discontent with In the Mouth of Madness is the miscasting of Sam Neill, who plays an insurance investigator who gets caught up in the search for Sutter Cane and his latest manuscript. Neill is one of my favorite underappreciated actors, but he seems all at sea here: Even his well-practiced American accent is sometimes clotted with his native New Zealand vowels. The role, which has a comic undertone, needs a more smart-alecky performer like Jim Carrey or Bill Murray. But then most of the cast -- including a cameo by Charlton Heston and a screen debut by Hayden Christensen as a paperboy -- is just along for the ride as the special effects and the plot kinks mount up. 

 

Mandabi (Ousmane Sembene, 1968)

Ynousse N'Diaye, Makhouredia Gueye, and Isseu Niang

Cast: Makhouredia Gueye, Ynousse N'Diave, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture, Farba Sarr, Serigne Diayes, Thérèse Bas, Mouss Diaf, Christof Colomb. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Paul Soulignac. Film editing: Gilbert Kikoïne, Max Saldinger.

When we first see Ibrahim Dieng (Makhouredia Gueye), he is having his head shaved and his nose cleaned. Then he strolls through the streets of Dakar, immaculate head held high, the very image of smug prosperity. He is anything but prosperous, of course: He is stone broke, having been unemployed for a very long time, supporting himself, his two wives, and seven children with a combination of handouts and loans, sustained mainly by his pride and a Micawberish sense that something will turn up. That something turns up in the form of a money order from his nephew, a street sweeper in Paris, and it will be the undoing of Ibrahim. Most of the money his nephew sent is not his: Part of it is to go into the nephew's savings, part to his mother, Ibrahim's sister (Thérèse Bas), who is a formidable force herself. The little left over goes to Ibrahim, and the thought of it elicits a brief period of delight -- one of the wives even makes up a song about the money order. But when word of it gets about, Ibrahim is immediately set upon by creditors and handout seekers. Mandabi (which means "money order") is a tragicomic film about postcolonial Africa, its people strangled by governmental corruption. Ibrahim is caught in a Catch-22: He can't cash the money order without an identity card. He can't get an identity card without a birth certificate. He can't get a birth certificate without some form of identification. The bureaucracy that frustrates him is both Dickensian and Kafkaesque. Ousmane Sembene tells Ibrahim's story with sympathy, but also with a smart distancing from the character, whose faults he makes all too clear. The only problem I had with the film is that it ends with a didactic speech by a character delivering the message: People should work to end the corruption that results in such misery. But Mandabi wasn't made for me, but for people like the ones it portrays. It was the first feature made in Wolof, the indigenous language of Senegal, which Sembene chose over French, the official language imposed by colonialism. "Message movies" may be tiresome to us Westerners, but they were an important tool for filmmakers like Sembene.