426) Sleepy Eyes of Death: Sword of Seduction (1964)

426) Sleepy Eyes of Death: Sword of Seduction (1964) Dir: Kazuo Ikehiro Not Yet Released Date Seen: December 2, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

Considering that its protagonist is a ronin that wanders from place to place, the pace of the film is understandably choppy but it's so strange and visually arresting that it's never not involving. See my mention of it in my piece on Chanbara archetypes for The Onion NY AV Club.

425) A Perfect Getaway (2009)

425) A Perfect Getaway (2009) Dir: David Twohy Date Released: August 2009 Date Seen: December 2, 2009 Rating: 1.5/5

David Twohy is not a memorable filmmaker, a fact which I think he understands. Since making The Arrival (1996), Pitch Black (2000) and Below (2002), Twohy's career took a fatal nose dive after his The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) was received with open arms and gnashing teeth (I'm rather partial to this quote from Variety's David Rooney, stolen from Metacritic: "May not quite gain entry to the hallowed pantheon of interstellar cheese of a 'Battlefield Earth,' but it's not far behind."). To say that Twohy's career needed a kick-start would be an understatement. Five years later, he returns to directing feature films with A Perfect Getaway, a last ditch effort for attention whose central plot twist effectively sinks the film's aspirations of being a smug Shane Black-esque pastiche of B-movie cliches. Twohy, who also wrote the film's script, tries very hard to make the audience so distracted by his pithy meta-dialogue (ed herring and second act twist being the most egregiously abused) that they'll ignore the fact that his film is never clever enough to build on that rickety foundation long enough create an involving story or memorable characters.

SPOILERS HERE

Instead, Twohy jerks the viewer around with a third act revelation worthy of superhack Wes Craven, whose career was made by championing the "bad guys" and painting the "good guys" a dark shade of greyish-black. While we sympathize with hapless tourists Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Mila Jovovich) as they backpack around Hawaii with Nick and Gina (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez), who they suspect are actually the Neu Honeymoon Killers, it's actually them who are the murderers. This dumb-dumb twist is especially irritating because it ignores the two or three scenes where Cliff is earnestly seeking out clues about the killer's identities and the killing's in general. Twohy tries to minimize the illogic of this mis-step by making Cliff a man that gets off on distancing himself from his real personality, a fact we learn from an extended, info dump-heavy series of flashbacks that includes some of the most wretched film dialogue of the year ("Look, I get it: in some sick way, your need for detachment fits my need for attachment," says Jovovich's Cydney). By that point, he gives the viewer fewer and fewer reasons to care. His pacing gets noticeably desperate, relying on ill-advised stylistic experimentation that makes Ang Lee's well-meaning but wonky editing in Hulk look pared down. The fact that A Perfect Getaway did relatively well signals that Twohy's career is safe for the moment. Hopefully that means the man can now work on something worthy of his earlier career, when he was just a benign craftsman.

424) Destiny's Son (1962)

424) Destiny's Son (1962) Dir: Kenji Misumi Not Yet Released Date Seen: December 1, 2009 Rating: 4.25/5

Yowza, yowza, yowza. This is the Chanbara equivalent of an acid western. I feel as strongly about the brilliant preposterousness of this film as fans of Leave Her to Heaven do, I'm sure. It's especially amazing considering that Misumi went out to a career of generic Chanbara films, including some of the Zatoichi films and much of the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. Crazy like a fox. See my mention of it in my piece on Chanbara heroes for The Onion NY AV Club.

423) Summer of Sam (1999)

423) Summer of Sam (1999) Dir: Spike Lee Date Released: July 1999 Date Seen: December 1, 2009 Rating: 2.25/5

Cynicism does not become Spike Lee, a lesson that complements an established truism about his much-scrutinized body of work: Spike doesn't do comedy very well. Because he's made a career out of examining racial tension by way of caricatures, his humor is inherently confrontational and more than a little boisterous. By that token, Summer of Sam is not a straight-laced snapshot of the hysteria that struck New York City during the summer of 1977, but rather an excuse for him to shoot fish in a barrel. The film is a black comedy about the paranoia that led a group of civic-minded Bronx-bred goombahs on a vigilante hunt for the .44 Caliber Killer (They decide if you're one of the good guys based on what your favorite baseball team is. Here's a hint as to what the right answer is: do de evolution, I mean math). He picked this moment in history as an excuse to look back at the city in heat and at its ugliest for the sake of wringing out a few cheap yuks about the wacky '70s (the film's representative punk listens to The Who while its womanizing disco duck makes the big mistake of taking his girlfriend to Plato's Cave only to be kicked out of the car after being called a "faggot hair dresser" while Abba's "Dancing Queen" plays; dig that counter-point, Spike).

And yet, amongst all that jeering and proudly unsympathetic nonsense is some genuinely mean-spirited but funny moments. Lee's depiction of the Bronx mafiosi's first official meeting as a posse, where they come up with their list of suspect suspects, is priceless, as is his snide dedication to a series of interludes surrounding David Berkowitz, the real killer. In them, Berkowtiz angrily beats his pillow, spells out his plans with children's building blocks and finally has a brief but memorable conversation with the dog that's been tormenting throughout the film ("Kill! Kill! Kill them all!"). These scenes work because they're genuinely risible. The rest of Summer of Sam is just plain ugly.

422) So Long at the Fair (1950)

422) So Long at the Fair (1950) Dir: Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough Date Released: March 1951 Date Seen: December 1, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

I must confess that I'm at a loss when it comes to So Long at the Fair. I've seen bits and pieces of it on TV once or twice before, which is remarkable considering that it's a rather obscure Brit noir, but have never sat down and watched it all the way through until today. It was a frustrating experience because the foreignness of the film's mystery, the most alluring aspect of the viewing experience in any noir, wasn't as striking as the first time around. Having already seen Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons), a hapless Briton abroad in Paris, run from the concierge to the British consulate after her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) seemingly vanishes without a trace of ever having accompanied her, the film just didn't grab me by the throat like it used to.

At the same time, the film itself is also to blame for my discombobulation. So Long at the Fair's beguiling anticlimax leaves much to be desired and too much unresolved for the sake of a perplexing ending that has something to do with a budding crisis in French nationalism and an inexplicable resurgence of the plague. Yeah...no amount of context in the film can prepare you ready for this ending.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the film's depiction of the British-French connection is consistently muddled at best. Brits in the film high-handedly dismiss the French as foreigners and hence inherently suspicious, which is especially strange considering that they in fact are tourists visiting Paris for the World's Fair. Conversely, the elaborate lengths that the French hotel workers go to to keep Vicky from her brother suggests that behind their clucking is a nation of proud victims unwilling to admit their powerlessness (also: what does it say about the film that you can only understand what the frogs are scheming behind Vicky's back if you speak French? There's an awful lot of unsubtitled French whizzing about in the film, making one wonder how tainted the film's Francophilia is).

In conclusion, he had the Black Death. Show's over, the end. Huh?

421) The Sun (2005)

421) The Sun (2005) Dir: Aleksandr Sokurov Date Released: November 2009 Date Seen: November 30, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

To create the dream-like limbo that his films exist in,* Aleksandr Sokurov relies on a method of anti-pacing. Though his movies tend to dawdle instead of sprint, his art requires a kind of momentum not unlike montage sequencing that allows each adjacent scene to complement each other rather than stand alone as tableaux vivant. This is most apparent in The Sun, his most historically and narratively grounded film released in the U.S to date. The fluidity and grace of his two earlier films, Russian Ark and Alexandra, no longer takes precedence in The Sun. Instead, Sokurov creates an account of Japanese Emperor Hirohito's inevitable surrender that only mimics a dream. Most scenes in the film are brilliant in the way they undermine the verite effect of Sokurov's conspicuously grainy digital camerawork. These moments establish Hirohito (an unsettling performance by Issei Ogata) as one of Sokurov's oneiric travelers, people out of time that lack the perspective and social graces that might allow them to understand the reality they find themselves in. The handful of other scenes in the film though, the ones that reduce his actions to cheap synecdoche (his comments on the examination of a preserved frog, his circuitous address to his generals and his lingering stare at a Renaissance print all reek of simple-minded analysis), remind us that the film's pacing has in fact slowed down, leaving us to wait for the next great singular moment. You don't have to wait long but still, I've never felt as restless watching a Sokurov film as I have while watching The Sun.

*This is in reference to the three films of Sokurov's that have been released in the US: Russian Ark, Alexandra and The Sun.

RV!: New Tale of Zatoichi (1963)

RV!: New Tale of Zatoichi (1963) Dir: Tokuzo Tanaka Date Released (DTV): October 2002 Date Seen: November 30, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

I wasn't sure if I'd seen this one before up until the last scene; that's how generic these films are. Still, this is one of the better ones...I guess. See my mention of it in my piece on Chanbara heroes for The Onion NY AV Club.