masorad-film

[masorad-film]

Steckler is adept at killing thrills, trying patience and exhibiting a very American & masturbatory sense of filmmaking. Lacking talent but with camera-in-hand, as long as it's in the can it's a movie. All of Steckler is bad, but the bad got better after this.

[masorad-film]

Takashi Shimura wipes his face and neck with a handkerchief better than any other actor, in any time, period. He can't pronounce apres-guerre, but the doltish Mifune & his criminal doppelganger can, and the film is a tidy police procedural as well as a commentary on the national shame that swept Japan after WWII.

[masorad-film]

Doris Wishman goes Melies one further. One small step for (Wish)man, a giant leap for nudist camp movies.

[masorad-film]

Stylized nihilism that alternates between noxious and obnoxious. The reversed chronology succeeds in standing the routine revenge story on its head, but the spacetime distortion in the camerawork, the long takes, the forward-to-the past gimmick really only serve to prolong the agony of the characters and the audience. The film at times seems to delight in its provocation, daring you to look away (the infamous static-cam anal rape of Bellucci) and Noe surely wants viewers to confront the basest evil men are capable of, but the fact is nihilism is ultimately an adolescent's conceit, an affectation disabused by experience.

[masorad-film]

Altman's axe-grinding is almost audible in this hate letter to Hollywood. The perennial outsider (played by his own rules, did Bob) locates numerous tinseltown grindstones- producers, shills, lackeys, actors, agents, corporate stooges & flunkies- but saves the biggest cut for the audience. The "happy ending" (both in the film and the film-within-the-film) posits the viewer as an accessory to these enterprises, because bankable resolution requires (criminal?) dissolution. Populus vult decipi.

[masorad-film]

Exceptional interwar French reel set in the port of Le Havre, where various characters with skeletons in their closets, chips on their shoulders, half-buried grudges and deferred dreams rendezvous in an ultra-atmospheric genre-blend that is as asymptotic to art as you can find in cinema. Stray-dog Gabin, tortured rat-bastard Simon, and camera-loves-her Michele Morgan anchor the narrative. There are subplots, sure, but it's the playing-out of the main story in a location that rivals Casablanca for intrigue and promise that stays with you.

[masorad-film]

Masumura's matter-of-fact satire of the degradations of capitalism (told via warring caramel companies) is both visually and mentally a feast. Pop art elements, campy dance numbers, armies of salarymen, a furious diatribe against fair play (bushido/chivalry) that could have been written yesterday, characters sold out, selling out, double-crossing. And the cigarette lighter montages, which serve multiple purposes. The final shot, a truly amazing juxtaposition of comic & tragic, dehumanized and human, corporate toy and individual giant, is indelible.

[masorad-film]

Nifty parallels between the lustmord of the Lipstick Killer and the backstabbing in the newsroom. Underrated Lang thriller that splashes the police blotter on the big screen, adds a column or two from the scandal sheet, dramatizes the denizens of the society pages and ties it all up in a Hollywood extra-edition denouement that satisfies like an unexpected free drink. And Dana Andrews is buying.

[masorad-film]

Director Lewis's direction to his two leads suffuses "Gun Crazy" with phallocentric eroticism, and the good times for Bart & Annie continue as long as he can keep it up ( the l-o-n-g take of a bank robbery is both narratively and cinematically a climax) but when performance anxiety sets in, it's over. Russ Tamblyn, as the youthful Bart, is rather good here.

[masorad-film]

Odd reel about those who fetishize marriage & parenthood at the expense of sex and sensuality. Nascent spinster Davis (who in the first act appears to be a Groucho Marx impersonator) gets her head straight courtesy of Captain Renault, goes on a cruise and meets Victor Laszlo, swoons to Max Steiner's score, & returns to the US of A someone everybody knows. She has a Rick Blaine epiphany, turns on her monster-of-a-mother, saves the girl (It's Tina here, not Ilse) but alas, settles for a rather common celestial body. Hal Wallis produces.

[masorad-film]

Like an episode of Scooby Doo, without the intellectual rigour.

[masorad-film]

Tu recte vivis, si curas esse quod audis.

[masorad-film]

Von Stroheim has been the posterboy for every "artistically compromised" director to come down the pike since this adaption of Frank Norris's novel debuted in 1924. The MGM cut we got doesn't readily display clipped wings: this is tight and timeless, in-your-face, honest.

[masorad-film]

A midwar German "mountain movie," Hollywood-style. Roark embodies the radical right's vision of itself as being beset on all sides by the small-minded, the liberal, the populist, the meek & lily-livered. The straight-faced championing of puerile Nietzschean mindbarf is to be expected in a Vidor sound picture: Like Rand's contribution to philosophy, the dialogue & thematic thrust here is window dressing. Turn off the volume and just watch the mise-en-scene. And if you're a woman, know your place.

[masorad-film]

Great popcorn movie. If the Nazi weltanschauung doesn't get you on the edge of your seat, then Riefenstahl's depiction of the Reich as an unstoppable inevitability will have you raising your arms (maybe just one) in capitulation. As a blueprint for agitprop, TOTW's tricks are still being used today. The visuals work. And, of course, work of this sort will set you free.

[masorad-film]

Once upon a time there was money to be made in a Hollywood picture that took the Establishment as de facto corrupt. Now, the "few rotten apples" paradigm prevails and a 21st-century Frank Serpico would bob them out, then be awarded and take the promotion, and we'd fade out on a gathering of New York City's finest applauding.

[masorad-film]

Watching Solondz's acrid Happiness is like watching someone from New Jersey masturbating using tears as lubricant. This is a despairing film, peopled with characters who add injurious insult to their already-maladjusted lives: self-haters, schlemiels, users, abusers, the used & abused, pederasts, the longing and the long-gone. Like a precocious child, the film serves to remind you of your own demise.