Sunday Night Movie Post

Another week, another bunch of movies. Kind of short, these notes, but that's okay...

Capote : **1/2 - Philip Seymour Hoffman in a star turn as the writer, in the process of writing In Cold Blood. Focusing on the identification between Capote and one of the killers, Perry Smith, and Capote's investment in the project, sometimes at their expense. At times, it creeps close to preachiness, taking a kind of judgmental attitude toward Capote - but Hoffman's performance, his ability to convey Capote's self-awareness, carries the film.

Burden of Dreams (DVD): ***1/2 - Les Blank's documentary about Fitzcarraldo. Unforced, economical, very beautiful and fascinating - and making its own points, shadowing Herzog's film, while exploring Blank's own interests.

Pistol Opera (DVD): ***1/2 - 2001 film from Japanese cult film master Seijun Suzuki. It owes something to Suzuki's classic, Branded to Kill, with its ranked assassins and over the top style - somehow, it manages to be less coherent, and more intense.... In Pistol Opera, the #3 killer, Stray cat, is assigned to kill #1, Hundred Eyes, who nobody knows - meanwhile, a seemingly endless array of associates appear - more killers - "Teacher", "painless surgeon", "dark horse", and number 0, "the champ", who may be the same character as in Branded to Kill... plus stray cat's mother, a little girl named Sayoko, an old woman selling guns, a guy in charge of an exhibition of terror, an agent in a white robe and purple mask, and so on. People die, or don't, dream, meet the dead, deliver speeches on stages, pose with guns, and move with the magic of cinema. They fight and scheme and talk and flirt, there are puns about sex and guns and masturbation (stray cat likes to do it alone - she won't teach the little girl) - pass through charged, beautiful spaces... it's strange, one of the strangest films I have ever seen - but beautiful, and hypnotic and wonderful.

Scattered Clouds: ***1/2 - the last of the Naruse series (there are a couple more showings, at the MFA, of films that have already played at the Harvard Film Archive), the last film Naruse made. Color, widescreen, the story of a woman whose husband is killed in a car accident - the driver of the car tries to send her money, tries to help her - she resists but sooner or later they end up falling in love. But this inevitably causes someone else to be in a terrible car accident, which they witness, and she panics, and doesn't go away to Pakistan with him. The, um, hint of melodramatic nonsense does not distract from the film making, which as always with Naruse is breathtakingly beautiful, clean precise and powerful.

Little Fugitive: **** - pioneering independent film by Morris Engel. With a specially made camera (35 mm, handholdable, in 1952), a crew of 2, and, for most of the film, one 7 year old actor, he went to Coney Island, and made a film. Influenced by the neo-realists, an influence on the new wave, it stands on its own - funny, moving, revealing of the popular entertainments of the day - it works fine as a documentary, as well as a story. A great film.