Return of Movie Roundup

It's been a while since I posted such a post. Last week, being a holiday, saw me riding the rails and making like Henry VIII over the stuffed fowl rather than watching movies - but we're back! It's been a pretty thin couple weeks for the new releases - all documentaries, you'll note... BUt throw a couple classics in there... Onwards:

Jesus is Magic - ** - Basically a concert film by Sarah Silverman - rated NC-17! I didn't know that! y'know, that's just wrong. There's something there that is just wrong. I mean, it's bad enough that Kevin Bacon's ass gets an NC-17, but all Silverman does is talk! or is it for the singing? I don't know.... Her act is funny, and clever, all that twisty morality and irony.... The film, though, is just a concert film, maybe a bit better than a comedy central special, but that's all.

Ballet Russes - *** - I know nothing whatsoever about ballet. I have heard, perhaps, of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Balanchine and Agnes DeMille, but anything I know about their work comes from whether it turned up in Hollywood (and whatever Jane Feuer said about it.) That ignorance caused this film no harm. It is, for the most part, a talking heads and archival footage documentary - but the talking heads (the surviving dancers mostly) are charming and funny and fascinating. And the archival footage is stunning. Granted, I suppose any ballet is rather awe-inspiring to the completely uninitiated, but here it's put into just enough context that I can at least imagine I know what they are talking about when they say something is out of the ordinary... Anyway - I know more about ballet now than when I went in, and got that knowledge in an inspiring way. Nice film.

Seven Men From Now - **** - I had managed, despite all the movies I have seen, never to see anything by Budd Beotticher until this. It stars Randolph Scott, who is on the trail of 7 men who murdered his wife in a hold-up. While tracking those men, he crosses path with a husband and wife headed to California by a rather odd route, and his old pal/foil Masters, played by Lee Marvin - in LEE MARVIN mode. From there... "pow"...

The Tall T - ***1/2 - Boetticher and Scott again, plus Richard Boone as a lonely gunman saddled with a pair of young fools (Henry Silva as the necessary preening gunslinger) and Maureen O'Sullivan as the "plain" daughter of the territory's richest man. A robbery turns into a hostage situation, and the characters circle each other until such time as some must die.

These two were shown with an episode of the Rifleman directed by Boetticher. Adam West reads lines in his inimitable style in the role of a gunslinger who used to be a schoolteacher who... never mind the plot. There's a drunk and a whore (and the show comes as close to identifying her as a whore as one imagines television could do in the 60s) and a blizzard, and the threat of violence, and some nice shots - the drunk with a fork full of food waiting to eat when the kid says grace...

A History of Violence - *** - repeat viewing. In the context of the Boetticher films, it comes off better than it did the first time I saw it. The beginning, establishing the Stalls family in small town America, is appallingly bad - worse than I thought when I saw it the first time. Lame attempt at a David Lynch vibe, arch and stylized and - dreadful. Then the Bad Men arrive, and the film clicks in - there are still too many moments of cheesy soul-searching, but they don't overpower the film - it runs along on something very similar to what ran those Boetticher films. That's a good thing. On the other hand - the goofy closeups of blown apart heads, and that stupid sex scene on the stairs are very ridiculous. Oddly - both the gore and the opening sequence have parallels in The Tall T - some early scenes of happy frontier life; the aftermath of violence - both handled with a great deal more elegance and gravity by Boetticher. Cronenburg comes off a bit like Count Floyd on SCTV - ooohh Kids! scary!

Darwin's Nightmare - ***1/2 - Documentary about Lake Victoria, which has been utterly taken over by a single species of fish, the Nile Perch - which has created a huge fishing industry in Tanzania, with very little tangible benefit to the Tanzanians. The film itself reminds me of some of Herzog's documentary - different style and emphasis, but similar for its way of maintaining and presenting a very strong point of view, while allowing the subject matter, the people in the film, their chance to speak, to exist, somehow independently of the filmmaker.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra - This is not really a film one can rate. It's a strange case - a dead on parody of bad 50s SF films - that almost never quite breaks character as an imitation of one of those films - maybe a little... I remember when this first came out - seeing the trailers, and thinking it was one of the best things I had ever seen. But once I realized it was a trailer for a real, actual film, that was going to be really, actually released on the real actual big screen - well... the trailer is just as wonderful - but the thought of seeing an actual film of that sort... I didn't see it - and the reviews I've seen (then, and the ones I looked up now, like The Rog) hammered it; it turned up on TV this week, and I rather enjoyed it. I am glad I saw it on TV, though - it is too perfect an imitation of shitty 50s SF films - the pacing is dead on perfect - shots held too long - pointless dueling closeups, lots of filler shots... The stories for films like this one (or, the films it's parodying) take about 15 minutes to tell (less than that really - the trailer told the story perfectly in its 2-3 minutes of screen time) - but the films last an hour, 75 minutes - right.