Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977)

Like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, which I wrote about here no too long ago, I first saw this film when I was 19 or 20 or so years old--a little over three decades ago--and like that film, I haven't forgotten much about it. (At the time, I saw it in the back of a local club with some friends.) Most of you have probably seen it as it's such a classic. This film is a bit like the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album; even if you haven't seen or heard it, you've at least seen some hipster wear the t-shirt.

The setup: filmed in stark black & white, with an ominous, many-layered soundscape. Henry lives in an desolate industrial wasteland. During an awkward visit to his girlfriend and her parents, he learns she gave birth to a baby, though she isn't sure it's really a "baby." The baby is a hideously deformed creature who constantly cries, keeping Henry and his girlfriend awake. Eventually the sound drives his girlfriend away, leaving Henry to care for the baby by himself. He is comforted by visions of a lady in the radiator who has chipmunk cheeks. Or something.



Visually arresting and obviously very surreal (side note: I have a much easier time interpreting this at the age I'm at now than when I was 19). It's remarkable how much of Lynch' style was pretty much all present and fully developed here; for instance, much of the visual style of the more surreal elements of Twin Peaks: The Return goes back to what he does here.

That baby thing really is hideous and disgusting. I have no clue how that thing was made, so I tried looking it up; according to Wikipedia, Lynch has been silent on that particular topic ever since, and the page suggests that "the prop may have been constructed from a skinned rabbit or a lamb fetus." That's nice.

Anyway, it's Lynch and it's a classic--definitely one of his best. If you haven't seen any Lynch whatsoever I'm not sure I'd recommend it as your first Lynch, but since it was his first, and mine, and much of the rest of the world's, why not. Rating: 5 baby cries out of 5.

 

Bringing Out the Dead Hadn't seen this one before. Nicholas Cage plays a paramedic being eaten up by the futility of most of his efforts and by the death of a girl months prior for which he believes he's responsible. Tom Sizemore plays himself. Though having been made and taking place 20 years later, this is the NYC of Taxi Driver. Hell. Of course it's a Paul Schrader script. Frank Pierce is not Travis Bickle, however. When it comes down to it, he's averse to violence, and even when he's at his lowest his moral compass is not warped.

 

Bringing Out the Dead was great. One of Scorsese's best, but woefully underappreciated.

 

That's the film that'd first introduced me to UB-40's rendition of "Red Red Wine".

Spoiler

You'd never thought you'd feel so bad for a drug addict before.

 

Finished Sons of Katie Elder. It kinda reminded me a tad of Four Brothers. I did enjoy this movie but I’m not in the mood to do my typical simple rundown.

 

"Four Brothers" is a semi-remake of the earlier film.

 

Oh wow really? That’s nifty I made that connection not knowing.

Also I was right about Quiet Man on Prime it says 2X Oscar winners though it doesn’t say what award.

 

Vivre Sa Vie. Godard chronicles Anna Karina's descent into prostitution with a fairly dispassionate film that still manages to make it look deeply depressing. Karina is a young wife who leaves her husband and infant to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, she says, though she's already cheated on him and she mostly just seems generally discontented. But she doesn't make it, can't pay the rent, and soon resorts to prostitution, an event that appears deeply unpleasant the first time but she eventually gets used to. She seems somewhat content by the end, but when she tries to leave the trade to take up with a kind john, she ends up dead on the street. She starts by selfishly pursuing a foolish, narcissistic dream and it's a quick road downhill; Karina's character is never quite likable, but she's always interesting. Godard, shooting most dialogue with the camera on the back of the speaker's head, like a glitching video game, and staging the action in twelve vignettes skipping through Karina's career, employing a few artificial, winking tricks, keeps us at a certain remove, observing an impersonal trade in an impersonal manner. It's compelling without quite being engaging.

 

Five Came Back. It's not often you have a film spoiled by its title, but it works to create a bit of mystery and tension in this case. Twelve people get on an airplane for Central America; who will be the five? You have the pilot, copilot, and steward, plus the usual assortment of passenger types: an elderly couple, a young heir eloping with his fiancée, a woman with a checkered past, a young boy who happens to be a gangster's son and his bodyguard, and an anarchist being extradited for an assassination with his guard. The plane goes down in the jungle, far off course where rescuers won't find them, in a storm. Everybody has to work to repair the plane and enable them to escape, while under threat from hostile natives. You have the usual drama while they work toward rescuing themselves: The pilot falls in love with Lucille Ball, who made a splash playing the fallen woman with motherly instincts toward the boy, while the fiancée is drawn to the copilot after rich boy Patric Knowles reveals himself as worthless under pressure. The old folks learn to appreciate their love again, and the anarchist revises his opinion of humanity upward, revealing an inner nobility in the finale, in which the survivors must choose who goes out on the airplane, which can't carry all of them due to a bad engine. It's all a sort of early ensemble disaster melodrama, done as a B-picture that proved a surprisingly big hit with audiences. It makes for a respectably solid thirties adventure, a bit predictable but enjoyable.

 

The Sons of Katie Elder is my favourite John Wayne film.

 

I mean, it’s Godard.

 

Contempt. Contempt is basically a film-length marital argument, which is as excruciating as it sounds, yet still compelling and intriguing in the hands of Jean-Luc Godard. Michel Piccoli plays a writer who is approached by boorish American producer Jack Palance to rewrite a script for an Odyssey movie he's making in Italy with Fritz Lang (playing himself). When Piccoli lets his wife, Brigitte Bardot, go off with the openly leering Palance, and she then catches him hitting on Palance's assistant/translator Giorgia Moll, a long argument ensues. Its underlying substance is Piccoli's integrity, his willingness to debase himself to the crass Palance for a paycheck, causing her to lose respect for him, but it's a long time getting to the heart of it, as Bardot does the passive-aggressive thing where she's obviously upset but insists she's not, and refuses to explain her feelings to Piccoli. It's a compelling character study of two people struggling over how they see their relationship, where neither one is very heroic. Piccoli is a loser, a weak and contemptible man, while Bardot is rightfully offended but destructively passive-aggressive about it. It's a sharp character study that also happens to look gorgeous, shot in color and widescreen.

 

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Nuclear anxiety and race relations? You've got two fifties message movies in one with this story, and it works.

Harry Belafonte is inspecting a mine when he's trapped by a cave-in; by the time he gets out, the world has ended in a cloud of isotopes. He makes his way through an empty world (the total lack of bodies is expected in a fifties movie, but the effect is less apocalyptic than deeply unnerving) to New York City, where he sets up in an apartment, having found nothing. But there's one other person living in New York, Inger Stevens.

They become friends, striking up a mode of living as the last two people in the world, Belafonte using his engineering skills to rig up a decent standard of living. But when Stevens starts falling for him, Belafonte draws back. Maybe he's internalized the color line; maybe he's bothered by the fact that it took the end of the world for him to achieve social equality. But he keeps her at arm's length, uncomfortable with beginning a relationship. Then Mel Ferrer wanders into town, and Belafonte does his best to get out of the way and let Ferrer, who's very interested, court Stevens. But she's not having it, and things eventually come to a head.

It's an interesting movie that does a really good job of presenting its post-apocalyptic world, with a lot of striking images of an empty city. Its dynamics are intriguing, and it even lets Stevens object to the fact that the men are paying far more attention to what they want or don't want than to what she wants; the film allows her to remain a woman with her own agency, not a prize to be won. But it's taken some heat, including from Belafonte and Stevens (who would later be secretly in an interracial relationship herself) during production, for not explicitly resolving its love triangle at the end. Instead, its focus is on the need for them all live together in peace, a legitimate message but not one that addresses the issue of interracial relationships it's been dancing around. It handles the issue sensitively in general, but never actually comes out and endorses colorblind love. It's a limitation, but not one that obviates the solid quality of the rest of the film. It's a good story that doesn't quite have the guts to go all the way.

 

Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse (2023)

Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey in their newest animated feature film which brings in even more wild and crazy Spider people and beings from other dimensions. Just like the previous film, it has an excellent script complete with tons of humor, drama, and of course some romance. At over two hours, it is kind of long for an animated film, but it's so entertaining you don't want it to end. I know I've mentioned it before, but I really like the Gwen Stacy character. She seems to have a more prominent role in this film, and I would like to think that a video game could be in her future; maybe even a spin-off animated film.

Of course there will be another Spiderverse movie to look forward to; picking up immediately where this one left off.

 

Contempt is indeed very much worth seeing, I rated it 4.5/5 at the time. It was recently released in 4k, so I’ll watch it again soon.

 

Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad) (dir. Alain Resnais, 1961)

If you like Lynchian weirdness you might enjoy this as well.

In a luxurious Baroque hotel we see a number of (apparently wealthy) guests, and hear snippets of their conversations (much of these oddly stilted). An unnamed man (Giorgio Albertazzi, speaking French with an Italian accent) approaches an unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig) and tries to convince her they met last year at a similar resort--maybe at Marienbad, but it may have been elsewhere--and that they may even have had an affair. Another man who is also wondering the hotel’s hallways is implied to be the woman’s husband, but the film never confirms this. So, the man keep reminding the woman of memories she doesn’t have.



It's a gorgeous-looking film; obviously pretty surrealistic. The film has an oneiric quality throughout (for instance, in some of the outside scenes, the people cast shadows but the trees don't; behind the scenes, this was accomplished by filming on an overcast day, with the people's shadows painted). The film never makes it clear what the sequence of events is; with most scenes it’s unclear whether it is taking place in the present, whether it is a flashback, or perhaps a flashforward, or whether it is solely taking place in one of the characters’ minds. Sometimes conversations are repeated in different locations; sometimes the film switches location mid-dialogue. Ultimately the film never even makes it clear what happened at all. Browsing around on th'innernets reveals that a number of interpretations of the film have been proposed, including but not limited to:

• it's an allegorical retelling of the Adam and Eve myth
• It's an allegorical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth
• This is heaven, and they're dead. Or maybe it's limbo.
• This is heaven, and she's dead, and he's a devil trying to lure her to hell
• It's an allegory for the relationship between psychiatrist and client. Or maybe he's a psychiatrist and she's his amnesiac client?
• It's all taking place in her mind
• It's all taking place in his mind, and he has killed her, and the narrative represents his refusal to acknowledge that he has killed her
• It's a memory of a dream

What does it all mean? I don't know, but I thought it was very engaging and beautiful-looking. Plus it has weird organ music. Obviously not for everyone though... OR IS IT? DUN DUN DUUUUN. Rating: 4.5 of the same conversations always repeated by the same colorless voices out of 5.

 

Prisoners 2013
Denis Villeneuve is my favorite current director.
Hugh Jackman, in an incredibly intense performance, plays a father whose young daughter disappears. There is a camper in the area; and the guy driving the camper, (Paul Dano, the Riddler in The Batman) is arrested but let go due to lack of evidence. Jackman captures Dano and proceeds to torture him to find the whereabouts of his daughter. Does he even have the right person? Absolutely devastating character piece and dark crime thriller. Jake Gyllenhaal is equally good as the cop on the case. Just a great film that is disturbing and makes you think. Incredible cinematography by Roger Deakins.
I also watched Enemy by DV. Just an absolute classic. Don't even get me started on the spider imagery. (Spiders=fear of commitment) There is just so much to unpack in Denis Villeneuve"s films. Jake Gyllenhaal is terrific in duel roles as 2 guys who look exactly alike (hint split personality)

 

Learn and Live With Joe Instructor
A WW2 instructional film for pilot trainees. It's one of the corniest things I've ever seen, but the actors embrace the cornball and make it work. All the piloting advice they give is still solid gold 80 years later. There's some good footage of early WW2 aircraft, mostly AT-6s and BT-13s, plus a B-24, an A-20, a Stearman, and a couple of P-39s. You never see A-20s or P-39s any more.

 

Revenge of the Nerds. Among the ranks of eighties comedies, I don't think Revenge of the Nerds holds up very well. It's not just that pretty much every single joke in the movie would get everybody in the film canceled today, though a lot of that comedy has not aged well. A large part of it is that so many eighties comedies were defined by a warm-heartedness underneath their slobs-vs-snobs or horny-teenager formats, but Revenge of the Nerds really isn't. A lot of its comedy, especially in the early going, amounts to "get a load of these losers," and the film never really does anything to endear its protagonists, a collection of dweebs and minorities, which I guess in the eighties was basically the same thing, to the audience. There's a big speech at the end about embracing being a nerd, but it's not a message the rest of the movie sells; it seems generally contemptuous of its subjects. There are some funny gags, but not enough likability to really make the movie enjoyable, to get you to root for the nerds, and certainly not enough to breeze past the more off-color material. It just never quite works. How can you like a comedy that doesn't like itself?

 

Star Trek Beyond (2016). Still my favorite of the Bad Robot treks, even if I'm getting a bit tired of the supervillain storylines. Idris Elba does a great job as Krall, his on-screen presence remains unaffected by his heavy prosthetic makeup.

Kotia Päin (1989) (Homeward Bound) Directed by Ilkka Järvi-Laturi, this is one of the most cinematographically ambitious Finnish movies, certainly those made in the 1980s. It tells the story of a young engineering student who moves from Oulu to Helsinki (about 600 kilometers) to go to college when his widowed mother marries a small-time crook who's taken to jail straight after the wedding. Things get very unpleasant when he's released, to the point that she hires a couple assassins to kill him. After the murder, things go downhill from there.

This was rated K-16 in Finland, but in the US it would undoubtedly get an R for full frontal nudity, both male and female, and very explicit sex scenes. The abuse is unpleasant to watch, to the point that the fairly gruesome murder (the victim's beaten with a baseball bat and drowned in the bathtub) comes as a relief. If you're in Finland, it's currently available on Yle Areena.

 

The History of Time Travel (2014)

A mockumentary portraying the creation of a practical time machine with a personal story behind it. You always have to take these films with a grain of salt; they feature scripted interviews and satirical events that kind of leave you scratching your head. And this film itself alters its own events throughout its 72 minutes; giving that illusion that history was altered while you were watching it. Of course it's all fanciful nonsense for the most part, but you would hope at least there were things that would be mildly believable. I've seen very good and interesting mockumentaries like the British made, "Confederate States of America" and NatGeo's "Mermaids: The Body Found", and you can tell that actual research was done to give the what-if scenario more meaning. But I didn't find too much of that in this film. It was all just general knowledge that anyone could have come up with. And their time machine was essentially an 80s video game console with a few extra spare parts added to it.

 

May I suggest "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash"? One of the original mockumentaries, it's funny on it's own, and even funnier if you have a good knowledge of The Beatles. For the full effect, watch it, then watch the later serious documentary "The Compleat Beatles", which seems to follow the same beats as the earlier spoof.

 

Is it available on streaming?

 

Are there ’80s comedies that do hold up well?