Another collection of brief capsule reviews, written between March 2019 and May 2020, all taken from my Letterboxd and all slightly revised after re-reading them with fresh eyes. I like them all, and I like having them all in one place. Please enjoy.
Canyon Passage | Jacques Tourneur, 1946
The destruction of red forests by white men: banal at first and, finally, predatory — a gradual descent into hell, predicted by red leaves and skies, driving rain and broken glass, as a close-knit community falls apart in stages: a man with tree-trunk arms menaces from the sidelines; a forbidden romance bubbles under, then over; gambling debts allowed to spiral cause a murder; sixty men ride to fight back after one of their own provokes a dozen-or-so Indians into a retributive attack. Individual violence becomes societal. A close-up of a gleeful Susan Hayward at the front of a crowd watching as Dana Andrews beats the shit out of Ward Bond in a bar fight. There's safety in violence for the people of this town, and this violence ignites a romance — so it's hard not to read the ending as a warning of doom to come. Pent up desires become reality in the chaos of battle, a path to happiness is cleared in the debris. Ride on to a new life in a new town.
The Dead Don't Die | Jim Jarmusch, 2019
The end of the world as a product of baby-boomer America. An apocalypse viewed from an old-fashioned small town, built and maintained by an old guard whose elders all cling to memories of one another from their youth, but keep the generations after theirs at a distance. Adam Driver's say-it-as-he-sees-it deputy questions the logic of why kids are buried in a separate section of the cemetery to the adults, a concern that Murray's old-timer police chief (who should've retired two years ago) bluntly dismisses as a product of its time and changes the subject. Selena Gomez and her hipster friends pass through in town on a road trip and are left to die in a motel, while three teenagers, locked for unknown reasons in the town's excessively large young offenders prison, escape into the darkness, never to be seen again. The past will destroy the future, the old have destroyed the young. "I've read the script".
Dracula | Terence Fisher, 1958
Centuries of loneliness. There are no portraits in Dracula’s castle; no signs of life, past or present. The stony walls are lined instead by medieval weapons and trophy heads. A history of violence, but no heritage. The cavernous castle is nothing but a succession of spaces waiting to be filled, its unmoored owner unable to make use of it. There are monsters all across Fisher’s cinema, human or otherwise, and Christopher Lee’s looming menace lends itself beautifully: his Dracula a vast shadow of a man reduced to a predatory carnality, at once both an alluring romantic and a horrifying creature. Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing, the intellectual counterpoint to Dracula’s sensuality, is the only viable resistance to the vampire, and Fisher gradually sets up a typically one-sided confrontation between human and non-human, living and dead. But this inevitable moment of triumph for humanity passes, and it’s the tragedy of the vampire that lingers. Cushing, alone, looks over what’s left of Dracula’s body in pensive silence, and Fisher closes the film on a close-up of a ring among the ashes: a discarded relic that should be an heirloom, but nobody around to claim it.
Gangs of New York | Martin Scorsese, 2002
"The blood stays on the blade", and it does. The past has great sway over these men and their actions. History must be kept alive to justify the choices of the present, but all that exists in this history is violence. Battle scars and grudges, notches on clubs and glass eyes. Violence as a way to claim and consolidate power, and to validate a poisonous belief system. The challenge finally comes not against the beliefs but against the leader — so nothing changes. It's just another violent chapter in this history. Time passes and vendettas are forgotten, buried beneath the ground of an abandoned, overgrown graveyard. The blood stays on the blade, sure, but the knife is lost to history.
Grass | Hong Sang-soo, 2018
Like the rows of plant pots that bookend it, this is very much a film of controlling nature. A portrait of a writer's attempts to create, observe and inflect upon human interactions in a quiet coffee shop as a way to navigate, escape, and make sense of her own problems. It's never entirely clear how much Kim Min-hee is authoring the on-screen events, if at all, and single lines of dialogue seem to undo any presumed comprehension of previous detours ("you've been here all day") but, whether reality or invention, or a straddled line between both, the goal of these observations is to find a way to parse emotional turmoil rationally. A film of disparate elements slowly coming together in harmony, and Hong ties them all together with a simple gesture that hints at a breakthrough and a return to normality — it's good to eavesdrop, but it's always better to drink and talk.
Kill, Baby... Kill! | Mario Bava, 1966
A nightmare in ruin. A medieval village exists in near-dilapidation and foggy silence, its residents plagued by fears of the vengeful spirit they believe to be responsible for a series of bloody deaths. A doctor, whose rationality sits at odds with the spirituality of the villagers, arrives from a faraway town to perform an autopsy on the latest victim, and it’s through these practical eyes that Bava views the curse that lingers over this place. The initially explainable bumps in the night soon become harder to define: a church bell ringing of its own volition could be caused by the wind, but meeting and talking to a young girl who apparently died twenty years earlier is more difficult to make sense of. Bava revels in these impossibilities, pushing the doctor’s logical reasoning to its limits with increasingly nightmarish imagery (time-loops, doppelgängers, creepy dolls), yet as the doctor gets closer to the history of this place he begins to uncover its despondency: the pristinely maintained bedroom of a young girl, locked and kept exactly as it was on the day she died by her mother, and the ruinous state of the village itself. A nightmare in ruin, resigned to slowly crumble away in anguish.
Red Sorghum | Zhang Yimou, 1988
A sledgehammer-blow of a movie. Every action is a power-play (pissing in the wine, shutting a door, faking a bow) that shifts and deepens a relationship, whether romantic, antagonistic, or otherwise, until, suddenly, everything changes, and these relationships and their histories are re-contextualised by war. A love-song blows with the wind through burning fields, a child weeps for his mother in a bomb crater. The beauty of this place is destroyed in the fire. Everything turns red in the end.
Shark | Sam Fuller, 1969
A truly grotesque spectacle, in which people kill for money and sharks kill for blood. Fuller forces his characters down and away from each other by dividing shots with ceiling fans, fences, beaded curtains, wooden beams, watching as people dance around each other trying to gain trust while their own schemes evolve on the fly. Always oppositional, always oppressive, always dangerous. The second anyone dives down, Fuller cuts to a shark. There's no such thing as safety.
Shock Corridor | Sam Fuller, 1963
An amazing indictment of journalism, in which editorial meetings are held under the same portraits as in Park Row but with none of the nobility that those men supposedly traded in — the goal now is sensationalisation. There's not much of a story in the murder itself but rather in its setting, an easy way to stoke fears of psychiatric treatment. If anything, the real scoop is in the witnesses to this murder, three men destroyed by homegrown monstrosities (brainwashed POWs returning home, violent racism and the rise of the KKK, the creation of nuclear weapons) and abandoned by their country, but that, presumably, doesn't sell newspapers anymore. "We're right on the brink of a disaster". What good is a journalist with nothing to say?