TO LIVE (1952)

A.K.A.: Ikiru

Country: Japan

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Takashi Shimura / Shin’ichi Himori / Yunosuke Ito

Plot

Stricken with stomach cancer, an old man regrets having spent the last three decades behind a desk and looks to find a purpose for his life in his final days.

What I Liked

*spoiler alert*

Enriched by the enthrallingly expressive face of lead Takashi Shimura, “To Live” returns inspiration and meaning to the old cliché that “it’s never too late.”  Shimura’s Mr. Watanabe is frighteningly pitiful and, more frighteningly, easy to empathize with.  Watanabe has closed himself off so thoroughly from the passions and beauty of life that his co-workers call him “The Mummy,” but Shimura does a fantastic job of embodying that description while defying cliché.  His shuffling gait, decrepit movements, and suffocated voice are in no way monstrous, but familiarly human.  Through Shimura, Watanabe is not a creature entirely devoid of soul, but a man on a quest to recover a long lost soul. 

In some ways he is less Mummy, than he is Odysseus.  Like the epic hero on his quest to find his way back home, Watanabe’s journey brings him through a series of mistakes, lessons, dark places, misfortunes, discoveries, and defeats.  His refusal to give up the journey and, once he discovers the true path, his conquering of every obstacle is inspiring.  It’s a simple story with a simple meaning, but one that has more to tell us than countless more complex tales.  “To Live” is a universal story that could have taken place in any era and any place, but it’s setting in post-War Japan does seem to have a special importance.  As Watanabe searches for a way back to living, director Akira Kurosawa places around him the gaudy sights and sounds of Japan’s quickly Americanizing society.  The image of the lonely old man in decades-old clothes hobbling against a background of shiny lights, drunken celebrants, and pretty young Japanese girls singing Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” might be Kurosawa’s lament for what his people were losing in a rat race pursuit of money, convenience, and escapism.  That Watanabe is also seduced by this world but finds no joy there provides one of the film’s most haunting moments, when he sorrowfully sings an decades-old song to some befuddled young late-night revelers.

Though Watanabe’s journey ends with a personal satisfaction, Kurosawa in no way gives us a traditional happy ending, but rather one much more touching and thought-provoking.  After his death, the great message to be found in Watanabe’s success is thoroughly lost upon those he has left behind, who are too either too concerned with self-aggrandizement or too frightened by the lessons to be found in Watanabe’s quest to make any changes in their own lives.  Thus Kurosawa gives us a final scene that is hard to stomach as a parting warning to examine our own choices in life.

What I Disliked

Few movies are as flawless as “To Live.”

Most Memorable Scene: “I can’t afford to hate people.  I don’t have that kind of time.”  A mantra everyone should take up.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

GOOD BYE LENIN! (2003)

Country: Germany

Genre(s): Comedy / Drama

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Cast: Daniel Bruhl / Katrin Sab / Chulpan Khamatova

Plot

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, an East German family tries to prevent their passionately Communist mother, recently awakened from a coma and in ill health, from learning what has become of her beloved country.

What I Liked

Sometimes all a movie needs is a good story to satisfy its audience; which makes “Good Bye Lenin!” even better for having not only an engaging plot but also moving performances and relatable characters.  Such a movie, with that trifecta of strengths, and helmed by a director who knows how to keep his ego from getting in the way of those strengths, is able to evoke heart-warmed smiles and heart-broken tears with equal success.

But it is the storytelling that is the source of the movie’s real power; not just the sometimes funny, sometimes hand-wringing nature of the plot itself, but how the characters all evolve on their own personal journeys and the various lessons they slowly learn about life, love, and truth.  Few films engage the audience with a family dynamic as interesting and touching as this one.

What I Didn’t Like

Really no complaints.  This isn’t a movie that will blow anyone’s mind with style or innovation, but it’s just a solid, no-frills piece of filmmaking about human beings and life.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert*

What can only be assumed to be the mother’s death is such a beautiful moment of both peace and sadness that my eyes welled up.  That does not happen to me much when I watch movies, but I definitely choked up here.

My Rating: 4 out of 5

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (1936)

A.K.A.: Un Partie De Champagne

Country: France

Genre(s): Romance

Director: Jean Renoir

Cast: Sylvia Bataille / Georges D’Arnoux / Jacques B. Brunius

Plot

Accompanying her family on a country picnic, Parisian girl Henriette is seduced by a local man who takes her on a trip down the river in a rowboat.

What I Liked

Despite its understated look and plot, “A Day in the Country” remains an emotionally evocative movie nearly eighty years after it was made.  Brief but poignant, it is the aborted creation of legendary French director Jean Renoir, who apparently stopped production on the film after experiencing some sort of creative block.  He left the film incomplete and it was not released for a decade, with minimal title cards to help make the plot more understandable.  What Renoir did put on film stands well on its own, even in truncated form, as truthful and emotional filmmaking.  The film tells the story of a city family’s day trip out into the country to fish and picnic and two young locals who try to seduce the female tourists.  From this simplicity Renoir calls forth wonderful feelings of sentimentality and light-heartedness, and, later on, remorse and longing.  Some of that emotion is generated through some fascinating technical work, particularly as Henriette rides a swing and enjoys the carefree beauty of her surroundings.  The camera swings through the air with her, capturing her weightless joy.  Today such shots are common, but it must have been very difficult with the hulking mechanisms that passed for motion picture cameras in the 1930s.

What I Didn’t Like

While everyone in the family are portrayed as ignorant, naïve tourists bumbling their way through a vacation, the father and his future son-in-law are made particularly idiotic as the film’s comic relief.  The father is a false know-it-all, trying to impress everyone with his pretended outdoorsmanship.  The future son-in-law is his spineless, man-child sidekick, one of the most annoying buffoons I can remember seeing in a movie.  The attempt at a Laurel and Hardy dynamic fails.  Neither character is interesting, funny, or entertaining.  Ironically, the boringness of one of the characters becomes a source of the tragedy to be found later in the film.

Most Memorable Scene

*spoiler alert*

While the majority of the film is light-hearted, almost whimsical, the film’s last moments remind us that one day cannot last a lifetime, as much as we might sometimes wish it to do so.  The title cards take care of a leap forward in years where we find that young Henriette has again travelled to the scene of her youthful, romantic memories.  She has since married the young buffoon, who has come with her only to take a nap and leave her alone.  When she encounters the same man with whom she had shared such a wonderful afternoon so long ago, the hearts of both characters endure the torture of a last, longing conversation.  Suddenly the film becomes about as heartbreaking as any movie can be, Henriette’s tears at her inability to escape her fate and the man’s obvious longing to return to that moment when they were young serving as a solemn coda that will long linger in the mind of the viewer.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5

SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Samuel Fuller

Cast: Peter Breck / Constance Towers / James Best

Plot

Looking to boost his career with a sensational story, reporter Johnny Barrett pretends to be a disturbed man in order to pass as a patient in a mental ward and solve a recent murder.  Things don’t go as planned, however, and he soon loses touch with his own sense of reality.

What I Liked

Few films can find let alone walk the wobbly tight-rope between B-movie schlock and fine art as well as “Shock Corridor.”  Quaking with a neurotic mess of silly psychos, face-biting nymphos, pop psychology, electroshock therapy, strippers, and incessant yelling, the film is a black-and-white kaleidoscope of exploitation ridiculousness.  Yet it rises above other films of its kind in two very important ways.

First is the unabashed way in which the filmmakers use a mad house as a metaphor for 1960s America.  As Barrett gets closer to three of his fellow patients in particular, he learns of that the sources of their illnesses stem from the social ills of contemporary society.  One man has been so ostracized for his Communist beliefs that he has convinced himself he is dead Confederate General Jeb Stuart to compensate.  One of the scientists who designed the atom bomb has reverted back to a childlike state to avoid the guilt of responsibility.  And, most fascinating of all, a black man is so troubled by his status as second class citizen that he comes to believe himself not only a white man, but a member of the KKK.

Even more important to the film’s status as a bonafide classic is the cinematography.  The severely underrated cinematographer Stanley Cortez (“The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The Night of the Hunter”) enhances the sense that the ward is a world all to itself, with its own innate natural laws.  As the story continues and Barrett’s own psyche falls pretty to these laws, the camera angles go off-kilter, distort, and sometimes turn completely upside down, adding to the growing sense of unease.  The claustrophobia of the film is made more potent through Cortez and director Sam Fuller’s emphasis on the single hallway the patients call “the street” and the shadows lurking in the corners and side rooms.  Thus the movie has a unique, eye-popping look that can only be described as psychedelic noir.

The movie’s likable blend of cesspool and quality clearly left its mark on later generations of filmmakers.  From an infamous Dave Chappelle skit,  to the motifs found in “Shutter Island” by Martin Scorsese, to a lot that can be found in Quentin Tarantino’s work, much of what was considered so deviant about “Shock Corridor” when it first came out is now considered brilliant when modern filmmakers imitate its strangeness.

What I Didn’t Like

The movie’s depiction of psychology and psychosis can’t be taken seriously.  But accurately capturing the complex nature of the human mind was likely not anywhere on Fuller’s agenda.  “Mark Twain didn’t psychoanalyze Huck Fin and Tom Sawyer,” complains one character in the film.  It’s true, and seems to be Fuller’s point.  He’s telling us a story and, just because the details used to tell that story might be scientifically incorrect, doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have something to tell us.

Like the goofy psychos of the ward, the B-movie melodramatic acting and shock value tactics would be hard to put up with if it wasn't for the fact that the film's better qualities render its faults charming as only the best cult cinema can be.

Most Memorable Scene

If Fuller got the nature of personal psychosis wrong, he certainly captured the insanity of mass psychosis with frightening realism.  As I mentioned earlier, the insanity of society itself is a major theme of the film.  The moment when a black orderly is chased down the hall by a ravenous crowd of mental patients who have been spurned into attacking him by a racist rant from another black man is a fine example.  The whole scene is legitimately terrifying, an unflinching portrait of the madness in human civilization.

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5

FANTASTIC PLANET (1973)

A.K.A.: La Planete Sauvage

Country: France / Czechoslovakia

Genre(s): Adventure / Animated / Fantasy / Sci-Fi

Director: Rene Laloux

Cast: Jean Valmont / Eric Baugin / Jennifer Drake

Plot

The human-like Oms rebel against the enslavement of the giant Draags.

What I Liked

“Fantastic Planet” is a peculiar mix of 70s European animation, surrealist visions, and hippy ethos.  Back in the 1970s, it was still rather unusual for an animated adventure movie to carry adult messages, but this one does just that – albeit with childlike simplicity.  Clearly designed to veil Cold War-era political statements in some colorful and far-out science fiction gimmicks, the movie has some admittedly creative creatures and gadgets that might have otherwise been the product of collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Salvador Dali.

What I Didn’t Like

This is what happens when you let hippies make movies.  It’s hard to imagine a movie more dated.  From the unbearable 70s porn soundtrack, to the “Star Trek” cartoon sound effects, to pretty-but-archaic animation, to the peace-and-love morality of its conclusion, it’s now only watchable as retro kitsch.  Any ground it might have broken in 1973 has been thoroughly excavated by later films, rendering the innovations of “Fantastic Planet” obsolete.

Most Memorable Scene

The gratuitous glow-in-the-dark forest orgy made me cringe.  So bad.  Apparently saxophones are the soundtrack for sex even in galaxies far, far away.

My Rating: 1 out of 5

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Comedy / Horror

Director: John Landis

Cast: David Naughton / Griffin Dunne / Jenny Agutter

Plot

After an attack by a werewolf, an American tourist becomes a werewolf himself.

What I Liked

Where run-of-the-mill horror movies tend to rely purely on shock value, this one has much more to offer.  The most respected of a spate of werewolf flicks that came out in the 80s (“The Howling and its sequels, “Teen Wolf,” “Silver Bullet,”  etc.), “An American Werewolf in London” stands out from the pack thanks to the playfulness of writer-director John Landis and the still fascinating effects work of Rick Baker.  Landis was an accomplished veteran of comedy films (“Animal House,” “Blues Brothers”) when he was given the chance to make his dream film, one he had written when he was 19 years old.  His joy in having that kind of opportunity comes through in the finished product, which is a respectful homage to the werewolf pictures that had come before but goes out of its way not to take itself too seriously.  The film is full of goofiness and self-referential clichés from the start, along with a morbidly hilarious scene where the main character is forced to confront his grumpily undead victims in a porn theater.

Of course comedy’s all well and good, but the film also delivers on the thrills as well.  The real star of the film is of course the werewolf creature, brought to convincing life by Baker’s incredible work.  He has created a monster that looks to be more beast than man.  Unlike the bipedal Wolf Man characters of the past, this werewolf prowls about on all fours and has the elongated face of a very terrifying wolf.  Though some of the effects concerning the movement of the monster seem a little outdated, these scenes are few thanks to Landis’s wise choice of showing much of the action from the werewolf’s perspective.  These scenes, particularly one shot in the London Underground, are fraught with eerie suspense.

What I Didn’t Like

Nothing, really.

Most Memorable Scene

Baker’s effects really take over the movie once David transforms for the first time into the wolf.  No on screen werewolf transformation had ever appeared so fluid, frightening, and downright painful before.  The hair and claws grow right before our eyes while David’s bones stretch, break, and rearrange with agonizing realism.  Of course today it would all be done digitally and look even more natural.  But honestly, in a film market riddled with CGI, I sometimes long for the painstaking craft and ingenuity of first-rate makeup effects like those in “An American Werewolf in London.”

My Rating: 4 out of 5

HEAT (1995)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Action / Crime / Drama

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino / Robert DeNiro / Val Kilmer

Plot

A gang of professional thieves plot a multi-million dollar bank robbery with an obsessed Los Angeles police detective determined to bring them to justice.

What I Liked

Much was made of the pairing of gangster movie icons Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the same film together for the first time since “The Godfather, Part II,” a movie in which they had not shared a single scene.  Thankfully, both actors delivered on the promise of what was, truth be told, a gimmick to sell the movie, with performances that met if not surpassed expectations.  It’s not so much their portrayals of their characters individually that impresses.  Both actors were perfectly cast in roles that are not vast departures from characters they had played before.  It’s the way that Pacino and DeNiro, with help from director Michael Mann, elevated the relationship between their two characters from what could have been a simple cop-and-robber cliché to a more complex symbiosis that is conveyed so powerfully to the audience that it borders on spooky.

Outside of the Pacino-DeNiro dynamic there’s still plenty more about “Heat” to admire.  Essentially an update on the L.A. noir and detective movies of yesteryear, the film is at once a tip of the hat to the sinister fantasy of what was essentially a dead genre and a first rate heist action flick.  The kind of film that warms the hearts of nerdy cinephiles and casual fans who want things to go boom.  Director Mann finds that perfect middle ground by endowing the look of the film with a gorgeous black sheen and his characters with the cool brilliance that classic tough guys Pacino and DeNiro embody perfectly.  Of course we know that the lives of L.A. detectives and their criminal prey are never as glamorous as Mann would have us believe, but that’s part of the fun.  He’s given us an escapist pleasure disguised as a gritty crime picture.

What I Didn’t Like

Let’s face it, we’ve seen these characters from Pacino and DeNiro before and since.  How many incorruptible cops with unpredictable tempers has Pacino played before?  His characters in “Serpico” and “Sea of Love” come to mind.  DeNiro as a brooding gangster of few words?  That list is too long for me to bother compiling.  Luckily, the combination of those two characters and what the actors do with that combination is what makes the film work.

These titans of cinema are backed by one of the most star-studded supporting casts of the 90s: Natalie Portman, John Voight, Ashley Judd, Val Kilmer, Henry Rollins, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi, Tom Sizemore, and others all do well with limited screen time.  But sometimes star power can be a weakness in a film.  I can’t tell you the name of a single character in that movie and I just watched it yesterday.  To me, they were Pacino, DeNiro, Kilmer, Judd, Voight, etc.  Talented and familiar actors they may be, but I might have gotten even more into this movie if the supporting cast featured more unknowns.

Most Memorable Scene:

Come on.  No contest.  The diner scene.  Pacino and DeNiro in a verbal chess match over coffee.  I once heard one movie critic describe this is the greatest dialogue in movie history.  That’s overrating it a bit.  In fact, it’s less the tough guy dialogue that makes the scene so scintilating than what the two actors bring to the dialogue with their glances, stares, sneers, smirks, and gestures.

My Rating: 4 out of 5