Crimewave

I was going to watch The Road, but you can tell from the first five minutes of the film that it's not going to work: Viggo Mortensen's dreary voiceover on top of the gray but perfectly composed images. There's a very powerful sequence in the book, where the father tells the son how to commit suicide with a gun. There's the same sequence in the film, but with images it actually loses a lot of it's power. So I turned off the film after 15 minutes. I liked the book a lot, but why would I be interested in sitting through this when I can choose not to? Sorry, Viggo!

So I rather popped in an antidote, Crimewave, the film directed by Sam Raimi and written by Joel and Ethan Coen between the two first Evil Dead films. It's about... well, it's not that important what's it about. It's sort of Harold Lloyd meets the Three Stooges. It has lots of great visual ideas, a cartoony energy with the camera forever spinning around, and everything is completely artificial. It is a movie like no other. It has Bruce Campbell in a supporting role as "a heel". It has been disowned by Raimi because he lost control of the film in editing. It is funny and probably a bit too much, but it only lasts 75 minutes, and they save the best joke for the end: the nuns and their oath of silence.

Next: The Misfits

Covers...

...for Norwegian fanzine Kraftig Kost and for What I did, omnibus collecting Hey, Wait..., Sshhh! and The Iron Wagon.

Carnival of Souls

A woman is a passenger of a car that crashes through the railing of a bridge and into a river. She later appears on the riverbed, not knowing what happened or how she survived. She gets a job as a church organist in a small town, but keeps seeing a ghoulish character and having experiences where she is invisible to other people. She is also strangely drawn to an abandoned amusement park.

I caught this film on a French channel some years ago, not knowing anything about it, which is probably the best way to see a film like this. So if you've never seen this film, stop reading right now! Forget the title! Keep checking channels for late night movies and hope you stumble upon this one! See if it doesn't turn up in your dreams!

It's clearly low budget and has an amateurish feel, something that only increases it's strangeness. It's like a horrorfilm made by someone who has never seen a horrorfilm. There are clumsy scenes next to scenes that even Stanley Kubrick couldn't have done better. Candace Hilligoss as the main character gives a very effective performance, her spaced out eyes saying more than the often ridiculous dialogue.

Next: The Road

Tokyo Story

An elderly couple visit their grown children in Tokyo, but are not made to feel welcome, except by their widowed daughter-in-law.

I don't really know much about the director Yasujiro Ozu. I haven't seen any of his other movies. Jim Jarmusch has mentioned him as an influence, and you can see that in the use of a static camera. Unfortunately there was something wrong with the dvd, so I was unable to watch the last half hour of the film. Japan is a foreign country, and Japan in the 50s even more so, but the relationship between parents and grown children is pretty universal, I suppose, as is the theme of growing old. It's a film that it's easy to relate to. I found it maybe a bit black and white, with the bad daughter and the impossibly good daughter-in-law. Sometimes the characters say what they feel, when it would have been more exciting to guess their feelings.

Slow, foreign movies work maybe better in a cinema. Viewing it at home it's easy to be distracted by other things. The car chase was pretty good though.

Next: Carnival of Souls

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

I got a bunch of dvds that don't really have anything in common except I bought them and haven't had the time to watch them yet. Starting with The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. The story takes place in a little town in the South of the US. Alan Arkin is a deaf-mute renting a room in the house of teenage girl Sondra Locke. He's there to live close to another deaf-mute, and he also meets a black doctor and Stacy Keach as a bum, pretty much the same role Keach later played in Fat City.

I remember seeing this film on tv when I was a kid. We had a black and white tv at the time. I haven't seen the film since then and I was a bit disappointed in finding out that it actually is in colours. It's been many years since I read the novel by Carson McCullers, so I don't really know how well it has translated into film. It's got all the surface details at least. Especially Arkin and Locke are excellent, and I like the simplicity of the film. The director doesn't try to do anything fancy with the camera. It's a story about isolation and loneliness, about a girl becoming an adult, and the ending is just as touching as I remember it to be.

Next: Tokyo Story

Ibsen cover

I made this cover for a biography of Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright.

Cape Fear

Ex convict Robert Mitchum turns up in the hometown of lawyer Gregory Peck. He holds Peck responsible for the eight years he has spent in jail. The film also stars Martin Balsam as the police chief and Telly Savalas (with hair!) as a private detective. Music is by Bernard Herrmann.

This was a late film noir, and it still holds up pretty well. It's shot in black and white, and even in tone it's quite dark. It's never said directly but implied that Mitchum's character will take revenge by raping Peck's young daughter. For Peck, and the viewer, it's a question of how far are you willing to go to protect your family? Not getting any help in the courts Peck has to finally use his own family as bait. The final showdown between the two is a primitive man to man struggle for survival in the Florida swamps, far from cilvilisation. Both actors are very good, even if they are very much typecast.

In the Robert Mitchum School of How to pick up girls, there's a great line in this film. You walk over to the girl sitting in the bar and say, -I give you one hour to get rid of your friends. (It's even better if you are escorted out by police officers, like Mitchum is in the film.)