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Who hasn't seen it? A severed alien arm against the ground. Star Wars, Mos Eisley, right? You'll find a very similar shot in Yojimbo, a Kurosawa action/dark comedy film that has inspired Western film makers for decades. Sometimes inspired them a little too well. A Fistful of Dollars is, if you ask many, practically an unacknowledged remake of this film.
So what's it about, now? Yojimbo means, approximately, 'bodyguard' in Japanese. So once upon a time, a long time ago, a masterless samurai walks into a town at war, occupied by two fighting gangs and their sycophants and allies. Both factions want this samurai on their team, so to speak, but he has cleverer and more dangerous ideas in mind than simply throwing his loyalty to one or the other.
As with other Kurosawa films, the violence is far from constant, but when it occurs, it's swift and shocking and the very fact that such techniques as slow-mo and close ups are avoided make the battles seem more realistic and frantic. Humor is laced liberally throughout the narrative, which is complex and political and may take a second watch to fully grasp. Characters have consistently funny lines, some (mild by today's standards) gore is played up for laughs, and the story has more to do with strategy and trickery than hack and slash, which only bolsters the dark comedy aspects of the film. Like Seven Samurai, this movie transitions so easily to the Western genre (almost too easily, counting the Fistful of Dollars controversy) that one wonders if Kurosawa was either influenced by the genre or was perhaps lightly satirizing it in this case. Regardless, a fun movie with terrific (and often copied) shots.
There's no way around it. Solaris is pretty crazy. Yes, it's another one of those Tarkovsky thinking films which uses science fiction as a foil for philosophy, but while Stalker is comparatively straightforward (!), Solaris is what happens when you take a film about love/loss, the power of need, the power of a complete inability-to-let-things-go and throw in some serious madness. You have gloriously bright and distinct sets, almost blinding, they're so vibrantly painted. And yet sterile. Much of the action is on a next to abandoned space station. Expect long walks down vacant corridors.
Ghosts are physical things here, manifestations of need that have their own will, their own needs, and their hauntings are both wanted and unwanted. Solaris is everything that you want and everything that you would die to avoid. Nightmare and daydream at once. It's that kind of movie. There are lovely moments and moments that make you want to reach for the remote.
And other moments which are their own kind of . . . special. Such as our hero's tendency to wander around in monogrammed pyjamas. Or the time . . . well, you'll just have to see it.
The ending is incomprehensible, just about. But 2001 wasn't exactly clear as a scraped-clean windshield either. It's about the journey, not the end. Something like that.
Stalker was a Russian alien on American soil. So it would seem. A review of the 1979 film appeared October 20, 1982, in the New York Times and was insistently insulting: the film was plodding, ugly, and poorly acted. The Russians might have beaten us to space, but obviously their science fiction sucked.
I confess I can't understand what the reviewer saw (or didn't see) in the film to draw her ire so completely. Stalker is ponderous and melancholy, a slow film rather than the pew-pew, whoosh of Star Wars. Watched a certain way, it is not science fiction at all, but a philosophical brooding on the nature of belief. There is a magical Zone where you can find your greatest desire in a special room, as long as you do not anger the attendant, invisible forces that guard it . . . or there's an overgrown abandoned town, lightly, but dangerously irradiated, where madmen give tours to the gullible. Both interpretations are perfectly valid. This might be what drove the reviewer crazy. These fields may be lush and these dunes absorbing, but they're just everyday fallow fields, and this is just where some industry dumped some extra sand years ago. Or are they? I simply can't agree that the actors are 'interchangeable,' when all three have a distinct, conflicting personality, but I suppose they are all balding older men. Searching for meaning after they've tried everything else.
Almost no music, long stretches without dialogue, a style that asks the viewers to make their own conclusions. Or don't. I found this movie both beautiful and thoughtful, a slow epiphany on how much we give up when we lose our capacity for credulity (or do we?), but your mileage may vary. You can hardly have a quieter film than this.
Afterlife is an underrated musing directed by Koreeda Hirokazu, a gentle movie (if likely too talky for some viewers) about the passage between life and death. The premise is simple enough - you can take one memory with you from one life to the next, a memory that will be filmed for you in a warehouse like back-building with high-school backstage props. Part of the charm of the film is its low budget. This miniature Purgatory is obviously poorly funded. Too many people use the hair dryers at once and the lights go out. The buildings look weathered, down to the scuffed tiles. Who would want to linger here, in this pale, worn reflection of a college campus? And yet people work here, ushering the newly dead into their afterlife, tirelessly interviewing the newly self-bereaved and turning their memories into miniature B-movies.
Although there are several quiet narratives intertwined here, the movie has a thematic unity: how do you come to terms with your life? Can you? Can you wrap up all your essence into a single moment and take it away with you as illustrative of your prime purpose, whatever that may have been? The difficulty of defining your life, or perhaps more importantly, finding those points where your life intersected with another and made it meaningful, is underscored in this film. Even the good cannot be sure that they are good when all is finished, the mediocre feel precisely thus. What is joy? Is a moment of peace under a cherry tree enough, or do you have to be Mother Theresa to be deserving of even what happiness you found
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