Revenge is Best Served Weird

Film: Yukinojo Henge (An Actor’s Revenge/Revenge of a Kabuki Actor)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Every now and then, I am confronted with a film that leaves me nowhere to begin and not really sure where to go. Such a film is Kon Ichikawa’s Yukinojo Henge (known as both An Actor’s Revenge and Revenge of a Kabuki Actor). As you might expect based on that second English title, this is a revenge picture. It’s not a difficult film to follow, but Ichikawa’s vision is a strange one, and I’ll do my best to make sense of it here.

The story behind this film is that Ichikawa was being punished by his production company for creating a few self-indulgent and money-losing films. To make up for this, he was told to direct Kazuo Hasegawa’s 300th film appearance, a remake of a film early from the actor’s career. The issue, of course, is that when Yukinojo Henge was first produced, the actor was a young man. For this version, he’d aged a good three decades.

Month 30 Status Report

Thirty months in, and I've crested the 700 review mark. There's still a lot to go, and some films will continue to be problems for me. If you look to the right (and when this scrolls down the list, to the right and up), you'll find a link to a wiki on finding the 150 or so films not currently available on NetFlix. That's great. However, I'm having real technical issues getting these things to work.

It's all okay, though, because except for a couple of films, I've got alternate routes for a lot of them.

July, though, will likely be a month of obscurities with a few well-known films tossed in for good measure. However, I've decided that it makes sense to focus a bit more attention on these more difficult films. I have watched and reviewed more than half of that list on the wiki, which helps, but there's still a long way to go, and I prefer not to overload the people who can get a few of these for me now and then.

A big victory this month was completing the first 100 films on the list. With L'Atalante done early in the month, I've now done everything from 1936 and earlier, so that feels like something of an accomplishment.

Interconnectivity

Film: Babel
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel is the type of film that defies being summarized. There’s too much going on in this film and too much that doesn’t make any sense for a large portion of the proceedings. This doesn’t mean I didn’t like Babel because that would not be accurate. It also doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try to come up with a summary anyway, because that’s just what I do.

Essentially, Babel is a series of interconnected stories that take place around the world, ranging from places as divergent as Japan, Mexico, the U.S., and Morocco. While there appears to be no connection between these stories initially, we learn as we see more and more that there is a specific chain of events that link all of these disparate elements together. A simple action in one place leads to inevitable consequences in another.

Devil with the Red Dress On

Film: Jezebel
Format: VHS from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

I understand the creation of characters like Miss Julie in Jezebel. This is a character that pops up frequently in movies. She’s in older films like Gone with the Wind or I Know Where I’m Going! and she’s not too different in many respects from the “manic pixie dream girl” so common in indie films of today. So I get the character, and I get why she exists. What I don’t get is why I’m ever supposed to root for her.

Miss Julie (Bette Davis) is a Southern belle, which means that in all situations, it is to her benefit to pretend to be weak and helpless so that men do things for her. She’s not much different in that respect, except that she frequently wants these men to do things that go against either the traditional code of conduct or the moral codes of the time. She’s manipulative and is so because she can be. Put bluntly, she’s the type of woman defined as “headstrong” by those with social graces, as a bitch by people without, and for people with nothing to lose as a word that begins with “c,” rhymes with “runt,” and doesn’t belong on this blog.

%(*^ing Clowns!

Film: La Strada (The Road)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I don’t like clowns. I don’t have the typical phobia of clowns that a lot of people have—I’m not scared of them; I just don’t like them. I’ve thought about it and I determined a few years ago that the reason I don’t like clowns is pretty simple. Clowns are crazy. They’re like socially approved crazy people who have license to do whatever they like at any moment. On those very rare occasions when I am approached by a clown, I don’t know how to react because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I could easily get smacked in the face with a fish or doused in confetti or kicked lightly in the ass. All I really know is that I don’t want any of those things to happen, so I want the clown to go away from me.

Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) takes place in a circus in no small part and features a number of clown-like characters, so it showed up with one strike against it. Fellini is a director I feel like I’m supposed to like, that if I don’t like one of his films, there’s something wrong with me rather than the movie. But…clowns and a circus. I watched it anyway, but this is a film I probably would have avoided forever had it not been on The List.

I Never Thought You'd Be a Junkie Because Heroin is so Passe

Film: Trainspotting
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

It’s an admission of mine to say that I was never really a part of the drug culture. Oh, I certainly saw my share of it, but I wasn’t much of a participator. My drug of choice in my college days was alcohol, and thus most of my drug-related stories involve booze instead of anything else. I don’t say this from a place of superiority (moral or otherwise) but from a place of fact. Drugs didn’t interest me that much, and I got my drinking out early. These days I don’t drink much. All of this makes it more difficult for me to really grok stories that center around drug culture.

This brings us to Trainspotting, a film that I’ve certainly heard out almost since it came out but have to this point managed to avoid seeing. I’ve even owned a copy for a year but still haven’t seen it until today. What I expected (at least from what I had been told about this film) was something akin to a Guy Ritchie film, something like Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Except for the sometimes impenetrable accents, though, there’s not a lot of commonality here. The person or people who told me this film was funny lied to me.

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

Film: Xich Lo (Cyclo)
Format: VHS from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

I sometimes find it difficult to muster up the necessary wherewithal to make it through subtitled films. That’s not an admission I’m proud of, but it’s an honest one. I have, over time, learned to like more difficult films and to not balk at watching things that challenge me mentally, but there are times when I just want to turn off my brain and be entertained. That’s more difficult with subtitled films, because they require concentration all the time. There’s no holding a conversation with someone else or looking away for a few moments. When a film is both subtitled and difficult in subject matter, this problem is compounded.

Xich Lo (Cyclo) is such a film. In addition to being in Vietnamese, it is also a film that requires particular mental fortitude. It reminds me very much of Ladri di Biciclette, although it bears similarity only on the surface and only in parts. It does have some close comparison to the Italian neo-realist style, though in terms of subject matter and characters as well as many of the plot elements.