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Reviews
Survivor (2015)
Three Days of the Condor Redux
"Survivor" updates "Three Days of the Condor" with Milla Jovovich in the Robert Redford role, Pierce Brosnan in the Max Von Sydow role, the cleverly blackmailed Robert Forster in the bad boss Michael Kane role, Angela Bassett in the John Houseman role, the wheelchaired Frances de la Tour in the wheelchaired Jess Osuna role, and so on and so forth. Dylan McDermott is kind of a mix of "Condor's" Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunaway roles (even though the final film knowingly or not suggests Jovovich is lesbian). This time terrorism - or the appearance of terrorism - drives the plot, much as it does in the first half of the 2006 James Bond Film "Casino Royale." Oblique references are made to 9-11, even showing a brief clip of the first plane flying into the Twin Towers, where Cliff Robertson had an office in "Condor." Jovovich's (odd) attraction to the "underground" - and her stalking through the literal Underground - also draws comparisons to "The Third Man." That said, the too generically titled "Survivor" is a fun, if rather convoluted little romp. The film's unlikely scenario is compelling enough, with Jovovich and Brosnan (in an always fun-to-watch opposite James Bond mode) playing an entertaining game of cat and mouse, and it's refreshing to see a woman hold her own in this sort of film without resorting to over-the-top he-man heroics or cocky quips, but...it's hard to tell what's going on most of the time. Important plot points were left on the cutting-room floor for some reason. And while it's plausible to keep the audience guessing who is good and who is bad in all of this, it's hard to figure out in the end which way the always magnetic James D'arcy and the criminally under-used Angela Bassett swing. Still, it's fun and mostly intelligent, if not a wee bit derivative and unbelievable. It ain't as serious as the final title card implies. But it's fun if you can figure out what's going on.
Windows (1980)
Not bad..but not great
This is a fascinating, however flawed film. It's hardly perfect, as so many of the negative reviews here will attest. But it's not nearly as awful as so many people expecting something else - more blood? more bodies? more shock cuts? more exposition? more girl-on-girl action? - might suggest. "Windows" is the only film directed by celebrated cinematographer Gordon Willis, the "Prince of Darkness" who photographed the Godfather films, "All the President's Men" and a number of Woody Allen's best films made between 1977 and 1985.
"Windows" is a stunningly beautiful film, shot on location in Brooklyn with many gorgeous shots of NYC (with the Twin Towers off in the distance) and many angles of the Brooklyn Bridge. Willis was a native New Yorker and obviously loves the city (as evinced in the gorgeous "Manhattan") and he films New York in a way that makes you feel like you are part of the story. The story that was filmed obviously differs from the original script ("Corky") that was provided. Willis seemed to want a movie that was more Hitchcock (think "Rear Window") than Hitchcockian (think "Dressed to Kill"). But the result is, well, not much of either. Indeed, Elizabeth Ashley's character went from man-transitioning to manly lesbian...like that made any more sense. And Talia Shire's damsel in distress is, well, just distressing.
There was also a bit more Hitchcockian humor in the original script, which is unfortunately absent here. Many things appear to be missing here: scene after scene ends suddenly and unresolved; some scenes play out with no dialogue or resolution; Ennio Morricone's score seems heavily edited; Talia Shire's character, Emily, doesn't seem to be all there herself - and her oddity doesn't explain her sexual appeal to everyone; Emily's relationship with Andrea (pronounced not like the woman's name, but rather a man's name) is never realistically explained; the attack at the beginning of the film seems unusually staged (even though that's exactly what it is) - and the cab ride with the perp is unbelievable in the extreme. The film winds up as a series of weird compromises that cannot have pleased anyone.
Still, "Windows" is worth watching. Willis may not have made a great director, but what he puts up on screen is utterly fascinating. The way he lights scenes and doesn't light faces is amazing. He can make you fear Elizabeth Ashley while she does little more than throw a creepy shadow. The location shooting can't be beat. Elizabeth Ashley gives a bravura performance, even if it doesn't make much sense...but there's no accounting for someone in love. Even if the final film differs from what might have originally been intended, there is something here, as in "Eyes of Laura Mars," "Cruising," "American Gigolo" and "The Fan," that is credible and fun to watch. It's also a top-tier NYC film.
La maison sous les arbres (1971)
The Amazon with the Scarf of Fire
This gem may require a bit more patience than your average thriller, but its charms are plentiful and more often subtle than not. Director René Clément (1913-96) delivers an entrancing melodrama, highlighted by the ever-beautiful Faye Dunaway, who gives a tremendous performance as a mother in peril. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a better presentation of such a classic (or cliched) trope: Dunaway mixes her caught-in-the-middle Evelyn of "Chinatown" (1974) with the plucky Kathy of "Three Days of the Condor" (1975). It's unusual to see the actor portrayed as a loving mother (one exception being the great 1988 film "Burning Secret"), but her scenes with young Patrick are very believable (at the expense of so many other scenes - especially those with the enigmatic daughter Cathy). Even that little apartment the family occupies is very realistic too. They move around the place like they really live there.
Clément shows us a beautiful, but decidedly un-touristy side of Paris. The film, shot by Andréas Winding, who lensed Clément's previous "Rider on the Rain" (1970) and Jacques Tati's "Playtime" (1967), looks beautiful: soft focuses throughout, with Faye looking lovely, fading into dark, hazy, almost hallucinogenic settings. It's unclear why Faye and family are in Paris in the first place, but these outsiders inhabit their giallo with all the baggage that comes with strangers in a strange place. This film never quite goes giallo - despite its Italian title - but it comes close. The elliptical script was written by the actor/writer Daniel Boulanger (a writer of two segments of the 1967 Edgar Allan Poe omnibus film "Spirits of the Dead"), with the apparently uncredited Ring Lardner, Jr., who had previously scripted Robert Altman's "M.A.S.H." (1970) and was probably responsible for the convincing English dialog heard here (his credits in film noir are especially notable here).
It is a classic Hitchcockian situation, where a MacGuffin (in this case, a vague threat of "industrial espionage") drives the action. That action, the kidnapping of the children - which the script threatens mercilessly before the film's halfway point, when the kids finally disappear - comes, of course, from Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956). But it's hard to see Faye Dunaway as a Hitchcock "blonde" or any one of the Master's female leads (only Marnie comes close). She comes from a generation of women Hitchcock could probably not have realistically directed or, really, even properly understood.
There are, however, a number of other film classics are referenced here as well, most notably "Gaslight" (1940 and 1944) and "Rosemary's Baby" (1968). These two references alone make Phillipe (a sexy Frank Langella) suspect; however, they also go to great length to address the painful wrongs society does to women in general and mothers in particular. The jolt, watching the film nearly five decades later, is seeing Jill (Faye Dunaway) taking the moral, public and even legal blame for the disappearance of her children. Once the kids are gone, Jill enters a Kafka nightmare that this film evokes in Wellesian images from the fantastic 1963 film adaptation of "The Trial."
The "brilliant" Phillipe's confusing involvement with "The Organization" also recalls Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley's Game," which is odd as that novel wasn't written for another three years (Wim Wenders filmed the 1974 book as "The American Friend" in 1977 and Liliana Cavani filmed it, beautifully again, in 2002). It's notable that Highsmith's first novel, "Strangers on a Train," was filmed by Hitchcock in 1951 while the novelist's celebrated "The Talented Mr. Ripley" was first filmed by Clément in 1960 as "Plein Soleil" (a.k.a. "Purple Noon" - also with Maurice Ronet, who gets only one brief scene here). It's not inconceivable that the talented Ms. Highsmith was inspired by this film to craft her terrific (and more logically worked out) "Ripley's Game."
The sheer number of beautiful staircases Clément shoots here also suggests the classic woman-in-peril noir "The Spiral Staircase" (1946): Jill's loving mother is "muted" here by her pre-figured criminality and her gaslighted "weak and imperfect" motherhood makes her an absolutely perfect potential victim. She can neither satisfy her husband (!) nor successfully protect her children. Well, it is early 70s French provincial after all. One staircase in particular here actually prefigures another famous staircase seen two years later in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist."
The lush orchestral score is by the renowned French singer Gilbert Bécaud (1927-2001), best known today as the writer of "What Now My Love" (covered by both Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra) and "Let it Be Me" and co-writer of Neil Diamond's "Love on the Rocks" and "September Morn." Bécaud's main theme is a melodic piece that traffics appropriately in both playful childlike wistfulness and melancholy adult malaise. The tension cue that plays over the children's abduction is an eerie Morricone-esque minimalist piece that perfectly reflects a mind on the brink.
As far as the English dub on the 2016 Golem Video DVD I watched, the voices are so badly recorded it sounds as though they were doing it in someone's kitchen or bathroom. At times I couldn't figure out if Ms. Dunaway was dubbing herself or someone else was - or both. And all of the male voices sounded like no one other than Gene Wilder, who made a name for himself as Willy Wonka the year this film was released.
Oddly, this movie is known under many titles, few of which make much sense. Only the source novel's boring title seems reasonable, "The Children Are Gone." Not exactly thrilling, though, is it? So, how about the American title, "The Deadly Trap?" What was the trap? Phillipe's unexplained web of whatever? The French title, "The House by the Trees," sounds exciting - but it only makes sense toward the very end and only for a few brief moments. Then there's the Italian title, "The only clue: a yellow scarf," which is, umm, true but not as exciting as something like "The Amazon with the Scarf of Fire" or something baroquely giallo like that.
Still, the film is a worthy and intoxicating European thriller. It follows a classic dream/nightmare logic that makes it a worthy contender among such kidnap classics as "High and Low" (1963), "Séance on a Wet Afternoon" (1964) and "Bunny Lake is Missing" (1965) and goes some way to informing the giallo classic "Who Saw Her Die" (1972). There are great subtle touches here, notably Barbara Parkins' lovely performance as the significantly named "Cyn," the odd Michele Lourie playing the utterly inscrutable Cathy and the strange ending where a child's drawing is either malevolent or the happy ending that seems intended. All worth watching...
Beoning (2018)
Worth every moment..
A haunting film that earns its ironic chill(s) slowly and steadily, in the classic thriller tradition. Many have noted the "slow burning" quality of the film, but I was often reminded of the obsessions and the spell-casting of "Vertigo." The scenes where Jong-su follows Ben's fancy car through the streets of Seoul and Paju provide the most obvious clue. But there is also the disappearing woman (who also recalls the missing women of "L'Avventura" and "The Vanishing"), the suave mystery man who may or may not be a master plotter (or "player," as he says here) and the hapless, lonely guy with a phobia (in this case, violence and fire) that forces him to "retire" from reality. The scenes referencing Faulkner and Gatsby are superbly expressive and a testament to the literary legacy Haruki Murakami - who wrote the short story, "Barn Burning," that this film is based on and which appeared in The New Yorker in 1992 - acknowledges and so thoroughly and artfully extends.
Among the film's most memorable scenes is the sunset party at Jong-su's farm - scored to nothing less provocative and meaningful than Miles Davis' theme to Louis Malle's 1958 film "Elevator to the Gallows." There is beauty - in a film that purposely plays down the natural beauty of Korea - and menace in these scenes: you don't know who is going to do what, but something bad is portended. The creepiest scene for me involves Ben, a woman and a make-up box. Some things in the movie remain utterly unresolved, which is okay, but the film's final scene seemed to come out of nowhere and felt inconclusive or wrong to me. Maybe it depends on who you think the baddie is in all this. I saw a "Vanishing" ending coming when it all went rather more "Vertigo" or where "Vertigo" probably ought to have gone.
Steven Yeun is, of course, terrific and newcomer Jong-seo Jun is an undeniably hypnotic presence. Little wonder why Ah-in Yoo - the laconic and passive presence of whom I couldn't take my eyes off - is besotted, despite his ignoring all the alarm bells of amour fou going off around him (recalling Truffaut's underrated "Mississippi Mermaid"). The director, Chang-dong Lee, did an amazing job here, blending the literary and the cinematic to perfectly poetic pretense, though the film is probably a bit longer than it needs to be. Don't let the running time put you off; this film is worth spending time with...even if you don't get it. It is exactly what Hitchcock called "pure cinema."
Poirot: Three Act Tragedy (2010)
A great addition to a great series
While I too am a long-time viewer of this ITV series and a much-avowed fan, I must disagree a bit with the previous writer who said this is not one of the series' best. "Three Act Tragedy" really is one of the best films of the long-running Poirot series. Agatha Christie's story, filmed once before for American TV as "Murder in Three Acts" (the original title of the first American publication of the book) in sunny Acapulco with an oddly contemporary setting, is a classic of misdirection with one of those twist endings the author is never properly celebrated for.
The story presented here is an absolute marvel of authenticity, with only a few changes made (Mr. Satterthwaite is deleted and the murderer's modus operandi is changed a bit here, negating the book's most evasive clue, "am worried about M"). Otherwise, "Three Act Tragedy" is pure perfection.
Directed with a combination of astonishing period elegance and artfully ironic noir camera work by Ashley Pearce (who directed the well-done "Mrs. McGinty's Dead) and scripted with great eloquence by Nick Dear (who also scripted "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" as well as two of the series' best later entries, "The Hollow" and "Cards on the Table"), it's hard not to be impressed with this film.
The slowness of the film's first half that the previous writer refers to is present in the book as well. This is due to the fact that the investigations, such as they are, are not manned by Poirot but rather by amateurs – amateurs who get nowhere fast (or slow) and provide more red herrings than usual for a Christie story.
What makes the film of "Three Act Tragedy" exceptional, though, is a tremendous ensemble cast, expertly led by the magisterial Martin Shaw (Inspector George Gently, Adam Dalgliesh, Judge John Deed and a bunch of other British TV detectives), who gives an astonishing performance of the performance of a lifetime here. Many others, including Kimberley Nixon as Egg, Kate Ashfield as Miss Wills and Tom Wisdom as Oliver Manders, give wonderfully notable performances here as well.
Suffice it to say, David Suchet is exceptional as Poirot, offering a performance that is as impassioned and world-weary as his character is written in the book. "Three Act Tragedy" really does rank among the very best work for all concerned in this terrific series, which still has a little way to go before "Curtain."