The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - '"Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

       Here’s another film that’s been on the queue for years, and yet always managed to escape the list. Unlike with Wages of Fear however, we’re not dealing with an unknown here; This is Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis, also known as the film that I end up comparing every silent movie I’ve ever reviewed against, as well as Destiny, which wasn’t as good but still had moments of inspiration. Many directors go their entire career without making one film on the level of Metropolis, but just as many readers likely don’t realize that Metropolis was just one part of Lang’s storied career. A career which spanned several decades, continents, and genres, from the early days of silent film through the Golden Age of Hollywood all the way to the 60’s. In fact as much as I praise Metropolis, it’s arguably not Lang’s most lauded, most celebrated, most fondly remembered film -- this one is. So if I want to win any of those arguments, I better check it out for myself and see if that hype is real. Also I’m probably not actually going to argue, I just want to watch a movie.

       Released in Germany in 1931, M was directed by Fritz Lang, written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, and produced by Seymour Nebenzal through Nero-Film A.G. There’s a child murderer (Peter Lorre) loose in the streets of Berlin and the public is in an uproar. Accusations are thrown, people are being accosted and attacked on the street, and as usual the police’s way of handling it is heavy-handed and completely ineffectual. Well that’s not quite true, as the near constant bar raids and night patrols do raise the ire of Berlin’s criminal population. With their livelihood on the line the heads of the various syndicates decide to set up their own investigation in tandem with the police. As both sides of the law create a city-wide pincer movement it seems that the killer’s day are numbered, but you don’t become a serial killer in pop culture without being hard to catch. Moreover, if he is caught, who’s gonna get to him first?

       Film began as a principally visual medium, and Fritz Lang understood that better than most filmmakers. We can see that quite clearly in Metropolis with its elaborate effects, but we can see in M the kind of visual storytelling that Hitchcock would utilize in his thriller films. The scene of little Elsie Breckmann bouncing her ball against a pole where a notice of the murderer is posted, only to see that same ball roll slowly roll out a bush later on, a sign of the grisly act that has just taken place. Or during the scene where the murderer is running from his pursuers, and rather than making that shot look smooth the camera jostles as it races after him, coming to a stumbling stop as he turns towards us, compounding this atmosphere of panic. Hell, even the visual of the M, the brand which marks the killer for what he is, is a deceptively powerful look for how simple it is. While the film does have sound there’s a lot of it that is done in complete silence, and it really shows just how much a director can convey without saying anything. Not as dynamic as Metropolis, but powerful nonetheless.

       That’s not to say that the inclusion of sound here is just a gimmick, as it seemed to be in some early ‘talkies’, as Lang uses it quite distinctly in M. Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, originally written for the Henrik Ibsen play Peer Gynt takes on a sinister second life as the murderer’s favorite tune, and of course you couldn’t do Peter Lorre’s final speech justice without sound. It’s a bit strange that, rather than just having scenes being done without talking and leaving natural sound they are done with sound removed entirely, I don't know if that’s a matter of how it was preserved or what but it works. There’s not a wasted syllable in the bunch.

       Speaking of Peter Lorre, he is undoubtedly one of the highlights of this film. This was only his third ever film role, second ever credited, and he hits it out of the park. People talk up Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector, for good reason but I don’t know if anybody has ever embodied the concept of creepiness like Peter Lorre. You see him in M and you see on screen what you picture in your mind when you hear the words ‘child murderer’. The way he looks, the way he talks, how he smiles, Lorre’s every move and gesture arouses this feeling of anger in the viewer as naturally as blinking. His final speech is a powerful bit of acting, catching the viewer between the two extremes of pity and disgust. It’s no wonder he became a Hollywood staple for a couple decades after this, everything about him is iconic. That’s not to say that the rest of the cast were bad, there’s not a bad one in the bunch, but I don’t know if this film would be as strong as it was without the casting of Peter Lorre. It was a star-making kind of film and he was the star. 

What kind of film is M, though? I personally see it as a transitional film for Lang, between the German Expressionist movement that he helped to establish and what would become film noir. M’s subject matter is rooted in the underbelly of modern society, a film about criminals tracking down an even worse criminal, but there’s an aura of the bizarre about it that calls back to Fritz Lang’s origins. The directness of the visuals, the overpowering silence (intentional or otherwise), the weird little bits of humor the overwhelming weight of Lorre’s insane compulsions, while it’s not as out there as nightmarish as Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari there’s still a surrealism that covers the film like a blanket. It’s a film with its feet in the past and the future, and you can see in it a throughline to Hitchcock and Batman and countless other pieces of art and media.

M receives the recommendation. While crime thrillers aren’t exactly an uncommon sight in film, it takes skill and vision to do it well, and Fritz Lang proves here that he is a skilled craftsman. While it’s not the grandiose cinematic experiment that Metropolis became, it’s a classic in its own right. Be sure to check this one out this Halloween if you’ve got a chance, it’s definitely worth the time. Maybe pair it with Psycho or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, make it a really wild night. I don’t know if it’d be fun, but it would be memorable.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Wages of Fear (1953), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Bombtrack" by Rage Against the Machine

       Not much comes to mind in the preamble. I’ve already talked about the enormous influence the French people have had on the creation and development of film as an artistic medium, and that they’re just about the only non-English speaking country I can rely on for a science fiction film or an animated movie that isn’t China or Japan, so I don’t feel like repeating myself like usual. Rather I will just say that this film has been on the radar as far back as the start of this blog if I recall right, and I’m glad that I can finally cross it off the old bucket queue. A bucket queue, to be clear, is like a bucket list but a lot nerdier, and with less Morgan Freeman.

       Released in 1953, The Wages of Fear was directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, written by Clouzot and Jerome Geronimi and produced by Raymond Borderie, based on “Le Salaire de la peur” by Georges Arnaud. Yves Montand stars as Mario, a French lothario and immigrant stuck in a town somewhere in South America, which like many South American towns is incredibly poor, underdeveloped and currently being exploited by a U.S. oil company. With no jobs available to make money and thus no money to leave, Mario wiles away his days bumming around with the other immigrants, stealing cigarettes from the local tavern and shtupping the local barmaid. With the arrival of the elder, cool and collected Jo (Charles Vanel) however, Mario finally has a fellow Frenchman to spend some time with, not to mention a man who has the wherewithal to make enough dough to get them out of that hell hole and back to France. Of course Jo doesn’t have any money either, having dropped the last of it on his plane ticket to get there, but it’s only a matter of time before something comes along.

        Then, miraculously, something does come along in the form of a horrific pipeline explosion. The guys running the pipeline conclude that the only way to curtail the fire is by using a large amount of nitroglycerine to snuff the fire out with an even bigger explosion. Thing is, the only way to get the nitroglycerin to the location is transporting it by truck, and given the state of the roads (part of that whole ‘forcibly underdeveloped’ thing) any driver who takes a pothole the wrong way or zigs when they should have zagged runs the very real risk of violent death. But hey, that’s why you have a reserve pool of labor, am I right? Just offer the right amount of money, 2,000 dollars for example, and you’ll have people lining up around the block to sign up for your suicide mission. So it is that four men -- Mario, Jo, the coincidentally named Luigi (Folco Lulli) and the stoic Bimba (Peter Van Eyck) are chosen to drive the two trucks. To collect their...wages of fear.

        The Wages of Fear is a film built on a foundation of suspense. If you’ve ever watched a scene in a movie where somebody is running away from a vicious killer who seems to appear around every corner, or they have to deactivate the villain’s superweapon before it unleashes chaos upon the world, imagine that scene spread out over 70 percent of the movie. Every bump in the road or engine shudder could be the prelude to death, and events which in any other scenario would be minor hurdles or inconveniences are almost insurmountable obstacles. That’s an insane amount of pressure, and the film is built around how our four characters deal/degrade under that stress. All of which Clouzot presents with this stark intensity that would make Sergio Leone nod his head in approval.

        Of course suspense works best when the audience sympathizes with the characters, but I don’t know if Wages of Fear does that. Mario and Jo are toxic shitheads at the start of the movie and turn that toxicity towards each other as the movie goes on, and even if it tries to turn that around and imply a genuine bond by the end of the film it never rang true for me, because while Imay not have wanted them to die I actually was not invested in their success. In fact Clouzot ends up watering down his ‘corporate indifference to human suffering in the pursuit of profit’ message to a less engaging ‘everything sucks’ angle; Everyone is ignorant and callous, and the few people who aren’t are derided and punished for it. It’s a very dour film, with the kind of ending that Ingmar Bergman would’ve been proud of. All of which would have likely been regarded as rather profound in the post-WWII period when that generation was still reeling from collective shellshock, but nowadays seem to exude an air of juvenile nihilism. Rather than making me think it feels more like it’s making me check and see if I refilled my antidepressant prescription.

        I guess I didn’t though, because despite my eagerness to watch this in the beginning I find I have nothing really to say about it. The Wages of Fear has one thing that it does very well, I’ll give it that, but connecting with the film on an emotional level (at least for a first viewing) didn’t really happen. The acting was fine, the music was fine, the cinematography was damn good, but I didn’t really feel anything by the end of the film except the mild dissatisfaction one gets from calling a scene minutes before it happens. Damned by simplicity.

        I can still recognize why it's regarded as highly as it is however, so I’m letting it pass with a mild recommendation. If you’re a film major in college you might have a time with this, maybe namedrop it in class to get some points with the professor, or if you need a different kind of thriller then you might pop this in, but I can’t say for sure that this is a movie I feel like coming back to any time soon. That’s just the way she goes sometimes, although not too fast or she’ll fucking explode.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989), directed by Kazuki Omori

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Bio Wars" by Koichi Sugiyama

       Now this is truly a blast from the past. We haven’t seen hide nor hair from the King of the Monsters since Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, the sixth ever writeup on this blog. Despite making it a priority to cover foreign films, despite the direction of this blog being geared towards genre films (especially horror and science-fiction), despite the fact that I’ve been a fan of the thing since I was a child, the last time the big green lizard’s name appeared on this section of the internet was almost a decade ago. It’s not like we had a good excuse either, I mean if Monkeybone or Cool World of all movies could get an entry then Big G definitely should have been four or five films deep at this point. Yet every year when the list was compiled Godzilla was, like so many others, a bridesmaid but never the bride.

       Well this year I’ve decided to use the Global Top Ten to take care of some films that have been on my watch queue. We’ve already seen one, Once Upon a Time in the West, and now it’s time to return to Japan and see how they filter important social and political issues through the lens of people in rubber suits smashing miniature models of Tokyo. The only proper way to do it, really.

       Released in 1989, Godzilla vs. Biollante was written and directed by Kazuki Omori, story by Shinichiro Kobayashi, and produced by Shogo Tomiyama and Tomoyuki Tanaka through Toho, the grand central station of kaiju pictures. After falling into a volcano in the ending of the previous film, Japan has been freed from the menace known as Godilla, the atomic lizard has left behind something other than destroyed homes and families: his DNA in the form of sin cells. So useful are these cells that other nations are trying to get their hands on them, including the country of Saradia, an oil-producing country in the middle east that is totally not a stand-in for any other country. That’s bad news for botanist and geneticist Professor Shiragami, as it’s not five minutes after Saradia acquires those G-cells that someone bombs the research lab they were in, killing his daughter in the process. 

        Five years later and it looks like Godzilla is getting ready to leave his lava bath, so Japan has cooked up a way to kill him off for good: Anti Nuclear Energy Bacteria, a biological weapon designed to to consume radiation, derived from those G-cells. Of course the existence of such a weapon is an even bigger gamechanger than the G-cells, and so you have espionage agents and spies gunning for that secret formula. Also Shiragami, who was put on the ANEB project, decided to take the G-cells and combine them with plant cells for whatever reason, he’s a fucking moron I guess, and obviously that ends up creating a giant monster named Biollante. Now normally when two giant monsters are in the same general area they just leave each other alone and don’t interact, but I think this just might be the exception.

       Let’s start with the good: the special effects. Not much has changed from the Showa to the Heisei era films on a technical level, it’s still people in suits walking around miniature cities with little smoke bombs going off every now and then, but what has changed is the presentation. Godzilla is no longer the goofy joke he was in the 70s but a brutish engine of destruction, and Biollante wouldn’t look out of place in a John Carpenter film, in fact I’d say it looks better than the creatures in In the Mouth of Madness. The miniature cities have similarly increased in size and complexity, Godzilla appearing almost dwarfed by these giant skyscrapers, which explode and crumble with exquisite precision. There’s a surreality to it for sure, the lighting on those skyscrapers almost emphasize how much they’re not actual buildings, but to me films like Godzilla vs. Biollante and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was when kaiju movies finally looked like kaiju movies rather than Rifftrax fodder. A bit like how some people say that superhero films weren’t good until the MCU started, if I cared about Marvel.

       Unfortunately just about everything else in Godzilla vs. Biollante isn’t as good. There’s a good premise of governments and corporations trying to exploit Godzilla for their own ends, some ‘you thought of whether you could rather than if you should’ before Ian Malcolm put it out there for taste, but that premise is reduced to a simple ‘find the McGuffin’ thread with people trying to steal/recover the bacteria, and the whole anti-genetic engineering message kinda goes out the window when both things created through meddling with nature ultimately saved the day in the end. Then there’s this angle involving psychics, because psychics exist I guess, and one teenage girl apparently can project the same level of power as Godzilla, which begs the question of why we need bioweapons when a bunch of 9th graders could take care of it in five minutes. Also ghosts exist and inhabit plants? Apparently the Godzilla filmography takes place in the Undertale universe. It’s an aggressively muddled movie.

       That’s not a foreign concept when it comes to Godzilla movies, so you then have to look at the action layout. It’s a cold hard truth of the kaiju subgenre that despite it being predicated on giant monsters destroying stuff or fighting each other, most of the film will be dedicated to things that are not kaiju related, so keeping the audience engaged with the human aspect of the film is key. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah managed to do that decently well with it’s faux Aliens, but Godilla vs. Biollante is the polar opposite. I could not bring myself to care about any of these characters, besides the idiot who says a witty one-liner to Godzilla after shooting him with a rocket and is immediately crushed to death,  and because most of the film is built around waiting for Godzilla to do something and then sending other people to do it, the film can’t figure out a way to make them interesting either. I can’t even remember any of their names besides Shiragami, Kuroshima the Ian Malcolm wannabe and Asuka the forgettable female lead. Even Shiragami barely exists in this film, the character who should be the most emotionally nuanced in the film given his backstory and him literally being responsible for creating a giant monster, and it doesn’t help that the actor is more wooden than Pinnocchio’s taint. It’s hard to believe that a movie with giant monsters, super science and psychics could be so damn dull, but Godzilla vs. Biollante will make you a believer.

       Even calling it Godzilla vs. Biollante seems like a touch of false advertising. Yes the two monsters do meet each other, but the total amount of time that the two kaiju are on screen together is probably less time than it would take to eat a Happy Meal, and their fight is less active than your average episode of Power Rangers. In fact Godzilla spends the majority of the movie, when he actually shows up, fighting with the JSDF and their state of the art ship that looks like a bloated horseshoe crab, and those fights are actually way more dynamic than the one with the giant monster plant. Biollante, despite being second-billed, doesn't really do all that much, and honestly could have been completely written out of the story and barely anything would change. 

       I also can’t let this write-up go without giving a big middle finger to the score. While you do get the iconic theme whenever Godzilla is on screen, most of the time you get this Sousa-like booming orchestral stuff which sort of makes sense in the scenes with the horseshoe crab ship but is totally dissonant with the other scenes. A giant nuclear monster just ran through a major metropolitan area, tearing it to the ground and killing hundreds if not thousands of people, it probably shouldn’t sound like the ending of Star Wars.

       Ultimately I just don’t see myself giving Godzilla vs. Biollante. I’m as big a fan of the atomic lizard as anyone, and it’s nice to see him again after all this time, but the film surrounding him is a mess, and not in a funny way like the Showa movies. If you want to see some badass Gojira action, the best bet in this blog’s opinion is still Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. There’s still plenty of Godzilla movies to choose from though, and hopefully it won’t take almost a decade for us to see another one.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: The Dybbuk (1937), directed by Michal Wasznyski

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Tumbalalaika" by The Klezmer Conservatory Band

       I think it should go without saying that Jewish people have been instrumental in the development of cinema as an art form. Whether it be through acting, writing, directing, producing, some of the most celebrated films of all time likely would not exist were it not for members of the Jewish people, and some of those most celebrated films are about Jewish people. Yet when it comes to this blog’s forte, the genre film, it always seemed to me like there was a gap in representation. I mean think of all the famous horror film based around Christian theology, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Devil’s Advocate and then try to think of an equivalent film based around Hebrew theology. Pretty hard I imagine. In fact the only Jewish genre movie that comes to mind (besides The Hebrew Hammer, which I believe is legally classified as a dumpster fire rather than a movie) is The Golem, a German Expressionist film that literally came out over a century ago, so I’d say we’re overdue for another one. So how about one that’s slightly less than a century old instead?

       Released in Poland in 1937, The Dybbuk was written by S.A. Kacyzna, directed by Michał Waszyński and produced by Zygfryd Mayflauer, based on the play of the same name by S. Ansky. Sender and Nisn are the best of friends, So much so that they make a vow to each other that if their soon-to-be-born children turn out to be boy and girl, then they shall be wed. God, however, hates harmless statements and decides to dole out some punishment on them: Sender arrives home to find his wife gave birth to a daughter but died in childbirth, and Nisn dies at sea before learning his wife gave birth to a son. 18 years later a young scholar named Khonen arrives in town and hits it off with the Sender family, especially Leah, but Sender has become a wealthy man over the years and the only potential groom he can consider for his daughter is one that can make him even wealthier. Obsessed with claiming Leah as his bride, Khonen turns to the Kabbalah and even Satan in order to get her, but God apparently hates that too and promptly kills him as well. That seemed to be the end of it, but it is said that if a man dies before his time that his soul can return to walk the earth, looking to experience the things they missed out on life, becoming what is known as a dybbuk. Which is exactly what happens here: Leah in her grief calls out for Khonen to be with her, Khonen’s spirit returns as a dybbuk and possesses her, and now the Sender family has to figure out a way to free her from the malignant spirit. Kind of like The Exorcist but with more Yiddish.

       One of the big appeals for me in watching foerign films is being able to catch a glimpse of different cultures and to see how they interpret the world. While the Jewish people aren’t ‘foreign’, at least in places like the U.S., as I wrote earlier you never really see that much of a Jewish presence in pop culture outside of Hanukkah time, so this is a treat. Not only to see Jewish actors performing in Yiddish, but getting to see how the Jewish people celebrate holidays and religious ceremonies, hear their songs and their views on theology, the full monte. More than a film that just utilizes an aspect of Jewish culture/folklore as a gimmick, like The Leprechaun, this is a film that knows and honors its roots.

        So besides being a cultural touchstone, how is The Dybbuk as a film? It’s fine. This was the era when many films were essentially stage plays on screen and Dybbuk is no exception, but there are some exterior shots and cinematic tricks (such as those involving the spirits) to spice things up, and I think the little village area they use as the main setting looks well crafted. The acting is also perfectly adequate, M. Lipman is probably the highlight as Sender and Leah’s potential bridegroom (psychoanalyze that Mr. Freud), who is the closest this film has to comic relief, although I think the actors who play Leah and Khonen have more charisma separately than they do together. I also liked the music, you can never have enough klezmer, although with the way audio was captured back in the day some of the songs come off as a bit creepy.

       As a story though there was definitely a disconnect. When I went into this film I was expecting it to be a sort of Hebrew religious fable, and given how much Jewish theology plays into the story it sort of is, but this is less like David & Goliath and more like Romeo & Juliet. In R&J the theme of ‘get along or this shit can ripple down to your kids and fuck up their lives’ is pretty clear, but I’m not sure of the moral of The Dybbuk. Sender and Nisn try to decide things beyond their station and get punished for it so you’d think the message is ‘place your faith in God and don’t try to micromanage everything’ but then it pushes Leah and Khonen together anyway. Khonen is running down the Talmud in one of his early scenes so you think he’s going to have to learn humility in order to get his just reward, but in fact Khonen succeeds by doing the complete opposite. Then you think it might involve Sender repenting for mistake and his miserly behavior but no, that doesn’t really factor in either. Usually in a religiously-based film the world with God or faith is portrayed as gray and miserable, but in The Dybbuk where God is a factual thing, all the characters end up miserable, and faith appears to be completely meaningless. Which really starts hitting home when considering the 2 hour runtime. It’s downright depressing, almost absurdist in a way, but I’ll fully admit that’s an outside perspective and the audience for which it was made likely saw it differently.

       A film made by Polish Jews on the eve of WWII sounds like it could be a movie on its own, but the film we got was interesting enough in its own way, so I’m giving The Dybbuk a mild recommendation. It’s not really a film made to just sit down and watch whenever, but maybe if you’re a teacher looking for something to show the class (I first found out about the play from a college class), or if you and your significant other like old sad B&W movies, or you’re just trying to expand your horizons as I’m trying to do, then The Dybbuk is worth looking into. If those don’t apply to you, then it'll probably be too long and too slow paced to be truly enjoyable, and you’ll want to look for something different. And if any mysterious bearded men suddenly appear and start giving you life advice, just walk away.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Wheels on Meals (1984), directed by Sammo Hung

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "The Food Truck Blues" by The Arcadian Wild

       It felt like a little bit of a copout when the time came to pick this year’s martial arts film and I returned to the Jackie Chan well yet again, but I’m justifying it because this isn’t just a Jackie Chan movie, but a Samo Hung movie as well. Most people in the United States probably aren’t familiar with the name, but Hung has been an important part of the development of the Hong Kong kung fu film as a worldwide phenomenon, not only as an actor but as a stuntman, action director, producer and film director. If you’ve ever watched Enter the Dragon or some of those old Shaw Brothers films, then chances are good that you’ve either seen him on screen or seen fight scenes that he’s choreographed, because they’d release like six of those movies a year back in the day. Although he never had the star power of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, his rotund physique combined with his impressive acrobatic skills and choreography experience made him a unique figure in the kung fu flick scene, and he was eventually able to transition that into his own successful movie career, appearing in films as recently as 2019. Pretty sure a 58 year career in the movie business qualifies as a ‘good run’.

       Originally I wanted to cover a movie where Sammo Hung was the solo lead, but the film I was going to use for that, 1980’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind, was being oddly elusive at the time. So it’s Sammo playing alongside his old buddy Jackie Chan, but he is directing the movie, which I think is a suitable compromise. Maybe next year I’ll just avoid Hong Kong entirely and cover The Last Dragon or something.

       Released in 1984, Wheels on Meals was written by Edward Tang and Johnny Lee, directed by Sammo Hung and produced by Raymond Chow (the founder of Golden Harvest, the studio which either produced or distributed pretty much every kung fu movie you ever liked). Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao star as Thomas and David, two Chinese immigrants running a food truck in what I assume is Barcelona Spain, because what other Spanish city do they set movies in? While visiting Dave’s father at the local mental hospital, the cousins come across Sylvia (Lola Forner), a woman as beautiful as she is thievish, but luckily for her Dave is into that shit. After conning the two several times, it seems like Sylvia and the cousins actually form a kinship, but things take a turn for the serious when a group of mysterious thugs enter the picture, intent on nabbing Sylvia for undisclosed but undoubtedly nefarious purposes. David and Tom must team up with their friend Moby (Sammo), a bumbling private detective who as fate would have it has been hired by someone to track down Sylvia as well, in order to keep Sylvia safe and save the day. Most of which involves kicking people’s asses.

       The Hong Kong film scene was no stranger to action packed movies back in the day, but I don’t think it was until the 1980s that the action film began to crystallize. Wheels on Meals for example has plenty of those fight scenes that made Golden Harvest such hitmakers, but a significant portion of the run time is dedicated to action set pieces such as automobile stunts. Pretty good car stunts too while we’re at it; They’ve got cars flipping over and smashing into each other, cars driving on their sides, it’s very frenetic. That might not seem all that remarkable in these modern times of perpetual Fast & Furious movies, but similar to the case in Once Upon a Time in the West with Cheyenne on top of the train, diversifying the ways in which you excite the audience makes for a more engaging film overall.

       Comedy wasn’t a stranger either to these films either, and Wheels on Meals is principally a comedy. In a similar situation to before, there’s plenty of the physical comedy that you loved in films like Drunken Master, but just as much of the humor is built around cartoonish gags and dialogue. Chan, Biao and Hung had been collaborating since their days in the Peking Opera so they’re completely at ease with one another, and that chemistry lends itself to gag-writing which feels quite fluid which comes through even in spite of the dub. With Samo directing I think there’s the assumption that his character Moby would get the best bits and while Moby is definitely the clown of the film each of the three stars get their own chance to shine.

        As I wrote earlier, while Wheels on Meals is more of an action movie than strictly a martial arts movie, this is still a film starring kung fu actors distributed by a kung fu movie studio, so there’s still plenty of fight scenes to scratch that itch. The greatest of these fights is naturally in the climax, where our protagonists are engaged in three separate fights, which manage to be not only masterful displays of choreography and the stars’ speed and skill in acrobatics but great examples of slapstick comedy as well. If the 3 Stooges were living weapons, basically. We also get some non-fight stunts as well (in case you ever wanted to see Jackie Chan ride a skateboard), nothing as complex and potentially deadly as what we would see in Jackie Chan’s later films, although there is a running gag involving leaping out of a first floor balcony onto the street that probably didn’t feel too good on Biao and Hung’s hips when they busted their ass.

       If there’s a problem with the film, it’s the same one shared with a lot of these kinds of movies, in that the story is secondary to the action. The movie begins, then we kind of meander around a bit doing whatever, until the characters finally learn what the plot is in time to stop it and save the day. I can’t even say this film has a main antagonist; Yeah there’s a guy that we see boss the thugs around who means to harm our good guys, but he gets so little focus it’s as if he barely exists at all, and when we reach the climax of the film he’s barely an afterthought. Sylvia isn’t all that memorable either; She spends most of the film not as a femme fatale con artist but as the love interest/macguffin for the characters to fight over, and her dubbed voice only serves to further increase her blandness. There’s also a number of scenes set in the mental hospital where the jokes are based on how wacky people suffering from mental illness can be, which may or may not be a dealbreaker depending on your view but is in any case a tired trope. 

        In a decade that saw dozens of amazing action films come out of Hong Kong, Wheels on Meals doesn’t stand at the head of the pack. However it’s a film that knows who its audience is, knows its stars and knows how to craft an action scene, and that is what it delivers, and I can respect that. Wheels on Meals gets the recommendation, if you’re looking to relax and want something fun and uncomplicated to watch in the 80’s style, throw this on and see how you like it.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), directed by Sergio Leone

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Once Upon a Time in the West" by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Tuva Semmingsen

       Cultural intermingling is about as common as the tides, and it’s about as obvious as the tides when it comes to film. Hollywood’s film noir craze in the 40s and 50’s were inspired by the German expressionist films of the 20’s, the films of directors like Martin Scorsese and Monte Hellman have their roots in the French New Wave, and then of course you have the spaghetti westerns. While originally used as a derogatory term by critics, these were films directed, crewed and produced in Italy and Italians obviously love spaghetti, the spaghetti western has gone on to subsume the concept of westerns in the public consciousness. I mean picture the quintessential Wild West gunslinger in your head and chances are he’s gonna be a lot closer to Clint ‘Chair Talker’ Eastwood than ol’ John ‘The Indians deserved it’ Wayne, and when westerns tropes are referenced in modern works it is more likely going to be from something like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly than it is Angel & the Badman. Whether spaghetti westerns are out and out better than the old American western isn’t really a question worth answering, there are plenty of classic American westerns just as there are plenty of shoddily made Italian westerns, but there is a distinct difference between the two and that is in their tone. The Italian’s depiction of the American West is gritty; It’s a morally gray world where good people die for nothing and the only common language is the one that comes out of the barrel of a gun. Compared to the squeaky clean, white hat versus black hat, occasionally jingoistic image of the old western the spaghetti western seemed more visceral, more relatable, especially to an American audience that was hurtling towards the Vietnam War and everything that followed. Westerns still faded away in the end sure, but it can’t be denied that those films and those directors gave that genre a level of critical and commercial acclaim that it hadn’t experienced in years, and arguably is the main reason that the genre hasn’t just faded into complete irrelevancy.

       The man credited with the creation of spaghetti western is also the most famous director of spaghetti westerns: Sergio Leone. Entering the world of show business back in 1941 with a small role in Roberto Roberti’s The Man on the Street, Leone worked for several years as an assistant director and second unit director before finally making his debut in 1961 with The Colossus of Rhodes. Three years later he would turn in his sword and sandals for leather chaps and revolvers in A Fistful of Dollars, and the rest is history. It’s a bit sad that a director as influential as Leone wasn’t more prolific, he only directed 7 films before his death in 1989 with over a decade long gap between Duck, You Sucker! in 1971 and his final film, Once Upon a Time in America in 1984, but if you’ve got to choose between quality and quantity then Leone chose quality. Years ago I wrote about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a film which many consider one of the greatest westerns of all time, and so to kick off Long Dark Marathon of the Soul ‘21’s international top 10, why not return to Leone and cover the other greatest western of all time? I mean 80 percent of the Marathon this year is already returning names, what’s one more on the pile right??

       Released in 1968, Once Upon a Time in the West was written by Sergio Leone and Sergio Donati with story by Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, directed by Sergio Leone and produced by Fulvio Morsella through Rafran Cinematografica. Once upon a time in the West, a man carrying a harmonica, known only as Harmonica (Charles Bronson) arrived at a little town named Flagstone, looking for another man named Frank (Henry Fonda). Frank wasn’t there to meet him however, as he and his friends were busy murdering a family named the McBains and framing a local outlaw named Cheyenne (Jason Robards) for the crime . He and his outlaw gang were working for a railroad tycoon by the name of Morton you see, and that delicious McBain land is right in the middle of some prime locomotive territory. Later that same day, a woman arrived in town and revealed herself to be Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), the secret wife of patriarch Brett McBain who had arrived just in time to find her new family massacred. Thus we see a tangled web is weaved; Harmonica wants Frank, Morton wants the land, Frank wants power, Cheyenne wants money (and a little bit of Jill), and Jill is the center of it all. All it takes is one good shake and everything will come loose, with explosive results.

       With a name like that you’d think the movie would be more fantastical, but at the same time I can’t think of a better name for this film. Leone’s westerns prior to this had a storybook element to them; The gunslinger with no name who arrives in town and saves it from outlaws in Fistful of Dollars or the odyssey the Tuco and Blondie embark on to find the hidden treasure in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We see it here as well with the character of Harmonica and his role in the story, but where those previous films used the western as more of an aesthetic choice (literally in the case of Fistful of Dollars, as it was based on Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), Once Upon a Time in the West is intimately connected with its setting. The entire film is built around the expansion of the United States through the railroad after all, its populated by a veritable melting pot of people, black, white, Chinese, Mexican, Native American, which runs parallel to Harmonica’s quest to kill Frank. The inevitable march of time and progress, represented by the railroad, which sweeps away the remnants of the past, represented by the outlaws and gunslingers like Cheyenne and Frank. Once Upon a Time in the West has a storybook style name because like storybooks it has a definitive ending, for the film and in a grander sense for the ‘Wild West’. Leone would go on to direct, write and produce other movies in the genre in the years following the release of this film, but Once Upon a Time in the West does have this air of finality to it that you could easily see it as the end of the western movie.

       It’s almost not worth mentioning the cinematography in this case, because we all know the Sergio Leone style by now: wide angle shots of the landscape paired with close focus shots on people’s faces, and hold for a couple glacial seconds. Which of course works because the scenery is fucking beautiful and the close-ups are connected to some of the most intense scenes in the film. Sergio jumps out of the gate with it too, with Frank’s men waiting at the train station to kill the man who turns out to be Harmonica. Three men just sitting at this train station in the middle of nowhere, ill intent marked clear on their faces, and the tension builds and builds until the train and Harmonica is introduced. Even though they break that atmosphere somewhat with some silliness, it’s a textbook example of the visual power the director wields. I also liked the scene with Cheyenne taking out Frank’s men from on top of a moving train; While not as dynamic as modern action set pieces it is a change of pace from the normal western gunfights, and does aid in the presentation of this film as an epic.

       As far the cast goes, it’s solid. While Charles Bronson doesn’t cut the same figure as Clint Eastwood (although ironically Bronson was offered the lead role in all the Leone westerns that Eastwood would later star in), like Eastwood he does have this quiet machismo about him that conveys the idea of Harmonica as this enigmatic, deadly figure. Henry Fonda is great as the villainous outlaw Frank; A man who puts on airs of power and class but at heart is just a killer, and one who loves doing it. Jason Robards does a fine job as Cheyenne, a foil to Harmonica who eventually grows to be the secondary protagonist almost, although much like Bronson compared to Eastwood I don’t think he leaves as strong an impression as Eli Wallach did a few years earlier. Neither does Claudia Cardinale if I’m being honest; One look at her and you can tell why she was the most popular actress in Italy at the time, but I could never get a feel for her character. For a while I thought there was going to be a twist where she turned out to be a con artist looking to scam the McBains, because there were a couple scenes that seemed to suggest as much, but then nothing came of it and she just becomes a character that reacts to other characters doing things, which is never an ideal position.

         Next we arrive at the music, composed by Ennio Morricone, king of the spaghetti western scores, and I’m surprised to say that it’s a mixed bag. When it hits like in the final duel it’s overwhelming, an explosion of raw emotion in the form of noise that elevates that scene to high art, and when it doesn’t it stumbles off a cliff. There’s this one little bit of music that has a bit of a cantering cadence, I don’t know if you’d call it a leitmotif or not, that keeps appearing in the film. From the sound of it you’d think it’s for the background of the sillier moments, but then it shows up for scenes that are dead serious and it’s tonally dissonant. Not to mention the soft and sensual music for what is, in essence, a rape scene, I don’t really get the logic there. Ennio Morricone is a legend in the world of film and rightfully so, but if you’re coming into this expecting the Moricone that everyone knows from pop culture then you’ll probably be out of luck.

       I guess that’s the biggest takeaway from watching Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a great film to watch, with deep characters and a story that it is both personal and grandiose, but as I’m writing about it I keep coming back to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It’s impossible not to, as Good, Bad, and the Ugly is the quintessential western. It’s got the iconic scenes, iconic characters, iconic music, it’s a successful film on all levels. Once Upon a Time in the West falls short not because it’s necessarily a worse film, but because it doesn’t compel you to revisit it the same way that GBU does. You see it, you feel it and you move on. Whereas with GBU just writing about it has given me the urge to rewatch it. 

       The operative words here are ‘you see it’. Once Upon a Time in the West is 100 percent recommended, but not quite a ‘turn off this computer and go see it now!’ kind of film. If you’ve slept on Leone and/or spaghetti westerns prior to this, then watch Fistful of Dollars, watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, watch The Wild Bunch and The Magnificent Seven and all those Django and Sartana movies, and when you feel up to it pop in Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s the last western, thematically at least, and that’s how it deserves to be seen.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Frozen (2010), directed by Adam Green

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Frozen" by Daniel Lanois

       Oftentimes the scariest things in horror movies are also the simplest. When Tim Robbins is watching the subway pass by at the beginning of Jacob’s Ladder and and we see the ghastly passengers glaring back at him, or when Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween is walking around Haddonfield and we suddenly notice Michael Myers in the background,watching her, those are often the moments which resonate most with audiences and make those films as iconic as they are.

       Those are scenes though, it’s different when that mindset is applied to the premise of the films themselves. Christine is a movie about a car that kills people but because of the direction of John Carpenter it’s been elevated to a great film, but most people probably wouldn’t say the same about Rubber, the movie about a killer tire. The Birds is a movie about birds that kill people but because of the direction of Alfred Hitchcock it’s been elevated to a great film, but I doubt many people would say that about Frogs or Slugs or any of the other deluge of animal swarm horror films. Of course of all the genres of film horror is also the one that requires subtlety and depth the least, so even if they are simple on the surface you can never really count them out. So I remember years ago watching the Angry Video Game talk about a movie that seemed to be just that: bare bones and a simple premise. And instead of watching Chronicles of Riddick like I was originally planning, apologies to all you Vin Diesel fans out there, I decided to watch this one instead. Can it live up to the nonexistent hype? I dunno actually, I write these intros before I watch the film itself.

       Released in 2010, Frozen (not to be confused with the Disney film, or the 3 or so other movies called Frozen) was written and directed by Adam Green and produced by Peter Block and Cory Neal through A Bigger Boat and ArieScope Pictures. Shawn Ashmore plays Joe Lynch, a young college student who has decided to take impromptu ski trip with his best friend Dan (Kevin Zegers) and, reluctantly, Dan’s girlfriend Parker (Emma Bell). It’s an eventful day of water sports, but as night falls Lynch convinces the two to take in one last ride on the powder, despite the ominous foreshadowing. During their trip up the slope however, a series of unfortunate events leads the chalet staff to shut down for the night (and the week, as it turns out), trapping them on the ski lift. As the reality of the situation sets in, tensions start to flare out of control and the three start contemplating rather drastic plans for escape. Will Parker, Lynch and Dan manage to make it off the mountain alive, or will they end up…………………………….Frozen? You’ll have to watch to find out.

       Talking about simple films, you can’t get much simpler than Frozen. A handful of people for the cast, set in one mostly static location, it’s practically Waiting for Godot with some extra steps. Unlike The Birds however, which works in spite of itself thanks to the director, Frozen really works because of its simplicity. On the surface it seems quite mundane, just some people stuck on a ski lift, but it’s the reality of it that makes it terrifying. You’ve probably never been attacked by a bird before, but chances are that you’ve been on an elevator and had an errant thought of what would happen if the power went out or the cable snapped. Or ridden on a plane and wondered if the technicians were on the ball when they were making sure the thing could fly. Being stranded on a ski lift is something that could and probably has happened to people in real life, and it takes those things that we take for granted in our everyday lives, access to food, water, air conditioning, bathrooms, and magnifies them to matters of life or death. At its best it can be downright excruciating to watch, more than anything involving Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger, and that’s pretty damn impressive given how much of the film’s runtime is dedicated to seeing people sitting down.

       Credit where credit is due though, because those people sitting down do a damn good job. I’m not really familiar with any of their work, although they all seem to have had recurring roles in various TV shows like The Walking Dead over the years, but I would hope that this performance helped to open some doors for them. You can wholeheartedly believe that these poor fuckers are slowly freezing to death, each scene radiating this aura of hopeless misery as they struggle against their situation. Shawn Ashmore as Joe Lynch is probably the standout, as his character is given the most material to work with, but it’s really an ensemble film. Lynch’s third wheel bitterness really works because it clashes against Parker’s fish-out-of-water helplessness, all of which is contrasted by the need to cooperate and help each other to ensure mutual survival. There’s no stupid betrayals or hidden psychopaths to throw a wrench into things, just the struggle for survival.

       If my description of Frozen makes it sound like a misery porn movie, then unfortunately I’m going to have to confirm that assumption. At first it doesn’t seem so bad, these people are stuck on a ski lift not on a cruise ship after all, but as the film goes on apparently Adam Green believes that almost freezing to death isn’t enough tension and keeps upping the ante, to the point that the tension is lost and starts becoming a dark comedy. When they introduced the wolves, because apparently New England just has packs of wolves roaming the countryside, it led to me laughing more than anything else. Like, how much more fucked do these people need to be? Their limbs freezing solid and falling off isn’t enough, having to piss yourself because you’re stuck 20 feet in the air on a metal bench isn’t enough, you have to add being mauled to death on top of it. By the end of the film I can’t even say I felt catharsis, just this sense of ‘yep, it’s over’, and I don’t know if I would have felt that way if they had just pull themselves back a bit. 

       When Frozen is good however, it’s the first film I’ve seen in a while that made me feel genuinely uncomfortable watching it, so for that it gets the recommendation. While I think Adam Green’s writing choices are overindulgent and ultimately undercut the emotional impact of the story, it’s also a great example of how you really don’t need much in order to make an effective film, especially when it comes to horror and thrillers. No 100 million dollar budgets, no A-list actors, just a good idea and a good crew. So if it’s a little chilly outside when Halloween rolls around pop this one in and see where it takes you. You’ll probably never want to go skiing ever again, if you’re one of those weirdos that go skiing, but hey, there’s always SSX Tricky.