Mirror - 1975

 One of the original thought processes behind the film blog here was because I have a pretty bad memory.  When I was in high school I wanted to watch all of the Godzilla films, as well as Zatoichi.  I would watch one of these, say, Zatoichi's Vengeance, and then like a week later or whatever I would be like, which ones have I seen again?  The titles (case in point in this example) might have nothing to do with the plot, so I would end up forgetting and end up having to rewatch or waste a rental or watch out of order.

Mirror, another example of a title which you really can't say anything about, is possibly a Tarkovsky movie I had never seen before?  That or I completely did not remember it.  Either one is completely possible.

Random thoughts of reflection after just having watched Mirror:

1. What did this script look like?  I wonder what Tarkovsky had to give investors and such in order to secure funding.  If one thinks that likely the poems infused into all of his work were likely not in the script, were they just pages describing shots or the minimalistic movements of characters?

2. What is a tone poem, when was it popularized, and do we have at least a partial amount of our awareness of them because of Tarkovsky?  I feel like these movies are in a large part essentially tone poems, enigmatic, atmospheric, interpretive, and esoteric. 

3. Does visual beauty make us relate to minimalism more?  Large expanses of nature, minute nuances in music or painting - do we look deeper into these because of their seeming slightness, does that connect with us....  Or really, to answer WE DO, and then the real question is WHY?

Mirror is perhaps Tarkovsky's most nonlinear and most esoteric work.  A chance meeting in the beginning of the film between a travelling doctor and Maria sparks a largely internal journey of a dying poet to recount his childhood, his relationships with his parents, and his turmoil.  That's basically the plot.

I also want to mention the editing.  Perhaps it is only the strict contrast between Mirror and some of Tarkovsky's other work, but there are several moments where something changes in the last millisecond of a shot, and exactly then is when it edits.  I believe this is extremely powerful in the film.  I think it says something very interesting about memory, about feeling, about the notion of "unfinished business" or death or life, or all of it.  Oddly enough, this feels a lot more like a film about death then The Sacrifice, but I'm also going to rewatch that and get back to you on that.

But like I said, the "plot" here is really nothing.  What this is, instead, is a visual and auditory journey through symbolism, emotion, artistry, nostalgia, memory, and near worship of the power of a moment.  This movie is basically meditation, it is the goal and the experience of meditation, at least for me.  It's self-exposing, complete interpretive minimalism is exactly what I believe the goal of such a task is.

Mirror thoroughly confused film critics, confused me, and sat in relative obscurity until being placed in the Sight and Sound top 100 and being hailed as a work of artistic genius years later.  The meaning behind and the examination of it is solely up to the viewer, and what can I say besides, genuinely, everyone will get something different out of this.  And for that, Mirror gets...

Stalker - 1979

 There is a inevitable end to all things, whether it be Stalker, a film blog, life itself.  

Tarkovsky and I, well, I don't know where to start.  I don't specifically remember when but I watched Solaris, which I did rewatch in the last 5 or so years, and I guess I did not review.  This led me to Stalker, which probably leapt up to the rank of favorite, and eventually I ended up watching everything except I think The Steamroller and the Violin.

Stalker is a bizarre, sci-fi infused philosophy film that really masters that hypnotic feeling which Tarkovsky was the ultimate master of.  I spoiled it to my girlfriend while we watched, and I'll spoil it here sort of - nothing really HAPPENS in the movie, and yet there is the deepest feel of dread, of enraptured wonder, of freedom and of homesickness, of doubt and of bizarre reality in the film.

We start with the main character the Stalker waking up at home.  His home is depicted as is the entire sequence in a bizarre sepia tone which seems to accentuate every scuff and dirty patch on the filthy walls and floor.  Eventually its revealed he is going to be leading two men, the Writer and the Professor, into the Zone.  There's almost an action sequence as they get into the Zone, and from there the film evolves into a high esoteric, atmospheric tonal piece with drowning thoughts about philosophy, human nature, and the concept of life.

It's odd because one would really want to use the word "quiet" to describe Tarkovsky so much, but his movies are anything but.  They are practically wall to wall dialogue, with dreams and philosophy and poetry flooding out the characters mouths.  Yet, the themes and the visual language is so minimal and so stayed that the word quiet would be used to describe THOSE and be correct.  

There is imagery in here that has always stayed with me.  The sand dune sequence, the owl, the train car, the water....  I was thinking while I watched this that this film is water, maybe Nostalghia is land, The Sacrifice is fire... I wonder if this could be applied to more of this films.  Relating them to an element.

The film is an absolute masterpiece, one of those that make the argument between the concept of "film" versus "movies" or "flicks".  This is a reminder that true, emotional, ambiguous art CAN exist in film.  It's for sure 5 stars.

I really don't know if the blog is over or not.  I feel like it is this time.  I haven't been watching very much honestly, and even in the dead of winter, just not feeling like writing.  Movies are really interesting in that they illicit and inspire a thought process, at least the good ones do, and I appreciate that about them exponentially, but really, I feel like I am pretty much "over it".  

I want to reread a lot of my posts as I find the process of seeing these interesting.  Maybe one day I'll do some sort of retrospective.  Until then, I hope that you the reader enjoy these odd 10 years of my life where I decided to write about what I watched and include some asides about my own life and ideas.  If nothing else, I did create the blog to contain those personal moments.  Maybe, one day, I'll return.

Theo

The Banker - 1989

 I guessed in the 90s.

IMDb trivia says this is the movie that turned Tarantino into Robert Forster? Interesting. I wonder if that is true. He stars in this muder at mystery thriller movie. 

The Banker is an odd name for a fairly by the numbers movie.  Someone is killing prostitutes and leaving marks on their bodies.  Forster is the cop who is investigating the killings.  The symbol is about the domination of women, and that spirals into the seedy underworld of strippers and sex.

I mean, there's not a lot to say about this crap.  Its barely worth mentioning except that the killer uses a crossbow and is painted in all red and black when we eventually see him  It made me think, how is it that we got to HERE from the horrors of the true life serial killers...  You know its funny because it almost feels like mockery.  Like, we have Dahmer or whoever out there committing real crimes and the banality of their menace is so different from the outrageousness of this stupid movie where some dude has a crossbow.

The Banker is a movie that few people have seen or think about, and it deserves that, but somehow...it also deserves Tarantino to love it?  Movies are weird.

Hardcore - 1978

 There's some notorious movies I've long seen and been on my radar for whatever reason and this is one of them. 

If only for the poster,  which screams "oh god that's my daughter" or something,  this stands out. George C Scott never says the line but it's implied,  and the rest is, well...

A snowy, down to earth Grand Rapids family sends a daughter off to LA and she never returns. Scott flies out to investigate and hires Peter Boyle as a private investigator. He digs into the seedy underworld of hardcore pornography and uncovers more than he ever wanted to know while he searches for his daughter. 

This movie is a lot more controversial and is less of a talky than I would've assumed. It's late 70s but feels that 90s aesthetic, a lot more like its brother from another mother 8mm. 

There's some interesting developments and we do kinda know how it's going to go but not in a awful way. In fact, this is pretty dang interesting and very well made film. This is one to seek out. 4 stars

Sisters - 1972

 I'm still curious to see a lot of De Palma but I won't say all mostly cuz of his more recent work. 

Sisters is a nice classic Hitchcock homage and made me wonder what people now draw from Hitch. I'm watching a lot of Hitch recently and I'll have to say...I mean it's all true. He's a true master. 

Sisters stars Margot Kidder before Black Christmas and Superman, and she's a classic untrustworthy narrator type. She meets a man on a dating show,  takes him home for sex,  and the man is killed by her the next morning. But she may have a twin and it may have been her twin...

This is not a far way away from De Palma's later murder films like Dressed to Kill and Body Double. The edgy raciness, the bizarre off kilter sense. It's definitely in the realm. 

A neighbor who's also a reporter saw the murder see and is onto it,  and she's going to uncover a truly bizarre and confusing scene. 

Just like his other stuff,  this movie takes some wonky turns and goes a lot of places,  just in general. But I enjoyed it and i give it 4 stars.

Devil Story - 1986

 I have so many movies left to watch.  The fact that this exists and I have never heard of it...is confounding.

The immediate comparison I made in my head was to Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies.  It has been years since I saw that but in my head it's this slow hazy nonsense movie with vague zombies and basically no plot, and if that doesn't describe that movie well it certainly does describe this movie.

Some French production originally called "Once Upon a Time...the Devil", this the last movie by director Bernard Launois.  It consists of what I will guarantee you are more sounds than words and more specifically noises made by a horse instead of dialogue.

A ship crashes into a hill, a horse bucks around whinnying like mad, a mummy walks around, a undead zombie creature goes around killing people, and all these things are maybe linked, but definitely not clearly linked as our main heroine runs or hollers or fails to react at all.  Like I said, there's not even much dialogue in the movie and a lot of scenes play out with nothing said, explained, understood or communicated whatsoever.

Devil Story I guess has a cult following, in that hallowed hall of movies claimed to be the worst.  In the end, another inexplicable scene happens and it doesn't even make you blink.  This movie like no other trains you to just sorta take it in stride, blink, say uh huh, and just sorta detune yourself one more step and step outside of reality a little more.

There is value in this, its hard to define, but I do like it, and I give it about 4 stars.

Winterbeast - 1992

 There's many levels of cult film, some of which I am still discovering.

Winterbeast is some amateur as fuck, completely non-narrative Z grade bamboozle fest fucking weirdo movie that is basically not a movie at all, but rather a collection of things which are honestly not related, but pretend as if they are.

Directed by Christopher Theis, this slab of nonsense is some sorta who knows what of nondescript nothingness paired with insane wtf which will have you instantly wondering "is this a movie"?  The short and real answer is no.  I would challenge anyone who says it is.

Play the first few minutes for someone and introduce them to weirdness.  The problem is that you would not want that first 2 minutes to continue for about 75 minutes.  It would get boring, nonsensical and repetitive.  Of course, they don't exactly repeat it.  There's claymation in this movie, original music, bizarre actor moments, and even some local small town almost sightseeing nonsense?  

Basically this looks like someone was shooting their vacation footage and decided to add a horror plot.  I have rarely seen a movie where it was more obvious that within the same sequence or scene they cut away from the actor to a different actor, completely somewhere else, responding as if they were in the same scene.

 They had some ingenuity, claymation for example.  I have no idea what this is, but I will say I kinda liked it.  I give it 3 stars.

The Stranger - 1987

 One puts on the blandly named movie The Stranger with hopes - after all it is basically described as a slasher adjacent mystery movie - and then one gets bogged down in irrelevant dialogue.

Also side note the ENTIRE move I was saying to myself "that's Bonnie Bedelia" and then I would convince myself it isn't.  It IS Bonnie!  Bedelia stars in this shit.

This is possibly also one of the critical few movies where the plot revolves around a song someone remembers?  I mean really, there's a few of these and they are mostly bad - this one doesn't buck the trend.  Bonnie has these phantom memories revolving around an ad jingle from the sound of it and she has vague memories about a murder and I dunno what the fuck else happens in this movie.

The detective character is good and I liked him.  The rest of this....I mean...  One star is generous.

Tokyo Joe - 1949

 I have been on a mostly unreviewed Bogart fest.  I watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and rewatched The African Queen as well.  Good movies!

Tokyo Joe I put on without a second thought, feeling kinda sick and high on edibles while I recovered from tonsil surgery.  Humphrey Bogart stars in this film noir sorta drama, and I had no idea what to expect.

What I could never have predicted was how unintentionally hlarious moments of this were, as well as how bizarrely influential to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!  Seriously, what a strange duo of things for this movie to pull out of it's ass, but I mean seriously!  

First we meet Bogart's daughter he didn't know existed.  The uber-wooden, awfully scripted, overacted part is pure comic gold.  The little girl never blinks and delivers hyper adult, unrealistic dialogue as she doesn't move and inch and bores a hole directly into Bogey's face.  Tried to find a quote of hers from the IMDb page but nothing doing, take my goddamn word for it brah.

Then we have the place sequence where first off all I notice Bogey is dressed like Indiana Jones and then the sequence in the plane, while not being from an action movie, really reminded me of the sequence in Loa Che's airplane at the beginning of Temple.

I scoured IMDb and Wikipedia, no word on those about the connection to Indiana Jones.  What a bizarre thing though!  I mean it's not a 1:1 but watch those movies and tell me they're not loosely connected.

This is a weird one and one that sticks out.  Sometimes that's all it takes!  I give it 4 stars.

Sleepstalker - 1989

 The first movie about the fairy tale character of the Sandman came out in 1933, the most recent in 2017.  Obviously a character of some status, this little known horror movie also is sorta about the character.  Sorta.

Sleepstalker reminds me of those 3-4 middle Hellraiser movies that were barely about Pinhead and instead some stupid other story with Pinhead shoved in there in the end with 4 lines of dialogue.  It's also about the level of quality of those movies.

We begin with Griffin's family being murdered and the killer being put on death row.  We get a priest who comes to the man on death row and gives him the ability to come back as living sand, which he obviously uses and comes back to murder some more.  Along the way some cops get  involved or whatever and some mild weird "scares" happen.

This is one that took me a long time to get through.  It moves at a glacial pace and is an hour 45 minutes which is probably about 45 minutes too long for what it is trying to do and how thin the storyline is.  Character have bad dialogue, stand around, plan things, discuss things, have zero chemistry or charisma.  It's a fucking dull, dull movie.

Then we eventually get to the priest who unveils what we already know, and cablam, final confrontation.  I dunno.  This movie is not good.  I'll give it like half a star. The effects are good, the few times they happen. It might deserve higher.  But ya know.

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural - 1973

 Halloween horror fest bayyyy-by!  The theme of the movies this year is "Tubi algorithm".  I am going to watch whatever it recommends in the first screen (or so) and this will be therefore random, and will also give you an interesting insight into what Tubi thinks I like.

Also known as The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora, Lady Dracula.

Lila is a angelic virginal singer who is a member of a church after her father is accused and found guilty of murder or something like that.  She receives a communique from her dad and sets off to find him after being told to come alone.  Doesn't sound fishy at all.  On the way, she enters an area full of cursed, psychotic people and things don't get much better when she finally arrives and meets cryptic Lemora.

The movie chugs along and there are some pretty good sequences.  The beginning with the bus ride into town is really good, and though the movie telegraphs what is going on and what is going to happen, its a fun ride to take even with the outcome clear.  The usual lesbian undertones are present, there is a little nudity, and that's about the sum of it.

About 30 minutes were cut to make the version now available.  It's rated mature and nowadays except for the brief breast shot it's practically PG rated.  I wonder if the original cut had more violence and nudity.  This cut though, gets a relatively average 2.5.