"13 Assassins" is the Samurai Epic For a Modern Era

13 Assassins is a film heavily indebted to Akira Kurosawa's classic samurai epic Seven Samurai. It takes the simple premise of bringing together samurai for a noble task and turns it into something more brutal, violent and showy. In the shogunate era of Japan, a number of samurai hatch a desperate scheme to kill a sadistic feudal lord and heir apparent to become shogun. The lord's sadism is displayed to almost excessive gruesomeness within the film's earliest moments that all but belies any attempt to sympathize with him -- although this brutality is fitting for director Takashi Miike, best know for his extreme horror films. The film is surprisingly soulful despite being very one-sided. The fighting is cool, but it's also fairly depressing. The film's primary message is about futility; about how there's essentially no point to this conflict and little to be gained from it. It's a suicide mission. The film has heavy, simplistic storytelling but it uses it in the first hour to establish characters and make us understand their motivations before unleashing a furious, imaginative, and fantastically staged extended action sequence. The film drags in places and could use some trimming down, and a few too many of the titular assassins don't get enough development. But it's that rare action movie that has some things it's trying to work through and think about and that actually earns its hugely entertaining climactic moments. 

Grade: B+

"Le Samourai" is a Cool, Slick Neo-Noir Thriller

Scott Tobias in his New Cult Canon columns mentioned a type of movie called the "'cinema of cool' that pantheon of movies with enough style and attitude to reduce critical thinkers into drooling fanboys and fangirls". He was referring to Army of Darkness, a pure unabashed, unashamed thrill ride with not much else going on, but that does it with so much panache that it ends up being hard to fault it. Jean Pierre-Melville's Le Samourai could fall similarly into this category at times. A hyper-stylized neo-noir thriller filled with pop sensibilities and a suave, cold-as-ice contract killer taking heat from the cops (Alain Delon) as its protagonist. The film is a throwback to 1940's gangster movies but updated for a contemporary setting. While it adopts the whip-smart dialogue of older noir, it takes leave to become more stylistically bold and freely formed. It's also a film that's incredibly fun; taut, thrilling, and utterly cool.

Grade: A    

"The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" is Pure John Cassavettes For Better and For Worse

John Cassavette's gritty, bruising neo-noir The Killing of a Chinese Bookie sags in places (particularly in its unnecessarily extended night club scenes); but when it embraces its crime drama, it's a thrilling, intense, audacious piece of film-making. Ben Gazarra is fantastically sleazy as strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli, who acquires a gambling debt that he can't pay off; in order to reduce the debt and save his club, he is forced to commit an unthinkable criminal act, kill a "Chinese bookie". But nothing goes quite as planned in the story. Cassavette's directorial style gives the film a loose, languorous quality that doesn't always tonally suit its subject matter. It's shot in an uncomfortably intimate, claustrophobic style with lots of close-ups. Cassavette didn't compromise, even in the face of a genre narrative, which surely will displease those going in for its action rather than its philosophical musing about human nature.  

Grade: B

"No" Tackles Its Serious Subject Matter With a Wry, Intelligent Sense of Humor

Humor is Pablo Larrain's No's defense mechanism. The film's story of an ad campaign that helped topple the dictatorial Pinochet government is a bleak one that withholds no punches. But it's livened by a dark, intelligent humor. The ad campaign is filled with cliches, showboating, grandstanding and attention grabbing tactics. It's a desperate sunny side up attempt to slip in some political critique of Augsto Pinochet and his regime. Pinochet has only allowed a counter campaign to the 1988 referendum vote on whether he should maintain power to appease the United Nations; the Chilean government allots fifteen minutes of ad time at a God-awfully late hour. Most of the people working on the campaign, including and especially ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), don't suspect it will have any impact and do it because as Atticus Finch said "real courage is ... when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what". The election is going to be rigged so that Pinochet ultimately wins even if he doesn't get the votes and there's still a good chance he actually wins legally. But if they can used the blessed little television time they have to actually get across an alternative, rarely heard opinion than perhaps that will be its own reward. The film is fantastic at capturing the vibe of the late 1980's and rich with tiny period details. It's shot as if being played on a worn out videocassette tape -- which could be gimmicky but is fitting for the film's look at the subversive, malleable power of news, video and television can have on us. At times it falls into the trap of hitting too many by-the-books, historically-based dramatic beats but it overcomes it with its sharp thematic underpinnings and a good, biting sense of humor.   

Grade: B+

"The Host" is a Damn Entertaining, Genre Bending Horror Film

The strange world of Joon-ho Bong's The Host is hard to put into words. It is a surreal and absurd horror comedy about a fish monster created from the improper disposal of toxic chemicals into the Han River. A fish monster so gloriously schlocky that you might think you'd stumbled upon a sci-fi original movie if it weren't for the film's dark as night black comedy. The film is deeply cynical about humanity and human nature and takes stabs at it from the decidedly political (even geopolitical) to the mundanely character specific. And in the middle of this inventive, insane and amusing horror is a surprisingly moving family drama with a man and his family chasing down his daughter who has been taken by the monster. Bong's tonality is quite unlike that of any film, at points dead to rights hysterical and at others unexpectedly moving and filled with sentiment without ever getting sentimental, and, as any proper big spectacle horror movie, filled with lots of scares and thrilling action.

Grade: B+

"The Battleship Potemkin" and What a Movie Owes Us

I've discovered that, at times, moviegoers have this weird pre-existing assumption that movies owe them something. As if we sign some unstated contract with a movie the moment we plop ourselves down in front of screen to watch it. When a movie does something we don't necessary like but fits in with what a film has been attempting, we may react against it -- frequently strongly. Now this isn't to suggest I don't think movies owe us something; I think, if anything, they owe us a complete, interesting story and one that hopefully satisfies what it set out to do. But beyond that movies don't owe you anything.

Moviegoers also sometimes mistake not liking a movie for a movie not being good. But those are two entirely separate things. We have different tastes and different types of movies will appeal to different people. But just because you're not a fan of romance or action or horror does not mean that those sorts of films are always bad. Something that critic Roger Ebert helped convince people of was that each movie ought to be judged on its own terms. Not every movie can be the next Citizen Kane. A daffy little comedy may not be the arthouse drama of the year but if it wasn't trying to be in the first place than what does it matter.

This leads me into a brief discussion of Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's influential Soviet silent film. Now I didn't really enjoy Potemkin; it's naive and propaghandistic. But there's no denying it is excellent movie. The famous Odessa Step Scene (memorably paid tribute to in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables) is still an exquisitely crafted scene, heavy with tension, chaos and human drama. The film manages to create compelling conflicts fraught with tension and televised through some striking imagery (the infamous, disgusting maggots scene or the plate smashing scene). Eisenstein was able to make some innovative stylistic and storytelling choices within a restricted Soviet studio system.

There's a gap between our own expectations and the intentions of the film. Eisenstein gets across his patriotic message of revolution and civic pride and he does it with a lot of flare (through stylistic choices fed into through theoretical beliefs in line with his political ones). Now is it the film I pop in on a lazy Saturday afternoon? No. We watch Battleship Potemkin more for its influence and historical significance than for its lasting entertainment value. But that doesn't (or shouldn't at least) detract from our ability to appreciate it.

Some movies will be those you simply appreciate. They aren't trying to make you feel good. They're trying to make you think or examine an important, serious topic or they're trying to attempt something with film that's more than distract you for two hours or so.

Because of their mass appeal though we often fault films that aren't merely crowd pleasers or comfort food. We wouldn't call into question a novel attempting to tell some high minded or rigorous narrative.

So I put it before you to call into question your assumptions whenever you start to doubt a film; it may be for misplaced reasons.

"Videodrome" is a Strange, Chilling, Intelligent Horror Movie

The creepy, trippy and thoroughly disturbing new age horror film Videodrome has a lot to say about our codependency with technology, particularly video and television, that still feels surprisingly relevant. It's also a film that's horribly chilling regardless of its social commentary. Max Renn (James Wood) works for CIVIC-TV, a television company in the business of acquiring videos for its clientele, everything from soft-core porn to torture. They argue its for the greater good of society as they allow people to filter their worst, most destructive fantasies through these videos. Max is looking for something fresh to market to his clients and comes across a video series called "Videodrome" where people are brutally beaten and murdered. The more Max investigates the origins of the videos the more things get bonkers, and the line between reality and video recording become eerily one in the same -- "Videodrome" might just be a far more than just a screwed up video service. The world of Videodrome is a world where everyone is plugged into their television set, craving videos and looking for new and disgustingly sensational programming. Everyone is desensitized; everyone is becoming one with their television and the tape in the VCR. It's weird. It's hard to stomach. It's a visually fearless. And it's arguably more relevant today than it was upon its release.

Grade: A-