Homework Movie - Cure (1997)

            When I first saw the movie title, I thought the 1997 movie Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa was going to be a routine psychotic killer movie.  What I witnessed was anything but.  The beginning starts out a little bit comical with a dark twist, and it continues from there.  Most of the victims aren't suspecting their fate and the murderers are aware of their crimes, but can't seem to stop themselves.  And it seems that one person is able to travel between victim and murderer without being captured for almost the whole movie, that is until the Inspector played by Kôji Yakusho gets his man with good old-fashioned police work.  The only problem with that is, the pattern doesn't stop there.

             At the time of filming this movie, Kôji Yakusho had already been an accomplished actor for several decades in his home country, much like his director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is not related to Akira Kurosawa.  This movie marks the first time these two men worked together, and they have worked now on six films together since.  After this film, the two made the 2001 film Pulse, which later got an American version in 2006 starring Kristen Bell and several other up and comers in Hollywood.

            I found it interesting that some of the sets were very large spaces with perfectly placed props that people used.  After such a long time making movies, there should have been more planning involved to make more sense of things like perfectly placed seats and objects to use as weapons.  There were some clever bits when using light sources for triggers of the killings and then the Inspector's constantly finding need to look at similar light sources.

            Over the years in Japan as with any country, the storytelling has improved.  Cure takes a supernatural twist over movies such as Jigoku, which we watched in class.  The levels of Hell are depicted over a man's guilt for a crime he wanted to report, but didn't due to peer pressure not to.  In a twisted manner, the movie Suicide Club's beginning is similar to Cure's in which there is some serious moments and then a wide angle shot of something that strikes me as funny.  The way the students jumped into the oncoming train in their suicide pact was shot in a way that although horrifying, looked really strange and made me laugh, not shriek in horror.

Homework Movie - Written on the Wind (1956)

"A whiskey bottle is about all you'd kill"

For our examination of the Suburbs Gone Haywire, we took a look at some movies that showed how house wives sleep with their bosses or husbands friends, guys that are stepping out on their wives, spending their family's inheritance before the parents are dead, and a lot of the mixed bag of other Noir topics. Written on the Wind is a family of wealthy siblings and their relationships with the parents, and themselves. We've got an alcoholic, a straying wife, a frisky sister and the best friend that has to endure it all with a strong sense of friendship.

Douglas Sirk directed Written on the Wind about half way through his career, and it shows. The whole movie is very well crafted from the story to the settings and the casting. This was done for Universal Studios, which might mean that he was able to have a larger budget. With the cast he had, Including Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall which both already had very successful movie careers before starting this picture, led this wonderful yet tragic look into people with more money than sense.

Movies like this one prove that even when times were supposed to be simpler, there was understandings that people didn’t all have it together. Along with movies like Crime of Passion, where a young woman leaves the family business to find love with a detective then to feel unsatisfied when he's not moving up in his career, Written on the wind shares a look into complacency or the lack thereof.

Be careful not to take a slug to the belly, be happy with what you

Homework Movie - Chinatown (Revised review)

When someone wants to get dirt on his or her spouse affairs or someone they are doing business with that they don't trust, the call Jake Gittes. So when JJ is confronted by not one, but two woman as Evelyn Mulwray, he gets just a bit confused and wants to get to the bottom of this. So begins Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Solving that case of mistaken identity wraps Jake up into a messy case of murder and politics.

Roman Polanski directed this movie in 1974, twenty years after making his first movies. By this time Polanski had crafted a great storytelling technique and a great visual style that was very imaginative. The use of long camera shots and mirror tricks gives the audience the impression that they too are watching someone as a detective.

When everyone's a suspect, there's no one to trust. Everyone in this movie has an agenda involving the water and Gittes has to sort it all out before he loses his whole nose. Fingers are being pointed in every which direction and Gittes complicates things when he get personal with the real Mrs. Mulwray late in the story.

Detectives and reporters work in the same way in the movies we've watched this week. They check their facts against news clips and photos, talk to the right (or wrong) people, and then they get their big payoff in either a check from their employer (people of interest), or by capturing the correct person for the now solved murder. Each protagonist is obsessed with solving their crime (Chinatown) or getting their story (Shock corridor) so much that it takes over their life.

Homework Movie - Don't Look Now (1973)

Looking over one's shoulder isn't the best idea to do when the title of the movie is Don't look now, however Donald Sutherland was constantly doing so as John Baxter in Venice. He's on an assignment to restore a building for the Church. At first I thought that he too was seeing things but wasn't telling his wife. Then, like so many other movies directed by Nicolas Roeg, the mood and story shifted to John Baxter's search for his wife who seems to have run off with some women that she met in town that communicate with the Baxter's deceased daughter.

Some of the double exposure shots in this movie are really impressive. I'm sure that at the time the movie was released for the first time it was really innovative. I'm sure Roeg's time as a cinematographer helped in choosing the locations and shot selections for this movie to compel the suspenseful tone and the disconnected feeling of the film.

I was surprised to see how well Donald Sutherland's character changed over the course of the movie. His crass dismissal of the two women as crazy and non-sense was later revealed to him as something he was afraid to understand. When he took the blind sister home it was a really nice gesture.

Of the movies we watched in class and Don't Look Now, there was some veiled attempt to place some sexual encounter in the story for what seemed a random scene. It didn't lead to anything in Don't Look Now, other than to follow in some unwritten rule that if you have sex in a horror movie, you would die. Sex in films show the immorality of the culture with men chasing their secretaries or friends of wives in some way. If it has no other bearing on the story, why put in in? This helps ticket sales and recognition of the actresses, right?! Yes, Julie Christie has had a wonderful career in film, however this film came 10 years after Julie's first movie and by then she was already in her 30's. She has gone onto a long and varied career in film, only returning to horror/thriller territory a handful of times.

Homework Movie - Black Sunday (1960)

When you start off messin' around on your significant other, you just have to know that something wrong is going to come of it. Such is the case in Black Sunday Staring Barbara Steele and directed by one of Horror's best-known directors, Mario Bava. Barbara plays multiple characters that can't seem to keep their hands off the other men in her life when she's supposed to be married as both characters. In both cases it ends very badly for more than one guy. Infidelity doesn't just end with Mrs. Steele's character.

Dr. Gorobec is messing around with the older woman in the beginning, who it turns out to be a younger woman later on in the story that wants the Dr. to take over the estate of the wife/Jenny characters. He then hires a competent doctor that has been looking after Jenny at an asylum before the story takes place and has him move in for a while to study Jenny's behavior to see if she's suitable for the estate or if Dr. Gorobec should watch over and inherit the money/property of Jenny's.

This movie marked the first of many horror genre films for Barbara Steele, including in the 80's the original Piranha for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Steele has worked on everything from dramas to some comedies, but she's always made time for the horror genre.

Starting off as a cinematographer, Mario Bava didn't rise so quickly into the role of the director until almost 20 years into the business. Sure he'd directed some documentary films and shorts in that time, but his first major film being Black Sunday, this makes watching this film especially fun to see his style start to emerge on the scene. Since the 60's, Bava has rarely strayed from the horror genre, being named one of the godfathers of the modern horror film.

Watching some of his other works in class, Black Sunday is a good start to anything he's done over the years. The whip and the body we watched in class and it was cheesy is some parts and somewhat laughable. Thinking about Black Sunday in the terms of when it was made, it could have scared the pants off of you if you weren't keeping track of where people were in the house.

Homework Movie - Night of the Hunter

"They abide and they endure" - Mrs. Cooper in The Night of the Hunter

Being born at the turn of the 20th century, Charles Laughton's career was largely as an actor. He has worked in movies as early as the 1930's, with a few short films earlier in 1928. He has been credited for a handful of writers credits as well as producing credits. His directing credits have gone more often than not uncredited. This is the only movie he has worked on as director that has been credited to him in his 30 plus year career. With a writers credit also, Night of the Hunter stands to be an amazing testament to his abilities for story telling through film.

Based on the Davis Grubb novel of the same name written in 1953, this movie portrays a murdering priest that finds his victims while in prison listening to death row criminals about their remaining families. This story and subsequent movie was based on events taken from headlines from Grubb's hometown of Moundsville, West Virginia.

As for the headliner, Robert Mitchum, he was the show's main attraction. As the underhanded Harry Powell, he got to play the worst type of bad guy in my opinion: a crooked preacher that kills women for their dead con husband's stolen money. If there's an example of two wrongs don't make a right, it's certainly this one. The children in the story are fully aware of this from the beginning and Father Powell doesn't want to have anything of it. When anyone is around he and the children he's just as nice as a summer's day, but get him alone with the boy and he's on him to spill the beans as to where the stashed money is with dangerous results. Mitchum has been on both sides of good and evil in other movies, but this character was such a memorable bad guy, with his tattoos on his finger and the story that he told to go with 'em, that I really felt for the kids.

When the kids take off down the river alone, their story seemed hopeless til they came to the old mother hen, played by Lillian Gish. She took in the kids as if they were her own from the moment she saw the two. This wasn't her first time taking in stray kids. She was very skeptical from the moment she heard of Mr. Powell's appearance. It took one word from John to get her to see what a wicked man Powell really was.

This story of good versus evil takes it's twist at the end with a juxtaposed picture of the evil preacher signing sweet songs staring down the house where Mrs. Cooper sits with a shot gun in hand to protect "Her" children from harms way. And just like a mother duck and her chicks, they all fall in line walking home after the trial of Mr. Powell just in time for Christmas.

Of the killers we've seen this week, Mitchum's character didn't favor the gun as did others, including Arthur Frantz's The Sniper. He used the switchblade when he wanted to do his dirty work. But as a whole, there was something very sinister about each of the men hunting down women or children in these films. As a part of film noir, the heavy dark aspects are played til the end of the movies teetering the balance of good versus evil until the very end, where the audience is never quite sure who's going to be the victor. In the case of Night of the Hunter, the children (innocence) wins as they are rewarded with a new family.

Homework Movie - Peeping Tom

When you have been living with the idea that your life is completely normal being terrified by your parents, the thought of harming someone else doesn't seem to enter your mind. That is the first impression I got from the movie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell in 1960. Upon further viewing, this movie is so much more than that, as the main character is attempting to become more main stream talking to Helen.

His torment began when his father would capture him on camera after throwing a lizard at him or catching him watching someone else in a romantic interlude over the fence. We never see Mark's father during the action in the movie, but his work is seen through Mark's actions and reactions to the terror in his victim's faces. The difference between Mark's victims and Helen is that Helen was never scared of Mark, only fascinated in his upbringing.

Mark knows what he's doing is wrong, but it's something that has haunted him since his father's passing. His plan to end his own life on film was creative and very clever for the time when this movie came out and to see it now, it's still remarkable that there hasn't been a movie today that has used his demise.

Of the movies we've watched this week, Peeping Tom seemed the most realistic. Quartemass 2 had an interesting story, but the devices were a bit clunky and ill fated for horror. Especially for today's audiences, the monsters of these early films seem to be more laughable that terrifying. The Crawling Eye gave me a few laughs in class as it lurched towards its victims. With Peeping Tom, the character of Mark could possibly exist, which makes the film more grounded and therefore more horrifying.

Homework Movie - Fury - Fritz Lang

At every turn in this movie, it seemed to go from bad to worse in no time at all. The couple start at a separation that was supposed to be temporary that lasted longer due to a misunderstanding. As the movie progressed, so did the game of telephone that was happening between townsfolk and the authorities. It doesn't stop there when the town begins to form the furious mob (Thus the title, Fury). Spencer Tracy plays the wrongfully accused Joe that turns his calm demeanor into a vengeful protagonist when he is suspected of being burned to death by the town that took actions into their own hands for a crime that Joe didn't commit.

What I saw in this movie was a town full of people that wanted nothing more than to busy themselves with other people's business and when that wasn't enough, they took it to extremes and it got out of hand. To make matters worse, the protagonist doesn't even try to make things right for himself with the town after escaping what was supposed to be his death. Instead he gets his two brothers to file a lawsuit with the DA to charge them all with the murder of Joe that never happened.

I enjoyed this movie for the pacing of the action. It didn't really ever stop. There was always something going on that had me actually catching myself trying to keep up. The story was easy to follow, as were most of the films of that day, looking back now. Fritz Lang didn't attempt to use any fancy camera tricks in this movie, not to say that he hadn't before or since. This movie happened to be a more straight forward movie and didn't rely on them for the affect on the audience.

Homework Movie - John Waters Movie - Pink Flamingos

When I was given a free pass to leave class for the screening of Female Troubles, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to live that one down. Instead of watching that, I wanted to watch another of John Waters movies. So I rented Pink Flamingos because that was the most outrageous of Waters' pictures from what I've been told. People eating shit, having sex with chickens, Mothers in playpens, that's only the tip of the iceberg for this slice of Americana. There are no punches pulled in this movie what so ever. I had to watch this with my eyes covered several time because I knew that what they were about to do on screen wasn't faked or edited out. Usually I'm pretty good with movies because I know that there is someone behind the scenes making up what goes on screen, but not here. It's the real deal!

Waters love his hometown of Baltimore and does his best to showcase the place as much as he can in every movie. He's worked with the same crew for most of his career. Mink Stole has also been in almost every Waters movie made.

Extra Credit - Triple feature - Love in the 90's (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, & Doom Generation)

When I saw the first two movies on our syllabus this semester, I had to go to my bosses and no matter what I wanted this day off! I hadn't seen these movie on the big screen when they came out and really wanted to see them as they were and are intended. On the big screen! Love in the 90's was an amazing trio of one liners and action sequences that was tough to compare to when they were made. As far as I'm concerned, True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott) and Natural Born Killers (again written by QT but directed by Oliver Stone) were a constant in my VHS player in my room. I would have the door shut and the volume way up, pissing off my mom to no end watching these movies after work at the video store where I was turned onto these films in the first place.



Flash forward 15 years, I was standing outside after the last of these killer 90's movies played (which was Doom Generation before I forget). There were so many different discussions going on about the outcome of the finale film, which sounded like most of the audience hadn't seen before that night. Nobody seemed to have seen the ending coming and were totally shocked, many with jaws still to the floor after ten or so minutes outside. I love going to the movies where I've seen them before JUST to see the people's reactions to something shocking or out of place in todays film going experiences. Sure, there's a time and place for the truly shocking like some of the stuff in Doom Gen., but that was what the director was feeling at the time, as was most of the youth of the 90's. Gregg Araki wore many hats working on this film, as he has done on all of his films, writing, producing, and directing every single one he's worked on.

In Class Movie - Lady From Shanghi

When we watched The Lady from Shanghai in class, I was really excited to see a movie with Orson Welles that most people my age haven't seen. I own Citizen Cane and The Third Man on DVD, so when Orson Wells had his accent in the movie, that was all that I could see or hear. One scene I remember was when Wells' costar Rita Hayworth was swimming in the ocean, she came out of the water with perfectly coifed hair. I can't imagine how that would happen. In any case, this movie was written, produced, directed and even stared in by Orson Wells.

Homework Film - Double Indemnity

Written and Directed by Billy Wilder, this 1944 drama stars Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. I watched it one evening while finishing up other homework. The story was really entertaining and I remember thinking that it reminded me of a more recent movie, but couldn't remember that title. There was a line from Edward G. Robinson's character, Mr. Keyes, that struck me as odd. He leans over Mr. Neff (Fred) and says, "You know why you couldn't figure this one out. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from you." Keyes responds, "Closer than that," suggesting that Keyes was in on the plot the whole time.