Drácula (1931) directed by Enrique Tovar Ávalos & George Melford

 I suppose I can come through with a Halloween movie review this year. This is the interesting Spanish-language version of Universal Studios' Dracula adaptation. The original English-language launched the career of horror actor Bela Lugosi, but many people note that the direction, set, and costume design of this version is superior. This is widely regarded as the "hotter & sexier" version that is more closer in that sense to the original. The gothic atmosphere played-up more and some of the acting is done better, but not much. Carlos Villarías does his best to try and match Lugosi, but that is what the English-language version has on this one, otherwise this would be 100% better rather than 80% better.

My Review of Chez Jolie Coiffure (2018) directed by Rosine Mbakam

 What a beautiful little documentary this was. Chez Jolie Coiffure is a cinéma vérité documentary about an undocumented Cameroonian hairdresser named Sabine and her salon that she runs in an underground mall in Belgium. The film is done totally in the salon and it documents the daily life of Sabine, her employees, and her customers and it commentates on the wider community of African immigrants in Belgium. For me, it is an interesting look at how immigrant communities outside the United States deal with the issue of immigration, trying to get citizenship in a system that tries to make it impossible, and how folks deal with their everyday lives in the meantime. This is the first film I have watched by the film-maker Rosine Mftego Mbakam, but it won't be my last.

My (short) Review/Impression on Squid Game (2021) directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk

 I suppose this will be a partial-continuation of my previous review in relation to the survival-horror genre. Squid Game has become the premier Netflix title and while it ain't bad, I don't think it is the greatest thing: basically it's a'ight. I suppose to me this serial does not really do anything new, but does a lot old. For me, it is the fact that it relies so much on stock-genre tropes and lazy stereotypes. The actual action parts are entertaining and interesting, but once the show gets into its rhythm it becomes too predictable and by-the-numbers for me. Even the "twist" was seen a mile-a-way. It's still better than As the Gods Will, but this would work well for someone who is not use to these kinds of shows. Teenage me would have liked this more than 30-something me. 

I guess the moral is that Battle Royale was the first and possibly still the best of this genre. I did get the commentary on the wealth disparity in South Korean society. I felt like this was ok, but had more potential than was delivered. 

My Review of A Man Escaped (1956) directed by Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson's films are about people trying to find their way into some sort-of grace or salvation. About dealing with the mystical or god-like in everyday situations and often through dirty or unpleasant means. In this film we find a member of the French Resistance (based on André Devigny) being housed in Montluc Prison while awaiting to be executed during WWII. The fighter (called Fontaine in the movie) is not content to wait for his death and immediately plans to escape, but the Nazis are not about to make it that easy. He now has to make it out of this heavily-fortified prison alive with every move under close watch.

This film is an A to Z of what one gets in a Bresson film. Anonymous actors (who Bresson always referred to as his models) do not act so much as recite the lines with as little emotion as possible. There is a "holy minimalism" in how the action is portrayed in these films (and yes, despite how restrained the actors "models" are, they're the ones that drive the plot). The sparse use of music is another thing that distinguishes this and other movies of Bresson, because of how precise he uses it is use. We get some music during the movie's intro and then none for about 30 minutes until a random scene where the prisoners are emptying their slop jars in the prison yards. He said that he wanted this to represent a precise moment of ritual for the characters lives. This all goes back to Bresson's quest to purge cinema or movies (which Bresson unhelpfully calls "cinematography") of as much of the influence of the theater or plays as possible. That's why he calls his movie actors "models": in his mind actors belong in places like Broadway, film has to have its own language distinct from what came before it. Other directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Mohsen Makhmalbaf thought on similar lines, but neither took it as far as Bresson to try and remake the basic language and function and cinema as we know it. Even his devoted fanbase of film-makers in the French New Wave were not prepared to "transgress" (though Bresson would probably see it as a purification) in the way that he was.

This film, and all of Bresson's films, is an experience unto itself and you either going to like it or hate it. This is a film about prisoners escaping the Nazis, there were countless films with that plot before A Man Escaped, and have been countless since, but I guarantee none of them look like this.

My Review of Late Spring (1949) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's career can be divided up quite neatly: there's everything before Late Spring and everything he made after it. Though Tokyo Story (1953) is his masterpiece, this film marked the turning point in his career where his post-war style crystalized and the majority of his greatest films were made. Ozu had spent the majority of his films up to this point exploring generational conflict in Japanese families—mainly with The Great Depression as the back-drop. Starting with this film he would use the aftermath of WWII as the back-drop to exploring these conflicts and this movie set the tone of it involving a daughter being matched-up for marriage by her family. It all begins here with the story of a widower and his single daughter named Noriko.

The synopsis is that a widowed father and his young adult daughter Noriko are living happily together in post-WWII Japan. When an aunt decides that Noriko needs to get married before she gets "too old" (i.e. 30), it kicks-off the drama of the film as the daughter was happy were she was at and had no thought of getting married. The conflict is started by the aunt, but is really between the father and daughter as they struggle to understand their place in this "new" Japan. Though one could speculate what Ozu's thoughts on the characters' motivations, it never 100% certain who is truly right (though in the world of 2021 it would make more sense that the woman's opinion is the most important, this was not so in 1949). The ending is one of the most quietly devastating endings I have seen in a movie solidifying it as one of the great father-daughter movies. 

This film would kick-off the first of the many "Noriko" films of Ozu that would involve this female character (usually, but not always, played by Setsuko Hara) caught over whether she should get married (Hara would play a Noriko in Tokyo Story, but the circumstances of that movie are very different). These films would provide variations of Late Spring and some would be remakes. When Ozu found a story he liked, he stuck with it over-and-over. It is amazing how many angles he examined this topic from 1949 until his last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

We need to talk about the two main actors. Setsuko Hara was for Yasujiro Ozu what Toshiro Mifune was for Akira Kurosawa. She was Ozu's primary actor and no actor performed more dedicatedly for him than her. The father in the film is played by Chishū Ryū—who was for Ozu what Takeshi Shimura was for Akira Kurosawa. They were part of the Shochiku stock character ensemble. It is interesting to see these two actors, both established actors in the Japanese movie industry by 1949, as they were approaching their creative peaks. Ryu was, as always, playing a character older than he was since he was "old-looking" by design. 

Ozu was well-known by now for his camera-style and it is what most folks know about him at first glance. He shot most of his angles at near-ground level and he liked to put scene transition elipses in his movies. At this point he also had eliminated 99% of tracking shots in his movies. His career-long relationship with cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta helped make this style so iconic.

I don't know if more can be said on this film at this point. In a world where a woman's right over her body is still highly contested, this film was the beginning of Ozu's decade long examination of it in Japanese society. Though Ozu is certainly not the proto-feminist that his contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi was and definitely not the feminist that Kinoshita would turn-out to be in the early 1950s, he reflects part of a conversation that Japanese society was having in the post-WWII era about what place women (who got the franchise after the war) would have in it and what rights they could expect. 

My Review of The Inheritance (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 A year after completing one of the great epic achievements of epic cinema and Masaki Kobayashi was not done even a little at showing the dark side of Japanese society. The Japanese Economic Miracle had now officially begun in earnest and everybody was trying to get rich after thirteen years as a war-ravaged third world country. Though the war was over for most of Japanese society and its economy, one man was not through with showing his society how sick it was. This movie would be the last contemporary film or "Shomin-geki" by Kobayashi for 6 years. He would follow this film-up with one of his greatest–Harakiri–later that year. This a film that would set the tone of the more darker tone that emerged over the course of The Human Condition.

This story is as hardcore an allegory as Kobayashi could offer. A terrible industrialist is dying and decides to leave his fortune to his illegitimate offspring. His young wife and all his cronies decide to scheme him for as much they can. That is the movie in a nutshell. The point of the film is to show how each person sets about doing it and to analogize it for Japan at-large. This film maybe smaller in scope that The Human Condition, but it is as anti "feel good" as that film saga. There are no good people or heroic folks in this movie. It is a game of thrones of greed. Also, it is interesting to hear Toru Takemitsu doing a jazz score as oppose to a Western or Japanese classical score.

My Review of Where is the Friend's House? (1986) directed by Abbas Kiarostami

 I definitely needed to revisit the Iranian New Wave given all that's been happening in the world and my own life. This story is the first of Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy" of movies that revolve around Koker, Iran. This first movie is a straight-forward neorealist film involving the protagonist trying to return the homework journal of his friend so that he does not get kicked out of school by his hard-ass teacher. There is no experimentation with the style here so I will talk mostly about the movie.

This movie is one of the last of Kiarostami's kid films where the protagonists are children and it is like a book-end of his second feature film The Traveler (1974). In the earlier film it was an evil little hellion that goes around looking for people to scam and goes on a journey only to get his poetic justice in the end. In this film it is a much more forthright kid who goes all over the province where he lives to find his school friend and return the book he picked up by mistake and the film also ends with poetic justice, but in a different way. Both films have jackass families, but this film sees the protagonist do right despite this while The Traveler's protagonist does the wrong thing. Where is the Friend's House?  makes you have to watch until the very end for the satisfying pay-off and just goes to show the beautiful humanism of the Iranian New Wave cinema at this time. A good ending can just make a film!