Eddie Murphy: Delirious (rewatch)

Remember when Eddie Murphy was funny?  Those were the good old days.  This is Eddie at his peak, even the stuff about gays is okay because he does it without a trace of hatred in his voice.  So many classic bits… ice cream man, Uncle Gus and Aunt Bunny, Michael Jackson.  There are a few parts that have lost their luster after a few viewings, but for a lot of it I was laughing my butt off.  The interview with Byron Allen on the DVD is not especially revealing.  Rating: 8

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The Place Promised in Our Early Days

The DVD case bills Makato Shinkai as “the new Miyazaki”, but that’s reaching a bit.  For one thing, it doesn’t have any of his signature charming oddballness.  I’d say the gentle tone is closer to Isao Takahata (Only Yesterday).  I guess Miyazaki’s screenplay for Whisper of the Heart has a similar vibe, but he didn’t direct that one.  

But that’s not the point.  This isn’t up to Miyazaki’s level of quality.  Visually, it’s incredibly pretty.  Breathtaking scenes are highlighted with beautiful lighting.  But the plot is a drag.  It starts out strong — three young friends bonding against the backdrop of an alternate history where Japan has been divided into North and South after WWII.  There’s a mysterious air to the giant, elegant tower which looms on the horizon, and it enhances the story’s atmosphere without overwhelming it.  That changes starting with the second act, where we get bombarded with the same kind of goofy sci-fi mysticism that’s plagued anime since Akira.  It kind of makes sense on the surface, but by the end you’re like “Wait… did I miss something?”  The human element is quite satisfying (though a bit oversentimental) but the nutty story of the tower is barely comprehensible.  Something involving the universe dreaming about parallel realities.  Worth a look for the knockout visuals, likeable characters, and stirring emotional content, just don’t expect a masterpiece.  Rating: 7

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Spirit of the Beehive

Like two other films I’ve adored, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Innocence, this movie is beautifully photographed, gently paced, concerns the fates of young girls, and refuses to hold the viewer’s hand through a simple A-B-C narrative.  Unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about the Spanish Civil War and so the political metaphors flew entirely over my head, at least until I started diving into the extra material on the DVD.  But it’ll give me something to keep an eye on the next time I watch it, and there will be a next time because I loved it.  Very gorgeous and evocative with a number of scenes that linger in my memory, and also a truly lovely score.  Rating: 9

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Nayak

Satyajit Ray’s answer to Wild Strawberries?  A man travels to receive an award, and during the journey reflects on his life in flashbacks and dreams.  Ray’s protagonist is a much younger man, but the similarity seemed striking to me.  Ray’s film contains less revealing human insight than Bergman’s, although he does get in some good criticisms of the film industry.  Casting Uttam Kumar in the lead is apparently significant, sadly I don’t know enough about Bengali cinema to fully appreciate it.  Overall, it’s a fine film that slowly sucked me in.  Good performances and direction — I hadn’t pegged Ray as someone who would do dream sequences, but he handles them pretty well.  Still, I had hoped for something a little deeper, and the subplot about the ad man and his wife was a needless distraction.  Rating: 8

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Mahapurush

It should be a given by now that these DVDs suck, so I’ll skip the gripes about that.  Mahapurush is another hour-long film, a companion piece to Kapurush.  It’s clearly one of the lesser works in Ray’s oeuvre, a simple satire about a holy man and a group of friends who scheme to expose him as a fraud.  Religious charlatans might have been bold subject matter in 1965 India, I’m not sure.  I got really confused at the climax and didn’t understand how their plan worked.  I might have liked it a little more if I had grasped exactly what happened.  From what I could tell, it wasn’t a very good plan.  Anyway, the movie is amusing but not terribly so.  The final scene evoked a chuckle, but overall The Chess Players is funnier.  One thing I noticed about these two works is that they both make use of flashbacks, which is rather unusual for Ray.  Rating: 6

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Kapurush

Another dud of a DVD, but at least there were no major subtitle screwups this time… except for a lengthy (and important) note that went untranslated, but you can gather the gist of it from the context.  This is a short film (about an hour) with two of Ray’s top actors: Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee.  The story, one of cowardice and regret and second chances, is very engaging and you can never tell which way it’s going to turn.  It’s a little slow to get started, especially for such a brief movie, but other than that it’s a splendid work.  The score is unusual for a Ray film of this period, but very effective and evocative, and of course Chatterjee and Mukherjee are superb as always.  Also some wonderful camerawork (although the DVD was often too dark or blurry to truly appreciate it).  Rating: 9

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Joi Baba Felunath

I was excited to discover Netflix had a bunch of Satyajit Ray films I’d never seen before, but if this DVD is indicative of the quality, I’m a bit less enthusiastic.  The dark, blurry image and choppy soundtrack are somewhat tolerable, but some kind of authoring mistake made a mess out of the subtitles.  For the first 30 or 40 minutes, any dead spots in the dialogue are filled with subtitles from later in the film.  So not only is it confusing, it’s possible that you might spoil yourself.  I caught on quick and learned to turn off the subtitles whenever people weren’t speaking… until a little bit later when the dead spots were filled with subtitles about 3 minutes ahead of sync.  So I had to read the subtitles and then remember what they were when the lines were actually being spoken.  Fortunately this only happened for two scenes, but still… it’s a disaster.

Enough about the shitty DVD, how’s the movie?  It’s a detective story, using a character (Feluda) created by Ray for his own novels.  There is an earlier Feluda film, but I haven’t seen that one yet.  Feluda’s a typical storybook detective, with some shrewd instincts and a pair of helpful sidekicks.  It’s not a bad mystery, but it isn’t terribly satisfying either.  It also could have easily lost about 20 minutes.  But it’s interesting to see Ray break away from his usual melodrama, and he handles it fairly well.  Also the film is shot better than a lot of his other color films, and he makes some nice use of architecture during a chase scene.  Rating: 7

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Sanjuro (rewatch)

Again, I hadn’t seen this for years, but after Yojimbo I was really excited to dig into it.  I was hoping I might be able to debunk the popular opinion that it doesn’t hold up well compared to its predecessor, but alas, it’s true — this is a vastly inferior film.  While Yojimbo stuck entirely with the hero and never showed us anything that he himself didn’t witness, Sanjuro frequently breaks away from him, when all we really care about is what Sanjuro’s up to.  As Sanjuro is burdened with the nine clueless disciples, so is the audience, and they really get in the way.  Mifune is still awesome, the camerawork is still fantastic, and the music is dynamite.  It just doesn’t hold your attention like the previous film does.  There’s some marvelous bits of business, one just wishes for a few more.  Rating: 8

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Yojimbo (rewatch)

I actually had to struggle to build up the enthusiasm to watch this.  It’s been six years since I last saw it and I’d forgotten how purely awesome it is.  Mifune’s great performance, dazzling camera compositions, wonderful score, and whiz-bang entertaining from start to finish.  Perhaps the best pacing of any Kurosawa film.  It really flies by and leaves you feeling completely satisfied.  Rating: 10

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Xala

The wretched DVD left nearly half the dialogue untranslated.  It was fairly easy to guess what was being said from the context, but I’m sure I would’ve gotten more out of it if I knew all the lines.  It’s a very funny film about the corruptive influence of colonialism in Senegal.  I can’t recall ever seeing sexual impotence used as a device for political satire before, or at least not so well.  What keeps this film from greatness is a slightly sluggish pace and occasionally amateurish production.  It’s strange because all the location work is shot quite competently, but whenever they’re on set it just looks horrible (much the same way Satyajit Ray often had problems shooting on set in the latter part of his career).  This movie ends up on “best of” lists sometimes, but I think that might be a bit of tokenism.  I’m sure that better films have come out of Africa.  However, Sight & Sound recently had a cover story devoted to African cinema, and this was really the only one that sounded interesting to me.  Still, I’ll check out more at some point.  Rating: 8

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