Most Meaningful First Viewings and Re-Evaluations of 2013 Part 9: The "N"s, The "O"s, The "P"s and The "R"s

Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)/Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
Ordinary objects as tools to carry death. Modern technology, videotape, is no longer new and is still carrying the curses of Tourneur's film and centuries before. Night of the Demon is still modern in how the sinister is not distance from ordinary reality when it in fact lies within a conventional human environment, be it written on paper and recorded on tape.

Noisy Requiem (Yoshihiko Matsui, 1988)
The messiness of real life - the more abstract and transgressive this film became, the more it yet felt closer to depicting real despairs. A review can be found here.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
It's amazing to think how Hitchcock could create tension from ordinary circumstances, to continue a theme. The reflection off a television screen can catch you out. A crop-duster, from the famous sequence, can be used to scare but the wait in a bus stop in the middle of nowhere is just as alienating. There's no sanctity to walking on top of American monuments when the web of human intrigue becomes involved, and for a film seeping with melodrama and exhilaration, it came from a normal man being seen as an un-normal man, and that point is never ignored.

Odin: Photon Space Sailor Starlight
(Eiichi Yamamoto, Takeshi Shirato, Toshio Masuda and Yoshinobu Nishioka, 1986)
A folly I cannot help but love. It's surprising how hated this film is in the anime community, although considering its length and structure, its greatest flaw is its indulgence without completely thinking out the dangers of stretching itself out as it became. But the earnestness, the visuals and animation, and just the ludicrous excess in making it, from an era of economic boom that will not appear again for a long while globally, gives its an energy that is heady. A review can be found here.

The Old Lady and the Pigeons (Sylvain Chomet, 1998)
Even before his feature debut with The Triplets of Belleville (2003), Chomet proved he was incredibly talented and imaginative with a short that can manage to juggle the macabre and the light hearted with ease.

Out for a Kill (Michael Oblowitz, 2003)
I may have stated on this blog that I have no real interest in Steven Seagal after a brief delving into his films. But this one, while of questionable merit, stands out for me as a bizarre totem for straight-to-video action, when it is not legitimately great cinema but an excess, if made into an absurdist work. It was films like this that informed me of the existence of the country of Aruba, which I never knew existed before, made to look both like China and Eastern Europe. Seagal is the usual individual he became with these films, and frankly was when he was a Hollywood star, but he's in a work that is just on the precipices of falling to pieces, yet manages to survive by being such a close-to-shambolic mess. All the quality wavering aspects of these films are literally put together by themselves to make up this one film, and while not very justifiable in its existence, the result is compelling. The same revenge story repeating, after being done over and over again, with not only the scenario slightly different, but the film around it being a prop of curiosity in itself.

Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt (Hiroyuki Imaishi, 2010)
When very intelligent and talented people purposely set out to make the most offensive and ADD riddled work they can. Its derivative, its tasteless, it's too structured around being based on American animation like Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, but for me it transcends this by not giving a damn. It takes a scorched earth policy to the notion of being commercial for an audience on either side of the globe, Japan or English speaking countries, yet is still inventive in its content. Simplistic but stylised animation which gives the advantage of higher depth in movement and fluidity, a willingness to go for intentionally ridiculous ideas, such as cutting to real models exploding, and actually creating memorable female characters in the lead that, perversely, are far more stronger than others in anime despite one being written as an nymphomaniac. With this Hiroyuki Imaishi made himself stand out further from the pack as an anime director, with just as talented people working under him on the production, and now he has his own studio I hope for him and anyone working with him continue to creating such beautifully constructed works of self sabotage. I have not been catching up with his latest, Kill la Kill (2013-ongoing), as each episode is being released, so I wait for the whole series to be released with great optimism both as the first series his studio is working on and for more from him.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [2005 Special Edition] (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
I was cold to this film to be honest seeing it. The structure difficult to engage with. But I keep thinking of Slim Pickens by the edge of the river, Bob Dylan's Knockin' On Heaven's Door playing, and a shiver runs down my spine.

Paul Verhoeven
(Business Is Business (1971), Turkish Delight (1973), Katie Tippel (1975),
The Fourth Man (1983), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995))
Thanks to parents who has no issue in letting me see Starship Troopers (1997) when I was eleven or twelve, the man who probably was the first film director to have a drastic effect on what I saw films as; even if I just wanted to see the gore and sex, and didn't understand the satire, films like his made in Hollywood were so drastically different to any others. How he managed to build the career he had in Hollywood when his Dutch films got global attention is unbelievable in hindsight, none of them liable to be ever made in the current era. I was able to view almost all his Dutch work now, and revisit Turkish Delight, and I am even more amazed he even caught Hollywood's attention. Dramas which did not hold back in mixing the vulgar with the serious. A comedy drama based on the testimonies of real prostitutes (Business Is Business) that juggles slapstick comedy with the dramatic. The final Dutch film he made before going to Hollywood, The Fourth Man, is an immensely dreamlike and peculiar concoction that keeps pulling the rug out from under you. His Hollywood films I saw this year didn't compromise this. Rewatching Total Recall, reviewed here, he ended up making a film that completely questions its own existence as an escape. Rewatching Basic Instinct, which I hated once, it's The Fourth Man redux but playing with American cinema archetypes. And then, reviewed here, I saw Showgirls, and it's not possible to see it as a terrible film or awful camp, as many do, when put aside the other films mentioned here. It's too deliberate in its transgressions and gonzo content....too perverse to swallow, which is probably why its seen as badly as it is. Revisiting him in these films, Verhoeven still proved to be someone whose work I could obsess over. His style is out-of-place in these politically correct days, but his lack of shame is blistering now.

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons/Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1974-77)
It's great that the BFI released this on Dual-Format DVD/Blu-Ray. It's a shame it was a limited edition release only. Avant-garde films released by them are still in print, most of them made by men only with very masculine content. Why did they choose to change this procedure when it came to two feminist dissections of how women are portrayed in society? Bad timing or it's a questionable plan of design that doesn't make sense when there's far less accessible works released by them that didn't get releases limited to a thousand copies or so. Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons felt like the superior film of the two, despite being an extra, because its subject of dissecting the archetype of the Amazon warrior was immediately rich and its experiments were memorable, such as co-director Peter Wollen, while reading an incredibly long monologue to camera, dropping the cards he's reading it from and the camera looking at the previous ones in close-up as he is reading from later ones. But Riddles of the Sphinx, about representations of women and motherhood, is likely to grow on me. Moments in its have stayed in my mind. A sequence devoted to a tilting maze game which uses liquid mercury instead of a ball bearing. And especially the many scenes that are shot with a continuous circular panning shot. The sensation of following a camera all around, in a circle, in the centre of the room is one of the most significantly memorable for me of this year, even over more well known movies, or ones I preferred more, for opening my mind and senses to more possibilities of how a film can depict what is in front of it.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
One of the most elusive films in Bergman's canon, from what I have seen, but only in that, while the central idea is completely simple, a woman's psychological trauma, the presentation doesn't aim for easy answers and instead places you in the middle of this other reality, where emotional distress alters all around it. Its more cold than difficult, placing itself as one of the bolder works of the late auteur in terms of presentation and tone.

Peter Greenaway
(Vertical Features Remake (1978), The Falls (1980),
A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), Drowning by Numbers (1988))
Returning to films I've seen before, and seeing one I haven't (Drowning By Numbers), I am definitely not the viewer who found two of the films here utterly pretentious like I did long ago. Instead I admire the level of depth with the works. Admire how Greenaway likes to play games with the viewer. Become awed by the level of technique craftsmanship his films have, and yet in the earliest films here could stretch minimal amounts of material into expansive imaginary worlds. And be baffled in how other people viewed him as pretentious like I did once when his humour is upfront, The Falls both one of the best sci-fi films made in Britain and one of the funniest things I have seen. There is a review for A Zed & Two Noughts here, and one for The Falls here.

Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972)
Finally got around to one of the most important cult films ever made. I admired the lovable perversity of it. How for all its rough edges it was charming and weird at the same time. And yes, seeing Divine eat dog faeces made me gag. A review can be found here.

Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001)
A film with such a complicated history for me since viewing it twice this year - it's the only film on this blog, here and here, which has had a re-review for it when I finally grasped its tone and attitude. It's an improvisation, layered over a basic plot of assassins killing each other for rank supremacy, but the whole film is Suzuki wanting to do what he desired for visual or contextual interest with no regard for plot. It's completely un-commercial, but the surprise is, when I gauged with its tone on the second viewing, i.e. actually had context for how the basic plot was structured, it actually becomes such an energetic work that is completely on point without drifting. The point its making though is filmmaking for filmmaking's sake, an uninhibited canvas turned into the equivalent of the Exquisite Corpse game. Which is not surprising considering its director got so bored making b-movie crime films he made Branded To Kill (1967). Having seen that film many years ago, I should have remembered the experience of that so I would have got the film on the first time. No, I was probably expecting a live action, "zany" cartoon like an idiot. Thankfully the second viewing gave me better than that, manga meeting avant-garde theatre, which is a rare delicacy.

Pitfall (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962)
Another Japanese film rewatched. Cold to it at first many years ago. Seeing it again, as this review shows, I encountered a hypnotic and mesmerising film, mixing political drama with the supernatural and raw. It's a testament to the power of Japanese art at its best, but it's also films like that have pushed me, away from the seventies, into loving sixties cinema the most. I have many films to go, but in a time of freedom in terms of content and experimentation, in a decade where political fluctuation encouraged such experiments to take place even in lurid genre films, the sixties is growing as a powerhouse of incredible cinema, many amongst the best I have ever seen. Now I need to watch my DVD copy of Woman In The Dunes (1964). I think I may be ready to fall in love with that film if this earlier Teshigahara, his debut in feature filmmaking, was already this accomplished.

Prata Palomares (André Faria, 1972)
Chaotic and suffers from its desire to be politically confrontational cinema, but this film shows a passion and fire that is missing immensely from a lot of filmmaking now. I do not want to suggest anything controversial, but it's clear that, with digging into films from Brazil from this period, where the political power was oppressive, that passion and fire unfortunately could only come from desperation and a desire to fight for an ideal, while many films now are just lacksidasical and lazy without a real goal behind them outside the cinema screens. A review can be found here.

Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979)
Again a film I once hated. Did I suddenly develop a double, only instead of being evil and having a goatee, I suddenly loved these art films that most would dismiss as pretentious? It's about the journey, not themes, but the mood. Listening the music, looking out the windshield of the moving car. Some brief exchanges of conversation between characters take place but they are for their own sake rather than for a dramatic plot. For me a film like this is of great virtue because, learning to expect something very different from a film like this, I can see the value in what its director really wanted to achieve. A snapshop of Britain at the cusp of Margaret Thatcher's England. Whether you hate her politics, defend her or are on the fence, the grey England depicted, beautiful in its motorways but also oppressive in its concrete and characterless flats, fells tangible. Enough to want to play Kraftwerk over it.

Reflections of Evil (Damon Packard, 2002)
It's an utter shame, because its director decided to use copyrighted material, a huge chunk of this was removed, meaning I only saw a butchered fragment of the work. I do believe that copyright is needed to protect people from being conned out of money they deserve for their work, but in terms of "remixes", parodies and artistic reinterpretations, I side with those who want to be creative with this material. And in the case of Damon Packard's film, the man, God bless him, put the film up on his own YouTube page for people to see without any cost, clearly more interested in the artistic endeavour. He would have put up the original four hour version of the film, from the pieces that are up, but I suspect, if I could make a wild guess, that the copyright issues deprived that from happening. It's a rough, hellish mess of ugly-beauty and amateur-genius. Again another completely uncommercial work, and for a very small audience, but even in a fragmented form this has stayed with me. The continuous fighting and violent arguments taking place randomly on the streets, as if a rage apocalypse has taken place. The nightmarish hallucination Packard's main protagonist feels within a movie theatre, standing out for actually filming within a cinema for real and making trailers an instrument for alienating the audience. That fact he goes further than this and manages to film inside an actual ET ride at Universal Studios, turning it into Dante's Inferno for anyone age three and up, is incredible even if the film around it is a viewed as a crazed mess. A theme park is made into purgatory and it's amazing a man who loves mainstream Hollywood cinema, from how it figures into the film, uses it to create hellish imagery, not only taking a swipe at Steven Spielberg early on but going further than even John Waters went with a film like Pink Flamigoes, or Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt did, in terms of tastelessness by depicting the least appropriate film tie-in ride you could ever make. Content that bold and out-there is what these extreme low budget could do at their best.

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)
The completely silent, extended bank robbery is a masterpiece. But the film around it, the preparation, the set-up of the character's, the drama of the fallout of the heist, is just as admirable in the skill and care taken with them.

Roujin Z aka. Rôjin Z (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 1991)
An immense underrated animated film. Even now, especially with the aging population of Japan being far higher than the youth, and that's not taking into consideration that globally people are living longer in general, the message of the film is strong and actually more relevant in this era. Its imaginative and distinct. Everything one could ask for from a feature length anime. And again, along with the other nineties anime I've seen in 2013, I look back and wish more stuff life this was still being made. Gambles and bold creations are still being made, like with Hiroyuki Imaishi, but more stuff like Roujin Z with completely un-otaku related subject matter would be refreshing.

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Images cared for from the following sources:

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