Scott's Movie Comments

Kaosu (Chaos)

This film opens with a couple having dinner in a very nice restaurant that looks to be expensive, even by Japanese standards. This glimpse of their life gives the appearance of an existence that is perfectly content, if a bit bland. But, as anyone who has ever seen an Alfred Hitchcock movie can attest, things are not always what they appear. This twisty and tricky film noir was director Hideo Nakata’s follow-up to his hit thriller Ring (subsequently remade in America with Naomi Watts) and its sequel. It has to be daunting to make this sort of movie, since any movie fan worth his or her salt will have seen enough examples of the genre to anticipate at least some of the turns in the plot. But, after a deceptively slow start, this flick manages to keep us guessing and on the edge of our seats for most of its running time. In this, the film is masterful, as well as being erotic in a way that Hitchcock was never able to be. We never have any idea until the final frames exactly how it will turn out, and that is an exhilarating feeling. But then, there is only one thing you can count on in films noirs. It’s usually not a good idea to trust a beautiful woman. (Seen 13 October 2004)

Karakter (Character)

The interesting thing about this well-made film is how it evokes the visual style of movies, particularly German ones, that were being made around the time that it takes place (the 1920s and 1930s). The protagonist (Fredja van Huet) even looks a bit like a very young Peter Lorre. The film’s theme of a problematic parent/child relationship is certainly timeless, and van Huet’s portrait of an ambitious young man who’s practically sole purpose in life is to be a lawyer is nothing if not timely. Director Mike van Diem based the movie on his favorite classic Dutch novel, and what is compelling about the story is the ambiguous intentions of van Huet’s father. Is he really trying to punish the lad because of his frustrations with the mother, or does he really think he is building his character by putting some adversity in his way. Unfortunately, this ambiguity is pretty much dispelled in a finale that is a bit too Hollywood. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why this entry from the Netherlands picked up the Best Foreign Film Oscar. (Seen 29 September 1998)

Kate & Leopold

Director James Mangold’s last movie, Identity, was nifty if gimmicky, but it could have been dismissed as simply Psycho lite. Anyway, it was a definite improvement over his 2001 romance Kate & Leopold, which was definitely Somewhere in Time lite. You certainly can’t fault the actors. Meg Ryan does her typical perky romantic comedy thing, but her character is oddly un-involving, which is bad since modern American women in general are clearly meant to identify with her. And Hugh Jackman erases any memory of Wolverine from the X-Men movies as the Anglo-American New York aristocrat yanked out of his own era. This is one of those flicks that assumes we know the story so well already from other movies that it doesn’t need to work very hard at making us root for the right outcome. As Jackman gallantly races down a mugger on horseback, we are meant to cheer reflexively, perhaps remembering how we felt watching similar scenes in, say, Crocodile Dundee. The ultimate irony of this movie is its theme of unauthentic modern lives deriving from people devoting all their energies to things they don’t actually believe in (Ryan is, of course, in marketing), and yet there is no evidence on screen that Mangold and company really believed in this movie. (Seen 5 October 2003)

Kelly’s Heroes

Seen today, this wonderful war/caper/adventure/comedy flick actually seems more subversive than it did in 1970. Sure, it ends with American troops being greeted as liberators by joyous French villagers, but the cheering crowd doesn’t realize that the Yanks are making off with a fortune in gold stolen from the local bank. The American officers in this flick are universally incompetent and the soldiers cop on easily to the fact that they are just pawns of the politicians and the generals. But it’s easy to forget that the World War II movie back then was as much a generic adventure format as westerns or gangster movies. The stories were pretty much divorced from reality anyway. After all, back then even a Nazi POW camp was considered suitable fodder for a TV sitcom. In the end, it is the sprawling cast that makes this movie. Clint Eastwood, poised between his spaghetti western and Dirty Harry phases, is basically the same steely-eyed stoic hero he was in his westerns. Indeed, there is an explicit homage to the Leone films near the film’s climax. Telly Savalas, who had just played Blofeld in a Bond film and would soon be playing Kojak on TV, is perfect as the loose bull of a sergeant. Donald Sutherland’s oddly counterculture tank driver has echoes of his role in M*A*S*H, which came out the same year. Don Rickles plays himself to fine comic effect. Playing apoplectic sidekicks are Stuart Margolin and Gavin MacLeod, with great faces among the grunts, including Harry Dean Stanton. And, as a comically gung-ho general, Carroll O’Connor uses most of the exact same tics and mannerisms that he would soon be employing for TV’s Archie Bunker. What is amazing is how well the movie, filmed in Yugoslavia, manages to balance the broad comedy with some fairly tense action sequences. (Seen 3 March 2006)

The Kid Stays in the Picture

The title comes from an utterance by producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Robert Evans, the subject of this glorious documentary (drawn from his autobiography of the same name), was a very lucky, if not particularly gifted, pretty boy actor in the 1950s. Twice, within months, he was spotted at random in public and cast in major movies: first, to play the young Irving Thalberg in the Lon Chaney biopic The Man of a Thousand Faces; second, to play the bullfighter Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises. The latter film’s major talent (including stars Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner and the novel’s author, Ernest Hemingway) demanded that Evans be fired, for insufficient acting ability. After Zanuck saved his job, the ambitious Evans more or less decided to give up acting and “be the guy who gets to say, ‘The kid stays in the picture.'” Soon he was the head of production at Paramount Studios, answering to a new corporate owner, Gulf + Western (satirized by Mel Brooks in Silent Movie as “Engulf + Devour”), which wanted the studio lifted from the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder. And, boy, did Evans deliver. In a seven-year period, he oversaw no fewer than four pop culture landmarks. He brought Roman Polanski to America to make Rosemary’s Baby. Two years later Love Story was released, with Evans newly married to its star, Ali McGraw. He picked a young director with an unimpressive track record, Francis Ford Coppola, to make The Godfather (because he wanted an Italian to direct it). And he worked with Polanski and Robert Towne to produce Chinatown. Needless to say, things could only go down from there. Given that everything is seen from Evans’s perspective, the film is ultimately self-serving. But Evans does such a good job of telling his story (his hard-boiled, no-nonsense New York delivery, wherein it sounds perfectly natural to call women “dames”) that we feel are getting a reasonable version. As for the visuals, the filmmakers Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen work with a lot of still photos but bring them to life with some mesmerizing special effects. It’s worth waiting for the end credits to see some 1970s footage of Dustin Hoffman doing a parody of what he imagined Evans would be like in the year 1996. (Seen 6 October 2005)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Whew! After berating Quentin Tarantino for years, I find myself giving his fourth flick three stars. (It seems like this guy has been around so long and done so much that it’s hard to believe this is only his fourth movie.) I didn’t want to give it three stars, but I was forced against my will. I was afraid Uma Thurman would come and beat me up if I didn’t. That’s how this movie is. It picks you up by the ears and throws you across the room and makes you beg for your breath. More than any other of his flicks, this one shows that Tarantino is the man who put the I in Irony. His tongue is so firmly in his cheek here that it actually punctures his cheek and makes a bloody hole in it. Tarantino’s love of movies is indisputable, and that love is on full display here. We see his love of Hong Kong action flicks, of Russ Meyer movies, of samurai movies, of Yakuza movies, of spaghetti westerns, of Japanese anime, of American comic books and cartoons. The list is endless. So is Tarantino’s appetite for gore. Never has movie violence been so cartoon-like and graphic at the same time. When people get shot or stabbed or lose a limb in this movie, blood gushes out like an open fire hydrant. Someday Tarantino may make a truly great film. This flick shows he has the style and verve and technical skills to do it. But it’s always for a joke. We are never allowed to take anything seriously for more than a few minutes. In the closing credits, he thanks his “brother” Robert Rodriguez, and the two really are a pair. Neither has yet matured enough artistically to work without the wink. The only unintentional joke I spotted in the whole movie was also in the closing credits, where the state of California and Governor Gray Davis are thanked. (Seen 13 October 2003)

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Quentin Tarantino’s movies basically do for old B action movies what the Red Robin restaurants did for fast food. He takes something we loved in our youth and makes it “adult” (and not necessarily in the good sense of the word, but definitely in the fun sense). Taken together with Vol. 1, we have a breathtaking pastiche of various mini-movies, aping the styles of Tarantino’s favorite flicks. The mixture of styles and characters can be a bit jarring, like when Michael Madsen’s trailer trash character starts making deals over a fabulous, exotic samurai sword. But no more so than when the titular Bill starts waxing philosophical over Superman comic books. The story here echoes the first film, as Uma Thurman has to claw her way back (this time even more literally) from the grave, before she can (re)begin her rampage of vengeance. With the movie’s liberal dosage of eastern philosophical kung fu mumbo jumbo, it is entirely fitting and appropriate that Bill is played by David Carradine. What’s even better is that, with age, Carradine’s face, manner and voice seem to have morphed into those of the late Jason Robards, who was one of the best things about Once Upon a Time in the West, which is also fitting, since there is a heavy Sergio Leone influence going on here as well. We can’t help also being reminded of David Lynch when Michael Parks shows up, sporting one of the weirdest accents we have ever heard. In the end, this pair of movies is so well made and compelling that we wish it would take itself just a bit more seriously. We know Tarantino can do it; he did it with Jackie Brown, and let’s hope that in the future he will find a way to marry the tone of that film with the hyperkinetic energy of this one. In the meantime, the Kill Bill movies are entertainment enough. Technical question: so, is this Tarantino’s fifth movie or merely the second half of his fourth movie? (Seen 23 April 2004)

The Killing of John Lennon

Every time some monstrous criminal is about to be put to death, one of the various arguments offered by death penalty opponents is that we can learn a lot of useful information by keeping these people alive and studying them. Because Mark Chapman committed his murder in New York, he was not put to death and has been a guest of the state for more than a quarter-century and will continue to be—as long as his parole requests continue to be denied. So there has been plenty of time to study him. Writer/director Andrew Piddington says that his film is a thoroughly researched account of how Chapman spent the weeks before and after he shot Lennon in the doorway of his New York co-op. “There is not a conceit in the entire film,” he declares proudly. Well, maybe the impressionistic touches depicting Chapman’s frequently fevered state of mind are not a conceit. And I wonder if one of the most chilling moments (after Chapman has been chatting up two women in front of the Dakota, he mutters to himself in anticipation of what they will soon be saying, “He seemed so nice!”) is actually documented somewhere. But what is certain is that there are extensive voiceover monologues taken verbatim from Chapman’s own writings. And that is the discomfiting thing about this whole enterprise. Piddington’s direction is exemplary and the starring performance of Jonas Bell, in his first credited movie role, is award-worthy. But throughout the film’s 114 minutes we endure the queasy, unclean feeling that, with this movie, Chapman has gotten exactly what he wanted. He is the hero (or anti-hero, if you wish) of his own epic. He has become famous—again. And, by spending this time with us, he earns at least a modicum of understanding or even sympathy. I actually made a conscious decision over the past 27 years to know as little as possible about Mark Chapman. Now I know way more about him than I could ever have wanted. (Seen 16 October 2007)

The King Is Alive

You think your last vacation was a nightmare? Pity the group of tourists in this movie. After a problem with their airplane, they are bused hundreds of miles and, through sheer incompetence, wind up in the middle of the desert with no petrol. Faced with a major challenge to their survival and a real possibility of lingering death, they band together to do what anyone else would do in this dire situation: they go about mounting a production of King Lear. Okay, in fairness, it makes a bit more sense when you see it in the film. But, once we know that we have a play-within-a-movie, we know pretty much what has to happen. Yep, reality has to start imitating art and the group of actors more or less represent all of humanity. The director is the Dane Kristian Levring, and this film subscribes to Dogma 95, in which a bunch of European [more precisely, they’re Danish] filmmakers agreed that they wouldn’t use any technology in their movies that might make them interesting to watch. Okay, that was a cheap shot. The film is actually plenty interesting to watch, even if there is no artificial light or post-production special effects. What’s left is some nice minimalist photography, a script the begs the scenery to be chewed, and a cast with the teeth to gnash to high heaven. Familiar faces include Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bruce Davison, with Janet McTeer as an aptly self-described bitch and David Bradley doing a lovely job as the catalyst for the drama production. (Seen 22 May 2001)

Kingdom of Heaven

Every time we get a new Ridley Scott movie, there is a dreaded question to confront. Was it made by the genius who gave us masterpieces like Alien, Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down? Or was made by the filmmaker who has given us such puzzlements as Legend and Gladiator? The good news is that it isn’t nearly as bad as Legend. You can probably guess the bad news, although you may not consider it bad news, since a lot of people seem to have liked Gladiator. And at least Gladiator had Russell Crowe in it. One cannot help but wonder what this Crusade flick would have been like with someone with the acting heft of Crowe or Christian Bale in the lead. Orlando Bloom is pretty as all hell and he was a dandy Legolas in The Lord of the Rings, mainly because mostly what was required of him was, well, to look pretty. But in an historical epic like this, you really need to have someone who can dominate the screen, and Bloom cannot convince us for a minute about his crime, repentance, spiritual search or transformation into legendary military leader. As far as Scott’s storytelling, there are some strange ellipses in the narrative (a shipwreck and a major battle slip by off-screen, as if Scott ran out of money or hard disk space on the computer doing his CG effects), and we have the confusing situation of a film that seems to be a “message” movie, but we can’t tell exactly what the message is. It might be that Europeans should stay out of the Middle East or maybe it’s that only good Europeans should get involved in the Middle East, but not the sort of Europeans (and presumably their American descendents) that want to start wars. One message comes through pretty clear, however: Muslims are devout and honorable, and most Christians are shameless hypocrites. (Seen 22 June 2005)

Kings

Based on a play by Jimmy Murphy, this Irish language movie presents a world that will be familiar to devotees of the American stage, i.e. men on the far side of middle age looking back with bitterness and regret at the unrealized hopes and dreams of their sunny youth. The specific situation here involves a group of young men who left Connemara together for London in the 1970s and now find themselves alienated and older than their years, as they gather for the funeral of one of their number. Tom Collins’s film unabashedly subscribes to two articles of faith among many in the west of Ireland: 1) living anywhere outside of Ireland is a form of hell and 2) no one can get ahead in life without selling out his friends. Having said that, the cast do an excellent and convincing job of playing men who have not coped well with the passing of time. Peadar O’Treasaigh is especially good as the heartbroken father of the dead man. The best known face is that of Colm Meaney (of Star Trek and The Commitments), who is perfect at conveying someone trying to convince himself not to feel guilty that he has done better than his mates, although he is too much the Dubliner to really seem like he is from the Gaeltacht. There are few surprises along the way in this drama, but it does transport you to that strange place of laughter and bitter tears that is the Irish psyche. (Seen 28 December 2008)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Here’s another thing I didn’t see coming. The older he gets, the more Robert Downey Jr. looks and sounds like Dustin Hoffmann. And when did Corbin Bernsen morph into the late Michael Conrad? Apparently not related to any of the three other movies that have more or less the same title, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of those films that makes a point of reminding you regularly that you are watching a movie, specifically a Raymond Chandler-like multiple murder mystery. In doing so, it makes itself much more entertaining and amusing than emotionally involving and gripping. It features extremely clever dialog by screenwriter Shane Black (also directing, for the first time), who wrote the Lethal Weapon movies as well as the sadly underrated Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero. In a way, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the anti-Lethal Weapon, i.e. Black vents about Hollywood, about silly police move conventions, silly crime novel conventions and even people who don’t stay to watch the end credits. In one particularly amusing scene at the end, he takes on the way some characters in movies always turn up alive after all the laws of science and nature say that they should definitely be pushing up daisies. The material is tailor-made for the chronically ironic Downey, and Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan make dandy foils for him. You’ll probably laugh a lot, but after it’s over, you won’t care that much. (Seen 23 November 2005)

Kisses

There is a lovely sequence in this film when two children hitch a ride on a barge on one of Dublin’s canals and the movie changes from black and white to color. Not only is this the first view I have ever gotten of what it would be like to travel to Dublin’s city center by canal, but the movie manages to evoke both The Wizard of Oz and Huckleberry Finn all in one go. Kisses was written and directed by Lance Daly, who previously gave us more typical independent fare with flicks like Last Days in Dublin and The Halo Effect. Dylan and Kylie are two adolescents living next door to each other—and who will probably need subtitles if and when this flick makes it to the U.S. market. Neither has a great home life, and when things turn yet worse for them, they take it on the lam to the city in hopes of finding Dylan’s older brother, who left home years before. At first their adventure is a lark, with bright lights, shopping centers, buskers and spending money that Kylie swiped from under a bed. But inevitably things turn dark, as the night wears on. Daly nicely captures the magic and fears of most large cities, as seen through the eyes of a child. And the two young leads, Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry, turn in commendable, realistic performances. In a particularly nice touch, the music and spirit of our young lad’s namesake, Bob Dylan, seems to be everywhere. (Seen 11 July 2008)

Klavim Lo Novhim Be’yaroq (Dogs Are Colour Blind)

One of the first scenes we see in this Israeli comedy is a woman in a business suit lying on her back and having a conversation on her mobile phone while the gynecologist who is examining her tries to ask about her sex life. This gives us an idea of the kind of humor we are in for. The film spends one night following a group of people whose paths keep crossing in strange and inevitable ways. The characters include a couple who are having marital difficulties, a pimp/gangster and his prostitute, a guy who just wants to watch a game on TV, a randy cop who tries to train his dog to recognize traffic signals (hence the title), and a couple of incompetent burglars. This is a completely harmless and amusing way to spend 92 minutes. (Seen 4 June 1997)

Kleine Teun (Little Tony)

Dutch filmmaker Alex van Warmerdam makes odd movies that initially seem light and humorous but relentlessly turn dark. His 1996 film The Dress was about a garment that ruined the life of virtually everyone who touched it. A dress turns up in this movie too, and once again nothing good happens to the three people involved. There are some truly amusing moments in the first half of the film, as something of a romantic triangle develops on a farm involving a husband and wife and the young woman hired to teach the husband to read. (The wife has tired of reading the subtitles to him when they watch foreign films on TV.) But, bit by bit, the movie turns into a somewhat lighter (which isn’t saying much) take on the plot of Arturo Ripstein’s Deep Crimson. The main upshot of Little Tony is: if you ever find yourself driving through the Dutch countryside after having seen this film, those quaint little farmhouses won’t look quite so benign. (Seen 19 May 1999)

Knallhart (Tough Enough)

Of course, if this was a Hollywood movie, young Michael would become a virtual action hero by the end of it. On the other hand, as a look at the problems of youth in urban areas, this German film by Detlev Buck isn’t exactly neo-realist either. Through the eyes of young Michael, we see the stark contrast between the Berlin suburb where he has been living with his mother and her doctor boyfriend and the inner city neighborhood where they move after the boyfriend kicks them out. It is a world where blond-haired Germans seem an ethnic minority and where gang bullying is rampant. Fifteen-year-old Michael is too pretty and baby-faced not to be a target, but he is determined not only to survive but to thrive. Ironically, his fine features are his apparent salvation, as a chance encounter with a drug lord allows him to be spotted as the perfect, innocent-looking courier. But Michael, well played by David Kross, soon gets a lesson in exactly what this sort of life entails. And a single event (one that gets depicted multiple times in Hollywood films with little thought or repercussion) becomes a harrowing and traumatic rite of passage in a dark, dark world. (Seen 16 July 2006)

A Knight’s Tale

If the title A Knight’s Tale seems a bit literary for a film that is essentially your basic rock ‘n’ roll knights-in-armor jousting movie, there’s a reason for it. The anachronistic touches and jarring inclusion of rock music may seem like a blatant attempt to draw a teen audience, but there’s more going on than that. The film’s goofy humor, coupled with the inclusion of a major literary figure as a key character and much consequent wry observation on the art of writing, make this a sort of a Monty Python and the Holy Grail meets Shakespeare in Love. The writer/director is Brian Helgeland, who has scripted a mixed bag of Hollywood films that includes Highway to Hell, Assassins, L.A. Confidential, Conspiracy Theory, The Postman and Payback. He concedes that some bad experiences with studios, including his frustrated directing effort on Payback (against his wishes, the ending was changed so that Mel Gibson could live), colored this screenplay and it can be read as an allegory of the writer-director struggle. And the strange soundtrack just happens to include tunes he was listening to while working on the script. The movie is fun to watch and even a bit touching in places. Not the least of its pleasures are some attractive faces, including the lead, Heath Ledger, who is no stranger to anachronistic heroes, having updated Shakespeare in the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You and played an Irish prince fighting Romans(!) in the short-lived TV series Roar. But the show is stolen by Paul Bettany’s hilarious turn as the voice of writers everywhere. (Seen 25 April 2001)

Knocked Up

I really struggled with giving this its third star. After all, by now the trademark (or, if you will, formula) of the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogan coterie is clear. Give the lads a comedy on the high end of raunchy but lace it with unexpected sweetness and an even-more-unexpected bit of moralizing at the end. Well, after this flick and The 40 Year Old Virgin and Superbad, it won’t be that unexpected anymore, so we’ll have to see what else these guys have. Now genre-wise, Knocked Up treads well-worn Hollywood territory. The man-child, who entertains us with his perpetual childhood only to be forced by life to finally grow up a bit, is a multiplex staple (cf. Wedding Crashers ad infinitum). But at least in this movie, our arrested adolescent is spurred to grow up by the one thing in life that actually does get many young men (and sometimes even not-so-young men) to do some growing up. By focusing on two couples, writer/director Apatow makes some all-too-sharp observations on the eternal battle of the sexes, both in the early stages and in the later stages of a relationship. (He also makes some hilarious observations on life in L.A.) But he conspires to finish up with a nearly foolproof ending, the high point of virtually any romantic relationship. We know everything we need to know about Seth Rogan’s character when he discloses that he has lived for years entirely off a modest accident settlement. We know everything we need to know about Katherine Heigl’s character when she discloses that she has never smoked dope and that her favorite female actor is Mary Tyler Moore. In this movie Heigl is Mary Tyler Moore. She has a Mary Richards-type personality and a Mary Richards-type job and goes on disastrous Mary Richard-type dates. But for once, it has somehow all worked out, in the messy, unexpected way that life sometimes works out. For that affirming message not overly sugar-coated (plus a bunch of good laughs), this movie squeaks by with its third star. (Seen 24 September 2007)

A Koldum Klaka (Cold Fever)

Sometimes a journey takes you to a place that is on no map. These words close Cold Fever, a beautifully photographed film by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson (Movie Days), letting us know, if we didn’t already, that this film is about an Iceland that is in no atlas. At times this Iceland resembles the bare white landscape of Fargo’s Minnesota. At other times it is an eerily beautiful netherworld where you never know when a supernatural spirit might appear. We see the country from the point of view of Atsushi (Masatoshi Nagase), a young Japanese man who has come to perform a memorial service for his parents who died there seven years before. This alien perspective makes the film resemble nothing so much as a Jim Jarmusch movie. The exception to this is a strange interlude with an American couple (Fisher Stevens, Lili Taylor) who seem to have no place in the movie except as an obligatory nod to Quentin Tarantino. (Seen 2 June 1996)

Komikku zasshi nanka iranai! (Comic Magazine)

Very, very black Japanese comedy about television journalism in the age of junk culture. The hero is a TV reporter, who follows actresses around airports and, when they refuse to utter one word to him, he shows the film on TV and pronounces, “As you can see, she didn’t deny the rumors about her affair.” The climax is when a couple of hit men break into a businessman’s apartment and off him while a mob of reporters films the whole thing. (Note: This really did happen in Japan.) The highlight for me was a bubble gum pop group of prepubescent girls singing a song called “Please Don’t Take My School Uniform Off.” (Seen 23 May 1987)

Kopps

Josef Fares follows up his hit Jalla! Jalla! with another screwball comedy, collaborating with many of the same people who worked on the previous film. If Jalla! Jalla! was more or less Sweden’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then Kopps is its Andy Griffith Show. Actually, the Andy Griffith comparison works pretty well because, on that old American TV series, people always greeted each other by saying, “Hey.” And in this movie, they greet each by saying, “Hej.” But maybe a better comparison is the Police Academy movies, since the four cops on patrol in this rural town are all more Deputy Barney than Sheriff Andy. The humor is gentle and easy to take, with the best bits being the Walter Mitty-like fantasies of one of the cops, whose inspiration for police work comes from movies like Die Hard and various Hong Kong flicks. The plot involves a scheme by the officers to avoid having the station closed due to a lack of local crime. Inadvertently, the movie explains why it is so hard for governments to cut spending. (Seen 12 July 2003)

Korea

It is 1952 and John Doyle has much to be bitter about. He fought for the Irish Republic but now, three decades later, the only way of life he has known—fishing the lakes of Ireland’s Midlands—is coming to an end because the government wants to attract English tourists for sport fishing. And Ben Moran, whom John hates because he was on the side of the Free State in the civil war, is now a government official and much better off than he. Also disillusioning is the fact that so many young Irish are emigrating because there are not enough opportunities for them at home. (One of these was Ben’s son Luke who has come home in a coffin after the U.S. sent him to war in Korea.) John still mourns his wife who died young, and soon his only child Eamon, who is graduating from school, will leave him. Perhaps the hardest blow of all is that Eamon has fallen in love with Ben’s daughter Una. The conflict between John and Eamon is the heart of what is really a very simple story. This dark, brooding movie is based on a short story by John McGahern. It was beautifully, if gloomily, filmed in County Cavan by Cathal Black who explained after the screening that it was originally supposed to be under an hour but eventually expanded into feature film length. This was its first public showing. It will open in Ireland in the fall. (Seen 8 June 1995)

Korei (Séance)

I am well on my way to becoming a Kiyoshi Kurosawa (apparently no relation to that other Kurosawa) fan. His two movies that I have now seen are creepy and atmospheric and keep you involved and guessing from beginning to end. This one is based on the novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, which was previously made into a movie in 1964, starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough. But Kurosawa has clearly put his own stamp on the material and it is easy to draw comparisons with his earlier film Cure. Both involve sleuthing psychiatrists (as well as detectives) delving into the paranormal, and both explore marriages consisting of a troubled wife and a very (perhaps overly) supportive husband. And both generate major creepiness. Junko has a problem that we have seen in movies before. Simply put, she sees dead people. But where The Sixth Sense (and more extremely, 1999’s The Haunting) relied on periodic visual shocks to put us on edge, this movie does it with such simple things as lighting, camera angles, shadows, and pacing. And, since movies like this have now conditioned us for years to expect certain things to happen, it’s refreshing and satisfying (and, in a way, even more creepy) when they don’t, that is, we just don’t know what to expect. (Seen 29 May 2001)

Krapp’s Last Tape

If you want to have the battle of your life, try seeing this film after just a few hours sleep the night before. It is the longest 58 minutes you will ever spend. It’s a filmed version of Samuel Beckett’s one-character play, which John Hurt performed on the Dublin stage. The movie version was filmed at Ardmore Studios by Canadian Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing, Exotica), who knows a thing or two about stories involving magnetic recording media. Beckett is definitely an acquired taste, and if I can take his absurdist approach to writing, it’s only because I studied French literature as one of my majors at university. (Both Ireland and France claimed Beckett as one of their own, once he became sufficiently famous.) For most people, this will be unwatchable. Still, Hurt gives a powerful performance, working with a minimum of dialog, some of it not completely coherent. Krapp lives and breathes, and we feel that we know him. If there is a message to this story, it is that life is full or regret, and watch where you throw your banana peels. (Seen 17 October 2003)

Kull the Conqueror

I suppose it’s a sign of the times that in this movie Kull the Conqueror is a much more politically correct and sensitive guy than he was in the original pulp fiction writings of Robert E. Howard. When Kull becomes king of Valusia through an incredible bit of luck and chutzpah, his administration gets off to an even rockier start than when Bill Clinton tried to open the military to gays. Kevin Sorbo looks fine in the title role, although his speech seems a bit refined for a barbarian/pirate/warrior and he is given to wisecracks not unlike that other fantasy hero he plays on TV. Once again Tia Carrere makes an alluring villain, although we keep waiting for her to do something more awful than habitually punch out the hapless wizard who resurrected here. The movie is entertaining enough in a strangely old-fashioned way. It’s kind of like one of those adventure movies in the 1950s and 1960s that featured heroes like Sinbad and starred actors like Guy Williams. The producer, not coincidentally, is Rafaella De Laurentiis who was responsible for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan movies and 1996’s Dragonheart. (Seen 29 August 1997)

Kung Fu Panda

As entertaining as this typically amusing DreamWorks animation is, I couldn’t help thinking, while I was watching it, that it would be even more fun to see footage of Dustin Hoffman as he was reading his lines into the microphone. Cross off one more item on my list of things I never expected to see in my lifetime: Dustin Hoffman more or less playing Yoda. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this movie, and I laughed out loud a couple of a times, particularly at the scene involving acupuncture interrupting a conversation with the overly serious Tigress voiced by Angelina Jolie. In a strange way, I suppose this movie is the anti-Incredibles, in that it harks back to the traditional children’s entertainment message that everyone is special—even a lumbering and obese panda voiced by Jack Black. More interesting, however, is its other message: that what is written on the paper is not nearly so important as that people believe in it. (Seen 7 September 2008)

Kurotokage (Black Lizard)

This Japanese movie was made in 1968, and it is reminiscent of the Cinemascope Technicolor spy capers of that era. (The main theme music sounds an awful lot like Charade.) But this movie veers into high camp. The title character, a master femme fatale criminal, is played by Japan’s leading fernale impersonator. He/she goes through more hair-do and clothing changes in two hours than Joan Collins went through all last season. The evil Black Lizard has a weak spot: she is in love with Japan’s No. 1 detective, who has sworn to arrest her. A lot of fun. I won’t go out on a limb and say that this film has an appeal for a very specific audience, but I did notice that I was the only guy in the audience not wearing lavender. (Seen 23 May 1987)

Kurt and Courtney

This documentary by Nick Broomfield purports to be about Kurt Cobain, but it is really about the weird things some people will say if you point a camera at them. The “star” here is Nick Broomfield, who wanders around Washington state and California looking perpetually perplexed as people (many of them quite strange) share their stories—some real and some perhaps imagined—about Cobain and Courtney Love. The film is, of course, notorious because of the airtime it gives to conspiracy theories about Cobain’s death—notably from Love’s own father, a real piece of work who was marginally involved in her life. Broomfield appears not to be believe the conspiracy twaddle, but in the apparent interest of “open-mindedness” (or is it perverse fascination?) he pays it a lot of attention. The fact is, though, he uncovers more than enough evidence to show that being married to Love would be enough to drive a man to suicide. Among the few truly worthwhile bits in this oddity are the interviews with Cobain’s aunt who plays haunting recordings of Kurt as a child. This is the most we get about the man himself in a film that (for legal reasons) is entirely lacking any music by Nirvana. (Seen 8 July 1998)

Kyua (Cure)

In the men’s restroom after the screening of this one, the guys were throwing around comparisons to The X-Files and Twin Peaks. I can live with that, but I would also throw in a dash of Silence of the Lambs. This 1997 film by Japanese hotshot director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is inevitably dubbed “a psychological thriller,” and never has that label seemed more apt, since what is going on in the various characters’ minds is absolutely crucial to this multiple murder mystery. Ordinary people are suddenly and temporarily turning violent and killing someone close to them, and that’s all of the plot that I dare divulge. Ultimately, the story comes down to a duel between a detective determined to crack the case and the strangest film villain we have seen in a long time. A perpetually dazed, long-haired student type, he is a strange cross between Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter. And, since this is essentially a mystery of the mind, expect one of those “huh?” endings. (Seen 16 May 2001)