Movies

Naked Alibi (1954) is a weirdly unconvincing noir starring Sterling Hayden, Gloria Grahame and Gene Barry. Barry overacts horrifically as a volatile bakery owner, Hayden is the disgraced ex-police chief trying to prove Barry is a cop-killer, and Grahame is the woman in between.  Hayden and Grahame are good actors, and both kind of unusual looking, so they go together well, but this takes place in the world where there are towns called things like Border City, with streets that all curve so you can only see two blocks and not into the Medieval Paris or New York part of the backlot a few hundred yards away. The strange unbelievability of the production is distilled in Grahame's execution of the following peculiarly trashy dubbed musical number in an overlit soundstage Border City cantina with music but no band. Still there is something irresistibly seductive to me about her unusually tiny mouth - I find it hard to look at anything else when she is onscreen. 6/10 overall, but for weirdness it is more of an 8.

The Time of His Life (1955) Offbeat independent British comedy in which a snobbish matron must endure the reappearance of her convict father, whose only desire is to go back to jail where he belongs.  It relies mostly on prolonged slapstick and pratfalls for its "laughs" and could have been more amusing if it had simply gone with the appeal of the characters and circumstances. The only face I recognized was bespectacled Richard Wattis. Kind of a chore to sit through, but the organ and vibes soundtrack added a sort of Mr. Hulot emotional appeal and there is a song. 4/10

Movies

Gangway for Tomorrow (1943)  Extremely entertaining feelgood wartime propaganda piece - a carful of ridesharing war workers on the way to a day's work at the airplane plant recall in turn the past events that led them to where they are.  Not a big or flashy movie, but a set of interesting human stories.  Written by radio suspense-master Arch Oboler, very well produced and directed.  Good clean fun.  8/10

Attack the Block (2011) A gang of teenage hoodlums are interrupted in mid-crime by an alien invasion.  The problem is, they are the ones who have what the monsters want.  A pure, sharp, clean, witty and intense monster movie without a lot of fancy-ass jerkycam CGI spectacle.  A good monster movie is about people, and this story is populated by believable and eventually likeable characters, fighting guys in monster suits.  That's right, monster suits.  Not some motion capture glittery tentacled slime-dripping whooshing ray-emitting crap, but guys in big black fur suits and it totally works. Just enough woah moments and sudden grim laughs; not too grisly but the right amount to show you those gorilla-wolf motherfuckers mean business.  This is the best pure monster movie I can recall seeing in years and I don't give 10/10 easily or often but this earns it. Nice job, everybody.

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Movies - recent viewing

Narok (2005) is a Thai hell movie.  A group of people are erroneously sent to hell even though they are all still alive in the emergency room.  Buddhist hell, where they saw people in half, hang them from hooks and smash their hands and feet with mallets forever.  Not much of a story is necessary in a Hell movie - you are there and you want to get out, some do and some don't. It was great to see a Buddhist slant on it.  I don't think there are nearly enough hell movies.  This one is okay as a horror ordeal story, 6/10.  I recommend more highly the Nobuo Nakagawa film Jigoku (1960) which makes maximum use of its limited resources.

The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly (1957) goes by other names but it is a Japanese movie about a good guy with an invisibility ray against a bad guy with shrinking gas which makes him so small he just drifts around and floats into locked rooms to murder people.  It is a movie about people you can't see.  The next day I couldn't remember what I had watched the night before.  3/10

The Nitwits (1935) is the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy said to have been remade as Genius At Work, previously reviewed.  Two goofy guys get involved with a mysterious serial murderer and there the resemblance ends.  The difference between the two movies is W&W have distinct personalities and chemistry as a team, they do and say amusing things in amusing ways, and there are jokes and humor included in the script, as well as a couple of good musical numbers.  As good a Wheeler and Woolsey movie as was ever made - harmless fun and gentle entertainment.  7/10

The Ghost Writer (2010) directed by Roman Polanski, is in many ways similar to his earlier The Ninth Gate, entering an obscure byway of literature by way of a protagonist just intelligent enough to work his way into a baffling maze but not to get back out again in one piece.  Similar too is the depiction of the soullessness of wealth and hollow opulence where genuine evil hides behind banal smiles.  Not a single ray of sunshine is seen in the cold bleak settings or in the hearts of the grim characters laboring under the weight of the contents of their own minds. Eli Wallach's brief appearance is memorable, and the stark locales and settings are simultaneously wide open and claustrophobic.  9/10

I watch all kinds of stuff.  I also recently enjoyed the second of the King Naresuan historical epics from Thailand which goes beyond any other historical epic I have seen for vast rampaging spectacle.  I sort of enjoyed Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), a trippy Italian giallo starring Brazilian actor/director Florinda Bolkan as a woman who appears to have dreamt the stabbing death of her neighbor exactly as it happened.  Didn't really enjoy L'anticristo (1974), an Italian Exorcist rip-off which I had seen before and for some stupid reason watched again, and didn't even make it half way through some damn thing called Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture (1973) also, perhaps more literally, known as Story of a Wild Elder Sister: Widespread Lynch Law.  It is the stupidest and lousiest cheap Japanese exploitation flick I have ever tried to watch.