Scott’s Movie Comments

Original post date: 23 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   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.

Original post date: 22 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   The title refers to the year 1969 when Neil Armstrong took his one small step and Americans believed they could do anything. Everett Jones is a gung-ho Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia and he is out To Make A Difference. Lew, the guy he would be replacing if Lew would just leave, has flipped out and spends his time drinking beer and shooting the rats scampering around his cozy home. Everett (who prefers to be called Jones) falls in love with a local girl. The movie gives a good idea of what it’s like to be an North American in Latin America, but unfortunately it degenerates into a kind of soap opera cum melodrama that destroys the M*A*S*H -like absurd realistic style it starts out with.

Original post date: 22 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   The kind of delightful surprise you usually only find at film festivals. A quirky independent U.S. comedy with a style all its own. Features Susan Dey ( Partridge Family , L.A. Law ). Dick is a freelance (read unemployed) science fiction writer who is bombarded with rejection from publishers and from Susan Dey but constantly attacked by his California airhead landlady and her sexpot teenage daughter. I can’t remember a movie where every line and every scene seem so carefully planned to work independently and yet build on everything that has gone before. The scenes portraying the action in Dick’s novel about an escapee from a prison planet chain gang are hilarious.

Original post date: 22 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   Minimalism.

Original post date: 21 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   A few years ago, before I become a mature, responsible adult, I was in love with Monique van de Ven, the gorgeous Dutch actress who starred in Kathy Tippel and Turkish Delight . Call me sentimental, but I still get together with Monique once a year. She always comes to the film festival with her latest movie. One year I even got up the nerve to shout a question from the audience, and she answered it! (She didn’t come down into the audience and slap my face or anything!) Anyway, this year her movie is Iris , and she plays a big city veterinarian who opens a practice in a remote Dutch village where inbreeding among humans seems to be the norm. Her main clients are a weird family: Father is disgusting old man in a wheelchair; Son is good looking and randy; daughter is shy and zombie-like. There is also a Neanderthal handy man, who perpetually has three days growth of beard, and a clairvoyant alcoholic lady living in a trai...

Original post date: 21 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   It’s 1933 and a world-famous (but aging) opera singer is making a triumphant return to his nowhere home city in Poland. Accompanying him are his retinue, his coterie, his entourage of hangers-on, backers, groupies, and staff. His secretary Art (who looks like a reed thin Robert Duvall) is a schemer and manipulator who would put J.R. Ewing to shame. During the course of this movie there are double crosses, triple crosses, quadruple crosses, blackmail, seduction, cuckolding, spying, gossip, and other standard business practices. The issue is: who will be director of the baritone’s new opera in Strasbourg? The plots are so byzantine that it’s hilariously funny. It is clearly an allegory of the politics of the time. (It’s no coincidence that Art is an ethnic German.) And the finale where the baritone (who has lost his voice) must lip sync his long-awaited concert to one of his own recordings (with Art pulling the strings in...

Original post date: 20 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   This is sort of a Romanian Heartbreak Kid . The film is framed by shots through a long corridor of a back lit young man in fencing gear. By the last shot, be has gone through hell (albeit a hell of his own making). Mihai is a young factory worker who is pretty darn cute. His hobbies include fencing, playing the flute, and making love to his girlfriend while listening to Haydn. He shares a room with Ghita in the workers hostel. Ghita, who looks like a slimmed down version of Avery Schreiber, is anything but smooth. When he tries to speak in public, he gets totally tongue-tied and then winds up giving the speech he meant to give later, standing in the shower with all his clothes on. Ghita is hopelessly smitten with an unwed mother/co-worker named Maria. But when she meets Mihai, she falls for him and he for her. Not that he lets this interfere with his stumbling into a vague betrothal with his other girlfriend. This film ...

Original post date: 20 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   The title refers to the trip made by a man named Bertram from Lebanon to Germany with his small son. He has just snatched the boy from his ex-wife, who is in a terrorist training camp. But the Reise also refers to Bertram’s whole life, which is chronicled by a sometimes confusing series of flashbacks. This film is based on a true story. The real “Bertram” committed suicide after these events and his family declined to have the movie filmed until they found a dispassionate director, which explains why this German movie was directed by a Swiss. Bertram is the son of a Nazi poet who, spiritually, never surrendered, after World War II (which Bertram is old enough to remember). At the university, Bertram becomes involved in radical politics and protests against U.S.involvement in Vietnam. He and his wife split when he draws the line at terrorism and she decides she likes a more radical comrade better anyway. All in all, the...

Original post date: 20 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   This is an ironic caper comedy that could only take place in Berlin. Ede Meier is a young paperhanger in East Berlin who comes into an inheritance. He buys a fake West German passport, leaves East Germany, and takes a fabulous trip around the world. (Everyone thinks he’s vacationing in Bulgaria.) But when he comes back to West Berlin, he goes back to his old life using a visitor’s visa to cross into East Berlin. He lives a double life as an East Berliner by day and a West Berliner by night. He comes up with a scheme to smuggle plain white rough-textured wallpaper into the East and claim that he invented it on his own home printing press. You see, in East Germany they only make wallpaper with ugly patterns that everybody hates and that takes twice as long to hang because you have to match up that pattern. Ede’s life is complicated as he tries keeping his secret from everyone including his straight arrow, party member gir...

Original post date: 19 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   Another Soviet film. It’s 1908 and a shy, earnest, gangly young composer sets out for Georgia (theirs, not ours) to record folk songs. A rebellion against the Czar has just been crushed and people are restive and paranoid at the same time. Everybody seems convinced that the young composer has come to lead the people in battle. And it doesn’t help that his self-appointed guide, a hard drinking, hearty laughing lout by the name of Leko keeps spreading this story around. I can’t help but think that, if these Russians would spend less time casting meaningful glances about and more time talking things out, these kind of misunderstandings could be avoided. Even though this movie was made only three years ago, the acting is the exaggerated kind we tend to associate more with silent movies. I guess one of the points here is that you really can’t separate politics from art—unless you’re in Hollywood, but that’s another story.

Original post date: 19 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭ ✭ ✰   The events portrayed in this movie could never actually happen, but it’s nice to sit in a movie theater for a couple of hours and pretend that they could. Frank Capra could have made this movie, and he would have called it Mr. Smith Stops the Arms Race . This is your basic watering eyes, lump in the throat, feel good movie. But you don’t feel like a jerk for liking it because it doesn’t get excessively cute or sticky sweet. And it has a very definite point of view and doesn’t flinch, something you don’t see in many Hollywood movies. It’s about a kid named Chuck who is a star Little League pitcher in a small Montana town and an NBA star named Amazing Grace Smith who plays for the Celtics. They each decide to stop playing their respective sports until there are no more nuclear weapons. Gregory Peck plays the President of the United States and he is much better in the role than any other actor who has had the part in at ...

Original post date: 18 May 1987 Rating: ✰✰ ✰ ✰   This movie commits the one cardinal sin of films, as far as I’m concerned. It makes sex boring! The title is French for “magnificent lover,” which gives you a clue what it’s going to be about. It’s about a young wife on a French stud farm (snicker), who has some serious problems, but apparently nothing that a virile, young stable boy can’t fix. Some movies show people starting to “do it” and then the camera swerves to look at some natural phenomenon. This movie watches them “do it” interminably and then swerves to focus on nothing in particular for a while. Maybe that’s art, but it looks to me like the cameraman fell asleep. The wife and the stable boy run away together, and apparently the director needed to break them up for a poignant ending, but she couldn’t think of a way to do it, but they go their separate ways anyway. The most fascinating, involving sex scene in the whole movie involves two horses. Warning to p...

Original post date: 18 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   A very pleasant surprise. This movie was filmed on location in a little fishing village on the central coast of Peru. They went all out on the budget. You even get to see a car. It turns out to be a mystery thriller and a very watchable one at that. But wait. Something’s funny here. Why does this murdered photographer who died 50 years ago keep popping up? Why is this woman having a dream inside a dream? A Raymond Chandler-type plot. A woman comes to Malabrigo looking for her husband. There’s a mysterious explosion at the fish processing plant. The hotel owner’s wife is messing around with the police chief. The insurance inspector talks to himself a lot. Something’s rotten in the local power structure. A fun movie that prompted vigorous discussion among complete strangers afterward.

Original post date: 17 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   Lina Wertmüller is an Italian director with a penchant for very long titles that have virtually nothing to do with the movie. This is unquestionably her best film in days. Actually, in my opinion, the best one since Seven Beauties . A rich female capitalist decides to get revenge on the proletariat by kidnapping a terrorist kidnapper and ransoming him for all the ransoms her friends have had to pay over the years. Once she has him tied up in her Gucci chains, she finds she’s got the hots for him. This is probably her most accessible comedy ever.

Original post date: 17 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰   This is a German movie made right after Amadeus , using the same sets in Prague and even the same costumes. Different actors though. These are speaking German, which makes it seem more authentic somehow. Imagine if, when Mozart died, someone said, “Nobody leaves ‘til we get this figured out.” Sort of like making Mozart’s death an episode of Murder She Wrote . Intriguing. Was it Salieri? Mozart’s doctor? His wife? Why did the mannequin maker die at almost the same instant? For 25 cents, I’ll give you the answers. Note: This film has more sex than Amadeus.

Original post date: 17 May 1987 Rating: ✭✰✰ ✰   You know Ronee Blakely. She is a country/western singer who used to be on Hee Haw before she became an actress and played the Loretta Lynn-like character in Nashville . More recently, she played the mother in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which she kept telling her daughter she needed to get some sleep. For a while she was married to German director Wim Wenders. She made this weird movie, I guess, to show him that she could do it too. Very personal. Ronee was there in person to answer questions and explain why the sound quality wasn’t better.

Original post date: 16 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Altered States early 19th century style. Ken Russell’s latest. Ostensibly about the night Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley and a couple of other people got together to tell ghost stories. Things get out of hand. Ghosts. Vomit. Leeches. Homosexuality. Heterosexuality. Bisexuality. Drugs. Food. Dead babies. This one has it all. A wonderful film for the whole family.

Original post date: 16 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ The big crowd pleaser at the film festival so far. The joys and sorrows of a wacky family living in rural Italy. Big name cast. Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve, and Philippe Noiret speak Italian.

Original post date: 16 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ A Soviet film about a 300-year-old island village that has to be abandoned because it is going to be flooded for a hydroelectric project. Some of the older people take it kind of hard. Just imagine My Sweet Little Village with screenplay by William Shakespeare and directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Original post date: 16 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ Earlier in the evening I wondered how I would ever manage to stay awake until 1:30 a.m. I needn’t have worried. Just imagine if George Romero had been the one to make Poltergeist . A real scream. A howler. This has everything. Dead people attacking live people. Live people attacking dead people. Chainsaws. A hand that bites the mouth that feeds it. Decapitations. A fruit cellar. Possessions. Repossessions. The plot: a young couple drive up to an isolated cabin in the middle of the night for a fun weekend. Mishaps occur. This one is already playing at your local theater. Run, don’t walk. Take the whole family.

Original post date: 15 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ A tale of repression (sexual and otherwise) in the Anglo-fied Argentina of the 1930s. Nicely photographed romantic epic by Maria Luisa Bemberg, who made the film Camila. Stars Julie Christy, who is now playing frustrated middle-age maiden nannies.

Original post date: 15 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ A very black Dutch comedy about child-parent relationships. A 32-year-old child is finally kicked out of the nest and promptly moves in with his father’s mistress. On the whole, quite strange.

Original post date: 15 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This film and Charleen are a couple of documentaries by Ross McElwee, the guy who did Sherman’s March, which played for a long time in Seattle. These are mainly about people that McElwee knows in his hometown in the South. Somehow he seems to make them as involving as if they were fiction. Which is high praise for reality.

Original post date: 15 May 1987 Rating: ✭✭✰✰ This film and Backyard are a couple of documentaries by Ross McElwee, the guy who did Sherman’s March, which played for a long time in Seattle. These are mainly about people that McElwee knows in his hometown in the South. Somehow he seems to make them as involving as if they were fiction. Which is high praise for reality.