Pete and I actually went to the movies the other night, Cinderella Man. As you would expect from Ron “Happy Days” Howard, it is more than manipulative, totally predictable, and there’s the bootstrap-stuff to boot. Also, the communists die.
Then there were the interminable boxing scenes that I couldn’t even watch. The night just flew by.
Just watched his “Seance,” an updating of a ’60s English film I never saw. The plot: a medium and her husband get entangled in a kidnapping plot. Enough said.
This isn’t great Kurosawa, but it is a fine little thriller–exploiting (recent) conventions of Japanese horror (spooky hair and claw-like hands), and a reasonable little psychological suspense thriller, as well.
That’s where Kurosawa excels. One, his horror films–more than any other filmmaker working today–rely upon careful composition, evocative silences, and slow steady narrative progression to evoke dread… and that neat feeling of the “uncanny,” the anxious sense that some awful horror doesn’t just displace but underlies the everyday.
This is particularly important because (two) Kurosawa’s horrors seem resolutely social. Perhaps his best film is “Cure,” made not long after the Aum Shinrikyo subway gassing, which follows a serial-killer case… but again the genre is obliquely cited/reiterated, then subtly shifted. It’s spooky and smart.
NOT the bowling flick, nor another terrible adaptation of Alan Moore’s comics. Instead, a very fine sort-of-sketchy, sort-of-Sherwood-Andersony comedy from Britain. Like other great sketch groups, a trio of performers enact every recurring character; unlike those shows, there is a loose plot (a man stranded in forlorn Royston Vasey, a rural town somewhere in the wilds of England) and the fun is all character-/setting-driven. There’s an undercurrent of dread and horror to the comedy that is peculiarly, brilliantly evoked.
Mark first cued me into these guys, and I saw the first series from a dvd at my library. I write simply to advise that the next two seasons come out on dvd in the next few weeks. Very much recommended.