Citizen Rules...Cinemaesque Chat-n-Review

The Goddess (1934)
Shen nu (original title)

Director: Yonggang Wu
Writer: Yonggang Wu
Cast: Lingyu Ruan, Tian Jian, Zhizhi Zhang
Genre: Drama
Language: Chinese


An early Chinese silent film, which is kind of a rarity as most silent films no longer exist having been lost over the years.

I was watching this for like a half hour and thinking that it was an early Japanese silent. I kept wondering why the woman had Mandarin style collars and dresses that looked like Chinese fashions. My wife noticed that they had tables and chairs which would be unusual for a traditional Japanese home....Then I took a break from watching the movie and looked it up IMDB and to my surprise I seen it was an early Chinese film. That's really cool, as it's the only silent Chinese film I've ever seen and it's a good one too.

The actresses was superb at relaying emotions through her facial expressions and the film felt more naturalistic in it's style of acting than many American silent films. She was pretty too. The sets were simple and that's as it should be as this is a story of a poor woman forced to prostitute herself so she can earn enough money to keep her son feed. It's a heartbreaking story and effectively told.

Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Writers: Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich (screenplay)
Cast: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Maureen O'Sullivan
Genre: Comedy, Crime Mystery

Bashed on the novel 'The Thin Man by renowned writer Dashiell Hammett...I've been meaning to watch this for such a long time, as I'm a big fan of William Powell and Myrna Loy. My favorite paring of Powell and Loy is in Manhattan Melodrama (1934)

The Thin Man is a unique blend of a who dunnit mystery & screwball comedy. My wife loved seeing the dog Asta. Asta was quite good at doing tricks, I laughed at the balloon biting trick myself.

It's interesting that this is a Dashiell Hammett story, who's best known for penning The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man was sort of like a proto-noir in that it had some of the elements of The Maltese Falcon, but without the forbidding, ever-present danger. It's very much like early 30s films that are set in newspaper rooms with there many characters, lots of dialogue, and combining comedy+mystery+drama.

Fun movie and the dog was cute too.

CR, I know you're a big Gloria Grahame fan, as am I. There's a very watchable 53 minute bio of her available on YouTube. I think it's entitled simply "Gloria Grahame". You can easily find it if you're interested. She was a pretty hot number...

~Doc

Thanks Doc, I'll have to watch that. Think I might watch another Gloria Grahame movie tonight, she goes good with pizza

I didn't realize that Hammett had written the novel on which The Thin Man was based. Something tells me that much of the humor was added. I've read some Hammett, such as The Glass Key, but haven't read "Man".

Myrna Loy and William Powell were the perfect screen couple, and were probably the chief coupling in the history of film. Granted, we had Pickford/Fairbanks, Tracy/Hepburn, Mitchum/Russell, and others; but no two people seemed to fit together as well as did Loy & Powell. And she was more popular than he. I believe they made 6 "Thin Man" type films.

Manhattan Melodrama is a superb film, but I never think of it when considering Powell/Loy. Any film Clark Gable was in, was a "Clark Gable Film"...

~Doc

Prefer both his Ivan's Childhood and The Mirror to Stalker but it sure is both visually and aurally delightful and props to it for having my favourite line in any of his: "I'm fed up with your nuts and bandages"

I haven't seen either of those, just Stalker and Solaris. Maybe sometime I'll watch more of his films. They are impressive, but one has to be in a reflective mood to absorb their headiness.

I know I'm repeating myself, but whenever I see reference to this movie I recall the revelation that Don Adams said his voice and mannerisms for Maxwell Smart was an imitation and homage to William Powell in the Thin Man movies!

Another piece of useless trivia is that I always thought that Nick and Nora Charles were British characters (but they're American)!

This mistake was due purely to the movie parody Murder By Death (1976), where the spoofed detective couple were played by David Niven and Maggie Smith as "Dick and Dora Charleston" (where their obvious Britishness was played up). But most of their aspects were kept in tact for the parody, including the couple's repertoire & snappy banter, their nearly constant drinking and their dog!

@Captain Steel have you seen Stalker? It's another Russian sci-fi by Tarkovsky the director of Solaris (1972). I think you might like it.

Solaris (1972) I previously reviewed this filmhere: Solaris review. This is my thoughts on Solaris after a second watch.



Solaris (1972)This was a very emotionally moving watch for me. That's why it's one of my favorites. Tarkovsky, in the first part of the film, the sequence on Earth, sets up the somber & reflective mood that Kris Kelvin feels about his own life. The cinematography and narrative in the first part of the film gives the viewer this feeling of withdrawn seclusion. The setting is beautiful in it's contemplative mist covered isolation, which reflects Kris' inner turmoil. We don't know at this point what his turmoil is, or why he burns his past as he does when he throws his personal letters into the fire.

In the second act on the space station, Tarkovsky wisely goes for the human story and not a sci fi tech story. We don't need an expose on how the space station works, instead we're immersed in the mystery of Solaris and the key to the mystery is the ghost that haunts Kris. When Hari appears, she's both illuminating and pitiful. She reflects the guilt that Kris feels over the loss of the real Hari. She's helpless and alone, not even knowing her ownself. Tarkovsky shows us her bare feet, then in the next scene in a soft voice she ask Kris, 'where are my shoes'...She looks for them in Kris' backpack but that's futile and he can only watch her suffer as she slowly learns the truth about herself and the fate of the real Hari. Through that understanding, the living planet below then understands what love and humanity is.

High fidelity? That's a fave of mine with Cusack.

I was blown away by the opening scenes! I've never seen a dystopian sci-fi film create a world that was so bleak and yet so interesting. It must have been the juxtaposition of the haves and have nots, that made the opening of the film so compelling. I've seen a lot of sci fi too, it's one of my favorite genres, and the world and the feeling that went with it, is unlike anything I've seen before. Maybe it was the use of the burnt umber tinting that gave the film this other worldliness, or perhaps it was the huge fires that burnt in front of the windows that cast an eerie glow in the buildings interior that made this film so different.

I liked how the tourist traveled deeper into this strange world, over the huge trash piles he went and past giant scrap metal heaps, into what could only be called a post apocalyptic bed & breakfast run by mom and pop. All that was pretty darn cool.

But as the film took on overt religious tones and waxed philosophical I felt like I was being preached at, and the exploration of this strange land stopped. There wasn't many other movies sets in the second half besides what we seen in the opening. At least none that floored me.

I've said before I don't like long monologues, I prefer the visual or a well told story or even deep character exploration. So the last half of the film lost me and I didn't really care about the plight of the degenerates, like the film intended. Though I do have very mixed feelings about using actors that looked to me to have real physical and mental disabilities. I hope they were treated well on the set. At any rate they looked to real which took me out of the movie and I began to wonder about their lives and the quality of care in Russia at the time. I would have preferred a post apocalyptic sci fi to use actors with chemical-biological mutations, you know some gnarly bumps and skin lesions, the usual sci fi stuff. Oh the girl with the big fake teeth also took me right out of the picture, to distracting. It's an uneven film with a brilliant first half but the rest of the film didn't do much for me and the final scenes at the museum were a let down.

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My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)
Moy drug Ivan Lapshin (original title)

Director: Aleksey German
Writers: Yuri German (novel), Eduard Volodarskiy
Cast: Andrei Boltnev, Nina Ruslanova, Andrey Mironov
Genre: Historical Based Drama
Language: Russian

An impressive style of film making and a very interesting nomination. I'm afraid some of it went over my head at first, as I got lost in so many secondary characters. Which is actually OK, as it felt like a fly-on-the-wall, you-are-there film.

That first person, historical effect was made even more so by the use of hand held cameras and non fancy cinema techniques, like panning to characters versus film edits to shift character focus. I think a more artsy approach would have been a deterrent to the first person telling of the Stalin Purges back in 1935, so kudos to the film maker.

I didn't remember exactly what year the film was made while watching it, I knew it was in the 80s. So I kept pondering was this made after the fall of Communism? Or during Gorbachev and the new openness? Anyway, I was quite interested in what Russian/Soviet era this was made. Now I see it was made in 1985...

Pulp Fiction, that's what this movie reminded me of, with it's multiple personable characters...who are - but aren't part of the main story, and along with the everyday common vernacular gives the feeling that we're watching real people going about their lives the best they can. We see them banging their heads on low hanging shacks and complaining about spilling a can of petro, or drinking out of a bucket, etc. All of those little 'extras' made it seem very real to me.

My aim was to convey a sense of the period, to depict as faithfully as possible the material conditions and human preoccupations of Soviet Russia on the eve of the Great Purge.

He achieved that! In story, dialogue, structure, cinematography, editing, sound...in all, it felt like he had a time machine and made his film back in 1935.

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It's on the list!

(I don't really get to watch movies much these days.)

I still say that Star Trek the Motion Picture is one part Solaris (mostly surrounding Ilia & V-ger: as a powerful unknown entity or force that creates a copy of a human being) and Run Silent Run Deep (Kirk taking command from Decker with both films directed by Robert Wise!) with a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey thrown in (basically the enigma of alien contact, the mission to make contact, and when you get the surprise ending, V-ger is even slightly analogous to Hal as far as a machine created by man gaining intelligence and perhaps even emotions).

Bummer....can't you install a cable splitter and put a TV in the bedroom?

Letyat zhuravli (original title)

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Writers: Viktor Rozov (play), Viktor Rozov (screenplay)
Cast: Tatyana Samoylova, Aleksey Batalov, Vasiliy Merkurev
Genre: War Drama, Romance
Language: Russian


Very impressive film. Tatyana Samoylova who played the lead, Veronika was amazing. When I was looking for photos for this write up I noticed she almost always had a distant far away look in her eyes, and her face was taunt like she was deeply focused and burying pain deep inside. You can see that in the above photo.

The opening scenes reminded me of Fellini before he delved into surrealism. It was like every scene was imbibed with energy and the joy of life. Then in the second and third acts, the film is more claustrophobic, with tight camera shots on the actors stressed faces. That all worked well.

I loved the story too, young love: devoted, ethereal and all encompassing. Then comes the war and that innocents in shattered by the German onslaught. I like the way the film captured that dichotomy. There was one camera shot that really brought home what it must have been like for the Russian population to know the Nazis were close to marching into the heart of their city.



All the actors were very good, in that they seemed very personable and not at all like actors. I loved it when Veronika went to get her squirrel back. What a jerk her husband was!

Definitely a landmark in Soviet film making.
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Leviathan (2014)
Leviafan (original title)

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Writers: Oleg Negin, Andrey Zvyagintsev
Cast: Aleksey Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Roman Madyanov
Genre: Crime Drama
Language: Russian


It took me awhile to figure out that this is one gutsy film! That photo I used, says it all: look at Putin there on the wall looming over the scene? That's the first key that this is actually about current Russian politics with all of its ugly corruption and abuses of power....Later in the movie when they have a picnic and target practice at a remote lake, one of the men pulls out a bunch of old portraits of past Soviet leaders, to use as target practice! Now shooting at the image of Lenin or Brezhnev is just kind of funny in and of itself. But it's what happens next that ties in the movie's themes with political commentary. The man says he has some current portraits too, and he mentions Yeltsin is more of a drunken conductor (meaning he was a harmless buffoon)...but he never directly mentions the other leader that he has a portrait of, which is Putin.

Leviathan is a monster that can't be controlled, we hear that in the church sermon and by the events that befalls Koyla. I thought all that innuendo was pretty bold seeing how a number of Russian newspaper editors and opponents of Putin have been poisoned. So I give the movie high marks for it's daring social commentary. I enjoyed it too, though it was a bit slow to get started, but once it did I was interested in it. And of course it was great seeing a part of northern Russia I've never seen before.