#90 - Kwaidan

Number 90 is one I will probably buy on bluray at the next Criterion sale at Barnes and Noble - it's just a beautiful piece by who is probably my favorite director from Japan after Kurosawa - Masaki Koboyashi

This is a collection of four stories of the supernatural, so you don't spend the whole 3 hours getting a drawn out story but some great shorter pieces - the Sets were so huge they had to be painted and built in an aircraft hanger, and it was one of the most expensive films of it's time - it's also Masaki's first color film, so he wanted to spiff it up a bit.  There are some well known actors here like Tatsuya Nakadai, Tetsuro Tanba, and Takashi Shimura - and a lot I've never seen before

all the stories have a bit of a twilight zone vibe to them, and they're based on the stories of as I understand it, a Greek Writer who emigrated to Japan and took a Japanese name - but you wouldn't be able to tell, as they have the style and feel of so many Japanese horror films, which is in and of itself a genre one could write a book about.

I won't touch on every story, but I want to touch on the longest, and centerpiece, Hoichi the Earless - this is a great piece (which could have probably been it's own film and I think took up 70 minutes) - it starts with the scene of a great sea battle which to my knowledge is the first Samurai sea battle I've ever seen, and interweaves with some closeups of a couple ships fighting with a painting that shows the thousands of ships that were at this battle - he was able to hereby do this one on the cheap with just a few ships - in this battle one clan is utterly wiped out

fast forward to a monastery nearby a few hundred years later, and a blind monk skilled in the biwa has mastered a song (100 parts - LOL) - that tells of the battle, and a ghostly apparition invites him to come and perform it for his Lord. - I won't get too much deeper into it than that but suffice it to say the gravitas and visuals of this story are some of my favorite of any film I've seen.  The music is excellent too, as well played Japanese Folk music can be very pleasing - (to me anyways)

there will be a few entries of Masaki's coming up, including my hands down favorite, Hari-Kiri - but also a 10 hour epic called the Human Condition.   I've seen all of these and there's also an Eclipse series I'm going to have to check out but this one I had never seen before - I will probably watch it one more time with the commentary going just to hear Stephen Prince's excellent work.   There are some other special features but I regret that Netflix only gives us disk 1 of these DVD sets.

next time bluray

RB

#89 - Sisters

It did take me a bit to get into this one but once it got rolling, whewwie -

A psychological thriller by Brian De Palma takes our #89 spot - and what a film it is - in one sense you can see where it's going but at the same time the way it gets there is a pretty good cinematic experience

Margot Kidder (who honestly, I only remember as Lois Lane) - plays a pair of sisters here - one sweet and wants to be a model, one is a bit more disturbed - a murder committed by one of them leaves us in the quandary of who did it, and we watch the investigation play out by a no-nonsense reporter played by Jennifer Page

De Palma has done a few films we've all seen - probably Carrie, Scarface - this one I think is his first real thriller, and he does a few more to follow.  The one I remember is Blow Out with Travolta.   Like I say it took a bit to ramp up but when it did it had my interest

still in print so the usual special features - a new 4k restoration - (I didn't see this on blu-ray though) - and so forth

good stuff - nice thriller

RB

#88 - Ivan the Terrible - Parts I and II

for number 88 - we actually have two films - Parts I and II were filmed about a year apart but due to the nature of Part II, it never saw the light of day for 12 more years and the third part was scrubbed.

Sergei sought to make a trilogy of the Prince who united Russia as Tsar, but Stalin saw overtones in the 2nd film he didn't like and as a result the enterprise was scrapped - I will admit the stories as a whole were a little harder to get into - I found myself checking the time on Ivan a lot, but visually it was a decent film - there is a transition to color for a celebration at the end of part II that provides new life to the party, and the descent of Ivan into a paranoid tyrant is fun to trace.

I'm sure part III would have had the battle scenes and conquering hero riding west, but we stop here at a point where he has put an end to a plot against his life and as such, end on an anticlimactic note - stupid Stalin is always ruining my films.

In any case both DVD's have a documentary on them discussing the films, which give a lot to the backstory of how they were made and so forth - so worth finding in the library if you can

RB

#87 - Alexander Nevsky

#87 is our 2nd Russian film - (after Andrei Rublev) - and it comes in a fascinating time - the height of Stalinist Russia, before the second World War - it's a pretty good film, IMHO - but definitely shows the times it was made in, with a little bit of propaganda/state line thrown in

There's a lot about the director, Sergei Eisenstein, in Wikipedia - these are his last films, and I guess this was his most popular - the historical figure Alexander Nevsky is shown in his great battle stopping the Germans, who conveniently seem to have icons and helmets very, very similar to Nazi Germany - LOL   - the pivotal point of the film is what must be a 30 minute battle scene that inspired many later battle scenes including the Battle of Aracourt from Henry V, the great final battle in Seven Samurai, and others we've seen up to here

The story itself only has a bit of plot - the Germans are coming, the Russian folk hero and peasants rally, and defeat them with the last lines being immortalized as print in the closing "He who comes to Russia with a sword will die by the sword" - wonder who that was meant to inspire or discourage - LOL

The funny part of all this is although the film was made in '38, and tensions between Germany and Russia were strained, the treaty of  '39 that divided Poland basically took the film out of circulation for two years until '41 when the Germans declared War on Russia, making this film very, very relevant again.

some pretty good orchestral music in here too, and there are some snippets from an earlier failed film he did, an audio commentary that seems pretty good, and other stuff that makes this one of the more feature heavy DVD's of the early period.

Interestingly, the website for Criterion puts this as out of print although the Wikipedia page does not but it may be in the Janus Film box set (most of which I have been unimpressed with due to their lower quality/transfers) - SO - if you want to see it, you might have to wait for the Criterion Channel or raid the library cause I think even my Netflix was not sure if it was gonna be around

of course, most of these are also on Amazon Prime for rental at $1.99 or so if you wish - in any case, it's a good film with a crude if effective and inspirational battle scene - :)

#86 - Eisenstein - The Sound Years

So now we're in this phase where the spine numbers for collections are listed separate from the films - LOL - I guess we did this with the Cocteau Orpheus Trilogy as well

all I can tell you about Sergei Eisenstein is what I've read in the Wikipedia and basically - we're about to watch his last 3 films, and he did them with the blessing of Stalin but the 3rd one went poorly so footage of the 4th film - (Ivan part 3) was destroyed - there you go

I got both these DVD's from my library so I'm excited to get started maybe later tonight or tomorrow

#85 - Pygmalion

It took me a while to get to this one - primarily because I'm just not a big fan of these 1930's English dramas, and because it was out of print but in the public domain

What we have here is a film adaption of a George Bernard Shaw play just a year before the start of WWII.   It actually ended up turning out to be a fairly entertaining story that I appreciated watching.  The theme of someone being pulled up or turned into someone they're not is a pretty common one - (Pretty Woman, Trading Places, She's All That) and in this one, we have two upper class Englishmen working to turn a Cockney flower girl into a Duchess.  The Scene at the ball has some of the most delicious tension I've ever seen in a film as they attempt to ascertain if they've been successful :)

The DVD is out of print but there are some public domain copies out there on youtube although this one seems much cleaner than those.