Spaceship - A unique film, book, art review blog

    Kansas City (1996) Plot should never be allowed to get in the way of Robert Altman’s love of Kansas City Jazz, unless to provide Harry Belafonte a choice role to perform.     If you’ve got brass, you’ve got enough class For one stroke of a note on the ivory coast To glow free of smoke from bar or factory After sweating all day in Chicago’s blast. There are gangsters all around with luck…

Strawberry Mansion (2021) Beware! In the future, the govenment will tax your dreams. Albert Birney and lead actor Kentucker Audley concocted this extraordinarily unpredictable exploration of the human psyche, as well as the nefarious implications of corporate advertising, among other things, in an homage to le fantastique in cinema. Fifteen years in the making, this independent film was released…

  Devi (1960) The patriarch of a Calcutta family [Chhabi Biswas]  dreams that his daughter-in-law [Sharmila Tagore]  is the reincarnation of the Goddess Kali. Partly based on a story suggestion by Tagore, Satyajit Ray critiques the dangers of religious orthodoxy. The film was harshly criticized in its initial release, but today its portrait of idolization will strike most viewers as terrifyingly…

Rouge (1988) A melodramatic mix of ghost story with Hong Kong history allows Stanley Kwan to subvert issues of gender. The dead courtesan Fleur [Anita Mui] shows up at a newspaper office to place an ad for her lover [Leslie Cheung] with whom she committed suicide fifty years ago. The reporter [Alex Man] and his girlfriend [Emiiy Chu] agree to assist Fleur, and in the process rediscover their own…

Van Gogh (1990) Singer-songwirter Jacques Dutronc won a César for Best Actor in this revisionist biopic written and directed by Maurice Pialat. The film focuses on Von Gogh’s relationship with his physician, Paul Gachet [Gérard Séty], and Margurite [Alexandra London], the physician’s daughter. However, it descends into backroom cancan dances at the Folies Bergère, with a cameo appearance from…

The Master (2012) Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed this study of master/acolyte power dynamics, with memorable performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell. Meglonomania and post-traumatic stress disorder discover brotherhood in one another, though a dependency of scoundrels running a cult, ending with this devastating insight —“If you…

In the Company of Wolves (1984)

In the Company of Wolves (1984) Angela Carter collaborated with Neil Jordan in this adaptation of her sado-masochistic rewrite of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. Menstrual blood flows like Red Riding Hood’s cloak in these stories within stories where Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) dreams that she lives in a fairytale forest during the late 18th century. The stellar cast includes wily Angela Lansbury…

Hôtel du Nord (1938)

Hôtel du Nord (1938) “Atmosphere! Atmsophere! Do I look like an atmosphere?”  With those words, Arletty stole the show and made cinema history. I will succumb to any movie where she appears. Guided by her director, Marcel Carné, she made the most of her supporting role as a no-nonsense prostitute living with her pimp, Louis Jouvet, in the Hôtel du Nord. Theirs is only one story that the hotel…

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Color Out of Space (2019) H. P. Lovecraft has been notoriously difficult to adapt to film, but this production attempts to get the horror right, resulting in a psychedelic dissolution of the American family whose log cabin and alpaca herd are contaminated by a meteor that falls from the sky with its “color out of space.” Aided and abetted by Nicholas Cage as the father driven berserk by alien…

The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969)

The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) Brian Forbes directed this theatrical masterpiece by Jean Giraudoux in Maurice Valency‘s adaption (with a screenplay by Edward Anhalt). aided and abetted by the cinematography of Burnett Guffey and Claude Renoir. Shot in Nice and Paris, Katherine Hapburn flounces about with histrionic flamboyance as the Countess Aurelia, in this allegory concerning the predatory…

Midnight’s Children (2012)

Midnight’s Children (2012) From a screenplay and with voice narration by its author, Salman Rushdie, this production was shot mostly in secret because its director Deepa Mehta feared attacks from Islamic fundamentalists.  The result is a movie faithful to the plot and probably too complicated to be understood by anybody who has not already read the novel. Two children, born at the moment of…

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) Carl Franklin joined forces with Denzel Washington to respectfully adapt Walter Mosley’s noir class to film. This is the origin myth for Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a WWII vet who is thrown out of work for purely racist reasons, and has to find a way to make money to pay the mortgage on his American dream of house and car. He stumbles into detective work, and through his…

Blithe Spirit (1945)

Blithe Spirit (1945) David Lean adapted Noël Coward’s witty play to screen with sly aplomb. Aided and abetted by stellar performances from Rex Harrison as a writer researching the occult, Constance Cummings as his wife, the irascible Margaret Rutherford as the spiritualist Madame Arcati, and Kay Hammond as the reluctantly summoned dead wife, the duplicity of England’s “smart set” get their…

Okja (2017) Met with boos at the Cannes Film Festival for being a Netflix film, this parable about man’s predatory relationship with nature is a remarkable achievement by director Bong Joon-Ho and his technical team of special effects puppeteers. Finely balanced between satire and childlike wonder, thanks to the performance by child actress Ahn Seo-Hyun, Okja becomes a beloved creature reminding…

The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)

The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) A 1950’s Drive-in Theatre favorite,this wacky scifi, independently produced on a shoestring budget by Jacques Marquette, casts John Agar as a scientist possessed by an alien brain that wants to take over the world. Apparently, it also wants to take advantage of Joyce Meadows as well. Meanwhile, another alien brain from the same planet arrives to stop this evil…

Rain (1932) Only in Pago Pago during the monsoon could America’s Puritanical treatment of women be revealed with such passionate fury. Walter Huston, as the preacher reciting the Lord’s Prayer, accosts Joan Crawford, the island prostitute, in order to save her soul. Crawford gives her all to this performance, and, to the native drumbeats, seduces the preacher, driving him to commit suicide. This…

Misery (1990) When faced with a histrionic performance, the only thing the other actor can do is underplay the role. James Caan will always be underrated for the skill with which he managed to bring to his role subtleties of smoldering rage and sly calculation, in his contest with the crazed Kathy Bates. Cabin fever has often provided Stephen King with psychological grounding for horror, for…