Pacita Abad (at the WAC)

 A large retrospective of art works by Pacita Abad (1946 - 2004) is on show at the Walker Art Center.  Abad was born in the northern Philippines and, during the mid-sixties, protested the Marcos dictatorship.  Marcos, an authoritarian strong man (supported by the American CIA), had a sinister way of making political adversaries disappear and Abad, who was then studying law, had to flee the country.  (She seems to have never returned).  Her plan was to continue studying law in Madrid, but, as often happened at that time, she made a detour to explore the counter-culture in San Francisco.  This divagation turned out to be decisive and she, apparently, married and moved to Washington DC, apparently, renouncing her studies in the law. She studied art but didn't find her signature style until 1981.  When a white table cloth in her apartment was spoiled by a spill of red wine, Abad recuperated the linen by sewing applique patches onto its surface.  The result was a pillowy-looking, bas relief quilt, accomplished in an embroidery style that she called "trapunta" after an Italian word that means "quilted" or "stuffed."  Trapuna became her metier and the hundred works in the show, with the exception of a few early paintings and a striking-wrought metal sculpture (it shows a figure framed by a barred security door), are all accomplished in that style.  (Her first trapunta, done on the ruined table-cloth, and called "Baguio Fruit" is, I think, her best; it was made between 1981 and 1983 and represents various kinds of fruits and vegetables, each a quilt patch and all jostling one another, more or less life-size across a tapestry banner that is about four-feet wide and seven feet long.  The colors of the fruit are represented with remarkable fidelity -- there's a regal purple eggplant, grapes, a great cream-colored cauliflower opening like a pale floral blossom, cabbage and carrots and all sorts of tropical fruits; the composition is an intense field of color, an "all-over" effect like Jackson Pollock, abstract from a distance but resolving very neatly into individual vegetal specimens as you approach the piece -- Abad's works have the characteristic of seeming abstract and, yet, figurative at the same time.  It's a magisterial work of art and demonstrates that Pacita's mature style sprung forth full-blown in her very first work in the "trapunta" style.)  Her art, as represented in the retrospective, falls into four categories -- there are huge masks with a bright, archaic aspect depicted in tapestry, some figurative works that have a social criticism aspect (she's concerned with immigration and poverty), abstracts, her weakest works in my estimation, although all of them are pretty enough, and, then, a spectacular series of undersea scenes, representing, it seems, the denizens of coral reefs.  In a hallway, there's a huge tapestry of Marcos and his cronies, a giant bugaboo with staring mask-like features, surrounded by ten masks of various sizes that have the effect of a tropical and hallucinated painting by James Ensor.  The masks are spectacular, decorated with cowrie shells and fragments of mirrors so that the objects sparkle in the light and the colors are brilliant, curves and patches of quilted materials, tie-dyed fabrics and Batik, all stitched together in huge radiant banners.  (This is the brightest show that I've seen at the Walker for years, a nice antidote to the exceptionally dour and ugly art of theJannis  Kournellis retrospective that preceded this exhibition.)  Abad's stuff is undeniably cheerful; even when the subject matter is dire (for instance a kid in metal cage called "Caught on the Border"), her trapunto-style has a gaudy, flamboyant, and  jolly aspect.  (She signs her work "Pacita" in big broad white script prominently displayed on one the quilted patches.)  A work called "Girls in Ermita", a group of half-naked go-go dancers quilted onto a pop art column of ads for peep shows and dance halls is cheerful, vibrant, and, more or less, devoid of any social commentary about the American military base and the prostitution that it inspired -- rather, the big banner is more of an advertisement than a critique or lamentation.  The most startling work in the show called "My Fear of Night Diving" covers an entire wall and has at its center a pink, flesh-colored octopus with fat writhing tentacles; above the octopus, there's a horrific open jaw, a barracuda or lamprey or something with huge needle-like teeth.  In the inky darkness, phosphorescent-looking fish, really just fish skeletons (they look like fish as imagined by Paul Klee) gleam with sequin eyes.  It's remarkable, but too pretty to arouse the horror, that, perhaps, she wished to convey.  Abad seems to have been indefatigable -- she married an artist, but divorced him and, then, gravitated toward men presumably like her politician (and legislator) father; she married an economist and, then, an American banker working with third-world countries.  Everything that she touched, she decorated and pictures show her clad in vibrant tie-dyed outfits.  She felt her colors were darkening and, perhaps, become more weak and so she moved to Singapore where she spent the last part of her life luxuriating in the tropical glory there..  She was directing an army of assistants in painting a long bridge in that city when she died from cancer in 2004.   The show is fascinating, cheerful, and, I think, uplifting.  It brightens your day.

Also on show is an austere installation by Kahlil Robert Irving.  This is a room-sized wooden platform on which you walk to inspect various cut-outs in the floor boards.  Three or four of them open to tile sub-floors embedded about a foot below the level of the platform.  Some of the tiles are spattered with what seem to be droplets of molten gold.  In one corner of the platform there's a black barrel-shaped canister.  A wall like a chimney rises from another part of the platform -- but the wall is just a wall; there's no opening for a hearth that one expects and, so, it appears to the eye like nothing more than a naked obstruction of brick.  The subject of the installation is modern "archeology" and the insertions in the floor open into a substrate of the past -- at least, this seems to be the intent.  I didn't like the work and thought it was trivial but it engages all the senses:  you look at it and hear it as your footfalls echo on the hollow platform and the plywood comprising the flooring has a sweet, fresh smell.  If you want, you can touch the bricks and the enigmatic barrel (I didn't).

An artist named Paul Chan is responsible for some gimmicky provocations occupying three galleries.  Chan uses inflatables wafted about by industrial fans to create spooky figures that wave their puffy fists at you like advertising at a used car dealership.  The figures move in a looping repetitive way, alternately flailing and drooping and there is something nightmarish about their limited repertory of gestures -- they are caught in endless futile repetition. Some of the works represent groups of the figures, hooded and ghastly, headless or with cone-shaped, faceless tops that writhe as the air fills them.  You can imagine some of the installations as perverse figures mimicking, for instance, the three graces -- that is, three more or less shapeless forms with flopping arms and strange hoods like inquisitorial figures or monster Klansmen all holding hands and infusing one another with air jetting from the fans.  Chan runs a publishing house and, curiously, has printed Saddam Hussein's essays on democracy written when the dictator was a young man; there's a big, elaborate black and white portrait of the dictator as he looked before he was executed hanging on one of the walls as well as some virtue-signaling in the form of anti-racist and anti-fascist slogans.  The writhing inflatables have jokey names like "Pillowsophy".  They're fun to watch as they go through their futile machinations, but there's not much substance to the show.   

By contrast, Pacita Abad's evocations of harried immigrants, kids in cages, and her masks of thugs from the Marcos regime all have an inadvertent effect of being precisely and remarkable attuned to the Zeitgeist.  Her art is strong, however, and I think that it is characteristic of most good art that it somehow seems adapted to the world in which we find ourselves living -- even though made more than 35 years ago.  Even her images of the coral reefs seem now to have a sort of elegant elegiac effect.  

The Raid -- Redemption

Why do people pay money to attend martial arts movies?  To see the fighting.  And the more fighting, the better.  By this logic, which seems impeccable to me, the ultimate martial arts movie would contain nothing but fighting -- that is, no plot, no characters except fighting machines, limited dialogue, no political or social themes, no Stimmung or atmosphere, just one battle after another until the protagonists are reduced to two figures locked in a duel to the death.  This atrocious logic governs The Raid - Redemption, a continuous "point and shoot" spectacle that comes as close to pure abstraction as any movie devised for popular consumption that I've ever seen.  

Long before dawn, a handsome young cop rises, completes his morning prayers on his prayer rug (apparently, he's Muslim), expends a lot of energy pounding at a punching bag demonstrating his lightning quick hands, and, then, tenderly says goodbye to this pregnant wife -- later, he will remember this farewell in a moment of respite from one of the hundred or so lethal battles in which he is involved.  This is about the extent of characterization allowed by the frenzied narrative comprising this film.  A group of about two-dozen heavily armed cops rides in armored personnel carriers through some shabby-looking east Asian city.  We're told that they are raiding a tenement building controlled by a bad guy, Tama, some kind of Indonesian crime lord.  Tama has two lieutenants, a slender handsome guy and a puny little hoodlum called Mad Dog on account of his fearsome fighting prowess.  When we first see Tama, he's cheerfully executing about a  half-dozen victims for some unexplained infraction.  When he runs out of bullets, he uses a claw hammer to finish off the last couple thugs.  Tama is hanging out with slender handsome guy (sort of the brains of the operation) and Mad Dog who looks, and acts, like a scrawny Indonesian Joe Pesci.  Tama has a bank of monitors that show him the corridors and stair wells of the shabby seven-story tenement that he oversees from its top floor.  The cops invade the tenement and, for the first half hour, the film treats us to spectacular fire fights with automatic weapons.  Thousands of rounds are fired and most of the cops end up dead.  The hero with the pregnant wife encounters Mad Dog who has him in the gunsights of his pistol.  Mad Dog and our protagonist go into one of the bleak, if roomy, chambers of the apartment building to fight mano a mano.  The hero has lost his machine gun (it's out of ammo anyway) and Mad Dog says that killing people with firearms is no fun anyhow and so he puts his revolver aside-- "It's like ordering take-out," he says, in a genuinely funny line.  So the two men fight interminably with judo chops, kicks, and lots of bone-splintering spins and dives..  Since we are merely at the film's half-way point, the fight, although gruesome and protracted, is inconclusive.  By this time, everyone has abandoned firearms and the fights involve men armed with machetes.  But, after a few more minutes, the machetes are abandoned and The Raid delivers what we came to see --  that is, lavishly choreographed karate fights.  This goes on without respite for about 45 minutes and becomes extremely tedious, at least as far as I was concerned, although, I concede, that if you're a fan of balletic fisticuffs this stuff would probably possess some appeal.  The cast gets winnowed down to Mad Dog and Tama's handsome lieutenant and the protagonist with the pregnant wife.  (Tama gets shot unceremoniously by some spoil sport before the final fight between Mad Dog and the young cop who is now allied with the handsome criminal who turns out to be his brother who has gone over to the dark side.  The brother is redeemed and, with the cop with the pregnant wife, they battle Mad Dog.  Mad Dog is outnumbered and wounded to boot, but  he's one tough hombre and doesn't go down without an epic struggle.  In this climactic fight, we sympathize with the beleaguered Mad Dog who is after all fighting two enemies at once, both of them skilled warriors -- in some ways, the movie is so narratively inept (or indifferent is a better word) that it really doesn't care that our allegiance has now switched over to the under (Mad) Dog.  

The movie is totally pointless and futile.  But it's got a number of bravura sequences.  In one scene, the hero is hiding behind some sort of false wall, in a nasty crevasse in the hulking building.  One of the army of bad guys (who exist only to be killed in picturesque ways) thrusts a huge machete through the wall, splitting over the hero's cheek with a wound about a half-inch deep in which the blade is left resting whilst the man wielding the knife gets distracted by other mayhem nearby.  When he pulls the blade back through the wall, the effect makes you wince -- although this showy scene lacks plausibility in that the bad guy doesn't notice that the blade is all gory thereby signifying someone actually hiding behind the wall he was probing.  There are some impressive long-take fights in which the hero dispatches an army of machete-wielding villains with fists and feet.  (These have some of the glamor of the touchstone scene of this kind, the jawdropping fight with the hammer in Park Chn-wook's Old Boy.)  The tenement building is a bizarre structure with weirdly blotched concrete walls, big patches of rising damp, as it were. in the rooms and wide corridors lined with old dark wooden doors, some of them primitively numbered.  The stairwells are smeared with colorful graffiti and when people get their brains blown out against these walls, there's a colorful, even painterly, aspect to these killings that creates a sort of Basquiat-like effect.  The sullen-looking blemished walls are adorned with bright plumes and sprays of blood.  The rooms aren't differentiated in any way -- they all look more or less alike although some of them have fire extinguishers, waste bins, some furniture that can be busted up in the duels, and vestigial kitchens.  It doesn't matter where the fighting takes place -- it could be anywhere and the claustrophobic dens and hallways are really just the scenery of a computer first-person shooter.  At the University of Minnesota Art Museum, there's an installation by Ed Kienholz that represents, a shabby corridor in some flophouse apartment, brooding wooden doors shut against the hallway where the carpet is stained and where a small battered table displays an ashtray full of decaying butts.  The thing is called Pedicord Apartments (it's actually by Kienholz wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz)  and, when you press your ears against the sinister-looking doors, you can hear people moving around inside, someone crying, and man and a woman trading insults, or radio playing a ball game.  The physical apparatus of Raid - Redemption reminded me of that artwork and I thought the ugly anonymous building where the fighting takes place was the best thing in the movie.

The director, Gareth Huw Evans, seemingly knows what he is doing and he winks at the audience.  There's one lurid scene in which a bad guy has fired all his rounds and, with trembling hand, tries to reload his pistol.  He's hiding in one of the bleak, abstract chambers in the building and his face sweats and his hands tremble and the camera rotates around him to show his fear and agitation as he tries to insert bullets in his gun.  At last, he succeeds, steps out of the shadows, and is immediately shot through the throat with his own gun twisted around by the cop in order to kill him.  It's a scene that's ironic and demonstrates the folly of the whole enterprise, something that Evans seems to richly appreciate.  

The Banshees of Inishirin

I can't think of any movie marketed in a more deceptive manner than Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inishirin (2022 HBO Max).  Promotional trailers for the film make the picture seem like a merry Irish romp with comic turns by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. In terms of "Coming Attractions", The Banshees was advertised as a sort of profane and rambunctious version of John Ford's The Quiet Man, with Farrell as Padraic playing the Maureen O'Sullivan's ingenue role to Gleeson's gruff, John Wayne.  In fact, the film is a grim horror-show drenched in Celtic despair.  (I suppose anyone who knows other films by McDonagh or his theatrical work would be properly forewarned.)  The Banshees features spectacular and graphic self-mutilation, donkey-murder, a suicide and interfamilial pederasty -- all set against the backdrop of the Irish troubles, in this case the Civil War in 1922 in which the Free Ireland forces and the IRA took turns slaughtering one another.  McDonagh has a ready wit and he writes good sardonic dialogue but the film is the opposite of the "Laff Riot" promised by its trailers.  However, once the viewer grasps the gruesome nature of the picture, the movie is suspenseful, brilliantly acted, and thought-provoking -- in fact, the film follows  in the traditions of Yeats and John Millicent Synge (and Sean O'Casey's Shadow of the Gunman) and explores many archetypal Irish themes, albeit in a slapstick horror vein.  

The movie's premise is simple but baffling.  Two men living on an isolated Irish island have been fast friends for many years, indeed, apparently almost inseparable.  The older man, Colm SonnyLarry Doherty (Gleeson) is a sort of rustic philosopher --  he plays the fiddle, composes melancholy tunes that sound like folk songs, and seems to have been a seafarer, one of the Emerald Isle's "wild geese".  He lives in a cottage full of weird souvenirs from his travels:  a Kabuki mask, hanging effigies and fetishes, and religious Santos that have a vaguely Mexican or Filipino appearance.  Colm's best friend is Padraic, a self-proclaimed "nice guy", who is pretty obviously a little bit dimwitted.  The two form an odd couple but they seem to have been close for many years, reliably meeting each day at 2:00 pm for some day-drinking at JoJohn's Pub.  The island is sparsely populated but it has a domineering and brutish copper, a church with spartan furnishings and no priest (a man has to be brought from the mainland to celebrate Mass); there's a grocery in a village on the opposite side of the barren island.  The farmers on the island are like the pioneers in John Ford's cavalry movies (or The Searchers); they  have no apparent means of eking out a living on the barren, treeless island that is rock-girt and looks like Iceland,  The island, itself, has the physiognomy of ancient enmities -- the arable terrain is subdivided into tiny grassy swards that enclosed by high rock walls.  An opening shot of jigsaw-fields with their innumerable stone enclosures looks like something out of a dream, or nightmare -- it could be an image from a Herzog film.  (The place is off the coast of Galway and one of the Aran Islands famous from Robert Flaherty's documentary -- also the subject of  one of McDonagh's plays).  Periodically, the islanders hear explosions and gunfire on the mainland and are happy that they aren't entangled in the bloody internecine war between the factions that threw off British rule and are now busily murdering one another.  (The movie is an obvious parable about the Troubles and the Civil War and the quarrel between Padraic and Colm mirrors the brutal and inexplicable factionalism that seems endemic to Ireland.)

One day, Colm refuses to accompany Padraic to the pub and, later, announces that he doesn't like him any more.  Padraic is baffled and pleads for an explanation.  Colm says that he feels his mortality and has about a dozen years left to live and, so, doesn't want to spend it" chatting" with the inane and "limited" (as he says) Padraic.  Instead, Colm plans to devote himself to his art, composing music, and intends to accomplish something with what's left of his life -- this aim is inimical with his friendship with the doltish Padraic.  As a token of his artistic ambitions, Colm presides over a sort of salon at the pub where he is teaching eager young Irish Nationalist musicians the art of the island's folk songs.  At the same time, Colm is composing a melody that he calls "The Banshees of Inishirin".  (A banshee is a legendary creature, generally appearing as a hag, who announces imminent deaths -- but, as Padraic notes, Inishirin is too nice a place to possess Banshees; at least, this is what he purports to believe.)  Padraic can't accept Colm's rejection and pesters him for his friendship.  This irritates Colm to the extent that he makes a horrific vow -- if Padraic keeps bothering him, he will snip off one finger on his fiddle hand and, if the former friend persists, he'll cut of all his other fingers as well.  It's a bizarre promise but plausible in light of Colm's "despair", a condition that he has confessed to the rather boorish and unsympathetic priest.  Like most of the other people on the island, Colm is "mental" (as Padraic's sister, Siobhan, proclaims)-- that is, afflicted by mental illness, in his case, some sort of nightmarish depression.  Colm's anger at his former friend's importunate attempts to revive the friendship, and his rage at having wasted half of his life with the "limited" Padraic, has turned inward and manifests itself in gory acts of self-mutilation.  First, Colm lops off one finger, much to the horror of his faithful dog.  (Domestic animals play an important role in the film -- Padraic has a horse and some goats and a much beloved miniature donkey named Jenny who trots after him like a loyal Labrador retriever.)  Padraic goes to the pub where Colm is holding forth, showing his students how to play fiddle tunes, but with only four fingers left on his hand.  Padraic gets drunk and there's a confrontation.  The encounter is complicated by the presence of the villainous cop who has been "fiddling with"-- that is, sexually abusing -- his own son, Dominick.  (Dominick is reputed to be the island's idiot, but, in fact, as the movie shows us, he's more witty and well-spoken that Padraic; his so-called idiocy--he's an "ee-jit" as the other characters proclaim -- is really just an aspect of his unfiltered and naive way of speaking: he says outright what he feels and speaks aloud what others would conceal.)   The cop, Peadar, has beaten up his son for stealing his poteen (some kind of booze), smashing the poor boy across the face with a tea kettle -- "I didn't mind the kettle," Dominick says, "except for the spout."  Padraic insults the cop, who  later beats him up, and, then, demands that Colm acknowledge his friendship.  Colm goes home in a rage but has said something to the effect that he likes Padraic better when he's not so "nice" and when he behaves aggressively.  When Padraic hears this, he goes to Colm's cottage, barges into the place, and again denounces Colm for his betrayal.  Colm, true to his vow, cuts off his other four fingers and goes to Padraic's farmhouse to throw the amputated digits at the building.  Somehow, Colm interferes with Padraic's miniature donkey, Jenny, and accidentally kills the little creature.  Padraic mourns the loss of the animal, buries her in his meadow with a cross over the grave, and, then, sets out to revenge himself on his former friend.  This sets up the climax of the movie.  Siobhan, who is the most intelligent of the characters in the film, has received an offer to teach on the mainland.  It seems that the war there is winding down.  She sees that there is no future and no hope on the impoverished island and, when Dominick makes a romantic overture to her (with predictably horrible consequences), she decides to escape from this stony prison in the sea and emigrates to the mainland.  An old woman all in black is stalking about the island (when people see her coming they hide behind the ubiquitous stone walls) and forecasting that soon people in the area will die.  (She's the banshee in the title and we see her, from time to time, portentously gesturing atop cliffs or in the barren fields.)  Colm has completed his melody, although he can't play it because he has maimed himself.  If there is a glimmer of hope in the awful circumstances, I suppose, that it lies in Colm's persistence in his art and Siobhan's escape from the desolate island.  

McDonagh's direction is impeccable and the island locations are spectacular.  Of course, McDonagh writes brilliant and penetrating and very funny (on occasion) dialogue.  The film's central argument, that Colm is willing to amputate his own fingers to deter Padraic's well-meant, if simple-minded overtures, requires some considerable suspension of disbelief -- and, finally, can only be accepted as evidence that the seemingly rational Colm is, in fact, completely insane.  (The dialogue with the priest about despair tries to naturalize Colm's bloodymindedness, but it's pretty obvious that among all the bitter, moronic, or half-crazed characters in the film, the fiddler is by far the most disturbed and least sane.)  McDonagh makes Colm's bizarre vow to lop off his own fingers plausible within the terms of the picture, but, in fact, on cool reflection (let's say the morning after watching this movie) this plot point is pretty dubious and hard to accept.  Evidently, McDonagh wants to propose a dialectic contrasting the avuncular Irishman with his beautiful brogue and taste for the "craythur" (booze) with the obsessive and savage aspects of the national character -- those parts of the Irish soul that fueled the horrific bloodletting during the Civil War (and that fueled the "Troubles" in Belfast, a topic on which McDonagh has previously written).  The contrast is between the gentle, kindly, and sexually perverse Leopold Bloom and the monomaniacal, monkish Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses.  The characteristic Irish reverence for the arts, particularly music, animates the clash between Padraic and Colm; Colm poses an either/or dichotomy -- either Mozart or niceness and pub-chatter.  (This reverence for art throbs in Joyce and is obvious in Van Morrison, for instance, as well as popular songs like "Raglan Road".)  A weakness in McDonagh's scenario is the overly symbolic and aggressively insistent subplot involving old Mrs. McCormack, the banshee whose presence is clearly premonitory, foreshadowing the calamities at the film's climax.  This character is so completely allegorical that her presence is a bit distracting.  But, it must be said, that the duality between the ancient crone, Mrs. McCormack and the young, vibrant and intelligent Siobhan reflects a central component of Irish mythology.  In Portrait of the Artist, Joyce says "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow", a sentiment echoed by Siobhan when she considers with dismay the bloodshed on the mainland.  Yeats imagined Ireland as a crone,  impoverished and embittered in his play Cathleen ni Houlihan performed in 1902 at the Abbey Theater and written with Lady Gregory.  But Kathleen ni Houlihan is also imagined to be a beautiful young woman capable of urging men to murder one another.  McDonagh exploits these aspects of legend in The Banshees and, although his presentation of these issues is overly explicit, I can't argue that it isn't effective.  The film is exceptionally good in all respects and, of course, I recommend it highly.      

   

El Escapulario (The Scapular)

 El Escapulario is a stylish Mexican ghost story made by Churubusco Azteca studios in 1968.  The director, Servando Gonzalez, is unknown to me but was, obviously, an impressive craftsman and the movie is gorgeous, splendidly shot in astonishingly atmospheric black and white by the great Gabriel Figueroa. The plot is carefully constructed and the dialogue is well-written if a bit florid by contemporary standards.  The narrative has the cunning art of delaying revelation of key information with the effect that aspects of the film that seem puzzling on first encounter are clarified as the movie progresses.  The picture isn't really scary but it has a convincingly fatalistic and eerie mood that is skillfully maintained from beginning to end.  I can't make great claims for the movie but it completely succeeds on its own terms and sustains interest for its ninety minute length.  The picture cost me $1.99 to rent for 48 hours on Amazon Prime and, if you choose to pay to see the film, you won't regret your expenditure.  I think Figueroa's outstanding photography itself justifies watching the movie.  The images in the movie are fantastically tactile -- the picture is a symphony of textures.  In the opening scenes, we see characters moving across cobble-stone streets and plazas at night, lit obliquely with raking illumination that causes each dimple of stone to manifest with an uncanny force; the mottled cobble-stone surfaces are contrasted with the bark of tree trunks also in view that have a wholly different texture.  A woman is dying in a bed that is imprisoned in elaborate curlicues of wrought iron -- the German word for these kind of arabesques (Schnorklig) perfectly describes the baroque twists in the metal and the shadows that they cast.  Spaces are enclosed by heroic-looking walls also made from masonry studded with gem-like field stone and there are bridges and intersecting aqueducts that look like fine-grained Piranesi engravings.  When one of the doomed heroes rides out to meet a woman at her country estate, the man's passage through the country is recorded by tracking shots along strangely feathery trees with melting soft foliage.  Figueroa is influenced by the spectacular compositions in Eisenstein's footage shot for his aborted Mexican film (released as Que Viva Mexico) -- campesinos are framed in pyramidal masses against the sky, sombrero's glowing with lunar radiance under storm clouds.  In one sequence, Figueroa makes every shot rotate around a cathedral-like church; the interior of the church is brilliantly white and radiant.  The opening sequences are shot with figures vanishing into the haze of dust storm.  A cantina is vibrant with adobe brick walls that seem to overhang the characters.  Everything in the film is shot with such tangible presence that you can feel the hardness of the rock, the cobbles underfoot, the adobe bricks leaking sand onto the barroom floor as they crumble and the skies are always dark and tempestuous.  

The film has an elaborate flashback structure with a double frame.  At first, we see a man being led to execution by firing squad.  Before the man can be shot dead, he bares his breast, shows the title scapula, a sort of large belt-buckle size religious talisman, and implores his executioners to fire in such a way as to not damage the pendant.  Someone rides into the dusty, ruinous village where the execution is about to take place and shouts that there has been a last-minute reprieve.  The scene, then, shifts to a still, spookily empty street where the camera lurches along, simulating the point of view of someone who has come to summon a priest to the bedside of a dying woman.  The priest is handsome, but seems somewhat vague and distant; it's as if he's distracted.  The POV walks along the night-time street, leading the priest to the sickbed.  Hiding in the corner of the frame are two wretches who are plotting to waylay the priest, rob him and slit his throat.  At the woman's bedside, the priest hears her confession and, then, she implores him to listen to her story, a complicated family tale about the scapula.  The woman, it seems, had four sons -- there is a picture of them on the wall -- and she seems determined to narrate how these young men came to grief.  Her first story, about her son Julian, brings us back to the dusty hamlet and the firing squad.  Julian, who has deserted the government ranks to fight in the revolution on the side of the Indian insurgents (a flashback within a flashback) is sent to sabotage an armored train.  He succeeds in this mission but is captured and condemned to death.  (These scenes have something of the raw, visionary atmosphere of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.")  Julian has been spared so that he can be tortured, presumably, to reveal more information about the insurgents.  But in the foggy dawn, after an interlude at night (soldiers sing Golondrinus Oaxacarena -- the "sparrows of Oaxaca"), Julian tries to escape with the help of a disenchanted Federale.  Ultimately, he is killed, although the Indians march through the fog, probably launching an attack on the soldiers.  The movie, then, reverts to the deathbed where the woman begins the story of her second son, Pedro, a "saddler" who works with his uncle Juan, a man who has had his tongue cut out and can only communicate by grunts and high-pitched creepy squeals.  Pedro is in love with Rosario who seems to be a rich man's daughter -- in fact, she is the older man's ward and, in a melodramatic twist, he is cheating her out of her inheritance.  The beautiful young woman's guardian, fearing Pedro's involvement, sends a message to him, luring him to his remote country estate where he plans to murder him.  Pedro rides through an increasingly surreal landscape and encounters three men who have been hanged, rebels dangling from the strangely soft-looking and pillowy trees -- again, this is reminiscent of Bierce.  One of the rebel Indians is still alive somehow and he leads Pedro to the gothic manor in the country where the girl's guardian is waiting to ambush him.  The guardian drops dead out of a balcony in a startling scene, smote dead by God, it is said, who is a wrathful God in this film.  The hanged man says that he is cold and demands Pedro's serape.  Pedro flees the country estate and comes upon the three hanged men still dangling over the trail.  One of them now wears Pedro's serape.  From this point on, the story becomes more obviously supernatural.  The movie reverts back to the frame-story at the woman's death bed and there are more ghostly revelations, many of them unexpected.  The film has some of the quality of Juan Rulfo's great Pedro Paramo, a famous Mexican novel that describes the country's nightmarish revolution in terms of dead voices echoing in the darkness in a ruined village that is quite literally a "ghost" town.  Similar themes motivate the last ten minutes of El Escapulario -- characters literally don't know who they are or where they came from; it's like a dream from which you unable to awake.  It seems that the violence of Mexican history has resulted in a nation of ghosts and sleepwalkers, people who have slipped out of real time to inhabit a zone of spectral nostalgia.  El Escapulario is full of indirections and eerie visual rhymes -- the firing squad, for instance, returns in the form of soldiers riding into the country to hang their three prisoners.  In the scenes involving Pedro, a sinister organ grinder plays Golondrinus Oaxacarena to signify the hero's love for Rosario.  In the great church that dominates the village, the pipes of the organs have been carved and painted to resemble human faces with open lips, a chorus of angels or the damned depending upon how you interpret the image.  In some ways, this film reminds me of a more diffuse, and more melodramatic, Ugetsu Monogaturi, Mizoguchi's great ghost movie.  

Bhakshakkaru (Kannada) also known as Jallikattu (Malayalam)

 In 2017, Lijo Jose Pellissery directed the Malayalam language film Jallikattu.  The movie was dubbed into another southwestern Indian language, Kannada, in 2021.  Pellissery, who is an important director, works primarily in Malayalam, a language spoken along the southwest coast of Indian; he is also fluent in Tamil, another language spoken in that vicinity as witness his most recent movie Nanpakal Nerathus Mayakkam, a 2023 release on Netflix.  Amazon Prime offers Jallikattu to subscribers to the cable service although only in the Kannada version; this is unfortunate because the subtitles for the film as released in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken inland to the east of the Malayalam and Tamil-speaking coast, are awful -- non-grammatical, often displayed too quickly for comprehension, and full of bizarre locutions:  do people in southwestern India rally eat "pork mutton" or "beef mutton" (the word "mutton" seems to be a general term for "meat")?  The Kannada-subtitled film, called Bhakshakkaru in that language, is Pellissery's 2017 movie, seemingly complete and unedited.  But it also has some peculiar features.  Any time a character drinks alcohol or smokes a cigarette (and Pellissery's hoodlums are always guzzling some clear liquor that looks like vodka and chainsmoking), a ribbon-shaped advisory pops up on the screen, yellow with red letters and some pictograms with a martini glass and pack of cigarettes shown cancelled by a line -- as far as I can determine, the inserts, appearing in about half the shots in the movie, warn viewers against using alcohol and tobacco.  The device is off-putting because the advisory flashes in scenes packed with characters in which the actual person smoking or drinking is well-nigh invisible.  So, in addition, to laboring mightily to read the incoherent and, often, nonsensical, subtitles, the viewer finds himself trapped in a game of "find the smoker" or "booze-hound", an exercise that is fun in a sort of perverse way, but also distracting.

I'll call Pellissery's film Jallikattu since this is how it is more often identified.  Jallikattu is so astonishing visually, and so bizarre and compelling thematically, that I was willing overlook the horrible subtitling and the invasive admonitions about nicotine and booze.  Pellissery is one of the best new filmmakers and the three pictures of his that I have seen are thrilling and spectacular.  So I recommend seeking out this picture on Amazon and giving it a try.  The milieu is incredibly exotic and Jallikattu, although thematically insane, is remarkable and as exciting as something like the Bourne movies or Mission Impossible.  I'm not certain that I understand Jallikattu, although in a way it is more compact and accessible (since it channels Hollywood action movies) than Pellissery's magnum opus The Angamaly Diaries, an elaborate and fantastically complex gangster movie that imitates Scorsese or the ineffably weird Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, a beautiful but opaque portrait of life in a small village in which the principal character is either a ghost or a reincarnated avatar of a dead emigrant villager.  Jallikattu is only about one hour and forty minutes long and has a simple, if epic, plot arc.  Every frame is packed with wild action:  Pellissery's movies also resemble the films of the great Russian director Alexei German -- they are hyper-violent, everyone battering everyone else and whole groups of men brawling continuously.  (I have no idea if this is Pellissery's idiosyncratic view of human nature or some kind of documentary comment on the Malayalam-speaking villagers that he chronicles in his films; the continuous punching and slapping, kicking and wrestling, is particularly bizarre because village men in southwest India were skirts that they are constantly adjusting and hitching up before they get involved in fisticuffs -- a prelude to a fight, generally, involves a burly guy with hair on his shoulders, yanking his knee-length skirt into position before attacking his adversary.  

I have said that Jallikattu is epic.  The movie features several thousand extras, fantastically elaborate takes that track characters as they stomp around their villages or charge recklessly through the forest, and, probably, seventy or so speaking parts.  But the plot is very simple and easily understood, although almost all the details are culturally inexplicable.  A villager named Vincent attempts to slaughter a bull in the gloom of the forest at night time.  The bull escapes and terrorize the villagers.  More and more people gather to hunt the animal through the jungle.  The narrative progresses from an unassuming anecdote of village life to a cosmic vision of human cruelty and madness.  At first, the film is comical, but, as the bull's rampage continues, the imagery becomes increasingly disturbing and unhinged.  The final sequence is visionary and terrifying.  The picture begins with a sort of prelude in which we see people waking before dawn in a small village in heavily wooded mountains.  The chief industry in the village seems to be slaughtering beef cattle for their meat.  (As in The Angemaly Diaries everyone is fanatically carnivorous and people traipse around with bulging plastic sacks of livers and entrails and cuts of beef.)  The narrative involves several strands that interwoven in complex sequences that take place over about three days and nights.  One self-satisfied man, a member of the bourgeoisie, is planning a menu for a wedding, probably his daughter's nuptial; of course what's on the menu is beef and pork mutton so spicy "as to be memorable."  The young lovers try to elope, presumably to avoid the wedding, but their motorcycle fails and they slink back home.  An important villager named Anthony has, apparently, informed on another man, Kuttaijan who was sent to prison for smuggling on that basis.  Anthony and Kuttaijan hate one another passionately -- there is probably some other basis for their rage, but I couldn't figure it out from the movie and the murky subtitles.  Kuttaijan is much-admired by a group of young hoodlums who spend all day drinking and dancing in the streets of the small, impoverished village.  Someone sends for Kuttaijan who is the local tough-guy and who owns a "licensed" gun.  Kuttaijan enters the village in triumph with his rifle, the great hunter who is planning to dispatch the enraged bull.  The local police who seem to exist mainly to slap people around can't take action against the bull because this will require a court decree, something likely to result in delays of a month or more.  (Meanwhile the bull has rampaged through a garden of Ayuravedic medicinal plants owned by the town's sole Hindu and sole vegetarian.  The cops tell the holy man to get a "licensed" gun and shoot the bull.  This is beyond his purview -- he has said that killing "innocent animals" is a sin in which he will not be involved.)  Kuttaijan tries to shoot the bull but it smashes apart half the town and hurls itself wildly down the heavily forested slopes of the mountain where the town is located.  Anthony gets a gun somewhere and competes with Kuttaijan for the honor of shooting the animal but both fail.  The bull ends up trapped in a well.  The townspeople lower Anthony into the pit on a rope and he somehow lassoes the bull.  As they are raising Anthony and the bull out of the well, a thunderstorm releases a downpour and the ropes slip.  Some villagers get fatally gored as the bull escape and others end up dead in the bottom of the well.  Anthony and Kuttaijan abandon their pursuit of the bull to fight seemingly to the death in the mud; just as they are about to succeed in killing one another, the bull intervenes and knocks them both down.  By this time, tens of thousands of villagers have gathered with torches to pursue the enraged bull -- the animal is now mutilated, like a bovine Moby Dick with a dozen lances and spears sticking out of his flesh.  The animal evades the army of hunters but gets mired in muddy field.  Anthony tries to wrestle the bull to the ground by grabbing and twisting its horns.  Then, thousands of villages reach the mud hole and, throwing themselves onto Anthony and the bull, they create a writhing human pyramid probably sixty feet high.  No one and nothing can survive under the mountain of mud stained men, all of them clawing and wrestling with one another while human landslides occur with dozens of men toppling down the slopes of the pile.  Somehow the bull has escaped.  An old man who is dying in his hut hears a sound, laboriously rises and sees the badly wounded bull outside his window, huffing and puffing and stamping at the ground.  

In the film's prelude, we see insects swarming, a shot repeated with moths later, in the film and clearly the conduct of the villagers, at least in the second half of the film is equated to ants and flies and spiders.  After about an hour, the film departs from any sort of plausible reality and becomes a parable of human cruelty and wickedness on a grandiose level.  Hints of the picture's magical realism are evident in the first hour.  One of carnivore villagers says that the best meat of all is human flesh.  When the bull tears the village apart, a house is set afire -- the bull seems to have run through bonfire in the woods.  "What is the relation between the bull and fire" someone asks quizzically.  A bank is foreclosing on a house and, at one point, the bull smashes through bank and terrorizes the bankers:  "What is the relation between the bull and interest rates?" someone asks.  Disturbing aspects in the film are manifest in early scenes when the tone is light and humorous.  We first see Anthony blithely slapping his wife's face as hard as he can about five minutes into the film.  Why?  What has she done?  In the world of the film, people's conduct is uniformly irrational and violent.  Later, when Anthony plans to be lowered into the well to extract the bull, he goes home, more or less rapes his wife, and, then, picks up a coil of heavy rope.  His wife tells him to make certain that he bring some choice steaks cut from the bull after he captures it.  The film is grotesque tauromachy, a vision from Goya.  Jallikattu refers to a local festival in which a bull is tormented, stabbed and gouged, and finally murdered while young men try to ride the poor beast.  A title notes that "no animals were injured in the making of the film" -- but the scenes of violence involving the bull are a bit like the sequences with the Great White Shark in Jaws, convincing and frightening at the same time.  Pellissery's villagers, who are all nominally Roman Catholic -- they bestow lavish gifts of beef on their priests -- seem somehow perverted by their habit of eating meat.  The film is a vast survey of human savagery.  The last third of the picture has to be seen to be believed.  

Beef

 Ire, sometimes called "wrath," is one of the seven deadly sins.  Beef (Netflix) is a ten part series that takes ire as its subject.  It's an inventive and well-wrought program, frequently surprising with unpredictable twists and turns.  We live in a world in which media of all kinds flourishes (and profits) by inspiring anger in its consumers.  In the last few years, anger has become an industry and, of course, our nation is profoundly, and, possibly, irrevocably divided.  Therefore, Beef, here referring to a row or dispute between people, is acutely attuned to the Zeitgeist.  The show, more or less, rubs your nose in dysfunctional rage and provides a demonstration as to how unbridled anger infects and contaminates -- what begins as a minor incident infects an extended community of people, destroys families, and, ultimately, results in a number of murders.  Beef is not completely plausible on all levels; aspects of the series involve magical realism (for instance, there are peculiar visions, talking animals, and the like), but the show cleaves closely enough to its milieu and the characters inhabiting that environment to be highly compelling.

Simply put, the premise is the program is that a road rage incident involving a contractor of Korean heritage and a Vietnamese immigrant entrepreneur proliferates into a series of insults and assaults that expands with a sort of lethal and exponential force.  Almost all of the characters are East Asians, either working class members of the Korean diaspora, strivers from the Vietnamese refugee community, and well-heeled, rather condescending Japanese-Americans.  There are only a couple of typically Caucasian characters in the film and, with one exception, they have relatively minor roles.  (One pleasure of the film is that it explores how these communities, comprised of second-generation immigrants, are organized and how these various ethnic groups interact).  An interesting aspect of the show is that the characters all look alike  to some extent -- that is, they are all Asians -- but, of course, sharp distinctions exist as to their social and ethnic identities.  It appears that the Vietnamese look down on the Japanese and vice-versa.  The Koreans live in tightly knit communities that are organized along family and religious ties -- the Korean characters all attend an evangelical Christian church that features much vigorous singing, praying, and rock and roll at their services.  Korean criminals fear Filipino gangs.  And, so, we are presented with clashing ethnicities throughout the program.  Clearly, there are ethnic subtexts to the road rage incident that precipitates the action in Beef; however, I can't exactly understand those aspects of the show.  At a big box Home Depot sort of store, Danny, a Korean-American contractor, is returning a half-dozen hibachis.  He has to wait in line and endure delays caused by other customers who seem insufferable to him.  (He has purchased the hibachis to generate enough carbon monoxide in his apartment to kill himself but has lost confidence in that suicide plan -- we don't learn this until about the third episode and this is an example the rather macabre surprises that the plot offers; it's hard to write about the ten episode series without "spoilers", that is, revealing narrative aspects to the story that are intended to astonish viewers -- therefore, I will give only an abbreviated summary of the show's very intricate plot.)  Departing from the Home Depot (or whatever it is), Danny almost backs into a white SUV.  The driver of the white SUV gives him the finger and this leads to a frantic, and terrifying, chase down the LA highways that ends with both vehicles roaring through someone's landscaping, an encounter that is filmed on cell-phone by a passing motorist.  As we come to learn, the driver of the SUV is Amy, a forty-year old woman of Vietnamese extraction who is the throes of selling her very successful business, a franchise of shops that sell potted plants.  (She is involved in negotiations with Jordan, an eccentric female tycoon, who seems to own a business like Walmart and who lives in a remote fortress-like castle complete with panic-rooms and a octagonal chamber in which she displays her collection of medieval and pre-Columbian crowns; the patronizing and entitled Jordan is the closest thing to an actual villain in Beef.)  Both Danny and Amy are stretched taut to the point where something has to snap -- and it's the road rage incident that demonstrates this.  Neither of the two main characters can dismiss the confrontation and they continue to brood about it.  Danny figures out Amy's identify and goes to her house where he obsequiously comments on her defective plumbing and, then, urinates all over the floor of her bathroom.  Amy tracks him down and paints obscenities and insults all over his red pickup truck.  Danny retaliates by going to Amy's house, dousing her car in gas, and is about to strike a match when he sees Amy's four-year old daughter, June, smiling at him from her car seat in the back of the vehicle.  Amy is married to George, a gregarious and ultra-handsome Japanese man, the son of a famous artist.  (George makes rather grotesque, phallic-shaped pots and jugs -- they look like the work of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.)  George is a perfect husband and father and too good to be true -- his marriage to Amy is foundering on his overbearing perfection.  Amy, like Danny, is badly damaged by her childhood -- she was bullied into success by her refugee parents:  we never heard birds growing up, Amy's mother told her, because we were starving, we had eaten them all.  Correspondingly, Danny's parents, who ran a flea-bag motel, have lost everything when a cousin, a thug named Isaac, channeled his criminal operations through the family business, money-laundered with its cash, and embezzled from them.  Danny is struggling to please his rather stern and aggrieved mother and father by building a house for them -- financed by money embezzled from the Evangelical Church in which he leads a rock band.  Both Danny and Amy, beneath their rather placid exteriors, are half-mad and kindred spirits -- this is demonstrated explicitly in the final episode in which, for a few minutes, they speak in unison and, then, switch identities.  Amy catfishes Danny to lure him into thinking that her very attractive (Caucasian) assistant is sexually intrigued by him -- she doesn't know that her assistant is having an affair with the handsome and smarmy George, her husband.  The scheme backfires when she accidentally hooks Danny's kid brother, Paul.  Amy and Paul, then, have a sexual encounter.  Ultimately, all of these misdeeds are exposed, houses get burned down, children are kidnapped, and a lot of people get shot.  

Beef's ten episodes are cumulatively about eight hours long, more or less, the length of Erich von Stroheim's original cut of Greed.  (The equivalence in length exposes an interesting factor -- today's limited series form, clocking in at eight to twelve hours, is the ideal vehicle for presenting faithful adaptations of novels that would otherwise be unreasonably truncated if reduced to feature film length.  The industry has finally caught up with Stroheim.)  Greed, also an allegory about one of the deadly sins, had a similar structure and was also "magical realist avant la lettre -- it featured visionary sequences and symbolic imagery as well.  Most importantly, Greed starts as a low-key domestic satire, a critique of lower middle class mores and bourgeois marriage, and ends with two men, shackled together, laboriously killing one another in Death Valley.  Beef, the name sounds like Greed, ends up with its two principals badly wounded, dying, it seems, in a barren canyon in the desert mountains near Los Angeles.  Greed was butchered; Beef is all there.  (The show is co-produced by Steven Yuen and Ali Wong, the standup comedian, who play the leads.)

A Fugitive from the Past

 A Fugitive from the Past is a Japanese police procedural, jumbo-sized at 185 minutes, directed by Tomu Uchida.  The movie was made in 1965 and was Uchida's last film.  (Uchida began his career in the silent era; he died in 1970 at the age of 72).  Uchida was a reliable director working in a variety of genres for Japanese studios -- his equivalent in Hollywood would be William Wellman or, even more precisely, King Vidor.  (Analogies, however, break down -- neither Wellman nor Vidor worked extensively in Japanese-occupied Manchuria making propaganda films for the Imperial Army.  Uchida's work in Manchuria for the notorious Manchuku Films apparently ended with his capture and he wasn't repatriated to Japan until eight years after the War in 1953.)  A Fugitive from the Past isn't well-known outside of Japan.  It was never commercially shown in Europe or America (except for a few festivals and museum retrospectives) and its release on Arrow DVD marks its first appearance in commercially available form outside of Japan.  The movie is highly regarded.  Kinema Jumpo, the Japanese equivalent of Cahiers d' Cinema, rated the movie as the third-greatest picture in the history of Japanese movies -- I think this was in 1990; the film has since dropped off the list of the ten-best Japanese pictures of all time.  Uchida is best known in the West for Mad Fox, a surreal Kabuki-styled melodrama and horror film and his luridly named Bloody Spear and Mount Fujiyama.  The latter picture, which I have reviewed in these pages, is the opposite of its garish title -- it's a serene, leisurely road picture set in the 19th century with only a couple spurts of violence at the end of the movie; the film is amiable, fairly funny, and seems to be similar to some of John Ford's pictures, particularly My Darling Clementine.  Japanese audiences, I think, were enthralled with Uchida's portrait of the American occupation in A Fugitive from the Past and, further, would have sensed a strong resonance with the director's own problematic career -- Uchida went from an urbane, civil director of period pictures and screwball comedies pre-War into a phase in which he worked on virulent propaganda movies supporting the vicious and genocidal conflict in Manchuria:  so there is a strong sense that the overriding atmosphere of guilt over past crimes that oppresses the picture arises from both the culpability of Uchida for his actions in the War and, in general, reflects the Japanese people's unresolved feelings about that conflict.  In some ways, the movie resembles some of Fassbinder's works, particularly the BRD Trilogy, in which recovery from the ravages of war results in former Nazis rising again to power; repatriated soldiers return from Russia to a society anxious to forget events occurring only a few years earlier -- concerns as to justice and accountability are suppressed in favor of the economic Wirtschaftswunder.  Similar motifs animate A Fugitive from the Past -- indeed, the repatriation of soldiers from camps in Manchuria is a major theme in the movie.  

Despite it's inordinate length, A Fugitive from the Past is very gripping and feels far shorter than its run-time.  And, unlike many Japanese movies the picture isn't so complex as to be impossible to understand.  The plot is clear, vividly dramatized, and the movie is mildly exciting (and mildly suspenseful) up to its last third.  There is a perky, idiosyncratic prostitute who worships the criminal hero of the film.  She occupies the middle half of the movie and is the best thing in the movie.  When the anti-hero murders her, all the energy seeps out of the movie and the final part of the film just consists of middle-aged men berating one another -- we are told things and not shown them and, although the film is so well-directed that it never becomes tedious, the last third of the picture is confined to conference rooms, involves long speeches, and is perversely claustrophobic.  I think these debates and loquacious seminars on various subjects are a grave flaw in the picture -- the film is impeccably scripted but one wonders if there wasn't some better way to adapt this part of the source material (the movie is based on a 1700 page novel that obviously resembles Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.)

On September 20, 1947, three criminals steal a modest fortune from a pawnshop in a provincial city.  They set the pawnshop on fire and the whole town is destroyed with many casualties.  (There are aerial shots showing the devastation in the town and it looks like Hiroshima.)  The leader of group of criminals seems to be a man named Inukai.  (He is similar to Fred McMurray in appearance and plays the part in a bemused way -- again a bit like McMurray in Double Indemnity; it must also be observed that A Fugitive from the Past is an impressive Japanese film noir.)  Inukai and his accomplices happen into a horrifying natural disaster -- a ferry carrying over 800 people has sunk in straits between Japan's main island and Hokkaido; these are the so-called "Hunger Straits", the Japanese term for the body of water.  Hundreds of corpses are washing ashore and we see spectacular scenes of the typhoon, the rescue efforts, and the dead bodies being dragged off the beaches to makeshift morgues.  (Less successful shots showing a model of the ferry breaking apart in heavy seas seem to be channeling the Godzilla films -- you expect to giant lizard or a man in giant lizard suit to emerge from the turbulent bathtub waters.)  As it turns out, there are two extra corpses in the dead recovered from the ferry-boat tragedy.  The two unaccounted-for corpses turn are ultimately identified Inukai's colleages in crime.  Inukai appears, bedraggled on the wooded and mountainous coast on Hokkaido.  He observes a scary medium channeling the spirit of a dead woman and, later, on primitive train carrying cut trees, he meets the dead woman's daughter, a prostitute called Yae.  In a small town at a harbor, Inukai hides from authorities in a whorehouse where Yae works.  She seems half-deranged, mocking her father's superstitious engagement with the blind medium and wriggling around lasciviously in a sort of cocoon-like blanket. Somehow, she senses that Inukai is a "good man", has sex with him, and, then, finds that she has been badly scratched about the throat by his uncut fingernails.  While cutting his fingernails, she gets one of them embedded in her palm.  Inukai has to flee and so he pays her the ill-gotten loot from the pawnshop robbery, a large sum.  The girl buys her way out of the brothel (where she is indentured due to her parents' debts) and goes to Tokyo where she tries to earn an honest wage.  She works at a noodle shop and bar as a hostess, hanging around the train station and soliciting travelers for the shop.  The business is under the protection of Japanese gangsters and there's a fight that results in the noodle-shop having to close.  So Gae goes back into prostitution and, apparently, is very successful -- she earns a lot of money, is frugal and hardworking, and, after ten years is on the verge, of embarking on an honest enterprise.  (In any event, she works at a legal brothel which will be closed due to a change in the law six months in the future abolishing state-sanctioned prostitution -- so it's time for her to find another job.)  By this time, she has a lot of money and, when a newspaper article reveals to her that Inukai is now a successful businessman and philanthropist (he's now called Tarumi), she goes to his house on Hokkaido Island to thank him for his kindness.  (She still has the fingernail as a fetish that she carries everywhere with her.)  Inuakai-Tarumi panics when he meets her and strangles Gae to death.  When his male secretary inadvertently discovers the crime, Inukai (said to have enormous strength) murders him as well, weighting the bodies with stones and throwing them in the bay.  

During the first part of Gae's ten-year stint as a successful Tokyo prostitute, the cops from Hokkaido are tracking Inukai.  They conclude that Inukai killed his two accomplices but he has, then, vanished.  A detective even goes to Tokyo to try to interview Gae -- the cops know Inukai went to her brothel on Hokkaido -- but they can't find her.  The two murders of Gae and the secretary (Inukai claims it was a result of a lover's quarrel with murder and sucide) cause the local cops to interview Inukai.  He defies them and there is no evidence as to his guilt.  The cops, then, locate the old detective (he has a tubercular cough) who chased Inukai unsuccessfully ten years earlier.  The old man travels to the city in Hokkaido where the police suspect Tarumi (Inukai) of the crime.  After various interviews and interrogations, Tarumi- Inukai is cornered and confesses to killing Gae and the secretary -- he doesn't confess to killing his two accomplices or burning down the whole city during the typhoon.  Here the movie's length proves to be its strength.  The viewer can't exactly recall what we were shown in the film's first twenty minutes and, so, Inukai's account of the events involving the robbery of the pawnbroker (probably a reference to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment) and the typhoon seems plausible -- we can't exactly recall whether what he is telling us is true or false.  And the film features unreliable flashbacks -- we sometimes see images reconstructing events that turn out to be false.  On the ship crossing the Hunger Straits, the pious old detective casts flowers into the wake of the ferry.  He chants the Heart Sutra in a guttural voice :  Emptiness is Form -- Form is Emptiness.  Inukai dives off the ship and perishes.  The Hunger Straits symbolize the passage from life to death.

This summary, of course, doesn't do justice to the novelistic complexity of the film -- obviously the source novel was a book with an ambition to import every possible aspect of post-war Japan into the narrative.  The film's scenes rhyme with one another -- for instance, the final chanting of the Heart Sutra echoes an earlier scene in which the detective buries the two accomplices in shallow graves so that they can be exhumed and later identified.  (The movie is full of scenes with people inspecting corpses -- these are hyper-realistic although mercifully we don't see the bodies; people cover their noses with handkerchiefs or burn incense to ameliorate the stench.)  Some of the sequences are solarized for effect, with weird flares and bursts of light suffusing the elegant black and white images.  Much of the movie was shot on 16 millimeter blown up to 35 mm -- this gives the picture a grainy documentary aspect that is particularly effective in the scenes involving the fire, the typhoon and its aftermath, and the mean streets of Tokyo.  Uchida's camera frequently moves, but the shots are hand-held and have a herky-jerky immediacy.  The acting is naturalistic and impeccable.  Essays on the film emphasize Uchida's commentary on social problems -- apparently, the prostitute and her aged father (who cheerfully acquiesces in her sex work) are members of some kind of low-caste group who are despised by other classes in Japanese society.  (None of this is apparent to a casual American viewer.)  Post-war Japan is viewed as a sort of inferno -- prostitutes are everywhere, starving children roam the street where arrogant-looking American soldiers prowl for sex.  Little kids fight over pieces of potato in their soup.  The outskirts of the cities are squalid wastelands.  Nightmarish crane shots show crowded slum streets patrolled by sinister gangsters.  The small Hokkaido villages are shattered, ruinous, and completely impoverished.  The movie is very powerful, but not entirely engaging and the last part of the picture is a misfire.  It's not as good as its reputed to be -- but still the movie is worth watching.

Gimme Danger

Gimme Danger is a 2016 documentary directed by Jim Jarmusch about Iggy Pop and the Stooges.  Jarmusch is an interesting filmmaker and I admire many of his features.  Gimme Danger is rather conventional and its subject will not be to all tastes. Iggy Pop, aka Jim Osterberg, is a handsome ex-drug addict who was beautiful and reckless as a child.  He's still a good-looking and formidable old man with the grizzled appearance of a character actor in an old Western.  He's fairly articulate, although he speaks with a stutter and seems to be a reasonably competent raconteur.  However, since he spent half his life under the influence, it's not exactly clear what he recalls or how accurate his recollections might be.  The film studies Iggy's Stooges as well, the Asheton brothers from Detroit and a man named James Williamson.  When the band flamed out in 1973, the Asheton boys withdrew to Michigan and spent thirty years working in warehouses, driving cabs, and laboring in factories.  They seem to have lived for most of that time with their parents and sister, a blonde old lady who must once have been a beauty of considerable repute.  Williamson, a blonde and gorgeous child  himself (he was about 22 when the Stooges collapsed) was a protegee of David Bowie, but escaped the clutches of the Glam Rock star (a figure in many ways the exact opposite of musicians in Iggy's band), went back to college and, apparently, studied mathematics.  Williamson went into the production end of the music business, was apparently an innovator, and retired as one of the top executives of Sony Records -- this was in 2001.  About that time, Iggy was plotting the reunification of the Stooges (not the "reunion" as he insists), a successful venture in which he gathered the surviving band members (the Asheton boys and Williamson) playing a notable gig at Coachella in 2003, I think.  It seems that the Stooges may have been briefly successful again and toured until 2007 or 2008 when the heavy-set Asheton died (he went around in Nazi regalia but denied any political significance to his accoutrements).  Iggy and the rest of the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.  At the ceremony, Iggy saluted his young wife (about a third his age) and made a memorable statement that he read off a 3 by 5 card:  Music is Life and Life isn't a Business -- a sad commentary on his past fame and the various betrayals that he endured at the hands of record company execs a lot like James Williamson. A record company executive notes that he loved the Stooges but that they were "highly unprofessional"; by contrast, the Ramones were well-behaved.  

There's nothing distinctive about the film.  It consists of interviews with the charismatic Osterberg -- he sits on a kind of throne with two human skulls on adjacent tables.  (There's a lurid Basquiat-style painting behind him.)  Interspersed with Osterberg's recollections are archival footage of old Stooges concerts, mostly between 1967 and 1973 when the band collapsed since all of its members were then addicted to heroin among other things.  The period between 1973 and 2001 (that is, 28 years) is mostly ignored -- it's completely unclear what, if anything, Osterberg was doing in that period.  There's some scant footage taken at Coachella in 2003 and the ceremony at Hall of Fame, but otherwise the movie, more or less, flames out -- like its subject -- in 1973.  Iggy and the Stooges evolved a stylized approach to performing:  the band stoically plays garage-band riffs at high volume while Iggy, who seems to be double-jointed, dances around wildly on the stage.  Iggy is always shirtless when performing, exposing his rather gaunt and emaciated torso which is sometimes covered in blood.  He cuts a bizarre figure, squatting as if to defecate on the stage, strutting like a bantam rooster, and whirling around in circles while clapping his hands.  (He looks like he's imitating Mick Jagger although, for all I know, Mick may have stolen some of his trademark moves from Iggy.)  Iggy has a curious posture -- he throws back  his shoulders and contorts his back into a curve like an integral sign so that his belly is thrust forward.  He probably thinks he's leading with his pelvis, but, objectively, it looks like he's sticking out his tummy at the audience.  From time to time, he bends over backward so that he actually touches the stage with his hands held out behind him.  In one alarming sequence, he does a back flip up onto his feet, a movement that shows spectacular athletic aplomb.  He's lithe but grotesque -- it seems that he wants to move in serpentine way that is completely (and to the viewer, instinctively) repellent.  Often he dives off the stage, gets trampled, and has to be dragged like the dead Christ being removed from his cross, semi-conscious onto the stage.  The music sounds a bit like the Ramones, very fast and aggressive but with little variety -- the songs all sound the same. more or less (All Ramones songs sound alike and all Ramones songs are good -- I would hesitate to apply this principle to the Stooges' music.)  Iggy and the Stooges were a niche act, more or less a novelty, and most listeners probably would have found them annoying.  I never had any particular interest in their schtick although certain very vivid and enthusiastic writers proclaimed them to be the "world's greatest rock and roll band"; I think Robert Christgau may have made this claim as did Lester Bangs.  Osterberg is smarter than he looks and knew a lot about music -- he was a clerk in a record store in Ann Arbor (where much of the action takes place) and he carefully studied the music of people like John Cage, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra.  The film gives relatively short shrift to the Stooges' music -- I think the assumption, which is reasonable, is that if you are inclined to watch this documentary (it's about 94 minutes long), you already are a fan of the music.  There's a weird backstory to Iggy's childhood -- his parents apparently lived in a long lemon-yellow house-trailer -- but we don't learn enough about this to understand why this was.  Jarmusch provides some clips of the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez movie The Long, Long Trailer to comment on Iggy's childhood, but this doesn't really explain why his parents lived in such a vehicle.  (There's an implication that Iggy's manic performing style was a reaction to being mercilessly bullied when he was a child.) There's a fair bit of old TV footage, fascinating if you're my age, but probably not if you are younger.  Jarmusch also provides some ugly, poorly contrived animated sequences -- this stuff doesn't add anything to the movie. The film makes big claims for the central importance of Iggy Pop and the Stooges in rock and roll culture and, for all I know this may be a correct evaluation of their influence -- I can attest hat I've known about Iggy Pop all my life, but have to admit I'd never heard a single song by Stooges until I watched this documentary.  There are cameos by all sorts of famous rock and rollers -- the MC 5 are particularly prominent in the movie since they were from Detroit and Fred "Sonic" Smith, Patti Smith's husband, is seen briefly.  Of course, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and their circle are also shown from time to time -- I think Jarmusch was a habitue of the same venues where these performers plied their trades.  There's a funny story about one of the Asheton brothers worrying about getting permission of the Three Stooges (some of whose routines are a highlight in the film) to use the name.  Apparently, Asheton called Moe Howard who is said to have responded to his inquiry by saying: "I don't care if you use the name the Stooges just don't fucking say you're the Three Stooges."

Angamaly Diaries

 Angamaly Diaries is a Malaylam-language crime film released in 2017 and directed by Lijo Jose Pellissey.  Films produced in Malaylam are sometimes called "Mollywood Movies".  On the evidence of this movie, and Pellissey's most recent film, the ineffably weird Nanpakal Merathu Mayakkam,  Pellissey is an important filmmaker with a lavish visual style and fantastically ambitious objectives.  Pellissey is relative young, his first picture made in 2010, and I expect that he will prove to be an important director in world-cinema.  Angamaly Diaries was made with actors who had never performed previously for the camera and the picture is fantastically energetic, complex, and visually exciting.  The terrain is exotic and many aspects of the film were inscrutable to me and so, my appreciation, is tinctured, I'm afraid, by my ignorance.  That said, the film is reasonably accessible (more so than Nanpakal) and, in fact, its form and several crucial episodes mimic scenes in Scorsese's Goodfellas and Mean Streets.  If the picture is interpreted in light of its American models, viewers, I think, will have a useful perspective from which to view the movie.  

Angamaly is a city in Kerala in Southwestern India.  It's a Christian settlement with a vibrant Syria-Malakbar Catholic community; this religion seems to be similar to the Roman Catholic traditions shown in Mean Streets and, indeed, religious festivals play an important role in the film; the picture's climax reprises the scenes involving the Feast of San Gennaro in Mean Streets.  The town is an important character in the movie and shown in lightning fast montages that feature exotic religious processions, huge crowds of people, and spectacular close-ups of various stews and curries that characterize the local cuisine.  Apparently, the people in Angamaly are carnivorous in the extreme and everyone is always scarfing down huge amounts of chicken, beef, and pork.  In fact, raising, butchering, and eating swine, is a principal theme in the movie -- I don't know of any picture involving more close-ups of pigs and pork.  At one point, one of the characters, aspiring to the pinnacle of pleasure in Angamaly says: "We just want to chill happy, eat some pork, and have some drinks.  

The film's structure involves an elaborate flashback that comprises 8/10ths of the 132 minute movie.  Beginning in 2014, the picture cuts back to events beginning in 2001 and comprises, more or less, the autobiography of the movie's main character, Pepe.  Pepe, named after Joseph, Jesus' human father, narrates the movie and he shows some of the wit, amorality, and insouciance of Henry Hill in Goodfellas.  The picture begins with "team members" (gangsters) killing time among buses that they apparently control -- one of the gangsters is eating python, a creature stolen from High School biology class room; these people seem to be willing to eat just about anything.  (The teacher confronts the gangster and slaps his face, an act of courage that apparently impresses the thug because he doesn't retaliate.)  A homosexual who operates a ladies' clothing store complains that rival gangsters are extorting him -- like most everyone in the picture, the little queer guy is very fierce.  The bus-gangster go downtown to beat up their rivals, some punks lead by two hirsute crooks, Rajan and Rani.  A religious festival is underway and the crowded streets are full of percussion bands, people carrying crosses, and, even, some folks dressed up as centurions, disciples, men crossdressing to play Mary and Mary Magdalene, and, of course, Jesus himself.  Jesus with the centurions, "women", and disciples are all getting drunk in a local tavern when the bus gangsters appear, planning to administer a beating to Rajan, Rani, and their team.  But, suddenly, Jesus and his followers attack Rajan and Rani and their gang and a wild fracas ensues.  (The movie involves many gang fights that don't seem particularly lethal until someone accidentally gets killed -- this is probably a realistic depiction of this sort of violence).  As Jesus punches one of his enemies, the movie flashbacks to Pepi (who is dressed as Jesus for the festival) singing as a choirboy in the local Catholic Church (it's the spectacular basilica of St. George in the center of Angamaly).  The film, then, proceeds in a roughly chronological narrative that depicts Pepi's childhood, his early admiration of the local "teams", and his development as a gangster himself.  The "teams" of gangsters are literally soccer teams but they run all sorts of illicit activities, operating in the local slaughter business as well, and, not only do they administer beatings, and occasionally murder people, they also mediate disputes.  Pepi and his five friends are affiliated with one of the local gangsters, a man named Babuju.  In a gang fight, Rajan and Rani with their hoodlums kill Babuju and go to prison for a few years.  Pepi falls in love with a girl that he knows from Church but the relationship ends and she "goes to Singapore to marry some guy."  (One of the motifs in the film is that the local kids can't make a living in Kerala and are always emigrating to Australia or Europe.  Pepi's second girlfriend is studying in Germany.  Pepi is encouraged to emigrate to Germany where reportedly you can get a college degree in "butchering pigs.")  For a while, Pepi runs a cable TV business, but, when Rajan and Rani, whom he hates, return from prison, he and his friends, nonetheless, agree to work for them in the swine industry.  They have some concrete pens where they raise pigs, slaughter them, and retail the meat through R & R's enterprises.  Pepi is ambitious and he decides to eliminate the middleman, surreptitiously going into the pork business for himself.  Rajan and Rani are enraged and they attack Pepi's food booth with home-made hand grenades and blow it up.  Pepi and his gang pay a local reprobate, the fat Kinjooty, to teach them how to make grenades and they acquire three bombs.  When Rajan and Rani attack Pepi's hog farm, another big battle ensues.  In the course of the fighting, Pepi and his thugs pursue R & R's gang through the jungle.  Pepi throws a grenade as one of the enemy crooks is scaling a wall; unfortunately, the gangster loses his grip and falls right into the explosion.  He's killed and the rest of the movie involves Pepi's efforts to avoid reprisals for the accidental killing.  (The problem is the implacable R & R; the local cops are all cheerfully corrupt -- they torture the gangsters apparently for fun but always let them go.)  The services of shady lawyer are engaged and Thomas ("Shots" as in shotglass drinks) Chetta, an older mobster, acts as a go-between.  (Thomas "Shots" was earlier one of Babaju's thugs and he runs a tavern that features Arrack booze and, of course, pork curries.)  After elaborate negotiations, R & R agree to a cash settlement to end the vendetta -- this is financed by Pepi running card games and profiting from gambling.  R & R are devious, however, and once paid, they invest a sizeable share of the proceeds in hiring several assassins to murder Pepi and his crew-members.  This sets up the film's bravura climax, a tour de force involving a thousand extras and shot in one continuous eleven minute sequence.  (The scene is similar but far more elaborate to the famous tracking shot in the Copacabana nightclub in Scorses's Goodfellas.)  The assassins hunt Pepi and his buddies through a fantastically colorful street festival; Pepi and his buddies don't know they are about to be attacked and they get very drunk.  (This scene takes place on the evening after the fight in the barroom in which Pepi dressed as Jesus beats up some of R & R's thugs.)  There's a big knife-fight and R & R get pushed into fireworks which explode in a tower of flame and white smoke over their writhing bodies.  Pepi has been married to a childhood sweetheart, Lichi, who works in Dubai.  In the film's impressive last scene, we see him watching a video on his phone, these shots intercut with images of tiny, naked pigs being born; the camera tracks back and we see that he's in an aerial crane perched about 500 feet above Dubai; the camera slowly retreats along the crane's huge hoist drifting upward over the vast city all hazy with blowing dust and heat.  

The movie is vastly more complex than my summary and contains many very funny sequences.  One of the gangster is very volatile, like Joe Pesci (for instance in Raging Bull) and there's a big fight over someone being served the last plate of rabbit curry.  A dead gangster has to be buried; his mistress wails exorbitantly over his casket while his rather indifferent wife and daughter look on.  But the casket is too narrow and the dead man's arms protrude and they can't get the box into the wall-niche where it is supposed to repose.  After every try, the mourners stop wailing and weeping as if on cue while the undertaker tries to figure out how to get the body into the narrow cubbyhole.  Finally, R & R  intervene simply breaking the body's arms and folding them up in the box to the horror of all the mourners.  There are very lively montages -- for instance, everyone in Angamaly is apparently called "Marty" and we get a series of shots of various "Marty's" introducing themselves to the camera.  Feasts of curry and pork goulash are lavishly detailed.  Pepi's mother is like an Italian mamma; she's a tyrant in the kitchen and slaps everyone who gets in her way.  As is the case with Indian movies in general, there are several impressive musical interludes and some of the gang violence is scored to these musical tunes.  (There's a great musical number with the lyrics "Good times have come / the famine of money is over", this played to illustrate shots of cash changing hands.)  The film is edited into very quick, digressive montage sequences and, in general, the cutting is very fast.  However, there are freeze frames and slow motion sequences as well.  And, of course, the climactic fight during the religious festival is shot in one continuous take.  There's some Goodfellas-style advice -- in a gang fight, always punch the guy next to the person with whom you are speaking.  This will result in a chaotic melee with everyone piling onto everyone else.  People engage in casual criminal conduct -- the kids steal tools from a neighbor which they then sell back to him.  Cops cheerfully threaten to torture bad guys with meat-hooks.  It's tremendously hot all the time and the tough guys wear skirts around their loins which they are continuously hitching up or retying around their waists.  And, of course, in every scene someone is eating.  When a girl orders catering for her wedding, she apparently has some Hindu of Muslim friends and asks for a vegetarian dish -- the caterer is amazed but says he can cut up some potatoes and cook this is a beef or pork curry.  On first viewing, I found the film very hard to follow.  However, on a second viewing, everything falls into place and I would expect that further study would reveal many more interesting details that I missed when during earlier screenings.  You can watch this movie on Netflix and I highly recommend it.