Reel Film Buff

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Timecrimes (2007)

I bought a cheap DVD of Timecrimes from a Blockbuster when it was closing several years ago based on a recommendation director Joe Lynch made on G4's Attack of the Show. I never watched it and now have no clue where that copy is.

Then this weekend, the movie theater I work at got the new film Colossal which is from the director of Timecrimes, Nacho Vigalondo. So after getting off work, I decided to go on Shudder and finally check out Timecrimes and if I could go back time, I would've watched this back in middle school when I first heard of it! Holy shit was this movie good! I don't want to get into too much detail because this is such a well-written movie filled with a lot of twists and turns. All I want to say is it's a Spanish thriller about time travel and a bunch of crazy shit happens!

The way this film dealt with time travel reminded me a lot of the film Primer. I've only seen that film once but it's a very smart and, from my memory, complicated film dealing with the intricacies of multiple timelines due to the use of a time machine. Primer is a really good movie and definitely one I need to revisit soon but I remember it being very dry and technical. Timecrimes on the other hand is just as smart and even sports a similar color palette as Primer but is a ton of fun to watch. I highly recommend checking it out and I definitely look forward to seeing Nacho's new film very soon.

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The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [Director’s Cut] (1978)

It's taken me a really long time to see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I rented it on iTunes my senior year of high school and fell asleep trying to watch it on my iPhone one night and the rental expired. Then a couple years ago, when the Criterion catalog was still on Hulu, I planned on going through all of the Cassavetes films they had up in chronological order. I thought Shadows was good. I thought Faces was absolutely amazing. I remember it reminded me a lot of Rohmer's My Night at Maud's for some reason (which is a film I love). Then I watched A Woman Under the Influence, which I remember really liking but I was drinking heavily at the time and don't remember it as well as I'd like to. Definitely need to give it a rewatch. Then I attempted for the second time to watch The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and once again, this time probably due to the alcoholism, fell asleep pretty early in and never ended up seeing it.

Then last week, one of my new favorite podcasts, Pure Cinema Podcast, did an episode pairing classic Noir films with more modern Neo-Noir films. On the episode, they paired The Killing of a Chinese Bookie with Blast of Silence (which I just watched, reviewed, and loved). Not only did they recommend this film that's been on my to-watch list for so long, they also said the much shorter director's cut was the one to see.

So after a very long wait, I finally watched The Killing of a Chinese Bookie on FilmStruck and holy shit, it was so fucking good! My god! I cannot believe it took me this long to finally get around to seeing it! I’d need to rewatch Faces but it may be my favorite Cassavetes film.

The film is about Cosmo Vittelli, a charismatic and sleazy, gambling-addicted strip club owner played perfectly by Ben Gazzara. This honestly may be his best role! Anyways, Cosmo is $23,000 in debt and the only way he can pay back the gangsters he owes the money to is by killing the titular Chinese bookie. Of course it doesn’t go exactly as planned and things go a bit off the rails for Cosmo. The only thing I’ll say other than that everyone should watch this movie because it’s fantastic and tense, is that two of the gangsters are played by Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel and a character actor I always love to see pop up in movies named Timothy Carey.

It’s actually very interesting because just like the Japanese drama After the Storm that I watched yesterday, this film also dealt with some of the negative effects of gambling addiction. The difference though is in that film, the negative effect was missing child support payments while in this film, it was being pressured by gangsters into murdering a random old Chinese man. Which is worse? Who can say, really?

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After the Storm (2016)

Yesterday, I went to the movie theater I work at and saw After the Storm, the new film written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. I hadn't seen any of his previous work, although After Life, Nobody Knows, and Still Walking have been on my to-watch list for quite sometime now. Recognizing him as an acclaimed Japanese filmmaker, I didn't want to miss a chance to see one of his films while it was in it's limited theatrical run (plus it was free because I work there and I do my best to see everything we show).

The film is a drama about a gambling addicted writer turned private detective (he claims he's doing research for a new novel that he's been working on for years now). He's still in love with his ex-wife who he occasionally follows and has trouble paying child support to due to his addiction to gambling. He also wants to spend more time with his son and give his elderly mother the impression that he's doing well. A big theme in the film is how similar he is to his recently deceased father who also had a gambling addiction and the fear that the more time he spends with his son, the more likely some of those negative traits will rub off on him.

The film is realistic and well-written but is also just a little too long. All the performances are believable but I found myself getting bored once I was past the film's halfway point. It's a two-hour long character drama where not a whole lot happens. I’m not at all saying it’s a bad film! In fact, I definitely plan to check out more of Koreeda's work soon. I just didn't know what I was going into and may have not been in the mood for something so slow-paced and dialogue-driven (where all the dialogue is subtitled). I recommend watching After the Storm, just know you're in for a sad Japanese drama about fighting for love and learning to let go.

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Blast of Silence (1961)

Blast of Silence is a fantastic noir drama about a hitman preparing to do a job around Christmastime in New York City. It stars Allen Baron who also wrote and directed it. My big thought after finishing this is why has Allen Baron not directed more films after this phenomenal debut? Not only that, but why has he not acted since? He not only created a really dark and gritty crime drama but also played the lead perfectly. He’s a hitman who is cold and calculated while simultaneously looking for some way out of the life of crime he’s gotten himself into.

The film’s other standout performance is from Larry Tucker as the rat-loving arms dealer Big Ralph. He plays his role so disgustingly, he makes the rats look good. After looking him up, I realized that I probably recognized him from his role as Pagliacci in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. And again, despite his excellent performance here, he really didn’t act much. In fact, it looks like Larry Tucker is actually most known as the writer of Paul Mazursky’s film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

This is definitely an essential noir that is luckily out on Criterion DVD. Martin Scorsese is a big admirer of this film which is no big shock because it’s visuals and narration definitely at times reminded me of Taxi Driver. It’s very surprising to me that Allen Baron never repeated the success of this film but I feel that simultaneously makes this even more important to see as it’s the singular masterwork of a career.

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Iced (1988)

I recently started reading the book Bleeding Skull!: A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey by Dan Budnik and Joseph A. Ziemba (which has sadly gone out-of-print recently) and watching some of the films reviewed in the book that peaked my interest. Iced caught my attention because I remember seeing that it had been screened recently at the Alamo Drafthouse in Richardson as part of their “Video Vortex” series. I knew nothing about it at the time and decided not to go and after watching it tonight, I thoroughly regret that decision. This movie is definitely one of the most entertaining cheaply made slashers I’ve seen. The killings don’t kick into gear until almost an hour into the movie but all the characters are so hilariously cheesey in the most eighties ways possible, you’re never not entertained.

The plot is as simple as it is dumb. A weird guy named Jeff is on a ski-trip with a group of fellow college students. When Jeff gets upset at one of the girls for liking another guy, he goes off and kills himself while skiing out his emotions. Four years later, the whole group of college students is back at a ski lodge near where the tragedy occured and someone starts killing them off. Pretty basic slasher stuff. But when you throw cocaine, a wooden leg, a killer wearing full ski gear, and surprisingly explicit sex scenes shown at very random times, you’re definitely in for a treat! I watched it on YouTube but I really wish I had gone and seen it with a crowd at the Alamo because I’m sure it was a good time seeing this piece of eighties insanity on the big screen.

Iced is definitely my second favorite skiing movie of the eighties right behind the Savage Steve Holland classic, Better Off Dead (and to be honest, it’s actually debatable which of the two films is more insane).