Grab Bag: Alice, The Fury, Hissatsu!, Gift Shop

Hi, folks! I took a week or so off, but now I'm back. Today I'm going to do something a little different. I know this is highly unorthodox, but I'm getting tired of being way behind, so today I'm going to post brief mini reviews for a few movies. I won't be going as "in depth" as I normally do (which isn't very in the first place). Just a paragraph or two per movie. OK, here goes!

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore by Martin Scorsese, 1974

I feel kind of bad not devoting a whole review for this, but ugh, I'm so bogged down. By coincidence, I watched this on the day before Mother's Day, which was totally appropriate. It stars Ellen Burstyn as Alice, a wife and mother living a suffocating existence, who is given a chance to start a new life with her son in a new town. After his breakthrough with Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese proves himself a truly versatile director, making a movie that's both romantic and brutally honest at the same time.

The performances are aces, especially Ellen Burstyn in the title role. Even to this day, it's not often that so much respect is given in movies to women over 30. Harvey Keitel manages to first charm and then terrify in his small part. Also, Alfred Lutter is utterly believable as Alice's obnoxious kid. He might have a smart mouth on him, but I think he's going to turn out OK, because he totally listens to T. Rex and Mott the Hoople.

The Fury by Brian De Palma, 1978

As a follow-up to his massive hit Carrie, Brian De Palma made another thriller about teenage psychics. Kirk Douglas stars as a government agent whose psychic son is kidnapped by a dirty fellow agent looking to turn him into a living weapon. Douglas finds and enlists the help of an unstable psychic girl (Amy Irving) to rescue his son.

This movie was a lot of fun, doubling as both a horror movie and a paranoid conspiracy thriller. It was pretty cool seeing a 60-plus Kirk Douglas still kicking ass in chase sequences and stuff. John Cassavetes plays the villain, and this was the first movie I'd ever seen him in, but it won't be the last. Also, the score by John Williams is fantastic, maybe one of his best non-Spielberg/Lucas scores. I used to think I didn't like Brian de Palma, based on the small number of his movies I'd seen, but now that I've seen some more, I understand what his fans see in him. At least in his earlier films. I still just don't like The Untouchables, guys. Sorry. Maybe I'll revisit it someday.

Hissatsu! (Sure Death!) by Masahisa Sadanaga, 1984

This is the first samurai movie I've ever seen from the 80's, and it was pretty crazy. I hear it's part of a popular series, but I haven't learned much about the sequels. It follows a group of assassins who pose as local merchants, who have to fend off another group of killers trying to take them out by killing them first. It was enjoyable and quite silly. Everybody had killing techniques that fit the jobs they work in their civilian identities. The score is weird too, sometimes it sounds almost like an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western score, other times, it's straight-up funky, and other times it almost sounds like 70's Sesame Street music or something. I enjoyed it, but I think I enjoy every samurai movie. It's nowhere near the same class as the ones of the 50's and 60's, and it doesn't have the crazy stylized hyperviolence of the 70's ones.

Exit Through the Gift Shop by Banksy, 2010

A fascinating, funny documentary on the worldwide explosion of the Street Art movement. It follows Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French-American vintage clothing store owner, his growing obsession with the guerrilla artists leaving clever and often thought-provoking tags on the sides of buildings and elsewhere, and his eventual rise to fame as a street artist himself, Mr. Brainwash. Much of the story focuses on Shepherd Ferry and the anonymous Banksy, two of the artists at the forefront of the movement. Much speculation has gone into how much of this documentary is true and how much is a hoax or a prank. It's legitimately difficult to tell where the line is drawn between reality and comedy, or if there even is one. Captivating and entertaining stuff.

-----------------------------------------------

Well, I think four reviews is enough for now. I'll probably post another group of reviews tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed the change in format!

The Grifters

Making a good Con Man movie at this point is no easy task. It's always fun to watch con artists pull off a job, but the genre itself is riddled with cliches. I get so tired of when you find out that the con man hero was actually being conned the whole time, by his partner or mark. That was a funny and original twist thirty years ago in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but a tired old gag by the time it turned up ten years ago in Matchstick Men.

The Grifters is, thankfully, different from the typical con man movie. In fact, it's not like any I've ever seen. It is less interested in the act of deception and more interested in getting inside the characters and exploring the reasons why they make a living out of deceiving. Produced in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, and directed by Stephen Frears, The Grifters is a dark and gritty look at what makes the con artist tick.

John Cusack stars as Roy, a young grifter who focuses only on the small game. He learned from his mentor never to pull a long con, never to work with partners, and never to get caught. Unfortunately, he's maybe not as good as his mentor. At the start of the movie, he gets caught by a bartender he attempts to rip off and takes a baseball bat to the gut, resulting in his hospitalization for internal bleeding.

This brings his mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), out of the woodwork. She works at a horse racing track for a dirty bookie, betting on horses in order to mess up the odds. Lilly had Roy when she was only 14, and never has fully forgiven him for ruining her life. The feeling is mutual. Roy has issues with her methods of parenting as well.

Roy's girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), is also in the game. Though in her glory days, she worked long cons with the big guys, she now also works small time, largely relying on sex to get the job done. There is an instant dislike between Myra and Lilly upon meeting.

What follows is a story of deception and betrayal, as the three characters demonstrate just how far they will go to get what they want. I loved that there wasn't a "mark" or a con that they all team up to pull on somebody. It was all about the three of them.

In the case of Cusack, he's not willing to go quite as far as the women. He doesn't really have what it takes to be in the game, and that's what makes him likeable, and maybe is why his performance is not as well regarded as Bening's and Huston's, who both got Oscar nominations. He really is just as good as they are, though. This was made not long after Say Anything... with Cusack hungry for the big leagues and ready for more grown-up roles.

As said before, Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston are fantastic as well. They take each of their characters to really dark places. Moreso than with Cusack's character, who really just wants to be loved by his mother, you see through them the kind of damaged person one must be to make a life out of lying.

Stephen Frears is an extremely talented director who has made some great movies in a wide range of different genres. He is perhaps best known, in addition to The Grifters, for directing another John Cusack classic, High Fidelity. These two work together excellently. I'd go so far as to say Frears is the best Cusack director there is. They should make another movie together, it's well past time for that.

I laid off talking about the actual plot of The Grifters, because there are some twists and turns and it actually took me by surprise. The story did not play out remotely how I expected it to, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It's rare and refreshing to see a Con Man movie that doesn't fall back on the usual devices of the genre.

Hugo

I'm not sure if a lot of fans out there were clamoring for a Martin Scorsese kids movie, but I know I was. About a decade ago, waaaay back when I was in college, there was an internet rumor that Scorsese was interested in directing the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This was years before the Tim Burton debacle that eventually happened. I just really like it when great directors known for more adult subject matter make movies for children, because they make them with the same degree of sophistication that they give any of their films.

Hugo is not only a wonderful, magical children's adventure set in 1920's Paris, it's also a loving ode to the dawn of cinema and the ability of movies to transport you into your dreams. Figuratively speaking, of course, we're not talking a Last Action Hero golden ticket scenario. It stars young Asa Butterfield in the title role, Hugo Cabret an orphaned son of a clockmaker who lives inside the walls of the train station in Paris, keeping the clocks running, unbeknownst to anyone. In his spare time, Hugo is trying to repair an old automaton that his father found at a museum, stealing parts from an old toymaker with a shop in the station. When Hugo is caught by the toymaker, his whole life is upturned, and he begins a journey, uncovering the toymaker's mysterious past while finding his own purpose in life in the process.

I'm not going to go into what Hugo discovers, and how it ties in with cinema, because that was all part of the magic of the movie. I loved how magical the movie felt, even though there was actually very few truly fantastical elements. Pretty much only the clockwork automaton.

The performances are all around wonderful. Asa Butterfield was great, as was Chloe Grace Moretz as the toymaker's God-daughter. Sacha Baron-Cohen continues to show his versatility and his prowess for physical comedy as the station's orphan hunting inspector. I wouldn't be surprised if Sir Ben Kingsley gets a Supporting Actor nomination for his part as Papa Georges, the toymaker.

I saw Hugo in 3-D, something I don't usually do. I was very curious to see how Scorsese utilized the 3-D technology as a tool. Unsurprisingly, it's among the best 3-D I've seen. But I learned something that I kind of already knew while watching it: As well done as it was, even the best 3-D doesn't look half as good as a 2-D movie. As deep and immersive as the experience was, I feel it would have been even more so in 2-D, without the darkened tint on the glasses and the eyestrain and the blur.

Hugo is based on a novel, called The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I suppose the studio that made the movie shortened the title in a desperate bid to make the title more memorable and hence more marketable. Or maybe they thought people would pronounce Cabret with a T instead of the French way. But in shortening it they drained all the magic and wonder from the title. Hugo gives the viewer no indication what they're going to see. Disney is doing the same thing with net year's John Carter (or JC as they like to shorten it). Hey Disney! The John Carter part isn't what interests us! It's the "OF MARS" part we want. Look at Hugo's opening weekend box office. Shortening the title didn't work.

Ok, enough ranting. Hugo is a movie that any film buff should go and see. Martin Scorsese clearly has put as much love and passion into it as anything he's ever done, if not more in some cases. I'm not sure if all kids would find it too interesting, but if you take the right kid to see it, you might just be setting them on a path to find their own love of cinema.