Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Breathless: There Are Lots of Different Ways to Be Great

Wow, everybody, I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is the 300th movie I've reviewed on I Probably Liked It. That's a lot of movies for someone to probably like in only 20 months! I haven't slowed down at all since watching it either. I still have almost 30 movies to review. I'm really wanting to be caught up by the end of this month, but writing takes a lot of time that I don't necessarily have, so we'll see.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, by Lam Nai-Choi, 1991


I've been hearing about this movie since I was in 9th grade. Back in the early, pre-Stewart days of The Daily Show, they always used to show a clip of a guy smashing another man's head with his fists like Ghallagher smashes a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The older geeks who were more in the know than I told me about The Story of Ricky, and thus a legend was born.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, set in a hellish not-too-distant future of 2001, is about a good guy who is imprisoned for killing a crime boss. The prison is just as corrupt as the outside world, as Ricky soon learns when he comes to the defense of a poor old man who is just shy of parole. In doing this, he makes enemies of not only the worst of the prisoners, but also the evil warden and his lackies. Now Ricky must fight his way through these guys and out of the jail that would rather see him dead.

This movie is nuts! I don't know why it took me so long to see it. I guess because it was never sitting directly in front of me, until it popped up on Netflix. The violence is super over-the-top and hilariously fake looking. It's like if Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi made a science fiction kung fu prison drama/comedy. We're in a world where pretty much anything can happen. We see Ricky smash his fists through heads and torsos, and one of his foes tries to choke Ricky with his intestines at one point. Ricky has superpowers and is basically indestructible, unfortunately for these bad guys. You never feel like the odds are overwhelming for the hero, you just watch to see how he's going to eviscerate one boss after another.

I'm guessing my description isn't really selling Riki-Oh. You're probably wondering what's so appealing about it. It's hard to do this movie justice with words. Let me just say that it's weird and funny and culty and great to watch with a group of friends (inebriation optional). Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is off its rocker, and totally awesome for it.

Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960


While I think you could say the Story of Ricky achieves a kind of greatness, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is the real deal. Sure, it doesn't have a scene where the hero shoves a bad guy into a meat grinder, but it has its own non-meat-grinder related merits. There's a reason this film is frequently voted by critics as one of the best ever made.

One of the films that kick started the French New Wave, Breathless is the story of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a guy who steals a car and shoots a cop and now needs money to get out of the way. He goes into the city to find someone to give him a loan. While he's there, he also tracks down Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he's slept with a few times, and wants to come with him. Much of the movie is set in her apartment, as they smoke cigarettes like they're in a French movie and discuss their situation and she tries to determine whether she loves him or not, while the cops are out there tracking him down.

It says something about a movie when it is the source of all the stereotypes of what a certain kind of movie is. Breathless is like that. Every American parody of an "artsy" French film on TV, in cartoons, and in movies, is just doing its own version of Breathless. This is that movie. The philosophical voice-over narration of the hero, the frequent use of jump-cuts. Not only often parodied, but often used for serious. The way Godard used jump-cuts in his editing was a brand new thing at the time, though it's become recognizable and commonplace over the last 50 years.

I had seen Godard's Alphaville before this, and I liked it, but now that I've seen Breathless, Godard seems much easier to get into. It's bold, groundbreaking, and personal and it still feels that way half a century later. This would have been a much better film for me to start off with.

Mon Oncle

Mon Oncle, by Jacques Tati, 1958

The word "delightful" is surely applied to a lot of films, but few embody delight as wholeheartedly as Jacques Tati's gently satirical comedy, Mon Oncle. I think I was probably smiling through the whole film. Winner of the 1958 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Mon Oncle is the story of, well, not so much a story as an episodic progression of events, of Monsieur Hulot, played by Tati himself, his signature character. He lives a relaxed life in an old building in a more traditional part of France. He is worshiped as a hero by his nephew, a little boy whose parents take great pride in their ultra-modern, high tech, comically unwelcoming, house of the future. There's a series of events, and a beginning and end, but that simple premise is pretty much the bulk of the story.

Mon Oncle is basically a silent film. There's dialogue, but it's mostly inconsequential. The narrative is carried by elaborate comedy set pieces and sight gags, commenting on, among other things the coldness and lack of function of modern 1950's design, as compared to the warmth and charming inefficiency of the old world. Monsieur Hulot's sister is obsessed with showing off all the pointless flourishes and gadgets of her home to all who visit, eager to impress them and be the envy of her neighborhood with her spitting fish statue, which she noisily turns on whenever somebody walks to the front gate. Her front yard is a labyrinthine series of stones, the lawn is off limits.

Hulot, on the other hand, fumbles through the modern world, never quite in step with it. This is demonstrated as his meddling sister tries to get him out of her son's life by getting him a job and setting him up with a lady. Tati plays Hulot much in the way Buster Keaton played his characters, with a cryptic expression that we the viewer can apply all sorts of emotions to. Is he annoyed or is he just baffled? Or is he amused? He quietly observes, and never seems to judge, or at least is too polite to do so openly.

The comedy set pieces are truly masterful. These aren't big pratfalls and stunts. Tati's physical comedy is much smaller in scale and more mundane. He sets up a plethora of motifs and recurring jokes and then builds them through repetition and slight variation, and they get funnier and funnier as they progress. The timing of the gags are some of the most intricate I've ever seen, and not just the comedic timing of the actors, but also of the world around them. It's like watching a symphony of comedy.

And speaking of music, the music and sound effects are just as important as the visuals. Tati does some truly incredible stuff with sound. Each location has a theme, and each recurring joke has its own recurring sound effects to go with it.

This is the first of Tati's scant six films I have seen, but I have a feeling I'll be seeking the rest out in the coming months. I think Tati is going to join the ranks of my favorite filmmakers.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies / OSS 117: Lost in Rio

I take back anything disparaging I might have said in my somewhat disappointed review of The Artist. Michel Hazanavicius is a GENIUS. I thought The Artist was fine, but after all the buzz and the hubbub, I walked out of it feeling pretty underwhelmed. But his spy spoof, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, and it's sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio are exactly my kind of movie.

I had known of these movies' existence for years, and had been interested in seeing them, but I had never made the connection that The Artist was directed by and starring the same guys, Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin.

OSS 117 is a spy spoof based on a long running series of French novels and movies that predates even James Bond. The agent in question is Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, who is basically all of the worst qualities of Sean Connery's James Bond pushed to hilarious extremes. He is cocky and arrogant, racist, sexist, and xenophobic, not all that smart, and incredibly lucky.

In the first film, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Bonisseur de La Bath is sent to Cairo to investigate a missing fellow agent. While there he runs afoul of Nazis, Soviets, and Muslim extremists. Really, Muslims in general, after he beats the crap out of the guy who keeps him awake at night by ringing the early morning prayer bell. There are all of the ingredients of a good spy movie, cars, action, violence, betrayal, and girls, including Dujardin's The Artist costar, Berenice Bejo as Larmina.

Cairo, Nest of Spies is set in the late 1950's and Hazanavicius shoots it in the style of films from that time period. The camerawork, production design, and wardrobe are spot on. Of the old Bond movies, it is probably most visually similar to the first two, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.

The sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, follows Bonisseur de La Bath as he teams up with a sexy female Mossad agent in Brazil to hunt Nazi war criminals and recover a microfilm that would be damning to the French government. While there, he encounters vengeful Chinese, a foul-mouthed CIA agent, alligators, and hippies.

Like the previous film, Lost in Rio is also shot in the style of a film from the time period it is set in. This time around, it's set in 1967. One of the funniest running gags in the whole movie involves the extreme overuse of the slick split-screen editing style of such late 60's films as The Thomas Crown Affair.

After watching these movies, I'm convinced that Jean Dujardin is one of the funniest comedy actors in the world. Nobody on earth plays smug and self satisfied as hilariously as he does. He plays that up a bit in The Artist, too. Sometimes he smiles proudly to himself at a one-liner he makes, even when nobody is around to hear it. I also love what a terrible spy he is, completely ignorant of other cultures, politics, and even foreign languages. A joke that runs through both movies is that he doesn't know a word of any foreign languages. He learns to count to five in Arabic in the first one, and nods dumbly as the CIA agent endlessly insults him in English. He doesn't even seem to know what exactly the Nazis did that made them France's enemies. I also loved all the smaller details about his character, such as his disgust at the dust on Larmina's car.

I can't recommend the OSS 117 movies enough. They're smart and goofy at the same time, balancing high brow and low brow comedy pretty perfectly. I laughed a ton during both of them. Not only that, but I think they've improved my opinion of The Artist, too. Seeing it in context as a piece of Hazanavicius' body of work really helped. He was doing for silent movies of the 1920's what he did for spy movies of the 1960's with these, though the OSS 117 movies are considerably sillier. I now eagerly await whatever Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin have up their sleeves for us next.

Alphaville

Hello, everyone! I'm back. I know I haven't written much in the last few weeks. I needed to recharge my reviewing batteries, so I was on a self-imposed hiatus. I wasn't even planning on coming back so soon, but then TotalFilm.com included a link to my page in their weekly Email newsletter. I'm not sure if I was chosen randomly, or if somebody there actually liked what they saw, but this little piece of positive reinforcement gave me some much needed motivation, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Thanks, Total Film!

I've actually been meaning to watch Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film, Alphaville for a few years now. I hadn't seen any of Godard's other films yet, but I've seen a few other French New Wave classics, and the thought of a French New Wave science fiction film noir was too cool to ignore.

Alphaville is the story of Lemmy Caution, played by American actor Eddie Constantine, a spy sent into the titular city undercover as a journalist. His mission is to find and destroy Alpha 60, the malevolent artificial intelligence that controls the thoughts and hearts of all of the city's residents.

Lemmy Caution is the embodiment of the American film noir detective, rumpled trench coat and fedora and all, displaced into a dystopian near future. It's pretty cool that Godard got an actual American to play the role, I can't imagine there were a ton of American actors fluent in French at the time (or now, for that matter).

I found the computer, Alpha 60, to be an interesting character. Cold and logical, it rules the city with a iron (silicon?) thumb. If anybody shows any outward signs of irrationality, AKA emotions of any kind, it calls you to a room, interrogates you, and if it deems you irrational, executes you. I read that Alpha 60 was voiced by a man with one of those tracheotomy rings that smokers who got throat cancer use. It gives it a much more unsettling feeling than most other monotonous computer voices from the 1960's.

The city of Alphaville is pretty much just modern Paris. There's not much in the design that makes it very science fiction, it was mostly very modern for the time. Many of the settings in the film were the newer buildings that were built in Paris, presumably after World War II, which looked quite different, colder, and more futuristic than the city's older buildings, and that is actually enough to give Alphaville the space age feel it needs.

Alphaville may have been the first movie to cross science fiction with film noir. I'm not 100% on this, but if that is the case, then other great films such as Blade Runner and Dark City may owe a debt to Godard's film. It's definitely a must watch for any lover of science fiction and/or French movies of the 60's.

Blood and Roses

Roger Vadim's Barbarella has been one of my favorite films ever since I first saw it a decade or so ago. Even though it's campy and ridiculous, it holds up as an entertaining film, with great visuals, and set in an imaginative, fully realized universe. I don't know why it took me so long to think, "Hey, I wonder if Roger Vadim made any other movies?"

Well, I finally did think that, and after some rudimentary research on Wikipedia, I learned that the answer is, yes. He made a lot of other movies, some to much acclaim. After a little bit more looking, I learned that one of those other movies can be found on Netflix Instant Watch, and it is, of all things, a vampire movie. Awesome!

Blood and Roses (1960, French title: Et Mourir de Plaisir) is based on the classic Gothic story Carmilla, which itself was a predecessor to and influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula. A group of friends are staying at an ancestral home in Italy, celebrating Leopoldo and Georgia's engagement. Carmilla (Annette Vadim, the director's second of MANY wives), in love with Leopoldo, is jealous and depressed, unwilling to go outside for the costume party at the family graveyard.

Drawn hypnotically to an old wedding dress, Carmilla dons it and trance-walks into the crypt of its owner, Mircalla, a vampire who takes over her mind. Her friends don't pay much attention the changes in Carmilla at first, animals are afraid of her, her skin is cold. Every day, she must secret herself off to the place of her burial, in order to survive. At night, she hunts and feeds on innocent girls.

Blood and Roses is one of the coolest vampire movies out there. It has a great story, told with atmospheric and surreal cinematography by Claude Renoir (who also shot Barbarella). And as a bonus, the girls are totally 60's French sexy.

The only problem is that the version on Netflix is dubbed, and I don't know for sure, but it looked to me like the sides of the frames were cropped. I've heard the film was edited for release in America, and this may have been that cut. I would love to see the full French language version of the film.

Carmilla has been adapted more than once before. I read that Dreyer's silent film, Vampyr is somehow based on it, but it bears little similarity to Blood and Roses. There's another one from 1970 produced by Hammer, that I'm probably going to check out in the future. I assume it's going to be more of an exploitation film than Blood and Roses (which also has its share).

I'm going to have to watch more of Roger Vadim's films now, too. I'm happy to see that Barbarella wasn't a fluke, and that he totally had directing chops.

The Artist

I was genuinely surprised by The Artist. You see, going in, I thought I was going to love The Artist, and was surprised to discover that I only liked it. The buzz around it has been so loud, and it's in black and white and old timey, visually rich. I was sure this was going to be my kind of movie.

Director Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist is the story of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star who struggles to continue his career in the face of the onset of the talkie. His fall is contrasted with the rise of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a fresh faced star of the sound pictures that George helped launch.

It was good. I liked it. There are lots of good scenes, like when George spends his fortune funding his own silent epic, when nobody is interested in working with him anymore. What he makes winds up being a pretentious piece complete with a metaphor of him being buried alive with quicksand. It fails, of course.

Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, and the rest of the supporting cast are all great. I especially liked Bejo as Peppy Miller, who goes out of her way to help George get back on his feet, if only he would set aside his pride and let her. James Cromwell is also very good as George's loyal chauffeur and best (human) friend.

And speaking of best friends, everybody loves that dog, am I right? Am I the only one that is so used to seeing trained dogs do these exact things in movies dating back to the silent era, that I'm not particularly impressed? Wasn't that dog in the Thin Man movies pretty much doing the same thing? Some people just automatically love something if a dog thinks it's people.

I guess one reason I didn't love The Artist is that I saw two other movies in 2011 with a similar idea behind them, and I liked both of them better. The Muppets and Hugo were both about former celebrities that got lost in the march of time, coming back to earn the love of a new audience, and I thought they were both more fun, more magical, and less, you know, pretentious.

The Artist is probably going to win Best Picture, and maybe it deserves it. Most of my favorite movies of 2011 weren't even nominated, so what do I know? Heck, why does a nomination even matter? Go see The Artist and judge for yourself, but also watch Attack the Block because that movie ruuuuled.

Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece

Before Spielberg's recent The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn was released, most of us here in America didn't even know Tintin was a "thing". Well, guess what, us? It's been around for a good long time! I remember the cartoon on HBO when I was a kid, even though I didn't really watch it. I started reading the comics a couple years ago, and found that I really enjoyed them. There's a certain timeless purity to them that appeals to me in the same way that, say, Astro Boy does.

Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece was a live-action French take on the characters from 1961. That's right, 50 years ago! That makes this one of the very first comic book movies ever made. All of the characters everybody outside of America knows and loves are here: boy journalist Tintin, his little dog Snowy, indistinguishable bumbling inspectors Thomson and Thompson, lovable drunk Captain Haddock, and deaf inventor Professor Calculus (who is not in the Spielberg film).

The story follows Tintin and Captain Haddock, as Haddock learns an old shipmate of his has died and left him his boat. With the boat are clues to a treasure (there's always a treasure). Tintin, Haddock and Snowy race the bad guys (there's always bad guys) to follow the clues and find the treasure. It's actually an original story, though there are elements lifted from Red Rackham's Treasure, one of the books the new film lifts from. They both really take an idea from that story and put a different twist on it, so one doesn't spoil the other.

In some ways, this movie actually captures the look and feel of the comics better than Spielberg's film. They have real actors dressed as the characters. I kind of preferred the exaggerated features on the CG renditions, but this movie shows that a live action movie could have been done too. Snowy wasn't nearly as cool in this movie, since he was a real dog and therefore limited to what he could be taught to do. The dude playing Tintin looks exactly like he should. I'm not sure if it's the early 60's Technicolor look or what, but the color scheme actually matched Herge's coloring style more than the new movie did. It's brighter and more primary looking.

The production values in Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece are actually pretty good. I think it was a pretty big popcorn movie in France at the time, not just a little B-production. There is some location shooting, I think in Greece. There's some fun little chases and action sequences, but nothing huge, unsurprisingly. Tintin gets in a few fist fights and they're actually pretty cool, seeing him kicking some ass.

I'm sure The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is going to create a few new fans of the character in America. I mean, I'm not expecting it to blow up, but it's definitely getting a bit of exposure. This old movie is probably not worth seeking out unless you already love the world of Tintin. If you did enjoy the movie, and the movie opened your eyes to the comics, then you will probably get a big kick out of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece. There are other Tintin movies out there, too.