Quarantine: Days 13, 14 and 15

DAY 13

DOLLS (1987)
Toys are loyal and that's a fact.

Charles Band loves little creatures. The Puppet Master franchise, Ghoulies, Demonic Toys and this Stuart Gordon directed flick. Gordon, Charles and composer Richard Band had a solid run in the mid 80s with Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dolls.

What makes Dolls work is it never overstays it's welcome at a brisk 80 minutes. Great puppet effects with Guy Rolfe stealing every scene he is in.

P.S. I'm taking the two hitch-hikers with me.

B+

RIP Stuart Gordon

CANOA: A SHAMEFUL MEMORY (1976)

Cazals brings a documentary realism to this picture. One that, according to Guillermo Del Toro, changed Mexican cinema in the latter half of the 20th century. This event took place in 1968 in the small village of Canoa in Puebla, Mexico. Five young members of the Autonomous University of Puebla spend the night there on their hike up to La Malinche. The villagers, who were manipulated by a local right wing priest to believe them to be Communist infiltrators, take to lynching the students.

A gut punch of a film.

A+


DAY 14

TAMMY AND THE T- REX (1994)
From Wikipedia:
Stewart Raffill says he was approached by a man who owned theatres in South America and had an animatronic T-Rex which was going to a park in Texas. "The eyes worked. The arms moved. The head moved. He had it for two weeks before it was going to be shipped to Texas and he came to me and said, "We can make a movie with it!" I said "What's the story?" and he said "I don't have a story, but we have to start filming within the month!" and so I wrote the story in a week...

Originally intended as a comedy, the gore effects for the T-Rex kills were cut for the release of it. Thankfully, the gods at Vinegar Syndrome restored the gore back into the film. It's entertaining as hell. If you're down in the dumps with all the horror going on in the world, seek this one out.

B+...maybe even an A-


...nah, B+

DAY 15

THE BIG GUNDOWN (1968)
The Western genre was one I just could not get into. John Wayne and the Monument Valley backdrop. John Ford. The Searchers. I could see and appreciate their value toward directors like Spielberg and Scorsese but could never appreciate the genre on its own merits.

It easn't until I watched the spaghetti western that I took notice. A Fistful of Dollars in particular pulls not just from the John Ford westerns of yesteryear, but takes its source material from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. That movie an adaptation of the Dashiel Hammett novel, Red Harvest. When you take all this into account, you start seeing a feedback loop of inspiration that crosses continents. This isn't dissimilar to the way the British (The Who, Led Zeppelin) took American blues and processed it into their own style. Americans then taking those inspirations and ramping it up with the likes of metal genre in the 70s. You see the ball bounce back and forth.

Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy is the most famous of these westerns. The magnum opus, The Good the Bad and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach respectively. Of those three names, Lee Van Cleef is who we're focusing on today. For he is the star of this Sergio Sollima directed The Big Gundown.

The film concerns a bounty hunter named Jonathan Corbett, played by Van Cleef in what may be his best role, summoned by a railroad tycoon to capture a 12 year old girl's accused rapist. The man in question being Cuchillo. Played by Thomas Milian, a star of several Euro crime films afterward.

What immediately made me gravitate toward this genre was the music. Ennio Morricone quickly became my favorite composer of all time. The Big Gundown is easily in his top 5 scores.

"You'll never catch Cuchillo"

A

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

For the longest time, 2001 was in my top 3 favorite films of all time. It wasn't until last year it slipped out of that spot and out of my top ten completely. The Kubrick movie to replace it being The Shining. Many factors went into that change. The reading of the King novel, seeing how a filmmaker was able to take the source material and change it to suit his own creative vision. The viewing of Room 237 and its take on how The Shining was this larger than life movie that, even through its various interpretations and analyses managed to create another piece of art in that documentary.

Reading Michael Benson's Space Odyssey helped me appreciate Kubrick in a whole new light. His intense curiosity toward any subject. His willingness to collaborate with people who had new ideas. The making of 2001 itself is as interesting as the film. Viewing it immediately after reading the book unlocked so many pathways to reconsidering and reassessing its genius. Right down to the sound design. An aspect Benson rightly acknowledges as not often talked about.

A+