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| Jussi Vatanen and Alma Pöysti in Fallen Leaves |
Anna Hints' Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a documentary, of sorts, about Estonian women bonding during a sauna retreat. The women swap stories from their lives with an emphasis on body image and society's expectations of women. The film is a little too distended for a feature, but the images, which both celebrate and demystify the female form, are gorgeous. I've never believed objectivity is a requirement for good documentary work, so Ms. Hints calculated approach did not rankle me. The film functions as an incantation to evoke the power of sauna as a purifying ritual.
Yeon Sang-ho's Seoul Station is the animated prequel to Yeon's zombie classic Train to Busan, both films were released in 2016. The animation is so-so, the zombies as rendered as scarily as a Scooby-Doo villain. However, this is not fatal to a project in which the zombies are not the personifications of evil, but humans are instead. Seoul Station's plot is never predictable and the pacing is expert. Recommended to all zombie film aficionados. Currently streaming on Tubi.
Michael Mann's Ferrari is a handsome, yet curiously unengaging film. The racing scenes are terrific, but the domestic scenes, detailing the the love triangle between Enzo Ferrari, his wife and his mistress, are torpid rather than operatic. Patrick Dempsey gives the best performance.
I've been foraging through a slew of recent B Horror films and the best of the batch was John Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser's Hellbender. A home schooled, vegetarian adolescent finds out her mother is not keeping her isolated because of a supposed auto-immune disease, but because she is some kind of combination of witch and alpha predator. Once the gal gets a taste for flesh and blood, her needs become insatiable. The film is a crude parable of sexual awakening in which the child becomes mother to the woman. The film has little plot and gives away its secrets too early, but it is an impressive technical achievement for its level of filmmaking.
Ján Kadár's The Other Side of Evil, from 1978, is a respectable TV movie starring Alan Arkin. Arkin plays a troubled man voluntarily committed to a Montana Institution for the Criminally Insane. The film is a cut-rate ...Cuckoo's Nest, but it is all the better for its limited ambitions. Whereas Cuckoo's Nest onscreen was turned into a high falutin allegory, with Nurse Ratched as Big Sister or sumthin', The Other Side of Evil is a modest exposé about institutional corruption. While Kádár's socialist realism is not my cup of slivovitz, it is ideally suited to the material. Arkin is very good and there are fine contributions from Morgan Woodward, Roger E. Mosely, Leonard Stone, and Tony Karloff. Currently streaming on Tubi.
Ken Russell's Billion Dollar Brain, from 1967, is the third Len Deighton adaptation that Harry Saltzman produced in the 1960s following The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. In all three films, Michael Caine plays British secret agent Harry Palmer who Deighton left unnamed in his novels. Billion Dollar Brain is a feeble film, unable to find a consistent tone. It varies from being a straight espionage caper to a mod send-up of the Bond films. Russell's direction fluctuates from leaden, in the expository sequences, to hysteric, especially the Texas square dance party shot to resemble a Nazi rally. Caine, Karl Malden, and Oscar Homolka try their best, but only Ed Begley Sr's performance matches the cartoonish flair of the visuals. This film contains the final performance of Françoise Dorléac, wasted in a role that is pure window dressing.
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