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Mixed Reviews: Guilty Pleasures
From 1970s Euro sleaze to Italian Neorealist classics, it's time to admit some guilty pleasures.
Perhaps the most futile sin of all is envy, and to this I must plead guilty, as I am jealous of the career of journalist Jason Wood, author of Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers in Interview (Wallflower Press, $25.00).
Though I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many fascinating directors, my list doesn’t compare with the roster of moviemakers in this new book. A compilation of 31 interviews (some of them previously published in magazines such as Sight & Sound) with some of international cinema’s most significant directors, the book is most impressive and enlightening when it focuses on moviemakers seldom interviewed in English-language media like Laurent Cantet (Human Resources), Tranh Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) and Carlos Reygadas (Battle in Heaven). The interviews with more established directors like Claire Denis (Beau Travail) and Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) are excellent, too, but these figures have been heavily queried elsewhere.
Some of the discussions are regrettably brief, as if Wood was only given 20 minutes in a hotel room as part of a press onslaught. But the writer manages to triumph even in these quick chats. The strength lies in Wood’s questions; never generic or glib, his inquiries always demonstrate an assured insight into the director’s work, and the moviemakers respond with the appropriate intelligence (and gratitude that the journalist actually did his homework). Talking Movies could have easily been a cursory collection of existing pieces, but instead it has the cohesion of an original book.
If I confess to envying Wood’s career, I must also confess to coveting Robert Mitchum as, well, a man. Perhaps the ultimate icon of cool American masculinity (the existence of Clint Eastwood being my only reason for qualifying the statement), Mitchum is often mistakenly regarded as a lazily laconic screen presence more than an actor, and that’s wildly inaccurate. John Huston once cited him as an exceptional actor who could play anything if he desired, and Mitchum himself contributed to minimizing his own skill at the craft. Warner Bros. recently released a six-DVD set, Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection ($59.98), that allows one to enjoy some of this underrated performer’s work. I would have liked to have written “best work,” but this isn’t the case. While Mitchum is always exceptional, the films in which he appeared often weren’t. His best work—Out of the Past, Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter—is available elsewhere, so we wind up with a random grab bag of RKO, MGM and Warner Bros. leftovers here. Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952) is a solid film noir; Home from the Hill (1960) is an overlong but undervalued Vincente Minnelli drama; Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) is a meandering but affecting Australia-set family drama; and I have a soft spot for Sydney Pollack’s Japanese action film The Yakuza (1974), too. But I think most viewers could live without the remaining two entries: The uneven noir Macao (1952) and the clumsy western The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (1969). Providing any sort of overview of Mitchum’s career is a hopeless undertaking, and in a way that makes this collection all the more remarkable in that Mitchum is never less than riveting—no matter the quality of the films themselves.
I admit that I approached Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand (Stone Bridge Press, $19.95) with considerable trepidation. With an image from Oldboy on its cover and a list of entry-level Asian genre films on the directory of reviewed titles (Battle Royale, The Ring, A Tale of Two Sisters, etc.), I feared the publication would do little more than rehash fanboy Internet hyperbole in print form. But author Patrick Galloway transcends this by bringing a level of keen insight to accompany his equally infectious enthusiasm for these films. His book emerges as an entertaining read for longtime devotees of Asian genre cinema and an outstanding primer for newcomers. Galloway doesn’t break much new ground, as most of the reviewed films will be familiar to those acquainted with the territory, but he possesses a keen critical eye—not to mention great taste—and that’s enough to make the book a solid endeavor.
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This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
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