This opens with Dick Powell wearing a suit and tie and singing a song to the camera, but Powell’s presence in anything diminishes my interest, especially when he’s doing light comedy and singing songs.

Dick Powell was just another boring white dude with minimal talent. I
almost typed that he was the Pauley Shore of his time, but Mr Shore has occasionally made me laugh, and Powell never has. He’s simply not funny, and sings no better than my flatmate Dean, who often annoys me by warbling Sinatra standards while cooking.

Never normal for a minute, this starts with a monster being forked in a bowl of soup, then eating the eater’s uvula. It’s just the first moment of strangeness, unrelated to the rest of the story.

Mostly the movie is about a family of abnormals running a bed & breakfast in the countryside, where their first guest suicides. The publicity would be bad for business, so of course they bury the corpse instead of reporting it, but their second guest is a sumo wrestler who dies in flagrante delicto with an underage girl, which would also be bad for business … and soon the woods out back are crowded with corpses.

The Happiness of the Katakuris features lots of Claymation moments, scenes of dancing and karaoke, Queen Elizabeth’s illegitimate son, allusions to The Sound of Music, and laughs and zombies and general nuttiness. What’s perhaps oddest is that the film builds some genuine emotional resonance from all this.

This has gotta be one of the kookiest big-budget flicks ever.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ Happy Endings (2006)

A woman whose face is obscured in the sunlight drops cards to the ground, in the style of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, but with no music. There may be a subtle message in this very short short (less than a minute), in which the cards spell out, “There are no happy endings.

“Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ The Happy Prince (1974; Canada)
Streaming free at YouTube

From a story by Oscar Wilde, comes this pompous, snooty half-hour object lesson about charity for the poor. It’s old-style realistic animation, narrated by a Brit so starched you can see his tuxedo without even seeing it, and with music provided by The Ambrosian Boys Choir, singing, “Where is the justice in poverty?”

Though I’ve never read the source material, Mr Wilde has my respect from other works, so for this Happy Prince I’ll blame what must’ve been a committee of well-funded do-gooders.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦ Happy Together (1997; China)
Streaming free at Kanopy, with your library card

Hong Kong superstars Leslie Cheung (Farewell My Concubine) and Tony Leung (Hard Boiled) co-star as Ho and Lai, mismatched lovers who can’t go their separate ways.

Ho is a heavy drinker, big on insults and sleeping around, which he flaunts in front of Lai, who’s his opposite, a quiet schmoe, but not movie-stereotypical weak and soft. These two men fall in and out of love, in again, out again, loving but not able to stand each other. They move from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, hoping for a “fresh start” for their relationship, which you know never works out, but that isn’t even a spoiler.

Despite the title, for most of the film these two are unhappy together, but director Kar-Wai Wong does everything up artistically. And unlike any American film with hetero stars playing gay, there’s never a wink to the audience — it’s all played straight, so to speak.

Is the movie fun? No, but it’s good.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦  Harakiri (1962; Japan)
a/k/a Seppuku
Streaming free at Internet Archive

“Swordsmanship untested in battle is like the art of swimming mastered on dry land.”

This is a wow movie, a flick so dynamite, I immediately watched it a second time, and then came back for thirds a week later.

In 17th century Japan, Hanshiro is an out-of-work samurai. Along with 12,000 other men, he lost his job when his boss was exiled, and ever since, he’s barely made do with odd jobs and such. Trouble is, he’s a samurai, you know? He wants the sword, the honor of that line of work, and yet, “Try as I might, we live in times of peace.”

After eleven years of unsuccessfully looking for samurai work, he’s ready to give up and kill himself. Harakiri in Japan, especially among samurai, is a very stiffly ritualized matter, so Hanshiro visits the House of Iyi, where he asks permission to use the property for his suicide ceremony. The lord of the house rolls his eyes when the request is relayed, because another ronin (masterless samurai) had recently made the same request, with very much the same sob story.

The several samurai of the house decide Hanshiro is bluffing, that he’s hoping for a job or a handout, and not serious about killing himself. And so begins about a dozen layers of honor and intrigue, tension ratcheted so high it’s a heartstopper just watching one of these dudes walk down a hallway.

“How rare it is these days to find men with such a great sense of honor. I would like to add this man to the ranks of our retainers. But when a man declares that he wishes to tear his belly open, it can only come from a most profound resolve. I am sure it would be no use trying to dissuade him. Grant him his final wish.”

Old Japan, man — everyone’s so serious. Samurais never tell fart jokes.

I’m not Japanese, and know dang near nothing about samurai culture except what I’ve seen in the movies, which means, I know nothing. But I think this movie is a sword-sharp criticism of the whole worship-of-honor thing, while scrupulously adhering to all the honorable rules.

The film’s structure involves numerous flashbacks, but the story never even briefly loses its footing. It’s wide-screen black-and-white, exquisitely scripted, filmed, performed, scored, and restored 50+ years later. Sometimes all the honor on screen is so intense you have to laugh, and probably more than half the movie is just one guy talking. Most of the action is in your head, but cripes it’s thrilling in there.

I have zero criticisms. This is a completely perfect film.

Verdict: BIG YES.

An American action movie wouldn’t open with its star playing a clarinet, and let him play nearly the entire song. It perfectly sets the mood, though, and the song becomes the movie’s theme, played often on the soundtrack.

Hard Boiled is a classic Hong Kong cops-and-gangsters movie, made by John Woo, with all the Woo flourishes — the kinetic camerawork, the macho melodramatic shots of the stars, etc. It has tens of thousands of gunshots, countless exploding squib packs, gun battles choreographed more precisely than a dance by Gene Kelly, hundreds of people dying in slow motion, guys sliding on the floor and flying through the air, all while firing their guns, and of course Chow Yun-Fat’s famous slide down the banister while firing guns in each hand, each with more bullets than any gun can hold.

Woo is really the star here, as much or more than Yun-Fat, who plays police inspector ‘Tequila’ Yuen. Tequila is the reincarnation of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry or Steve McQueen as Bullitt, another tough guy cop who doesn’t play by the rules. He’s a stock character that I hate, and this movie glorifies the police, but I gotta grudgingly admit that it makes for fun at the movies. Tony Leung plays the madman bad guy, and he’s fun too.

Hard Boiled is festival of death and killing, and it’s beautiful, exciting, etc, but as a proponent of gun control I’m not enthusiastic about it. Fistfights, judo fights, sword fights, laser and light-sabre fights, even car chases in the movies can be interesting as heck. Gunfights too, within limits, but there are no limits here, and it becomes a bit much.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

• In the silents no one can hear you scream: Science fiction from the days when spaceships didn’t make any noise

• The myth of Caligula

• Talking to Hitler’s lost tribe

8/12/2024

• • • Coming attractions • • •
Hard Candy (2005)
Hard Contract (1969)
Hardcore (1978)
Hard Core Logo (1996)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
… plus schlock, shorts, and surprises