#364
March 16, 2025
In Hymn to a Tired Man (1968), Zensaku is a 50-something schlub with a tired face and a hearing aid, working a dreary office job and coming home to be nagged by his wife. He’s so ordinary you’re tempted to laugh, but it’s only a comedy through the first few scenes.
Soon, twisted fate brings two people from Zensaku’s past into his present — first, the woman he truly loved before marrying his wife, and then, the former military officer who beat him so fiercely it caused Zensaku’s deafness.
All through the film, there are small moments of elegant intelligence not often seen in movies. Most moving for me, though not particularly important to the plot, was when Zensaku’s son, applying to join the present-day Japanese military, spouts near-anarchist thoughts.
Like the protagonist in The Human Condition, Zensaku’s defining characteristic is that he tries to do the right thing, and the question here is whether doing the right thing all through one’s life is itself the right thing to do.
This is a Japanese drama I’d never heard of, by Masaki Kobayashi, and I know it’s ‘American’ of me, but I can’t hear Kobayashi without thinking Maru. This Kobayashi is a win-win situation, though — he made the terrific Harakiri and The Human Condition, and I’m wondering, are all his movies as terrific as the three I’ve seen?
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Hyper-Reality (2016) is a compilation of everything I hate about modern videos — horrid pinball-esque music, beepity-beep video games, cell texting, pop-up ads, flashing lights, companies’ logos everywhere, and ceaselessly banal special effects. I usually don’t do things I hate, and knew within seconds that I’d hate this, but it’s only six minutes so I sacrificed that time, hoping for at least the fun of writing a scathing review.
But damn it, after that loud beginning, it’s actually an interesting 21st-century nightmare, satirizing the endless advertising and augmented reality most people live their lives inside.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
In The Hypnotic Eye (1960), beautiful women keep inexplicably hallucinating and mutilating themselves. One lights her hair afire and burns. One swallows lye. It’s happened to eleven women so far, but they’re doing it to themselves. Or are they?
An extremely stupid detective wants to figure out what’s going on, though the answer is obvious, thanks to the movie’s title and several looong scenes showing stage performances by Desmond the Hypnotist. The detective’s girlfriend connects these glowing neon dots, but when she explains it to the detective he’s completely dismissive. The detective is so dumb, I was hoping it would turn out he’d been in on it all along, but the movie’s not that clever.
It is kooky and campy enough to recommend as a late-1950s curio, though. The guy playing Desmond is a hoot, and there’s even a very bad beat poetry reading.
“Keep your eyes on my fingers, all of you!”
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
… and out of alphabetical order …
It Comes at Night (2017) takes place after the apocalypse, so — six months from now.
Everyone in the city is dead, but a few folks have escaped to the woods, where they’re healthy but hungry. Paul lives with his wife and teenage son in an otherwise abandoned house. A guy from the woods, Will, breaks in, but has a plausible excuse — he thought Paul’s place was abandoned, since all the windows were boarded up.
Circumstances require Paul and Will, and eventually their families, to work together against everything and everyone else in what’s left of the world, but it’s uncertain whether the new guy is trustworthy, so there’s ample tension.
No electricity, though, and as promised, lots of It Comes at Night happens at night. These scenes are simply too dark — it’s difficult to know who’s who, who’s talking, and what’s happening. If keeping me blinded was an artistic choice, I overruled it and simply cranked up the brightness, which is what I recommend.
The drama builds, and the film becomes something more than just another glimpse of humanity’s wretched nature, and future. These two families need each other, need to become friends in a savage world — a world exactly like ours, only with fewer people — but can they work their way through so much fear and mistrust?
Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Dunno who the heck he is, but I want to see more of his work… so turn up the lights, please.
Verdict: YES.
3/16/2025
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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