Dogs Bark

Nice Image - - Mirage (1965) - - 26 October 2012

Recommended.  In the mid-sixties, Alfred Hitchcock was a highly dependable money maker for Universal Studios. The suits wanted more of the same. After Charade made a bundle, writer Peter Stone (Father Goose, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three) was a hot commodity and churned out several great, faux-Hitch scripts for them. Mirage paired Gregory Peck (only three years past To Kill A Mockingbird) with a strong supporting cast (Kevin McCarthy, George Kennedy, Jack Weston) - - Walter Matthaeu at the height of his powers - - in a great little amnesia mystery. I love how Stone slips past just a whisper on the heartlessness of urban culture. The velvety, black and white camerawork (Joe MacDonald, Niagara), hepcat Quincy Jones’s (In the Heat of the Night) soundtrack and the Manhattan location shots complied by helmer Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny) give this film an authentic cool. This mirage doesn’t dissolve with a closer look.

House Odds - - Casa De Los Babys (2003) - - 20 October 2012

Recommended. Casa De Los Babys, John Sayles’s movie about the accidents of birth, is a very talkie movie, considering the pre-verbal title stars. Actually, half the dialogue is in Spanish so maybe it’s a bi-talkie. The story considers six American women languishing in a Mexican city awaiting the approval of their adoption applications. We also have the Mexican characters, who support, to various degrees, this peculiar trade. Sayles seems mildly disapproving, given how unappealing the Americans seem, from Darryl Hannah (Kill Bill) as a SoCal New Ager to Marcia Gay Hardin (Mystic River) as a neurotic yuppie. Only Susan Lynch (From Hell) seems acceptable Mom material. The Mexicans, including the gorgeous Rita Moreno (West Side Story) and the late (and gorgeous) Pedro Armendáriz Jr. (The Legend of Zorro), are much more interesting.  Is being raised by a loving family just a toss of the dice? Seems a rather cynical birth story.

Easy To Refuse - - Outrage [Autoreiji] (2010) - - 1 October 2012

Not recommended. Outrage is a recent, popular film from Japanese Renaissance man Takeshi Kitano (Battle Royale, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi), aka Beat Takeshi. His oeuvre is the Yakuza film and Outrage is billed as The Godfather of the genre. This is a very well made movie, well shot by Katsumi Yanagijima (The Grudge 2) and cut (Kitano and Yoshinori Ohta, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi). And there’s a clever but grim humor to the thing. The killings depicted in Outrage are certainly as carefully staged as a Coppola film but more of the loathsome style than elegiac. A victim is ripped from a moving vehicle and almost decapitated by a tied-off noose. Another bad guy gets ventilated by a dentist’s drill. If this sort of mayhem cocks your hammer, this is your film; however, if you need a little character and story in your slaughterhouse, better go back to the Corleones.