CS Film Club II

I have HBO, Disney+, Netflix (stream and disc delivery), Prime, and Tubi. Don't mind renting on Prime either.

I'll post your picks tomorrow.

Sorry for late response!

I'll go with "I Don't Feel At Home in This World Anymore".

For you:

Hillbilly Elegy - Netflix
Layer Cake - Netflix
Babe - HBO
End of Watch - Hulu
Life of Pi - HBO

I was hoping you'd go with Hillbilly Elegy. You, Phantom and Drac would all have much to discuss.

Ad Astra is good, god damn it!

I just started paying for his Patreon too.

Kwaidan
"Hoichi the Earless"

A blind musician named Hoichi is visited by a ghostly samurai, who invites him to tell the Tale of Heike for his masters at their court. Little does Hoichi suspect that the samurai is leading him to a graveyard where he is singing to the spirits of those told in the tale.

Getting adjusted to my new job is taking some time. While I have finished Kwaidan I haven't posted about it, but here I am trying to not leave the story unfinished, lest I end up in trapped in a jar of water (this joke makes more sense if you've seen the movie, I assure you).

The longest of the segments is in many ways the lightest on plot. Mostly the reason it is so long relates to the telling of the Heike story that is central to the premise. There is a prologue devoted to acting it out (there are some memorable visuals during this sequence), while later in the segment Hoichi sings a portion of it again, as we stare at apparitions. This lengthy scene does little except feature the camera sweeping around actors staring at Hoichi in dead silence, but while one could argue that the point of the scene is understood by the viewer ad nauseum by this time, the images are striking and the sequence isn't tiresome.

Of course one would wonder why the segment is called "Hoichi the Earless," especially since the title character is blind. The title is a bit of a spoiler for the climax, which is rather neat, as Hoichi is covered head to toe in a text that renders him invisible to spirits, leading to one last confrontation with the samurai, who latches onto the only thing he can see. Transparency effects are well done during this scene, as it reaches a conclusion that we probably already saw coming.

Was pleased to see Takashi Shimura during this segment, the actor being a Kurosawa mainstay and, of course, Dr. Yamane from the original Godzilla film. I always enjoy seeing him pop up in Japanese cinema. Here he plays a priest that tries to help Hoichi, but also contributes to an oversight that helps result in the title.

While I have already watched it, next up is "In a Cup of Tea." I'll get to that one soon enough.

Kwaidan
"In a Cup of Tea"

The final story of this anthology is an ode to incomplete stories, featuring a Lord who sees the face of a spirit in his cup of tea and drinks it.  Soon he is confronted by the dead seeking retribution.

It's interesting to me that Kwaidan's final story is about not having an ending.  I was curious what kind of note it would end on, and I found this choice not only the best possible one, but one I hadn't considered.  The film ends with a tale unfinished, the idea of the viewer deciding where the tale might lead, and an ambiguous ending of one who is writing the story.  It implies a lot of things simultaneously, such as concepts of "Stories are never finished, only abandoned" and "Death of the Author" while also stimulating the creativity of the audience, perhaps nurturing the inner storyteller within them who might want to blossom it.

Of course those without that might be pissed.  But then again, the movie is three hours long.  It had to end at some point.

If I may say one thing about this final story it's that since it doesn't have a climax, it doesn't resonate.  It's a group of setups that fly out at the viewer then abruptly cut off.  As an individual it's the least compelling narrative because of this, but that being said, it ends the film with the feeling that tales of the spirits will never end, and the it's only rightful that the film has no true ending.  And as it finally finishes, it's with an image that is intriguing and haunting, leaving the audience with much to chew on.

Great movie.  Ten outta ten.  But Sadako and Kayako could kick the asses of all these ghosts.

Glad you liked it. I'd agree that it's really the mood of melancholy and angst that makes the film so compelling.

I'M NOT CHANGING THE DUE DATE!!

Jk, we usually start a new round a week or so after the previous due date anyways so if Drac hits Joe vs. The Volcano on HBO he'll have plenty of time.

City of Lies (2021)
I hadn’t heard many nice things about this movie but did decide to watch it anyway, in part because of my pathological need to see seemingly every project that gets made about the various theories about the deaths of Biggie and Tupac, which I have been mired in to the point where it may make it hard to objectively view anything based in this subject matter. This particular film has had something of a troubled history as its release was delayed in part because of a lawsuit that was filed over star Johnny Depp having assaulted someone on set as part of a (probably drunken) argument. There was, however, a report suggesting that this lawsuit was actually a pretext used to harm the movie because the LAPD didn’t want it released… but I don’t really believe that at all because everything in this movie is very, very, very old news. The movie is based around arguments made by former detective Russell Poole that would be laid out in Randall Sullivan’s book “LAbyrinth.” Sullivan is a character in this movie’s framing story, which depicts him as learning all of this shortly before Poole’s 2015 death, but that’s clearly a fabrication as that aforementioned book was published in 2002, about five years after Biggie Smalls’ death. That “LAbyrinth theory” has been the basis for most media about this subject; it was the basis for Nick Broomfeld’s 2002 documentary “Biggie & Tupac” and a version of the conspiracy theory was also the basis for the recent mini-series “Unsolved.”

In essence the “LAbyrinth” theory is that Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight ordered the killings of both Tupac and Biggie, the former over a contractual dispute and the latter in order to drive suspicion away from himself in that first killing so that the “coastal feud” between the two rappers would take the blame. Also that Knight employed various corrupt LAPD officers to engage in these killings. I’ve always found this conspiracy theory to have a few holes in it and Poole’s account of the investigations to be… rather self-serving. The main issue with the theory is that it’s a little hard to swallow that Knight would try to have Tupac killed while he was in the same car with him, also Occam’s Razor would strongly point towards that murder having been retaliation for the fist fight that Knight and Tupac had engaged in fifteen minutes earlier. It is possible for Knight to have ordered the Biggie shooting without having been involved in the Tupac killing and there does seems to be some evidence of police corruption around the margins but Poole was never really able to do much more than find a bit of smoke that may or may not indicate fire.

I go into depth about this because this movie, in many ways, is looking to do for the “LAbyrinth Theory” what Oliver Stone’s JFK did for the “grassy knoll” and I’m not sure that’s inherently a good thing. There are, however, many reasons why this movie has failed to impress a lot of people who don’t come into it with strong feelings about the theory at its center. For one thing it’s kind of not great optics to take a story about the death of two black icons and center it on a white cop. This was also a complaint about “Unsolved” and is perhaps unavoidable if this is the story you’re trying to tell, but it is off-putting to many and the film certainly didn’t do itself any favors by looking to Johnny Depp to play this guy, firstly because a lot of people have come to dislike Depp as a person but more importantly because Depp is an actor who is quickly running towards Harrison Ford levels of not taking his job seriously and he rarely really brings life to this rather talky movie filled with arcane and hard to follow facts and names. Beyond that director Brad Furman just can’t really inject the film with the same kind of energy and interest you get from something like JFK or to make the umpteenth repetition of this theory a real reason to be presented yet again all these years later.
** out of Five