Kwaidan (1964)

Posted on October 5, 2013 at 10:21 am by Jeff Kuykendall

On Friday night Masaki Kobayashi’s classic anthology of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan (Kaidan, 1964), kicked off the month-long series “International Horror Classics” at Madison, Wisconsin’s Cinematheque. It’s hard to pass up the opportunity to see this film projected in lustrous (and, yes, occasionally scratchy) 35mm – such a rarity these days that even the purist Cinematheque is being forced to raise funds for a digital projector and server to accommodate DCP (Digital Cinema Package) screenings, now that studios prefer DCP over shipping actual film prints to revival theaters. On the big screen (or, at least, as big as the Cinematheque provides), Kobayashi’s film immerses the audience in its sweeping brushstrokes of red, orange, purple, blue, and black. Lost in a dark theater and free of distractions, the meticulously-paced, dream-like film is somehow both hypnotic and electric. Not that there weren’t plenty of walkouts (and one audible, persistent snore) from those who couldn’t fall in line with Kwaidan‘s peculiar rhythms, or were intimidated by its 161-minute running time. Few were complaining that this wasn’t the original, 182-minute cut of the film (which only in recent years has been made available to English-speaking audiences via Eureka’s Masters of Cinema U.K. DVD); anyway, I presume this was the only 35mm print the Cinematheque could acquire, marked with a red “Special Jury Prize – Cannes Film Festival 1965” notice at the front.

A warrior rises from the grave in "Kwaidan"'s segment "Hoichi the Earless."

The film is based upon the stories of the Irish author Lafcadio Hearn, who at the age of 40 relocated to Japan and published books of Japanese folklore and culture under the name Koizumi Yakumo. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) is his collection of “kaidan,” or Japanese ghost stories, some of which he translated from old texts, others having been told to him. The film adaptation came from Toho Studios in full color and with an epic running time, dazzling visuals and set design, and a prestige director at the peak of his craft: Masaki Kobayashi had previously directed the three-part, nine-and-a-half-hour-long WWII drama The Human Condition (1959), as well as the samurai film Harakiri (1962), another Cannes Special Jury Prize winner. Kwaidan would present four separate ghost stories, each framed in an historical context and often explicitly referencing the craft of art and storytelling. Staged almost entirely inside a cavernous airplane hangar, decorated and lit to transform itself into a multitude of fantastic environments, the film flaunts its artificiality, drawing connections to kabuki theater, but also casting the audience’s attention toward the art of moviemaking. We’re conscious of when a spotlight suddenly outlines a distraught, lonely man, or lights up a fallen – and possibly haunted – bowl lying upon the floor. We’re made aware of the presence of makeup, which becomes highly stylized whenever unearthly elements are introduced. Frequently the soundtrack is displaced by Tôru Takemitsu’s chilling, jarring score, which combines traditional Japanese music with the blatantly avant-garde. It’s bold of a filmmaker to draw this much attention to himself, and yet, if you open yourself to it, you can easily drawn into the film’s ghostly spell.

Rentaro Mikuni, in his horror, physically transforms in "The Black Hair."

The film’s first segment, “The Black Hair” (“Kurokami”) is the tale of a samurai (Rentarô Mikuni, The Burmese Harp) and his wife (Michiyo Aratama, The Human Condition) living in poverty; at the outset, he abandons her, declaring that “career is important to a man,” and refusing to waste away all his years destitute. He finds his way into wealth, but not happiness, when he marries a vain and vindictive woman (Misako Watanabe, Youth of the Beast) of a wealthy family. Realizing the error of his ways, he returns to his first wife, and finds her just as he left her. Of course, not all is as it seems, as signaled by his wife’s statement “I’ve forgotten my sorrow”; in the morning, her long, lovely black hair hides the face of a dessicated corpse lying beside him. The husband finds himself cursed and disfigured by ugliness (and baldness). The story has some structural similarity to Kenji Mizoguchi’s famous film Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), itself taken from an 18th century anthology of folk tales bearing the same name. What separates “The Black Hair” is the aforementioned theatrical style. When the supernatural finally unfolds, traditional cinematic continuity falls to the wayside. The husband’s face transforms dramatically from one shot to the next. The house decays and crumbles. The score pounds and clangs and screeches. Still, this proves to be the most conventional of the film’s episodes.

Lips in the sky: the sensual world of "The Woman of the Snow."

More interesting is “The Woman of the Snow” (“Yuki-Onna”), starring Tatsuya Nakadai (of The Human Condition and many Kurosawa films) as a woodsman who encounters a wraith of the winter (Keiko Kishi, Rififi in Tokyo) who happens to be eerily beautiful. He catches her killing his friend Jack Frost-style – with her cold breath. She’s about to freeze him to death, too, but changes her mind out of sympathy (and perhaps love-at-first-sight). She makes him promise to never tell what he has seen; if he breaks it, she will come to him and kill him. This familiar ghost-story setup gets a twist which is genuinely haunting, because it involves matters of the heart. If that doesn’t stick with you – and it ought to – then you’ll at least remember the set design. Kobayashi’s set shifts with the seasons, and the backdrop eschews realistic Hollywood matte paintings, opting instead for artwork that’s deliberately surrealistic. Which means that you will be aware that the actors are performing in front of a painted wall, but what a setting to inhabit: eyeballs stare accusingly at the actors during the rage of a winter’s storm; the sun bursts through the clouds in fractured squares; a meet-cute between the woodsman and a traveling girl gains an added layer of sensuality with the streaks of red lips and lipstick in the sky behind them. In one dissolve, Kobayashi even merges the actress’s lips into those red streaks, seeming to transform her corporeal self into a sky-spirit.

Warring clans prepare for a conflict at sea in "Hoichi the Earless."

The film’s strongest – and longest – story, “Hoichi the Earless” (“Miminashi Hôichi no hanashi”), is appealing on many levels: as a sophisticated, macabre variation on a traditional fairy story (as my wife pointed out, you can easily replace “empty cemetery by the shore” with “underground fairy kingdom” to trace the similarity with traditional European folk tales); as a grisly horror tale; and as a visually stunning fusion of disparate cinematic styles. To that latter point, the story begins with another surreal setpiece, as two warring clans – the Genji and the Heike – battle on flimsy wooden boats upon a (stage-bound) sea. After the defeated Heike warriors, along with their infant emperor, decide to commit suicide by drowning, and we flash-forward in time, the style becomes more realistic, the visual palette cooler, laying the framework for another supernatural intrusion into ordinary life. In a rainswept Buddhist temple, the blind Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura, Pleasures of the Flesh) serves the head priest (Takashi Shimura of Ikiru and Throne of Blood) and entertains him by playing the biwa. His music draws the attention of the dead warriors lurking in the sea, and they summon him out to the cliffs, where, night after night, he plays for the infant emperor and the fallen from both clans, singing their favorite song: the one that describes their battle. An extraordinary extended sequence shows the set changing around the blind, unwitting Hoichi while he performs, and first the Heike, then the Genji dead look on with heartrending sadness. When two comic-relief servants of the temple follow Hoichi and discover him playing among dancing spirit-lights, they pull him away and declare his transgression to the priest. The priest tells Hoichi that if he continues to dwell among the dead, he will soon join them permanently; to protect him from the next summoning, they paint his body from head to toe with protective writing and symbols; and at night, he is left alone in the temple to confront the spirit of the soldier who calls for him.

An undefeated warrior (Kanemon Nakamura) encounters a ghostly face "In a Cup of Tea."

The final segment, “In a Cup of Tea” (“Chawan no naka”), is the shortest, and notable in that it connects Kwaidan with the metaphysical storytelling terrain of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), as well as the framed stories of Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” (1971-1974). We meet the author of our stories, who decides to tell an ancient piece of folklore left unfinished by its writer. We’ve been warned there’s no ending to the tale, but, in Kobayashi’s masterstroke, the conclusion we’re given leads the film to (almost literally) swallow itself whole. It’s a clever knot to tie up one of the enduring classics of Japanese cinema – a film that is both overtly theatrical and painfully intimate, absurdly stylized and delicately human. Kwaidan unfolds like a three-hour dream.

Upcoming films in the Cinematheque’s excitingly varied series include Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981), in addition to a benefit screening (on behalf of the UW Cinematheque’s quest for a new digital projector) of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) at Sundance Cinemas in Madison on October 29.

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The ‘Burbs (1989)

Posted on October 3, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The ‘Burbs (1989) was something of a seminal moment in my coming-of-age. Let me explain. I saw the film in the theater, with my family and with a very dim notion as to what it was that I was walking into. Immediately I was enthralled by the plot: suburbanite dad Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks), his obnoxious and nosy friend Art (Rick Ducommun, Groundhog Day), and overequipped Vietnam vet Rumsfield (Bruce Dern) become suspicious that their reclusive new neighbors, the Klopeks, are up to something sinister in their cellar. The scenario is really an excuse for director Joe Dante and writer Dana Olsen (Going Berserk) to pay tribute to horror movies of the 60’s and 70’s, and in doing so fits snug into Dante’s movie-loving filmography. I lived in the suburbs, and my father obsessed over the perfect green lawn, so I related to the setting, even though it was obviously a Universal backlot. This studio suburb seems to exist in the same fictional universe as Dante’s beloved TV series Eerie, Indiana (1991-1992), but it recalls old television, with the out-of-place, dilapidated Klopek residence squatting in the center of the street like the Addams Family or Munsters house confronting the sunny prefab development of Leave it to Beaver. All of this undoubtedly triggers nostalgia in Dante, and it triggered nostalgia in me, too, somewhat by proxy, since I was raised on 50’s and 60’s sitcoms as they were recycled through syndication in the 80’s. Anyway, I was hooked from the start, and loved the movie all the way through. When I was confronted by Roger Ebert’s two-star review (even then, I read him religiously), and other mixed-to-negative reviews, it felt like a punch to the gut. Why do I remember the impact of reading a damn review, all these years later? I can only think that here, when I was twelve-going-on-thirteen, I started to really become aware of critics and the wider landscape of critical opinion; it was a step to learning how to measure my own opinions and where they landed in that new landscape. That – and there’s a scene where Hanks is flipping channels late at night, every channel showing a gory and disturbing horror film. I wasn’t allowed to watch that kind of film; I was stuck with the old masters (1930’s Universal monsters). These brief images of human sacrifice, Texas chainsaws, and Exorcist vomit suggested a whole world to explore just one door over. So I have Joe Dante to thank for that too.

Ray (Tom Hanks) and Art (Rick Ducommun) dare each other to introduce themselves to their new neighbors.

A few years ago I’d revisited Dante’s Innerspace (1987), another film I watched over and over in my adolescence, and was somewhat disappointed – the film didn’t glow as brightly as it did in my memory. Therefore I approached revisiting The ‘Burbs, which I hadn’t seen since the early 90’s, with some apprehension; but watching Ti West’s recent Trailers from Hell entry on the film sent me off to the video store. The nostalgia from watching that trailer was just overpowering. But what if Ebert was right? I’m happy to report that the film was both exactly as I remembered and better, too. It’s aged very nicely, in part because of that studio backlot and Dante’s effort to recreate the enclosed suburban world of TV sitcoms. It doesn’t look much like an 80’s film – that is, until Corey Feldman shows up, doing a Bill & Ted act and bringing a Valley Girl girlfriend along who’s pretty in pink.  Well, there’s no such thing as “timeless.” An extra dimension of enjoyment I received on this viewing was suddenly understanding movie references that went over my head the first time. When “The Doctor” (the wonderful Henry Gibson) first arrives, he emerges from a basement door built into the stairs in the exact same layout as the basement portal in Psycho (1960). I laughed when Feldman asks Hanks if he’s ever seen The Sentinel (1977) – of all the films to explicitly reference in a Hollywood movie! – and appreciated the cameos from Dante company players Robert Picardo and Dick Miller. When I first saw this film, I thought of Dick Miller as that guy from Joe Dante movies; now I call him the guy from Roger Corman’s movies.

Wendy Schaal and Bruce Dern as the Rumsfields.

Another revelation on this viewing: I really miss the pre-Philadelphia Tom Hanks. I watched a lot of Hanks comedies growing up, because my mother and older sister were fans of his cross-dressing sitcom Bosom Buddies (1980-1982); that meant we had to go see Splash (1984), The Man with One Red Shoe (1985), and The Money Pit (1986) as they hit theaters and drive-ins (and then, on the ride home, my mother would apologize for all the sex jokes). I was reminded of just how good Hanks’ comic instincts were. There’s a beautifully stupid moment when Art, holding a human femur that Ray’s dog dug up in the Klopeks’ yard, comes to the conclusion that it’s their missing neighbor Walter. While Jerry Goldsmith’s music blares, Dante zooms in and out on their screaming faces like a Jess Franco film. Most comedies would then cut to the next scene. But Dante has more dialogue left, so he just lets the take continue. Watch Hanks’ face as he comes out of his hysterics and tries to settle back into the somber tone. As he glances about in confusion, he looks like he’s recovering from a concussion; it’s brilliant. It seems like you don’t see this Tom Hanks these days unless he pops up on Saturday Night Live, but I prefer stuff like this to watching him decode DaVinci. His performance in The ‘Burbs is actually pretty layered – he treats his character, who’s spending his vacation by defiantly being a couch potato (I relate), like a sleepwalker, or someone under hypnosis, which provides the perfect counterpoint to Dern and Ducommon’s frenzied energy. His final rant is effective because it’s as if he’s finally woken up and can see just how nutzoid he and his friends are.

Hans Klopek (Courtney Gains) and The Doctor (Henry Gibson).

The entire cast is at the top of their game. Dern is so perfectly cast – and so hysterical in his aggressive poking and prodding of the Klopeks during his (un)welcome-wagon visit – that I’m left to wonder why he’s so seldom cast in comedies (he recently reunited with Dante for 2009’s The Hole, the latest in the director’s many suburban movies). Canadian stand-up comic Ducommun essentially has the Dan Aykroyd role in this film, and is quite good, but The ‘Burbs wasn’t a box office success, and didn’t propel him to stardom. Carrie Fisher and Wendy Schaal have the thankless roles of “the wives,” but both shine, in particular Fisher, who was already transitioning out of acting to a career as a writer. One of the film’s recurring themes is the men’s regression back to boyhood; a highlight is Fisher denying Dern and Ducommon’s request for Hanks to come out and play. In fact, this may have been one of the reasons the film didn’t quite connect with critics – it seems like many don’t seem to understand that the neighbors’ obnoxiousness toward the Klopeks, and their immaturity and paranoia, is the whole point of the film. Some have criticized the film’s ending, wanting the hammer to come down more strongly on our protagonists (such as: they all end up in prison). But I like what we get instead: something true to the spirit of the film’s retro-horror nature, while still exposing the madness of Hanks and his friends as their behavior comes to a very destructive end. I’m older now, and I see The ‘Burbs from a different perspective. Now I’m married with two dogs and living in the suburbs, where people obsess over their lawns and look down on those who don’t put in the requisite yardwork. The film still clicks, just in a different way. Given the kind words I’ve heard others say toward this film, I think its following has only grown over the decades. It’s one of Dante’s purest and funniest films, and one of his very best.

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Paperhouse (1988)

Posted on October 1, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Every once in a long while someone mentions Paperhouse (1988), the big-screen debut of British director Bernard Rose (Candyman). There’s a kind of hushed reverence when the film is mentioned; it’s usually a bit like: “No one’s ever seen it, but there’s this wonderful little film called Paperhouse…” Or “The plot reminds me of this British film, it’s called Paperhouse, no one’s seen it but it’s pretty good, actually…” To the point that one grows suspicious: maybe everyone’s seen Paperhouse, only they all think that no one’s seen it, I’m not sure. But we know that’s not true. You’ve seen Paperhouse if you sought it out – any North American art-house release was cursory at best. For me, and I suspect it’s the case for a lot of people, it was the review by Roger Ebert that set me on the trail, until I found it at the video store sometime in the early 90’s. Ebert gave it four stars, and he wrote, “This is not a movie to be measured and weighed and plumbed, but to be surrendered to.” He praised the simplicity of the film, twice comparing it to Bergman, which is perhaps a bit too intimidating a comparison (unless you’re one of those adventurous souls who have discovered Bergman, and discovered that he’s not so intimidating after all). He wrote, “It’s like a Bergman film, in which the clarity is almost overwhelming, and we realize how muddled and cluttered most movies are.” He’s right, of course, about that and about the four stars. But I would assure the uninitiated that the film is not nearly as austere as all that. When I read the novels and comic books of Neil Gaiman, I’m reminded of Paperhouse. When I see a Stephen Moffat episode of Doctor Who, in which he takes a child’s nightmares and makes them real, I’m reminded of Paperhouse. (Actually, the 2006 episode “Fear Her,” written by Matthew Graham, is so close I believe Mr. Rose should be owed some money.) There are similar stories that predate the film (The Twilight Zone strikes close a few times) and after (one or two episodes of The X-Files, Joe Hill’s acclaimed comic book series Locke & Key), but what makes this film endure is the fact that it never takes its finger off the emotional pulse of its narrative. It’s a story about the frustrated, lively, and confused feelings of a girl on the cusp of puberty. Without being too showy about it, Rose completely engulfs you in her world – he draws you inside her head, so you can understand her rage and euphoria and sadness.

Anna (Charlotte Burke) explores her dreams, as Bernard Rose pays homage to the 1948 Andrew Wyeth painting "Christina's World."

Which is quite a trick, considering how off-putting stubborn young Anna (Charlotte Burke) is at the film’s outset. She prides herself on being the class rebel, sticking it to a bully and telling the teacher off, to the point that one of her classmates stands and applauds her. She faints outside the classroom, then turns it into a drama, taking advantage so she can go and enjoy her birthday at home. When her chain-smoking mother (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels‘ Glenne Headly, doing a decent British accent) discovers that she’s faking an illness to get out of school, she turns the car around. Anna sneaks off again, this time with a friend to an abandoned train station, where she passes out while playing hide-and-seek in a dark tunnel. A doctor (Gemma Jones, The Devils) finds she’s running a fever, but her recurring fainting spells indicate an illness worse than that. Anna doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to spend her time bedridden, but would rather be in front of the TV. Stuck in her bedroom, she loses herself in drawing, sketching out a house and a boy in the window. When she dreams, she visits the house exactly as she drew it – with, yes, a young boy in the window. The boy, named Marc (Elliott Spiers), is lonely and sad, and she thinks that’s because she drew him that way. He can’t walk, and she assumes it’s because she didn’t draw him legs. Each time she dreams, Marc is there waiting for her in her Paper House; and she slowly becomes convinced that he’s real – dreaming in the hospital, a patient her doctor described, one with muscular dystrophy and stuck in bed for a year.

The house that Anna built.

In trying to make some improvements to her dreamscape, she runs into trouble. Inspired by a photo she took of her (alcoholic and absent) father, she draws him into the picture as a means of inserting him into her dreams. But she has second thoughts; she’s worried she drew him to look like a madman. In a fit of anger and frustration, she crosses out his face – or, rather, his eyes – crosses out the boy’s window, crumples up the sheet of paper and tosses it in the trash bin. When she finally revisits her dreamworld – after a harrowing rescue from the garbage collectors – she finds it darker, visibly marred by her black markings. Her dream has become a nightmare. Her father approaches from the horizon, but as she drew him: deranged and blind. He holds a hammer in his hand and calls out to her, while she rushes to bar the door – which she never drew to have a lock. The radio on the wall – too large, like so many objects she drew to populate the house and provide comfort to Marc – glows like a jack-o’-lantern, and squeals out some unearthly, mumbling voice. Candles arranged on the floor, filling the room, suddenly extinguish, and a black shape stands in the darkness, a man without eyes.

The simulacrum of Anna's father (Ben Cross) carries her through the burning landscape.

It’s in moments like these that Paperhouse resembles a horror film – like a more inventive offshoot of the Nightmare on Elm Street series – and, however briefly, it works as a terrifically effective one. Rose worked for years with Jim Henson, and served as a production assistant on The Dark Crystal (1982). This, coupled with his experience creating videos for artists such as Roger Waters (contributing, with Nicolas Roeg and Gerald Scarfe, to his Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking live show), has given him a great sense of imaginative, evocative visual design that comes to the fore when the film suddenly kicks into thriller mode. But there’s more to Paperhouse, which escapes any genre pigeonholing. Specifically, there’s about twenty minutes more after the film’s climax, because Rose and screenwriter Matthew Jacobs, adapting Catherine Storr’s 1958 novel Marianne Dreams, know that you’re invested enough in Anna and Marc to want to know what happens to them. The extra celluloid is earned, because it follows through on the emotional arc of the story, bringing all the players – even her father, whose flaws inspired the nightmare doppelganger – to a cathartic conclusion that’s as messy and bittersweet as real life, without negating the story’s investment in the fantastic. (This is a movie that takes place in dreams, but it doesn’t settle for an it’s-all-a-dream ending.) Rose has continued directing films, but with a much lower profile following his justly-revered Candyman (1992), which remains the best film to be associated with Clive Barker’s name, and his Ken Russell-inspired Beethoven biopic, Immortal Beloved (1994). (Rose is a fan of Russell’s, and, just as in Russell’s films, classical music plays an important role in Paperhouse.) Paperhouse is available on DVD in the U.K. in a bare-bones release from Lionsgate (at least it’s anamorphic). A U.S. release of any kind would be welcome, and is certainly overdue.

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