Movie Lists and Sporcle Quizzes

Pathetically enough, two posts in the same month is now a flurry of activity for me. But while I haven't been writing much, I haven't stopped making an excessive number of lists.

Katie recently introduced me to Sporcle, a site that hosts an easy to use toolkit for generating user-made online quizzes. I was immediately addicted. We stayed up to about 4am our first night of playing around on it.

I'm made four movie quizzes so far, and will probably do more as the whim strikes me. Here they are:

101 Time-Travel Movies - And yes, I have seen most of them. And yes, I am that obsessed.

Directors by Signature or Trademark - How well do you know your auteurs?

Giallo Titles by Synonym (e.g. "The Feline with the Nephrite Peepers" for "The Cat with the Jade Eyes")

War Films by War - From the Crimean War to the Cambodian Civil War, from ancient Rome to the contemporary Middle East, humanity has had a terrible history of bloodshed and a wonderful tradition of films about them, but can you name titles that span almost 50 different conflicts?

Exactly Why has also entered the fray with:

H. P. Lovecraft Films

Horror Films by and Tagline

Enjoy!

Lastly, I do want to mention that I've happily sifted through a lot of "Best of the Decade" lists over the last few months, but good or bad most have been pretty predictable. That's why I was really glad to see Filmlinc's ruthlessly highbrow, unabashedly challenging Top 150 Films of the Decade.

Two films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the top ten? 8 Taiwanese New Wave films including at least one I've openly disparaged? No Batman or Lord of the Rings? And yet this is a list with something to say, with material worth seeing and worth discussing. Innovative films, gutsy filmmakers and expansive ideas are well represented in a way that the box office, the Oscars and the majority of our media just doesn't cover. I've got nearly a third of the list still to see and I'm really excited to track them down!

Not nearly as good or consistent, but still on the right train of thought is Slant Magazine's list. It has the added advantage of short reviews and is more than capable of furnishing some recommendations.

Review of Four Flies on Grey Velvet

[Image: Robert, moments before squashing a fly with a climactic cymbal clash.]

“Four Flies on Grey Velvet” (1971) was released for the first time on R1 DVD this February, and I didn’t even find out until last month. That’s pretty inescapable evidence that I’ve been slacking off on my giallo intake, but no reason why I can’t have an excited delayed reaction. “Four Flies” is the last of Dario Argento’s ‘Animal Trilogy’ and the last to get released. It falls somewhere between the quality of the groundbreaking “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” (1970) and the stodgy “Cat o’Nine Tails” (1971).

[Image: Robert and Tobias.]

Robert Tobias is a rock band musician who finds himself annoyed by a mustachioed stalker. After pursuing the man onto the stage of an abandoned theater, Robert accidentally knifes the confused guy, a murder inconveniently photographed by a masked fiend in the upper galleries. Robert and his wife Nina are then terrorized by the murderous blackmailer, who knocks off their diverse network of friends and helpers (including a gay private eye and a hobo named God). After about an hour and a half of this, the deranged killer is finally revealed.

The plot is easily amongst the worst of Argento’s oeuvre, with some of the poorest psychological balderdash to motivate the killer in particular. There’s vague hints concerning the identity of the villain, but nothing resembling actual clues, and with our protagonist passively going about business as usual while he hopes for one of his friends to catch the blackmailer, there’s no sense of an investigation with forward moving progression or rising tension.

[Image: At least there’s no shortage of focus pulls, like this elaborate zoom into Robert’s rearview mirror.]

The upside is that Argento, cinematographer Franco Di Giacomo (“Who Saw Her Die?” (1972), “The Killer Must Kill Again” (1975)) and special effects wizards Carlo Rambaldi and Cataldo Galliano work out a visual style easily on par with Argento’s best work. Their inventiveness is rather astounding, including at least three ideas that I’ve seen ripped off (more likely reinvented given the film’s low penetration) and praised in many films made decades later: slow-motion “bullet time,” following a phone cable from caller to the recipient and pulling the final image off the retina of a corpse (which even Argento admits was a stupid concept, but he liked the way it looked in the film).

[Image: A step-by-step transition from a phone booth to the killer’s home set along the route of the wires themselves.]

The special effects sequences largely guide the plot, rather than the other way around, but Argento makes this into an asset and even a primary theme. “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” focuses heavily on what we see and how we interpret it, but “Four Flies on Grey Velvet” is more about vision on a more fundamental if less tantalizing level: how what we can and can’t see creates fear and how vision can grant power and strip privacy. Robert is tricked into manslaughter (staged, quite literally, on a stage) because he is being spied upon, then spends the rest of the film rather helpless as the villain taunts him by repeatedly breaking into his house and planting photos of the crime. At least two characters witness the villain’s work and try to blackmail the blackmailer, creating a spiral of peeper power struggles with predictably deadly results.

[Images: Plays on vision: (1st) Running a laser through an eye to get its last sight, in this case the titular four flies. (2nd) A classical peering-out-of-wardrobe-as-the-killer-searches shot with the eye caught in a sliver of light. (3rd) The type of doorknob every private eye should have. (4th) The killer’s wide-eyed grinning mask, paired with spotlights and a camera lens to make it the ultimate gaze.]

Most of the scenes are quite dark, probably one of the oldest and most worn tactics for generating fear and uncertainty in horror films. Despite this, however, Argento’s colors are usually remarkably vivid in “Four Flies,” very much in keeping with his other works from the 1970’s. It’s a combination the director often uses to apply lurid, emotion-inflected splashes onto the more typical canvas of brooding shadowy suspense. “Four Flies” contrasts the darkness with an even more unique technique, in that scenes set in the mind’s eye are brightly lit and uniformly white.

[Images: The killer’s traumatic memories of time spent in a padded cell and Robert’s reoccurring dream of a Mid-East execution.]

Like with many gialli, the games played with lighting, color and camera position don’t necessarily have any particular meaning; what’s important is how they make a viewer feel. To take an example, one scene has Robert’s maid waiting in the park to be paid off by the killer. From the first shot, we know she’s going to die and the whole exercise could unfold with excruciating predictability. Instead we get a series of intriguing flourishes: the mood changing from safe to scary via startling jump-cuts, the chase runs through an illogical hedge maze and crushingly tight tunnel and the final stabbing is left unseen, but heard from the opposite side of a tall brick wall where a young couple impotently responds to the cries for help (reminiscent of a scene in “The Leopard Man” (1943)).

[Images: The music on the park’s loudspeakers cuts off abruptly, followed by a trio of jump-cuts (every bit as quick as just glancing down the two screenshots above) showing the park going from full-swing to empty. By dramatically abridging the maid’s wait from an hour or so to a few seconds, we’re thrown off-balance.]

Other set pieces may go a bit too far, particularly one at a luxury coffin convention that serves almost no purpose and is probably intended as comic relief. There are a few other moments of largely misguided humor, including a bible-quoting bum and an incompetent mailman, that only drag out the already sparse pacing.

[Image: Presenting the race-to-heaven and honeymoon coffins!]

My biggest complaint, other than the story, is the music. It’s very rare for me to give a thumb down to anything composed by Ennio Morricone, but this is some of his least impressive work. Robert is a drummer, and I wanted to like the way that his band’s music and his rambling drum solos are crosscut into the action, but it doesn’t have nearly the right feel. Apparently Argento wasn’t happy with it either, and the two didn’t work together again until the mid-90’s.

One of the best reasons to watch giallo is the visuals, and they’re strong enough here to compensate for the admittedly extensive flaws. With the DVD now widely available and the print cleaned up expertly, giallo collectors owe it to themselves to pick this one up.

Walrus Rating: 7.0

[Image: What do you think: the most horrifying cat corpse ever or what?]

Review of The House with the Yellow Carpet

                With a title like “The House with the Yellow Carpet” (1983), you know right off that bat that you’re watching a giallo. Not only is the movie clearly trying to cash in on the precedents of “The House with the Laughing Windows” (1976) and “The House by the Cemetery” (1981), but this particular variation actually includes the genre (which just means “Yellow”) in its original Italian: “La Casa del tappeto giallo.” Director Carlo Lizzani was probably eager to build in an audience, since he certainly didn’t have name recognition or marketing clout.

                Then, too, Lizzani was riding pretty far back on the coattails of the giallo heyday and had an even smaller budget than the meager rations doled out to other Italian B-movies. So it’s not surprising that his film, adapted from the two-act one-room play “Theater at Home,” has as much in common with dialogue-intensive American mysteries like “Sleuth” (1972) and “Deathtrap” (1982) as it does with Argento and Martino’s more ambitious thrillers.

[Image: The menacing yellow carpet falls toward the camera to get the film started.]

                Lizzani’s single set, at least, is unique and handled well. Though not terribly interesting in itself (it suits the screenplay to forego the usual pop-art décor for a more toned-down modernism), he shoots it in cool shades of blue and white, perpetually a little underlit, to give it an unwelcoming air. It also serves to set off the titular prop, a vivid yellow Persian carpet that, we are inexplicably told, “brings out bloodstains.” In the absence of any other dominant color, the carpet becomes a conspicuously powerful focal point and ultimately a lurid symbol of unfulfilled incestuous desire and paranoid murderous madness. Yay!

[Image: The director is not above using blue lighting, an unusual choice for a sex scene, to make the carpet stand out more.]

                The apartment’s two occupants, Antonio and his wife Franca, received the carpet from her step-father on their wedding. Since their apartment is too small for it, they are trying to sell it. Antonio has to step out to stop his car from being towed away right as the prospective buyer, listed in the credits as “The Professor,” arrives to negotiate a price. He turns out to be a creepy, manipulative compulsive-liar whose story changes a dozen times in the course of a deadly game of cat-and-mouse that Franca is forced to play.

[Images: Antonio and Franca go through their morning routine oblivious to what the coming day has in store for them. Despite the apartment being rather cramped, Lizzani stages them so that they cross on separate planes and are almost never in the same room together. Their lack of physical intimacy, compared to the night before, foreshadows Antonio’s absence and potential guilt throughout most of the first act.]

                Trying to figure out exactly what the professor is up to is the primary fun of “The House with the Yellow Carpet.” Giallo-veterans will definitely appreciate how contrived it gets (otherwise it would be too easy for them), but most others will be pounding their heads against the walls and screaming that it’s all nonsense (they’re mostly right). 

But what makes the effort so worthwhile is Erland Josephson’s performance as the enigmatic professor. Josephson is about 3000 notches above the material, but clearly enjoys the chance to slum around a bit. His two previous films, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Nostalgia” (1983) and Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” (1982) are towering achievements that are ranked amongst the finest classics of European art cinema. Next to Max von Sydow, he was Bergman’s favorite male actor and turned in beautiful, restrained performances in many of his masterpieces like “Cries and Whispers” (1972) and “Scenes from  a Marriage” (1973). In “Yellow Carpet” he cackles about killing his family, tortures a scantily-clad housewife with a knife and injects illicit drugs directly into his eye sockets. Frankly, it’s kind of awesome.

[Image: Erland Josephson, demonstrating that critics never gave him his due amongst cinema’s great sadomasochistic loonies.]

                And, or course, it’s all part of some twisted mind game that only the screenwriter, if anyone, really understands. At first, when the professor claims he saw Antonio secretly meeting another woman when they passed on the stairs, we’re almost inclined to believe him. But the longer he chatters on about spending fifteen years in prison, being friends with Franca’s step-father, colluding with Antonio to kill her for money, and so on, the more we realize he’s as crazy as whatever plot he’s up to. I won’t spoil whether he’s an eccentric carpet buyer, an assassin, a madman, a professor, an actor or a psychiatrist (all of which are proposed), but neither will I promise that by the end it will necessarily be all that clear-cut anyway. At least it does sort of have something to do with the carpet, unlike anything mentioned in the titles of most giallo.

                The dialog has that giallo-feel where everyone seems enormously suspicious no matter how casual the topic of conversation. Take for instance, this exchange after Franca takes a 5 second phone call from a prospective carpet buyer:

Husband: “What type of voice did the caller have?”

Wife: “Oh, I don’t know. An ordinary voice.”

Husband: “What do you mean an ordinary voice?”

Wife: “Just a voice, that’s all. Beside the connection was bad. I couldn’t hear very well.”

Husband: “Well was it a man or a woman? Old? young?”

Wife: “A Man. He sounded odd. Sort of ironic. He had a slight accent.”

Husband: “He sounds like he made quite an impression on you. Considering you could hardly hear him.”

                I’m not sure if Antonio is more suspicious for his inappropriately hostile interrogation or if Franca is more suspicious for outright contradicting herself.

                With only four speaking parts, it would seem like there would be a very limited number of combinations for everyone’s agendas, but the writing keeps us perpetually on our feet, meting out interesting, if outrageously unlikely, twists. The plot pulls from the whole library of mystery playbooks, coyly testing out the jealous husband’s revenge, plots to drive insane, maniac on the loose, perpetrator/victim table-turning, “it was all a dream” and much more, before discarding each one with playfully indifference. The movie even seems to know its reliance on Freudian psychology and avant-garde theater ideas were dated; ripe for flippant plot points in a trashy play.

[Image: The strictly black and white set design, especially in the bedroom, struck me as curiously underplayed, but it might just be because my print was blurry.]

                Unfortunately, due to its minimal scope, single set and utilitarian camera placement, there’s less excitement and flair here than there could be, so it doesn’t rank amongst the best gialli and may not win over the wider horror audience. At the same time, a smattering of nudity and adult content make this unlikely to play well for the reserved literary set and the screenplay may be too contrived even for the parlor room potboilers favored by mystery junkies. I’m not sure it has much of an audience, but I’m guessing anyone who bothers to track down a copy of this never officially released giallo will be amenable to its charms.

Walrus Rating: 6.0

[Image: Franca screams out the window of her apartment into an aggressively claustrophobic courtyard (trash chute?) in one of the film’s only trick shots. Look closely (or even casually) at the brick pattern on the left and you can tell we are actually looking down a hallway.]

Review of Death Laid an Egg

If there’s any giallo that could be considered weirder than “Footprints on the Moon” (1975), it would probably have to be Giulio Questi’s “Death Laid an Egg” (1967). The strangeness begins with the title, a surprisingly relevant pun considering that the plot concerns a twisted love triangle on a mechanized chicken farm. The story, dialogue, editing and music all sort of run off and do their own peculiar thing, creating an end product that lies somewhere between head-trip, thriller and social critique.

[Image: Anna and Gabrielle posing for an impromptu chicken modeling session.]

The great French actor Jean-Louis Trintingnant stars as Marco, who is unhappily married to Anna, the ambitious and unethical owner of a chicken farm undergoing rapid modernization. The two look after the young Gabrielle, a distant cousin of Anna and surreptitious mistress to Marco. There is also a mysterious fourth player, Mondaini, an advertising expert who is helping Marco design a new chicken-themed marketing campaign.

[Image: An example of Mondaini’s ad campaign which features chickens as central figures in society like politicians, soldiers and, as seen here, doctors.]

It takes some time before there is any sense of what the plot is going to be. Unlike the usual giallo structure, there is no unidentified killer knocking off beautiful women one by one. Well… except for Marco, who regularly meets and murders prostitutes at a motel, but I’m not counting those.

Instead, the story revolves around the bizarre relationships between Marco, Anna, Gabrielle and Mondaini, who are each plotting their own dastardly agendas. There is no shortage of amusing insinuations, clues and red herrings to occupy our time before each scheme falls into place, ultimately stitching a web of immorality that knits together the doomed quartet even as they are ripped asunder and deviled* by their machinations . As the deliciously salacious tagline says: “See them tear each other apart. Then see what they do with the pieces.”

At the black heart of the plot is a plan to frame a character for a murder he/she already intended to commit, exactly the type of fatal irony that the nihilistic tone demands. But the core of the story and its character dynamics are often less interesting than the peripheral details. These include,

1) A robotic grain distributer which becomes a diabolical killing machine,

[Image: Marco’s dog Blackie, moments before it is ground into slush by Anna’s titanic milling machine. There might have been some emotional punch behind this scene if Questi had introduced the dog more than a minute before they kill it, but it at least registers as stomach-churning.]

2) A psychotic poultry corporation willing to stop at nothing for more profit, and

[Image: An example of the tasteful (and tasty!) corporate art featured at Anna’s parent company.]

3) a scientist who creates hideous chicken freaks, born without heads or wings, to increase meat output.

[Image: Just when you think the film won’t get any more disturbing it introduces mutant chickens bred to be pulsating spheres of pure meat.]

There’s no question that Questi and co-writer Franco Arcalli were trying to get across a potent message about the direction consumer culture, the sexual revolution and corporate modernization was leading, but the way they contrive to combine them is almost too trippy to translate. Their dialog isn’t successful on a serious level. Arcalli strings together hard-boiled* quips that waver awkwardly between artsy psychological insights and hilarious nonsense, but never come close to real world conversations. Below is an example:

Anna: I was noticing Gabrielle today. We were down at the pool together.
Marco: Gabrielle! What does she have to do with anything?
Anna: Her body seems to be made of separate parts… beautifully united, but still each one perfected to be separated and put together again.
Marco: You make her sound like a toy you and can dissemble just for the fun of it. You might kill her in the process.
Anna: It wouldn’t be to destroy her, but to remake her… a different way every time.
Marco: That’s pretty abstract.
Anna: There’s nothing abstract about Gabrielle when you see her nude.

And so on. The best part is that Anna isn’t even planning to kill Gabrielle or anything. She actually really likes her!

Stranger still is the soundtrack, which consists of discordant experimental jazz compositions primarily featuring someone plucking on a Spanish guitar with very little sense of melody. While not pleasant to listen to in a conventional sense, it actually fits quite well with the prickly, unhinged atmosphere and staccato deliveries. It also matches the jerky, startling editing that really defines the film’s rhythm.

[Image: Marco and Gabrielle having a tense conversation in the empty white “room of truth.” Even if I provide context for that description, it still wouldn’t really explain it.]

It makes a certain sense that Arcalli also served as editor. He clearly knew exactly how he wanted to chop the film up, and what type imagery should accompany each scene. “Death Laid an Egg” is a rare slow film that makes use of fast editing, particularly a wide array of off-kilter, mood-manipulating montages.

Some of the montages move so quickly and with such packed imagery that they come closer to collages. An early example occurs when Marco is driving on the highway, flashing past billboards that may represent and foreshadow the oppressive corporate yoke (yolk?) that weighs down on him.

Most of the montages tend to be from Marco’s point of view, drawn from his surroundings and reflecting the way his dreams are falling apart, not to mention the scrambled*, disintegrating state of his mind. The art direction pitches in motifs of broken glass (thankfully no scenes of him staring into broken mirrors), broken eggs (inevitably) and all sorts of sharp or fragmented objects. This plays into Marco’s obsession with knives and razors, which might be seen as his reaction to the exasperating smoothness of his corporate cage with its ovoid eggs, chicken blobs and grinding cylinders.

[Image: Marco’s reserved motel room, where he escapes to when he gets a hankering for stabbing, also features some pointy, jagged artwork.]

The consensus amongst the relatively few critics who have watched “Death Laid an Egg” seems to be that the film is a difficult and frustrating beast that lashes out experimental tentacles in all directions and generally makes a mess of everything. Personally, I found the film to be deeply thought-provoking, shockingly creative and oddly cogent. It’s probably one of my favorite giallo, and I tentatively recommend it for giallo-surrealist fans.

Walrus Rating: 8.5

[Images: (Top) The early sunny-side-up* images of the chicken farm with the happy couple and free chickens and (Bottom) the darker pessimistic counterpart near the end of the film when the birds are caged and the couple… absent.]

* My apologies.