Category Archives: film

Armando Robles Godoy’s The Green Wall

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The Japanese film poster for the 1969 Peruvian film LA MURALLA VERDE aka THE GREEN WALL

Remember the back-to-the-land movement of the mid-1960s, which lasted well into the late 1970s? It was a counterculture response to urban living with its many problems – traffic, pollution, crime, political turmoil, etc.. Young people, in particular, were looking for healthier, more sustainable lifestyles such as growing their own food and living off the land. Although this cultural phenomenon mostly occurred in North America, the idea was co-opted by young idealists around the world, even in such far away places as Tingo Maria, Peru. That is the setting of the 1969 film La Muralla Verde (English title, The Green Wall), the story of Mario (Julio Aleman), a recently married businessman, who becomes fed up with city living in Lima and convinces his wife Delba (Sandra Riva) to start a new life on the land he has purchased in the Peruvian jungle. Along with their newborn son Romulo, the couple set off on a new chapter in their lives with high hopes.

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Run for the Border

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The film poster for the South Korean chase thriller ESCAPE (2024)

Films from South Korea were not something you would expect to see at the local cineplex in the U.S. until around 2006 when Park Chan-wook’s kaiju horror fantasy The Host became a surprise crossover hit, appealing to fans of Godzilla and other giant rampaging monster flicks. Prior to that, a few South Korean movies such as Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003), Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder (2003) and Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) had attracted critical acclaim and popularity on the art house circuit. But it was The Host that really opened the floodgates for South Korean cinema in the U.S., reaching a peak in 2019 with Joon Ho’s Gisaengchung (English title: Parasite). It won four Oscars including Best International Feature Film and, more importantly, Best Picture, the first foreign language movie to ever snag that award. Currently you can find numerous South Korean films and TV series like Squid Game available on Netflix and other streaming platforms and most of them are not art house darlings but easily accessible genre movies that U.S. audiences can enjoy. Talju (English title: Escape, 2024), a slickly produced, fast paced chase thriller is a perfect example of this, which interestingly enough, is set entirely in North Korea, a country which does not distribute movies in America due to their restrictive media policies.

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The Stranger Upstairs

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A mysterious stranger arrives at a boarding house in London and inquires about the advertised room to let. The landlady has some reservations about him but his good manners, personal charisma and willingness to pay his rent in advance convinces her he will be a respectable lodger. How many times have we seen movies that open with the same scenario where the new boarder turns out to be a suspicious character and possibly mentally unhinged? Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), Man in the Attic (1953), Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) and The Minus Man (1999) are some of the more famous examples of this. The 1935 British film, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, however, gives us a protagonist who could be some kind of savior in disguise, a spiritual being who has come to help the unhappy and misanthropic boarders. Is he an angel, a Christ figure or maybe a figment of someone’s imagination?

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The Lure of the Big Apple

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New York City has served as the background and, in some cases, the main star in dozens of films from King Kong (1933) to The Naked City (1948) to Manhattan (1979), and usually it is depicted as a vibrant melting pot of humanity where opportunity and chance encounters can change the course of one’s life. It can also be a place of desperation, danger and soul-crushing despair and The Rat Race (1960), based on Garson Kanin’s play and adapted by him for the screen, falls into this category. Along with such films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976), this tale of two innocents being beaten down by the realities of big city life comes across like a hate letter to the Big Apple, whether that was Kanin’s intentions or not.

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Beastly Behavior

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Sometime in the near future, the human race experiences a strange phenomenon in which random people begin to mutate into different animal species. There is no rhyme or reason to the malady but it is starting to dictate a new world order. Francois and his teenage son Emile are affected by this because Lana, Francois’s wife and Emile’s mother, is beginning to transition into some type of creature. She is currently under observation at the hospital but a decision is made to move her into a government facility in a rural area for her own protection and a possible cure. So begins Le Regne Animal (English title: The Animal Kingdom, 2023) from French director Thomas Cailley, a film that has been pigeonholed by some reviewers as a science fiction film but is actually more of a surreal fantasy.

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Don’t Stop for Strangers!

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Is there anybody meaner than Lawrence Tierney on the screen? Sure, James Cagney was a bad-ass, shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy or knocking Virginia Mayo off a chair in White Heat. And Bogart could be equally cold-blooded in films like The Petrified Forest and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But Tierney is like a rabid dog in comparison, sparing no one, not even himself, from violent death, and The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) is a perfect example of his menacing screen persona.

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After the Show: Telluride Potluck 2010

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One of the best kept secrets about the Telluride Film Festival is what happens AFTER the event. The town residents are treated to a 6 to 8 film sampler with two different screenings at the Palm Theatre each night (check with the Chamber of Commerce to confirm date and venue). The selection is purely random and usually based on which films don’t have to be shipped out immediately to the next film festival such as Toronto or New York. But if you’re a hard core film fanatic, you can hardly go wrong. The price is affordable – tickets are usually discounted and lodging rates in Telluride drop down to almost half the cost of what they were doing the film festival. The year I attended the mini-post festival in 2010, the featured films were the animated musical drama Chico & Rita (preceded by Jeff Scher’s short, The Shadow’s Dream), Errol Morris’s bizarre documentary Tabloid (preceded by Bill Plympton’s animated short, The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger), Denis Villeneuve’s powerful drama Incendies, Poetry, a South Korean drama about an elderly woman facing dementia, The First Grader, a true story dramatization set in Kenya, and Javier Bardem in Biutiful, directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu.

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Only a Pawn in Their Game

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Tetsuo Abe in his only film role plays a ten-year-old boy who is used by his parents in a dangerous extortion scheme in Nagisa Oshima’s Shonen aka BOY (1969).

Not everyone has an idyllic childhood and some unfortunates don’t even have a childhood at all. That is certainly the case with Toshio (Tetsuo Abe), a ten-year-old who is being used by his father Takeo (Fumio Watanabe) and stepmother Takeko (Akiko Koyama) in an ongoing scam which entraps car drivers. The ploy involves stepping out into traffic, pretending to be hit by a car, and falling to the ground and feigning an injury. If the driver doesn’t offer to settle the incident on the spot with a cash payment, the fake victim threatens to call the police to settle the matter. In many cases, the drivers are only too happy to pay the scammers a cash settlement to avoid a lawsuit or court case. Toshio and his family of three (including a tiny tot named Peewee) have been on the move across Japan, enacting this scenario for some time with Takeko playing the fake accident victim. But the time has come for the parents’ ten-year-old to take on this role and he has little choice in the matter. So begins Nagisa Oshima’s Shonen (English title: Boy, 1969), a harrowing portrait of parental abuse and negligence, which was based on a true case that made national news in Japan in 1966.

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Z Man

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It is a well known fact that Douglas Fairbanks was one of the first superstars of the silent era but he first became famous as a leading man in romantic comedies such as Wild and Woolly (1917) and Reaching for the Moon (1917). In the aftermath of World War I, audiences had grown bored with the cheerful, boy-meets-girl formula that had made Fairbanks a popular screen idol so the star decided to try a different tactic. A short story by Johnston McCulley, “The Curse of Capistrano,” had appeared in the pulp magazine, All-Story Weekly, and he decided to read it during a long train trip from New York to Los Angeles. This was unusual in itself since Fairbanks did not like to read (and that included his movie scripts) but actress Mary Pickford encouraged him to read the serial and McCulley’s story became his next project. It was first called The Curse of Capistrano, which was then changed to The Black Fox and finally released as The Mark of Zorro in 1920.

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Extraordinary Encounters on the Trans-Siberian Express

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Movies that take place on trains constitute a film genre of their own and there have been plenty of great ones over the years – The General (1926), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Narrow Margin (1952), Snowpiercer (2013) – but I can safely say that Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (English title: Joan of Arc of Mongolia, 1989), directed by Ulrike Ottinger, is the most unusual one ever made. Although it embraces the idea that travel can be a life-changing experience for everyone, Ottinger puts her own personal spin on this by addressing ideas about gender, history, personal empowerment and cultural traditions through a smash-up of popular genres. These include musical theater, campy soap operas, widescreen epics and ethnographic documentaries. It might sound like either a complete goof or pretentious nonsense (some detractors claim both) but it works as a one-of-a-kind hybrid, informed by Ottinger’s insights into human behavior and her own directorial eccentricities.

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