This Man Must Die

Que la bete meure; crime drama, France / Italy, 1969; D: Claude Chabrol, S: Michel Duchaussoy, Caroline Cellier, Jean Yanne

A speeding car accidentally hits and kills a boy on the street and flees. The boy's father, Charles, vows revenge at the unknown perpetrator, writing it down in his diary, yet the police is unable to find any leads. One day, while his car gets stuck in mud, Charles meets a farmer who claims to have seen a nervous driver right on the day of the accident, and identifies his companion as actress Helene Lanson. Charles meets and befriends Helene, falsely identifiying as a writer who plans a script with a lead role for her. He travels to her hometown, where he meets her brother-in-law Paul, a terrible brute who is detested even by his teenage son Philippe. Charles finds out Paul was indeed the driver who killed his son. Charles wants to kill Paul in a boat trip, but Paul reveals a gun, and thus Charles and Helene leave the town. However, they return when they hear the news Paul was poisoned. The police suspect Charles due to his diary, but Philippe steps forward, admitting he killed his own father.

Another subtle, calm and sophisticated crime-thriller drama by the French Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, "This Man Must Die" suffers from an overstretched running time, but even its seemingly "empty walks" scenes later on turn out to have a justification and purpose in the final act, since they play a role (for instance, the "throw away" scene of the villain Paul drinking some bitter throat medicine from the bathroom). The movie starts off strong: an unknown driver and a woman (whose faces are never shown) hit and kill a boy on the street with their car, and then flee. The boy's father, Charles, thus starts the first line of the film with this narration: "I will kill a man. I know neither his name, address nor looks. But I'll find and kill him." The storyline follows his random search without any clue, but thanks to a random lucky chance, he is able to track down the perpetrator. Even though the movie's mood is surprisingly calm and tranquil, it is at the same time equally as disturbing and "subtly suspenseful" as it follows Charles showing remarkable restraint as he talks and gets to know the perpetrator, Paul. Chabrol refuses to lead Charles on the easy path: just as they are above a hill with the whole beach below in the background (filmed with a great claustrophobic wide lens), Paul suddenly trips and remains hanging from the cliff, crying for help—should Charles simply let him fall down to his death or help him climb up, since other people could see him? Several twists gives the story spark, and thus the viewers are never quite sure how a situation might unravel—just as Charles finally has Paul all alone for himself in the sea, on a boat, and thinks the revenge is so close, Paul suddenly reveals a gun, turning the tables, since he read Charles' diary. It all could have been more intense, but Chabrol's intent was always to rather explore layers of human characters, good and bad, in the society, done in the typical European calm way.

Grade:+++

Higurashi When They Cry (season 1)

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni; animated fantasy horror crime series, Japan, 2006; D: Chiaki Kon, S: Souichirou Hoshi, Mai Nakahara, Yukari Tamura, Satsuki Yukino, Mika Kanai

June 1 9 8 3. Keiichi (16) lives for a year now in the village of Hinamizawa. Years ago the government wanted to build a dam in the area, but the villagers, led by the powerful Sonozaki family, rebelled against the idea. Each year, several people are mysteriously killed during the festival of the village deity Oyashiro, which allegedly curses anyone for trying to leave the village. Keiichi's high school friends, girls Mion and Rena, start acting strangely and forcefully give him a syringe, causing him to go mad, use a bat and kill them in his house. Keiichi later kills himself by clawing his own throat... Reset. Keiichi starts a relationship with Shion, Mion's twin sister. Mion turns out to be half-possessed by demons and holds Shion captured in a dungeon. The police intervenes, but later Mion appears and stabs Keiichi near his house... Reset. Upon hearing that Satoko's uncle molests her, Keiichi decides to kill him, but the corpse disappears. Keiichi wishes the death to the village, and indeed, swamp gas kills everyone... Reset. Tokyo Inspector Mamoru arrives to investigate the kidnapping of the son of the Head of the Ministry of Development, rsponsible for the dam project... Reset. Angry that her parents divorced due to Rina, a "gold digger" who cooperates with Satoko's uncle to extract money from Rena's dad, Rena kills Rina and the uncle... Rena discovers that an alien virus infected the village, which was thus placed under quarantine, and the newly infected are killed with their intestines to make an antidote.

Despite its suspenseful and unpredictable story, "Higarashi When they Cry" season 1 is at the same time a mess that overstuffed too much in its narrative that is a blend of "Outbreak", "Village of the Damned", "Zodiac", "Groundhog Day" and "The One", leaving too much of its plot points unanswered, all left erroneously for season 2. Several first episodes show a perplexing shift in tones: it starts off with a scary silhouette of a teenage guy killing two girls with a bat in a house at night, and then there is a switch to a more "uplifting" and "happy" segment where the protagonist Keiichi goes to school in the village and even experiences comical misadventures with girl Mion (he loses a bet in a card game, so the girls draw cat features on his face with a marker, which he has to leave there the entire day). The story quickly drifts away into the crime genre, as mysterious murders (sometimes very bloody ones) start happening each year during the village summer festival. 

However, it seems the authors made the error of investing everything into just setting up the mystery than in actually resolving it and explaining to the viewers what happened at the end of the season, leaving it incomplete. There are a few suspenseful moments presented here (at his home, the paranoid Keiichi talks with Inspector Oishi via the phone about how Rena was sent to a psychiatric institution because she broke windows at school and injured some students, and all of a sudden Keiichi is visited by his dad in the room, who brings him drinks for two because he recently let Rena go to him upstairs, but she evidently never showed up; the classic "switcheroo" involving twin sisters Mion and Shion where one is normal, the other one is the killer). Another bizarre addition is the "time reset" subplot, where every four to five episodes the story goes back to the beginning, and the characters play it out differently. This becomes stale and annoying because no explanation or context are given, while the dialogues become rather routine. It is thus left up to the viewers if they have the time or interest to go watch the next season for more "illumination", yet in this edition these absent threads are obviously missing, and thus come inevitably as flaws.

Grade:++

Last Exit to Brooklyn

Last Exit to Brooklyn; drama, Germany / UK/ USA, 1989; D: Uli Edel, S: Stephen Lang, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young, Peter Dobson, Jerry Orbach, Stephen Baldwin, Sam Rockwell, Ricki Lake

Brooklyn, 1 9 5 2. Harry is a Union representative during a workers strike against a factory. When two trucks still enter the factory, an angry mob surrounds the premises and the trucks are barely able to escape. Harry is married and has a baby, but is secretly gay and has an affair with transvestite Regina, but the latter only exploits him for his money. When Harry is out of money, Regina dumps him. Harry wants to have sex with a guy, but is attacked and killed by an angry mob... Joe is shocked to find out his daughter Donna is pregnant, so he finds her lover Tommy and forces him to hastly marry her... Prostitute Tralala and her three pimps bring soldiers from the Korean War to a dock to rob them. When she has sex with a soldier who leaves for war, she falls in love. In a bar, Tralala feels lonely so she exposes her breasts and calls for every man to have sex with her. A friend chases the men away and gives Tralala her sweater, and cries as she comforts him.

After numerous directors failed to adapt the difficult novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Hubert Shelby Jr. to the big screens, the director Uli Wedel succeeded with this film adaptation that feels somehow chaotic in trying to unite four stories into one whole, yet a one that dazzles with aethetic cinematography by Stefan Czapsky and a clear sense for reconstructing the mentality and set design of Brooklyn in the 50s. The movie is depressive and bleak, but it features the excellent Jennifer Jason Leigh as prostitute Tralala whose cleavage is somehow there to bring some uplifting energy and light into the picture. The movie juggles with such themes as homophobia, unemployment, poverty, repressed emotions and intolerance, but its most fascinating observations revolve around the exploitation of people in love seen through two perspectives: Harry and Tralala. 

Through Harry, who is in love with gay man Regina, but who doesn't want to go out with him once he is out of money, the movie shows the emotional toll of victims of such love-money exploitation. Conversely, by showing it from the perspective of the exploitator, Tralala, who only uses soldiers for money or for robbery by her three pimps, the story explores a peculiar anomaly in this rule when she herself falls in love with a soldier. After the soldier is sent to war, the movie's most unusual and perplexing sequence shows up, the one where Tralala finds herself feeling something she never felt before—lonely. At a bar, all the men are preoccupied with other women, while she just sits there abandoned. The confusing state of being in love and missing that person, causes Tralala to do a strange step—she exposes her buxom in front of everyone and says: "Best tits in the western world!" This is one of those sequences that are legendary and famous even if people never heard of them, containing a sort of "subconscious fame". The dialogues are rather conventional, and some moments feel too melodramatic, yet "Last Exit to Brooklyn" is still a well made depiction of existential dread searching for some light at the end of the tunnel.

Grade:++

Speckles: The Tarbosaurus

Jumbagi: Hanbandoui gongryong 3D; computer-animated adventure, South Korea, 2012; D: Han Sang-Ho, S: Lee Hyung Suk, Goo Ja-Hyeong, Sin Yong Woo

Cretaceous period. Speckles is a little Tarbosaurus living with his mother, older brother and two twin sisters. They hunt and eat dinosaurs through an ambush from their hill. One day, a T-Rex causes a stampede which tramples Speckles' brother to death, his twin sisters fall from a cliff, while the T-Rex kills his mother. Now alone, Speckles wanders through the forest, scavenging for food, like eggs. 10 years later, Speckles is grown up and partners with a female Tarbosaurus, Blue-Eyes. They get three kids in their nest. A volcano erupts, causing a great migration of dinosaurs, and the death of one of their offspring. Blue-Eyes' leg is injured in the cave, so she dies along the way, while Speckles and the remaining two kids have to leave her behind while the scavenger Velociraptors eat her. In another stampede, another of his kids is killed, while the T-Rex attacks again. Speckles kills him in the sea and swims with the last remaining live child back to the shore.

A combination of computer-animated dinosaurs set in the background of live action landscapes, Korean adventure drama "Speckles: The Tarbosaurus" (also translated as "Dino King") gives a distinctively dramatic and emotional depiction of "dinosaur existentialism", unusual and unorthodox in its refusal to present dinosaurs as random beasts, thereby being much closer to "The Land Before Time" than your average dinosaur flick. The surprising thing is that the longer the viewers watch the film, the more they will differentiate the dinosaurs as separate characters: the main protagonist is a Tarbosaurus, Speckles, who starts off as an irresponsible and playful "child", but then becomes an orphan, has to learn how to survive by himself, and ends up as a responsible "father" taking care of his new family. The director Han Sang-Ho uses good camera angles and aesthetic shot compositions to conjure up this prehistoric world (Speckles' mother and their kids observing the valley over the entire horizon; a frog's-eye view of Speckles' legs as he battles a Velociraptor; a bird's-eye view of an apatosaurus running in a herd on a cliff, while the sea is beneath it), in all its harshness and cruelty: one has compassion with Speckles' plight in which he loses his family members both in his era as a child and in his era as a grown-up. Speckles has a child's voice as a narrator in the first third, and then a grown-up voice as a grown up. However, he cannot communicate with others, like his "wife" Blue-Eyes, and thus almost all of his painful experiences and trauma from the past will remain unspoken to others. Somewhat overlong and overstretched, with some thin moments of style, but still realistic and affecting enough to grip the viewers almost as if they are watching a drama.

Grade:++