by Robert Buchanan
Writers: Yutaka Maekawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Chihiro Ikeda
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cinematographer: Akiko Ashizawa
Editor: Koichi Takahashi
Players: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Yuko Takeuchi, Teruyuki Kagawa, Haruna Kawaguchi, Masahiro Higashide, Ryoko Fujino, Takashi Sasano, Masahiro Toda, Toru Baba, Misaki Saisho
Composer: Yuri Habuka
Producers: Satoshi Akagi, Hiroshi Fukazawa, Satoko Ishida, Setsuko Sumida, Kota Kuroda
Trauma inflicted by an apprehended psychotic (Baba) deters him from further involvement in criminal affairs until a retired detective and professor of criminology (Nishijima) is reminded by his academic colleague (Toda) of a family's unsolved disappearance six years prior, shortly before his former subordinate (Higashide) invites him to probe this case to which he's reluctantly but ineluctably drawn. Freshly settled in a commuter town of west Tokyo, neither he nor his wife (Takeuchi) could imagine that his odd, tottering, mercurially tactless, apologetic, timorous, confrontational, loquacious, inimical, ingratiating, paranoid, chummy next-door neighbor (Kagawa) has anything to do with his investigation.
He's never been too shy to admit his stylistic debt to the greatest and most influential of all genre auteurs, but Kurosawa here waxes so Hitchcockian that this most conventional of his crime dramas verges on pastiche, so evident in his technique (memorably framed opening titles; allusive scuttlebutt; quietly significant dollied and zoomed shots; a rear-projected background; unnerving, even intimidating perspective shots) and script (first evidence disclosed at 57 minutes; a wrongly-arrested protagonist; unreliable police). Natheless, he doesn't refrain from reuse of his own hallmarks, as handheld shots stepped to and from subjects, creeping pans of wide shots, momentarily grisly close-ups, lingering disquietal that intensens to gripping suspense, and that foreboding, horribly applied transparent plastic. Kurosawa's professional retrospection is purely pragmatic.
When it isn't graded grimily green and gray to excess, Akiko Ashizawa's photography is satisfactory. A scene wherein an orphaned witness (Kawaguchi) recounts reemergent, material memories to Nishijima's criminologist darkens eerily during vocalization of her testimony.
Unforgettable in several of Kurosawa's past pictures as characters malign (Penance), sympathetic (Tokyo Sonata), or both (Serpent's Path), Kagawa has long proven himself one of the most idiosyncratically compelling living character actors of stage and screen. Any hack could unidimensionally portray his cowardly, casually contemptible and flagitious antagonist, but Kagawa created him with a comprehensive pathology that informs his peculiar, often discomfiting foibles and subtleties in a performance that insidiously slips under one's skin. Takeuchi's almost as impressively expressive of stifled, then fulminated frustration, inner conflict and torment. As protagonistic and deuteragonistic foils to their exceedingly dynamic co-stars, Nishijima and Higashide are as solid as the cast's remainder. Two differently traumatized daughters of destroyed families are underplayed with quiet conviction by model Haruna Kawaguchi and Aoi-alike Ryoko Fujino, whose captive schoolgirl's flat affect and suppressed dread lends to the story's ambiguity. Takashi Sasano endows the part of a canny old detective with quaint gravitas, and Masahiro Toda (a frequent minor player in Kurosawa's flicks since Cure and License to Live) is likably enthusiastic as a teacher thrilled to participate in matters detective.
Harmonic strings in minor keys sound most of Yuri Habuka's score to sparingly underscore pathos and menace, but never disrupt Kurosawa's carefully cultivated ambiences.
Fans who expected a return to the elliptic mysteries, offbeat chills, and black humor produced on small budgets of his best horrors and thrillers will be largely disappointed by Kurosawa's formalism, which here obliges an uncharacteristically satisfying climax. Yutaka Maekawa's novel was an ideally adapted vehicle for him to revisit the burden common to most of his fiction: potential peril proceeding from alienation and isolation in a gradually asocial Japan.
Writers: Jason Cohen, Steven Leckart
Director: Jason Cohen
Cinematographer: Svetlana Cvetko
Editor: Jake Pushinsky
Subjects: Rod Canion, Jim Harris, Bill Murto, Ben Rosen, Mitch Kapor, Gary Stimac, Karen Walker, Bill Aulet, Chris Garcia, Bob Jackson, John Markoff, Bill Fargo, Charles Lee, Howard Anderson, Kim Francois, Ross Cooley, Hugh Barnes, Steve Ullrich, Steve Flannigan, Mike Swavely, Roger McNamee, Christopher Cantwell, Ken Price
Composer: Ian Hultquist
Producers: Ross M. Dinerstein, Glen Zipper, Lydia Dunham, Steven Leckart, Jason Cohen, Samantha Housman
Profuse personal and professional photographs, excerpts from newspapers, magazines, archival footage of televised commercials and news, financial, and technological programs, and interviews with commentators (Garcia, Markoff, Anderson), associated industrial veterans (Kapor, McNamee), whilom staff of IBM (Aulet, Jackson), Compaq's founders (Canion, Harris, Murto), chairman and initial investor (Rosen), and employees (Stimac, Walker, Lee, Francois, Ullrich, Flannigan, Cooley, Barnes, Swavely, Fargo, Price, etc.) constitute the meat of this gimmicky, personal, informative documentary, which recounts the storied, alacritous ascent of Compaq during the 1980s from a minuscule tech startup in '82 to the preeminent manufacturer of personal computers twelve years later. When first fording their glutted yet fertile emergent consumer market, the Houstonian trio distinguished themselves to immediate lucre by realizing their first product: a rugged luggable compatible with IBM's software and superior to a few underwhelming, bunglesome predecessors. The Compaq Portable evinced its firm's scrupulous attention to quality control and consumers' expectations -- paramount considerations owing to the same munificence of fathering executives who established an unbureaucratic, meritocratic corporate culture that was receptive to the input of its work force. At its best, Cohen's account vividly details with lime infographics the Texan manufacturer's challenges, exploits, victories, and celebrations: grueling conciliation with software and hardware designed for IBM's microcomputers without consultation of their published references to avoid infringement of copyright; managerial contention with nearly exponential internal expansion; interoperability of products that surpassed IBM's own; humorous telecast commercials starring John Cleese; glitzy introductions of products that featured performances by notable entertainers (The Pointer Sisters, David Copperfield, Irene Cara); retaliatorily litigious threats by behemoth Big Blue in pertinence to semi-legitimate patent claims; the intercorporate development of the intercompatible EISA bus standard with eight fellow manufacturers of IBM-compatible PCs (AST, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Olivetti, Seiko Epson, Tandy, WYSE, Zenith) in cooperative, diametric response to the Micro Channel architecture of IBM's disastrously uncompatible PS/2; aggressive competition from upstart Dell; Eckhard Pfeiffer's push for higher volume at lower cost as Compaq's executive of European and Asian operations, president of its North American division, COO, then CEO after Rosen convinced the company's board to terminate Canion for failing to resolve a slump in sales and massive subsequent losses. At its worst, it lapses into an advertisement for AMC's overtly silly docufictional series Halt & Catch Fire for incorporated clips thereof and needless, obnoxious exposition by its co-creator, Christopher Cantwell. The ambition by which three middle-class family men dissatisfied with their employment at Texas Instruments instituted an enterprise that rose to rival their industry's preponderant leviathan in less than a decade can't be readily overstated -- mauger hyperbole of certain interviewees.
Writer/director: Bryan Bertino
Cinematographer: Peter Sova
Editor: Kevin Greutert
Players: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward, Kip Weeks, Laura Margolis, Glenn Howerton
Composers: tomandandy
Producers: Nathan Kahane, Doug Davison, Roy Lee, Thomas J. Busch, Joseph Drake, Marc D. Evans, Kelli Konop, Trevor Macy, Sonny Mallhi
At first knock on the door of a rural summer home where a troubled couple (Tyler, Speedman) are vacationing, a trio of masked, shrewd lunatics (Ward, Weeks, Margolis) who've come calling late at night know that they've found the targets they'll terrorize with tactics sly, sportive, sadistic. Bryan Bertino's deceptively simple directorial debut is cunningly plotted, shot dexterously and unindulgently by hand and Steadicam, tightly cut, and played well -- especially by Tyler, who hits her grueling marks with believably jolted hysterics. Long-tarnished by tacky, unscary, perennial sequels and remakes (particularly of superior Japanese and Korean productions), the reputation of American horror cinema was much meliorated during the late aughts through teens by a surge of smart, economical productions, few of which enjoyed this one's nationwide, then internatonal distribution and franchise. To considerable effect did Bertino refresh creepy niceties, jump scares, sinuate suspense, and the inexpungible musk of the '70s.
Recommended for a double feature with The Sitter, When A Stranger Calls, Them, You're Next, or Creep.
Writers: E. L. Konigsburg, Michael De Guzman
Director: Joseph Sargent
Cinematographer: William Wages
Editor: Paul LaMastra
Players: Stephanie Zimbalist, Shawn Phelan, Pamela Reed, George Grizzard, Jenny Jacobs, Libby Whittemore, Dorothy McGuire, Patricia Neal, John Evans, Barbara Britt, John Bennes, Judith Sullivan, Mary Nell Santacroce, Dan Albright, Warde Q. Butler, Joseph C. Floyd, Marc Gowan, Alice Heffernan-Sneed, Randi Layne, Mark Lee Levitt, Jeff Young Lewis, Lonnie R. Smith Jr., Tonea Stewart, Bruce Taylor
Composer: Charles Bernstein
Producers: Dorothea G. Petrie, Paul A. Levin, John Beaird, Les Alexander, Joseph Broido, Dan Enright, Don Enright, Barbara Hiser
Is a charitable, mundivagant nurse (Zimbalist) actually a former debutante long-imagined dead in an aviatic crash years before, daughter to a paternally negligent investor (Grizzard), daughter-in-law to his overbearingly bitchy second wife (Reed), aunt to their nerdy son (Phelan) and hobbled, pampered, putatively retarded daughter (Jacobs)....or just an opportunistic impostrix? As her reappearance coincides with the impendence of her matrilineal inheritance, an investigation initiated at the aforementioned termagant's behest is eventually overshadowed and presumably abandoned when the possible changeling focuses on how her suspecter's little girl has been stunted by mommy's controlling overindulgence. We who haven't read Father's Arcane Daughter by one E. L. Konigsburg can only hope that his novel isn't as artlessly expositional or schmaltzily overdramatic as De Guzman's teleplay therefrom, which compels from its cast consistently irritating overacting of stilted dialogue, and in which nobody can be bothered to recall, much less mention blood types or dental records. A few attractively framed shots recall Sargent's best pictures from the '70s, but his effort in helming this well-costumed but middling melodrama is otherwise perfunctory; god knows he didn't once enjoin his players to refrain from gnawing their scenery. Simply conceived yet sloppily and flabbily plotted, Konigsburg's umpteenth variation of the noble pretender misrepresents ruinous altruism as summum bonum in a post-Christian, proto-feminist context, positing women's independence as a counterpoint to neurotic familial dysfunction. Insinuation of that kosher dialectic is the sole subtlety of such an oppressively hackneyed domestic psychodrama, which reminds one of just how wearisome these had become on page and screen by the '90s.
© 2024 Robert Buchanan