A Charlie Brown Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Melendez, 1965)

This short film has always been a favorite of mine while preparing for Christmas since my childhood. Not having cable TV until I was 25 years old forced me to watch shows on standard television. The Charlie Brown specials were some of my favorites. Fond memories of those little shorts of minimalism filled with Charles M. Schulz’s great characters will follow me all my life. 

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

This review is dedicated to the memory of Haji (born Barbarella Catton) who recently passed away August 9th 2013. She was born in my hometown, Québec City, and this film was chosen by me has our assignation for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Club for August 22nd 2013. It was a coincidence but I'm glad that it turns out to highlight her career a little bit.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965)

Camp, cult, sexy, violent, influential, and indescribable are some of the best adjectives that comes when watching director Russ Meyer’s film. It is also a cinephile’s delight with the campy dialogues, the bad girls and the over the top acting and the crossing of the line of filmic codes. It is also a great transgenre that marries Western, Horror, Thriller, and Film noir. Definitely and without a doubt a huge influence on Quentin Tarantino’s films, especially Death Proof, it also has an edge of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the weird family of men, the strong retarded son and the crippled father.

Alphaville

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

A US secret agent is sent to the distant space city of Alphaville where he must find a missing person and free the city from its tyrannical ruler.

Dense, uncanny, avant-gardist, visionary, are some of the many qualities that we can label on the films of Jean-Luc Godard during the 1960’s. His love of Cinema, especially American genre pictures and B-Movies made him the director he was. Each of his films of this era owes a great deal to the likes of Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, and Nicholas Ray amongst many others. The most famous New Waver along with the late François Truffaut, Godard was at the peak of his career in 1965 and he was directing films in full speed, all that with few means. However, as every film he has ever made, he uses the message of imagination over everything. Few Science-Fiction films were made by the French New Wave, and Alphaville is one of the most unique films of the genre and the whole group of cineastes. With Truffaut’s hit or miss Fahrenheit 451, Godard delivers a genuinely intelligent mix of private detective meets its near future.

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constatine) arrives in Alphaville in on a planet similar to the Earth. This environment has forbidden sentiments and personalities to its inhabitants. With his American values, Caution must find a missing person and escape the world of Alphaville.

Ultimately influencing hundreds of its followers, the concept of dystopia and near nihilist future are themes that Godard will overly reuse and exploit ad infinitum in his post May 68 period. In Alphaville, the cineaste uses his lover Anna Karina in a very unique way. Her naïve traits and lectures give to her character, Natacha von Braun, a tragic inhuman robotic presence. Despite being a little limited acting wise, Karina achieves to be particularly convincing with the culmination of the ending when she almost whispers the words: “Je vous aime” (I love you).

Just like George Orwell with his 1984 or Aldous Huxley with his Brave New World, Jean-Luc Godard elevates the “propos” of his film along those masterpieces that reveals the malignant and devious tendencies of the post-modern world. Added to that, Alphaville is still an entertainment of high value while it inspires great thoughts and self-study of our societies.

Along with À bout de souffle (Breathless), Pierrot le fou, Le mépris (Contempt), Bande à part, Alphaville is the cream of the whole corpus of films that Godard directed. Highly recommended.

Kwaidan (1965)

Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965)

This exquisite Japanese masterpiece of traditionnal ghost stories reveals the many aspects of Masaki Kobayashi's great talent as a filmmaker and also as a painter and a set dresser. Almost entirely shot inside a huge airport hangar and completly painted by Kobayashi himself, Kwaidan tells three medival ghost stories.

Appart from being visually stunning it's obvious that the shooting was set inside, Its visual aspects add something unusual almost eerie to the story. It fits very well with the unsettling tales of the different ghosts. The bright colours of the Criterion transfert gives a undated perspective of this little gem.

Kobayashi is a very lesser known director, maybe in the shadow of his fellow compatriots like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Immamure, etc. But his films are as important as those other Japanese directors. His other films include: The Human Condition and Samurai Rebellion.

But, to many cinephiles, including your host, Kwaidan is his masterpiece!