Remi Andre

Dec 7th Suspiria

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

This is, of course, it. The Argento movie “everybody” knows, being referenced in Juno and all, which, at least for a few minutes, made the director a “touchstone for hipster youth.”

What you actually may or may not feel about Suspiria (1977) largely depends on what setting you watched it in. Having seen it in a “Halloween-month horror showing”-bar setting with a friend who hadn’t previously watched it, it was clear, judging by his reaction, that there is a “right” way to watch Suspiria. It’s kind of a cheesy movie if you try to judge each part of it on its own merit.

Turn off the lights, however, and remain quiet throughout, preferably while being just slightly drowsy, and you see the whole picture. And it is kind of glorious.

Suspiria is not supposed to be logical. It’s a surrealistic nightmare, based on, among other things, classic fairytales and stories of Argento’s at-the-time domestic partner Daria Nicolodi’s grandmother’s (supposed) childhood.

And from the moment the protagonist, Suzy Bannion, gets in a cab to get to a German dance academy, it is a descent into a pretty horrifying nightmare.

The first 15 minutes are, somewhat unfairly yet also understandably, considered the best part of the movie. Not only does it include one of the most intricate and crazy killings on film, it is also where the utterly bizarre tone of the movie is set. The pulsating red, blue, green, and yellow lights with strange and beautifully shot happenings progress in a slow yet strangely intense manner, flanked by a jamming Goblin soundtrack (co-written by Argento).

Quite a bit of the soundtrack was recorded before the filming, and the music was blasted on the set while filming, to unnerve the actors. Many will also argue it’s Goblin’s best soundtrack, which is not without merit. (Though I personally consider Tenebre their best work, but that’s for another post.) Apparently Argento-fans Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg blasted the album on repeat while writing their seminal horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead.

The movie is strange, and I can see why it’s not for everybody. In effect Suspiria is an art house horror movie, which, let’s face it, is a bit of an odd combination.  If you can get past that it is strange, however, and take it in the way it’s supposed to be watched, it truly is a surreal masterpiece in all its visual and audible glory.

Dec 4th The Prisoner

TV and Movies and Music and such: I watch TV. I watch movies. I listen to music. And such. Then I write about it.

It’s probably not politically correct to sing the praises of the McGoohan-less remake of The Prisoner, but you know what? I’m going to do it all the same. Yes it is different from the original. The crazy psychedelic mod feel of the old series has been tossed aside to make way for a bleak desert Village under the glassy silhouettes of two WTC-looking towers.

Yet, for me at least, the six episode re-imagined Prisoner just works. It is confusing at time, certainly, but when you look back at it all after the excellent finale, most everything makes sense. Even the wraps.

Particularly McKellen as #2 impresses. The whole series feels like a playground where he can act pretty much exactly how he wants to. And it works. Caviezel also does a great job.

I suppose people have certain expectations of what The Prisoner is, and the closest we come to some of the hammier parts of the original is the suit a prisoner on the run is wearing in one of the opening scenes.

Whatever.

If you can get past the fact that the remake is merely a head-trip, and not a psychedelic head-trip, I have a feeling The Prisoner is a mini series fans of Lost and Twin Peaks will enjoy. And at least you get to listen to Brian Wilson’s SMiLE as the soundtrack here. Y’know. When it comes out on DVD or is rerun.

Dec 3rd Deep Red

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

After the much ignored Le Cinque Giornate (not reviewed here, as it’s largely not considered an “Argento movie”), Argento made the wise move (at least as far as I’m concerned, and let’s face it — I’m pretty much always right as far as I am concerned) to return to the horror genre with Deep Red (1975, original title: Profondo Rosso), the film that arguably kicked off his golden era of movie making.

On the surface, this is a pretty standard mystery, following Marcus Daly (nicely portrayed by David Hemmings, best known from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow Up) searching for the killer of a famous psychic, a murder he himself witnessed. In other words, not a million miles from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Yet it’s the execution that sets the movie apart from the countless 1970s gialli: Deep Red is jawdroppingly shot, using color techniques arguably only mastered by the great Mario Bava before this. Add to that the framing and the pace of the editing, and it is fairly obvious that Quentin Tarantino studied Deep Red closely before making… well… the majority of his movies. (Particularly the Kill Bill films come to mind, visually speaking.)

Deep Red was also the first Argento movie to feature music by Goblin, making what remains one of the highest selling movie soundtracks of all time. Indeed, the music helps drive the plot along in an interestingly rhythmic fashion. The prime example, other than the memorable and oft-repeated theme, being the bass and rhythm guitar driven “Mad Puppet” — named for a puppet which served as the inspiration for the “Billy” puppet in Saw — which accompanies a lengthy trek through an abandoned mansion.

There were certainly many of hints what Argento was capable of with the Animal Trilogy, but this was the home run that elevated him to a cult director status. A good indication of where the movie stands among Argento’s fans is that it was named his best movie in a reader’s poll at the official unofficial official Argento fansite, Dark Dreams.

Suspiria might be Argento’s most famous movie, but this is indeed in all likelihood his best movie, even though I wouldn’t call it my personal favorite. Those two are yet to come. Wait, and be excited!

Dec 1st Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, original title: 4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio) concludes Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” and, after a brief foray into television (and the rarely seen non-horror Le Cinque Giornate), would catapult him into what many consider his 12-odd-year “golden period.”

But that’s for another post, and it could be argued that Four Flies on Grey Velvet (and indeed the rest of the “Animal Trilogy”) is one of his best works. Here the more conventional film making of its “prequels” was starting to be pushed aside to make way for the more Argento-esque. The Ennio Morricone score, for example, plays a smaller role, and is accompanied by a more jazz-y prog-rock soundtrack. Morricone and Argento apparently had some disagreements over this, and it would be Morricone’s last score for Argento until 1996’s The Stendhal Syndrome. (He was, of course, for the most part replaced by Claudio Simonetti and his band Goblin.)

As part of the trilogy, this movie feels a whole lot more like a pure giallo than The Cat o’ Nine Tails. The plot of a man set up to commit a murder by a photographer in a creepy mask who continues to stalk and taunt him with pictures of the killing… Yes, there’s definitely something pulp about the whole set up. But it’s wicked fun to watch.

Four Flies… was largely considered Argento’s “lost movie” as its availability was pretty much non-existent until early 2009, when the remastered uncut DVD was released. Apparently Paramount sat on its rights for all those years, refusing to release it, which is odd, seeing a new version of Suspiria is released every other week. (That might be a hyperbole.)

Again, I digress. In terms of a giallo murder mystery, Four Flies on Grey Velvet is as classic and classy as they come. The pounding soundtrack, good chunks of humor (Jean Pierre Marielle walks a fine line in his portrayal of a homosexual private investigator,  without stumbling to the wrong side of aforementioned line), and “bullet effect” before its time, make up a thriller that truly is an Argento classic.

Nov 25th The Cat o’ Nine Tails

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971, original title: Il Gatto a Nove Code) might very well be the coolest movie Argento has ever made, which, frankly, doesn’t take that much. I mean, inviting your friends over to drink cappuccino and wear berets wouldn’t work too well if you were watching somebody getting shanked with a razor blade in Tenebre, would it?

The Cat o’ Nine Tails is a bit different. Here you have cool cars in cool chase scenes (some of which are fantastically shot), with cool men delivering cool lines to cool women. Yet, for being an Argento movie and a giallo, there is little blood or gore, and quite a bit of plot. In fact, the whole story is quite excellent, with more tensity than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

The premise surrounds a blind man who accidentally overhears a suspicious conversation which has him thrown into a world of murder, intrigue and biochemistry. Yes. I kid you not. Biochemistry. A large part of the story surrounds the XXY syndrome, a chromosome abnormality which makes people more prone to commit violent crimes.

In other words, this is more of a pure suspense thriller than most of Argento’s work, and a very good one at that. As often as he is called “the Italian Hitchcock,” this is really the only Argento movie I can think of that is very much in the style of “The Master of Suspense.” (Do You Like Hitchcock? being the obvious exception.)

The soundtrack is, as with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, provided by Ennio Morricone, and some good music it is. As for the filming, there are some excellent shots to be seen, though not as over the top as some of Argento’s later work.

Most of all, The Cat o’Nine Tails is probably one of Argento’s most accessible movies. No crazy Surpiria/Inferno type surrealism to be seen here. This one is worth checking out for anyone who likes a good thriller without too much gore.

For more, check out IMDb.

Nov 24th The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

After co-writing the highly successful Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, original title: C’era una volta il West), Argento moved on to direct (and write) his first feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970, original title: L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo). No matter what you think about Argento, you have to give the man this: He jumped into giallo film making both feet first. I mean really: The man has had the reputation of misogyny (however unfair as that might be) ever since Plumage, which should be a good indication of how violent this movie is.

And make no bones about it, this is as violent as a giallo comes. For those not familiar with the term giallo, it simply is a sub genre of whodunit crime movies, often with a lot of blood set to a pumping soundtrack. The word is Italian for “yellow,” which references the color of the covers of the print paperbacks that were the basis for the genre.

As a directional debut, the movie is surprisingly tight. Flawed, but tight. Plot wise and look wise, there are things here that will stay with pretty much any Argento movie up until today: The protagonist sees something, in this case a murder, but he can’t quite remember exactly what he saw. The filming of the killer’s black-gloved hands — belonging to Argento during the murder scenes — with a knife. Crazy beautiful colors and set designs. A booming soundtrack, this time courtesy of the legendary Ennio Morricone. And so on and so forth.

The movie progresses with the hapless witness tracking down a killer who also is tracking him down, through a slew of dead bodies.

It’s a simple story, but then again, I’m a simple man. What is not so simple is the filming. While not as breathtaking as some of his future work, Plumage offers some styles of shots that have been a staple in horror movies ever since. Watch this film and then jump over to Carpenter’s Halloween and you will see what I’m talking about. (Carpenter has cited Argento as an influence multiple times.)

Plumage isn’t Argento’s best work — it’s obvious who the killer is from the get-go — and in some ways it feels like this is the first stab (get it?!) at making what would turn out to be his 1975-classic, Deep Red, which is very similar, yet a lot better.

That’s not to say this isn’t a fun movie, though. If you can cope with watching a lot of cornsyrup, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a highly entertaining thriller.

For more, check out IMDb.

Nov 23rd Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever

Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever: This is part of my “Watching every Dario Argento movie, ever” category. Here I go through all the movies written and directed by Dario Argento, and provide you with the pleasure of reading my views on them!

I enjoy the movies of Dario Argento. So much, in fact, that I’ve decided to review every Argento movie chronologically on this very site. Probably much to the excitement of my four readers!

For those not familiar with Argento, he is an Italian writer/director, whose most famous screenplay isn’t for an “Argento movie,” but for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, currently ranked #23 on IMDb’s top movie list. For fans of horror movies, however, titles like the murder mystery Deep Red and the surrealistic dream-like Suspiria are titles that instantly are connected to his name. Adjectives like “gory” and “bloody” might also come to mind to most Argento followers, though in an age of Hostels and Saws, his gore is decidedly artistic looking as opposed to realistic.

To truly appreciate Argento’s best work, though, you don’t need to enjoy conventional horror movies. There isn’t much conventionality in the man who has been dubbed — and while this is supposed to be complimentary, there aren’t many similarities between the two directors  — “The Italian Hitchcock.” Argento, at his best, delivers visually stunning movies with pounding soundtracks. The stories might not always make sense, nor are they supposed to, and the acting and dialogue might be eclectic at best at times, but when it’s all said and done, that is all part of the charm. Argento is an acquired taste, kind of like tripe.

In other words, get ready to have your minds blown starting tomorrow, when I start my journey through Argento’s movie landscape with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. You will love it.

Nov 12th If I only give you one Firefox tip that you should listen to, this is it…

After about a six month stint with Safari, I’m back to using Firefox. Not because I don’t like Safari — it has some really nice features — but because Firefox has a few advanced features I like, and, more importantly, because I like to change things up.

The one Firefox feature I really do like is the keyword feature in bookmarks, which allows you to perform custom searches in the address bar. For example, I’ve set one up for Wikipedia that allows me to type “w search phrase” which takes me to the appropriate Wikipedia phrase for “search phrase.” Quick and simple, and also doable with most sites, like Internet Movie Database, GMail, etc. It’s easy to set up to:

1. Go Bookmarks->Organize Bookmark.
2. Click the “options” button (a cogwheel in OS X) and “New Bookmark.”
3. Here add:
   1. Name: Wikipedia
   2. Location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
   3. Keyword: w

Now you can type “w whatever” in the address bar and it will search for “whatever.” If you want to use another shortcut than “w” you can call it pretty much anything, like “wiki,” “wp,” “wikipedia,” etc. The “%s” in the location is the wildcard, which is what Firefox swaps out with whatever you type after the keyword. (In this case, “whatever.”) Had this been an IMDb search, you would have used “http://us.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%s” and, probably, a different keyword.

And that’s how simple it is.

Nov 2nd Xflix and movies you totally should watch

The one good thing about being knocked out by the flu for a week — and honestly, one good thing really doesn’t make up for having the flu — was to be able to give Netflix on Xbox a run for its money. Previous attempts at using it has been a bit of a hit and miss, with varying picture quality and a less than stellar selection of movies.

All the six movies I watched had the quality identical to what I’d expect from a DVD, with the advantage of offering a fast-forward and rewind function with frame previews. (Pretty dang helpful.) And the selection had gotten quite a bit better than last time I used the service.

And of course the advantage is that you get an instant gratification with what we so cutely refer to as “Xflix.”

More importantly, the movies I watched, and what my impressions were:

Peeping Tom: An absolutely groundbreaking and wonderfully shot thriller from 1960. Even today it feels disturbing, and it can probably be considered the first — and I hate this moniker – ”torture porn” movie. (Most critics love Peeping Tom, so no worries, you can watch it without losing your sought after street cred.) This movie is recommended!

My Name is Bruce: B-movie legend Bruce Campbell stars (and directs) as a caricature of himself, in this often hilarious horror movie spoof. My Name is Bruce is recommended!

Nosferatu: Pretty much the “original” horror movie, which is still scary to this day. Hence why it is recommended! How they had expected to get away with ripping off Dracula without getting caught is another question altogether.

Carnival of Souls: The original 1962 version is out of this world eerie, and one I want to check out again when I feel better. Because, yes, it’s difficult to follow fully. Definitely recommended, particularly for fans of David Lynch.

Gonzo: A nice enough look at the world of Hunter S. Thompson, and recommended for any of his fans. Most notably it was presented in HD, and there were no lags, which is a great testimony to Xflix.

From Dusk Till Dawn: Been meaning to catch this one for the last 10-12 years. And yes, it’s a pretty amusing movie, which I’d semi-recommend.

… and yes, these all fall into the “catching up with movies I have meant to watch” category.

Oct 12th And I so wanted a Sidekick too

After the horrendous reviews of Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft has taken another punch in the face after losing all data for many of its Sidekick users.

For those not up-to-date, the Sidekick stores its data in a “cloud,” which is just a fancy way to say the data is stored remotely, kind of like how your GMail contacts or whatever is stored on Google’s servers. After a botched SAN (storage area network — basically a bunch of servers and hard drives in a data center) update, somebody noticed that nobody had bothered backing up the data before attempting to perform the upgrade.

Whoops!

The remedy? Ask their users to not power down their phones so they could re-sync the data from the Sidekick back into the cloud. Apparently many to most users didn’t receive the memo. And for now, it is unknown if they will ever see their data again.

One thing here is that Microsoft doesn’t quite “get” this whole cell phone thing, another is that they apparently can’t be trusted with cloud technology. Which is kind of funny, seeing they are launching their cloud-based Windows platform, Azure, shortly.

I realize Azure and Sidekick are two completely separate things, but would you trust a company that doesn’t understand the importance of back-ups with your data?