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Goluboy ekspress (1929)
"The Blue Express" The Lincheng Outrage, and "Shanghai Expressl
This movie is pure propaganda, but that doesn't make it bad propaganda, or a bad movie.
It has its genesis in the "Lincheng Outrage" of 1923. Bandits composed of ex-soldiers and....pure bandits hijacked the crack "Blue Express", the Shanghai to Peking (actually, Tientsin, to the East) killed (a little) looted (a lot) and held Westerners on the train for ransom. And there was a treasure trove of important hostages to take! In the end, it did not go well for the hostage-takers.
That story gets transformed into a Chinese class struggle against the typical forces of Western capitalist oppression.
The heroes and heroines are the Chinese people on the train, who rise up against the capitalists. There are images of that speeding train that presage "Shanghai Express" by less than 3 years. So, what do you need to know?
The Chinese, informed and enlightened against the foreign oppressors defeat them in an intense gun battle on the train. Wicked capitalists decide the only way to thwart the rising of social consciousness is to divert the train on to a side track that will lead to a catastrophic crash.
The capitalist lackey on the track and the honest socialist switch-man engage in mortal combat. Badly wounded, our switch-man gets the train on the right track moments before catastrophe. The train and the narrative increase in velocity to the end. Some of the film cuts of the train's progress were perhaps lifted in Von Sternberg in "Shanghai Express". The Russians (like the director of this film and Serge Eisenstein) felt that Von Sternberg lifted much of the story, some of characters, and a lot of the editing from this movie. Pretty good story, pretty good editing, pretty good acting. Pretty good Soviet filmmaking from its golden, silent, age. Not "The Battleship Potemkin", but worth it if you want to see connections between good Soviet propaganda and Von Sternberg's early works.
Fools' Parade (1971)
Great Little Movie with a Very Great Little Cast! Best Line: "God uses the good ones; the bad ones use God."
Gee, yeah, it's just a little movie, but what this cast does with it! Jimmy Stewart plays a wrongly imprisoned ex-con with a glass eye (clearly visible with prosthesis), a mustache, and a way with explosives.
Ah, George Kennedy as the evil bounty-hunter, Strother Martin as Jimmy's side-kick, and a very young Kurt Russell, as the kid who comes along for the ride.
Nice tension. Revenge. Dirty double-dealing bankers, the Depression, a girl to be sold into white slavery, geeze, it ain't a Wonderful Life, but it rhymes!
And a goofy bloodhound that can't get things right...quite. Maybe, even, the _Justice_ Mr. Potter didn't get in "It's a Wonderful Life"!
It's a lovely little movie with a great cast that plays it for all it's worth. Well done little movie!
Java Head (1934)
A Frustratingly Slow Start, and then, ...Wong arrives
There are frustrations watching this movie. It is interminably slow to start.
Then "Princess" Taou Yuen (Wong) arrives, the new wife of dashing, handsome, prosperous, ... and callow sea captain, Gerrit Ammidon.
The movie doesn't adequately explain why she would stoop to such a marriage. Marrying a barbarian and moving away to a distant, strange land. For Taou Yuen is no frail butterfly. She is an intelligent, moral almost to a fault, and tolerant of the difficulties she knows she will face in this strange land. In this movie, Bristol, England, in the book and original movie, the City of Witches, Salem, Massachusetts. That locale was not by accident.
The plot is "Madama Butterfly" turned upside down, then shaken. "Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton" is true to his promise-he brings his "Cho Cho San" to his home.
What happens next?
The story has only true strong, well developed characters: Wong's brilliant performance as Taou Yuen, and George Curzon as her nemesis, the failed China trader, Edward Dunsack, half-mad with opium, and suffering a fixation that today might be called "yellow fever". He is as relentless as Othello's Iago to Wong's Desdemona. It's brilliant. John Loder is wooden as the newlywed captain.
There are some cringe-worthy moments; the moment after the climactic scene worst.
Wong's descent into something like madness is a wonder to behold. The climax is astonishing; incomprehensible in some ways, but perfectly logical in others. There are strikingly modern elements in the story-sexual obsession, drug use, religious fanaticism, semi-nudity. And Anna May gets to kiss the romantic lead. For once.
In this movie, only one character loves, adores Princess Taou Yuen just as she is. Laurel, a young girl in the Ammidon clan.
There is some humor. Some broad and some effective.
The last 20 minutes is a runaway carriage, figuratively and literally.
An inanimate object, a smuggled chest of raw opium, decides the fates of all the characters.
Along with the beautiful, serene, tolerant, intelligent Taou Yuen,
A sea chest of opium wreaks upon the English port city the havoc that the Opium Wars wreaked upon China.
It is Karma.
A great, flawed movie. Stop the movie as soon as Anna May's face dissolves on the screen at the end. Don't ruin it.
Gojira -1.0 (2023)
An Alternative History to Make You Cry
I never thought a Godzilla movie would make me cry. Hyper-realism and...the Monster.
In an Alternative History, the US becomes so involved with the Soviet Union right after WW Ii, the defeated Japanese are left to fend for themselves.
Intense drama in a formula that is right of "Independence Day". How does Japan save itself after WW. Ii. Godzilla's awakening comes early...and it's the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that do , by suggestion.
Tokyo fends for itself. The remnants of the Japanese Navy are permitted to defend the nation. And there is an airplane.....
The movie expresses the national regret for WW II, the loss, but for the military survivors, a chance to make their failures into something else.
Godzilla--yup, he's there, in all his wicked grandeur, and more,
There's a lot of excellent special effects, and a few logical pieces that don't quite make sense. Never mind that.
One of the main themes-it's not enough to die certain death for your country, but to live for it, too.
People were crying at some scenes. I cried. My son cried. It was just electric in the theater. And something I haven't seen in a long time--clapping and cheering.
If this movie isn't up for Academy Awards, including best picture, we'll, then the fix is in. The movie has similar concepts as "Oppenheimer", but twisting history around, to make an alternative history and science fiction fantasy as real as possible.
See it!