TiVoPlex
TiVoPlex for March 23 2010 through March 29 2010
By John Seal
March 29, 2010
From the obscure to the obscurest to the merely overlooked or underappreciated; they all have a home in the TiVoPlex! All times Pacific.
Tuesday 3/23/10
12:35 AM Encore Action
Black Mama, White Mama (1973 USA-PHI): Shot in the Philippines and directed by the legendary Eddie Romero (Mad Doctor of Blood Island, Beyond Atlantis), this outrageous women-in-prison flick features Pam Grier and Margaret Markov as unlikely allies in a war against The Man. Grier is Lee Daniels, most politely described as a sex worker, whilst Markov plays revolutionary sista Karen Brent. The ladies are doing time in one of those women's jails that seem to be de rigueur overseas, but they escape their captors' clutches thanks to the intervention of guerilla Ernesto (Che Guevera? No, some guy named Zaldy Zshornack). But Lee and Karen's troubles aren't over: shackled together à la Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, they must evade recapture by the authorities, whilst also eluding bounty hunter Ruben (Sid Haig) and gangster Vic Cheng (the ubiquitous Vic Diaz). What's a girl to do? Kick some ass, of course!
4:30 AM Turner Classic Movies
The Most Beautiful (1944 JAP): TCM's tribute to Akira Kurosawa continues today with five of his earliest features. Kicking things of is The Most Beautiful, the director's sophomore effort and a film only recently released on home video—and that as part of the Criterion Collection's understandably pricy 25(!) disc set, 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa. It's a little known feature, not least because it's basically a wartime propaganda effort about patriotic women working in a bombsight factory, and is best appreciated as the Japanese equivalent of Edward Dmytryk's Tender Comrade. Apparently, of all the films Kurosawa directed, this was the one closest to his heart—perhaps because he ended up marrying one of the film's stars, Yoko Yaguchi. It's followed at 6:00 AM by the somewhat more familiar Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945), a perfunctory, set-bound tale of feudal court intrigue; at 8:30 AM by No Regrets for our Youth (1946), in which a Japanese girl loses her political innocence when her loved ones are targeted by the Imperial government; at 10:30 AM by One Wonderful Sunday (1947), which I've never seen but has been compared to the works of Frank Capra (!); at 12:30 PM by Drunken Angel (1948), arguably the first of Kurosawa's masterpieces and the first of the director's two dozen collaborations with actor Toshiro Mifune; and at 2:30 PM by Stray Dog (1949), the closest Kurosawa ever came to making a film noir.
Wednesday 3/24/10
1:45 AM Turner Classic Movies
Dodes' Ka-Den (1970 JAP): And one more for the road. The film that drove Kurosawa to attempt suicide (and the first film he shot in color), Dodes' Ka-Den relates a very grim tale of Tokyo slumdwellers, including the retarded Roku-Chan (Yoshitaka Zushi), whose imitation of a streetcar lends the film its title (in English, Clickety-Clack). Produced in the wake of the fruitless half decade after the director's 1965 epic Red Beard, the film doesn't fit neatly into the Kurosawa filmography, not least because Toshiro Mifune is nowhere to be seen. As loathed as much as it is loved, Dodes' Ka-Den will, however, be much appreciated by admirers of troubled youth pics such as Los Olvidados and Pixote.
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