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Karppi (2018)
Like Watching a Fish Tank
A woman is dead. Was she killed? Was it an accident? Did she die of sheer boredom?
The aptly titled "Deadwind" takes place in the harsh beauty of Finland. Everyone lives in blocks of modern loft apartments with high ceilings, blank, white walls and hardwood floors. Everyone works in shadowy, dimly lit offices. A mysterious company wants to build more modern loft apartments with high ceilings, blank, white walls and hardwood floors. Also strange wind turbines that don't work well.
There is a City Council that is going to vote on building more modern loft apartments with high ceilings, blank white walls and hardwood floors. Eventually.
The woman's mysterious death is assigned to Detective Sofia Karppi (Pihla Viitala), who lives in a modern loft apartment with high ceilings, blank white walls and hardwood floors. She cannot afford a comb or hairbrush. Sometimes she wears her long, blond hair up, but mostly not. She has boots. Also a badge. Her expressions range from somber to pensive to mournful to morose to introspective. Karppi has a teenage daughter. The teenage daughter has a nose piercing and is rebellious in a pensive, morose way. The other detectives are dull-witted fellows and mansplainers, but it is pensive, morose mansplaining.
In the harsh beauty of Finland, everyone is pensive and morose. Some of the men have beards, which helps them be pensive and morose. Others do not, but they have still mastered being pensive and morose, especially when they stare at their laptop computers. The men often wear sweaters. In the harsh beauty of Finland, the men's sweaters are pensive and morose. Even the music is pensive and morose. Except when it is "suspenseful."
The dialogue is also pensive and morose:
Hm.
Hm.
(Sigh)
Hm.
Every so often, something happens. Like a stabbing or a shooting. Or someone runs. Sometimes it is outdoors in the harsh beauty of Finland. Or in a modern loft apartment with high ceilings, blank white walls and hardwood floors.
"Deadwind" is like watching a fish tank. A pensive, morose fish tank where the fish live in modern loft apartments with high ceilings, blank white walls and hardwood floors.
Hm.
Sigh.
Bar-Rac's Night Out (1937)
New Dimensions in Pete Smith Not Being Funny
I'm not a Pete Smith Fan. In fact I had never heard of him until TCM started airing his shorts a few years ago. He is better known for shorts with Dave "Reefer Madness" O'Brien on "How to Dig a Hole or "How to Boil Water."
This short, however, goes the limit in an unfunny story about an unfortunate (and apparently trained) raccoon who has "comical" misadventures with other apparently trained animals in trying to bring home a meal to his "wife." At least it isn't the dog baseball one, which is somehow even worse.
So Fine (1981)
The worst
I saw this movie when it came out and although it's been nearly 30 years, the memory of this disaster remains fresh. I'm shocked to see all the rave reviews. I was never a huge fan of Ryan O'Neal, but his presence in this film shows how much his career had deteriorated since "Love Story" and "Paper Moon."
"So Fine" was intended as a satire on the garment industry and the gullibility of the fashion-conscious, in this case, a company that sets the fashion world on fire with jeans with see-through hip pockets. The finale, a disastrous opera production, was intended as an homage to the Marx Bros.' "A Night at the Opera" with "amusing" subtitles, an example being something like "I, Mr. Eddie, have come for my revenge." You couldn't pay me to watch this thing again.
The Razor's Edge (1984)
One of the worst I've ever seen
I saw this movie when it came out and 26 years have not dulled the memory of how terrible it is.
How bad? Well "Razor's Edge" is like Bill Murray's lounge singer trying to do a serious grand opera -- and occasionally reverting to his lounge persona.
What makes this movie particularly awful is its grand pretensions. Murray, at least at that point in his career, didn't have the acting chops for serious drama and was allowed to get away just about anything. It's the ultimate vanity project. Awful. Awful. Awful.
It was nice to see Brian Doyle Murray, Bill Murray's brother, in a small role, since they used to work together on the National Lampoon Radio Hour.
The Black Dahlia (2006)
Almost the Heaven's Gate of Film Noir
"The Black Dahlia" is a long, bloated, confusing, self-important, self-consciously artsy movie undermined by miscasting, absurd plot turns, naive symbolism, an utter disdain for history and laughable overacting that make Robert Towne's ponderous, plodding "Chinatown" sequel, "Two Jakes" (1990), look like a taut thriller.
The most marked difference between "Dahlia" and other classics of the more recent genre is that although "L.A. Confidential" is firmly planted in the 1950s and "Chinatown" takes place in the 1930s, De Palma's film has shallow roots "once upon a time in Los Angeles." Clearly, a movie nominally set in 1943-47 in which the lead characters attend a silent movie ("The Man Who Laughs, " 1928--note that the characters are sitting in the balcony, which was reserved for blacks back in the ugly days of segregation. Oops!) has nothing but contempt for the past, which is reflected in a thousand ways, from male actors' scruffy haircuts and inability to wear hats properly to a laughable lesbian nightclub scene featuring K.D. Lang in top hat and tails singing "Love for Sale," which rather than depicting the classic film noir era is most evocative of "Bugsy Malone," a far more accurate film.
One can find fatal flaws in virtually every area of this movie with little effortin fact the most difficult task in critiquing the film is remembering everything that's wrong with it.
First, there's Josh Friedman's dialog: "She looks like that dead girl! How sick are you?"not quite "She's my sister and my daughter," is it? Then there's miscasting (at 31, Kirshner is much too old to play the 22-year-old Black Dahlia), opulent production design by Dante Ferretti (police officers lived like this on LAPD pay? Who knew?), music (Mark Isham in the entirely predictable "cue mournful trumpet" genre), odd costumingFriday casual for the men, fall collection for the women(Jenny Beavan), down to the crowd scenes, which are busy to the point of distraction. And I wish I had the cigarette holder franchise on this film. I would be a rich man.
Even special effects are misused, with an earthquake that serves no purpose except to underline an obvious plot turn. Granted, the overly complex story is almost impossible to follow, but in this instance, De Palma must assume the audience has an IQ of about 50. And unlike the shocking and painfully realistic nose-slitting scene in "Chinatown," the far worse violence inflicted on the Black Dahlia is amusingly fake. If De Palma was hoping to make a slasher flick, he failed badly.
Nor does Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography escape a rap on the knuckles for a ridiculous lesbian stag film (presumably made at a cost surpassing the combined budgets of all blue movies produced from the 1920s to the 1950s), and a self-conscious and overly elaborate shot in which partners Blanchard (Eckhart) and Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) engage in a shootout, followed by the camera slowly rising up floor by floor of an entire apartment building, proceeding to a befuddling shot of the building's roof before it at last discovers the Black Dahlia's body in a vacant lot in the adjoining block. As visual storytelling, this is a grandiose and miserable failure.
And then there's Fiona Shaw, who chews so much scenery that she must have been rushed to an oral surgeon to have the splinters removed.
For that matterand perhaps this is what makes the heart of the film beat so faintlythere is very little of the Black Dahlia in "The Black Dahlia," who only surfaces far into the picture.
In fact, the first 30 or 40 minutes are devoted to boxing matches between the two detectives, nicknamed "Fire" and "Ice" from the Symbolism 101 school of writing. (I know it's in the book, but that's no excuse).
So where is the Black Dahlia in this confusing mess? She exists entirely on film. Of course in real life, Elizabeth Short never got a screen test or even appeared in a school play, but De Palma gives her one and Kirshner, trying her best at the impossible task of acting 22, makes it as pitiful as possible with an intentionally miserable reading of Vivian Leigh's famous monologue from "Gone With the Wind."
The handling of the crime scene? Ridiculous even by Hollywood's lax standards. Vintage black-and-white police cars swarming the streets and detectives bellowing instructions like some shark-jumping 1970s cop show that any good investigator would already know. Ditto the morgue.
Then there's the contrasting love/sex scenes, and it's obvious De Palma hasn't a clue how to stage either one. The sex scene, between Harnett and Johansson, occurs in the dining room, when, overcome with passion, Bleichert rips away the tablecloth, sending dishes everywhere, and has his way with Lake. Isham's score is lushly romantic, an oddly contrasting choice of music, and amour like this is sure tough on the Havilland china and the Baccarat crystal.
The love scene, between Swank and Harnett, is just as amusing with Bleichert and Linscott having a little pillow talk while she's wearing nothing but huge pearl earrings and a long matching necklace with pearls the size of small onions, ensuring, I would imagine, a rather bumpy ride.
And about those crazy Linscotts. Bleichert knows exactly how to make rich people confess to murder: Use their valuable antiques for target practice. The last time I checked, police revolvers hold six rounds, so unless Bleichert was planning to fight off one of them as he reloaded I can't imagine what he thought he would do after his sixth question. Then again, not everybody can send a crystal chandelier crashing to the floor with one shotsome of us need two.
And while you're at it, Bucky, take out a couple of those clown paintings, please.