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DG is a group blogazine devoted to news, movies, art, music, whiskey, and New York City. Harry and Jennifer Swartz-Turfle are its editorial tag team. Jennifer's personal blog is Teapot Dome.
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harry(at)dailygusto.com
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November 01, 2005
Discover. Preserve. Protect.
For those archivist/preservation types out there, here's a great website devoted to keeping old movie theaters alive (and reminiscing about those that are gone).: http://cinematreasures.org/...
June 30, 2005
Crazed Fruit
Brothers Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara) and Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa), are spending their summer at a coastal resort running with a group of similarly-minded college-age youths boating, gambling, generally not doing much of anything. The younger, more naive Haruji, would like nothing more than to meet a nice girl while on this summer vacation, but as we all know, love (or, more to the point, lust) can complicate matters....
May 17, 2005
Restoring the order of things
As Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1999 feature Charisma begins, burnt out cop Yabuike (Koji Yaukusho) is brought in to defuse a hostage situation. Seized by a moment of indecision, he misses a key opportunity, leading to the deaths of both the unbalanced criminal and his prisoner. Yabuike is forced to take an obviously much-needed vacation, but instead of going home, he decides to go for a walk in the woods....
May 12, 2005
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance
Koji and Junko Sato are a married couple living a quiet, modest life. Koji (Koji Yakusho) works as a sound effects recorder for television; Junko (Jun Fubuki) works from home as a medium. Their respective careers will come to involve them in quite the life-changing event....
May 11, 2005
Cannes 2005
The 58th annual Cannes Film Festival kicks off today. Much has been made of the main competition's reliance on past masters, but that is not necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn't change the fact that there are some films getting excited about: In competetion David Cronenberg's A History of Violence has the baggage of being adapted from a comic book...oh, excuse me, a graphic novel, but as he has proven before, pulp source material can be transformed into excellent cinema (see: The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers). Michael Haneke's Cache, starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche (reuniting with her Code...
March 28, 2005
The kids aren't alright: All About Lily Chou Chou
Films about young people that actually explore social dynamics in an honest and forthcoming way are few and far between. That Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) manages this feat while also engaging the viewer on a purely cinematic level is something of a minor miracle....
December 03, 2004
Nip/Tuck: Franju's Eyes Without a Face
To the strains of Maurice Jarre's spiraling carnival-waltz score, Alida Valli drives through the French countryside just outside of Paris. In the back seat is a figure slumped over, face obscured by a hat. Valli pulls over to the side of the road and drags the body out of the car. Dressed in a man's raincoat and nothing else, the corpse's legs become just a little too visible for comfort as Valli, her own black vinyl raincoat glistening in the moonlight, rolls the dead girl into the Seine....
November 15, 2004
Social Disservices: The Demon
It is 1978 and the middle of a heat wave in Japan. Kikoyo (Mayumi Ogawa) is at her wits end with her three children. Gathering the kids up, they take a train to visit the children's father. Sokichi (Ken Ogata) is running a printing business with is current wife Oume (Shima Iwashita) who has until now had no knowledge of his lover, let alone his brood. No longer able to support Kikoyo and the children, Sokichi has simply cut off contact with them. Now, Kikuyo insists, they are his problem....
November 12, 2004
Red menace
For those in the NYC area, a reminder that Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future opens today at the Cinema Village. Kurosawa's films are hard to see theatrically in the U.S. outside of festivals, so try to catch this one while you can. Kurosawa's films have a mysterious elusive quality to them, none quite as much as Bright Future. Of the five I have seen, this is on the one hand the most straightforward film, but it is also perhaps the hardest to get one's head around. I have been mulling it over in my mind like no other movie this...
November 02, 2004
A Desperate Housewife: Yoshitaro Nomura's Zero Focus
Yoshitaro Nomura's Zero Focus (1961) begins with an ending; not the film's ending, but the end of a relationship, though this is unbeknownst to either partner at the moment. Teiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is at a Tokyo train station seeing off her new husband Kenichi (Koji Nambara) as he leaves to oversee the transfer of his position in an advertising agency to a new hire. He tells his wife that he will be back in a few days. Those days pass quickly for the young woman and as the third day comes and goes, then the fourth and the fifth,...
October 20, 2004
Being Koji Yakusho
Now, I don't really have anything against Richard Gere. He's probably a perfectly nice guy, and he wears his grey hair well. However, as I see the commercials on the tee vee for the remake of Shall We Dance, I can't help but pine for a future when Koji Yakusho is as well know in the States as he is in Japan. Koji originated the role of the stuffy businessman who discovers both ballroom dancing and love in the 1996 original. It's a lightweight movie, as I recall, but one that is helped immeasurably by its star's performance. Koji...
September 23, 2004
We all fall down
When funding fell through for Lars Von Trier’s sophomore feature film, instead of completely scrapping the project, he transformed it into something new. The least seen of his major works, Epidemic (1987) is a very self-referential piece for the director, a film about the making of itself, real life eventually contaminated by fiction....
September 09, 2004
I've got something I want to play for you...
Television programmer Max Renn (James Woods) is looking for something new, "something tough" to really pull in an audience that, as he sees it, has grown tired of the same old same old. Softcore Japanese porn isn't going to do it; faux-Greco-Roman period softcore really isn't going to do it. One day, Max thinks he has found his solution in a pirate televison signal his technogeek Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) picks up in his lab....
September 08, 2004
Maybe the cinema really is about death
This sounds straight out of the John Waters movie "Cecil B. Demented." Police in Paris have discovered true underground cinema in the centuries-old skull-lined catacombs under the city. After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access. Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said. Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave...
August 18, 2004
Happy birthday to Roman Polanski
I've always had some weird fascination with celebrity birthdays, possibly out of a desire to see how long someone can work successfully within the movie-making world. Roman Polanski, who turns 71 today is proof that one can turn out masterpieces at both ends of a career, from his 1962 feature debut Knife in the Water to 2002's The Pianist. Polanski is currently working on an adaptation of Oliver Twist, with newcomer Barney Clark in the title role and Ben Kingsley as Fagin. Two of the last Polanski dvd hold outs are due this fall: 1967's The Fearless Vampire Killers...
August 16, 2004
Mopping up the goo
Now that theater owners will have had a little time to squeegy the collective fan-boy wad off of the screens showing Alien Vs. Predator, let's take a look at a few flicks down the pike, ones with hopefully a little something more to offer: I (Heart) Huckabees (October 1) is the first film from David O. Russell since 1999's Three Kings (which will apparently be re-released this fall). A comedy about, well....I'll actually let the official Fox Searchlight synopsis handle this one: "Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), head of the Open Spaces Coalition, has been experiencing an alarming series of coincidences...
August 06, 2004
Math never was my strong suit
A group of scientists at King's College, London, has come up with a mathematical formula to determine how scary a movie is. By taking into account such variables as music, the unknown, setting, and a balance between realism and fantasy, the researchers have determined that Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is the perfect scary movie. They get no argument from me (The Shining never fails to scare the hell out of me and ranks as one of the director's very best works, in my opinion), though the idea of determining a film's (or any piece of art's) worth via a...
July 14, 2004
Kairo, and those moments out of left field
I love those moments in films that catch the viewer totally off guard. A scene is playing out in normal fashion, but something completely horrible happens and punches you in the gut. One such scene occurs in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (aka Pulse). The shot in question is pictured here, but I won't give away what happens. There is a special effect of some sort involved, but it is so seamless that I sat there simultaneously shocked and wondering how the shot was pulled off. (Likely something very simple, but simplicity is the key the shot's effectiveness.) It's a moment...
July 08, 2004
Go Dickie!
There's a hilarious faux-political website set up to promote the John Sayles film Silver City. Check out Dickie Pilager's views on everything from gay marriage ("Colorado will have no part in the wave of indecency sweeping across this nation like a wave of indecency.") to capital punishment ("I am in favor of the death penalty for those who need it, whether those people like it or not. A couple of seconds in Old Sparky is the kind of permanent rehabilitation Pilager ’04 is all about."). Then be sure to check out Chris Cooper-as-Dickie when Silver City opens this September....
June 28, 2004
Gothamist Interviews Hal
No time to give this the post it deserves, but today's Young Manhattanite interview is with one of my heroes, Hal Hartley, to whom I give partial credit for my love of both film and of Martin Donovan. I'm looking forward to seeing Hal's new film, Girl from Monday, when it is released early next year. Perhaps (I always say "perhaps") it's time for another Hartley marathon......
June 15, 2004
Lights...camera...action! : Godard's A Woman is a Woman
Angela (Anna Karina) has decided she wants to have a baby. Lover Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) will have none of it. Their current situation is fine as is. He doesn't seem to care when Angela decides to seek outside help from Emile's pal Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo). "Is this a comedy or a tragedy?" This being a Jean-Luc Godard film it's, well....Godard....
June 09, 2004
Now If We Could Get Him to Apply This Principle to Filmmaking
It's beat up on Lars Von Trier day. (I love to stir up you Von Trierites.)...
May 18, 2004
Some People Like Kieslowski, Others Jet Fighters
The Final Countdown is now on DVD!
May 05, 2004
When Gutless Execs Strike
Disney is forbidding American distribution of Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 911. The film deals with the Bush administration and has been creating a stir on the film festival circuit, and now financer Disney is getting cold feet about tax breaks in Jeb Bush's Florida. I've got problems with Moore as a shady documentarian -- but this guy needs a factchecker, not a corporate censor whose going to put his movie on a shelf. Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company, already backed out. That was over a real disagreement of opinion and I can respect that. But it's despicable to get...
April 30, 2004
Weekend at the Movies
For those inclined to spend "warm summer days indoors," Karen Cinecultist has a nice rundown of weekend movies here. For our part, we're most excited about The Saddest Music in the World, too, with the lovely Isabella, a Kids in the Hall alum, and the adorable Maria de Medeiros. We've not yet seen any of Guy Maddin's other films, but he's Canadian! How could a Canadian be bad, Alanis Morissette notwithstanding? (p.s. Ten of our favorite picks for the saddest music in the world are here.)...
April 22, 2004
Pale Flower
--> Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) finds himself in an existentialist funk in Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower (1964). Fresh from serving a three year prison sentence for a gangland murder, he feels no connection with the people he sees on the Tokyo streets. He could kill any one and it would not make a difference. The mob he belongs to has joined up with its former rival, all the better to prevent a new faction from Osaka from moving in on their territory. Things have changed in the relatively short amount of time he was away, but Muraki can still...
April 20, 2004
Subrin Sundances
I noticed today that Filmmaker magazine ("The magazine of independent film") has a blog -- and it's actually useful and good for all my fellow movie hounds out there. Their entry for today is about a reading of "Up" sponsored by the Sundance Institute. The screenplay was written by Elisabeth Subrin and Evan Carlson, and will be directed for the big screen by Subrin. For those who don't know her work, seek it out now. The Fancy is the only artist biopic that doesn't romanticize its subject or get bogged down in art mythology, and I recommend it as a...
April 12, 2004
Onibaba
In war-torn 16th century Japan, a middle aged woman and her young daughter-in-law (both unnamed) struggle for existence. Killing samurai who lose thier way in the tall susuki grass, the two women trade the armor and weapons for food and other supplies, dumping the corpses in a deep, dark hole nearby....
April 08, 2004
Good-bye, MoMA Gramercy
My second home is no more. Yesterday MoMA's Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street bid adieu with a retrospective of Sofia Coppola's films. The ridiculous idea of cannonizing Ms. Coppola after two-and-a-half films fits my sadness, which is for the loss of something that was a temporary home while the museum fleshes out its expanded 53rd Street space. The Gramercy was close to both apartments I've had while living in New York. The screen was the perfect size, and every seat on the floor was fantastic. The experience at the Gramercy was second only to the Walter Reade for optimal viewing....
April 07, 2004
Two movies that have absolutely nothing in common.
In one weekend I saw both “Dawn of the Dead” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” For fun I decided to go to a midnight showing of "Dawn of the Dead” on Saturday night. Midnight shows make scary movies infinitely scarier. I was prepared to watch a good portion of the movie through closed eyes and held breath, or at the very least, to laugh a lot. The opening was really good. Super fast and scary and fun. But after that I can’t remember being scared again. I do remember fearing for the safety of others, as people continued...
Le Corbeau
1942, a small French village. The townspeople begin receiving poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" ("the Raven"). The letters shed unwanted light on the locals' secrets, from the underground abortion work of Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), to extramarital affairs, to the corruptness of the mayor. While the first letter seems to be written only to intimidate a potentially unfaithful wife, soon the entire town is in a paranoid uproar over the raven's apparent intention to expose all of the dirty little secrets possible. Henri_Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau was made during the German occupation of France under the aegis...
April 06, 2004
Cinecultist takes on Jersey Girl
Sometime Gusto contributor and Cinecultist site owner Karen does the unthinkable -- she goes to see Jersey Girl and lives to blog about it. In particular, check out Karen's pull quote from Newsweek where Kevin Smith is [refreshingly or brutally, depending on your own take on Smith] honest about his own abilities and limitations as a filmmaker. Thanks, Karen, for going so the rest of us don't have to....
April 02, 2004
Weekend Movie Roundup
Opening This Weekend It's a grim scene this weekend for new movies. Opening this weekend is the Sundance darling The United States of Leland, which has, at the very least, my Hartley darling Martin Donovan to recommend it. Also opening are Hellboy, The Prince & Me, Walking Tall (warning: click on this at your own peril!), and Home on the Range, Disney's last hand-drawn animation feature from its SoCal studios. Rep Houses and Around Town The American Museum of the Moving Image AMMI shows films by Raoul Peck as part of the Haiti on Screen festival. About Peck: When Raoul...
March 31, 2004
A Short Film About Love review
Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love opens with a close up of hands, wrists bandaged. Another hand attempts to caress them but they in turn are stopped by a third party. The scene's significance will become apparent later. The film proper begins: we witness 19-year-old Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) break into what appears to be a school and steal a small telescope. He sets the small scope up in the bedroom he rents from a friend's mother and spies on Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska), an artist living in an apartment on the opposite side of the courtyard. Tomek is clearly obsessed...
March 24, 2004
A Short Film About Killing Review
19-year-old Jacek (Miroslaw Baka) wanders aimlessly about Warsaw. He cares nothing about those around him, pushing a man down in a public restroom, dropping a rock off an overpass into traffic. Having coffee in a cafe, he works on cutting a piece of rope down to a suitable length for use as a garrote. A middle aged taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) cleans his cab outside his apartment building. He ogles a young woman working a produce truck and denies a fare to a married couple looking for a ride. He honks his car horn to frighten two passing dogs...
March 21, 2004
demonlover Review
Walking a fine line between narratively abstract art movie and genre filmmaking, Olivier Assayas's demonlover occasionally wanders a bit too far in one direction at the sake of the other. Sheer directorial verve keeps the project from falling apart; the movie may be a bit messy at times, but so are the the themes and ideas it explores. Paris-based media conglomerate Volf Group is in the process of buying out Tokyo Anime, a company already producing successful animated porn and looking to expand in to a 3-D video game style variation that will revolutionize the industry. Two competing companies are...
March 19, 2004
Weekend Movie Roundup
First, everyone (including me) and her parakeet is going to be seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend. Here's a smattering of reviews: Over at Slate, David Edlestein calls ESotSM "the best movie I've seen in a decade." Salon's Stephanie Zacharek is slightly less enthusiastic. Although she too liked the film, she's frustrated by its "bag of ironic tricks." Also in the "enjoyed, with reservations" camp is The Times' Elvis Mitchell, who found that "this angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love." The New Yorker's...
March 18, 2004
The Exorcist Voice is Silenced
A Hollywood legend has fallen. Oscar-winning actress and clenched-fist fireball Mercedes McCambridge has died at age 87. Although she's famous for being the demonic voice of Linda Blair in "The Exorcist," my favorite role for McCambridge was as the repressed coil of lust, greed, and envy that she played in "Johnny Guitar." The role required her to match the assured power of Joan Crawford, and McCambridge was more than up to the task. Her frenzied voice, frantic movements, and revenge-fueled righteousness was the perfect compliment to Crawford's steady solitude. McCambridge began in the days of radio, and appeared in at...
March 16, 2004
Morvern Callar DVD Review
Movern Callar (Samantha Morton) awakens Christmas morning to find her writer boyfriend dead in a pool of blood, lying in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He has committed suicide because, as his note to Morvern on his computer indicates, "it just felt like the right thing to do." Morvern doesn't call the police, she doesn't freak out (at least not in a traditional sense). She opens her presents: a leather jacket, a cigarette lighter, and a mix tape that will provide much of the accompanying soundtrack for the rest of the film. Then she goes...
March 11, 2004
NYUFF nyuck nyuck
Funny fuck Todd Levin thinks he's fucking funny translating the arty film descriptions for the New York Underground Film Festival into advice for the everyday filmgoer. Isn't mocking the humorless kind of like beating up a cripple? "…an ode to lights and color" "Even my closest friends and family will have second thoughts about attending this film." "…exaggerates the clichés of femininity and men in power." Get ready for 75 minutes of women throwing up and the men who constantly try to rape them. And isn't a cliché – if presented without sufficient context – already something of an exaggeration...
March 10, 2004
Ouch.
As I'm recovering from a food poisoning, maybe it'll be fun for others to remember the Top 10 Puke Scenes from movies. With video clips!...
March 09, 2004
Wisconsin Death Trip DVD review
Based on Michael Lesy's 1973 book of the same name, James Marsh's Wisconsin Death Trip feeds off of that innate curiosity many of us have with odd facts, people, and crimes. Both book and film are concerned with the town of Black River Falls and the strange events that occurred there in the late 1890s. Lesy collected vintage newspaper clippings and photographs to compose a portait of this turn of the century town. Marsh in turn took select items from the book and recreated them for his film to make, in his words, a visual essay. Opening with beautiful,...
March 07, 2004
Revisting the classics
Every once and a while, you decide to watch a film you haven't seen in years, one you know is great but has somehow faded in memory. Then, after seeing it again, you wonder why you don't watch it at least once a year. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes was a movie I had seen over ten years ago, had appreciated at the time, yet I now felt ready to see it again with fresh eyes (especially after having recently seen Black Narcissus for the first time). Here is a film that truly represents everything that...
March 04, 2004
3-D Thursdays
Film Forum is following the sold-out success of their January run of Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder" with a month of stereoscopic mania every Thursday -- beginning tonight with Raoul Walsh's "Gun Fury" (and the Three Stooges' "Pardon My Backfire"). Where Hitchcock's use of 3-D was subtle, unexpected, and domestic, my guess is that "Gun Fury" will leave people needing neckbraces from all the surprise action bursting from the screen. Adventure, violence, and swagger are the order of the night. But Walsh has a soft touch and amazing sensitivity, too. He's been called the only director who could get away...
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