Cinematic Distractions...

[dulcedemon]

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail(Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi - 1945):
Another winner from the early Akira Kurosawa movies I'm still working my way through. It's not a samurai movie; though it could be. The men here are certainly well trained and prepared for battle. Fighting will not help them achieve their objective. Battle must be avoided if they are to reach their goal.
A young lord returns from a military victory along with six of his most loyal samurai. Upon his return, he finds he has been betrayed by his brother, who essentially has him declared public enemy number one. Targeted for arrest and execution, he and his men flee. They attempt to make their way to a neighboring independent territory where they will be safe.
In order to get there, they must pass through a heavily guarded checkpoint. The samurai disguise themselves as monks. Their lord disguises himself as their porter. They are guided along the way by an actual porter with an almost incessant nervous laugh. What follows is a master class in social engineering.
"Bow to the Buddha!"
This movie was banned upon its completion in 1945 by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers for its depiction of feudal values. It was finally released in 1952 after the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco.
It can be watched at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/the-men-who-tread-on-tigers-tails
If you drink alcohol, try drinking each time the porter laughs, and be thankful the movie is only an hour long.

Last Year at Marienbad(L'année derniére á Marienbad - 1961):
If you followed a link from my Twitter, you have already been given a sense of what this movie is like. It begins with several minutes of a monologue that loops but with subtle changes, fading in and out as if the person speaking were moving through different rooms of the hotel while the audience remains in one place.
They mill around for hours, days, maybe longer, in a grand, oppressive, baroque hotel. He pursues her through its corridors, salons, galleries, and gardens. All the while he tells the story of when they met. Last year. Was it last year? At Marienbad. Was it Marienbad, or was it Frederiksbad?
She doesn't remember him, or she does but wants to forget. He begs her to run away with him. They are shadowed by a man. Probably her husband. Maybe the devil. Maybe death personified. He likes to challenge other guests to a game of Nim. He always wins.
Overheard conversations of other guests indicate that they all keep returning to this same hotel. They don't know why. Others allude to a scandalous incident. A few of them talk about Frank. Who is Frank? Frank wasn't here last year. Occasionally, someone mentions the freakishly cold weather they had last summer, so cold that the fountains on the hotel grounds froze solid. Snippets of conversation, disjointed memories, allusions to a scandal...A tragic accident, or was it something more unseemly? An affair? A rape? Murder? Suicide? It's left for the audience to decide.
I decided that these people are the same people in the New Year's party photo in The Shining. They're all dead, and this movie is what their ghosts do for all eternity.
In looking up information about the film, I read that Orson Welles had unfavorably compared it to paging through a copy of Vogue magazine. He's not wrong. It's a moody haute couture fashion shoot with a posh hotel of a bygone era backdrop set to overbearing music best described as Carnival of Souls meets The Edge of Wetness(Johnny Carson).
This movie is sort of a joke between us and our friend in Alaska, who recommended it to us several years ago. Maybe joke is not the right word. It's our pet cult classic. I have now watched it four times.

Struggle On The Nile(Seraa fil Nil - 1959):
How much trouble can a young man leaving his village for the first time with a purse full of his father's and several other villagers' life savings get into?
Muhassab(Omar Sharif) is tasked by his father with sailing the family's old cargo boat, Bride of the Nile(its name is a foreshadow), from Luxor to Cairo to trade it in for a steam-powered barge. His father sends the town mayor(Rushdi Abazah) along to head the crew. He is also tasked with instructing and looking after the inexperienced young man.
Muhassab can't swim let alone captain a boat. He is away from home for scarcely a day before he becomes hopelessly infatuated with a belly dancer he meets in the first town they stop at along the way. The dancer, Nargis(Hind Rostom), is in tight with scammers and thieves, who use her as a seductress to get closer to Muhassab's fat purse. The mayor sees her for what she is, yet even he can't ward off trouble.

Fantasy Island: Season 01: Disc 01(1977-1978):
This disc contains the original made for television movie/pilot, the sequel Return to Fantasy Island, and one regular episode.
I'm not sure what I'm seeking in revisiting this show. I was trying to pick a series that I had watched with my grandmother. This is and isn't one. I was a bit young when it premiered. I was fairly new to life, and hadn't yet mastered the skills of walking and talking. The Facts of Life would have probably been a better choice, but I don't really want to watch that show again. For now at least, Fantasy Island is the happy family time childhood nostalgia replacement for Have Gun Will Travel, which I used to watch with my grandfather.
The first thing I noticed was how fake and repetitive the flora is. Didn't notice it at all when I was a kid. I can't take my eyes off it as an adult with a botany background. The same red, obviously plastic flowers are everywhere on the island. Low growing vegetation, shrubs, overhanging trees, it makes no differences. They glued the same damn fake red flowers to every plant on the set. The terrain and its real plant life are conspicuously Southern Californian, except for the opening, which shows Hawaiian coastline.
Guest stars on this disc include: Bill Bixby, Joseph Cotton, Dick Sargent, Sandra Dee, Nancy McKeon, Cameron Mitchell, Joseph Campanella, Victoria Principal, and John Saxon.

Top Hat(1935):
This was my first Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture, and I didn't like it. The only song and dance number I liked was the well known Cheek to Cheek. The character he plays is kind of a jerk, a nice jerk, but too annoying for me like. The plot is mistaken identity with many missed opportunities to correct the situation by making a simple introduction. If they had introduced themselves properly in the beginning, there wouldn't be a movie. Deserves an award for most fake Venice.

Lightning Bolt(Operazione Goldman - 1966):
I could hardly see the movie through the thick haze of chauvinism. This is a good one if you like a hero who tells women they're fat. The mustachioed villain is a brewery owner who wants to vaporize the moon with a lava gun, or maybe he wants to put a lava gun on the moon and vaporize the earth with it. It's not exactly a lava gun. It's a lava-powered lightning laser. I think he is planning to hold the moon hostage with it. I'm not really sure. He is kind of sketchy on his own nefarious plan. He does freeze some people, but he melts them later, and he zaps a few with lightning.
The lava comes from the volcano, which also serves as his villain lair. The magma is just right there under the floor, running through transparent pipes like the chocolate in Willy Wonka's factory. It should melt the whole place, but it doesn't. It's fine. Our hero tells the villain he is fat, proving in the end that he is an equal opportunity body-shamer.
I recommend playing it with the sound off and making up your own lines. The best part for me was the ridiculous beer truck/bad guy spy mobile.