The Rare Review - Movies, books, music and TV

Bring Me What?: Sam Peckinpah’s Alfredo Garcia Movie

On June 10, 2024

There are several memorable scenes in what is a truly lousy Sam Peckinpah film—Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)—which quickly nosedives with an insane script.

Undeniably, a pretty raw experience is offered in this enterprise—raw enough to be offensive. Warren Oates engages in a lot of very dopey, mow-’em-down shooting. Peckinpah strips Isela Vega of her clothes a bit too frequently, and when she confronts Kris Kristofferson . . . well, never mind. See it for yourself if you want to bother.

By the way, I don’t know who Isela Vega is, but her acting has subtlety and quiet appeal. She makes the film seem a little less ridiculous than it is.

The director of Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, and The Wild Bunch made THIS?

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 1957 “Nightfall” Never Takes A Fall

By EarlD

On June 5, 2024

In General

Aldo Ray is a mere marionette of an actor in Jacques Tourneur‘s Nightfall (1957) and Anne Bancroft provides little personality in her role. But the film itself is a knockout, finely directed and savvily adapted from a novel by screenwriter Stirling Silliphant. It tells of a free-lance artist (Ray) erroneously believed by murderers—and a possible policeman—to have made off with the evildoers’ loot.

There is nothing of a marionette in Brian Keith; he is disturbingly human, engrossingly true as John, one of the killer-crooks. His character leaves the impression that he should have been a good man. Thanks to Tourneur, there is a nifty scene inside and outside a shack which emphasizes John’s estrangement, all firearms raised, from his fellow murderer (slimy and played by Rudy Bond).

Nightfall (1957 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What the Children Do: “The World of Us”

By EarlD

On June 2, 2024

In Movies

Yoon Ga-eun‘s Korean film The World of Us (2016) is a masterly work about childhood bullying and discontent. Sun (Choi Soo-in) is a lonely young girl non-physically bullied by her schoolmates. A new girl, Ji-ah (Hye-in Seol), enrolls in the school and Sun is clearly motivated to make friends with her, which she does. Things go swimmingly between them until Ji-ah gets chummy with a girl more esteemed than Sun and “learns” to dismiss Sun. But this precedes Ji-ah herself becoming unpopular, and yet the lass persists in taking jabs at Sun—with no glee whatsoever.

Yoon is a truly fine writer and director. The children are drawn knowingly, truthfully, memorably, fleshed out by a palatable cast. The World of Us—of Sun and Ji-ah—turns out to be the WORLD, with its bullying, harshness and sadness, as well as pleasure. The film hopes for at least some of the pleasure to be consistent.

(In Korean with English subtitles. Available on Tubi and Prime Video)

The Undervalued: “The King of Masks”

By EarlD

On May 28, 2024

In General, Movies

ABEB34BB-C348-4105-90D8-5D51F0D31283 In the West, the lives of most little girls are hardly devoid of privileges and delights. In China of the 1930s, however, little girls were rigidly undervalued and sold by their impoverished parents (or keepers) to ensure all-around survival.

“Doggie” (Zhou Ron-Ying), the child in the Chinese picture The King of Masks (1996), has keepers, not parents. An elderly street performer, Wang (Zhu Xu), is fooled into thinking she is a young boy and buys her, only to be shocked and dismayed when it transpires she is a girl. It is only a boy who can inherit Wang’s silk mask entertainment trade after he dies. Not without pity, the old man allows “Doggie” to work for him, but a string of awful misfortunes makes it, for a while, impossible for him to support her.

Many a theme receives attention in Wu Tianming‘s rich film: childhood destitution, the ubiquity of injustice, the seeming need (when it is a need) for accepting fate, pariahism. For all its dramatics, King is no masterpiece of drama—it needs a sturdier plot—but it is interesting and beautifully chaste. It ends on a sentimental note but it is also an affecting film.

(In Mandarin with English subtitles)

Natalie And Paul And . . . “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”

By EarlD

On May 25, 2024

In Movies

I gave Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) a second chance and liked it a little better this time. It’s the one about confusion over sexual values (in the late Sixties) and emerging freedom itself, if that’s what it is. The initial sequence is smart in how it suggests that traditional religious beliefs have been supplanted by touchy-feely, therapeutic balderdash. This and the rest of the film, moreover, is well—and artistically—directed by Mazursky.

I still find the writing by Mazursky and Larry Tucker dissatisfying, however. Too often the talk gets boring. The resolution at the end doesn’t work because Dyan Cannon‘s Alice is the only one in the quartet who hasn’t injured someone by having an affair. She and her husband Ted (Elliot Gould) are not in the same moral position. I believe the picture should be seen, though, especially since it stars a breathtakingly beautiful Natalie Wood, a true star. Why wasn’t she seen on movie screens more often after this film?