This is a 1995 film noir movie, directed by Carl Franklin, and based on a novel by Walter Mosley.
It's set in Los Angeles, 1948, and stars Denzel Washington as Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlings, recently fired from his job at an aircraft manufacturer, who is hired to find the missing girlfriend of an aspiring politician. Of course it's not long before Easy finds himself caught up in a web of murder, deception and corruption.
It's a film about someone becoming a private detective, rather than already being a full P.I. The film sticks by and large to the rules of the genre, but it does have important points to make about race relations in that time and place. There is a strong sense of place and some cool hard-boiled dialogue. Denzel Washington is perfect as the charismatic Easy Rawlings, with strong support from Tom Sizemore as his shady employer. Don Cheadle almost walks away with the film, making the most of every second of his brief screen time as Easy's murderous friend Mouse. The only caveat is that Jennifer Beals doesn't have much to do as the mysterious femme fatale.
This is an enjoyable, strong film, well worth checking out.
I went out today and saw the 1991 French movie Delicatessen, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. It really is an amazing film, a surreal, dark comedy, fantasy, set in a post-apocalyptic world about the various bizarre and grotesque inhabitants of an apartment building, where new tenants often find themselves being carved up and sold in the butcher shop owned by the landlord (played by Jean-Claude Dreyfus). The latest tenant is good-natured ex-circus clown Louison (played by Dominique Pinon). Louison attracts the attention of the butcher's daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), who determines to save him from being turned into the Sunday roast.
Despite a murky palette of mostly browns and greens, it's visually stunning. It's often very funny as well, with some beautifully choreographed physical comedy. It creates an entire world of it's own inside this apartment block, while the world outside is, more or less, just hinted at. Despite the subject matter and bleak world, it is a film that is full of joy.
Last night I saw the 2000 movie Ring 0: Birthday, directed by Norio Tsuruta, and based on a short story, "Lemonheart", by Koji Suzuki, who created the Ring franchise.
It's a prequel set about thirty years before the events of the first Ring film and tells how troubled psychic Sadako Yamamura (played by Yukie Nakama) changed from a promising actress in a theatre troupe to a vengeful spirit. For most of the film, it's more of a backstage melodrama with supernatural overtones. It feels like pretty much an oddity in the Ring series, for one thing the cursed video tape is only ever mentioned once, briefly in a modern day set prologue. Obviously, video tapes did not exist in the late sixties, where the film is set, so it doesn't answer the question of where the tape came from. The film takes a real turn in it's last half hour or so, and has some quite bizarre plot revelations. That don't really make a lot of sense.
It's very slow, and I can imagine a lot of people will get really quite bored by it, but it is atmospheric and there is enough to keep watching. Also the series deserves points for at least trying new things.
Last night I watched the Japanese movie Ring 2 from 1999, directed by Hideo Nakata.
The Ring series began as a novel by Koji Suzuki. The series is about a VHS video tape. After some unfortunate person has viewed it they are condemned to die in exactly seven days. The 1998 film adaptation was a sensation both in Japan and internationally and kickstarted the popularity of "J-horror" in the west.
Suzuki wrote a sequel to Ring called Spiral, which was turned into a film that was originally intended to be the official sequel to the 1998 film, the two were shot back to back. However, Spiral did very poorly at the box office, and so they decided to shelve it and make this film to replace it. This film has no connection to the Suzuki novel. This film also has nothing to do with The Ring Two, the sequel to the US remake of Ring (confused yet?)
This film picks up several days after the conclusion of the first film, and reunited the first film's director, Nakata, and many of the cast. Mai Takano (played by Miki Nakatana) is a young research assistant, who is investigating the mysterious fate of her boss, and, with the aid of a newspaper reporter, comes into contact with the cursed video and her boss's young child Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka) who has a powerful psychic ability and whose strong feelings of rage and fear have the ability to summon the vengeful spirit Sadako Yamamura (Rie Ino), who is behind the Ring curse.
The film really seems to have divided people, and a lot of people really don't seem to like it, but I did, it's not as good as the first one, and there is nothing in this film that is as iconic as the conclusion of Ring. It's not a scary film, it's more of a supernatural mystery, but it is atmospheric.
