Missing in Action

Playing DVD catch up with movies that never made it here.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Nov 29, 2006

It's that time of year again. No, not Christmas; that weird week when the onslaught of holiday blockbusters and awards contenders ceases in the long shadow of Thanksgiving blockbusters. Last week, it was Bobby and The Fountain; this week, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.

The respite might be a good thing for those behind on their must-see movies, but what if you've already caught everything from The Queen to Casino Royale? Before new-release withdrawal makes you do something crazy, like seeing Turistas, allow us to suggest a few movies that never quite made it here.

Perhaps the most egregious omission from the recent calendar is Hou Hsiao-Hsien's bewitching Three Times, which failed to land a Philly playdate despite its distributor's valiant efforts. Spanning three eras — 1911, 1966 and the present — the film casts Shu Qi and Chang Chen as troubled lovers playing variations on a theme. (Think The Fountain without spaceships.) When it debuted, the rap on Three Times was that it was Hou for Dummies, a self-produced primer recapping the atmosphere of Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo. But the movie's middle segment, set in a Shanghai brothel on the eve of Taiwanese independence, is among the most thrilling moments in Hou's career.

Staged as a silent film, complete with intertitles and fluttering piano accompaniment, "A Time for Freedom" casts Shu as a headstrong courtesan, and Chang as a wealthy client flirting with the idea of purchasing her liberty. Although the shift to silent style was reportedly dictated by Shu's difficulty with period dialect, it's a manifold blessing, shifting the focus as it does to Hou's rapturous imagery and away from Shu's admittedly limited acting, not to mention severing any residual ties with Flowers' elaborate verbal rituals. The movie's other segments, set in a small-town pool hall and amidst the technofied clamor of contemporary Taipei, do feel ever so slightly redundant, but given how few people have seen the films they're repeating, it's a piddling complaint.

A self-described "science fiction fantasy," Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder casts wild-eyed Brad Dourif as a downcast space alien recounting his race's abortive attempts at colonization. Standing in the wreckage of a trailer park, he admits, "We aliens all suck." By the looks of it, humans aren't doing much better. Repurposing footage of shuttle astronauts and sub-icecap explorations, Herzog cobbles together an eccentric history of manned exploration, using Dourif's narration to transform the images in front of our eyes. Deep-sea divers become interstellar voyagers exploring a world of liquid helium, the ice above their heads a frozen sky. Trouble is, the transformation only works as long as Dourif keeps talking: Once the voiceover dries up, NASA astronauts start looking like NASA astronauts again.

Tribulation 99, Craig Baldwin's alternate-universe history of American misadventures in Latin America, mixes the familiar and the unfamiliar with such rapidity you rarely know which end is up: One minute, you're watching a highly distressed clip of a cut-rate flying saucer, the next, Manuel Noriega. A paranoid conspiracy theory that mostly turns out to be true, Tribulation recounts the fight against "alien anomalies" nestled under the earth's crust, a loopy but cogent analogue for right-wing paranoia. The real point of interest, though, is Baldwin's dizzying montage, an obsessive collage of pop-cultural detritus and subterranean history.

Equally obsessive if far more oblique, Christine Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String is the fruit of a 13-year process, a stop-motion fable as beguiling as it is baffling. Crammed with overdetermined images of birth and death, Blood Tea concerns the struggle between a trio of grasping albino mice (done up like the coachmen in Alice in Wonderland) and a group of half-bird, half-wolf critters known as The Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak. Cegavske's debt to Jan Svankmajer is obvious, but the film more closely resembles one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychedelic vision quests as re-realized by Ladislaw Starewicz. Cegavske's ultra-handmade style (she did the menacing crows in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) is the opposite of every trend in contemporary animation, and worth lauding for that reason alone.

Finally, a classic that never got its due: Carol Reed's newly Criterionized The Fallen Idol. Reteaming Reed with The Third Man's Graham Greene, it's the story of an ambassador's son (Bobby Henrey) who becomes an inadvertent witness to adultery, not that of his absent father, but the butler (Ralph Richardson), who seems to be his only friend. The butler takes the boy in as a confidante, but their little secret proves to have devastating consequences. Although the movie begins in sprightly form, it quickly takes on a darker tone, masterfully exploring the corrosive power of lies and the delicate contradictions of a young child's mind. Filmed between Odd Man Out and The Third Man, The Fallen Idol seems to have been overlooked, but it's every bit as good as its better-known siblings.

(sam@citypaper.net)

 

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