Happy Thursday, everyone! We're now in mid-August, it's the dog days of summer (especially if your baseball team is currently moribund though showing signs of life) and let's look at what I've found recently.
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The classy find of the week, Sansho The Baliff (1956) is from a Japanese director who is pretty much a blind spot for me. Kenji Mizoguchi (May 16, 1898 – August 24, 1956) directed 50 films but checking Letterboxd, it appears I have only seen one, the strange and compelling Ugetsu (1953). But this movie has a great reputation (and honestly, this is a really excellent piece of Criterion cover art) so I'll probably dig into it over the weekend.
Not to mention, I'm a sucker for a Criterion set that includes the source material, in this case the short stories by Mori Ōgai that the movie is based on. I'm sadly unfamiliar with his work as well and I'll read those after the movie.
Sansho The Baliff is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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Now on to another classic...classic trash, that is!
Arrow is one of the other boutique labels, but unlike Criterion they tend to focus on genre titles. In this case, 1998's Wild Things. A movie that at first glance is our exploitative sleaze, but whoa boy does this movie have hidden delights. (Hell, it spends half the credits explaining who is screwing who over and how.). This movie is what the Woody Harrelson vehicle Palmetto wanted to be; sunlight and swamps and scams but with exactly the right tone and four leading roles from actors who know exactly what they're doing. (I am absolutely convinced that Denise Richards should have had a far better comedic career instead of being shoved into sexpot roles, and this movie is a really good example of how she can work at the intersection of both of those modes.). It's a fantastic dark comedy and Arrow has put out a set jam-packed with special features on it.
Plus, c'mon, posters!
Wild Things is streaming on Fubo, the Showtime platforms and DirecTV.
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And now, a pickup I'm weirdly happy about as I do see all the Marvel movies, including the ones that are pre-MCU and have no connection to the continuity (did you know there's a Dr. Strange movie from 1978 that has the great Jessica Walter in it?). Man-Thing is a Marvel creation from 1971 that's never been an A-lister, a shambling swamp creation from Louisiana that bears enough resemblance to the 18-months later Swamp Thing that there was talk of action, but since the characters have diverged so much nobody seems to care these days. So at one point Artisan Entertainment (now part of Liongate) made a deal with Marvel to produce films based on 15 of their characters* (really, Marvel was desperate for cash at the time and made a lot of those deals, including the Sony deal that has them still making movies around Marvel's main character). And they went and made a couple of Punisher movies, which are of varying quality and then this R-rated thing that apparently the folks at Marvel have completely disavowed. So heck yes, grade-a swamp trash for me!
Warning: this trailer is NSFW. Or taste.
*Interestingly, the deal at the time also included Iron Fist and Black Widow; all of those rights have reverted to Marvel. With the acquisition of 20th Century Fox, at this point the only rights outside of the Marvel/Disney stable appear to be Spider-Man, Venom and associated characters. There is also Namor, showing up in Black Panther 2, but that seems to be a matter of distribution issues with Universal, not the rights to the character itself.
Man-Thing is, of course, on Tubi.
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