by ·Comments Off on Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan)

I thought from the film description that the Dreaming Deliriants would be the heroes but the first one we meet, hunted through his illusions, is a stooped decaying opium gobbler asking to be put out of his misery. He has a film projector in his guts, making this a double feature candidate for Cigarette Burns. His guts project him into his favorite silent film and mine: The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

Hat Cop breaks out a murder suspect during the prison ball. The suspect Lady-From-Shangahis himself into a mirror room, escapes the cop and stabs him in the ear – there’s much more ear stabbing in this movie than I would prefer. Think I see the train car from the short.

Twenty years later he’s an ex-monk named Mongrel helping to loot a temple, has the power to destroy rocks with his fingers. He spends the night and meets the Spirit of Bitterness who wants to reach enlightenment by hearing how the guy killed his rabid father.

Ten years later the Deliriant vanished into nothingness, but we see him at a bus station – he’s a scammer who picks up a kid to do card tricks. This ends with a cinephiliac long-take section where he spends the last night of 1999 with a vampire girl he just met. Then the hunter from the beginning(?) infiltrates his final dream to make him think he’s at his mother’s side. This feels like a reference to Spielberg’s AI, but also, the Sprinkler gets Sprinkled yet again. I know this all reads as nonsense, but these are the notes I took while watching this movie, and I’m sticking with ’em. Music by M83 in a rare side gig from his brother Yann G‘s movies.

A true cinephile uses all the aspect ratios:

by ·Comments Off on Blue Heron (2025, Sophy Romvari)

Older brother Jeremy is acting up, parents are worried. Little sister Sasha is probably more focused on living her life, dad sees family as a distraction from his computer. They go see herons at a nature center and learn that after the birds raise their kids, the bond between parents dissolves, hmmm. Jeremy goes missing, is found by mom, shoplifts and is brought home by the cops, is sometimes sweet and mostly blank or hostile. Child psychologist is little help, the parents agree that he’s an asshole. Then a lady arrives holding a clipboard, that’s never good. “She suggested that she takes him away and I said yes.”

Sudden flash-forward and Sasha is a filmmaker presenting the case of the brother to a current-day group of social workers. What do we know now that we didn’t know then? Then Grown Sasha is the clipboard woman, stepping back into her house to visit Young Sasha and her parents.

Sophy for Sight & Sound:

I love when a film brings you into an experience rather than just telling you a story. It asks you to dissect the construction as you are participating in the watching of it.
…
It’s quite nihilistic in some ways. You want there to be an outcome that benefits the characters, but I’m a realist. I wanted to show the artistic exploration, but then cut short the emotional catharsis because it’s not a rescue mission that she goes on. If anything, it’s a research mission. Oftentimes when you do research, you don’t find what you’re looking for.

by ·Comments Off on Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970, Elio Petri)

Our guy slashes his girl’s throat during sex Gone Girl-style, but she’s too respectable to bleed more than an ounce or so. The flipside to Police Python, which also starts with a police chief killing his girl, this chief explains his moral power-play games to himself on tape, then manipulates the murder investigation away from himself, then toward himself, with no apparent difference in results. “We must know everything, control everything,” he rants, “Repression is our vaccine,” he exclaims. Movie gets more slippery and subjective, and is quite watchable despite our protagonist, but most importantly it’s got one of Morricone’s glorious soundtracks, a nice repeating theme full of boioioing noises.

This is also how I solve crimes:

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Dilatation (2024, Bertrand Mandico)

Another part of the Conann expanded universe, this one entirely in split-screen. Funny to watch this experimental remake of his previous film right after Funny Games US. The first half is a ballet adaptation containing music videos and animated bits. After Puppet Petrouchka becomes a ghost, each character gets a solo dance and debrief.

The butt-faces remind me of Tsukamoto, but the film is dedicated to Terayama Shuji:

Part two, The Deviant Comedy, is a victory lap through the Conann story with our buddy Rainer, and some changes (did any of the women have bat-wings for arms in the previous films?).

by ·Comments Off on Who Invented the Yo-Yo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy? (1979, Kidlat Tahimik)

Kidlat decides to be the first person to play the yo-yo on the moon.

Collecting spaceship parts with his buddy, a German child:

Deciding on the best acronym for the Filipino space program:

Q: What about spacesuits and oxygen masks? Don’t you need that on the moon?
A: It’s just propaganda.

Feels like a movie I would have made (complimentary). Essie’s writeup is the one.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Heat (1988, Mark Goldblatt)

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help.

Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie reanimation chamber – and just in time, since Treat gets himself killed in another room.

Lot of fishtank drama in this movie:

“Rich dead people, what does it mean?” Funny, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Zero K, which asks the same question. But here the screenplay is just something you’ve gotta get through, an obstacle to the heart of the movie, which yearns to show us more reanimated corpses with machine guns (and admittedly good makeup), now including Treat. The PR woman joins them, saying she didn’t mean to be evil. When she belatedly admits that she’s also dead, the company keeping her alive as long as she’s useful, she corpse-rots immediately. Now they need a new hotgirl on the team, and fortunately we’ve got Treat’s ex, morgue attendant Becky.

Treat, Gremlins Salesman, and the zombie army:

More stuff: the zombie chemicals run through Chinatown, where the Gremlins salesman makes a getaway by turning on a lightning machine which reanimates all the chickens and ducks and pigs in his butcher shop. The zombie company is run by Dr. McNab (Kolchak: The Night Stalker) and PR woman’s father, VHS Vincent Price. You expect the happy ending is gonna be finding a way to keep Treat unalive so he doesn’t rot like the PR woman, but no, everyone ends up dead, and when a cornered Kolchak shoots himself, they reanimate him just so they can kill him again. Good commitment to the bit, though overall the movie doesn’t move swiftly or smartly. Director Goldblatt was better known as editor of James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven and Joe Dante movies (the evil company here is called Dante).

The split-second before John Le Carre’s “Smiley’s People” took a bullet intended for Joe Piscopo:

Treat’s final form:

by ·Comments Off on 3 Bad Men (1926, John Ford)

Pretty Girl loses her dad on the way to the gold rush, gets semi-adopted by Bad Men (her name for the notorious wanted criminals). Bad leader Bull decides what she needs is a husband, so they “hire” an Irish guy after a good scene of checking the bar for eligible men. Sure, they don’t respect land rights, and sometimes do some robbing and killing, but it’s quickly clear that the Bad Men are better than the whitehat sheriff of the town where everyone stays while waiting for the gold rush to begin (there’s an official start date/time, so it’s literally a race).

Soon, Bad Bull is leading a revolt against the corrupt sheriff, who wants to burn down the church full of women and children. Turns out rescuing babies by tossing them out the window of a burning building wasn’t invented by Hard-Boiled. Then our romantic couple needs to be saved from a pursuing gang of evil cops.

High-hatted Spade stays back to hold the pass against the sheriff’s men, delaying them by 15 seconds. Soft-hatted Mike does a better job, holing up in a gunpowder cabin and taking ten men with him. Then Bull kamikazes the sheriff, leaving the romantic couple safe.

Bull’s goodbye:

The romantic leads were in Fig Leaves by Hawks the same year, and the Irish guy would star in Sunrise the following year. Not much on the other guys except for Softhat Mike, who had small parts in most movies, including the Preston Sturges pictures. Ford semi-remade this a couple decades later, not the only time he’d do that. Hits from my silents playlist: Mogwai, Os Mutantes, Cyro Baptista… a Kraftwerk biking song during the church fire, a blast of Squarepusher during the gold rush race, and Coil over the finale. Really the only thing that didn’t work was a track from Tron Ares – I must remove all the movie soundtrack albums from my movie soundtrack mix.

by ·Comments Off on The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country’s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn’t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot. All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord’s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka from Noriko’s Dinner Table) who staged all three mysteries. She and the prisoner convince lord MM to run away from the castle and live a long life drinking tea instead of continuing to fight. Movie looked great, my first Kiyoshi movie in theaters since Tokyo Sonata, but it does go on, I wasn’t so invested in the mystery plot, and I had to laugh when I realized it’s showing some of the same events as Kitano’s Kubi.

by ·Comments Off on Chronovisor (2026, Auen & Walker)

Like Bohdanowicz and D’Ambrose remaking Blair Witch – a research film with cathartic psychedelic ending and good thriller music throughout. “Filmed in gorgeous 16mm” per Hard Light but I dunno, I thought the interiors looked like hell.

Mubi:

The object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV. But both Ernetti and his invention are real, part of a historical rabbit hole the American filmmaking duo stumbled down and constructed a fictional edifice around, resulting in a film about the act of reading which slowly transforms into, by film’s end, video art.