by ·Comments Off on Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025, Matt Johnson)

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theaters, thank your lucky stars.” Annoying handicam fake-doc transforms into a very good Back to the Future ripoff. Narratively goes through great lengths only to loop around itself and accomplish nothing. I laughed for five straight minutes during the CN Tower lightning rod sequence.

Calum Marsh:
It didn’t surprise me to realize that this movie was largely built around unused webseries footage, because they have so much footage and in fact entire scenes and episodes of content that wound up on the cutting room floor. It’s such an incredible, inefficient method of working but it’s the only way to get stuff this good, and it’s a veritable goldmine when combined with their team’s compositing and VFX work, which is peerless at this budget.

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The Chronology of Water (2025, Kristen Stewart)

A new feature of this blog: bonus sub-post about the 130-minute movie I watched for 15 minutes before getting annoyed or exhausted and putting on a genre film of decent length. Seems very well put together, a fragmented narrative with striking images and upsetting music loops, also seems like a trauma/abuse story that I don’t wanna endure for another 115 minutes, hence Nirvanna. Josefina called it “a better Lynne Ramsay movie than the one Ramsay released that same year.”

by ·Comments Off on Anaconda (1997, Luis Llosa)

Watched at the bar on mute, this appeared to be quite bad.

The director was a real 90s Guy, starting out with Erik Estrada and David Carradine then breaking through with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. The editor did Miller’s Crossing and the DP did Jaws, but the writers did Turner & Hooch and Legal Eagles, and the lure of dodgy CG and a crazed Jon Voight as the villain dragged this down. The entire cast would make quick recoveries (Out of Sight, Three Kings, Heat Vision & Jack, Mr. Jealousy, Titanic, etc) and this movie would be forgotten, certainly not to receive a sweaty 2025 comic semi-sequel starring a bunch of comics I used to like.

by ·Comments Off on All You Need Is Kill (2025, Kenichiro Akimoto)

Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice himself. Everything magically works out in the end, because this was a kids movie and I had no business watching it.

by ·Comments Off on No Direction Home (2005, Martin Scorsese)

Scorsese tests us by opening the movie with a harsh version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s voice never sounding worse. Then it develops into one of the few good rock docs, by not singlemindedly focusing on a particular artist but bringing in his influences and surroundings, making an artistic portrait of an era. Great editing by his usual rock doc collaborator David Tedeschi, skips around in time and makes it work.

Animals *and* birds??

“You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.” For almost an hour he’s not even a folkie yet, so this is closest to the Velvet Underground doc that goes deep into their roots and skims their actual popular career. Then it ends before his ’66 motorcycle crash, only a year after Going Electric. Present-day Joan Baez steals yet another rock doc.

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of Silyan (2025, Tamara Kotevska)

People who watch movies for the human drama, the “empathy machine” people, are the overwhelming majority in the arthouse realm, leaving us bird people to scan every title and plot description for some sign of avian life and not bird-as-metaphor. Once a decade we hit absolute gold, and coincidentally the same month H Is For Hawk came out, right around when I was watching the egret of Alamar, this incredible crane movie popped up. This is what the cinema could be: vague stories featuring doc footage of storks eating frogs, and by that measure the greatest movies would be this and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

That said, there’s much time spent on non-crane activity, as the movie contrasts fallen corrupted human economic life with timeless biological bird life. Priced out of farming, a Macedonian man spends his time helping an injured stork.

by ·Comments Off on Angel (1937, Ernst Lubitsch)

Why does Herbert Marshall do so much walking in this? Besides being very good at walking, he’s an important rich person with neglected wife Marlene Dietrich (shortly after her great Sternberg run), ditching her for work events in the same way as Ray Milland in The Big Clock but with much more charm than Ray. There’s a love triangle in Paris facilitated by Madame Pittypat, and Marlene starts secretly dating her husband’s old army buddy Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn is hunky and all, but extremely elegant people belong together, so the marriage is saved.

Senses of Cinema:

As much as any film made under the Production Code, Angel dares to challenge the ready-made conventions of vice and virtue, good and evil, light and dark on which mainstream Hollywood entertainment has traditionally been based. It is subversive cinema of the most glittering and highly polished order – and all the more radical for being produced on a lavish Paramount budget.

by ·Comments Off on The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles)

Edward G arranges for a desperate nazi to escape prison so he’ll lead them to the big man. Eddie (just after Scarlet Street) gets knocked out and loses the trail of his guy (K Shayne of a Boetticher noir), so he doesn’t see Orson Welles strangle Shayne in the woods, decides to hang around this Connecticut town until more leads turn up.

When your old nazi friend drops in on your wedding day:

Orson is so confident in his new wife Loretta Young (oscar winner the following year) that he admits to killing the “little man,” then when she doesn’t take this news well, he plots to murder her too. Eddie helps tie up loose ends but it’s Loretta who shoots Orson before he’s stabbed by the town clock (my second movie this month to end in a big clock). Clockworker Richard Long is Loretta’s brother, appeared with Orson the same year in Tomorrow Is Forever. The beginning of Welles’s dubbing problems, which would last the rest of his career.

Also rewatched Magnificent Ambersons on the new blu, and learned some Welles tidbits. Simon Callow explains the musical structure of the original cut very convincingly, making a case for what was lost when the studio recut the film. Apparently Pearl Harbor was bombed on the last day of filming, then Orson disappeared to Brazil to shoot It’s All True on the studio’s dime during editing. I just got derailed by a couple other books, but trying to get to the James Naremore biography.

by ·Comments Off on War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981, Piotr Szulkin)

The title and premise sound exciting, but the movie is a sweaty bewigged newscaster (Roman Wilhelmi of Zulawski’s Chopin biopic The Blue Note, with Robert Picardo vibes) being tormented by everyone, including martians, who look like silver-spraypainted oompa loompas in puffy coats. Decaloguists Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Stuhr get a big scene each. The most believable detail is that the biggest music act in the country is called The Instant Glue. Gotta watch the blu extras and learn more about the music. Dedicated to H.G. and Orson Well(e)s, so in addition to finishing Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy I can add this to my ongoing Orson project.

Any government building during covid:

by ·Comments Off on Tattooed Life (1965, Seijun Suzuki)

Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one minute of mad style in Kanto Wanderer.