by ·Comments Off on Police Story 2 (1988, Jackie Chan)

After Drunken Master, why not play some more Jackie Chan? This is even more of a corny goofball movie than the first one, idiot characters and extended fart jokes, but it comes alive when the action hits. In fact the best part is the opening montage of all the action from part one without the comedy.

Baddie Chu is out of jail already after faking an illness, and Jackie’s busted down to traffic cop. Maggie is threatened personally, and the entire city is threatened generally by a group of mad bombers. Jackie defies authority to save the day. Good product placement for Canon and Mitsubishi. All the actors playing bombers and cops are in a hundred other Jackie Chan movies. Watched on the fourth of July, not knowing it ends in a fireworks factory.

by ·Comments Off on A History of Violence (2005, David Cronenberg)

Opens with Stephen McHattie’s young partner Billy killing a kid. These actors would reunite in Tarsem’s Immortals with John “no relation” Hurt.

Their fatal visit to Viggo’s diner plays hell on the family. Son Jack (a punk drummer in the Germs biopic) goes from self-denigrating violence-avoidance to kicking asses in the school halls. You don’t see wife Maria Bello much even though she gave the best performance of 2005… she was in Prisoners and some recent crappy horrors.

Ed Harris shows up the very next morning calling Viggo “Joey,” stirring up trouble that’ll get him and his boss (oscar-nom William Hurt) killed. Not pictured: Sheriff Peter MacNeill, one of the Crash-ers.

by ·Comments Off on Blood Simple (1984, Coen Bros.)

Frances leaves surly asshole bar owner for stoic cowboy bartender, bar owner hires sleazy private eye to spy and then murder them but he kills bar owner instead. Bartender discovers owner and thinks Frances did it, so buries the guy himself, then the private eye comes after both of them.

Cowboy Bartender was later notable as the only actor to bridge Cronenberg’s The Fly and its little-loved sequel. I feel like I should know Private Eye M. Emmet Walsh better than I do – time for a rewatch of Critters.

Mike D’Angelo:

It’s uniquely structured in that the audience always knows exactly what’s happening, but none of the characters have the slightest clue, even though they’re all convinced they’re on top of it. The movie ends with a dying man laughing his head off as he finally realizes the mistake someone else has made—as cogent a summary of the Coens’ personal philosophy as can be found in any of their films.

by ·Comments Off on Jubilee (1977, Derek Jarman)

Her Majesty wishes to have knowledge, so her whitehatted sorcerer summons the angel Ariel. This is awesome, and is the last awesome thing that will happen in the film, which jumps to present-day artpunk, deteriorating into campy self-satisfied in-jokes as the novelty wears off and it stretches painfully to feature length.

The Past:

Jarman’s second feature after a decade of shorts costars Adam Ant, who lip-sync-fronts a live band. One of the Bowie-wannabe youth is Nell Campbell who somehow specialized in maximalist rock films, also appearing in Rocky Horror and The Wall and Lisztomania. A spirit named Ariel and an actor named Orlando seem to productively predict future, better films.

The Present:

by ·Comments Off on Friends and Strangers (2021, James Vaughan)

“Is he a bit of a weirdo?”
“No, I think he’s just earnest, like one of those sincere guys.”

People are saying “mate” and “no worries,” and somebody “has a lie down” – this must be Australia. This is the kind of indie cinema where every scene is shot from the coolest angle they can manage – not quite The Girl and the Spider-level, but I approve. Almost not worth keeping track of all the characters and their intersections (centering on Ray and Alice), but just when you think it’s gonna be about a platonic roadtrip, the second half goes to unexpected places with paranoid Under the Silver Lake vibes.

Confirmed: Australia

Chloe Lizotte in Cinema Scope:

Once Friends and Strangers ultimately reveals itself as an absurdist comedy, it retrospectively becomes clear that the film’s momentum has stemmed from its accumulation of seeming non-sequiturs.

by ·Comments Off on Inventing the Future (2020, Isiah Medina)

“Such protests are registered only in the minds of their participants, bypassing any transformation of social structure.” Dense sentences on voiceover with dense images flickering by. When it switched to a table of young guys discussing collective economies, I got tired real fast.

Sound and picture editing are hyperactive and wandering, some segments repeating, and clarity of the voiceover is sometimes sacrificed to the random sfx. Not random though – the movie has a particular look despite all the jumping around. A fascinating object, though the VO is too academic to follow for any length of time, reading political essays aloud. Sometimes even the movie itself tires of the narrator and fast-forwards her. And when the essays go on too long they start to overlap and destroy themselves, the visual flitting from swans to mathematics to abstractions to vibrators to legos.

Freedom and power… AI vs. the human mind… the meaning of work. The politics are advocating for three-day weekends, and given that I had time to watch the movie because of a three-day holiday weekend, I would agree. Other works this reminded me of: All Light Everywhere, Ken Jacobs’ Seeking the Monkey King, the less narrative Adam Curtis docs.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope speaks of the difficulty of watching this in the covid era, and pulls the movie into editing software to analyze it further.

Though its pace and intensity will be familiar to those who have followed Medina’s earlier work, Inventing the Future marks a major step forward in terms of density and, in turn, musical or motific intricacy.

by ·Comments Off on Liverpool (2008, Lisandro Alonso)

Loner sailor Farrel takes shore leave when his gigantic ship docks in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and sets off to look for his mom. He catches a ride to his family’s town, drinking heavily, passes out in a shed and is carried to the family home, where his dad berates him. Mom is alive but far gone, doesn’t recognize him. He gives a younger girl (Scope says this is his abandoned daughter, not a little sister like I’d thought) some money and a souvenir trinket, then “I’m off,” but the movie stays with the girl. Minor evolution from the laboring guy in La Libertad to the journeying (and daughter-seeking) guy in Los Muertos, but it barely can predict the new textures of the (journeying, daughter-seeking) Jauja (and I haven’t caught up with the movie theater-set Fantasma).

Alonso in Cinema Scope 36:

Liverpool is the result of throwing the ingredients of Fantasma into La Libertad and Los Muertos … I think that simply filming someone is the best way to demonstrate what I think about the human being – about his lack of communication, his isolation, and his incomprehension about himself and the world … I’m very interested in describing characters’ environments. I think that these environments may even be more important than the characters themselves.

by ·Comments Off on Stroszek (1977, Werner Herzog)

It’s strange to see space alien Bruno S. playing someone besides Kaspar Hauser. Here he’s playing a version of himself, as are many of the actors, who autobiographically collaborated with Herzog on his hastily-written Germany-to-USA adventure. Reformed criminal/music lover Bruno helps Eva Mattes (Petra von Kant‘s daughter) while she’s on the run from her thug pimps (one of whom would later play Vigo in Ghostbusters II). The thugs barge in, assault Bruno and break his accordion. The neighbor who looks after Bruno (Kaspar Hauser fan-favorite Clemens) is leaving for Wisconsin, so Bruno and Eva join him.

Bad luck right off the bat as customs confiscates Bruno’s mynah bird (using its real voice, which is a big deal for birds in cinema). Werner discovers Weird Wisconsin immediately, filming two neighboring farmers on tractors with rifles. Bruno’s house is taken away for non-payment… not making enough cash as a waitress, Eva returns to prostitution and runs off with some truckers… and Clemens is arrested for robbery (the bank was closed so he robs the barber next door). Everything around him going to hell, poor Bruno wanders a live-bird amusement park then kills himself on a ski lift.

The credits thank Errol Morris, Les Blank and the documentarian who discovered Bruno in West Berlin. Supposedly Ian Curtis killed himself right after watching this movie, and yeah it’s a downer, but one night earlier I’d coincidentally watched New Order’s live set from Coachella 2013, and after seeing what a crank Bernard Sumner can be, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame the film.