Guess I should’ve watched the show instead of the movie, because the antagonistic interviews with celebrities are very fun, but I didn’t need the framing story of Zach G and his crew road-tripping to conduct a certain number of interviews in a week for boss Will Ferrell. After binging On Cinema episodes, maybe it was bad timing to watch another show about a deluded low-rent awkward talk-show host.
Author: Brandon
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The Viewing Booth (2019, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz)
After watching Boys State and Dope Is Death with Katy, I rounded out the trilogy of True/False catchup movies with one she didn’t want to see.
The concept is based on a Virginia Woolf quote about people looking at the same war images and perceiving them differently. The filmmaker shows a curated set of Israeli/Palestinian youtube scenes to students then narrows down to a single student with Israeli parents who sees unexpected things in the images, sometimes to the point of absurdity, and questions her about her perceptions. It appears to be raw footage shot on cellphones, but she thinks everything here is staged. “They have the kids cry in the background as an added effect,” as if it’s unrealistic that kids would cry on their own while soldiers tromp through their house. The kids’ mom is being “overdramatic” and the soldiers are even criticized for not searching the house well enough. When Israeli kids are just pelting a Palestinian home with rocks, “This doesn’t look good for Israel,” then she self-corrects, imagining an inciting event from before the camera was rolling, “Arabs throw rocks all the time.” In the second half, the director calls her back to watch the videos again alongside her own responses (so, the first half of this movie). “The viewer also has control… Film is only so real, you’re not there.” A good experiment, but I resent having to spend this much time with an overthinking college student.
Dope is Death (2020, Mia Donovan)
Portrait of a NYC clinic that sticks pins in your ears to treat stress and addiction. Through interview and archive footage it delves into the history of how Black Panthers and other associated groups studied Chinese acupuncture and brought it back to help their community, then keeps returning from the archives to the present-day clinic and its patients. The founding leader was Mutulu Shakur (below) – I’m behind on the ol’ blog, no surprise, and now we’re watching the new Adam Curtis movie, following the story of Afeni Shakur, so really covering Tupac’s roots this year. The fatal armed car robbery that gets Mutulu imprisoned for life came out of nowhere in this story, and it’s not interested in explaining much about acupuncture itself, more of a history lesson and community portrait.
Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It (2015, Christopher Kirkley)
Watched for the Mdou Moctar music, spent the runtime trying to remember Purple Rain. Mdou is new in a Niger town, takes on the local guitar king, but Mdou’s dad disapproves of his music and destroys his guitar. Can he impress the cute girl, find a new left-handed guitar in time for the big competition, and write a killer new song that’s even better than his previous song, which rival Morris Day Kader has stolen for his own band? Yes!
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, vol. 1
101: Revenge
1955 was a busy year to launch a TV series while also releasing To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry. Episode one was directed by the man himself. Vera Miles (year before The Searchers and The Wrong Man) is a sweetie living in a seaside trailer with her new husband, trying to rest after “a small breakdown,” when she’s found collapsed after an attack. “He killed me,” she says about a salesman she wouldn’t buy from. Some fun noir lighting along the way, but at this point I knew how it’d end, as husband Ralph Meeker (same year as Kiss Me Deadly) has revenge on his mind, and you can’t trust a woman with a history of breakdowns… she points out the man who attacked her… then another, and another. The kindly neighbor was in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the murdered man an FBI agent in Pickup on South Street. Was it the American writers or British Hitch who named the lead character Spann and had him kill someone with a spanner?
How to help a woman with anxiety:
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106: Salvage
“We don’t serve unescorted ladies at the bar.” Nancy Gates (Some Came Running, the crazy-sounding Suddenly) has heard local gangster Gene Barry (a Brock in a Fuller film) is out of prison, wants to confront him about her involvement in the arrest and death of his brother, is pretty sure he’s gonna kill her. Instead he sees her desperation and helps her out, bankrolls the dressmaking shop of her dreams, waits until she’s at her happiest point – then kills her. From a writer of Too Late Blues and the director of Jack Nicholson’s feature debut The Cry Baby Killer. I wasn’t trying to watch all forty episodes this season, so I chose based on particular factors, such as the presence of Elisha Cook Jr., which paid off.
Elisha, drunk and confused:
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107: Breakdown
Joseph Cotten is a shithead business leader who fires a longtime employee then drives the long way home. I was expecting a Roadwork revenge scenario, but I guess there wasn’t time for the blubbering victim to plan an interception route – instead, Cotten crashes into construction equipment and we spend the rest of the movie in his head as he’s paralyzed and assumed dead by all who come to the scene. Gave me flashbacks to another anthology episode, which research suggests was Tales from the Crypt “Abra Cadaver.” The blubbering man was a silent star, notably of The Cat and the Canary, and Cotten’s only film of the year was a West German comedy that nobody has seen since.
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131: The Gentleman from America
Sir Stephen (Ralph Clanton, good at being desperate and sinister) needs money, and rich Biff McGuire (The Thomas Crown Affair) is loaded, so Sir S and his less exciting sidekick John Irving bet the guy that he can’t stay the night in their haunted castle. After a flashback ghost story they win that bet, but hard, only realizing years later that the rich guy lost all of his marbles that night. Director Robert Stevens was an anthology TV heavyweight, appropriately ending his career on an episode of Amazing Stories.
Sir S shows Biff his pistol:
Yakuza Apocalypse (2015, Takashi Miike)
50 sword deaths in first couple minutes, a good sign, as unstoppable mustache man slays all his rivals then returns home to slay his hot girlfriend. He turns out to be our narrator Kageyama’s boss. We know he’s gonna gradually introduce K to his elite life, glimpsed when the two visit the boss’s bar, where the blood bartender runs a basement prison forcibly teaching captured yakuza to abandon their tough-guy ways – but the boss comes to an untimely end when a cowboy-hat coffin-backpack outsider shoots him with a chintzy lightning gun then kickboxer Kyoken beheads him.
The badly wounded K is revived by a bite from his vampire boss’s severed head, and not knowing how his new hunger works, he bites a townsperson which quickly unleashes a vampire plague on the town – the vamps act like yakuza and band together to torment (but not bite) the mortal yakuza. Meanwhile, kickboxer and coffin-backpack are joined by a kappa goblin and a frog furry with its own theme song. This is one of Miike’s high-energy crazypants movies, and it’s extremely fun, up there with Blade of the Immortal and Zebraman 2.
Let’s see… there’s also a tough woman named Captain whose head fills with water… K loves a hospitalized blind girl who turns out not to be blind… a sad kid whose father died turns into an enraged revenge-vampire… and there’s a bloody showdown between K and the kickboxer at the end as the frog furry grows city-sized and threatens to destroy the world.
K is Hayato Ichihara, lead/bullied boy in All About Lily Chou-Chou, has grown up to have a cool, severe face. The unblind Riko Narumi was a teen in The Great Yokai War, is also in notably bonkers movies Why Don’t You Play In Hell and Labyrinth of Cinema. The late boss has starred in a few Kore-eda films and Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain. The kickboxer is from Java, and The Raid movies.
Boys State (2020, Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss)
I can’t tell if the movie pulled a fast one on us when the kid on the poster loses the climactic governor race to a kid we’ve never even seen before by distracting us with the speeches and strategies of the competing campaign leaders. Pretty impressed that the lowest-common-denominator guy lost running on a platform of dick jokes and then confessed to having underestimated the group and turned himself around. Really professionally assembled doc, and for once I mean that in a good way. Ultimately wouldn’t vote for any of these gun-rights Texans for any office, but after avoiding politics-in-movies for the last year, this turned out to be more harmless than we’d feared.
Wolfwalkers (2020, Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)
Okay, Soul had its moments, but it’s almost a shame that just a few days later we watched this movie which so thoroughly blew it away. Such intricate illustration and character design, fun perspective tricks, it all looks so handcrafted and amazing.
No shocker after Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea that the plot concerns Irish mythology, and as in Kells there’s a supernatural girl on the outskirts of a besieged town. This time the girl is leading the wolf army they’re all afraid of, and new girl Robyn’s dad is hired to trap and kill them, but Robyn (with her cool pet falcon, oh my heart) ventures into the woods, meets the red-haired wolf girl, and accidentally becomes a wolfwalker herself. Later her dad will become one, and they’ll turn on the wolf-hating tyrant who rules the town. Not a grim, doomsy movie at all – the baddie is the only death, and there’s nearly as much friendly romping as there is story.
L’Ange (1982, Patrick Bokanowski)
A swordsman attacks a doll hanging from a string… the motion freezes, stutters and repeats, and the music begins doing the same. A hand-less balding man seated at a table surrounded by inky blackness – his pitcher falls to the floor in a time-locked Brain Candy loop, then appears in a Muybridge time-lapse still, with dark, severe string music. I think we’re inside one of the houses from The Endless.
Librarian and his eagle:
There’s a silly bathtime romp, a scene shot in reverse, a busy library in which all the all the old men are wearing the same old-man mask, the masks and their clockwork motion giving the thing a sense of animation. Naked woman in a wasteland gets trapped in a box. After these unrelated(?) vignettes (DVD description says they’re “all connected by a central staircase”), the last 15 minutes bring something new – all angles and bright lights, TV-static-beings tearing through the screen, revealing perhaps l’titular ange.
Light:
Rotterdam says it “lies on the edge between optical and plastic art, in a gap of constant reinvention.” Bokanowski had another hourlong light-vs-darkness film a few years ago which almost nobody has seen, though those few said it’s great, and he’s been producing shorts regularly since the 70’s.
Bathed Man:
More Light:
