by ·Comments Off on Little Sister (2016, Zach Clark)

Low-key handheld indie drama where a sad nun returns home to deal with family drama… the whole “young nun reverts to her goth roots” aspect was played up more in the advertising than the movie itself. Our lead nun is Addison Timlin (Afterschool, Odd Thomas), whose brother (unrecognizably Keith Poulson, lead of Somebody Up There Likes Me) is home and depressed with massive facial burns, and mom Ally Sheedy isn’t dealing so well herself. I kinda lost most of the details by waiting too long to write about it, but it’s one of the best I’ve seen of this type of movie, chosen to watch since Katy’s little sister was over.

Timlin with her big brother:

Timlin with head nun Barbara Crampton:

by ·Comments Off on Magic Mike (2012, Steven Soderbergh)

Maybe a weird choice when my parents were visiting, but everyone loves sexy dancing. I guess it’s about friendship and forgiveness, following your dreams, and sexy, sexy dancing. Good movie, unusual looking in the usual Soderbergh style, all muted colors except inside the club.

Mike (Tater Channing) works at McConaughey’s strip club while saving up to open his own furniture business. He picks up a protege (Alex Pettyfer, star of spy-kid flick Alex Rider) at his construction day-job, who turns out to be a fuckup, and Mike loses his savings bailing the dummy out of trouble. Mike gets a semi-happy ending with the fuckup’s sister (Cody Horn) and the rest of the gang is moving to a new club in another city – despite this, it looks like Tater and all the dancers, but not the fuckup or his sister or McConaughey, appear in the sequel.

by ·Comments Off on The Little Hours (2017, Jeff Baena)

Servant Dave Franco (like a less intense James) escapes from Lord Nick Offerman after getting caught with his Lady, and runs into drunken priest John C. Reilly, who offers Dave a job at his dysfunctional convent, where Dave pretends to be mute and becomes an object of desire by the nuns – slightly flipping the power structure of the Pasolini version in The Decameron.

Lead nuns: Aubrey Plaza is a vicious witch (with co-witch buddy Jemima Kirke), Alison Brie (Diane on BoJack Horseman) has rich (or formerly rich) parents and was just waiting out her time until she could be married off. Kate Micucci (Garfunkel and Oates) is a kissup narc (and secretly Jewish). And drunken priest John C. Reilly is sleeping with head nun Molly Shannon. Eventually, all of this gets out of control and Bishop Fred Armisen has to come sort it out.

The Italian landscapes and castles are cool, but overall little fancy filmmaking here. I was kept constantly amused by the anachronistic, foul-mouthed dialogue and blasphemous behavior in the period setting. Jeff Baena cowrote I Heart Huckabees then disappeared for a decade, recently came back with Life After Beth and Joshy, which share a bunch of cast members with this one.

by ·Comments Off on Brigsby Bear (2017, Dave McCary)

I assumed this movie about a kidnapped bunker boy trying to remake the TV show his fake-dad created to educate/protect him would be more fun and absurd, but it was flat and quiet, like Lars and the Real Bear, mostly people chatting in medium shots. Any episode of fellow bunker comedy Kimmy Schmidt has more laughs… even the mostly underwhelming serial-remake comedy Be Kind Rewind was funnier. At least this one has a sweet scene with Kate Lyn Sheil in a diner.

James is Kyle Mooney from SNL. A sad Matt Walsh plays James’s real dad, Mark Hamill his bunker dad, Greg Kinnear the cop who ends up working with him on the show. Even a Lonely Island comedy draws the same scattered retirees to the Ross. We stood outside after, watching the hundreds of kids streaming past from an It screening at the multiplex.

by ·Comments Off on My Life as a Zucchini (2016, Claude Barras)

Cool stop-motion, meticulous big-headed characters, the camera rarely moving – kind of a laid-back movie. Opens with a nine-year-old accidentally killing his drunken violent mom by shutting the attic door as she’s coming up the stairs. He’s sent to an orphanage, where he befriends red-haired bully Simon and broken introvert Alice and new girl Camille and gets everyone to work together. The kids are surprisingly in-touch with their feelings for nine-year-olds. Anyway, the cop who first talked to Z after his mom’s death finally adopts him and Camille, but the movie doesn’t address how their budding young romance will be affected when they suddenly become siblings.

by ·Comments Off on A Short Film About Love / Killing (1988, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

I’ve watched these before, in their Decalogue versions, but since the extended movie versions appear on certain lists of great films, I always wanted to watch ’em and compare. It has been nearly a decade, so it’s hard, but I’d have to say I prefer the Decalogue series as an interconnected project than either of these movies individually.

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A Short Film About Love (1988)

Deep-voiced teenage creep Tomek watches neighbor Magda through the window with a stolen telescope, then tries to interfere in her life. She is dismissive, then taunts him, and finally becomes concerned after he tries to kill himself. I guess they’re a couple of doomed losers who might just end up together, but Kieslowski is up to something more twisty, closing on Magda in Tomek’s room, watching herself across the street. It’s got the mutual torment of White mixed with the surveillance of Red, set to some nice Priesner music.

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A Short Film About Killing (1988)

Another movie about a deep-voiced creep! A hanging cat in the opening credits brings to mind Cosmos, but this movie’s a slog, the most unpleasant Kieslowski I’ve seen. I covered the story pretty well last time – main difference here is that it’s longer, and the inky blackness and distorted colors of the picture comes out more clearly on the blu-ray. I love the sudden time jump from Jacek sitting in his stolen cab dreaming of escaping to the mountains, to the moment of his conviction for murder.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead (2013, Fede Alvarez)

Okay, we’re at a crisis point with the movie blog. I fell about two months behind, only taking basic plot and character notes on the last 25 movies, so I need to admit the next few posts are going to be very bad and just rush through them. Jumping back and forth between some recent SHOCKtober films and the Aug/Sept backlog for a while…

I’m not a huge fan of remakes of beloved classics, so ignored this when it came out, then I heard it was actually good, so took a chance. It’s actually good! An intense little horror film, splitting the difference between adding new details (prologue with a demonic-possessed girl being burned to death by her father), following the same old story with fan-service references (“does that sound… fine?”), and trying to top the original (*two* people cut their own arms off).

After the prologue we meet the doomed new gang. Eric (Lou Pucci of Spring and Southland Tales) is the glasses nerd who will discover the Book of the Dead and read the cursed passages. Olivia (Jessica Lucas of Cloverfield and Gotham) is a dark-haired nurse who is probably the first to die, though it’s hard to tell when anyone in this movie actually dies. City Boy David (Shiloh Fernandez of We Are Your Friends) is our lead cool dude who we assume will be the new Ash, but won’t be. His blonde girlfriend Natalie (Liz Blackmore of TV’s Vampire Diaries) gets bitten on the hand, tries to take care of the problem with the electric carving knife but still goes full demon.

And that leaves Mia (Jane Levy of Don’t Breathe and Castle Rock), City Boy David’s sister who was lured to the cabin as an intervention to help her get off drugs. She’s the first victim of demonic possession (of all the details from the original, they kept the tree-rape scene), then vomits demon blood onto Nurse Olivia, is locked in the basement, but I guess Mia recovers, cuts off her own hand, and chainsaws a Demon Mia to death in the apocalyptic blood rain as the cabin burns down. Some fun with camera and focus, as in the original.

by ·Comments Off on Kékszakállú (2016, Gastón Solnicki)

The credits say it’s inspired by the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, and the synopsis says it’s about the “physical and spiritual aspects of a cultural recession.” The idle rich in summertime, not at all like La Cienaga.

Lara is the teenager I recognize from film stills:

The lighter-haired girl, not as recognizable from the other still where she’s walking on a second-story deck, gets a job at styrofoam factory. She escapes on a ferry at the end.

Also, there’s an octopus. Set in Buenos Aires, even Cinema Scope called it inscrutable. It’s unlike me to use the exact same images in this post which first drew me to the movie, but they’re still what stands out. The article has some good background and analysis, and this is probably worth rewatching sometime, even if I have nothing to say about it now.

by ·Comments Off on Shiver of the Vampires (1971, Jean Rollin)

I’ve heard Jean Rollin’s movies are very bad, but I’ve also heard that they’re sensual atmospheric wonders full of naked woman, so finally I am finding out for myself. Started with Rollin’s fourth feature after Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire and Requiem for a Vampire, cowritten by Bernard‘s daughter Monique Natan. The verdict: it’s bad, but it’s true about the naked women, and I also enjoyed the groovy electric guitar music.

Half the cast: newlyweds framed by mute girls:

Whatever is going on, we’ve got two women who aren’t saying a word and there’s a coffin ritual and some unhappy guys chained in a castle. I’m starting to suspect vampires. The next(?) morning newlywed Isle (Sandra Julien of Je suis une nymphomane) arrives with her guy (Jean-Marie Durand, who had a career in film doing everything except acting) and learns that the cousins she has come to visit have just died. Then the cousins show up and say no, just a joke, everything’s fine. Isle meets the two silent women and two others: widow Isabelle (Nicole Nancel of Don’t Push Grandpa Into The Cactus) and Isolde (Dominique of Rollin’s previous film), who walks out of a clock. Everyone’s a vampire, of course, and there are playful attacks and serious attacks and lots of boobs, and I think Isolde uses boob-daggers to stab Isabelle in her boobs, and despite all this bawdiness I couldn’t focus very hard because it’s all so terribly dull, the sort of thing that happens when your slow arthouse movie relies on a sense of atmosphere you failed to create. There are some freeze-frames and fun camera pans, but there’s no saving it. One of the cousins was Michel “The Ethnologist” Delahaye, at least.

The Ethnologist and his dark-haired brother in front of some vampire wall art:

I guess the groom and the two unnamed girls from the beginning help defeat the evil Isolde and/or Isabelle, then the two male cousins and the bitten Isle die on the beach as the sun comes up. It’s possible that the groom Antoine was meant to be our hero, but he also gets beaten up by a library.

Isolde and her daggers… I’m actually trying to avoid nudity in the screenshots because I know all my traffic on this post will come from guys searching for “boobs”, but with this movie it’s difficult:

Every wall in the castle where they filmed has been vandalized: