by ·Comments Off on Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975, Keith Lock)

Color fields, electro-tones, patterned text onscreen, with the main camera action being Canadian farmers. A barn raising is interrupted by color fields. A pig is killed, but then, pigs are portrayed as horrible disgusting creatures (I thought the one playing with the dogs was cute). It’s an ambitious title for an experimental re-edit of your home movies from some months at the cabin, but I’m not mad that I spent the time watching this, and at least it will always be filed alphabetically next to an oscar winner.

Joshua Minsoo Kim in Cinema Scope:

At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal, humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he heard such sounds coming from the images themselves … It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, numbers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle behind glass.

by ·Comments Off on Downhill (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)

Movie about Ivor’s life repeatedly falling apart even though he’s rich, white, and handsome. First his college buddy, a trend-following buffoon with a pretty sister, knocks up local girl Mabel. She pins it on the rich boy so his family will pay her off, even though scholarship kid Tim was the culprit, and Ivor is expelled on moral grounds and kicked out of his home.

Subtle, Mabel:

But Ivor inherits some money, somehow? He marries a fancy actress, who spends all their cash, cheats on him, then kicks him out of the apartment. He spends some time pathetically mooching off pathetic older women then runs off to France. Fortunately back home, Tim is dying and deathbed-confessing to clear Ivor’s name, so his family takes him back when he returns home half-starved.

Hitch pulls off some really great framing and closeups, but the movie felt like a chore, a couple steps down from The Lodger, so I opted to cut my losses and skip the couple hours of blu extras for now.

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! (2012, Charles Roxburgh)

The humor’s in the absurd cheapness, straightfaced performances, and overwritten script. It’s very fun and silly, and I appreciate the hardcore supporters for bringing it to my attention. Personally the joke wore off halfway through the 100-minute runtime, but I’m still adding Magic Spot and Metal Detector Maniac to the queue.

by ·Comments Off on The Shrouds (2024, David Cronenberg)

Making up Vincent Cassel as Cronenberg and having him mourn his late wife could’ve gone so hard into self-indulgent territory but instead this soft dialogue drama (with Crimes lighting and lots of handheld images-on-screens) gradually careens into paranoid techno-thriller territory with plenty of sex and hardly any murder. Ends with nothing resolved, in the middle of a dream sequence. Short but powerful bursts of Howard Shore music which have either introduced new sounds to his toolkit, or else the Movieland’s speakers have blown out. Diane Kruger plays the dead wife (missing an arm in dream/flashback), and her conspiracy-horny sister, and the AI built/puppeted by the sister’s ex-husband Guy Pearce. Choice lines about sex and flesh and surgery, and Vince (a supposed visionary who outsourced everything and takes no real action here) is told he’s made his career out of bodies. Japan and China and Korea and Iceland and Hungary all figure in. Need to watch this two or three more times.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Heat (1988, Johnnie To & Andrew Kam)

The earliest To movie I’ve seen by five years, but something seems fishy… is this actually a Tsui Hark movie? Good Cop John is a crack shot but has spinal issues and his hands lock up… Clumsy Lun is incompetent… and Kam has moves. Guy who kills a bunch of people in a hospital meets his doom in an elevator shaft. This was written by Gordon Chan, who’d one-up his gunfight-in-a-hospital scenario in Hard-Boiled. The hand injury plot doesn’t work but it’s a brutal little movie.

Up top is Malaysian Ong and Kam (Hard Boiled‘s Mad Dog), below left is our hero (Waise Lee, Running Out of Time) and his girl Maggie (Betty Mak of the Iron Butterfly trilogy) who will be shot in the head in the next scene after discovering a cocaine conspiracy:

Clumsy Lun scribbling on his girl Joey “White Snake” Wong, two scenes before Lun is rigged with a grenade vest and blown to bits:

by ·Comments Off on Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho)

Pattison is an idiot, fleeing into space pursued by loansharks after he and Steven Yeun lost a fortune on their macaroon business. Turns out he signed up to be an expendable, now he’s always being sent on deadly missions then getting resurrected in the 3D printer. Movie starts in the middle, when 17 has fallen in a hole surrounded by beasties who rescue him instead of eating him like everyone assumed, while they go ahead and print up 18. Now his girlfriend Naomi Ackie (a friendly interloper in Education) enjoys having two Mickeys while rat spy Kai (Jane from The Empire, a specialist in awkward uneven scifi movies) wants to turn them in.

Bong remains the least subtle dude around, as the ship is led by Trumpian Hulk Ruffalo and Toni Collette, shithead politicians who aim to create “a pure white planet full of superior people.” 17’s narration is funny at least, but it’s no Starship Troopers.

by ·Comments Off on Parking (1985, Jacques Demy)

Eighties Orpheus (Mad Love star Francis Huster) never removes his rock star headband, even at his wife’s funeral when she ODs after seeing him kissing his dude Calais (Laurent Malet of Querelle and some quality Ruiz films). Good stunt casting of OG Orpheus Jean Marais as Hades in a Schindler-colored afterlife, and Celine & Julie‘s Marie-France Pisier as his co-conspirator. Whenever the guy sings I suffer through it, then when Legrand plays the same tune over the next scene I decide it’s rather nice.

First death of Orpheus:

O and wife:

O in the underworld:

by ·Comments Off on Babygirl (2024, Halina Reijn)

Kidman is married to Vanilla Antonio Banderas but is intrigued by Triangle of Sadness Harris Dickinson. “It’s a positive to be vulnerable, not a negative.” Has script weaknesses, which are more glaring when you just finished watching Heat. I was a quarter of the way through this and I paused to check what else the director had made… BodiesX3 and a Carice van Houten movie… oh, Carice, I’ve thought about Black Book every day since it came out, I should be watching that instead… so I did.

I saw Black Book twice in 2007, both times before it “opened” (probably playing for one sad week at the Landmark in April), but if we run with its NYC/festival date of 2006, the first year of the blog, I can still live with that year’s top ten (incl. honorable mentions). Three of these ten (Scanner, Slither, Fountain) are due a rewatch, some others (Prairie, Promise, all the HMs) possibly as well, and I’ll drop everything the moment Princess Raccoon (or Pistol Opera) gets remastered.

Besides Black Book, great 2006 movies I watched in ’07 after the year-end list deadline included Volver, The Host, Old Joy, The Namesake, Miami Vice, The War Tapes, Dry Season, Offside, Bamako, Ten Canoes, Screwfly Solution – a whole alternate top-ten here.

Watched even later: Manufactured Landscapes, The Brand Upon the Brain, Coeurs, Bug, Opera Jawa, Big Bang Love, Exiled, Syndromes and a Century, Inland Empire, Colossal Youth, Election 2, and Deja Vu.

Oh shoot, it turns out I’ve already done this before, reassessing 2006 movies based on their awards-qualifying release dates instead of their real dates – a silly enterprise since I’m not an awards voter – with a sort of must-see list at the bottom. What would I add to that now… Half Moon, Woman on the Beach, La-Bas, Blood Tea and Red String… the Holy Modal Rounders doc… The Guatemalan Handshake?

What were we talking about? Oh, Babygirl, I came back and watched the last 15 minutes a couple weeks later, got to see Harris fight Antonio. I guess Nicole learns to be happy with her husband, asserts herself at work, and Harris gets himself a dog.

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989, Kazuki Omori)

A very silly movie, rarely ever good, with big sweeping symphonic music that sometimes gets close to ripping off Star Wars. Jeers to Criterion for getting people to take a 1980s Godzilla movie seriously enough that I was tricked into wasting an evening on it.

Army weapon temporarily turns Godz into a Trapper Keeper graphic:

Competing English-speaking forces kill each other to capture Godzilla DNA, then a plant lab gets blown up, then a psychic girl speaks to plants. Botanist creates a plant monster and the next time hitmen come to steal secrets they get Little-Shopped. Plant monster and Godzilla fight.

What? Your IVYSAUR evolved into BIOLLANTE

Some of the human players: Yoshiko Tanaka (right) starred in Imamura’s Black Rain the same year, the plant scientist had starred in Samurai Spy in the 60s, the psychic girl became a Godzilla regular.

Godzilla will return, and return, and return