Nice doc, we got to hear much of Pet Sounds in different forms, see some goofy photo shoots, hang out with Brian and his co-lyricist who seems like a good guy who fell into an awesome gig. Everything’s pretty positive – even Mike Love comes off well, except during the “Hang On To Your Ego” vs. “I Know There’s an Answer” debate. Nobody says the word “Smile” or discusses the post-Pet future. I’ve been listening to some 1960s albums and watching related movies – hence the TAMI and TNT and Beatles and Dylan. Something new I’ve learned about Pet Sounds which also wasn’t covered in the doc: it’s not only the best Beach Boys record, their previous four albums were hardly even good.
Author: Brandon
Brandon's the guy who runs this site.
2 + 2 = 22 (2017, Heinz Emigholz)
Mostly a rock doc of some guys recording motorik music.
The title is probably a Godard reference, but I’m still in the mid-1960s on my rock doc playlist, that one’s a couple years away.
The Last Ten Minutes vol. 34: Michael Shannon edition
Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Ramin Bahrani)
Evil Philosopher Cop Michael Shannon is arresting Michael B. Jordan, who turns the table and burns some guy to death, racking up likes on a big screen (is this The Running Man?). Sofia “Climax” Boutella takes MBJ to the suburbs where he saves a starling (it’s a big year for cinematic starlings) then Shannon makes a big tormented face as he murders MBJ in a burning barn. I’m seeing him sing R.E.M. songs next week – here’s hoping he makes that same face during “Fall On Me.” I can’t be mad at a movie that ends on a murmuration.
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Superman (2025, James Gunn)
Backed up more than ten minutes so I wouldn’t miss Warboy Lex Luthor. Is this a cartoon? Soup fights an airborne army of boba fetts. There are other super-people around, and also the Bunk for some reason. It’s very snappy and JamesGunny and there’s a CG dog, and they glue the split-apart city back together then party with some second-rate heroes (incl Nathan Fillion). Lois is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Soup is from We Own This City, it closes on an Iggy Pop song, and this overall looks good, it’s just that I’ve reached a certain age and you’re not gonna trick me into watching any more Superman movies.
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The Flash (2023, Andy Muschietti)
Backed up too far but this time by accident – HBO’s interface isn’t all that. Various Flashes and Supermen and Batmen are getting killed in a fiery time-loop by Evil CG Michael Shannon, pulling together the previous two movies into a Fahrenheit Multiverse. “We Need To Talk About” Ezra has a little argument with himself – Flash isn’t even fast in this, he just fights with glowy knives, and the villain is a version of himself who stayed awake during The Jaunt. Ah fuck, it’s Haunted Chris Reeve and CG Nic Cage, now I remember why people were mad. In the obligatory wrap-up, Ron Livingston is his dad, the girl from Hearts Beat Loud his love interest, and George Clooney as Batman would’ve been a good bit if they hadn’t awkwardly bungled it. Muschietti also directed It, which also nobody liked but they all watched anyway.
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Jonah Hex (2010, Jimmy Hayward)
How is this movie only 81 minutes? Civil War Thanos and his girl Jennifer Fox are taken captive by Evil Malkovich. I don’t see Michael Shannon, but he’s in this movie and there are also flamethrowers, making this part of the Fahrenheit Multiverse. I do see Lt. Cedric Daniels for some reason, then the movie starts flashbacking really hard until the bad guy explodes. The director is a former Pixar animator and musician who is friends with Tool and Primus and Mastodon, and the writers made Crank and Gamer, so this bomb was a bump in the road for a bunch of otherwise cool guys.
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The Lego Batman Movie (2017, Chris McKay)
I missed Will Arnett in Jonah Hex, so here’s his Christian Bale impression in a frenetic cartoon which is admittedly cool-looking (from a Robot Chicken guy). Nice shark-spray callback. It’s fun for everyone that the comic corporations get to make big expensive self-serious superhero movies and big expensive silly parodies of the same, less fun that something called The Lego Batman Movie tries to wrap up by getting weepy about family.
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Assassin’s Creed (2016, Justin Kurzel)
I also missed Michael Fassbender in Jonah Hex, so let’s check out his second-worst movie. Jeremy Irons is presented with a treasure chest while Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Rampling look on, wow this is a heavy cast for a video game movie. Irons is going to enslave mankind or whatever, seems very calm about it, while Omar is brandishing knives in the crowd. Fassbender arrives in a robe and joins the serious-whisper acting cavalcade then makes his move, assassin-wise. The whole thing feels like a real drag.
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Knox Goes Away (2023, Michael Keaton)
Speaking of assassins, I missed Michael Keaton in The Flash so here’s his aging-hitman thing. Oh wow, a shaggy Al Pacino rats on Keaton to some nerd cops who were talking about security footage anomalies. After a brain-damaged Keaton takes the place of his son Cyclops in prison, a closing montage of each major character looking meaningfully at different objects.
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Suicide Squad (2016, David Ayer)
Back into the superhero multiverse, this supposedly has Ezra “Flash” Miller, but hundredth-billed so I don’t expect to see him here. I expect to see supervillains teaming up to fight Gozer. Will Smith shows all his teeth in closeup then blows up the stargate to the demon dimension. The guy from John Woo’s Silent Night gets his wife back from the dead, or from the stone lion she was trapped inside, but the team of killers is no match for an angry Viola Davis, who sends them to prison until Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius breaks them out. I was gonna close with the latest Joaquin Phoenix Joker thing and Watchmen, but that’s quite enough of these things.
Happy as Lazzaro (2018, Alice Rohrwacher)
Innocent Lazzaro works on an illegal tobacco farm slave plantation, and while his young master is enlisting him in a kidnapping extortion scheme, the others are being discovered by authorities and freed into the real world. Laz falls down a mountain and wakes up years later (unaged and part-wolf) to find his old friends.
Bright Future (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Ugly digital video was the craze that year. The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-Ichi Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of Princess Raccoon). The imprisoned guy’s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima’s Passion/Senses) shows up to figure out what happened, while the useless guy accidentally infests the river with a swarm of killer red jellyfish. This movie felt unusual back then, and remains so.
B. Kite:
The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fish through an overhead shot of the group drifting through the city streets at night, illumined by their glowing walkie-talkie headsets. Their aimlessness and matching uniforms might not suggest anything spectacularly promising, but Kurosawa places the title under them as a caption – Bright Future – and has insisted he means it. Why not? Like the fish, they’re adaptable and perched on the point of transition … Ambivalent Future, the fascinating documentary made during the film’s shooting by Fujii Kenjiro, shows the extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa’s artistic process. He expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures or help the actors find their way into a role.
The boss interfering in his employees’ personal lives, on his last day alive:
Sleeping Sickness (2011, Ulrich Köhler)
White doctor Ebbo has opened a clinic in Cameroon and is sorry to be leaving. Three years later Black doctor Alex arrives to find that WD never left and the clinic’s finances and practices are problematic. As the tension ramps up, WD disappears, possibly shot and/or eaten by a hippo.
Produced by Maren Ade, this won a prize at Berlin alongside The Turin Horse and A Separation. White doctor was in Prospero’s Books, Black doctor in 35 Shots of Rum, wife in The Strange Little Cat, and fellow white doctor Hippolyte Girardot was in everything, including the last couple Resnais movies. Hippolyte, Hippo… hmmm.
Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope:
The masterstroke in Kohler’s screenplay is how the destabilizing aspects of the narrative place viewers – for entirely different reasons – in the same off-balance mental space as Alex, who comes across as permanently jetlagged, despite the fact that Cameroon and France share a time zone. Something has instilled a bit of the Kurtz in Ebbo, and though Kohler surely has some idea, he leaves the gaps in for us to fill – daring simpletons to proclaim the cause as “Africa” – and then takes it up a notch. In the last extended sequence – one might say the film’s third part – Kohler places us in the nighttime jungle, and lets us get lost again.
Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)
Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.
Shelter me from the power of the finger:
Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (2020, Edström & Winter)
Some movies are long because they need to be and some just don’t respect our time. This one plays a wobbly three-minute piano song over black with the opening title, and I’m already suspicious. Some guys talk shit over drinks, then piano, farmers, polaroids. People are filmed from a far-off obscure angle with locked-down camera, so I’m not sure if the couple of people organizing these bunches of daikons and talking about past new year holidays have been in the movie before. A guy facing away from us tells a long story about passing an exam when he was 24.
This is what I imagine Oxhide was like:
I made it the length of a normal movie before I started fast-forwarding – that seems fair. I learned that every 100 minutes there’s a chapter break, and there are some good birds (below) in section two. Tayoko’s husband gets sick and dies at the end.
Mark Peranson says I missed out:
Though the process of watching the onset of life’s end yields gut-wrenching moments, some recorded, some reconstructed, it makes little sense to extract one scene from the whole picture, as the film’s ultimate strength lies in its refusal to privilege, well, anything: an image of a tree means as much as a visit to an onsen, three people walking in the dark, a farmer hoeing her land, or a black screen with no image at all, only an intricately composed soundscape (as the quote introducing the film reads, “Until the moment you are dead you can still hear”).
Winter:
We entered into pre-production imagining that the film, in part, would be some sort of portrait of Tayoko and her husband, Junji. He had been diagnosed with a heart ailment and had been given one to two years to live. And so we imagined that some of what we would be filming would end up being their last months together. However, two weeks before we were to begin, Junji suddenly died … In the last year of Junji’s life, there had been tension and arguments in their marriage. The sort of thing that hadn’t much occurred since their first couple of years together. And Tayoko was remorseful that things had ended this way. But in those few days after his death, as she talked to Junji at the shrine set up for him in the house, the facts of her faith were revealed. She knew with certainty that Junji could still see and hear everything she was doing and saying: expressions of love and sorrow and apology. And, in seeing this, what would be the undergirding of the film was revealed. The film, at least in part, could, for Tayoko, be a second chance. A chance to go back, to relive the previous year, and to do the things she wished she’d done with Junji and to say the things she wished she’d said, knowing that he would be watching and listening. Tayoko was moved enough by this proposal that we agreed we’d weave these sorts of moments in throughout the film. To do this, we cast Junji’s childhood friend, Iwahana, to play the role of Junji. And from there we got back to work.
The Movie Orgy (1968, Joe Dante)
Somebody took a season’s worth of MST3K movies and Forbidden Room-ed them together. It keeps starting new stories, cutting them off for something new, then occasionally returning to one in progress, like how I’m currently reading ten books at once. Learned: You Bet Your Life was hilarious. Goofy Vietnam-era song over a mantis attack. Where’d the fake ads for headache pills and baby powder come from? Where’d this “House of the Rising Sun” music video come from?
Elisha!
Once an occasional cult cine-club screening, now this has more lboxd views than Trapped Ashes. I figured from half-understood descriptions that this would be an artless junk montage, but it’s entrancing… if Movie Orgy was a channel you could turn on at will, like Maddin’s Seances on Tubi, I’d hang up the blog and tune in forever. Don’t crowd me, Joe.
