by ·Comments Off on Outrage Coda (2017, Takeshi Kitano)

I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.

The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.

by ·Comments Off on Carry-On (2024, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Joey Gordon-Edgerton? – Of the Tetris movie, I guess? – is playing TSA Agent Joey while evil remorseless terrorist Michael Bluth threatens his disney-cute gf Sofia and Agent Deadwyler puts the clues together to help out. Upgrade star Joey Logan-Green is a fake cop who gets in a big Children of Men car-fight with the agent, Nanny‘s Sinqua Walls is a coworker who’s gotta get gotten rid of, and Son of Anarchy Theo is Bluth’s hit man. The tension of the useless guy getting coerced into helping blow up a plane is all on point, but the attempts at deeper characterization and psychoanalysis and Joey’s redemption arc only serve to drag the movie to the full two-hour mark. Lately everything reminds me of Red Eye, so why do I not simply rewatch Red Eye? Maybe the least-good Joey Gordon-Serra film I’ve seen (and I skipped the obviously bad ones). Closing credits are excellent.

by ·Comments Off on Spermworld (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

He’s outdone himself in camerawork and subject matter. Needs slightly less focus on megafather Ari, whose psychosis has already attracted other doc-makers. Finds an amazing source of cringe in having people read their text messages aloud.

Read: Mark and Rafa and Neil, but mainly the Filmmaker interview.

Lance:

I think there’s the bigger questions that the movie ended up becoming really about: What exists of me when I’m no longer here? All these people are chasing something bigger than themselves. They want to be bigger than life and feel in different ways that they haven’t achieved that sense of importance. I relate to that. That’s more or less why I make movies, right?

by ·Comments Off on In the Shadows (2010, Thomas Arslan)

Criminal Trojan who looks like the intersection of Adam Scott and Nathan Fillion gets out of jail and looks up some guys he used to work with: one guy so he can get paid for the job that sent him away, and the others so he can pull off One Last Job and steal enough cash to get outta this town. But he’s being tracked by another criminal associate Meyer who looks like a hot evil version of Richard Kind. Our guy’s friend Dora knows an armored car inside man Kruger, so they enlist retired Nico (Rainer Bock of De Palma’s Passion, a sinister cop in Barbara) and pull an easy heist. But Hot Richard tracked the action and wants his piece, finally Trojan is fleeing town with a stolen car and nothing else. Watching this now because Trojan will soon return in belated sequel Scorched Earth.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Arslan’s stripped-down approach may well deserve the epithet “masterly,” but only in the modest sense of such acknowledged forebears as Irving Lerner or Don Siegel, whom Arslan cites as an influence for his preferred style of laconic, almost “neutral” acting he likewise admires in Hollywood films of the ’30s … Although the director says that the heist sum of 600,000 Euros was simply chosen in order to remain realistic, it seems hardly a coincidence that it is slightly higher than the budget of In the Shadows itself.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on Oh, Canada (2024, Paul Schrader)

Opening in Richmond VA, Richard Gere is playing a Coward Errol Morris being interviewed via his own interrotron while dying of cancer. In flashback he’s Jacob Saltburn Elordi, first knocking up Alicia then turning to Amy, then Amanda. In the present he’s with Uma Thurman, and everyone is playing two roles, like a prosaic Cloud Atlas. He’d been a young draft dodging womanizer, then a trendy doc filmmaker, now full of regret – so it goes.

Can’t argue with the Phosphorescent soundtrack, very pretty. On the film shoot are Rene (looks somewhat like Emily Watson, was actually in the Devil elevator – the develevator – and Tulse Luper Suitcases) and idiot PA Sloan (of the latest bad Hellboy remake) and Malcolm (he played a missionary in The Addiction, justifying my Heretic double feature).

by ·Comments Off on Heretic (2024, Scott Beck & Bryan Woods)

“That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us.” Hugh Grant invites in a couple of mormon girls who don’t quite talk like real people, but maybe that’s the point. He quickly proves to be weirder than they are, with his dogeared bibles of all religions and specific theological questions they can’t answer, his never-seen but oft-mentioned wife, the metal in his walls preventing cell signals. Hugh puts on a Hollies LP and calls the Book of Mormon a “zany regional spinoff edition” of the Bible over “The Air That I Breathe,” then drops the gentle facade and locks them in his Barbarian basement with an apparently dead woman. Resurrection, afterlife, and simulation theory are proposed, the girls realize they need to outwit Grant at his own theological game and call out some inconsistency in his story, leading to a final showdown which kills Sophie Thatcher (of the new Companion), leaving only the quieter Chloe East (Wolf of Snow Hollow) alive to escape, no thanks to Elder Topher Grace who’d been searching for them. Decent movie, we should cast Hugh Grant as a verbose psychotic in more movies.

by ·Comments Off on 100 Yards (2023, Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng)

As the master dies, a duel between his top disciple QQ (Andy On, rookie cop of Mad Detective) and the master’s son Shen An (Jacky Heung of Chasing Dream), which QQ wins, taking over while the son asks for a rematch. I thought this meant Disciple QQ was the righteous leader and the son was the entitled guy trying to cheat his way into power, but I got it backwards. Anyway, the whole rest of the movie is rematches, QQ coming off worse and worse. It’s all nicely lit and designed, fake-looking in a beautiful way.

Meanwhile, Shen An has got a banker hotgirl (Bea Hayden Kuo of Tiny Times) but gets rescued by postal carrier Tang Shiyi, who knows the secret short sword technique QQ thinks Shen An is protecting. This all escalates to a video-gamey final wave battle in the castle before the the Martial Arts Circle breaks it up and sends everyone away for a few years to cool down.