by ·Comments Off on Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)

Richard Gere is kinda not the good guy in this – he keeps killing his bosses. His “sister” was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the same year, making her the cinema queen of 1978. I recently saw farm owner Sam Shepard leading The Right Stuff and haunting Hamlet, but he’s one of those guys I can’t seem to recognize. Linda Manz is given incredible lines and makes a great narrator; I need to catch up with her in Out of the Blue. Happy to finally get around to watching this beautiful blu-ray, hope I get to see it in an actual theater someday. Good reactions: Brendanowicz, and PD187 (katy said the same thing). Guess I’ve written up all the Malick movies… Badlands doesn’t have an entry, but was covered here (and is due a rewatch, as are ALL of them, including this one).

Animals of Heaven:

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022, Chad Stockfleth)

Memorial screening for Will Hart. You go your whole life without hearing Olivia Tremor Control in public, then you put on the new Ted Danson show a few minutes after watching this doc, and “The Opera House” plays over the closing credits. One of those docs (see also: The Sparks Brothers) where there’s such a wealth of interesting archival material and diversity of cool music that you can’t help but make a compulsively watchable movie out of it all.

by ·Comments Off on That’s Dancing (1985, Jack Haley Jr.)

Terrible host segments as usual, misguided efforts at diversity, then it settles down into a clip show of dance scenes from classic movies and all is well. Happy to see Bojangles Robinson, whose statue I drive past on the way to the movie theater.

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.

by ·Comments Off on Love in the Time of Twilight (1995, Tsui Hark)

Yan is Charlie Yeung (crazy chick of Fallen Angels the same year), an actress in a theater run by Wong Fei-hung’s dad, until she meets bank clerk Nicky Wu (her costar in Tsui’s The Lovers). Nicky was an unwitting helper in a robbery, killed by a power line, now a time-traveling Lawnmower Man trying to set things right. Movie gets crazy, then excellent, and finally exhausting.

Inside the electricity, a clear Twin Peaks s3 influence:

by ·Comments Off on The Temple Woods Gang (2022, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.

by ·Comments Off on Totally Fucked Up (1993, Gregg Araki)

Sketch movie of disaffected gay youths, told “in 15 random celluloid fragments.” One guy is a videographer so we get TV interview segments cut between epic 90’s-indie-looking episodes blanketed with heavy music and concert posters/shirts and advertising billboards. Relationship dramas within James Duval’s friend group: the nice guy he starts dating ghosts him, Tommy’s dad kicks him out, Deric gets beat up by randos and doesn’t want to see video-Steven who’s hung up on him. Not as apocalyptic as Doom Generation, though it is bookended by suicides, ending with Duval drinking a Reverend Toller cocktail.

Plus Coil, J&MC, Ride, Kozelek, Unrest, Thrill Kill Kult, etc: