by ·Comments Off on The Lodger (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)

There’s a serial killer murdering the blondes of London, but the movie is more concerned with showing us all the media technologies of the time (telegraph, newspaper, radio, electric billboards). Meanwhile after a performance of “Golden Curls,” the few performers who weren’t wearing wigs are worried about their walk home. Good music by Neil Brand, and I love the construction paper graphics on the intertitles.

Ivor Novello arrives, pale and scarved, at a boarding house, acting like a dramatic ghost while renting a room, and is assumed to be the killer so everything he picks up is implied to be a possible murder weapon. He likes local girl Daisy, which annoys her hanger-on Joe. First the landlady then the cops go snooping through Ivor’s stuff, then the real killer is caught off-camera but not before jealous Joe gets an angry mob to beat Ivor half to death.

Killer calling card:

British people must spend 15% of their day standing in shocked silence after something mildly disagreeable happened. Novello’s legacy: he would be portrayed ninety-some years later by the guy who also played young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia 2.

POV: Ivor Novello wants to kiss you

by ·Comments Off on Demon Pond (1979, Masahiro Shinoda)

Thirsty traveler (star of Tampopo) enters dusty village, finds a stream and nearby house, meets Yuri (a female impersonator, also of Yumeji) and coincidentally his long-missing friend Akira (of Samurai Rebellion), who has become Yuri’s reclusive boyfriend and the town bell-ringer who keeps away evil spirits. The traveler would like to see the local Demon Pond before returning to work in the morning and his friend offers to guide him. Seems like a restrained, traditional Japanese folk story so far, but I was underestimating it.

As soon as the girl is alone, a carp poacher spies on her until he’s bitten by a crab, then the movie turns suddenly goofy, the carp and crab transforming into costumed characters off to see the undersea princess (same actre(ss) as Yuri), the eerie score mutated into crazy electro music. The princess wants to see her lover at another lake but is trapped here as long as the bell is faithfully rung. Back in town the poacher gets an angry mob after Yuri, insisting the bell not be rung, realizing their mistake too late as the lake destroys the town. I enjoyed this more than Shinoda’s Silence. Carp also starred in Pitfall, and Crab was in The Eel (heh).

by ·Comments Off on Boy (1969, Nagisa Oshima)

Boy lives with an adoptive family of scam artists, the parents both Oshima regulars (she’s the criminal’s wife in Violence at Noon, he’s an officer in Death by Hanging). They earn money by having the kid and mom Curly-Sue passing cars then shaking down the drivers. This life doesn’t bring Boy happiness so he’s hoarding his allowance to afford a train ticket out of town, but the others catch up, and carry on until one of their crashes proves fatal and a suspicious driver reports them. Kind of a true-crime story, adapted from news stories, and predicting a bunch of Kore-eda films. The Boy is really good but his lines are so post-dubbed that it sounds like he’s a talking doll having his string pulled.

Boy didn’t act again, but grew up to be Morrissey:

by ·Comments Off on Torque (2004, Joseph Kahn)

Road Rash: The Movie… fast editing, super precise framing, wall-to-wall heavy mid-2000s rock music, so, basically heaven. Looking forward to rewatching this every few years forever. Written by Matt Johnson, but not that one. Lead New Zealander Martin was Darcy in Bride & Prejudice, one of his buddies starred in Hostel, Thor-looking drug boss was between two Fast/Furious movies.

All I want for Christmas is an Ice Cube knife:

tfw crooked Agent Adam Scott is giving you three options:

by ·Comments Off on The Shadowless Tower (2023, Zhang Lu)

I thought this would be more mysterious and experimental… I think I heard about this movie around the same time as John Smith’s Black Tower and got them mixed up?

Xin Baiqing is a Beijing food critic who is just like me: a middle aged guy who likes to drink and is pretty boring but with a few quirks that only make him seem offputting to people. He has a sister and a daughter and an estranged dying wife and an ex-con dad (Horse Thief director Tian Zhuangzhuang) who the family pretends doesn’t exists but who bikes 300km to see them in secret on their birthdays. Xin hangs out with food photographer Huang Yao, plays at being her boyfriend, then her father.

by ·Comments Off on Megalopolis (2024, Francis Ford Coppola)

Once again an online review affected the viewing experience, and I spent much of this movie giggling at its “Cheesecake Factory aesthetic.” I had a good time watching this with my bottle of Coppola wine, and since it is (more or less) the American Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, I’m going to use the same approach and just post the notes I took while watching it:

Julia out partying, someone who isn’t her dad picks her up, Claudio is hanging round her, ah her dad is Mayor Cicero, she can see Adam’s time stoppage
LOL at the dialogue
Laurence tells us an empire begins to die when its people no longer believe in it, uh oh
Rich banker Crassius’s son is Claudio, those girls are his sisters the Claudettes, he’s hot for ’em
Mayor’s daughter Julia is a big part of this

Vesta wears invisible dress Cesar invented
Doddering super-rich uncle Voight is marrying Wow, is Cesar’s uncle
Shia is good in this, schemes to show vid of Cesar in bed with girl singing about her purity pledge, she might be good singer but you gotta be a good lipsyncer to be in a movie

No characters in this movie, just narrators – the dialogue is all terrible but the lighting is very good, so we’ll call it even.
During Driver’s scandal he loses his time control
He gets new girl preg, he’s married to Sunny
Only Shia and Adam are thriving here

Mayor will confess to hiding Cesar’s wife’s body if Cesar leaves the preg daughter
Tattoo guy sends a 12-yr-old to assassinate Cesar for Claud
Wow and Shia plot to take over the bank from Voight
So the movie is about rival family members of the world’s richest banker both trying to become populist revolutionaries
Movie bad.

by ·Comments Off on Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)

I think the notes I took while watching this can stand on their own:

Girl Fishball’s prost mom gets beaten to death
He’s trying to save up for a fake ID but gets into gambling with the boys
Music is too big but maybe that’s the 1980s setting
This is 1986?

Raymond is the “employed cop” (?) of Detective vs. Sleuths
Cyclone’s doctor is looking for dead Jim’s son to kill his whole family
Chau is the doc, Lui killed his family, Jim was Lui’s killer who seems modeled after Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of NY
Jim is Koo’s Throw Down costar

Boss Tiger lost an eye to Jim, Boss Chau his family, and Cyclone killed Jim
Cyclone was secret friends with Jim and smuggled his family out of town after killing
Our guy is Jim’s son, whitehair doc Chau is pissed
They spent a billion dollars recreating the neighborhood for this film, but needed these guys to play different ages in the 1960s and 1980s and threw some talcum in their hair
Gravity-defying fights, not going for realism despite the kowloon recreation

AV is guy with underwear mask
It uses the godzilla (??)
They all butcher each other while Lok is incapacitated
Some of the goofiest action moves since Dragon Inn
Almost everyone is dead and the cops have Lok

Sammo’s sunglasses guy King uses this fight to move in and take over
King kills his boss Sammo after killing Cyclone
King’s deal is that he is physically indestructible
The action is too choppy, but decently cool
I saw a lady for a few seconds, must have been a mistake

by ·Comments Off on A Different Man (2024, Aaron Schimberg)

Watched this because I wondered if it had the same plot as The Substance – not really! Sebastian Stan is an Adam Pearson-looking pathetic guy with a tentative friendship with hot playwright neighbor Renate Reinsve, then gets revolutionary medical treatment causing him to look like Sebastian Stan, changes his job and identity, then tries to get cast as his former self in the play Renate wrote about her ex-neighbor’s life. This is going fine for Stan until the real Adam Pearson shows up oozing charisma and steals his role and his girl. Plot hole: Renate doesn’t recognize Adam despite having a Chained For Life poster in her living room.

by ·Comments Off on The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)

Dumb Mulholland Drive. Even more gleefully artificial than I Saw the TV Glow, its length allows more emphasis and repetition than is really needed – I keep remembering how much Body Melt accomplished in 80 minutes, while after all the buildup, only a couple bodies melt in this one.

After Demi is fired from a TV network for being too old, she gets the inside scoop on the substance, which creates a younger you from the current you, and the two yous alternate weeks of consciousness. Her first day as Qualley she gets her old job back from squishy boss Dennis Quaid, then Demi wastes her own weeks eating junk food in her apartment, then the second week she starts stealing extra youth time, which causes Demi to age rapidly/erratically. It’s a huge problem that neither of them has self control. They start videodroming (Q pulls a chicken leg out of her bellybutton) then body-melting (Q gets the idea to substance herself, then drops a boob out her eyehole on live TV).