by ·Comments Off on The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)

I got a new dumb idea: to watch a bunch of movies called The Big ____ and call it The Big Movie Series. Not planning to rewatch The Big Heat (Lang) or The Big Boss or The Big Sky or The Big City or The Big Short or The Big Shave or The Big Snit or The Big Sick or The Big Picture… maybe The Big Lebowski or The Big Sleep… and I wonder if there’s an HD version of the extended The Big Red One yet.

our boys:

Idle rich pretty boy Jim (John Gilbert, star of The Merry Widow the same year) surprises everyone by enlisting in the army during WWI, teaming up with slack-jawed steelworker Slim (Karl Dane of fellow big movie The Big House) and officer/bartender Bull. At this point I got tired of hearing “You’re In the Army Now” on the blu-ray soundtrack so I put on Jason Moran’s album of WWI music, and loved how the slide-whistle song synched up with the Three Stooges-ass scene when Jim is walking with a barrel on his head. This is while they’re in France before the fighting starts, and Jim is falling for a pretty local (Renée Adorée, also Gilbert’s costar in Tod Browning’s The Show).

french girl:

Once they’re in the trenches, each gets his chance for heroism and revenge and death. WWI battle tactics are depicted as: walking in a straight line towards machine gun and cannon fire like robots until some yokel has the idea of throwing a grenade at the enemy. Only the rich guy gets to live, and back home his girlfriend and his brother try to pretend they haven’t fallen in love with each other while he was away, but he could care less, he hobbles back to France as if his beloved farmgirl really needs a yank with a wooden leg. But I kid, it’s a beautiful scene, made that much better by the Dirty Three album I put on after running out of Jason Moran songs.

my new motto:

by ·Comments Off on Suzhou River (2000, Lou Ye)

A strange one, a noirish story-in-a-story about a bagman who gets friendly with the young girl he’s driving around, the narrators possibly making up the story as they go. It all leads to kidnapping and murder and suicide and mermaids. I chose this one because the director (who also made Saturday Fiction with Gong Li and Purple Butterfly with Zhang Ziyi) had a new film at Cannes, which unfortunately nobody liked. The bagman also starred in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen, and Zhou Xun (who played the girl and the other girl) was in Wang’s Beijing Bicycle and also Tsui Hark’s Dragon Inn sequel (not his Dragon Inn remake).

The bagman and his charge:

The narrator’s girlfriend:

by ·Comments Off on Life is a Dream (1986, Raoul Ruiz)

At a movie theater with birds flying around, a man talks with the police stationed behind the screen and with the Chileans in a club accessible through the ladies room. Not exactly an adaptation of the 1600’s Spanish play, but our man has used the play as a mnemonic device to memorize (then forget) the names of 15,000 Chilean revolutionaries, and the film apparently includes footage of Ruiz’s prior staging of the play. Life may be a dream, or a movie, as the man tries to re-remember the list of names while the story blends dreamily with the genre films playing at the timeless theater. Variations on themes and images I’ve seen before, and then there’s this:

Lesley Stern wrote about it, reprinted in Rouge.

Maybe too complex for me, but hopefully we’ll get a restoration some day and I can get lost in it again.

by ·Comments Off on Love Lies Bleeding (2024, Rose Glass)

Starts out full of small-town problems: Kristen Stewart’s sister Jena Malone is being beaten by mustache husband Dave Franco who’s been screwing homeless bodybuilder Katy O’Brien who just applied for a job at the husband’s workplace, a gun range run by Ed Harris, who also smuggles guns into Mexico. Kristen falls for Katy, gets her into steroids, and Katy goes to Dave’s house and hella kills him in a roid rage, justifying the Clint Mansell soundtrack.

I was thinking about Lost Highway‘s domestic fatal head injury when I read Michael Sicinski making other Lynchian connections, and giving it up for:

Glass’ genuine feel for neo-noir as a collision course of tangled motivations, some of which the characters themselves don’t entirely understand. It’s fairly easy to make films about duplicity, where people lie and cheat and manipulate one another. It’s much harder to produce figures so damaged that they essentially sabotage themselves, failing to really grasp why everything has gone so terribly wrong.

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Inn (1992, Raymond Lee)

I realized that Tsui Hark wrote/produced this Dragon Inn remake between Once Upon a Time in China movies, and I proceeded to watch it with the wrong soundtrack selected, wondering why everyone was so badly dubbed, damn it. Beautiful action film, with more people twirling through the air holding swords than I’ve ever seen in a movie before.

Tall Tony 2 is protecting the children of his late superior from the power-mad evil eunuch’s forces. He meets up with fellow fighter/girlfriend Brigitte Lin at the desert inn run by Maggie Cheung, a mercenary whose chef serves previous guests for dinner. They spend half the movie looking for the secret exit door and when they finally escape through it after defending a massive attack on the inn, they only get a three second head start over president eunuch Donnie Yen due to a scarf mishap – they might as well have walked out the damn door. Maggie and her chef choose the righteous side and help the others defeat Donnie during a sandstorm. I saw Iron Vest in there somewhere, guess he did not survive.

Mouseover to see what happens when you hold your battle pose for too long:
image

by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (2023, Ryan Daly & Will Oldham)

A feature-length music video for the latest Bonnie Prince Billy album, made of scanned 16mm film, much of it zoomed out so we can see the sprocket holes and optical soundtrack. Some real on-the-nose footage selections – guess what’s onscreen during the songs about types of trees. I was waiting to see what he got for “Satan did a dance with me and I danced right along,” and it didn’t disappoint. I liked the fuzzy neon street scenes of “Blood of the Wine.” If I was allowed to take screenshots from streaming, I would’ve picked the woman covered in pigeons during “Kentucky is Water.” “Queens of Sorrow” MVP, juxtaposing commercial imagery of dolls with women’s-rights marches. The Bonnie Man makes the briefest in-person appearance. I’ll bet this was fun to edit. It’s very inessential as cinema, but if they want to start putting entire BPB albums on Criterion Channel that’s alright with me. Do I Made a Place next.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched April 2024

Woman Haters (1934, Archie Gottler)

An entire Three Stooges short with dialogue in rhyme! And usually not so great. The plot goes that new members of the titular club have sworn off women, then each one is caught alone with the same blonde girl (Marjorie White of sci-fi musical Just Imagine). They sing too much in this one and the rhyming doesn’t work, but they do hit each other a whole lot.

Not trying to make sense of the historical context of these shorts, I ended up watching “the first official Three Stooges short” per a professor of Stoogeological Studies. Director Gottler wasn’t a Stooges guy but had a regular gimmick (his other movies feature “dialogue all in rhyme” and “young men competing for the affections of a beautiful blonde”).

Aged Stooges:

–
World of Glory (1991, Roy Andersson)

And I rewatched this, after catching up with You, The Living.