by ·Comments Off on Naked (1993, Mike Leigh)

Incredible opening, David Thewlis having abusive sex with some woman, she threatens him, he immediately steals a car and skips town. He’s off to visit his ex Louise (Lesley Sharp of The Full Monty) but she’s at work, her roomie Sophie (Mike Leigh regular Katrin Cartlidge) lets him in, hilarious, doesn’t move her mouth when she talks. When Louise does get home he’s awfully rude to her for having a job and being boring, then he fucks Sophie who gets clingy so he becomes increasingly violent and horrible to her.

Sophie and Louise:

This shot is a bit much:

Jeremy/Sebastian is a yuppie powerguy, possibly the two girls’ landlord, who shows up at their flat and terrorizes them, shortly after “Johnny” Thewlis has gone on walkabout in the city. Johnny hangs out with incredibly daft Scot Ewen “Spud” Bremner, quietly destroys security guard Peter Wight with philosophy, then pays a visit to Brian’s drunken dream girl. He follows a diner waitress home (Gina McKee of In The Loop, I think), quiet and nervous (and also drunk), who freaks and kicks him out in the cold, where he gets his ass kicked by a concert promoter and some random youths. Johnny comes home to the girls, rejects Sophie even in his decrepit state, takes some cash and runs. As a study of character and place/time it’s perfect and self-contained, but I still checked out the audio commentary… turned it off when Leigh explained that “pulling pints means working at a pub.”

With Jeremy:

Blowing Brian’s mind:

With Spud… eh???

by ·Comments Off on Queens of the Qing Dynasty (2022, Ashley McKenzie)

Indie-stilted drama with amazing music. A world of screens with Superjail pencil tests on every one of them. Suicidal Star bonds with counselor An. He passes his citizenship test.

Per Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope, “These characters feel unique to Canadian cinema, contemporary, micro-budget, or otherwise, and the actors inhabit them to the point where they don’t really seem to be acting at all … the slightly surrealist weave of images is heightened by the tour-de-force soundscaping of Andreas Mandritzki, who interlaces Autechre-ish electronica with musique concrete and stylized foley work.”

The director:

With my shorts and with Werewolf I was really inspired by my environment, its working-class history and textures. The logical representation of that was a social-realist film made in a verité style. That style fit my other movies well, and made a lot of practical sense too, but I did start to feel like it was limiting the way I thought about crafting characters, building scenes, and writing dialogue. Then Star and An started to emerge as complex, vibrant, and talkative creatures, and naturalism couldn’t contain them: their creative ways of conceptualizing and expressing themselves necessitated that I find new ways to engage. The entire movie is a sort of experiment in burrowing into their brains and vibing on their frequency.

by ·Comments Off on Amazon Women on the Moon (1987, Joe Dante, John Landis, et al)

I’d had this confused with Kentucky Fried Movie all along. It’s not so bad, a sketch comedy anthology. Came out September 1987, so that must have been around when my family took the Universal Studios tour – I remember this was being advertised but I wasn’t old enough to see it.

Sketches:
– Arsenio gets attacked by everything in his apartment, finally falling to his death out the window
– fake Penthouse video

– Murray’s remote sucks him into the TV, wife Selma keeps changing the channel
– Michelle Pfeiffer had a baby, Idiot Doctor Griffin Dunne lost it
– fake hair loss ad
– titular fake 1955 moon landing movie
– BB King fake ad about black men born without soul
– Rosanna Arquette runs a credit and ID check on blind date Steve Guttenberg
– Henry Silva hosts “Bullshit or Not”, investigating if the Loch Ness Monster was Jack the Ripper
– Bruce McCulloch-esque Archie Hahn is watching TV when the movie critics start reviewing him

– titular moon landing movie pt 2
– fake ad for edible silly putty
– Bruce gets roasted at his funeral by an all-star comedian slate, his wife is the closing act
– David Alan Grier is the black guy without soul, part 2
– video pirates discover booty of gold vhs tapes (including The Other Side of the Wind)

– Ed Begley Jr. is Son of Invisible Man, not actually invisible, his assistant Trent doing damage control
– Amazon Women pt 3
– ad: John Ingle hosting an out-of-business sale for a national art museum
– ad: Henry Silva pt 2: sinking of the titanic
– ad for a novel about a sexy white house first lady
– meek teen Matt Adler buying condoms for hotgirl Kelly Preston, pharmacist is his family friend
– Amazon women pt 4, cutting back to the movie having missed important plot developments, a good joke reused in Grindhouse
– Dave McFly gets custom tape from video store of hotgirl sherrie making love to him, her husband frankie comes home waving a gun around, kills her and himself, McFly is arrested
– Grier has no soul pt. 3: okay we get it
– credits
– 1950s teen scare film: Iowan Carrie Fisher goes to NYC, passed around by talent scout, gets married, goes to Dr. Paul Bartel because she caught a social disease
– closes with an ad for the Universal Studios tour, coming back around.

by ·Comments Off on Detective vs. Sleuths (2022, Wai Ka-Fai)

Pairs well with Mad Fate – another potentially insane lead character, this time Lau Ching-wan, playing another Mad Detective. He’s now an ex-detective, living on the street but still solving crimes, pissed at the employed cop (Raymond Lam of P Storm) botching the cases, drawing interest from pregnant cop Charlene Choi (The Goldfinger). Things get convoluted as a young group called The Sleuths – Lau’s daughter and the children of crime victims and the wrongly-accused – uses Lau’s research for a revenge campaign, killing off criminals. Some traitor sleuth cops are pulling the strings, getting cops and sleuths killed. After a covid-delayed open, this got nominated for every HK award, so hopefully we’ll get a sequel.

by ·Comments Off on Hotel Room (1993, David Lynch)

Created with some usual collaborators, and some unusual (James Signorelli, director of the second episode, also made Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). Scenes set in the same hotel room across eras, an excuse to rifle through the rolodex of interesting actors.

1969: Harry Dean Stanton and his girl Darlene (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) check in, are visited unexpectedly by beardy Lou (Dune). Some kinda twisted psychological game ensues, I think Harry gets conned by Lou, then arrested for the murder of his wife (not Darlene, she’s ok). Written by Barry “Lost Highway” Gifford, but the only thing usually marking this as Lynchian is the Badalamenti music.

1992: Deborah Unger (The Game) has her girls over (Mariska Hargitay of Lake Placid, Chelsea Field of Dust Devil), is gonna confront her man and ask for a commitment. Griffin Dunne arrives but instead of committing, he dumps her, and Unger bonks him pretty hard on the head. Written by Jay “Bright Lights Big City” McInerney.

1936: More spectral than the others, Oklahoma couple Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt (Dune, Cecil B. Demented), conversing very slowly in a blackout. “I saw you on the other side… but it wasn’t you.” They’re in the city so she can see a doctor. She can sorta remember that they had a child who died Don’t Look Now-style, but she remembers a neighbor getting run over really clearly, and Glover follows with a story of a navy buddy who died. After a phone call, the room and the wife become enlightened.

by ·Comments Off on Almanac of Fall (1984, Béla Tarr)

Jake Cole’s review is the one to read.
Also covered in Rosenbaum’s Placing Movies but I don’t have my copy handy.

Main dude in The Turin Horse plays the son Janos.
Mustache guy Tibor gets arrested at the end for pawning mom’s jewelry.

The camera goes up in the ceiling…

and under the floor.

by ·Comments Off on Flora and Son (2023, John Carney)

Flora (Eve Hewson of Tesla) raises her shithead son Max with little help from his dad Jack Reynor. She tries to get the kid a hobby, fixes up an abandoned acoustic guitar, but he’s more interested in rapping over laptop beats so she takes online lessons herself with teacher Joey Gordo-Levitt. The movie’s trick of teleporting him out of the laptop and into the room during a camera move is a good one. The power of music brings everyone together yet again… if Carney keeps making these things, we’ll keep watching them. Once > Sing St. > Flora > Begin Again.

by ·Comments Off on Silent Night (2023, John Woo)

Speaking of John Woo… it would appear that he’s back. Slick transitions between scenes, locations, time periods as he sets up the dialogue-free story of Joel “kill-a-man” Kinnaman getting revenge for the death of his son. Half the movie is a training montage, as the sweater-wearing family man practices shooting and stunt driving and knives, and he’s still unprepared, as the first guy he kidnaps proves to be dangerously tough. Joel finds time for some normal vigilante work, gets his first couple of kills. Then he starts a Christmastime gang war and assaults the HQ of the head-tattooed supervillain. Gets very videogamey in the final assault, and Joel is belatedly joined by cop Kid Cudi. Tattooed guy was in a Liam Neeson disabled-guy revenge movie the year before, and Kinnaman played Neeson’s endangered son in Run All Night, so Neeson is the godfather of all revenge films now.