by ·Comments Off on The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957, Jack Arnold)

Scott “Biff” Grant of The Monolith Monsters yachts through a glitter cloud, his wife (of I Was a Male War Bride) unaffected since she was in the cabin. “People actually decrease in height during the day,” says a doctor trying to comfort him. But it’s no use, doc, Biff is definitely getting smaller, and being a real pain in the ass about it. He goes out on the town and meets circus midget April Kent, but that doesn’t help either. Finally he’s small enough to be chased around by the family cat – he escapes into the cellar, but his brother Charlie arrives, and refusing to look in the cellar declares his brother definitely dead then wanders off with the hot wife. Meanwhile, Biff makes a grappling hook (this is exactly what I used to assume I’d do in any desperate situation) to defeat a spider, after which he reaches transcendence as he vanishes into atoms.

Per Criterion, Joe Dante (of course!) loved this movie, and cast the doctor in Innerspace… the same cat who tried to kill Biff later starred in Breakfast at Tiffany’s… I should really watch the remake with Lily Tomlin and Charles Grodin.

by ·Comments Off on The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold)

Ann Seyfried totes her little brother (Lewis Pullman of a Salem’s Lot remake) as she discovers a Christian sect called the Shakers, marries Chris Abbott but can’t have kids, gets arrested and returns as their messiah, moves to America and leads the group as they grow and inevitably diminish, since her main rule is strict celibacy. The US arrests her for being a treasonous witch but releases her for lack of evidence, then vigilantes burn their place down and murder a bunch of them – this country was cursed from the start.

A musical of the best sort, the looping rhythmic hymns reminding me of Lungfish songs. I assume the great Seyfried won all the awards, but I’m clicking on the awards link and getting distracted by which movies the Golden Globes consider a “musical or comedy.”

by ·Comments Off on Pompeii (2014, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Sometimes the vulgar auteurists are wrong. This brit-accented antiquity drama mixed with fast-cut bloodless gladiator action (edited to hell, the same way I recall RE6) from the writers of Batman Forever was a nice-enough waste of time between Resident Evil episodes.

Pretty girl Emily Browning (The Uninvited) likes slave-gladiator Kit Harington (best known as the star of Xavier Dolan’s eighth-best feature). Her dad Jared Harris (Benmont in Dead Man) and Emperor(?) Kiefer Sutherland are playing some kind of political-financial game nobody cares about while Kiefer arranges slave-battles, until the world explodes.

Girlies:

Gladiators:

Emily’s mum is Carrie-Anne Moss, and her friend is Jessica Lucas of Evil Dead Remake. The curly-wigged Charles Laughton-type in charge of the slaves is Graecus of Antiviral, his jailer Bellator is from a Cabin Fever prequel, and the tough Black slave (on his last day on the gladiator force before retirement) pitted against Kit until they team up to fight their oppressors is Heavy Duty from GI Joe 2 or 3.

Birdie:

Apocalypse:

by ·Comments Off on Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025, Gianfranco Rosi)

A wrecked movie theater where they project Pompei-related films (but not color ones)

The fire department answering callers after earthquakes, all wanting to know if Vesuvius is exploding.

Archaeologists and grave robbery investigations, a ship unloading tons of grain from Ukraine.

Another lovely doc with gorgeous photography by Rosi, who would probably not be amused that I chose his movie for a double-feature with the Paul W.S. Anderson. How did the city name lose an “i” in the intervening decade?

by ·Comments Off on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Almereyda & Stephens)

Altered States: the documentary. Lilly invented the isolation tank, did psychedelic drugs, got naked, and “regressed through generational time.” He survives experiments with dolphins, the US government, hollywood, LSD, and the isolation tanks, only to go insane on ketamine (“hourly injections of ketamine inspire increasingly apocalyptic visions”). Besides Altered States, works based on his studies include Ecco the Dolphin, Day of the Dolphin, Holy Mountain, and probably parts of the Hitchhikers Guide series.

I’d hoped this would be more formally exciting, some kind of Experimenter storytelling with Invention vibes, but it’s more a traditional doc (with archival footage, talking head interviewees, and clips from related works) covering their shared interests in oddball scientists and American un/popular history.

Lilly may have been a wealthy weirdo dolphin torturer whose science wasn’t so scientific, but per Filmmaker:

One of Coincidence Control’s clear takeaways is that universal reverence for dolphins and whales, and how their preservation became a stand-in for caring about the environment as a whole, is a direct and uncomplicatedly laudable part of Lilly’s legacy.

by ·Comments Off on Magical Mystery Tour (1967, The Beatles)

This collection of TV music videos with a loose framing story seems more like first-take/b-roll mess. Is it for kids? Was it influenced by The Monkees? They probably explained briefly in Anthology how this turned out so badly, and I already forgot.

At least each song gets a different visual treatment and some are nice (like the color-filtered mountainscapes over an instrumental song) and not just over-literal imagery (showing policemen in a row for the line “policemen in a row”). And at least during the awful narrative parts (Ringo squabbling with his aunt on a bus) we get nice symphonic versions of early band hits.

Have they been watching Kenneth Anger? Paul does his best silly walk. Ridiculous striptease with the Bonzo Dog Band. I don’t know if people back then knew who Mal was, but after you’ve seen Get Back it’s impossible not to notice him in every scene here. The anonymous veteran co-director was poor old Bernie Knowles, DP of The 39 Steps, now working with DP Richard Starkey.

by ·Comments Off on Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025, Matt Johnson)

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theaters, thank your lucky stars.” Annoying handicam fake-doc transforms into a very good Back to the Future ripoff. Narratively goes through great lengths only to loop around itself and accomplish nothing. I laughed for five straight minutes during the CN Tower lightning rod sequence.

Calum Marsh:
It didn’t surprise me to realize that this movie was largely built around unused webseries footage, because they have so much footage and in fact entire scenes and episodes of content that wound up on the cutting room floor. It’s such an incredible, inefficient method of working but it’s the only way to get stuff this good, and it’s a veritable goldmine when combined with their team’s compositing and VFX work, which is peerless at this budget.

–
The Chronology of Water (2025, Kristen Stewart)

A new feature of this blog: bonus sub-post about the 130-minute movie I watched for 15 minutes before getting annoyed or exhausted and putting on a genre film of decent length. Seems very well put together, a fragmented narrative with striking images and upsetting music loops, also seems like a trauma/abuse story that I don’t wanna endure for another 115 minutes, hence Nirvanna. Josefina called it “a better Lynne Ramsay movie than the one Ramsay released that same year.”

by ·Comments Off on Anaconda (1997, Luis Llosa)

Watched at the bar on mute, this appeared to be quite bad.

The director was a real 90s Guy, starting out with Erik Estrada and David Carradine then breaking through with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. The editor did Miller’s Crossing and the DP did Jaws, but the writers did Turner & Hooch and Legal Eagles, and the lure of dodgy CG and a crazed Jon Voight as the villain dragged this down. The entire cast would make quick recoveries (Out of Sight, Three Kings, Heat Vision & Jack, Mr. Jealousy, Titanic, etc) and this movie would be forgotten, certainly not to receive a sweaty 2025 comic semi-sequel starring a bunch of comics I used to like.

by ·Comments Off on All You Need Is Kill (2025, Kenichiro Akimoto)

Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice himself. Everything magically works out in the end, because this was a kids movie and I had no business watching it.