by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997, Sammo Hung)

Cheesy, stupid movie whenever anyone is talking, but it’s also the most handsome-looking one of these movies in a while, and Jet Li is back, and his and Clubfoot’s action scenes are hot. The action is chopped up more than usual, but it works, until it doesn’t. Music is hit or miss – playing the OUATIC theme on Western instruments is cool but sometimes the composer plays a choir on a sampling keyboard, which is less cool. Wong loses his memory on a trip to America, joins a native tribe and hooks up with Agent Tammy Preston (in her only acting role outside of Twin Peaks). Sammo sure is trying some things to revive the series, sometimes successfully, but goes too broad and ends up with anti-racism for babies, nowhere near the heights of his Millionaire’s Express.

Our guys are joined by Billy (stuntman Jeff Wolfe), far right:

by ·Comments Off on Curling (2010, Denis Côté)

Cote loves shallow-focus shots (so do I). Watching this reminds me that his covid movie came out a hundred years ago, and Soderbergh’s is still not out?

Odd-jobs guy is over-sheltering his 12 year-old. Each of them finds dead bodies in the snow and keeps it as a secret: dad hides his body in the abandoned motel like The Wire season 4 and the daughter hangs out and chats with hers in a frozen field. They seem nice.

Director and actor won prizes at Locarno, where it played with fellow chilly films Winter Vacation and Cold Weather.

Côté in Cinema Scope 44:

People ask me, “Why curling?” Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl. The moment he hears about curling, there’s a spark in his eyes – the only positive thing in his life during the whole film is curling … The film is very simple: how do you connect with the world of the living?

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.

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.