by ·Comments Off on Gemini (1999, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Yukio (Bird People In China star Masahiro Motoki) is a doctor who detests poor people.

Rin (Ryo of Harmful Insect and Scabbard Samurai) is his wife, has lost her memory.

They sleep like this:

One day, the doctor’s fur-lined bloodshot-eyed doppelganger arrives and kills the doctor’s parents.

Then the doppelganger throws the doctor down a well.

He torments the doctor, reveals the truth about their parents and the wife, all the plotty drama less convincing than the excellent visuals and cool music.

by ·Comments Off on The Day The Earth Blew Up (2024, Peter Browngardt)

Palate cleanser after all this week’s zombie movies (28 Years Later, The Sadness, Weapons) and antisocial behavior (Golem, The Beast To Die). I mean sure, this is also a zombie movie (the population gets possessed by alien chewing gum) full of antisocial behavior (Daffy), but with a different tone, and animated. Zippy and funny, the 74 credited writers should be proud (their other works include Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob, Camp Lazlo, She-Ra, and Brigsby Bear).

by ·Comments Off on The Beast To Die (1980, Toru Murakawa)

Date is a psycho criminal, played by Japan’s coolest man Yûsaku Matsuda, but in this movie’s world violence tends to be awkward and clumsy and nobody is cool. Date is already being tailed by beardy detective Hideo Murota (also beardy as the first doctor in Dogra Magra) when he comes across an aggrieved waiter with frizzy hair (Rikiya of Tampopo and Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter) and enlists him in a bank robbery plot.

Turns out Date is a shellshocked war photographer (always you lose points when you bring real war atrocity footage into your dumbass crime picture, let this be a warning), which is why he “walks like a dead man” and acts weird around his girl even though he’s supposedly a classical music fan and she’s a hot concert pianist. The shellshock doesn’t explain why he tells really long stories though. Having recently watched Heat, I’m gonna be comparing all cops and robbers movies to that – these guys are more intense than Kilmer and company, killing both their girls before/during the big heist.

Pre-game pep talk:

Detective with 30 seconds left to live:

by ·Comments Off on Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens)

Feels like 10% doc, 90% light indie drama. There will be production noise (“cut… and that’s a wrap on Paul!”) in the blackout between scenes, puncturing the story of daughter Callie Hernandez following up on her late father’s inventions, interviewing friends/investors and other participants. But the actual documentary quantity is unknown, since people are playing version of themselves (others are played by fellow indie filmmakers), and the inventor dad was also real, playing himself in archival appearances on local TV. Courtney unpacks the precise true/false nature in a good Filmmaker interview, where they also discuss dads, “the mythology they have around themselves, and even fantasies about themselves, which as someone’s child you often enter because you’re very little, and it’s the way to be close to them and to love them.”

by ·Comments Off on Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger)

I noticed the parasite stuff on the classroom board long before it came up again via zombie-fungus-ant TV show, argh. The most mystifying was Handsome Family’s “Don’t Be Scared” (the “wake up, Paul” song) playing on the car radio to a cop named Paul. My conspiracy theory is that everything after Paul’s night at the bar with the teacher is his dream, that he fantasizes finding the missing kids (with help from his crack-addict tormentor) and almost saving them before getting paralyzed by a witch and then killed by his ex-girlfriend.

Pulp Fictioned-out story that keeps rewinding and changing perspective. Is it ironic that Brolin writes WITCH on the teacher’s car and the the villain turns out to be an actual witch? Effective blend of fairy-tale horror (pied piper children-napping by evil mind-control witches) with suburban dread/investigation drama. As for investigation, the cops are portrayed as even more ineffective than usual – the one we follow fucks up his home life, falls off the wagon, keeps getting stabbed by a crackhead, brutalizes civilians while disabling his car camera, then gets conquered by the witch, and killed with his own gun. As for the rest of the force, supposedly working hard on the case, nobody thought to check what direction the kids were running and then walk in that direction until the lines intersect – a parent figures this out a month too late.

Movies gain an automatic extra star when seen on the big screen. Packed weeknight crowd tittered at the suspense scenes, but their biggest reaction was upon seeing Justin Long The Mac Guy for some reason. Good movie but Parker isn’t wrong.

by ·Comments Off on Golem (1980, Piotr Szulkin)

Paranoid kafkaesque man is being given the runaround, everyone seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. The commentary notes the “sense of profound gaslighting” he experiences, but I let myself down by only playing the first 15 minutes of it and barely got out of the historical background section. Besides his mixed-up identity situation, our guy Pernat (the lead cop in Ga-Ga) gets involved in a murder conspiracy, and gets abducted by a scary ophthalmologist.

Goin to the movies:

USA 2025:

Krystyna Janda starred in everything (Interrogation, Mephisto, Man of Iron, Dekalog 2)

It was already pretty Brazil-reminiscent, then this guy rappels in:

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle)

Dad and son leave their tidal island home for a coming-of-age venture into zomb territory, and when their short trip gets derailed and extended they end up meeting skull collector Ralph Fiennes, a doomed Swede, and evil acrobat messiah Jack O’Connell. Second-most interesting part of this movie is learning that the rest of the world is normal modern, with internet and uber eats, and only England is zombie-quarantined – the most interesting is that Boyle is image-making here, not just telling a family/zomb story, and this has got more trick shots/edits in the first four minutes than the entirety of last week’s zombie junk The Sadness. Ends weirdly because they’re setting up a sub-trilogy, so the kid and his dad (Aaron T-J of one of the bad Godzilla movies) and other weirdos will return, but the kid’s mom (Bikeriders wife Jodie Comer), an elite zombie defender with terminal brain cancer, will not.

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2021/2025

It’s the seventh annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five* years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

*Oops, there was a global pandemic in 2020, so we’re switching things up this time. Skipping ahead to the 2021 selections, also looking through this year’s fest and seeing if there are any 2025 programmed directors whose earlier works I’ve been meaning to watch, or any 2025 Histoire(s)/Retrospective films I can catch up with.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d otherwise seen, unlinked are items of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Played Locarno 2021:

The Sadness (Robert Jabbaz)
Little Solange (Axelle Ropert)
She Will (Charlotte Colbert)
Mad God (Phil Tippett)
Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi)
The Case Of The Vanishing Gods (Ross Lipman)
From the Planet of the Humans (Giovanni Cioni)
The Balcony Movie (Pawel Lozinski)
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Edwin)
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico)
A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong)
Medea (Aleksandr Zeldovich)
The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)
Luzifer (Peter Brunner)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
Lynx (Laurent Geslin)
Brotherhood (Francesco Montagner)
Actual People (Kit Zauhar)

2025 Filmmakers:

Joachim Trier
Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (The Tale of King Crab)
Jafar Panahi
Radu Jude
Alexandre Koberidze
Dane Komljen
Ben Rivers
Abbas Fahdel
Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter (Space Dogs)
Kamal Aljafari
Sophy Romvari (Pumpkin Movie +2)
Radu Muntean
Lemohang Mosese
Park Sye-young (Fifth Thoracic Vertebra)
Julian Radlmaier

2025 Retrospectives:

Project A (1983)
A Diary for Timothy (1945)
The Stranger Left No Card (1952)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)
Nebraska (2013)
The Descendants (2011)
L’Atalante (1934)
Anno Uno (1974)
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Silent Light (2007)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
Hell Drivers (1957)
Night and the City (1950)
Obsession (1948)
Odd Man Out (1947)
The Passionate Friends (1949)
Peeping Tom (1960)
A Portrait of Ga (1952)
The Shining (1980)
Time Without Pity (1957)

by ·Comments Off on The Sadness (2021, Rob Jabbaz)

Starts as a mild relationship drama (she has a job, he is useless), then he goes outside and witnesses an extremely sudden citywide outbreak of The Crazies. The infected get red around their big black eyes, sport a big grin, and torture normals for fun, retaining their person skills (can talk and use weapons). After no living humans are in sight, the crazies have violent blood orgies. So our guy runs back home to come up with a plan, after the gardener neighbor cuts off a couple of his fingers, meanwhile the girl has taken the midnight meat train to work, uh oh. Rest of the movie is them trying to find each other, meeting up at a hospital, each trailing their own zombie archnemesis. I feel like it’s trying to be somewhat comical in an over-the-top gory kind of way, like Terrifier, but mostly ends up depressing (“charmless, sadistic“).