Spends a lot of time setting up cool characters – overweight aspiring street rapper Patti, her 80’s metalhead mom turned karaoke queen, Patti’s co-rapper drugstore clerk Jheri, and loner weirdo electronic music wizard Basterd… then culminates in an electronic 80’s-metal rap-battle. Gotta admit the Feel-Good Sundance Sensation spirit got to me, though I do keep wondering how Basterd affords all that equipment and why it doesn’t get stolen when his doors don’t seem to lock. A New Jersey movie! Danielle Macdonald (Patti) can currently be seen in Lady Bird, her mom (actual karaoke queen Bridget Everett) is from Inside Amy Schumer and Trainwreck, and Mamoudou Athie (Basterd) played Grandmaster Flash in The Get Down.
Author: Brandon
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Train to Busan (2016, Sang-ho Yeon)
Spoiler: there are zombies on the train to Busan. But there are suddenly zombies everywhere, and the train survivors aren’t sure whether it’s more dangerous in the zombie-infested train, or out in the zombie-infested world. The heart of the story, which doesn’t work nearly as well as The Host, to take another Korean family/supernatural-disaster movie as an example, is that workaholic dad Gong Yoo (The Age of Shadows) is a professional asshole and a shitty father to his daughter. During the course of the invasion, not only does he step up and learn to help people and work together, but we get a real panicky villain who needlessly kills others trying to save himself, making dad look even better in comparison.
L-R: Baseballer, Tough Guy, Hero Dad
There’s also a big tough dude and his pregnant wife, a high school baseballer and his girl Jin-Hee, the bedraggled survivor from outside, two older sisters, and one extremely dedicated train conductor. Once you get bit, the zombification escalates very quickly, so it’s all panic and chaos. The action is kinda poor, but the tension is great – especially when the group pictured above fights their way through to a car with the other survivors, then Panicky Villain Guy convinces the others that the newcomers can’t be allowed to stay.
Zombies can see better than they can hear:
The two sisters:
One train crash later, our Hero Dad finally gets zombie’d fighting off the villain, and the daughter makes it to Busan with the Tough Guy’s pregnant wife. I didn’t love the director’s animated The Fake – he bridged the two films with an animated zombie train movie called Seoul Station. He’s joined here by the cowriter of Hwayi: A Monster Boy.
Prevenge (2016, Alice Lowe)
“Who cut the cord?” Pregnant woman is a psycho knife murderer, apparently speaking with her unborn child but actually just kinda schizo ever since her guy died in a climbing accident.
She is director Alice Lowe of Sightseers and Darkplace. First to die is a reptile salesman, then cheesy DJ Dan, a couple mustache dudes who I get mixed up, girl with boxing gloves, then post-spree Alice has an identity crisis when her baby is born seemingly normal. Formally speaking it’s no Sightseers, just a bit of bloody fun.
Whose Streets? (2017, Sabaah Folayan)
The story of Brittany, who is an incredibly good shouter, and other Ferguson residents in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting. Somehow I got the impression from the description that this was assembled from cellphone footage shot by the participants, but no, it’s a proper doc with a camera crew and everything. Also the second T/F’17 movie we’ve seen to use the “say his name” song. I don’t like to use words like “powerful” when describing a movie, but it’s powerful, and makes you not want to hang around any cops for a while.
The Lost World (1925, Harry Hoyt)
Alloy Orchestra returned, with a double-feature this time! First up was this highly ridiculous adventure story, full of corny nonsense, but also featuring some fabulous stop-motion dinosaurs and a cool monkey.
A beardy madman (Wallace Beery of wrestling picture fame) insists to a roomful of people, Lost City of Z-style, that his previous expedition had discovered a plateau where dinosaurs still live, but everyone on his team is now missing so he needs a new team. Sportsman Lewis Stone (Stars In My Crown, Queen Christina) would like to come find new creatures to shoot, and his buddy, romantic doof reporter Lloyd Hughes (title star of Rip Roaring Riley), gets himself invited to impress a disinterested rich girl. Professor Arthur Hoyt (the director’s older brother, mayor of The Great McGinty) comes too, and so does Beery’s dead ex-teammate’s daughter Bessie Love (her final film was The Hunger). Everyone proves to be pretty capable (especially the monkey) at getting into trouble and getting back out of it, and the doof falls for Bessie. More impressive than the “oh shit we’re dead, might as well die together” romance is that the dinosaurs, which would seem to have limited area to live and breed, are constantly killing each other and falling into tar pits. The humans manage to bring a live brontosaurus home to London, where it escapes and nearly goes full King Kong, finally destroying a bridge and either swimming away or drowning, it was hard to tell which.
The evening highlight was A Page of Madness, which had a more experimental score and blew everybody’s minds.
Cemetery of Splendor (2015, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Set in a makeshift hospital across from a construction site. I see Jen, there’s talk of past lives, and little happens for a long time so we’re in comfortable A.W. territory, but we also get a catheter bag and a guy shitting in the woods in the first 20 minutes.
Jen spends time in the hospital as a volunteer, where young soldiers sleep in beds because, as we learn when Jen is visited by two shrine princesses, ancient kings buried beneath the hospital grounds are drawing energy from the sleeping men to fight their posthumous wars. This all sounds crazier than it feels while watching it, since the actions and dialogue are so understated. The men do wake up occasionally, and Jen hangs out with one named Itt.
Out on the town with real Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, whose character was named Keng in Tropical Malady):
Out on the grounds with Keng-as-Itt:
Some other things: Jen and Itt can see each other’s dreams… Jen is married to an American named Richard who she met online… she remembers a lake animal from her past, which now floats inside her… a silent game of musical chairs… talk of massive floods… an amoeba-spaceship floats through the water-sky… Itt possesses a psychic woman named Keng, gives Jen a tour of the grounds pointing out the ancient structures that used to exist there, pours gingko water on Jen’s bad leg and kisses it… and a meditation lesson, which may be key to understanding this, A.W.’s most somnambulist feature.
Infinity Baby (2017, Bob Byington)
A somewhat-sci-fi movie that sets up an interesting premise – a genetic engineering mishap has created a thousand babies that will never age – then perversely dances around it, devoting most of its time to two morons who kidnap one of the babies, and their boss Kieran Culkin, a metaphorical infinity-baby. Starts in the middle, sociopath Kieran meeting an older woman (Martha Kelly of a Zach Galifianakis show about a clown college) on a first date and quickly rejecting her, then backs up to him dumping a girl with help from his “mom” Megan Mullally. For the bulk of the movie he’ll date Alison (Trieste Dunn of Cold Weather), who laughs a ton, and is too sweet for Megan to help Kieran break up with, so he manages on his own.
Meanwhile, the morons are drunken unhealthy asshole Larry (Kevin Corrigan) and gentle bowl-cut Malcolm (Martin Starr of Silicon Valley and NTSF) who goes blind when sprayed in the face with cleaning products by Larry. They nearly kill the baby, taking it to Stephen Root for disposal, but it turns out alright. And everyone is working for Nick Offerman, whose Infinity Baby business model is unclear.
As with Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, it likes to jump forward in time. Kieran ends up with his dream girl, someone young who’s into drugs and partying. Larry is in bad shape, and Blind Malcolm turns out to be a good father to the stolen baby, who is growing older (I’ve forgotten the explanation for that). Writer Onur Tukel made Catfight last year. Music by Aesop Rock!
Little Sister (2016, Zach Clark)
Low-key handheld indie drama where a sad nun returns home to deal with family drama… the whole “young nun reverts to her goth roots” aspect was played up more in the advertising than the movie itself. Our lead nun is Addison Timlin (Afterschool, Odd Thomas), whose brother (unrecognizably Keith Poulson, lead of Somebody Up There Likes Me) is home and depressed with massive facial burns, and mom Ally Sheedy isn’t dealing so well herself. I kinda lost most of the details by waiting too long to write about it, but it’s one of the best I’ve seen of this type of movie, chosen to watch since Katy’s little sister was over.
Timlin with her big brother:
Timlin with head nun Barbara Crampton:
Magic Mike (2012, Steven Soderbergh)
Maybe a weird choice when my parents were visiting, but everyone loves sexy dancing. I guess it’s about friendship and forgiveness, following your dreams, and sexy, sexy dancing. Good movie, unusual looking in the usual Soderbergh style, all muted colors except inside the club.
Mike (Tater Channing) works at McConaughey’s strip club while saving up to open his own furniture business. He picks up a protege (Alex Pettyfer, star of spy-kid flick Alex Rider) at his construction day-job, who turns out to be a fuckup, and Mike loses his savings bailing the dummy out of trouble. Mike gets a semi-happy ending with the fuckup’s sister (Cody Horn) and the rest of the gang is moving to a new club in another city – despite this, it looks like Tater and all the dancers, but not the fuckup or his sister or McConaughey, appear in the sequel.
