by ·Comments Off on Final Destination 6: Bloodlines (2025, Lipovsky & Stein)

Good twists on the formula, becoming both prequel and sequel while still leaving the series open to infinite new premonitions. Kaitlyn has been having someone else’s deathdream, that of her hot young gramma Brec “Iris” Stargirl. She tracks down Iris, who saved so many people that death took forty years to rube-goldberg each of the restaurant survivors and is now coming for their families who never should’ve been born, Back to the Future style.

But Death is catching up fast: Uncle Howie gets lawnmowered at the picnic, which is as full of death-bait as a gymnast’s balance beam. Tattoo Parlor Erik survives a fan-chain attack and shop fire, then a garbage truck compacts his sister, then he’s killed by an MRI machine while absurdly trying to flatline Peanut Allergy Bobby in order to escape Death. That’s right, they’ve learned the Death Rules from Tony Todd (who finally gets his own lore besides just being the Harbinger Coroner), though it never seems to help. The three survivors retreat to grandma’s fortress, but it explodes and everyone dies. The most suspenseful bit was when someone almost says the words “clear river.”

The directors are following-up their live-action Kim Possible movie, and one of them made a 2010s Leprechaun sequel, jeez. Sequels that are named Bloodline(s): Final Destination 6, Hellraiser 4, Wrong Turn 5, Tremors 5, a Rosario Dawson Wonder Woman, and Pet Sematary 4 (which features “Bad Moon Rising” just like this movie does).

by ·Comments Off on The Woman in the Yard (2025, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Something is up with mirrors, and mom realizes the woman in the yard is her own confused, chicken-murdering self, or rather her suicidal ideation incarnate, and that she’s trapped in the mirror world, like if Us was 100x less interesting and featured Nosferatuan shadow-snatching. Yard Woman never seems to do anything, but all the pets are dead and everyone’s hurt and she’s spreading family discord, letting the days go by. Her first words are “how did I get here?” Mom saves the day by time-tunnelling into the gun locker(?). Cameo appearances: before dad’s fatal car crash they park outside a movie theater showing The Mirror Has Two Faces… and was that a Uneeda Biscuit canister in their shed?

by ·Comments Off on The Monkey (2025, Oz Perkins)

“A bit annoying and overwritten,” was my first thought, before landing on “uniquely idiotic.” But the opening sequence features Adam Scott with a flamethrower, so among all the sorry humor and sub-Final-Destination Rubegoldbergian kills, we get a few undeniable pleasures. Also some nice long cross-fades, and a couple of possible Bruce Campbell references. Skeleton Crew has now birthed two and a third theatrical films (The Mist, The Raft) plus some anthology horror episodes and apparently a Guy Maddin version of Here There Be Tygers?? That’s what the wiki says, though the lboxd description of Maddin’s Tygers sounds as faithful to the King story as The Lawnmower Man.

The Streaming:

Anyway, the monkey… twin boys (nu-Fregley in an animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid) inherit the thing, it kills their babysitter (not that they’re even aware) and their mom and uncle, then 25 years later their aunt, as they grow into twin Divergent Theos who are trying to find the monkey in order to kill each other. This latter part is supposed to be in the present-day, but all the phones still have cords. Also starring Orphan Black as their mom… Young Timothee Wonka as one twin’s kid… Elijah “Wirt” Wood as a guru stepdad… Sarah “daughter of Eugene” Levy as the aunt… and Rohan “no relation to Bruce” Campbell.

Horses:

by ·Comments Off on Caught by the Tides (2024, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Mark Asch:

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

Vadim Rizov:

Li has aged much more dramatically than Zhao but both their transformations over nearly a quarter-century are inevitably poignant. Does that generate anything beyond a reflexive effect? I think so; Caught by the Tides is a multiverse manifestation rather than nostalgia trigger — or, at least, this is a lot of neat footage, and it’s fun to see it find a home. Above all else, Zhao is a seemingly infinite performer whose affect hasn’t really been unpacked yet. Her stony unreadability is broken by unpredictable responses to others, manifestations of interest punctuating the deadpan surface of inscrutable women who, over the long haul, are reconfigured as martyrs or stoic survivors. Caught by the Tides reminds us that we’re all lucky as viewers that she and Jia found each other; it’s maybe the actress-director partnership of the ages.

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year 90 Nine Zero / Phony Wars (Godard)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)

Bursts and scraps, especially impressive in headphones.
“Now that the cold war is over, being American is pointless.”

Lemmy Constantine travels through Germany, speaks three languages. Good stuff.

–
Phony Wars (2023)

More scrapbooky than ever, and made of smaller scraps – his scrappiest one yet, but charmingly homemade in its montages and handwriting, without the typed titles.

Still, even when directors seem to have fully ignored or subverted the assignment, I continue not to like shorts commissioned by fashion companies. May ’68, tho. :raised-fist:

by ·Comments Off on Litoral (2008, Raoul Ruiz)

Lost Ruiz miniseries, made between Klimt and Mysteries of Lisbon. Cortinez has been onboard the ship Lucerna all week without seeing any other crew members, they assemble and tell him their own (or each others’) ghost stories. “We’re here either to tell stories or to jump into the water.”

The captain grows horns whenever his wife has affairs, a sailor is set up with a woman who lives 70 years in his past. A demon sets a guy up in the business of selling dead men’s clothes. They might all be dead, or imaginary, or miniaturized on the toy boat of a rich man. “What you see in here, don’t remember it even in dreams.”

by ·Comments Off on Circumstantial Pleasures (2020, Lewis Klahr)

Often I have no idea what he’s going for, or what any of the objects are supposed to represent, but it’s always pleasing to watch the patterns shift, the items shuffle about and disappear. Section 2 features assorted world leaders and other shitheads, more rapid color shifts and wackier sounds.

3. some of the envelopes and mattresses and money rolls recur across sections. In this one the music is more concrete. I got nothing on theme or visuals, just lost myself in the images.
4. a very dreamy section, I fell right asleep and had to pick up the next day

5. live footage out the window of a Chinese train in Sept 2016, looking exactly like the footage I shot out the window of a Chinese train in June 2019
6. The most varied and coolest section visually, or do I think that because it’s synced to a Scott Walker Bish Bosch song?

by ·Comments Off on Bringing Out The Dead (1999, Martin Scorsese)

Not sure if it was worth two whole hours just to see Ving Rhames revive I.B. Bangin’ (played by Paul Simon’s son, who exec-produced Pavements), but the movie also has other pleasures.

Mary Beth Hurt is the nurse who debriefs the patients, asking why they deserve help.
Hospital security guard Griss, who wears sunglasses and third-persons himself, has been in everything from Sankofa to the worst(?) Terminator sequel. The Wire‘s Kima and Omar get a minute of screen time each before they’re killed.

Cage and Arquette are both sleepwalking addicts, wearily observing the chaos of the city, until he takes decisive action by mercy-killing her life-supported dad. Cage’s haunting by a girl he couldn’t save is achieved by some Scorpion King-caliber CG face replacement. The dealer who gets fence-impaled was a Sunshine spaceman and the manic suicidal neighbor who Tom Sizemore maybe murders is pop star/NFL owner Marc Anthony.

by ·Comments Off on Shanghai Blues (1984, Tsui Hark)

Tuba guy (Kenny Bee of some early Hou movies) barely meets short-haired Shu (Sylvia Chang of some early Edward Yang movies) under a bridge when the war started, now trying to meet her at war’s end as planned. They each get pickpocketed and rip off pedicab drivers, identities and intentions are mistaken, it works out.

An atrociously dubbed comedy. After buying the Once Upon a Time box set and watching some twenty Tsui Hark movies, it cracks me up that this is the one that’s universally loved by the letterboxders I follow. Them: “just pure joy and beauty at every turn” … “A work of pure balletic grace, and a reminder that Hong Kong’s romcoms are every bit as ahead of the pack as their action movies.” Only Dave Kehr makes sense: “Hark’s colors have the almost startling intensity of old Technicolor; combined with his stroboscopic cutting, they make the film seem to fizz and sparkle on the screen.”

Pure joy and beauty?