by ·Comments Off on The Smugglers (1967, Luc Moullet)

Excessively, whimsically French-new-wavey – a silly-ass low-budg indie comedy, more admirable than enjoyable. Brigitte (Francoise Vatel, a Brigitte in Brigitte and Brigitte) and Francesca are stuck with the same guy, a “customs officer”/smuggler. When they get cornered they keep rewinding the film until they figure out the right strategy for escape. Their schemes are successful, but it gets tiring so they move into the city and get government jobs. “Stealing a few minutes from the boss raises the personnel’s morale and efficiency.” The director: “Bresson praised the grace of the film. But did he mean it or was he just fucking with me?”

Kayak battle:

Most relatable scene: Francesca does the dishes by hyperballading them off a cliff:

by ·Comments Off on Variety (1983, Bette Gordon)

Christy needs a job, finds one in the box office of a porno theater alongside Luis Guzman. Inspired by her new job, she starts writing dirty stories and reciting them to people. This all scares away her uptight boyfriend Will Patton (boyfriend #1 of Janet Planet), so she lets stalker-customer Louie take her out to a Yankees/Red Sox game. When he leaves abruptly she goes detective mode and follows him to a shady under-bridge deal. After a few days of this she tells Louie she’s been following him and to meet her on a corner. This seems like a dangerous move, but the movie ends with a street shot (the corner?) over some nice John Lurie music, so maybe it worked out. Some lovely scenes of a fish market at night, though I wish they wouldn’t pick up the fishes by their eyeballs, and the meditation handshake montage is great. Written by sometime-Mekon Kathy Acker.

by ·Comments Off on Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh)

Spy/hunter Fassbender gets five potential spy/leakers together (including his wife Cate Blanchett) and pits them against each other, while he and Cate carry on like a low-budget True Lies. The rare movie where the polygraph test is the best scene. I accidentally just watched Naomie Harris’s earliest and latest movies about havoc caused when an internal science experiment is freed from its lab.

by ·Comments Off on Vulcanizadora (2024, Joel Potrykus)

Back to basics, just Joel and Joshua Burge alternately amusing themselves with fire or glowsticks and driving each other nuts in the woods. As their growing tension and weird vibes and the movie’s awesome poster indicate, the end goal is a double suicide, but squirrely Joel can’t follow through, so his head is exploded by a supercharged firecracker while Josh gets a half-hour coda of legal issues and regret. Really messed-up movie, a perfect addition to the Joel/Josh canon.

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Ludovico Testament (1999)

Best-case scenario of early homemade short films. This is exactly the sort of lifesize stop-motion that I would’ve made in my VHS-cam days if I’d seen The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb the year it came out instead of eight years later.

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Gordon (2007)

Gordon takes his kid to the playground and dies unexpectedly, then comes back a few months later as a zombie, his face deteriorated but his suit still in nice shape. Family has moved away, and nobody can stand to look at him, so he bums around town to Beck’s “He’s a Mighty Good Leader,” his teeth and fingernails falling out, then returns to his grave.

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Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes (2020)

Conceptual comedy, Joel calls all the industry people in his phone to ask how the quarantine is going for them, then doesn’t listen to their responses and hangs up in a hurry. The joke is on Alex Ross Perry, who gets called four times, each time listing him as the director of a different film.

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Unemployees (2023)

Dani and Kandy are slacker idiots with an ill-thought-out plan to get jobs and be fired then collect unemployment. After stints in an office, a factory, and a cafeteria (all filmed at Grand Valley U in Allendale MI) they take a field labor gig and discover that money does grow on trees – but trees that cause horrible skin infections.

by ·Comments Off on Amour Fou (2014, Jessica Hausner)

I admit I only watched this because I’m rewatching the long Rivette film with a similar title, but it turned out to be great, currently my favorite Hausner movie. Set in the 1810s, pleasantly suicidal poet Christian Friedel can’t convince Sandra Hüller to die with him, so terminally ill poetry fan Katharina Schüttler steps up. Many quotable scenes within.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie)

This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how meaningful are their relationships and how many times we’ve saved/endangered the world, the highlight is two nearly wordless action scenes in vehicles. In the submarine I think Cruise says one thing (“torpedo tube”), and the plane fight gets better when Esai stops supervillain-monologuing.

by ·Comments Off on A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977, Seijun Suzuki)

Coming a decade after Suzuki’s exile from studio film directing, and not long before his awesome Taisho Trilogy, I wasn’t sure where this movie stood in Suzuki’s career and I’ve put off watching it due to the dour title. Turns out it’s a real hoot, a brightly colored golf/advertising/stalker melodrama.

Taisho star (and a drunk pimp in Ronin Gai) Yoshio Harada plays the shitty boyfriend of a not-top-rated golfer, who hires trainer Takagi (of a handful of Ozu films I haven’t seen) to turn her into a golf champion, but only so an agency can sign her to a modeling contract. She succeeds, and on her first ad shoot they put her in all brown with a fluffy wig – I’d think they don’t know what they’re doing, then again it’s the 1970s.

Golfer Y?ko Shiraki was only in one other film:

The hot new star moves into a custom house with her little brother, where the neighbors don’t accept her, except for Ky?ko Enami (she starred in a Lady Gambler film series) who is starstruck, until she feels wronged by the golfer and the shitty boyfriend and turns dangerous. In the end the golfer is fired from her modeling job and getting pimped out by her stalker, the boyfriend is arrested (by Jo Shishido!) and goes violently mad on a golf course, then the little brother kills both women and burns the house down, all in high wild style.

From the writers of Naked Rashomon, Karate Bear Fighter, and Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, and the cinematographer of Female Teacher in Rope Hell. Japan is a source of neverending delight. The commentary promises to talk about “idols” in their culture, something that’s been bugging me since Perfect Blue, but I only listened to the first half hour.

by ·Comments Off on 28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)

I was gonna say “the movie looks artfully shot, too bad my copy is smeary low-res for some reason” – but no, it turns out they shot it on mini-DV. I don’t need to rewatch part two before the third movie, but don’t remember this one at all. Coma victim Cillian awakens into the post-apocalypse, after the extremely infectious rage virus is released from a lab by idiot activists and England is destroyed by Crazies®. He’s rescued by Naomie Harris, and they find a girl whose dad is Brendan Gleeson, and they go on adventures together, getting a flat tire in a rat tunnel, having a Grandaddy-soundtracked grocery shopping spree. Fun’s over after Gleeson gets infected by a crow and the others find a mad group of rapist soldiers. Cillian (a bike messenger who just woke from a coma) turns elite commando and wipes out the squad to save the women. Nayman and Lewis.

by ·Comments Off on The Rehearsal season 2 (2025)

“They gave me a blank check as long as I don’t go over budget.” The aviation safety season – Nathan discovers a problem that only he can solve, bringing some Nathan For You energy into The Rehearsal. He thinks social difficulties between copilots prevents them from speaking up when they see something wrong, and aims to solve this by having pilots role-play during flights. Along the way he starts a game show inside the fake airport he built, then the fake crew of his fake singing competition start covertly giving fake therapy to the real pilots. “I’ve always felt that sincerity was overrated.” He goes to Colorado with a couple of cloned dogs, rehearses one dog to live the life of his original (has Fielder read The Boys From Brazil?) then Nathan speed-runs episodes from Captain Sully’s life to understand his mind (always claiming he wants to help others then turning back on himself). “I began studying footage of other comedians who went before congress” – he shows a fake senate his pilot dating reenactments, but not even HBO’s lobbyists and the help of an autism center (who all but directly state that Nathan is obviously autistic) can get him into the real senate, so he has to become a licensed pilot himself and fly a planeload of people safely around in a circle. I’m not sure what any of this proves, but every episode succeeded in being more bonkers than the last.