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.

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.

by ·Comments Off on Love in the Time of Twilight (1995, Tsui Hark)

Yan is Charlie Yeung (crazy chick of Fallen Angels the same year), an actress in a theater run by Wong Fei-hung’s dad, until she meets bank clerk Nicky Wu (her costar in Tsui’s The Lovers). Nicky was an unwitting helper in a robbery, killed by a power line, now a time-traveling Lawnmower Man trying to set things right. Movie gets crazy, then excellent, and finally exhausting.

Inside the electricity, a clear Twin Peaks s3 influence: