by ·Comments Off on Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974, John Hough)

Opens with a heist, Peter Fonda collecting money from the manager whose family is held hostage by his partner Deke (biker-movie regular Adam Roarke). Dirty drifter Susan George (Straw Dogs) gets in the way so they take her along. Sheriff Vic Morrow takes this pursuit personally and throws all resources into the chase. Car swappin’, fast drivin’, and drawbridge jumpin’ ensue, up to the requisite ’70s downbeat ending (our group is flattened by a train). Amazing to read that a lab error led to the movie being badly color-shifted for its first 30 years. Hough was mostly a horror guy, made The Legend of Hell House, the Cassavetes Incubus, and a Howling sequel.

Movie is known for its car action but I only gasped at this helicopter:

by ·Comments Off on Trap (2024, M. Night Shyamalan)

M. Night sometimes likes to be grim and serious or to talk earnestly and endlessly about his big ideas, and sometimes he likes to weave murderous tension into scenarios so ridiculous they border on hilarious – a mode I far prefer, which is why this movie joins Old Beach and Lady in the Water among my favorites.

Josh Hartnett never better, not even in Valley of the Gods. With M. Night’s daughter as Lady Raven, Scott Pilgrim’s drummer Alison Pill as the mom, Jonathan Langdon as the merch guy with the outstanding dialogue, Rob Lowe’s wife from Stir of Echoes 2 as a fellow parent at the show, Bill & Ted 3‘s Kid Cudi as the guest star, and trap veteran Hayley Mills as the police psychiatrist.

by ·Comments Off on The Kid Detective (2020, Evan Morgan)

Thought this would be a low-stakes entry in the Inherent Vice / Under the Silver Lake / Big Lebowski burnout detective genre, and it mostly is, but with a biting ending as Evil Principal Peter MacNeill (sheriff of A History of Violence) reveals that detective Adam Brody’s new client is the daughter of his long-missing receptionist. “Now they’ll know what we were capable of.”

by ·Comments Off on Iron Monkey (1993, Yuen Woo-ping)

Doctor Yang (Yu Rongguang of Supercop 2, which is a different movie from Police Story 4 even though Supercop 1 was Police Story 3) goes around in disguise acting like Disney’s Robin Hood, with assistant Orchid (Jean Wang, kicking much more ass here than as 14th Aunt), making mockeries of corrupt governor James Wong (a major songwriter, also in Twin Dragons) and his lead cop Yuen Shun-Yi (of Drunken Master). Wong Fei-hung’s dad Donnie Yen (confusingly, he’ll play the title role in the sequel) is passing through town, the governor holds his son prisoner so he’ll help them catch the righteous bandit. But of course they all team up to defeat the evil master (also the evil master of Heroic Trio the same year).

Twin monkeys:

Much action ensues. I saw this on VHS or something back in the day, but it’s extremely helpful to have seen a bunch of kung-fu movies leading up to this, getting used to their plots and moves and sound effects, to appreciate this one’s particular excellence… in context of the OUATIC sequels going slowly downhill, this feels like the best movie ever made.

Like father like son:

by ·Comments Off on Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall (2022, Bob Smeaton)

Long wikipedia-caliber intro with narration by Jeff Bridges (haha). He shouldn’t have compared CCR’s sales records to the Beatles in the intro then followed with a bunch of interview and tour diary clips where they are infinitely less witty and charismatic than the Beatles. But after a half hour of this feature-length stretching-out, the April 1970 concert begins and is pure fire.

by ·Comments Off on Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012, György Pálfi)

Even more so than the Bouquets there’s no point in getting screenshots of this one: a generic boy-and-girl plot composed of shots from other movies. This is usually pretty nice and clever, a cute time waster, except in the “Put the Blame on Mame” musical montage when it is electrifying, with clever lipsync matching. The first movie Katy has watched/finished with me since Ren Faire, which was the first since May.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2024

The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.

–
Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.

–
Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).

–
Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.

–
Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

by ·Comments Off on Rose Lowder’s Bouquets

Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995)

Excellent to see these with the intro by Gloria Vilches of a Barcelona film society, since she goes into Lowder’s history and filming methods – utilizing the 16mm bolex camera’s ability to advance or rewind to a specific frame and capture stills. So Lowder will shoot every other frame, then move to a new location and fill in the alternate frames, or any new pattern variation she thinks up on-location. Unusually for me, I’m watching these silent films without adding my own soundtrack, figuring they’re each one-minute complex creations and I need to pay strict attention.

–
Poppies and Sailboats (2001)

From the Cinexperimentaux 5 disc – unfortunately the poppy field does not hold up under DVD compression, but this is the easiest way to catch on to the perceptual experiments. With an even blend of poppy frames and sailboat frames, the boats are sailing through the flowers. Start to adjust the rhythms and you get something else, a harder flicker or a poppy field with sailboat ghosts.

–
Bouquets 11-20 (2005-2009)

Less interleaving, more slow/fast and even real-time focus on single moments, more attention paid to flying and walking creatures.

Rewatched these while reading her notebooks, less for the frame-by-frame structure of each piece than for the context and location (mostly small French organic farms). She emphasized that the films aren’t structually pre-planned, that the notebooks are documents of the filmmaking decisions that have already been made

–
Bouquets 31-40 (2014-2022)

The online copy of 21-30 isn’t great, skipping for now. I’d like to hear how her definition of a Bouquet has changed, because for instance Bouquet 1 (rapid flicker of beachy fauna/flora) isn’t so similar to Bouquet 40 (long take of a leather worker with a chicken credits stinger). The Light Cone notes are detailed, revealing that some Bouquets are sequels to previous episodes, and also that the chickens at the end of #40 were eaten soon afterwards by a fox.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope 96:

Lowder creates constantly modulating patterns of outrageous intricacy. A more sustained accounting of these films would require taking their reels in hand and working frame by frame. While this would make available a more detailed description, it would not help with the fact that language requires placing one word after another, a process that plays out in a kind of time that is entirely remote from Lowder’s striving towards simultaneity – a richness of experience that is, for her, true realism. The images that we see in films such as the Bouquets, in some sense, don’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)

Environmentalism, nuclear power, aging and death and forgetting, found sounds as music, notes that sustain eternally and notes that don’t. He goes to the north pole to examine global warming effects, and records sounds of melting snow. Sakamoto has scored some great and less-great films, and not being a big soundtrack listener I don’t know his work well, so I started playing his albums (including the glitch-ambient Insen and cool 1980s Esperanto) in prep for the VR Big Ears concert which was quietly canceled after he passed away.