It’s hard to make time for the movies at Big Ears, but sometimes they’re programmed at 10am so you can watch one without missing any concerts. I would’ve loved to see The Tuba Thieves but it conflicted with Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and I later heard that Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave and subsequent interview got delayed by an hour, which would’ve made me miss Secret Chiefs 3 and Kronos Quartet. This didn’t conflict with anything except brunch, and I’d already seen Threadgill’s Very Very Circus ensemble and knew I like his music. This was consumer-looking-video of a few interwoven Threadgill covid-era projects. Primarily it’s a concert performance of a new piece, music played by a small orchestra he’s conducting with pauses to read poetry off projected pages (their layout and typography being as good as the language). There are sections where he’s arranging small mystical objects while yelling at cloud in voiceover, and slideshows of the photographs he took of junk New Yorkers put out on the sidewalk when they had to actually inhabit their apartments due to the pandemic.
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Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018, Pamela Green)
A pure info-dump doc – I took no pleasure in watching, though I instantly flagged the narrator as Jodie Foster. Very busy visuals, the audio chopped half to death. I noted one interview with especially yucky sound editing: Pamela Green… the movie’s own director! Just re-record! Motion graphics, desktop cinema stuff and zoom calls. I learned what I needed to know about Alice, anyway – she hired both Lois Weber and Louis Feuillade. She had her own studio until Edison’s patent racket drove the filmmaking world from NJ to CA. Studio fire, divorce, and investment problems all hit at once in 1918, ending her cinema career. Gotta give it up for the outstanding location scout sequence where they superimpose her films onto their present day locations, and good work weaving her post-career 1920s-40s correspondences with the filmmaker digging up a 1957 interview.
Then I attempted to enjoy some Alice Guy films…
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Falling Leaves (1912)
String music by Tamar Muskal was far more engaging than the movie, a standard-looking drama with its one famous plot point, young girl tying leaves onto the trees after hearing her sister will be dead of consumption before the leaves have fallen. A passerby sees this behavior and announces the following.
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Cupid and the Comet (1911)
A silly crossdressing comedy, everyone gesticulating wildly. The doc got its title from Alice Guy’s studio motto: “Be Natural” – but there’s none of that here.
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The Consequences of Feminism (1906)
Comedy portraying a woke society where women hang out and drink and are sexual predators while the men iron and watch the children and make themselves pretty. Big modern music by Max Knoth, I liked it.
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A Story Well Spun (1906)
Dude crawls into a barrel and a prankster pushes it downhill, causing much chaos. Later remade as 2000 Maniacs. Hope the editor got in trouble for leaving in those couple frames of the stagehand crouching behind the barrel.
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On the Barricade (1907)
The barricade doesn’t hold for two seconds before the military run right over it and execute its constructors. Some kid who excitedly joined the battle claims he’s not a combatant, the soldiers let him go home, then he guiltily returns ands demands to be executed, but his mom protests and he’s spared a second time, how embarrassing. Somewhat shorter than the other movie I’ve seen about the Paris Commune.
Gemini Man (2019, Ang Lee)
In the midst of my disreputable movie spree I found some new movie list to obsess over, and wondered if it’s perhaps possible to watch the high framerate version of Gemini Man on a laptop screen. And it is… it is!
Will Smith is a super-elite hit man serving his country, who offhandedly mentions he’s “deathly allergic to bees” but that probably won’t come up again. After one last (successful) job shooting a fella on a moving train he tells his handler Ralph Brown (of the mid-2000s Exorcist prequel travesty) he’s retiring before he loses his touch. Starting his new vacation life he meets a girl with hair like this, clocks her as a spy, then rescues her when gov’t boss Clive Owen starts ordering everybody dead.
Benedict Wong shouldn’t smoke so close to a toucan:
The handler reports that the bosses have activated Gemini, and soon Will is getting his ass whupped in a motorcycle fight by the Fresh Prince. People get killed: Will’s boat friend Jack (Black Museum proprietor Douglas Hodge), his train friend Marino (EJ Bonilla of the latest Exorcist sequel travesty), eventually his plane friend Benedict Wong. Finally Will and Mary put together what we’ve known since the trailer came out and flee to Budapest to visit Yuri. Ilia Volok is stunt casting, having acted in Mission: Impossible 4 (American spy is disowned and pursued by his bosses) and Benjamin Button (lead actor is made younger with digital effects). And about those effects, the movie doesn’t shy away from long closeups on Fresh Prince’s uncanny face. The Prince gets talked out of assassinating himself after realizing Clive Owen is manufacturing infinite Wills Smith as suicide-mission supersoldiers.
Will and Fresh and Mary hoping their skulls don’t get added to the pile:
What turns this sci-fi twist on a spy-revenge story (from the writers of Shrek 4, The Hunger Games, and 25th Hour) into a literally insane must-see movie is the filmmaking tech. The crazy stunt action and star power say it’s a megamovie, but the ghost lighting, hollow sound design, and overall DTV look keep reminding of the no-budget festival screener DVDs I watched in 2008.
Letterboxed fisheye shot of a passing train, great:
A molten-masked third Will Smith gets blowed up:
Melvin and Howard (1980, Jonathan Demme)
Melvin is Puppet Master star Paul Le Mat, gives a ride to injured Howard (Jason Robards of A Boy and His Dog, made up to look like John Huston’s ghost). But Melvin’s a fuckup, and the bulk of the story is his getting left by wife Mary Steenburgen, getting back together with her, and getting left again. So it’s not surprising that he later mishandles the late Howard’s handwritten will, resulting in him never getting his share. The real Melvin lived almost 40 years after the movie came out, so hopefully he at least enjoyed his biopic fame.
Gerry (2002, Gus Van Sant)
After Paris Texas I was in the mood to watch more people wandering the desert. I’d long assumed this would be a slow-cinema endurance test, but it’s absurd and wonderful. When lost idiots Matt Damon and Casey Affleck ever speak, it’s in-joke code. The movie mocks them, changing terrain and teleporting them from California to deserts in Utah and Argentina, and they make a mockery of their terrain, stranding Affleck on a way-too-tall rock, which he gerries down unharmed.
Apparently a Bela Tarr homage. Gerry-liker Mike D’Angelo only complains about “an abrupt ending that serves up an unwelcome dose of cheap irony,” while the only nice thing Tarr-o-phile Rosenbaum could say is that it’s less phony than Finding Forrester.
Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)
I remembered Red Hat Harry walking though the desert in the opening minutes, and the climax where he talks to estranged wife Nastassja Kinski through the one-way glass, but not the entire hour of movie in between. His brother Dean Stockwell has been raising the estranged couple’s son with wife Aurore Clément (a regular Akerman star) after both parents disappeared. Harry is mute and keeps walking out of situations, even gets kicked off a flight, but Dean wrestles him home and he finally softens up and tries to connect with the kid, usually acting like a kid himself, watching home movies of the parents in happier times. He borrows the truck and enlists the kid in trying to track down his mom via the drive-thru bank where she makes monthly deposits, then they follow her car and that’s how they find the peep show where she’s working for John Lurie. Lurie, Stockwell, Kinski and Stanton have all appeared in David Lynch movies – he might be a fan. After the German road movies I thought I’d rewatch this one in glorious HD before tackling the “ultimate road movie,” Until the End of the World.
I’m not above giving you the overused screenshots:
Claire Denis assisted… I’m not above the most obvious trivia either.
The kid is my age, Kit Carson’s and Karen Black’s son, later starred in a Tobe Hooper movie.
Conquest (1983, Lucio Fulci)
Opens with an old man sending a young archer on his adventuring way, all double exposed on a beach with a Goblin soundtrack, and I’m afraid my story description from here on isn’t going to make much sense. Nicely summed up (in a positive review!) on lboxd: “every scene is clouded in iridescent fumes & I don’t know why anybody does anything.”
Wolf-suited tax collectors rip a girl apart so their snakey nudist leader can gobble her brains. Is she then killed by an arrow of light shot by our faceless archer or was that a vision? Our hero Elias is armed with a bow and four arrows, but is attacked by fourteen dudes, then rescued by an animal-loving stone-nunchuck warrior called Mace with lipstick runes on his forehead. Mace won’t kill animals so he steals all his food, keeps a cavegirl nearby until her head is smashed in by dog soldiers in the next scene.
Obsessively backlit – both this and Conan‘s best parts are their music, but this one is better for being wildly unpredictable. “Birds flying towards the water… that’s not good.”
Birdie:
The kid gets poisoned by a barrage of film-scratch darts coming from the weeds, and Fulci finds a way to get zombies into the movie as Mace braves a horde to collect a poison-healing herb. Then Mace gets attacked by his shadow self (Cactus-faced Zora in disguise) and it’s his turn to be captured by cobwebbed cave muppets, and the kid has to rescue him.
Somehow the kid keeps finding arrows in a land that’s never seen a bow before – have I mentioned this? – but finally he starts shooting blanks and letting the effects team add bolts of light. Mace is rescued by dolphins then attacked by powervaulting cave furries… the villains behead the kid but the nude woman can’t devour his brain because he opens his eyes… I dunno anymore.
Fulci in his heyday (The Beyond was the year before) ripping off Conan – even titled so they’d sit together alphabetically in video stores, good move. The kid’s career path was a Howard Hawks film -> this -> Werewolf with Joe Estevez. Stonechuck warrior Andrea Occhipinti had just starred in Fulci’s New York Ripper, and the nude girl Sabrina Siani specialized in playing the nude girl in this sort of movie. Like Conan this won no oscars. Big congrats to Oppenheimer but in another 40 years we’ll see which of these movies people are still watching.
Conan the Barbarian (1982, John Milius)
On Oscars night I thought we should watch something that never* won an award, and so, Conan.
Painted-up horseback killers arrive and destroy young Conan’s town, kill his dad first, then James Earl Jones (with beautiful long hair and named Salsa Doom) beheads Conan’s mom and takes all the town’s kids to be millwheel slaves. Our kid grows into Arnold whilst pushing the millwheel, then gets thrown into gladiator battle where he caves in the other guy’s head, leading to a montage of him killing a lot of guys and “realizing his sense of worth,” haha. After the one-on-one fights in Universal Soldier 6, the chaotic action mishmash of this was bound to disappoint. Impressed, his slavemasters send him to fighting school but some redbeard randomly frees him then he immediately finds a kickass Earth God sword.
The Empty Man, Earth God:
Arnold doesn’t know how to socialize properly, so he has sex with a sorceress while she’s in the middle of reciting his prophecy, then hurls her into the fireplace. He meets Gerry Lopez (thief, archer, and surfer in Milius’s Big Wednesday) and they run around Spain to the lovely adventure music of Basil Poledouris (later a Verhoeven accomplice). Soon after he punches a camel, they meet a cute lady thief (Sandahl Bergman of Hell Comes to Frogtown) and together rob a snake-cult tower and behead the snake god within.
King Max von Sydow congratulates them and sends them on a mission to unkidnap his daughter from the snake cult. Conan ditches the others and runs the rescue mission solo for some reason, asking directions from some hippies, and meeting wizard Mako (The Bird People in China) who lends him a camel, which he learns should be ridden, not punched. Arriving in snaketown, Arnold seduces some guy to steal his cult robes, but he’s not very sneaky and Salsa Doom’s men crucify him on the tree of woe. Really shouldn’t have come alone.
His buddies arrive belatedly and Mako kwaidans him back to life. They sneak in and massacre the palace guards, getting green soup everywhere, while Salsa Doom transforms into a snake and crawls off. The cute girl thief dies of snake wounds before Arnold can find a fireplace to hurl her into. Arnold heals up and goes back to slash his way through more guys, with help from buddies Gerry and Mako and the ghost of his dead girlfriend, beheads Salsa Jones and all the cultists go home. Ends slowly, with a sequel setup, but instead of Conan the Destroyer (a Richard Fleischer/Jack Cardiff joint, shorter, with Grace Jones) I think I’m supposed to watch the Lucio Fulci ripoff Conquest.
*This lost Saturn awards to Star Trek II, Tron, E.T., The Dark Crystal, and Poltergeist, a pretty good lot, but in 2001 it won a DVD commentary award. I listened to a couple minutes of commentary around the camel-punching scene, and nah, I would’ve gone with Charlie’s Angels.
Guess this was technically a rewatch since I remember catching it on cable at Brad’s house in 1983… now that it’s fresh in my mind, bring on the new Mandico version. Milius had recently cowritten Apocalypse Now and 1941, I guess he was into warfare in every era. Producer Dino de Laurentiis also made Halloween III and Amityville II this year, and Edward Pressman and Oliver Stone had just made The Hand.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012, John Hyams)
There’s this idea going around on Vulgar Auteurism Twitter that some godforsaken JCVD/Dolph Lundgren action series got revived in the 2010s by the son of the director of Timecop, starring the 12th-billed actor in Expendables 2, as a straight-to-video 3D (?) fifth sequel shot entirely in nondescript strip-mall locations, and it was actually great. Still buzzed off The Doom Generation, I watched it to set the record straight, and it was actually great.
Not a normal DTV sequel – dank Damon Packard vibes, the scenes linger weirdly, the strobe effects more intense. Apparently I was supposed to watch Regeneration first to make any sense out of this. Scott Adkins’ family is killed in first-person oner-cam by culty home invaders. Evil plumber Magnus is freed by Dolph Lundgren in a red Mario hat, prompting a strobey JCVD appearance in a strip club bathroom and a full-house slaughter. Scott Adkins finally comes alive and destroys the plumber, then meets mystery woman Mariah Bonner and another Scott Adkins who works for JCVD, and learns we’re all clones who never had families. Murderous rages are flown into, everyone dies.
Daniel Goldhaber decodes it: “A movie about a man trapped inside of a genre movie, programmed with a stock motivation.” More from Josephine and Josh.