by ·Comments Off on Cold Weather (2010, Aaron Katz)

Gail and Doug are siblings living together – he studied forensic science but has a job at an ice factory. Ice worker Carlos moonlights as a DJ, meets Doug’s ex Rachel when she’s in town then becomes concerned when she skips a date… and belatedly/charmingly this hangout movie swings into mystery mode, our three heroes investigating Rachel’s whereabouts with ever more brazen detective tricks.

Great music by local Oregonian Keegan DeWitt who later worked with Robert Greene and Alex Ross Perry. Carlos was later in We The Animals and Unsane, Gail starred in Infinity Baby and last year’s haunted house movie Girl on the Third Floor. My first movie by Katz, whose Gemini I missed a few years ago. Looking back at his contemporaneous interview in Cinema Scope, he describes the next two films he was writing, neither of which sounds like the next two films he made.

by ·Comments Off on Drive a Crooked Road (1954, Richard Quine)

Pre-Body Snatchers Kevin McCarthy and his cheesehead buddy Jack Kelly (Forbidden Planet) scout Mickey Rooney at an auto race, clocking him as a capable driver without a big ego, and schmooze him for half the movie before even revealing that they’re planning a heist and need a driver. They hook him up with lovely Dianne Foster and he falls hard, while in private the beautiful people call him “a little ugly guy.” She has the decency(?) to tell Mickey they used him at the end, and cornered, he kills both of the heist guys. My first Richard Quine movie, and I have to keep reminding myself he’s the guy from television, not from the Voidoids (or Television).

by ·Comments Off on Lovers Rock (2020, Steve McQueen)

A house party movie without a talky main plot about some kid trying to score. Finally someone made a film where the slow-motion camera weaving through a hot dance floor isn’t a stylistic highlight in the middle of a narrative, but the whole point of the thing. Wasted dudes take over the dance floor later in the night – nothing great lasts. They still make time for a villain, and two near-wordless rescues from danger, and finally someone does score but it doesn’t feel contrived.

People whose names I figured out include lead girl Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, her friend who ditches early Shaniqua Okwok (of new 80’s-set miniseries It’s a Sin), love interest Micheal Ward (The Old Guard) and roundfro villain Francis Lovehall.

by ·Comments Off on Vitalina Varela (2019, Pedro Costa)

Costa loves his very low-light digital cinematography (very cool, Lois Patiño-esque) with actors being extremely still, until he faces a challenge in the second half with a jittery Ventura – either the actor or his priest character is now afflicted with Parkinson’s. Everyone in this movie is desperate, all zombie-walking through spaces, only VV has any passion left. Her confrontation with Ventura is intense, and her big backstory monologue takes place on the toilet.

by ·Comments Off on The Little Drummer Girl (2018, Park Chan-wook)

Park’s followup to The Handmaiden doesn’t reach the same heights as Stoker, his other English-language movie, held back by the writing and the six hours of buttoned-up spies underplaying to survive. Big actory dialogue though – by episode three I decided I wasn’t buying any of it, but it’s pretty fun so I watched to the end. On the plus side, cool sets and costumes and cars. Park can really throw light exactly where he needs to, is excellent at photographing multi-level architecture. Michael Shannon has a wonderful laugh, but we maybe hear it once, given he’s playing a tormented Israeli agent on a convoluted revenge mission. Most importantly, Florence Pugh has the most openly expressive face of any actor right now, so what’s she doing in a spy movie? Well, it’s complicated, but she plays an actress hired by Shannon to get caught up with the Palestinian bombers so they can eventually be trapped or killed. Kidnappings and love letters and multiple fake relationships as she becomes a terrorist-in-training… as far as U being who U pretend to be, I wonder if Mother Night is out on blu-ray.

Pugh dances with Alexander Skarsgård:

Pugh practices with evil mastermind Khalil:

by ·Comments Off on Knocking (2021, Frida Kempff)

“At least it’s more lively than Possum,” I wrote in my notes, trying hard to look on the bright side after a long movie day. Molly is released from the psych ward and set up in an overheating apartment with a stain on the ceiling, crying in the vents, and a constant S.O.S. knocking sound in the walls. She keeps bugging the neighbors and the cops (complete with a rare use of body-strapped Pi-cam) trying to get to the bottom of the sound, afraid that somebody is in trouble. Bad use of birds – a precious birdie dies, a finch keeps slipping off a metal railing – some cool cranes appear in a video, at least. At the end, she’s crazy AND she’s right, but I’m tired of playing “is this real? OMG is anything real” in these movies.

by ·Comments Off on Cryptozoo (2021, Dash Shaw)

Paper-cutout people make out in a lovely owl forest. The man dreams of breaking past a line of police and storming the D.C. Capitol – this is set in Vietnam-era, but January 2021 is funny timing for such a sentiment. A burst of nudity, profanity and violence after they scale a fence and the man is impaled by a unicorn, and I was ready to write this off as low-rent edgelord animation, but the movie changes course dramatically – I got caught up in it, and gotta admit with its scale, ambition and budget, the animation gets the job done.

Lauren Grey is a globetrotting zoo agent, capturing mythical creatures (cryptids) and giving them nice captive zoo-bound lives, fighting off enemy agents who want the cryptids for private sale… the zoo’s real motives are questioned as its moneyed owner fucks a bigfoot in her castle tower, tables are turned, the traumatized woman from the beginning releases the most dangerous caged beasts, and all hell breaks loose.

by ·Comments Off on The Blazing World (2021, Carlson Young)

A girl drowning while her neglectful parents fight inside reminds of Don’t Look Now, but Udo Kier appearing with a wormhole does not. Years later, the drowned girl’s twin sister is in college, drawings of wormholes covering her wall, decides to do herself in. The tough girl with the beret from Mayday was in this, according to imdb, so she appeared in two separate movies premiering the same day at Sundance where suicidal girls travel to fantasy realms filled with transformed people from their lives.

Back in the real-world-or-is-it?, Margaret (Young, starring in the movie she wrote/directed) visits her parents, still wasted and fighting, hangs out with some old friends. There’s lots of metaphysics in this, maybe aimed at Donnie Darko fans. By the time she’s walking down a Caligari-shaped, Argento-lit hallway towards demon Udo Kier, it all looked pretty cool but I wasn’t too interested anymore. She has to defeat three demons in a certain time, first her mom in a house of sand, doing that fantasy thing where every line is slow and portentous. Margaret trades her shoes for a glass of water, I think door #2 is her childhood home and door #3 is herself, then she banishes Udo and chills at home with a Panda Bear song.