by ·Comments Off on The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan)

Great opening titles, introducing all the characters as a music montage cut with the body of their dead friend being dressed, closing on shot of his stitched-up wrists. It’s a hangout film after that, former classmate/friends who now all have good jobs and drug habits. Some light resentments and conflicts, some secrets and such, one delightful ending.

JoBeth Williams had just starred in Poltergeist, her outsider husband is an object of fun. Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly (Body Snatchers), also an outsider, had been Dead Alex’s girlfriend so they all feel responsible towards her. Mary Kay Place (between New York, New York and Pecker) is a lawyer with bad hair who wants to get pregnant but has no man, so is sizing up her friends (and gets the movie’s best insult-comic line). Kevin Kline is the nice-guy husband of Glenn Close (between Garp and The Natural) who’d had an affair with Dead Alex. William Hurt, messed up on pills, had already starred in Altered States and Body Heat. Mustachioed Tom Berenger is a TV celebrity (actually on his way to Major League immortality after an oscar-nominated stop in Platoon). And reporter Jeff Goldblum would reunite with Kline and their dead friend Kevin Costner in Silverado. Lost the same writing oscar as Fanny & Alexander, Kasdan went on to make the terrifically bad Dreamcatcher. Wiki says the last ten minutes were meant to be a 1960s flashback with Costner-as-Alex, and it was cut… and I see the blu-ray has ten minutes of deleted scenes… but they’re completely different scenes, no fair. At least Criterion had the good sense to commission an essay by Lena Dunham.

by ·Comments Off on La Haine (1995, Mathieu Kassovitz)

Expertly choreographed steadicam movie. I put off watching this, thinking it was about nazi youth or something, but it’s three smalltime criminals, not such bad guys (“the only good skinhead is a dead one”) who get into a spot of bother when one of them gets a gun (they all die). Unexpected Vincent Lindon appearance towards the end. The director went on to have an undistinguished career, the three guys ended up in (1) The Constant Gardener, (2) Three Kings & John Wick 3, (3) Irreversible & The Shrouds. Won best director at Cannes the year of Underground.

by ·Comments Off on Foreboding (2017, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I’ve got a bit of a backlog, and sometimes I’m in the mood for a Kiyoshi movie and wonder why I never watched this one from eight years ago, and the title Foreboding sounds generic enough, and it takes me 20 minutes to realize this is the alien invasion companion piece to Before We Vanish. This starts out effectively unsettling, with elements of the paranormal social malaise from his other movies, then as it introduces the human-concept-reaping alien Dr. Makabe (the two guys in Asako I & II) it gets silly.

The fake doctor, coming for your concepts:

Kaho of Tokyo Vampire Hotel and a Gamera movie is our lead, refusing to play the alien’s games, but her husband Tetsuo (starred in Tokyo Tribe and Lesson of Evil) is happy to lead the fake doctor to people who’ve wronged him. Health Minister Ren Osugi arrives too late in the game. Humans start disappearing from the earth, somehow this all still leads to the classic movie ending of people talking and fighting in an abandoned warehouse.

Humanity’s future rests with them:

by ·Comments Off on Dogra Magra (1988, Toshio Matsumoto)

The Funeral Parade of Roses guy two decades later has turned to narrative… but it’s super-meta-psycho-narrative, at least. In the 1920s an institutionalized amnesiac is given conflicting stories by a hairy Dr. Detective and a bald Wacky Doctor, and instead of piecing together the real story, he either goes on a killing spree, or doesn’t.

Which of these doctors would you trust:

Labyrinth of Dreams was based on the same author’s work, and I wondered if the novel was an influence on Shutter Island. The boy went on to be a voice actor, most notably dubbing Leo in Titanic, and the not-bald doctor/detective Hideo Murota is in all the Kinji Fukasaku movies. Unsurprisingly this cinematographer also worked with Terayama.

by ·Comments Off on Fistful / Sucker (Sergio Leone)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

What a picture. Clint comes to town and meets the grey-haired bartender next door to the busy coffin carpenter, proceeds to get paid by both sides of the warring criminal families, then after Clint does a good deed by rescuing an imprisoned girl, he and his bartender are tortured. The coffin maker secrets Clint away to a cavern so he can recover then return and slaughter everybody.

Been a while since I saw the not-really-sequel – this is just as good, though it suffers from lack of Lee Van Cleef. The girl was in Franju’s Spotlight on a Murderer, the lead Rojo gangster in Le Cercle Rouge, his main brute in Dead Pigeon, and at least two others are from Viridiana. If nobody has yet made a supercut of atrociously dubbed children in Italian movies, nobody ever should.

–
Duck, You Sucker (1971)

Real class-warfare pervert stuff, right from the start. “He doesn’t know anything” says the white man’s mouth in grotesque Svankmajer-esque extreme closeup about the peasant their coach picks up, unaware they’ve picked up bandito Rod Steiger. The bandits next encounter a fellow criminal, explosives-rigged James Coburn, so they team up. Coburn is fighting for a cause, Steiger for cash, but after the idiot bandito gets pulled into the revolution and the government slaughters his family he becomes a true believer.

Steiger is the Run of the Arrow guy, and Coburn is the oscar winner for Affliction who was also in 100 other movies I haven’t seen. I’d preferred the alternate title A Fistful of Dynamite but once you hear Irish Coburn say his catchphrase moments before his bombs go off, you realize Duck, You Sucker is correct. He drops the accent almost immediately, but Steiger lays his on so thick I had to turn on subtitles – at long last the Italians are working with sync sound, and it’s actually worse than before. Ultimately the movie gets tedious, and the Leone apologists out there making excuses for Steiger are wrong, but some stuff blows up real good.

Coburn + parakeets:

by ·Comments Off on Flannery & Wildcat

Flannery (2019, Coffman & Bosco)

PBS bio-doc about fellow Georgian O’Connor. A couple of crazy details in here. She was terrified of catching lupus, the disease that killed her beloved father, so when she did catch it, her doctors and family told her she had arthritis. And attending the Iowa Writers Workshop, Southern fiction and Faulkner were all the rage, yet the students there mocked her accent. Movie trips over itself trying to explicate her racism, otherwise a good introduction.

“I know they’re stupid and all, but they have a lot to be proud of”

–
Wildcat (2023, Ethan Hawke)

Some wild visuals, much weirder than it seems from outside. Not a mild prestige biopic drama, but something more prickly, a Flannery Naked Lunch, spinning the stories into the biography. So this is my second movie in a week to combine artist biography with adaptation of their work, and Hawke easily beats Guadagnino. I’m not saying it always works, but it’s refreshing.

Some of the same quotes used in the doc. Flannery likes Cal, the suicidal environmentalist of First Reformed, and holds out hope of living a normal life until rejection and disease send her into writing seclusion. The Licorice Pizza kid looks too Elonesque in this, and I hate to say but Laura Linney is the weak point. It sure is fun to try on a new accent, and I know it’s stupid to ask this, but why not cast southerners in the role of southerners?

by ·Comments Off on Anhell69 (2022, Theo Montoya)

Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.

The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.

by ·Comments Off on Pickpocket / Xiao Wu (1997, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Obviously I should now rewatch Unknown Pleasures, in which Xiao Wu reappears, but I didn’t love it the first time. He’s a good character, the oldest of a gang of thieves, prickly and annoying, avoided by family and friends, bad with women, finally arrested and publicly shamed.

Josh Lewis:

Unlike Bresson who takes an interest in the tense procedural craft of his titular pickpocket (as well as the protagonists spiritual and existential crisis), Jia focuses almost entirely on the wandering weariness that comes with the knowledge that the only thing you’re good at is destined to alienate you from civilized society. My man just wanted to smoke, drink, play pool, and sing karaoke with a beautiful woman, and he gets ruthlessly humiliated and punished for it.

by ·Comments Off on Queer (2024, Luca Guadagnino)

Has its moments. It’s my own fault that I stopped reading Burroughs long ago and let the Cronenberg version take over my imagination. Daniel Craig’s love interest is Drew Starkey of the latest Hellraiser remake. Craig convinces the kid to go on a South America trip to find ayahuasca, but becomes messed up from drug withdrawls along the way.

Mike Leigh muse Lesley Manville protects the ayahuasca – that’s Lisandro Alonso in the background:

Bill Lee’s Space Odyssey finale: