by ·Comments Off on Tennen Shojo Mahn Next (1999, Takashi Miike)

Thought I’d kick off SHOCKtober this year with Miike’s epic vampire TV- movie which I bought on DVD years ago but never actually watched. Bad move: either it was too stupid or I was not drunk enough to enjoy it properly. I think the problem is simply that it’s a giggling teenage sparkly-vampire flick and I am in my thirties.

Dig the shadow:

Opens with some guy who doesn’t matter getting his whole gang’s ass kicked by a teen girl in motorcycle gear – Riona, I think, who is friends with Mahn (Ayana Sakai of Battle Royale II and Devilman), I think. I didn’t take very good notes here, so I’ll omit the words “I think” (also “teen”) from now on, or else you’ll see them everywhere. Together they’re some kind of Teen Girl Squad who practice sweet fight moves, and maybe kill vampires. Not sure if vampires were a big deal before the scope of this movie, but presumably they fought something in Tennen Shojo Mahn, the previous chapter of this series. Both movies came out the same year as Audition and Dead or Alive and Silver and a couple others, so these didn’t exactly receive Miike’s full attention.

Mahn and Riona, I think:

Vampires have sparkly blood, of course, but they can walk in the daylight and go places they’re not invited and other stuff. Local hunk Yuya runs the city’s dreamiest fashion modeling agency (despite being nineteen) and is the public face of the vampire organization, while his buddy Kamio lurks moodily atop a skyscraper wishing for more power. Then there’s a winged “Saint Vampire” who controls them all from behind an Argentoesque red curtain.

Vamp boys:

Saint V:

Cheap cheap cheap looking movie. Reviews say it has amazing FX for television, but these reviewers have low expectations. The girls aren’t great actors either, but the fight scenes are surprisingly okay.

More intrigue: the girls’ friend Maki (who is big into donating blood – don’t ask) wants to be beautiful like top model Maria (played by porn star Shiori Fujitani), so gets bitten and joins the vamp club, immediately becoming a bitch to her former friends. Head vamp Yuya is a misogynist who is “taking revenge on all women”, though despite his big talk he kinda seems nice And Mahn meets a bullied young boy who happens to be Yuya’s little friend. She gives him a time-killing training montage set to some bland mid-tempo pop songs, teaching him not to be such a little wuss, while Yuya (who could’ve taught the kid himself) looks on disapprovingly. Everyone gets facile back-stories, including characters I won’t bother to mention. And this beardy preacher (Shingo Tsurumi of Freeze Me and Dead or Alive) shows up, embarrassing everyone whenever he’s on screen:

“Mahn, I wish I’d met you earlier… I might not have hated all women.”

Things Of Slight Interest: The word “vampire” isn’t spoken for the first hour. Kamio has a Dr. Claw-via-Minority Report virtual TV (below) that shows him what’s happening anywhere in the city. Only virgins can become vampires, so one girl’s dad tries (unsuccessfully and pathetically) to rape her in order to save her. And vampires are immune to garlic, crosses and sunlight but grow weak when they hear piano music. That one was never explained.

Turns out only the saints have eternal life. Girls become super beautiful and powerful when bitten, but only live 500 days after that, so Maria has an electric death scene on the beach. The girls decide to act, so their former friend won’t suffer the same fate. Then the grand vampire turns out to be the long-lost dad of one of the girls, or maybe of Taichi, I wasn’t paying attention. Some shit goes down and he dies easily, then Yuya stabs Kamio and himself and has a dull, protracted death scene

Maria on the beach:

Based on a comic, obviously, from the writer of Stop The Bitch Campaign, and adapted by the writer of Andromedia and (surprisingly) Visitor Q. So, not a killer Miike adaptation, but we do get a couple cool moments reminiscent of Big Bang Love:

by ·Comments Off on Television from the last few months

30 Rock seasons 1 & 2

So apparently I like sitcoms now. Katy and I enjoyed this a lot. I don’t want to talk about TV shows (“remember that one episode?”), so instead I looked up the credits.

Writers with movie connections: Tina Fey and Kay Cannon (co-producer of Baby Mama), along with veterans of Norm, Animaniacs, Just Shoot Me, Spin City, The Weird Al Show and Futurama

Directors with interesting credits: Dennie Gordon (Joe Dirt, What a Girl Wants), Don Scardino (lead actor of Squirm), Gail Mancuso (lead director on Roseanne), Beth McCarthy-Miller (Demetri Martin’s show, 200+ eps of Saturday Night Live, the superbowl halftime show when Janet Jackson took her shirt off, Nirvana Unplugged), Michael Engler (Sex and the City episodes), Scott Ellis (an upcoming movie from the writer of Untamed Heart, he hopes), Adam Bernstein (It’s Pat: The Movie), Juan José Campanella (oscar winner The Secret In Their Eyes), Richard Shepard (The Matador) and Kevin Rodney Sullivan (Barbershop 2).

Oh, the guests!
Paul Scheer (as the head page) and his Human Giant costar Rob Huebel, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Buscemi, David Schwimmer (as “Greenzo”), Kristen Wiig, Edie Falco, James Carville (yay), Andy Richter, Matthew Broderick, Conan O’Brien, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Reubens (as the last of the Hapsburgs), Isabella Rossellini, Charlyne Yi, LL Cool J (as “Ridikolus”), Wayne Brady, Nathan Lane, Molly Shannon, and hundreds of TV people I don’t know.

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The Mighty Boosh season 1

I didn’t care for this at first, but oh boy did it grow on me. I’d like to thank Fumi for insisting for years that I watch it.

Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) started out on Edgar Wright’s Asylum, which I really must watch now that I’ve found a copy. He and Vince Noir (Noel Fielding) were in the seemingly popular Nathan Barley and the barely-known-to-IMDB Unnatural Acts together. Naboo seems to have only ever been Naboo, which is fine by me because he is a perfect Naboo.

Director Paul King made a darkish Gilliam-esque movie called Bunny and the Bull with some Boosh cameos, and worked on a promising-sounding show called Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

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Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008, Jon Ronson)

A fascinating look through Kubrick’s research with glimpses into his working methods and various obsessions (like collecting stationery, and having a location scout photograph every single doorway in a certain neighborhood, only to have Kubrick end up creating the doorway in a studio). Can’t say I was enthused by Ronson’s role as gleeful narrator, but I’m thankful for his valuable work peeping at Kubrick’s private life and showing us the results (especially dug the rapid-fire location-photo montages set to the music from the Clockwork Orange sex scene). Lots of talk about Eyes Wide Shut and a couple never-completed projects, so I wonder why there wasn’t a single mention of A.I.. Ronson wrote the book The Men Who Stare At Goats was based on, and he hopes he’s written the book Edgar Wright’s next movie will be based on, but he shouldn’t hold his breath.

by ·Comments Off on To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)

I guess this movie gets lots of credit for being a Hollywood anti-nazi resistance comedy released soon after U.S. entry into the war. Not a lot of funny Hitler movies going around back then, and reportedly it pissed off some audiences that German-born Lubitsch would try bringing his trademark lightness to such a heavy situation. But if anything, today it suffers from being not enough of a comedy. I couldn’t watch half the scenes without flashing back to The Great Dictator or Inglorious Basterds. Not that it has to go as far as Basterds, letting a couple of Jews machine-gun Hitler at close range as the whole theater explodes, but it came off closer in tone to 49th Parallel than Great Dictator.

One of the things that stood out about Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant a decade earlier was its pre-censors sexual frankness, and now this one gets away with having Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century star in her final role – she died in a plane crash) cheat on her husband with young bomber flyer Robert Stack (House of Bamboo, Written on the Wind – very early in his career) and get away with it.

Jack Benny (about to ditch the movies for a long TV career) leads an acting troupe along with wife Lombard and also Felix Bressart (Shop Around the Corner), Lionel Atwill (lots of Frankenstein movies) and Tom Dugan (bit player who averaged a movie per month in the 40’s). The play they’ve been rehearsing is censored by the nazis on the eve of its opening, so they go back to performing Hamlet, during which Robert Stack keeps leaving the audience at the start of Benny’s big soliloquy, brushing past everyone in the second row to meet Lombard backstage (why doesn’t he get an aisle seat?). Later at the height of the war, the theater troupe has joined the Polish resistance and Stack is fighting in the UK when a spy (Stanley Ridges of Canyon Passage, heh) with critical information about the resistance makes it into Poland and wants to meet with Lombard to inquire about the “code” he’s been given for her, “to be or not to be”. Stack flies into Poland and fills everyone in, so now the actors have to do their best impressions of nazi officials (Benny: “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?”) to get back the secret papers.

The premise got away from me towards the end, when I thought Benny and his gang, having Hitler and a thousand nazis rounded up in a theater, aimed to do some damage. But of course, that’s Basterds talking again – I think they were just trying to get away from occupied Poland by stealing Hitler’s personal plane. Remade in the 80’s with Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft and Christopher Lloyd for some weird reason.

by ·Comments Off on Harry Brown (2009, Daniel Barber)

Opens with grainy shaky videocam footage of cussy drug addicts in an alley who then shoot a girl while on a hectic motorbike ride – meaningful cut to black with the words, in tiny print, “a film by daniel barber,” signaling that this will be an Important Film About Urban Problems (see also: the overbearing music throughout). That’s how Michael Caine treated it in interviews also. Normally Caine wouldn’t be into this sort of grimy personal revenge story of course, but this is an Important Work on a Meaningful Topic, not just some action catharsis. And some viewers even treated it that way – it won a couple of best-film awards – but me, I wanted some action catharsis and found that the movie delivered that well.

Also: Emily Mortimer plays a cop:

MC’s violent spree kicks off (after he has Lost Everything He Had, of course) with a parody scene of extreme urban decay. Caine visits an illegal dealer who sells him a gun while shooting up heroin into his leg while firing a pistol and smoking crack out the barrel while growing pot in his basement while sexually exploiting a young girl while threatening his partner and swearing up a storm and playing loud electro music. Predictably, that scene doesn’t end well, with Caine killing the dudes, taking the guns and burning the whole fucking place, which explodes behind him as he drives the girl to safety. There’s a long action-movie history of vigilante violence by One Man With Nothing Left To Lose Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore, and I don’t see why Sir Michael and crew have to deny that proud tradition and fake like they’re making some documentary expose about the streets, especially when their baddies are so cartoonishly evil. They could do with a few viewings of The Wire. Or hell, maybe street life is really this shitty in England – if so, I’ll take Baltimore any day.

by ·Comments Off on Head Against The Wall (1959, Georges Franju)

“You’re botching my gramophone!”

Jean-Pierre Mocky (also the film’s writer, who would later write/direct/produce/star in something called Mocky Story) is our rebel star, a fuckup biker who borrows money all over town and carries on affairs with pretty ladies. The sister of the husband of one of those ladies (Anouk “Lola” Aimée) comes by to warn Mocky away, but she instantly falls for him because he is bad. Then he goes home, burns some of his dad’s work papers, and gets arrested and committed to a mental institution.

Movie slows right down, becomes an exposé of institution life, and more importantly, the impossibility of ever leaving. Mocky meets Charles Aznavour (who was in this and Testament of Orpheus before starring in Shoot The Piano Player), who seems alright but falls into seizures at moments of great stress, and the two talk about being (or seeming) cured, or of simply escaping from the facility.

Not my favorite kind of story, but Franju keeps it visually amazing, as he always does. He and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Eyes Without a Face, Port of Shadows) do such a job with the black-and-white, I can’t imagine it being filmed in color (one of these days I’ll get around to watching color Franju film Shadowman). Some memorable moments: a patient gets violent with a saw, Aznavour has a fit during an escape attempt, he and Mocky ride a little train around the facility, the two doctors coldly discuss their patients outside a cage full of doves (symbolism, anyone?) and Edith Scob (below), in her first film, starts singing.

The “good” doctor (if Aznavour can be believed) whose ward is always full is noble-looking Paul Meurisse (Army of Shadows, Le deuxième souffle, Diabolique), and our man’s doctor (distinctive-looking with his beard and spectacles) is Pierre Brasseur (Port of Shadows and Children of Paradise, later star of Eyes Without a Face and Goto: Island of Love). Mocky’s evil dad is Jean Galland (the masked dancer in Le Plaisir, also star of Renoir’s Whirlpool and Pál Fejös’s Fantomas).

Another failed escape: Mocky tries to walk out with Anouk Aimée on visiting day:

by ·Comments Off on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010, Edgar Wright)

Edgar Wright sets out to prove he can do good work without Pegg and Frost. He and cowriter Michael Bacall adapt a video-game-obsessed comic book for the big screen, so many mediums combine – noisily and awkwardly according to Katy, or with a powerful awesomeness if you ask me.

Somehow the Michael Cera thing hasn’t worn off on me yet. Good to see Kieran Culkin as his sarcastic gay roommate, Anna Kendrick of Up In The Air as his sister, and Brandon Routh of Superman Returns as a baddie who gains his powers from eating vegan. Jason Schwartzman as a corporate supervillain was an interesting choice. Had no idea that the main hair-dyed love interest (Mary Winstead) was in Death Proof, that Cera’s band’s drummer played Milk’s campaign manager, that the action-movie-star ex-boyfriend was Human Torch from Fantastic Four, or that Thomas “Dreamcatcher/The Punisher” Jane was a vegan policeman.

EDIT: Watched again in 2013, though it took me a couple tries to get past the beginning and title sequence, which I felt compelled to watch again and again.

EDIT 2016: I have seen this movie lots. It it the best movie.

by ·Comments Off on Extract (2009, Mike Judge)

It’s wise for Judge to dial back the visual ambition from Idiocracy, return to cheaply-shot office and home settings, since the CG in Idiocracy didn’t look so hot in theaters (during the one week it spent in theaters). Not sure why he dialed back the humor and personality as well.

Gene Simmons!

Jason Bateman is a regular white dude who owns a flavor factory (flavor-factory-related jokes in the movie: zero) and hilarious comedy actress Kristen Wiig plays his wife (number of hilarious lines given to Wiig in the movie: zero). Bateman hangs out with ringer A-list bartender Ben Affleck (less funny than ringer A-list bartender Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Invention of Lying) and decides to hire a guy to sleep with his wife in order to gain license to sleep with new hottie scam-artist Mila Kunis (Black Swan). Meanwhile, a factory worker named Step gets testicularly injured on the job and Kunis gets him to hire TV lawyer Gene Simmons (one of the funnier cast members, actually). Hilarity blandly fails to ensue as the movie rolls along on the light charisma of the cast. David Koechner plays a typical Judge character, an annoyingly socially-awkward guy, and the one surprise in the movie comes when Wiig finally unloads on him and he drops dead of a heart attack. Other than that one decisive moment, the script wants to avoid conflict, and plot threads don’t get tied up so much as quietly die off.

by ·Comments Off on A Single Man (2009, Tom Ford)

I’d never heard of Steve McQueen (the Hunger director, not the actor) or Tom Ford before their latest movies came out, but I sure expected to enjoy the work of “acclaimed visual artist” McQueen more than fashion designer Ford. So as usual I like all the wrong things, because I thought Hunger was alright and this was excellent. Shame about the ending though – Firth decides not to kill himself then has a fatal heart attack moments later, the kind of twist that would’ve seemed well-worn in 1962 when the film was set. But hell, that’s probably from the novel (from the writer of Cabaret, though I didn’t see that mentioned on the posters). Katy says it sounds like a typical literature ending.

Tom Ford (whose IMDB photo looks like a digital mash-up of Keanu Reeves and Kevin Spacey) is fond of jump cuts, slow-mo and focus tricks. He keeps the colors desaturated only to pump them up when his lead character’s emotions are sharp, plays with focus, edits whenever he damn well pleases, and throws in subjective fantasy scenes (like the bomb shelter above), but it all hangs together well, never calling dramatic attention to technique. I guess I could credit cinematographer Eduard Grau (the upcoming Buried) and editor Joan Sodel (Glass House 2) for the technique, but I’m surely not going to. Shout out, however, to Shigeru Umebayashi, whose music grabbed me right from the start (but only returned rarely – he’s just the “additional” composer, damn it).

Firth goes to work on the last day of his life (because he plans to kill himself), teaches his class and inspires spooky student Nicholas Hoult (the boy About a Boy was about) to stalk him. He also wishes death upon his whitebread next door neighbor (Ginnifer Goodwin of that awful movie) and her family, gives some free cash to a hustlin’ Spanish dude (Jon Kortajarena) he meets in the liquor store parking lot beneath an awesome huge Psycho poster, talks to longtime boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode of Match Point) who died months ago in a car crash, and has a private party with old friend Julianne Moore who’s always had a crush on him. Lots of people have crushes on Colin Firth in this movie.

Shades of American Beauty… the period suburbs (actually Los Angeles but it felt like suburbs) featuring women with perfect hair while solitary men with hidden pain were threatened by gun violence and creepy young men with pointed eyebrows (Wes Bentley/Nicholas Hoult) lurked. Firth was up for an acting oscar but lost to The Dude. I thought the movie was nominated for best picture, but even after having seen both of them, I’m still confusing it with A Serious Man.

Julianne Moore gets down: