by ·Comments Off on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez)

Clooney is the bank robber who didn’t mean to kill anybody but absolutely will if they force his hand, Quentin is his idiot brother who kills as many people as possible and gets to suck whiskey off Salma Hayek’s feet. I would say the violence is distasteful, but I also just watched The Devil’s Rejects and Terrifier 2, so, shrug.

After they kidnap Harvey Keitel with daughter Juliette Lewis and son who doesn’t get to do much, and cross into Mexico to meet their contact at Salma’s vampire biker bar, fellow badass almost-survivors are Tom Savini and Fred Williamson. Between the shooting and cutting and action and makeup, all the craft is top-notch, so it’s a shame they throw in some dated morphing effects.

Rosenbaum raves: “if your critical horizons are low and you’re feeling in a nasty mood, you probably won’t be bored.”

Tito & Tarantula:

The future Machete:

Regarding my recent complaint that holding any two sticks together forms a holy-enough cross to ward off vampires, they reason that it worked for Peter Cushing.

by ·Comments Off on Freddy’s Dead (1991, Rachel Talalay)

Opens with a Nightmare at 20,000 Feet scenario.

After a teenage apocalypse, 24 year-old Shon is the last living teenager in Ohio.

Fred keeps wizard-of-ozzing him, until Amnesiac Shon thinks he is the Anti-Freddy Messiah, then he gets dropped from a height onto a bed of spikes.

Dream Therapist Yaphet Kotto and Lisa “sister of Billy” Zane are counselors bringing a fresh batch of doomed teens to Freddytown. They immediately run into Roseanne and Tom Arnold, a bad sign.

Deaf Ricky Dean Logan (Back to the Future Part II) is given faulty hearing aids and his head explodes.

Gamer Breckin Meyer (of Skeet Ulrich thriller Touch) goes inside the television and gets Super Mario’d in a series highlight.

Boxer Lezlie Deane (of 976-EVIL) maybe survives along with the counselors?

Comin’ at ya:

Little Fred turned bad because his father was Alice “Prince of Darkness” Cooper. Now he’s dead, like the title says. They got him with a grenade, he’s dead for sure.

Talalay followed up with video store staples Ghost in the Machine (a mashup of Lawnmower Man with Pulse 1988) and Tank Girl.

Comin’ at ya:

by ·Comments Off on Out of the Dark (1995, Jeffrey Lau)

Parody of The Professional, I think, but instead of a hit man Leon (Stephen Chow) is a crazy guy who sees ghosts. Blondie from Fallen Angels is there, and Sammo Hung-reminiscent police captain Lo Hung (apparently no relation). A very silly movie – not really sure how it escalates into cops getting chainsawed to death, it’s not important, nor should we interrogate why the survivors make magic hats out of newspaper and fly safely away from the evil ghost at the end.

by ·Comments Off on The Ninth Gate (1999, Roman Polanski)

Of course I watch The Gate regularly, and have even seen The Gate 2 a couple times, but I never got a hold of parts 3-8, so it’s hard to draw connections here. Depp wears glasses throughout, so I assume he’s the Glasses character from the first two movies (Louis Tripp), continuing to investigate demonic texts, sent from “New York” to Europe by Frank Langella to authenticate a satanic book.

Whenever Depp finds new information or studies a new copy of the book, somebody ends up dead and something ends up missing, but he gains a floaty guardian angel in Emmanuelle Seigner and persists. The movie is all talk for eighty minutes until she floats down a staircase and karates a would-be thief – not that I’m complaining because it’s also a rare classy film about ancient books in an otherwise low-rent Shocktober.

Depp into trouble:

The best scene is this Spanish guy playing twins:

After we’ve lost Bookseller Bernie (a Depp buddy from Donnie Brasco to Public Enemies) and devilbook owner Fargas (of Pieces) and the probably-evil Baroness (Weisz’s mom in The Deep Blue Sea), Langella thinks he’s obtained all the devil’s power, and stupidly tries to prove his invincibility by setting himself on fire. After he burns up, Depp carries on his mission, and maybe the world ends, I dunno. This was the same year as Sleepy Hollow and The Astronaut’s Wife, the year he slipped from interesting actor to movie star.

by ·Comments Off on Szamanka (1996 Andrzej Zulawski)

Movie is off like a shot, the credits and characters both in a big hurry to get going. Iwona (a non-actor, whoa) is a chaos demon who should be followed by a cleanup crew at all times, Michael (star of Blind Chance) is a creep professor whose fiancee is out of town, and together they get the amour fou in this sordid missing link between Possession and Cosmos. Possibly the most sex-crazed Zulawski movie, though with too much synth and marching band music.

He is an anthropologist studying a just-unearthed shaman mummy, so I figured it would awaken and kill them all. I did not see it coming that she would smash his head and Hannibal his brains, then a minor character would set off a small nuclear bomb.

by ·Comments Off on Serial Mom (1994, John Waters)

Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston and Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard are the perfect family, except mom has started making dirty anonymous phone calls to her supposed friend Mink Stole, then she escalates her naughty behavior by murdering her kid’s teacher with her car, and expands her victims list to anyone who annoys her for not rewinding videotapes, or not recycling. Turner and Waters are on top of their games here, and it’s a great movie, but if it was made as an answer to Falling Down then it might be the greatest movie.

Good Hair Scotty is Andy from Child’s Play 3:

Mom gets arrested at an L7 show:

by ·Comments Off on After Life (1998, Hirokazu Kore-eda)

It’s me, the cynic who didn’t love After Life, a movie which appears to have stolen Brain Candy‘s plot of people re-living their happiest moment and turned it into a dry, quiet portrait of a bureaucratic limbo (and film studio). It’s also me, the guy who lost it at the end, when one of the counselors who’d refused to pick a happy moment for decades, relents: “I’ve learned I was part of someone else’s happiness. What a wonderful discovery.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen for Criterion:

One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who’s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that After Life quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.

by ·Comments Off on Drylongso (1998, Cauleen Smith)

Indie drama wih peppy editing, handheld segments, swish pans. Pica is too iconoclastic to succeed in her photography class, meets April, who dresses like a boy to avoid harassment and joins P at her night job pasting up photos after P finds her friend Malik murdered by a serial killer. It’s all cute, creative and contrived in equal measure, and gives no indication of the far-out places Smith would end up in her latest shorts.

“a tribute to the richness of what can be made with little and shared without limit” – Yasmina Price’s Criterion essay is good.

by ·Comments Off on Kansas City / Jazz ’34 (1996, Robert Altman)

Finally a period movie that acknowledges that everyone is named Johnny. Altman took note of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Hudsucker Proxy‘s 1930s and cast her in his own 1930s flick. It’s less a follow-up to Hudsucker than a precursor to Uncut Gems (someone tears around town making a lot of noise and pissing people off until they are shot in the head).

Rosenbaum calls the story “borderline terrible”:

It counts on the dubious premise that a gangster (Harry Belafonte) would fritter away a whole night deciding what to do with a thief who rips him off — thereby enabling the thief’s significant other (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to kidnap a society lady (Miranda Richardson) and Altman to crosscut to his heart’s content as he exposes the inner workings of a city on the eve of a local election.

“Democrats: they’re whatever they’re paid to be.” I could take or leave the Belafonte plot with Dermot “Johnny” Mulroney or the election rigging plot with Steve “Johnny” Buscemi (another actor cribbed from the Coens’ period films), but greatly enjoyed hanging out with Leigh and Richardson, the stars of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Spider.

Jane Adams:

Christian McBride:

–
Jazz ’34

All the music performances from Belafonte’s club in Kansas City allowed to run at their full length, with multiple narrators giving context. Not exactly a rock doc, but not far off – 1990s jazz guys pretending to be 1930s jazz guys, but they’re actually playing the music, so it’s a concert film. It is popular to say that this movie is better than parent film, but only I have the bravery to say: they are both good.

Ron Carter: