by ·Comments Off on Accident (2009, Soi Cheang)

Sourfaced Louis Koo leads a hitman squad, staging deaths as accidents, along with older Uncle, female Woman, and Lam Suet. They pull off their latest job – electrocution via kite string – but Uncle is losing his marbles, then an out-of-control bus plows into Lam Suet. Louis starts tailing people involved with the job, convinced his team is being taken out by a rival. He thinks Woman is against him so he kills her, then their final client falls from a window. Gorman: “Master of the surveillance state goes crazy when the apparatus is turned against him, then has an epiphany about the cruel vicissitudes of pure chance.”

Koo between the Election movies and Breaking/Romancing. Woman was Anthony Wong’s wife in Motorway. Lam Suet was Lam Suet. Uncle was a Sammo/Jackie Lucky Star who died last Halloween. Next year we should have a Devil’s Vendetta / Ghost Snatchers double-feature in his honor.

by ·Comments Off on Funny Games U.S. (2007, Michael Haneke)

Hadn’t watched the original in so long I’ve forgotten most of it, so why not refresh my memory with the remake, which everyone says is exactly the same movie but in English. No missteps noted in the adaptation, this worked out great for everything except the actors’ reputations. I’ve only seen one movie each by tormented parents Naomi Watts and Tim Roth (not counting Twin Peaks season 3) in the last two decades but maybe that’s a me-problem. Tormentor Michael Pitt was tenth-billed in Seven Psychopaths (so, not a psychopath). His softer-spoken (briefly-dead) co-conspirator is Brady Corbet, who was just getting started, first starring in all the big arthouse dramas and now directing them.

Family members attempt escape, all are caught and executed, just another stop on these guys’ tour of lake houses. When these movies first came out I wasn’t familiar with Naked City, which plays a couple times, but now I realize the movie is about two cool John Zorn fans struggling to put up with regular society.

by ·Comments Off on La Captive (2000, Chantal Akerman)

Tense music cranks up as pretty, vacant young Simon (Almeyer, also in Oliveira’s La Lettre) realizes everyone is keeping secrets from him. His beloved Ariane (Sylvie Testud of Lourdes) loves to sleep, tells him nothing of substance, changes her stories.

After she sings a courtyard duet with a neighbor, Simon goes out to solve the mystery of women, asks some women about their relationships with each other, takes everything they say literally, then comes home and confuses his girlfriend, deciding they should break up, then deciding they should stay together, until she swims out and disappears in the sea.

Impeccable looking movie. I immediately read the Christine Smallwood book afterwards, a very good analysis of Akerman and Proust tied together with the right amount of autobiography.

Simon with his grandma Françoise Bertin, a Resnais regular:

Smallwood:

The film constantly switches registers. There is a softcore shower scene; conversations that are screwball in their absurdity; an expressionist dream of dramatic shadows; a line of simpering sex workers straight out of Fellini; a talky, Rohmer-esque conversation about love over drinks in a bar.

by ·Comments Off on Joint Security Area (2000, Park Chan-wook)

Part political/military drama, part murder investigation, and part a Korean Joyeux Noel. Park’s third feature, and his earliest to make a splash over here, with the future stars of Lady Vengeance, No Other Choice, and Parasite. At a tense militarized border, a couple southerners accidentally cross north and aren’t received too badly, so they cross north again and again, hanging out with their new friends. After they’re discovered and a shootout ensues, it’s up to Lady V to discover the truth.

by ·Comments Off on The State I Am In (2000, Christian Petzold)

Would’ve made a good One Battle After Another double-feature. A wanted couple is staying on the move, low on resources and comrades. Their teenage daughter is starting to become a liability, acting impulsively and attracting attention. In increasing order of importance, the daughter just wants: cigarettes, stability, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, trip-hop. A boy she meets tells her about his parents vacant modernist house, so the family moves in and plans one more bank job. Surely if they can pull this one off they’ll be home free.

Dad ended up in the teen trilogy Vampire Sisters. Mom would return as the mom in Miroirs No. 3, and the girl would go on to be stunt-cast in Carlos.

by ·Comments Off on Down With Love (2003, Peyton Reed)

Revisited one of the greatest battle-of-the-sexes 1960s-flashback non-musical comedies with K and her mom. Really a two-person show, with good supporting parts for Ewan’s boss Niles (who should’ve been in more movies) and Renee’s agent Sarah Paulson (unfortunately best known as the psychologist in Glass).

by ·Comments Off on No Direction Home (2005, Martin Scorsese)

Scorsese tests us by opening the movie with a harsh version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s voice never sounding worse. Then it develops into one of the few good rock docs, by not singlemindedly focusing on a particular artist but bringing in his influences and surroundings, making an artistic portrait of an era. Great editing by his usual rock doc collaborator David Tedeschi, skips around in time and makes it work.

Animals *and* birds??

“You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.” For almost an hour he’s not even a folkie yet, so this is closest to the Velvet Underground doc that goes deep into their roots and skims their actual popular career. Then it ends before his ’66 motorcycle crash, only a year after Going Electric. Present-day Joan Baez steals yet another rock doc.

by ·Comments Off on Paradise (2009, Michael Almereyda)

List of things that quicken the heart.

Almereyda in Metrograph:

The early 2000s happened to be a fallow time for me, and it was consoling to think big while gathering footage with a little camera. Magical things were always materializing, flashing by, almost as if the camera were inviting them to happen.

by ·Comments Off on Childstar (2004, Don McKellar)

The kid is from a forgotten Neverending Story reboot, and has worked consistently. Our director plays the star’s driver/handler, also trying to break into the industry with his experimental film called The Stupidity of God. Good cast, good fun.

Matrix Macaulay:

Mark Peranson in (of course) Cinema Scope:

It takes a while to sink in that the characters in Childstar evince an odd or off-putting psychology. They aren’t just in a movie; they behave as if they are in a movie. They interpret their surroundings in movie terms. They might come across as flat or underdeveloped, but that’s the danger of being driven by culture.

McKellar:

What’s interesting about the child-star phenomena is that it’s an exaggeration or acceleration of what a lot of people are feeling. Trapped in popular culture. Circumscribed by this all-encompassing machine that doesn’t allow them to find their own ability to express themselves.