by ·Comments Off on Final Destination (2000, James Wong)

I don’t remember why I avoided these movies for so long, but they’ve been buzzing around the internet long enough that it’s time I check them out. The first dialogue scene is a 90’s version of Doris Wishman, this ain’t good. I decided which teens I’m rooting for based on the posters hanging in their room – Alex (Devon Sawa of Idle Hands) has Pecker and the Goo Goo Dolls, but Claire (Resident Evil regular Ali Larter) has Cub and Mule Variations, so she wins.

Devon, Ali, Sidemouth Todd:

Big school trip, but Alex gets all upset after dreaming the plane falling apart, and also has a bad haircut, so six get kicked off the plane, which does fall apart, and since they cheated death, death comes for them one by one. Sidemouth Todd (Chad Donella of a Saw movie) dies first, clotheslined in the tub. The teacher (Kristen Cloke of Black Christmas Remake) is taken out by everything in her house in a coordinated attack, and two kids (curly girl must’ve been Amanda Detmer of Saving Silverman, and Seann William Scott six months before Dude Where’s My Car) die in vehicular accidents, unexceptional but for their shock timing. Despite the Goo Goo Dolls poster, Devon grew on me, and his escaping the FBI in a rowboat is really good. He and Claire are both alive at the end, but I only see her in the cast of part two. Very excited to see Tony Todd as a mortician, hoping he’d be Death Incarnate, but just a mortician… he’s in the cast of future Final Destinations, so hopefully this will still play out.

There’s talk of alternate realities. It’s fun that the characters are named after classic horror people – sometimes it pays off, as with teacher Val(erie) Lewton, and sometimes it’s just weird… I’m sure naming the FBI guys after the Caligari director and Nosferatu actor looked cool on the page, but when they introduce themselves as “Agents Ween and Shrek” it sounds ridiculous. Director James Wong was a major X-Files contributor, and named the asshole teen Carter, hmmm. Wong followed up with forgettable Jet Li film The One, and somehow made a live-action Dragonball movie I’ve never heard of.

by ·Comments Off on La Libertad (2001, Lisandro Alonso)

I watched this and Days within 24 hours. Is this what existentialism is? Will someone explain what it is?

Guy in a Mets hat walks outside, has a shit, sets to wrecking some nice trees with axe and chainsaw and shovel. He borrows a truck, sells the wood for under 30 pesos then spends 10 on gas and cigs. Was Makala a remake of this? Instead of dancing in a prayer tent at the end, he cooks and eats an armadillo. Still, there was more dance music than I expected from a one-person manual-labor movie set in the woods.

Gofundme to get Misael some gloves:

Watching the Alonso movies out of order, but it’s easy to see the progression, and I like the direction he’s going – anticipating the eventual followup to Jauja. I don’t have the original Cinema Scope cover story handy, so it’s worth reading V. Rizov’s letterboxd writeup for context on this movie’s groundbreaking status for doc/fiction hybrids and fest-style slow cinema.

by ·Comments Off on Vengeance (2009, Johnnie To)

Irene barely survives a violent home invasion, her family killed, her dad Johnny Hallyday (Man on the Train) visits in a Macau hospital and swears revenge. But Johnny’s not an elite killer getting dragged back into the business, he’s just a French restauranteur with a fading memory. He runs across a team of hitmen played by the Johnnie To superstars Suet Lam, Anthony Wong and Lam “Bo in Sparrow” Ka-Tung and they can fit his revenge scheme into their schedule. Of course since their boss is Simon Yam and he barely appears in the first half of the movie, I guessed the (very satisfying) second half would pit our doomed men against their own organization. Since there’s a French lead actor, this was able to play in competition at Cannes, but got robbed by Haneke and Audiard.

by ·Comments Off on PTU (2003, Johnnie To)

Lam Suet of every Johnnie To movie finally gets a major role as a bully fuckup cop – or so it seems, until the more capable Simon Yam takes over the movie, in search of the gun Lam lost while getting beaten by street kids. Not that Yam is so upstanding – his guys brutalize the youths, being careful to cover their tracks, and beat a red-haired asthmatic to death in an alley then manage to revive him. Suet steals evidence, makes a deal with the warring gangs, finds his gun (which it turns out he dropped in the scuffle and nobody picked up), the gang guys slaughter each other and the cops cover everything up. This more than compensates for Heroic Trio‘s portrayal of noble policemen with super abilities. Most importantly, this is on the early side of To’s spectacular run of great-looking movies – realism be damned, the actors glow as perfectly on the night streets as they do in neon-lit restaurants. Looks like Yam starred in a flurry of belated sequels.

A trap:

Sponsored by:

by ·Comments Off on Sparrow (2008, Johnnie To)

Bird-tossing right out of the gate. The sparrow looks like a finch, but I’m immediately happy that there’s even a bird and the title wasn’t a metaphor, though lbxd says it’s also slang for pickpocket. Back to that opening scene, Simon Yam is smiling too much and gliding around his artfully lit apartment like he’s in a musical, which nicely sets the tone for this movie, a HK crime flick where nobody gets killed and the climax is a wordless slow-mo umbrella dance. Johnnie To gives Throw Down fans another romantic balloon incident, and uses some kind of wide-angle lens distortion throughout. It looks and moves differently than his others, light on its feet, and a movie about a pickpocket gang gives him ample opportunity to show off his mastery in staging and visual design. Perfect movie.

Kelly and sparrow/finch:

Simon, Bo, Sak, Mac:

The Girl is Kelly Lin – she and the protege pickpocket Ka Tung Lan are returning from the previous year’s Mad Detective and Triangle. Lead dude Simon Yam was Lok in the Election series. Pickpocket Mac (the one with the busted head) has had some small roles, and Sak with the glasses is To’s assistant director and editor, who would later make a Donnie Yen movie about ancient warriors time traveling to modern-day HK. Suet “Fatso” Lam works for Kelly’s boss/captor Mr. Fu, and the umbrella showdown pits his skills against our guys’ for her freedom.

EDIT 2023: Watched again with Trevor, who then asked for all my Johnnie To films.

by ·Comments Off on Homecoming (2005, Joe Dante)

“They told us there was a threat to America, but the weapons of mass destruction weren’t there.” I survived an endless difficult work day, and learned that Donald Rumsfeld had died, so this felt like the right movie to watch (though The Limits of Control was considered).

Thea Gill is a “constitutional scholar” (right-wing talking head) and Jon Tenney is a campaign reelection consultant whose boss is a conniving Robert Picardo (in his tenth Dante movie). When dead soldiers begin returning from the grave, seeking only to vote against the current administration, these three try to spin the news to their advantage, angering the soldier zombies. Our spin-artists’ buried family secrets rise along with the zombies, leading to panic and death for all. It’s all wickedly well written and blunt as hell, a quality I was attuned to having just discovered an intriguing letterboxd list called “Garish, Unpleasant &/or Heavy-Handed Movies: A Worthy 21st Century Approach.”

by ·Comments Off on Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001, Shinichiro Watanabe)

It wasn’t until I finished the series that I found out there was a movie, oh boy. The gang is back together, so who knows where this takes place chronologically. Terrorists have a sort of Dreamcatcher/Prometheus plot to grow the nanobots up in the water supply, killing the world, and only our heroes can put the pieces together in time. The movie’s focus on sub-Garbage 90’s technopop music or visual fx is never impressive, but the compositions and characters always are.

by ·Comments Off on The Hand (2004, Wong Kar-Wai)

I half-remembered this from watching Eros at the Landmark way back then, and the new remaster gives us a good excuse to revisit. Gong Li is a high-class call girl, whose life/career hits a rocky patch, then she has to move into a dank moldy place and gets the croup. Chen Chang is her devoted tailor in good times and bad. Besides all the perfect costuming and sumptuous dim-light photography, highlight is a scene of erotic dumpling stuffing.

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There’s Only One Sun (2007)

Found this short, nonsensical spy drama on vimeo, with horrid video compression compared to The Hand blu-ray. It’s a commissioned television ad that culminates in Amélie Daure of Frontier(s) making out with her flatscreen. Before that, there’s some talk off finding an untraceable person(?) named The Light, a flashback structure, a couple murders – that’s a lot for Wong, who likes to let his camera linger, to pull off in eight minutes. Mostly it seems designed to show the brightest colors possible, bleeding into each other, to impress the rubes when the brightness is cranked up at the Best Buy video wall. No need for too many new ideas – songs are reused from the 2046 soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.