A bunch of silliness in the first half which escalated wonderfully in the second. At the beginning Cowboy and Indian try to construct a last-minute birthday gift while Horse takes piano lessons with a cute female horse. But pretty soon they are all enslaved by snowball-prankster kung-fu scientists within a giant arctic penguin robot. Plastic toy stop-motion!
The Torquays was a successful five-piece band of U.S. soldiers who’d stayed in Germany after their war service, playing nightly shows when two serious German art-school dudes approached them and convinced them to rebrand as The Monks and play a pared-down but forceful new kind of rock music. We spend much time with the band members, leaving no anecdote untold and culminating in a one-off NYC reunion show with celebrities like Jon Spencer in the crowd. Still one of the greatest albums ever made… this two-hour movie has only about 15 minutes of illuminating stories, but it’s nice to spend so much time in a world where the Monks mattered.
Louis Koo is a washed up drunken former fighting champ who is going blind, other fighters and weirdos (incl. Tony 2 and Aaron Kwok) want to challenge him to fights, while singer Cherrie Ying hides out in his karaoke bar. Sold as a tough-guy redemption story, that is not the movie Johnnie To felt like making. He felt like using the skeleton of an archetypal Judo-hero story and hanging every eccentricity off it. The emotional climax isn’t a big fight, it’s when our three main characters team up to free a balloon from a tree.
I got Naked Island flashbacks, people transporting water to different islands. Rahmat is a tear collector, witnessing dramas on each island he visits. He gains a stowaway named Nassim who tries to steal from him, they meet a blind man scavenging dead birds, a woman is sent screaming into the burning sea… death at every stop of the boat. Besides the tear bottle there’s a bag where people discard their sorrows, and a series of jars where they whisper their secrets. A rogue painter is tortured and forced to declare that the sea is blue, then sent away with the tear collector so his nonconformist views won’t spread. Another girl is sent away for being too beautiful.
I watched an old DVD of a then-recent film, for some reason transferred from a used print. I had to rewind when I saw lightning during a conversation about how it never rains – just a jagged film scratch. In the end, Rahmat bathes the feet of a government man who only asks “if everyone’s well.”
Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:
In a bold move that is quite the opposite of what we see from too many concerned filmmakers on the left, Rasoulof joined his increased anger and frustration not with greater literalism or artlessness, but with a shift into the allegorical, mythic register. While the bitterness and protest underlying The White Meadows are crystal clear, the film explores the state of Ahmadinejad’s Iran through a series of absurdist horror vignettes, staged against an unforgiving Lake Orumieh, and witnessed by a man condemned to merely observe and chronicle, but helpless to intervene … Rasoulof weaves this tale of interlocking allegories through visual as well as dramaturgical means. This is a strikingly beautiful film, simultaneously lush and austere, characterized by expansive, elemental landscapes and seascapes. Within these broad fields, human forms are enveloped, knocked hither and thither, struggling to maintain balance and dignity.
The opposite of what I just said about Undine (“thought the overall structure of the movie only kinda worked, but moment-to-moment I was quite thrilled to be watching it”) – in this case I didn’t appreciate any particular scene at the time, but ended up thinking it was great.
Set ten years in the future, telling a story about the past (then-present) year 2001, when raves were still in fashion. The Assassin star Shu Qi is Vicky, stuck with her abusive and controlling man Hao-hao (Duan Chun-hao of Long Day’s Journey Into Night). She’s with rich Jack (Hou lifer Jack Kao) for a while, but movie is a cycle – I like the pulsing music under all the action that sometimes rises and takes over. Beautifully mobile camera, I dig how it moves from outside to inside Jack’s place via security cam. I guess I’ve seen half of Hou’s major films now, but I still don’t have a strong sense of what he’s on about.
Two old friends get together, the larger Munho (Yoo Ji-Tae of Oldboy the year before) is a married teacher, and the glasses-wearing Hyeongon (Kim Tae-Woo of Joint Security Area) a wannabe filmmaker. Seonhwa (Hyun-Ah Sung of a couple Kim Ki-duk films) is introduced being abducted by a former schoolmate.
drunken hanging-out:
Things begin repeating and skipping through time, both guys with Seonhwa at different points, then they’re reminiscing and visit her again… she is basically mistreated, and they’re both kinda pathetic. Multiple sex scenes, a fun soundtrack. I’m being short and inspecific since I watched this too long ago.
“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days… Satan is our only hope.”
I’m not immune to expectations, and when you hear for a decade that a movie is very bad, then you start to hear that actually it’s maybe quite good, so you watch it and it’s excellent, that weight of the previous decade makes you want to yell that it’s one of The All-Time Great Horror-Comedies, so I dunno if I’m just amped or if this is true. Either way, I had a fine time, and between this and Dellamorte I’ve got a couple new favorites.
Amanda Seyfried is our protagonist “Needy,” with mom Amy Sedaris, boyfriend Young Neil (whose mom is Bonnie from The Player). Chris Pratt is a local cop, JK Simmons is a teacher with a mechanical hand – this great cast must be post-Juno Diablo Cody’s doing, and not post-Aeon Flux Kusama’s. Our lead succubus is of course Megan Fox, proving that she only sucked in the Transformers movies because everything in those movies sucked.
After a music club fire that triggered dark memories of Collectiv, Fox is drugged and kidnapped by the indie band, then virgin-sacrificed to further their career. This works, career-wise, they become huge, but she was not a virgin and so becomes a demonic creature seeking boys and blood and revenge. Loved the goth kid Colin Gray (Kyle Gallner of Red State), didn’t love the very studio sound of the “live” band, but at least the club atmosphere was right on.
Fake documentary following the exploits of an area serial killer after the discovery of a room full of videotapes documenting his crimes. Much of this movie is footage “from” those tapes – not just VHS quality, but with an effect like the tapes or camera suffered magnetic damage, the picture bending in waves.
It’s a bummer of a movie that makes you feel bad for watching it. The guy’s first known crime is the abduction/rape/murder of an 8-year-old, the central case is a girl he keeps for a decade and subjects to Martyrs-level torment, and the interviewees are a parade of FBI guys impressed by the killer’s craftiness, which includes railroading a cop to a state execution for the killer’s crimes. So the killer is portrayed as an evil genius still at large at the end, but Se7en or Memories of Murder this ain’t. Let’s stay away from the real sordid feel-bad movies this week and look for more horror-comedies.
Crappy old horror movie The Invisible Ghost is given the Arnold treatment. In this case it’s less time manipulation – there might be some but I’m not sure since this is the same length as the original film – than erasing dialogue and actors from the frame. The storyline of the original sounds nuts – there’s little sign of it here as Bela Lugosi, Clarence Muse, and our interchangeable young lovers roam a house, giving each other meaningful looks or having semi-conversations or just standing around looking haunted. Often the camera will just look through an empty room, and towards the second half, even the semi-conversations dry up, which is too bad since they were my favorite part. It’s more technically impressive than his other films, but it’s less of everything else. No credits because it was an installation – I should’ve guessed.
The catalog description says:
Death becomes the fury of disappearance which gives witness to an “unbearable transition beyond existence” (Georges Bataille). The madness has been inscribed into the faces. The ecstasy of effacement, the annihilation of being, the hypostatization of the inorganic,
and so on, because you don’t become a catalog description writer by saying “crappy movie is digitally altered, parts of the image and sound painstakingly erased, to create different crappy movie.”