by ·Comments Off on Book of Blood (2008, John Harrison)

“The dead have highways…”

It’s the only line I remember from the (very) short story, so of course it’s spoken five or six times in this 90-minute movie. I watched this in hi-def, only perhaps the third feature I’ve watched at home in HD (hello, The Fall and Night of the Creeps), and the first where I’ve sat close enough to the screen to notice how awesome it is. Actually sometimes I forget, it’s not that HD is awesome, it’s that SD is terrible and it has been hanging around far too long. Down with the tyranny of standard-definition… we welcome our new masters! I’d love to welcome them further but I can’t afford blu-ray or a nice TV – this $200 widescreen computer monitor will have to do for the next few years.

Oh, right, the movie… so as we’ve discussed I am a sucker for movies based on Clive Barker stories. I’ll watch any old shit as long as his name is attached (except the made-for-TV shit and Underworld/Transmutations). Therefore, Book of Blood, based on the titular story which served as an introduction to his anthology, and another I don’t remember called “On Jerusalem Street.” This was halfway decent, not as much a waste of time as Midnight Meat Train, maybe even worth watching. That’d be the first Barker-related movie to hit the high mark of “worth watching” in nine years, so this is a big deal.

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The plot doesn’t sound so great: mystical whiz-kid Simon (TV’s Jonas Armstrong) is taking some college course in supernatural hoo-ha (lucky bastards – all my courses were about operating systems and design fallacies and thermodynamics and Thomas Kuhn) taught by over-serious Mary (Sophie Ward of the Crispin Glover Crime and Punishment – yes, there is such a thing and I must see it), who hangs around haunted houses in the evenings with tech guy Clive Russell (supposedly in Spaced and Neverwhere, but I don’t remember him). They find a house that is seriously badass haunted and they pay Simon to sleep there while they monitor the goings-on. Sure enough, he is haunted as hell, but they fail to record it because Simon’s actually faking the whole thing, jamming their signals and scrawling on the walls because his parents didn’t pay him enough attention.

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The action stops for an hour or two while each character recites his or her traumatic back story. There’s the same scene of a guy with big headphones and a shotgun mic walking around a haunted house as in Spooked. I love that.

Finally the actual ghosts have had enough of this, haul Simon to the CG-riffic GHOST REALM and take turns carving their stories into his skin. Simon escapes back into the framing story – have I mentioned there is a framing story? – in which a dude is stalking Simon at a restaurant. The dude captures him, listens to his story (that’d be the bulk of our movie), kills Simon and removes his skin, then drowns when his cabin fills with Evil Dead amounts of blood and the door won’t open (funny how the doors never open). Who hired the dude to skin Simon? Could it be Mary, the only other character in the movie? Yes!

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by ·Comments Off on Midnight Meat Train (2008, Ryûhei Kitamura)

From the director of Versus and Godzilla: Final Wars, two movies I didn’t like at all. Guess I should’ve looked that up before I rented it, but I’m a sucker for anything Clive Barker-related, so it probably wouldn’t have stopped me. Barker’s elliptical story has been handily adapted into a full-length movie by the writer/director of Insanitarium, a little-seen horror starring Peter Stormare. Add a hundred producers and the cinematographer of Soul Plane and you’ve got yourself a movie.

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Bradley Cooper (Jennifer Connelly’s cheaty husband in He’s Not All That Into You and an enthusiastic drama counselor in Wet Hot American Summer) plays a dullard photographer who wants to get deeper, go further into the depths of the city to get the most real, unflinching photographs anyone has seen, to the frustation of girlfriend Leslie Bibb (who was she in Iron Man?). They have a good-looking friend (Roger Bart of Hostel II) and they know a couple of other undeveloped characters, so much the better since a horror flick needs bodies. Oh and Bradley’s photo guru is Brooke Shields, whose name you hear a lot though she’s hardly been in anything I’ve heard of.

20 minutes in it announces itself to be slapstick horror, with a three-person train massacre filmed in the hammiest way possible with all From Dusk Till Dawn 2 POV shots. I didn’t think it would stoop to that. Then it straightens up and goes serious suspense for a while – can’t figure out what it wants. Maybe the slapstick thing would’ve worked if they’d stuck with it. Clashes with Barker’s style, but I’m sure Vinnie Jones would’ve been game.

Clearly game for anything:
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Oh, so Vinnie is “Mahogany,” butcher by day, filler of train cars with murdered naked bodies for subterranean mutants to eat by night. They pull the thing where Bradley finds out, fights Vinnie and wins, but now has to replace Vinnie as the purveyor of bodies for mutants under the guidance of he sinister magic conductor. Neither as good as I’d hoped nor as bad as I’d feared.

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by ·Comments Off on The Gleaners and I (2000, Agnès Varda)

Good to see this again. Funny that all I really remembered is one of the first scenes with Agnes asking a couple reluctant women about gleaning, and Agnes talking about her own hands.

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I’m feeling uninspired, so we’ll let Senses of Cinema do the talking:

The official subject of this film is gleaning, the act of gathering remnants of crops from a field after the harvest. As Varda demonstrates, people can be discovered throughout the French countryside gleaning everything from potatoes to grapes, apples to oysters, much as they did hundreds of years ago (though no longer in organised groups). More figuratively, there are also urban gleaners who salvage scraps from bins, appliances from the side of the road, or vegetables from stalls after the markets have closed. And then there’s Varda herself, a gleaner of images, driving around France with a digital camera and a tiny crew (at times, she wields a smaller camera herself, permitting an even greater degree of intimacy).

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Varda has a (sometimes contested) reputation as a feminist, left-wing artist, and this is very much a political film, though it offers a series of poetic metaphors and concrete encounters in lieu of an explicit, closely reasoned argument. My guess (based mainly on anecdotal evidence) is that the political outlook of The Gleaners And I has a lot to do with its popular success – even if Varda herself, who began filming back in 1999, wasn’t fully aware how thoroughly she was tapping into the zeitgeist. Without specifically referring to political movements or events, the film embodies a quasi-anarchist ethos now in the air in all sorts of ways – a resistance to consumerism, a suspicion of authority, and a desire to reconnect politics with everyday life.

Agnès enjoys a pilfered fig:
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Katy liked the movie, and the next day she felt like going out to pick figs. Shot on a handheld digital videocamera. The picture/framing isn’t always beautiful, but she keeps things quirky enough to stay interesting amongst all the talking heads.

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As with Le Bonheur, Varda has taken over the DVD’s special features section herself with a whole hour-long follow-up film entitled Gleaners & I: Two Years Later (2002) Gleaners was her most locally popular and globally well-distributed films in decades, and she racked up awards and fan mail, so here she addresses concerns and gaps in the previous film and catches up with some of its stars.

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Killer finale, the heart potatoes, symbol of the Gleaners film, old and wrinkled as it sprouts new life. As the credits roll, sudden cutaways to closeups of the potatoes, exactly as in the opening credits with the sunflower in Le Bonheur.

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by ·Comments Off on Exiled (2006, Johnnie To)

Rented this just a couple weeks ago on a night I knew damn well I wouldn’t have time to watch it. It’s just as good a few weeks later.

During the first half I wasn’t enjoying it so much because I was looking for the wrong things. The characters seemed to have no names or individual traits – just a group of guys who are always in the same scenes together, defined by their commitment to friendship (the backstory consists of one old photo of them together as kids) over loyalty to their mob boss (and therefore their personal safety). I didn’t know the actors (recognized a couple as Chi Wai’s multiple personalities from Mad Detective) and was waiting for the story/character scenes to kick in. But they never do, and now I can appreciate that. The photo is the backstory: these guys are friends… what more do we need for an action flick?

So without character development, we’re left with dark, shadowy cinematography on awesomely-staged action sequences. The one below is a favorite. The fifth friend, whom the other four were supposed to kill on orders from their boss which led them all to revolt, is wounded and being treated by the gang’s private doctor, when the boss himself, also wounded, shows up. He’s being treated, surrounded by bodyguards, while the friends hide behind curtains and furniture, the lead-up to the shoot-out being deliciously more thrilling than the shoot-out itself.

The fifth guy dies, and his wife goes on a shooting rampage against our heroes. They fail to kill their boss, who is now hunting them. They’re on the run and it looks like the movie is gonna break out an existential loneliness dialogue when they stumble upon a heist, a truck full of gold being defended by a cigarette-smoking super-soldier. The movie wasn’t what I’d call realistic to this point, but now it flies off the rails, and they join up with this guy to steal the gold. But narratively it’s not gonna work for the four remaining gunmen to live rich in hiding while their former boss stays in power and their dead friend’s wife raises her new baby alone, so they go back for one more suicidal fight, leaving the gold to the wife and the soldier.

You have to think that guys wearing sunglasses and shooting guns in slow-motion is cool to properly enjoy the movie, and I do, so I loved it by the end. Set in Macau, a former Portuguese colony now in the same political situation as Hong Kong. Nice comic touch: a cop with only a couple days left on the force keeps driving by, getting shot at, and running off unharmed… he lives to see retirement.

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May 2026: Watched this again and enjoyed the hell out of it, up there with Throw Down in good-natured expectation-subversion, with a Western-reminiscent guitar soundtrack during select scenes (and solo harmonica before the final showdown).

Now I recognize the bosses/baddies: Simon Yam and Gordon Lam (Bo in Sparrow). The old friend who started this whole mess was Nick Cheung, Jet in the Election movies, his (eventual) widow is from Motorway and Dead or Alive 3. The cop who will see retirement is Lau Ching-wan’s boss in the Running Out of Time movies. Of the four main guys, long-haired Cat is the evil alien son of Wicked City, his buddies are Anthony Wong and… y’know, it’s just the entire cast of The Mission. Incredible Red Bull product placement.

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla GMK (2001, Shusuke Kaneko)

The full title (one of my all-time favorites) is Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!

Sparkling print (because it’s never screened anywhere) of the English dubbed version. Dubbing is always humorous, but it was less hilarious here than in For A Few Dollars More. Maybe that’s because the dialogue here was too worthless to worry about lip-sync… 90 minutes of soapy garbage surrounding an awesome 15-minute monster movie.

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Forgetting about the garbage (it involved a disreputable docudrama production company somehow having handy all the equipment necessary to do wireless live reporting, a possible love triangle dropped early due to disinterest, a spooky old man/ghost who tells everyone about the spirits of dead soldiers trapped in some guardian stones, and somebody’s dad driving a research sub into Godzilla’s mouth to explode his insides), Godzilla is back and is fucking pissed. Reborn as a purely evil human-extermination machine with milky-white eyes and atomic breath, he easily stomps a friendly-looking burrowing Barugon halfway through the movie.

Big G. unleashes the mighty tail-flip upon Barugon:
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This awakens the other two guardian monsters, honestly-not-all-that-powerful Mothra and three-headed dragon Ghidorah, who head to Tokyo for the big showdown. Ghidorah’s knocked cold, then Mothra is incinerated while trying to sneak up behind G. (who sometimes seems to be toying with his opponents).

Mothra sneak-attack:
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But gold-sparkly Mothra-dust descends upon Ghidorah, turning him dramatically into the golden, winged KING Ghidorah, to the cheers and applause of the sold-out Plaza Theater. King G. bullies Godzilla underwater for a bit, finally eats atomic ray, and just when all hope seems lost for humanity, that girl’s dad does his thing with the submarine.

Triumphant rebirth of Ghidorah:
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Yuri, our reporter heroine, appeared in Ju-on:Grudge 2, and her boss – is that the long-haired guy? – was in Godzilla 2000, the terrible Final Wars, and Evil Dead Traps 2 & 3. The ghostly old fella is a 60’s Godzilla veteran, also appearing in King Kong Strikes Again and Farewell to the Ark. Our director made the fully-decent 1990’s Gamera trilogy, a supernatural teen live-anime thriller series called Death Note, and a pyrokinesis horror called Cross Fire which I’ve had for seven years on VHS but never watched. His D.P. shot the non-Kaneko-affiliated Mechagodzilla follow-up feature, and Tsukamoto’s Hiruko The Goblin. And the guys in the monster suits all did motion-capture acting for the Metal Gear Solid video games.

by ·Comments Off on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, Shane Black)

Found this on Videodrome’s Christmas shelf and couldn’t resist. Completely fun movie with Robert Downey Jr. as a thief playing actor playing detective and Val Kilmer as a gay detective playing acting coach. It’s an action-comedy with snappy dialogue, but since those were way out of fashion in 2005, it’s a meta-action-comedy with snappy dialogue, featuring pauses and rewinds and lots of narration and self-conscious movie-cliche jokes. Somehow this all works and doesn’t annoy the shit out of me, which is what I’d imagine it would do if I were reading this instead of watching the movie.

Anyway, Downey gets the girl (Michelle Monaghan of Mission Impossible III) and they collectively take out the bad rich guy (Corbin Bernsen!) and his henchmen (incl. Dash “Doll in Thin Red Line” Mihok and Shannyn “One Missed Call Remake” Sossamon). Katy liked it but didn’t think Val Kilmer was a very convincing gay detective.

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April 2025: Watched again (RIP Val) by myself, cackling aloud for 100 minutes, how could Katy stand to watch this with me? I don’t think it’s Kilmer’s fault that Downey ran away with the movie.

by ·Comments Off on A Christmas Tale (2008, Arnaud Desplechin)

The large family house still stands, where once lived two parents, two sons and a daughter (now grown with children of their own), and one best friend who often visited. They’re all somewhat miserable now, especially the daughter, a playwright who never smiles. The family reconvenes for the first time in years (after one had been banished for a time) in the big house because of a life-threatening illness. Old problems re-emerge, along with some new ones, and there’s a secret love affair involving the best friend. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, here’s the acclaimed new holiday picture from the director of the even-more-acclaimed Kings and Queen.

An IMDB review of K&Q calls Arnaud’s earlier 1996 drama “a rambling, shambling, thoroughly engaging 3 hour trip through the lives of a group of rambling, shambling, lost characters, made by a director looking to pour as much raw life into a film as possible and let the rest sort itself out. He has no interest in a well-knit story.” The same goes for this one, much to Katy’s frustration. This is roughly the same kind of movie as Happy Go Lucky, but instead of following the quirky life of one main character for two hours, we’ve got ten main characters for two and a half, so obviously we come away with less depth from anyone here than we did with Poppy in H-G-L – another Katy complaint. I liked the movie a fair bit. It’s an engrossing family sketch with great performances and no big scripted moments, fake-sounding climactic speeches or tidy resolutions, and the filmmaking was spot-on, tracking skillfully between a hundred different people and events (and featuring a hundred different music styles), cutting quickly without every becoming wearying or losing the threads of things. But then again, the Traumatic Family Drama isn’t really my bag, and while I’d happily watch this again over Rachel Getting Married (our last big family trauma film similarly featuring lots of shaky-cam cinematography), I’d even more happily forget both of ’em and sit through another show of Happy-Go-Lucky (or, ahem, The Royal Tenenbaums).

Junon (Catherine Deneuve, last seen in A Talking Picture) is sick (not visibly), needs marrow transplant. Her jolly, supportive husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon of Same Old Song) rigorously calculates her chances of survival. Hot-tempered middle child Henri (star Jean-Do in Diving Bell and the Butterfly), eventual marrow donor, bounces around with his new girlfriend Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos, star of La Moustache and Read My Lips) joking around and getting people upset at him. Tormented oldest child Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, Jean-Do’s dictation assistant in Diving Bell) tries to protect her schizophrenic, suicidal teen son Paul, usually without the help of her husband Claude (Hippolyte Girardot, intrusive downstairs neighbor in Flight of the Red Balloon). Meek youngest child Ivan (filmmaker and regular Raoul Ruiz actor Melvil Poupaud) hangs out with wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni of Love Songs and Ready To Wear, daughter of C. Deneuve and Marcello M.) and their two kids, and best friend/cousin/painter Simon.

Whew. So having introduced the characters, here’s where I lay out their story arcs and intersections, but I can’t think of a whole lot of those. There’s some to-do about Paul, a potential marrow donor, and whether his mental state is up for it. Junon and Faunia go shopping. Sylvia sleeps with Simon, in one of the only forward plot developments.

Easier to list are things the movie brings up which are not fully explored (or only barely). The childhood death of a sibling (who also needed a marrow transplant). Why Liz went from tolerating her brother Henri to hating him. Ivan’s reaction to catching his wife in bed with his cousin. And so on… but maybe it’s all comprehensible in hindsight, removed from the kinetic hustle of the movie. Take Henri’s Jewish girlfriend Faunia: a veiled attack on his possibly antisemitic mother, with whom he’s had a bitter history, plus, as an outsider who has never met the family, a window for the audience into the family home, someone for whom old family frictions can be described without the movie having to resort to narration (although it does – main characters talk to the camera), her outsider nature reinforced by her Jewishness on Christmas eve (she goes home before the day). Hmmm, that actually wasn’t so hard.

Shot by Eric Gautier, an impressive Assayas and Resnais D.P. who also did Into The Wild and Gabrielle. References include Shakespeare, Emerson, Funny Face, The Ten Commandments, The New World, and Angela Bassett’s ass.

by ·Comments Off on Tickets (2005, Olmi/Kiarostami/Loach)

Anthology films are never great, but are usually at least interesting, so I was surprised when this one started out great. But of course it was just front-loaded, and got less great as the other episodes appeared. Didn’t realize at the time that the great one was by Ermanno Olmi (a director who, like Ronald Neame yesterday, has done a couple criterion-dvd-released movies that I know nothing about). Was less of a straightforward story than the other two – an important-seeming older guy leaves business meeting and boards train with this woman’s help, then sits in the dining car thinking about writing the woman a letter, thinking about falling in love with her, all the while surrounded by other passengers incl. a bunch of army and security guys. Doesn’t sound like all that, but I really dug it, balancing the tense (because of the army guys) train ride with the flashbacks and an almost-love story, seemed very beautifully done.

In the third part, Loach lowers the class level a few more notches (after the woman in Kiarostami’s piece had already knocked it down a little) portraying three excitable young men with shit jobs who have been saving up to see this soccer match in Rome. On the train, one shows off his soccer ticket to a refugee kid, who takes the opportunity to swipe his train ticket. The soccer kids realize what has happened – do they demand their ticket back themselves, have the train personnel mediate, or let the cute kid and his poor jail-threatened family keep the ticket then run away from the cops at the station while fellow soccer fans run interference? The latter, and valuable lessons about humanity are learned by all. Actually I found it pretty lame, a crappy version of the triumphant ending of Offside. A valuable lesson about humanity is learned at the end of the first segment as well, the man getting a glass of milk for the mother of a baby in the standing-room section – not the highlight of that segment, but still less hacky than this one’s ending.

In the center slot, Kiarostami shows a kid assigned (through some community service program) to assist a general’s widow, a horrible woman who steals one man’s seat but does not steal another man’s cell phone, and gets into unbudging arguments with both of them. Meanwhile our kid is trying to have a surreal conversation with a young girl who remembers him from his hometown – he never noticed the girl before but she’s a friend of his younger sister. The conversation seems like she’s telling him about someone else, as if he doesn’t remember his own past, but maybe she remembers his past from a different angle; she only knows the parts he had been ignoring. We don’t get much about this guy in the present, what he’s like, but finally the widow gets to be too much and he hides from her somewhere on the train, letting her exit confused without him (with baggage help from the cellphone-argument man, a minor version of the Valuable Lesson About Humanity).

An alright movie – not much innovation in story or composition or anything else, but I’m glad I watched it, and I might make Katy check out that particularly moving first segment sometime if she’s got a half hour to kill.

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On the DVD: a 40-min behind-the-scenes doc where we learn that it took a while to come up with the transitional segments to join the three main pieces. That’s something I could’ve been told in under forty minutes, thanks.

by ·Comments Off on The Dark Knight (2008, Chris Nolan)

Okay, okay, billions of rabid fans, you win. It’s a good movie, and Heath Ledger is great in it. He plays insane like no one else, and when he walks out of the hospital in a nurse’s uniform stabbing at his remote control prompting a cliched huge explosion while he casually keeps walking, it’s one of the awesomest things at the movies all year. But… top-selling film of all time and #1 on IMDB or not, I still find it the third-best Batman movie. Full of episodic cliffhangers (maybe as tribute to the comic books?), which is the only way in which it reminded me of Fantomas. Batman/Wayne, as a character, is almost absent, replaced by gadgets and friends and a dead girlfriend (Maggie G.) whom he mourns for all of four seconds before going on to kill two-face and take the blame for two-face’s crimes himself, so the sucker public will go on believing in Harvey Dent, the district attorney who almost cleaned up this town before going insane and killing a buncha people. Some role model. Now Batty is on the run from Commissioner (finally) Gordon and I think Morgan Freeman quit his gadget-man job and neither of us can remember if the Joker died (which is a bad sign – nobody forgets how Nicholson’s Joker ended up – and while I’m in these parentheses, the soundtrack was no Batdance neither) and the Hong Kong financier is dead (burned alive on a pile of money = irony) and I guess the mob is in control of Gotham again, just with less money.

Batman has banding issues:
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I dunno, might have to see again sometime when expectations are gone. I spent a lot of the runtime complaining about stuff, either in my head or directly to Katy.

Watchmen trailer looks cool, anyway.