by ·Comments Off on When the Levees Broke (2006, Spike Lee)

My blu-ray of Treme is arriving tonight and I just realized I’ve never watched its prequel. I know I started it at least twice, but pretty sure I’ve never made it to part two before, because I don’t recall armed police “defending” the bridges from residents of other parishes.

Historian Doug Brinkley: “I’ve never seen such a time when the US government turned its back on people in need to this degree, to have a people in such dire need getting such little help from the federal government while they’re screaming for help, I think it’s unprecedented.” Maybe in 2005/06 that was new, but it’s doubly depressing to watch this the week FEMA is getting dismantled. Movie opens with Mayor Ray Nagin under great suspicion, then by episode two he becomes a great populist hero fighting for the people, so imagine my disappointment when I pulled him up on wikipedia to see where he went next (to jail for corruption). Fighting for the people might now have gone permanently out of fashion. Very good music, at least.

by ·Comments Off on 24 City (2008, Jia Zhang-Ke)

I struggle with Jia’s movies sometimes, but when they’re great, they are great. Catching up with his most major work I hadn’t yet seen in anticipation of Caught by the Tides, and it is major indeed. An interview doc with Chengdu former factory workers, but some of the interviews are being reenacted by actors. The woman talking about gaining inspiration from a Joan Chen movie… I think she’s Joan Chen.

Jake gets it. Neil analyzes further.

Sean Gilman: “Factory Leaving the Workers”

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on Hollow Man (2000, Paul Verhoeven)

The effects hold up less well than Starship Troopers but they’re illustrating a cool concept (mammals becoming visible from their veins outward) – and I’m sure they were closer to cutting-edge at the time, but now when lab leader Kevin Bacon invisibles himself and becomes a skeleton I get the song “Money for Nothing” in my head.

Bacon is a science genius but kind of an asshole – his first order of business when becoming invisible is to sexually harass coworkers – so his ex Elisabeth Shue and her square-jawed labmate Josh Brolin are understandably hiding their relationship from him. Not taking the news well that he can’t be re-visibled, Bacon goes out and rapes his neighbor, kills his boss (Bill Devane of Rolling Thunder), then comes back to trap and slaughter his entire team (including Zero Effect‘s Kim Dickens). Hit or miss, still better than the last invisible man movie I watched.

by ·Comments Off on Deja Vu (2006, Tony Scott)

Denzel investigates a terror-bombing, focusing on a dead hotgirl (Ghost Protocol‘s Paula Patton) who apparently died before the explosion. He meets twenty round-faced white guys who all look the same, then gets pulled into a super-surveillance team with a magic technology that can see anywhere in the city four-and-a-quarter days ago, so they track Paula’s past in hopes of finding the bomber. This works out, but Denzel realizes he can influence the past through their portal and tries to stop the bombing before it happens.

“We’re combining all the data we’ve got into one fluid shot” – Scott loves a fluid shot. Branching universe theory: “is she alive or is she dead?” Some excellent pre-Tenet mind-twisters, including an incredible car chase where Denzel sees the current time through one eye and the past in the other.

Featuring Jesus Caviezel as the mad bomber, Adam Goldberg as the Jon-Wurstery scientist, Matt Craven as Denzel’s doubly-doomed partner. I worried this would be a dumb/bad movie reclaimed by the vulgar auteurists, but I have to admit it’s extremely awesome and I had the best time watching it.

Huber and Peranson in Cinema Scope (see also: John and Jake):

Deja Vu is upfront about the questionable nature of the whole government-funded enterprise; this is not about clearing your name (as in [Minority Report]). Saving the woman being watched, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), is not the goal, rather trailing her past will help the agents solve a terrorist bombing with echoes of both 9/11 and Oklahoma City. The projected futility of the investigation’s outcome for Claire makes Carlin’s obsession with her all the more poignant, but like in Vertigo the voyeuristic and necrophiliac aspects of his romantic feelings are foregrounded. “I get the weird feeling I’m being watched,” reads an entry in Claire’s diary after an uncomfortable Jumbotron-surveyed shower … More effective is his touching prior assertion to Claire: “Don’t you remember we held hands once?” It is also quite sinister, since this happened during her autopsy.

by ·Comments Off on The Target Shoots First (2000, Christopher Wilcha)

Opens with Wilcha getting a marketing job with Columbia House because he understands the Nirvana phenomenon, ends with Wilcha quitting in the wake of Cobain’s death. In between he tries to reconcile his alt-punk roots with his corporate environment, spearheading a sardonic issue of their marketing catalog. Watched in prep for his latest, Flipside.

by ·Comments Off on Torque (2004, Joseph Kahn)

Road Rash: The Movie… fast editing, super precise framing, wall-to-wall heavy mid-2000s rock music, so, basically heaven. Looking forward to rewatching this every few years forever. Written by Matt Johnson, but not that one. Lead New Zealander Martin was Darcy in Bride & Prejudice, one of his buddies starred in Hostel, Thor-looking drug boss was between two Fast/Furious movies.

All I want for Christmas is an Ice Cube knife:

tfw crooked Agent Adam Scott is giving you three options:

by ·Comments Off on Noroi: The Curse (2005, Kôji Shiraishi)

Found-footage horrors are rarely good – I’m thinking of Willow Creek and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and V/H/S and its sequels (which also suffer from being anthology horrors, which are also rarely good). If nothing else, the found-footage conceit is an excuse for shitty handheld camerawork, and we’ve got that here, and also clips from fake TV programs with insufferable narrators and graphics. Movie is also not nice to birds. Still, pretty good, I’d check out the director’s torture video Grotesque.

Ghost investigator on the trail of a kidnapped girl pieces together a documentary stitching various hauntings he filmed that turn out to be related. Doc guy Kobayashi pulls in haunted actress Marika and foil-hat “super psychic” Hori, and they have a blairwitchy experience at the dammed/damned lake where a village once existed. Apparently the village had a ritual to keep demons at bay, no longer being performed as everyone moved away, now wherever the demon-possessed abortionist from the drowned village goes, her neighbors are driven murderously mad from the sounds of her ghost babies. Our team tracks her down, the doc guy rescues her hostages, but fails to banish the evil, uh oh. Not to be confused with magic pirate revenge movie Noroît. The actors here also appeared in various Rings and Grudges, and two were in Kurosawa’s Retribution.

by ·Comments Off on Uzumaki (2000, Higuchinsky)

Rewatching this standout from the great J-horror wave in anticipation of the troubled new animated version. At the time I enjoyed this enough to check out Higuchinsky’s follow-up (Long Dream, not as cool as The Jaunt) – now the mix of bizarre happenings with cool lighting and soft-focus soap opera reminds me of House.

Kirie’s boyfriend knows the town is spiraling and suggests they run away together but she doesn’t take him seriously and stays until it’s too late. His dad (Ren Osugi, Nightmare Detective chief, Shin Godzilla prime minister) becomes dangerously spiral-obsessed until he suicides in the washing machine, and mom (Keiko Takahashi, star of Door) develops extreme spiralphobia as a result. Meanwhile kids are becoming snails and growing mad spiral hairstyles. A reporter talks to the kids and does some research, has a breakthrough, and before he can tell them, Kirie’s ridiculous classmate who likes surprising people (Sadawo Abe of Yatterman) jumps in front of the reporter’s car and they both die. Closing apocalypse is shown via stills, presumably from the comic.

The lead girl showed up a decade later in Norwegian Wood. Denden is the local cop – I think he shot his partner in Cure – and among the schoolkids are the stars of Ring Virus and Ring Spiral (appropriately). Potentially useful list of “the best horror cartoonists” found on Lboxd: Ito, Burns, Carroll, Umezu, Corben, Freibert.