by ·Comments Off on X-Men 6: Apocalypse (2016, Bryan Singer)

At a time when movies are dominated by comics, Bryan Singer’s got a franchise all to himself. He directed parts 1 and 2, cowrote and produced part 4, directed parts 5 and 6… and had nothing to do with part 3. “At least we can all agree: the third one‘s always the worst,” says Jean Grey leaving a Return of the Jedi screening, establishing our mid-1980’s setting while letting us know Singer’s thoughts on the Brett Ratner entry. Soon after, Quicksilver tells someone that Magneto is his father, and I can’t tell if we’re still making Star Wars references.

Quicksilver:

Quicksilver and Nightcrawler in the same movie is a dream come true – every time they warp through time and space it’s thrilling. The Professor X vs. Magneto thing is old hat by now, nobody cares about Agent Rose Byrne, Beast is okay and Mystique is blah. Oscar Isaac appears as his unconscious self for ten seconds before becoming Apocalypse and ceasing to be Oscar Isaac completely – it’s either an immersive performance or a total waste of a promising young actor in a role that could’ve been played by a CG-enhanced mannequin. As always, the ending hinges on whether Magneto is truly evil or can be convinced to compromise.

Apocalypse and his Horsemen: Storm, Angel, and this lightsaber girl, the fourth horseman being Magneto, who becomes evil again out of rage when his perfect wife and kid are murdered by some doomed motherfuckers in Poland where he’s hiding out after whatever happened in part four.

Since I don’t rewatch the movies and the first one was nearly two decades ago, it’s hard to keep track of all the characters and timelines and paradoxes, but I assume the writers have this stuff taken care of, and the fact that Angel dies in 1984 but is back in part three (?) makes sense to someone. Also, I keep seeing Jubilee in the credits for X-Men movies – who the hell is Jubilee?

Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) is Young Jean Grey, seen here with Young Cyclops (Tye Sheridan of Mud) and Beast:

I notice Days of Future Past and this movie bringing back Stryker (Brian Cox’s character in part two) as a minor baddie, and I assume he’s the tie-in to the solo Wolverine films, none of which I’ve seen. And coincidentally, the week after watching this movie I saw a trailer for the third one of those, Logan, which looks awful.

Some uncomfortable politics as usual, bringing up Auschwitz yet again, and having a middle-eastern villain watching American news footage of 1980’s decadence and decrying our false idols and weak leaders. Also Professor X’s chamber where he can spy on the thoughts of anyone in the world hasn’t aged so well. Better to focus on the series’ overall focus on acceptance of difference, but even that has taken a back seat to the action scenes since part two.

by ·Comments Off on ParaNorman (2012, Laika)

Finally watched this Laika movie. I love love loved the look, beautiful stop-motion with ghostly effects. A total visual triumph, and I wish we’d caught it in theaters. Didn’t expect the screenplay to suck, though. Overall story is fine, weird kid in town can see ghosts, has to use his powers to save the town from a vindictive witch, but most of the plot points and dialogue were boring and obvious, led by a veritable who-cares of voice acting. Maybe it’s just because we watched it on Halloween (Katy’s sole SHOCKtober film) and treaters interrupted the movie every five minutes so I couldn’t get sucked into its particular atmosphere.

The cast:

The crew:

by ·Comments Off on HyperNormalisation (2016, Adam Curtis)

“His favorite band was the Electric Light Orchestra. But now, he was president.”

Fascinating story of Muammar Qadaffi, history lessons combined with Tarkovsky and De Palma clips. Not as fanciful with the stock footage as earlier docs since Curtis has real news footage for most of his story now. Been pondering the movie title in different contexts. Might have to watch this again a few times.

EDIT: watched this again with Katy in the fake world of May 2017.

by ·Comments Off on Miss Hokusai (2015, Keiichi Hara)

The famous painter Hokusai and his daughter O-Ei work in the same house, sometimes finishing each other’s works. She likes a dreamy guy, but some doofus guy likes her. She has a blind sister whom Hokusai never visits, and the sister takes up about half the movie. A few moments of grace (the paintings coming to life, blind girl making snow angels, geisha whose head escapes at night) enliven an ordinary story that opens awkwardly with out-of-place guitar rock then limps along to the end after the blind girl dies. Katy says the advertisements were misleading, implying that O-Ei would break free from her dad’s shadow and find her own style.

by ·Comments Off on Lemonade (2016, Beyoncé)

This is more a collection of music videos broken up by vignettes (words by Somali poet Warsan Shire) than a feature film or any sort of documentary. After the Nick Cave movie I thought perhaps I’d watch this and Frank Ocean’s Endless, the three 2016 albums which were released as movies, but the Ocean is still a store-exclusive (for future study: Let England Shake, Centipede Hz and Beyoncé’s previous album).

Pray You Catch Me:

Hold Up:

Sorry:

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But oh, what music videos – some of the best photography and movement and costume/makeup design of the year, illustrating the greatest concept album of the year.

Daddy Lessons:

Love Drought:

Forward (Michael Brown and his mother):

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Cinematographers include Malik Sayeed (He Got Game, Clockers), Reed Morano (Vinyl, Kill Your Darlings) and Khalik Allah (Field Niggas), and codirectors include Kahlil Joeseph (The Reflektor Tapes) and Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go).

Formation:

by ·Comments Off on Night Moves (2013, Kelly Reichardt)

Reichardt’s darkest movie, thematically and visually. Extremist environmentalist Jesse Eisenberg blows up a dam along with Dakota Fanning (providing the funds) and Peter Sarsgaard (handy with explosives), killing a camper with the ensuing flood. Days later, Dakota is freaking out from guilt, so Jesse murders her, then flees into the anonymous suburbs.

A. Stoehr:

They’re young, sensitive, brooding, idealistic — not tortured, exactly, but stung by the feeling that they have to do something and totally destroyed by the something they end up doing.

V. Rizov:

The middle-aged suburban guy selling his fishing vessel couldn’t be more innocuous in his personal manner, but we see his neighborhood through Josh’s angry eyes: the backyard waterfall is a clear misallocation of resources, the golf on TV the final insult … The way Contagion forced viewers to see every surface as a potential viral breeding ground rather than an neutral object, Night Moves makes it easier to view the everyday world’s physical components through perpetually, justifiably aggrieved environmentalist eyes.
…
Night Moves has a hint of a repeatedly disenchanted activist’s understandable bubbling-under stridency while adding to Reichardt’s gallery of would-be liberal American citizens navigating a hostile landscape already shaped and perhaps permanently ruined by those who came before.

Reichardt:

What should anybody be doing right now? No answer was discovered in the making of the film for that question.

by ·Comments Off on Fear Itself (2015, Charlie Lyne)

“I can still get a fair way into a film and not know when the fear will come, or where from.”

One last SHOCKtober entry. The one-two punch of 31 and Neon Demon almost murdered the season prematurely, but I decided not to give in to despair. This was a supercut of horror films – including some interesting less-horror choices like Code Unknown and Post Tenebras Lux and Gravity – with a moving voiceover essay about fear and death in both film and real life.

Uzumaki:

by ·Comments Off on The Neon Demon (2016, Nicolas Winding Refn)

Feels like it wants to be Mulholland Drive-ish, as young beautiful Elle Fanning arrives in the L.A. fashion business and experiences nightmarish visions before she’s eaten alive by her competitors. Dialogue delivered in weirdly silent rooms – I was expecting more keyboardy soundscapes, and maybe that would’ve helped get me on the wavelength of cool horror and deep mystery the movie seemed to think we were on together.

Elle is the Fanning from Super 8 and The Boxtrolls (older sister Dakota is the Fanning from Night Moves, War of the Worlds and Coraline). She arrives in town with her photographer friend, Karl Glusman from Love – another lethargic, sex-minded movie I had to struggle to keep from turning off. Elle meets makeup artist Jena Malone (the girl Donnie Darko likes) and a couple of evil models, gets work with famous photog Jack, and avoids her awful landlord (a miscast Keanu Reeves).

M. Sicinski:

Neon Demon is an inert object, mostly comprised of color-saturated tableaux and walking-dead, anti-psychological “performances” … Much like Matthew Barney’s films, The Neon Demon delivers in chunks and slabs, but never seems cognizant of cinema as a time-based art.

by ·Comments Off on The Wailing (2016, Na Hong-jin)

Bloody mess (in both bad ways and good) of an occult horror movie. I missed Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser and The Yellow Sea – finally checking him out for SHOCKtober this year. Lead policeman Jong-Gu (Kwak Do-won) is round-faced and dim and quite bad at his job, like Song Kang-ho’s character in The Host crossing over into Memories of Murder. He investigates a local family murder which is eventually blamed on “some fucked-up mushrooms,” and it seems like his incompetence is gonna be played for laughs until another family is killed and then his own daughter Hyo-jin starts showing the signs of possession that the other murderers displayed.

Jong-gu and his partner torment a Japanese man who recently moved in (Jun Kunimura of Chaos, Audition and Kill Bill), illegally searching and destroying his property. When the Japanese man’s dog is killed and he’s chased almost to death through the woods I started to feel bad for him, but then again he’s got a photo wall of the recent killers and victims at home, and turns out to be an evil ghost. There’s a mysterious woman who may also be a ghost, a showy shaman (Hwang Jung-min of A Bittersweet Life), naked cannibals and blood-eyed zombies, and the police all seem outmatched. Oh, and someone gets struck by lightning. I’m not always sure which parts were plot twists, and which parts were just me not being able to follow where the horror is supposed to be coming from now.

D. Ehrlich:

Demented occult nonsense that gradually begins to feel less like a linear scary story than that it does a ritualistic invocation of the antichrist … The Wailing boasts all the tenets and tropes of a traditional horror movie, but it doesn’t bend them to the same, stifling ends that define Hollywood’s recent contributions to the genre . The film doesn’t use sound to telegraph its frights a mile away (there are no jump scares, here… well, maybe one), nor does it build its scenes around a single cheap thrill. On the contrary, this is horror filmmaking that’s designed to work on you like a virus, slowly incapacitating your defenses so it can build up and do some real damage.