by ·Comments Off on Flipside (2023, Christopher Wilcha)

Introducing Chris with clips from his film The Target Shoots First, he fast-forwards his life since, getting to keep working behind the camera while starting a family. But to his regret, “I direct tons of commercials, hundreds of them, but I don’t finish even one of my own films.” So, he starts shooting Flipside Records where he worked when he was a teen, but fortunately that’s not the movie, since we’ve got enough record store docs. Instead he stitches together his partial docs into a Cameraperson meta-doc about lessons from human experience, and the art life. Upsetting to learn that I once lived 20 minutes from Flipside – of course I couldn’t drive then, so we never explored further than Boonton.

Wilcha in interview with Vikram Murthi, whose enthusiasm got me to watch this:

[The Target Shoots First] was made at CalArts, on those machines and with the help of my mentors who would watch cuts. A lot of these people were serious artists — like, for instance, James Benning. His advice to me at one point was, “Make 60 one-minute sequences,” which is so James Benning.

Vadim Rizov:

When, early on, Wilcha shows that cult TV icon Uncle Floyd is a regular crate-digger [at Flipside], I flashed to my only real reference point for him, David Bowie’s “Slow Burn” from 2002’s Heathen (no contrarianism intended, one of my favorite Bowie albums). An hour later, Wilcha drops the song as performed live in concert, not cutting away for over two minutes as my heart briefly stopped at this unexpected treat.

“I always had this feeling that the world was gonna forget, and that I was somehow in charge of remembering.”

–
Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro (2015)

Funny, when Wilcha talks about never finishing a documentary since Target, this road-trip stand-up doc never comes up. Sure he’s a co-director, but he’s got other Flipside/This American Life crew members, so it seems like a Wilcha joint. Documents Tig’s tour with Jon Dore (star of movie The Pickle Recipe) to houses, farms, and other venues proposed by fans.

by ·Comments Off on Juror #2 (2024, Clint Eastwood)

Clean-cut white family man Nick “Steve” Hoult pulls jury duty (in Savannah GA, so not quite a rural juror). He hears the story of Problematic James (Super 8 kid Gabe Basso) murdering his girlfriend (the director’s own daughter), and suddenly Hoult realizes that maybe he hit the girl with his own car when he was out not-drinking after an emotional day. Out of guilt he tries to 12-angry-men the jury into acquitting, then after consulting his lawyer friend Kiefer, he tells his pregnant wife that he will Protect Our Family and tries to 12-angry-men the jury into convicting.

Stressed-out Hoult:

DA Toni Collette is running for office and wants this to be an open-and-shut case, but ex-cop juror J.K. “J/K” Simmons thinks she hasn’t investigated well enough and starts sniffing around until he’s kicked off the jury and replaced with an alternate. The throughline is professionals getting into lazy ruts and missing details that don’t fit the easiest story. Toni’s redemption arc is to be dissatisfied with victory and putting in the extra work to track down Hoult. Not a showy film, letting the script and actors carry the drama, though crosscutting between the defense and prosecution during the opening arguments was cool. The defense lawyer was in the Devilevator, other jurors whose names I caught include a boys club guy from Bojack, the purple lady from Logan Lucky, Leslie Bibb of Midnight Meat Train, and a stoned kid from the recent Halloween remakes.

by ·Comments Off on Godzilla Minus One (2023, Takashi Yamazaki)

I get that in today’s marketplace you’ve gotta reboot everything at least once per decade, but it’s a shame to churn out new reboots so soon after the superior Shin Godzilla. This is as talky as the Anno, but some cheesy shit from the director of Parasyte. What’s funny is this movie stops every 20 minutes so our hero (coward would-be-kamikaze Shikishima, survivor of Godz and war, played by the voice lead of Your Name and Summer Wars) can have a trauma breakdown, while Hideaki Anno, who invented trauma breakdowns, never did this in Shin.

He shacks up with a neighbor whose kids died in WWII bombing (she’s the great Ruri-Ruri from Shin Kamen Rider) and gets work as a minesweeper, until Godz returns. They blow up a mine in its mouth, but it has hyper-healing abilities and nuclear-blast-attack, which it uses to destroy a battleship. When the wild-haired doctor’s plan to sink the lizard using bubbles(?) doesn’t work, our guy gets help from a mechanic who hates his guts (Munetaka Aoki of the new Serpent’s Path) then uses his plane-crashing skills to blow up the monster’s head. His not-wife, who’d apparently sacrificed herself to a nuclear attack to save him, escapes with minor injuries.

by ·Comments Off on Anhell69 (2022, Theo Montoya)

Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.

The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.

by ·Comments Off on Queer (2024, Luca Guadagnino)

Has its moments. It’s my own fault that I stopped reading Burroughs long ago and let the Cronenberg version take over my imagination. Daniel Craig’s love interest is Drew Starkey of the latest Hellraiser remake. Craig convinces the kid to go on a South America trip to find ayahuasca, but becomes messed up from drug withdrawls along the way.

Mike Leigh muse Lesley Manville protects the ayahuasca – that’s Lisandro Alonso in the background:

Bill Lee’s Space Odyssey finale:

by ·Comments Off on Happer’s Comet (2022, Tyler Taormina)

Wordless nighttime portrait of a restless town. Opens with rotting corn, ends with a rollerskate couple making love in the cornfield. An hour-long pillow-shot between Ham on Rye and the new Christmas Eve thing.

by ·Comments Off on Carry-On (2024, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Joey Gordon-Edgerton? – Of the Tetris movie, I guess? – is playing TSA Agent Joey while evil remorseless terrorist Michael Bluth threatens his disney-cute gf Sofia and Agent Deadwyler puts the clues together to help out. Upgrade star Joey Logan-Green is a fake cop who gets in a big Children of Men car-fight with the agent, Nanny‘s Sinqua Walls is a coworker who’s gotta get gotten rid of, and Son of Anarchy Theo is Bluth’s hit man. The tension of the useless guy getting coerced into helping blow up a plane is all on point, but the attempts at deeper characterization and psychoanalysis and Joey’s redemption arc only serve to drag the movie to the full two-hour mark. Lately everything reminds me of Red Eye, so why do I not simply rewatch Red Eye? Maybe the least-good Joey Gordon-Serra film I’ve seen (and I skipped the obviously bad ones). Closing credits are excellent.

by ·Comments Off on Spermworld (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

He’s outdone himself in camerawork and subject matter. Needs slightly less focus on megafather Ari, whose psychosis has already attracted other doc-makers. Finds an amazing source of cringe in having people read their text messages aloud.

Read: Mark and Rafa and Neil, but mainly the Filmmaker interview.

Lance:

I think there’s the bigger questions that the movie ended up becoming really about: What exists of me when I’m no longer here? All these people are chasing something bigger than themselves. They want to be bigger than life and feel in different ways that they haven’t achieved that sense of importance. I relate to that. That’s more or less why I make movies, right?