by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022, Chad Stockfleth)

Memorial screening for Will Hart. You go your whole life without hearing Olivia Tremor Control in public, then you put on the new Ted Danson show a few minutes after watching this doc, and “The Opera House” plays over the closing credits. One of those docs (see also: The Sparks Brothers) where there’s such a wealth of interesting archival material and diversity of cool music that you can’t help but make a compulsively watchable movie out of it all.

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.

by ·Comments Off on The Temple Woods Gang (2022, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Shadowless Tower (2023, Zhang Lu)

I thought this would be more mysterious and experimental… I think I heard about this movie around the same time as John Smith’s Black Tower and got them mixed up?

Xin Baiqing is a Beijing food critic who is just like me: a middle aged guy who likes to drink and is pretty boring but with a few quirks that only make him seem offputting to people. He has a sister and a daughter and an estranged dying wife and an ex-con dad (Horse Thief director Tian Zhuangzhuang) who the family pretends doesn’t exists but who bikes 300km to see them in secret on their birthdays. Xin hangs out with food photographer Huang Yao, plays at being her boyfriend, then her father.

by ·Comments Off on Megalopolis (2024, Francis Ford Coppola)

Once again an online review affected the viewing experience, and I spent much of this movie giggling at its “Cheesecake Factory aesthetic.” I had a good time watching this with my bottle of Coppola wine, and since it is (more or less) the American Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, I’m going to use the same approach and just post the notes I took while watching it:

Julia out partying, someone who isn’t her dad picks her up, Claudio is hanging round her, ah her dad is Mayor Cicero, she can see Adam’s time stoppage
LOL at the dialogue
Laurence tells us an empire begins to die when its people no longer believe in it, uh oh
Rich banker Crassius’s son is Claudio, those girls are his sisters the Claudettes, he’s hot for ’em
Mayor’s daughter Julia is a big part of this

Vesta wears invisible dress Cesar invented
Doddering super-rich uncle Voight is marrying Wow, is Cesar’s uncle
Shia is good in this, schemes to show vid of Cesar in bed with girl singing about her purity pledge, she might be good singer but you gotta be a good lipsyncer to be in a movie

No characters in this movie, just narrators – the dialogue is all terrible but the lighting is very good, so we’ll call it even.
During Driver’s scandal he loses his time control
He gets new girl preg, he’s married to Sunny
Only Shia and Adam are thriving here

Mayor will confess to hiding Cesar’s wife’s body if Cesar leaves the preg daughter
Tattoo guy sends a 12-yr-old to assassinate Cesar for Claud
Wow and Shia plot to take over the bank from Voight
So the movie is about rival family members of the world’s richest banker both trying to become populist revolutionaries
Movie bad.

by ·Comments Off on Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)

I think the notes I took while watching this can stand on their own:

Girl Fishball’s prost mom gets beaten to death
He’s trying to save up for a fake ID but gets into gambling with the boys
Music is too big but maybe that’s the 1980s setting
This is 1986?

Raymond is the “employed cop” (?) of Detective vs. Sleuths
Cyclone’s doctor is looking for dead Jim’s son to kill his whole family
Chau is the doc, Lui killed his family, Jim was Lui’s killer who seems modeled after Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of NY
Jim is Koo’s Throw Down costar

Boss Tiger lost an eye to Jim, Boss Chau his family, and Cyclone killed Jim
Cyclone was secret friends with Jim and smuggled his family out of town after killing
Our guy is Jim’s son, whitehair doc Chau is pissed
They spent a billion dollars recreating the neighborhood for this film, but needed these guys to play different ages in the 1960s and 1980s and threw some talcum in their hair
Gravity-defying fights, not going for realism despite the kowloon recreation

AV is guy with underwear mask
It uses the godzilla (??)
They all butcher each other while Lok is incapacitated
Some of the goofiest action moves since Dragon Inn
Almost everyone is dead and the cops have Lok

Sammo’s sunglasses guy King uses this fight to move in and take over
King kills his boss Sammo after killing Cyclone
King’s deal is that he is physically indestructible
The action is too choppy, but decently cool
I saw a lady for a few seconds, must have been a mistake