by ·Comments Off on Longlegs (2024, Oz Perkins)

Agent Lee Harker (a Draculized Harper Lee, played by The Girl Whom It Follows) has a hunch that gets her partner killed, and instead of getting mad at her the FBI declares her to be psychic and puts her on the decades-long case of a phantom serial killer who convinces dads to murder-suicide their families. She eventually discovers tall pale T. Rex-fan Nicolas Cage, who smashes his own face while revealing that his accomplice was Agent Harker’s mom (Alicia Witt, Crispin Glover’s Hotel Room partner). Mainly I want to know why the agency’s forensics dept. confidently says that the killer (Cage) never entered the homes, when the long late explanation of mom’s participation shows the killer (Witt) entering all the homes. Directed by the grandson of Scarface’s boss, whose next movie might be an adaptation of the cover story of King’s Skeleton Crew and whose previous movies I can’t decide whether to watch or to 1/10th-watch.

This just in: Robert Rubsam in Mubi.

by ·Comments Off on Last Summer (2023, Catherine Breillat)

Léa Drucker – coworker-friend of In My Skin, aging-backwards wife of Incredible But True – absolutely nailing her star turn here. Appropriately, as a kid she also appeared in Kung Fu Master. Her husband (Adele’s dad in Passages) brings home his estranged teen son Theo for the summer, and he’s a real asshole. When Léa discovers he burgled the house and stole her bag, she says she won’t tell if Theo acts like part of the family and drops the hostility. But he drops too much hostility and soon he’s having sex with his stepmom. Of course they’re caught, though it’s not clear at the end what the husband believes happened. Remake of recent Danish movie Queen of Hearts. Breillat joins Assayas among French directors who think adding Sonic Youth music will make their movie cooler (they’re right).

Breillat in Decider:

I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not interested in the question of the age gap. I am an entomologist. I look, and I represent things as they are, as naturally as I can … I was telling Léa, who’d never done an intimate scene of this kind before, that I have less interest in bodies than the nudity of the face. And I told her, don’t be mistaken, there’s much more intimacy in allowing the camera in close-up on your bare face. That’s what cinema is trying to get at, in the end. All I film is intimacy, and it’s all on the face.

At rogerebert.com she says her film is less moralistic than the one she’s remaking:

In terms of what happens for Léa’s character, it was very important that there be no kind of predatorial seduction [on Anne’s part, as is the case in the Danish film] – it needed to be something that happened to her in a moment that she’s caught off guard. She sets up a pact with him – when she says, “I won’t tell your father [that you robbed his house] if you agree to integrate [with] the family,” it’s at that moment that she signs her death warrant as a happily faithful wife. In that scene, he still looks very childish, quite chubby – he’s not beautiful in any sexualizable way – but at some point, he looks up at her, and suddenly the camera comes in very close, his face gets thinner, and his features get sharper, and he looks at her like a woman. That gaze is what she’s eventually going to succumb to because it’s a gaze that is hard to resist – it carries the promise and the potential to make oneself younger again.

by ·Comments Off on Trap (2024, M. Night Shyamalan)

M. Night sometimes likes to be grim and serious or to talk earnestly and endlessly about his big ideas, and sometimes he likes to weave murderous tension into scenarios so ridiculous they border on hilarious – a mode I far prefer, which is why this movie joins Old Beach and Lady in the Water among my favorites.

Josh Hartnett never better, not even in Valley of the Gods. With M. Night’s daughter as Lady Raven, Scott Pilgrim’s drummer Alison Pill as the mom, Jonathan Langdon as the merch guy with the outstanding dialogue, Rob Lowe’s wife from Stir of Echoes 2 as a fellow parent at the show, Bill & Ted 3‘s Kid Cudi as the guest star, and trap veteran Hayley Mills as the police psychiatrist.

by ·Comments Off on The Kid Detective (2020, Evan Morgan)

Thought this would be a low-stakes entry in the Inherent Vice / Under the Silver Lake / Big Lebowski burnout detective genre, and it mostly is, but with a biting ending as Evil Principal Peter MacNeill (sheriff of A History of Violence) reveals that detective Adam Brody’s new client is the daughter of his long-missing receptionist. “Now they’ll know what we were capable of.”

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2024

The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.

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Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.

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Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).

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Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.

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Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

by ·Comments Off on Subject (2022, Hall & Tiexiera)

A doc about docs and their fallout. The women who were teens when The Staircase was made about their family feel doubly exploited when The Staircase 2 comes out… a star of Hoop Dreams was one of the few participants covered here to profit from the film’s receipts and merch… Bing Liu’s family therapy in Minding the Gap somewhat backfired… Capturing The Friedmans guy wants to escape the shadow of the movie. Sometimes we’re just catching up with a subject later (The Wolfpack). After each example, a small team of scolds points out that there is no way to ethically create or consume art.

by ·Comments Off on The Bikeriders (2023, Jeff Nichols)

Tom Hardy is the absolute best as a family man whose mind got warped by a TV viewing of The Wild One so he adopted a Brando voice/pose and formed a motorcycle club that provided a real good time for a group of empty-headed friends before it got too big for him to control. Jodie “The Last Duel” Comer is our entry point, being interviewed by Mike Faist (who has nothing to do here) about her relationship with Elvis Butler and the changing forms of the club.

Nichols’s dream project based on a photo book about the real club. Feels kinda flat, sorta what’s-the-point – if you’re going to make Rumble Fish then don’t hold back, just make Rumble Fish. At least it’s smart enough to cast The Bonnie Man as a bartender and to end strongly, and of course it’s better than Ferrari. Note that my options tonight were this Mike Faist movie where two sporting men who are deeply in love keep getting challenged, or Challengers.

some riders:
Michael Shannon, the director’s lucky charm
Damon Herriman (Charles Manson) as Hardy’s right-hand man
Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) wants to quit and become a cop
Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel) shoots Hardy and takes over
Happy Anderson (The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) must have been the first challenger

other riders: Blueface from The Nice Guys, Karl Glusman of Noe’s Love, Boyd Holbrook of Dial of Destiny, and Norman Reedus of Cigarette Burns.

by ·Comments Off on Red Rooms (2023, Pascal Plante)

Coolly obsessive Kelly-Anne camps outside the courthouse every night to attend a serial killer’s trial, along with very-uncoolly obsessive Clementine, who’s crushing on the killer. K-A bonds somewhat with Clem, as much as she can bond with anyone, since she’s a probable psychopath and we’re given little clue about her motivation. Her modeling job and her online gambling are all put at risk by the case, as she becomes a newsworthy attendee then a secret participant. She maybe has a change of heart at the end or maybe had a master plan all along, hard to tell. I thought of Serpent’s Path, with its torture/murder video producers destroying each other while manipulated by an outsider.

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)

Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.

Shot:

Reverse shot:

“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.

From Bamako to Dead Man: