by ·Comments Off on Ren Faire (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

I should’ve done this in a TV roundup with The Sympathizer since I have nothing to say about it, but too late, I already created the post. Long doc about Texas Renaissance Festival founder “King” George’s half-hearted attempts to delegate and hand off power (and to date young women with natural breasts at the olive garden) and the employees and would-be successors whom he keeps screwing over. Lance shoots the hell out of it. Good enough to make us consider his sperm doc.

Lance is aware of the artifice and performance, wishes for a “documentary-subject performance” oscar in his Vulture interview.

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Days (2023, Wim Wenders)

Some unimportant details:
– He always plays classic rock hits in the car, and we’ll see the song start and end, but his trip has been edited down visually, so the music and the picture run on different timelines, Dunkirk-style.
– He won’t sell his cassettes for a coworker, but lends the guy all his cash then has to sell a cassette anyway to afford the gas home.
– I know the movie title references the Lou Reed song he plays in his apartment, but then is his niece Niko’s name a Nico reference?

Bilge Ebiri has got the important stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Hit Man (2023, Richard Linklater)

Just as charming as people are saying it is. I still don’t like Glen Powell enough to watch his Twister sequel. The girl was in the Irma Vep remake, and the cop who Glen replaces as a fake hit man also starred with him in Everybody Wants Some. I love the ending so much, the movie letting them get away with murder then saying ha ha, it’s just a movie.

by ·Comments Off on In a Violent Nature (2024, Chris Nash)

Monster follow-cam, like if Ben Russell made a horror movie. Maybe this was an experiment in distancing and de-emphasis – like, what if a crazed zombie stalking and slaughtering a group of sexy young people was just one of many things occurring in the life of the forest. Looking for his stolen locket, our zombie monster starts by killing the wrong guy, an asshole trapper. Strange to see this kind of thing with no music score. Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t afford anyone who could pull off groovy stalker-tension music. They didn’t manage to write or deliver any good dialogue so maybe they should’ve done without that too. This movie’s major outcome was getting me to immediately rewatch The Cabin in the Woods, and it’d been too long since I’d last seen that, so, thank you.

by ·Comments Off on Shadow of Fire (2023, Shinya Tsukamoto)

Restaurateur turned post-WWII desperate prostitute Shuri calls a kid “stray dog” right after I’d been thinking of the movie Stray Dogs because of the condition of her apartment walls. She takes in wannabe-customer Hiroki Kono and our lead kid – three fuckups acting like a makeshift family – though I didn’t realize the kid was the lead until the adults blew up at each other and the kid left to survive elsewhere.

Next he falls in with Mirai Moriyama, inheritor of Shin Kamen Rider‘s legacy. Mirai is excited that the kid has a pistol and enlists him in a sketchy revenge plot against his ex-superior officer. As with Kitano I’m catching Tsukamoto’s latest after missing his last two – one of which was also a late-WWII desperation drama. Unlike Kitano, it seems he’s settled down into prestige-drama mode, with only subtle hints of the handheld hopped-up maniac who made his early films.

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Bath (2024, Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz)

Woman throws a baby down a waterfall. Later, Agnes (star of The Dreamed Ones) marries Wolf, and I don’t approve of their traditional wedding game of chicken-whacking. As an outsider from a neighboring town with apparently very different customs, Agnes is the most awkward of the local girls. Lot of slooow pans and slooow pulls into frame, and scenes always cut right after something curious happens. Wolf won’t have sex with her, and his mom (a regular of this film’s producer Ulrich Seidl) keeps bossing Agnes around – she becomes depressed so the “doctors” put leeches on her and poke her with pins. The neighbor killed himself so they toss him on the bone pile – Agnes avoids his fate by killing a random boy. If people in Olden Times didn’t desire to continue living, the best route to heaven was to kill some kid, confess to a priest, then be executed in town square. This is explained by an intertitle before the end credits, alas too late, since we just watched a boring two-hour movie illustrating the same thing.

Unhappy couple:

Lenz in the boneyard:

by ·Comments Off on Kubi (2023, Takeshi Kitano)

I skipped the last couple Kitano movies – rude behavior to the great man after he gave us the commercial self-destruction trilogy – and am now delighted to discover that he’s still got it. This is an epic 1500’s warlord power-struggle story with about fifty characters, and he nearly keeps it to two hours without making the plot confusing (it really helps that they introduce and re-introduce everyone with onscreen titles). Plus it’s great-looking, fun, and full of beheadings and other gruesome stuff, and gleefully anachronistic – even not knowing any Japanese I can tell they’re conversing more like yakuza than samurai. But I didn’t realize until the name Hattori Hanzo came up that it’s based on real history – all these characters have wikipedia pages.

Kubi means “neck”:

Kitano plays Monkey, the most degraded of the warlords until his plans and alliances come together at the end. He’s scheming with bald Hidetoshi Nishijima (Drive My Car guy, Creepy cop), who’s having a secret affair with rebel-in-hiding Kenichi Endo (a major Miike guy). They’re working under/scheming against the current ruler Ryo Kase (an Outrage lead). It’d take all day to name the rest of them but I’ll note that both leads of Ichi the Killer are in here somewhere (psycho Tadanobu Asano plays a Kitano ally).

by ·Comments Off on Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022, Ethan Coen)

This predates Drive-Away Dykes but was withheld for a couple years until Jerry was safely dead, then slipped onto streaming to mostly poor reviews. As a doc it’s little better than a slickly-edited youtube mix of TV appearances. Some 80% of the runtime is music, and almost all the interviews are with Jerry himself, who’s particularly unenlightening about his own life and career, and absolutely full of himself. So, pretty poor by cinematic standards, but really excellent as a rock-doc (wall-to-wall music, mostly live versions, duets with Mickey Gilley, Tom Jones, Little Richard, and no celebrity talking heads). As a follow-up I spent July 4th the ideal way (reconstructing original Jerry Lee Lewis album tracklists by studying Bear Family CD box set liner notes).

In Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov calls it “as unambitiously amiable a timekiller as you might expect from Live Nation Productions” and says the doc “proceeds, in no particular thematic or chronological order I can discern, through the life and career of Lewis, as important a musician as he is appalling a human.”