Flora (Eve Hewson of Tesla) raises her shithead son Max with little help from his dad Jack Reynor. She tries to get the kid a hobby, fixes up an abandoned acoustic guitar, but he’s more interested in rapping over laptop beats so she takes online lessons herself with teacher Joey Gordo-Levitt. The movie’s trick of teleporting him out of the laptop and into the room during a camera move is a good one. The power of music brings everyone together yet again… if Carney keeps making these things, we’ll keep watching them. Once > Sing St. > Flora > Begin Again.
Tag: 2020s
Silent Night (2023, John Woo)
Speaking of John Woo… it would appear that he’s back. Slick transitions between scenes, locations, time periods as he sets up the dialogue-free story of Joel “kill-a-man” Kinnaman getting revenge for the death of his son. Half the movie is a training montage, as the sweater-wearing family man practices shooting and stunt driving and knives, and he’s still unprepared, as the first guy he kidnaps proves to be dangerously tough. Joel finds time for some normal vigilante work, gets his first couple of kills. Then he starts a Christmastime gang war and assaults the HQ of the head-tattooed supervillain. Gets very videogamey in the final assault, and Joel is belatedly joined by cop Kid Cudi. Tattooed guy was in a Liam Neeson disabled-guy revenge movie the year before, and Kinnaman played Neeson’s endangered son in Run All Night, so Neeson is the godfather of all revenge films now.
May December (2023, Todd Haynes)
Shot (digitally) with major grain, in Savannah/Tybee. Natalie Portman comes to visit the scandal-couple to prep for a role, portraying criminal wife/mom Julianne Moore. Portman learns how to wear the makeup and do the lisping voice, and seduce Charles Melton, and that might be all she learned.
Mad Fate (2023, Soi Cheang)
Catching up… I shouldn’t have watched this within a couple weeks of Detective vs. Sleuths. Johnnie To may be retired but his particular way of lighting street scenes lives on – writer, editor, and DP are all from Drug War, Blind Detective, and Romancing in Thin Air.
Bo from Sparrow is a twitchy guy trying to help people change their fates. His latest client leaves and is immediately murdered, witnessed by a pervert delivery boy whose hobby is killing CG cats, always pursued by a mustache cop. According to fate, Bo will go insane and the delivery guy will do a murder, so they team up to change the future. Then a bad-luck prostitute moves into the apartment building, looking like an excellent victim to both the delivery boy and the real killer whose bag of knives keeps changing hands. My second HK movie lately with scenes in a morgue, as Bo tries some spirit-transfer business, but tragically he ends up becoming an MPD psycho and getting locked up, as the cop retires young and the delivery boy learns to be kind to CG animals.
Belle (2021, Mamoru Hosoda)
DNF
High-school girl’s metaverse (in the facebook sense, not the spider-verse sense) avatar Belle is an instant-hit pop star, but the real girl is bitter and withdrawn, determined to use her internet fame to doxx other users. Belle runs into an infamous dragon-thing who is probably also a damaged high-schooler, maybe even someone she knows in real life. I don’t know because we put off watching the second half for so long that now neither of us feels like finishing it. Practically a sequel to Hosoda’s cool Summer Wars, but just too… high school.
Pacifiction (2022, Albert Serra)
Kind of a rambling movie. I waited until I had a comfy 3-hour night but should’ve broken it into two 90-minute screenings. Or chopped off the first hour, or the middle, or the last, who would notice. I’ve never much liked an Albert Serra movie, but every few years I get suckered by my beloved film critics into watching another one. At least there’s great color and precise framing, a new era for Serra.
White-jacketed De Roller runs a Polynesian club – this is Benoît Magimel from The Piano Teacher, having a big year, also starring in The Taste of Things and sporting an electric penis in Incredible but True. He’s trying to promote a casino, goes to an islander church and says he’ll destroy them if they don’t allow the locals to gamble. Usually he’s much more sedate, hanging with the scantily-clad club servers to unwind, chatting about the upside of genocide, concern about nuclear testing rumors. At least Neil Bahadur got it.
De Roller with (I think) writer Romane Attie:
Youth organizer Matahi:
I dunno what De Roller and Sergi López (Happy as Lazzaro, Pan’s Labyrinth) did to this Portuguese guy:
Past Lives (2023, Celine Song)
Pretty good movie, well-deserved star turn for Greta Lee. Inspired by the director being in the exact position of the opening scene, sitting at an NY bar between a husband and an old flame, wondering how she looked to outsiders.
The Killer (2023, David Fincher)
Michael Fassbender is a reportedly excellent assassin, but after his long, confident voiceover and setup, he botches the first job we see, hitting someone other than the target then escaping to find that his bosses are trying to erase him, getting to him through his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte of a bunch of Brazilian films Filipe did not like). Fass proceeds up the chain, killing according to personality – physical smashing through walls with “Brute” Sala Baker, cool chat with Tilda Swinton, bloodless faceoff with client Arliss Howard (a fellow film producer of Mank). Fass’s second spy-revenge action movie which I found enjoyable enough, nothing more (Nayman found more). This is the most I’ve wanted a movie’s soundtrack in a while (I mean the Reznor, but yes it’s also prompting a Smiths re-listen).
Killer in Florida:
Since The Social Network, he’s seemed dead-set on making incredibly detailed films about stupid things. As is so often the case these days, we cannot be certain whether The Killer is just a lunkheaded, self-important project or whether it is a film about lunkheaded self-importance. Based on the reviews I’ve read, one’s appreciation of The Killer seems to be directly proportional to the extent that the viewer believes it’s a comedy. But even then, how are we to take the jokes that don’t land?
Across the Spider-Verse (2023, Dos Santos/Thompson/Powers)
With the frantic pace of the first film and my useless writeup, I worried we wouldn’t know what’s going on in this movie. But it’s just Spider-man, dealing with his usual Spider-man teenage problems while also trying to prove himself to the interdimensional society of Spider-men who say Miles only became a Spider-man through infinite improbability when a spider from Universe 42 warped into his version of New York. Attempts to save the universes from a Jason Schwartzman-voiced Watchmen-looking portal beast, then the movie cuts off before the next battle, Miles and his buddies facing off against an Evil Miles who became Venom The Prowler. Looks somewhat less splendid and amazing than the first movie because we made the mistake of skipping it in theaters and watching at home.