by ·Comments Off on Petrov’s Flu (2021, Kirill Serebrennikov)

DNF*

Guy coughing in a packed bus admits to having the flu while a loud racist spouts off – pretty much the worst nightmare of 2021. He’s removed from the bus and given a rifle to execute some well-dressed people, returned to the bus, removed again by a bald cop in a hearse. A guy talking dirty to a child gets his teeth knocked out. A black-haired librarian (the Former Mrs. Petrov) goes Hellraiser-eyed and destroys a violent poet. I think it’s floating in and out of fantasy, displaying the worst parts of society – a dipshit Hard to be a God.

Some good single-take camera tricks, but I did not have the patience for this. After an hour I skipped rapidly through the rest – saw UFOs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a long stretch in black and white.

*I have rules about this sort of thing – if I only watched half a movie, I don’t mark it “seen” on the database, don’t log it on letterboxd, don’t write a blog post, etc… usually I’ll just mention it at the bottom of whatever I watched next, or in a round-up post. But I feel I should mark that hour I watched of Petrov’s Flu, since I never intend to finish it, and file it away somehow. Not gonna start watching the first halves of movies in order to get more posts in, also not gonna pretend this never happened. Setting a precedent, but who cares?

Librarian:

Romance!

Russia turned upside down:

by ·Comments Off on Zola (2020, Janicza Bravo)

Waitress/stripper Taylour “Zola” Paige joins new friend Riley Keough for a work/vaca trip to Tampa, not realizing the dude along for the ride is Riley’s pimp (Colman Domingo, Paige’s Ma Rainey costar). Instead of either participating or getting the hell out of there, Zola gets cut into the management side, negotiating Riley higher pay for her work. This all culminates in a fatal hostage situation caused in part by Riley’s suicidally dumb bf Nicholas Braun (of the Poltergeist remake), and our heroes survive mostly intact. I assume this is basically Spring Breakers, but with better music and based on a true story.

by ·Comments Off on Passing (2021, Rebecca Hall)

Seems like a pretty faithful adaptation of the 1929 novel, according to the wikis, right down to the ambiguous cause of Ruth’s fall from a high window at the end. Really well visualized by Hall (British actress, star of Christine) and acted by protagonist Tessa Thompson, husband Andre Holland, and frenemy Ruth Negga. Also the first movie I’ve watched at someone else’s house since Batman Returns seven years ago (unless we’re counting the cabin).

by ·Comments Off on Tick, Tick…Boom! (2021, Lin-Manuel Miranda)

The American Movie of the theater scene, guy spending years working on an epic that is never finished, then turns his own creative process into art instead. Andrew Garfield plays the guy who would later write Rent, Miranda stuffs the cast with theater people we didn’t recognize, and the whole thing is charming with good music.

Charles Bramesco called Garfield exhausting and said Larson’s “pre-success years play like fan fiction of his own life.”

This was chosen as a movie to please everyone at Thanksgiving, and it mostly worked out.
We also attempted to watch:

by ·Comments Off on In the Same Breath (2021, Nanfu Wang)

We don’t wanna sit around watching covid docs, but after her last movie, we trusted Nanfu Wang to make a good one. The initial hook is her Chinese/American family getting caught a world apart when lockdowns begin, but the family-reunion adventure-film doesn’t play out. Instead, she sends Chinese reporters into hospitals and on other missions, spends all day and night sifting through their footage and various social media posts, piercing the censorship veil to locate real stories of the virus’s initial spread, its early damage and the government’s control over the media, before flipping back to the U.S. to discuss the same kind of political spin doctoring and poor decisions here.

by ·Comments Off on The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson)

Back in theaters for this one. I love going into Wes movies with absurdly high expectations, because he always meets them. I’ll read the hater critics some other time – maybe they were looking for something more than an endless parade of favorite actors and impeccable production design, but I wasn’t. Much of the movie is in 4:3 black and white, and either my screening was over-matted or the titles appear at the extreme top and bottom of frame.

Bookending segments in the newspaper office, with editor Bill Murray alive in the first piece and dead in the second. Bicycle tour through the town of Ennui by Owen Wilson. Story 1 is relayed by Tilda Swinton, involving art dealer Adrien Brody patronizing imprisoned painter Benicio del Toro whose guard/model is Léa Seydoux (they get some actual French people in here sometime). I was least involved in the middle piece, about faux-May’68 student revolutionary Timothée Chalamet’s affair with reporter Frances McDormand. Then Jeffrey Wright is reporting on celebrated police chef Steve “Mike Yanagita” Park, who helps foil a plot by Edward Norton to kidnap chief Mathieu Amalric’s son.

Michael Sicinski (Patreon) also liked the Benicio story best:

By contrast, Anderson’s snotty riff on May ’68, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” succumbs to the director’s worst comedic instincts, essentially declaring that political desire is nothing more than sublimated horniness … The final segment, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” sort of splits the difference, although it is elevated considerably by a fine performance from Jeffrey Wright, channeling James Baldwin as a melancholy ex-pat uncomfortable with his journalistic distance. The story itself is mostly just a riff on The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s portrait of courtly civility as a bulwark against anarchy. But it’s Wright’s representation of honest inquiry, and humanistic curiosity, that makes it far less silly than it should be.

Watched again a month later, with Katy this time.

by ·Comments Off on Censor (2021, Prano Bailey-Bond)

Enid is a film censor (Niamh Algar, also of a Barry Keoghan drug dealer drama) with a set of strict rules, applying an even-handed scientific process to the banning of video nasties, then finding her life becoming one. It gets there gradually – the first death is almost an hour into the 83-minute movie. Hazy slow-mo traumatic flashbacks are not so good, the rest is fine, especially when a sleazy Michael Smiley shows up (she impales him on one of his own film awards). She ends up on a film set which is all a dream conspiracy. Didn’t totally work for me, but I appreciate postmodern takes on the schlocky horror movies more than people who revere the originals seem to.

by ·Comments Off on In The Earth (2021, Ben Wheatley)

I bailed on this after a couple scenes at Sundance, but only because I had work in the morning, not because I didn’t want to watch the rest. Still bugged by the new guy (Joel Fry of Paddington 2) being allowed into the lab unmasked before passing his array of pandemic-virus tests. He’s assigned a guide (folk-horror vet Ellora Torchia of Midsommar) and heads into the woods to do something or other, despite being bad at the outdoors, and hopefully run into his boss Dr. Wendell. There’s talk of underground network “like a brain” between trees, and later we’ll get a nice spore-releasing montage (the earth breathing) and ritual mushroom water – after A Field in England, it’s Wheatley’s second piece of mushroom art.

First they find Wendell’s ex Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen), who kidnaps them, then Wendell herself (Hayley Squires of Colin Burstead), who blasts the movie’s Clint Mansell score through tree-mounted speakers with accompanying strobe lights, and each tries to convince the newcomers that their ex is the crazy one. There’s a powerful ancient stone with a hole through it, and arguments over everyone’s intentions. Dr. Wendell claims both of the men were drawn towards her experiment when they contracted ringworm (a fungal infection: more mushrooms). When they finally enter the spore cloud, the movie goes psychedelic. Good pandemic movie – besides the plague in the cities, it is kinda about people going nuts in isolation.

Who’s crazy – mum?

Or dad?

–
And that’s it for SHOCKtober 2021. Final ranking:

1. Mad God
2. The Empty Man
3. Detention
4. The Devil’s Candy
5. Malignant
6. Office Killer
7. Final Destination
8. Parents

by ·Comments Off on Malignant (2021, James Wan)

I saw James Wan’s Saw and a few sequels, then slept on his sequel-spawning follow-ups for whatever reason, maybe the same sense of “anything popular can’t be good” that made me skip the Final Destination series. This one is inventive and completely loopy – and seems to invite sequels, though our hero is gonna get hella locked up after slaughtering an entire police station.

A research hospital in 1993 has a patient who drinks electricity and broadcasts its thoughts over radio. Then present-day Maddie has an abusive husband who conks her head against the wall and is later killed by unseen forces – the same forces that start hunting down the scientists from the opening scene, and tie up some random tour guide in an attic, all of which Maddie sees happening in a psychic daze. Maddie’s sister (of God Bless America) investigates dark family secrets while detective Shaw (of A Bread Factory) tries to help and detective Sasstalk (of She Hate Me) doesn’t help at all.

L-R: Shaw, Sasstalk, Sister, Maddie:

If you hadn’t used the movie title to piece it all together (I hadn’t), Maddie’s half-absorbed conjoined twin was awakened by the head injury and is taking over her body to do murders (and that’s their mom in the attic). I guess the twin’s radio-control mind-power gives it incredible fighting skills in her body (this is an upgrade to Upgrade).

The names in this movie’s cast are more upsetting than the horror creature. Maddie’s real name is Annabelle, and starred in Annabelle (but not as Annabelle) while Maddie’s sister’s real name is Maddie, and the dead husband played Mike Love in Love & Mercy.