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.
Tag: 2020s
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.
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.
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
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.
Last Night in Soho (2021, Edgar Wright)
I came in expecting Baby Driver Wright, not Hot Fuzz Wright, so wasn’t disappointed. BDW has minor plot issues that become exasperatingly major in the last half hour, but at least three absolutely dazzling scenes per movie – instead of musical car chases, here it’s Thomasin “Leave No Trace” McKenzie dreaming Anya Taylor-Joy’s nightlife fifty years earlier, the two actresses swapping places in reflective surfaces.
At least I liked it better than rogerebert.com did:
Amid colorful, surreal kaleidoscopic reflections, a gaggle of morbid apparitions appear to attack Ellie. These ghosts elicit few frights due to their indistinguishability, and how often Wright deploys them. The ever-shrinking boundaries between Ellie and Sandy might be intriguing if the two were more connected beyond having the same address in different decades.
Just saw Anya’s charismatic pimp Matt Smith as a social worker in His House. Diana “Emma Peel” Rigg is Thomasin’s landlord, aka Anya herself all grown up and murderous. Other swingin’ 60’s actors: Rita Tushingham (The Knack) as Thomasin’s mom and Terence Stamp as a guy who hangs around whom she suspects of being the Old Pimp but is really just a doomed ex-cop. Michael Ajao (Attack the Block) is Thomasin’s over-the-top helpful love interest.
King Rocker (2020, Michael Cumming)
Hate-watched this Nightingales documentary on the plane, even though the Sparks doc was right there. Turns out this was made by a popular TV comedian named Stewart Lee, and half the movie (barely) covers the pre-Nightingales band The Prefects, then Nightingales mk I, then the hiatus and singer Robert Lloyd’s solo stuff, then Nightingales mk II. The other half is “hey everyone, it’s me, Stewart Lee, and I’m making this movie, look at me, making a movie.” He also laughs onscreen at his subjects’ quips even more than Scorsese did in Pretend It’s a City. Lee sits in a pub and gets Lloyd to tell a minor incident from his past career, then they repetitively, informally discuss the incident, then cut to someone else who was there at the time saying “oy, that’s not how I remember it,” repeat that formula ten times. Maybe five minutes of good music in the whole movie. Nightingales shared a member with The Fall, were heavily krautrock-inspired, went through a mid-80’s country phase – the band still seems worth checking out, too bad about the movie.
L-R: Pikachu, Lee, Lloyd:
“How do you want to be remembered? The film will leave a record of you.” Lloyd says his songs, which, yeah, are probably gonna outlast the doc. Unconfirmed whether Lee is wearing a GBV shirt in one scene, but I did spot a Waxahatchee poster. It’s perfect that Lee spends the whole movie comparing Lloyd to a King Kong statue that used to stand in the square, then when they track down the statue for an emotional finale, there’s rain on the camera lens. They cover Lloyd’s food writing gig, the fact that he makes more money from horse betting than from the band, and stage a table read of his mid-90’s failed TV pilot – I finally had to skip ahead during this part. When the closing credits hit I was writing down names of people who I’m mad at (turns out both directors have worked with Chris Morris), but the final scene under the credits was nice – a lipsynched music video, the only good scene.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020, Jim Cummings)
Charming little small-town murder-mystery, with plenty of sharp scenes and cool editing, cutting back and forth in time during each major incident. Tourist dies first after offending the locals, but that doesn’t set a pattern, and the savage wolf attacks get more gruesome (decapitation, dead baby) until a crazed taxidermist with a wolf suit is caught. The next movie by Cummings is already out, and sounds good.
The Family Force: Robert Forster, Riki Lindhome (Knives Out, Under the Silver Lake), and our fearless writer/director
A killer, but not The killer:
The main cop’s daughter has a LOVE WITCH poster in her room!
Mad God (2021, Phil Tippett)
A wordless stop-motion hell, resonant of the Quays and Bobby Yeah. A lone terranaut descends endlessly through a pitiless parade of horrors, guided by a crumbling map, apparently set on destruction of the core. It’s a mechanized hell, with rampant death of the half-human workers. Gruesome in every particular – even I was icked out by the surgery scene. Some maniac spent twenty years on this movie, and it shows.
EDIT: Watched this again at the Plaza… then again with Trevor.
EDIT DEC 2023: And again with blu commentary… he says it was inspired by Bosch and Bob Dylan.