Spy/hunter Fassbender gets five potential spy/leakers together (including his wife Cate Blanchett) and pits them against each other, while he and Cate carry on like a low-budget True Lies. The rare movie where the polygraph test is the best scene. I accidentally just watched Naomie Harris’s earliest and latest movies about havoc caused when an internal science experiment is freed from its lab.
Back to basics, just Joel and Joshua Burge alternately amusing themselves with fire or glowsticks and driving each other nuts in the woods. As their growing tension and weird vibes and the movie’s awesome poster indicate, the end goal is a double suicide, but squirrely Joel can’t follow through, so his head is exploded by a supercharged firecracker while Josh gets a half-hour coda of legal issues and regret. Really messed-up movie, a perfect addition to the Joel/Josh canon.
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Ludovico Testament (1999)
Best-case scenario of early homemade short films. This is exactly the sort of lifesize stop-motion that I would’ve made in my VHS-cam days if I’d seen The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb the year it came out instead of eight years later.
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Gordon (2007)
Gordon takes his kid to the playground and dies unexpectedly, then comes back a few months later as a zombie, his face deteriorated but his suit still in nice shape. Family has moved away, and nobody can stand to look at him, so he bums around town to Beck’s “He’s a Mighty Good Leader,” his teeth and fingernails falling out, then returns to his grave.
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Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes (2020)
Conceptual comedy, Joel calls all the industry people in his phone to ask how the quarantine is going for them, then doesn’t listen to their responses and hangs up in a hurry. The joke is on Alex Ross Perry, who gets called four times, each time listing him as the director of a different film.
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Unemployees (2023)
Dani and Kandy are slacker idiots with an ill-thought-out plan to get jobs and be fired then collect unemployment. After stints in an office, a factory, and a cafeteria (all filmed at Grand Valley U in Allendale MI) they take a field labor gig and discover that money does grow on trees – but trees that cause horrible skin infections.
This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how meaningful are their relationships and how many times we’ve saved/endangered the world, the highlight is two nearly wordless action scenes in vehicles. In the submarine I think Cruise says one thing (“torpedo tube”), and the plane fight gets better when Esai stops supervillain-monologuing.
“They gave me a blank check as long as I don’t go over budget.” The aviation safety season – Nathan discovers a problem that only he can solve, bringing some Nathan For You energy into The Rehearsal. He thinks social difficulties between copilots prevents them from speaking up when they see something wrong, and aims to solve this by having pilots role-play during flights. Along the way he starts a game show inside the fake airport he built, then the fake crew of his fake singing competition start covertly giving fake therapy to the real pilots. “I’ve always felt that sincerity was overrated.” He goes to Colorado with a couple of cloned dogs, rehearses one dog to live the life of his original (has Fielder read The Boys From Brazil?) then Nathan speed-runs episodes from Captain Sully’s life to understand his mind (always claiming he wants to help others then turning back on himself). “I began studying footage of other comedians who went before congress” – he shows a fake senate his pilot dating reenactments, but not even HBO’s lobbyists and the help of an autism center (who all but directly state that Nathan is obviously autistic) can get him into the real senate, so he has to become a licensed pilot himself and fly a planeload of people safely around in a circle. I’m not sure what any of this proves, but every episode succeeded in being more bonkers than the last.
I’ve gotta stop sitting so close to the screen – between the closeness and the frantic editing, I’m not sure how our small team survived when fifty vampires, who’ve been shown as lightning-quick and super-strong, bust into the house. Bold music throughout, and the music not just incidental but vital to plot and theme. I’d be interested in reading about influences, since it turns From Dusk Till Dawn to Django Unchained. A little too neatly tied together, with the late revelations of the twins’ Chicago adventure (not actually becoming rich gangsters but stealing big from two rival gangs then running away while the gangs blamed each other) and the tolerant local whites’ less-tolerant motivations, and each of the three main dudes meeting a woman at the same time, then those six being the main survivors. Mostly as good as advertised though, taking place in a single day, plus a delicious Buddy Guy postscript.
The near-white girl is Hailee from True Grit, and the other Michael Jordan’s woman played the wife in His House… we saw a preview for the evil white vampire’s next horror movie 28 Years Later… the girl Sammy likes will supposedly star in a Running Man remake… I never recognize Lola “Gemini” Kirke, who doesn’t look enough like her sister… the Chinese woman who must have died in that climactic rampage is in the new Alma & The Wolf… the doorman was in Miracle at St. Anna and plays Raphael in the recent Ninja Turtle things… plus Delroy Lindo on harmonica.
We regret that we couldn’t stay for all 24 hours of The Clock in Minneapolis some years ago, so while in Boston it was easy to catch all 60 minutes of Doors, which plays on a loop with no beginning or end. People from classic movies (with some modern-auteurist exceptions: Phantom Thread, Lost Highway) enter doors, then we cut to the opposite angle and they’ve transformed into somebody different. I thought the cuts were going for maximum contrast (old person to young, man to woman, black/white to color), and I thought he was purposely choosing cheapie Brit dramas so we’d never recognize a clip/actor, but every time I thought I’d found a pattern he’d switch it up. Very funny to me that it’s 95% G-rated harmless scenes (some light gunpoint threats) except for the two minutes a class of small children was being ushered in, then it switched to Fire Walk With Me / Scream horror, and the kids were ushered right back out. We also saw Sara Cwynar’s Alphabet exhibit and her giant awesome mural in the lobby, where the desk people told me it’s pronounced “swinn-arr”. Katy watched Rose Gold with me when we got home, and felt eight minutes was long enough so she didn’t want to check out Glass Life afterwards.
After the tenth straight minute of split-screen I realized that Perry must’ve seen the Velvet Underground doc, thought it’d be funny to the same for Pavement, then the whole thing got out of control.
It brings me no pleasure to report that the weird gay french movie is 10x better than the Cannes-winner. I really don’t mean to be contrarian, this only makes it harder to predictably find movies I’ll enjoy.
Jeremy the French Bill Hader-via-James McAvoy (actually Felix Kysyl, Gorin in the Hazanavicius Godard movie) is from Toulouse, returned to the small town where he used to live for a baker’s funeral. Jer stays with widow Catherine Frot (of the Belvaux trilogy), and his presence bristles deep-voiced Hermit Walter and especially the late baker’s Big Quinquin-looking son Vincent. The Vincent rivalry gets heated to the point that Jeremy ends up killing him with a rock in the woods, burying him in a shallow grave, which doesn’t seem great for the future of his relationship with V’s mom.
Enter Phillippe, the best movie priest of the year, who becomes a co-conspirator and helps Jer, who’d been making up new night-of-the-crime stories whenever his old ones got busted. Phillippe says that murder is fine, and achieves his goal of getting naked in bed with Jer, this scheme being more complex and better thought-out than the murder conspiracy itself. If I’m not making it sound strange enough, there’s a cop who keeps sneaking in at night and trying to get Jer to confess to the crime in his sleep.
Priest, Widow Martine, and Unwitting Widow Annie:
from his Film Stage interview:
I think that I work a lot on emotions and I work a lot on questions that I want to provoke in the spectator. But I always have the feeling, by the time the film is over, that I’ve somehow missed something … by the time I get to the stage where we’re at now, I don’t quite remember what my intention was from the beginning … I’m not sure that what I even had intended was doable or realizable from the start.
Celebrating Cannes week by watching last year’s winner, part of a Cannes strip-club double-feature. Annie dances for a Russian guy who looks like Rodrick, then agrees to marry him in Vegas so he can stay in the US, but he runs when his parents send two hapless thugs after them, and Annie is stuck with the thugs while they search, finally catching him back at the strip club with her rival Diamond. There’s a lotta sex and dance music in this. It stretches on forever, then she fucks Igor, and that’s the ending?
