by ·Comments Off on Hiruko the Goblin (1990, Shinya Tsukamoto)

After the relentless Tetsuo movies this one is going for an Obayashi contrast: demonic possession and rushing camera blur and bodily explosions amidst a medium-paced, brightly colored daytime plot with upbeat made-for-TV music. A few good stop-motion and matte painting shots, then after the initial goblin attacks the movie has lost its juice, and they’re just spraying flying spiders with a can of wd-40. Feels like a studio with a bland cursed-high-school story hired an edgy young filmmaker to helm, and each side brushed against each other’s limitations.

The goblin is hard to deal with, since people who see it tend to chop off their own heads. Student Masao has an exploding growth on his back, a Tsukamoto specialty. Disgraced Archaeologist Hieda (Yumeji / Mr. Katakuri) shows up at a high school with homemade ghostbusting equipment, summoned by a professor who then got Evil-Deaded by the goblin’s-eye camera. Masao and Hieda and the school janitor (the non-bald doctor in Dogra Magra) have to piece together the mythology and save the world from evil, I suppose.

by ·Comments Off on La Chimera (2023, Alice Rohrwacher)

Our guy Josh has a magical talent for finding tomb treasures, the camera Evil-Deading in a slow circle until he’s standing atop the frame then collapsing upwards. But Josh isn’t great at much else. He can’t seem to profit consistently off his skills, or tell who are his friends vs. who are trying to bury and murder him. Nice recurring visual, chasing his dead girl to the other side by following a string, and always good to see Isabella Rossellini as the late gf’s clueless mother.

by ·Comments Off on Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019, Jessica Sarah Rinland)

Sort of a process doc, focused on hands and objects (no faces are seen until the last ten minutes), partly documenting its own making (you hear claps for sound sync, direction to move action into camera view). I usually can’t figure out what they’re doing but I got when they traced the faint remaining pigment lines from ancient pottery and recreated the original design. Anyway the end titles (in reverse order) tell us exactly what we’ve been looking at.

Darren Hughes in Cinema Scope:

The film seems designed to ensnare viewers in the unspoken fetishistic pleasures of collecting, archiving, and displaying — the same pleasures that drive the economies of poaching and museum-building … Rinland has consistently used a number of formal techniques that have, in recent years, become associated with ASMR. [This film] is a comprehensive catalogue of triggers.

by ·Comments Off on The Mummy (1932, Karl Freund)

“How could you do that?”
“Had to! Science, you know!”

Historians/Archaeologists being uncareful with their findings, discover the mummy of Imhotep who was buried alive. These guys have fragile British minds, and one goes instantly mad when he sees the mummy walk away from the dig site. Unlike the Hammer version, the mummy doesn’t return as a silent grey-ragged monster but as a well-spoken Boris Karloff, who helps the remaining dudes and one of their sons figure out where to dig next. Karloff hypnotizes a hottie named Helen to make her into his immortal queen, but the other guys needlessly interfere after realizing Karloff is their lost mummy by watching flashbacks in a magical TV-pool.

Imhotep’s funeral procession as seen in the Flashback Pool:

The hottie was Zita Johann of Howard Hawks’s Tiger Shark. Her movie career was as short as Freund’s directing career – he had shot Dracula and Metropolis, and after stepping up for this movie he made Mad Love and a few others before returning to his cinematographer role. David Manners, our young hero nobody cares about, also played the hero nobody cares about in Dracula, and his dad was Arthur Byron, sadly unrelated to Mary Shelley’s buddy Lord Byron.

L-R: Byron, Johann, Karloff, Manners

by ·Comments Off on Call Me By Your Name (2017, Luca Guadagnino)

At the time I saw this, both movies playing the Ross were oscar-nominated period pieces starring Michael Stuhlbarg. I liked him as the Russian spy, but as an archaeology professor distracted by his work, he didn’t have as much to do here… until the end, when he gives a hell of a monologue and we realize he wasn’t as distracted as he seemed. I wouldn’t have gone to see the lazy sunny movie where the bored vacationing rich kid falls for an older boy but it kept topping critic lists and I loved Guadagnino’s last fast-cutting high-energy vacation movie, so was wondering how he’d play it this time. While nothing much was happening on the seduction front, teen idol Timothée Chalamet dating and dodging local girls, I nerded out over the editing style, still with the attentive cutting but making room for some lovely long takes. Meanwhile, Chalamet finally gets his older boy (Armie Hammer) and runs off with him for a couple days, then returns home a mess… Stuhlbarg monologue, a long stare into the fireplace, and the beauty of the damned thing snuck up on me.