Paula Beer is in a car crash, losing her family, in front of the house of a family who lost their daughter/sister, so she naturally falls in with them.
If I was properly caught up with my Petzolds I’ve have seen the mom in Yella and The State I Am In.
Babybel:
If I’m following the story (lol), Young Mr. Diman (Yannick “brother of Jeremie” Renier) played Superspy John in a movie series, got recast after his movie vs. diamond Serpentik failed. Now older Connery-looking Mr. Diman (Fabio Testi of a Zulawski movie) is getting kicked out of his hotel after trying to pay with fake diamonds, and thinks Older Serpentik (Maria de Medeiros) might be living next door.
But really it’s just a fragmented romp of distilled genre pleasure. Maybe half dreamed/imagined (there’s a character who hypnotizes victims into believing they’re in a film). A surprisingly high number of Hellraiser-reminiscent scenes, what with the fishhook-haired woman raking people’s faces off, all the skin-cutting in closeup (sometimes with hooks), and fragments of victims’ exploded faces on the ground. Sicinski liked it.
Something is up with mirrors, and mom realizes the woman in the yard is her own confused, chicken-murdering self, or rather her suicidal ideation incarnate, and that she’s trapped in the mirror world, like if Us was 100x less interesting and featured Nosferatuan shadow-snatching. Yard Woman never seems to do anything, but all the pets are dead and everyone’s hurt and she’s spreading family discord, letting the days go by. Her first words are “how did I get here?” Mom saves the day by time-tunnelling into the gun locker(?). Cameo appearances: before dad’s fatal car crash they park outside a movie theater showing The Mirror Has Two Faces… and was that a Uneeda Biscuit canister in their shed?
Not sure if it was worth two whole hours just to see Ving Rhames revive I.B. Bangin’ (played by Paul Simon’s son, who exec-produced Pavements), but the movie also has other pleasures.
Mary Beth Hurt is the nurse who debriefs the patients, asking why they deserve help.
Hospital security guard Griss, who wears sunglasses and third-persons himself, has been in everything from Sankofa to the worst(?) Terminator sequel. The Wire‘s Kima and Omar get a minute of screen time each before they’re killed.
Cage and Arquette are both sleepwalking addicts, wearily observing the chaos of the city, until he takes decisive action by mercy-killing her life-supported dad. Cage’s haunting by a girl he couldn’t save is achieved by some Scorpion King-caliber CG face replacement. The dealer who gets fence-impaled was a Sunshine spaceman and the manic suicidal neighbor who Tom Sizemore maybe murders is pop star/NFL owner Marc Anthony.
Watched this in mid-Feb, not intending it as a Gene Hackman memorial screening, but here we are. Great detective plot, Gene a two-bit private eye who finds the missing girl a half hour into the movie then sticks around as new smuggling/murder plots continue to unfold, until the girl (Melanie Griffith a decade pre-Body Double) is dead, movie stunt coordinator Ed Binns (Sixth Angry Man) is dead after two crashes and trying to murder Gene, giggling stuntman Marv dead underwater, mechanic James Woods floating in the dolphin pool, stepdad John Crawford (DEI-enforcing mayor of The Enforcer) guilty possibly dead, and tough Florida girl Jennifer Warren, whom Gene and I were both really getting to like, head smashed by a plane. Side plot of Gene discovering his own wife’s affair (via an Eric Rohmer movie date) then trying to repair his marriage, which doesn’t go too well, as he keeps returning to this case. Matt Singer gets it, and Filipe points out that “everything plot related happens offscreen.”
Boy lives with an adoptive family of scam artists, the parents both Oshima regulars (she’s the criminal’s wife in Violence at Noon, he’s an officer in Death by Hanging). They earn money by having the kid and mom Curly-Sue passing cars then shaking down the drivers. This life doesn’t bring Boy happiness so he’s hoarding his allowance to afford a train ticket out of town, but the others catch up, and carry on until one of their crashes proves fatal and a suspicious driver reports them. Kind of a true-crime story, adapted from news stories, and predicting a bunch of Kore-eda films. The Boy is really good but his lines are so post-dubbed that it sounds like he’s a talking doll having his string pulled.
Boy didn’t act again, but grew up to be Morrissey:
Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours between discs. This began Wenders’ U2 era – they also did songs for Faraway, So Close and Beyond the Clouds and The End of Violence, and Bono wrote and produced the awful Million Dollar Hotel, beginning a drought during which WW couldn’t make a decent fiction film until (here’s hoping) 2023.
Sam Neill is our narrator writing a book about what happened after Claire left him. I thought there’d be some play between the real versions of events and the way he writes them, but no, he’s just following the story as we are and typing it up neatly so we don’t get lost. Claire is Solveig Dommartin, star of the two angel movies and Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die. She takes an abandoned road to avoid a traffic jam and crashes into a couple of thieves with bags full of money, beginning the road movie tradition of accumulating a cast of friendly characters. Next she’ll add tech fugitive William Hurt and original road man Rudiger Vogler as a bounty hunter. In various configurations they travel to Lisbon, Berlin, China, Japan, USA. Across the shabby chaotic cities of nuclear crisis 1999, WW nailed how annoying computer voices and graphics would be in our future.
It’s all very plotty, not a loose hangout piece like the earlier films with Vogler. That’s not a problem, just a different sort of thing, but when they settle down in Australia for part two, it becomes a problem. Hurt (“Trevor”) and Claire gerry their way through the desert clutching the airplane door she’s been handcuffed to, soundtracked by Peter Gabriel. I imagine Rabbit Proof Fence was a reference to this – also imagine that their character names are a shout-out to Stagecoach star Claire Trevor. When they arrive at Hurt’s family tech lab, the brisk travel plot abruptly stops and we get bogged down in the plot of transmitting brainwave images to Hurt’s blind mom Jeanne Moreau. Dad Max von Sydow (my second 1980s von Sydow this month) changes the focus of his project to dream capture, alienating the locals and the viewers. Neill keeps writing as Hurt and Claire lose their sense of waking reality and the movie turns to drug addiction metaphors (she goes through withdrawal when her dream-viewer runs out of battery). The gang starts to fall away and it all peters out, ending with a postscript of Claire taking a zoom call in space. Spotted in the credits: Michael Almereyda, Paulo Branco, Chen Kaige.
The Australia half is almost redeemed by this band:
Chico can dig it:
From the extras: Almereyda tried to write a draft. Wenders very interested in creating and distorting the HD images, a prototype technology at the time, and talks about being a music collector. “That was another reason why the movie had to be so long” – he wrote all his fave musicians asking them to write a futuristic song, thinking most would say no, then ended up with a ton of songs. He wanted an Elvis song he couldn’t have, so “I don’t know how it happened but” David Lynch produced a cover version.
Funny how this keeps happening but only to groups of 18 year olds. Opening setpiece here is a racetrack pileup that explodes into the stands. Our precog final-boy is darkhaired Nick (Bobby Campo, also star of a starvation deathmatch thing) with redhead gf Lori (Shantel VanSanten, went on to star in an Oregonian ghost movie), and their buddies: darkhair Janet (Haley Webb, who went on to Blonde) and cocky Hunt (Nick Zano also of a Joy Ride sequel). As per the formula, the kids also rope in a few randos from the first scene: ally security guard Mykelti Williamson (Don King in Ali), uninterested tampon mom Krista Allen (of Henry Rollins monster movie Feast), hapless mechanic Andrew Fiscella (of some Abel Ferrara movies), and antagonist nazi Justin Welborn (The Signal).
come on now:
That’s a lotta people, so let’s start killing ’em off. Nick dreams the deaths in advance, first as the lower-mid-tier CG opening scene and subsequently via appallingly-CG symbolic visions (“it seemed real,” he says after one of those). Mom catches a lawnmower-propelled rock to the face and the mechanic is jet propelled through a chainlink fence. They rescue Janet from being carwashed to death and George from suiciding, while Hunt gets his guts sucked out by a pool. After looking up the plots of the previous films they celebrate having broken the chain, but with a half hour of movie still remaining, uh oh. I don’t get how some cowboy surviving the crash then re-dying in hospital means they’re all in danger again, but now Nick has to save his friends from an exploding movie theater while fighting off a sentient nailgun… then they’re all simply smashed to death by a runaway truck. Good pacing, one long death premonition. Between parts 2 and 4, Ellis made Snakes on a Plane. The DP also did Trick ‘r Treat and the last three Resident Evil sequels, clearly a cool guy.
the moment I realized this must’ve been released in 3D:
Léa Seydoux is a famous TV newscaster, known for onsite foreign reports and for giving playfully confrontational questions to the president at home, lives with husband and kid in an insane performatively-rich house. At work she gives too much on-camera direction, saying “got that?” a half second after every speech – her segments must be a nightmare to edit. There’s a minor car crash (she rear-ends a motorcyclist) and a major one (her husband and kid plunge off a cliff), and every personal tragedy or professional fuckup is just another tabloid headline. She starts actually caring about the stories she covers, but the public image and end result is the same.
France will be seen next in the Cronenberg, her TV producer is in the brand-new Quentin Dupieux and her husband was in Personal Shopper. Doesn’t feel very Dumontian, except when accident victim Baptiste is around. It’s all very nice-looking (and with great music by the late Christophe) but a traditional media/celeb satire seems like small fries after Slack Bay.
France with producer:
France with husband:
