Civil War union boys attempt to patrol out west. Non-period-accurate dialogue, the actors apparently just told to say whatever’s on their minds, it loses me whenever they speak religion or philosophy. I wondered with a half-hour left where this is all heading, and decided it’s heading nowhere and will have an open non-ending, and yup.

As far as movies where women don’t exist, this isn’t as good as Chevalier. The DP (who also wrote the music) uses some unusual lens, dark on the edges with blurry backgrounds, editor also works with the Dardennes.

Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!

Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)

This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.


Smile (2022, Parker Finn)

With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.


Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)

Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?


Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)

Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.


Men (2022, Alex Garland)

Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.


Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)

I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.


Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)

Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.


Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)

This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.


Cell (2016, Tod Williams)

Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).

Weirder and more pathological than expected. Yes I’ve seen In Bruges, but that starts out in a violent context while this is about gentle island people in 1923. We get a hell of a character from Brendan Gleeson, who abruptly wants to be left alone to write fiddle tunes, showing he’s serious by psychotically mutilating himself until he can’t play anymore. We get a sick payoff to Barry Keoghan finding a stick with a hook (“What would you use it for, I wonder… to hook things that were the length of a stick away?”), the loss of a great donkey, a shitty cop, some terrible loneliness, and a nearby civil war nobody seems to comprehend.

Three great actors (Nicole, Kirsten, Colin) plus Elle leading the up-and-comers. Colin is an enemy soldier brought to their boarding school for medical help, then as he recovers his strength, things get increasingly tense until he plays an ill-advised trick on Kirsten, and the women murder him with poison mushrooms.

Lovely movie, great twisted fun. I have few deep thoughts, because my post-film reverie was interrupted by the sight of a guy wearing a Battlefield Earth t-shirt – the novel, not the film.

After waiting years to watch this, it was finally pretty disappointing… even if the political/social criticism is on point, the movie felt slow and obvious. Former swimming champ Adam has worked at the same hotel pool for decades, along with buddy David (a miniaturized Danny Glover) and now his son Abdel. Adam pays off a local government dude to keep Adbel out of the civil war – we thought Dry Season took place post-civil war, but apparently this is a new civil war, which ended a few months before the film premiered in Cannes (winning third place to Uncle Boonmee and Of Gods and Men).

Parents and son at home:

A Chinese company buys the hotel, notes that there isn’t enough pool work to justify employment of these three men, so fires David and demotes Adam to gatekeeper. He claims he can’t afford to pay anymore – maybe true, or maybe he is mad about the job situation – so Abdel is quickly drafted and Adam gets his pool job back. All is well for a few days, then Abdel’s previously unseen pregnant girlfriend moves in, the town is evacuated as the rebels advance, and Adam goes off to an army hospital to kidnap his mortally wounded son and give him a river burial.

Adam was the baker from Dry Season, looking convincingly less weathered (or maybe it’s been too long and I’d forgotten what he looked like, because I thought they must be two similar-looking actors). Abdel had small roles in Caché and Indigènes. David was in Grisgris and Haroun’s lesser-known Sexe, gombo et beurre salé, and the chief was in Africa Paradis and a passenger in Night on Earth. The girlfriend Djénéba Koné, a singer who cries a lot, was in Bamako as the sister-in-law of that film’s crying singer.

Adam Cook:

The film is beautifully shot with strong performances, particularly from the soulful Youssouf Djaoro in the lead role, but his life changing decision… never quite rings true. It does make the second half dramatically powerful and moving, and it even makes sense on a thematic level, but it is hard to believe his character would ever make such a callous choice.

Great collection with the best liner notes, borrowed from a coworker and watched piecemeal.


The Original Movie (1922, Tony Sarg)

Silhouette animation imagining what moviemaking was like in early days (a mashup of eras from the dinosaur age forward). Nice use of Flintstonian animals as machines (like a long-necked dinosaur as camera crane), but Lotte Reineger it ain’t. Seems an in-joke gag about how producers have always ruined the work of screenwriters. Nice Muybridge reference. The notes say Sarg was a famous puppeteer who created the first Macy’s parade floats.

Producer (left) with his editing goat, receiving a pitch:

It’s a mark of how quickly the division-of-labor production system overtook Hollywood that already in 1922 The Original Movie can find its satiric “moral” in the inability of writers to recognize their work by the time it reaches the screen. The puritan-cloaked censors who contribute to the caveman filmmaker’s breakdown would have been on everyone’s mind. Nineteen twenty-one witnessed the Fatty Arbuckle scandal and brought New York’s new censor board as well as a hundred bills in state legislatures to curb perceived Hollywood excess.


The Confederate Ironclad (1912, Kenean Buel)

I guess an ironclad was a hideous, armored boat. Fifteen-minute action flick about confederate soldier Yancey, the Southern girl who loves him, and beautiful Union spy Elinor who easily cons ol’ Yancey into giving up military information. I didn’t realize the movie would take the confederate side, though – their gunboat rips up the union army, and noble Yancey allows Elinor to escape. Unusually, the original music score has survived, and was used in this restoration.

Wounded Yancey with his Southern Rose:

Yancey was married to the spy, Anna Q., who was a superstar in the 1920’s. Rose was Miriam Cooper, who had a lead role (“the friendless one”) in Intolerance.


Early Films from the Edison Company

Blacksmithing Scene (1893) – blacksmiths take turns banging on iron, drinking, banging on iron… sure enough, this is the original film the Lumieres remade.

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) – a decidedly not-gay shoe clerk kisses a flirty female customer.

Three American Beauties (1906) – a rose, a girl, a U.S. flag, all hand-tinted.

The liners on the first two films:

Because the three “blacksmiths” are impersonated by Edison employees, this is not a documentary but the first instance of screen acting. It is also the earliest surviving complete motion picture on film … Of course, at the time “gay” referred only to his devil-may-care impetuousness. The modern meaning gives unintended irony to The Gay Shoe Clerk, whose “young woman” was played by one of Edison’s male employees.


Spies (1943, Chuck Jones)

The Looney Tunes staff with writer Dr. Seuss illustrate a “loose lips sink ships” scenario, as Snafu thinks he’s keeping his mission secret but lets enough pieces of information slip for the enemy to put it all together. I thought Snafu had a rather Bugs Bunny voice, though Mel Blanc says he meant for him to sound like Porky. Amazing work, need to find and watch all of these.


OffOn (1968, Scott Bartlett)

Like the 2001: A Space Odyssey eyeball voyage scene, but homemade with newfangled late-1960’s video technology. Some other indescribable weirdness ensues, funhouse-mirroring and Rainbow Dance techniques. Impressive. Features the kind of grating horror soundtrack in fashion with the avant-garde, though it chills out into some pulsing tones at times.

Speaking in the 1960s at the time he made OffOn, his second film, he saw a technology on the horizon that would make his innovations simpler for future media artists: “With video plus computers you could do it even better,” he said of his imagery of metamorphosis.

Did anyone else count nine? Maybe Kurt Russell isn’t considered hateful since he always appears to be telling the truth? But he does punch Daisy in the face a lot of times (to the great amusement of the Alamo crowd). So if we count him, there’s the seven star actors mentioned in the trailer, plus the definitely hateful Mexican Bob (Demián Bichir, Castro in Che), and certainly-hateful not-surprise (since there are opening credits, though when he showed up three hours later I’d just about forgotten) guest star Tater Channing. So I suppose the title is meant to throw you off, as is most of the script.

I got to see the little-known 35mm roadshow version, though now having seen it, I wouldn’t cry to lose ten minutes of footage and the intermission. Alamo’s a cool place, though they ran out of half the stuff we ordered and came crawling down the floor to let us know, which all seemed awkward. Mostly it was fabulous to sit front row watching a great-looking 35mm widescreen film from a perfect print.

Let’s keep this short: bounty-hunter Kurt Russell transporting criminal Jennifer Jason Leigh picks up fellow bounty-hunter Sam Jackson and would-be-sheriff Walt Goggins on the way to a rest stop to wait out a blizzard. Waiting there are, as we find out in the second half, an ambush of J.J. Leigh’s compatriots pretending to be random travelers, including hangman Tim Roth, quiet cowboy Michael Madsen and the aforementioned Bob… and confederate general Bruce Dern, a genuinely random traveler searching for his son. Also, Leigh’s outlaw brother Tater is hiding in the basement. Everyone gets shot except Kurt Russell gets poisoned and Leigh gets hanged by ragged, barely-survivors Goggins and Jackson, who reluctantly team up as the plot unfolds. Partly an homage to The Thing (Kurt Russell trapped in snow, nobody being who they say they are). Oh also Zoë Bell of Death Proof appears with others in a flashback massacre. And haha, QT cast a guy named Stark to play a naked man in the flashback leading to Dern’s death just before intermission.

The actors are all perfect for their roles. I’ve barely seen JJ Leigh since the great eXistenZ, though she was one of a hundred confusing people and things in Synecdoche, New York. So the film is well-shot, though confined to the damned cabin for most of its runtime, and the new Ennio Morricone music is lovely, though sparsely used, and the actors are super, though their characters are truly hateful. So I’m not sure what to make of this, or why it’s the movie Tarantino felt he had to make right now. There’s a lot to talk about, and Glenn Kenny takes a great shot at covering it.

Sam Adams, in an article amazingly titled “Fear of a Black Dingus” (just beating Cinema Scope’s headline “You’ve Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me”): “Tarantino has never worked so strenuously to get a rise out of his audience … Watching The Hateful Eight is a little like being [Bruce Dern], knowing that Tarantino wants you to jump, and feeling like a sucker when you do.”

J. Reichert in Reverse Shot:

So, after his biggest box-office success, one of our most obnoxious filmmakers made a movie whose worldview lines up with the Republican presidential debates or a Donald Trump rally … It functions as the opposite of Reverse Shot’s best film of the year, In Jackson Heights, which shows Americans our best selves. The Hateful Eight may not be the Quentin Tarantino film anyone wanted, but it may be the Quentin Tarantino film we deserved.

A. Nayman in Cinema Scope:

One possible way to approach the pachydermous beast that is The Hateful Eight is as a hybrid tribute to/remake of Carpenter’s The Thing … And one possible way to look at Tarantino at this point is as the artistic equivalent of Carpenter’s parasite: an unscrupulous shape-shifter who will throw on any disguise that suits his purposes before moving on, leaving the host party hollowed out as he proceeds on his relentless mission of conquest … This is Tarantino’s most audience-alienating film to date. A line from The Thing springs to mind: “I don’t know what the hell’s in there… but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”

Between watching Hateful Eight and getting this post online we also saw Inglorious Basterds at the Alamo, since they’re having a Tarantino fest to celebrate Hateful’s release. Fassbender made more of an impression this time, since now I know who he is. I’d forgotten Waltz’s defecting to the allies at the end, and personally planting one of the basterds’ bombs under Hitler’s chair. Katy was surprised to like the movie, despite all its graphic violence.

Not having seen either Little Women or The Women before, I used to get them mixed up. Now, having seen both within a week of each other, then delaying a month before writing about them, they’ll probably remain mixed up. We double-featured this with the free Valentine’s Day screening of The Philadelphia Story at Filmstreams, kicking off their Katharine Hepburn retrospective month.

Civil War-era family drama spanning about a decade, which is why twentysomething Joan Bennett is unconvincing as a pre-teen at the start of the film. Four sisters are growing up while their dad is off at war (he returns alive towards the end), falling in love with the next-door neighbors, dealing with wartime cutbacks, their perfect mom and their forbidding aunt. Ends with three weddings and a funeral.

Rich, sheltered neighbor boy Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) and an energetic Hepburn have a thing for each other, but won’t commit, and he ends up with younger Joan Bennett (women in the painting in Scarlet Street) after a summer together in europe. Hepburn moves to the big city to be a writer, marries older professor Paul Lukas (of Dodsworth and Strange Cargo). Can’t remember much about Meg (I Walked With a Zombie star Frances Dee) – maybe she’s the humble one – who likes Laurie’s tutor. And sweet, artistic Beth (Jean Parker of The Gunfighter and Beyond Tomorrow), who loved to play piano and look after babies sick with scarlet fever, dies of scarlet fever. Won a writing oscar, and Hepburn got best actress the same year for a different movie.

Woman who was supposed to play Aunt March died in the middle of the shoot, so retakes were required. While paging through Chicago Tribune articles to find out whether the movie killed her (it did not), I came across some great headlines: “Woman Dies of Poisoned Food Left by Suicide”… “U.S. Jury Frees Mayor on Rum Charge”… “Twelve Killed, Two Made Blind by Poison Booze”… “Hoodlum Slain as Judges Join War on Gunmen”.

Not as bad as all that, but certainly not good – a Martian adventure full of aliens with indistinguishable-sounding names, overexplainy without making us understand or care. Could’ve taken a lesson on narrative clarity in unfamiliar worlds from Nausicaa.

Muscley Carter grumbles that he’ll fight for no cause, would rather be locked up by General Malcolm’s Dad than fight in his dirty Civil War. Carter finds a cave of gold, guarded by a bald dude who warps him to Mars, which he finds engulfed in a Civil War in which Carter grumbles he will not fight. But he meets a girl, so he fights for her instead with his amazing strength and jumping abilities, defeating McNutty, who receives orders from multidimensional bald super-alien Mark Strong (sad trailer-home sniper of Tinker Tailor, psycho-baddie of Sunshine).

Oh wait, there’s a simpering frame story in which young Edgar Rice Burroughs (Juni of Spy Kids) is supposed to inherit Carter’s fortune but is actually being entrusted to protect Carter’s body on Earth while his astral projection makes sweet love to a Martian princess. Bunch of people in the credits who I never saw turned out to play motion-capture aliens – bummer. See ya some other time, Samantha Morton and Willem Dafoe.