by ·Comments Off on The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)

Dumb Mulholland Drive. Even more gleefully artificial than I Saw the TV Glow, its length allows more emphasis and repetition than is really needed – I keep remembering how much Body Melt accomplished in 80 minutes, while after all the buildup, only a couple bodies melt in this one.

After Demi is fired from a TV network for being too old, she gets the inside scoop on the substance, which creates a younger you from the current you, and the two yous alternate weeks of consciousness. Her first day as Qualley she gets her old job back from squishy boss Dennis Quaid, then Demi wastes her own weeks eating junk food in her apartment, then the second week she starts stealing extra youth time, which causes Demi to age rapidly/erratically. It’s a huge problem that neither of them has self control. They start videodroming (Q pulls a chicken leg out of her bellybutton) then body-melting (Q gets the idea to substance herself, then drops a boob out her eyehole on live TV).

by ·Comments Off on Love Lies Bleeding (2024, Rose Glass)

Starts out full of small-town problems: Kristen Stewart’s sister Jena Malone is being beaten by mustache husband Dave Franco who’s been screwing homeless bodybuilder Katy O’Brien who just applied for a job at the husband’s workplace, a gun range run by Ed Harris, who also smuggles guns into Mexico. Kristen falls for Katy, gets her into steroids, and Katy goes to Dave’s house and hella kills him in a roid rage, justifying the Clint Mansell soundtrack.

I was thinking about Lost Highway‘s domestic fatal head injury when I read Michael Sicinski making other Lynchian connections, and giving it up for:

Glass’ genuine feel for neo-noir as a collision course of tangled motivations, some of which the characters themselves don’t entirely understand. It’s fairly easy to make films about duplicity, where people lie and cheat and manipulate one another. It’s much harder to produce figures so damaged that they essentially sabotage themselves, failing to really grasp why everything has gone so terribly wrong.

by ·Comments Off on To Die Like a Man (2009, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Tonia wants an operation to become a real woman. Meanwhile her life is falling apart and everyone is being extremely mean to her. Her army son shoots a coworker and runs, her junkie thief boyfriend kills the fish and sets the dog on fire, her employer says she’s gotten too old for her job. The boyfriend sobers up and settles back into his dressmaking work for the drag shows, and in a bit of good luck, they get lost and stumble across the couple who buried the son’s victim as “the unknown soldier,” so the body was never found by the authorities. In less-good luck, Tonia’s leaking breast implants have to be removed, and now she’s de-transitioning and dying.

by ·Comments Off on Deep Cover (1992, Bill Duke)

The dialogue in this movie is just okay (except when flashy drug dealer Roger Guenveur Smith is described as having “a life expectancy of about half an hour”) until Jeff Goldblum gets a hold of it – this is my second movie this month that he’s rescued. Larry Fishburne is undercover, takes over the late Roger’s job and teams up with lawyer Goldblum, who gets off on the power and money. “Being a cop was never this easy.” An extremely cynical movie and as great as Hoodlum. Be careful who you pretend to be, etc. LVP Glynn Turman in an opening scene with its own weird tone. Surprising to hear Snoop Dogg in 1992.

The boys:

by ·Comments Off on Coffy (1973, Jack Hill)

Pam Grier’s cop friend William Elliott (of mutant rabbit horror Night of the Lepus) gets beaten half to death for not selling out to the drug lords, who are secretly supporting the senate campaign of Pam’s boyfriend Booker Bradshaw (of missing link comedy Skullduggery). Pam is flaming mad, goes on a revenge campaign against drug boss King George (Robert DoQui, the only decent all-human cop of RoboCop).

Sig Haig gets involved, there’s a one-eyed assassin, I dunno, felt much like Foxy Brown, Pam’s charisma being wasted on a crappy movie. This was a random 1973 pick – here’s hoping Black Caesar is better.

by ·Comments Off on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras)

Katy and I enjoyed some oscar-nominated docs the week of the awards. This is a structurally satisfying doc about Nan Goldin’s life and art and activism through three health epidemics: the mental health crisis that took her sister, AIDS which took many of her friends, and her own opioid addiction, for which she seeks revenge through public protests to convince museums to refuse Sackler drug money.

Matthew Eng for Reverse Shot:

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed retains the impassioned clarity of Poitras’s style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life in one-on-one interviews with Poitras, conducted on weekends during COVID, included here under the agreement that Goldin would have final say over which of her words were included in the finished film. (She also served as a music consultant on the film, compiling an eclectic playlist that ranges from The Velvet Underground and A Taste of Honey to Lucinda Williams and The Facts of Life’s Charlotte Rae, singing the Brechtian ballad that inspired the title of Goldin’s landmark exhibition, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.) A great deal of Poitras’s film is fittingly composed of Goldin’s work, presented to the audience in the photographer’s preferred format: the slideshow, which has long been the crux of Goldin’s practice. It is a simple yet immensely effective device—its clicks evince a pleasing tactility—that lets Goldin’s photography speak for itself and enhances the attention-seizing potency of her portraiture with its stark staging, electric colors, and magnetic characters.

Won the top prize at Venice against all the big oscar dramas (Tár, Banshees, The Whale), the arthouse faves (No Bears, Saint Omer) and the would-be contenders (Bones & All, Blonde, Bardo, White Noise). This took three editors: Amy Foote (The Work), Joe Bini (Grizzly Man), Brian Kates (Killing Them Softly). We skipping Risk, not in any hurry to catch up with it, so it felt like Poitras was gone for nearly a decade.

by ·Comments Off on Cabinet of Curiosities 5-8 (2022)

It’s taking a while to get through SHOCKtober writeups, ain’t it?
Here’s the rest of the Guillermo del Toro series.

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Pickman’s Model (Keith Thomas)

Handsome Christian-Bale-ish lead guy Ben Barnes (of a Dorian Gray movie) is intrigued when older Crispin Glover joins his art class, drawing unspeakable horrors in cemeteries and saying stuff like “suffering is living.” Years later, Ben is still hanging around drawing rooms boring people about the values of modern art, visits the insistent Crispin’s studio, discovers the guy didn’t have a wild imagination but was realistically drawing the beasties emerging from the well-to-hell in his basement.

Keith Thomas? Hardly a master of horror, he made this year’s Firestarter remake (Filipe review: “very uninspired product… cheap and ugly looking.”) Here he makes every actor look foolish, and overdoes the sound design, though the subtle motion in the drawings was neat.

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The Viewing (Panos Cosmatos)

I knew who directed this one as soon as the Oneohtrix music kicked in. Four TV talk-show guests are invited to rich Peter Weller’s new age bunker: music producer Eric Andre, alien astrophysicist Charlyne Yi, novelist Steve Agee, and ESP expert Michael Therriault (of a recent Chucky movie). Sofia Boutella is there somehow, and a henchman from Books of Blood. They enjoy their host’s special whiskey, magic joint, cocaine and fairy dust, and sinister alien meteorite… then some of them melt or explode, and the rest fight for their lives to escape. Fuckin’ cool.

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Dreams in the Witch-House (Catherine Hardwicke)

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that I’m tagging these posts “Masters of Horror,” because really, what’s the difference between the two series? This is a special crossover episode, since we saw Stuart Gordon’s version of the same Lovecraft story in 2006. That was the end of practical effects creativity, and though the 2006 rat-person wasn’t brilliant work, it’s miles better than the lazy bullshit computer-rat in this version.

But I get ahead of myself – first Rupert Weasley grows up caring about ghosts after seeing his sister die, works at a brokedown spiritualist society, checks into a house where a woman who claimed dimensional travel once lived. There he has sleep paralysis and is visited by a cool witch and the aforementioned bullshit rat. Second episode this week about otherworldly paintings, as Rupert is warned the witch will kill him by sunrise, and this proves to be true, but I think he manages to resurrect his sister in exchange. Some good cursing, at least.

I was not hoping to be reminded of The Blazing World:

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The Murmuring (Jennifer Kent)

As someone who rarely goes a day without singing “Murmuration Song” to my birds, a story about a bird-watching couple would be right up my alley. The pair (Essie “Babadook” Davis and Andrew “Walking Dead” Lincoln) are haunted by the ghost of their past (their kid died) and also by literal mother/son ghosts, with increasingly intense visits (not Jennifer Kent with a parental trauma movie). They’ve brought portable recording equipment to an island (reminiscent of Fire of Love) to study sandpipers when Essie starts sidetracking into ghost drama. It’s my first shocktober in our new old house, and all the stories seem determined to tell us that old houses are full of harmful vibes.

by ·Comments Off on The Dreamed Path (2016, Angela Schanelec)

Schanelec movies suffer by reminding me of Zürcher movies just enough to make me wish I was watching those instead. This one isn’t as entrancing as it means to be, but slightly, seductively baffling. Down-and-out druggie couple starts out busking “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” before Kenneth is called home, his mom ailing in hospital, dad asking him to use his drug connections to find morphine for her. This first couple is last seen laying down on the earth, separately. Many years later a cop is leaving her husband, he rents his own place, and the time periods are mashing up in a non-obvious way.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

… an amorphous, exceedingly enigmatic trance film masquerading as a puzzle film. Puzzles fit together; this does not … These temporal leaps we’re taken through … become equal to every other narrative element. … Time, then, beyond language, becomes the decisive medium that negotiates and complicates characters’ emotional relations to one another, and Schanelec’s avoidance of distinguishing between “now” and “then” insures that the impact of every loss, every ruptured relationship, is held in an eternal suspension.

On Letterboxd: “Virginia Woolf” by Robyn Hitchcock

by ·Comments Off on Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)

It’s only been half a year since I’ve watched a Johnnie To movie, but Throw Down left a lasting impression and this one flipped a switch and set me frantically into Johnnie To Mode. About 25 lead actors here, 19 of whom I’ve never seen before, in a complex duplicitous undercover plot, and it’s all still thrilling and comprehensible.

Police Captain Honglei Sun (star of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop) and undercover cop Yi Huang bust a busload of drug mules, and while they’re dropping their loads, injured methmaster Louis Koo is fleeing the warehouse explosion that killed his family. Koo is busted, and facing the death penalty he cooperates. Most of the movie is their duplicitous dealings, intercepting meetings between drug traffickers who’d never met in person, pretending to be the one guy, then the other guy, the highlight of this being a laughing dealer named Haha. After the offscreen deaths in the prologue explosions, no shots are fired in the first hour of a movie called Drug War… then all of a sudden, very many shots are fired, as docile collaborator Koo violently switches sides. Raid on a drug factory run by deaf-mutes goes bad, Suet “Fatso” Lam turns out to be the mastermind. Don’t think I’ve quite seen an undercover cop movie with this trajectory before.

Koo:

Cops:

Fatso: