by ·Comments Off on Billion Dollar Brain (1967, Ken Russell)

1960s movie about the threat of artificial intelligence, shot in high style for a British spy drama, which is medium-low style for a Ken Russell picture.

Caine covering up Karl and Francoise:

Villain Ed Begley is a wacked out texas oilman whose computer tells him how to overthrow communism. Oskar Homolka is the KGB man trying to stop him from starting WWIII. Karl Malden and Francoise Dorleac are getting rich playing multiple sides, toting a carton of eggs injected with lethal viruses. Guy Doleman is the British spy boss trying to retrieve the eggs. And all of these groups befriend and/or kidnap special agent Michael Caine, who doesn’t exactly solve the case, but is at least present while it solves itself.

Nazi-coded Texan:

by ·Comments Off on Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Top Secret (1984, Zucker & Abrahams)

Extremely cold war comedy with Val Kilmer (RIP) as a sort of Beach Boy Elvis who meets a girl and gets caught up in her family spy plot. The ZAZ group’s followup to Police Squad, pretty decent.

Omar Sharif:

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2024

The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.

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Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.

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Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).

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Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.

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Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

by ·Comments Off on Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.

Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.

In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the

brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business — though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).

by ·Comments Off on The In-Laws (1979, Arthur Hiller)

RIP Alan Arkin, who even the day after watching this I was back to getting confused with Alan Alda. If I’d checked what else I’ve seen by Hiller I might not have watched this silly movie, but it’s a solid excuse to watch Peter Falk for 100 minutes. Mismatched guys’ kids are about to marry, Falk gets Arkin mixed up in an international incident, the movie staying ambiguous whether Falk is criminal or CIA or insane. They’re finally taken to the General who plans to crash the global finance system, and rescued from firing squad by American forces. Arkin had recently played Freud, Falk was between Muppet movies.

The Guys:

El General: Richard Libertini of the Unfaithfully Yours remake

BONUS: David Paymer’s first feature

by ·Comments Off on Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning 1 (2023, Christopher McQuarrie)

We prepped by rewatching part one, where Kittridge was a standout, just the gov’t boss who has to say all the plotty dialogue, but he turns it into a twitchy physical performance, so we were psyched for his big return. I think I got the plot here, but not the allegiances – Cruise and Kittridge are both trying to destroy the world-domination superconnected AI, but Kittridge’s guys (Shea Wigham from a lotta shows and a guy named Tarzan from Top Gun 2) keep shooting at Cruise. Thief Hayley Atwell is a welcome addition, comes fully onboard just as Rebecca Ferguson checks out. Rhames and Pegg are trying to be the tech help when tech can no longer be trusted. Weapons broker Vanessa Kirby (soon to be Joaquin’s Josephine) is excellent as herself and her mask-self. Human baddie Gabriel (Esai Morales of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit) is both an AI stooge and a boogeyman from Cruise’s pre-agent past, who falls out with his muscle Pom “Mantis” Klementieff at the last minute. After a thousand sleight-of-hand tricks, Cruise has the key and knows it unlocks a beta version of the AI in a sunken submarine… somewhere in the world.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 2 (2000, John Woo)

John Woo’s follow-up to Blackjack, a Dolph Lundgren movie I’d never heard of before this moment. But he was obviously chosen based on his Face/Off experience in mask-based deception, and his ability to make dudes look extremely cool riding motorcycles, wearing leather jackets and sunglasses, kicking ass surrounded by explosions, jumping through the air whilst firing two guns.

Thandiwe Newton bounces between hero and villain (Dougray Scott of Ever After). Anthony Hopkins too embarrassed to be credited as the mission leader even though his other credit that year was the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. Aussies: Ving is joined by John Polson in the chopper and the baddie is assisted by finger-trauma Richard Roxburgh. Evil henchman William Mapother had been in Magnolia, but I think not in the Cruise scenes, and the scientist who sets off the whole plot by creating a supervirus runs the costume shop in Eyes Wide Shut. Bad guys just want to spread the virus across Sydney after securing stock options in Brendan Gleeson’s chem company that will manufacture the cure, and stock options are a boring reason to get the whole IMF on your ass, killing you and your friends, but at least they do it in style.

by ·Comments Off on The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965, Martin Ritt)

Richard Burton, more intensely sad than I’ve ever seen him, is a spymaster-turned-spy, quitting British intelligence and hanging out with cute librarian Claire Bloom (The Haunting), but actually getting coached by Smiley (“just continue to be embittered, continue to drink”) in the hopes of being picked up by the Germans.

Took me a while to realize that they’d crossed into Germany. It’s established that Burton is fluent in German, but nobody speaks German in the movie, and even accents are rare… they simply keep speaking English, asking the viewer to imagine that it’s German. On the other side, the East Germans all act like they know Burton’s whole deal, but they’re plotting against each other and Burton intends to inflame their rivalry. Oskar “Jules” Werner is the black leather cap-wearing ambitious second in command to 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse star Peter van Eyck. As power and loyalties shift, I’m not sure that even Burton knows if the plot has gone off the rails, but apparently free and victorious at the end, he gets himself killed over the girl, leaving Smiley (Rupert Davies) and Control (Cyril Cusack, pathetic husband in Gone to Earth) needing to find a new sad drunken spy.