by ·Comments Off on Three Extremes (2004, Miike & Park & Chan)

Dumplings (Fruit Chan)

Bai Ling of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is abortionist-chef Aunt Mei, and her latest rich customer is from Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2. I once watched the feature-length version of this on bootleg DVD, which defeats the point of bathing in all the lovely green shades brought out by Christopher Doyle, shooting a WKW movie without the blurry slow-mo. The movie’s other point is to gross you out with all the baby-eating, which evokes Monty Python’s crunchy frog sketch. Customer wants to look youthful forever so her bigshot husband Tony 2 will keep liking her, and maybe eating babies is the answer? Nice peek into early-century medicine, doctor handing out mood-altering pills to pregnant women.

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Cut (Park Chan-wook)

Opening long-take of a vampire film-in-the-film, the camera doing that post-Fight Club thing where it has to float through objects. Later, the vampire film’s director (the No Other Choice guy) has been tied up on the same set, while an extra from his films explains his class resentment while chopping off fingers from the director’s pianist wife (the chef/daughter of Oldboy). The extra has got an overcomplicated revenge plot (and a nice dance routine), and everyone ends up confessing too many things until the wife gets close enough to bite her kidnapper’s neck off, then the director strangles her while she’s still immobile.

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Box (Takashi Miike)

Writer dreams of a man burying a box, then has a long, slow conversation with her agent. Writer is near-catatonic, flashbacks reveal she was half of a contortionist circus act whose act involved two sisters who could fold themselves into two small boxes. One night she locked her sister in the box and attacked their keeper with a dart, then the place burned down. Sorry to make the movie sound exciting – it’s mostly her moving very slowly while feeling trauma, reliving the fire again and again, until her dreams/visions allow her to apologize to the dead sister in the box after being berated by the circusmaster.

by ·Comments Off on The Barefoot Contessa (1954, Joseph Mankiewicz)

Four years after Sunset Boulevard, a movie that opens with the death of someone in the movie business then rewinds to show us the backstory. Our tragic contessa is Spanish Ava Gardner, last seen in the similarly-technicolored Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It’s not a deal killer for a Hollywood movie but her Spanish is not good – what’s more important is she can speak English with a Spanish accent.

The guy who pulled Ava from her unhappy home (her father later murders her abusive mother) is filmmaker Humphrey Bogart, who then introduces us to his gang: rich bully Kirk (Forbidden Planet), lady Myrna (Summertime), and PR guy Fats Murdoch. These movie business guys talk about the movie business too much – so much dialogue and narration in this movie it’s like an audiobook. Fats won an oscar because all the guys from On The Waterfront split the vote, and the writing won an oscar because there’s so very much of it.

Looking good, Bogart:

Bogart and Ava get involved in different romances (not with each other). She finally finds true love with an Italian guy, but after they marry he gives her an army document explaining that his dick was blown off in WWII. She thinks it will be a wonderful surprise to her tormented husband if she gets pregnant by another guy, instead he shoots her dead.

by ·Comments Off on Head (1968, Bob Rafelson)

A Magical Mystery Tour parody, I think.

A Monkee wonderful-lifes himself off a bridge, then a girl makes out with each Monkee in turn in a single take. A highlight is Mickey puncturing a Western scene by swiping away the fake arrows and walking through the backdrop. Maybe not a highlight but certainly memorable is when the boys get shrunk to dandruff-size then are vacuumed off Vic Morrow’s head.

Pretty meaty role for Timothy Carey. Jack Nicholson pops in for three seconds, and Frank Zappa delivers a motivational speech with a talking cow.

by ·Comments Off on The Stunt Man (1980, Richard Rush)

Heck of an opening sequence. This silly meta-action movie isn’t gonna top that, I thought, then the opening sequence is followed by an entire heck of a film, to the point that I started wondering if it won oscars. Nominated, but tough luck coming out the same year as Raging Bull and Ordinary People. Director is the toughest race: Redford/Lynch/Scorsese/Polanski/Rush. I haven’t seen Tess, but Rush would feel like a strong contender. This is a good man-on-the-run drama about the making of a bad WWI movie, every shot and camera placement and stunt and Peter O’Toole line reading a bit further out than necessary.

Steve Railsback (star of Lifeforce) is on the run from the cops when he stumbles onto a movie set and maybe accidentally helps kill a stunt driver. Filmmaker Peter O’Toole hires Railsback as the new/old stuntman, claiming to the police that there was no accident, the two guys covering for each other at least until manipulative madman O’Toole gets all the dangerous long takes he needs. The actress caught between these guys is Barbara Hershey (Last Temptation of Christ, Mrs. Yeager in The Right Stuff). It all works out, more or less, Railsback admitting he became a fugitive by attacking a cop with a tub of ice cream, and O’Toole graciously not murdering him during a stunt.

by ·Comments Off on Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath)

Corey Atad:

It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions.

After convincing us for three hours that Henry Fonda represents America itself, weaving film and interview clips and bringing in political history and Henry’s outspoken actor kids, the doc closes on a shot of pelicans, affirming its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on Childstar (2004, Don McKellar)

The kid is from a forgotten Neverending Story reboot, and has worked consistently. Our director plays the star’s driver/handler, also trying to break into the industry with his experimental film called The Stupidity of God. Good cast, good fun.

Matrix Macaulay:

Mark Peranson in (of course) Cinema Scope:

It takes a while to sink in that the characters in Childstar evince an odd or off-putting psychology. They aren’t just in a movie; they behave as if they are in a movie. They interpret their surroundings in movie terms. They might come across as flat or underdeveloped, but that’s the danger of being driven by culture.

McKellar:

What’s interesting about the child-star phenomena is that it’s an exaggeration or acceleration of what a lot of people are feeling. Trapped in popular culture. Circumscribed by this all-encompassing machine that doesn’t allow them to find their own ability to express themselves.

by ·Comments Off on Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma)

Haven’t seen this in a while… probably De Palma’s best movie, but I’d probably say that about ten different De Palma movies if I’d rewatched them this week. Sound recordist Travolta works at a movie production house with a framed poster of Squirm, rescues Nancy Allen from a car crash, and gradually uncovers her role in the “accident.” Unfortunately for everyone, killer John Lithgow has gone rogue, starts a side project murdering girls who look like Nancy so her eventual death will be blamed on the serial killer instead of politics. Nancy’s accomplice, blackmail-photographer Dennis Franz, relaxes at home watching De Palma’s Murder a la Mod, while his shadowy co-conspirators erase Travolta’s entire tape library (filmed in an Akerman spin take).

by ·Comments Off on Real Life (1979, Albert Brooks)

Brooks-as-himself tells the people of Phoenix he’s capturing real life, so not to play up for the camera while his crew films the Charles Grodin family going about their daily business. His psychologists turn against him, Brooks makes everything about himself as usual, and finally burns Grodin’s house down to create drama for his film. Brooks imploding for 90 minutes is a little tedious – fortunately the movie is saved by the camera-headed people, who are funny every single time I see them.

Dave Kehr:

With its deliberate avoidance of punch lines and insistent drift into darkness and disaster, Albert Brooks’s 1979 film left audiences baffled when first released. It now seems like one of the most innovative comedies of the decade, suggesting a hundred different ways in which movie comedy could escape the gag-heavy, character-destroying styles imposed by television (if only it wanted to).