by ·Comments Off on Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

I’ve been biased against this movie since it first came out on video. At Georgia Tech anime kids would follow you around talking about anime, even if you don’t care about anime, as I did not, and Perfect Blue was their idea of a movie which would instantly convince the doubters. Nowadays I like anime just fine, including Satoshi Kon, whose Millennium Actress was good, and Paranoia Agent was incredible, so I finally gave this a chance. If anyone from Tech is reading… I’m sorry… I’m glad y’all have got your own Anime Fight Club, with its multiple-multiple personalities and identity twists and breakbeat soundtrack, but it’s not for me.

The words every girl wants to hear:

I can relate:

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

OK, boobs, I get it, we all love boobs. The most 1995 thing I’ve ever seen. The only thing I remembered from the VHS is that shot where the cyborg supersoldier pulls something so hard her arms come off, and it’s still the coolest thing here by far (the invisibility-suit effects also nice).

Android moral quandaries ripped from Robocop. It’s so talky in a self-important sci-fi cop-show way, but all this chatter is background noise to the actual plot (reminisce: Nemesis), which leads to a Lawnmower Man ending. The writer worked on Pistol Opera, which needs to come out on blu-ray.

This is who comes for you if you haven’t turned on multifactor authentication:

Jake Cole:

This really isn’t a thriller because the sporadic action merely punctuates a story that uses nearly every plot element as a macguffin to ruminate on the nature of identity and how technology alters our perception of self. The finale, in which a cyborg evolves to propagate itself, recasts the internet and global networking as the next stage of reproduction.

Adding this line to my resume:

by ·Comments Off on She Is Conann (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Elina Löwensohn plays a dog in this one.

Some kind of framing story gives an excuse to recount Conan the Barbarian’s life.

I prepared for this, but not enough.

Each time Conann ages into a new actor, she kills her previous self.

I think maybe Ultra Lux kills everyone at the end?

The Mandico Connected Universe continues to pay great rewards.

She’s giving Toby Dammit vibes:

by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”

by ·Comments Off on Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Chameleon Street (1989, Wendell B. Harris Jr.)

Our guy (played by the director) has a new wife Gabrielle, is tired of working for his dad installing burglar alarms, so he pretends to work for Time to interview a basketball star, figuring if he can sell the interview to Time afterwards then he basically told the truth. Less justifiable is hanging out in a hospital doing real surgeries with no training. He spends some time in prison for that one, then escapes. “That afternoon I went to Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast to get my mind right,” hell yeah. He identity-thieves his way into Yale, calls himself Pepe le Mofo, sees a band called Fantomas Judex, has a grand time while his pregnant wife is left forgotten at home. I’m not clear how they both end up at the same masquerade, but after they win best costume he goes back to the family, donating blood to get by. Suddenly he’s a fake lawyer, meeting the mayor, a promising young political volunteer, until the cops arrive because his wife sold him out.

Harris is narrating much of the time. Lines repeat, characters talk into camera, reminded me of Story of a Three-Day Pass. Terrific end credits scene, the frog/scorpion story told by an array of readers fast-cut together. Won a Sundance grand prize (over Metropolitan, To Sleep With Anger, The Unbelievable Truth, The Plot Against Harry), and feels at times very much like a 1990 Sundance movie. Based on the life of a real guy who, per a delightful Film Stage interview with the director, hated the movie but appreciated the residual checks he got from it.

by ·Comments Off on Gemini Man (2019, Ang Lee)

In the midst of my disreputable movie spree I found some new movie list to obsess over, and wondered if it’s perhaps possible to watch the high framerate version of Gemini Man on a laptop screen. And it is… it is!

Will Smith is a super-elite hit man serving his country, who offhandedly mentions he’s “deathly allergic to bees” but that probably won’t come up again. After one last (successful) job shooting a fella on a moving train he tells his handler Ralph Brown (of the mid-2000s Exorcist prequel travesty) he’s retiring before he loses his touch. Starting his new vacation life he meets a girl with hair like this, clocks her as a spy, then rescues her when gov’t boss Clive Owen starts ordering everybody dead.

Benedict Wong shouldn’t smoke so close to a toucan:

The handler reports that the bosses have activated Gemini, and soon Will is getting his ass whupped in a motorcycle fight by the Fresh Prince. People get killed: Will’s boat friend Jack (Black Museum proprietor Douglas Hodge), his train friend Marino (EJ Bonilla of the latest Exorcist sequel travesty), eventually his plane friend Benedict Wong. Finally Will and Mary put together what we’ve known since the trailer came out and flee to Budapest to visit Yuri. Ilia Volok is stunt casting, having acted in Mission: Impossible 4 (American spy is disowned and pursued by his bosses) and Benjamin Button (lead actor is made younger with digital effects). And about those effects, the movie doesn’t shy away from long closeups on Fresh Prince’s uncanny face. The Prince gets talked out of assassinating himself after realizing Clive Owen is manufacturing infinite Wills Smith as suicide-mission supersoldiers.

Will and Fresh and Mary hoping their skulls don’t get added to the pile:

What turns this sci-fi twist on a spy-revenge story (from the writers of Shrek 4, The Hunger Games, and 25th Hour) into a literally insane must-see movie is the filmmaking tech. The crazy stunt action and star power say it’s a megamovie, but the ghost lighting, hollow sound design, and overall DTV look keep reminding of the no-budget festival screener DVDs I watched in 2008.

Letterboxed fisheye shot of a passing train, great:

A molten-masked third Will Smith gets blowed up:

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: