by ·Comments Off on Club Zero (2023, Jessica Hausner)

Mia Wasikowska is new at boarding school, teaching “conscious eating” to five students, either because they’re weight-watching or environmentalists or looking for an easy grade. It’s a culty class, but everything in these kids’ lives is culty. She has them eating less and less, then nothing. “You could be among the few who could actually live, when the rest of the world is going under.” She’s fired for associating with a pupil in private, because she took Fred to the opera, not for endangering their lives. Some kids take the course more seriously than others – environmentalist Elsa loses her mind completely – and at Christmas break four of the kids disappear.

Great soundtrack. My first Mia movie since Piercing, but that’s on me for missing Bergman Island. Funny to watch this right after Thanksgiving – both movies feature a trampoline and electric carving knife. That movie had more horrific deaths but this one has more disclaimers in its credits. Blake took it seriously in Filmmaker.

Fred, Ragna, Helen, Elsa, Ben:

by ·Comments Off on Piercing (2018, Nicolas Pesce)

Oh no, it opens with ironic home-video texture. Heavy midnight-movie style-vibes, after the guy from Girls is tempted to murder his baby, and the baby says “you know what you have to do, right?” He needs to tie up a prostitute then kill her with an ice pick. Midnight vibes confirmed when he rehearses chopping up a body, the movie giving us the sound effects in his head over smooth jazz music while he mimes the actions.

Part of the point of Rotterdance is to check out the hot new filmmakers, so this year instead of catching up with The Image Book or Happy as Lazzaro or Anthropocene, I decided to watch only new-to-me directors. In the time since Piercing‘s release, Nicolas “Nicky Fish” Pesce has already made an unloved reboot of The Grudge. Coincidentally, the last time I saw Chris Abbot was also a genre movie by a promising young director whose third feature just came out to not-great reviews.

Mia W appears as the chosen prostitute, and it turns out Chris isn’t as cool and capable in person, but acts transparently like a serial killer (flashbacks to the Second Incident). Also, Mia turns out to be damaged and complicated – we don’t know much about her, but the movie gives us some damaged/complicated shorthand and asks us to trust it. This proves difficult when the movie’s logic falls apart… Mia stabs herself in the bathroom then takes him to her place in Diorama City… he calls home from the hospital and his wife (Laia Costa, Alia Shawkat’s costar in Duck Butter) now appears to be in on the murder plot, even though last time we saw her Chris was lying about going on a business trip?

This is all played for absurd comedy – it’s really a laugh-a-minute sex-murder movie. They do finally tie each other up, but she finds his journal, drugs him, beats the shit out of him with a can opener, turns the tables, etc. Wendell Pierce appears for four seconds in a split-screen – why?

Mike D’Angelo in AV Club:

The playfulness works beautifully, even though it bears little resemblance to [Audition author Ryu] Murakami’s deep dive into two badly broken psyches … Re-conceiving the tone was a smart move on Pesce’s part — a faithful, ultra-grim adaptation would likely have been unbearable. Trouble is, he loses his nerve … The movie turns ugly, but the ugliness hasn’t been earned.

by ·Comments Off on Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo del Toro)

Can’t figure out why this was made – straightforward haunted-house murder story with predictable twists, feeling at times like a remake of The Devil’s Backbone minus the evocative wartime setting. One character sees ghosts that lead her to the truth behind some murders, ghosts have similar look to the earlier film, phantom blood emanating from cracked-china holes in their translucent faces. But it’s undeniably a beautiful film, sumptuously designed with gorgeous candlelight and shadows and snowy mist, falling leaves, costumes, big creepy crumbling house, and so on. Nice iris-out effects complete the period look. Definitely good to see Guillermo returning to his gothic-horror roots – an enjoyable film to soak in, leaving me satisfied without that post-Martian malaise.

Mia Wasikowska has become a fave of scary/creepy movies (Stoker, The Double), plays a bookish New Yorker with rich dad Jim Beaver (TV’s Deadwood and Supernatural). Incestuous baron siblings Loki (Mia’s Only Lovers Left Alive costar) and Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter, Interstellar) are in town raising funds for their clay-excavation machine. Loki marries Mia and takes her home to England where she discovers he does this a lot, and the bodies/ghosts of his previous rich-girl wives are buried in red clay pools in the basement. Pacific Rim star Charlie Hunnam is Mia’s friend from home who comes to her rescue. Did I mention that Jessica Chastain is an axe murderer? That’s something you don’t expect.

by ·Comments Off on Maps to the Stars (2014, David Cronenberg)

“I have the flu. I need cigarettes.”

Julianne Moore is an actress who sees ghosts, trying to get a film part where she’ll play her own mother in a bio-pic (like a terrible Clouds of Sils Maria remake). Evan Bird (of TV’s The Killing Remake) is a horrid child star, son of Rosemary Cross and new-age massage therapist John Cusack. Evan’s older sister Mia Wasikowska is out of an asylum and back in town, gets a job as Moore’s assistant and hangs out with limo driver Rob Pattinson.

Eventually connections fall into place, and people start dying. Moore gets the role because her rival’s son drowns. Evan murders a young costar who’s been upstaging him. Mia bludgeons her employer Moore with a film award. Rosemary Cross somehow catches on fakey digital fire. Then Mia and Evan creep away and take handfuls of pills. Throughout, the music and editing and shots are pretty unexceptional and I’d be worried about Cronenberg except that I read his terrific novel which released around the same time at this movie.

M. D’Angelo:

Mostly, though, it’s just an excuse for [writer] Wagner to depict “scathingly” bad behavior, as when Moore’s fading starlet leaps around her house with joy upon learning that a rival’s adorable little son has just drowned, freeing up the plum role that Moore had just lost to said rival. Cronenberg, for his part, shoots this cavalcade of random potshots as functionally as possible — this is easily his least visually distinguished film (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first film he’s ever shot in the U.S.). Hollywood may be a nest of vacuous vipers, but it deserves a less feeble takedown than this.

by ·Comments Off on The Double (2013, Richard Ayoade)

Third screening of Sundance Week, though the posts have been broken up and delayed. I guess if this blog was my real job, I’d have watched the Sundance movies in advance and posted ’em on the week itself, but it’s not, so here we are in mid-March. And with the delays I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say about this, if anything, except that J MASCIS plays a janitor for some reason. Also it’s a remarkably good movie, with an excellent balance between comedy/amusement and mystery/terror, all with super camerawork. Jesse “Social Network” Eisenberg plays a pathetic drip so well that when his confident double (also Eisenberg) shows up they seem like different actors. The drip is obsessed with meeting neighbor Mia “Stoker” Wasikowska, tries to please boss Wallace Shawn and get noticed by head company man James Fox. The double does all this and more with ease, leading the drip to finally assert himself and destroy the other man by attempting suicide (since their bodies are linked). Feels a bit like The Tenant at the end. Three of Ayoade’s Submarine stars also appear.

by ·Comments Off on Stoker (2013, Chan-wook Park)

Kind of your standard family-secret homicidal-maniac twist-ending thriller, but Park makes it great. Every scene is amazing looking, not just well-shot but with attention-drawing effects like seamlessly transitioning Nicole Kidman’s hair into a field of grass.

Mia W. is our vaguely Rogue-looking heroine whose dad died the day she turned 18 – killed by his maniac brother, it turns out, who killed their youngest brother as a boy, then kills Mia’s would-be-rapist school acquaintance (Alden Ehrenreich, Bennie in Tetro), then almost kills her mom until finally Mia pulls out the hunting rifle that the movie has taken care to mention and blows him away. Then she drives off, killing a sheriff on the way out of town, having inherited her uncle’s taste for murder.

Other victims include family maid Mrs. McG (hidden in the freezer) and Auntie Jen (Jacki Weaver of Picnic at Hanging Rock) – great discovery scene as Mia calls auntie’s cell and hears it ringing underground. The shooting (by Park’s usual guy Chung-hoon Chung) and editing (by Nicolas de Toth, son of the House of Wax director) are thrilling. Matthew Goode (Firth’s dead boyfriend in A Single Man, kinda has a George Clooney voice) is crazy uncle Charlie, Mia Wasikowska is currently starring in Only Lovers Left Alive, and this is the first Nicole Kidman movie I’ve seen since Birth. Shoot, Harmony Korine was in this and I didn’t notice him.