by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 34: Michael Shannon edition

Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Ramin Bahrani)

Evil Philosopher Cop Michael Shannon is arresting Michael B. Jordan, who turns the table and burns some guy to death, racking up likes on a big screen (is this The Running Man?). Sofia “Climax” Boutella takes MBJ to the suburbs where he saves a starling (it’s a big year for cinematic starlings) then Shannon makes a big tormented face as he murders MBJ in a burning barn. I’m seeing him sing R.E.M. songs next week – here’s hoping he makes that same face during “Fall On Me.” I can’t be mad at a movie that ends on a murmuration.

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Superman (2025, James Gunn)

Backed up more than ten minutes so I wouldn’t miss Warboy Lex Luthor. Is this a cartoon? Soup fights an airborne army of boba fetts. There are other super-people around, and also the Bunk for some reason. It’s very snappy and JamesGunny and there’s a CG dog, and they glue the split-apart city back together then party with some second-rate heroes (incl Nathan Fillion). Lois is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Soup is from We Own This City, it closes on an Iggy Pop song, and this overall looks good, it’s just that I’ve reached a certain age and you’re not gonna trick me into watching any more Superman movies.

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The Flash (2023, Andy Muschietti)

Backed up too far but this time by accident – HBO’s interface isn’t all that. Various Flashes and Supermen and Batmen are getting killed in a fiery time-loop by Evil CG Michael Shannon, pulling together the previous two movies into a Fahrenheit Multiverse. “We Need To Talk About” Ezra has a little argument with himself – Flash isn’t even fast in this, he just fights with glowy knives, and the villain is a version of himself who stayed awake during The Jaunt. Ah fuck, it’s Haunted Chris Reeve and CG Nic Cage, now I remember why people were mad. In the obligatory wrap-up, Ron Livingston is his dad, the girl from Hearts Beat Loud his love interest, and George Clooney as Batman would’ve been a good bit if they hadn’t awkwardly bungled it. Muschietti also directed It, which also nobody liked but they all watched anyway.

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Jonah Hex (2010, Jimmy Hayward)

How is this movie only 81 minutes? Civil War Thanos and his girl Jennifer Fox are taken captive by Evil Malkovich. I don’t see Michael Shannon, but he’s in this movie and there are also flamethrowers, making this part of the Fahrenheit Multiverse. I do see Lt. Cedric Daniels for some reason, then the movie starts flashbacking really hard until the bad guy explodes. The director is a former Pixar animator and musician who is friends with Tool and Primus and Mastodon, and the writers made Crank and Gamer, so this bomb was a bump in the road for a bunch of otherwise cool guys.

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The Lego Batman Movie (2017, Chris McKay)

I missed Will Arnett in Jonah Hex, so here’s his Christian Bale impression in a frenetic cartoon which is admittedly cool-looking (from a Robot Chicken guy). Nice shark-spray callback. It’s fun for everyone that the comic corporations get to make big expensive self-serious superhero movies and big expensive silly parodies of the same, less fun that something called The Lego Batman Movie tries to wrap up by getting weepy about family.

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Assassin’s Creed (2016, Justin Kurzel)

I also missed Michael Fassbender in Jonah Hex, so let’s check out his second-worst movie. Jeremy Irons is presented with a treasure chest while Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Rampling look on, wow this is a heavy cast for a video game movie. Irons is going to enslave mankind or whatever, seems very calm about it, while Omar is brandishing knives in the crowd. Fassbender arrives in a robe and joins the serious-whisper acting cavalcade then makes his move, assassin-wise. The whole thing feels like a real drag.

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Knox Goes Away (2023, Michael Keaton)

Speaking of assassins, I missed Michael Keaton in The Flash so here’s his aging-hitman thing. Oh wow, a shaggy Al Pacino rats on Keaton to some nerd cops who were talking about security footage anomalies. After a brain-damaged Keaton takes the place of his son Cyclops in prison, a closing montage of each major character looking meaningfully at different objects.

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Suicide Squad (2016, David Ayer)

Back into the superhero multiverse, this supposedly has Ezra “Flash” Miller, but hundredth-billed so I don’t expect to see him here. I expect to see supervillains teaming up to fight Gozer. Will Smith shows all his teeth in closeup then blows up the stargate to the demon dimension. The guy from John Woo’s Silent Night gets his wife back from the dead, or from the stone lion she was trapped inside, but the team of killers is no match for an angry Viola Davis, who sends them to prison until Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius breaks them out. I was gonna close with the latest Joaquin Phoenix Joker thing and Watchmen, but that’s quite enough of these things.

by ·Comments Off on The Bikeriders (2023, Jeff Nichols)

Tom Hardy is the absolute best as a family man whose mind got warped by a TV viewing of The Wild One so he adopted a Brando voice/pose and formed a motorcycle club that provided a real good time for a group of empty-headed friends before it got too big for him to control. Jodie “The Last Duel” Comer is our entry point, being interviewed by Mike Faist (who has nothing to do here) about her relationship with Elvis Butler and the changing forms of the club.

Nichols’s dream project based on a photo book about the real club. Feels kinda flat, sorta what’s-the-point – if you’re going to make Rumble Fish then don’t hold back, just make Rumble Fish. At least it’s smart enough to cast The Bonnie Man as a bartender and to end strongly, and of course it’s better than Ferrari. Note that my options tonight were this Mike Faist movie where two sporting men who are deeply in love keep getting challenged, or Challengers.

some riders:
Michael Shannon, the director’s lucky charm
Damon Herriman (Charles Manson) as Hardy’s right-hand man
Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) wants to quit and become a cop
Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel) shoots Hardy and takes over
Happy Anderson (The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) must have been the first challenger

other riders: Blueface from The Nice Guys, Karl Glusman of Noe’s Love, Boyd Holbrook of Dial of Destiny, and Norman Reedus of Cigarette Burns.

by ·Comments Off on The Little Drummer Girl (2018, Park Chan-wook)

Park’s followup to The Handmaiden doesn’t reach the same heights as Stoker, his other English-language movie, held back by the writing and the six hours of buttoned-up spies underplaying to survive. Big actory dialogue though – by episode three I decided I wasn’t buying any of it, but it’s pretty fun so I watched to the end. On the plus side, cool sets and costumes and cars. Park can really throw light exactly where he needs to, is excellent at photographing multi-level architecture. Michael Shannon has a wonderful laugh, but we maybe hear it once, given he’s playing a tormented Israeli agent on a convoluted revenge mission. Most importantly, Florence Pugh has the most openly expressive face of any actor right now, so what’s she doing in a spy movie? Well, it’s complicated, but she plays an actress hired by Shannon to get caught up with the Palestinian bombers so they can eventually be trapped or killed. Kidnappings and love letters and multiple fake relationships as she becomes a terrorist-in-training… as far as U being who U pretend to be, I wonder if Mother Night is out on blu-ray.

Pugh dances with Alexander Skarsgård:

Pugh practices with evil mastermind Khalil:

by ·Comments Off on Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson)

So many details to talk about in this movie, but the main thing I’ll remember is, after the whole twisty, backstabby mess, when Chris Evans has been taken away for murder (one provable, two attempted), that final shot of Ana de Armas (the hologram-girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049) with the “my house/my rules” mug. The nazi child was Jaeden Martell of Midnight Special – so the second time he’s played Michael Shannon’s son. The silly-ass state trooper is Noah Segan, a Rian Johnson regular since Brick. Murdered Fran is a Groundling, Shannon’s wife is from Garfunkel and Oates – lot of comedians in the cast, but most everyone plays it straight against eccentric detective Daniel Craig.

by ·Comments Off on The Shape of Water (2017, Guillermo del Toro)

Opens on my birthday, sometime during the cold war. Mute Amelie (Sally Hawkins) lives in the apartment above a reclusive artist (Richard Jenkins) who forges them fake IDs and van decals when it’s time to break her fishman boyfriend out of the government facility where she works alongside Octavia Spencer, but wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, blatantly evil U.S. government agent Michael Shannon wants to kill and dissect the fishman, and sympathetic Russian spy Michael Stuhlbarg defies his superiors to save the fishman, all the while nobody noticing that Mute Amelie is having an affair with the fishman, and forgetting that she’s not deaf and can hear all their plans which they are constantly saying out loud.

I was warned by the anti-Guillermo critic contingent, but thought it’d be worth checking out Sally’s dance moves on the big screen, and jeez, does this movie ever have the best production design. Since Doug Jones plays the fishman, can this count as a Hellboy prequel?

by ·Comments Off on Loving (2016, Jeff Nichols)

Quiet, lumpy Joel Edgerton (fourth movie I’ve seen him in, maybe I’ll recognize him next time?) marries sweet Ruth Negga (Ethiopian, of World War Z), they just want to be left alone with their kids and their auto repairs and home building and what not, but they’re arrested because they live in a racist Virginia shithole, and forced to move out of town. The NAACP hears about this and decides to use their case to challenge federal law, hires a shaky-looking local lawyer (comedian Nick Kroll), and Life sends photographer Michael Shannon, who gets them national attention. A slow-paced, good-natured movie with a happy ending – what’s not to like?

by ·Comments Off on Nocturnal Animals (2016, Tom Ford)

It was the baby-monitor jump-scare that lost me. Intriguing backstory open before the movie changes directions, centering on Amy Adams (far less electric here than in Arrival, and given much less to do) reading the rape-murder-revenge novel written by her ex Jake Gyllenhaal, visualizing it starring him with Michael Shannon as a dying cop who doesn’t play by the rules. I suppose the ending should be cynically satisfying, as Adams becomes obsessed with the novel, contacts Jake to meet him and talk about it, and gets stood up. By that point though, who could care about Amy and Jake’s old relationship problems (she got an abortion without telling him, and dumped him for Armie Hammer) or his elaborate literature-based revenge plot, when the bulk of the movie has become the novel itself, a grimy, joyless, desert desperation story? And who can say why Adams gets so sucked in, to the point where she starts seeing jump-scare monsters inside her assistant’s baby monitor, a moment that felt so outrageously cheap that I optimistically figured it would be justified later, or at least be the beginning of a series of visions?

Also it opens with naked fat women dancing in slow-motion. And hey, here’s Love star Karl Glusman and Donnie Darko‘s Jena Malone, both of them returning from another 2016 movie I found ugly and misguided. Standard dialogue scenes were filmed in a flat and boring manner (and the movie is mostly standard dialogue scenes). Diana Dabrowska in Cinema Scope and David Ehrlich on Letterboxd both compliment the camerawork, so maybe I missed something there. At least Jake G. is very good in his role, and Shannon is always pleasant to watch.

by ·Comments Off on Midnight Special (2016, Jeff Nichols)

After Take Shelter, I’ll definitely sign up for another Jeff Nichols/Michael Shannon drama about impending doom. This one is maybe more ambitious, definitely more confusingly plotted, and has less well-defined characters and relationships. Shannon and childhood friend Joel Edgerton have kidnapped Shannon’s magic son Alton from a doomsday cult and with help from Shannon’s (ex-?)wife Kirsten Dunst and federal agent Adam Driver they take Alton to fulfill his destiny by ascending to Tomorrowland.

Pretty sure this was meant to evoke the string of psychic-child adventure stories in the late 1970’s: Firestarter (the novel, if not the film) and The Fury. In fact I was so busy trying to remember how Firestarter ends that I may have missed some details about the doomsday cult and why exactly they wanted Alton – or maybe they weren’t even sure of that themselves. If not an instant classic, at least a cool-looking, mysterious movie, full of great acting and shocking moments (I leapt when satellite parts rained down on the gas station). I always appreciate sci-fi stories that show glimpses of larger worlds and deeper mysteries than the film has the time or inclination to explain.

This counted as the kickoff to Cannes Month, since Nichols’ previous movie Mud played Cannes, and his second film of 2016 Loving is about to premiere there. Although I would’ve watched it anyway.

M. D’Angelo:

For some reason, the emotional core of this film seems to have gone missing — I can see where it’s supposed to reside, but the love Alton’s parents feel for him is oddly abstract, perhaps because E.T. seems more human than he does.

I. Vishvenetsky:

The bad guys trace [our heroes’ car] through an insurance bill left on a kitchen counter, because even Midnight Special’s sense of conspiracy is grounded in the commonplace. The only explicitly poetic line the movie allows itself is spoken by the cult’s neckless goon, played by character actor Bill Camp. Sitting in his truck, he says, “I was an electrician, certified in two states. What do I know of these things?” This is the most the viewer will ever learn about him. Midnight Special defines characters through what they can’t understand, contrasting fear of the unknown with faith in it, and flipping the supernatural into a metaphor for the everyday.

From J. Romney’s review intro:

Cinema has rarely felt so much like a son et lumière as it did in a brief period in the early ’80s, when suddenly shafts of light came shooting out of movie images, as if the screen had been slashed. It became a defining image of Steven Spielberg’s films — Close Encounters, E.T., and Poltergeist too, if you want to count that as one of his … In their purest and most glaring form, those shafts of light had something of the quality of angelic revelation about them. Certainly, you suspected that cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond and Allen Daviau had taken a close look at certain academic religious paintings of the 19th century, or perhaps at Renaissance church sculpture, with their sheaves of marble emulating beams from the divine. At any rate, it came as a shock to get the impression from these films — and with such eye-searing intensity — that cinema was a matter of light streaming directly out of the screen, rather than just bounced off it. The motif was a powerful way of restoring, if not a holy, at least an authentically otherworldly dimension to cinema.

by ·Comments Off on Misc Shorts, Q2 2015

World of Tomorrow (2015, Don Hertzfeldt)

Emily Prime is contacted by her third-generation clone, discussing memory, robots, love and life in the outernet of the future.

Only 16 minutes long but I watched it seven times.

Choose You (2013, Spike Jonze & Chris Milk)

Written by Lena Dunham and directed by Spike Jonze – and yet it’s terrible? I think that’s because it’s a corporate-sponsored short made for a music video awards show. Anyway, subtitled and censored, club dude’s ex-gf is now dating DJ Michael Shannon, some girl he doesn’t even know freaks out about this, then Jason Schwartzmann hosts a choose-your-own-adventure ending and double suicide is chosen.

The Discontented Canary (1934, Rudolf Ising)

A sad caged canary gets his chance to escape, but nature beats the hell out of him, so he returns home, learning to appreciate his captivity. At least he wasn’t hit by lightning like the feral cat. Moral: life is just horrible.

The Alphabet (1968, David Lynch)

Now in high-def!

Les jeux des anges (1965, Walerian Borowczyk)

Heads roll.
Pipe organ becomes firing squad.
Angel wings.
Infinite scrolling.

Mouseover for decay:
image

The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918, Winsor McCay)

Didn’t realize this was a WWI propaganda film. “Germany, once a great and powerful nation, had done a dastardly deed in a dastardly way.”

Intro explaining how difficult the movie was to create, and plenty of title cards, so the nine minute short has maybe four minutes of animation. But the animation is real good stuff, all water and smoke.

We Give Pink Stamps (1965, Friz Freleng)

Absurd fun in a department store as the Pink Panther torments the night janitor.

Closed Mondays (1974, Will Vinton & Bob Gardiner)

Great claymation. Wino wanders into an art gallery, hallucinates (?) all the paintings and sculptures coming to life.

Night Mail (1936 Wright & Watt)

I’ve heard this is one of the greatest short documentaries. True, it’s admirably put together, showing all the moving parts in a great, manned machine that moves the mail across England and Scotland really damn fast. And it makes you marvel at the heights of human endeavor. And it ends with a post office rap song. So yeah I was gonna say it’s just a doc about a mail train, but I guess I see their point.

Monster (2005 Jennifer Kent)

Beginnings of The Babadook (there’s a pop-up book and everything). Monster-doll grows into full monster and attacks son, mom screams at it, tells it to go to its room.

Fears (2015, Nata Metlukh)

Terrific 2-minute animated short linked by Primal.
A man literally embraces his fears.

Restaurant Dogs (1994, Eli Roth)

Student film in which an evil brigade of fast-food restaurant mascots is bloodily defeated by a young dude who’s given a mission from the Burger King himself to save his daughter the Dairy Queen. Something like that, anyway. I thought the guy only wanted to buy a milkshake, and suspected he was drunk, so I’m surprised he signed up for the murderous mission so quickly.

Given all the trademarked properties being mixed with nazi images via Terry Gilliam-style cut-out animation, I thought I’d better watch this as soon as I heard about it, rather than wait until our corporate overlords remove it from the internet like they did the Soderbergh cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I’d been meaning to watch. Besides Reservoir Dogs, there’s some Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in the grimace/hamburglar flashback scene.

Ritual (1979, Joseph Bernard)

Under three minutes, viewed online as a trailer for the new Bernard blu-ray, which I obviously need. Drawings, figures, people and scenes and stuttering colors cut together into changing rhythms and overlays. My favorite bit has an overlay of two scenes, one of which is cutting, an effect I don’t see often.