This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how meaningful are their relationships and how many times we’ve saved/endangered the world, the highlight is two nearly wordless action scenes in vehicles. In the submarine I think Cruise says one thing (“torpedo tube”), and the plane fight gets better when Esai stops supervillain-monologuing.
Tag: plane crash
The Rehearsal season 2 (2025)
“They gave me a blank check as long as I don’t go over budget.” The aviation safety season – Nathan discovers a problem that only he can solve, bringing some Nathan For You energy into The Rehearsal. He thinks social difficulties between copilots prevents them from speaking up when they see something wrong, and aims to solve this by having pilots role-play during flights. Along the way he starts a game show inside the fake airport he built, then the fake crew of his fake singing competition start covertly giving fake therapy to the real pilots. “I’ve always felt that sincerity was overrated.” He goes to Colorado with a couple of cloned dogs, rehearses one dog to live the life of his original (has Fielder read The Boys From Brazil?) then Nathan speed-runs episodes from Captain Sully’s life to understand his mind (always claiming he wants to help others then turning back on himself). “I began studying footage of other comedians who went before congress” – he shows a fake senate his pilot dating reenactments, but not even HBO’s lobbyists and the help of an autism center (who all but directly state that Nathan is obviously autistic) can get him into the real senate, so he has to become a licensed pilot himself and fly a planeload of people safely around in a circle. I’m not sure what any of this proves, but every episode succeeded in being more bonkers than the last.
Night Moves (1975, Arthur Penn)
Watched this in mid-Feb, not intending it as a Gene Hackman memorial screening, but here we are. Great detective plot, Gene a two-bit private eye who finds the missing girl a half hour into the movie then sticks around as new smuggling/murder plots continue to unfold, until the girl (Melanie Griffith a decade pre-Body Double) is dead, movie stunt coordinator Ed Binns (Sixth Angry Man) is dead after two crashes and trying to murder Gene, giggling stuntman Marv dead underwater, mechanic James Woods floating in the dolphin pool, stepdad John Crawford (DEI-enforcing mayor of The Enforcer) guilty possibly dead, and tough Florida girl Jennifer Warren, whom Gene and I were both really getting to like, head smashed by a plane. Side plot of Gene discovering his own wife’s affair (via an Eric Rohmer movie date) then trying to repair his marriage, which doesn’t go too well, as he keeps returning to this case. Matt Singer gets it, and Filipe points out that “everything plot related happens offscreen.”
Carry-On (2024, Jaume Collet-Serra)
Joey Gordon-Edgerton? – Of the Tetris movie, I guess? – is playing TSA Agent Joey while evil remorseless terrorist Michael Bluth threatens his disney-cute gf Sofia and Agent Deadwyler puts the clues together to help out. Upgrade star Joey Logan-Green is a fake cop who gets in a big Children of Men car-fight with the agent, Nanny‘s Sinqua Walls is a coworker who’s gotta get gotten rid of, and Son of Anarchy Theo is Bluth’s hit man. The tension of the useless guy getting coerced into helping blow up a plane is all on point, but the attempts at deeper characterization and psychoanalysis and Joey’s redemption arc only serve to drag the movie to the full two-hour mark. Lately everything reminds me of Red Eye, so why do I not simply rewatch Red Eye? Maybe the least-good Joey Gordon-Serra film I’ve seen (and I skipped the obviously bad ones). Closing credits are excellent.
Porco Rosso (1992, Hayao Miyazaki)
Porco is a daredevil pilot with a broken-down plane, chasing pirates, who at least have a code of honor. The pirates team up with hotshot pilot Curtis, who falls for Porco’s girl Gina. Porco is stuck with young architect Fio until his climactic dogfight, which becomes a boxing match when both planes are incapacitated, then everyone gets back up and flees the fascist government. It’s a fun pig adventure that holds onto a nice sense of mystery at the end.
Death in the Garden (1956, Luis Buñuel)
Buñuel’s least-well dubbed movie, filmed in Mexico and spoken in French. Diamond miners and soldiers are having a showdown when a mysterious stranger wanders into town, but instead of impressing everyone with his skills a la Yojimbo he’s an asshole to everyone – this is Shark (That is the Dawn‘s doctor Georges Marchal), who needs a place to stay so he shacks up with prostitute Simone Signoret, who is beloved of miner Castin (Clouzot regular Charles Vanel).
The miners-vs-soldiers war reaches a climax in a midnight firing squad which leads to a riot. Our heroes escape (with fake priest Michel Piccoli and a mute girl: Michèle Girardon of the earliest Rohmers), getting very lost in the jungle, walking in circles. They reach the promised land, finding a crashed plane full of food and jewels along the way, rescued and rich, but Castin goes mad, throwing his diamonds in the lake and murdering everyone.
Politically the movie may side with the miners, but once this crew forms and heads into the jungle, Buñuel is more interested in exploring the hypocrisies that exist in every human heart. And so the priest is a fraud, the prostitute is an opportunist, and the miner loses his mind … Death in the Garden concludes with a more subversive poetic image: two figures blithely paddling across a South American lake as if they were in a Venetian gondola, when in fact a literal and spiritual wilderness surrounds them.
Final Destination (2000, James Wong)
I don’t remember why I avoided these movies for so long, but they’ve been buzzing around the internet long enough that it’s time I check them out. The first dialogue scene is a 90’s version of Doris Wishman, this ain’t good. I decided which teens I’m rooting for based on the posters hanging in their room – Alex (Devon Sawa of Idle Hands) has Pecker and the Goo Goo Dolls, but Claire (Resident Evil regular Ali Larter) has Cub and Mule Variations, so she wins.
Devon, Ali, Sidemouth Todd:
Big school trip, but Alex gets all upset after dreaming the plane falling apart, and also has a bad haircut, so six get kicked off the plane, which does fall apart, and since they cheated death, death comes for them one by one. Sidemouth Todd (Chad Donella of a Saw movie) dies first, clotheslined in the tub. The teacher (Kristen Cloke of Black Christmas Remake) is taken out by everything in her house in a coordinated attack, and two kids (curly girl must’ve been Amanda Detmer of Saving Silverman, and Seann William Scott six months before Dude Where’s My Car) die in vehicular accidents, unexceptional but for their shock timing. Despite the Goo Goo Dolls poster, Devon grew on me, and his escaping the FBI in a rowboat is really good. He and Claire are both alive at the end, but I only see her in the cast of part two. Very excited to see Tony Todd as a mortician, hoping he’d be Death Incarnate, but just a mortician… he’s in the cast of future Final Destinations, so hopefully this will still play out.
There’s talk of alternate realities. It’s fun that the characters are named after classic horror people – sometimes it pays off, as with teacher Val(erie) Lewton, and sometimes it’s just weird… I’m sure naming the FBI guys after the Caligari director and Nosferatu actor looked cool on the page, but when they introduce themselves as “Agents Ween and Shrek” it sounds ridiculous. Director James Wong was a major X-Files contributor, and named the asshole teen Carter, hmmm. Wong followed up with forgettable Jet Li film The One, and somehow made a live-action Dragonball movie I’ve never heard of.
Rock Docs and Concerts, part 5
The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005, Jeff Feuerzeig)
RIP Daniel. This was jaw-dropping, I had no idea.
“He spent some time in Bellevue, a day or two, was released through a clerical error, and actually opened for Firehose at CBGB that night.” It all sounds perfectly unbelievable, “print the legend,” larger-than-life biography, but Daniel is real and wonderful, so you follow along from his humble beginnings as the stories get wilder. I kept pausing the movie to tell Katy stories until she asked if I was Forgotten Silvering her. Then Daniel wrestles control of his dad’s plane, cuts the engine and throws the keys out the window, and you’ve entered new ground for a rock doc.
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Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax! Records (2018, Julia Nash)
Katy overheard me watching this, said it seems like there’s a lot of talk and not much music, and she’s not wrong. Wax Trax! was started by a gay couple in the 1970’s, and this is very much their story, with the colorful rock & roll stories as decoration. In fact it could’ve used more WT! music – when the label starts taking off with some Ministry singles, we hear “To Hell With Poverty” instead of Ministry. Nice touch: we hear someone say “Nine Inch Nails was a terrible catalyst,” before showing the heretic speaking the words (it’s Reznor). The label was said to be popular in the bible belt (“It almost seemed the more conservative a small town you were in, the more you needed a Revolting Cocks record”), and in fact one of the label cofounders left it all behind and moved to Arkansas in the mid-90’s, right about when I was in Arkansas discovering all this music for the first time. The Amphetamine Reptile movie was 100x better, but this one is more emotional.
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MC5: A True Testimonial (2002, David Thomas)
I watched this despite having listened to the group’s “Kick Out The Jams” album this summer and thinking it was just okay… and after watching, it turns out the MC5 is the greatest band in the history of rock & roll. One of the most unconventionally affectionate rock docs I’ve seen, with not a single celebrity testimonial, just the surviving band members and their friends and family, making the band seem smaller than they were, which lets the music (and there’s lots of it!) speak for itself.
MC5 faced down the police, constantly got arrested for obscenity, faced down the US fuckin’ Army, and formed the White Panther movement because they wished they could be as cool as the Black Panthers.
The internet says Wayne Kramer suppressed the movie for 15+ years, boooo.
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Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film (2012, Hanly Banks)
Between songs, some very short interviews, scraps of wisdom and insight. Grab all you can from the Apocalypse man. A few short years later in 2019, Bill is healthy and happy, wide open, chatty and content, touring on another consecutive masterpiece record. Back in 2012, this was more than we expected, and it was good, each song with its own visual scheme, as in the best concert films.
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Also watched some live Malkmus/Jicks
Some reunion-era Ween
Yo La Tengo with Jad Fair
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
and Courtney Barnett
Wild Tales (2014, Damián Szifrón)
Five stories of People Driven To The Brink: a great opening segment set on a plane, then four mediocre, pointless segments. Kinda fun to watch for a while, but I can’t believe the acclaim this thing got. Went up against Leviathan, Timbuktu and the winner Ida for the foreign oscar. I guess its defenders hoped the artistically-serious vote would cancel itself out and the goofball candidate would take the prize.
First episode has a flight full of people who gradually realize that they all know the same guy – and they’ve each wronged him in some way – and he’s the pilot. Then comes the best part of the movie: the opening titles.
Part 2: a diner waitress realizes the sole customer one night is the gangster who drove her father to suicide. The chef poisons the guy’s son then stabs the gangster. Part 3: rich guy vs. normal guy road rage incident goes out of control, ends with explosive deaths. Fourth: an explosives expert’s car keeps getting towed, ruining his family life. Guess what he does? Next, rich family’s son drunkenly kills pregnant woman, family pays their gardener to take the blame, bribes are negotiated then gardener is murdered by dead woman’s husband. Finally, a bride discovers at wedding that her husband has been cheating, makes a scene.
Editing to music: something more movies should do. It’s fun and easy.
After portraying the producers as wolves, vultures and lions:
A massive hit in Argentina. “Every story in Wild Tales has to do with the clash between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed” – QuintÃn writes about how the movie cautiously addresses the problems facing Argentina, convincingly calls it an important film despite its light-violent-entertainment appearance to outsiders like myself.
