by ·Comments Off on The Phenix City Story (1955, Phil Karlson)

Opens with convincingly real and unrehearsed news interviews, which they empasize are real and unrehearsed, but is the interview guy not aware that he’ll be in a movie? Why’s he gotta be so dry? From this drab beginning, the movie gets increasingly brutal, as the local casino runs a terror campaign against the voters, press, and church.

Edwards stops John from killing a casino boss, too bad:

John (Pickup on South Street) comes home to Phenix with his girl, has been there a half hour before running into gang violence and police corruption. He and some others who are sick of the casino’s shit team up, and mostly get killed. RIP John’s lawyer dad, their casino worker mole friend Kathryn Grant (Anatomy of a Murder’s star witness), some do-gooder named Fred, and the innocent daughter of The Steel Helmet‘s James Edwards. The girl is Black so doesn’t even warrant a trial, but Fred’s killer is acquitted, leading to further escalations, until John calls in the national guard to shut the whole thing down. Arguably the Fort Benning army shitheads across the bridge funded all the murders and paid no consequences.

Witness:

What witnesses get:

by ·Comments Off on Desperate Living (1977, John Waters)

Peggy is recovering from a breakdown when she and her maid Griselda kill Peggy’s husband and go on the run. They get molested by a policeman in exchange for help escaping, and make it to a shanty town run by evil queen Edith Massey. These are all Waters regulars except for their new blonde lesbian roommake Muffy (“Nightclub Stripper” in Lady Street Fighter the same year), whose gf Mole gets a sex change at the end, but gets angry-inch’d. Movie is half wonderful, and half annoying (everyone is yelling all the time).

by ·Comments Off on Zabriskie Point (1970, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Opens with a tiresome assembly of college revolutionaries, and closes with a fancy house exploding again and again, all of its contents blasted into the air in lovely slow-motion.

In between is a shaggy story of aimless young people with inconsistent dubbing, just what you’d expect from Antonioni. Mark, a white guy with sideburns, has maybe shot a cop and definitely stolen a plane. He’s flying over the desert when he spots a girl in a car, and starts casually north-by-northwesting her. This is Daria, who is either heading to a work meeting with her boss or trying to ditch it and find a meditation retreat. These two lovebirds Gerry themselves into the desert, have a phantom orgy with twenty other couples, then repaint the plane and he takes off, only to be shot to death by cops as soon as he lands. She stumbles into her work meeting but seems distracted by news of her new boyfriend’s murder, goes outside and imagines it all blowing up again and again and again.

Rosenbaum:

Antonioni creates a portrait of a volatile America that he (as a foreigner) and the hippies (as outsiders) see more clearly than others … Most of the major sequences make scant use of the dialogue or acting, and the plot mainly functions as a pretext for creating these sequences. Moods, landscapes, and a continual oscillation between documentary and abstraction are the central tools at Antonioni’s disposal, and the characters drift through the “dialogue of ambiance” like tour guides from the physical world.

by ·Comments Off on SPL: Kill Zone (2005, Wilson Yip)

I think the movie wants us to root for the cops who are trying to out-brutality each other, versus drug boss Sammo Hung who had the parents of a “cute” child murdered before they could testify against him. I chose to wish righteous death upon everyone onscreen, and nearly got my wish. Each cop has his little emotional family subplot before getting killed by a white-suited knife guy, except for retiring-due-to-brain-cancer Simon Yam who unfairly gets to live to see the sequel. Sammo also survives, but has been through a lot (accidentally murdering his family using Donnie Yen as a weapon), so he’s allowed to skip the sequel. The lighting was good, anyway.

Look what happens to bad cops:

My coworkers are always asking the autocomplete apps for professional advice and they no longer trust any knowledge that doesn’t come from bots, so I finally gave in, asking a bot how this movie ends, and it gave a completely wrong answer. Brandon’s Deeper Into Movies Blog: providing more accurate movie descriptions than the autocomplete bots for almost twenty years.

You have defeated Donnie Yen, but at what cost?

by ·Comments Off on Police, Adjective (2009, Corneliu Porumboiu)

Depressing movie about policing within a corrupt system. Slow-burn investigation by officer Cristi culminates in a half-hour meeting with his boss (star of The Whistlers), who insists that he either arrest a bunch of kids for drug violations or quit the force, pulling out a dictionary and being as pedantic as [__ ___ ____].

by ·Comments Off on The Longest Nite (1998, Patrick Yau)

Tony Leung is a bad cop in Macau whose specialty is smashing people’s hands to pulp, and Sean “Mad Detective” Lau is a tough guy working for one of the two gangs under uberboss Mr. Lung. Better than the same year’s A Hero Never Dies, this is nonstop gangster double-crosses. It ends where all 90s action movies must end: in an exploding box warehouse that doubles as a Wellesian mirror trap, as the killers become each other. They both die unceremoniously, as Mr. Lung arranges to erase both gangs and take the territory for himself, only his undercover man Lam Suet surviving. The girl is PTU star Maggie Shiu, Mr. Lung is from God of Gamblers, and loose cannon Mark was in Peking Opera Blues.

Bad cops:

Bad ass:

Mark with crazy lighting:

by ·Comments Off on Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger)

I noticed the parasite stuff on the classroom board long before it came up again via zombie-fungus-ant TV show, argh. The most mystifying was Handsome Family’s “Don’t Be Scared” (the “wake up, Paul” song) playing on the car radio to a cop named Paul. My conspiracy theory is that everything after Paul’s night at the bar with the teacher is his dream, that he fantasizes finding the missing kids (with help from his crack-addict tormentor) and almost saving them before getting paralyzed by a witch and then killed by his ex-girlfriend.

Pulp Fictioned-out story that keeps rewinding and changing perspective. Is it ironic that Brolin writes WITCH on the teacher’s car and the the villain turns out to be an actual witch? Effective blend of fairy-tale horror (pied piper children-napping by evil mind-control witches) with suburban dread/investigation drama. As for investigation, the cops are portrayed as even more ineffective than usual – the one we follow fucks up his home life, falls off the wagon, keeps getting stabbed by a crackhead, brutalizes civilians while disabling his car camera, then gets conquered by the witch, and killed with his own gun. As for the rest of the force, supposedly working hard on the case, nobody thought to check what direction the kids were running and then walk in that direction until the lines intersect – a parent figures this out a month too late.

Movies gain an automatic extra star when seen on the big screen. Packed weeknight crowd tittered at the suspense scenes, but their biggest reaction was upon seeing Justin Long The Mac Guy for some reason. Good movie but Parker isn’t wrong.

by ·Comments Off on L’Humanité (1999, Bruno Dumont)

Slow cinema starring a vacant-eyed cop reacting to news of a raped/murdered little girl, whose body we get a nice long leering stare at. The cop just wants to hang out with his neighbor Domino, but she’s dating bus driver Joseph, whose route goes right past the murder site. After some investigation, he finds Joseph arrested in boss’s office, tearily confessing, then our cop goes home and has a long hug and cry with Domino, then cut to the cop in handcuffs. Think I liked this best of Dumont’s pre-Quinquin slow art films, though somehow I missed “a brief shot that shows Pharaon levitating in his garden.”

by ·Comments Off on Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)

Long-take first-person camera to the point of absurdity, with eye blinks. Our guy, swearing to himself he’s not a junkie, smokes some bad drugs. We are Oscar, but it turns out you shouldn’t yell “I have a gun, I’ll shoot” to the police, and then we become Ghost Oscar floating above his body then roaming the city, clipping through walls.

Your first destination as an invisible ghost: the strip club, to watch your sister have sex with some guy in a back room. Sister (Paz de la Huerta, who got naked in The Limits of Control) flashes back to her happy childhood with Bro Oscar until their parents die in a car crash, while Bro remembers meeting Cool Alex who lent him a book of the dead. I guess Oscar’s obsession with his sister, watching psychic steam emanate from sexual encounters, leads to his getting reborn through her?

me, watching this movie:

We’re all watching this because of his Region Centrale camera, right? It bounces back and forth in time but never gets more than a half hour into his post-death, repeats and belabors its points too much, should’ve taken more hits from Je t’aime, je t’aime. Follow-cam with head-piercing sounds, not such fun to watch – Massive Attack’s “Protection” video is both cooler and shorter. At least it’s funny that, in retrospect, by the time Noe made his 3D porno Love, it was the most tame thing he’d done.