by ·Comments Off on Live Flesh (1997, Pedro Almodóvar)

After a shooting during a Buñuel movie, aggrieved pizza guy Liberto Rabal goes to jail while his mom Penelope Cruz is dying of cancer and his crackhead girlfriend Francesca Neri marries the cop Javier Bardem who the pizza guy put in a wheelchair. This all makes the pizza guy crazed for revenge, so he plans to ruin everyone’s lives (also everyone has sex with everyone else).

Crackhead, Pizza Guy:

Josh Lewis:

If for nothing else this should be on your radar for the excellent early Javier Bardem performance as the sexy Madrid cop turned paralympic basketball star who spends most of the movie in various Tasmanian Devil t-shirts while he goes voyeur-detective mode on this guy he suspects is Cape Fear-ing him and his wife, and instead unraveling all kinds of secret affairs, domestic abuse and sexual obsessions that the characters eventually start pointing guns at each other over.

by ·Comments Off on Oddity (2024, Damian McCarthy)

My second movie this week where someone runs a cursed antique shop – in this case it’s the blind sister of “Brian May” Ted’s murdered wife (Carolyn Bracken, playing both sisters, was my mother in You Are Not My Mother). On the anniversary of her sister’s death, Blind Darcy comes over bearing cursed antiques for the husband and his new hotgirl (“Do I look stupid?” “I have no idea what you look like. You sound stupid.”) Backstory ensues, the argument of whether Asylum Olin with weird eyes (who also had weird eyes in The Northman) or Asylum Ivan (The Hole in the Ground) actually did the murder is academic, since the husband definitely ordered it. The hotgirl and blind sister both die, the husband can’t help himself from ringing the little bell he was gifted, leading to the best final shot of the season.

by ·Comments Off on A Diary for Timothy & The Stranger Left No Card

A Diary for Timothy (1945, Humphrey Jennings)

Narrator explains to Baby Tim on his birthday – also the fifth anniversary of Britain entering WWII – what we’re fighting for, and how we’ve got a difficult recovery ahead. He sketches out the next six months, closing by asking whether the kid will make the world a better place (spoiler: he did not). Starts out as boring wartime propaganda and gets increasingly complex, until by the end I almost see why this keeps popping up on best-movie lists.

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The Stranger Left No Card (1952, Wendy Toye)

“They’d never seen anything like me before,” says the stranger, an overly facial-haired street magician, but that’s because Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals hadn’t been invented yet. All the townspeople take interest in this guy as he runs around being whimsical. Some sync sound issues, but mostly narrated by our self-delighted stranger (Alan Badel of Day of the Jackal and Children of the Damned). After establishing himself all week as someone who shows up everywhere playing harmless tricks, he shows up in a contractor’s office at closing time and revenge-kills the guy for sending him to prison years earlier. It’s the perfect crime, but it’s also the 1950s so he can’t quite get away clean, leaving a trail of glitter to the train as he’s leaving town.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

I’ve gotta stop sitting so close to the screen – between the closeness and the frantic editing, I’m not sure how our small team survived when fifty vampires, who’ve been shown as lightning-quick and super-strong, bust into the house. Bold music throughout, and the music not just incidental but vital to plot and theme. I’d be interested in reading about influences, since it turns From Dusk Till Dawn to Django Unchained. A little too neatly tied together, with the late revelations of the twins’ Chicago adventure (not actually becoming rich gangsters but stealing big from two rival gangs then running away while the gangs blamed each other) and the tolerant local whites’ less-tolerant motivations, and each of the three main dudes meeting a woman at the same time, then those six being the main survivors. Mostly as good as advertised though, taking place in a single day, plus a delicious Buddy Guy postscript.

The near-white girl is Hailee from True Grit, and the other Michael Jordan’s woman played the wife in His House… we saw a preview for the evil white vampire’s next horror movie 28 Years Later… the girl Sammy likes will supposedly star in a Running Man remake… I never recognize Lola “Gemini” Kirke, who doesn’t look enough like her sister… the Chinese woman who must have died in that climactic rampage is in the new Alma & The Wolf… the doorman was in Miracle at St. Anna and plays Raphael in the recent Ninja Turtle things… plus Delroy Lindo on harmonica.

by ·Comments Off on Cloud (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Ryosuke and Akiko are a young couple driven by money (he’s new, she starred in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). He quits his factory job to get rich buying junk (like pricey Sailor Moon snowglobes) and reselling it online, guided by schoolmate Muraoka (the First Love guy) and with help from very loyal assistant Sano.

But somebody is after him from the beginning, laying tripwires in his bike path and throwing car parts through his window, and soon his online identity gets doxxed and a gang of aggrieved customers who got ripped off by his fake designer handbags are after him, breaking into his house and Serpent’s Path-ing him for revenge. I’m not sure what all this double-crossing gun intrigue adds up to, besides the dreamlike final scene which spells out that unchecked greed will lead you to hell.

The Arkanoid Conspiracy:

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic.

by ·Comments Off on Silvestre (1982, Joao Cesar Monteiro)

Supremely cool movie, the artificial look gave me flashbacks to Perceval Le Gallois. I guess I like Monteiro now, and there’s plenty more to see.

Without Affinity I don’t know how to remove weird watermarks:

Maria de Medeiros looked exactly the same age 22 years later in The Saddest Music in the World, doesn’t transform from a damsel into the warrior Silvestre until the last 40 minutes. Her sister was in Francisca the same year, went on to star in Tabu. Luis Miguel Cintra is the villain here, and Paio also played second fiddle to Cintra in Ilha dos Amores and Satin Slipper.

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on The Temple Woods Gang (2022, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)

Local gang carjacks some valuables from a Saudi prince who likes to dance incognito at grungy clubs. The gang is friendly with Mr. Pons, whose mom just died, and they seem like good-natured dudes, hanging out feeding the pigeons, but the prince’s guy hires Elite Jim, who suspects these guys straight away, and quickly hunts/kills them all. Mr. Pons is an ex-army sniper, which means he’s got a long gun wrapped in a carpet hidden in a storage locker somewhere, and out it comes for some fast revenge. I wouldn’t have started watching if I’d remembered Rabah made the decently forgettable South Terminal, but this one’s better: a grounded version of the crime/revenge movie.