by ·Comments Off on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez)

Clooney is the bank robber who didn’t mean to kill anybody but absolutely will if they force his hand, Quentin is his idiot brother who kills as many people as possible and gets to suck whiskey off Salma Hayek’s feet. I would say the violence is distasteful, but I also just watched The Devil’s Rejects and Terrifier 2, so, shrug.

After they kidnap Harvey Keitel with daughter Juliette Lewis and son who doesn’t get to do much, and cross into Mexico to meet their contact at Salma’s vampire biker bar, fellow badass almost-survivors are Tom Savini and Fred Williamson. Between the shooting and cutting and action and makeup, all the craft is top-notch, so it’s a shame they throw in some dated morphing effects.

Rosenbaum raves: “if your critical horizons are low and you’re feeling in a nasty mood, you probably won’t be bored.”

Tito & Tarantula:

The future Machete:

Regarding my recent complaint that holding any two sticks together forms a holy-enough cross to ward off vampires, they reason that it worked for Peter Cushing.

by ·Comments Off on Tale of Tales (2015, Matteo Garrone)

Not the best fantasy English-language debut by a Cannes jury prize winning European filmmaker starring John C. Reilly I’ve seen in theaters this week. Hard to believe this was even worse than Reality. No atmosphere or rhythm, just a series of things happening to no apparent purpose. The colors and costumes looked nice, anyway.

I guess there are three nearby kingdoms. King John C. Reilly dies slaying a sea monster to cast a spell so Queen Salma Hayek can have a baby, but her substitute chef also has a baby and they grow up to be albino twins Christian and Jonah Lees, who send messages via water flowing out of a tree root. Second there’s King Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) who loves having sex with ladies and wants all the ladies to have sex with him. He likes the singing voice of Shirley Henderson so her sister Hayley Carmichael semi-competently fools him, then is thrown from his window and turned into young and beautiful Stacy Martin (Young Joe in Nymphomaniac) by a witch in the woods, after which she marries the king. And King Toby Jones is obsessed with his giant pet flea so absentmindedly allows his daughter Bebe Cave to marry a dangerous ogre.

Shot by Peter Suschitzky (Cosmopolis, Lisztomania) and edited by tossing rough-cut scenes in the air and picking them up in any order.

M. D’Angelo:

One tale will be abandoned for so long that its return is like suddenly remembering last night’s dream in the middle of the day. Guy Maddin employed that device masterfully in The Forbidden Room (which premiered at Sundance earlier this year), but he did so by burying dozens of stories inside others, like Russian dolls. Here, Garrone just randomly cuts to someone else every so often, killing the momentum every time.

The CLF in Cinema Scope:

Thanks to very good CGI and a diligent DP, the film looks pleasant if you’re into Middle Ages fetishism, dragons, albino twins, abusive ogres, and that sort of thing. The way Garrone elaborates the source material is pedantic in its refusal to give a moral dimension to the stories (something missing from the original). What is the point of drawing on archetypical forms of storytelling if their transposition fails to meaningfully relate to the present time? Like many films these days, the only good question Tale of Tales raises is: Why was this film made?