by ·Comments Off on V/H/S/99 (2022)

Framing story starts out as some kid’s stop-motion army-guy video, nice.

1. Phony from top to bottom, a punk band goes to the basement venue where another punk band died in a fire three years ago on this very night, and gets murdered by ghouls. Director Maggie Levin “is a filmmaker with rock n’ roll roots” per her bio, argh.

2. Better: sorority pledge (girl from Synchronic) is buried alive as a hazing thing, cops chase off the aboveground girls as a rainstorm is coming through. Synchronic Girl meets a sinister ghost while buried alive while drowning while covered in spiders, oof, and all the other girls get supernaturally leaky-coffin’d next. Director Johannes Roberts made two killer shark movies and a failed Resident Evil reboot.

3. Some underlit Nickelodeon game-show called Ozzy’s Dungeon is Double Dare meets torture porn. Donna competes in a doomed wish-fulfillment game that nobody has ever won, then her surviving family turns the tables on the host, taking him into the victory cave(?) beneath the set to meet the fat-suit wishmaster, but apparently the girl’s wish was to explode the heads of her family members, like a cut-rate version of The Viewing. Directed by Flying Lotus themself.

4. Older brother Dillon of the stop-motion kid is a horny teen who films himself skating and doing pranks. Their friend Boner is an apocalypse prepper – this turns out to be unimportant, as focus turns to the hot medusa across the street who turns the boys into statues for attempting to install spyware on her new imac. Only good joke in the movie is the package delivery service being called DUI. Tyler MacIntyre also made the pd187-approved Tragedy Girls, and looking up the lead actress is how I found out someone remade Castle Freak.

5. Coven is doing a summoning ceremony, but demon Fircus interferes and drags the cameraman Troy and Nate to hell, where they meet Mabel the Skull Biter, the movie’s only good character, and scramble to return to the surface when the coven’s portal opens at midnight. Also the movie’s best segment, the only one that doesn’t look like shit on purpose, so I assume it made the top ten of Vulture’s ambitious V/H/S segment ranking… nope, Dowd got it all wrong. The Winters also made a haunted house livestream influencer movie starring Mabel.

by ·Comments Off on Paranoid Park (2007, Gus Van Sant)

Nice movie… felt really good walking out of this one.

Shot by my hero Christopher Doyle with lots of slow-motion, but looks more idiosyncratic in Van Sant’s style than in Doyle’s. Shot in 1.33:1 aspect ratio (thankfully respected at the Plaza). I notice light levels slowly fluctuating. I see Van Sant’s long, wandering shots and his slooow forward camera movement like in Last Days and Elephant, but seriously toned down now, not calling attention to themselves anymore. Regular story segments are buffered by 8mm skate footage. The soundtrack was the most surprising part. Music is usually playing, and it’s all over the map, from suspenseful Bernard Herrmann sounding pieces (actually Nino Rota’s circus-noir), thrash punk, glitchy ambient music, singing in French, a cowboy song heard twice, some hip hop, a bit of indie rock (Menomena), bird calls (!) and two Elliott Smith songs (which did not remind me of Good Will Hunting, but it’s understandable that reviewers keep bringing that up).

image

Acting ranged from very good to great with a nonprofessional cast (except surprisingly for our guy’s girlfriend, who starred in Jim Carrey’s Grinch and other high-profile stuff). Story is told out of order, as is so fashionable now, with flashbacks and diary-entry narration. Never flashy with the editing, the flow and pacing really work for the story, so the non-chronological thing is never annoying. No Kids (or even Elephant) style gratuitous teen sex, even when there was a convenient spot for it in the story – thanks for that.

And the story, wow, smaller and more intimate than you’d expect from the trailer, with real depth and feeling for our lead character Alex. He’s a low-key skater kid, hangs out with his friends Jared and Macy and girlfriend Jennifer, deals with his excitable younger brother and his divorcing parents. Then one day he goes to the title skate park alone, goes off to play on the train tracks with a cool older kid and accidentally causes the death of a security guard. Tension mounts when a detective comes to school to question all the kids, and later (actually revealed earlier than the group interrog.) questions Alex alone. The detective isn’t a bad guy, and wants to solve this crime, but Alex feels horrible for what he’s done, and we do not want to see him locked up. At the end there’s no scene where the detective sighs to his partner “I guess we’ll have to rule this one an accident”, but we assume Alex gets away with it. He writes his confession in a journal then burns the pages, freed (or at least partially relieved) of his guilty burden. It’s a beautiful ending, one of my favorites of recent years.

image