by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on Door (1988, Banmei Takahashi)

Mom runs a cheesy household, where things are nice, and the family is always saying “oh how nice,” but as soon as she’s left alone she gets tormented by advertisers. She is Keiko Takahashi of Uzumaki, and her husband (Shiro Shimomoto of Serpent’s Path and Guard from the Underground) is the worst. One day she’s fed up with a pushy guy selling English lessons (Daijiro Tsutsumi of Sure Death 4) and slams his hand in the door, he starts aggressively stalking her. Movie is not great but almost worth it for a climactic long-take chase through the apartment filmed from overhead. She consistently does damage to the stalker, he never gets in any good hits, just keeps getting more and more injured until she does him in with a chainsaw.

They live at the Sportsment:

Bebeco Who / More Hast Less Speed / Produce

by ·Comments Off on Greta (2018, Neil Jordan)

This was just about a good enough movie to watch on a plane – which I did. I knew Chloë Grace got conned into being friends with lonely crackpot Isabelle Huppert, but not that Isabelle kidnaps and brainwashes her in the second half, murders private eye Stephen Rea sent by Chloë’s dad, then is defeated by Maika Monroe, who searches the subways until she finds a purse lure with Greta’s home address. When investigating, they’re told that Greta acts this way (the obsessive calling, not the kidnapping/murder) with everyone, and that she’s not even French (ha). Somehow only the third Neil Jordan movie I’ve seen – Mona Lisa was alright (so was this), and I’ve been meaning to watch The Company of Wolves.

by ·Comments Off on Unsane (2018, Steven Soderbergh)

Claire Foy (of Nicolas Cage monk-actioner Season of the Witch) makes the huge mistake of confessing suicidal thoughts to her therapist, gets admitted to a psychiatric ward for evaluation for a couple days, which gets extended to a week because she keeps railing against her confinement. She sees her stalker ex-boyfriend working at the clinic, and I thought the whole movie was gonna be the old “are these things really happening or is she actually crazy” routine, but it becomes clear only a few scenes later that he is a dangerous stalker abusing his position of power and her inability to escape. I haven’t seen Side Effects yet, but between this and The Knick and Contagion, Soderbergh has got a thing for dangerous hospitals.

“There is no path to happiness from here.” The stalker is Joshua Leonard of the Blair Witch Project. SNL’s Jay Pharoah helps Claire out, claims to be a recovering drug addict who checked himself in, but is actually an undercover reporter exposing the hospital, or he would have if Josh hadn’t murdered him. Josh also kills unstable patient Juno Temple (the blonde one in Jack & Diane) and Claire’s mom, then miseries Claire’s foot when she runs away. I think she kills his ass in the end, the hospital gets busted for being run like a secret prison, and Claire gets a promotion at work. Whole movie was shot on a phone, with some unique angles and fishbowl views.

by ·Comments Off on Ingrid Goes West (2017, Matt Spicer)

Not nearly as good as one of my least-favorite Black Mirror episodes, Nosedive, but it’s got Aubrey Plaza at least, expanding her range from the April-as-a-nun movie. After apparently just having done a similar thing to someone else, Ingrid obsesses over social-media star Elizabeth Olsen to a dangerous degree. Wyatt Russell (Black Mirror: Playtest) is Olsen’s failed-artist husband, Billy Magnussen (Black Mirror: USS Callister) her shitty brother, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton) Aubrey’s landlord and Batman-loving fake-boyfriend. Feature debut by Spicer, who previously made shorts with members of Stella and Human Giant.

by ·Comments Off on Sleep Tight (2011, Jaume Balaguero)

With shades of Talk To Her, a hopeless balding dude has a one-sided relationship with a woman in the building where he is concierge – every night he drugs her and sleeps with her, the only witness a young girl across the hall, who is blackmailing him. He is Luis Tosar (Miami Vice, The Limits of Control), very friendly and polite to the residents, but depressed and secretly causing all sorts of misery for them. Things are looking bad for César: police investigate the threatening letters Clara is getting, he’s caught inside her apartment and fired, he kills Clara’s boyfriend, but César gets the last word, a year later confessing to Clara in a letter that he’s the father of her baby. A good, tense variation on the recent home-invasion horrors from the perspective of the invader.

by ·Comments Off on The Aviator’s Wife (1981, Eric Rohmer)

Skipped the Golden Globes and watched this non-award-winning Rohmer movie instead. Rohmer’s lead characters aren’t always cool cats. In this case, kinda obsessive, immature Francois sees the ex of his girlfriend Anne (Marie Rivière, star of Autumn Tale) leaving her apartment, then runs into him again later and stalks him to the park. While inexpertly following this guy (Mathieu Carrière, a German who appeared in some Volker Schlöndorff movies and India Song) with another girl, clueless Francois runs into super-cute (too young) Lucie, who figures out what he’s up to and helps out as a laugh. Francois stays on the trail after they part, finds out the ex was just walking around with his sister, goes to meet his fellow spy but catches Lucie with her boyfriend and sends a postcard instead. So the title refers to the ex (a pilot), whose wife isn’t even in the movie.

Lucie:

“It is impossible to think about nothing.” The first of the six-film Comedies and Proverbs series. Pretty fun little adventure, but not sure that I got anything meaningful out of it, least of all an illustration of why it is impossible to think about nothing.

Ebert:

The story … reveals little of the texture of this film, which Is about how goofy, sad and driven we can be, especially when our hearts are fueled by self-made loneliness. There’s a lot of talk in this movie … There needs to be a lot of talk, because The Aviator’s Wife isn’t about actions but about reactions, speculations, false leads, hurtful suspicions and romantic insecurity. We need to live within these weaknesses for a time in order to understand them. … The ending, in which the hero chooses alienation over the simplicity of accepting happiness, is sad, and sadder still in that we immediately identify with it.

Francois and Anne:

Lead guy Philippe Marlaud had been in a Maurice Pialat film, died at 22 in a camping accident a few months after this opened, and the young Anne-Laure Meury would return in Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends.

by ·Comments Off on Thriller, part 2

Part one, featuring Richard Kiel, a Scooby-Doo mystery, a rooster-beast, Ida Lupino, Barré Lyndon (not Barry Lyndon), a mannequin museum, John Ireland and a voodoo cult can be found here. I watched those four years ago, so at this rate I’ll be through season one in the year 2054. Thriller paired well with Black Sabbath, which also had three episodes hosted by Boris Karloff.

The Twisted Image

First episode of the show started off with a bang. Leslie Nielsen (post-Forbidden Planet and Tammy and the Bachelor) plays bland but successful executive and family man Alan, and not one but two people are insanely obsessed with him. Secretary Lily (Natalie Trundy of the Planet of the Apes series) wants to marry him and Mailroom Merle (George Grizzard of Happy Birthday, Wanda June) wants to be him. Lily stalks Alan and writes letters to his wife (Dianne Foster of Drive a Crooked Road). Merle is more dangerous, steals Alan’s watch, wallet, car and daughter, and murders Lily when she says he’s no Alan.

Typical plot-contrivance follows. Alan goes to Lily’s apartment (because if your wife suspects you’re having an affair, you should definitely go to the girl’s apartment alone at night), finds her dead, is spotted at the scene, then goes looking for Merle alone.

Wife: “Why can’t you call the police?”
Alan: “Judy, you don’t understand. I can’t go into details now, just take it easy.”

Happy ending, family values are upheld, etc. Lot of good close-ups of Lily with confident, creepy eyes. Also featuring Constance Ford (the 1962 The Cabinet of Caligari) as Merle’s abusive sister and Virginia Christine (Becky’s cousin in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as his annoyed boss. Arthur Hiller later made See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which is not a horror movie, though quite horrible in its own way.

Pigeons From Hell

“Those were no ordinary pigeons – they were the pigeons from hell” says Karloff without even smiling. Maybe Thriller was trying to distance itself from the smartass introductions on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Too bad the intro proved to be the most amusing part of this talky, boring episode.

Two doofus college-age brothers get stuck in a swamp, immediately blame it on the South, then camp out in an abandoned house, where one brother appears from upstairs all bloody attempting to axe-murder the other. Survivor Tim (Brandon De Wilde of Hud and Shane) flees, interrupts a redneck sheriff (Crahan Denton, a huge racist in Bunuel’s The Young One) who was drinking with his buddies, tells the crazy story and is accused of killing his brother, the end.

But wait, it’s not the end! The most fantastic part of this episode isn’t the house full of haunted pigeons or the zombie remnants of the family that owned it, but the rural cop deciding to investigate this city kid’s story, consider the evidence and finally believe him and try to discover what really happened. From a story by Robert Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian.

Rose’s Last Summer

Drunken nuisance ex-movie star Rose French (played by actual movie star Mary Astor, princess in The Palm Beach Story) goes on a trip, is found dead in a random suburb. Her friend Frank and ex-husband Haley (Jack “brother of Roger” Livesey) are more suspicious than the cops were, investigate the family whose yard Rose died in.

Mary!

Turns out Rose has been hired by the family to be their dying mother, who needs to stay alive a few more weeks to claim inheritance from eccentric relative (a genius doll inventor!), after which they’d planned to dispose of Rose to protect their secret before Frank rescued her.

Real mom, fake mom: