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 Anora (2024, Sean Baker)

Celebrating Cannes week by watching last year’s winner, part of a Cannes strip-club double-feature. Annie dances for a Russian guy who looks like Rodrick, then agrees to marry him in Vegas so he can stay in the US, but he runs when his parents send two hapless thugs after them, and Annie is stuck with the thugs while they search, finally catching him back at the strip club with her rival Diamond. There’s a lotta sex and dance music in this. It stretches on forever, then she fucks Igor, and that’s the ending?

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.

by ·Comments Off on Exotica (1994, Atom Egoyan)

One of those everyone-is-connected dramas, but with birds. Most of the birds are either fake/decorative, or an offscreen plot device (smuggled hyacinth macaw eggs) but it’s still appreciated.

Egg-smuggler Don McKellar runs a pet shop that is being audited by tormented beardo Bruce Greenwood (Meek, of the Cutoff) who is obsessed with stripper Mia Kirshner who works at the titular nightclub with her ex Elias Koteas and boss Arsinée Khanjian. Victor Garber is in here, in a wheelchair, with daughter Sarah Polley, and they both spend uncomfortable time with the beardo, knowing that he’s erratic and messed up ever since his daughter’s murder. Koteas and Kirshner had just met when they discovered her body years earlier. And the pet shop boy is seduced by an egg-thieving customs agent and blackmailed by his auditor into spying on the strip club.

Elias one-way-mirroring Bruce:

Don is intimidated by Mia:

What is wrong with Egoyan that he makes such sad movies? The revenge trip turning into a sad reconciliation was a motherfucker – it’s hard to write good people who get fucked up by misfortune and still hold onto some goodness – but for me the knife in the heart is the final two seconds, after a movie full of birds a cat walks into frame.

Victor and real bird:

Arsinée and fake bird:

by ·Comments Off on Hustlers (2019, Lorene Scafaria)

I think I sorta remember watching this. Anyway I gave it 2 1/2 stars on letterboxd, which feels right, in between four-star stan Ehrlich and 1.5-star stan-hater Kenny.

Post-2007-financial-crash, Constance Wu (Crazy Rich Asians) returns to her strip club job to find that old friend Jennifer Lopez has a new scam, drugging rich guys and charging huge tabs on their cards, with buddies Lili Reinhart (the latest Charlie’s Angels) and Keke Palmer (Akeelah and the Bee). This is recounted in the form of interviews with reporter Julia Stiles (lately of It’s a Disaster, which I recently read would be a good quarantine movie).