by ·Comments Off on New Blood (2002, Soi Cheang)

Dude survives the suicide pact with his now-dead girlfriend thanks to three blood donors: architect Eric, cop Lok, and cute girl with mental illness Joy. Now they’re all seeing blood visions and being haunted by the bald-capped dead girl. This drives them all nuts – Eric throws blood around at the girl’s funeral, a possessed Lok kills his dad, both men (and the surviving lover) die and Joy ends up in an asylum. Grim movie, to the point of stealing the Requiem for a Dream music during the blood transfusion scene.

tfw you have mental illness:

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Bath (2024, Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz)

Woman throws a baby down a waterfall. Later, Agnes (star of The Dreamed Ones) marries Wolf, and I don’t approve of their traditional wedding game of chicken-whacking. As an outsider from a neighboring town with apparently very different customs, Agnes is the most awkward of the local girls. Lot of slooow pans and slooow pulls into frame, and scenes always cut right after something curious happens. Wolf won’t have sex with her, and his mom (a regular of this film’s producer Ulrich Seidl) keeps bossing Agnes around – she becomes depressed so the “doctors” put leeches on her and poke her with pins. The neighbor killed himself so they toss him on the bone pile – Agnes avoids his fate by killing a random boy. If people in Olden Times didn’t desire to continue living, the best route to heaven was to kill some kid, confess to a priest, then be executed in town square. This is explained by an intertitle before the end credits, alas too late, since we just watched a boring two-hour movie illustrating the same thing.

Unhappy couple:

Lenz in the boneyard:

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

I love 45 minute movies, make more please. This is peak creepy K.Kurosawa. In my current state of mind the knife murders felt pretty normal, the real horror was when chef Mutsuo Yoshioka (who had small parts in Foreboding and Onoda) embarrassingly blew a job interview. I can’t tell if his wife (Tomoko Tabata of The Hidden Blade) is also affected or if she’s just obsessively Japanese. After the chef’s student commits suicide in class, the chef kills another student (Takashi Shimizu, whose previous movie Sana was also a horror about people hearing a weird sound). Comes to no real conclusion as to what is happening or why. Made with a new DP and Hamaguchi’s editor.

Adam Nayman in Film Comment:

A sudden act of violence that passes the narrative baton from Tashiro to his middle-aged instructor Takuji is staged with the same slow, inexorable inexplicability as the murders in Cure (Kurosawa doesn’t so much avoid jump scares as invert their affect; his set pieces are drenched in the numb, hypnotic dread of sleep paralysis). In lieu of a sociopathic Dr. Mesmer figure puppet-mastering the action, Chime dispenses with an antagonist — and a hero — altogether, and simply offers glimpses at a society in the throes of some profound, collective malfunction. To invert the title of a film by one of Kurosawa’s former students, the film unfolds in a space where evil does, indeed, exist.

by ·Comments Off on Suzhou River (2000, Lou Ye)

A strange one, a noirish story-in-a-story about a bagman who gets friendly with the young girl he’s driving around, the narrators possibly making up the story as they go. It all leads to kidnapping and murder and suicide and mermaids. I chose this one because the director (who also made Saturday Fiction with Gong Li and Purple Butterfly with Zhang Ziyi) had a new film at Cannes, which unfortunately nobody liked. The bagman also starred in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Frozen, and Zhou Xun (who played the girl and the other girl) was in Wang’s Beijing Bicycle and also Tsui Hark’s Dragon Inn sequel (not his Dragon Inn remake).

The bagman and his charge:

The narrator’s girlfriend:

by ·Comments Off on Poetry (2010, Lee Chang-dong)

Grandma (major 60s/70s actress Yoon Jeong-hee) takes care of grandson Wook, whose friend group raped a classmate until she suicided. She tries to get enough cash from the rich disabled guy she attends for the payoff to the dead girl’s mom. Her Alzheimer’s diagnosis adds to her inner struggle but doesn’t affect the plot. When she visits the dead girl’s mom but talks only of apricots is it because the disease made her forget her reason for coming there, or was she distracted by the poetry or nature, or is she avoiding hard conversations. I have no qualms with her fellow poets but the employers, the fathers, the kids – most people in the movie are living comfortably, contemptibly.

I spend at least an hour a day saying this:

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope 43:

There is no simple cause and effect between the initially cautious [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis and her decision to sign up for a poetry class … That doesn’t mean, however, that the viewer is denied such a cause-and-effect reading if they choose one, and Lee isn’t a filmmaker to either encourage or discourage it. This is perhaps the most notable aspect of the evolution of Lee’s screenwriting – rewarded at Cannes with the screenplay prize – starting from the unmistakable determinism of Green Fish and the elegant but closed geometrics of Peppermint Candy. Like his camera, which allows viewers to make their own compositions and choices within the larger frame, his narrative approach trusts in granting characters their own lives, so much so that one gets the sense that they frequently surprise Lee himself with the choices they make.

Auteurist foreshadowing:

by ·Comments Off on Kings of the Road (1976, Wim Wenders)

Wenders apparently working without a script, just putting two guys together and following them around – a good idea, turns out.

Rudiger* Vogler isn’t a writer/photographer this time but a traveling film-projector maintainer. He picks up rider Hanns Zischler after watching him roar his Volkswagen into a river, and they barely speak, just proceed along the route of small movie theaters in western East Germany.

One night they’re woken by a guy despondent over his wife’s suicide – second Wenders in a row where a suicide causes a mood shift. Hanns walks off to the town where his father lives, visits/harasses him at his newspaper office. After this cathartic visit he thinks Rudiger should also have a cathartic visit home, so they borrow a motorbike and sidecar. After all the not-talking, they do finally get drunkenly combative and introspective, but part on pretty good terms.

Hanns and the sad man in the jukebox-equipped back of the truck:

Commentary says the photography was an homage to Walker Evans, the photographer who also inspired Upland Stories. I’ve seen the rider in a few things, including Clouds of Sils Maria and Dr. M. Man who lost his wife was in a bunch of Fassbinders – he’s the landlord in Fear Eats the Soul. Alice’s mom (of the Cities) works at a theater in one town, a Lang Mabuse actor plays the rider’s dad.

*Okay, first all my old posts‘ diacritics went bad, and now my macbook isn’t letting me make new ones by holding down vowel keys.

Alice’s mom with Rudiger:

Shadowplay:

Essential equipment for long drives:

by ·Comments Off on In a Glass Cage (1987, Agust Villaronga)

We try to keep Shocktober light and not end up watching psychosexual nazi stories, I don’t know how this keeps happening. A visually striking Spanish movie about ugly shit, the Apt Pupil of its time.

Nazi pedo (who was also in The Boys From Brazil, appropriately enough) is stuck in iron glass lung, cared for by wife Griselda (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes) and kid Rena. Then crazy Angelo moves in with his weird eyebrows claiming to be a nurse, actually a witness to the nazi’s final victim before the suicide attempt that landed him in the lung. I thought it a revenge plot but Angelo tells the old guy he wants to be his protege, so, no good guys in this. Nice giallo-lite as he stalks the wife through the house and hangs her, then he starts kidnapping random local boys and reenacting murders from the man’s journals in nazi cosplay. This is almost worth it for the way the music tears itself apart in the climax when Angelo is killing his idol and taking his place.

Rena is okay with Angelo wrecking the place:

by ·Comments Off on Theater of Blood (1973, Douglas Hickox)

RIP Anthony Hickox – on the day he died, I watched a film by his father. Vincent Price is in disguise as a fake cop, not helping some housing bigwig evict murderous squatters. Turns out Price is back from the near-grave, having suicided in front of the critics association after losing an acting award, rescued by cartoonish winos and become their king. Daughter Diana Rigg handles his above-ground affairs while Price contrives new ways to kill his tormentors (beheading in sleep, being fed their own beloved dog on a fake game-show set) in connection with his Shakespeare roles. They don’t necessarily deserve to die for thinking Price is a cheesy actor, but for other reasons, they mostly do. In fact it’s annoying that the boring critic Ian Hendry gets to survive, but I can’t stay mad at a movie that stages a swordfight on trampolines.

I forget which Shakespeare play this was:

by ·Comments Off on Talk to Me (2022, Danny & Michael Philippou)

Typical dumb-youth peer-pressure setup, the idea of grabbing the cursed severed hand and letting random angry ghosts inhabit your body for a couple minutes quickly turns from an unthinkably bad idea to a hilariously fun drinking game. The movie makes summoning demons for social media clout seem like a realistic idea, then after a wild possession party, Mia lets her little brother Riley participate, and while possessed he smashes his face and blinds himself, so party’s over.

Mia and the kid are still somewhat possessed, making a series of bad decisions (he is violently suicidal, she steals the demon-hand and decides to murder her dad). Craziest part was the sound mixing, when watching at home through the soundbar, you turn up the volume to hear the mumbly teens then the sounds of match strikes and knives whistling through the air are loud enough to shake the walls. The directors are famous youtubers who’ve already got Talk 2 Me and Untitled Prequel on their filmographies.

Riley, Mia, Young Jason Momoa from Aquaman, Jade:

Already my second movie of the month where someone stabs themself in the face – I rewatched The Empty Man, which is referenced in Adam Nayman’s Ringer article:

Talk to Me is closer to something like Zach Cregger’s brute-force B-movie, Barbarian, than Peele’s intricately intellectualized “social thrillers.” But whatever their pretensions — or lack thereof — the Philippous are keen observers of a marketplace where it pays to attach some kind of pedigree to terror, and underneath its adroit shock tactics, Talk to Me makes a fairly significant concession to the elevated-horror model by hinging its plot on a case of capital-G Grief. The reason Mia is so susceptible to possession is because she’s heartbroken over the death of her mother, whose overdose may or may not have been an act of self-harm. Where her friends are just chasing a hedonistic thrill, she’s trying, if at first only unconsciously, to reconnect with a loved one — a difference that ends up dooming her above the others and rerouting a story line bristling with unpredictability into a fairly conventional trajectory.