by ·Comments Off on RR (2007, James Benning)

Trains! Usually the tracks are at a wicked slant to the camera/landscape, the train going in different directions, taking up varying amounts of our field of vision. Couple seconds of black between shots, camera never moves, and trains are neither snakes nor funerals so he shoots in 4:3.

We hear train noise of course, and nearby nature sounds, a couple speeches (bible, american politics), a song, a baseball game on the radio. In addition to trains, we get good bridges, trees, buildings and cars, and of course Lakes and Skies. Sometimes the trains go on longer than seems realistic, once after much buildup we only get a railcar, and three times we get a special treat: multiple trains moving at once.

I’ve misplaced the Cinema Scope cover story, but we’ve always got Marshlands:

The surface pleasures here are ridiculous, occasionally hallucinatory, and the camera placement w/r/t what the trains conceal and reveal within the compositional duration makes my head hurt, jaw dropping stuff, choo choo motherfuckers this land is your land

by ·Comments Off on White Heat (1949, Raoul Walsh)

Cagney and his dimwitted men rob a train and kill a lotta guys then hide out, but boring cop John Archer (Destination Moon) and his men are closing in, so Cagney confesses to a different, non-fatal job as an alibi for the train heist and goes to jail for a little while. “A very good friend of mine… me!” sounds like an Odenkirk line.

The cops want more on Cagney so they send Large-faced Eddie “Rock Around the Rockpile” O’Brien to jail as a mole to gain his trust. Rivalries in jail then prison break, while outside Big Ed steals his girl Virgino Mayo (Walsh’s Colorado Territory the same year) and they kill Cagney’s beloved Ma (Margaret Wycherly, fake mystic of The Thirteenth Chair). This is the movie where Cagney is a mother-obsessed seizure-prone psychopath, but I don’t find him any more psychotic than most movie gangsters. The cops track him to the next job with newfangled radio equipment – trapped in a burning building he’s made it, ma, top of the world.

by ·Comments Off on City of Women (1980, Federico Fellini)

Mastroianni plays our director’s stand-in again. Following a hot woman off a train in the middle of nowhere, he stumbles into a hidden hotel hosting a theatrical feminist convention. The women drive him into the night in a crazed caravan until he’s rescued by a dude with plenty of weapons and dogs… sees a telekinetic performance… descends a giant slide while reminiscing about various hot chicks… then the women put him on trial for sexism, ho hum.

No part of this is realistic, all dream-logic. Does it play circus music whenever things get zany? Sure as hell it does. We love Marcello, and Fellini is good at filming beautiful people and things, but it’s a Petrov’s Flu situation.

by ·Comments Off on In the Lost Lands (2025, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Look like somebody wanted to remake Resident Evil 6 – this looks more similar to RE6 than any other movie looks to RE6, even other Resident Evil movies, and Milla is even named Alice again. There’s some Monster Hunter thrown in (they are in the wasteland hunting monsters) and some post-apocalyptic Mad Maxisms. I haven’t been going out to the movie theater this year, missing important big-screen pictures like Nickel Boys and The Brutalist and Mickey 17, but prioritized this because I thought it would be… not great exactly, but fun/cool, and I nailed it.

Deep Lore sourced from an early George RR Martin story, Milla plays a cursed(?) magic mind-control witch, hunting a mighty werewolf alongside softie tough-guy Dave Bautista who thinks he’s hiding his werewolf identity from her, at the behest of Queen Amara Okereke (British theater actress), pursued by fanatical church assassin Arly Jover (Blade). Some good train action, including an escape from dangling railcars that doesn’t hold up great against the last Mission Impossible, some good fire, and too many CG snakes. The queen’s rival for control of the people “the patriarch” is Fraser James of Shopping, Anderson’s longest-running actor. Bautista’s girlfriend is Deirdre Mullins of Mandrake, her equally doomed business partner is the Polish Sebastian Stan. I said if this turned out to be good then I’ve gotta watch Pompeii, and I guess I’ve gotta.

by ·Comments Off on Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974, John Hough)

Opens with a heist, Peter Fonda collecting money from the manager whose family is held hostage by his partner Deke (biker-movie regular Adam Roarke). Dirty drifter Susan George (Straw Dogs) gets in the way so they take her along. Sheriff Vic Morrow takes this pursuit personally and throws all resources into the chase. Car swappin’, fast drivin’, and drawbridge jumpin’ ensue, up to the requisite ’70s downbeat ending (our group is flattened by a train). Amazing to read that a lab error led to the movie being badly color-shifted for its first 30 years. Hough was mostly a horror guy, made The Legend of Hell House, the Cassavetes Incubus, and a Howling sequel.

Movie is known for its car action but I only gasped at this helicopter:

by ·Comments Off on Ghosts of Mars (2001, John Carpenter)

I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie’s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and “Hellraiser In Space” is one of my favorite genres, and it’s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under assault in a precinct, so perhaps it’s actually good? I’m here to tell you that it’s not good.

Natasha “Species” Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham. The team’s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders – who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la Return of the Living Dead 3 led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in Cabin in the Woods), possessed by the spirits of the planet’s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works … The film’s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the ’80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we’ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 11: Stephen Dwoskin and Structuralism

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.

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Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.

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Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).

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Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”

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Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.

by ·Comments Off on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

Interesting tone in this movie, a perfect-crime hijack-ransom plot pulled off by a crack criminal team, but instead of no-nonsense city police on the other side of the phone line we get a droll workplace drama starring Walter Matthau as lead transit cop, a sickly coward mayor (Lee Wallace, who’d also play the mayor in Batman), and timely jokes on camera-toting Japanese tourists and women in the workplace.

Robert Shaw (Robin and Marian‘s sheriff) is the lead baddie, serious about his deadlines and their consequences, and on his team is the ex-train operator who knows the system, the loose cannon, and the guy without a strong personality. The city scrambles to come up with the money, which it does in time to save almost all the hostages, then Matthau turns to preventing the color-coded criminals’ escape. One is killed by a cop, the other by his own men, and the leader third-rails himself to avoid capture. They track the final guy (Martin Balsam, later of Mitchell!) by looking through the records of fired train operators, recognizing the sick criminal during an apartment interview by his sneeze, previously heard over the intercom, and I ask you, is this the final shot of a serious crime movie?

by ·Comments Off on Police Story 3: Supercop (1992, Stanley Tong)

Some of the most daredevil action ever filmed, with the all-time flimsiest setup (the cops say drug smuggling is out of hand, requiring some kind of “super cop,” so Jackie Chan is called in). Maggie is left behind to be annoying alone, while Jackie springs a criminal from prison to gain his trust, then Michelle Yeoh pretends to be Jackie’s sister and saves their asses when they get busted while undercover. It’s a 1992 action movie, which means there are bazookas, and really too many things get blown up. But damn, Yeoh jumps a motorcycle onto a moving train.