Young mother Jennifer Lawrence is behaving oddly. It’s implied that she’s a threat to others when we watch her cat-stalk though the grasses with a knife in hand, or when she borrow/steals Sissy Spacek’s gun to shoot their injured dog. She keeps smashing herself through glass things, or raking the walls till her fingers bleed, or trying to ladybird herself out a moving car, finally walks into a previously unseen (except in the opening titles) forest fire, a Petzold move but without any aftermath, so we can wonder whether it’s a metaphorical fire. Lot of odd-looking day-for-night shots. Ramsay be like: protagonist crazy, so movie crazy – I’m used to her being hit-or-miss, but this one is more almost-hit. Robert Pattinson very good as her befuddled husband. I would not be surprised if LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte didn’t know what the movie is about or why they appeared in it. Thoughts from Josh Lewis, Lena Frances, Adam Nayman, Katie Kadue.
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2006, Michel Gondry)
One of the last movies I watched in theaters before starting this blog. Rewatching now because I read the great J Dilla book and am working my way through a list* of related artists. At the peak of his fame and success, Chappelle’s vanity project keeps alternating between music performances on the day, and his interactions with the public. Rewatching now I wish there was much more music and less Dave. Each group gets about one song, which keeps being interrupted by host episodes. This is a choice, not necessarily a defect – Gondry’s story is more about building this event and getting people excited about it, not a you-are-there concert film. Questlove must have remembered this movie once or twice when working on Summer of Soul. Filmed when Dave was at the top of fame, released a year later when he was in the news for walking away from his sketch show, and he’s had nothing but rocky press since then (along with then-rising young star K*nye W*st, bittersweet to see both of them here).
*A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, D’Angelo, The Pharcyde, Raekwon, Busta Rhymes, Fugees, Common, Erykah Badu, Slum Village, 5-Elementz, Talib Kweli & Mos Def, MF Doom, The Roots, Jill Scott, Ghostface Killah, Bilal, Madlib, Robert Glasper, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Hiatus Kaiyote, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, David Fiuczynski, Kendrick Lamar.
Devo (2024, Chris Smith)
Kind of a sad retrospective, a series of “here’s what we meant to say/do, but nobody got it” stories. Lot of good pop culture garbage in the visuals. Curious not to mention the reunions and box sets, but to act like the name Devo was retired in 1985 and everybody moved on. I liked the story of Brian Eno’s and David Bowie’s contributions to the debut album being removed by the band during mixing, and reports of the very early shows.
Pirates (1986, Roman Polanski)
Sex criminals are suddenly in the news, so let’s see what Polanski made before Frantic. A decade after Fearless Vampire Killers, this director with a great talent for composition and psychological drama insists on going in a direction where he has no talent at all: the action comedy. He’s aiming for Goonies meets Airplane and ending up with flabby, lifeless spectacle.
Walter Matthau (doing an accent) and his sidekick Cris Campion (Day of Reckoning) are shipwrecked pirates, rescued by the Spanish, and the first half of the movie is them figuring out how to turn the tables on their rescuers/captors (led by The Doctor of Kill List) and conquer the ship. When they succeed a fellow mutineer tries to rape the lovely Charlotte Lewis (The Golden Child) but he is killed by Cris, because sex crime is not okay! Ends right where it started, with pirate and sidekick stranded on a lifeboat (this was nine months after After Hours came out).
Krank is as shocked to be here as you must be to see him:
The Naked Gun (2025, Akiva Schaffer)
Not a remake – Liam Neeson is Leslie Nielsen’s son, so this is part four (or part ten if we count the TV series). A good joke every minute, can’t ask for more. Made by the same gang that did the Rescue Rangers reboot, weird. Muskian baddie is Danny Huston of Birth, his head thug is Kevin Durand of Resident Evil 5.
Salesman (1968, Maysles Bros. & Charlotte Zwerin)
I knew this was a famed doc about door-to-door bible salesman, have previously seen multiple parodies of it, did not foresee a scene where a salesman gets lost in a Florida town designed like an Arabian Nights theme park. John Semley: “Sad men with no money bilking lonely housewives with slightly less money for salvation on the installment plan.”
Hard Truths (2024, Mike Leigh)
Finally watching this after I meant to have a Mike Leigh double-feature in March but Secrets & Lies knocked me for such a loop I had to postpone this one. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is completely different here, an utterly miserable suburbanite, making life difficult for her family and everyone she comes across. “Cheerful grinning people, can’t stand them” brings to mind Harry Dean in Repo Man, or perhaps the opposite of Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky.
Her son Moses is quiet, bullied, an overgrown kid, gets a happy ending in the movie meeting another human who is respectful to him. Husband Curtley (David Webber of The Avengers) gets a terrible ending, throwing out his back at work then coming home to find her trying to kick him out of the house. Movie centers around a get-together with Marianne’s sister Michele Austin (also her sister in Lies?), whose two daughters have their own work problems but know how to behave pleasantly around family, unlike some people.
Bilge Ebiri in Vulture:
Hard Truths might be Leigh’s funniest film in a long time, but as always, it’s the kind of laughter that comes with an unnerving feeling that something is going horribly wrong … Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.
Frankenstein (2025, Guillermo Del Toro)
GdT’s third remake in a row, but excuse me, it’s less a remake of the 1930’s version than a new over-faithful adaptation of the novel. I watched at Movieland, with the new Emma and Yorgos playing next door, on their second victory lap after their smart, modern, oscar-winning semi-Frankenstein. Big physical acting from both men in this, but the superior second half following Monster Elordi can’t make up for a draggy first hour spent with Doctor Oscar. Script mostly bad, but I appreciate some del Toro touches (cool set design, the monster brought to life with a battery vest like a steampunk Iron Man). Did not appreciate the CG wolf fight, can’t recall whether the novel had so many explosions in it.
The Longest Nite (1998, Patrick Yau)
Tony Leung is a bad cop in Macau whose specialty is smashing people’s hands to pulp, and Sean “Mad Detective” Lau is a tough guy working for one of the two gangs under uberboss Mr. Lung. Better than the same year’s A Hero Never Dies, this is nonstop gangster double-crosses. It ends where all 90s action movies must end: in an exploding box warehouse that doubles as a Wellesian mirror trap, as the killers become each other. They both die unceremoniously, as Mr. Lung arranges to erase both gangs and take the territory for himself, only his undercover man Lam Suet surviving. The girl is PTU star Maggie Shiu, Mr. Lung is from God of Gamblers, and loose cannon Mark was in Peking Opera Blues.
Bad cops:
Bad ass:
Mark with crazy lighting:
