by ·Comments Off on Strangler vs. Strangler (1984, Slobodan Sijan)

The credits roll over a long slow zoom into the back of a conductor’s head – someone has been watching Unfaithfully Yours – and later they’ll steal the Psycho music during a shower murder. It’s a cute mass-murder/mass-media comedy from Serbia, the director’s follow-up to How I Was Systematically Destroyed by Idiots. There are elaborate flashbacks, an opera, a music video, and an intertitled talking cat.

No one will be admitted during the thrilling shower scene:

The police inspector, having a bad day:

Strangler One is Pera, a flower salesman tormented by his mother, who falls into mad amnesiac rages when women insult his flowers. Spiro is an indie rocker who claims to be in touch psychically with the strangler, and writes a hit song about it. Women are just around to be strangled, until DJ Sofia bites off a strangler’s ear during the final struggle.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Waltz (1978, Martin Scorsese)

Is it coincidence, or was it planned,
that you can sing the words to Silkworm’s “Slow Hands”
to the tune of “The Weight” by The Band

Went out in a thunderstorm and watched the movie by the band The Band. People who know the setlist take their bathroom break during Neil Diamond, but I’d argue if you can wait until Paul Butterfield is jamming on harmonica, he is even less essential. Dylan has finally gone the correct amount of electric (Very Electric) and sounds good. Joni Mitchell also comes off well as a rocker. The Staple Singers jumpscare “The Weight,” after the band plays the whole first verse and chorus without the cameras revealing anyone else is onstage then Mavis blasts into verse two. The cocaine isn’t even the worst part of Neil Young’s appearance – he looks like shit overall, but he has never sounded better. Only one Mekons cover (“Makes No Difference”). I’m annoyed to have finally found a Dylan movie that Joan Baez isn’t in, but Emmylou Harris makes up for it. I knew two thirds of the guests by face/voice, but the whole time Van Morrison was on I thought of him as The White James Brown. Good show – I can see why people come out declaring it The Greatest Rock & Roll Movie Ever Made, or at least why someone would want to put together a Levon Helm tribute night at the Hideout.

by ·Comments Off on One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968, Jean-Luc Godard)

After La Chinoise and Weekend, JLG was hired to film the Rolling Stones for some reason. If the Stones were happy for this and Gimme Shelter to be released, then Cocksucker Blues must be really bad. Are there any movies where this band actually comes off well? Guess that’s what Shine a Light will be. What we do get is beautiful color film of the recording of one of their most famous songs, first as a restrained folk-rock number, repeatedly practicing the delicate intro before the drums come in, finally turning the song into a hootfest with your granny on bongos. The Heinz Emigholz motorik doc wasn’t kidding around when it stole this movie’s title.

In between studio recording segments are episodes that look like movie scenes but don’t behave like them, long takes with dialogue moving in trance loops. Black power, Vietnam war, Sexual revolution – Anne Wiazemsky (same year as Teorema) is being interviewed in the woods, he asks obscure questions and she answers only yes/no. “When the novel is dead then the technological society will be totally upon us.” Then sometimes a narrator will read us comic stories or pornography.

by ·Comments Off on Body Heat (1981, Lawrence Kasdan)

Lawyer William Hurt meets Kathleen Turner on a hot week in Florida and goes absolutely sex mad, ultimately buying bombs from Pyro Mickey Rourke and murdering Kathleen’s older husband Richard Crenna (of MST3K flick Marooned) so they can be (rich) together, but she vanishes with the money, letting Hurt get busted by his cop friend J.A. Preston (Remo Williams) and prosecutor Ted Danson (the year before getting buried in the sand in Creepshow).

The director’s and Turner’s debut, with Hurt fresh from Altered States, and some good quippy dialogue. Filipe called it genre autopsy. I had high hopes, but this week I’d just seen better craft in The Stunt Man, better dialogue in The Jerk, and more perversion in Turks Fruit.

by ·Comments Off on The Jerk (1979, Carl Reiner)

Steve Martin, grey-haired at 33, is raised by a Black family in Mississippi (mom from Ganja & Hess, dad from Across 110th Street) until one day he hears white music on the radio and goes to St. Louis to find its source. He gets hired by Jackie Mason at a gas station until madman M. Emmet of Blood Simple chases him into a traveling circus, where he’s taken home by the daredevil (Catlin Adams, later a director who discovered Ben Affleck). He meets cornet player Bernadette Peters and they move out west, getting rich off his glasses invention until sued by crosseyed Carl Reiner. Homeless, he tells his story to the movie camera, then is immediately reunited with his family.

Not a rapid-fire gag machine, but a few of the jokes are extremely good, including a couple of extended Martin routines: one about the precise math of “days feel longer when we’re together,” and one mopily collecting objects from the house after losing his fortune, leading to the poster image. Steve and Bernadette are cute together, and would costar in the even better Pennies From Heaven. The director of Car Wash made a Martin-less sequel to this, which nobody has ever watched.

by ·Comments Off on Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987, Eric Rohmer)

Two girls meet on a country road and spend four chapter-titled episodes together, this might as well have been named Four More Moral Tales. M is a city ethnology student (Jessica Forde of The Blind Owl the same year). R is a country painter (Joëlle Miquel of Lelouch movies). M agrees to stay over another night after a passing truck ruins their experience of The Blue Hour (a moment before dawn when “you can feel nature holding its breath”, the exact opposite side of the day from The Green Ray). So far I’m on R’s side, because she thinks a lot about outside bird sounds.

2. After M stays in the country, she invites R to paint in the city. Tyrannical waiter Philippe Laudenbach (Mon oncle d’Amérique) illustrates how much Europeans hate when you try to pay the tab with large bills.

3. The most tedious episode – M sees a woman shoplifting, attempts to help her evade the police by moving her bag aside, but the criminal runs off leaving M with a bag full of pilfered groceries and an ensuing lecture about it from R, then she in turn lectures a subway scammer (Green Ray star Marie Rivière).

4. R shows off her portfolio to an art dealer (Perceval himself, later evil boss of The Empire), M pretends to be a disinterested visitor who shames the dealer into paying more for a painting.

by ·Comments Off on The Stunt Man (1980, Richard Rush)

Heck of an opening sequence. This silly meta-action movie isn’t gonna top that, I thought, then the opening sequence is followed by an entire heck of a film, to the point that I started wondering if it won oscars. Nominated, but tough luck coming out the same year as Raging Bull and Ordinary People. Director is the toughest race: Redford/Lynch/Scorsese/Polanski/Rush. I haven’t seen Tess, but Rush would feel like a strong contender. This is a good man-on-the-run drama about the making of a bad WWI movie, every shot and camera placement and stunt and Peter O’Toole line reading a bit further out than necessary.

Steve Railsback (star of Lifeforce) is on the run from the cops when he stumbles onto a movie set and maybe accidentally helps kill a stunt driver. Filmmaker Peter O’Toole hires Railsback as the new/old stuntman, claiming to the police that there was no accident, the two guys covering for each other at least until manipulative madman O’Toole gets all the dangerous long takes he needs. The actress caught between these guys is Barbara Hershey (Last Temptation of Christ, Mrs. Yeager in The Right Stuff). It all works out, more or less, Railsback admitting he became a fugitive by attacking a cop with a tub of ice cream, and O’Toole graciously not murdering him during a stunt.

by ·Comments Off on Normal (2025, Ben Wheatley)

Somehow when I wasn’t paying attention to the drug TV shows and the Russian-made genre flicks, Bob Odenkirk became an action star in his sixties. Here he’s a traveling fill-in lawman, and while halfheartedly playing sheriff for some Minnesota town a lot of shit goes down – a bank robbery brings the yakuza-payrolled townsfolk to armed warfare. “That’s not where I was aiming” – Bob’s first return shot blows apart Evil Mayor Fonz. The dead ex-sheriff’s daughter Jess McLeod teams up with him. It’s all shooting and ‘splosives until the two sides team up to con the Japanese into not murdering them all, then the ruse is exposed and it’s all shooting and ‘sploves some more. A pretty good time, more generic than Free Fire but also better.

Fukasaku Fest:

by ·Comments Off on Return to Silent Hill (2026, Christophe Gans)

Opening scene is so lousy, but the colors are bright, I remember liking the first movie (and that’s all I remember about it) and there’s promise of a Pyramid Head monster (which is also what I’ve been calling the pileated woodpeckers buzzing around the cabin), so, keeping an open mind.

Ivor Novello (Benediction) meets the lovely Mary (a horror regular, of various Saws and Purges). Flash-forward, she is dead because he’s such a bad driver (this is his defining character trait), but still sends him a letter to return to their home, which is an increasingly dodgy-digi-fx place. I think he has Trauma, and his personal Silent Hill is inside the mind – an ash-covered town, the local duplex playing Jacob’s Ladder and The Tenant. It’s one of those Shutter Island (or Jacob’s Ladder) stories where an empty man gradually figures out who he is/was.

Love at the bottom of the sea:

Some people attempted to write a normal movie review, focusing on what is actually in the movie, most of which sucks, while people with internet madness are predictably calling it a perfect film from a master stylist, or the most affecting onscreen portrait of grief ever filmed. Me, I am postponing plans to rewatch part one this SHOCKtober.

Me, going out to tape Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro:

Metro security, spotting my gear: