by ·Comments Off on Loveless (2017, Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Thirty years later, Zvyagintsev refutes Sting’s claim that the Russians love their children too. Boris (Aleksey Rozin of Leviathan and Elena) and Zhenya may or may not have ever loved each other, or their son, are just trying to sell their apartment so they can move on with their lives. Boris is now with pregnant Masha, mom dating a balding dude with a grown daughter who looks a bit like mom. After the parents argue over who gets their 12-year-old son (neither wants him, so mom suggests boarding school then the army), he runs away and is never seen again. The police suggest that runaways almost always return to their warm homes, but the police don’t know what this kid overheard.

Set mostly in fall 2012 before cutting to the more recent past, for symbolic and political reasons that I’m not keen on looking into. Creeping, controlled camera moves and an overall sense that all hope is lost, that nothing will ever be good again. I suppose I liked this even better than Leviathan. Premiered at Cannes, now the eighth competition title I’ve seen from last year – that’s out of nineteen, but some (Redoubtable, Rodin, Jupiter’s Moon) I’m not trying to catch up with.

by ·Comments Off on Daguerrotype (2016, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Better than Creepy, this is K.K. in arthouse French festival mode.

Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet of all the Dardenne movies) is an eccentric whose giant glass plate photographs are only still in demand by a few connoisseurs, so he spends most of his time in the basement photographing his daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau of Simon Killer) in uncomfortable poses for increasingly long exposures, trying to capture the ineffable. He hires Jean (Tahar Rahim, main dude in A Prophet) as a new assistant, which may have been a bad move – don’t hire someone who’s gonna covertly call an auction house to appraise all your belongings.

For the most part, the film follows Jean as he falls for Marie, who wants to move away from the lonely basement photo sessions and start her own life working at a botanical garden. Jean is a bit of a scam artist, and helps her out by scheming to coerce her dad into selling his estate, for which Jean will get a commission that they can live on together. But the schemes don’t totally make sense, and time goes by and things get weird. It’s not a tight Chabrolian thriller, but something more diffuse. Eventually Marie appears to have died in two separate incidents (a stairs tumble, a car crash), but she still appears real to Jean, and Stéphane’s long-dead wife reappears as a Pulse-referencing slow-motion spirit.

Originally titled Le secret de la chambre noire, I watched this right after Creepy. Since Before We Vanish, K.K. has already released its extended semi-remake Foreboding. The others I missed since Tokyo Sonata include Real (Inception-y romance), Seventh Code (an hourlong paranoid thriller), and Penance (a murder-guilt anthology miniseries).

by ·Comments Off on Creepy (2016, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I’d put off watching K. Kurosawa’s most generically named film, which got his most average reviews, until I accidentally missed our only screening of Before We Vanish, then feeling the sudden Kurosawa drought, I double-featured this with Daguerrotype and now I’m satisfied. It is, however, a pretty average movie. Either the subtitles are wack or the movie is purposely being strange in its dialogue and social interactions, because everyone seems kinda stupid.

Opens with a bad hostage standoff in a police station, an unassuming-looking psycho killing a couple of people and stabbing serial-killer expert Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, main dude from Dolls, the editor in Loft) in the ass with a fork, causing him to have to leave the force and become a professor, moving into a suburb next door to a serial killer. He and his wife Yasuko (Yûko Takeuchi of Ring) introduce themselves to Nishino (Teruyuki Kagawa, dad in Tokyo Sonata, sheriff of Sukiyaki Western Django), a certified crazy with a shy daughter who turns out to be kidnapped, her mom drugged-out in his Silence of the Lambs basement. Tak’s ex-partner Nogami (Masahiro Higashide, a pastor in Before We Vanish) wants to get Tak back into action, bringing him a cold case of the serial killer who happens to live next door, and it’s all feeling a bit ludicrous, like K.K. is bringing together these stock situations and crazy coincidences to make some sort of statement.

new neighbors:

everything is perfectly normal here!

Progress is made on the cold case, bodies of the missing discovered shrink-wrapped in a neighbor’s house, while Tak’s own neighbor is shrinkwrapping the now-dead parents of his fake daughter. Nishino has been keeping his hostages docile with a never-explained mind-control drug, and his TV constantly plays squid footage (a Bright Future reference?). After the neighbor kid starts to bond with Tak’s own wife, she is inevitably kidnapped, as is Tak himself, until they turn the tables on their tormentor by only pretending to have been drugged, then blowing him away. K.K. the director comes through in fine form, but K.K. the writer, sheesh.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in AV Club:

Bug-eyed and clammy, Nishino belongs in the pantheon of next-door weirdos, swishing from personably awkward to coldly standoffish as though they were steps in a waltz that only he can hear. Kagawa, who starred in Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata as a white-collar family man with a very different type of secret, is a marvel to watch; when Nishino and Takakura run into each other on a commuter train, he gives a grimacing courtesy smile that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley.

Mike D’Angelo:

Creepy is at its best when things are just…slightly…off, a quality embodied in everything from Teruyuki Kagawa’s Asperger-y performance to the proximity in which two characters are standing at the beginning of a shot … Were I capable of ignoring Creepy‘s outlandish, frequently nonsensical plot and focusing entirely on Kurosawa’s control of the frame and tone, we’d be in business here. But I’m not.

by ·Comments Off on Columbus (2017, Kogonada)

A lovely little almost-romance set in an Indiana town with unusually interesting architecture. A few familiar indie-drama tropes collide as a guy who has escaped his family has to return when his dad falls deathly ill (the twist being it’s not his hometown, but a place he doesn’t know), meeting a girl with smarts and ambition who feels compelled to stay home and care for her addict mother. Jin (John Cho) claims not to be interested in architecture, but his dad’s an expert and Casey (Haley Lu Richardson: Split, The Edge of Seventeen) is fascinated, so Jin helps her realize her goals while she keeps him company during his Columbus purgatory stay. It kinda sounds like nothing special when writing out a description, but the movie’s particular carefully-framed look and feel (David Ehrlich described it as Garden State meets Ozu) set it above the usual Sundance fare.

by ·Comments Off on Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)

Katy says the challenges in the book are all about solving complex puzzles, and it sounds like the whole 1980’s obsession is explained better, but we’re at the movies now, so some quick backstory narration and a killer car race will do just fine. Our dude Parzival (Tye Sheridan of Joe and Mud, young Cyclops in the last X-Men) figures out how to cheat at the racecar event and win the first of three keys in a massive contest to gain control over the virtual-reality universe that all the poor suckers on the dying planet of the future spend all their time in, meanwhile falling for Artemis, a hot red avatar his own age who turns out to be an actual hot girl his own age (Olivia Cooke of Thoroughbreds). Parzival’s badass tough-dude engineer buddy H turns out to be Lena Waithe (Master of None) and his ninja friend Sho is actually 11 years old – they’re all kinda okay kids, but I don’t know if it’s a happy ending when they’re handed the keys to the global economy at the end, and besides shuttering the evil company run by lame Ben Mendelsohn, they close the internet for a couple days per week so kids have time to make out.

Alison Willmore calls it an accidental horror movie:

A lot of the pop culture references in the adaptation have been updated, improved, added to, or made more cinematic, including a sequence in which The Shining gets turned into a survival horror experience in a way that’s both blasphemous and easily the most memorable part of the movie. But onscreen, even though familiar characters (Duke Nukem! Gundam! Chucky!) fill the frame, franchises cross, and the legal fees to clear everything must have been astronomical, Ready Player One doesn’t really feel like it’s about nostalgia. Instead, it seems more concerned with escapism, and how much its characters use pop culture as a womb to shelter them from the ugly realities they’ve accepted from the world outside. It’s not about looking back so much as looking away.

by ·Comments Off on On the Beach at Night Alone (2017, Hong Sang-soo)

“What I want is to live in a way that suits me.”

A philosophical movie starring Kim Min-hee, who has become my favorite actress at playing drunk. Part one is a half hour long and set in Germany, actress Younghee hanging out with a friend (Young-hwa Seo, Hill of Freedom‘s letter-reader) – turns out the actress is fleeing Seoul after an affair gone bad. They go music shopping, then eat pasta at Mark Peranson’s house (with a La Chinoise poster in the kitchen). In the dreamlike final scene, Younghee is left on the beach at night alone for just a minute then is seen being carried away unconscious, presumably by the stalker we’d previously seen walking at them It Follows-style.

Part two opens with the lights coming up at a movie theater and no mention of the beach incident. She has returned to her hometown in Korea and meets up with some old friends, first at a coffee shop some of them run, then for a dinner party. First there’s Hae-hyo Kwon (the prickly guy in part one of In Another Country) then meek Jae-yeong Jeong (main dude in Right Now, Wrong Then). She’s staying at a fancy hotel with friend Seon-mi Song (The Day He Arrives), who decides to be Younghee’s assistant. Younghee is taking a break from her career and daily routines, evaluating her life, but doesn’t seem to be doing too badly – rumors are the director she recently broke up with is worse off. Back at the beach alone, not quite at night but perhaps the early evening, she dreams a meeting with the director (I think he’s the professor from Oki’s Movie) after his crew stumbles across her, and he wants to read her a book passage about love with the crew sitting awkwardly around.

The stalker from part one reappears as a window washer:

It’s a good Hong movie, probably not my favorite, but viewers who follow his personal news were mostly stunned that he made this Kim Min-hee movie about the aftermath of a scandalous affair with a film director right after getting caught having a scandalous affair with Kim Min-hee.

by ·Comments Off on The Party (2017, Sally Potter)

The Party is a small private party held for political party member Kristin Scott Thomas, just appointed (elected?) minister of health – so I thought there’d be more political stuff, but if so, I missed it. The seven people onscreen represent five couples, only two of which are still – tentatively – still together at the end, with an offscreen eighth participant (it’s us! we’re implicated!) possibly about to get murdered in the final shot.

Kristin’s husband Timothy Spall acts comatose for half the film (amusingly so – he’s the most magnetic actor here, usually because he’s doing the least), finally blurts out that he’s been given a death sentence by his doctor and is leaving his wife to spend the rest of his short life with his girlfriend, the wife of Cillian Murphy, a coked-up banker who arrived with a gun to kill Spall having just found out of the affair. Emily Mortimer is pregnant with triplets, and her partner Cherry Jones seems hesitant about parenthood. Cherry also once slept with Spall (over 30 years ago, big deal). KST’s best friend Patricia Clarkson sits on the sidelines sniping at everyone, especially her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend Bruno Ganz, a weirdo “whole body healer”. And this is all… too much. Too many revelations and coincidences and big collisions for a 70-minute movie to contain without seeming overly contrived. Potter and her overqualified cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov shoot some striking black-and-white images in the intro, then there’s no time for more, since they’ve gotta run around following the actors’ mayhem. At least the actors don’t devolve into hysterics, so the thing holds up better than these things sometimes do.

by ·Comments Off on A River Below (2017, Mark Grieco)

A Tribeca doc we found on netflix. Activists to various degrees – a marine biologist, an environmentalist TV host, and the filmmaker himself – get involved in ethical quandaries while trying to protect the Amazon pink dolphin by bringing media attention to its plight. On-camera confessions and the build-ups to “shocking” revelations feel somewhat like reality TV, and I’m more interested in the larger-scale societal problems barely addressed here (overfishing due to overpopulation, uncontrollable river pollution, government policies destroying livelihoods of entire villages). But it’s an undeniably interesting, twisty story that I’ve been pondering for weeks since watching.

The marine biologist enlists superstar TV host Richard Rasmussen to let the people know that this precious, docile dolphin is being trapped and killed, cut into parts, and used as bait to catch a local catfish that gets exported because it isn’t even healthy enough to be sold within the country. Richard is a fascinating character, honestly passionate about environmental concerns but also a born showman, and sometimes two-faced and underhanded in his methods. He personally enlists a river family to butcher a dolphin so he can get it on camera, then sells them out to publicize the footage, which catches fire in the media and leads to policy changes in the country. It’s easy to pick on Richard’s personality, his potentially illegal/immoral actions, but it’s also guerrilla activism for a purportedly noble cause. “As murky as the waters of the Amazon River itself,” says the official description, ay.

by ·Comments Off on Rumble Fish (1983, Francis Ford Coppola)

Visually and performatively stylized melodrama, slangy and retro and dreamily lit, like a much better Grease, or a nonmusical West Side Story. Rusty James (Matt Dillon in his third S.E. Hinton movie in a row) mopes around with his tough friend Smokey (Nicolas Cage, his second year in the movies) and his nerdy David Cronenberg-looking friend Steve (Vincent Spano of City of Hope) and Nice Guy Eddie, speaking wistfully about Rusty’s long-missing older brother, local-legend gangster The Motorcycle Boy. Rusty James has a hot girlfriend Patty (Diane Lane) who’s into him, but he cheats and disappears and flakes around. Rusty James is trying to keep alive the gang wars he barely remembers from his brother’s day, and just as he’s losing a fight, The Motorcycle Boy dramatically reappears. This is the earliest I’ve seen Mickey Rourke, four years before Angel Heart, doing his gentle/tough handsome-zen thing – everyone in town agrees he’s crazy, but we don’t see him acting crazy, except maybe when he liberates every animal in the pet store.

It’s clear from the tone of the thing that somebody is doomed – probably Rourke (and yup, sure enough). The cops aren’t happy to see him back, but a heroin-addict substitute teacher starts hanging around, and old rivalries start simmering. It’s kind of a hangout movie where not much happens, but it feels tense most of the time. Dillon’s character is kind of an idiot, and his idol brother’s return blows up his worldview that things were better in the tough old days. In the end Rourke has died, Cage has stolen the girl and said he’d take over the gang if there even was a gang, Rusty James rides his brother’s motorcycle to the ocean, and it sounds like Wall of Voodoo over the credits but I guess it was that guy from The Police.

I keep meaning to watch the four hours of extras on the Criterion disc, but haven’t found the time. The Outsiders was also a Coppola-shot S.E. Hinton-written gang movie made the same year, and I should have double-featured these. The cast in this film is impressive – the brothers’ shitty alcoholic dad is Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne is a gang go-between, Tom Waits a bartender. William Smith, who starred in the real David Cronenberg’s Fast Company, is the mustache cop who uses inappropriate force to kill Rourke after the pet store incident.

Rumble brothers with grudge cop: