by ·Comments Off on Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011, Takashi Miike)

Cannes Month continues. This played there in 2011 – in 3D! The 3D would’ve added some novelty to a remake which seems to have none at all, unless we’re counting that it’s filmed in color. Scene-for-scene redo of the original, well-acted and shot (but the original was well-acted and shot), kinda languid in the flashback-heavy middle, and with a less biting ending.

Motome (Eita of Memories of Matsuko) had a desperately sick wife (Hikari Mitsushima of Love Exposure) and baby and needed doctor money, so he did a dishonorable thing, telling the local samurai house that he wanted to commit seppuku at their house so they’d pay him to go away. But they’d decided to make an example out of the next sap who tried this, and since Motome had done another dishonorable thing – selling his sword for food and secretly substituting a wooden one – he’s forced to die an agonizing, splintery death while his family succumbs to illness at home.

So the dead wife’s dad Hanshiro (Ebizo Ichikawa, later in Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) visits the house a couple months later with the same seppuku story in order to get an audience and shame them for what they’ve done. Per an IMDB comment (I know!) the film argues “that honour is ultimately irrelevant in the face of social suffering.” It’s a compelling story, but during hard times, the house (led by Doppelganger & 13 Assassins star Koji Yakusho) has built its fortune on the traditional ideas of honor and can’t afford to let Hanshiro’s humanist ideas take hold.

C. Huber in Cinema Scope:

Hara-Kiri [demonstrates] a classical craftsmanship few contemporary directors could ever hope to match, but at the cost of personal expression. Miike’s single-minded take on a straightforward samurai tragedy follows the original’s outlines, yet replaces its smart, suspenseful time-shifts with big blocks of flashback melodrama … the marvellous, mostly brownish palette of the interiors tended to sink in the murky fog of light reduction, making Cannes’ first 3-D competition entry a good argument against the process.

by ·Comments Off on Midnight Special (2016, Jeff Nichols)

After Take Shelter, I’ll definitely sign up for another Jeff Nichols/Michael Shannon drama about impending doom. This one is maybe more ambitious, definitely more confusingly plotted, and has less well-defined characters and relationships. Shannon and childhood friend Joel Edgerton have kidnapped Shannon’s magic son Alton from a doomsday cult and with help from Shannon’s (ex-?)wife Kirsten Dunst and federal agent Adam Driver they take Alton to fulfill his destiny by ascending to Tomorrowland.

Pretty sure this was meant to evoke the string of psychic-child adventure stories in the late 1970’s: Firestarter (the novel, if not the film) and The Fury. In fact I was so busy trying to remember how Firestarter ends that I may have missed some details about the doomsday cult and why exactly they wanted Alton – or maybe they weren’t even sure of that themselves. If not an instant classic, at least a cool-looking, mysterious movie, full of great acting and shocking moments (I leapt when satellite parts rained down on the gas station). I always appreciate sci-fi stories that show glimpses of larger worlds and deeper mysteries than the film has the time or inclination to explain.

This counted as the kickoff to Cannes Month, since Nichols’ previous movie Mud played Cannes, and his second film of 2016 Loving is about to premiere there. Although I would’ve watched it anyway.

M. D’Angelo:

For some reason, the emotional core of this film seems to have gone missing — I can see where it’s supposed to reside, but the love Alton’s parents feel for him is oddly abstract, perhaps because E.T. seems more human than he does.

I. Vishvenetsky:

The bad guys trace [our heroes’ car] through an insurance bill left on a kitchen counter, because even Midnight Special’s sense of conspiracy is grounded in the commonplace. The only explicitly poetic line the movie allows itself is spoken by the cult’s neckless goon, played by character actor Bill Camp. Sitting in his truck, he says, “I was an electrician, certified in two states. What do I know of these things?” This is the most the viewer will ever learn about him. Midnight Special defines characters through what they can’t understand, contrasting fear of the unknown with faith in it, and flipping the supernatural into a metaphor for the everyday.

From J. Romney’s review intro:

Cinema has rarely felt so much like a son et lumière as it did in a brief period in the early ’80s, when suddenly shafts of light came shooting out of movie images, as if the screen had been slashed. It became a defining image of Steven Spielberg’s films — Close Encounters, E.T., and Poltergeist too, if you want to count that as one of his … In their purest and most glaring form, those shafts of light had something of the quality of angelic revelation about them. Certainly, you suspected that cinematographers such as Vilmos Zsigmond and Allen Daviau had taken a close look at certain academic religious paintings of the 19th century, or perhaps at Renaissance church sculpture, with their sheaves of marble emulating beams from the divine. At any rate, it came as a shock to get the impression from these films — and with such eye-searing intensity — that cinema was a matter of light streaming directly out of the screen, rather than just bounced off it. The motif was a powerful way of restoring, if not a holy, at least an authentically otherworldly dimension to cinema.

by ·Comments Off on Mad Max (1979, George Miller)

“I’m the (k)night rider. The toe cutter, he knows who I am!”

I was immediately impressed with the character names, but also confused by the movie. Max is a cop, and yes his police station looks awfully run down, but it’s not some Tom Petty wasteland future – it’s all pretty much how I assume Australia looked in 1979. So maybe the apocalypse happens before part two, and that’s when Max becomes Mad. He gets pretty close to Mad in this one – give an awesomely dangerous guy a “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” montage showing how much he loves his precious family, and guess what’s gonna happen to that family – but I wouldn’t call his murder-revenge spree against the biker gang that killed his family and his partner and broke his arm a permanent madness.

“Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them – a terminal crazy”

Other Weirdness: the big cartoon music during tense scenes. And Max locks a dude to a bomb, suggests he sever a limb to get free – an influence on SAW? Pretty straightforward, sharp-looking movie. And hey, the baddies only run down Max’s wife and kid – nobody gets tortured or raped, making this one of the more palatable 1970’s revenge movies.

We all know Mel Gibson went on to star in The Beaver and Machete Kills, but who was everyone else? Max’s wife Jessie was in early Nicole Kidman film Nightmaster. Max’s even-madder partner Goose does a lotta TV, was recently in The Great Gatsby. Max’s boss “Fifi” was once in movies called Stone and Stoner in the same year. Lead baddie Toecutter played lead baddie Immortan Joe in Mad Max 4. Shot by David Eggby (not Dave Eggers) who later shot a couple of Riddick movies.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes Vol. 17: Pre-Blog Bad Movie Redux 1

Why have I not thought of this before? Instead of watching the ends of bad movies I’ve never seen, rewatching the ends of bad movies I saw years ago and don’t remember anymore – and checking out where the idiots who made ’em ended up. Idea sparked by noticing that fondly-remembered Charlie Sheen alien-invasion movie The Arrival was on hulu, so let’s begin with…

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The Arrival (1996, David Twohy)

Unshaven Charlie Sheen and panic-eyed Teri Polo (a cut-rate Sharon Stone) are locked in a box, when suddenly a van crashes their party and a quick-thinking Charlie attacks a canister of liquid nitrogen with an axe, causing the van’s (presumably alien) occupants to make like T-1000 (but without the one-liner and the shattering). They drop their floating spherical puzzle box – a Hellraiser-meets-Phantasm device which fails to stop Charlie from retrieving a MiniDV tape from an Alien egg, then Charlie waves the tape at a kid whose knees reverse (the only detail I remembered from this movie) as he runs off, ostrich-like. Ends with Charlie exposing the alien conspiracy over television, exactly like They Live. Hey, if you’re gonna steal, steal big. Editing and effects (including some early CG) are inept.

Twohy cowrote some big-deal films in the 1990’s: The Fugitive, Waterworld, G.I. Jane, then created the Riddick character in Pitch Black and focused entirely on that for the next 15 years. Teri Polo played the mom in The Hole and appears in the acclaimed Meet The Parents trilogy. Sheen appeared in Machete Kills and I don’t know what else he’s been up to.

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Cube 2: Hypercube (2002, Andrzej Sekula)

Lot of equations and diagrams scrawled on the walls of this here cube, as a tattooed V-Mars woman narrates to herself everything that we’re seeing. Her previously unnoticed friend Sasha says the realities are collapsing. On top of all the time-and-space-warping, Criminal Simon drops in and there are murders, then dodgy effects a-go-go and V-Mars wakes up in a military puddle. Some floaty device is recovered from her and she’s shot in the head, an anticlimactic ending to the Cube saga.

Sekula is mainly a cinematographer (shot Pulp Fiction and American Psycho). Writer Sean Hood worked on the Halloween sequel with Busta Rhymes. V-Mars was Canadian Kari Matchett of many generically-titled TV shows and Mad Simon had his own show Forever Knight in the 1990’s.

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Hellraiser 5: Inferno (2000, Scott Derrickson)

Ah why is this Tim Robbinsy Bruce Campbelly guy shotgunning naked women in showers? Why is the camera shaking so hard? This is the part where tormented Tim/Bruce confronts all his dead friends and has to kill them again. Pinhead arrives to make fun of him, seeming more moralistic than usual (Pinhead’s message is that we should be nicer to people?). After getting his face exploded by hell-chains, Tim Bruce wakes up and goes to work, then kills himself, then wakes up again, living a Hellraiser Groundhog Day.

Derrickson made some popular recent horrors about which I’ve heard nothing good, is working on a major Marvel feature. Lead actor Craig Sheffer (who gets to yell both WHYYYYY and NOOOOOO in the last ten minutes) was the star of Nightbreed and more recently did 60+ episodes of One Tree Hill.

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Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker (2002, Rick Bota)

Cenobites are being dramatic in front of bland Trevor, kind of a young Michael Madsen/Ben Affleck type. Trevor seems an arrogant businessman, is rude to the demons, gets himself chained and cues a buncha flashbacks in which Ashley Laurence is working with Pinhead to collect souls. It’s like they’ve combined the episodic post-Bloodline movies with the original story, good move.

Bota keeps busy, though he’s done nothing I’ve heard of since Hellworld. Oh man I recognized Trevor but didn’t realize who he was: Dennis, Tina Fey’s pager-selling boyfriend in 30 Rock. In the last year he’s got his own show Battle Creek, and is appearing on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

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Mortal Kombat 2: Annihilation (1997, John Leonetti)

I love Jax for the grunts and cries he’s always making. There are lots of simultaneous fights, and the bad guys always seem to be winning then the good guys turn that shit around. Sonya kills Red Scorpion with her sexy legs, but it looks like she couldn’t do the stunts so they edited around it. Fuck, Liu Kang is a dragon. It’s kind of nice to remember that comic movies used to make it into theaters even when they looked like cheap garbage. Still, that techno theme song counts for a lot. Anyway Liu Kang defeats some deep-voiced baddie and the world’s landmarks (including the twin towers) are restored to peace. Where’s Christopher Lambert?

Leonetti works as a cinematographer on horror movies. The five(!) writers include a producer of C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, a writer on the Prehysteria! sequels, and the chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Of the actors, I saw Liu Kang in Death Race, Sonya played Viper in an early Marvel/Shield TV movie, and Omaha native Jax was an American Gladiator and did a couple episodes of NightMan.

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The Mummy Returns (2001, Stephen Sommers)

Man this movie was long. Brendan Fraser quotes The Monkees then screams at Comic Relief Jonathan then gets attacked by one of my favorite bad special effects: a digital scorpion with a Toy Story version of The Rock’s face crudely pasted on. Rachel Weisz gets a brief action scene, then they’re all saved by Airship Izzy. Seems like the kind of movie that has no reason to exist after its digital effects had badly aged, which happened before it hit theaters.

Sommers is a Last Ten Minutes veteran, having made G.I. Joe 2 and Odd Thomas – and 1994’s live-action Jungle Book, which Disney is hoping nobody remembers right now. Brendan Fraser is apparently still working, but in nothing I’ve heard of since 2008’s Inkheart. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003. Comic Relief John Hannah starred in Charlie Brooker’s A Touch of Cloth. And Rachel Weisz was so excellent in The Deep Blue Sea that I’d like to forget her dark Mummy-sequel past.

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This might not be a recurring feature, since the streaming services’ catalog from 1990-2004 is pretty poor. Taking 1998 as an example of a particularly undiscriminating year, bad movies I watched included The Siege, Emmerich Godzilla, Spriggan, Armageddon, Bride of Chucky, Deep Impact, U.S. Marshals, Mighty Joe Young, The Faculty, I Stand Alone, Halloween H2O, A Simple Plan, The Avengers, Star Trek Insurrection, Urban Legend, The Negotiator, Very Bad Things, Enemy of the State, GVS Psycho, Meet Joe Black, Ambushed, The Dentist 2 and John Carpenter’s Vampires. Netflix has three of those (13%) and Hulu has NONE – though I appreciated its suggestion of Hollis Frampton’s The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I for Bride of Chucky.

by ·Comments Off on Moneyball (2011, Bennett Miller)

A baseball movie perversely set in quiet, underlit offices and locker rooms (Mom: “Can you make the TV brighter?”). 2002 Oakland A’s manager Brad Pitt becomes impressed with nerdy Jonah Hill’s stats theories, hires him to create a low-budget team of effective/undervalued players. Strange idea for an underdog sports movie, because their ideas don’t actually work. Pitt can’t get coach Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the roster that Hill intended to maximize wins, so Pitt trades away Hoffman’s favorite players to force the issue… and they set a league winning streak and make the postseason, but the year still ends disappointingly. Meanwhile we get backstory of Pitt’s unimpressive early career as a player and his current home life (ex-wife Robin Wright and a daughter he’ll be able to see less often if he takes a different job) and a side plot with no payoff feat. Chris Pratt as a washed-up catcher turned fledgeling first baseman. But it’s got appealing actors and an Aaron Sorkin script, so it’s mostly a good time (memorable scene: Jonah Hill having to inform a player twice his size that he’s been traded) – and it made me care enough about Pitt’s Billy Beane to look up the real guy (still with the A’s through 2019).

Pitt makes most key decisions while driving:

Film Quarterly wrote a joint article about this and Margin Call, which made me realize that these two Autumn 2011-opening financial films with rhyming titles are the reason I still get Bennett Miller and JC Chandor confused.

by ·Comments Off on Embrace of the Serpent (2015, Ciro Guerra)

Karamakate in the Amazon is visited by two white men seeking the same herb at different times in his life. As a strong and suspicious young man in 1909 he meets Belgian Theo (Borgman star Jan Bijvoet) who claims he seeks the plant to cure an illness. As a forgetful old man during WWII he meets Evan (Brionne Davis of a recent Wizard of Oz miniseries – IMDB: “ambitious and terrible”), who claims to be a noble scientist but is ultimately seeking materials for military use.

Really beautiful black-and-white jungle/river photography, recreations of native life and its corruption and destruction by so-called Christians. The story about needing to teach the white guys to dream, and the parallel timelines (the latter-day one ending with Karamakate destroying the plant rather than hand it over) were a bit confounding and the heavy symbolism a bit tiresome, but overall I liked it better than Cinema Scope did, and not as much as Reverse Shot did.

by ·Comments Off on An Affair to Remember (1957, Leo McCarey)

Someday I will be able to recognize Deborah Kerr from one movie to the next. Here she’s a singer who runs into celebrity playboy Cary Grant on a cruise ship. After they’re seen together a few times, everyone on the ship assumes they’re having an affair, so while they’re trying to cover up an affair they’re not even having, they fall for each other. Actually I suppose it happens at a shore stop when Cary takes Deborah to meet his granny (Cathleen Nesbitt of Family Plot, not as frail as she looked, lived another 25 years). It wasn’t enough to be attractive and in love in the 1950’s – you had to prove your family values by being nice to granny. Second half: painting, empire state building, secrets, and that awful reveal when he finds out she didn’t mean to stand him up, but was hit by a car on the way to their rendezvous. When I try typing up more story details, my eyes get strangely blurry until I can’t see the screen.

Remake of McCarey’s own Love Affair, and nominated for almost as many oscars, again with no wins (apparently Bridge on the River Kwai was really fucking good). I definitely preferred this version – Kerr is Irene Dunne’s equal, Grant blows away Charles Boyer, and the movie’s color/widescreen look is intensely appealing. Late McCarey, made a decade after Good Sam. Grant was between To Catch a Thief and Indiscreet (another love-scandal movie) and Kerr a few years after From Here to Eternity. As their fiancees: Creature with the Atom Brain star Richard Denning and Desk Set computer programmer Neva Patterson.

by ·Comments Off on Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve)

After this and Edge of Tomorrow, Emily Blunt is an action star. Though she was no hero in this one – she’d talk big, but ultimately she’s being used by compromised higher-ups who have no interest in her stupid morals. Josh Brolin is a boss, working with Benicio Del Toro, who turns out to be consolidating cartel power, I think, and/or taking personal revenge, by going all James Bond and assassinating some Mexicans at the end. Blunt and partner Daniel Kaluuya (star of my favorite Black Mirror episode) are forced along for the ride.

Think I like this Villeneuve fella. Storytelling is bizarre (probably plays better the second time around) with some groany dialogue and troop behavior but filming is nice. People said it was tense and scary but I still think El Sicario Room 164 is scarier.

M. D’Angelo:

Kate is incredibly strong in a situation where her strength is useless. This is a deeply pessimistic film about the near-impossibility of overcoming institutional corruption — one that’s honest enough to have its protagonist struggle for a long time about whether what she’s witnessing even is corruption.

by ·Comments Off on Where to Invade Next (2015, Michael Moore)

Moore goes to other countries to pick and choose great social/political/economic ideas that the USA oughtta steal. Some powerful ideas in there – Katy and I liked it.

I already can’t remember the full list of countries/ideas, so let’s see if I can put together a list from web sources…

Italy: plenty of paid vacation time and family leave
France: healthy school lunches
Finland: successful education system eliminating homework and standardized testing
Slovenia: free college even for non-residents
Germany: recognition of the country’s past sins
Norway: reasonable prison system
Portugal: treating drug use as a health-care issue, training cops to respect human dignity
Tunisia: constitutional equal rights for women
Iceland: sending the corrupt bankers to prison

Okay, I stole the whole list from G. Cheshire’s review at rogerebert.com:

In my view, it’s one of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made … As he investigates one potentially useful idea after another, Moore keeps discovering that many originated in the U.S. Thus he’s not stealing from foreigners but reclaiming remedies that once belonged to us.

D. Ehrlich was not as impressed:

Moore has forgotten how to be funny. His docs used to be genuinely hilarious. Still, this gains power in its final movements, especially when it hits upon the idea that change is both the responsibility and the *power* of the people.