by ·Comments Off on Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Realtor Yang Kuei-mei (The Hole‘s downstairs resident) brings home her Eat Drink Man Woman costar Chen Chao-jung from the mall, and while she’s occupied, passerby Lee steals her house key. Now all three of them live part-time in the same apartment, semi-aware of each other. Nobody really feels great about any of this, or about their jobs or anything else.

Does all their work seem scammy, or do movies make all businesses look scammy? This won the Golden Horse (over Eat Drink and Chungking Express) and the top prize at Venice (tied with Before the Rain, over Heavenly Creatures and Ashes of Time), beating two different Wong Kar-Wai movies within three months.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Marie Rivière (marriage-plotter of Autumn Tale) gets into a series of awkward social situations, some of them self-caused (she’s a preachy vegetarian), while increasingly feeling that her summer vacation is slipping away.

Won the Venice Golden Lion, same year as The Beekeeper and A Room With a View. I should have realized Green Flash Brewing is named after the same phenomenon. I didn’t love this as much as others seem to, but Jake and Lawrence wrote good justifications for its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on The Target Shoots First (2000, Christopher Wilcha)

Opens with Wilcha getting a marketing job with Columbia House because he understands the Nirvana phenomenon, ends with Wilcha quitting in the wake of Cobain’s death. In between he tries to reconcile his alt-punk roots with his corporate environment, spearheading a sardonic issue of their marketing catalog. Watched in prep for his latest, Flipside.

by ·Comments Off on Timestalker (2024, Alice Lowe)

Nobody really liked this, but I, a renowned Alice Lowe enjoyer, will surely like it. She keeps dying for the same guy then being reborn, like dumb The Beast. It has hardly any good jokes, then her 1980s fortune teller says maybe instead of dying for him over and over, it’s his turn to die, but it still takes forever to get to the end. And come to think of it I didn’t really like Prevenge – I was thinking of Sightseers. That one’s good.

by ·Comments Off on The Night Visitors (2023, Michael Gitlin)

Onscreen text, echoey voice clips, gentle electro music with handclap percussion, poetry, research – all presented as weirdly as possible. Focused primarily on being weird, secondarily on moths. Takes a long sidetrack to make fun of a Poe story, and another to discuss the dumbass scientist who imported the mega-destructive spongy (nee-gypsy) moths from Europe.

by ·Comments Off on Dad Movies (Looney Tunes vs. Muppets)

K’s dad was in town.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981, Jim Henson)

Our biggest failure of a group movie choice in ages, the hostile viewing environment not helping the experience. Too bad, since it’s got great songs and the best puppetry, taking the characters into natural environments and action scenes and making you ask “how’d they do that” every few minutes.

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Race to Witch Mountain (2009, Andy Fickman)

The Rock pals around with a couple of misunderstood aliens, one of whom is the girl who helped out Mid-Sized Sedan in Rebel Ridge. Semi-remake of a couple Disney movies from the director of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. The pd187 writeup of this is better (and possibly longer) than the movie.

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Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003, Joe Dante)

I’ve seen this before, great movie, nothing to add.

by ·Comments Off on Janet Planet (2023, Annie Baker)

Julianne Nicholson (La Doctora in Monos) has a weird daughter, tries dating Will Patton (last seen as a religious nut in Minari) then Sophie Okonedo (oscar nominee, had hands-for-feet in Aeon Flux) then Elias Koteas (pride of Canada, last and probably next seen in Crash). Janet breaks up with the first two, Elias vanishes mid-picnic. The writer/director was the daughter’s age in 1991 when the movie is set, what a coincidence.

by ·Comments Off on Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

Watched the miniseries version, which lived up to its high reputation. Kids grow up in wealthy theater household, where everyone’s got their eccentricities and all the husbands are sleeping with the maids. Theater owner dad (Allan Edwall, who bought a theater after appearing in this) has an episode during a rehearsal and dies, then after a year, mom Ewa Fröling marries bishop Jan Malmsjö (Scenes from a Marriage) and moves the kids into his severe, forbidding household.

Family members have been pathetic or horrible, but mostly in an entertaining way, while the new stepdad is horrible in a horrible way. Knowing how Bergman loves mixing religion and punishment, I figured this would be the bulk of the movie and lead to everyone’s ruin, but the kids’ grandmother and her friend Isak (Erland Josephson, Hour of the Wolf baron and Nostalghia madman) plot a successful rescue operation.

L-R: the bishop, uncle Jarl Kulle (guy who loves dueling in Smiles of a Summer Night), uncle Börje Ahlstedt (I Am Curious x2)

“I don’t understand why I always have to see dead people,” says Alexander, ahead of his time. In addition to theater, there are ghosts and dreams and stories and magic in every episode. In the last half hour, instead of simply wrapping up, the movie introduces trans psychic Ismael, giving the sense that the kids’ lives will stay richly weird for a while longer.