by ·Comments Off on Fellow Citizen & First Graders

Toothache (1983)

I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.

This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.

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Fellow Citizen (1983)

Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.

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First Graders (1984)

After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.

by ·Comments Off on On Dangerous Ground (1951, Nicholas Ray)

“Nobody likes a cop.” A woman picks up her husband’s gun in the first second of the movie post-credits, what would Chekhov say about that? Robert Ryan (between The Set-Up and Clash by Night) is very tame for a supposedly short-tempered, violent officer on the trail of two cop killers. His team catches the guys, but Ryan is sent away to the country to cool off, where Ward Bond is on a rampage, promising to kill his daughter’s murderer without a trial. The suspect’s sister is blind Ida Lupino, so the movie stops its killer pursuits to hang out while these two assholes torment her. Her brother surfaces and spares the two men from having to kill him by falling off a cliff while running away.

Ryan in the country with Ward:

Ryan is good, at least, relative to the rest of the movie. Country and city folk have perfect diction, nothing feels authentic or lived-in – a couple shots of great truth and intensity, but a phony movie. The title always reminds me of crap 90s Steven Seagal social-issues actioner On Deadly Ground, but it turns out there was also a crap 90s Rob Lowe social-issues actioner called On Dangerous Ground.

Ryan in the city with his jittery informant, Welles regular Gus Schilling:

by ·Comments Off on Secrets & Lies (1996, Mike Leigh)

After her foster mum’s death, Marianne Jean-Baptiste consults compassionate social worker Lesley Manville about finding her real mum. Lesley gives her some options, says this should be handled delicately, and of course don’t just show up at mum’s doorstep, but Marianne is out of patience and does exactly that, getting to know Brenda Blethyn (Keira K’s mum in Pride & Prejudice and Keira’s boyfriend’s mum in Atonement) and remaining her “work friend” to the rest of the family until all the titular secrets get blurted out at a birthday party.

Brenda’s brother is Timothy Spall, his wife who nobody likes is Phyllis Logan, and mum’s other daughter (and birthday girl) is Claire Rushbrook of Adler’s Under the Skin, who brings along her boyfriend Paul. Poor Paul seems nice enough, has nothing to do while caught in this massive unloading of grudges, and when the fourth family secret within 15 minutes drops, he makes a facial twitch that justifies his entire existence in the film. As for Blethyn, she and the movie won top prizes at Cannes in a stacked year (Crash, Fargo, Breaking the Waves, Three Lives, Drifting Clouds). She’s excellent throughout, but one line delivery in particular, which I won’t detail here because I’m trying to stop thinking about it, had me upset all week. I planned to catch up on a few Mike Leigh films – maybe Meantime or High Hopes – before watching MJ-B’s comeback Hard Truths, but maybe stacking these in a single month would be overwhelming.

Josh Lewis: “So funny to make a movie as nihilistic and troubling as Naked and then immediately follow it up with Timothy Spall in this who is a contender for the nicest, warmest character in the history of movies.”

by ·Comments Off on Vanya on 42nd Street (1994, Louis Malle)

Relaxed film, supposedly a full rehearsal of the Chekhov play in a disused theater, director Andre Gregory and the small audience only seen at the beginning and during act breaks. Camera crew is onstage, so it’s an immersive drama that doubles as a distancing experiment. Everyone loves the important professor, come to his country home with hot new wife Julianne Moore, but as the days go on, all the men fall for Julianne and lose respect for the professor, who plans to repay their years of work on his estate by selling it off and making them homeless. Local doctor who never seems to go home is Larry Pine, the professor in Q, and thankfully I didn’t recognize this movie’s professor as the Police Academy commandant because that would have been so distracting. MVP Brooke Smith (the girl who puts the lotion in the basket in Silence of the Lambs).

Wallace Vanya with Moore and Lynn Cohen:

by ·Comments Off on Hollow Man (2000, Paul Verhoeven)

The effects hold up less well than Starship Troopers but they’re illustrating a cool concept (mammals becoming visible from their veins outward) – and I’m sure they were closer to cutting-edge at the time, but now when lab leader Kevin Bacon invisibles himself and becomes a skeleton I get the song “Money for Nothing” in my head.

Bacon is a science genius but kind of an asshole – his first order of business when becoming invisible is to sexually harass coworkers – so his ex Elisabeth Shue and her square-jawed labmate Josh Brolin are understandably hiding their relationship from him. Not taking the news well that he can’t be re-visibled, Bacon goes out and rapes his neighbor, kills his boss (Bill Devane of Rolling Thunder), then comes back to trap and slaughter his entire team (including Zero Effect‘s Kim Dickens). Hit or miss, still better than the last invisible man movie I watched.

by ·Comments Off on Ladies & Gentlemen… (2025, Oz Rodriguez & Questlove)

The opening mashup is as good as people said, then between each ad break they pick a particular focus: Lonely Island, hip hop, star-making performances, the dangers(?) of live television. They take pains to tell us what an honor it is to play such an important show, how vital is SNL to our culture, and if you don’t agree with this premise then it all starts to feel hollowly self-promotional, but there’s sure some good music along the way.

by ·Comments Off on A Cure for Wellness (2016, Gore Verbinski)

Valerian “Val” DeHaan travels to a secluded German manor to work out a contract for his employer – is this based on Dracula? Upon arrival he signs some papers without reading them, then starts mad hallucinating, taking too long to realize what kind of movie he’s in. Gore’s ability to illustrate a creepy horror thing with big striking images makes me wonder if I should rewatch his Ring remake.

I guess Val dreams his mom dies after his limo crashes into a Very Digital Deer. Mia Goth plays the weird girl wandering the grounds, but then, everything is pretty weird. Val finds micro-bugs in the water, later panics when his scuba therapy becomes eel-infested. He sees eels everywhere, then tries to rally the patients to revolution but instead they zombie-attack him and the doctors pump Val full of eels – in the end, this is like The Matrix, but with eels instead of technology. I guess the incestuous mad doctor/baron Jason Isaacs (military guy in The Death of Stalin) is Mia’s dad, and they are 200 years old, kept alive through eels, until Val snaps out of his zomb-eel stupor and foils their plan. Partly based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the guys who wrote Shutter Island may have also read. Someone should program a Cure for Wellness / Road to Wellville double feature.

by ·Comments Off on Stooges and Barbarians

Rainer, a Vicious Dog in Skull Valley (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

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We Barbarians (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

These are backstage meta-Conan spinoffs, the first one cycling through playwright trance-purgatory, the second a series of character monologues, always ending in hell and death.

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Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb (1938, Del Lord)

Curly is entering slogan/jingle contests like it’s Christmas in July, and he wins for “coffin nail cigarettes.” Three hot girls in their same hotel plan to marry them for the money, but alas, everybody is lying and poor.

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Violent Is the Word for Curly (1938, Charley Chase)

They work at a gas station and dance around a car saying “super service!” while destroying the vehicle and its posh occupants. Then after they are mistaken for those three automobile-owning visiting professors, there is a musical number, which had me briefly enraged until I gave in to the gleeful idiocy. The weird title is a play on the now-forgotten oscar-nominated drama Valiant Is the Word for Carrie about a Southern prostitute moving north.

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Three Missing Links (1938, Jules White)

They go to “Africa” and tangle with a gorilla and (another) lion… okay, that’s enough of these for now.