by ·Comments Off on Don’t Look Back (1967, D.A. Pennebaker)

Pretty funny that as the Beatles came to the USA playing havoc in the media with their jokey answers to interview questions, Dylan went to England to do the same. This is more of a hotel room hangout movie than expected, and Bob gets aggressive and confrontational. Joan Baez comes across a ton better than she did in the TNT Show, harmonizing with Bob on Hank Williams songs. They’re in full folkie mode, Bob not having Gone Electric until a couple months after filming.

When I said Joan comes across well I meant musically, not lighting

unrelated: guess who I’ve got tickets to see this summer

by ·Comments Off on The Big T.N.T. Show (1966, Larry Peerce)

The Stones didn’t show up this time but the crowd still shrieks annoyingly while actor David “Man From UNCLE” McCallum leads the orchestra in “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Turns out the crowd can be controlled – they shut the fuck up and focus on clapping out of time when Petula Clark starts “Downtown,” then resume yelling for The Lovin’ Spoonful’s singer looking silly hugging an autoharp. Ray Charles gets a big rocker, Bo Diddley chugs on the guitar, The Byrds dress stylishly and jangle on, and Joan Baez plays a song from Inside Llewyn Davis. Movie catches fire with the Ronettes into Roger Miller (the only one who talks to the crowd between songs). Donovan gets an appropriately pretentious intro (Dylan was wise not to accept the invitation) and after he mystifies the crowd, Ike and Tina bring the energy the hell back up for a raucous finale. Good movie.

Petula silences the screams:

Bo lets the girls rock out:

Joan kills the mood:

The Sparks Brothers say what are WE doing here?

Roger plays to the camera:

The crowd puzzles over Donovan:

Tina takes it home:

But there would be no next year:

by ·Comments Off on Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds (2017, Altham & Asher & Blaine)

Nice doc, we got to hear much of Pet Sounds in different forms, see some goofy photo shoots, hang out with Brian and his co-lyricist who seems like a good guy who fell into an awesome gig. Everything’s pretty positive – even Mike Love comes off well, except during the “Hang On To Your Ego” vs. “I Know There’s an Answer” debate. Nobody says the word “Smile” or discusses the post-Pet future. I’ve been listening to some 1960s albums and watching related movies – hence the TAMI and TNT and Beatles and Dylan. Something new I’ve learned about Pet Sounds which also wasn’t covered in the doc: it’s not only the best Beach Boys record, their previous four albums were hardly even good.

by ·Comments Off on 2 + 2 = 22 (2017, Heinz Emigholz)

Mostly a rock doc of some guys recording motorik music.

The title is probably a Godard reference, but I’m still in the mid-1960s on my rock doc playlist, that one’s a couple years away.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 34: Michael Shannon edition

Fahrenheit 451 (2018, Ramin Bahrani)

Evil Philosopher Cop Michael Shannon is arresting Michael B. Jordan, who turns the table and burns some guy to death, racking up likes on a big screen (is this The Running Man?). Sofia “Climax” Boutella takes MBJ to the suburbs where he saves a starling (it’s a big year for cinematic starlings) then Shannon makes a big tormented face as he murders MBJ in a burning barn. I’m seeing him sing R.E.M. songs next week – here’s hoping he makes that same face during “Fall On Me.” I can’t be mad at a movie that ends on a murmuration.

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Superman (2025, James Gunn)

Backed up more than ten minutes so I wouldn’t miss Warboy Lex Luthor. Is this a cartoon? Soup fights an airborne army of boba fetts. There are other super-people around, and also the Bunk for some reason. It’s very snappy and JamesGunny and there’s a CG dog, and they glue the split-apart city back together then party with some second-rate heroes (incl Nathan Fillion). Lois is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Soup is from We Own This City, it closes on an Iggy Pop song, and this overall looks good, it’s just that I’ve reached a certain age and you’re not gonna trick me into watching any more Superman movies.

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The Flash (2023, Andy Muschietti)

Backed up too far but this time by accident – HBO’s interface isn’t all that. Various Flashes and Supermen and Batmen are getting killed in a fiery time-loop by Evil CG Michael Shannon, pulling together the previous two movies into a Fahrenheit Multiverse. “We Need To Talk About” Ezra has a little argument with himself – Flash isn’t even fast in this, he just fights with glowy knives, and the villain is a version of himself who stayed awake during The Jaunt. Ah fuck, it’s Haunted Chris Reeve and CG Nic Cage, now I remember why people were mad. In the obligatory wrap-up, Ron Livingston is his dad, the girl from Hearts Beat Loud his love interest, and George Clooney as Batman would’ve been a good bit if they hadn’t awkwardly bungled it. Muschietti also directed It, which also nobody liked but they all watched anyway.

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Jonah Hex (2010, Jimmy Hayward)

How is this movie only 81 minutes? Civil War Thanos and his girl Jennifer Fox are taken captive by Evil Malkovich. I don’t see Michael Shannon, but he’s in this movie and there are also flamethrowers, making this part of the Fahrenheit Multiverse. I do see Lt. Cedric Daniels for some reason, then the movie starts flashbacking really hard until the bad guy explodes. The director is a former Pixar animator and musician who is friends with Tool and Primus and Mastodon, and the writers made Crank and Gamer, so this bomb was a bump in the road for a bunch of otherwise cool guys.

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The Lego Batman Movie (2017, Chris McKay)

I missed Will Arnett in Jonah Hex, so here’s his Christian Bale impression in a frenetic cartoon which is admittedly cool-looking (from a Robot Chicken guy). Nice shark-spray callback. It’s fun for everyone that the comic corporations get to make big expensive self-serious superhero movies and big expensive silly parodies of the same, less fun that something called The Lego Batman Movie tries to wrap up by getting weepy about family.

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Assassin’s Creed (2016, Justin Kurzel)

I also missed Michael Fassbender in Jonah Hex, so let’s check out his second-worst movie. Jeremy Irons is presented with a treasure chest while Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Rampling look on, wow this is a heavy cast for a video game movie. Irons is going to enslave mankind or whatever, seems very calm about it, while Omar is brandishing knives in the crowd. Fassbender arrives in a robe and joins the serious-whisper acting cavalcade then makes his move, assassin-wise. The whole thing feels like a real drag.

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Knox Goes Away (2023, Michael Keaton)

Speaking of assassins, I missed Michael Keaton in The Flash so here’s his aging-hitman thing. Oh wow, a shaggy Al Pacino rats on Keaton to some nerd cops who were talking about security footage anomalies. After a brain-damaged Keaton takes the place of his son Cyclops in prison, a closing montage of each major character looking meaningfully at different objects.

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Suicide Squad (2016, David Ayer)

Back into the superhero multiverse, this supposedly has Ezra “Flash” Miller, but hundredth-billed so I don’t expect to see him here. I expect to see supervillains teaming up to fight Gozer. Will Smith shows all his teeth in closeup then blows up the stargate to the demon dimension. The guy from John Woo’s Silent Night gets his wife back from the dead, or from the stone lion she was trapped inside, but the team of killers is no match for an angry Viola Davis, who sends them to prison until Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius breaks them out. I was gonna close with the latest Joaquin Phoenix Joker thing and Watchmen, but that’s quite enough of these things.

by ·Comments Off on Happy as Lazzaro (2018, Alice Rohrwacher)

Innocent Lazzaro works on an illegal tobacco farm slave plantation, and while his young master is enlisting him in a kidnapping extortion scheme, the others are being discovered by authorities and freed into the real world. Laz falls down a mountain and wakes up years later (unaged and part-wolf) to find his old friends.

by ·Comments Off on Bright Future (2003, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Ugly digital video was the craze that year. The story of two fuckups working dead-end jobs until the ambitious one (post-Ichi Tadanobu Asano) murders their annoying boss and gives his pet jellyfish to the useless one (Joe Odagiri of Princess Raccoon). The imprisoned guy’s dad (Tatsuya Fuji, star of Oshima’s Passion/Senses) shows up to figure out what happened, while the useless guy accidentally infests the river with a swarm of killer red jellyfish. This movie felt unusual back then, and remains so.

B. Kite:

The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fish through an overhead shot of the group drifting through the city streets at night, illumined by their glowing walkie-talkie headsets. Their aimlessness and matching uniforms might not suggest anything spectacularly promising, but Kurosawa places the title under them as a caption – Bright Future – and has insisted he means it. Why not? Like the fish, they’re adaptable and perched on the point of transition … Ambivalent Future, the fascinating documentary made during the film’s shooting by Fujii Kenjiro, shows the extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa’s artistic process. He expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures or help the actors find their way into a role.

The boss interfering in his employees’ personal lives, on his last day alive:

by ·Comments Off on Sleeping Sickness (2011, Ulrich Köhler)

White doctor Ebbo has opened a clinic in Cameroon and is sorry to be leaving. Three years later Black doctor Alex arrives to find that WD never left and the clinic’s finances and practices are problematic. As the tension ramps up, WD disappears, possibly shot and/or eaten by a hippo.

Produced by Maren Ade, this won a prize at Berlin alongside The Turin Horse and A Separation. White doctor was in Prospero’s Books, Black doctor in 35 Shots of Rum, wife in The Strange Little Cat, and fellow white doctor Hippolyte Girardot was in everything, including the last couple Resnais movies. Hippolyte, Hippo… hmmm.

Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope:

The masterstroke in Kohler’s screenplay is how the destabilizing aspects of the narrative place viewers – for entirely different reasons – in the same off-balance mental space as Alex, who comes across as permanently jetlagged, despite the fact that Cameroon and France share a time zone. Something has instilled a bit of the Kurtz in Ebbo, and though Kohler surely has some idea, he leaves the gaps in for us to fill – daring simpletons to proclaim the cause as “Africa” – and then takes it up a notch. In the last extended sequence – one might say the film’s third part – Kohler places us in the nighttime jungle, and lets us get lost again.

by ·Comments Off on Dust Devil (1992, Richard Stanley)

Hardware was silly fun, Color Out of Space a real cool time, this movie is the Richard Stanley tiebreaker, and… I can dig it. We got just-okay storytelling, but baller filmmaking – South African post-Twin Peaks cult-killer stuff, with at least three cool birds.

Shelter me from the power of the finger:

Chelsea (one of Deborah Unger’s girls in Lynch’s Hotel Room) is on the run, and connects with roaming psycho Robert John Burke (between Hal Hartley movies). Everything this guy does, he does ominously. Her husband (of Space Mutiny: MST3K season 8) is after Chelsea and cops Joe and Ben (both of Cry Freedom) are after RJB. Eventually everyone will die except Chelsea, but she takes on the serial-psycho spirit and becomes the new RJB. The DP supposedly shot Highlander III: The Sorcerer in 1994, but that must be an AI hallucination – there were only two Highlander movies.