I can't pretend to understand the politics or historical context of 2015's The Assassin, and that's an important impediment to understanding its plot. There are others. It's also got a very minimal soundtrack, only in the rarest occasions letting a bit of score seep in and even then, it might be diegetic. It's often like we're in another room, looking in, and therefore only overhearing scenes. And to say it's slow-flowing is an understatement, with many very still shots making you check if your player somehow froze the image. If it's anti-filmic in those ways, others might consider it to be PURE film and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It's largely down to cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous - everything I've seen from Hou Hsiao-hsien was basically painted with light - but that's just not enough for me here. I wish it were, because the concept of a reluctant assassin with a connection to her target is a strong one. But her interior life gets lost in opaque historical drama and direction that is obstinate in its contention that the audience should decode images without any help.
Cathernie Breillat's L'été dernier (Last Summer) concerns a taboo relationship between a woman (a fearless Léa Drucker) and her rebellious teenage stepson. From her side, it's not entirely predatory - the 17-year-old is definitely the aggressor - but given what she's ready to do to cover herself in the back half of the film, you may well question whether this was a calculated - if irresponsible, and of course, criminal - seduction. Drucker is absolutely amazing in her ambiguity, by turns ruthless and powerless, and informed in no small measure by her job as a lawyer specializing in family law, child protection and sexual assault. She knows all the tricks, but also all the pitfalls, so why does she do it? So many lines with double meanings here, and I absolutely love the one-pixel finish (you'll see what I mean) before the credits roll. Excellent soundtrack choices too.
While I'm a fan of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (especially), the third film in John Waters' "Trash Trilogy", Desperate Living... Not so much. Literally sitting between Female Trouble and Polyester - it even feels like a blend of the two - does it no favors, but you can see how pushing the bad taste to its limit blew the concept's load (so to speak), pushing Waters to do other things in the 1980s. As with Polyester, suburbia is cranked up to 11 at the beginning of the movie (to me, the best part, but then I'm a fan of both Polyester and Serial Mom), with Mink Stole and Jean Hill proving to be forces of nature who kill the former's husband and run to "Mortville", a fascistic shanty town that's about to undergo a revolution. And while Desperate Living is more colorful than Waters' previous films, and it certainly MOVES like a freight train, it's just too LOUD for me. Constant violence and nudity, characters screaming their heads off, and one shock piece after another just wore me down until it was just a big smear. A smear I could respect, both for its quest to find "the line" that shouldn't be crossed, and for its overt LGBTQ+ content, respect, but not love.
Divine is saddled with the absolute worst family and that's enough to drive even the saintliest woman to drink in Polyester, John Waters' parody of family melodramas. Yes, it's the one "shot" in Odorama, and I do wish I had the scratch and sniff card, but also, I'm sure there would be instant regret by Smell #2. It's an amusing gimmick, but it's more than that. This is a world that "stinks", and certainly, Divine's life does. She's gifted with a powerful sense of smell that presages the flashing numbers on the screen, almost like she can sniff out evil. And while some of the broad acting (by the kids, mostly) can be hard to take, and the joke starts to wear thin in the final act, this still has to be one of Waters' downright funniest movies. There's all the stuff taken to extremes, of course, but I find a lot of the small details (the Pepsi bottle at the breakfast table, for example) extremely amusing. Waters has always been a good satirist, but Divine is a sympathetic figure that allows us to tap in when things get TOO satirical. And what a role for Edith Massey - her acting is worse than her dental work, but I love her for it.
I'm sure Mermaids means more to people of a certain generation (coming of age through the 60s), but it still works as a story about the loss of innocence. The mother lost it long ago, her eldest daughter both fears losing it and desires to, and the youngest daughter is a total innocent. Modern America is also about to suffer its first trauma and lose a kind of innocence there. All this is wrapped in the portrait of a single-parent family, where the mom (the always powerful Cher) acts like a teenager and is contentiously parented by her daughter (Winona Ryder) and vice-versa, with Bob Hoskins quite charming as the man who would like to make the family "whole". Ryder's sister is Christina Ricci, which makes me think it's too bad Jenna Ortega wasn't even a baby in 1990 so she could be in this family. Quite obviously adapted from a novel, the narration is good, but I'm not in love with Ryder AS a narrator, which kept the film at a distance from me at first. But it did eventually charm me.
Silent comedies often string disparate set pieces together to make their feature length, whether they have much to do with the story or not. Harold Lloyd's Speedy is in that category, though even the long Coney Island sequence still pushes the characters in a certain direction (and scores them a useful dog), so as usual, Lloyd's film are better at story-telling than, say, Buster Keaton's. He plays the eponymous Speedy here, so named because he thinks quickly on his feet, never stays in one job for long, and drives like a maniac. Nominally, the plot concerns his having to save an old man's horse-car business before the railways take him over (truly, a 1920s problem) before Pop's granddaughter will agree to marry him. And as with Lloyd's other feature films, it's a lot of fun and he stands out as the underrated member of the great silent comedy trifecta. Speedy's unhealthy obsession with baseball is a fun bit, though it's almost just an excuse to get Babe Ruth into the film, except that the sport shows up thematically as a motif throughout, which I like, The third act is all kinds of great - chases, fights, suspense, comedy, romance community coming together to preserve tradition, a cute dog, it's got it all.
Bobby Suarez's Filipino exploitation flick, The One-Armed Executioner, is late to the game in terms of the one-armed martial arts subgenre (One-Armed Swordsman came in '67), but is kind of on the cusp of the heroic bloodshed genre with its inclusion of some gun fu elements in the lead character's re-training. It's perhaps closer to the western than anything John Woo would make, but either way, it makes for an entertaining revenge picture. Franco Guerrero is an engaging action star despite not always hiding his left arm in his shirt very well (a common problem, everybody's got an odd torso), and the script has fun with its ancillary characters. And then there's the location. You're well used to seeing this kind of movie coming out of Hong Kong or Japan, but not so much the Philippines. The third act in the jungle makes great use of muddy marshlands and involves multiple opponents, weapons, and vehicles. I'm not convinced with the big bad's death though... were they sequel-baiting?
Controversial? Boris Karloff's best movie is How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He's got such a great voice, it'd be a shame to put Frankenstein in this slot. Or maybe I just relate too well to the Grinch. I, too, hate all the noise and garishness of Christmas, but my heart swells up to three sizes pretty easily too. Whatever the case may be, it's actually fascinating to watch this golden oldie which is recognizably Dr. Seuss' drawings come to life, BUT JUST AS RECOGNIZABLY Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes work. The Grinch-Max relationship is like one of those great, slapstick-happy, cartoon pairings. It's all in the expressions and the MOTION' which is of course what Dr. Seuss couldn't entirely put in the book. Let's end on a question to ponder this Holiday Season: What kind of meat is "roast beast"? Sounds like beef, outwardly looks like turkey, slices like ham... all Who!???? I mean, what do you think Who Hash is made out of?
I was warned that reading anything about Delirium (AKA Psycho Puppet) before watching would spoil my enjoyment. That made it sound like it was all a dream, or some Tyler Durden situation. It's not. The twists are about "what's really happening" in the plot and I agree it's better to go in cold. Letterboxd's synopsis is finel IMDB's is NOT. So what can *I* say? It's fine to say that this is a cheap cop movie starring people who have few or no other credits, with detectives on the trail of a delirious (see title) serial killer leaving the corpses of some rather imprudent young women in his wake. From there, you're on your own. The twists make the movie. What DOESN'T make the movie is the stilted dialog, sometimes by way of the acting, too often because the editing leaves too much air between lines. The murders are savage (and exploitatively nude, half the time), and the victim's friend who starts playing Nancy Drew (Debi Chaney) is reasonably effective. The flick also has something to say about an issue of the day that I won't mention here - nothing deep, but it motivates the action. They were trying hard and I respect that.
The John Wick movies found a way to continue the revenge of its first film, but Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (a lot of Blood, but no Snow), while it starts with a good hook - Yuki is on the run from the authorities for her revenge murders - just doesn't and turns her into an all-purpose revenger. She might as well be Zatoichi. She's soon press-ganged into a spy mission in the home of a sympathetic anarchist, and uses her revenging skills in his cause. I don't dislike the story (the villains use unusual means), but it's a contrived extension of a story that was already finished. Toshiya Fujita is still the director, so Snowblood 2 at least looks LIKE the original. It's gorgeous. Beautiful shots. Saturatec colors and deep pools of black. Unusual framings. Violent action sequences (though far fewer than we need). It's a clunky addition, but the cinematography makes it watchable.
They evidently meant for Sonny Chiba to be Japan's answer to Bruce Lee - in The Street Fighter, he has similar moves, similar styling, and similar (if more exaggerated) expressions - but this is a more sombre and sadistic film than any Bruce had made. It seems like Chiba is fighting everyone in this flick, whatever side of the law they are, and ripping their eyes out - or their balls off! - in the process of protecting an heiress (for perhaps not the right reasons). I don't mind the hyperviolence - it's a feature, not a bug - but Japanese exploitation in the 70s usually meant sexual violence as well, and it's entirely unnecessary. The fights are still good. They're cheaply filmed, but dynamic. But if you're a Hong Kong action aficionado, you won't find them that special. Chiba snarls his way through the movie, or else tries to out-grimace Bruce Lee, so he's not half as charismatic as I was led to believe he'd be. If ultimately I pan The Street Fighter, it's really because of Chiba's pathetic sidekick Ratnose, an absolutely horrendous comedy character whose loyalty to the hero is as unjustified as it is irritating. (Watched with English dub, which I expect is the worst possible format, especially in terms of Ratnose's whining.)
I would have been fine with Gladiator II being just another gladiator story, unconnected to the events of the original, but Ridley Scott's new sword & sandals spectacular is actually set 16 years later, and involves a couple of surviving characters from 2000's Gladiator. That does sort of deflate whatever victory is eked out of the first story, or pushes it back to the end of this one. But without Russell Crowe (Paul Mescal isn't quite on the same level) and Joaquin Phoenix (the decadent twin emperors are rather thinly developed), the film doesn't quite achieve the same heights. What it is, however, is a rousing action picture, with lots of cool fights and Ridley's usual attention to detail. What's changed, mostly, is that now Ridley can use CG animals as part of the action and there are lots. I think the first shot is actually a brilliant adaptation of some of the iconic moments of the first film, and Denzel Washington, in the Oliver Reed role, as it were, is a brilliant villain. I wanted to shout "Are you not entertained?!" at patrons leaving the theater to go to the bathroom, because I was. That's all that was really required here.
40 years after Room 666, French director Lubna Playoust makes Room 999, asking the same alarmist question about the impending death of cinema. This time, the barbarians at the gates are the internet and streaming rather than television and video, but shouldn't the actual answer be the same? Many directors prophesied doom and gloom 40 years ago, and cinema is still here. There are still some doomsayers in this new lot, but the tone is generally more positive. It may have to do with there being more young directors and directors from countries where film is still thriving and/or developing - they haven't done everything they set out to do yet and can't admit their art form might die before they can - but even an older guy like Cronenberg, whose whole thing is exploring how technology changes humanity, sees only evolution where others see erosion. I agree with him. Film is not a rock, it's alive, and it's an exercise in self-pitying nostalgia to predict its death. It's only the death of the art form as one knows it - prose didn't die when the epistolary novel went out of fashion! Notably, only one person mentions A.I. (and obliquely at that). Make the film just one year later and that's all they'd be talking about. There are some great points made in Room 999, but there's a lot of chaff too. It's too long (twice the length of the original), and it starts to get repetitive after a while. There's also a certain irony in the fact that one of the signs cinema is "dying" is that we keep making sequels, reboots and revivals of old IP, and this is actually that, isn't it?
I love Wim Wenders' work, but I reject the question he asks in Room 666. The year in 1982. The place is a hotel room in Cannes. A bunch of attending directors walk into the room and respond to some bullshit doom and gloom, alarmist questions about whether TV and video herald the end of film as an art. 40+ years later, there's just as much crap as there was in the early 80s, but beautiful and innovating work too, and the cinema snobs have the exact same complaints about streaming, digital, amusement park rides, etc. Nominally, this is about what people thought the future of cinema might be, but it's framed as a negative from the onset (or is Wenders trying to provoke an contrarian response?). The film starts to shift when Werner Herzog, my hero, enters the arena. I won't tell you what he does except reject the premise, but in the context of all this, it's a hero moment. He's one of few optimists in the group, along with Spielberg (who people ridicule because he talks about budgets - what exactly did you expect from this quintessential spectacle director? - but he hits on the real threat to art, which is business) and Antonioni, the real prophet of the lot, wisely kept for the end. Now here's a director who knows that there is no end to film, only "film as you curmudgeons have been doing it" (my words, not his) and that one must evolve with the audience and the technology. While he can't imagine the actual advances, he actually does predict the future, and he doesn't see it as bad.
Given the task of crafting a Jaws rip-off, Joe Dante delivers something a lot more interesting and idiosyncratic: Piranha. There's no doubt this was made by the director of Gremlins when you early on catch sight of stop-motion "little guys" who are about as gratuitous as the movie's flashes of nudity. The Jaws stuff is still there - Dick Miller visually READS as a the Amity Island mayor - but it's everything else that feels amusing and memorable. The worst camp counselor in America. The plumbing-related escape from jail. The comic book-reading little girl who won't go in the water and might just be the hero the movie needs. The crazy finale. The genetically-engineered piranha in the movie sometimes nibble at your bum, sometimes skeletonize you in seconds, and sometimes are smart enough to disassemble your raft with their teeth - whatever the script needs at that point - but that's part of the fun. Piranha doesn't take itself very seriously, and Dante shows early that he can put little kids in danger and not have the audience get angry at him.
A Mexican B-movie (though perhaps not in Mexico itself) with some American actors and A-level effects, Demonoid moves at a very quick clip so you never get bored. In terms of the disembodied hand sub-sub-subgenre, it's got amazing creeping hand effects, but the "Devil's Hand" also has a Satanic possession power and it's that hybridization certainly enhances the picture. As does the stuntwork, the big sets, etc. Which is why I doubt Mexico itself would have considered this a B-effort. Samantha Eggar (The Brood, or if you'd rather, recognizable for dozens of guest appearances on 70s and 80s television) is pretty unflappable as the woman who wants to rid her husband of the cursed hand and becomes its next intended victim. Demonoid (surely, that can't have been the original title) takes its horror seriously - its tongue isn't in its cheek whatsoever - and goes for jugular. No one is safe, and the gore is savage. It doesn't reinvent cinema (in fact, it looks like a television production but for its adult content), but you could do a lot worse if looking for a horror quickie.
It's probably not a good idea to watch The Relic on a streaming service because the creature feature tries for dark, moody cinematography - which I certainly appreciate - but goes too far and I'm sure goes to total black at the usual bit rates (or however these things are defined). But when even a fancy museum gala is by candlelight, crawling through basements and sewers in search of a South American chimera is probably not going to be lit very well. At least Peter Hyams tried - he's a jobber, but I'm usually entertained - and possibly, this was to show the creature as little as possible, even if he had Stan Winston on creature effects (the gory bodies are still well lit most of the time). The creature is sometimes 90s CGI, but in the darkness, it's not so bad, so there you go. Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore are good enough leads, and despite all the tropes (he's a a superstitious cop, she's the logical scientist!), they don't initiate a romance between them. That's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pretty standard monster flick.
Ridley Scott's Spartacus 2000 - I mean, Gladiator - seemed overrated at the time. Russell Crowe's Oscar-baiting snot, Young Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielson giving off what we'd today call Lanister vibes, CG coliseums, and a ludicrous action story... Am I not entertained? Yes, I am, but it didn't - nor does it now - feel like a serious film like some of some of Ridley's other historical epics (The Duellists, Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down...). Revisiting it absent the contemporary hype, it IS a lot of fun, but it's also incredibly emotional. Maximus' tragedy, the constant rejection suffered by Commodus (whose shenanigans today remind us of other unstable world leaders) and Juba (Djimon Hounsou) as the soul of the film (or at least the soul Maximus believes he has lost) create an impactful, operatic emotionalism that supports the action beats and grandiose spectacle quite well. I looked a few things up and was very intrigued to discover that, while the story is fabrication, it has a lot of basis in fact. Maximus is a composite of several figures, one of which did kill Commodus, though not under the same circumstances. And Commodus WAS known to fight in the arena. Crazy. Look, it's Ridley, you're always in good hands.
L7: Pretend We’re Dead makes me wish I'd gotten more into L7 back in the early 90s when they were a thing, but honestly, I only just remember the song that gave the music documentary its title, and it's a lot poppier than their harsher, more metal, more political output. I might blame it on their band name (sounds like a boy or K-pop band), but I think it goes beyond that. The sound is a little harder than I liked at the time. Their blue lyrics meant they didn't get radio play. And their music label didn't really know what to do with them. But it's evident they were a big deal in certain areas and for certain listeners, and had a big impact on female rockers especially. The documentary avoids talking heads and has the band members talk over archive material instead - and there's a lot of it thanks to their own camcorder efforts. Whether the music speaks to you personally is secondary because this works as a documentary on all those mid-level bands that you THINK were successful, but in reality, barely got by. It's obvious the business model is built so record companies can exploit musicians, and L7 certainly fell prey to that. Some good tunes, some fun anecdotes, and a full tracking of this rags to riches to rags story.
I had no real knowledge of Nick Cave nor his music before watching 20,000 Days on Earth. I knew the name and that he was a thing in the music underground of a certain period - the angel in Wim Wenders' The Wings of Desire goes to one of his shows - but that was it. This semi-written doc, predicated on Cave discussing his artistic process with old collaborators in his car (Kylie?!) or with his psychiatrist(!), shows him working on his 2013 album as counterpoint to all the talking... and it does its job. Would I seek out some Nick Cave music now? Yes, I believe I would. How "Push the Sky Away" compares to earlier musical eras, I don't know yet, but I'm willing to do a bit of exploration. That's a promotional win for the film. AS a film, it's very slick and I liked what Cave had to say (some fun anecdotes as well as the talk about art). I'm not really able to judge how much of his story is fictionalized (is it just the contrivance of seeing all these people on this day, or are there full-blown myths made real here?), but it fits his art, which he describes as a solidification of memory.
Initially, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes is a retro-look German film that looks and feels like one of those 60s-70s art house vampire films, with a Gothic castle, arch dialogues, and underlying metaphors for relationships and sexuality. Then bam, we're outside the film, looking at the people who made the aforementioned, but that doesn't mean the story has untraveled. The question of who the film makers are remains - perhaps even more confused by having the ACTUAL film makers feature in bit parts on set (and looking like their charismatic actorly counterparts) - and the question of the ending (of the film within the film) is addressed several times, and... And I'm not entirely sure. This is evidently about the anxiety of completing something and having to let it go into the world (or not). Did we make the correct choices? And if we didn't, is it the end of the world? And does perfectionism (or collaborative stalemate, in this case, perhaps, since we have duelling authors) prevent us from making anything of value despite the contradiction in terms? Are we too close to our work to even know what we're doing anymore? These questions come up, but obliquely. Otherwise, this is an art house ghost story that's got a lot in common with Aronofsky's mother! (non-derogatory).
There are some opaque flourishes in Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear - like the appearance of the bear itself - that I have yet to decode, but I'm really here for Aubrey Plaza who may be playing her two essential castings - the deadpan comedienne who takes nothing seriously and the total mess - but she plays them to their fullest in what is possibly a career best. We're given two realities. One in which is she is a former actress, now screenwriter, witnessing a couple's fighting where she is lodging. The other in which she acts in drama that seems to be inspired by said couple. We're dealing with how an inciting event is transformed by art, and in the cast of film, also transformed in performances and a production's circumstances. It's all quite intriguing and Levine's playfulness (with the casting, for example) adds to the mystery, and even by the end, interpretations may vary.
I love meta stuff, and I love Zeo Kazan, so the fact that she wrote and starred in Ruby Sparks is a confluence of Things Meant for Me(TM). Indeed, I like this whole cast. Paul Dano is a novelist with writer's block suddenly inspired to write what can only be described as a manic pixie dream girl, falling in love with what's on the page, and bam, manifesting her into reality. Of course, she's so real, she starts making choices for herself, and the writer discovers that he can manipulate her back into the fold, but at the cost of her believablility/humanity. The characters that write themselves are the most engaging, and we all know when it looks "forced". Layered on top of that is just the simple idea of a man trying to control ("write") his relationship and robbing a woman of the agency that made him fall in love with her in the first place. Layered UNDER it is the concept of authorial narcissism and the writer's relationship to his own work, which of course, came out of himself. An unusual romance story with plenty of funny moments, and some subtle ones too - I like how Ruby is a lot like the writer's mother, which he resents, but those ideas had to come from somewhere, right? Clever and charming.
Based on true events, Memories of Murder can be a hard watch, and also a frustrating one as we watched country cops bungle an investigation into a series of terrible rape and murder cases, even with the help of better-trained detective from Seoul who, inch by inch, starts to crack under the pressure. As with the director's other films, it's excessively well-made, but yes, frustrating. I reconciled myself to the fact that this was ABOUT frustration, the frustration of the "unsolved case", the frustration of seeing the police go after the wrong people with the wrong means, the frustration of coming up empty or else seeing evidence evaporate before our eyes because of accidental circumstance. And that makes sense - it's a story crime thrillers rarely delve into - but for an audience, it hurts out brains and our souls. But that's really the point, and Bong Joon-ho's tonal inspiration - Alan Moore's From Hell - definitely exists in that same sphere.
When I discovered they made a TV show out of Charles Yu's postmodern novel Interior Chinatown, I thought, no, not doable. But as it's Yu himself with comedy genius Taika Waititi... okay, yeah, maybe it is. As it happens, this 10-episode limited(?) series is pretty great, though I think if you want to know what it's really saying about the Asian-American experience, you need to read the book. The novel uses a television script conceit to track its lead, Willis Wu's (Jimmy Yang) journey from background extra to "kung fu guy" (which itself proves limiting), but here, we're already in television land. So Yu and Waititi lean into that and make it a cop show, going through various eras (80s, CSI, up to today's big conspiracy arcs) to explore how television itself has changed of the years, especially in connection to showing more diversity on screen. To make it work as a television series, ancillary characters get much more to do, including Chloe Bennet as Willis' cop partner, Diana Lin as the mom, and the Daily Show's Ronny Chieng as the comic relief best friend. The absurd metatextual premise is amusing, but Chieng brings more straightforward comedy to the proceedings. So wow, guys, they did it. And the result is different enough from the book that both can still be enjoyed without spoiling one another.
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Movie comment on Cike Nie Yin Niang
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I can't pretend to understand the politics or historical context of 2015's The Assassin, and that's an important impediment to understanding its plot. There are others. It's also got a very minimal soundtrack, only in the rarest occasions letting a bit of score seep in and even then, it might be diegetic. It's often like we're in another room, looking in, and therefore only overhearing scenes. And to say it's slow-flowing is an understatement, with many very still shots making you check if your player somehow froze the image. If it's anti-filmic in those ways, others might consider it to be PURE film and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It's largely down to cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous - everything I've seen from Hou Hsiao-hsien was basically painted with light - but that's just not enough for me here. I wish it were, because the concept of a reluctant assassin with a connection to her target is a strong one. But her interior life gets lost in opaque historical drama and direction that is obstinate in its contention that the audience should decode images without any help.Movie comment on L'été dernier
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Cathernie Breillat's L'été dernier (Last Summer) concerns a taboo relationship between a woman (a fearless Léa Drucker) and her rebellious teenage stepson. From her side, it's not entirely predatory - the 17-year-old is definitely the aggressor - but given what she's ready to do to cover herself in the back half of the film, you may well question whether this was a calculated - if irresponsible, and of course, criminal - seduction. Drucker is absolutely amazing in her ambiguity, by turns ruthless and powerless, and informed in no small measure by her job as a lawyer specializing in family law, child protection and sexual assault. She knows all the tricks, but also all the pitfalls, so why does she do it? So many lines with double meanings here, and I absolutely love the one-pixel finish (you'll see what I mean) before the credits roll. Excellent soundtrack choices too.Movie comment on Desperate Living
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While I'm a fan of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (especially), the third film in John Waters' "Trash Trilogy", Desperate Living... Not so much. Literally sitting between Female Trouble and Polyester - it even feels like a blend of the two - does it no favors, but you can see how pushing the bad taste to its limit blew the concept's load (so to speak), pushing Waters to do other things in the 1980s. As with Polyester, suburbia is cranked up to 11 at the beginning of the movie (to me, the best part, but then I'm a fan of both Polyester and Serial Mom), with Mink Stole and Jean Hill proving to be forces of nature who kill the former's husband and run to "Mortville", a fascistic shanty town that's about to undergo a revolution. And while Desperate Living is more colorful than Waters' previous films, and it certainly MOVES like a freight train, it's just too LOUD for me. Constant violence and nudity, characters screaming their heads off, and one shock piece after another just wore me down until it was just a big smear. A smear I could respect, both for its quest to find "the line" that shouldn't be crossed, and for its overt LGBTQ+ content, respect, but not love.Movie comment on Polyester
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Divine is saddled with the absolute worst family and that's enough to drive even the saintliest woman to drink in Polyester, John Waters' parody of family melodramas. Yes, it's the one "shot" in Odorama, and I do wish I had the scratch and sniff card, but also, I'm sure there would be instant regret by Smell #2. It's an amusing gimmick, but it's more than that. This is a world that "stinks", and certainly, Divine's life does. She's gifted with a powerful sense of smell that presages the flashing numbers on the screen, almost like she can sniff out evil. And while some of the broad acting (by the kids, mostly) can be hard to take, and the joke starts to wear thin in the final act, this still has to be one of Waters' downright funniest movies. There's all the stuff taken to extremes, of course, but I find a lot of the small details (the Pepsi bottle at the breakfast table, for example) extremely amusing. Waters has always been a good satirist, but Divine is a sympathetic figure that allows us to tap in when things get TOO satirical. And what a role for Edith Massey - her acting is worse than her dental work, but I love her for it.Movie comment on Mermaids
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I'm sure Mermaids means more to people of a certain generation (coming of age through the 60s), but it still works as a story about the loss of innocence. The mother lost it long ago, her eldest daughter both fears losing it and desires to, and the youngest daughter is a total innocent. Modern America is also about to suffer its first trauma and lose a kind of innocence there. All this is wrapped in the portrait of a single-parent family, where the mom (the always powerful Cher) acts like a teenager and is contentiously parented by her daughter (Winona Ryder) and vice-versa, with Bob Hoskins quite charming as the man who would like to make the family "whole". Ryder's sister is Christina Ricci, which makes me think it's too bad Jenna Ortega wasn't even a baby in 1990 so she could be in this family. Quite obviously adapted from a novel, the narration is good, but I'm not in love with Ryder AS a narrator, which kept the film at a distance from me at first. But it did eventually charm me.Movie comment on Speedy
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Silent comedies often string disparate set pieces together to make their feature length, whether they have much to do with the story or not. Harold Lloyd's Speedy is in that category, though even the long Coney Island sequence still pushes the characters in a certain direction (and scores them a useful dog), so as usual, Lloyd's film are better at story-telling than, say, Buster Keaton's. He plays the eponymous Speedy here, so named because he thinks quickly on his feet, never stays in one job for long, and drives like a maniac. Nominally, the plot concerns his having to save an old man's horse-car business before the railways take him over (truly, a 1920s problem) before Pop's granddaughter will agree to marry him. And as with Lloyd's other feature films, it's a lot of fun and he stands out as the underrated member of the great silent comedy trifecta. Speedy's unhealthy obsession with baseball is a fun bit, though it's almost just an excuse to get Babe Ruth into the film, except that the sport shows up thematically as a motif throughout, which I like, The third act is all kinds of great - chases, fights, suspense, comedy, romance community coming together to preserve tradition, a cute dog, it's got it all.Movie comment on The One Armed Executioner
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Bobby Suarez's Filipino exploitation flick, The One-Armed Executioner, is late to the game in terms of the one-armed martial arts subgenre (One-Armed Swordsman came in '67), but is kind of on the cusp of the heroic bloodshed genre with its inclusion of some gun fu elements in the lead character's re-training. It's perhaps closer to the western than anything John Woo would make, but either way, it makes for an entertaining revenge picture. Franco Guerrero is an engaging action star despite not always hiding his left arm in his shirt very well (a common problem, everybody's got an odd torso), and the script has fun with its ancillary characters. And then there's the location. You're well used to seeing this kind of movie coming out of Hong Kong or Japan, but not so much the Philippines. The third act in the jungle makes great use of muddy marshlands and involves multiple opponents, weapons, and vehicles. I'm not convinced with the big bad's death though... were they sequel-baiting?Movie comment on How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
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Controversial? Boris Karloff's best movie is How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He's got such a great voice, it'd be a shame to put Frankenstein in this slot. Or maybe I just relate too well to the Grinch. I, too, hate all the noise and garishness of Christmas, but my heart swells up to three sizes pretty easily too. Whatever the case may be, it's actually fascinating to watch this golden oldie which is recognizably Dr. Seuss' drawings come to life, BUT JUST AS RECOGNIZABLY Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes work. The Grinch-Max relationship is like one of those great, slapstick-happy, cartoon pairings. It's all in the expressions and the MOTION' which is of course what Dr. Seuss couldn't entirely put in the book. Let's end on a question to ponder this Holiday Season: What kind of meat is "roast beast"? Sounds like beef, outwardly looks like turkey, slices like ham... all Who!???? I mean, what do you think Who Hash is made out of?Movie comment on Delirium
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I was warned that reading anything about Delirium (AKA Psycho Puppet) before watching would spoil my enjoyment. That made it sound like it was all a dream, or some Tyler Durden situation. It's not. The twists are about "what's really happening" in the plot and I agree it's better to go in cold. Letterboxd's synopsis is finel IMDB's is NOT. So what can *I* say? It's fine to say that this is a cheap cop movie starring people who have few or no other credits, with detectives on the trail of a delirious (see title) serial killer leaving the corpses of some rather imprudent young women in his wake. From there, you're on your own. The twists make the movie. What DOESN'T make the movie is the stilted dialog, sometimes by way of the acting, too often because the editing leaves too much air between lines. The murders are savage (and exploitatively nude, half the time), and the victim's friend who starts playing Nancy Drew (Debi Chaney) is reasonably effective. The flick also has something to say about an issue of the day that I won't mention here - nothing deep, but it motivates the action. They were trying hard and I respect that.Movie comment on Shurayukihime: Urami koiuta
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The John Wick movies found a way to continue the revenge of its first film, but Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (a lot of Blood, but no Snow), while it starts with a good hook - Yuki is on the run from the authorities for her revenge murders - just doesn't and turns her into an all-purpose revenger. She might as well be Zatoichi. She's soon press-ganged into a spy mission in the home of a sympathetic anarchist, and uses her revenging skills in his cause. I don't dislike the story (the villains use unusual means), but it's a contrived extension of a story that was already finished. Toshiya Fujita is still the director, so Snowblood 2 at least looks LIKE the original. It's gorgeous. Beautiful shots. Saturatec colors and deep pools of black. Unusual framings. Violent action sequences (though far fewer than we need). It's a clunky addition, but the cinematography makes it watchable.Movie comment on Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken
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They evidently meant for Sonny Chiba to be Japan's answer to Bruce Lee - in The Street Fighter, he has similar moves, similar styling, and similar (if more exaggerated) expressions - but this is a more sombre and sadistic film than any Bruce had made. It seems like Chiba is fighting everyone in this flick, whatever side of the law they are, and ripping their eyes out - or their balls off! - in the process of protecting an heiress (for perhaps not the right reasons). I don't mind the hyperviolence - it's a feature, not a bug - but Japanese exploitation in the 70s usually meant sexual violence as well, and it's entirely unnecessary. The fights are still good. They're cheaply filmed, but dynamic. But if you're a Hong Kong action aficionado, you won't find them that special. Chiba snarls his way through the movie, or else tries to out-grimace Bruce Lee, so he's not half as charismatic as I was led to believe he'd be. If ultimately I pan The Street Fighter, it's really because of Chiba's pathetic sidekick Ratnose, an absolutely horrendous comedy character whose loyalty to the hero is as unjustified as it is irritating. (Watched with English dub, which I expect is the worst possible format, especially in terms of Ratnose's whining.)Movie comment on Gladiator II
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I would have been fine with Gladiator II being just another gladiator story, unconnected to the events of the original, but Ridley Scott's new sword & sandals spectacular is actually set 16 years later, and involves a couple of surviving characters from 2000's Gladiator. That does sort of deflate whatever victory is eked out of the first story, or pushes it back to the end of this one. But without Russell Crowe (Paul Mescal isn't quite on the same level) and Joaquin Phoenix (the decadent twin emperors are rather thinly developed), the film doesn't quite achieve the same heights. What it is, however, is a rousing action picture, with lots of cool fights and Ridley's usual attention to detail. What's changed, mostly, is that now Ridley can use CG animals as part of the action and there are lots. I think the first shot is actually a brilliant adaptation of some of the iconic moments of the first film, and Denzel Washington, in the Oliver Reed role, as it were, is a brilliant villain. I wanted to shout "Are you not entertained?!" at patrons leaving the theater to go to the bathroom, because I was. That's all that was really required here.Movie comment on Chambre 999
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40 years after Room 666, French director Lubna Playoust makes Room 999, asking the same alarmist question about the impending death of cinema. This time, the barbarians at the gates are the internet and streaming rather than television and video, but shouldn't the actual answer be the same? Many directors prophesied doom and gloom 40 years ago, and cinema is still here. There are still some doomsayers in this new lot, but the tone is generally more positive. It may have to do with there being more young directors and directors from countries where film is still thriving and/or developing - they haven't done everything they set out to do yet and can't admit their art form might die before they can - but even an older guy like Cronenberg, whose whole thing is exploring how technology changes humanity, sees only evolution where others see erosion. I agree with him. Film is not a rock, it's alive, and it's an exercise in self-pitying nostalgia to predict its death. It's only the death of the art form as one knows it - prose didn't die when the epistolary novel went out of fashion! Notably, only one person mentions A.I. (and obliquely at that). Make the film just one year later and that's all they'd be talking about. There are some great points made in Room 999, but there's a lot of chaff too. It's too long (twice the length of the original), and it starts to get repetitive after a while. There's also a certain irony in the fact that one of the signs cinema is "dying" is that we keep making sequels, reboots and revivals of old IP, and this is actually that, isn't it?Movie comment on Chambre 666
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I love Wim Wenders' work, but I reject the question he asks in Room 666. The year in 1982. The place is a hotel room in Cannes. A bunch of attending directors walk into the room and respond to some bullshit doom and gloom, alarmist questions about whether TV and video herald the end of film as an art. 40+ years later, there's just as much crap as there was in the early 80s, but beautiful and innovating work too, and the cinema snobs have the exact same complaints about streaming, digital, amusement park rides, etc. Nominally, this is about what people thought the future of cinema might be, but it's framed as a negative from the onset (or is Wenders trying to provoke an contrarian response?). The film starts to shift when Werner Herzog, my hero, enters the arena. I won't tell you what he does except reject the premise, but in the context of all this, it's a hero moment. He's one of few optimists in the group, along with Spielberg (who people ridicule because he talks about budgets - what exactly did you expect from this quintessential spectacle director? - but he hits on the real threat to art, which is business) and Antonioni, the real prophet of the lot, wisely kept for the end. Now here's a director who knows that there is no end to film, only "film as you curmudgeons have been doing it" (my words, not his) and that one must evolve with the audience and the technology. While he can't imagine the actual advances, he actually does predict the future, and he doesn't see it as bad.Movie comment on Piranha
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Given the task of crafting a Jaws rip-off, Joe Dante delivers something a lot more interesting and idiosyncratic: Piranha. There's no doubt this was made by the director of Gremlins when you early on catch sight of stop-motion "little guys" who are about as gratuitous as the movie's flashes of nudity. The Jaws stuff is still there - Dick Miller visually READS as a the Amity Island mayor - but it's everything else that feels amusing and memorable. The worst camp counselor in America. The plumbing-related escape from jail. The comic book-reading little girl who won't go in the water and might just be the hero the movie needs. The crazy finale. The genetically-engineered piranha in the movie sometimes nibble at your bum, sometimes skeletonize you in seconds, and sometimes are smart enough to disassemble your raft with their teeth - whatever the script needs at that point - but that's part of the fun. Piranha doesn't take itself very seriously, and Dante shows early that he can put little kids in danger and not have the audience get angry at him.Movie comment on Demonoid
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A Mexican B-movie (though perhaps not in Mexico itself) with some American actors and A-level effects, Demonoid moves at a very quick clip so you never get bored. In terms of the disembodied hand sub-sub-subgenre, it's got amazing creeping hand effects, but the "Devil's Hand" also has a Satanic possession power and it's that hybridization certainly enhances the picture. As does the stuntwork, the big sets, etc. Which is why I doubt Mexico itself would have considered this a B-effort. Samantha Eggar (The Brood, or if you'd rather, recognizable for dozens of guest appearances on 70s and 80s television) is pretty unflappable as the woman who wants to rid her husband of the cursed hand and becomes its next intended victim. Demonoid (surely, that can't have been the original title) takes its horror seriously - its tongue isn't in its cheek whatsoever - and goes for jugular. No one is safe, and the gore is savage. It doesn't reinvent cinema (in fact, it looks like a television production but for its adult content), but you could do a lot worse if looking for a horror quickie.Movie comment on The Relic
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It's probably not a good idea to watch The Relic on a streaming service because the creature feature tries for dark, moody cinematography - which I certainly appreciate - but goes too far and I'm sure goes to total black at the usual bit rates (or however these things are defined). But when even a fancy museum gala is by candlelight, crawling through basements and sewers in search of a South American chimera is probably not going to be lit very well. At least Peter Hyams tried - he's a jobber, but I'm usually entertained - and possibly, this was to show the creature as little as possible, even if he had Stan Winston on creature effects (the gory bodies are still well lit most of the time). The creature is sometimes 90s CGI, but in the darkness, it's not so bad, so there you go. Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore are good enough leads, and despite all the tropes (he's a a superstitious cop, she's the logical scientist!), they don't initiate a romance between them. That's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pretty standard monster flick.Movie comment on Gladiator
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Ridley Scott's Spartacus 2000 - I mean, Gladiator - seemed overrated at the time. Russell Crowe's Oscar-baiting snot, Young Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielson giving off what we'd today call Lanister vibes, CG coliseums, and a ludicrous action story... Am I not entertained? Yes, I am, but it didn't - nor does it now - feel like a serious film like some of some of Ridley's other historical epics (The Duellists, Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down...). Revisiting it absent the contemporary hype, it IS a lot of fun, but it's also incredibly emotional. Maximus' tragedy, the constant rejection suffered by Commodus (whose shenanigans today remind us of other unstable world leaders) and Juba (Djimon Hounsou) as the soul of the film (or at least the soul Maximus believes he has lost) create an impactful, operatic emotionalism that supports the action beats and grandiose spectacle quite well. I looked a few things up and was very intrigued to discover that, while the story is fabrication, it has a lot of basis in fact. Maximus is a composite of several figures, one of which did kill Commodus, though not under the same circumstances. And Commodus WAS known to fight in the arena. Crazy. Look, it's Ridley, you're always in good hands.Movie comment on L7: Pretend We're Dead
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L7: Pretend We’re Dead makes me wish I'd gotten more into L7 back in the early 90s when they were a thing, but honestly, I only just remember the song that gave the music documentary its title, and it's a lot poppier than their harsher, more metal, more political output. I might blame it on their band name (sounds like a boy or K-pop band), but I think it goes beyond that. The sound is a little harder than I liked at the time. Their blue lyrics meant they didn't get radio play. And their music label didn't really know what to do with them. But it's evident they were a big deal in certain areas and for certain listeners, and had a big impact on female rockers especially. The documentary avoids talking heads and has the band members talk over archive material instead - and there's a lot of it thanks to their own camcorder efforts. Whether the music speaks to you personally is secondary because this works as a documentary on all those mid-level bands that you THINK were successful, but in reality, barely got by. It's obvious the business model is built so record companies can exploit musicians, and L7 certainly fell prey to that. Some good tunes, some fun anecdotes, and a full tracking of this rags to riches to rags story.Movie comment on 20,000 Days on Earth
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I had no real knowledge of Nick Cave nor his music before watching 20,000 Days on Earth. I knew the name and that he was a thing in the music underground of a certain period - the angel in Wim Wenders' The Wings of Desire goes to one of his shows - but that was it. This semi-written doc, predicated on Cave discussing his artistic process with old collaborators in his car (Kylie?!) or with his psychiatrist(!), shows him working on his 2013 album as counterpoint to all the talking... and it does its job. Would I seek out some Nick Cave music now? Yes, I believe I would. How "Push the Sky Away" compares to earlier musical eras, I don't know yet, but I'm willing to do a bit of exploration. That's a promotional win for the film. AS a film, it's very slick and I liked what Cave had to say (some fun anecdotes as well as the talk about art). I'm not really able to judge how much of his story is fictionalized (is it just the contrivance of seeing all these people on this day, or are there full-blown myths made real here?), but it fits his art, which he describes as a solidification of memory.Movie comment on Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes
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Initially, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes is a retro-look German film that looks and feels like one of those 60s-70s art house vampire films, with a Gothic castle, arch dialogues, and underlying metaphors for relationships and sexuality. Then bam, we're outside the film, looking at the people who made the aforementioned, but that doesn't mean the story has untraveled. The question of who the film makers are remains - perhaps even more confused by having the ACTUAL film makers feature in bit parts on set (and looking like their charismatic actorly counterparts) - and the question of the ending (of the film within the film) is addressed several times, and... And I'm not entirely sure. This is evidently about the anxiety of completing something and having to let it go into the world (or not). Did we make the correct choices? And if we didn't, is it the end of the world? And does perfectionism (or collaborative stalemate, in this case, perhaps, since we have duelling authors) prevent us from making anything of value despite the contradiction in terms? Are we too close to our work to even know what we're doing anymore? These questions come up, but obliquely. Otherwise, this is an art house ghost story that's got a lot in common with Aronofsky's mother! (non-derogatory).Movie comment on Black Bear
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There are some opaque flourishes in Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear - like the appearance of the bear itself - that I have yet to decode, but I'm really here for Aubrey Plaza who may be playing her two essential castings - the deadpan comedienne who takes nothing seriously and the total mess - but she plays them to their fullest in what is possibly a career best. We're given two realities. One in which is she is a former actress, now screenwriter, witnessing a couple's fighting where she is lodging. The other in which she acts in drama that seems to be inspired by said couple. We're dealing with how an inciting event is transformed by art, and in the cast of film, also transformed in performances and a production's circumstances. It's all quite intriguing and Levine's playfulness (with the casting, for example) adds to the mystery, and even by the end, interpretations may vary.Movie comment on Ruby Sparks
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I love meta stuff, and I love Zeo Kazan, so the fact that she wrote and starred in Ruby Sparks is a confluence of Things Meant for Me(TM). Indeed, I like this whole cast. Paul Dano is a novelist with writer's block suddenly inspired to write what can only be described as a manic pixie dream girl, falling in love with what's on the page, and bam, manifesting her into reality. Of course, she's so real, she starts making choices for herself, and the writer discovers that he can manipulate her back into the fold, but at the cost of her believablility/humanity. The characters that write themselves are the most engaging, and we all know when it looks "forced". Layered on top of that is just the simple idea of a man trying to control ("write") his relationship and robbing a woman of the agency that made him fall in love with her in the first place. Layered UNDER it is the concept of authorial narcissism and the writer's relationship to his own work, which of course, came out of himself. An unusual romance story with plenty of funny moments, and some subtle ones too - I like how Ruby is a lot like the writer's mother, which he resents, but those ideas had to come from somewhere, right? Clever and charming.Movie comment on Salinui chueok
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Based on true events, Memories of Murder can be a hard watch, and also a frustrating one as we watched country cops bungle an investigation into a series of terrible rape and murder cases, even with the help of better-trained detective from Seoul who, inch by inch, starts to crack under the pressure. As with the director's other films, it's excessively well-made, but yes, frustrating. I reconciled myself to the fact that this was ABOUT frustration, the frustration of the "unsolved case", the frustration of seeing the police go after the wrong people with the wrong means, the frustration of coming up empty or else seeing evidence evaporate before our eyes because of accidental circumstance. And that makes sense - it's a story crime thrillers rarely delve into - but for an audience, it hurts out brains and our souls. But that's really the point, and Bong Joon-ho's tonal inspiration - Alan Moore's From Hell - definitely exists in that same sphere.Movie comment on Interior Chinatown
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When I discovered they made a TV show out of Charles Yu's postmodern novel Interior Chinatown, I thought, no, not doable. But as it's Yu himself with comedy genius Taika Waititi... okay, yeah, maybe it is. As it happens, this 10-episode limited(?) series is pretty great, though I think if you want to know what it's really saying about the Asian-American experience, you need to read the book. The novel uses a television script conceit to track its lead, Willis Wu's (Jimmy Yang) journey from background extra to "kung fu guy" (which itself proves limiting), but here, we're already in television land. So Yu and Waititi lean into that and make it a cop show, going through various eras (80s, CSI, up to today's big conspiracy arcs) to explore how television itself has changed of the years, especially in connection to showing more diversity on screen. To make it work as a television series, ancillary characters get much more to do, including Chloe Bennet as Willis' cop partner, Diana Lin as the mom, and the Daily Show's Ronny Chieng as the comic relief best friend. The absurd metatextual premise is amusing, but Chieng brings more straightforward comedy to the proceedings. So wow, guys, they did it. And the result is different enough from the book that both can still be enjoyed without spoiling one another.Showing items 1 – 25 of 5928