The French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant is the kind of inscrutable loner you don’t understand but don’t mind in this Giallo-esque take on the swinging-60s romp. In Godard’s hands he may have been verbose and rather annoying, whereas here, despite not having much of a motivation beyond getting under the doll-faced Ewa Aulin’s vinyl coat, he’s neither pretentious nor boring. That’s because the Italian erotic auteur Tinto Brass’s roving camera eye and rhythmic sense of editing makes jazz of this low-stakes woman-on-the-run story. You could put this on in the background of a party and people might think you specially curated it.
Despite compelling performances from its leads (I wanted more of both Kai Lennox and supermodel Ashley Smith), this suffers from a problem I’ve talked about before, that problem being trying to look cool. Call me a classicist, but I think filmmakers should be a lot less concerned about style, especially when it comes to feature debuts.
Kind of a bullshit title if you ask me; I wanted to see them painting, whereas this is painters talking about art. Virtually no painting is featured. Nonetheless, it is good for your brain, especially as an artist (but not exclusively), to listen to artists talk about art, theirs, their colleagues’, and their forebears’. Even, or especially if you disagree with them, the artists in a film like this force you to come to your own conclusions. This time around, I concluded that guys like Robert Rauschenberg oversold the illusion of artistic genius in a way that presaged the performative detachment of the tech scions, while the painfully dry proceduralists like Jasper Johns did the important work of talking too much and for too long about details, which I believe is one of the jobs of the artist.
It’s hard to believe I watched this a month before the scandalizing JP Morgan lawsuit which bears the same conceit—a female executive alleged to have used her position to sexually manipulate a male underling—but as the real-world case appears to show, it’s a wildly unrealistic gooner fantasy that nevertheless provides some lurid water cooler convo. Come for Michael Douglas getting forced to receive a blowjob (“No! Don’t suck my dick!” like a Cumtown bit), stay for the Demi Moore virtual reality avatar jump-scare. I’m gonna look like such a dick when it turns out Chirayu Rana is telling the truth.
The only other film I hadn’t seen in Criterion’s Corporate Thrillers collection, The Deal stars Christian Slater as a slick finance guy (who is actually cool and the good guy) against Robert Loggia’s evil investor guy (duh) but is actually about Slater very gently falling in love with Selma Blair, who does kickboxing, so of course the movie turns into a kick-fest by the end. There’s like three movies in here and none of them very good. Which is cool tbh.
Legitimately so boring in the worst way, and not even just because it’s orientalist and jingoistic. Sappy, patronizing, all of Greene’s anticolonial tooth removed. The only cool thing is Audie Murphy, the American soldier who killed the most guys ever and then became an actor. Huh. Now that I’ve seen both versions of this Graham Greene adaptation, I just don’t know if it’s fit for screen—at least not from an industry that can’t reckon with the fact that we’re frequently the bad guys.
Back-to-back bad reviews bum me out, so thankfully here’s a Clint Eastwood heater that is tough as nails in both form and content. Dudes died making this mountain-climbing hitman movie and it’s easy to see why: they filmed an entire action movie while climbing a fucking mountain! Glorious wilderness cinematography and grizzled character actors abound. Clint Eastwood totally rules for this, the Wikipedia page is an adventure of its own, and you should watch it on as big a screen as possible.
Great premise, great execution, great performance from Riz Ahmed—ending sucks! Goes for a big twist that kept me engaged until I recognized what its ramifications were at the script level. Sometimes, like chess, one seemingly smart move locks you into a set of choices that undercut your whole plan. In these moments, it’s important that you go rogue, say fuck the audience, and do something really crazy like kill your main character a la To Live and Die in LA. Alas, this goes the way it has to—not the ideal outcome.
As long as it’s Silent Hill, I’ll watch it. The apocalyptically molested aesthetic remains cool and scary to me. But as with Silent Hill: Revelation, the story clashes with the vibes. I’d watch a movie that was basically just cutscenes, which is almost this, but its compulsive need to explain every motivation kills the core of what works about Silent Hill, namely, not knowing what the fuck is going on while the horrors mount, and t̵̟̼̟̝͕̤̂͌̓͊h̷̡͎̼͖̯̬͎̜̳̐̄͒̚ę̸͉̱͎̤̠̙̖̮̓̂̌͆̋́̀͜ ̶̨̩̳̠̟̌̉̐͗r̷̨͕̘̙̔̓̑̉̀͝ẻ̷̙̖͓͑̔̊̕͘̚͠ṽ̸͎̙̹͙̩ṵ̸̲̞̙̾͌l̷̰͚͕͍̖̘̒̄̆s̷̝̙̑̃̑͌̀̂̑͘̚i̷̧͍̿̈́̌̓̅͒̉o̸̥̤̭̫̖̲̥̖̎͜n̷̫̖̤̼͖̯̱̤͛̈́͐̅.
Two things: the skill with which Jacques Tourneur elevates the noir is exceeded only in Out of the Past, his film with Robert Mitchum; and Aldo Ray, if you’ve never seen him before, is nothing short of revelatory. You won’t even be able to see Twin Peaks’s Leo Johnson (his son Eric Da Re) the same.
Since Pete Campbell became my sleeper-favorite character in Mad Men, I decided to check out Vincent Kartheiser’s film work. I maybe could have been more selective than this low-budget tale of revenge against pedophile priests, which everyone is good in and clearly worked hard to make, but is severely lacking in atmosphere. It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing that fails here, but maybe that’s the problem: there isn’t any one thing that succeeds either.
I wrote all about this one for Screen Slate; suffice it to say there’s never been anyone better at pairing politics and popcorn entertainment than Wertmüller.
My third and final watch in Criterion’s Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur collection (I had seen Out of the Past in 2021) was perhaps the most interesting for its myriad eccentricities and shortcomings. It’s a huge story delivered on what appears to be a shoestring budget that nevertheless features moments shot on-location in an immediately post-war Berlin. An assassination attempt on a freedom fighter forges a tenuous alliance between American, Russian, British, French, and German dudes-who-rock, resulting in a story of what we’re capable of when we look past loser shit like nationalism. Call me corny but I think it would make for a powerful remake!
There’s nothing I’ll remember more about this seeing it at 9AM—which is apparently something you can do!—for better and worse. For a movie about the relationship between youth and mediated violence, it expands the fictive Faces of Death universe without adding complexity to the conversation. Other than the meta layer from which it draws its name, this is standard killer-horror fare: getting in over your head, yelling, and logistical improbabilities abound. I liked Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery as the leads, but on the whole, this could have been much weirder. Neither extreme enough for the oldheads nor nihilistic enough for a nascent Zoomer gore audience.
Those phantoms! Aren’t they devilish! And other dated British-isms run wild in this adaptation of Noël Coward’s 1941 play about a writer who hires a medium to do a séance… for research. Said medium opens the door to the spirit world, enter the writer’s dead first wife. It’s pleasant enough, although the glorious Technicolor feels underutilized, while the banter is staid but the outcomes surprising. If you’re reading this, I watched because I have been immersing myself in the possibility of writing a haunted love-story. You’re welcome to ask me about it! I’d love to discuss.
Didn’t finish. I want Benson & Moorhead films to work for me, but so far they’ve been duds. It’s enough that they get movies made, I’m fond of them for that. But they always seem to concern angry young men with forced problems who are simultaneously too misunderstood and too verbose. This one meets a succubus in Italy, I think, but I didn’t get far enough to know for sure if she’s a forest spirit or some other sylph. Been a fan of Lou Taylor Pucci since The Chumbscrubber, though, and I’m always happy when he gets work.
Joseph W. Sarno is a guy I’m just learning about, but apparently he was a proto-exploitation guy, a porn pioneer in the days where making out was considered pornographic. As such, this film is filled with things that aren’t quite edgy by modern standards, but it’s important to remember that once upon a time, this was some scandalous and scandalizing shit.
I remembered watching bits of this movie on a flight when I was a kid, and I remembered the plot being interesting—a guy who reconnects with his dead dad through a magical Ham radio. This movie looks crisp in a way that feels like an inflection point between movies that looked like the 20th and 21st centuries. Grand moments of Spielbergian movie magic meet hi-fi cinematography that are shot on film but no longer have to be. And in service of what? There’s a massive concept here that necessitates multiple timelines, but there’s almost too much that has to happen for it to come to a satisfying conclusion. Time travel? Serial killers? Jim Caveziel? It’s all kind of much? But I appreciate the ambition.
You’re not gonna convince me that there are any movies cooler or better than SOV (aka Shot On Video) films. The DIY energy and creativity on display is by default more exciting than anything you’ll find at the box office. That’s even true here, in this deeply mean-spirited film about a hitman (I think?) and a pimp (I think??) who hate the women who left them—even if they themselves were responsible—and go on a road trip (I think???) to kill some other dudes who may or may not be responsible. It sucks and it’s awesome.
There’s nothing to like about this movie which is exactly what I love about it: nihilistic, unkind, irredeemably cynical, ugly, virtually entirely comprised of conversations hashed out on Twitter, and the worst thing is that it works. Just about as nasty and spiteful a treatise as has ever been published about the United States of America, and equally as accurate and true.
A Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy where—get this—she’s dead! Which would have been cool if she was actually dead. Instead, for some reason that isn’t even studio interference—it’s in the book!—they made this Sleeping Beauty in a Coma, which means that her appearance to Mark Ruffalo in his new/her old apartment is astral projection and not technically a haunting. What are the story rules for that? I don’t know, and this movie didn’t either.
On the other end of “story rules” is this horror survival actioner from the late, great Joel Schumacher. Henry Cavill and Dominic Purcell from Prisonbreak are two brothers..reunited…on a farm….with an evil Nazi vampire??? So get this, Nazi occult experiments turned Michael Fassbender into an unkillable, Resident Evil-style Supernazi, and the only thing harder than breaking into his compound? Is breaking out. I would pay lots and lots of money for a chance to sit in on these production and scripting meetings, because it takes a feat of intellectual acrobatics to take such a wild idea so seriously, while turning such serious subject matter as Nazi experimentation into redline, full-throttle pulp. There are a lot of things it could have done better, like giving higher stakes to the scenario and more depth to the minor characters, but there’s an Evil Dead vibe that feels great. 2018’s Overlord is a more satisfying version of a similar idea, but I still wish this got the sequel it sets itself up for.
As close as we’ll get to Scorsese’s MKULTRA movie, this arcs towards disclosure in an interesting way: despite a “down” ending that points to its main character’s madness, there are enough easter eggs scattered about to keep the possibility alive that it is all an elaborate brainwashing nightmare. Which, of course, the government would never do. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about how good of an actor I think DiCaprio is. We don’t hold leading men to the standard of stage or even character performers, but he can do anything, with or without a director working to his abilities. But the real reason I watched this again was because I was thinking of Silent Hill. Forget MKULTRA, this is Scorsese’s Silent Hill movie.
Big Free Movie Ideas energy with this one, the story of a punk trio who join an underground network to assassinate some guys-who-are-not George Zimmerman, Daniel Pantaleo, and Darren Wilson. I liked how inscrutable and difficult the characters were, and the unexplained forays into telepathic communication and drone surveillance. I didn’t love the affectless dialogue which felt less at home in a movie than a video artwork, nor the underdeveloped lore of the organization, which felt less tied to the realities of counterinsurgency and stuff like COINTELPRO than something that was just dreamt up. But I LOVED how shitty the band was. Very realistic.
In 1981, almost 200 police constables in Halifax went on strike. The result was a booze-filled free-for-all that lasted some 53 days. In 1983, two of the guys who would go on to create the cult series Lexx would use the rare occurrence as the basis for their action survival film about a group of killer right-wing homophobes who chase the lone survivor of a gay bar massacre to an apartment building where the existing residents mount their resistance. Despite some brilliant, MacGuyver-esque tactics throughout, there was something missing for me, characters I really cared about or atmosphere. Hard to put my finger on it because, for all intents and purposes, this is a fine film. I just wish it were better.
First time I ever turned on a random movie and realized I knew one of the stars, namely, Angela Trimbur, who here does a fine job as a woman with an awful man she needs to dump, but can’t, because he looks like Adrian Grenier. No, I think she has other reasons, but I couldn’t relate because he sucks so bad. The character, I mean, not Grenier himself, who does a decent job as a wholly unpleasant Los Angeles loser. But he’s too hot for the part; this is a guy in need of a haircut, for instance, whereas Grenier himself looks like he just got one. Anyway, they go back to his childhood home somewhere in the South, where his bitch grandma tries to kill them both, and we meet his disfigured sister who is permanently stuck in baby-mode following a devastating fire. There’s a pessimism to this that I didn’t buy, nor the Southern trappings, it all felt forced and yet generic, down to the “I hate the word moist”-ass title. The cast were innocent tho.
What’d you watch last month? What’d you love? Any recommendations from me? Drop a comment—especially if you end up watching one of these!
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