If you’ve been keeping up, you know I don’t exclusively watch great films. Not that I don’t think every movie isn’t already pretty great for existing, but I tend to learn as much from the stinkers as the Chandon, and there are a lot more stinkers to go around. So I pace myself. I watch the undisputed masterpieces when I can, or when I can’t stand not having seen them any longer. Usually I don’t even end up with a review. What is there to say about a 64-year-old bushido epic that hasn’t already been said by the actual experts? Sometimes, knowing when to stay quiet is the greatest wisdom of all. Thanks, Harakiri.
My stunning and brilliant wife was asked to moderate a Q+A for this, as the title presages, honestly micro-budget indie comedy about a total idiot who thinks the solution to his financial and creative woes lies in making a film. It was made by a group of talented and seasoned improvisers who make the most of a little money, and they are frequently surprising, disarming, and hilarious. On the way, we saw an attractive neon sign that said Two Cookies, so we went in and bought two cookies. Reader, these were two of the best cookies I’ve ever had.
Went on the watchlist strictly off the art alone (you can judge a movie by its poster), turns out the art is excellent and the story is jumbled (go figure!). Based on a ten-volume novel called Teito Monogatari, the four-episode OVA from 1991 tells the story of Yasunori Kato, an evil sorcerer who comes to Tokyo with total destruction in mind, and the generations of the Tatsumiya family who rise to stop him. Despite fairly simple animation and plotting that attempts too much while clarifying too little, I loved how the story connects major events in Japanese history, like the Great Kantō Earthquake, to an occult undercurrent. I cannot get enough of explorations into how the real world is shaped by invisible forces and ancient technologies, like grudges and geomancy, and in my subsequent research, I was tickled to find out that neither can Trump.
Scale is generally the biggest challenge for a feature debut. Either a story is too big for its verdant auteur to wrangle, or too small to keep a viewer engaged. Not so when it comes to The Hitcher and Near Dark writer Eric Red’s 1989 first outing, about two hitmen tasked with bringing a kidnapped kid to the mob. Cohen (Roy Scheider), the elder, is a suave and somber foil to Tate (Adam Baldwin), his hotheaded counterpart. What I loved is the straightforwardness: from the moment Travis (Harley Cross) is taken from his murdered parents, the film is on a crash course. It will be Cohen vs. Tate, and neither outcome looks good for Travis. What I didn’t love was Adam Baldwin’s Tate, who is totally one-dimensional.
Seeing as John Slattery plays the most likable guy on Mad Men, I decided to see if his charisma carried over to the cinema, and even to a film about one of recent history’s least likable subjects. Turns out, even as a newspaper editor supervising the journalists who broke the story of the Catholic Church’s systematic coverup of child abuse, you still want to hang out with him. Humble and frill-free, this movie is exactly the good kind of boring: deliberate, detailed, and procedural. Would watch again.
It takes a lot for me to walk out of a movie but this had it all. Total nonsense, numbingly cringe, it doesn’t get less cool than this. You’ve been warned.
Catherine Breillat’s first feature contains quite a bit of what she’d later be known for, from complicated sexual politics to explicit imagery, and it was nice to see her in the process of forging her own cinematic language. It’s lighter than her later films, and visually brighter too, but her foundational long takes and the emotional intimacy that develops within them, feels experimental here. More interesting than her desire to push the limits of content is the young Breillat’s exploration of form. Essential to the completist.
End-times Christianity had a major cinema moment at the end of the 90s, God knows why, and this is some of the lesser product. Convoluted, corny style, overwrought, and undercooked; Denzel Washington never under-commits, but not even he could save this Se7en meets X-Files whiff. You guys know that New York factoid about the congressman with the awful name, Harvey Epstein? One of the executive producers of this is Elon Dershowitz. Yeah, that Dershowitz.
For Agnès Varda’s most famous film, I get it. It’s era-defining, iconic, lovingly and technically well-crafted, and the anxiety it captures is familiar. It took a while for me to get into it, though, and even at 90 minutes, felt long, perhaps a function of the timing device used to punctuate the film. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed seeing it at Film Forum more than the film itself.
Best film I watched last month. Handsome, exciting, lurid and complex, and thrillingly under-seen—thanks Tubi. Alain Delon’s buddy comes to him in the night having murdered a criminal with a widespread blackmail operation, and after he’s knocked off, Delon becomes the man all of Paris wants to know. Cops, crime, conspiracy, Klaus Kinski…this movie has everything.
I had the great fortune to join Screenslate’s Jon Dieringer and the TrueAnon Podcast, the “ONLY Anti-Pedophile Podcast fighting the Sicko Elite,” for a talk about Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Hollywood and the movie business. What we thought would be as easy as combing the trades turned into a three-hour mega-episode that both demystifies Jeff’s other philia—cinephilia—and complicates the USA’s relationship to its (former) greatest cultural export. As part of my research, I stumbled upon this fascinating little curio about a nice Jewish schemer who stumbles his way up the American-Israeli influence ladder until he’s rubbing shoulders with the Prime Minister. It’s totally odd, not least for the star power on display (Richard Gere, Steve Buscemi, Michael Sheen, Dan Stevens, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Hank Azaria), but for the window it innocently offers into how a group like AIPAC works. Nobody’s seen or heard of it, and it’s as close as anything to a movie set in Epstein’s world this side of Eyes Wide Shut.
I followed Norman up with a sequel that features a cameo from none other than Peggy Siegal, the Hollywood PR doyenne who was brought down by her close relationship to Jeff. Other than taking place in the world of high finance, it really wasn’t Epsteinesque—nor was it particularly entertaining, despite a charming and disarming turn from Shia Laboeuf. I’ve written before about how I love the challenges that sequels present, and this was no exception: there’s a lot of story one needs to bake into a second Wall Street outing, and a lot of relevant history between 1987 and 2010. But enough history? The post-Recession unrepentance certainly presages the Occupy movement that would overtake Wall Street months after the film’s debut, but one wonders how the sequel would differ had it come out a year later.
My comfort movie. Is that weird?
This austere, mannered Aussie sex work drama has the kind of artsy staginess that timestamps indies of the 2010 cusp (Dogtooth, Somewhere, Stoker) but its commitment to weird feels like a fresh breeze compared to the dogmatic, post-ironic indies of today. It’s ambiguous, adult, and not the least bit creepy, and it makes me yearn for a time when artists weren’t so concerned that audiences would conflate their personal morals with the decisions of their characters. I missed Sucker Punch (go figure) so this was my first time catching up with Emily Browning since A Series of Unfortunate Events. She’s revelatory here in what is perhaps the most recessed of performances (extended scenes requiring her to act and be interacted with as if she’s completely unconscious). I liked it a lot, would watch again.
A friend recommended this for Sigourney Weaver’s performance. She’s great! Reminiscent of her career-best performance in Working Girl. The movie? Not so much. Duchovny feels miscast as a married screenwriter-dweeb with back problems, while the film itself captures a cross section of studio TV production that will never happen again, but in a way that doesn’t really feel like it ever did happen. If I had to pinpoint what went wrong, it’s tonally inconsistent. Is it a comedy about wacky executive intervention? Or a drama about letting go of your artistic vision? In this case, it’s both, thus neither. Hulu’s unfairly canned series, Reboot, did this better.
Tubi recommended after Sleeping Beauty, a modern but Victorian-style BDSM folie à deux that, I’m sure, works as an aesthetic and ‘mood’ piece, especially if you’re not looking for anything, but left me barely ‘whelmed’ as a plot guy. Visually striking on a small budget, though.
Transcendently boring, the lights are off and no one’s home, but there is one funny moment towards the end, after the inauguration party, where Brett Ratner goes, “Sweet dreams, Mr. President,” and the President basically snorts and walks away.
Best part of this movie is Orson Welles. When he finally shows up, the bells that ring-in that thing we call “movie magic” sound to the high heavens. The second best part is Graham Greene’s screenplay, which crackles with such delicious noir-isms as “Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.” We used to write screenplays.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say Ryan Gosling is as close as we’re gonna get to another Paul Newman. Disarming, fallible, eminently watchable, the wrong casting and this is a maudlin dud, but he and Sandra Hüller and the puppeteers and voice actor who brought the alien Rocky to life make this that rarest of things: a big budget spectacular that justifies its expense because anyone can enjoy it on any level. It’s long, emotionally manipulative, and the ending is untidy, but when you can recommend it to your grandpa and have him call you back the next day all “BEST movie I’ve seen in years!” the ends justify the means.
Full-bush Aussie novelty featuring lots of cruelty, with a ball-tearer of a villain played by Chard Hayward (?). Low on style but high on aggression, by the time the serial killing handyman has squared up against the cops, any sleaze-seeker will have had their money’s worth (it was free on Tubi, but it looks like it’s gone…for now).
I admitted to my co-hosts on the Free Movie Ideas Podcast that I had never seen the Indiana Jones movies. They made me promise I would, so the next day I put them on while I was working and you know what? Pretty good. The third one is the best because the addition of Sean Connery (as “Pappy Jones”) brings the possibility of failure into the equation, giving it real stakes.
A couple of years ago my friend and I snuck into a bunch of movies in Times Square and one of them, Serenity, turned out to be the dumbest movie I had ever seen. No way could movies get dumber than this $39 million thriller where the twist is that (spoilers!) tropical island fisherman Matthew McConaughey is a character in a computer game based on the programmer’s real dad who died in Iraq (?). Turns out I was wrong, the movie where Chris Pratt has to clear his name with the help of the AI-powered surveillance state as his sidekick has somehow set the bar even lower.
Huge fan of Gian Maria Volonte, whether he’s an unstoppably evil cop (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) or an upstanding Italian business magnate (The Mattei Affair), and he’s similarly unmistakable and invisible as a naive professor who investigates the killings of two locals in Palermo. Whatever dubbed translation is on Prime is neither clear nor compelling. The country looks beautiful, there are dedicated performances, and interesting Italian faces abound, but I felt confused and, to the extent that I knew what was going on, simply whelmed.
In February, I ended up watching some of this austere Lifetime-y movie by accident because it had the same name. Last month, I watched the correct one, an erotic thriller where Debbie Harry plays a phone sex operator who gets taunted by a killer in the midst of his murders. She investigates, with the help of a police officer (James Russo), and there’s a really great scene in a sex shop that features haunting red light, slow-mo, and Grace Zabriskie. Third act blows it by turning into a “get him!” cop thing, which is unfortunate because it was moody, atmospheric, and non-judgmental up until then.
Police procedurals are great in the background when I need to get a lot of work done. Something about long, extended, step by step investigations gets the wheels turning. I had such a productive writing session to this, I put it on again and kept going.
All those “speaks truth to power” pull quotes got me; I wanted to see how far the vanguard of the Israeli Left is willing to go in a lauded new movie. A little background: a few years ago, a producer hired me to copy-edit a bad translation of a Hanoch Levin play that had been turned into a screenplay. The misanthropic Levin was something of an outcast and a pioneer among the nascent Israeli culturati—he was the first playwright with real artistic merit to say “this shit sucks, our country is horrifying, we’re turning our children into the same monsters who persecuted us, and this project has no future.” Nadav Lapid, the writer-director of Yes, comes in the same vein as Levin, but his message is two or three steps diluted. The first third, about a whorish musician who is hired to write a post-Oct 7. anthem, points a mirror at Israeli society, and it isn’t hard to show it for all its hollow, brutal grotesquerie. The second third, however, scream-cries, “But we suffered too!” And the third is all “So what do you expect us to do?” This Liberal Zionism shit sucks! There’s talented filmmaking on display, and it’s bold, but if this is as far-left and anti-war as it gets in Israel today, Hanoch Levin was right.
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!
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.