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Just noticed that Abderrahmane Sissako's Black Tea (about the romance between an Ivorian woman in China and a local man) is due for release in France on February 28th. I assume it'll be part of the Berlinale competition lineup.

Orion and the Dark is a kids’ movie based on a kids’ book (which I have not read), but as Charlie Kaufman did some of the adapting it’s a kids’ movie where everyone is either openly or secretly terrified, where Sleep assaults people, and where death is a meaningless abyss that awaits us all. There is a David Foster Wallace joke and a voice actor who is apparently not Seth Rogan and a voice actor who is very much Werner Herzog.

Though the anxiety is sympathetic and amusingly overthought – at the behest of the school therapist, young Orion has turned a sketchbook journal into a catalog of his fears – it's at its best when it feels like Kaufman is thinking about storytelling. The movie seems to open, as way too many do, with the character addressing the audience. But then it turns out he is not, until he seems to be doing so again, until it turns out he is not. Standard-issue childhood conflicts are trotted out as set-up – a bully, a nascent crush – and are allowed to be resolved offscreen or not at all. Instead of contriving complications, story elements keep coming to early understandings. IRL interruptions (and in the film, phones are blinding, carcinogenic) forced me to pause frequently, a weird boon: Wait, how much more time is left? The story moves breezily, but is allowed to re-set, is allowed to be real and not-real and both those things carry equal weight. And while it rotates through ambivalent messaging and tentative conclusions and not-endings, its surest decision is to show how we need to help each other through this terrifying life through creative collaboration.

There are partnerships, there is teamwork. The world keeps turning. Surely someone will come along to help us fix this crazy thing.

So it’s extra unfortunate that Kaufman’s collaborators in this seem a bit less-than. Orion and the Dark is about literal darkness and literal light and can't summon more than standard-issue glowiness. Other than quick turns at sketchbook and cut-out animation, it’s mostly cut-and-paste CGI. A team of color-coded nighttime entities feel like alt-Inside Out designs. It never looks expressive, and opportunities for surrealism settle on arms-length goofiness. Sometimes the sweet turns cuddly, and sometimes the winning andthenandthen and yes-and storytelling (“I like it. And I like what you said. Both things.”) gets blindsided by punched-up dramatic beats. Which could be Kaufman, or the book, but it feels easier to blame the “additional screenplay material” by Lloyd Taylor – who, like director Sean Charmatz, is a graduate of Dreamworks’ Trolls franchise.

Lois Patiño's Samsara proved a weirdly comforting sit in spite of my aversion to the physical and spiritual processes it so viscerally presents, and I recommend it equally to people who have similar fears and are willing to try some exposure therapy, and, more pertinently, to people who want to debate what the outer bounds of a "film" can be. The film's most impressive moments are the 20 or so minutes in its middle which depict the passage of a consciousness through an otherworldly realm as an avalanche of shifting sounds and flashing lights that intertitles ask the viewer to experience with their eyes closed. In an IMAX theater, at least, the effect is really powerful: the strong lights diffuse through the eyelids and, I guess, "stain" the patterns that usually move around when one's eyes are shut, giving the impression of sourceless colors and images. The corresponding sound collage is frenzied, static-like, cleansing, providing the structure for the segment (the intertitles tell you to open your eyes when the sounds subside) in a way that the director assumes that the visuals themselves could not. Is this still a film if even the ability to see it (or anything) is withheld by design from the audience? The film certainly expects this section to stand on its own merits, and on balance I think the movie offers enough to traditionally admire before and after the closed-eyes parts to make these parts traditionally meaningful. A slim and universalist (almost to the point of offending the poor Muslim residents of its second half with its belief in the cyclical one-ness of all things) narrative persists through this transitory passage, tracing the life of two interconnected living beings, but its importance is stylistically downplayed as much as possible. However non-visual the visual pleasures of the segment are, they're worth experiencing. Readers with the patience for slower (if not quite "slow") cinema could probably reproduce the effect pretty well by watching on a laptop or desktop with the screen brightness turned up, headphones on, and with one's head closer-than-usual to the screen just for the closed-eyes part.

I can offer one further (subjective) proof of Samsara's relevance to the cinematic experience: I watched S. J. Clarkson's Madame Web the following day in the same auditorium, and I can definitively state that Patiño's film offers more to visual art with a viewer's eyes closed than Clarkson's does in the act of watching. Madame Web falls into the Suicide Squad/Justice League/Rogue One/Fant4stic/The Snowman/(insert more titles here) ironic entertainment zone, where it's far more rewarding to try and sense the palpable stitches and seam lines in a hastily-cobbled-together-at-the-last-minute epic than it is to follow or revel in anything the film has to offer, and given this film's astonishing six-month, six-unit shoot, I suspect the state of the movie during production was probably as dire as some of those previously-cited examples. Without doing a 40-minute deep dive, the setting of the film was changed from the 1990s to the 2000s, and Tahar Rahim's villain was completely ADRed at A Night to Dismember quality (his mouth doesn't move half the time he speaks), so I suspect that some executive panicked and had the villain's motivations and arc, and thus everything else, re-written mid-filming. (Compare this track record to Oppenheimer, which got the material for a globe-trotting epic in 55 days with one unit at the same budget.) It's also the culmination of every stylistic and tonal half-measure taken by the blockbusters of the past two decades, displaying a, well, Oppenheimerian inability to commit to one approach. It's an origin story that fails to show its superheroes getting powers, putting on costumes, and fighting crime; it's a horror movie with no scares, bumps, fight scenes in the traditional sense, or defined antagonists; it's a star vehicle that completely mishandles its name talent, subjecting poor Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney to lines that no actor could possibly sell;

Spoiler

it's a Spider-Man movie depicting the actual birth of Peter Parker, the kid that becomes Spider-Man, without naming him on-screen or hinting at which Spider-Man he might be.

Like a lot of the disaster movies mentioned above, this film contains multitudes for an ironic, reactive, or cruel viewer while offering a sincere audience member nothing - and depending on who you are, that might just be its selling point.

From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

thirtyframesasecond wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2024 8:38 pm From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

I mean, she fired her agent when the trailer dropped, so she’s probably only doing the literal required legal minimum to support it

thirtyframesasecond wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2024 8:38 pm From what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

She dumped her entire management team weeks before it came out

thirtyframesasecond wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2024 8:38 pmFrom what I've seen on social media, Madame Web either falls into the 'so bad it's good' or 'so bad it's really bad' category, and Dakota Johnson seems weirdly detached both in the film and promoting the film.

It's the latter, and people who call it the former are probably mis-identifying the type of ironic pleasure they got from the film. There's very little that the film itself offers you to enjoy; it is not a The Room-esque experience where the creative choices are so wrong that they horseshoe into their own twisted aesthetic sensibility, but rather a movie aiming for a very specific (and dull) genre or mode that is mostly notable for how badly it misses the mark given the amount of time and money wasted. Part of that is how nakedly reshot and slapped-together the work is, but I think it also has to do with ambition: most of the so-bad-it's-good canon is either trying for energetic lurid excitement or is genuinely striving to be a film imbued with the passion of Tennessee Williams. The most Madame Web wants to do is blend seamlessly with the house styles of two separate micromanaging producers (Avi Arad and Kevin Feige). I kind of think a movie with such limited horizons can't be "so bad it's good."

Evil Does Not Exist

Though I liked his last two overall (not so much what I’ve seen before that), I never got the fuss over Hamaguchi until now. This is a film that dares to be so elliptically humanistic in its approach, that it consistently succeeds at walking very challenging tightropes across contexts: channeling both deep sadness and warm inspiration for the limitations and potentials of individual action in a social world. With pitch-perfect performances by the ensemble, a tremendous, sparsely used score, and objective yet intimate direction, this feels like a recontextualization of slow cinema techniques into something new, haunting and exhilarating. The Godardian score-drops alone signify this split between tones and our varying engagements with drama.

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I take the film’s title at face value. Hamaguchi feels sorry for the CEO, even if he feels way more compassion for everyone else. And even if violence is considered immoral, it is not evil to protect your daughter, though the ambiguity over how much is fueled by anger versus survivalism is part of the film’s power, and perhaps reflects Hamaguchi’s own confusion over what emotion he feels strongest towards the world and individuals in a post-covid world. But he does know what’s most important to him. Maybe recently discovered, as so many opportunities for emotional engagement yielded revelations in the last four years, not all good...

This feels like like ultimate post-covid movie, well beyond the surface content.

Immaculate

I'm convinced most audiences and critics either don't get what this movie is doing to begin with, or don't care to in our modern climate of abundant horror films seeking to make a point, but I loved this tight, self-conscious neo-giallo. The film strikes a balance between brazenly indulging its campy dressings and sincerely engaging with its sociopolitical themes, so the visceral predicaments are validly unsettling but it never pretends to take a new torch to patriarchal or religious systems, even if it does go about it with a slightly-bent originality. The whole film basically functions like a convent version of Suspiria's coven, just without as much juicy filler - even if this is lean and propulsive, if could've used maybe five more minutes in the middle adding small layers to briefly enrich relationship dynamics, etc. but that's a small quibble.

A huge bow goes to Sydney Sweeney, who's potentially as much of an auteur as the creative juices behind the script and camera (I haven't followed the project as closely as others, but I believe she was the driving force behind this getting made at all, which adds layer of meaning to an already-fun ride. Sweeney is an actress who is so keenly aware of her body and how it's commodified by others, that her choices to not simply hide it behind a nun outfit, but flaunt it in the ways she does are surprisingly creative and subversive, culminating in what may be the biggest middle-finger to the Wades of the world captured on film thus far. The last three minutes of this movie are a direct emulation of

Spoiler

Adjani's perf in the tunnel scene of Possession

and Sweeney nails it; and -like the film- consciously and conscientiously pays tribute while also making it entirely her own. The whole thing is worth watching just to see that. Calling it now: She'll be competing for Best Actress a few years from now (hopefully in good company alongside Zendaya and Hunter Schafer!)

therewillbeblus wrote: Wed Apr 17, 2024 3:39 am Immaculate

I'm convinced most audiences and critics either don't get what this movie is doing to begin with, or don't care to in our modern climate of abundant horror films seeking to make a point, but I loved this tight, self-conscious neo-giallo. The film strikes a balance between brazenly indulging its campy dressings and sincerely engaging with its sociopolitical themes, so the visceral predicaments are validly unsettling but it never pretends to take a new torch to patriarchal or religious systems, even if it does go about it with a slightly-bent originality. The whole film basically functions like a convent version of Suspiria's coven, just without as much juicy filler - even if this is lean and propulsive, if could've used maybe five more minutes in the middle adding small layers to briefly enrich relationship dynamics, etc. but that's a small quibble.

A huge bow goes to Sydney Sweeney, who's potentially as much of an auteur as the creative juices behind the script and camera (I haven't followed the project as closely as others, but I believe she was the driving force behind this getting made at all, which adds layer of meaning to an already-fun ride. Sweeney is an actress who is so keenly aware of her body and how it's commodified by others, that her choices to not simply hide it behind a nun outfit, but flaunt it in the ways she does are surprisingly creative and subversive, culminating in what may be the biggest middle-finger to the Wades of the world captured on film thus far. The last three minutes of this movie are a direct emulation of

Spoiler

Adjani's perf in the tunnel scene of Possession

and Sweeney nails it; and -like the film- consciously and conscientiously pays tribute while also making it entirely her own. The whole thing is worth watching just to see that. Calling it now: She'll be competing for Best Actress a few years from now (hopefully in good company alongside Zendaya and Hunter Schafer!)

Immaculate and The First Omen is one of those baffling cases of film synchronicity, like Capote and Infamous or Deep Impact and Armageddon, where two films in production at the same time have exactly the same plot. While I enjoyed Immaculate, I'll give the edge to The First Omen, which is a more stylish and atmospheric film and which I also found a little more creepy. Like the recent reboots of long-in-the-tooth horror franchises The Evil Dead, Scream and Saw, this prequel to The Omen is made with more care than one might expect. Its evocation of 70s Rome is spot on, down to Mark Korven's score, which evolves from the incongruously upbeat, melodious pop you would hear in an Italian exploitation film of the period to the full-blown Ave Satani. Nell Tiger Free, best known as the mysterious nanny from the Apple+ horror show Servant, is excellent in the lead role. She has a more otherworldly presence than Sydney Sweeney, and can look plain, scary or breathtakingly beautiful, depending on what's required. If you thought Immaculate has a reference to Adjani's freak-out/birth from Possession, just wait until you see the equivalent here.

In keeping with the times,

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the Catholic Church is the big bad in both films, and the only major difference between them is that Immaculate turns out to have no overtly supernatural element, while this, tying into the mythology of The Omen, does.

For me, both films are better at the build-up than the action-packed final act and Immaculate has the better last shot. The ending of The First Omen hints at a sequel (and "sidequel" to the original The Omen) that we'll probably never see, as the film didn't do well at the box office, but director Arkasha Stevenson, whose first feature this is, is a talent to watch.

Gotta say, if you want a fun monster/horror/suspense movie, you could do a helluva lot worse than Under Paris (French title Sous la Seine), streaming on Netflix. It's beautifully shot; the DP definitely knows what he's doing. Taut, suspenseful narrative. Weirdly, and this is not a criticism, it kinda turns into a zombie movie in the final act. Regardless, it's way better than the premise would lead you to believe. Also plays on shark-movie tropes, e.g. a mayor who's more worried about the economic impact of sounding the alarm than she is about saving lives (and the actress playing the mayor of Paris does a fairly good Anne Hidalgo impersonation).

The Toxic Avenger reboot starring Peter Dinklage might end up as an unreleased write-off

The Beekeeper:

I’ll say this much, this is a pretty good long plane ride kind of movie, something to really kill the time while providing enough fun to satisfy. This is very much a poor man’s John Wick (at least to what I know about the franchise) and a lot of my general enjoyment just comes from watching this killer Beekeeper just destroy anything that comes in his way with no general care for who gets hurt like an uncaring spirit of death. This is a movie that knows what it is, has fun with itself, doesn’t really care if you’re invested or not and has a badass Jason Statham in it so if you want to turn your brain off to something from this year, this is the popcorn flick I’d say you go for.
Rating: 3.32 out of 4.27

Despite absolutely despising the original due to it being one of the dullest Summer movies ever made, I was stunned to find I actually enjoyed Twisters. I couldn't give a shit about anything that happened in the original, which has one of the laziest cash-in screenplays ever written, yet I found myself actually caring about the story here. It's still razor-thin to be sure, but it at least feels to have something at stake, like there's an actual end goal to care about outside of "we need to collect data" (whoopdie-shit), even if there is still some of that. It also helps the characters are more fleshed out and there are a couple of surprises to the direction some of the characters go, and the villain is at least a little more villainous than just being rich, like Elwes in the original (I'm all for making billionaires bad guys but he was only the villain because he had more resources than the main characters). He is still a very secondary character who barely appears, though, but that's probably for the better.

I'm not familiar with her at all, but the lead (Daisy Edgar-Jones) stood out. Her character has far more depth than anyone in the original, and her "origin story" is far more harrowing. I get that it's cool to probably pile on Glen Powell, but this is the second film I've seen him in (that I'm aware of) and thought he was fine, though I probably can't distinguish his character from the one he plays in Hit Man, and I liked him in that. In this, he's really running on pure charisma.

There are some cool set pieces and I thought the CGI effects were really well done. Nothing like the flying cow or the drive-in sequence in the original appears here, which are both memorable sequences, but the opening is pretty good, and the climax has some really nice shots and set pieces, including one in a movie theater.

It's doubtful I'll actively go out of my way to watch it again, but when my wife decides she wants to watch it I at least won't cry inside like I do when she wants to watch the original (which I bought on 4K for her).

TechnicolorAcid wrote: Fri Jul 26, 2024 10:56 pm The Beekeeper:

I’ll say this much, this is a pretty good long plane ride kind of movie, something to really kill the time while providing enough fun to satisfy. This is very much a poor man’s John Wick (at least to what I know about the franchise) and a lot of my general enjoyment just comes from watching this killer Beekeeper just destroy anything that comes in his way with no general care for who gets hurt like an uncaring spirit of death. This is a movie that knows what it is, has fun with itself, doesn’t really care if you’re invested or not and has a badass Jason Statham in it so if you want to turn your brain off to something from this year, this is the popcorn flick I’d say you go for.
Rating: 3.32 out of 4.27

I thought this one was pretty fun for the first bit, but it's stupidity went off the rails in the last half. It was nice seeing Jeremy Irons in a sort of "villain" role again, but he was underutilized. But it's another I won't mind when my wife wants to watch it again (also one I bought for her on 4K). Describing it as a plane trip movie is very apt.

Not-at-all-funny story, (but in the moment it made things less stressful for me) but an elderly relative recently fell victim to a scam similar to what's in this movie. My daughter found out and the first thing out of her mouth was "but he watched The Beekeeper with us! How??"

Enjoyed much of Tilman Singer’s silly, creepy Cuckoo, though I left the theater juggling more asterisks than I’d hoped. It’s not for anyone primarily guided by logic, a tough go for anyone who prizes consistency over incidental pleasures. Like Singer’s Luz, Cuckoo is posed as an echoing construct; but instead of two simple locations turned performance spaces, this one’s set in an isolated resort hotel complex that acts as a “nature preserve” and the expansion brings growing pains. Stray characters (You’d think a stepmother would have more to do in a fairy tale forest!), dangling considerations, confused motivations, loose geography. The excited pile-on was a lot of the appeal of Luz, but Cuckoo doesn’t revel in confusion so much as messily contort itself to accommodate its concept. It’s fairly straightforward but unsure how hard to think, struggles with how much exposition to mete out, never finds a balance between introducing ideas and developing them. (It may shake into place better with a second viewing.)

But there’s a lot of fun to be had and a lot with which to engage. If Luz toyed with forms of control, Cuckoo considers autonomy through families broken, engineered, incidental, and chosen. Mother tongues and mother’s voices, Singer again insists on a multicultural and multilingual Germany that feels both enriched and unsettling; you never know what's going to come out when someone opens their mouths. (A lot of the time, it's vomit.) Communication is complicated by technology, phones and headphones and tapes and intercoms; apps talk to answering machines. I don’t know how much to make of its gender aspects – Hunter Schafer is too awesome in this to have her presence co-opted into messaging – but while there’s never the full-body dress-up of Luz, there’s a pointed fuzziness about roles and designations throughout.

And for a film awash in grief and injury and gross violation, it can also be very funny! Literally laughs at itself, and not enough people in my theater were giggling at Dan Stevens’ delicious delivery or a ridiculous late standoff straight out of Police Squad!.

Great writeup, brundlefly - I have very little to add, except I think I saw Cuckoo as more deliberately subversive on Singer’s part. If this wasn't the director of Luz, I might have more doubts, but the whole movie seems to be eschewing breadcrumb-plants constantly, especially around Stevens' hilariously underwritten character; and instead of contorting itself around its concept, I felt like the concept just kind-of grew into wherever Singer was in his setpiece/character design phase of writing. I can see why anyone would try to forget this film, but it was bewilderingly scary - in part because it's legit creepy as hell, but also because in abandoning and eliding and feeding-into-before-rug-ripping devices from us, the whole affair was rather formally unsettling in a narrative sense. So reflexively appropriate for a lead character trying to get a grasp on her own narrative throughout the film, coming up empty at every turn. Hunter Schafer rules the show, as some of us knew she would, and this is just further proof that she needs to be in everything.

therewillbeblus wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 3:40 am instead of contorting itself around its concept, I felt like the concept just kind-of grew into wherever Singer was in his setpiece/character design phase of writing. I can see why anyone would try to forget this film, but it was bewilderingly scary - in part because it's legit creepy as hell, but also because in abandoning and eliding and feeding-into-before-rug-ripping devices from us, the whole affair was rather formally unsettling in a narrative sense. So reflexively appropriate for a lead character trying to get a grasp on her own narrative throughout the film, coming up empty at every turn. Hunter Schafer rules the show, as some of us knew she would, and this is just further proof that she needs to be in everything.

This is a great angle and one I'll look for next time; would be a hoot to think Singer is algorithmically re-tailoring the world to meet and frustrate Gretchen's growth like he's the AI in "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," that her increasingly broken body isn't just a way to manifest internal trauma or communicate change but a metaphor for the narrative. That every time she walks into a pane of glass, she's banging her head against the film itself. But what I meant about contorting the concept was basic stuff like

Spoiler

calling it Cuckoo for reasons I thought obvious, then waiting until 2/3rds of the way through to explain that reason, then putting asterisks around the film's creature so that its behavior is more like extended surrogacy than brood parastism so hey, not Cuckoo anyway nevermind. It's the sort of thing that could be excused as Singer working to keep things slippery, and could be hyper-rationalized because the resort's cuckoo symbol (and the film's name!) was chosen by a man and men are wrong and have a history of malignant nomenclature. The creature wasn't a monster until its nature had been trapped and perverted by König; its death is both sad and necessary. IVF and surrogacy would be part of the all-female future Singer points toward at the end. So shedding the film's title is part of that process! And cuckoo still works as an adjective! But it's a tough haul, too much misdirection always feels sloppy.

Was also thrown by the underdeveloped role of the female doctors, who I guess may have also secretly been working to overthrow the patriarchy through their stash of secret tapes; by the end I was mostly lost as to what König was doing and why, and while I liked that there were weird levels of whatever happening behind the scenes, and that when Stevens spoke it could feel like the mad scientist master planner had always been working by the seat of his pants, it seemed more distraction than point? Again, fits with the m.o., but make all the people working at the bad place men and let my brain hurt less.

In total agreement that Hunter Schafer rules, won my Gen X heart right from her unreliable slacker start, convinced me right through to übercaring.

brundlefly wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 1:42 pm

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Was also thrown by the underdeveloped role of the female doctors, who I guess may have also secretly been working to overthrow the patriarchy through their stash of secret tapes; by the end I was mostly lost as to what König was doing and why, and while I liked that there were weird levels of whatever happening behind the scenes, and that when Stevens spoke it could feel like the mad scientist master planner had always been working by the seat of his pants, it seemed more distraction than point?

Spoiler

The confusion over Stevens' actions, including his master plan, is the element I most liked in terms of subversion - all that peripheral stuff clearly contained some internal logic we weren't privy to. We're firmly in Schafer's POV, so even when we part from that to get a piece of some overarching plot.. well, it's over and done with a bandaid-rip approach, diluting those normally-Higher Themes' utility in favor of the visceral experience of a teenager's suffering and jarring adult motivations holding one's emotional state captive.

These are fair criticisms, mind you, just ones that I felt Singer was deliberately ousting as he has little interest in retreading tropes (like building a castle carefully with blocks and then knocking it down at the expected cue) and more interest in destabilizing (setting up the building blocks and repeatedly knocking them down before they're done being constructed with sharp jolts of unpredictability). I genuinely loved how I couldn't predict what was going to happen next in this film, even if certain devices were clearly going to payoff in expected ways - for those, too, didn't play themselves up into significance; they more often petered out as we were cued into whatever the next threat was via Schafer's hypervigilance

I bet the title partially refers to an admittance that the plot/execution is cuckoo bananas, more than Singer actually cares about the bird's significance within the film

I saw Zoe Kravitz's directorial debut, 'Blink Twice' yesterday, starring Channing Tatum and a strong cast of 'what happened to...' like Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, etc. The female lead is Naomi Ackie, a British actress, who was in the Whitney Houston biopic. And Adria Arjona, from Hit Man, plays a supporting role too. Blink Twice is a very odd and unsettling psychological drama and satire (not that there are many laughs) about men's psychological and physical control over women, and is no doubt inspired by MeToo and the Epstein affair. Brief spoilers if you want them

Spoiler

Tatum plays a tech bro, who after a scandal, goes through the usual public mea culpa and retreats to a private island for therapy, but invites other women along for the experience....

I wouldn't say it's a wholly successfully executed film - but you leave the cinema feeling worse than when you went in, so it must've worked, right?

Nathan Silver's Between the Temples will be a feast for Jason Schwartzman lovers, but still, I have to say I was a bit disappointed in comparison to the reactions it's getting (is it just me or does every solid NYC indie seem to be met with outsized praise the past few years?). It's strange how now we need low-budget filmmakers to make the kind of conventional films that would have been studio hits 30 years ago—this one is a warm, introduction-to-a-culture meets getting-over-it situation comedy that functions largely as a showcase for the eccentric screen presences of Schwartzman and Carol Kane. It's effective for a lot of its running time, with a handful of jokes and moments hitting much harder than the others. But it also veers into broad comedy at times and, at the end, the filmmakers swing big for a cringe-inducing climax, both of which to me seem like missteps that open up inconsistencies in their conceptions of the characters. I've praised Sean Price Williams' cinematography before for elevating movies, but here I think his work actually hurts the film; an overactive approach of shaky handheld, too-close closeups, and intentionally mismatched shots that seems to be trying to shape the film into something it's not. I'd chalk this one up as not bad but not as good as it could have been.

India Donaldson's Good One is such a well-turned and simple movie that I'm not sure there's much more to say about it here. It feels like one of those understated post-WWII American short stories you would read in high school English class but in a good way. At the center of the film is some of the best, most accurate writing and performing for a contemporary teenage character I've ever seen, particularly in her guarded, sensitive, gently-condescending-but-not-wrong way of handling the egos of the adult men around her. The film's sole setting is a camping trip, which the filmmakers exploit for simmering physical discomfort, in both the sometimes arduous crossing of terrain (elements of a suburbanite, upstate New York western?) and raised questions of personal hygiene. Donaldson doesn't quite stick the landing, in my opinion, since the conclusion doesn't really have the impact it's going for, but her and the actors have the control and smarts to keep the ball in the air for the rest of the film up to that point. Recommended!

John Woo’s remake of The Killer is surprisingly good. Honesty one of the best films I’ve seen by him even if many of his more frustrating traits do pop up. The genuinely good script helps out a lot. The narrative is actually well thought out and doesn’t succumb to the weight of Woo’s melodramatics as so many of his films do. It’s also a fairly hilarious film, without being a comedy. Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is probably the best precedent for what is going on here.

The Curious Sofa wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2024 10:17 pm

The Curious Sofa wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 8:14 am On a related note, I plan check out In a Violent Nature this week, which has been described as "what if Terrence Malick made a Friday the 13th movie"

...and it was very good, though having seen it, it's more Gus Van Sant/Bela Tarr than Terrence Malick. Considering it's a deconstruction of a Friday the 13th type slasher under the influence of slow cinema I found it way more nightmarish and scary than any Friday the 13th movie. The kills are the most gnarly since Terrifier 2 and there is a scene reminiscent of the most memorable scene from Friday the 13th 2009 which should please it's fans (or rather it's one fan). Best horror movie of the year so far.

The quoted post above was in the Friday the 13th thread, but I thought it was worth bringing more attention here. I thought of this as something of an inversion of Friday the 13th, shown from the unstoppable killer’s point of view. It has all the elements of the archetypal slasher movie—a group of stupid young people camping in the woods, a mysterious and vague family tragedy as backstory, a final girl—but instead of the kids’ bullshit padding out the movie we get long scenes of the killer walking through the woods and fields, shot almost exclusively from behind in tracking shots, punctuated by highly imaginative and disgustingly gory kills. It’s a hell of a combination and very thrilling if, like me, you don’t particularly like slasher films because they all seem the same. Recommended if you have the stomach for it.

Not as good but just about as imaginative is Abigail, which is, basically, what if you kidnapped a ten-year-old ballerina but it turns out she is a powerful vampire. It gets a little mired in its plot (some organized crime nonsense), but the horror-action scenes are a lot of fun with some very amusing spins on the usual vampire tropes. It’s a fun, silly time. Recommended if you liked Orphan: First Kill or M3GAN.

knives wrote: Mon Sep 09, 2024 12:53 am John Woo’s remake of The Killer is surprisingly good. Honesty one of the best films I’ve seen by him even if many of his more frustrating traits do pop up. The genuinely good script helps out a lot. The narrative is actually well thought out and doesn’t succumb to the weight of Woo’s melodramatics as so many of his films do. It’s also a fairly hilarious film, without being a comedy. Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is probably the best precedent for what is going on here.

Nathalie Emmanuel is the lead in this? With her role in Megapolis and the previous Too Fast... films, she's definitely the most successful alum from dreadful UK teen soap, Hollyoaks.

I know her mainly from Game of Thrones where she had precisely one expression, a worried pout from under raised eyebrows.