Sunday, March 17, 2024

Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Out of Darkness (2022)

Following their strong, arrogant prick of a leader Adem (Chuku Modu) a small splinter group of a stone age tribe of early humans have crossed a large body of water to find new, hopefully better lands full of game and cosy caves, or so is the picture apparently gained through visions Adem paints of the place. The group consists of Adem’s pregnant mate Avé (Iola Evans), his brother Geirr (Kit Young), his son Heron (Luna Mwezi), old guy with a whole sackful of chips on his shoulder Odal (Arno Lüning) and stray outsider Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), there to provide whatever is needed.

That new land full of game and green grass of Adem’s imagination, nay, conviction, is rather less pleasant than advertised. Food sources seem to be scarce, as is shelter. One can’t help but notice these particular hunters and gatherers apparently don’t really forage for things very thoroughly. Stones are most definitely left unturned, so the complete absence of game is an even bigger problem here than it would be for more competent groups.

This isn’t going to be the tribe’s only problem for very long, though, for something dangerous is lurking in the shadows, stalking the group and picking them off one by one. Adem’s promised new land might very well eat them all, as promised lands have the habit to.

Andrew Cumming’s Out of Darkness is in many aspects a very typical stone age adventure movie, in so far as it absolutely mirrors the interests and fears of its own time much more than it does attempt an actual portray of stone age life. The difference is that, where, say, the late 60s/early 70s version of the stone age was a world of deeply silly adventure and fur bikinis, this version is mostly there to teach its audience valuable lessons about the evils of patriarchy, the human tendency to fear and hate the different and the unknown (though, given what the unknown does to our protagonists out of its own fear of the unknown, I can’t blame them for their reactions to it as much as the film does), and that a woman’s body belongs to herself.

All very worthwhile things to speak and think about of course, but also, one can’t help but think, not things actual stone age people would have wasted much of a thought on, unless you want to argue that the inner life of Grok the cave woman is basically the same as that of Inga the modern woman.

However, as there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old fur bikini movies using the far past as their adventure playground, there is also not much wrong about a contemporary movie using the same past to explore its own interests. Well, it could be a bit more subtle about it from time to time – the awkward post-climax voiceover provided so the most stupid audience members understand what the film is talking about really is a bridge too far for me – but often, its putting contemporary troubles into the past does what this approach is clearly meant to do: put the evils of a particular kind of masculinity, and how it feels to be at the receiving end of it into a clearer, more brutal form. This makes it easier to understand its victims by helping us empathize with them more clearly and lets us thrill to the moment when they regain – or gain for the first time – agency.

It does help the film’s case as well that it is rather good at portraying what I assume to be one of the most basic of human fears – being lost in the dark, stalked by something whose nature appears so alien it might very well not be natural, of starving and being very much alone in a seemingly empty world, thrown together with a handful of people who are only interested in the use you can be to them.

Particularly the first two acts are full of scenes that most certainly aren’t believable portrayals of actual stone age life, but feel true to what we imagine it might have felt like in its most dramatic and horrifying moments, the horrors of staring into the darkness, something invisible staring back at you.

Thus, Out of Darkness often feels like the cross of stone age adventure and horror movie I didn’t know I needed before.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Three Films Make A Post: The heist begins at 40,000 ft.

Lift (2024): This Netflix production as directed by F. Gary Gray is rather astonishing. Astonishing in how forgettable it is. If I hadn’t made a couple of notes while watching it, I’d remember not a thing about it a week after having seen it. Going by these notes, this is a heist movie neither charming enough to be light fun, nor serious enough to ever build up any stakes one might care about.

It also contains a terribly written romance between Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a somewhat inexplicable performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is certainly doing something that may or may not have anything to do with an attempt at being Udo Kier.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to even waste another sentence on.

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023): Screenwriter Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut is a very frustrating movie. In its beginning stages, it makes interesting and creepy use of the urban myth of the mass disappearances in US National Parks, with quite a few shots of mildly disturbing background happenings our protagonist doesn’t notice. In these early stages the film builds a wonderful mood of the weird and the outré.

Alas, its back half consists of what amounts to an endless dream sequence in which said protagonist – Georgina Campbell, wasted –works through emotional issues through the most hackneyed and obvious symbolism possible at tedious length, until the film finally ends. The Weird turns into the boringly prosaic.

Life of Belle (2024): I had heard rather nice buzz about Shawn Robinson’s POV horror (in the Paranormal Activity vein) piece. I can’t say the film does very much for me at all. While its approach to a child filming random childish crap while the borders of her world slowly break down in the background is certainly interesting, it’s also a bit tedious. That the film goes quite as heavy on the “mentally ill equals evil” part of the horror equation because it tries to be too subtle about its supernatural bits doesn’t exactly make it more likeable. Though I do have to give it props for not being afraid of eventually leading its audience into tasteful but disturbing scenes of child abuse.

Like with Lovely, Dark and Deep, there is a clear influence of creepypasta on display; like that movie, and a lot of creepypasta itself, Life of Belle has trouble getting beyond showing a handful of creepy images and calling that a movie.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

The Safecracker (1958)

Colley Dawson (Ray Milland), designing safes for rich people who use them to lock up treasures for nobody to see, has enough of the small life: fast cars, pretty women and touching said treasures loom large in his mind. So when an antiques dealer (Barry Jones) makes him an offer to put his talents to a safe-cracking use, Colley is easily convinced to start on a rather lucrative side-career.

To have use of his ill-gotten gains right here and now without alerting the police with a sudden influx of money, Colley starts on a double life, playing the daring safe-cracker and playboy under an assumed name on the weekends while keeping up his old life-style – including living with his elderly mum – on weekdays. Eventually, he gets caught when he ignores warning signs and directed warnings. He is sentenced to a ten year prison sentence.

However, in 1941, when World War II isn’t going terribly well for the British, Colley’s talents are in demand for a commando mission. The mission’s goal is to photograph secret documents kept in a safe in mansion in occupied Belgium that would disclose the whole of German spy operations in the UK. Particularly, doing this without the Nazis figuring out it happened would be quite a success for the British. Offered a full pardon on success, Colley agrees to take part in the mission, despite his decided lack of patriotism.

Ray Milland dabbled in directing from time to time, and clearly was a fan of directing himself. He’s still trying to hang on to his old charming, somewhat roguish image here in 1958, but at this stage in his career, “roguish” often turned out somewhat sleazy. Which isn’t a bad fit for Colley at all, though I was never quite sure Milland actually realized that was the impression he gave.

As a director, Milland isn’t terrible; he certainly isn’t great either. He has a tendency to use the least interesting shot in too many scenes, and doesn’t have a great hand for pacing either, leading to a lack of tension and a sluggishness not great in the sort of genres this is dabbling in.

The script doesn’t help there either. Structurally, this is a film of two halves from different genres, both of them not terrible successful. First, we have a heist movie that isn’t terribly interested in actually making the safe-cracking business exciting, focussed on a character who doesn’t change in any way once he’s turned from safe-maker to safe-cracker. Thus, the film is more going through the motions of a crime movie than actually being one. The second half does the same with war movie tropes. Again, there’s little tension; again, Colley isn’t changed by any of his experiences; again there’s an aimless, ambling quality to the way scenes are set-up. Not even the climactic raid appears to be all that tense.

Now, one could argue the decision to not have Colley experience any sort of inner redemptive arc as a somewhat interesting and uncommon decision, but since this leaves us with a character that goes through hardship and error completely without much of interest to an audience happening with him, I’d argue it’s an inherently boring decision as well. In the hands of more accomplished director and much more accomplished writers, one could of course do something with this reversal of expectations about how this sort of film is supposed to play out, but as it stands, this just makes a pretty lifeless film even more uninvolving.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Bucktown (1975)

Big city hard ass Duke (Fred Williamson) comes to the conveniently named Bucktown to bury his estranged brother who owned a nightclub there. For dubious reasons of The Law, Duke must stay in town for at least sixty days to put his brother’s affairs in order.

Given that he’s hassled early on by the corrupt and racist police force, whose main reasons to exist seem to be racketeering and extortion (and who will of course also turn out to be responsible for the death of Duke’s brother, as if that ever was in any doubt), that’s not a great proposition. Because a man needs something to do, and the buck needs to flow, Duke lets himself be convinced by a hustling kid and by Harley (Bernie Hamilton), an alcoholic buddy of his brother, to reopen the nightclub for a bit. This also gets him far into the good books and the bed of his brother’s girlfriend Aretha (Pam Grier).

When Duke very violently disagrees with paying the protection money the police expects of him, things do start to look a bit bleak for his continued survival, so he calls in an old buddy of his from the city, the gangster Roy (Thalmus Rasulala). Once Roy arrives with three generally unpleasant mooks (one of them played by the late, great Carl Weathers) in tow, he and Duke begin to gleefully murder their way through the cops.

Once that’s over, Duke expects Roy and the goons to go back to the city. Instead, Roy decides to stay in town and take over the police business, legal and illegal. Duke’s not too happy with this, because he clearly didn’t plan on replacing one group of violent shits with another one, and apparently thought better of Roy. Which, giving their whole companionable killing spree, seems somewhat peculiar. Eventually, the former friends will come to blows.

Before going into Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation movie Bucktown, it is probably best to temper one’s expectations a little. Specifically, the promise of Fred Williamson and Pam Grier starring in the same movie isn’t fulfilled in quite the way I would have hoped for: Williamson’s as Williamson as he always is, but Grier’s role in the movie is strictly being The Girl, so don’t expect razors hidden in afros, much asskicking or just coolness from her. She is unfortunately in the movie mostly for the melodramatic outbursts of awkward dialogue, which doesn’t at all play to her strengths as an actress or as an on-screen personality.

Having put the film’s great disappointment out of the way, there is rather a lot to like about the rest of the movie: its portrayal of the police force of Bucktown as just another gang goes even further than the racist and corrupt police forces in most other blaxploitation movies that at least seem to involve law enforcement work from time to time do; but then going another step further and positing that gangsters and pimps aren’t a great replacement for that role either puts the whole thing dangerously close to being a blaxploitation film that actually critiques the kind of violent but awesome (in the movies) types of black men that are the bread and butter of these films as well.

Of course, this being an exploitation movie, it also takes great delight at showing us the badassery of Duke and Roy quipping while brutally murdering some – admittedly very nasty – people, and certainly is never going to make a – for it obviously hypocritical – final stand against answering brutal violence with even more brutal violence.

It does, however, use the somewhat less awkward opportunity to portray the kind of close, male friendship that would later become one of the core interests of Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed movie beyond the (heroic) bloodshed. These scenes of Duke and Roy first being buddies in violence and then growing increasingly disenchanted with one another – Roy’s disgust with Duke’s apparent growing of a tiny little bit of conscience is played particularly well by Rasulala – are the strongest of the film’s dramatic scenes. Rasulala and Williamson play off one another wonderfully whatever their relation, suggesting a lot of the men’s personal history without never needing to explain them.

That their final throw down is the climax of their relationship as well as the film’s best action scene – not that there’s anything wrong with the earlier action – seems rather fitting in this context.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

The Valachi Papers (1972)

This Dino de Laurentiis production directed by Terence Young just about managed to beat The Godfather to the cinemas, but didn’t make much of a splash there; nor is it as well-remembered as even the least of Coppola’s gangster movie trilogy would eventually become.

Which certainly has a lot to do with how little this rates in any aspect compared to the Coppola film. Instead of turning the true crime plot about real life Mafia goon turned federal witness Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) into an exploration of a man’s relationship to the criminal world he betrays, or even just an actual exploration of anything but the surface of that world, this just races through plot points probably taken from the book this is based on, hitting on anthropological bits of Mafia rituals, murders and Valachi’s love life (Jill Ireland inevitably makes her appearance there) in turn, but never stopping to connect any of this to become something you might want to call an actual narrative.

Watching this, it’s not difficult to imagine Martin Scorsese suffering through it as well, only to think he can certainly do this better by using actual themes and characters and even – gosh! – connecting those, while keeping to the life-long scope of the film, coming up with Goodfellas in the process, a film that’s directly comparable in its scope and basic set-up, but does everything right The Valachi Papers can’t even seem to imagine doing.

Despite the gritty visual quality native to movies made at this point in time, there’s a blandness to the film that’s more than just a little infuriating, a feeling as if nobody involved could actually be bothered to add any personality or depth to the proceedings. The sloppiness of the period parts – where no attempt seems to have been made to hide out of period background details to a degree even I noticed it – adds further to this air of a film that’s just not bothering. Which, as always, leaves the question why a viewer should.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Metamorphosis (2022)

Original title: Yi bian bao long

After catching a very weird giant snake that escaped from a dubious gene research facility, biologist (weird wildlife expert?) and all-around honourable man of action Liang (Gao Shuang) hires on with the research outfit responsible for the monstrosity. His ex-girlfriend, scientist Shi Wen (Sun Ruiqi) is working there as well, and there’s still clearly still a lot going on between them. It’s a bad time for romance, though, for escaping giant snakes aren’t the place’s only problem: the T-Rex the researchers have cobbled together out of the genetical material of other animals breaks out of its cage as well, and now starts hunting the research staff. Liang and Shi Wen do their best to keep everyone alive, but herding these bickering scientists is rather a lot like herding the proverbial cats.

To make matters worse, the perhaps cow-sized T-Rex mutates whenever it encounters deadly force, and eventually evolves to acquire interesting traits like a prehensile tongue and super-chameleon-like stealth powers. All very much to the delight of the mad scientist who actually owns the facility.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking Chinese streaming services have started to fill the niche for cheap and cheerful CGI monster movies left deserted when the SyFy Channel jumped the Sharknado, and I’m all for it. Chen Liangyan’s Metamorphosis follows all the of the important rules of this particular genre, showing off its dubious but certainly not charmless creatures early and often, while only wasting time on the human characters to create a modicum of plot forward momentum.

Mostly, the people are in here to get eaten, look pretty, bicker to make us happy for them getting eaten, and be heroic, and the cast fulfil these functions as well as can be hoped for. Showing good sense for the kind of movie this is, Chen puts little emphasis on the interpersonal dramatics, and instead hits the monster action as quickly as possible, while doing his best to keep away from too much repetition through the wonderful goofiness of the monster’s mutations. Thanks to an economical runtime of just seventy minutes, this plan works out fine for the movie and at least this viewer.

I have a lot of time for cheap monster movies, and certainly ones that understand the basic needs they are made to fulfil quite as well as Metamorphosis does – the tropes and clichés are the point of these films, not something to be shamefacedly avoided, so wallowing in them is indeed a good thing.

Plus, there’s very little I can say against a film that follows Chekhov’s edict while replacing a boring gun over a fireplace with a colourful giant CGI snake.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Circle of Danger (1951)

Some years after the end of World War II. Having made enough money in the underwater salvaging business to afford it, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) travels to the UK to figure out the truth of the mysterious circumstances that resulted in the death of his brother during the war. All Clay really knows is that his brother died on a joint commando raid with British forces, but he has a curious feeling that there’s more to the death than “just” the vagaries of war.

Now Clay has the funds to travel around Great Britain from Wales to Scotland to meet up with the survivors of the raid who also happened to survive the war. His doubts grow with the reticence the men show to speak of what happened to his brother; this certainly makes his investigation rather difficult.

Because a man needs a hobby, Clay has an early meet-cute with americanophile Elspeth Graham (Patricia Roc) who is as obviously smitten with him as he is with her. Turns out investigating a mystery and romancing a woman at the same time is something of a juggling act Clay isn’t terribly well cut out for.

Going by the bare plot description I did expect Circle of Danger to be a – perhaps Hitchockian, perhaps early 50s paranoid – thriller somewhat in the vein of perpetual house favourite Ministry of Fear (a film that of course also features Milland). In actuality, this is a very leisurely mystery that spends as much if not more time on Elspeth’s and Clay’s romance as it does on a very minorly realized mystery. Quite a bit of the film looks and feels a bit like a tourist board ad as well, with Milland strolling through very different parts of the UK in the studio and some beautifully shot locations director Jacques Tourneur shows from their prettiest sides.

I don’t know the – usually great – Tourneur as a director of fare this light, but once I accepted that nothing about this affair is going to be tight, exciting, or tense, and clearly isn’t meant to be any of those things, I did start to enjoy myself with it.

After all, Milland is still in his charming leading man phase, and as always a joy to behold going through these particular motions, the romance is improbable enough to work, and Tourneur shoots even the least exciting criminal investigation with great style. As an added bonus, the suddenly very tight five minutes during the climax feature an incredible use of wide empty spaces for a suspense scene.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

Sunday, February 25, 2024

King Boxer (1972)

aka Five Fingers of Death

Original title: 天下第一拳

When kung fu master Sung (Ku Wen-Chung) finds that his best disciple Chao Chih-Hao (Lo Lieh) has nothing of worth to learn from him anymore, he sends the young man off to the school of Master Suen (Fang Mian), whom he deems superior to himself as a martial artist. The point isn’t just to better Chao’s abilities, but to turn him into the future winner of the Regional Kung Fu Tournament, an event so important, the school of the winner basically rules the (regional) martial world. Should the title fall into the hands of a school not as morally upright as those of Sung and Suen, a reign of terror over the non-fighting populace may very well commence.

Turns out that isn’t just two old kung fu masters being melodramatic, for the insidiously evil – and hilariously hypocritical – Master Meng (Tien Feng) is indeed planning on having his son, the also pretty vile Tien-Hsiung (Tung Lin), become the new champion to then indeed start on that reign of terror business. To that end, Meng invites every morally dubious fighter he can get his claws into to his school, and is certainly not averse to murdering Suen’s disciples when the opportunity arises.

Once Chao becomes established at Suen’s school, tensions mount further, for the young man, once completely trained even in the secret Iron Palm Technique, is certainly going to beat Meng Tien-Hsiung’s murderous behind handily. So Meng decides to get really serious with his intrigues, even going so far as to invite a trio of Japanese – gasp! – killers to his school, letting them kill, mutilate and be dishonourable to their hearts content, while Tien-Hsiung grins from the side-lines.

Cheng Chang-Ho’s (a Korean director more properly named Jeong Chang-Hwa who worked for the Shaw Brothers for decades) King Boxer was one of the breakthrough movies for kung fu cinema in the West, or at least on the US grindhouse circuit.

Working from a plot that was old when kung fu cinema was still in its infancy, it’s at first difficult to make out why exactly this of all films of the genre hit particularly hard. Cheng’s direction seems very state of the genre in 1972: the zooms come when you expect them to, the editing style is perfectly of its time and place, and everything looks and feels much like every other of the bloodier martial arts films made in Hong Kong of the era.

However, once the film gets really going, its attraction becomes very much clear – Cheng has an impeccable sense of timing, hitting the sentences of action and the punctuation of melodramatic revelations with absolute perfection (and very ably assisted by Wu Da-Jiang’s score). The escalation to increasingly bloody violence is just as perfect, until we hit on the kind of mutilation that really must have sold to the grindhouses; the choreography is of course impeccable. There’s such a perfect sense of timing, so much of the very specific kind of artistry experienced filmmaking hands can put into a genre movie that just wants to be a genre movie, and damn deconstruction, irony and cleverness on display in it, King Boxer takes on an archetypal quality. That the people involved were in reality probably just trying to churn out another Shaw production matters little when you look at the finished product of their labours.

This archetypal quality can also be seen in the character work. Of course the characters and their psychology aren’t deep, but they aren’t deep in exactly the right way, embodying their one or two character traits in exactly the right way (even if it’s being pretty but boring like main love interest Wang Ping) to feel like moving parts in an old tale that have been polished to be singularly perfect expressions of these traits.

Or, if you think I’m really laying it on a bit thick here: this is also a film full of joyfully intense bouts of kung fu, some great eye mutilation, a fantastically tense fight in the dark that’s just one of four connected climactic fights, and that wonderfully unsubtle score Quentin Tarantino borrowed a piece of for Kill Bill.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Here for Blood (2022)

Because she needs at least half an evening off juggling part-time jobs and learning for her college exams, student Phoebe (Joelle Farrow) convinces her boyfriend, underpaid and dumb but buff and tenacious pro-wrestler Tom O’Bannon (Shawn Roberts), to fill in for at least half a shift of babysitting while she spends some time actually focussing on learning.

Little Grace (Maya Misaljevic), the kid in question, is good as long she gets her dose of digital entertainment, so things shouldn’t go too far off the rails.

Alas, a group of masked weirdos invades the home of Grace’s parents, and attack Tom during an attempt to abduct the kid.

Given Tom’s joyful enthusiasm for physical violence, their plan - if you want to call it that - doesn’t go terribly well for the bad guys. Unfortunately, these aren’t just your garden variety home invaders but members of a cult worshipping some nasty entities from the Outside, so Tom is soon beset not just by armed assholes for him to beat up but also needs to cope with undead, possessed and very hard to kill guys for him to chop up. Things become rather high stakes for him personally as well, once Phoebe and two of her friends arrive to take over the other half of the babysitting gig; though Phoebe turns out to be a decent hand with a meat cleaver.

After a somewhat rough first fifteen minutes or so, where the jokes don’t hit and the filmmaking feels rather lacklustre in a particularly indie horror kind of way, Daniel Turres’s gory horror comedy hits its stride the moment the violence starts. Suddenly, drab camerawork turns exciting, indifferent editing effective, and the series of quips and one-liners may stay stupid but also becomes actually funny.

Turres is very, very good at milking his practical effects budget for all it is worth, and even though there’s clearly no possibility to do much beyond doing great make-up jobs on men of varying beefiness, the film does so with a surprising amount of hilariously nasty imagination. Enough of it, proceedings never descend into the realms of cheap gore comedy where the same gag is repeated far too often; instead Here for Blood demonstrates an impeccable sense of timing and pacing, where no incident is kept with for too long, and no scene hangs on for too long because somebody in the production was a afraid of ending a sentence instead of keeping it going (he wrote in a run-on sentence).

Unlike how one might probably imagine a Canadian movie to be, this is a decidedly, nay proudly, low-brow affair that puts a considerable amount of cleverness into being likeably dumb without ever becoming the nasty kind of low-brow that wants to bring back fascism. This is as fun as a movie full of decapitation, mutilation, squirting blood and a wrestler body-slamming a guy’s head to mush can be; it enjoys being that sort of thing, and will probably look at you funny if you complain about it being what it is. It’s too polite a film to feed naysayers to an ever hungry very old head, though. Probably.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Three Films Make A Post: Expose the corruption. Protect the hive.

The Beekeeper (2024): Somehow, for reasons only known to the Hollywood gods who keep good directors out of work, David Ayer still ends up with decent budgets for his movies. This Jason Statham vehicle is John Wick minus the style and the weirdness, with added bee metaphors (so many bee metaphors) and shows our hero boringly killing his way through the usual hordes of incompetent caricatures. There’s never a second where he appears actually threatened, which doesn’t exactly up the excitement ante, and the staging and filming of the action sequences is blandly competent without any sparks of visual or kinetic imagination.

The plot is silly, but never so silly it ever threatens to make the movie fun, and Ayer’s direction lacks style, visual imagination and character to a nearly disturbing degree. Bees and Jason Statham deserve better, as do people who want to actually be entertained by their dumb action movies.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023): On the positive side, The Beekeeper does at least have a vague idea of what its audience might expect of it, it’s just not terribly good at delivering it. This (first and only?) Kaijuverse streaming show as produced for Apple doesn’t, or rather, it appears to believe that what an audience wants from a show named after a secret giant monster hunting organisation are endless scenes of badly written soap operatics, mostly done by C&W style pretty young actors lacking the gravitas and actorly depth that might draw interest out of this nonsense.

Things tend to pick up whenever a monster appears or when the show spends time on flashbacks into the early years of Monarch, but most of its running time is wasted on moves that were old when Dallas made them. Apart from being clueless about what an audience may want from it, the show is also unlucky: take for example, the stunt casting of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt as the younger version of Kurt’s character. This sounds clever on paper but suffers from the younger Russell’s inability to act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Lord of Misrule (2023): It probably shows my skewed tastes that William Brent Bell’s critically drubbed folk horror movie is the one of these three pieces of media I’d actually recommend to anyone. It’s not that I disagree with the general gist of its critical reception: this is indeed a best of folk horror tropes compilation tape that has little of its own to add to the canon, and isn’t always great at connecting the tropes sensibly.

However, I happen to like these folk horror tropes, and am perfectly okay with the way Bell arranges them here, especially since the production design is derivative as hell, but also looks and feel pretty good. Thus, Bell manages to create at least a handful of decently creepy scenes for Tuppence Middleton to be dramatic in. Which to me makes for a decently good time.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Murder at Shijinso (2019)

aka Murder at the House of Death

Original title: 屍人荘の殺人

A university’s would-be great detective (Tomoya Nakamura) and his Watson (Ryunosuke Kamiki) are drawn into an actual murder mystery and more when actual girl detective Hiruko Kenzaki (Minami Hamabe) presses them into accompanying her to a dubious get-together of their University’s “Rock club” that’s taking place in a pretty impressive pension out in the boons close to a local rock festival.

In actuality, the rock club event is used as a feeding trough for older alumni to look for women in pretty damn toxically masculine way.

When a zombie outbreak occurs at the festival, the group – and a few other survivors they picked up at the festival - has to lock themselves inside the pension. Inside isn’t as safe as one would hope, for a mysterious series of seemingly impossible murders occurs that may have more to do with the shittiness of the male rock club people than a zombie apocalypse.

Having enjoyed the pretty incredible locked room/impossible crime but with zombies novel by Masahiro Imamura this is based on (published in English translation as “Death Among the Undead”), I found myself very disappointed with Hisashi Kimura’s adaptation. It’s not only that the adaptation doubles down on the weakest element of the novel – the Light Novel style characterisations right out of otaku central that just scream “I want to be adapted into a manga!” – it also changes a lot of details of its source in ways that are clearly meant to make the material faster paced and less talky. These changes do indeed sharpen the film’s pacing, but they also make the material less rich as a mystery and file off quite a few telling details that enrich the story emotionally and intellectually.

In consequence, the murders are mechanically less complex and mysterious, the background behind the killings and the killer’s character also become less complex and less compelling, and the handful of actual emotional beats don’t hit as well. The the film sacrifices everything that makes the book as fun and interesting as it is for a faster pace that isn’t the be all and end all in a somewhat traditional mystery like this anyway. Seeing these kinds of pointless changes in an adaptation is more than a little frustrating.

How this looks to someone who hasn’t read the novel, I obviously can’t speculate about.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Rififi (1955)

Original title: Du rififi chez les hommes

Tony (Jean Servais) has just gotten out of prison. He is now a bitter and at least half broken man, at least in part because his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) left him while he was inside and absconded with the loot of the heist he was in for to boot. After abusing Mado – who now has a new horrible boyfriend in form of gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici) – with a belt, Tony decides he’s going to go down in a blaze of glory. So he accepts the invitation of a buddy of his own young friend Jo (Carl Möhner), an Italian named – in a fit of deep originality – Mario (Robert Manuel), to help the younger men with a heist on a jewellery store. Instead of the smash and grab they had initially planned, though, Tony suggests they do something much bigger. Adding Italian safecracker Cesare (director Jules Dassin himself) to the team, they come up with a plan to get into the store’s rather impressive vault.

Thanks to excellent preparation and some cool professionalism during the job (imagine the opposite of Money Heist), the heist goes off without a hitch. The problems start afterwards, when Cesare, an inveterate champion of buying women who are otherwise out of his league, uses a piece of jewellery from the heist for his unhealthy hobby. Soon Grutter and his junkie brother Remi (Robert Hossein) are on our crew’s trail, and these men do not follow the handful of rules of criminal conduct even an abusive prick like Tony believes in.

There’s a reason why Jules Dassin’s Rififi is typically listed among the greatest and most influential heist movies – it’s pretty much a perfect example of the form, made by a filmmaker whose style to my eyes prefigures the hyper-realism of Scorsese and the detail-obsession of somebody like Michael Mann.

Quite a bit of the film takes place on actual grimy Parisian streets, but instead of mere documentary realism, Dassin’s eye for the often artfully artless looking shot, followed by the not at all artless looking next and often very dynamic (by mid 50s standards, not Michael Bay, obviously and fortunately) editing, turn these into an ideal of Grimy Parisian Streets that expresses the idea of the term just as much – one might suggest even better – than their actual reality.

Dassin’s ability to focus on the right details comes to the fore in the legendary, long, wordless heist sequence that produces great tension out of watching men at their (illegal) precision work. There’s a painstaking focus on detail in this sequence, as well as total trust in the audience’s ability to understand what’s going in it based on what it has seen in the preparation stages of the heist; both come together to create twenty minutes of incredible tension.

But even after that, Rififi isn’t through. At this point, you can expect a degree of slackening of tension in most heist movies – on the plot or the visual level – but this is not a film willing to stop and breathe for a moment. Dassin starts building tension again at once, this time, using quite a bit of the character building he has done in the first act to create the sling that’s going to throttle the characters, and goes through a series of suspenseful sequences that are just as tightly focussed and brilliantly conceived as the heist. This being a French movie, the characters’ doom does not feel like a moral judgement on them (in fact, modern sensibilities could argue that Tony’s abusive relationship with Mado could use a bit more of a moral judgement from the film), but as a result of the way the world works for any of us.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Film of the Year”

Fallen Leaves aka Kuolleet lehdet (2023): I’m not quite as enthused about this Aki Kaurismäki film as most professional critics seem to be, and would prefer his previous two movies to this romance with difficulties, but then, I always found that Kaurismäki’s directing style, his use of Brechtian/Mamet-type acting, his love for stiffly posing characters in the frame, works better in his more comedic films. Here, where humour is still there and accounted for but really not at the centre of attention, the conscious distancing and stiffness gets a bit in the way for me, overemphasising concepts in favour of characters in what is for all sense and purpose actually a character piece.

This doesn’t mean I don’t see this as a worthwhile or artfully made film. It’s just not one I’m burning to revisit soon.

Return to Seoul aka Retour à Séoul (2022): Staying with arthouse favourites that didn’t quite connect with me, I found Davy Chou’s years-spanning tale of a French woman (Park Ji-min) with Korean birthparents repeatedly returning to Korea often visually stunning, but also rather frustrating in its unwillingness to connect some dots about its main character Freddie for the audience. Where mainstream films tend to overexposit and feel the need to explain every damn thing in them, Chou goes the other way, never expositing or explaining, even when a bit of a hint or two might provide a deeper understanding of Freddie. As it stands, her behaviour often feels random and a bit disconnected from what we know about her, her trauma an abstract thing rather than one to empathize with.

And yes, yes, I get it, this does of course mirror Freddie’s lack of deeper connection to the people and the world around her, as caused by her issues, but that doesn’t mean it is a satisfying way to go for a movie; it’s more an abstractly interesting one, and I’m not terribly interested in the abstract in my film watching experience. I can feel disconnected very well on my own, thank you very much.

Mad Fate aka 命案 (2023): On the other hand, I did connect with this complicated film about the horrors of destiny, the weight of grief, and the nastiness of coincidence/the gods, rather a lot more than with the first two in this entry. It’s not as if director Cheang Pou-Soi is out to make anything easy for his audience. His characters – including deeply disturbing performances by Gordon Lam Ka-Tung and Yeung Lok-Man – are certainly not what you’d normally call “relatable”, while the plot is as finicky as you can expect from a film where the destructive force of destiny hangs over the characters like a badly-humoured cat. The whole affair has a somewhat curious disposition as well,where it finds a degree of hope in a manner bound to make you uncomfortable.

Yet there’s a drive to push the audience into the film’s world Return to Seoul only has visually, Fallen Leaves not at all, and a willingness to let the audience into the head of the characters as well as its ideas the other two films of this entry lack, and that really makes this something special.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1992)

Original title: インスマスを覆う影 Insumasu o ouu Kage

In a version of Japan where places like Innsmouth, Arkham and Kingsport are a train ride away from Tokyo, newly minted travel-journalist and photographer Hirata (Shiro Sano) develops a curious obsession with visiting the small coastal town of Innsmouth. Innsmouth’s pull on him seems to be connected to vague childhood memories and a vision of a rather fishperson-like looking gentleman.

Once Hirata arrives there, Innsmouth turns out to be a former rich fishing town that has somewhat come down. Most of its buildings appear closed and dilapidated. Apart from a female cab and delivery driver (Kimie Shingyoji) from Arkham whose outfit (nobody here seems to ever change their clothes) screams early 90s, the town’s population is less than friendly. Their food seems to consist of fish that’s not quite dead yet, and there are very peculiar ceremonies held on the beach. Still, Hirata persists in poking around town and making photos – there’s just something about the town he can’t quite grasp that draws him in ever further, yet that also seems to influence him for the worse, bringing on a desperate and violent side we didn’t get to see when he was still in Tokyo.

On the plus side, there’s a sexually aggressive lady in a kimono (Michiko Kawai) strolling around town for Hirata to fool around with.

If you keep in mind its nature as a sixty minute Japanese TV movie from the early 90s and can cope with the cheap look of the cinematography that comes with that, Chiaki Konaka’s is surprisingly clever adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”. There are, of course, a lot of changes, but most of these make sense for the film’s place, time, and budgetary constraints. Olmstead’s flight from Innsmouth as written in Lovecraft, the film simply couldn’t bring on screen in any decent way, and the long expositional scenes of Zadok Allen would either mean a guy talking at the audience for large swathes of the movie or flashbacks the film again simply couldn’t afford.

Thus, putting a stronger emphasis on Olmstead’s/Hirata’s disturbing familial connections and the horrors of heritage and identity makes a lot of sense, while keeping fully with Lovecraft’s interests. It also opens up avenues for horror and suspense sequences the film can afford, while also providing ample opportunity for building up a somewhat creepy mood. Konaka – who has predominantly worked as a writer for much if his career – turns out to be rather good at doing this with the simple sets much of the film takes place in, bathing them in the classical colours of weirdness – red and green – whenever something mildly creepy happens, and making up for the lack of make-ups effects that would work in dialogue scenes by filming most of the townies in expressionist half-shadow.

There are some pretty neat Deep One masks, mind you, and they are sculpted with what looks a degree of love and care – they are just not the kind of thing you’d put front and centre, or let the audience’s eyes linger on for too long.

Thanks to Konaka’s direction, and his clever interpretation of what this Lovecraft tale is all about (turns out, you can leave the whole icky fear of “miscegenation” out and still keep rather a lot of Innsmouth intact), this version of Innsmouth is much better than you’d expect given its circumstances. There’s a thematic coherence that doesn’t even break down when the plotting becomes a bit loose in the end. For much of its running time, Insumasu is dominated by the feeling of watching a guy stumble through a situation he can’t quite comprehend, reacting to it in ways he can’t quite understand either that does stand an adaptation of this particular novella in very good stead.

It also ends on little bit of flip-book magic that most certainly wasn’t in Lovecraft but is such a clever little moment, I found it impossible not to love the film for it alone.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

River (2023)

Original title: Ribâ, nagarenaide yo

A small, traditional Japanese mountain inn situated right next to a river and its surroundings are suddenly trapped in a time loop. While the characters keep a continuous consciousness and remember everything that happened in earlier loops, the world around them and the position and state of their bodies are reset every two minutes. We experience this through the perspective of Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), a young woman working at the inn. The staff do their best to keep the peculiar situation calm as if keeping guests from losing it were just another part of the horrors of working in the service industry to be survived through politeness and gritting one’s teeth.

Obviously, the situation escalates, because juggling eccentric guests and private feelings isn’t easy even outside of a time loop.

Junta Yamaguchi follows up his lovely, charming time travel variation Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, with this lovely and charming time loop variation again focussed on two minutes, again scripted by Makoto Ueda (who also has form in other time travel adjacent media).

In the beginning the film charms through the simple and focussed manner in which it treats its basic plot, the surehanded escalation of events and loss of nerves of its characters. Once the point is reached where it appears proceedings are just one step ahead of turning into outright horror or splatter, Yamaguchi slows it down simply by letting Mikoto turn in a different direction after a loop has reset, stepping into a quieter, more quietly emotional part of the plot, until we get a humorous action-ish finale.

Visually, Yamaguchi makes clever use of repeating camera angles and set-ups. We always start a loop on the same shot of Mikoto standing by the river, and follow her into the inn with the same shot from behind, to only then encounter the newest escalation with changes to the staging and framing of what follows. The film diverges from this very purposefully at certain points to signal larger changes in the emotional quality of what’s happening and the development of the plot. This does feed into – represents, really -  the film’s main thematic argument – the human need for change even in the sort of quiet and calm one might want to stay in forever. Which could sound a bit like something out of an astrology book or the worst kind of pop psychology, but is here, embedded in quirky shenanigans, time travel and time loop tropes, and some sweet quiet moments, perfectly convincing.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Detectorists (2014-2017;2022)

Friends Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) are living in a small town in Essex. These gents have a proper Hobby (the capital letter is very much as it is treated in the series and their lives): they are detectorists, wandering fields with their metal detectors looking to unearth bits of the past that hopefully go beyond buttons and matchbox cars. Whenever they aren’t doing that, they are bumbling through their private lives. At the start of the series, Andy’s doing temp work to finance his archaeology degree and going through growing pains in the relationship with his long-term girlfriend Becky (Rachael Stirling). Those problems are mostly caused by him being a bit of a coward and the kind of dreamer who seldom does something about his dreams. At the same time Lance continues to pine after his horrible ex-wife (Lucy Benjamin). These things will change during the course of the series in a quiet tale of not just a male friendship but also late-blooming growing-up of the kind that doesn’t end up with anyone becoming something horrible like a banker, nor with giving up on childish things like being a detectorist. Also involved are the misadventures of the metal detecting club the two friends are members of, and the breath of buried history – even the Grail (the show’s just that British).

Mackenzie Crook, who not only acts but also writes and directs this wonderful BBC show whose until now final breath has been a pretty fantastic Christmas special in 2022, is apparently a detectorist in real life, which provides the show with a feeling of authenticity even when it goes through what sometimes can be rather standard comedy plots. There’s an idea of how to many people’s eyes rather silly hobbies – like being a detectorist, like going on endlessly about movies and TV on a blog – have the value of quiet, quotidian joy for the people involved in them, bringing with them moments of companionship and calm, as well as things to get unnecessarily but genuinely excited about. Crook generally portrays this and his characters’ foibles and weaknesses with a smile and sympathy, instead of the fist of judgement that’s so au fait these days. It’s not that he doesn’t understand or treat Andy’s and Lance’s failures and weaknesses as such, or seeks to excuse them, it just understands them as a part of how these people are, and not all that any given person is, and thus treats nearly everyone kindly. Generally, the series always seems to root for anyone to do better next time; they often do.

Tonally, Detectorists treats plots and beats that could absolutely make the basis for a minor soap opera with the unhurried patience of Andy and Lance walking a field before it is pub time. It never pretends the things that loom large and dramatically over anyone’s lives aren’t terrible, or painful, or wonderful, and being a comedy it is also never going to ignore them as an excuse for a joke, but it isn’t wont to dramatic gestures. Again, quietness and kindness are often at the centre of the show’s philosophy.

Below all this sits a meditation on a complicated idea of Englishness, informed not by bizarre things like bloodlines or skin colour but by the simple act of living and being in a certain place and relating to it, as well as a fascination with the small buried pieces of the past the protagonists look so patiently, sometimes bored, for. Repeatedly, the series includes bits and bobs of English folklore and culture, relates them to history as well as the present of the characters, never pressing too heavily for dramatic parallels (this simply isn’t that kind of show), but treating these things as the buried treasure and hidden connections they are for these characters. There’s a romantic longing here, not for reliving the past but for a way to be with the past, living one’s life with an acknowledgement of what’s come before. And, with the way Andy and Lance find the treasures of the past they do find, also a clear idea of the ironies of life.

That the series is also nearly always very funny indeed nearly feels like a bonus there.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Fierce Cop (2022)

Original title: 烈探

Super cop Zhang Tu (Richie Ren) is a third generation Chinese policeman in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. Zhang is trying his best as a single dad, and is certainly doing pretty well by movie cop standards. Alas, when he arrests the rapist idiot son of a drug and slave trade lord, said lord kidnaps Zhang’s son and brings him over the boarder into another unnamed country that isn’t supposed to be Thailand at all, no sir.

Our hero does of course take off in pursuit where his colleagues can’t help him – though his boss is actually as helpful as he can be, in what is a confusing twist for a movie about an angry cop. Zhang is, however, assisted by one of the women (Chen Yao) the bad guys ferry back and forth over various boarders to work in nightclubs.

In fact, he already knows her from the accidental nightclub raid and rapist son arrest, which does set up the two pieces of character development in the movie – her regaining her courage, and Zhang learning that moral uppitiness isn’t a fair reaction to sex workers.

On the character front, there really is very little else worth mentioning going on here. This already brings us to the main problem with Chen Tai-Li’s Fierce Cop – a script that’s really not very good at finding appropriate connective tissue between action sequences, and goes for some kind of mildly socially conscious melodrama that never hits because the material is so underwritten. The script is also cursed with one of the banes of my movie existence – flashbacks to scenes that happened about ten minutes earlier, suggesting filmmakers that believe their audience to have the memories of house flies. Also pretty bad is Fierce Cop’s insane unwillingness to even attempt to plot properly. Instead is uses coincidence as the main driving force of much of its plot. In an interesting turn of events, the film also goes out of its way to make its ending uniquely unsatisfying for reasons of what I can only assume is sheer laziness, first setting up the kind of anti-climax that undermines the impact of the pretty damn great climactic fight, to then eventually trundle into a happy end of sheer, idiotic coincidence, because, to speak with the movie “good things happen to good people”. To which one might also reply, “on what planet?”.

All of this is particularly irritating since the action scenes – action directed and most probably choreographed by Kenji Tanigaki - are genuinely great, full of clever uses of improvised weaponry, and a genuine feel of physical impact. Ren seems fully engaged in the action, showing screen fighting skills I can’t remember him having displayed before, though I could be wrong there. There’s an effective rawness to the action but also enough imagination to never let it devolve into “realistic” fighting.

In fact, the fight scenes are so good, it’s worth it wading through the rest of the film for them.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Journey to the West (2021/3)

Original title: 宇宙探索编辑部

Tang Zhijun (Yang Haoyu) has spent his life hunting after UFO sightings and alien encounters, editing the magazine “Universe Exploration” about his obsessions. He’s never encountered anything extra-terrestrial, however, and public interest in his magazine has hit rock bottom. Today, a couple of years after the death by suicide of his daughter, Tang is sad and broken man, looking for alien contact in the static on his TV and trying to pay the heating bills of the magazine’s tiny office by holding lectures about UFOs in a psychiatric hospital.

After a sponsorship deal falls through under the kind of bizarre circumstances that appear to be part and parcel for Tang’s life, he encounters a video featuring strange aerial phenomena shot somewhere in Sichuan in Southwestern China. Tang decides to grab what’s left of his staff and go on one last big attempt at finding what he so desperately needs to believe in. It will be quite the odyssey.

Premiered in 2021, but only finding actual release a couple of years later, this first feature film directed by Kong Dashan is an astonishing thing. Stylistically, this begins with the look and tone of a fake documentary of the fly-on-the-wall, no commentary by the filmmakers type – including characters speaking directly to the camera in an interview setting - but one that grows increasingly peculiar and uses an increasing amount of visual and editing techniques of dramatic filmmaking, until it simply stops with the documentary approach altogether. This shouldn’t really work at all, or at least feel like a stark directorial imposition on the audience, but in Journey, these kinds of decisions feel like organic growth instead.

This sort of thing is absolutely programmatic for the film as a whole. Its wild mix of often very broad comedy, allusions to the Chinese literary classic it shares its English title with, in-jokes, moments of peculiarity that compare in their individual strangeness with somebody like Lynch (but have a very different emotional and intellectual resonance), science fiction, walking-based road movie, slow cinema with a touching movie about grief should not work at all. Instead of producing a series of tonally unrelated scenes, however, Kong manages to present all these strange idiosyncrasies in tone and style as parts that add up to an actual whole that expresses the feelings of a lost sense of wonder, loss of love and grief from loss that have nearly broken Tang much clearer than any more straightforward treatment could. Simply because lives, Tang’s, as well as those of the people he encounters and infuriates – and the audience’s - are this way, full of disparate elements that still become wholes in our minds. Seen from that perspective, the idiosyncrasies aren’t of course idiosyncrasies anymore, but actually a brilliant way to talk about some of our shared experiences in non-obvious ways, even though most of us – I presume – do not travel westwards to look for aliens.

Interesting for this old friend of the cosmicist, there’s also a bit of cosmicism in here, though the kinder, friendlier version of the philosophy that finds a bit of sadness and fear but also a sense of wonder that borders on joy in our own smallness in the universe. So more Clarke than Lovecraft. Seen from a certain direction, the film can be read as being about Tang’s journey from a softer, enthusiastic cosmicism through the harsher one, to a new, wiser version of it as much as it can be about him finally coming out at the other end of grief or about him learning to give up on dreams that have turned to poison for him.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

PSA: Changes

Dear imaginary readers, for real life reasons, you can expect fewer write-ups on here for the foreseeable future. I hope I'll be able to manage a still pretty obsessive three movie posts a week, but we'll see how it goes.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Where the Devil Roams (2023)

A family consisting of Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) work as a very minor sideshow act on the carny circuit during a stylized version of the depression. For Maggie and Seven, their act isn’t really the point of their lives, but only an official reason to travel. In truth, they are serial killers, roaming the backroads, murdering mostly pretty nasty customers (and their families, squeamish, they are not). Maggie takes on the active part during the murders, because Seven, traumatized during the Great War, crumbles at the sight of blood. Eve just makes photos of the corpses.

Maggie believes there might be a future for Eve in stage acts instead of acts of murder, for while the young woman can’t speak, she sings in a very post-Depression era manner. In their way, the family appear to live an at least satisfying and loving life, if you overlook the murders.

That is, until one of their little murder sprees goes wrong. Seeing her family ripped, well, hacked, apart by victims fighting back, Eve turns to the Devil’s magic to save them.

By now, the Adams Family – mother Toby Poser, father John Adams, and daughter Zelda Adams – have really found their stride as filmmakers. There’s a very independent kind of individuality to their filmmaking that’s carried by high technical chops, and a love for the gothic and macabre as filtered through the last few decades of US alternative culture.

In truth, this should look and feel like a Rob Zombie movie – the filmmakers certainly appear to share some of the same aesthetic fascinations – but where Zombie’s movies always feel like products of a man who doesn’t have the talent or vision to turn the things he loves into worthwhile art (or entertainment), this family really manages to create a world of their own imagining on far less money.

There’s a growing sense of ambition to the family’s films, and Where the Devil Roams with its period setting, a larger canvas of locations and even some flashbacks to the Great War continues that trend. This is never an attempt to actually recreate the period, or a real carnival of the era – which would be doomed to failure on the budget - but instead turns the idea of the Depression and what a carny of the time might have felt like into an aesthetic that can then be combined with the other visual hallmarks of Adams/Poser movies.

In pacing, this is a calm and quiet film that knows when to increase its tempo and never overstays any idea’s welcome. The filmmaking is excellent, some of it clearly influenced by still photography and perhaps painting, but while the film does love tableaux and strictly composed shots, it isn’t static. Instead, everything on screen seems beholden to the very conscious creation of very specifically thought through moods and atmospheres of the macabre, the sad, and the grotesque.

Despite all of the film being deeply American, this doesn’t just remind me of some of the best regional filmmaking of the 70s from the US, where sometimes strong aesthetic ideas won out over narrative or budgetary constraints much more than is usual in North American art, but also of the great visual stylists of European fantastic cinema. This never actually looks like Rollin or Franco, but the film’s commitment to a personal aesthetic does suggest kindred spirits.

Of course, if you’re looking for a straightforward movie about serial killing carnies, this won’t make you happy at all. Butt then, I don’t think Where the Devil Roams wants to be that movie.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

In short: Bullet Train (2022)

Half a dozen characters of the violent criminal persuasion converge on the same bullet train in Japan. Their diverse missions turn out to have rather more connective tissue than they are first led to believe, so it’s a good time to team up and betray or murder one another in various, changing constellations, while the laws of physics turn increasingly optional.

One could snark about how few Japanese people seem to populate the criminal underworld of the Japan of David Leitch’s adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka that features rather less white people. But then, I find it difficult to argue with a film that casts Brad Pitt as the Big Lebowski of killers, and has quite as much fun pitting him and the other comical grotesqueries populating the film against each other as this one has.

Like most of Leitch’s other films, this wants to be action cinema as POP! (a curiously British feeling idea of POP! for a guy from Wisconsin to boot); unlike most of Leitch’s other films, it actually achieves this goal with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm that I can hardly read as anything but a pure joy at creating cinema that’s absolutely free from all pressures to be serious and thereby can feel curiously freeing and subversive. Bullet Train clearly knows all the rules of character building and plot structure, when and how a film is supposed to use flashbacks, how much an action scene is allowed to break the laws of physics and logic. Having realized them, it then goes about very consciously breaking all of them in clever (sometimes clever-dumb) ways that’ll either leave an audience cheering, giggling madly, or throwing tomatoes at the screen. I found myself on the side of the gigglers here, more than a bit astonished about how seeming randomness can feel free and freeing when applied with as much thought as it is here.