"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Monk Comes Down the Mountain

Chen Kaige is an acclaimed Chinese filmmaker I have no familiarity with. Too classy for me, I guess. Now I finally watched one, but not one of his famous ones from the ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s his 14th film, a straight up kung fu movie from 2015 called MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. And the reason is because it’s based on a book by Xu Haofeng, who wrote Wong Kar Wai’s THE GRANDMASTER and directed THE SWORD IDENTITY, JUDGE ARCHER and THE FINAL MASTER. I adore his style and his themes and his two most recent (THE HIDDEN SWORD and 100 YARDS) aren’t available here yet, so I’ll take what I can get.

This is a good one but totally different from those other movies I mentioned. The ones Xu directs have a very artful economy and restraint to them, the compositions and camera movements are often very classical, the fighting styles are uniquely straightforward, often based around quick, simple movements rather than flying around all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, obviously I love flying around all over the place, but I like how distinct this other approach is.

MONK COMES DOWN THE MOUNTAIN is not that. Nor is it a TV movie starring Tony Shalhoub. It’s a big show-offy kung fu fantasy, with lots of digital FX, some of them pretty goofy. It was released in 3D Imax, and (unlike American movies, which are too cowardly to do 3D stuff in 3D movies) you can tell. And it’s often comedic in a broad, muggy kind of way. Xu’s movies tend to have a much dryer humor. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 25th, 2024 | 3 Comments »

Nyad

I didn’t know what a NYAD was, but it’s the last name of a real life person, Diana Nyad, a marathon swimmer who broke a bunch of distance records in the ‘70s and in 1978 tried to swim from Havana to Key West. She made it about 76 miles in 42 hours but had to quit.

Now it’s 2010, she’s played by Annette Bening (MARS ATTACKS!), she’s been retired since her 30th birthday, and she’s just hitting her 60th. She spends her time with Bonnie (Jodie Foster, HOTEL ARTEMIS), they seem like a couple at first, but they’re just best friends. Quirky lesbian pals. Since she’s been angsty about aging, Bonnie convinces her to get back into exercise, and she swims for the first time in years. That goes well, so she announces out of the blue that she’s going to try the Cuba swim again. Bonnie is kinda like jesus christ lady you cannot be serious and then somehow agrees to be her coach. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 24th, 2024 | 7 Comments »

Poor Things

After THE FAVOURITE gave Yorgos Lanthimos success, acclaim and a game lead actress on a bigger budget than his earlier films, the director aimed those resources at a project he’d been trying to do since 2009: an adaptation of the 1992 novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by Alasdair Gray. While I’ve read that the novel is set in a realistic Victorian London, Lanthimos has turned it into a colorful (and sometimes black-and-white) gothic cartoon world, with shades of Tim Burton and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, maybe a little BABE: PIG IN THE CITY, while retaining his cock-eyed view, dark humor and fascination with chaotic people upending social mores. POOR THINGS was nominated for Oscars for best picture, director, adapted screenplay, actress, supporting actor, makeup, music, costume design, cinematography, editing and production design this morning because they heard I was posting my review today and wanted to try to capitalize on that. I’ll allow it. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 23rd, 2024 | 45 Comments »

Anatomy of a Fall/American Fiction

Awards Season Catchup Double Feature: ANATOMY OF A FALL and AMERICAN FICTION

There’s a specialized little genre of music I love – modern funk bands doing covers of classic hip hop songs. It’s just a best of both worlds kind of situation, combining my two favorite types of music, and bringing things full circle in a way. So much of hip hop comes from curating and collaging the best parts of old funk songs, and now we’ve got new funk bands curating the best hip hop songs and filtering the sound through their instruments. Many of them also have a working knowledge of the sampled works, covering them as well or mixing them with a song that sampled them. That happens on the two albums of Wu-Tang Clan covers by El Michels Affair, as well as Brownout’s Public Enemy tribute Fear of a Brown Planet. I also have this record called Expansions by the German group Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band where they cover Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” but also “Space,” Galt MacDermot’s song famously sampled in “Woo Ha” by Busta Rhymes. And they play them with steel drums! So I immediately recognized their cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” when it started playing at the beginning of the Palme d’or winning French legal drama ANATOMY OF A FALL (Anatomie d’une chute), and I was surprised. I was even more surprised when it turned out to be an important part of the story, played about as much as “Fight the Power” is in DO THE RIGHT THING. Wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years, even with hints. I hope they play it every time it’s up for anything at the Oscars or any of those. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 22nd, 2024 | 5 Comments »

One More Shot

Well, Scott Adkins has another franchise. ONE MORE SHOT is the new sequel to ONE SHOT, director James Nunn’s 2021 siege thriller shot in ROPE style (simulated to look like one continuous shot). The first film is really well made, with surprisingly good drama and performances, in addition to the cleverly planned camera moves and action. Many fans ranked it among Adkins’ best, but it’s a movie where he mostly just uses guns and never does a single flying kick, so I could not be a party to that. It also has a bit of a War On Terror mindset that I wasn’t too excited about. But it’s good.

Adkins, Nunn, and co-writer Jamie Russell have reunited for the sequel, which not only avoids those things I complained about, but is just a bigger and more novel action movie anyway. While the first was set at a CIA black site similar to the location of over 432,000 other military action movies since the George W. Bush administration, this one is set at an evacuated airport. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 18th, 2024 | 6 Comments »

Ferrari

My favorite Michael Mann Mode (MMM) is crime movie mode. Or guy chasing another guy mode. Moody guy looking out a window talking to another guy across the city mode. The mode you can feel coming in the air tonight, oh lord.

FERRARI is obviously not that mode. It’s biopic mode, I’ve got a 496-page biography to recommend to you mode, I’ve been obsessed with this guy for years and hopefully I can articulate some of the reasons why plus some side info about car engines and racing teams mode, Ferrari started manufacturing in 1947 and the events depicted here take place in 1957 but we’ll have some text at the end explaining what happened to everybody later mode. Not my favorite MMM, no, but the nice thing about his modes is that he’s good at all of them. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 17th, 2024 | 5 Comments »

The Assistant/The Royal Hotel

I saw this movie THE ROYAL HOTEL that came out on video last week, and I really liked it, so I watched the previous one by director Kitty Green, and that was even better. Let me tell you about them in this Kitty Green/Julia Garner Stressful Job Double Feature, presented in order of release.

THE ASSISTANT (2019) chronicles one day on the job for Jane (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE), a junior assistant at a production company in New York City. It has a really engrossing fly-on-the-wall feel because it’s all presented very naturalistically, avoiding cinematic shortcuts, letting you piece together what’s happening instead of directly telling you. A more Hollywood version might have her narrating at the beginning about what a big deal her boss is, with a montage of camera flashes on a red carpet, fake magazine covers, she talks about dreaming of a dream job like this and wryly jokes about “What could possibly go wrong?” or whatever.

THE ASSISTANT doesn’t believe in that shit. It knows not to describe its world to us, but to just create it and drop us into it. I didn’t even know that her job was movie-related at first, it never tells us the name of the company, never lets us see the hot shit producer everyone walks on eggshells around or tells us his name. It kinda feels like we’re shadowing Jane for a day and we know better than to ask about that stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 16th, 2024 | 3 Comments »

The Beekeeper

THE BEEKEEPER is a proudly absurd new Jason Statham vehicle where he plays a humble beekeeper – a guy who cultivates beehives and collects honey. But also he’s retired from being another type of Beekeeper – an operative for a secret organization who kill bad guys and use bee, hive and queen metaphors to describe their role in protecting civilization. (Not puns, though, sadly.) It has a good pedigree as far as these things go – the director is David Ayer (HARSH TIMES, STREET KINGS, SABOTAGE, FURY, SUICIDE SQUAD) and the writer is Kurt Wimmer (DOUBLE TROUBLE, EQUILIBRIUM, ULTRAVIOLET, director of ONE TOUGH BASTARD). Not that you really need that information. Honestly if you’re not sold on “Jason Statham plays an asskicking beekeeper” alone I don’t know what your deal is. But also I’m kinda glad because I wrote a whole review, I hope you will read it.

I’m not the first to note that this is a very January movie, that month dismissed as a dumping ground, which really means it’s a good time to release a certain type of mid-budget, low expectations studio action movie I dig. January releases of the last decade include TAKEN 3, WILD CARD, THE COMMUTER, PROUD MARY, DEN OF THIEVES, THE RHYTHM SECTION, THE MARKSMAN, and PLANE. Some of these I saw on video, some I saw in the theater, probly at a show starting between 12:50 and 1:30, with less than five other people in the theater, all men, all by themselves. That’s the natural state of this type of movie, in my experience.

THE BEEKEEPER takes the tradition of the January-ass action movie a little further. It’s not elevated January, but maybe January+. It looked so promising my wife wanted to see it too, so we went to a 7:30 pm show on the six story tall, 80’ wide Imax screen in the Science Center. With no one else in the theater. It was beautiful. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 15th, 2024 | 22 Comments »

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

Man, it’s too bad. AQUAMAN was the wackadoo James Wan super hero movie that somehow won over skeptical audiences and literally made a billion dollars. It was set up in a couple other DC Comics movies, so it’s technically connected to them, but it takes place off in its own weirdo fantasy world where people ride giant seahorses and can talk underwater. If any modern super hero movie was gonna get a sequel with BATMAN RETURNS or BLADE II type boldness, it should’ve been this one. Didn’t quite turn out that way, I’m afraid. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 11th, 2024 | 23 Comments »

Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell

LONE WOLF AND CUB: WHITE HEAVEN IN HELL is the final film in the LONE WOLF AND CUB series – six films released between 1972 and 1974. It has the same writer of the previous one, Tusutomu Nakamura, but a director who’s new to the series, Yoshiyuki Kuroda (THE GREAT YOKAI WAR).

This is a good one to watch in winter because, as poetically described in the title, a bunch of it takes place in the snow. It opens with our deadly assassin papa and child, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) and Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa), skiing their weapon-filled babycart down a mountain. Must be a tall one because time passes, the sky turns dark, Ogami’s carrying a torch. Then the screen turns completely white and you see their silhouettes slowly become visible in the distance, like the opening of FARGO. And come to think of it I’m surprised this babycart doesn’t have a built in woodchipper. It has just about everything else you could need. Maybe it does and we just don’t see him use it. (read the rest of this shit…)

January 10th, 2024 | 9 Comments »

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