Sinners
SINNERS is the first original story from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Not that it matters. After the true story of FRUITVALE STATION he added to fictional worlds and characters created by other people – CREED, BLACK PANTHER and BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER – but he sure seemed like a visionary to me. Working in such worn-out modern formats as “the legacy sequel” and “the MCU” didn’t stop him from constructing crowd-pleasing but deeply personal movies that transcend those categories.
So shit yeah I was excited for him to do a vampire movie. Say no more.
It’s set in the Mississippi Delta, 1932. After some years of infamy working for Al Capone in Chicago, “the Smokestack Twins,” Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore have returned to their home town of Clarksdale. Both are played by Michael B. Jordan (WITHOUT REMORSE), and they’re introduced passing a cigarette back and forth. Later one tosses his knife for the other to stab a rattlesnake through the throat with. After that they’re often separated, but the illusion has been established seamlessly.
I like that it takes its time getting to the vampires, instead making me really invested in the twins’ plan to set up a new juke joint (with the generic name “The Juke”) in one day. They buy an old saw mill from a very iffy white man (David Maldonado, CAT RUN 2), then split up and go around to people with the resources and talents they need, friends from way back who seem a little bitter or suspicious and hesitate before they see how much it pays but still seem to love them. Family, basically. Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller, HOMEFRONT), for example, just wants to stay picking cotton on the field he share crops, but seems very happy once he’s there watching the door. (read the rest of this shit…)
O’Dessa
O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to SHREDDER ORPHEUS and SIX STRING SAMURAI, so I support it.
An apocalypse has happened. Something called plasma (a rainbow colored oil-like substance) has poisoned the earth. But people still have farms and stuff. O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, FEAR STREET PARTs TWO and THREE) is a young woman who lives on one with her mother Calliope (Bree Elrod, RED ROCKET). She has a guitar made of junk and, like Pearl but not psychotic, she’s lonely enough to perform for a scarecrow.
Calliope discourages O’Dessa’s musical ambitions, because O’Dessa’s father Vergil (Pokey LaFarge, THE LONE RANGER) and five generations before him were what they call “ramblers.” Vergil took off one day to travel around playing music, never to return. Some deadbeat shit right there, but sounds amazing to O’Dessa, a regular pre-aunt-and-uncle-being-burned-alive Luke Skywalker. (read the rest of this shit…)
Dark Skies
Recently I rewatched PRIEST (2011) for a podcast – I’ll link to it when the episode goes up. Do you remember that movie, though? Few do, but it’s one I really like, a post-apocalyptic vampire western action movie based on a Korean comic book. The director was Scott Stewart, a visual FX veteran (MARS ATTACKS!, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, THE HOST, RED CLIFF, co-founder of The Orphanage) who broke into directing with the weird angel-related action-horror movie LEGION (2010). Since then he’s directed the pilot for a TV continuation of LEGION called Dominion and a segment of the anthology HOLIDAYS, but only one full length feature: the close encounter movie DARK SKIES (2013). (I almost called it a UFO movie, but that’s not accurate, because we never see a space ship.)
This is the story of a middle class suburban family, the Barretts – real estate agent mother Lacy (Keri Russell, HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID), trying-to-find-a-new-job father Daniel (Josh Hamilton, MAESTRO), teenage son Jesse (Dakota Goyo, DEFENDOR, REAL STEEL) and younger brother Sammy (Kadan Rockett, “Mini Howie Mandel,” America’s Got Talent). They all have their normal human difficulties they’re going through and then one night Lacy gets up and finds the kitchen completely trashed, like an animal got in. Then another night she finds all the objects in the kitchen perfectly stacked and balanced, like a brilliant installation artist got in. And then all the family photos disappear, like a… I don’t know. Like something weird is going on here.
Increasingly bizarre things happen and what else can they do but in the moment be horrified by the inexplicability then in the sunlight the next day try to treat it like a normal problem with a normal way to deal with it. They talk to the cops, re-up their lapsed security system, add cameras. Surely something will work. (read the rest of this shit…)
Urban Vengeance
URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s URBAN JUSTICE, is a D.I.Y. skateboard action movie I stumbled across on Tubi. The art looked old but the release year was listed as 2024, and I got curious. Sometimes these things you gotta watch for a bit to get an idea if they’re even gonna be watchable at all, but this one I knew pretty immediately I would keep watching because the hero, Jack Urban (Will Martin), is riding his skateboard through an L.A. River type cement ditch called “Skate River” when a guy wheelies in on a motorcycle firing an uzi at him. Jack ducks under a low tunnel, the motorcycle somehow explodes into a fireball behind him, there’s a distorted guitar strum, Jack turns to grimly survey the damage and then skates off into the title sequence powered by retro synth arpeggios (score by Derlis A. González). Off to a great start.
Jack is supposed to be a teenager, and Martin looks like he could actually be one, but he’s also the writer and director of the film. On his websight he calls the movie “an homage to cheesy skateboarding dramas of the ‘80s such as GLEAMING THE CUBE and THRASHIN’,” but thankfully there is no winking or parodying. It comes across as a serious attempt at a CLASS OF 1984 world-gone-insane youth movie, with a sprinkling of DEADBEAT AT DAWN rawness.
How To Blow Up a Pipeline
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
I was a little thrown off by the opening, because it didn’t seem like the raw, authentic approach I had pictured. The filmatism is trying to make these twentysomethings rigging the security cameras at their maid jobs look like HACKERS meets OCEAN’S ELEVEN. And I was not buying this disparate team we see coming together – two messy punk rock kids (Kristine Froseth [THE ASSISTANT] and Lukas Gage [the villain the younger bouncer from the ROAD HOUSE remake]), one rugged camo-hat-wearing redneck (Jake Weary, MESSAGE FROM THE KING), etc. – how would they have gotten together? But it’s immediately thrilling with its blunt sense of purpose, its 16mm grain (cinematographer: Tehillah De Castro) and its un-ostentatious score by Gavin Brivik (The Pitt), with synths looping over beats banged out on oil drums. And though there will be scenes here and there that don’t ring true (like a cartoonish documentary director [Sam Quinn, JANE GOT A GUN] who says all the worst things to interview subjects in his one scene) it turns out to mostly play closer to “this must be what it would really be like” than just fun Hollywood bullshit. (read the rest of this shit…)
G20
G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an AIR-FORCE-ONE-in-a-hotel. Presidential offshoots of DIE HARD are pretty much a sub-subgenre now with WHITE HOUSE DOWN and OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and this in the books. But this is the type where the president is ex-military and is the indisputable action lead, and the only one where she’s played by Academy Award winner Viola Davis. THE WOMAN KING showed us Davis could have moves, everything else showed us she has the gravitas to play a formidable world leader, and it’s fun to watch her do both of those things at the same time.
Though this went straight to the Amazon Product Supply Corporation’s television buffering service it’s one of the ones they do every once in a while where they advertise it as if hoping a bunch of people will know it exists. It has good production values, seems like a professionally made movie, could probly be released in theaters, but luckily it wasn’t because it is about exactly good enough to mildly enjoy while on your couch and almost completely forget before you can figure out how to get it to continue playing the credits instead of showing you a bunch of other shit that you don’t want to see. Not that you really need to experience the credits but you’re not a savage, you would leave them on if the fucking thing would let you. (read the rest of this shit…)
Memoir of a Snail
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook, PREDESTINATION) is a human, not a snail, but she does wear a snail hat. She’s an odd kid and an outcast, made fun of for her cleft lip, and only her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) will stand up for her. When their dad, Percy (Dominique Pinon, DELICATESSEN), an alcoholic ex-juggler, dies in his sleep, the twins are given to separate foster families, communicating only through letters. At the start of the film Grace’s only (human) friend has just died, and she’s telling the whole story to her pet snail Sylvia. (read the rest of this shit…)
Y2K
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
As you may guess from the title this is set on a New Year’s Eve, 1999 when a sort of Y2K problem does happen – not computer systems breaking down, but electronic devices forming a shared consciousness, combining together into robots and trying to take over the world. Tamagotchis and iMacs attached to wheels and power drills going around attacking people. The animatronic effects (by Weta Workshop!) remind me of VIRUS, but instead of happening on a boat it revolves around a high school party. It’s kinda like SUPERBAD meets MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE. (read the rest of this shit…)
Cosmopolis / Maps To the Stars
Watching MICKEY 17 reminded me that I should create more peace with Canada by finally watching those two movies Robert Pattinson did with David Cronenberg. Since Pattinson is Batman he counts as American now, and these fine Canadian films set in the U.S. have become a beautiful bridge of brotherhood between warring nations. Furthermore, it just so happened that they were the only Cronenberg movies I hadn’t seen. Now that I have seen his full filmography I am complete, and I cannot be stopped. LONG LIVE THE NEW REVIEWS!
COSMOPOLIS (2012) is one of those movies that gets enough exactly right about modern Capitalism ’n Shit that it seems kinda prophetic right now, but also, I’m pretty sure, plenty of other times. It depicts the world of a damaged 1%er freak whose alleged genius is only in relation to the arcane manipulation of international currencies. The way his work is discussed I’m not sure if it’s math or sorcery. As far as I can tell he contributes nothing to the world while taking everything and believing he doesn’t get enough. (read the rest of this shit…)
Jade (2025)
JADE is a 2025 indie action movie that’s pretty derivative and very messy but kinda fun. It’s clearly made by a bunch of stunt people having a good time and not taking themselves too seriously, so it’s hard to be mad at. It’s a vehicle for Shaina West, who was in BLACK WIDOW, THE WOMAN KING, THE KILLER’S GAME and a The Weeknd video. According to her websight she’s a self-trained martial artist and “a real life superhero” called “Samurider.” (I think this is a character she dresses up as at Comic-Cons? I don’t think she’s saying she’s a vigilante.) She’s also credited as the stunt double for herself.
She plays Jade, who the opening narration explains moved here from London when she was 13 and became part of a “Club” but accidentally shot her brother to death so she left the Club and swore to never pick up a gun again. Since the DVD cover shows her with a sword I was pretty excited about this detail. I’m more into action heroes who don’t rely on guns, and it’s even better when it’s a conscious preference. (read the rest of this shit…)
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