Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Friday, April 24th, 2020
“I just wanted to leave my apartment, maybe meet a nice girl. And now I’ve got to die for it!”
AFTER HOURS is Martin Scorsese’s take on the “staying up all night and a bunch of crazy shit happens” movie (see also INTO THE NIGHT, MIRACLE MILE, EDMOND). This one follows Paul (Griffin Dunne), a young word-processing drone who lives alone in a small apartment in New York City. After a boring day at work he goes to a cafe to re-read what he says is his favorite book, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. A woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette, same year as SILVERADO) is by herself at a nearby table, notices what he’s reading and says “I love that book.” He doesn’t even hear her at first. But she starts trying to quote it.
Suddenly she moves to his table to get him to look at the weird cashier (Rocco Sisto, INNOCENT BLOOD, ERASER, THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT), who seems to be practicing dance moves. She’s about to leave but they have a short, weird conversation that includes 1) telling him she’s staying with her friend Kiki Bridges and 2) giving him Kiki’s phone number so he can inquire about her sculptures of bagels and cream cheese. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Catherine O'Hara, Griffin Dunne, John Heard, Joseph Minion, Larry Block, Lina Fiorentino, Martin Scorsese, Michael Powell, Rocco Sisto, Rosanna Arquette, takes place in one night, Teri Garr, Tim Burton, Verna Bloom
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 18 Comments »
Thursday, April 23rd, 2020
STRAY DOG is an Akira Kurosawa film from 1949 – only seven years into his directing career, but about a third of the way into his filmography. I believe it’s the first one I’ve seen by him that wasn’t a period piece. At the time he had gotten really into the Maigret books and decided to write a detective novel. It took him longer to adapt the book into a screenplay than to write the book itself. Apparently it started the genre of police procedurals and/or detective movies in Japan. Pretty impressive side-achievement to kick off an entire category of movies different from the ones he was known for.
The mystery: where the fuck is my gun? Toshiro Mifune – who I have to admit I didn’t even recognize – plays the rookie homicide detective Murakami, who’s feeling like a piece of shit because somebody swiped his Colt when he was on a crowded bus. He figures it out too late, chases a dude (assistant director Ishiro Honda, five years before directing GODZILLA) but doesn’t catch him. So he has to learn all about the local pickpocketing and gun dealing scenes, recognize someone from the bus in a mugshot, convince her to give him a hint about who she gave the gun to, then finding out that person rented the gun to somebody… (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Isao Kimura, Ishiro Honda, Keiko Awaji, Noriko Sengoku, post-WWII Japan, Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune
Posted in Mystery, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020
I think it’s pretty widely agreed now that Mike Flanagan is one of the most qualified candidates for a new “Master of Horror,” right? Two others would be Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, but they only have two movies each to go by. Flanagan has more evidence on file. I know it’s a title previously reserved for the guys we read about in Fangoria when we were growing up, and here I’m nominating three guys I’m older than. Time is a bastard. But we need fresh blood. The Masters need heirs.
I didn’t review them, but I thought HUSH and GERALD’S GAME (both not-on-DVD Netflix exclusives, unfortunately) were good. I think DOCTOR SLEEP is truly great, and will likely be near the top of my best of the decade list. But of the one’s I’ve seen so far his true masterpiece is the TV series The Haunting of Hill House. I’m a guy who generally doesn’t give a shit about ghost stories, and has a hard time keeping up with TV shows, but I found that series absolutely captivating, deeply moving, and at times really fuckin scary. I didn’t even need the ghosts to show up very often, honestly. I was so into the characters. As thrilling as the climax was, I was kind of sad to get to the last episodes because I just wanted it to keep going.
DOCTOR SLEEP and Hill House have many themes and elements in common, despite being adapted from unrelated books. And since they’re his biggest and most expensive to date, they’re kind of like the ultimate Mike Flanagan films. Both could be described as sprawling – they have multiple time periods and locations, some giant sets, large casts, great FX and a type of high level cinematography I love with very complex and effective camera moves (including long takes). So I really didn’t know if his first feature ABSENTIA, which had a $70,000 budget raised partly on Kickstarter and was filmed mostly in his apartment in Glendale, would seem that much like what we now know is a Mike Flanagan film. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Catherine Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Doug Jones, Kickstarter, Mike Flanagan
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2020
In February of 1996, when RUMBLE IN THE BRONX was released in the U.S., it was an event. I don’t know if it was the zeitgeist or a concerted marketing effort or what, but it came along at the exact right moment for Jackie Chan to achieve his dream of hitting it big in the States. He’d tried twice before with American movies filmed in English: Robert Clouse’s THE BIG BRAWL a.k.a. BATTLE CREEK BRAWL in 1980 and James Glickenhaus’s THE PROTECTOR in 1985. Neither caught on. But he finally did it with a re-edited and dubbed version of one of his Hong Kong movies.
For some of us, we’d had a few years of fiending to see and learn about whatever Hong Kong action cinema we could. Trying to find rentals or bootlegs of subtitled John Woo, maybe Ringo Lam, THE HEROIC TRIO, FONG SAI YUK, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR, or anything Jackie.
Most of those were about a certain poetry, a certain vibe, a mix of style and cool and honor and brotherhood and violence that seemed thrilling compared to what we got at home. But the excitement of Jackie was entirely about the miracle of human movement. A guy who can flip and run up walls and jump off buildings and onto or over moving vehicles. A daredevil and a silent comedian and a kung fu master all rolled into one. He wasn’t cool in the same way that Chow Yun Fat was. He was kind of a dork. But also a god. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Tung, Francoise Yip, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Stanley Tong
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 36 Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2020
I’m not sure why we’d ever be ranking the least likely trilogies of our cinematic era, but if the topic comes up, I’ll be sure to mention the ESCAPE PLAN saga. Here – let’s recap:
It all began with a legit theatrical release from the director of 1408. This was in 2013, after EXPENDABLES 1 and 2, in a period when Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were making solid old-man-action vehicles that just weren’t catching on (BULLET TO THE HEAD, SABOTAGE, THE LAST STAND). ESCAPE PLAN is only my third favorite of those, but it’s a solid sort-of throwback action movie, it was fun to see Sly and Arnold together in something less winky than an Expendables, and it was especially cool to see Schwarzenegger kind of being a character actor, being funny and a little crazy as a sidekick instead of the hero. Plus it had a weirdly overqualified cast of Jim Caviezel, Sam Neill, Vincent D’Onofrio and Amy Ryan (plus Vinnie Jones and 50 Cent). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 50 Cent, Daniel Bernhardt, Dave Bautista, Devon Sawa, Harry Shum Jr., Jaime King, Jeff Chase, John Herzfeld, Malese Jow, Max Zhang, Miles Chapman, Russell Wong, Sylvester Stallone
Posted in Action, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 15th, 2020
When we lost the great Stuart Gordon recently, I realized there were a few of his films I still hadn’t seen. It’s kind of nice, actually, to still have something left to discover. There’s a particular one that happens in space that involves truckers that I honestly have wanted to see since before it even came out, and somehow never have. It’ll be a few weeks before I can finally change that, because I decided to order a UK Blu-Ray instead of pay Amazon to stream it in standard def. But I wanted to watch this one first anyway – the one based on the David Mamet play.
Gordon and Mamet, if you don’t know, go way back. Long before RE-ANIMATOR, Gordon was doing envelope-pushing theater work in Chicago. He directed, at his Organic Theater Company, the production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago credited with establishing Mamet as a playwright, although there was an earlier one starring William H. Macy, who also stars in this movie.
Here he plays Edmond Burke, a dude who works for some kind of financial firm called Stearns & Harrington. He’s apparently had a bad day (his meeting on Monday got pushed back to 1:15 – WHAT IN THE LIVING GOD DAMN FUCK!?) when he heads home and, on a whim, stops to get a tarot reading. She tells him “You don’t belong here.” (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aldiss Hodge, Bai Ling, Bokeem Woodbine, David Mamet, Debi Mazar, Denise Richards, George Wendt, Jeffrey Combs, Joe Mantegna, Julia Stiles, Lionel Mark Smith, Mena Suvari, Rebecca Pidgeon, Stuart Gordon, William H. Macy
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2020
A week or two ago, when I reviewed Lucky McKee’s Lifetime thriller KINDRED SPIRITS, I said I’d watch anything by him because of how much I loved THE WOMAN. But after I wrote that I felt like I was a little full of shit because I knew he did a movie that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. So I got around to it. I watched ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE (2013) on Shudder, but I think it’s also on Tubi, if that helps you to watch along at home.
I know I should’ve watched it a long time ago. I guess I hestiated because the title sounds like a comedy, and it sounds like it’s about a thing that’s not all that interesting long before you get to my age. And he’s only co-director and I thought it was some previous unfinished thing because I remembered that title being on his IMDb profile a million years ago. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Grace Benitez, Brooke Butler, Caitlin Stasey, Chris Sivertson, Felisha Cooper, Leigh Parker, Lucky McKee, Michael Bowen, Reanin Jhannink, Sianoa Smit-McPhee, Tom Williamson
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Monday, April 13th, 2020
THE OMEGA MAN has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it on cable as a teenager. I would later read the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (love it) and see the first adapation LAST MAN ON EARTH (pretty good) and third one I AM LEGEND (in some ways the best adaptation, despite its flaws). The story of all these versions is of a scientist (usually named Robert Neville) who is immune to a plague that wipes out most of the population and turns the rest into vampires/ghouls/mutants.
So during daylight he’s alone in the city, at night he hides in his well-stocked home, holding off the attacking hordes, as he searches for a cure. It’s the holing up, of course, that kept coming to my mind a few weeks into Washington state’s shelter-in-place order for the Covid-19 pandemic (if I read that sentence six months ago I would’ve thought it was a reference to some sci-fi movie). I’ve mostly been looking for escapist entertainment – I’m definitely not planning on watching CONTAGION again, as seems to be popular – but I’m doing okay with genre movies that have parallels to the situation. So I watched THE OMEGA MAN again. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Zerbe, Boris Ssagal, Charlton Heston, Eric Laneuville, last man on earth, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Paul Koslo, post-apocalypse, Richard Matheson, Rosalind Cash
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 11 Comments »
Thursday, April 9th, 2020
As I believe I’ve made clear in many reviews over the years, as well as this week’s Profiles in Badass column on Rebeller, I’m aware of Michelle Yeoh’s wide range of talents and accomplishments. I love her most for the movies that really showcase her fighting and her swagger, like WING CHUN, and YES, MADAM!, or her fighting and her regret, like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, and the totally-worth-checking-out straight-to-Netflix sequel, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY. I also very much admire her dramatic acting chops from AH KAM to CRAZY RICH ASIANS. Still, the timing of my specific movie-watching path, discovering Hong Kong action in the ‘90s, means that I will always think of her as Michelle “jumped a motherfucking motorcycle onto a motherfucking train in SUPERCOP” Yeoh. That’s just a fact. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Athena Chu, Big Yank, Bill Tung, Dick Wei, Emil Chau, Fan Siu-Wong, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Popeye, Stanley Tong, Yu Rongguang
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, April 8th, 2020
BUTTERFLY AND SWORD is from 1993, so it’s after Michelle Yeoh had already done YES, MADAM! and even SUPERCOP, but it’s her first straight up wuxia movie. Let me put it this way: in the opening scene in “West Chamber, Eunuch Li’s Mansion,” I do believe we see a guy’s face get ripped off and thrown into a pile of snakes. 
So this is not a drill. This is the unadulterated, berserk kind of kung fu fantasy film where there pretty much aren’t characters who don’t jump 25 feet in the air and shoot some kind of weapon.
Our male lead Brother Sing (Tony Leung, HARD BOILED, RED CLIFF, THE GRANDMASTER) is introduced bouncing off a string to fly through the air like an arrow, causing at least half a dozen dudes to explode as he hits them. He also has a cool method of holding a bow behind his back and firing his sword. Yeoh’s character Lady Ko gets a quicker but even more fanciful introduction flying in with a fanfare of confetti and a web of unfurling purple silk scarves. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chang Kuo-Chu, Ching Siu-Tung, Donnie Yen, Joey Wang, Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung, wuxia
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 9 Comments »
