"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Anora

ANORA is a real knock out of a movie from writer/director Sean Baker, major indie voice of the 21st century known for style on a microbudget, authentic performances by non-professional actors, and being one of the first to shoot an acclaimed movie on an iPhone. I’ll be honest, I’ve only seen THE FLORIDA PROJECT, which I loved at the time, but for some reason haven’t caught up or kept up with the rest of his filmography. So correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression from that limited view is that this is him doing something a little more slick and mainstream than usual without abandoning what he’s good at.

Not that it’s 100% commercial or normal. It just feels that way. It’s pretty long, it’s about a sex worker, and it’s a somewhat odd combination of genres, but it’s really funny, it’s not super weird, and it has heart. It won the Palme d’Or, but I think it could pass as a fun movie for normal people better than recent winners PARASITE, TITANE, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS or ANATOMY OF A FALL. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 18th, 2024 | 19 Comments »

Jean-Michel Basquiat triple feature: The Radiant Child / Basquiat / Downtown 81

A couple months ago I got on a Jean-Michel Basquiat kick. You probly know who that is, but if not, he was a New York City graffiti artist in the early hip hop era, transferred his skills to paintings for galleries, became rich and famous and friends with Andy Warhol and stuff in a brief, prolific life before (like so many bright lights) dying of a drug overdose at 27.

Set aside the inspirational underdog story, the meteoric rise, the quirky details, the tragic ending. All interesting, but you don’t need any context for his art to be incredible. Labelled a “neo-expressionist,” he just has this lively, messy style, an explosion of scratches and scrapes and colors and doodles and words. If they are child-like, then the child in question must’ve remained young for 100 years, evolving his drawing into highly sophisticated crudeness. There are traces of influences from cartoons to African art, he sometimes references boxers and current events and social issues, but he translates it into these distinctive scribbles and cryptic/poetic phrases, sculpting beauty and humor from garbage and decay and vandalism. I don’t know of anybody quite like him, and lately (even before… you know) I’ve really been feeling it’s important to honor and glorify the true originals and pure artists among us, through my chosen medium of, uh, movie reviews. So here I am, glorifying Jean-Michel Basquiat. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 14th, 2024 | 10 Comments »

Observe and Report

Jody Hill’s OBSERVE AND REPORT (2009) was maybe a little ahead of its time. Or at least ahead of me. I guess I didn’t review it, but I remember being a little disappointed at the time, thinking it had kind of a fake darkness to it. I thought it was supposed to be a TAXI DRIVER type portrait of a mall security guard, and it seemed kind of forced to me.

Watching it now, though, it obviously got alot of shit right about a certain type of person that it really was important to be keeping an eye on. In fact it was right enough that now my issue is that maybe it’s treating the subject matter a little too lightly.

Seth Rogen stars as Ronnie Barnhardt, the jovial but completely deluded head of security at Forest Ridge Mall who sees an opportunity for glory when a serial flasher (Randy Gambill, production designer of Hill’s debut THE FOOT FIST WAY) keeps showing up and exposing himself to customers and staff. Ronnie treats it like a big murder investigation and becomes very competitive with the overqualified actual cop assigned to catch the guy, Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta, COP LAND). (read the rest of this shit…)

November 13th, 2024 | 11 Comments »

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep

EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP (a.k.a. GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER) is from 1966 and it’s the seventh Godzilla picture. The title monster is a giant lobster, and there are other members of the kaiju community involved, but the central conflict is actually unrelated to them – it’s about a fairly random group of people who stumble across The Red Bamboo (a terrorist army – like, with uniforms and everything) and use the monsters to disarm them for the sake of the world.

It happens like this. Ryota (Toru Watanabe)’s older brother Yata (Toru Ibuki, GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER)’s fishing boat was lost during a storm on the South Seas. He’s presumed dead, but Ryota thinks he’s alive because a psychic at Spirit Mountain (Noriko Honma, STRAY DOG, SEVEN SAMURAI, YOJIMBO) said so. He wants to take a boat out to the uncharted area where he thinks he’s shipwrecked, but he doesn’t have a boat, and he’s kind of a rube, so when he sees a dance marathon on TV where the grand prize is a yacht, he goes there.

(read the rest of this shit…)

November 12th, 2024 | 5 Comments »

100 Yards

100 YARDS was one of my most anticipated movies this year – it’s the latest period martial arts epic from writer/director Xu Haofeng, this time with his brother Xu Junfeng credited as co-director. Junfeng is a newbie but Haofeng is one of my favorite modern martial art directors, a true auteur with a very distinct style and tone and a set of reoccurring themes that happen to be extremely my shit.

This one is about the Tianjin martial arts scene in 1920, so it’s about what was going on there around a decade before his 2015 film THE FINAL MASTER. At this point there is only one kung fu school, Master Shen’s, but the world is changing and the next generation are trying to establish themselves. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 11th, 2024 | 4 Comments »

Juror #2

In Clint Eastwood’s JUROR #2, Nicholas Hoult (THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD) plays Justin Kemp, an upstanding magazine writer in Georgia who gets summoned for jury duty. He tries to get dismissed because his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch, THE DISASTER ARTIST) is expecting soon in what he describes as “a high risk pregnancy,” but he ends up seated on the jury for a murder trial.

The prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette, xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE) and public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina, BIRDS OF PREY) are friends, or at least professionally friendly enough to talk to each other at the bar they both hang out in. Faith is running for district attorney and feels putting away a real scumbag like this may put her over the top; Eric insists she’s got it wrong this time, the guy is really innocent. Defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, THE KINGS OF SUMMER, also unfortunately played dictator elect J.D. Vance in HILLBILLY ELEGY) is a known asshole who was seen arguing with his girlfriend Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, M.F.A.) at a bar (a decidedly different one than the lawyers go to) until she stormed off, refusing a ride home. The next day a hiker found her dead under a bridge on Old Quarry Road.

As the story is being told to the jury, Justin has a growing “oh, fuck” look on his face, and if you haven’t heard the premise of JUROR #2 you’re gonna be shocked too: he’s realizing that he was there when that fight happened. He remembers the date, because it was Ally’s due date from the last pregnancy, when they lost twins. He took his depressed, recovering alcoholic ass to the hideaway, stared down a drink but didn’t give in, then on his way home his car hit something on Old Quarry Road. He got out, couldn’t find anything in the dark, saw a deer crossing sign and hoped to God that explained it. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 7th, 2024 | 35 Comments »

Man, I don’t know.

I wish I had it in me to write something beautiful and optimistic and give everybody some solace. Should’ve prepared something in advance, I guess. Right now it feels like the bad guys won for the rest of my lifetime and it’s hard to even think or do anything. Evil, chaotic times ahead. I’ll be back on my movie review bullshit soon I hope but for now I need to regroup. Take care everybody.

November 6th, 2024 | 174 Comments »

Megalopolis

I’m no scholar of the works of Francis Ford Coppola. I agree THE GODFATHER I and II and APOCALYPSE NOW are amazing, and I’ve recently grown into a BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA zealot. I enjoyed THE CONVERSATION and THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLEFISH and THE COTTON CLUB and DEMENTIA 13 and obviously CAPTAIN EO. I’ve had some of his wine, too – we get those little cans of Sofia for Oscar parties. But like most people I’m not really up on the experimental shit he’s been up to b’twixt the 21st century. In fact the last time I saw a new FCC joint was JACK in 1996.

But hell, I wasn’t gonna miss MEGALOPOLIS! You know the legend. He conceived it in the ‘70s, he’s tried to get it off the ground many times across the decades, now he finally did it with his own $120 million. Amazing. Whatever it is, you gotta respect what he did. Become a rich guy just to make a true indie on the largest possible scale. Pretty much all rich guys waste their money in far stupider ways.
(read the rest of this shit…)

November 5th, 2024 | 19 Comments »

Azrael

Maybe it’s weird to watch a post-apocalypse movie right before this particular election, but I’d wanted to see AZRAEL and then I saw that it was on Shudder. I knew it was a low or no dialogue movie starring Samara Weaving (MONSTER TRUCKS, THE BABYSITTER, SNAKE EYES), and not much more, but “genre movie starring Samara Weaving” is enough for me. It would’ve been a bonus if I’d known it was written by Simon Barrett (YOU’RE NEXT, THE GUEST) or if I recognized the name of director E.L. Katz from the dark comedy CHEAP THRILLS.

We’ve seen so many post-apocalyptic worlds, but this is a new one for me. It opens with a card that says, “Many years after the Rapture… Among the survivors, some are driven to renounce their sin of Speech.” Yes, it’s a movie where none of the main characters speak, or even sign, so the details of their situation are never directly addressed. But that leaves plenty of space to interpret and contemplate.

(read the rest of this shit…)

November 4th, 2024 | 5 Comments »

Suspiria (1977)

1977 gave us some pretty important movies. Some influential ones. Some we still talk about today. STAR WARS was a big one. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. ERASERHEAD. SORCERER. THE HILLS HAVE EYES. And hailing from Italy, Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA. One of the greats, a true original, and I think it’s safe to say one of the most beautiful looking horror movies ever made.

When I first saw it as a young man it set my brain on fire. I was pretty new to the world of Italian horror and had never seen anything quite like it, but it turns out that’s also because there’s not anything quite like it. Since then I’ve seen it many more times, including once in a theater with a Jessica Harper Q&A, and its reputation has grown even stronger as a generation or two discovered it in the age of screen caps and gifs. Its stunning visuals require no context to knock you on your ass. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 31st, 2024 | 9 Comments »

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