"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Daniel Henshall’

Catch the Fair One

Wednesday, March 27th, 2024

I guess I would classify CATCH THE FAIR ONE (2021) as a thriller more than an action movie, but it’s a certified badass thriller. It’s the first acting role for Kali Reis, the former world champion boxer who recently starred with Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country (her reward for this, I believe). Reis also co-wrote the movie with director Josef Kubota Wladyka.

Reis plays Kaylee “K.O.” Uppashaw, a former pro boxer whose younger sister Weeta (Mainaku Borrero) went missing two years ago. Kaylee doesn’t fight anymore, she’s living at a women’s shelter trying to stay off drugs and working as a waitress. But she’s also in her BATMAN BEGINS stage of building up to find her sister. Her friend Brick (fellow pro boxer Shelly Vincent), who reminds me of Joe Pesci (in a good way), not only helps her train to wrestle and fight men much larger then her, but finds a recruiter (Isabelle Chester, THE FALLING WORLD) willing to take a bribe to bring her in with a “new batch” of workers for the traffickers she believes have Weeta. (read the rest of this shit…)

The Assistant/The Royal Hotel

Tuesday, January 16th, 2024

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…)

Okja

Monday, September 11th, 2017

This year THE HOST and SNOWPIERCER director Bong Joon-ho made a truly one-of-a-kind movie. OKJA is a sweet girl-and-her-creature tale like MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO after it has been swallowed by a vicious satire of corporate greed and man’s treatment of animals. It’s produced by Netflix with an international cast, many of them speaking English, but its wild shifts in tone make it feel safely within the tradition of South Korean cinema.

It already seems bug-nuts from the opening, when aggressively-faux-enlightened Mirando Corporation CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton, CONSTANTINE) gives her colorful presentation about the “discovery” of the allegedly miraculously eco-friendly “superpig” species and their plan to give them to farmers in 26 cities around the world to raise for ten years using their local traditions and then to crown one as the best.

The decade passes, and young Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun, the daughter in THE YELLOW SEA) lives an idyllic life in some mountains in Korea helping her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong, MEMORIES OF MURDER) take care of their superpig Okja. She’s bigger than a hippo – looks like a giant Eeyore – but limber enough to leap around like Ang Lee’s Hulk. Mija plays with her and rolls around on top of her belly and climbs inside her mouth to brush her teeth for her. (read the rest of this shit…)