Author: reynolds

Cinema 16

Has anyone heard of these discs? 2 discs, 16 short films from a pretty impressive range of European directors–not new stuff, but culled from bignames’ prior efforts. Just finished disc 1, which had a bleak and funny bit of corrosive stoic fury very much like the the director’s longer Songs from the Second Floor (Sweden’s Roy Andersson), the excellent Wasp by Andrea Arnold and equally fantastic Gasman by Lynne Ramsay, a very entertaining New-Wave parody by Toby Macdonald (who?), an old Svankmajer short, and then some stuff veering from forgettable whimsy to utter crap (Christopher Nolan’s ridiculous little Doodlebug). Disc 2 has films by Ridley Scott and Anders Thomas Jensen that I want to see, as well as the previously-discussed and excellent Six Shooter.

The Go-Getter

Go get it. Pretty damn good–great for an hour, then it kind of veers too much into the quirky conventional road-movie romance fantasy it so adroitly avoids and disrupts before that, but… I was sold by then. It’s anchored by a(nother) great performance by Lou Taylor Pucci, as a kid taken by an urge to get unstuck, so he steals a car… everything else about the plot emerges en route, so I won’t spoil up front. But there’s some dialogue and supporting performances that are sly, strange, occasionally idiosyncratically wonderful–particularly Bill Duke, as a traveling liquor salesman. And besides Pucci the film boasts a great M. Ward soundtrack.

Sukiyaki Western Django

We (or maybe mostly I) have talked about Takashi Miike before (here, among other places), and let it be said: even at his goriest, and by god he can be gory, he’s among the most astonishing–and astonishingly sloppy–stylists working. His Western goes in the greater pile. It begins on a soundstage so resolutely, beautifully drawn and shot in such high-contrast saturated colors that when you see Quentin Tarantino putting on a lousy Southern drawl, then a Japanese actor accosting him in an almost-phonetically-pronounced English, and then later have Tarantino intone phrases from an alleged story of a Japanese temple in an English mimicking that strange Japanese-inflected pronunciation… well, let’s say the artifice is not mere surface ploy but is emphatically and for this viewer wonderfully central.

The story is a neat mash-up template of various generic influences both Western and Japanese (one of the characters even jokes that the protagonist shouldn’t try getting all Yojimbo), and there are some great lovely gun battles, and a few tricky technical games (one lovely bit when a man jumps out of his second-story window onto his horse) — all in all, not a movie to watch to sink into the plot but a movie which delights in–and produces the delight of–genre and aesthetic form. I REALLY enjoyed this.

Marsupial angst

Easily the best film I’ve ever seen about a marsupial, Executive Koala is a film noir about a driven Japanese junior exec (in a pickle factory), whose wife disappeared three years ago and whose recent lover has turned up dead — and he’s the suspect. And he seems to have things buried in his memory. And he’s a human-sized koala bear. Most of his colleagues are humans, except for the rabbit, and one frog who works at the local convenience store. There are secret Korean martial arts in this film, and a short interlude in musical theater (about Exec Koala’s childhood town and upbringing). There are also shady psychotherapists and discussions of kimchi and this was way too straight to be camp but way too strange to be straight.

God damn I love Japanese pop culture.

Art (of) War

Following Mark’s lead, obliquely, I recalled a film celebrated in Z Channel that I’d always meant to see. I dutifully stuck Stuart Cooper’s Overlord onto my queue, and with equal diligence forgot entirely about it, ’til Mark’s recent post … and dug it out, moved it up–and here we are.

It’s worth seeing. In brief, Cooper tells the story of one soldier off to boot camp in preparation for the D-Day invasion, but he tells it in and out of time, with dreamlike flashforwards and -backs, sequences that seem half-dream or disconnected memory, interwoven with archival footage–particularly many stunning sequences of planes strafing, bombing, or just ominously dragging a shadow over bucolic landscapes. It’s a compact Thin Red Line, as dreamily philosophical as Malick with half the gas, at a third the length; its impact on Spielberg seems evident, as well, as at a fraction of the cost Cooper captures the terrifying moments before and at landfall in Normandy. Maybe that’s unfair, but since aside from Z I’d never heard of the film, and it only recently got the Criterion treatment, it seems crucial to trace its impact on those later acclaimed films.

And like those films, Cooper’s war is gorgeous. Here’s the thing that got me posting– Continue reading Art (of) War

The Cottage…

…won’t win hearts or minds, but it’s a dandy little nasty entertainment with enough wit and style–and a kick-drum wonder of a final shot–and I think it’s worth a look. Andy Serkis and Reece Sheersmith (familiar to many of us from “The League of Gentlemen,” whose name itself seems a product of said League) star as brothers involved in low-level criminal thuggery, a foolish kidnapping of a boss’ daughter, and the film opens somewhere north-northeast of nastier comic noirs by the Coens or Ritchie. They’re imbeciles, if relatively likable. And then the film takes a left turn toward those Hills with eyes, and things get violent, genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and still generally likable and funny. Again, nothing spectacular–the director, one Paul Andrew Williams, is coming off a well-received and annoyingly-unavailable-in-the-States thriller called London to Brighton, and he displays far more patience, visual wit, and structural clarity than the aforementioned Ritchie. This may be more my cup of joe than Gio’s, or most of youse, as I remain a sucker for homicidal mutant hicks and needless chopping and spurting, but the leads are funny and fun to watch, and … well, there you have it.

Elite Squad, with a hat-tip toward some prior debates about Brazilian crime films

Jose Padilha’s 2007 crime film pivots from the ground traversed in the excellent Bus 174 (see comments 3, 4, & 5), turning away from the criminal trapped and interpellated within a rigid, pervasive system of inequality toward cops, just as trapped. The film got a lot of love in Brazil, and certain international festivals, but my plot summary seems more cogent–and a lot more thrilling–than I found the film. I liked its thesis, and disagree entirely with Manohla Dargis’ critique of its politics, even as I fully accept her critique of its aesthetics. It perfectly defines “lugubrious,” trudging through the mechanics of a crime & corruption thriller, without any of the dynamics. And this makes me bring up, for the 100th time?, Fernando Meirelles’ superior (and I think superlative) City of God.

Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.

My semi-annual festival of horror films has begun. Aren’t you excited? Can’t you smell the garish red corn syrup? Hear the resounding echoes of the tortured shrieking? Envision the amputated limbs, wriggling as they hit the shag carpeting? ‘Tis the season!

I began the other evening with a Swedish vampire flick called Frostbitten, and as the title suggests, it relentlessly plays to the sort-of-funny, nerdy-teens-going-vampy, hip-slash-gory low-budget conventions of eight thousand Hollywood versions. Yet there’s something there, for the fan. Continue reading Helloween. Hello mean. Holy ream.

Newman

In Nobody’s Fool, Newman’s character Sully seems at first a lovable type–smart-assed, generally good-spirited, prone to teasing and stiff-upper-lipping and too much drinking. But, throughout, Newman uses his eyes as props pointing to real anger, real anguish, real shame — the surface bluster revealing great storms at the character’s heart. It’s a great performance, greater yet for being so internal, so unshowy.

But I probably love any randomly-named fifteen of his performances at any given moment.