This Week in Tickets: 30 December 2024 - 5 January 2025 (New Year, Old-Time Horror)

Place your bets, folks, at how long until I fall hopelessly behind. Last year, we didn't make it to the Oscars, but I'm feeling good about 2025!

Latest appointment book layout is vertical, like most movie tickets these days, although they're wide enough that there's going to need to be some staggering. Not sure what's up with the yellow, though, though.

I had enough vacation time I couldn't entirely roll over to have the last couple days of the year off, so I caught the Coolidge's 35mm print of Nosferatu '24 in the afternoon, really enjoying it far more than I expected, having fallen a little short of loving Robert Eggers's previous work at times. It was obviously very much influenced by the original silent version, which made a nice sort of way to roll into restarting Film Rolls, which by the nature of how my new-to-me shelf is setup will almost always start with silents, in this case The Enchanted Cottage '24 and Lights Out '23 on Monday and Tuesday evenings respectively, As you might expect from movies that were released on crowdfunded Blu-rays, they're not exactly classics, but they're interesting; you can absolutely see what the filmmakers were going for.

First film of the new year was Honey Money Phony, a New Year's Eve romantic comedy from China that gets a long way on just how crush-worthy star Jin Chen is in her role, and most of the cast around her is the kind of good company that helps this sort of movie roll even when you notice it doesn't have a lot of great, big jokes.

Thursday, I got started on the next round of Film Rolls by starting a box set, with the first film of four on tape being Five Shaolin Masters. Friday night had me hitting a new film from Korea, Harbin, which is undoubtedly a big part of Korean history but maybe doesn't quite make for a great movie, at least for those of us who aren't already have particular investment in its subjects. Saturday, it was back to Film Rolls with Shaolin Temple.

Then on Sunday, I closed the week with The Damned, a period thriller that has a lot going for it but only intermittently lands - which, truth be told, is better than the average horror movie that grabs a release on the first weekend of a new year.

As much as I always intend to keep the New Year's resolution to keep up with this, it can't hurt to follow my Letterboxd account just in case, although I'll generally at least try to have Film Rolls entries on the blog first.


Nosferatu 2024

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Coolidge Corner #1 (first-run, 35mm)
Where to stream it (when available)

This might become my favorite version of Dracula, even if I was kind of skeptical going in: I don't like sexy vampires, especially preferring "the walking embodiment of death and decay" for this variant in particular,, and some of the bits I do really like cause the end to leave a more sour taste in my mouth. It doesn't quite reinvent the story - indeed, by filming it as Nosferatu, Robert Eggers is more or less committed to a specific strain - but finds interesting things to do within those bounds.

There's an impressive streamlining of the story that many adaptations of Bram Stoker's epistletory novel don't always manage - Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) has a pre-existing mystical connection to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), so it can be assumed that he somehow corrupted Knock (Simon McBurney), the employer of Ellen's wife Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), in such a way as to serve the dual purpose of disposing of the romantic rival and establishing a foothold in a new place. Eggers highlights how Ellen's stay at the home of Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) highlights both financial precarity and questions of mental health, both assumed and real, that lurk under the couples' friendship. The decision of Ellen's physician, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), to call in mentor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) feels like both a wise move and desperation because physicians aren't really equipped to deal with contagion, whether biological or supernatural.

Some of this reorganization makes me curious how the first half or so will play on later viewings, because I think the familiarity of the story means director Robert Eggers is able to play things for laughs a bit. He doesn't crank it up to 11, but maybe 10.5, having fun pushing the whole thing as overtly stylized without having to worry too much about what folks will take literally. It also means that he can bring the nastiness of the horror down to earth later. The film is often quite funny but folks might not realize they've got permission to laugh until the second or third time they see it.

I was also kind of suspicious of him making Orlock this muscular, mustachioed warlord instead of the silent version's wraith or Bela Lugisi's elegant noble, but it really works: It lets him dig into the Eastern European origins for all manner of designs on the one hand, and it makes the death and pestilence that Orlok embodies a brutish thing that sacks the city, not just consuming the lifeblood that it needs to fend true death off but gorging itself. Bill Skarsgård may be a handsome Dracula, but his gluttony is monstrous and precludes romance or sympathy.

It's a contrast to the core of this movie which I really like, a scene with Lily-Rose Depp and Nicolas Hoult that has a strikingly modern feel as it becomes clear just how real their love is. They challenge each other and demand explanations, but in the end, they trust each other far more than the pair who said pretty words and did what was expected of people like them at the start. Eggers uses them to see the imbalance between gender roles that this sort of period piece takes for granted, reject it, and put both in position to drive for the rest of the film.

There's tons of good stuff around all this, too: Art design where the architecture is just askew enough to remind one of German Expressionist silents without being an obvious imitation. The carriage ride to the castle that recalls 2001 as much as previous versions of Dracula with its threatening bass and slow zooms of doors opening and closing on their own. Willem Defoe's Van Helsing equivalent is funny and almost always right but also mad enough that he probably should have been thrown off the university faculty. Heck, now that I think about it, I wonder if his madness doesn't lead to the bits of the finale I find unsatisfying because, as one character points out in a grieving rage, his zealous obsession with the supernatural threat blind him to the individual and aggregate humanity around him.

Darn good all around, and that comes from someone who often describes the F.W. Murnau Nosferatu as his favorite vampire movie and has often been left cold by Eggers style.


Shao Lin wu zu (Five Shaolin Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


The Damned

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Damned is solidly in the category of films that i would have loved to see at BUFF or Fantasia with a packed horse on a hair trigger, but where I just figure it's got some nifty pieces at a Sunday 7pm show in the AMC's smallest screen with one or two other folks in the audience who are occasionally coughing. It's a long 89 minutes, but there's at least one shot of snow covering a house built of black wood and the black volcanic mountains in the background which looks like it's a hand-printed woodcut worth 10% of my A-List membership for the month.

It takes place at a fishing station on the coast of Iceland; Eva (Odessa Young) has inherited the business from her late husband, with some question as to whether she would keep it going. The helmsman of the small boat is Ragnar (Rory McCann); his second-in-command is Daniel (Joe Cole), a longtime friend of the dead man. There are four other men on the team, plus Helga (Siobhan Finneran), the cook. It's a lean year pulling fish out of the treacherous waters, and the group is horrified when they see a large ship foundering, but seek to salvage needed supplies. Helga worries that the morbid mission will result in the drowned sailors becoming draugur, angry undead revenants, but the rest are too practical for such superstition.

I want to like the film a lot more, because it does a thing I love in this sort of period indie, pulling us into a very specific time and place and making it feel accessible rather than opaque, grounding the fantasy in procedure that may not be familiar but which is interesting to learn. All the characters tend to feel exactly like they should, but human rather than types. Even the one guy who feels a bit too 21sr Century does so in a way that says there must have been people like this in 1871 as well. It's got a really nice cast - Rory McCann and Francis Magee capture the period without being consumed by it, and filmmaker Thordur Palsson doesn't make Odessa Young protest that a woman can handle this amid the difficult decisions. She's got a nice chemistry with Joe Cole; when they're not dealing with potential monsters, it's interesting to watch them feel their way around the void left by Eva's husband as they clearly have feelings for each other.

On the other hand, while I feel like I should like the spot it hits between folklore and guilt and maybe guilt come to life, the telling of the tale is a slog. There is just not enough for these people to do while the draugur stalks them or rifts that can be exploited as the evil gets in their head and makes them turn on each other. We're constantly waiting for something to happen, but only really on edge a couple of times. There are a few striking images and scenes - I particularly like one where the perspective has the viewer not sure whether the black shape in the center of the screen is a person, a creature, or just a rocky outgrop with one's eyes playing the same tricks that the characters' are.

Get It in another environment, and I'm probably along for the ride if the rest of the audience is. Without a crowd, though, I've got way too much time to think about why I'm not as scared as I should be.

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern)

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern) It's funny, seeing other folks doing forty horror movies in October and I'm just all over the freaking place. Like, maybe Sunday's kind of Halloweeny, but...

I started the week off right with North By Northwest on 70mm film, which looked great, but like The Searchers a few weeks back kind of looks odd because the restoration process had them scanning the VistaVision film in an unusual fashion - since VV is 35mm run through camera/projector horizontally, with each frame two standard frames, they scanned two "frames" and put them together digitally, then did the restoration work, then output that to 70mm film - like it's definitely been in and out of a computer, even without the weird line right down the center of the screen in one scene.

(To be fair, movies shot in VistaVision often look kind of off to me, like they never did quite figure out how to light right for the process)

The next night was given to Goodrich, which was not another corporate origin story and not exactly the Mr. Mom redux it initially looked like, but a pleasant enough couple hours. Would have been funny if Mr. Mom had been a Meyers-Shyer thing, though.

Wednesday night was a "last evening in theaters" show of The Outrun, which is one I spent the better part of a month not quite being in the mood for but ultimately liking a lot. It had a kind of weird release - spotty times everywhere but Kendall that make me wonder if it's sort of being four-walled for Academy members or something. Pretty good, though.

After a couple days not going out and watching baseball, I hit Chinese movie High Forces Saturday afternoon, which was wobbly but had some quality minor-action-movie trailers in front of it: Werewolves just getting right out there with "One year ago, a supermoon turned millions into werewolves" with no buildup whatsoever, Elevation offering more big ravenous aliens, and Weekend in Taipei's trailer updated because it first started showing up in October with a "Coming in September" caption on it. Then, somehow, not really doing anything besides groceries and a trip to the comic shop in the afternoon, I was oddly worn down by the time Max and the Junkmen in the evening and was in and out too much to really say i watched it. Amusingly, I passed on getting it in the Kino Lorber Fall sale because I knew I'd be watching it over the weekend. Hopefully they'll still have some left for the next big sale!

That turned out to be my last "Melville et Cie." film at the Harvard Film Archive, because Saturday offered the choice of two things on my unwatched shelf - The Bat at the Somerville with Jeff Rapsis on the organ and Army of Shadows at the Archive on 35mm film. I went with The Bat and it wound up a lot of fun. Then, in the evening, it was out to the Seaport for Magpie, which is also pretty neat.

More on my Letterboxd account as I see more, if you don't need to wait for me to actually get spelling and such right.


North by Northwest

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 70mmm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD available on Amazon

Much like Psycho didn't exactly invent the modern horror movie but refined it into something sort of respectable rather than the back half of a twin bill, North by Northwest feels like the birth of the modern blockbuster: A-list talent, a sense of play in the script that lubricates a kind of silly plot that's nevertheless always moving forward, and grand action set pieces that spill into familiar locations. Not the first of its kind, for sure, but more like the James Bond films and other bits of star-driven action that followed it than the Cinemascope epics that preceded it.

(Maybe I'm overthinking it, missing something obvious, or going over well-worn territory here)

At any rate, this is one of my go-to answers when someone asks me my favorite movie and I don't want to either spend a lot of time thinking about it or let them down by saying I can't name one, but I'm not being glib; it's an exceptionally fun film with enough great moments that one will probably surprise you even if you've seen it a dozen times. In this case, it's the awkward little "excuse me" flashbulb as someone captures a picture of Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill apparently stabbing a man, and the little callbacks to it later.

There's a certain oddity to Grant as this sort of reluctant hero 65 years later, as "Cary Grant" lands in the part of the Venn diagram where "foppish" and "suave" intersect, just enough of the latter that the moments where he's suddenly pretty capable don't quite jar. The rest of the cast, though, is terrific, especially Eva Marie Saint, who makes Eve feel exactly that cool, James Mason and Leo G. Carroll as amiably aloof opposites, and a wonderfully dangerous Marin Landau. Hitch and writer Ernest Lehman move them all around quickly but not frantically, slowing down a bit for the scene when we get to see the leads actually like each other without qualification in a way that's sweet, charming, and clarifying, just before the big Mount Rushmore finale, a rougher and scrappier thing than a modern take on it would be but which maybe works better because it's trying to communicate rather than fool.the audience.

Still a ton of fun, and I'm glad that Warner is pushing 70mm prints to theaters to promote the upcoming 4K disc.


Goodrich

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Goodrich is the sort of film writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer's parents (Nancy Meyers & Charles Shyer) used to make, which in their own ways were kind of throwbacks to earlier days of cinema: Mostly-amiable comedies set against affluent backgrounds with well-cast stars. They were meant to entertain and do so in a relatively frictionless way, and if Meyers-Shyer can't quite make that work, it can be tough to see where it's what she's doing and where it's the times.

It opens in spikier fashion that could almost be a commentary on that as Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is woken up by a call from his wife saying she has checked herself into rehab, so he's in charge of their nine-year old twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera). He's not completely inept, but the nanny having a conflict means he has to call on Grace (Mila Kunis), the daughter from his first marriage (pregnant herself) while he works to save the gallery he's run for decades which has been losing money for a while now.

Whether or not Meyers-Shyer had Michael Keaton in mind for the title role, the part fits him like a glove, letting him go into cruise control a bit. That's not exactly a problem; I like Michael Keaton, and this film is basically him being the same guy he was in his 80s/90s heyday, but maybe a little more mellow if not quite as much wiser as he should be. That's kind of a "for better or worse" thing, at times; it makes for a fairly pleasant couple of hours but you can't help but wonder if maybe his title character shouldn't have been a little more prickly or selfish at points, and the film dances around the moments when his blithe, privileged optimism is burst; things are expected to just work out, eventually, because he's generally a good dude and things work out for guys like that.

This isn't that movie, though, it's resolutely nice and well-meaning and after the first ten minutes or so works very hard to avoid situations where someone gets as upset as they maybe should. It plays fair while it does that, at least, and even theVivien Lyra Blair (as the daughter who is too witty for being nine) never grates. There's a part of me that wonders if this started life as a movie about Mila Kunis's Grace, which would seem the more autobiographical route, only to have the more interesting bits of the script coalesce around Andy. Kunis has a great moment or three where Grace is allowed to confront that she loves her dad but that she sometimes feels like practice for raising her siblings There's a story in there that is not necessarily just an L.A. story as is implied in the dialogue, which would seem to be where she would start from.

Goodrich is almost certainly not all it could be, but it's easy enough to enjoy throughout and gives its star a couple hours to do the sort of thing he does well. There's worse ways to spend a couple hours.


The Outrun

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Drinking and alcoholism are boring. Yes, they're incredibly impactful and cause drama, but I suspect that even those with a lot of personal experience will look at scenes of Rona drinking, fucking up her life because of it, and going through AA meetings, and have a little "ugh, this shit again" reaction as it happens. It kind of puts the like to the old trope that happy families are all the same but unhappy ones are unique and interesting.

This sounds like a complaint, but it's actually what makes The Outrun kind of engrossing: Main character Rona's narration, which wanders from her own history to topics from geology to mythology to biology, reveals her as smart, curious, and self-aware of how her childhood has left her kind of a mess, and the version of her we see when she drinks is more loud than fun and uninhibited. We kind of get it; her father's bipolar syndrome and mother's religiosity on top of growing up on a farm where the work often involves grimly delivering stillborn lambs and disposing of their carcasses is the sort of thing we can see drinking to escape. And "escape" seems to be her reaction to her alcoholism when things come to a head, insisting on the sort of rehab that locks her up and running north, not just to her home, but to progressively smaller islands. She perhaps needs the quiet to progressively get rid of the noise that leads her to drink - and to make getting a bottle more work when the compulsion comes over her anyway - but it's stark.

Rona fleeing crowds winds up leaving us with Saoirse Ronan and the desolate rocky beauty of the Orkney Islands, and it's a solid foundation to build a movie on; Ronan's taciturn but engaging performance matches the stern environment and offers hints of the occasional joy she'll be able to show later. You can see her trying at times and going through the motions at others, and how her best self is smothered under the noise of drunkenness. The film's got some big clear metaphors working - the rare bird that's hard to find, the polar-bear dips to give one a jolt - but they work pretty well, in part because Rona is smart enough to see them as something she can sort of adapt and learn from in the world rather than the filmmakers building the world to reflect their points. I especially like a moment toward the end when she's explaining how she's changing her area of study to seaweed to her religious mother in a tiny apartment; it's earnest nerdiness that the drink has covered, but it's her also engaging in the world and something important about it that makes life happen. Her mother (Sasika Reeves) doesn't necessarily get it, but this is the way her daughter understands a higher power even as she lashes out at Christianity and is pointedly silent during certain phrases at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

It's a tough sit at times - dull for some, maybe triggering for others - but the people involved recognize and work with it, winding up with something often quite lovely.


Wei Ji Hang Xian (High Forces)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is

Oxide Pang is just about exactly slick enough to pull this very silly movie off. He doesn't really make it good, per se, but he keeps it moving even as the audience's eyes roll, and when the finale gets big and silly, folks are going sure, why not, rather than really laughing at it, comparing it to Hollywood productions (I'm tempted to revisit Passenger 57 to see just how much they have in common), or asking just which Chinese city, exactly, is big enough for a ring road that the largest passenger liner in the world can land on but not an airport.

Before that, we're introduced to Gao Haojun (Andy Lau Tak-wah), whose demonstration is canceled and is thus able to fly home on the new superliner; the company president, Li Hangyu (Guo Xiaodong), will also be aboard, though in a private office suite, as will ex-wife Fu Yuan (Tamia Liu Tao) and daughter Xiaojun (Wendy Zhang Zifeng). The former has reconciled with Haojun since he has shown real progress in treating the bipolar disorder that used to lead him to fits of rage; given that one caused the accident that left Xiaojun blind, she has not. Also on board, roughly a dozen terrorists whose leader Mike (Qu Xhuxiao) has a similar diagnosis and aims to ransom the plane half a billion dollars - but should the passengers be worried that they brought parachutes?

The script is dumb, and if the bad guys are ever given names rather than numbers in Chinese, they don't make the subtitles. I think this is Andy Lau's second movie in as many years which feels like it may do a real disservice to people with bipolar disorder, though I can't say myself. The "Die Hard on a plane" stuff is often weirdly choppy and frustratingly edited - you can see just enough cool action to wish you had a clearer view - even before getting into how it doesn't really take the tight quarters and sudden motions of an airplane into consideration very much. It almost makes me wonder if there had been a long negotiation worth the censor board, between the brutality of the kills and the way this new release shows 2018 every time the year shows up.

The finale, on the other hand, is big and likably dopey. I don't really believe a minute of it, but Pang and his crew mostly manage to hit the sweet spot where you know the physics is laughable but the effects are pretty well rendered (or, as the credits show us, built), it's well-paced, and the filmmakers seem to know just how much to err on the side of larger than life as opposed to realistic. It's entertaining enough to send one out of the theater enjoying its absurdity, and somehowthat's value for the price of a ticket.


Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Melville et Cie., 35mm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally ; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

I dozed off a bit here, and I'm upset about it, because it looks like two or three really fun movies in one: A cop so desperate for a win (and maybe a deterrent) that he resorts to entrapment, a group of slackers unable to really commit to a crime, and the cop falling for an old friend's sex-worker girlfriend. It's almost built for their not to be a heist, and the filmmakers are clever in how they show the general path to the foregone conclusion and don't give it twists so much as odd terrain - to torture the metaphor further, nothing ever actually disappears behind a hill, but you can't follow a straight line.

Plus, Romy Schneider, wow.

Anyway, sticking a pin here to this movie the next time Kino Lorber has a big sale.


The Fall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

Beyond having a few things that clearly inspired some comic book creators a decade later, The Bat is a genuinely fun Old Dark House movie, and that's a genre where I usually like the idea a lot more than the actual execution. It moves quickly enough that one can miss that it's playing fair, near as I can tell on a single viewing, has a fairly enjoyable set of characters that mostly stay on the right side of "too broad", and doesn't wear out its welcome.

The plot is kind of all over the place- it involves a cat burglar who announces his crimes, a young lady trying to hide her boyfriend who many believe to be said "Bat" from the police, passing him off to her spinster aunt as a new gardener, and a hidden room with a safe. It's convoluted and full of a few holes - if The Bat has been at this for a while, why are the cops investigating the latest robbery like it's a one-off - but the bones are simple enough to support more.

It's also kind of noteworthy that this was a movie from 1926 based on a play from 1920 or so, which means that it antedates a lot of things that it could be seen as riffing on, whether they be Batman or Agatha Christie or Miss Marple specifically, and, heck, The Old Dark House was a few years in the future. The building blocks were sort of sloshing around, but this puts a lot of things together in ways that anticipate what will work, and looks great - it's got a fair number of folks who would have notable careers well into the talkie era behind the scenes doing the excellent work where, nearly 100 years later, one can see the seams or the lack of refinement, but the ideas and execution are nevertheless impressive. There's a nice knack for having some funny bits and larger-than-life portions while still taking things fairly seriously.

It's not perfect even before you get to the racist tropes piled so high on the Japanese butler that one might be surprised actor Sojin Kamiyama was not a white guy in yellowface; it tries to juggle enough balls long enough that it can't help but drop a few on occasion. Still, the filmmakers tend to bounce back quickly and cram a lot of movie into its 90 minutes.


Magpie

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

The fun thing about Magpie is that not a lot seems to happen, but it's still got three phases that potentially twist things up: Before one realizes this looks like an unreliable narrator movie, discovering that one doesn't necessarily know who the unreliable narrator is, and when it sorts itself out. It's not that tricky a mystery to solve, but it's satisfying because the red herrings work differently than usual.

As it opens, it's been about five or six years since Anette (Daisy Ridley) and Ben (Shazad Latif) moved to the countryside so that Ben could concentrate on his writing and they could raise their daughter Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), with Anette leaving her job in the publishing industry. Matilda is now a child actress, and has been cast in a period piece as the daughter of a character played by Alicia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), who has just had a sex tape posted online before filming. As Ben visits the set to supervise Matilda, he finds himself feeling a connection with Alicia, while being left home alone isn't doing wonders for Anette's mental health, and it is implied she had some sort of breakdown before Matilda was conceived.

In addition to playing a lead role, Daisy Ridley has a story credit here, and it sort of confirms that she's been seeking out a certain type of role since Star Wars, these wired-differently young women who can make a viewer feel like they're hard to crack. She's interesting to watch as Anette, portraying the way parenthood can overwhelm somebody while also making them feel left behind without necessarily yelling it. There's a precision to how it's directed, emphasizing strain without having to have Ridley exaggerate anything about Anette. There's also a sort of fun in watching her, Shazad Latif, and Matilda Lutz find ways to play scenes so that one isn't quite sure whether they're just a bit awkward, showing guilty conscience, or if the actors are portraying not what the characters are actually doing and how, but what someone else thinks they're doing.

It eventually heads toward a Big Reveal that includes flashbacks, but I like how director Sam Yates and Tom Bateman haven't really worked on hiding things that much, doing only the slightest bit of misdirection in hiding something so that the audience is actively engaged with what's happening later; they seem to want viewers weighing possibilities instead of passively watching and waiting to be blindsided and explained to.

It's a nicely compact film - 90 minutes, not really an ounce of fat on it, but also pretty sparse in its action. Everyone seems to know how to get a lot of its minor events, but it's seldom the sort of consciously still movie that requires the audience to elevate tiny movements to something bigger. Just efficient and tight without feeling like it's been passed down in the name of efficiency.

This Week in Tickets: 14 October 2024 - 20 October 2024 (China, Hitch, oddities)

So, I gather nobody's been seeing these, even though I've definitely been posting them!

(You're not buying it, are you?)

I've got several things I want to catch up with on this blog, from T.W.I.T. to FIlm Rolls to Fantasia to the festivals in between, and they feel nested in a way that I wasn't ever getting out of, so now I'm going to try to rotate and keep current and say "you know what, if this isn't done by bedtime it gets a really quick finish tomorrow morning before work because it is cutting into 'watching more movies' time".

Anyway, it was a fairly fun and busy week, starting off with a Chinese double feature - Tiger Wolf Rabbit being a fairly serviceable thriller from the mainland and Stuntman is a more ambivalent ode to Hong Kong movies than is typical. I must admit, I can't help but wonder what moving the Chinese and Korean films from Boston Common to Causeway Street is doing to their audience; even if it is leading to theater splits that make double features easier.

The middle of the week (around watching some baseball) was given to watching some Hitchcock at the Somerville. Marnie on Tuesday was a nice 35mm print, and Frenzy on Thursday in a new-ish 4K remaster. They're both what I call "post-peak Hitchcock" in the reviews, made after the late-1950s masterpieces and perhaps in some ways more interesting compared to what other folks were doing in the 1960s and early 1970s than the rest of Hitch's career, because other genre filmmakers had started internalizing his lessons.

Friday evening was a trip to Kendall Square for Rumours, the new Guy Maddin that I wish I liked a bit more, then Saturday morning I headed out to the Seaport for the re-release of Tarsem Singh's restored The Fall, two filmmakers who can be niche but also have incredible style.

Then I wrapped the weekend with a couple of movies that AMC basically scheduled against each other and made difficult to see during the week, more or less carving out the weekend's late afternoons: Kensuke's Kingdom on Saturday was a nice little animated film from the UK, and Panda Plan on Sunday was the latest Jackie Chan film. The most amusing thing about it, perhaps, was that I skipped a film of his at Fantasia figuring Well Go or someone would release it in the USA, but apparently not before his next one.

Anyway - my Letterboxd account is genuinely more reliable than this, although full of spelling errors and hastily composed thoughts that get sorted out here.


Yu Huo zhi Lu (Tiger Wolf Rabbit)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

There are a couple moments in Tiger Wolf Rabbit when the filmmakers try to pull back from what has become a movie perhaps too dour and grim to get audiences to the finish, and the result is just mild disbelief. It's better than outright whiplash of going from talking about child abduction to romantic comedy material and back again, but the filmmakers don't quite have the knack for taking a little step away from the abyss or occasionally touching solid ground that keeps the audience from drifting away.

It's a movie that really doesn't come together until the second half, like the filmmakers know the three characters they need for later but can't really get them to work together before the main story kicks in. It opens with some striking scenes, but kind of drags between introducing the oddly mismatched trio - Cui Dalu (Yang Xiao), a just-released convict whose child was abducted; Li Hongyng (Zhao Zanilla), the woman he hooked up while searching for his son and wound up running scams with; and Zhao Zishan (Liu Ye), a mysterious figure who wants to hire Dalu to find a worse criminal - and giving them a big mission. That mission, it turns out, is pretty good. It's fragmented, sure, but you can see them building a movie to get there.

I don't know that the full story of the film really holds up; it often feels like the screenwriters came up with its two halves separately and stitched them together the best they could; the screenplay gets the story through but every previously-unrevealed thing about the characters feels more useful for explaining their next steps than making any sense of their previous ones. The cast is good, and vibe well when they're allowed to, but there's a segment in the middle where the characters are literally lost and pulled out via a weird deux ex machina, like the writers had no idea to how to get things to come together naturally.

There's style to the film, too; it feels like the folks involved sought out parts of China that seldom show up on screen and made the most of striking landscapes and village architecture. The big visual swings and plot twists are probably more memorable than things in many more sensibly constructed movies, to the point where it impresses more than it disappoints, even if the result isn't quite the sum of the parts.


Stuntman

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Stuntman starts out with what feels like a really good Police Story pastiche and gets interesting when that not only goes awry but the film fast-forwards to the present day and tempers its nostalgia for old-school Hong Kong action.

After the energetic stunt show, and the horrible accident at the end, it has once-famed action director Sam Lee (Stephen Tung Wai) running a little first aid clinic, catering mostly to former stuntmen who are now taking shifts as security guards and the like. At a martial-arts society reunion, he meets old friend Cho (To Yin-Gor), a director who wants him to handle the action on a movie he's putting together with action superstar Wai (Philip Ng Wan-Lung), who had been a suntman in Sam's crew but now has his own. Sam hires Lee Sam-Lung (Terrence Lau Chun-Him), who is just about ready to give up stunts to work at his brother's logistics business as the stunt co-ordinator, all while trying to prepare for the wedding of daughter Cherry (Cecliia Choi Si-Wan), though most of the father-of-the-birde work is going to her stepfather.

DIrectors Herbert Leung Kun-Seun and Albert Leung Koon-Yiu - I think they're brothers - have stuntwork bona fides and I wouldn't be terribly shocked if every piece of this movie was based on a real anecdote or experience. What's notable is that they present both the bits about making a movie and what comes after with remarkable clarity; where some may have blind spots about their life's work, the Leungs show what an action director does compared to a stunt co-ordinator, for instance, and what working-class jobs these actually are. Most importantly, while many fans of Hong Kong film and bigger names like Sammo Hung will often look back at the industry's heyday and talk about how a month would be spent on a single fight despite the guerilla filmmaking, they recognize that it was tremendously dangerous, and folks like "Heartless Sam" were a big part of the reason why. Perhaps the key thing they capture is that someone like Sam can be very good at his job and also extremely dangerous; the film's centerpiece is one that many films would play as a thrilling caper but which instead feels like Sam is going to get someone killed.

Hong Kong action is a complicated legacy and the film isn't completely successful at grappling with it; it's too fascinated by Sam to really give sufficient space to the younger characters who maybe want to be smarter about things even when he proves to be a terrible role model. It doesn't exactly help that Stephen Tung Wai has a wonderfully weathered face but never feels as natural as nearly everyone else in the cast as an actor, especially during the scenes with Cecilia Choi, where his smiling too wide and trying too hard only start to feel like something the character does rather than the actor in retrospect. The film is also big on "Hong Kong Spirit", not so much in a way that feels like it's meant to contrast with anywhere else, but also not in a way that examines it. Is it just doing more than such a tiny place should, stretching yourself past the breaking point no matter what, or...?

The stonework is legit, at least - Tung and the directors have extensive stunt backgrounds and know their stuff - and while I suspect the filmmaking is simplified, it's nicely grounded and doesn't seem interested in romanticizing the process too much.


Marnie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 35mm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K and DVD available on Amazon

Perhaps the most entertaining thing about Marnie is that you can see Hitchcock trying to coax a James Stewart or Cary Grant performance out of his lead, who absolutely cannot be anything but Sean Connery. He knew the power of movie stars, but Connery was just starting to be James Bond and broaden his own screen persona beyond that as the film was shooting, so maybe Hitch wasn't fully familiar with his new tool yet.

Connery plays the wealthy head of a publishing company who recognizes the title character (Tippi Hedren) as the woman who robbed her previous job when she applies for work as a secretary but is nonetheless fascinated by her, covering up her crimes and blackmailing her into marriage. There's the makings of an intense thriller there, but Hitchcock, perhaps, is not the man to make it; his world view seems locked into seeing Marnie as the broken women driven to crime by previous psychological trauma and Connery's Mark Rutland mostly holding her tight so that he can see how to fix her. There's a moment - perhaps the film's best - when Hitchcock or screenwriter Jay Presson Allen seem quite happy to undermine the idea, as Marnie mocks Rutland's psychological approach, saying she's seen all the same movies, but hanging a lantern on those issues isn't exactly rising above it. The whole thing might be better off acknowledging Rutland as kind of a bastard and letting Marnie own her choices move, even if they don't wind up together.

Heck, you can see how that works in the second best thing about the movie, watching Diane Baker's Lil mature from bratty to bitchy before the audience's eyes; she's never a conventional good girl but it's tough to really dislike her as she's doing interesting things around the edges, even if it she is working at cross-purposes to the film's central romance. There are also a couple other impressive scenes - the bit where Marnie steals from the safe is a clinic in presenting such a basic bit of crime as genuinely tense, and the way Hitchcock and Hedren present Marnie's panic during the hunt (where she should feel safe and assured) is great as well - but they're often exceptions, the parts the filmmakers can make singe even if what's around them aren't as great.

The movie is very much post-peak Hitchcock: Elaborate psychological constructs, a script stuck between explicit and euphemistic, and an underlying meanness where a younger Hitch would have found chemistry and affection.


Frenzy

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 4K laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K and DVD available on Amazon

Fifty years later, Frenzy feels like it's in a weird, in-between spot, where a casual viewer might not be able to tell where Alfred Hitchcock is ahead of the times, where he's catching up, and where his experiments are having mixed results. It's good, but there are moments when I'd wonder what he's getting at; it can feel like a Monty Python sketch, and Hitchcock's dark sense of humor means it could be a joke or the sort of thing the Pythons were spoofing.

(And that's setting aside stuff like the joke about how exotic and terrible a "Margarita" is, which has aged about as well as James Bond scoffing at the Beatles)

Some of those bits are obvious bad ideas, like a long recap of what has already happened that exists to beat the joke about the detective's wife's cooking into the ground. Sometimes I wondered whether stuff like using a freeze-frame instead of holding a shot was meant to be unnerving or not. Other times, Hitchcock seems to be trying to get every morbid gag he's ever thought of in during what he probably figures will be one of his last few films.

But, on the other hand, some pieces are legitimately great. The armchair psychoanalysis might be terrible, but the way the killer slides from affable to vicious is genuinely terrific, and a scene where the camera seems to nervously back away from a murder and then wait for the body to be found feels about three layers deep. The film tortures by waiting just a little too long, but not so much that giggling breaks out. It's mean, and the results of murder are undignified in a way that makes the whole idea even more awful.

At times, it feels like Hitchcock wants to scratch the same itch as Psycho but knows folks will compare the two films and maybe tries too hard to differentiate between them (and his other "wrong man" stories). But it works more often than not, and looks gorgeous to boot.

Previous review (2013)


Rumours

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Available to pre-order digitally on Prime; not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Everything about Rumours feels like it should not just be a lot of fun, but work well together: Guy Maddin (And his frequent collaborators)! Bog body zombies! At the G7 summit! With a giant brain! And a fun cast, including an increasingly game-for-anything Cate Blanchett! And yet, it resolutely fails to come together. One of cinema's greatest weirdos seems too timid to be absurd or satiric.

You can tell early on, too, when the leaders are chummy but won't say what sort of crisis they are meeting to discuss, and then seem like they're being taxed to write out platitudes. In 2024, it seems like the weakest jokes you can make about politicians, even if the G7 feels like a lot of empty hype (has anything concrete actually emerged from one?); if you're making them, put some tension in it. Make them seem paralyzed into politeness rather than empty. Or maybe go all in on absurdity, which is often this group's specialty, but they seldom push a joke past odd into weird or unnerving territory. Rumours is all the little bits a movie puts in between the big gags that you might miss, elevated to the foreground.

When the jokes land and linger, the film can be pretty fun - a late gag with the Canadian Prime Minister going for the land acknowledgment in an emergency feels downright clever for instance. The cast is admittedly terrific: Everybody seems to at least be digging into the various bits of pompous dignity of their characters, with Roy Dupuis (as Canada's virile, scandal-plagued PM) and Denis Ménochet (as France's intellectual President) in particular making off with any scene that's not tied down. It's also very fun to see Maddin's silent-influenced style emerge from a movie that initially looks downright normal, especially once one learns that they have taken an actual forest and used lighting and smoke to make it look like a set. The melodramatic score is fun.

The filmmakers just don't seem to know how to connect all those ideas that probably seemed like they would write themselves once that failed to happen.


The Fall

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in Alamo Boston #4 (re-release, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; original DVD available on Amazon (new one likely on the way)

The Fall is arguably one of the great cinematic follies of our time, and that's no insult: It's just acknowledging that there's clearly a lot of time, money, and effort poured into a film that was probably never going to connect with a mainstream audience unless it got very lucky. It's a folly, but one that's worth being in the world. The world is richer for having such things in it.

And it's worth checking out during this re-release, even if it hadn't been cleaned up and presented as the finest digital file possible. The film is more eye-poppingly gorgeous than one likely remembers, for a start, even if you remember it looking pretty good; 15 years of movies being increasingly built inside machines rather than from figuring out how to populate a grand landscape or striving for consistency rather than this movie's glorious contradictions makes something like this harder to conceive even in memory, as we often remember things in relation to other things, and that can cause something as singular as this to fade precisely because there's nothing like it. Watching it for the first time in years allows it to stun anew because there is very little like, say, a scene where an elaborately-costumed army makes their way down an almost Escher-like series of stairs in sync.

The script often seems shaggier than the precisely-planned visuals, and the fact that it's a bit of meta-commentary - Roy's story shifts and expands and contracts to capture his young visitor's attention to a purpose - the viewer can perhaps see that a bit too plainly. It stays to grind at a certain point, but then, the movie is about to change, and perhaps wearing out its welcome keeps the audience from rejecting the shift, and Tarsem's choice to plunge what had spent a lot of time as a children's story with dark undertones into not just darkness but despair can feels audacious: There's no winking or quipping, but the sincerity is powerful, and Tarsem isn't trying to impress us so much as be honest about how hard crawling out can be.

The filmmaker never got to make this sort of big swing again, but what a thing to spend your credit on.


Kensuke's Kingdom

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Kensuke's Kingdom certainly starts out in that easily-maligned category of "British animated films that look kind of cheap but somehow have an amazing voice cast", but happily grows into something better. The language barrier that never really gets bridged forces it to be more visual, and the filmmakers are wise to keep the scale manageable.

And it could be easy for it to seem too big, opening with Michael (voice of Aaron MacGregor) sailing around the world at some point in the 1990s, presumably, with his parents (voices of Cillian Murphy & Sally Hawkins) and older sister (voice of Raffey Cassidy), none too pleased about supposedly leaving his dog stella behind, though he's somehow managed to smuggle the pup on board and keep him hidden for days despite being not that great a sailor otherwise. It all leads to him being swept off the deck during a storm, landing on a seemingly deserted island, although eventually he'll meet Kensuke (voice of Ken Watanabe), who appears to have been there since World War II.

It's kind of wobbly at times, but the filmmakers are wise to lavish attention on what will get the most benefit: They quietly show how ow great it is to have a dog in this situation, lovingly render tropical animals, and make sure Kensuke's those doesn't look like a CGI effect on the middle of a hand-drawn film, as can happen. Heck, it happens here, as a choppy sea and the boat upon it are clearly created using different methods. The style switch to show his origins is very nice, and the animators give him a lot of dignity without making him stiff.

The filmmakers do sometimes seem to have a bit of trouble with how to tell the best part of the story; one suspects that the heart of the original book is Michael and Kensuke somehow getting to know each other without being able to speak, but that's probably more internal and time-consuming than the film can likely manage, while Michael remains a rather passive part of the story. The introduction of an external danger sometimes feels like something needs to be going on, but feels like an interruption more than a climax.

Still, as these small family movies which are fortunate to get one show a day for a week go, it's pretty decent.


Xiong Mao Ji Hua (Panda Plan)

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

You don't have to do this, Jackie Chan. You're a seventy-year-old legend who has recently expressed a fair amount of interest in being seen as a serious filmmaker rather than a clown. You don't have to sign up for the movie with the CGI panda cub, ego-puffing self-referentiality, and action scenes where everyone can see you've lost a step. You can just do one movie a year, play mentor on and off the screen, and just enjoy the fruits of an incredibly successful career.

Maybe someone gave Jackie that advice before Panda Plan, which takes what must have at one point seemed like a clever idea for a movie - action movie star gets caught up in the middle of a plan to steal baby pandas while at a symbolic "adoption ceremony" - and just sucks the life out of it. Part of it is probably Chan's ego - when going meta, he's willing to have people joke about his nose and make himself look like a goofball, but he's not going to let folks take out the knives like Andy Lau did in The Movie Emperor - which means that a lot of this movie is heroes and villains alike fawning over Jackie-the-character and he never quite plays himself as an older man who needs choreography in a way that would add tension. The filmmakers don't spend much of their Dairy Queen product placement money on actors who can play English-speaking mercenaries like people who actually speak English. The effects work isn't great and the last stretch is a cringe-worthy attempt to give the heartstrings an unwarrented tug.

(It's interesting that Jackie has a line about receiving an Oscar, though; it's clearly what he says, rather than subtitles, and while he did receive an honorary award in 2015, I wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe where The Diary got made out he didn't pass on Everything Everywhere All at Once. Plus you kind of expect him to go with the Mainland China equivalent these days)

Of course, Jackie Chan can star in a movie like this and get a National Week release because he knows the ropes as well as anybody ever has, and it's not just habit to smile as he slips through gaps in leaders or dodges punches. He may not be as spry as he was, but the choreography is still pretty good, inventive and funny, and there's a moment when things slow down enough to let Jackie talk about why he loves making movies where we're reminded of his genuine charisma and how good he can be given a chance to play it straight.

Sometimes you can say that the rest of the movie is worth it for those good bits, but this isn't one of them; it's a bit that could fit in many other movies and have the whole thing be much better.

This Week in Tickets: 26 February 2024 - 3 March 2024 (Slow Week)

Very slow new release weekend, very lazy get-out-of-the-apartment mid-week.

This week kicked off with one of my favorite Boston-area moviegoing experiences, the kind of disreputable movie at a fancy institution. In this case, it was Cotton Comes to Harlem at the Harvard Film Archive. In this case, it was shown in conjunction with the University's Houghton Library, which has acquired star Godfrey Cambridge's papers and has some of them on display in the lobby. He was a writer and journalist as well as being an actor, and the slide-show before the (very fun) movie was interesting.

I believe there was some weird train nonsense that made getting to things harder during the week, but I forget which color of weird train nonsense it was. Then on Friday, scheduling was weird/off, so both the big releases got hit on Saturday - Dune: Part Two as the afternoon matinee in 70mm on the Somerville's main screen and The Moon Thieves that evening, which was a pretty good day at the movies.

Sunday's train nonsense was definitely the Red Line - I came up just short of the one meant to get me to Kendall Square for some Oscar shorts and the next one wouldn't be for fifteen minutes, too late - so I wound up getting groceries and then catching Anatomy of a Fall at night, so I at least got a little Oscar catch-up done.

This week promises a little more on my Letterboxd account, although short packages probably won't be on in and Sunday's Oscar night, so I'll be watching that.


Cotton Comes to Harlem

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Godfrey Cambridge, 35mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD at Amazon

Cotton Comes to Harlem is just top-shelf pulp filmmaking from Ossie Davis, the sort where you maybe expect to cut it a little slack for its pioneer status but instead find a movie that feels like something more assured and confident in how its genre works than a lot of later Blaxploitation films. The term didn't exist yet, but it is that, and maybe a top example of the genre.

It's adapted from one of a series of books starring two Harlem NYPD detectives, "Grave Digger" Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and "Coffin Ed" Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) who, from their nicknames, are likely not known for de-escalation and bringing suspects in quietly. To start, they're assigned to watch a rally by Reverend Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart), and ex-con running Johnson is certain is a scam as he convinces neighbors to invest in his Back-to-Africa program. The event is robbed, and O'Malley's people are nearly as aggressive toward the cops as the crooks during the chase. The guys decide to surveil Deke's girlfriend Iris (Judy Pace), though he opts to shack up with his late second-in-command's wife Mabel (Emily Yancy). During the chase, a bale of cotton falls from the robbers' van, and neighborhood character "Uncle Budd" (Redd Foxx) picks it up, not knowing that the stolen $87,000 is inside and everyone is looking for it.

It's worth noting that the initial car chase is kind of terrific, not just because it's the sort of old-school chase that is quite frankly terrifying if you think about it, just cars that are all sharp metal speeding through streets where one shouldn't be going that fast, without modern crumple zones or airbags, gunshots that feel like every stray could kill a bystander, etc. It's in the classic "do more, say less" mode that it reveals a lot of the story without spelling it out (it's very clear that Deke is in cahoots with those robbing him but also not something Grave Digger and Coffin Ed can present as certain), great storytelling on top of great stunts. At the other end, there's a climax where a curtain falls in a way that's maybe more symbolic than the movie really merits, but is too good to not do. Davis and co-writer Arnold Perl know the power of the image and will do all they can to let it elevate a B-movie filled with secret passages, broad characterization, and maybe a little more nudity than is strictly necessary, at least a little.

The comedy at times gets a little broad at times, but it's notable that Davis and company already have their leads kind of cracking jokes about the sheer number of slogans and comments on authenticity that various activists are using, at the time even as they're doing it (consider the earnest performer talking about how she has to do something important that speaks to Her People toward the start and how that winds up being burlesque in the end). It kind of feels like the sort of self-aware thing that comes at the end of a cycle, tweaking the things that had gotten so serious over time, rather than at what's arguably the first blaxploitation film, but, then, sometimes things do start out that way and have it stripped out only to get more sophisticated later.

Also, the Archive had a gorgeous print of a great-looking movie - Colors really pop when everybody's outside during the daytime, and there's a sense of Harlem being both kind of run down and on the way up that the palette and Gerald Hirschfeld's cinematography really heightens.


Dune: Part Two

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, 70mm)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

Like its predecessor, Dune: Part Two is absolutely impeccable as a "just look at this thing" epic, especially on the Somerville Theatre's 70mm screen, chock-full of absolutely astounding feats of design, cinematography, and every other technical element of making a movie. It may not be the best possible realization of Frank Herbert's book, but it will certainly be daunting for someone considering another adaptation 20 years from now (as that appears to be the cycle we're on).

Although, speaking of Astounding (or was it Analog by then?), you can kind of see the original serial structure here, I think, as a lot of the focus changes suddenly around the midpoint, and it's bumpy, in part because director Denis Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts compacted a novel that took place over about five years to one that doesn't quite last the length of a pregnancy. That not only robs of the series's first creepy little kid, but it means that the Fremen seem a little more credulous about Paul's Chosen One status, and his eventual turn more forced than tragic. There's also a sense that the filmmakers are a bit wobbly on how they deal with prophecy and mysticism, not quite hitting that sweet spot where there's human frailty driving the sci-fi plot devices. The royalty, eugenics, and propaganda the story rails against work too well.

Crazy good cast, at least. Timothée Chalamet does a really nice job of making a character who is such a product of a weird environment as Paul into someone a viewer can genuinely connect with before turning on the afterburners, and while I'm not sure I've yet seen Zendaya in the role that makes one sure she's this sort of single-name superstar, one can certainly see where she's capable of being that actress. Rebecca Ferguson is a force, and it feels like it's been too long since I've seen Christopher Walken in anything.

And, did I mention it's gorgeous? They seem to have refined a lot of things that were only pretty good the first time around, such as the Harkonnen planet and royal family; there are more cool details to their standard black-leather bad guys this time around, and whoever came up with the black fireworks deserves some sort of raise.

So, yes, I'm looking forward to Dune Messiah (or Dune: Part Three, if they go that route), whenever they get around to that.


Anatomie d'une chute (Anatomy of a Fall)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 March 2024 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase on Prime and elsewhere and for pre-order on Blu-ray at Amazon

Anatomy of a Fall is a pretty darn good movie, but I think it's also the sort of movie that benefits from being the sort of thing that writers, actors, and other folks who really appreciate such things love. It's got a script full of ambiguity and chewy dialogue that actors and critics quite reasonably fall in love with, often enough to forgive when it gets a little too caught up in those things, even before the story itself is centering writing as so crucial. It wants you to know it's clever, and that it mostly is doesn't always help when it's maybe too clever by at least a little bit.

The first half is great, at least, sort of brilliantly uncomfortable in its depiction how opaque and being part of a police investigation must feel from the inside, placing the viewer right in the middle of what could be a suicide, murder, or accident, with director Justine Triet and her co-writer Arthur Harari at once presenting it as a mystery that leaves room for the victim's wife Sandra (Sandra Hüller) to be culpable but also highlighting the tension of being in her position and knowing that an inquiry is necessary but possibly dangerous rightly or wrongly. It's full of tension, with her lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud) trying to work this case with detachment and her son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) possibly convincing himself that she couldn't have done it. It's here that the stuff that often unnerves during courtroom dramas - the way that every kind of evidence, from eyewitness to forensic, is far more subjective than believe - plays out.

Once the film jumps forward a year to the trial, the second half can't quite avoid how much fun this stuff is for writers, actors, and lawyers, and that's before you get to the a recording being entered into evidence that is a performer's dream for just how many words it contains about just laying out the facts of a relationship and the grievances within, no matter how convenient the whole thing is, and how Triet and Harari are putting "Sandra is complex and maybe difficult to like even if she is innocent" out from. Then they pin the whole thing on Daniel being a kid who is so absurdly perceptive in retrospect that it stretches belief. Add that to the combativeness and insinuations from the prosecutor that are barely pushed against (folks used to American courtroom dramas and courtrooms are going to wonder if French ones are really like this a lot!), and the natural, discomfiting situations of the first half are replaced by a lot of people trying just a bit harder than they seemingly have to.

On balance, I think the upsides of this setup outweighs the pitfalls that the movie happily springs, and by a fair amount. It's never less than compelling, and for all that one can easily point out how the second half isn't quite so interesting as the first, Triet is pretty darn good at walking right up to the point where you roll your eyes but not quite getting there. Actors and critics don't go for this just because they're self-interested, but because there's so much good work that can be (and is) done with it.

Spare thoughts: First, everyone saying that Messi deserves all the awards for Best Supporting Animal is correct - he is just an extremely good dog. Second, this look at the French legal system does nothing to shake me of the idea that trial by jury is like democracy - the worst possible way to arrive at a fair result, except for all the others.

This Week in Tickets: 19 February 2024 - 25 February 2024 (Annoyingly Good Programming)

Sure, I said, I'll just get the Alamo Drafthouse membership because it'll pay for itself with two movies or so a month, but probably won't use it for much more, especially since they're all the way down in the Seaport.

Moviegoing kicked off on Tuesday when I finally got around to Pegasus 2, which may be the biggest Lunar New Year movie for the Year of the Dragon. It's not bad, although also not great, weirdly non-melodramatic for a fast-car movie!

Wednesday night I hit Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which turns out to be the only thing I went to as part of the Alamo's Time Capsule '99 shows, in part because a lot show elsewhere semi-regularly and 25th anniversary stuff, well, that'll be at the Brattle during reunion weekend and just kind of shows up regularly. Still, this was one I've not crossed paths with yet - I think it might have felt too weird for me when it came out - and I dug it. Speaking of 25 years ago, the next night was Drive-Away Dolls, which takes place in 1999, and is pretty decent, if not quite up to what the folks involved maybe could have managed.

Friday night, it was back to Lunar New Year stuff with Article 20, the latest from Zhang Yimou (who is making movies at a pace that suggests gambling debts or the like these days), although perhaps the most grounded and contemporary thing he's ever done. Surprisingly fun and quippy for the subject matter. Just kind of odd for Zhang.

Saturday was the first of two days heading down to the Seaport for stuff where the only/best show was at 12:15pm on the weekend, which isn't ideal even if the Red Line is working, which it wasn't this weekend. That got me there for Stopmotion, a decent-enough horror movie for a while that eventually diverges from what I tend to like about the genre. After that, I walked back across the bridge for Perfect Days, which is pretty much as great as people say, even if it's kind of odd for Wim Wenders to be directing Japan's submission for the Oscars.

The next day started the same way, with movie in question being The Invisible Fight, and, wow, I feel like it was just a few weeks ago that I was grumbling about how it was impossible to go to that place spur of the moment because between limited showtimes and seating, everything sold out a week in advance. When I got on the train Sunday morning, it looked like I might be alone in this show. Admittedly, it's a weird one at a weird time, but has the novelty worn off? Or is it just not enough in cases like this?

And, finally, speaking of novelty (sort of), we end the week back near home at the Somerville Theatre, which had one of the 70mm prints of Tenet that Warner was pushing out to promote Dune Part Two on large-format film next week, which is kind of odd - they're not exactly related beyond having a WB logo up front! - but we'll take it.

Those two-movie days get my Letterboxd account, closer to 1 film/day, which is either a bit much or a goal.


Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (Time Capsule: 1999, laser DCP)
Available to stream/rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on Blu-ray at Amazon

So many movies with this basic story - an assassin's assignment goes sideways and he must ultimately kill the whole organization before it kills him - are visibly working so hard to be off-kilter and cool without achieving half of the genuine eccentricity that Jim Jarmusch seems to manage effortlessly here. I'm not sure why that is - maybe it's that Jarmusch conceived Ghost Dog and his world more holistically than others; maybe he's just got an odd way of looking at things - but it makes the movie memorable in a way that others of its ilk aren't.

The assassin in question (Forest Whitaker) goes by "Ghost Dog", and after having been rescued from a beating by gangster Louie (John Tormey) some years ago, he's modeled himself on samurai retainers and pledged his loyalty. He and Louie communicate by pigeon, and that's where he got the orders to kill Handsome Frank (Richard Portnow), who has been hooking up with his boss's daughter Louise (Tricia Vessey). Trouble is, Louise was supposed to be on a bus as opposed to Frank's apartment, which means the gang can't say they don't know who to look for.

Of course, part of why this characterization works is that Jarmusch knows the price of such eccentricity; underneath Ghost Dog's cool is a man trying his damnedest to create some sense of stability by following a Way, even if his employers clearly have no code. Forest Whitaker never seems about to crack in the role, but always lets you see that this persona, real though it may be, has been carefully constructed. He may not be entirely aware that this whole situation is the result of how both he and the gangsters he serves are trying to live by genre tropes - in this case, the honorable man being used by those that change their minds capriciously, though he certainly is by the end, and is somehow at peace with that. It is, perhaps, a Way itself.

Jarmusch is aware it's a bit ridiculous,, and doesn't entirely play it straight, but his winking at the audience before the final High Noon reference is mostly having gangsters watching cartoons whenever there's a TV nearby, as if that's the highest level of sophistication these tough guys can muster about the violence they use. Instead, he makes the movie very funny in a certain way, deadpan absurdity where sometimes one finds oneself the only person in the theater laughing at a joke and sometimes one is a bit surprised to hear others. Somehow, every bit with Ghost Dog and his francophone best friend Raymond (Isaach De Bankolé) saying the same thing in different languages lands despite it always being the same joke because there's something earnest about understanding each other if not each other's words there.

By the end, Ghost Dog does not feel like it has vanished into its sort of meta-ness, but that is where it has wound up, with most characters accepting their parts in these genre narrative and the ones who haven't rather alarmed by it.


Drive-Away Dolls

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 February 2024 in AMC Causeway #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

I hope all three movies in Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke''s B-movie project honor their origins by coming in comfortably under 90 minutes. Not in a "man, even 1:24 is too much" way but because they seem well aware that there's potential for bloat in trying to get their zany ideas to not look dinky next to other listings and resist, moving things along instead.

The plot, such as it is, works as pure road-trip hijinks fuel, as buttoned up Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) winds up having her recently-broken-up hot mess of a friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) tag along on her trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, suggesting they can save some money by using a "drive-away" for folks who want to get a car from one place to another. A misunderstanding has them taking one with a MacGuffin in the spare tire well, so a couple of goons (C.J. Wilson & Joey Slotnick) are sent to make sure they don't accidentally find it - which, of course, they do.

It's one of the sturdiest foundations you can build a movie upon, and the filmmakers don't get too cute trying to twist it beyond some unusual details. That said, the movie often feels like it could have used a joke or two more, or maybe some better ones at times. It's never terribly serious, and doesn't seem particularly clueless in the way an older straight white dude and his wife making a movie about young gay women could be, but it's a movie that provides a steady stream of chuckles that leaves the audience maybe a bit impatient for the huge laughs that its goofy premise and impressive pedigree promise. There are a few, especially toward the beginning and end, but it still feels like the film is underachieving just a bit - they kind of know what has to happen for Jamie and Marion on the road, but don't really come up with characters to encounter that are able to steal their scenes, and there's maybe a little "I forget, was this transgressive then?" going on.

That's not true of the dolls themselves, thankfully; Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are introduced in a couple scenes that seem a bit overdone but quickly find a groove, like Coen & Cooke figured the language could be extra-screwball for a moment to establish them before pulling back. They're really great together as an odd couple one immediately believes as friends despite opposing personalities, and if there's romance in store, sure, that'll work too. Qualley gets the obviously funny stuff, but Viswanathan kind of had the hard part playing the more uptight half without getting anywhere close to being an annoying killjoy. Joey Slotnick & C.J. Wilson have a similar sort of vibe - Slotnick plays the chatty movie goon and Wilson the hulking one - but they're better off with Colman Domingo annoyed with the pair of them.

It should have been better, but it at least moves quick enough to never actually live out its welcome. The question, given that the filmmakers talked about doing three, is whether they've got jokes enough for two more movies like this given how thin they occasionally were here.


Stopmotion

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

Horror movie life hack: As soon as the kid who looks an awful lot like a young version of yourself and never seems to have parents around shows up, talk to a licensed mental health care professional and enquire about medication. It's never a good sign.

Of course, Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) was destined to have issues anyway; the daughter of a stop-motion animation legend (Stella Gonet) whose arthritis as left her unable to manipulate her maquettes directly, Ella is serving as Suzanne's hands on what is to be her final project, even though her mother doesn't see her as a true artist. When Suzanne has a stroke, Ella attempts to finish the work in a new space her boyfriend Tom (Tom York) finds for her, but, just as Suzanne claimed, Ella has a difficult time coming up with an idea when placed on the spot - although a kid running around the building (Caolinn Springall) has a few.

That audiences are certainly going to recognize that, not only does Caolinn Springall look an awful lot like Aisling Franciosi, but her character never gives a name, is not necessarily bad for the movie, since it's not like the filmmakers are being particularly cute about it; it certainly lets Ella's mini-me just jump straight to being a very weird little girl without a lot of messing around. We are here for a movie about the animator who has to plunge so deeply into her creations and worries that there's not much of herself anyway, right? And when the film is about that, it's kind of great, retaining the magic of the technique while still satisfying curiosity about how it works. The puppet imagery is terrific, and the moments when it spills over into the real world land very well.

Unfortunately, at least for me, the finale is the sort of horror movie climax where it gets gnarly and meaner, but there's not a whole lot that compels me beyond the blood and guts. I didn't feel a sense of doomed inevitability, or the discomfort of knowing it could have been avoided, or the forlorn hope that things could be turned around. It's just kind of time to escalate, as opposed to truly feeling like the inevitable next step of what's troubling Emma, despite the fact that we're pretty invested in that, for all it's been haphazardly presented.

That's the thing that separates a great horror movie from a decent one, often, that all the little details reinforce each other and prevent any way out. It's a bit disappointing that Ella's film doesn't tell us much about her, especially when there's such good material about her actually being a good technician but thinking she should be a genius like her mother; it could have even made the genericness of her monster and need to transgress sharper. Instead, it plays more like "this is kind of nasty, let's throw it in" than something really horrifying.


Perfect Days

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2024 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

So, I was kind of at "this is really good, maybe something special, and there ain't nothing wrong with that" until the last shot of all the complex emotions going across Koji Yakusho's face basically destroyed me.

Which, basically, seemed what he and director Wim Wenders are going for, in a kind of sneaky way, spending the first half of the movie or so sort of playing up this thing outsiders low-key fetishize about Japan, the pride in how even ordinary things can be beautiful and there's dignity in doing necessary work. Then, though, he starts quietly not-quite-upending this, but maybe making one get a little fidgety about it. A camera angle we haven't quite seen before reveals a pile of paperbacks finished and set aside, then something similar with the photographs he's been taking. Then his toilet cleaner Hirayama's Niko (Arisa Nakano) shows up and it's very clear that he's built himself a life with little room for more than it has.

Wenders's movie isn't the sort to scold him for this. The beauty found here is real, but it's got a cost, especially for a man like Yakusho's Hirayama who's not getting any younger, and there's a sort of realization that being able to live like this is something of an illusion. Your life may be a story of perfect stasis, but change will come, probably in the form of some small piece of this structure you take for granted disappearing.

Yakusho plays that well, even beyond that incredible final shot; for all that Perfect Days and Hirayama aren't entirely what they appear to be on the surface, it has to work as that portrait of a humble worker who sees joy all over despite a small apartment and a job cleaning Tokyo's art-installation-quality public toilets, but there's also got to be things about him that are a bit stunted: His lack of conversation gets abrasive, he's abrasive when a co-worker quite, and his response to a friend of a friend having terrible news is on the one hand cheering but on the other, maybe a bit childish. This isn't a big man-child, but he's maybe missed some of the development that usually comes before settling into this sort of serene engagement with life. That hits home with me a bit, to be honest, and it's interesting to watch the film weigh that.


Nähtamatu võitlus (The Invisible Fight)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Alamo Seaport #3 (first-run/Fantastic Fest Presents, DCP)
Not streaming yet, but where to watch when it is

The clever thing about The Invisible Fight is that a viewer is quite like to start this movie kind of delighted at the idea of a genre-poisoned mind looking at this Orthodox monastery and seeing the Shaolin Temple, but by the end, it's pretty clear that the cool things that the Soviet Union has banned are not just kung fu or rock & roll, but religion. Underneath all the slapstick and silliness, these filmmakers are genuinely fond of their monks, and see the part that they and their institution have to play.

First, though, we see three rock & roll Chinese bandits (Eddie Tsai Chia-Yuan, Kyro Wavebourne, Johnny X. Wang) practically fly into a fort on the USSR/China border in 1973, seemingly killing everyone but one guard. When Rafael (Ursel Tilk) returns home to Estonia, it's clearly made an impression on him - he wears his hair long, adores Bruce Lee, and listens to Black Sabbath, presumably smuggled in, because "everything cool is banned by the Soviet Union". His mother (Maria Avdjushko) despairs, but Rtia (Ester Kuntu) notices him one night at the bar; alas, she's already engaged, to Rudolf (Ekke Märten Hekles). Soon, though, Rafel finds a hidden monastery where the monks practice martial arts, and while most want nothing to do with him, Father Nafanail (Indrek Sammul) takes him on as a student, a blow to his current protégé Irinei (Kaarel Pogga).

There is a lot of goofy physical comedy as Rafael, dismissed as a clown by most of the monks, plows through certain of his destiny and his desire to learn kung fu with little on his mind beyond that. Writer/director Rainer Sarnet riffs on everything from silent comedy to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, seldom letting the opportunity for a physical gag go by but having a great eye for when a gag is both kind of silly and cartoonish and when it's based on something cool that's got to look cool. That high-energy enthusiasm carries the movie a long way. It's relentless and silly enough to keep the audience hooked even if the story is a bit thin, and the odd couple chemistry between Ursel Tilk and Kaarel Pogga as Rafael & Irinei is kept at a very enjoyable simmer, as these guys never actually grow to like each other but at constantly able to turn that into comedic tension. If you're going to build a movie around someone as brash and dumb as Rafael, it helps to have someone exasperated with his own flaws as a balance.

It does sort of start to stretch once one realizes that this isn't quite the martial-arts spoof it's sold itself as, or at least not entirely so and there's probably not going to be another big wire-fu set piece to bookend the film at the end; neither Rudolf nor the State Security guy they cross paths with is that formidable or even the right sort of character. It feels, a bit, like Sarnet maybe intended to go that direction, but eventually found his way to the spirituality being the thing - the confidence and trust and sense of belonging more than the supernatural or a demand of devotion - and there was some casting about while writing the script without removing the dead ends once the final direction became clear. It finishes satisfyingly, though, and I suppose that's a reasonable result for a movie tackling this sort of subject: One seldom ends a spiritual journey at their initial intended destination, after all.


Tenet

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (re-release, 70mm)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and elsewhere, or on DVD/Blu-ray/4K disc at Amazon

This random-seeming re-release to promote Dune Part Two playing on large-format film next week highlights just how great this plays with an audience and makes me think that the pandemic screwing up its intended release has allowed it to become a sort of cult film. I know, it's too expensive and filled with movie stars to be a traditional cult film, but it's weird, benefits from multiple viewings, and a lot of folks are going to discover how much they truly enjoy it because they saw it at a special show in the one place in town that can still run 70mm film, as opposed to it just being this week's blockbuster. It's a film where there's a narrative to seeing it.

And, on top of that, it's a better movie than I thought when I first saw it during its delayed initial release, and not just because there were more of us digging Nolan's amazing action sequences at a time than there were then, with everyone scattered throughout theaters that could only hold 10% or so. As with Ghost Dog (how's that for some fortunate/found bookending!), you can sort of see Nolan examining genre and moviemaking, how you may wind up building a movie both forward from the initial concept but also backward from the climactic action finale, an unseen hand putting everything in place but the story still needing to live and breathe on its own. I like the performances a bit more, with John David Washington's Protagonist dutiful but chafing at being put into a box, Robert Pattinson charmingly ostentatious, Elizabeth Debicki gaining a spine after being so thoroughly cowed. There are little bits I really love - Debicki racing back to look casual after her Kat hides a gun from her husband, Washington casually mentioning that one of the large vehicles he wants for the impossible heist he's planning has to be a fire truck, or a bit where he sarcastically asks Kenneth Branagh's Sator whether a line comes from Walt Whitman that I will believe is a Dead Again reference until Nolan personally tells me otherwise.

It is, for a movie so intent on making sure one appreciates the clockwork of it, awfully lively and emotional. It's currently lodged atop my list of most-rewatched films at Letterboxd, and although that only includes a few years, I think it will stay up there. It's enough fun to catch again when a local theater hauls it out, and I think enough folks are starting to realize that to get theaters to book it every couple years or so.

Initial Letterboxd entry from October 2020