Last Movie Watched.... The Xenforo Edition

Injustice (2021)
Dir. Matt Peters



After the Joker escapes from Arkham, he uses Scarecrows fear toxin to cause all sorts of mayhem in Metropolis. As the Justice League struggles to get the mad clown under control, the Joker manages to victimize many of the citizens, until Batman is able to apprehend his nemesis. Only by that point, Lois Lane is among the fatalities. A grief-stricken and angry Superman takes his revenge by killing the Joker. Batman realizes that his Kryptonian friend has crossed a line from which there is no turning back. The decision on Kal-El's part to forgo his former values as a hero and instead do whatever it takes to get results splits the Justice League in half, with one faction agreeing with Superman's new methods and another faction - with Batman as its de facto leader - abhorring the Superman's newfound extreme consequentialism.

Another entry in the DC animated universe and not a bad one at that. Based on a video game with a very similar plot line that I never played. A good voice actor ensemble, with Anson Mount's Batman and Gillian Jacobs Harley Quinn as my two favorites. Plastic Man is hilarious in this.

 

Salt of the Earth (1954)-The only blacklisted film. Most of the crew was also blacklisted. Kind of tame. I've seen films farther to the left than this. Rosauro Revueltas is the main character. An early feminist movie. Will Geer also stars. Good progressive flick.

 

A boring and poorly acted sexist story of magical space Jesus coming to save the down-trodden residents of a planet with worms.

Part 1.

 

Copshop (2021)
Dir. Joe Carnahan



In Nevada, a rookie cop is assaulted by a stranger, which leads to his arrest. A few hours later, a drunk almost runs two state troopers off the road and he is taken to holding at the same police headquarters the other man was. It is revealed that the former is actually a mob fixer on the run from a contract on his name and the latter is a hitman who is out to kill him and has only allowed himself to be arrested so he can get into the same police holding as his mark. As these facts are slowly revealed over the course of that night, things are further complicated by the arrival of a rival hitman as well as the revelation that one of the cops is dirty. It is left to the rookie to navigate the many dangers and complications, with her very survival at stake.

This is a pretty straightforward Joe Carnahan joint. If you have seen his Smoking Aces, you'll get the tone, which is basically over the top action that occasionally goes into action comedy territory. Most of the laughs this time around revolve around Lamb, the rival hitman. Toby Huss is majorly chewing scenery in that role. Not a bad 100+ minutes if this is your kind of thing.

 

Sleep, My Love (1948)
Dir. Douglas Sirk



Alison wakes up on a night train from NYC to Boston, with no memory of how she got there. Back in New York, her husband reports his wife as missing. After she contacts her husband after her arrival in Boston, her return via plane is arranged. During the plane ride back, she meets Bruce, a charming young bachelor who accompanies her for the duration of the trip. When she does arrive back home, her husband informs her that the night of her disappearance, she was acting strange and confused and even attempted to shoot him, the bullet grazing his arm in the process. Shocked by this revelation, she agrees to see a psychiatrist. Whilst Alison has to come to terms that she might have deep untreated psychological problems, her friendship with Bruce deepens and he starts to believe that there is something strange and nefarious going on in Alison's life, not linked to her supposed psychological problems.

Fairly entertaining noirish mystery. I think I liked the middle section of the film best, particularly the scenes at the Chinese wedding. A side-note, but it is strange how differently this movie treats its Asian characters compared to its black characters. The former are portrayed as people, the latter as caricatures. Also features Raymond Burr in a small role as a police detective.

Since I now also post these little write-ups to Letterboxd, I also get some useless stats, including the fact that this is apparently the 100th film I have posted about this year.

 

Lansky (2021)-Harvey Keitel stars as an aging Meyer Lansky. Sam Worthington, AnnaSophia Robb and John Magaro also star. It was a Splat on Rotten Tomatoes, probably because of the excessive focus on Worthington's character. Audiences seemed to like it, as did I. Good use of a couple hours.

 

Chicago Syndicate (1955)
Dir. Fred F. Sears



A mob accountant is murdered shortly after he decides to tell his story to a newspaperman. The murdered man claimed he had enough proof to take down Arnie Valent, the assumed leader of the Chicago mob and a man who the authorities have always failed to pin any crime on in the past. The F.B.I. decides that Valent's finances might still be their best point of entry. To that end, they dangle Barry Amsterdam (great name!) in front of him: on the surface a disgraced former government accountant who is primed to be turned to a life of crime. In reality, he has been recruited by the Feds due to his squeaky clean reputation and his rather impressive war-time record. With Valent needing a replacement for the man he had murdered, he takes a keen interest in Amsterdam after the two men meet in one of Valent's gambling dens. Barry manages to slowly work his way up in Valent's organization, but the books his predecessor had access too and which could form the basis of Valent's downfall are denied to him. As he becomes a member of Valent's inner circle, he also finds himself stuck between two very different women: Connie, a night club chanteuse and Valent's girlfriend and Sue, a beautiful and mysterious woman he encounters in various' businesses which belong to Valent, a lady who seems to harbor a deep hatred for the mob boss.

Fun little crime noir that starts in a verité style and keeps the motif going with various on-location shots of 1950s Chicago. Dennis O'Keefe is okay in the lead role but he is kind of played off the screen by Paul Stewart as the villainous Valent, a classic mobster character, one part superficial charm and one part sinister menace.

 

The French Dispatch (2021) Delightfully madcap Wes Anderson film. A series of vignettes for the title newspaper, there's a stellar cast. Set in France (obviously), there's an introduction to French actors and actresses. The audience in my theater kept cracking up.

 

Turns out you can get a lot of things done when you don't have a working computer for 3 weeks. Didn't see a lot of movies, though.



The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Small town (very) middle America doesn't see a lot of change, although they do have their share of weirdness. Nothing quite as weird as the day dead people start climbing out of their graves and eating people, though. This isn't going to end well.

I get the feeling Jarmusch threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and never bothered to see what stuck and what didn't. This was part small town comic drama, part horror, part environmental diatribe, part science fiction, and part fourth-wall breaking meta comedy but none of the parts meshed with the others and none were fleshed out enough to carry things. Characters who know they are characters can be a great mechanism to explore human agency (as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ) or film industry itself (as in Head) but here it's just a gimmick that falls flat. This could have been something about the center(ville) not holding, but again the environmental message is overbaked and there is no comeuppance - that's the whole raison d'être for zombie films! The samurai goes nowhere, the anti-technology hermit goes nowhere, the small town stories go nowhere - it all just goes nowhere. And I got really sick of that song - it was teed up for a cracking joke and he never swung.

I will say that it looks amazing. Jarmusch can make any set look as refined as art but as comfortable as an old sofa. There's this one pile of trash and it just looks like the Platonic ideal of piles of trash.

 

Forty Guns (1957)

Jessica Drummond's ranch stretches to the horizons, and if her vast wealth can't get people to see things her way (and it usually does) her 40 hired guns will. But that lead to the hoodlums feeling above the law, and one of them robbed a mail transport. Enter Federal Marshal Griff Bonnell and his two brothers to arrest the guilty party. Griff ends up stuck between his earnest desire to never return to his gunslinger roots, his love of Jessica, and the murderous hatred of the 40 guns, including Jessica's ne'er-do-well little brother Brockie.

A well-worth watching if unusual Western mostly because of Barbara Stanwyck's dominating performance as Jessica Drummond. She even did her own stunts, including being dragged by a horse in a way that would have killed ten ordinary men. Fundamentally the movie is a romance, and the gunslinging stuff is mostly about how disruptive and destructive that kind of lawless manly freedom is and how everyone is better off settling down with a good partner and farming or something. There's also some top notch directing from Samuel Fuller, including one of the longest single-take walking and talking scenes shot on film and an absolutely devastating funeral.

 

One of my all-time favorite westerns.

I also love what isn't on the page but is implied in Fuller's screenplay.

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

e.g. the torch that her suicidal foreman carries for her but also how you can imagine the harsh winters they spent together when they were trying to get the ranch afloat, with only each other to depend upon. Stanwyck's pain when they find his body is still something I can recall vividly years after having seen this film.

 

Army of thieves (2021)
Dir. Matthias Schweighöfer



Before the events of Army of the Dead, Ludwig Dieter was merely a bank clerk with a fascination for vault cracking. Until he was recruited by an international gang of thieves who want to hit three of the four Ring Cycle vaults within a 96 hour window and need a new vault cracker to do so. Dieter agrees, in spite of his misgivings about the inherent risks of a life of crime and mostly because of his attraction to the ring leader of the gang, the attractive Gwendoline. Moving from Paris to Prague and finally St. Moritz, they are increasingly faced with more challenging heists and Dieter with harder to crack vaults.

Ludwig Dieter was one of the more fun bits in Army of the Dead, but I'm not sure if he is interesting enough to warrant his own movie. Whilst director/lead Matthias Schweighöfer's charming performance as Dieter keeps this just about afloat, it does not hide the fact that the screenplay is paperthin and kept entirely together with tired and old heist movie clichés. It also doesn't help that apart from Gwendoline and Dieter, the heist team is fairly forgettable (though hacker Korina had some potential and is underserved by the screenplay). And whilst I thought Stuart Martin was fine in both "Miss Scarlet and the Duke" and "Jamestown", he is not a natural fit for an action hero role.

 

Code 8 (2019)

At the start of the 20th century, people started showing up with superpowers (telekinesis, heat, frost, electricity - the basic stuff). They proved useful in fields of construction and production, and were an important part of the American economy through the World Wars. But as production started to become more automated they lost their jobs, and never having built up inherited wealth or a history of education or political power they became an underclass, feared by the population. They served in menial jobs or as day laborers, many turning to crime. Which is the choice that Connor faces as his also super-powered mother's illness turns worse and occasional days doing below-code house wiring isn't going to pay the bills.

I'm always on the hunt for a movie that does something different with the concept of superpowers, and wow was this it. I haven't seen a film representation of a societal underclass this viscerally affecting since the 1972 movie The Final Comedown. Backed by an Indegogo campaign instead of the traditional producer system, we get something a little unconventional that makes good use of its limited budget. But that also means it's based on the artist's vision instead of what might be profitable, and it's much more of a downer than just about anything I've seen.

 

An Amell bros passion project?

 

Seems like it. They made a high-quality short film in 2016 very much in the style of the final project, so this was many years in the making. They scrolled their 30,000 Indigogo supporters' names in the final credits (which I ran through because I liked the music), which is almost as many as the list of special effect workers seen in a Marvell movie's credits.

 

O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)-Wonderful Coen Brothers film, which is a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, set in 1937 Mississippi. George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro star as chain gang fugitives who embark on a series of adventures. First time seeing this. Worth seeing.

 

The Descendants (2011)-Good movie. George Clooney, the controversial Shailene Woodley, and Judy Greer star. Clooney plays the patriarch of an old Hawaii family whose comatose wife has been having an affair with Matthew Lillard's character. The movie introduces Shailene Woodley. Worth seeing. It's free on Amazon Prime.

 

So, I was JUST having a conversation about Shailene Woodley and realized that people have different perceptions of her. What are you referring to, specifically?

 

Her current scandal with Aaron Rodgers.

 

That's not real specific...

 

Antivaxxers.

 

She is one?

 

That's precisely what I was wondering. I am someone who agrees with most of the political stances she has taken over the years; I'd be disappointed if it turned out she was an anti-vaxxer.