De Dödes Tjern (1958) Dir. Kare Bergström Liljan Werner, her fiancée and several of her friends travel by train to visit her brother Björn at the cabin he just bought. Liljan is concerned because she hasn't seen her twin in a while and he hasn't responded to her last two letters. She also has an ominous feeling, the same one she had before when something bad was about to happen to her brother. Her traveling companions don't quite believe anything bad might have happened to her brother and just blame his lack of communications on the remoteness of his cabin. The constable who accompanies them to the remote cabin from the train station also confirms he saw Björn just days earlier, very much alive and well. When they do arrive at the cabin, they find it vacant, but the fact that Björn's gun and hunting gear are gone makes them assume he just went out for a hunting trip and did not make home before nightfall. That evening, the constable who is being hosted for dinner, recounts the local legend of a man who murdered his sister and her lover one hundred years earlier, before taking his own life by drowning himself in the nearby lake. A man who still supposedly haunts said lake. A story that seems to be especially disturbing to Liljan. As clues emerge the day after about Björn's possible fate, some of the group do start to believe that a supernatural element might be responsible for his absence... A classic Norwegian horror film that I hadn't seen before. Enjoyable. Also slightly quirky, weird and vaguely gothic in the tradition of many Nordic/Scandi horror flicks. Some of the dialogue feels a bit affected by modern standards, as we are accustomed to a much more naturalistic-sounding discourse. This is especially true in any conversation involving the shrink among the group, Bugge.
Un Plan Parfait (2012) Dir. Pascal Chaumeil Isabelle has been dating her boyfriend for ten years and under normal circumstances, she would have already been married. The problem is that the women in her family seem cursed, going back at least three generations. Everyone of her grandmothers, great aunts, aunts, mother, sister and female cousins saw their first marriage fail, only finding happiness with their second husband. Isabelle thus assumes that tying the knot with her long-term boyfriend will doom what had been a stable and satisfying relationship up to that point. Her sister proposes a radical idea: finding a man willing to marry her and divorce her, so that she can get the doomed first marriage out of the way an safely marry her boyfriend afterwards. They identify a man in Denmark willing to go along with this plan for a fee and Isabelle travels to Copenhagen to get married and divorced on the same day... Only her Danish beau backs out of the agreement. Looking for a quick fix, she instead set her sights on Jean-Yves, an annoying travel guide author she had met on the flight. She follows the man to Kenya and during their trip manages to seduce and talk him into a quick marriage. On the mistaken assumption that she will not have to see him again after her return to France... A French rom-com mostly saved by the charm and surprising chemistry of its two leads, Diane Kruger and Dany Boon (playing the lovable schlemiel for the 20th time in his career). A film that features a surprisingly great number of on-location shots, including an entire section in Moscow, as well as a pivotal scene shot near Mount Kilimanjaro. And then also hilariously - if you are Belgian anyway - a scene shot inside of an AD Delhaize in Holsbeek (of all places).
Till Death (2021) Dir. S.K. Dale Emma ends her affair with Tom, her secret lover, the day before she is meant to celebrate her wedding anniversary with her husband Mark. Her marriage is not a happy one, as Mark is a very controlling and emotionally abusive man, but the fact that Tom is one of his subordinates at the law firm they both work at means that their affair is doomed to be discovered. Mark treats Emma to a fancy dinner and an expensive gift, and then claims to have one final surprise in the form of a last minute getaway to their upstate cabin. After spending the night there, Emma wakes up to discover that Mark knows about her affair and that the weekend away is meant for him to get his revenge on her in a sick and sadistic way, meaning that Emma has to fight for her very survival. An action thriller vehicle for Megan Fox that isn't half bad. There is nothing too original in the writing, but its a fun watch most of the time. I most enjoyed the middle section when Fox is essentially acting on her own, with minimal dialogue. The climax was rather a tired old cliche by comparison but I had been entertained enough by that point not to care too much.
Vice (2018)-A biopic of Dick Cheney. Christian Bale undergoes a remarkable transformation as Cheney. Very good cast. Credits are in the middle of the film, which is unusual. Good use of a couple hours.
Lilies of the Field (1963)- A black man (Sidney Poitier) meets some Southwestern German-speaking nuns and builds them a chapel. Academy award winning role for Poitier. Lilia Skala played the head nun and was also Oscar-nominated. Heartwarming flick.
Psycho Goreman (2020) Dir. Steven Stokanski Mimi and Luke are two kids whose parents have grown accustomed to their rather rowdy games and intense sibling rivalry. Through dumb luck, they find a strange artifact in a hole they have been digging as part of one of their games. Mimi manipulates the artifact, releasing from it a strange glowing gemstone. The next day it is revealed that her actions have released a demonic monster that was imprisoned eons ago after its failed attempt to enslave all sentient races across the universe. He wants to restart his nefarious plans on Earth, starting with the kids who have released him, only Mimi's control of the gem stone means that the monster - soon dubbed Psycho Goreman by Mimi herself - has to obey the middle-schooler. Hilarity, strangeness and gore ensue. Outrageous little horror comedy that is completely over the top. The core concept - monster has to obey a slightly mean middle-schooler's every whim - is fun, but I can't say this movie executes it as good as one might have hoped. Certainly I thought they left a lot of potential for laughs on the table. (Though the delivery of the line "Or do I?" in this bit had me in stitches). The creature effects are quite obviously consciously modeled after tokusatsu, lending the film a strangely familiar style in the process.
Akeelah and the Bee (2006)- A story about a young girl from South Central LA who competes in various spelling bees. Keke Palmer stars as the title character. Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett. Decent movie. I competed in spelling bees, though I never made it to nationals.
Booksmart (2019) - Two best friends are determined to have a wild night before graduation. Did you ever say to yourself "Hey, I liked Superbad, but I wish it was about girls. And Michael Cera should be a lesbian. Oh, and Jonah Hill's character should be played by his literal sister"? Of course not, but they still made this movie anyway. The two girls have worked so incredibly hard and sacrificed their youths to get where they want to be: headed to Ivy League schools. Just as they're about to graduate, they find out that all of their peers at rich, expensive, car-driving, sex-having, beautiful people high school that they have looked down upon for partying and goofing off have all been accepted to great colleges as well. This leads the girls to believe that all of their hard work and studying have been mostly for naught if all of their supposed lessers are also going to similar schools. (There's a scene where one girl goes around asking her peers where they're going, and this one girl who is high all the time says "I'm going to Harvard. It was, like, my 5th choice.") The girls decide that they're going to go to a party and have a wild time before they graduate so they can't say their entire high school experience was nothing but school. Hijinks ensue, and the girls get a night they were never expecting. Despite being an almost clear clone of Superbad, this is a really funny movie. The two girls (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) have real chemistry, and the supporting characters are all entertaining, especially the girl who is supposedly high all the time. At only 95 minutes, it kinda breezes right on by, but it's definitely worth your time if you want to laugh.
Fallen Angels ~ Wong Kar-wai It's "cool", but the characters lack the charm of those in Chungking Express. It's the lesser of the two, but CE is amazing, so that's not much of a slight.
Mass (2021) Dir. Fran Kranz Two sets of parents meet inside of a small meeting room within the annex of an Episcopal church, for a sitdown arranged by a counselor who has been helping one of the two couples. They are brought together by a horrific event that happened years ago. Jay and Gail are parents to Evan, a boy who died in a school shooting. Richard and Linda were parents to Aidan, the boy who carried out the shooting which left ten people dead. Evan's parents are there to get some form of closure, hoping to understand the crime that took their child away by getting to know his killer, through the stories his parents tell of him. What follows is a painful and revelatory discussion, where grief, anger, frustration, vindictiveness, grace, kindness and forgiveness all play a part, to varying degrees. This is an incredible debut feature. A tour de force in acting by all four principals. Writer-director Fran Kranz will be well known to Joss Whedon fans (assuming there are many of those left at this point) as he played Topher on Dollhouse. The fact that the majority of the film takes place within a single room, and the mise-en-scene could thus not be more basic (four people sitting at a table), the real admiration comes from the performances he gets out of his actors and the quality of the writing. Apart from one tiny section that did not work for me and felt a bit put upon - a discussion about the possibility of the school shooter suffering from psychopathy - the rest of the dramatic conversation flows naturally and beautifully and each of the actors gives a lived in and deeply affecting performance. To the point that it is occasionally hard to watch - in the best possible way. Ann Dowd especially deserves awards recognition in her role as the mother of the killer, the depths of pain and grief she emotes throughout every scene leaving a lasting impression. But everyone is great here. From Jason Isaacs' barely contained anger that is always boiling right underneath the surface, Martha Plimpton wavering between frustration and sorrow and perhaps the most subtle of the four main performances, Reed Birney as a man who was clearly already quiet and reserved prior to his son's horrific crime, those traits having calcified into something else entirely after the trauma of the school shooting. Very warmly recommended.
Amistad (1997)-Based on a true story of a slave revolt aboard the Spanish ship La Amistad. They go into US waters where they are captured. There is then a court case, in which the slaves fight for their freedom. Many Hollywood stars feature in this film. Worth watching.
Ministry of Fear (1944) Dir. Fritz Lang Stephen Neale is released from an asylum, though the exact nature of why he was there is unclear. He expresses a wish to visit London, in spite of the fact that the city is bombed almost daily by the Nazis. Shortly after buying his train ticket, he spots a charity event hosted by a women's group, the Mothers of Free Nations. The little public festival also includes a tent with a fortune teller and after being prodded by some of the other people in attendance, Neale enters and has his palm read. After a short exchange with the psychic, the woman gives him the exact weight of a cake that is being raffled off to whoever can guess how much it weighs. Neale tries the weight given to him by the psychic and is surprised to find his "guess" was accurate. Shortly thereafter, there are attempts made to get the cake back from him, claiming a mistake, which Neale dismisses. Instead he boards his train to London, only for a blind man to steal the cake and run off with it. Neale follows the thief, only to be shot at, saved at the last moment by a German bomb which happens to take out his assailant. Upon his arrival in London, he realizes that the cake has made him a target for unknown parties so he hires a private investigator to help him figure out what on earth is going on... I hadn't seen this Fritz Lang classic before, based on a Graham Greene novel of the same name. Somewhat of a Hitchcockian plot, about a man who gets embroiled in an espionage plot through dumb luck. A good lead performance by Ray Milland, with a noteworthy early role for Dan Duryea. The best scenes are those which lean into the weirder aspects of the plot, like the séance. There is something a tiny bit off about the edit, especially in the first act. e.g. I had the notion that some part of the story was missing in between the train section and Neale hiring the P.I.
One Shot (2021) Dir. James Nunn A CIA analyst and a four-man SEAL team helicopter into a prison island that is essentially a Gitmo like compound in which high-level terror suspects are imprisoned and interrogated. They are there to retrieve Amin Mansur, a man believed to have critical information about an impending attack. Shortly after their arrival, the compound is attacked by a large group of armed men, who quickly overrun the guards. They are there to retrieve Mansur themselves before he can be flown stateside. What follows can be summed up as "Assault on Precinct 13 but make it more War on Terror!". Though such movies have existed for a long time, there has been a fad in recent years of oner films (movies edited to have the appearance of being shot in one continuous take). With 1917 as probably the most recent high-profile example. Inarritu's Birdman, another film using that format, won the Oscar not that long ago. It can both be a gimmick that adds little to the film itself and an integral part of the structure. I think in One Shot, it helps with maintaining the unrelenting tempo of the action, though I'm not sure a more normal cut of the film would have been truly inferior. But it's an entertaining 90+ minutes. Scott Adkins is a good action lead. I should probably admit that I haven't seen more than maybe five of his films. I know he has a very loyal action following that rivals that of Dolph Lundgren and JCVD. Personally the muscles from Brussels and Nic Cage are my two go-to guys in terms of aspiring to action movie completionism. But this made me curious enough to want to explore more of Adkins back catalogue. Perhaps I could start with Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning as then I can scratch another JCVD title of my list too.
I was really impressed with Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, but it's definitely different. I think as a fan of horror you would like it. I think peak Scott Adkins physically was his Ninja movies. Some of the best fight choreography I've ever seen. His best movie outside of Day of Reckoning was Legacy of Lies.
Eternals ~ C. Zhao Kind of like a retelling of Avengers 2 with completely unknown characters. There just isn't room to develop this many characters and give any attention to the plot device driving the film. Nothing is terrible, it's just bland and feels like a retread of stories we've already seen. Arrival ~ D. Villeneuve Rewatched this and I think it holds up very well. Maybe one of my favorite films of the last decade.
Nightmare Alley (2021) Dir. Guillermo del Toro After Stanton Carlisle leaves his childhood home in dramatic fashion, he ends up at a traveling carnival. He ingratiates himself enough with the carnies to get a job, first doing odd jobs around the camp, then actually assisting in some of the acts. When he becomes an assistant in a mentalist act performed by a couple, he learns that the alcoholic husband was once an internationally renowned mentalist who quit his act when he believed it changed him as a man, for the worse. Carlisle himself sees an opportunity at an escape in the man's methods and convinces the older man to mentor him. Eventually his ambitions exceed the carnival and he takes his newly acquired act to the city, bringing along Molly, the Carnie girl he had been pining after, as his new assistant. Their Buffalo-based show, where they perform for a much more upscale audience than they did in their carnie days, is successful enough to earn them a living beyond what they were used to at the Carnival, but Stanton is not content with this. A chance encounter with a female psychiatrist is turned into an opportunity for Stanton to meet wealthy marks and swindle them out of their money. But is he biting off more than he can chew in the process? I was very interested in seeing this, primarily because the original adaptation of the novel, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring the excellent Tyrone Power, is one of my all-time favorite film noirs. Ultimately I still preferred Goulding's film, which isn't to say that del Toro's movie is bad. It's very nicely shot, its cinematography nomination for the upcoming Oscars definitely earned. It's also well-acted, which isn't surprising considering the deep amount of talent that del Toro could call upon, which means that even for single-scene cameo, he can bring in the likes of Tim Blake Nelson. But the central performance is key, and Bradley Cooper is good as Stanton Carlise. But once again, comparing it to Tyrone Power and I have to give it to the latter. Of course they are very different actors, and not just because acting itself has changed a lot in the 75+ years since the original adaptation. I gave a little bit of thought to why I still prefer Power and I think a lot of it has to do with their respective strengths. Bradley Cooper is very convincing in the scenes where we see Stanton as the person he pretends to be. But Power is better in those where Stanton is unmasked. I'm a bit sad at this film's performance at the box office, as it's already something of a unicorn (a 60 million dollar budget for an original story that isn't part of a franchise and/or a comic book movie). Considering even Martin Scorsese penned a column in the L.A. Times begging people to go see this, I'm guessing its box office failure didn't just disappoint Guillermo del Toro himself.
Having thought some more about del Toro's Nightmare Alley, I do think his ending works better than Goulding's. With the caveat that Goulding's was sort of forced upon him by the studio. But del Toro's refusal to leave an opening for any redemption/rehabilitation/recovery is more consistent with the overall message and themes of the film.
The King's Man (2021) Dir. Matthew Vaughn Conrad Oxford witnesses his mother's death during the Boer war, an event that marks both him and his father forever. In the case of his dad, it means he is fiercely protective of his son, which becomes problematic once the young man nears adulthood and thus desires to have more freedom and indulge in his thirst for adventure. The elder Oxford's personal ties with several key members of government and the military means he is often called upon to engage in official and unofficial diplomatic missions. To that end, he is sent to Sarajevo, to help secure Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand's visit there, as there are clear signs that an attempt on the man's life might be made. In this prequel to the Kingsman franchise, we more or less are told the story of the birth of the organization. The proto-Kingsmen are woven into "real" early 20th century history, including Gavrilo Princip's attempt on Franz Ferdinand's life and Rasputin's machinations at the Russian court. The filmmakers obviously realized that the Rasputin section of the film - with a hilarious and terrific Rhys Ifans in the role - is the best. Hence why most trailers are almost entirely devoted to this chapter (giving the audience the mistaken assumption that most of the film would have the Russian as the main villain). In reality, the character disappears around the halfway mark and after that, the film quickly deflates in terms of being a fun spectacle, in spite of some over the top action sequences (including hand-to-hand combat in No Man's Land). Still worth seeing if you are a fan of the franchise, I suppose. Total side-note, but only using Boney M's Rasputin for the trailer and not in the actual film is a big mistake. Big. Huge!
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) Dir. David Blue Garcia Nearly fifty years after the events of the first movie, a small group of Austin based yuppies descend upon Harlow Texas, in the hope of gentrifying the near-ghost town. After they kick a straggler out of one of the homes they thought they had purchased, the elderly woman in question dies, leading to her adopted son, a behemoth with a dark past, to return to his former ways. Carnage follows, but a survivor from Leatherface's past shows up. Can she save the day? I wasn't really going into this with very high expectations but this still underwhelmed. There have been so many sequels, prequels and reboots at this point it is hard to even remember them all. Nothing has come close to Tobe Hooper's original, of course, but some of them have at least been mildly interesting. This wasn't. The writing didn't even attempt to do anything new with the material. Leads Sarah Yarkin and Elsie Fisher do the best with what they are given, but this still landed like a dud.
Finally got around to the last of the Taylor Sheridan movies I wanted to watch. It's exactly what most of his movies, and now his shows, are all about. A forgotten or overlooked part of the American experience told with a grittiness and honesty that I consider the rural and middle America equivalent of someone like Scorsese for New York mobsters and the northeast. It also showcases the talents of Renner and Olsen outside of the big budget Marvel superhero world.
Thanks for talking about Wind River. I thought Hell or High Water was absolutely amazing. If I ever get free time again I'll check this out.
Wind River is a good movie, but would have been even better if the protagonists had been Native Americans. Instead the Native characters are sidekicks or victims in a way that is very trope-y.
I think Yellowstone somewhat remedies that as Sheridan matures enough to have them as their own group and not just filler to help the white guys. 1883 gives even more agency to the native characters. With that said, part of why it works in Wind River is that's the unfortunate reality for much of reservation life, with little power in the hands of the residents and tribal law enforcement, especially in a situation like the one portrayed.