Thursday, January 30, 2020

Holy Fucking Motors

Holy Motors (2012) was recommended by Dennis Cozzallo, who considered it his top film of 2012. Well, I guess.

It starts with a man (the director Leos Carax) waking up, and finding a door in the wallpaper of his room. This leads to a movie theater. Then Denis Levant gets into a limousine and begins putting on make-up as his driver, Edith Scob, takes him to his first assignment. Dressed as a ragged old woman, he stands on a street corner and begs. Then he gets back into the limo. His next assignment is to wear a motion capture suit and fight with, then have sex with, a woman in another suit. And so on.

Each assignment is completely different - some bizarre, some naturalistic. Some even seem like they may be his real life. In some he kills people, people who look like him. In some, he is killed. But he always comes back to the limo.

After one assignment, his agent is in the car, worried that Levant is getting tired. Levant says he misses the days when you could see the cameras. There’s an explanation for all this - he is an actor, playing a series of roles in futuristic movies. It’s just that the cameras and crews are no longer visible.  But that becomes untenable when his last assignment it to go “home” to his “wife” and “daughter”, who he has never met before. And are chimpanzees.

It ends with the limo returning to the Holy Motors garage with all the other limos. As the chauffeurs go home, the limos discuss their days.

This is obviously a surreal exercise in writing and a bravura performance from Levant. Parts are funny, and it all seems to be full of depth and meaning. But a lot of the performances are creepy and/or unpleasant. One of the longest has a filthy man grunting and biting peoples fingers off, and carrying off a beautiful woman. It’s just kind of gross.

So I guess this wasn’t really for me. Too bad, since Carax has made a number of other interesting looking movies. I’ll be skipping them.

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Spider-Man’s European Vacation

We had big expectations for Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), the triumphant return of the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man. This one takes him out of the friendly neighborhood.

It starts with Nick Fury and Maria Hill (Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders) in Mexico, investigating a tornado with a face. When it appears and starts tearing things up, a flying man with a silvered globe for a helmet appears and subdues it. Meanwhile, Peter Parker and his friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) are getting ready for a school trip to Europe. Parker is very stressed about the whole Snap thing, and losing his friend Iron-Man - he needs some time off. He also has a very specific plan to reveal his love for MJ (Zendaya). Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) shows up to try to get Parker to talk to Nick Fury, but Parker blows him off.

In Venice, another monster shows up - this time a water monster. Parker helps the mysterious helmeted man subdue it, and Fury finally catches up with him. He gives Parker a pair of sunglasses with the interface to an artificial intelligence system controlling a massive weapons satellite. He also introduces him to the mysterious man, who turns out to be Jake Gyllenhall, a hero from another dimension who is fighting the monsters. The Italians are calling him “Mysterio”.

SPOILER! Actually, that last line was the spoiler. Suppose a bald guy turned up in a Superman movie, acting like a hero, and called Lex Luther. It’s no big surprise when he turns out to be evil. Mysterio may not be as famous, but he’s pretty well known. His origin story is that he was creating illusory monsters and defeating them to gain fame and fortune, but that only works for one story. So the twist isn’t much of a twist for most viewers (as far as I know).

But that’s OK. Half the fun is Parker’s school trip, which Fury has started stage-managing behind the scenes to get Parker where he needs him. Then there’s his relations with MJ, which are pretty much going nowhere until she figures something out. Actually, this part got a little tedious - I wish he had been a little less dweeby about the whole thing. Also, MJ seems to have lost a lot of her prickly stand-offishness and is merely awesome. But, of course, she is awesome, so I guess that’s OK too.

There’s a lot of good laughs, great action, and fun side characters (Happy is maybe dating Aunt May? Played by Marisa Tomei, it makes sense). And Mysterio is a great villain, even if you know the twist. But this outing wasn’t as much fun for me as the last. Maybe the mixture of John Hughes style teen romp and superhero action didn’t work as well this time. Maybe I can’t really see Holland as 16, the age he seems to be playing. Or maybe you just can’t take the Spider-Man out of the Neighborhood.

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

By the Time We Get Dark Phoenix

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) is another shot at one of the great comics story lines. I know that most people consider this one a bomb, but that’s also the consensus about the last one (X-Men: Last Stand). And I liked that one. I wasn’t too impressed by Sophie Turner as Jean Grey in Apocalypse, and I really prefer Famke Janssen, but now I like her fine.

It starts with little Jean Grey causing a car accident with her psychic powers, killing or wounding her parents - hey, that’s Dr. Sivana’s origin story! So she goes to Prof. X’s School for Gifted Children. Now in the present (story set in the 90s, I believe), some astronauts are in trouble with a solar flare. So Prof. X sends a squad of X-Men up in the X-Plane to help out. As one of them says, “So we’re doing space now?” After Guardians, of course.

Jean Grey goes out to help, and winds up inside the solar flare, which stuffs her full of energy. She makes it back home ok, more powerful than ever. The students throw a party in the woods to celebrate and we get a few mutant cameos, including Dazzler - the disco mutant! But Jean loses control and blasts the party.

It seems that Prof. X blocked the memories of her part in the car crash, and now she’s going home to see her father - the father that wanted her out of his life because she killed his wife. So she starts throwing things around (including police cars). When the X-Men show up, she throws them around too, killing Raven. That escalated quickly.

Meanwhile, some shapeshifting aliens take over the bodies of Jessica Chastain and some other rich folk. They are after the cosmic force that Grey absorbed, so they are involved in the plot, but somehow feel like they are extraneous.

I like the Dark Phoenix story because of it’s heightened, operatic emotions, and also the idea of a powerful woman losing control and becoming deadly. I thought Turner handled that, although maybe it isn’t a difficult role. I also sympathize with the men who love Jean Grey, but here that’s pretty much Cyclops, played by Tye Sheridan, a complete nobody. I’ve said it before, this is a tough role - Scott Summers is supposed to be a leader of the X-Men, a bad boy on a motorcycle, but also a whiny indecisive nerd. Like the coolest kid at math camp. So they didn’t really write much for him in this movie.

Raven and Beast do better, the most senior X-Men in this timeline. They both think Prof. X is failing to protect his students by sending them on dangerous missions. MacAvoy’s Professor gets to be a bit more of a jerk here (and also gets his bald head). Magneto (Fassbender), on the other hand, is pretty much a hero here, although he gets pretty upset when he hears about Raven/Mystique.

In conclusion, I really liked this movie, but I might concede that it is not good. And I managed to get through this whole thing without calling the star Sophie Tucker.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Long Shot Kicked the Bucket?

I had great trepidation about watching Long Shot (2019), wherein klutzy shlub Seth Rogen successfully woos gorgeous, smart and talented Charlize Theron. What, Rogen winning over someone totally out of his league? That would never happen! Weirdly, I kind of liked it.

Theron is Secretary of State to President Bob Odenkirk, a TV star who played the president in a West Wing type show, then won the election. Basically, a Democratic Trump. He wants to cross over to movies, and will not be running for a second term, and plans to endorse Theron. Since she is idealistic and ambitious, she is all for it.

Rogen is an investigative journalist, known for going to extremes to get a story. He is first shown going undercover with some Nazis, and jumps out a second story window when he is recognized. So his attributes are a fearless devotion to truth and justice, and a rubbery ability to take a fall.

When his paper is taken over by a Murdoch type, he quits and finds himself out of work. His college buddy O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton) takes him to a charity party to cheer him up. There he meets Theron - it turns out that she used to babysit him, and he had a big crush on her. She kind of likes him, and when she finds out that he is unemployed, offers him a job as speechwriter. 

So we have a talented idealistic woman who might have to compromise her idealism to get into a position of power, where she can do some good. And a somewhat unattractive man-boy who encourages to follow her heart and reject those compromises. And it works! You can almost believe she falls in love with him. First of all, he really isn’t that bad looking - once you get him out of the hideous 80s clothes he wear at all times. Second, Theron is played as pretty deep and thoughtful - someone who might not care about someone’s looks, and see what’s in their heart.

Also, he fell down a flight of stairs, landed on his face and got up again, in front of her. True story: I did this in front of Ms. Spenser before we were dating, and that’s one of the reasons she fell in love with me. Except in my case, it was because my pants fell down around my ankles, so I landed with my bare butt in the air.

In conclusion, when Theron needs to cut loose, she gets Rogen to find her some molly, and they go to a night club - and then there’s an international emergency and she has to deal with it while rolling deep. I laughed anyway.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Restless Spirits

The Restless (2006) is a Korean martial arts fantasy - out of those qualities, “fantasy” was my favorite.

In ancient Korea, political disunity lead to the country being overrun by demons. An elite demon-hunting team beats them back, but when the country is united behind one king, they are seen as dangerous to the regime. They are all killed but one, played by Jung Woo-Sung. He saves a village by destroying their demons, but they betray him, serving him drugged wine.

He manages to hide in the forest, in a derelict temple, and finally succumbs to the drug. He wakes up in heaven. To be specific “Middle Heaven” where souls stay for 49 days before they are re-incarnated. This is explained by a passing soul, who wants to know what a live human is doing in heaven - and why he stinks so bad. Didn’t he take the purifying bath?

Eventually, an angel (or boddhisatva? Deva maybe) comes along to help out. She looks exactly like Jung’s dead wife. In fact, she probably is the soul of his dead wife, but has left behind all memory of her earthly existence. Since she died horribly, it’s probably for the best.

The main plot, though, is that the souls of the demon-hunters have decided to join forces with the demons and invade earth. Jung will have to fight them through Middle Heaven.

Of course, heaven is depicted in beautiful CGI splendor and the fights are equally fantastic. But the love story between a man and his wife’s soul is the best part for me, looking at whether love can last beyond a life, and if it even should. Also, it was pretty silly in parts.

This didn’t seem like a significant movie, but it was entertaining. And you know how much I love Buddhist themes.

Sunday, January 19, 2020

No Tale for Dead Men

Bet you didn’t know there was a fifth Pirates movie: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). Maybe not even the fourth. I actually like these pretty well - maybe better than the second and third, because so little Orlando and Kiera. This one doesn’t even have that much Johnny Depp. But what there is is cherce.

Remember how Orlando Bloom is cursed as master of their Flying Dutchman, and he can only set foot on land one day a decade? Well, his son (Brenton Thwaites) thinks he can use the Trident of Poseident to free him. So he goes to sea to search for it - for around 10 years. He thinks maybe Captain Jack Sparrow can help find it.

While searching for Sparrow, he comes across Kaya Scodelario, a scholar who is going to be hanged as a witch for being smart. On her way to the gallows, she runs into an attempted bank robbery in progress - the impenetrable bank vault is opened and a very drunk Jack Sparrow is found inside. His men get a line on the vault, and in a move borrowed from a Fast and Furious movie, drags it down the street behind a team of horse. Too bad all the money falls out.

So Sparrow is deserted by his crew (he lost his ship a while ago) and is pretty down and out - he even sells his magic compass for a drink. That alerts ghost pirate hunter Javier Bardem to his whereabouts. So he will be the big bad in this movie, with a cool head of CGI hair floating like he was underwater.

So we have two new young people, one a classic clever woman, Depp acting drunk for all of his screen time, Paul McCartney (Macca!) as Depp’s uncle (Keefer’s brother?), and only a touch of Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly. With the usual swashbuckling and magic. It wasn’t great but it worked for me.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

The Kid Who Should Have Been in a Better Movie

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019) looked like it should be just my style: a silly, family-oriented updating of the Arthur legend, directed by Joe Cornish (Attack the Block and Ant-Man). Too bad...

It stars Louis Ashbourne Serkis (Andy’s son) as Alex, a twelve-year kid who is bullied in school by an older boy Lance (Tom Taylor) and girl Kaye (Rhianna Doris) - how nice, equal opportunity bullying. When they bully his chubby buddy Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), he tries to distract them and winds up in a construction site, where he finds a sword, embedded in a concrete pillar. Which he pulls out and puts the bullies to rout.

When Merlin shows up at school, he looks like a somewhat oversized and gawky kid - Angus Imrie, who has a sort of young Dr. Who energy. He explains all about the sword and Morgan’s coming back to conquer Britain, etc. (Same as Nimue in Hellboy?) So Alex knights Bedders (Bedevere) and Lance (Lancelot) and Kaye (Sir Kaye?), making his enemies into allies. And off they go.

The problems are: 1) it isn’t that exciting - maybe they toned it down a little for the kiddies? And 2) it isn’t particularly funny, although Merlin gets a few gags in. Also, he sometimes shows up in adult form, played by Patrick Stewart.

There is a subplot about Alex’s absent father and his lovely single mother, that I just didn’t care much. But it does sort of pay off when Alex summons the Lady of the Lake in their bathtub.

Shame really - Cornish seems to be able to direct kids well, and these kids had a lot going for them. Needed a better script, I guess.

Monday, January 13, 2020

Glad I Meta

It’s funny - I like rom-coms as a genre, but not any specific rom-coms (made since the 50s). That kind of makes Isn't It Romantic (2019) perfect for me. It’s a meta-rom-com.

It stars Rebel Wilson as a passed-over junior architect. Everyone in the office wants her to get them coffee or fix the 3D printer. That is except her assistant Betty Gilpin, who spends all her time at work watching rom-coms on her computer, and Andy DeVine, her fun office buddy. Even when she gets the courage up to go into a meeting with a top client, Liam Hemsworth, he just asks her to get him some coffee. But she hits her head in a mugging, and wakes up in a different world.

It’s a world where doctors are handsome and kind, where New York doesn’t smell like garbage, and people will stage a dance number at the drop of a hat. She is in a rom-com world. In this world, Liam Hemsworth finds her delightful, which isn’t so bad, but kind of freaks her out. Gilpin is her office enemy, and her next door neighbor (Brandon Scott Jones) is a screaming Scott Thompson type gay man. DeVine, who spent his time in the old world staring past Wilson at a lingerie model billboard, now finds himself dating her (Priyanka Chopra). It’s very confusing and Wilson doesn’t like it at all. She decides that she can only get out by finding her true love.

I don’t think I’ve seen Wilson before - she’s pretty much what I expected: prickly cynical fat girl with self-esteem issues. I didn’t realize that she’s Australian, which I guess is neither here nor there. Anyway, I liked what she was doing here. Likewise Andy DeVine, with a rubbery comic face. The script seemed pretty tight, too. Rom-coms are based on a series of rules and constraints, and seeing them both mocked, subverted and fulfilled was somehow satisfying to me.

We’ve seen another one of Todd Strauss-Schulson’s movies: Final Girls. Which is a meta-horror movie. I wonder if that’s his niche.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Shadow Warrior

Shadow (2019) is the latest from Zheng Yimou, of Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower (which I definitely saw but maybe didn’t blog?). He also made The Great Wall, which I did blog, but let’s ignore that.

In ancient China, two kingdoms are fighting over a city (actually, they may be hostile allies, but never mind). The city is held by King Yang Cang, and the weak-willed King Pei is willing to let him hold it. But Pei’s commander Ziyu (Deng Chao) has challenged Yang to a duel for the city, so Pei busts him down to commoner.

But Ziyu isn’t really Ziyu - he is a “shadow” commoner, raised to be a stand-in for the commander. The real Ziyu (also played by Deng Chao) is wounded and crazed. He plans for his shadow to use the metal bladed umbrella weapon of Pei to win the duel. The shadow doesn’t do too well until Ziyu’s wife, Xiao Ai (Sun Li), shows him how to use a flowing, feminine style.

Meanwhile, King Pei is trying to marry his sister (who seems a lot smarter than he is) to Yang Cang’s son. Yang counters with an insulting offer to make her his son’s concubine. To everyone’s disgust, he accepts. He is just trying to keep out of wars, people!

Like Hero, this is a very color-coded movie, but the colors are all black, white, and grey. Men and women wear clothes with ink painting designs, and the practice floor is a giant yin/yang mosaic. But I don’t think it represents good/evil. Possibly male/female, active/passive, and so forth. Shadow and light.

There are also some very wild Chinese zither duets (guqin and guzheng?) if you like that kind of thing - I do. Remember the fight at the temple in the rain in Hero?

But I am sorry to say that there are not as many action scenes as I would have liked, and they are not that great. The metal umbrellas were kind of silly (like in a lot of these movies). Combined with a restrained color palette and somewhat talky script, the lack of action sort of killed this for me. I didn’t hate it, but wasn’t enraptured. Maybe Zhang isn’t really meant to direct action movies - a lot of his movies seem to be romances and dramas. Maybe he does them better. I might never find out, because I like action movie better.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

2019 in the Rearview Mirror

It’s now 2020, and time for the yearly wrap-up. For films from 2019, I think I’m going to hold off a few months. It looks like we saw 17 movies from 2019 in 2019. But there are at least 10 solid looking movies in the queue - most either saved or wait listed. Maybe I’ll check again around Oscar time (hint: none of our faves are likely to be up for Oscars). For now, I’ll propose Fast Color as the best non-franchise 2019 film we saw in 2019. We also liked Hotel Artemis and Bad Days at the El Royale, for other smaller scale, indie-ish action movies.

For 2019 trends, we discovered the heavy metal horror comedy genre. Depending on your definition, we watched several. The quintessential heavy metal horror comedy features (1) a gang of loser teen metal heads who (2) discover the song that conjures demons, (3) giving them powers but (4) threatening the apocalypse. Most of the movies we saw didn’t meet all criteria. One of the best, Heavy Trip, only met the first. By that standard, Detroit Rock City fits. Jennifer’s Body and Suck fit all but the first pretty well, because the rock is more indie than metal. Probably the best example, and a fine and funny movie, is New Zealand’s Deathgasm.

And that’s about it for “themes” in 2019. We watched some horror - Us and A Quiet Place being two top picks. We didn’t watch a lot of music docs: I think just Amazing Grace and Echo in the Canyon. No Shakespeare, no special black and white classics. Lots of new or recent superhero stuff - I love it all, but Captain Marvel and it’s ex-namesake Shazam! made much impact. I don’t know if it counts, but I guess John Wick 3 was our fave action movie - even if it is third in what looks like an endless series.

I guess our best bet, for plain day-to-day enjoyment value, has been those 2-pack classics, usually horror, like Mad Love/Devil Doll. They don’t usually make “best of”, but are always entertaining, sometimes memorable, and come in easy to digest bite-sized pieces - two movies, usually under 75 minutes each.

That leads to our streaming options. We gave up Netflix streaming, and took up Hulu, then dropped Hulu when it wasn’t really coming through for us. We have been using Amazon Prime exclusively for a while. They have The Expanse, many RiffTrax movies, but what I’ve been into is the non-classic classics. That is, black and white movies from the 30s-50s that aren’t that great but are often entertaining and sometimes coo-coo crazy. Since they are usually in the 60-75 minute range, I can watch one after Ms. Spenser has gone back to work, but before it’s time to go to bed. I should really start blogging them, because they are so forgettable that I never remember whether I’ve watched one. Also, I fall asleep a lot. I don’t consider that a bad thing.

In conclusion, the best film of the year is probably still Bringing Up Baby - which we didn’t watch this year. In fact, if we could choose one film, we might replace BUB with a Marx Brothers movie.
Like Cambridge’s Brattle Theater, we will watch them every New Year’s Eve. This year I bought a collection of the lesser movies, and we watched Room Service, then The Big Store on New Year’s Day. An auspicious start.

Now, Ms. Spenser is taking her students on a field trip to Vietnam, and I will be watching some men’s movies. Expect a lot of martial arts, dumb action and rom-coms. Then back to the usual fare. Let’s have a great 2020!