Ms. Spenser found Interstella 5555 (2003), I don’t know how. It is a feature length (barely) animation by Matsumoto Reiji (Leiji?) with a score by Daft Punk. Now, I don’t know much about the two dome heads, and what I do know I’m kind of neutral on. But Matsumoto-san is pretty much our favorite animator/manga artist. We saw his space-pirate movie My Youth in Arcadia the first week of our visit to Japan and loved him ever since.
This movie also takes place in space, with a nameless, blue skinned alien band rocking it up on an alien planet. I didn’t recognize the tune (“One More Time”) but Ms. Spenser had heard it innumerable times in gyms and workout classes. It was not one of her favorites. Then a spaceship attacks the planet and kidnaps the band.
The band are taken to Earth, where they are stripped of their memories and have their skin de-blued. They are packaged as a human band and kept docile by mind control sunglasses and the pleasures of the flesh. In space, a friend senses their plight and comes to their rescue, but is killed in the process.
And their you have the usual Matsumoto plot - characters lose their memories and wills, and someone is killed and mourned. This is a Gnostic story: Sophia (knowledge) falls to Earth, loses memory of her godly origin, until awakened (anamnesis) by a hero who must fall to death.
On the other hand, it’s kind of funny that the robotic, soulless music they make while under mind control is pretty much just Daft Punk as usual. I was surprised by how much rock guitar sound they used, but they definitely go in for repetitive loops (“One More Time”!). Like the minimalists say, if repeating something 8 times is boring, try 16. If 16 times is boring, repeat it 64 times.
In conclusion, this is an hour and five minutes. So if you don’t like it, it isn’t much of a waste of time.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Saturday, March 14, 2020
Zoning Out
I had heard a lot about The Dead Zone (1983) on blogs and podcasts and things, but I hadn’t caught on to one important fact - Christopher Walken stars. Once I realized that I queued it right up. So we’re sort of having a not-very-good Stephen King film festival.
It starts out with Walken teaching school - he’s reading Poe and assigning “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to his class, then going out on an amusement park date with his girlfriend Brooke Adams. Afterwards, she invites him to stay the night, but he declines - waiting until after they are married. I am sure at this point that she is a goner, but it turns out worse.
On the way home, he hits a milk truck that had jack-knifed on the road - Milk and blood on the highway. What is it with King and trucks? Was he prescient? Anyway, when he comes to in the hospital, Dr. Herbert Lim lets him know he’s been in a coma for five years. His religious mother tells him that Adams is married with a child. Bet he wishes he’d stayed the night now.
Then he takes a nurse’s hand and sees a vision of her daughter in a fire. He urges her to rush home, and she makes it in time to save her. Word gets around about his gift, but he can’t control it, and it seems to be draining him. He is called in to help the police track down the Castle Rock killer (this version of Castle Rock is in New Hampshire, I think). He catches him, but gets shot. So now he’s psychically drained and wounded in the leg. Then he has a serious vision and needs to do something radical.
This is directed by David Cronenberg, but there is really no body horror - very little gore at all. It has a nice rural Northeast flavor to it, almost like Something Wicked This Way Comes. Some of the creepiest parts were in the beginning, where Christopher Walken is smiling and relaxed. [Shiver.] Once he gets all tortured and twitchy, he’s much easier to take.
It starts out with Walken teaching school - he’s reading Poe and assigning “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to his class, then going out on an amusement park date with his girlfriend Brooke Adams. Afterwards, she invites him to stay the night, but he declines - waiting until after they are married. I am sure at this point that she is a goner, but it turns out worse.
On the way home, he hits a milk truck that had jack-knifed on the road - Milk and blood on the highway. What is it with King and trucks? Was he prescient? Anyway, when he comes to in the hospital, Dr. Herbert Lim lets him know he’s been in a coma for five years. His religious mother tells him that Adams is married with a child. Bet he wishes he’d stayed the night now.
Then he takes a nurse’s hand and sees a vision of her daughter in a fire. He urges her to rush home, and she makes it in time to save her. Word gets around about his gift, but he can’t control it, and it seems to be draining him. He is called in to help the police track down the Castle Rock killer (this version of Castle Rock is in New Hampshire, I think). He catches him, but gets shot. So now he’s psychically drained and wounded in the leg. Then he has a serious vision and needs to do something radical.
This is directed by David Cronenberg, but there is really no body horror - very little gore at all. It has a nice rural Northeast flavor to it, almost like Something Wicked This Way Comes. Some of the creepiest parts were in the beginning, where Christopher Walken is smiling and relaxed. [Shiver.] Once he gets all tortured and twitchy, he’s much easier to take.
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Do the Hustle
Hustlers (2019) is Lorene Scafaria’s stripper crime movie. I went in expecting a caper film, like maybe Widows or Ocean’s 8. But it was more of a relationship movie, a found family film.
Constance Wu is a stripper, supporting her Chinese grandmother. She’s not very good at it - she’s kind of shy and clearly hates the job. One day she sees star stripper Jennifer Lopez, and like everyone else, she’s hooked. Lopez mentors her, and they make a lot of money. One night, Usher shows up, even.
Then, 2008. The money dries up. The finance boys are stingier and there aren’t as many of them. They need to up their game. So Lopez decides they should dope the marks drinks and max out their credit cards. The guys could be convinced that they just overdid it on booze, coke and pills, and besides, they would have to come clean about the strippers if they went to the authorities.
So they have a nice little crime family, with Lopez as the mommy. The gang includes Cardi B and Lizzo, for some extra fun. But Wu is never really comfortable with fleecing the marks. She wants to make sure they only hit assholes, but at least one guy got really hurt. Then there’s some jealousy over a new girl. When the police start nosing around, it gets ugly.
This hustle was not exactly an elaborate caper. So if you like clever plots, forget that. It’s about the Wu’s ambiguous relation with stripping (degrading, but well-paying) and her feelings for J-Lo. It’s well done, but not so much my thing.
J-Lo, by the way, is amazing, and seeing her workout on the pole is breathtaking. But that’s another thing that didn’t quite grab me about the movie - I love strippers and all, but in the world of this movie, it is like the only thing women can do. I guess I just don’t love them that much.
Constance Wu is a stripper, supporting her Chinese grandmother. She’s not very good at it - she’s kind of shy and clearly hates the job. One day she sees star stripper Jennifer Lopez, and like everyone else, she’s hooked. Lopez mentors her, and they make a lot of money. One night, Usher shows up, even.
Then, 2008. The money dries up. The finance boys are stingier and there aren’t as many of them. They need to up their game. So Lopez decides they should dope the marks drinks and max out their credit cards. The guys could be convinced that they just overdid it on booze, coke and pills, and besides, they would have to come clean about the strippers if they went to the authorities.
So they have a nice little crime family, with Lopez as the mommy. The gang includes Cardi B and Lizzo, for some extra fun. But Wu is never really comfortable with fleecing the marks. She wants to make sure they only hit assholes, but at least one guy got really hurt. Then there’s some jealousy over a new girl. When the police start nosing around, it gets ugly.
This hustle was not exactly an elaborate caper. So if you like clever plots, forget that. It’s about the Wu’s ambiguous relation with stripping (degrading, but well-paying) and her feelings for J-Lo. It’s well done, but not so much my thing.
J-Lo, by the way, is amazing, and seeing her workout on the pole is breathtaking. But that’s another thing that didn’t quite grab me about the movie - I love strippers and all, but in the world of this movie, it is like the only thing women can do. I guess I just don’t love them that much.
Monday, March 9, 2020
Ready Steady Go
We almost missed Ready or Not (2019) because I had it confused with all the other Game Night type movies going around. This one is a stronger brew.
It starts with two boys playing a game of hide and seek in a mansion with the grownups. Right away, the movie tips it’s hand - this is the most dangerous game, and if the hider is caught, he dies.
Years later, Samara Weaving is marrying wealthy Mark O’Brien, one of the boys all grown up. He is taking her to the family mansion to play the family game. The family fortune is based on board games, and anyone who joins the family has to play a game, chosen at random. What she doesn’t know is that if hide and seek comes up, the new family member must be sacrificed.
So there’s a lot of fun running around as Weaving slowly figures out the stakes for this game. The family seeking her is a bunch of upper-class twits. Our favorite was Melanie Scrofano, who tended to be more dangerous to her own side than to Weaving. Oddly, this reminded us of Miguel Ferrer from DeepStar Six. In another odd coincidence, someone is bisected by door in this movie too.
This isn’t just a comedy-thriller - it gets into horror territory. Maybe not quite as far as Midsommar, which has a similar philosophy. Semi-spoiler, Weaving gets shot through the hand, falls into a pits of fresh goat carcasses and old human bones, then hangs from a nail through the hole in her hand - it’s pretty intense. There’s also a few she’s-getting-away-oops-they-got-her-back moments.
But, like Midsommar, it all ends happily. Enjoy!
It starts with two boys playing a game of hide and seek in a mansion with the grownups. Right away, the movie tips it’s hand - this is the most dangerous game, and if the hider is caught, he dies.
Years later, Samara Weaving is marrying wealthy Mark O’Brien, one of the boys all grown up. He is taking her to the family mansion to play the family game. The family fortune is based on board games, and anyone who joins the family has to play a game, chosen at random. What she doesn’t know is that if hide and seek comes up, the new family member must be sacrificed.
So there’s a lot of fun running around as Weaving slowly figures out the stakes for this game. The family seeking her is a bunch of upper-class twits. Our favorite was Melanie Scrofano, who tended to be more dangerous to her own side than to Weaving. Oddly, this reminded us of Miguel Ferrer from DeepStar Six. In another odd coincidence, someone is bisected by door in this movie too.
This isn’t just a comedy-thriller - it gets into horror territory. Maybe not quite as far as Midsommar, which has a similar philosophy. Semi-spoiler, Weaving gets shot through the hand, falls into a pits of fresh goat carcasses and old human bones, then hangs from a nail through the hole in her hand - it’s pretty intense. There’s also a few she’s-getting-away-oops-they-got-her-back moments.
But, like Midsommar, it all ends happily. Enjoy!
Sunday, March 8, 2020
More like DerpStar
DeepStar Six (1989) is one of those underwater creature features, like The Abyss. In fact, it was made the same your as Abyss, probably to cash in. We’re watching to round out our underwater portfolio. This version has a nice low-budget traditional monster movie feel.
DeepStar Six is an underwater mining platform, currently under contract to the DoD to do something with nukes. Marius Weyers, a stiff and distant European-ish scientist, is the leader, and he’s worried about being behind schedule. When a cavern shows up on a survey, he decides to just blow it up and remove any possible instability. They send a probe into the open cavern and it gets lost. They send a mini-sub in to retrieve it (probes aren’t cheap), and they don’t come back. There’s something down there.
They do the sensible thing and decide to get out of there. But before they do, the creature (which we still haven’t seen) attacks DeepStar Six. The captain, Taurean Blacque (great stage name!), gets stuck in a wonky pressure door, and in one of the best kills in the movie, is bisected.
Meanwhile, Miguel Ferrer is a sort of Army fuck-up, who does everything by the book, but wrong. Before they can leave, they need to secure the nuke. In case of hostile action, the procedure is to set it off, which he does without really warning anyone or thinking around the blast zone. This isn’t the last time he’ll put the whole thing in jeopardy.
By the way, the monster is some kind of crab creature, and we do get to see it eventually. It’s pretty clearly a guy in a crab suit, but not bad.
In fact, that’s what’s endearing about this movie. The exteriors are clearly models and the monster is a guy in a suit. It doesn’t break suspension of disbelief but it isn’t trying to get points for special effects. And there’s a couple of good kills. And it doesn’t have a ridiculous ending like, say, Sphere.
DeepStar Six is an underwater mining platform, currently under contract to the DoD to do something with nukes. Marius Weyers, a stiff and distant European-ish scientist, is the leader, and he’s worried about being behind schedule. When a cavern shows up on a survey, he decides to just blow it up and remove any possible instability. They send a probe into the open cavern and it gets lost. They send a mini-sub in to retrieve it (probes aren’t cheap), and they don’t come back. There’s something down there.
They do the sensible thing and decide to get out of there. But before they do, the creature (which we still haven’t seen) attacks DeepStar Six. The captain, Taurean Blacque (great stage name!), gets stuck in a wonky pressure door, and in one of the best kills in the movie, is bisected.
Meanwhile, Miguel Ferrer is a sort of Army fuck-up, who does everything by the book, but wrong. Before they can leave, they need to secure the nuke. In case of hostile action, the procedure is to set it off, which he does without really warning anyone or thinking around the blast zone. This isn’t the last time he’ll put the whole thing in jeopardy.
By the way, the monster is some kind of crab creature, and we do get to see it eventually. It’s pretty clearly a guy in a crab suit, but not bad.
In fact, that’s what’s endearing about this movie. The exteriors are clearly models and the monster is a guy in a suit. It doesn’t break suspension of disbelief but it isn’t trying to get points for special effects. And there’s a couple of good kills. And it doesn’t have a ridiculous ending like, say, Sphere.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
The Wild, the Innocent and the Luton Shuffle
Blinded by the Light (2019) is kind of like another one of Gurinda Chadha’s films, Bend It Like Beckham. East Indian in England feels out of place, finds some aspect of popular culture to love against the wishes of family, and finds meaning and way to fit in. In Beckham, it was football. Here, it’s Springsteen.
Viveik Kalra is a Pakistani teenager growing up in suburban Luton. He’s a bit of an introvert, writing lyrics for his best friend’s band. The funny thing about a movie about Springsteen is, it is set in 1987, so he starts out into Pet Shop Boys and a-ha. But he meets Sikh at high school who turns him onto the Boss. His friend thinks Springsteen is for his dad’s generation, but Karla listens to the lyrics and and it opens up his world.
The rest is pretty predictable, but sweet - and it’s filled with Springsteen’s music. It’s based on a true story, and I guess Springsteen was touched enough to license a big chunk of his catalog. Now, I’m going to drop any pretense of reviewing the film and just talk about my love for the Boss.
The summer of 1974, when I graduated from high school, was defined for me by two songs: Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” and Springsteen’s “Rosalita”. The next year, he played my college, and I got to see him for the first (and sadly, only) time. This was just before he got on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the Time article was written by the uncle of the woman who is now Ms. Spenser - hope that isn’t a conflict of interest). That summer, every dorm and frat had at least one speaker in an open window playing one of his albums, usually “Born to Run”. That was pretty annoying - you know how it is when the obscure artist you love gets popular. Then “Darkness on the Edge of Town” came out, and I just preferred his faster, more snappy stuff. So I mostly like the first three albums.
But I never felt like he lost it, or sold out (although “Dancing in the Dark” has some pretty corny 80s electronic drums). He might not have inspired me the way he did that Pakistani kid in Luton, but I know how he feels. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
Viveik Kalra is a Pakistani teenager growing up in suburban Luton. He’s a bit of an introvert, writing lyrics for his best friend’s band. The funny thing about a movie about Springsteen is, it is set in 1987, so he starts out into Pet Shop Boys and a-ha. But he meets Sikh at high school who turns him onto the Boss. His friend thinks Springsteen is for his dad’s generation, but Karla listens to the lyrics and and it opens up his world.
The rest is pretty predictable, but sweet - and it’s filled with Springsteen’s music. It’s based on a true story, and I guess Springsteen was touched enough to license a big chunk of his catalog. Now, I’m going to drop any pretense of reviewing the film and just talk about my love for the Boss.
The summer of 1974, when I graduated from high school, was defined for me by two songs: Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” and Springsteen’s “Rosalita”. The next year, he played my college, and I got to see him for the first (and sadly, only) time. This was just before he got on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the Time article was written by the uncle of the woman who is now Ms. Spenser - hope that isn’t a conflict of interest). That summer, every dorm and frat had at least one speaker in an open window playing one of his albums, usually “Born to Run”. That was pretty annoying - you know how it is when the obscure artist you love gets popular. Then “Darkness on the Edge of Town” came out, and I just preferred his faster, more snappy stuff. So I mostly like the first three albums.
But I never felt like he lost it, or sold out (although “Dancing in the Dark” has some pretty corny 80s electronic drums). He might not have inspired me the way he did that Pakistani kid in Luton, but I know how he feels. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Midsummer’s Night Sex Tragedy
Midsommar (2019) is sort of the horror smash of the season, Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary. It’s also a kind of gender switched Wicker Man.
It starts with Florence Pugh trying to get in touch with her sister - who isn’t returning calls because she has killed herself and her parents. So Pugh is a little low. Her boyfriend, Jack Reynor, isn’t helping much. He’s kind of withholding, and he spends a lot of time with his student friends, who want him to dump her. He doesn’t even mention that one of the friends has invited the crew to his village in Sweden for the Midsommar festival. But she winds up going along.
The village is a sort of pagan cult commune and the rituals and games seem like fun - at first. One of the rituals involves making the old people jump off a cliff, and crushing them with hammers if they survive. It’s the Trondheim Hammer Dance. This puts the visitors off the whole thing a bit. But Pugh gets elected May Queen, and her boyfriend gets a sexy prize as well. And then things get really hairy.
The relationships between Pugh and Reynor is classic - her clingy, him withholding. The other students with their rivalries and academic misdemeanors are fun too. The beauty of the setting, mountains and flowers and homespun clothes is relaxing, making the horror all the more gruesome. And best of all, you don’t have Nic Cage shouting about bees.
It starts with Florence Pugh trying to get in touch with her sister - who isn’t returning calls because she has killed herself and her parents. So Pugh is a little low. Her boyfriend, Jack Reynor, isn’t helping much. He’s kind of withholding, and he spends a lot of time with his student friends, who want him to dump her. He doesn’t even mention that one of the friends has invited the crew to his village in Sweden for the Midsommar festival. But she winds up going along.
The village is a sort of pagan cult commune and the rituals and games seem like fun - at first. One of the rituals involves making the old people jump off a cliff, and crushing them with hammers if they survive. It’s the Trondheim Hammer Dance. This puts the visitors off the whole thing a bit. But Pugh gets elected May Queen, and her boyfriend gets a sexy prize as well. And then things get really hairy.
The relationships between Pugh and Reynor is classic - her clingy, him withholding. The other students with their rivalries and academic misdemeanors are fun too. The beauty of the setting, mountains and flowers and homespun clothes is relaxing, making the horror all the more gruesome. And best of all, you don’t have Nic Cage shouting about bees.
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