Bullets or Ballots (William Keighley, 1936): 2/5

Great title but lousy movie that's really about bootleggers, not politics.  Not even the great Eddie G. can save it.

Trusting the nation who had to be told not to eat Tide Pods to do the right thing tonight

 

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm (Jason Woliner, 2020): 3.5/5

I wish I saw this in a packed movie theater. That entire cake shop to “abortion clinic” segment was a standout. High fives to Janise the Babysitter, to the woman actually nodding approvingly during Tutar's speech (Maria Bakalova is a force of nature, equally daring), and that girl who was disgusted by her father's comment at the debutante ball. Extra half star for Sacha Baron Cohen who literally risked his life making this; his complete and utter disregard for his own safety has really provided us with some of the best content of the 21st century. One of the only movies that could ever capture the complete insanity that this year has been.

Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, 2020): 3/5

Two hours of smart people looking sad, angry, and scared because they were silenced and suppressed by a legion of unremarkable dipshits who fell upwards in the anti-meritocratic hierarchy of the Republican Party. (Fire up the guillotines and set up mass trials STAT.)

And I get that it’s hard to watch a horror movie when you’re still living in the horror movie, but at the very least, watch this to see the twenty-something year-old Max discuss his experience of what it was like to volunteer on Jared Kushner's task force of unpaid, inexperienced college kids trying to acquire PPE in the midst of the pandemic from their own personal Gmail accounts. Just fucking unreal. Kushner is so confident in his ability to easily solve ANY issue, despite being hopelessly average and unsuccessful in all his endeavors.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin, 2020): 2.5/5

2-hour courtroom drama that’s deliberately, depressingly timely (not to mention a little centrist) in a way I find sanctimonious and not entirely productive.

Black is King (Beyonce Knowles, 2020): 3/5

No surprise, a huge dose of gorgeous, often poetic imagery and stunning performance. The LION KING stuff robs it of a not-insignificant amount of power. Felt like calculated corporate synergy, really bummed me out.

On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020): 2.5/5

Sofia Coppola got a call from Apple and gathered all of her rich friends together to make this generic corporate assignment about tedious rich people with nothing problems.

Kajillionaire (Miranda July, 2020): 2.5/5

Typical July: maudlin and aggressively quirky; absurdism mixed with earnestness. Kajillionaire, which indeed kicks off in full-bore crazytown mode, got less and less interesting to me as Evan Rachel Wood's bizarrely-named and -voiced Old Dolio gradually becomes conscious of the emotional void that she's inhabited for her entire unorthodox life. It's essentially a weirder variation on that old favorite of mine, "my parents didn't love me, or failed to demonstrate it enough." Also never quite bought the stealth romance, either, despite first-rate work from Gina Rodriguez as the ostensibly normal character.

Unhinged (Derrick Borte, 2020): 2/5

What is there to discuss? This man is plainly not hinged!

The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano, 2020): 2/5

How about LA FEMME NIKITA except a big mopey drag and shot like a prestige TV pilot?

Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, 1996): 3/5

There's just no getting around the fact that it's really pretty squishy and sentimental at its core, like a version of Old Yeller in which Old Yeller shoots himself to save Travis. (At the same time, I'm incredibly susceptible to stories of self-sacrifice, so there is still that.) Thornton gives an amazing physical performance.

Irresistible (Jon Stewart, 2020): 2/5

I’m convinced this movie was somehow written and shot in 2006 and kept in a vault until now. Basically a dogshit version of "Veep" that feels like it was written by A.I. fed a diet of cable news, Pod Save America, and right-wing radio.

The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor, 2020): 2/5

Mighty Ducks style basketball team, kids with cancer, drunk Batman—this movie’s got everything, except...show us the fucking BACK TATTOO, AFFLECK.

Chemical Hearts (Richard Tanne, 2020): 1/5

How do movies like this get approved? How did the actors feel comfortable speaking these words?

Ava (Tate Taylor, 2020): 1/5

There isn't a single novel moment or exciting twist or decent action beat in this entire misbegotten endeavor. Aggressively generic, cheap-looking and ugly, embarrassingly acted, and haphazardly edited. You've seen better terrible TV pilots.

rewatched La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995): 4/5

Kassovitz hasn’t made anything worthwhile since. One-hit wonder.

October Halloween/Horror Movie Month

rewatched The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980): 4/5

A tuxedo-clad man with a furry fetish has the best night of his life rudely interrupted by a marital dispute.

rewatched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown ( Bill Melendez, 1966): 5/5

TRY AND FIND A FLAW YOU CAN'T

rewatched The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973): 5/5

Still scary, but now it’s less scary than heartbreaking, suffused with grief and guilt and dread, with the sense that there's no system truly prepared to combat madness or pain; there's only the trial and error of barely surviving them.

The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990): 3/5

Missing the all-encompassing sadness and blunt craft of the original but still an idiosyncratic movie with some good shocks and sturdy performances. It also contains one of the best, scariest scenes in the entire history of horror (you will know it when you see it).

rewatched The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999): 3.5/5

Still very good. Shyamalan's seemingly effortless formal patience generates all of the tension here, because not much actually takes place narratively. Mostly you're watching this kid slowly have a nervous breakdown because he can see ghosts. It also can't be overstated just how good Osment really is here, especially in his scenes with Toni Collette.

rewatched The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980): 4/5

The rare hybrid of horror and weepie in which both genres prove equally potent. This time I teared up at the conclusion of the Romeo and Juliet reading.

Boys State (Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine, 2020): 3/5

If you are really interested in politics in high school you should be constitutionally barred from ever becoming a politician, and probably from voting as well.

Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020): 2/5

Glacially-paced allegory on growing old, specifically the toll of degenerative illness, stated with all the subtlety and insight you’d expect from a twenty-something, self-proclaimed fan of J-horror.

Nightmare Cinema (Alejandro Brugués, Joe Dante, 2018): 0.5/5

Amateur hour. The ineptitude (filmmaking and performances alike) is only matched by its shameless lack of imagination.

rewatched Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960): 5/5

One of my greatest regrets (as a cinephile, that is—let's not get carried away) is that I never got the chance to see this film properly, without foreknowledge of its, uh, change in perspective. (Though I feel like the unusual credit order—"and Janet Leigh as Marion Crane"—would tip a contemporary audience that something is up. Maybe that wasn't a convention yet in 1960? It was clearly intended to justify her early exit.) I was denied the initial, unrepeatable raw pleasure of being fully invested in Marion's predicament, only to have that investment abruptly and cruelly yanked away. What's remarkable is how magnificently the first 50 minutes work even when you know that most of what you're seeing is fundamentally irrelevant. Still my favorite Hitchcock film.

rewatched The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, 1999): 5/5

I won't be dissuaded: found footage horror begins and ends here. This is literally the blueprint and I don’t think anything will ever top this super specific kind of scary or their landmark marketing campaign. Brilliant use of the dislocation of sound and image throughout; Heather Donahue's screams echoing from afar, captured by someone else's DAT, as we see her own direct viewpoint via handheld camera. Love the tent attack; Heather tearing through the darkness, shrieking in blind terror at something we cannot see and she cannot understand. The Blair Witch Project remains frightening because the source of its high-strangeness horror is incomprehensible. Whereas your Paranormal Activities and the like lazily operate on tired cliches of ghosts and demons, the threat of Blair Witch is nebulous and unknowable—at bottom, all we can really be sure of is that a group of people are trapped in a hostile landscape stained with centuries of atrocity, from witch lynchings to child murders and environmental destruction.

rewatched Diabolique (Henri Clouzot, 1955): 4.5/5

A superb vise-tightener, the template for pretty much every thriller predicated on spooky inexplicable shit that's been made since. If only its successors wrapped up so succinctly.

rewatched May (Lucky McKee, 2002): 3/5

Jeremy Sisto's character does not fall in love with May after she serves him Gatorade in a wine glass, what a completely fucking unrelatable character. Loved Anna Faris as that horny slutty lesbo.

rewatched Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976): 3/5

A film constructed entirely around one bravura sequence, which De Palma executes so thrillingly that the rest scarcely matters.

A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Jee Woon, 2003): 3/5

The strange is strong in this one. Creepy sisters, jump scares, misdirection and synchronized periods. This is your honest to goodness fully kosher South Korean horror flick.

rewatched Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987): 2.5/5

I’m not here to kink-shame but ew.

rewatched Evil Dead (Fede Alvarez, 2013): 2.5/5

Definitely one of the better horror remakes out there. (Arguably the best, according to Leigh.) A decent balls to the walls gorefest. Yikes, what does the NC-17 cut look like???

Horror October 

From the Criterion Channel 70s Horror collection, and more...

Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974): 4/5

The first slasher movie, they say. It still works. Clark goes on to make Porky’s 1 &2, A Christmas Story and Stallone’s Rhinestone.

Deathdream (Bob Clark, 1974): 3/5

When people came back from Vietnam, they were pretty messed up/dead.

The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977): 4/5

The bad guy stuff is campy and fun in a deformity-representative-exploito way. Competent acting and excellent lighting contribute substantially to why it all works so well. Also, our protagonist is super-gay and repressed, which is interesting.

Season of the Witch (George A. Romero, 1972): 2/5

Unhappy housewife gets into witchcraft. Restrained.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (John Hancock, 1971): 3.5/5

Zohra Lampert’s excellent performance as the titular Jessica anchors this film in almost Cassavetes-type realism, which really helps when the spooky stuff overtakes the more interesting relationship stuff. 

Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978): 3/5

A couple breaks up over the course of weekend camping trip on a remote beach (where there’s also some desultory metaphoric nature-fights-back stuff.) This was when I started to just watch Bergman movies, where I could enjoy couples breaking up without the other stuff getting in the way.

The Beyond (Fulci, 1981):2/5

Someone built a hotel over one of the gates of hell. Fucking contractors. Bananas but boring anyway. 

Trick ‘r Treat (Michael Dougherty, 2007): 2.5/5

Pastiche of 80s horror. Skin deep but pretty fun.

Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008): 3.5/5

Part of the French extreme horror wave of the aughts, this is at times extremely hard to watch. A visceral experience, nihilistic and thrilling.

The Descent, rw (Neil Marshall, 2007): 3/5

This story of a caving expedition gone wrong was not quite as good as I remembered. I did turn it off half-way through (and returned to it the next night) but was it because I “didn’t like it” or because I couldn’t take the feeling of claustrophobia? I’ll never know.

Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964): 2/5

Painfully slow and long but at times worth it for the magnificently beautiful artificiality akin to Gene Kelly/Vincent Minnelli dream ballet sequences. Features a lot of that eerily slow Noh play-influenced stuff that shows up in a lot of Japanese cinema. Completely opposite feel from the director’s 10-hour trilogy, The Human Condition, (which I also watched: a 3.5/5) which is much more Western in its pacing, mise-en-scene and dramatic strategies. 

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962): 3/5

As fan of John Waters and last year’s Feud, I can’t believe I waited so long to watch this. I was surprised to discover that the acting was quite good, especially from Crawford. I thought it would be grotesquery for its own sake—and it was—but it was more traditionally entertaining than I had anticipated.

And some horror and other stuff from 2020

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (Jim Cummings, 2020): 2.5/5

Surprisingly bland, coming from the writer/director of Thunder Road, which pushed the small-town cop plot in an idiosyncratic direction full of self-loathing and self-destruction.

Invisible Man (Leign Whannell, 2020): 1.5/5

Hate-watched the final hour. I loved the deadly-empty-room stuff, but the social politics was garbage—and I say that as someone who basically agrees with the filmmakers.

Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2020): 4/5

Ben Mendelson and the rest of the cast are excellent. How do they keep making movies about teenagers dying from cancer? Still: Sob sob sob.

On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020): 3.5/5

I was charmed. Nice to see Bill Murray actually deal with a script and character—he’s really good at it. In a way, it’s another Sofia Coppola movie about a poor little rich girl who’s a prisoner of her privilege, but this one also offers Woody Allen-ish effervescence. 

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner, 2020): 3/5

I was amused. The satire could easily have been more specific, yet I kept being reminded of Blazing Saddles (highest possible compliment). If Trump wins tomorrow, I will personally throttle everyone involved for pre-celebrating.

Where All Those Horror Movies Pointed

This is not a particularly original observation, but I started to notice that many of these horror movies were essentially past-trauma, relationship-on-the-rocks movies that used horror metaphors and degenerated into besides-the-point bloody resolutions. If you throw out that those two latter elements, you get a Bergman movie, right? All these movies convinced me that Liv Ullman was one of the greatest of all time.

Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1974): 4.5/5

I had to wait until I had some distance from my marriage and other relationship breakups to enjoy this. Not banal bickering, but instead adults changing over 10 years and really fucking having it out about things that are meaningful to them. Incisive and exact.

Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978): 3/5

In the movie’s central scene the daughter tells the mother exactly and at length what was wrong with her parenting. Harrowing. 

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968): 4/5

Actually a pretty great war movie in the neutral, men-with-guns mode of The Red and the White. Plus, all the while, the story of a relationship coming together and breaking up. 

The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1968): 4/5

Four psychologically rich and realistic characters full of philosophies and past traumas bounce off one another. Full of lovely, soft colors that contrast with the violence of the emotions on display.