The Man Who Sold His Skin (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2020): 3/5

I can see the appeal, I can see why it was nominated; Yahya Mahayni gives a strong performance, the cinematography is rather good, the concept - exceptionally original. It ultimately feels more like a canvas of interesting ideas that are never properly explored or further delved into though. Also still not sure how I feel about the ending.

The Mauritanian (Kevin MacDonald, 2021): 2/5

Another addition to the "reasons to hate the United States" canon.

Things the movie wanted me to learn: how an inexcusable abuse of human rights stemmed from a fragile post 9/11 America

What I actually learned: Guantanamo Bay has a McDonalds and a gift shop.

Sword of Trust (Lynn Shelton, 2020): 3/5
The story is simple but screwy and enticing with plenty of little turns peppered into its short runtime.

You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938): 3/5

Sometimes Capra's naivete and compulsive idealism works for me, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes his films are infused with so much charm and sincerity, so many tender moments that they're close to magic. Here, it doesn't really work. The ideas are just a little too simple and the way he spreads the message - the old "follow your dreams, live life to the fullest" stuff. Which I can be a supporter of, but topics like these just tend to fall a little flat in the hands of someone who maybe wasn't the most complex of thinkers, nor the most subtle of cinematic prophets. (Capra does have a bit of Oprah in him)

I'll mostly remember this for Lionel Barrymore. He's terrific, and a total sweetheart.

In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021): 2/5

Simultaneously overwritten and underdeveloped. It’s an unpleasant sledgehammer of a movie. Points only for Clint Mansell's synth score and one really great sequence of genuine terror.

Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954): 3/5

It doesn't benefit from how easy it is to compare to LA BETE HUMAINE, a far more feeling and poetic work (it's the difference between Renoir investing himself 100% and Lang comfortably coasting along). Gloria Grahame is great, and when the film is focused on her woozy, frustrated femme fatale at her wit's end, it's almost as good as the previous year's THE BIG HEAT, made with the same leads working a similar dynamic under the same director. Generally, though, it needs a bit more fury and a bit less coziness with playing to formula. Definitely one of Lang's more sedate films, enormously competent but only interesting when he gets to play with trains.

Zeroville (James Franco, 2019): 1.5/5

I can't wait until James Franco makes a sequel to THE DISASTER ARTIST but it's based on the production of this movie.

Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939): 2/5

Hitchcock's most un-Hitchcock film. Two stars for Charles Laughton's eyebrows.

Copycat (Jon Amiel, 1995): 1/5

Has zero atmosphere plus a predominantly loud score that overemphasizes everything that's going on and two serial killers that act like they are in a Wes Craven slasher, which makes them instantly laughable.

U Turn (Oliver Stone, 1997): 2/5

Pretty ostentatious, glibly nasty thing. There's also a very thin thread about the exploitation of Native Americans, bizarrely articulated in a character's gruesome sexual abuse and a race-bending Jon Voight as a Wise Old Indian. Weird shit, with an unresolvable knot of tones.

The Tempest (Julie Taymor, 2010): 3/5

Put this off forever, but it's not so terrible—excellent cast, decent script (yuk yuk), spectacular Hawaii locations.

Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez, 2007): 2/5

Rose McGowan dancing around a stripper pole in the opening credits, and posing next to the credit of 'Produced By Bob and Harvey Weinstein' aged just terribly.

Radioactive (Marjane Satrapi, 2019): 2/5

Yet another mediocre and stock biopic. While there's ambition and visual flair, it's gravely vapid and excruciatingly uninteresting.

QT8: The First Eight (Tara Wood, 2019): 3/5

Nothing much new here, and the Weinstein stuff feels a little desperate and half-assed, but a lot of nice interview footage, and what am I gonna tell you, I'm sort of in the tank for the guy anyway.

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel, 2012): 3/5

No dialogue, no musical score, no storyline, no commentary, nothing. Just angry ocean vibes through and through. Watching it gave me the sensation of being an internal organ. Maybe a spleen. Insistent, exhausting, alive.

Kid 90 (Soleil Moon Frye, 2021): 2/5

Quite literally reading a stranger's diaries. Soleil Moon Frye (PUNKY BREWSTER) looks back on hundreds of hours of footage she shot of her and her friends as Hollywood brats in the 90s. Seeing all those stars in their teen years is arguably the biggest (and only draw) of the doc.

The Reckoning (Neil Marshall, 2020): 1.5/5

About what you'd expect from a guy who directed a bunch of Game of Thrones and then saw THE WITCH.

The Tale (Jennifer Fox, 2018): 3.5/5

Horrific. The only comfort here is that it’s skillfully told by a woman from her own experience and on her own terms. and in her own words. I know this is a bit of a hot take but ALL RAPISTS AND SEXUAL ABUSERS AND PEDOPHILES NEED TO FUCKING DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Land (Robin Wright, 2021): 2/5

Vanity project bogged down by the presence of an ambiguously melodramatic angle. It’s not tragically incompetent, but it has no idea how to evoke emotion and it offers absolutely nothing unexpected - I was able to see every beat coming from just the trailer/premise alone. Minimal progression or development with lots of learning to be woodsy scenes.

WeWork: The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (Jed Rothstein, 2021): 3/5

I like watching men fail at things they think they’re good at.

Okay, but begs the question: when are we going to get the only hot-new-business-blows-up-then-crashes doc we actually want? MoviePass.

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan, 2020): 2.5/5

Margot Robbie has a scene where she skates to "barracuda" by heart, just like she did in I, TONYA.

White Lie (Calvin Thomas, Yonah Lewis, 2019): 3.5/5

Or, The Complete and Utter Exhaustion of Lying: The Movie

rewatched House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004): 4/5

To this day carries the reputation of a CROUCHING TIGER coattail rider, but while it never reaches those emotional heights it's so much more traditionally Shaw, despite its formal modernity. The bamboo forest fight is as good as contemporary wuxia gets.

Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman, 2020): 3/5

"YOU LOOK LIKE GWYNETH PALTROW ON FOOD STAMPS."

Every Breath You Take (Vaughn Stein, 2021): 1.5/5

You're better off just listening to The Police song for 105 minutes straight, than to sit through this.

Falling (Viggo Mortensen, 2020): 1.5/5

Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut is a look into a father-son relationship where a father does not accept who his son is. (He also didn’t seem very accepting of pretty much anyone or anything and really was a hate-filled character that I quickly got tired of.) Everything here is either deeply earnest or turned up to 11 to the point where it’s impossible to invest in it as something genuine.

The Last Cruise (Hannah Olson, 2021): 3/5

The couple that complained about the decline in friendliness among the staff during a deadly outbreak on a boat where the staff is working 13 hour days and not being taken care of...those people were definitely the villains of this documentary. While they lounge on their balcony and hope for chocolate, we cut to the woman making their desserts crying, overwhelmed. This is a true upstairs, downstairs look at how COVID impacted the whole country, really.

Godzilla vs. Kong (Adam Wingard, 2021): 0.5/5

BANG BANG SMASHY SMASHY MONKEY MAN AND LIZARD BOY GO BOOM BOOM !

Kong's fur looked really good in this though. Good job to the vfx people in charge of that.

rewatched The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956): 4/5

It's interesting how they take like one minute for the plagues, but take the first hour and a half for just Moses realizing he’s not Egyptian.

The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020): 4.5/5

Honestly one of the scariest films I have seen in a while. Plays from Hopkins's perspective like a slo-mo psychological thriller, which is the perfect move to depict something as disorienting and torturous as dementia. Truly fucking heartbreaking to watch, especially with one cruel moment near the end that pushed me into hot angry tears. Big "used to be a play" energy but I don't mind it. Made me really glad I used my final genie wish to never ever ever grow old.

No but really just put me out of my misery if this happens.

The World to Come (Mona Fastvold, 2020): 3.5/5

Pioneer lesbians be like "You smell like biscuit."

Violation (Dusty Mancinelli, Madeleine Sims-Fewer, 2020): 2.5/5

Eschews the standard conventions of a rape revenge thriller: the rape is not brutal, but quiet, and filmed in soft focus and extreme close-ups. The victim's resistance is hard to detect. The rapist is possibly under the impression that he is not committing rape. He is not a neanderthal, but instead a baby-faced loved-one of the victim. It's the rapist who is sexually objectified, in one scene the camera lingers for an uncomfortably long time on his trembling hard-on. The revenge is messy and nauseating, and does not bring the expected catharsis. The structure is not the expected two-act split that is common to this genre and instead conflates the rape and revenge with a non-linear back-and-forth cross-cut. The cinematography is not crude and ugly and instead frames the violence with heavily saturated shots of idyllic nature, as if suggesting that such acts are at home in the wild.

Some of this works, and some of it feels like a couple of yuppies trying to gentrify a slum. Also, the characters were underdeveloped, dialog was all mumblecore, and the disjointed plot turned the film into a slog.

Crisis (Nicholas Jarecki, 2021): 2/5

The easiest comparison here is to call this TRAFFIC but with opioids instead of cocaine, and not as good. An inert thriller that neither excites nor captivates.

Breaking News in Yuba County (Tate Taylor, 2021): 2.5/5

Better than I expected. I mean it's not great and the stellar cast is better than the film deserves. It's a breezy enough 90 minutes though. MVP to Regina Hall's wig. Or Wanda Sykes' wig.

Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006): 3/5

Simple story. One asshole director, two similar girls. Some obvious metaphors (her car is stuck, then it’s not stuck any more). 

Nobody (llya Naishuller, 2021): 3/5

Not much there there, but it’s fun to watch Odenkirk really enjoy himself while (righteously) beating the shit out of, say, a group of five youths on a bus. 

The Father (Florian Zeller, 2021): 3.5/5 

There are some clever bits that help make the story more intellectual and visceral, both a relief from the natural surplus of emotion in a story like this. Nevertheless, the overall effect is that of pain, so you have to decide whether that’s something you want to put yourself through. 

Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996): 3.5/5

The satire of both sides of the abortion debate (kind of) is as broad as shit, but Laura Dern, going from zero to feral possum in two seconds is movie magic. And When Burt Reynolds steps off the plane in full curly toupee with 30 minutes left: now that’s how you intensify the drama and raise the stakes. The most potent and American image comes near the end, when she puts a zippered gym bag in her lap, reaches down into vertical orifice with ecstasy, and produces not a baby but bundles of cash, which she presses to her breast. Now I’ve seen all of Payne’s seven features. 

The Ladykillers (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2004): 2/5

Probably Hanks’ worst performance on top of a very deliberate script. You can recognize stuff that works better in other Coen films. I’ve now seen all 18 of their features.

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971): 3/5

Adapting the same Dostoyevsky novella as Visconti’s Le Bianche Notti, with the same connection to a river. This version is even hornier and has way more French hippies, musicians and artists. Some top shelf hand shots, as always. 

Moana (Robert J. Flaherty, 1926): 3/5

in this land of plenty, the primitive joy also exhibited by Nanook seems facile, leaving us with blowholes, tree climbing, dress making, fishing, catching a turtle by drowning it and a boar with a snare, building a fire, prepare local delicacies like a little fish in a big leaf with taro and green bananas ($29.95), tattooing with needles of bone (the result looks pretty sweet), and toplessly anointing your man with perfumed oil. 

A Little Princess (Alfonso Cuarón, 1995): 3/5

Quite a beautiful and fairy tale version of the world that still contains flat out racism and WW1. At one point our princess becomes a maid, making it the first of Cuaron’s angelic servants. Lots of set design. 

Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuarón, 1998): 3/5

Modernizes the novel. Another tale about love among the very rich from Cuaron 

McCabe & Mrs. Miller, rw (Robert Altman, 1971): 4.5/5

Altman, noticing the end of 60s idealism pretty early. The small businessman is fucked, and the small businesswoman best just smoke more dope. What’s remarkable is that the main character is dead meat halfway through and knows it. The movie ends with a 20-minute action sequence that also serves as a tour of one of the greatest location sets in cinema history. Very influenced by Foreman’s Fireman’s Ball, probably. Great use of the community experience as the cause of and solution to all our loneliness and other problems. 

California Split, rw (Robert Altman, 1974): 4.5/5

Somewhat renews my fondness for losers. Nearing the climax, Elliot Gould suddenly sings along with a non-diagetic song as if only he can hear it or maybe we’ve been listening to what’s been playing in his head. Elliott’s highly taped busted nose makes a nice entry into Jerry’s (nascent) investigation of main characters with face injuries, kitty-cat.  

Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971): 4.5/5

I was surprisingly moved. Very stylized and quite naughty and nasty. Made up of beautiful, long, languorous, dialogue-free crowd scenes, like Tati or (some) Altman. Visconti lets long passages of Mahler’s 3rd and 5th Symphonies play out, to enormous emotional effect. 

Le Notti Bianche (Luchino Visconti, 1957): 3/5

In sharp contrast to Death in Venice, this one is just a couple of long conversations, with some slightly more pictorial flashbacks. Filmed on an amazing set in Cinecitta. 

The School for Postmen, 16 min. (Jacques Tati, 1947): 3/5

Dry run for Jour de fete. A couple of excellent silent movie type gags. Contempt for modern efficiency is already present. 

Traffic (Jacques Tati, 1971): 4/5

I had always heard this was second-grade Tati, but no way. After a pokey start, stuff from earlier in the film start to pay off, 10 or 40 or 70 minutes later, and the whole thing picks up steam as it goes. Full of great characters/communities and barely-there comic observations. Lots of French hippies. 

Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974): 1.5/5

Like when you would see Truman Capote on the Merv Griffin Show. One generally understood and believed that he was a genius; there was just no evidence of it. 

Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003): 4.5/5

The visual conceit never bothered me, which is guess the point. I actually found the movie to be very beautiful, and the gradual and self-righteous exploitation then demonization of the outsider/woman is, of course, extremely on point. The bareness emphasizes the metaphoric or mythic levels of the story. Still: nasty bit of business and overall very despairing and hard to watch. Kidman’s best performance?

Manderlay (Lars von Trier, 2005): 2/5

Von Trier wades into how we treated black people immediately post-Civil War and race relations in general. What could go wrong?? Murkier than Dogville in its lighting scheme as well as in its thesis.

Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991): 2/5

Full of artifice and unmotivated style: unmotivated spots of color, unmotivated back projection, unmotivated shots straight down and spinning, unmotivated voice over talking about “you” did this and that. No wonder he stripped all that shit away. 

Elaine May Rewatch Fest

Difficult-to-like people we love. 

A New Leaf, rw (Elaine May, 1971): 3.5/5

A rom com where he’s planning to kill her the whole time. The tone is funny and unique:  madcap and improvisational, with much acceptance of the clumsy and anti-social among us. He just wants to be left alone. She’s maladroit. I want Matthau and May to be my parents—oh wait, they were. 

The Heartbreak Kid, rw (Elaine May, 1972): 4.5/5

I related to this one HARD. When I watched it 20 years ago (while still in my first marriage), I felt sorry for his wife and was saddened and revolted. That’s all still there, but now I also see in her a pathetic anchor and am cheering for him tearing his stupid life down. Funny how things change. Only time will tell whether the last moments of the movie will also be prophetic. Contains a couple of the funniest long-takes ever (when he tells his wife his new plans, and when he tells his potential new father-in-law his new plans), as our clueless main character thinks he’s impressing everyone. He’s a completely dumb asshole, although a nicer guy than the one in A Place in the Sun. 

Mickey and Nicky, rw (Elaine May, 1976): 5/5

An enormous pleasure to watch great performances by Falk and Cassavetes. Extremely lived-in, physical, present, and full of accidents, improvisations and spontaneity. What a contrast to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly (e.g.), who were born under a snow globe! As in Bergman, each scene contains things that connect the two characters and things that drive them apart. Although, as in McCabe, it’s an outside force that does them in—it’s the thing that’s shaking these two rats in the same cage. It feels similar to a Cassavetes movie, but it’s much lighter and funnier. (Which greatly improves it). May filmed 500 hours and edited it for 2 years. It does feel slightly stitched together, but it’s also all killer no filler. 

Ishtar, rw (Elaine May, 1987): 3/5

There are many movies in film history that are unfunny in much less interesting ways. It’s fun to see Hoffman and Beaty riff together. The best moments have a madcap energy, and there are a couple really funny bits (especially if you’re able to set aside the problematic Arab stuff.) Not everything works, to say the least. 

John Carpenter OK Fest

These movies are OK!

Dark Star, rw (John Carpenter, 1974): 3/5

It’s 1972 and a bunch of stoned out hippies are on a 10-year space mission. Parodies Star Wars and Alien 5 and 7 years, respectively, before their existence. The alien here is a droll balloon with feet. 2001 and Strangelove are the real touchstones. 

Christine, rw (John Carpenter, 1983): 3.5/5

I saw this movie twice in the theater when I was 16, and I still enjoy it today. Completely competent and well-paced like Spielberg, but raunchier. Robert Prosky and Harry Dean Stanton hang around being low-key perfect. 

In the Mouth of Madness, rw (John Carpenter, 1994): 3/5

Steven King and Dario Argento fight for attention within a sitcom-level mise-en-scene. The villain is clearly styled after Cronenberg. Charleston Heston’s 10 mins of screen time = pure production values.

Vampires (John Carpenter, 1998): 2/5

Did you ever wonder what James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, and Sheryl Lee were doing in 1997? Me either!

Ghosts of Mars (John Carpenter, 2001): 2.5/5

Full of state-of-the-art special effects…if it was 1962. A western on Mars that turns into a siege movie and a zombie movie. Ice Cube makes Natasha Henstridge look like Meryl Streep.