Last Movie Watched Thread

Tokyo Idols (2017) - The entertainment industry seems pretty sleazy wherever you are in the world but this documentary was some next level shit. This documentary takes an unflinching look at Japan’s idol culture and the middle aged men (who range from kind of sad to outright creepy) that it apparently caters to. Living in Korea I’m more than familiar with the concept of an idol but here the primary audience for such groups are middle school and high school aged girls so to see idols whose primary audience was a bunch of dudes in their 50s was kind of unsettling.

The way the documentary was arranged kind of gradually eased you in to the creepiness of the entire thing, starting with idols who were legally adults and their fans before moving on to middle school aged girls and finally showing a idol group consisting of ten year olds. Early on in the documentary a sociologist talks about how shaking hands was up until very recently an act that had sexual connotations in Japan so by the time you get to a group of dudes in their 40s and 50s shaking hands with elementary school aged girls whatever sympathy you might have had for the sadsack fans is replaced by revulsion and you are nodding along to the one Japanese woman talking head (I think she was a sociologist or maybe a writer) who just talks about how scummy the entire thing is and how the dudes that are into it are fucking losers who are afraid to talk to women who aren’t being forced to smile and be nice to them.

Keep cool. This was Zhang Yimou’s first post-dumped(?)-by-Gong Li film, which is probably part of the reason he chose to do something a bit different. It’s filmed pretty much entirely with handheld camera on location—Zhang’s a great director, obviously, but there was a definitely a feel of “ooh let’s see what I can do with my new toy” in the camera work. Lots of weirdly angled zooming close shots. It works for the film, but sometimes it’s a bit much. The on-location, pseudo-guerilla aspect’s great, though—this was made a few years before I lived there, but it really captures normal everyday Beijing, to the point where I was having smells of the city (and banquet hall food) come back to me. So many little things, like sitting on the second level of a double decker bus, the textures of nineties Beijing architecture, the place settings in restaurants, just brought me back. There’s also the contrast between the semi-criminal nouveau riche (our antagonist), the ordinary Beijingers (our protagonists), and the bumpkins from the provinces trying to make a living—including Zhang, who makes a cameo as a junk dealer w/his Xi’an accent on full display.

The movie’s advertised, at least outside China, as a quirky, sexy comedy and that’s not really accurate. The guy in the poster, Zhao, does pine for An Hong, the woman, but it’s more goofy-romantic than quirky-romantic. It’s very funny, but not in the way the poster implies. It’s also only one part of the story—a precipitating part, but not really what the film’s about. Zhao, inept goof though he is, makes a rich local club owner—either involved with An Hong or desiring her—jealous and has him beaten, and during the beat-down Zhao accidentally destroys a Mr. Zhang’s new laptop. While there’s another episode with An Hong again, most of the rest of the film is about Zhao and the much-less-photogenic Zhang, with Zhao planning revenge and Zhang going mad. It’s still funny, but it’s so successfully suspenseful and intense that the lighthearted packaging almost feels like a betrayal. This is a great pitch-black social comedy with terrific atmosphere (really atmospheres since the story shifts from bright outside to claustrophobic inside perfectly), and deserves to be known as such.




Céline & Julie vont en bateau: Here’s another one that was on my list from AVC times that I finally got around to, this one recommended by to me by Binky. For those not caught up on AVC lore Binky was famous for keeping up a convo with another poster in the comments to some old article, resulting in a long dialog between two women just talking about whatever, so it kind of makes sense she’d recommend this to me (and before I’d seen a couple other Rivette movies, La belle noiseuse and La Religieuse, both of which I really enjoyed). It’s about two women, and while it’s not really about them hanging out that’s the mood. There’s a lot of Lewis Carroll influence on this film, and that’s been widely commented on, but I think this is really too lose to make a lot of the stuff Rivette works with work. The Alice books are tight and are rigorous nonsense. There’s a bit of this in C&J (I like the touch that the freespirited Céline’s a stage musician—which requires real skill and discipline—while the more serious-minded Julie’s into more “literary” magic like tarot which relies on chance and erudition, but doesn’t need any particular skill or discipline), but ultimately it’s too lose—it just feels like it’s kind of tooling around with these interesting paradoxes, never going anywhere with them (I’ve read that a lot of the film was improvised, and that definitely adds to the mood but detracts from anything not-mood-related).

It, like Keep Cool, also makes the shift from big, bright comedy showcasing its city to a darker, more claustrophobic plot, dealing with the murder of a child in a now-empty mansion, with Céline & Julie first watching, then interacting with the story. It’s a cool idea, and Rivette tries to use this to showcase the differences between stodgier pre-1968 and looser post-1968 cinema, but he just hammers it too hard. The murder mystery’s just shot and performed so statically, so stodgily it becomes a real pain to watch.

I also watched this without subtitles (Dutch VCD rip!), so I definitely missed out on a lot of the puns/wordplay, so I didn’t get the full experience, but I think it’s just too loose, too seventies, for my taste. I can see why this film has a following, though, and C&J are legitimately fun to “be” around even if the film doesn’t work for me as an actual movie to watch.

Darby O'Gill and the Little People Wifemate and I had a conversation about the first movies we ever saw, and this was one that I saw projected on a screen in my local library when I was four or so, along with Pinocchio and probably some other Disney classics. I watched it again just a year or so ago, perhaps after beastofman wrote it up for the Avocado. The forced perspective effects really were great, and the animations of the banshee and cóiste bodhar also hold up 60 years later. Albert Sharpe's facial expressions are a joy to watch, like Red Skelton.

Ready or Not The other 2019 movie about a family of terrible rich people in a mansion. Unlike Knives Out this has few positive qualities, mainly only the lead Samara Weaving who has quite the scream. Andie MacDowell sure has fallen far. The fact that it turns out to be an actual deal with the devil is pretty dumb when the house being on fire could have tidied up the ending with a practical explanation that made the rich people look even dumber. I could go on about how the movie doesn't find footing with any of the things it wants to be, but really the sharpest indictment I can offer is that it's like a class-not-race version of Get Out written by someone with 1/10th the skill of Jordan Peele.

Ford v Ferrari Pretty darn long for a car racing movie but also pretty engaging. Matt Damon pitches a Texas accent toward Tommy Lee Jones and falls just short of Josh Brolin. Compare and contrast with Rush, a more enjoyable movie on the whole, where Chris Hemsworth plays the colorful guy people like and Daniel Bruhl plays the irascible jerk with a great feel for the road. This had a more fun soundtrack through. In further adventures in casting, Christian Bale plays a difficult Englishman and Josh Lucas plays another slimy exec, although I'm sure Josh Lucas is a nice person in real life. I was expecting this to be a commercial for the Ford company, but it's actually a commercial for Shelby that makes the Ford company and Henry Ford II look fairly awful.

Jackie Brown. Perfect or near-perfect movie.

Five Easy Pieces. From what I understand it’s pretty divisive because Jack Nicholson’s character, Bobby Dupea, is a jerk in this, so it really comes down to how entertaining (the diner scene is one of those things I saw referenced a ton of times without realizing it was a reference) or sympathetic you find him. As he goes back to his family of classical musicians I think it ups the divisive responses—on the one hand the Dupeas are eccentric but there’s definitely a core of real affection there, but on the other hand they’re eccentric, live in old sheet music, and are stuck on a house on an island in Puget Sound. So I come down on the sympathetic side, given that the Dupeas remind me of a lot of my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ generations (Bobby’s older brother’s named Fidelio after the Beethoven opera, I have a cousin who’s named for the opera’s heroine) and I’ve seen how that can filter down to people, even if intentions are best (tmi ).

*spoiler* Stalin dies.

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Inspirational cinema for us ill-kept and drugged-up recluses

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (2017) - I watched this because I am a fan of professional grappling and thought that this documentary film was entirely about the case between Hulk Hogan and Gawker and while a decent percentage of the film’s runtime is dedicated to wacky bullshit like Hulk Hogan declaring that his dick and Terry Bollea’s are different sizes in a court of law there’s a bigger story here about douchelord billionaires using their money and power to suppress the press and keep them from speaking truth to power.

Heavy Metal (1981) - It’s kind of funny to me that a cartoon for adults is somehow more juvenile than the random Pixar shit I watched with my kid last weekend. This was just a bunch of shit a 13 year old boy would have thought ruled ass. It was all babes with huge boobs who were always naked, swords, space shit, zombies, hard rock, John Candy talking about not wanting his dork to be hanging out, and senseless violence. Since it was an anthology some of the animation looked pretty good other times it looked like shit. The same goes for the various stories. Some were decent enough while others were more or less trash. I probably would have been more about this if I was still 13 years old.

Neverwhere (1968) - I thought the best bit of Heavy Metal was the part where John Candy talked about his dork so I looked up what comic that segment was based upon. It turned out that there was actually an animated short that predated the comic version that would appear in Heavy Metal and since that short was on YouTube I gave it a watch. The short starts live action introductory bit in which a nerd quits his job after getting turned down by a girl and dumped on by his boss. He discovers a fairy maybe who gives him the blueprints for some sort of device that the nerd builds. It’s a portal to a world that’s populated by crudely animated line drawings. A busty Line drawing babe needs his help so the nerd enters the portal and turns into a nude musclefuck. What follows is a bunch nerd wish fulfillment in which the now jacked nerd wrecks shop on mutants and wizards and stuff to save the girl and the entire world. The story was your standard issue John Carter of Mars type shit (which the nerd actually was reading in the live action bit so it’s not really a secret what the influences are here) but the grimy animation and weird 60s synthesizer soundtrack made the entire thing seem like something no one should be watching. Not as much fun as the version that appeared in the Heavy Metal movie but not a bad way to kill 14 minutes.

Raising Arizona I never actually sat through this deeply silly Cletus comedy very far before. John Goodman emerging from the mud is quite a scene, the anti-Shawshank. He's really the thinking man's John Belushi here, 13 years before Blues Brothers 2000. So do people in Arizona actually sound like this? Surely not. Lots of fun camera work; a fair amount of the movie is a cross between Sam Raimi and George Miller. Anyway my favorite gags are Nicolas Cage scraping his knuckles on that damn spray-on ceiling and getting tied up with the cord from those ugly Venetian blinds my mother still has. Just how many movies climax with the ol' surprise grenade pin trick?

I read a bit about the making of it and production was apparently kind of a mess since the US government didn't really know what they wanted their official party line to on Japan to be. One of the script writers recalled being unable to refer to Hirohito as a war criminal (which he was) because the US knew that they would have to deal with him later. Also right before the movie was originally slated to be released (January of '45) the US government decided that it needed to be more racist and had it reedited which delayed the release even further. The more I think about this movie, the weirder it is that it's a thing that's on Netflix just chilling out in a list of recommendations because I watched a documentary about Hong Kong kung fu movies.

To contrast all the WWII anti-Japanese propaganda, I watched A Whisker Away on Netflix over the weekend. It wasn't bad, but wasn't great. Really, it felt a bit paint by numbers.  Its about a girl who makes a deal with some cat spirit to turn into a cat. She uses this power to spy on a guy she likes and otherwise escape an unhappy homelife before coming to the conclusion that she needs to deal with her problems as a person and that stalking a dude and being a  huge weirdo around him is a totally effective strategy for winning his affections. 

Its kind of a given with big-budget anime, but I really liked the artwork. The town in which the movie is set is drawn such that it feels like a real place to the point that it felt like somewhere I could have conceivably visited. It turned out that I  had.  Over the credits I noticed that the movie is set in Tokoname, Aichi, which is about 50 minutes from where I used to live. The town actually has one of the only Costcos in the region as well as an international airport, so I was surprised that more planes didn't show up. The town is also locally famous for its Manekineko, which the movie doesn't really mention, but works for the whole cat connection.  

As an aside,  one interesting change in Japanese pop culture that i have noticed over the last 10 years or so is the use of actual places for settings.  Settings used to mainly be more generic "anytown, Japan" or "any neighborhood, Tokyo metro area." in order to make the appeal as broad a possible. But now there's a burgeoning travel scene, both on the international and domestic side, of people going to places where their favorite movies, anime, etc, are shown to take place. Local governments are in on it as well since it helps create tourism, and now that I've said that and mentioned the international airport, setting the movie in Tokoname makes a bit more sense since there was already (pre-pandemic) a supply of tourists to draw from.  Even stuff set in "generic Tokyo neighborhood" seem to do more stuff to actually show a few actual places or landmarks, which then get an influx of people trying to get a picture recreating a scene. It's an interesting development and I like it but I wonder if it is starting to get a little too twee. 

Totally forgot the use of homophobic slurs in this movie. I guess it's because the last time I saw it was in the 90s and it was just such a part of the everyday language back then.

Did a double feature of earlier Denis Villaneuve because I thoroughly enjoyed Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 and I'm crossing my fingers that his Dune adaptation still comes out in December. 

Enemy
Jake Gyllenhaal plays a twitchy, not-all-there academic who unexpectedly encounters a C-list actor in a movie who is his exact double (of course also played by Gyllenhaal). They meet and things go off the rails. A willfully obtuse and inscrutable film but well made enough to remain somewhat compelling despite laughable levels of portentousness throughout. Features a lot of unexplained spider imagery including a giant arachnid creature looming over the Toronto skyline that seems like a dry run for the heptapods in Arrival.

Prisoners
The young daughters of Hugh Jackman (doing a quite credible Philly-area accent), Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, and Viola Davis are kidnapped, setting off a very gritty crime thriller. Gyllenhaal returns as apparently the only working cop in their mid-sized Pennsylvania city--it's really quite ridiculous how he never has assistance or backup in any of his investigative work. At its core, it's a solidly plotted mystery but the script is also shaky and bloated at 2 1/2 hours. I would venture that they ended up unexpectedly landing name actors in Davis and Howard and beefed up their roles, throwing an odd wobble into the overall story. The denouement with Jackman's character is a little much as well.

All in all, though, the two films confirmed that, despite his interest in telling different kinds of stories, Villaneuve has a real flair for landscapes and environments. Given that 50% of my enjoyment of Dune will be from how he depicts Arrakis, it's a good sign. 


 

John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996). It was basically Escape from New York, but even funnier. I enjoyed it a lot. Snake Plissken rules.