Brandon's movie memory

The Odyssey from the Trojans’ POV. Guy with an eye injury arrives in town and does everything he can to get the king’s ear and warn everyone about Genghis Khan (the actor also played a Khan in Andrei Rublev), but is tortured and mocked for his troubles. The ruler destroys a caravan and finds a merchant with Genghis’s secret symbol, then kills Khan envoys, bringing total destruction upon his town, if it hadn’t been coming already, while the eye guy watches it all happen. Filmed in Kazakhstan…

First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse.…

Tense music cranks up as pretty, vacant young Simon (Almeyer, also in Oliveira’s La Lettre) realizes everyone is keeping secrets from him. His beloved Ariane (Sylvie Testud of Lourdes) loves to sleep, tells him nothing of substance, changes her stories. After she sings a courtyard duet with a neighbor, Simon goes out to solve the mystery of women, asks some women about their relationships with each other, takes everything they say literally, then comes home and confuses his girlfriend, deciding…

Icelandic writer digresses about the loss of glaciers in the world, tells us his parents’ life story, and you can tell he’s self-satisfied about some plaque he wrote about a particular extinct glacier since they take their time building up to it. Pretty good as an essay film, pretty funny that Dosa followed her fire movie with an ice movie, and ultimately the incredible glacier photography put this over the top.

After Saragossa Manuscript, another Wojciech Has movie full of madness, beautifully filmed, and based on an eccentric novel, which didn’t really work for me. Jan Nowicki (Barrier) goes to a time-warping hospital to find his not-dead-yet dad, then wanders through fantastical episodes, full of delirious clutter (and copious cobwebs) in the tradition of Szulkin and Hard to be a God. Opens with our guy getting directions from a blind train conductor, ends with him having become the conductor – I…

1961 original: downbeat, guys go broke and get injured, the girl dies 1986 reboot: a party, guys get rich and have a good time playing the game “He’s gotta learn how to be himself, but on purpose.” The Hustler finds a hotshot kid named Vince who is such a hotshot that he busts into pool halls and beats everyone in the room while wearing a shirt that says VINCE. Newman says let’s apply some strategy to this skill, and the kid’s girl (M.E. Mastrantonio) hears him, but the kid (T. Cruise) doesn’t,…

Secret Weapons (1972, David Cronenberg) In a 1977 future during the North American civil war, a drug company has taken over the country and “the holy police are experts in psychic attack.” Weird Jazz on the soundtrack, my favorite genre of late. Not bad, definitely feels like a Crimes of the Future (1970) followup. Inventor slips away and meets with the motorcycle gang resistance, some kind of TV pilot setup for a brainy urban sci-fi warfare thing that never came to be (unless you count the…

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way. The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior…

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations. I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting)…

Handyman’s daughter is kidnapped, the police are useless and hostile and corrupt, deciding to investigate him instead of the crime. Fortunately, the handyman is ballsy and badass, tracks down the baddies, crashes into their clubs and warehouses and makes a mess of their henchmen. He runs into a reporter guy whose wife is also missing and they team up against various child trafficker tough guys, including Mad Dog from The Raid as a cop-killing bowman, and the rich Heir Trafficker who…

The Cat Came Back (1988, Cordell Barker) Runaway (2009, Cordell Barker) Another good batch: two movies where a cow is on the railroad tracks. The cow makes a quick appearance in The Cat, while cow vs. train is the whole show in Runaway. The train engineer runs off with a passenger leaving the coal boy in charge as the train goes out of control after hitting the cow (which survives, unlike the engineer who gets incinerated). The Cat I’d seen ages ago and was afraid to rewatch lest the song get…

Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.…

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B) Kidnapper/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels…

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes) Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots. – The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes) Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and…

I wanted to celebrate the American semiquincentennial in some way, but it was too hot to go out for fireworks, so I watched all twenty of my still-unseen movies on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1998 list of American movies, from his “List-o-Mania” response to the AFI 100 list. Rosenbaum’s lists and writings have been as important to my movie hobby as Cinema Scope has. Discovering this article online in 2000 or 2001 was especially eye-opening, realizing that you could just put Dead Man on a list of…

After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad’s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn’t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by…

Sirk with the same great cast as Written on the Wind – inconsistent dubbing, but the greatest widescreen staging and overheated actors. Our doomed lovers are even more inevitably doomed than ever before, since they are daredevil pilots with engine problems. Inspiration for Slack Bay: In 1932, after Robert Stack’s own plane crashes he attempts to sell his wife Dorothy Malone to hotheaded businessman Ord in exchange for a new busted plane. Stack’s loyal mechanic Jack Carson gets the Ord plane…

Starving artist Glenn Anders (Lady From Shanghai) loves Nancy Carroll (Broken Lullaby), but Nancy loves Parisian Fredric March (romantic lead(s) of I Married a Witch), but she is married to older Frank “The Wizard of Oz” Morgan. She’s right to prefer March – he’s a charming nut, playing piano duets with the servants and romping around wearing bear rugs. Among all this romantic intrigue, the husband makes eight million dollars on a business deal and nobody in the family can be bothered to care.…

Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it’s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just inherited the company, playing power games by creating an executive director position and watching the company leaders fight for it. In the game: big brit George Sanders, big eyebrows Thomas…

“Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more.” Between shorter beginning and end chapters, the hourlong middle is a diary of a week spent with family in Lithuania, in a hundred numbered chapters. Handheld scenes, sometimes nicely composed and sometimes quick and jittery, with in-camera editing. See: Sicinski Jonas and mother: Episode 61: the duck was captured but not harmed:

Odd human trafficking spy/rescue story, less furious than The Furious but overall better, set in 1900ish San Francisco. Yet another movie where newspaper men have to solve local crimes themselves, sneaking around to find kidnapped brides held in bamboo cages. All the dialogue is philosophical quotes. Costarring every Asian guy they could round up to play Chinese (including the Chinese-Hawaiian Richard Loo, who played Japanese in The Steel Helmet, and the Korean-American Philip Ahn, who’d play a…

Ultimately a sappy social-issues message movie, worse than My Son John, ending up with an angry mob of college hunks assaulting the precinct. Everyone in this town should be in jail. But it had a promising enough beginning, when broke idiot Frank Lovejoy (played cops in House of Wax and In a Lonely Place) meets high-pantsed wealthy showoff Lloyd Bridges at a bowling alley and gets hired to drive for robberies. Robberies are working out fine, so they try kidnapping a kid with a rich dad, but…

Dry Detached Experimental Arthouse Cinema but with a bit of dramatic heat, via heightened music, color, poses. Estelle narrates from her notebooks. “I pretended I was malleable… I know it’ll happen again.” Her troublesome sister comes to stay, and they juggle two men between them – mostly Mustache Paul but also Estelle’s ex Jack, counting down until at least one of these men gets murdered. They seem to have no life or interests besides men and each other. They all disco dance in the living…

Another 1950s movie about an underpaid, overworked guy who neglects his wife in favor of his job. This time instead of a newspaper man, he’s a US health guy trying to save the country from a deadly outbreak, slightly more excusable. Our guy is Richard Widmark (same year as Night and the City and No Way Out) and the wife is Midge from Vertigo… he’s neglecting Midge! So, it’s back to being inexcusable. Murderer Jack Palance (in his sharp-faced debut) isn’t about to let himself get caught, and…

Local boxer beats his wife until she runs into the arms of an adoring Chinese shopkeeper. Multiple gossipy spies get involved, jealousy ensues, everyone dies. Nice story but the titles doing too much heavy lifting; they hadn’t invented cinematography yet. Lillian Gish (who I just watched yesterday in Night of the Hunter) lives a dismal life here. A weak tree with branches for no birds, good for nothin’ in this old world, I spent half of the movie thinking she should jump into the river.…

Real animals in this one, and oh that cyclops design, that makes up for a lot. And there’s a lot to make up for: three hours of battle scenes and whinging about the downfall of respectful society. Bunch of excellent actors and the Nolan bombast and the seat-rattling IMAX beat us into submission. MVPs: Cyclops, Travis Scott, the murderous giants, Elliot Page, Leguizamo, Pattinson, Agamemnon’s armor, Samantha Morton, the raven.

Long doc, full of split-screens to fit as much rock action into the widescreen frame as possible, and still manages to miss major events (Creedence) in favor of a portrait of the guy who cleans the toilets (a highlight) and reporters hounding the fest organizer over whether the fest is losing money. With 30+ hours of music recorded that weekend plus all the interviews and split-screens, this event would be a prime candidate for the Eno treatment.

Four years after Sunset Boulevard, a movie that opens with the death of someone in the movie business then rewinds to show us the backstory. Our tragic contessa is Spanish Ava Gardner, last seen in the similarly-technicolored Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It’s not a deal killer for a Hollywood movie but her Spanish is not good – what’s more important is she can speak English with a Spanish accent. The guy who pulled Ava from her unhappy home (her father later murders her abusive mother) is…

Fuller’s first great war movie. Fellow WWII vet Gene Evans plays a cigar-chompin’ slang-throwin’ tough guy, picking up a South Korean kid and a stray medic before linking up with a troop with an undercooked commanding officer. The men die off one at a time to traps and snipers and spies, then they die all at once during an all-out shooting battle at the temple where they’re camping. Medic James Edwards is resourceful: Our tough guy, through the clearing smoke: Survivors:

Opens with convincingly real and unrehearsed news interviews, which they empasize are real and unrehearsed, but is the interview guy not aware that he’ll be in a movie? Why’s he gotta be so dry? From this drab beginning, the movie gets increasingly brutal, as the local casino runs a terror campaign against the voters, press, and church. Edwards stops John from killing a casino boss, too bad: John (Pickup on South Street) comes home to Phenix with his girl, has been there a half hour before…