Brandon's movie memory

I thought from the film description that the Dreaming Deliriants would be the heroes but the first one we meet, hunted through his illusions, is a stooped decaying opium gobbler asking to be put out of his misery. He has a film projector in his guts, making this a double feature candidate for Cigarette Burns. His guts project him into his favorite silent film and mine: The Sprinkler Sprinkled. Hat Cop breaks out a murder suspect during the prison ball. The suspect Lady-From-Shangahis himself…

Older brother Jeremy is acting up, parents are worried. Little sister Sasha is probably more focused on living her life, dad sees family as a distraction from his computer. They go see herons at a nature center and learn that after the birds raise their kids, the bond between parents dissolves, hmmm. Jeremy goes missing, is found by mom, shoplifts and is brought home by the cops, is sometimes sweet and mostly blank or hostile. Child psychologist is little help, the parents agree that he’s an…

Our guy slashes his girl’s throat during sex Gone Girl-style, but she’s too respectable to bleed more than an ounce or so. The flipside to Police Python, which also starts with a police chief killing his girl, this chief explains his moral power-play games to himself on tape, then manipulates the murder investigation away from himself, then toward himself, with no apparent difference in results. “We must know everything, control everything,” he rants, “Repression is our vaccine,” he exclaims.…

Another part of the Conann expanded universe, this one entirely in split-screen. Funny to watch this experimental remake of his previous film right after Funny Games US. The first half is a ballet adaptation containing music videos and animated bits. After Puppet Petrouchka becomes a ghost, each character gets a solo dance and debrief. The butt-faces remind me of Tsukamoto, but the film is dedicated to Terayama Shuji: Part two, The Deviant Comedy, is a victory lap through the Conann story with…

Kidlat decides to be the first person to play the yo-yo on the moon. Collecting spaceship parts with his buddy, a German child: Deciding on the best acronym for the Filipino space program: Q: What about spacesuits and oxygen masks? Don’t you need that on the moon? A: It’s just propaganda. Feels like a movie I would have made (complimentary). Essie’s writeup is the one.

After Hiruko and White of the Eye, I’m accidentally on a late ’80s kick… help. Straightman Treat Williams and his wacky partner Joe Piscopo (Wise Guys, SNL) are in trouble with their cop boss Robert “The Cowboy” Picardo for being reckless out of control loose cannons who do not follow the rules. At a sketchy science lab investigating some major crimes committed by zombies armed with machine guns, PR Hotgirl Lindsay “Sister of Mark” Frost fails to distract them and Joe easily finds the zombie…

Pretty Girl loses her dad on the way to the gold rush, gets semi-adopted by Bad Men (her name for the notorious wanted criminals). Bad leader Bull decides what she needs is a husband, so they “hire” an Irish guy after a good scene of checking the bar for eligible men. Sure, they don’t respect land rights, and sometimes do some robbing and killing, but it’s quickly clear that the Bad Men are better than the whitehat sheriff of the town where everyone stays while waiting for the gold rush to…

Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country’s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn’t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot. All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord’s wife…

Like Bohdanowicz and D’Ambrose remaking Blair Witch – a research film with cathartic psychedelic ending and good thriller music throughout. “Filmed in gorgeous 16mm” per Hard Light but I dunno, I thought the interiors looked like hell. Mubi: The object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV. But both…

After the relentless Tetsuo movies this one is going for an Obayashi contrast: demonic possession and rushing camera blur and bodily explosions amidst a medium-paced, brightly colored daytime plot with upbeat made-for-TV music. A few good stop-motion and matte painting shots, then after the initial goblin attacks the movie has lost its juice, and they’re just spraying flying spiders with a can of wd-40. Feels like a studio with a bland cursed-high-school story hired an edgy young filmmaker to…

Good bright color and 1980s slow motion, bad Pink Floyd music. Women be shoppin’, then be gettin’ murdered at their homes in Tucson. Was it possible for artists working in the 1980s to not produce an “80s movie?” Certainly not in this case, and the music is largely to blame. Cammell pulls off some great angles and edits, like a glitchy Nic Roeg movie, and overall I felt bad not liking it after reading this. David Keith is an audiophile home stereo installer, who drives an ugly green van while…

Smiling Friends season 3 (2025) Animation-wise episode six is the greatest, one of multiple agency origin stories. Beef House (2020) Pretty good fake sitcom. The People’s Joker director worked on this.

Hadn’t watched the original in so long I’ve forgotten most of it, so why not refresh my memory with the remake, which everyone says is exactly the same movie but in English. No missteps noted in the adaptation, this worked out great for everything except the actors’ reputations. I’ve only seen one movie each by tormented parents Naomi Watts and Tim Roth (not counting Twin Peaks season 3) in the last two decades but maybe that’s a me-problem. Tormentor Michael Pitt was tenth-billed in Seven…

Checking out the Renoir silents with my faithful playlist of weird jazz. Cute riverboat girl Catherine “Nana” Hessling loses her dad to a random fall overboard and becomes the ward of her abusive uncle. Things aren’t gonna get any better from here, if the film title is to be believed. She meets a charismatic poacher named Weasel who provokes the locals into burning his house down, the girl left crying while Weasel skips town with her dog. But the girl doesn’t deserve all this torment by 1920’s…

Coffin Joe is still a real asshole to everyone he meets – an atheist and completely insufferable about it. In the last movie, after killing a bunch of people, he ended up blind, insane, and dead. This one simply opens among a mad montage of grave-clawing hands and squigglevision credits with [townspeople] “he’s still alive!” [doctor] “he’ll see again!” [judge] “exonerated for murder!”, and then we get on with it. The townspeople gather to shout about their women who’ve gone missing, figuring…

A couple gets axe-murdered in the opening seconds, orphaning their two fully grown frizz-haired daughters who are pretending to be cavorting schoolgirls. Once they’ve grown into their actual ages they get exploited by the patriarchy, as far as I can understand – Kirsanoff is more of an editing nerd than a clear storyteller. The cad who has taken advantage of one (or both) of them gets his head smashed in by some third woman and her mustache-man, in a mirror to the open. I played the music on…

We visited my aunt Dolly the week Dolly Parton died and somehow it never came up. A week earlier I saw the Lily Tomlin Snow White fantasy sequence from this movie at a Hard Light pre-show and didn’t recognize it at all from having seen snippets of this on TV through the 1980s, back when everybody knew who Dabney Coleman was. Sterling Hayden doesn’t show up until the very end, after they’ve kidnapped their boss and improved the company without him. Dolly somehow got three Globe nominations for…

The End of Sexual Taboos: Homosexuality and Other Variants “Sexual permissiveness – certainly destructive of established mores – has been an aspect of the ideology of the avant-garde from its inception. For this movement is forever at war with society and its values.” He calls necrophilia “one of the unconquered areas of liberated cinema.” – The Bloodthirsty Fairy (1968, Roland Lethem) Delivery men unleash the title character, who goes out and beats a man to death, strangles a nun, blinds a…

Long-take digital cinema about people stuck in an endless videogame maze of subway tunnels. Not since A Quiet Place has a movie spelled out its rules this clearly on signage, and not since Cube has the puzzle been solved by a late-arriving autistic guy (a kid, in this case). When a body meet a body passing through the tile. I picked the poster behind them as anomaly, but Escher’s first name really was Maurits: You have to go through the loop correctly (turn back if you see anomaly, proceed if…

Good production design – I thought about The Black Phone which opens “DENVER 1978” and spends the next 90 minutes painstakingly creating Denver in 1978, while this one feels free to follow its own rules (they drive a 1970s car, use modern music and speech, nobody has cellphones). Scarred twin sisters (from Kindred and I’m a Virgo) meeting their real mom Vivica A. Fox for the first time in memory, she says your dad ruined our lives. They track him via a mute strongman lawyer who pays people to…

Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well. Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d…

Fishing boat time-warp story drifts from mysterious to calculated and back. George MacKay is a young family man who returns from a few days at sea to an alternate timeline where his wife isn’t around, while his loser/loner coworker (Green Room punk singer Callum Turner) returns to the loving family he never had. This is part of some whispery conspiracy set in place by the locals, aware of the ship’s power, replacing their lost son with an unhappy MacKay. It’s all fine story setup, but after…

I intended for “shorts month” to be a single month, but it has jumped the fences, and now we have Infinite Shorts Month. – Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land (1931, Rudulf Ising) Some Steamboat Willie action, Black-coded animal creatures sing and dance, but either there’s nothing in here worth banning this cartoon for 100 years, or my version is edited. Finds time in its seven minutes for multiple overboard rescues, a girl’s Uncle Tom getting spooked by graveyard skeletons, and a dastardly…

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered. Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask,…

Mixes up chronology and split-screens engagingly in the last quarter, but it’s too little too late after a 150-minute biopic about a fashion guy. Yves is the A Very Long Engagement boy, his life/business partner is not-blonde-anymore Jeremie Renier, and the hottie who comes along threatening to overturn the whole situation with his hotness is Louis Garrel, while Lea Seydoux and The Emperor of a Thousand Planets hang around without much to do. Very attractive surfaces here, but it hurts to watch…

Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A…

Marie “daughter of Jean-Louis” Trintignant is Betty, a “drunken, self-destructive woman” who wanders into the life of Stéphane Audran. Each woman crashed out of society after losing a husband. Now Audran is dating local barman Mario (returning from a Chabrol/Audran movie 15 years earlier). The flashbacks are groovy, ranging from long sections to subliminally quick shots. Ultimately Betty runs off with Mario, leaving Audran to despair and suicide. The closing voiceover tells us it was always…

A guy and his boss are seeing the same girl, then the boss murders the girl, but all evidence points at the guy. Yes, it’s a Big Clock remake, minus the clock, sleazier, and with the guys turned from reporters into cops. When you are the lead suspect in your own investigation: The killer cop boss is in all the cop/killer movies where guys wear cool hats (Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge) and was Heurtebise in Orpheus. Stefania from The Conformist rejects his gifts, so he beats her to death with a…

Extreme amount of leveling-up here. She fights a lion, fights a bear, invents a new way to throw an axe, invents a grappling hook to save herself from quickswamp, learns from everyone else’s mistakes, masters her own weapons, fights French trappers, learns the white man’s weapons, learns the alien’s weapons, then defeats the alien using all these tools and skills. Amber Midthunder is from X-Men spinoff Legion, where she shares a body with Bill Irwin. Trachtenberg is good – he made my favorite…

A few groups of ultimate badass killer burglars get into death feuds with each other because nobody can act professional for just a few seconds at a time. A couple of love triangles here: hot dancer Mona is dating extreme badass Chow Yun-Fat (in his extreme badass era, same year as Hard Boiled) then when he disappears she bounces to sniveling ponytail weenie Anthony Wong. And Wong bounces from his best friend Chow to gay magician Simon Yam, falling in with Yam’s gang of villains (a girl named…