Brandon's movie memory

Redux Redux (2025, Kevin & Matthew McManus) A great concept turned into an unfortunately bad movie with boring music. I watched on fast-forward. The Block Island Sound directors cast their sister as a multidimensional force of vengance, hopping parallel universes in search of a world where her murdered daughter is still alive, taking out serial killer Jeremy Holm each time before moving on, until she picks up one of his survivors Stella Marcus and they get to repeatedly save each other. with…

Scott “Biff” Grant of The Monolith Monsters yachts through a glitter cloud, his wife (of I Was a Male War Bride) unaffected since she was in the cabin. “People actually decrease in height during the day,” says a doctor trying to comfort him. But it’s no use, doc, Biff is definitely getting smaller, and being a real pain in the ass about it. He goes out on the town and meets circus midget April Kent, but that doesn’t help either. Finally he’s small enough to be chased around by the family cat –…

Ann Seyfried totes her little brother (Lewis Pullman of a Salem’s Lot remake) as she discovers a Christian sect called the Shakers, marries Chris Abbott but can’t have kids, gets arrested and returns as their messiah, moves to America and leads the group as they grow and inevitably diminish, since her main rule is strict celibacy. The US arrests her for being a treasonous witch but releases her for lack of evidence, then vigilantes burn their place down and murder a bunch of them – this country…

Sometimes the vulgar auteurists are wrong. This brit-accented antiquity drama mixed with fast-cut bloodless gladiator action (edited to hell, the same way I recall RE6) from the writers of Batman Forever was a nice-enough waste of time between Resident Evil episodes. Pretty girl Emily Browning (The Uninvited) likes slave-gladiator Kit Harington (best known as the star of Xavier Dolan’s eighth-best feature). Her dad Jared Harris (Benmont in Dead Man) and Emperor(?) Kiefer Sutherland are playing…

A wrecked movie theater where they project Pompei-related films (but not color ones) The fire department answering callers after earthquakes, all wanting to know if Vesuvius is exploding. Archaeologists and grave robbery investigations, a ship unloading tons of grain from Ukraine. Another lovely doc with gorgeous photography by Rosi, who would probably not be amused that I chose his movie for a double-feature with the Paul W.S. Anderson. How did the city name lose an “i” in the intervening…

Altered States: the documentary. Lilly invented the isolation tank, did psychedelic drugs, got naked, and “regressed through generational time.” He survives experiments with dolphins, the US government, hollywood, LSD, and the isolation tanks, only to go insane on ketamine (“hourly injections of ketamine inspire increasingly apocalyptic visions”). Besides Altered States, works based on his studies include Ecco the Dolphin, Day of the Dolphin, Holy Mountain, and probably parts of the Hitchhikers…

This collection of TV music videos with a loose framing story seems more like first-take/b-roll mess. Is it for kids? Was it influenced by The Monkees? They probably explained briefly in Anthology how this turned out so badly, and I already forgot. At least each song gets a different visual treatment and some are nice (like the color-filtered mountainscapes over an instrumental song) and not just over-literal imagery (showing policemen in a row for the line “policemen in a row”). And at least…

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theaters, thank your lucky stars.” Annoying handicam fake-doc transforms into a very good Back to the Future ripoff. Narratively goes through great lengths only to loop around itself and accomplish nothing. I laughed for five straight minutes during the CN Tower lightning rod sequence. Calum Marsh: It didn’t surprise me to realize that this movie was largely built around unused webseries footage, because they have so much…

Watched at the bar on mute, this appeared to be quite bad. The director was a real 90s Guy, starting out with Erik Estrada and David Carradine then breaking through with Tom Berenger and Billy Zane. The editor did Miller’s Crossing and the DP did Jaws, but the writers did Turner & Hooch and Legal Eagles, and the lure of dodgy CG and a crazed Jon Voight as the villain dragged this down. The entire cast would make quick recoveries (Out of Sight, Three Kings, Heat Vision & Jack, Mr. Jealousy,…

Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice…

Scorsese tests us by opening the movie with a harsh version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s voice never sounding worse. Then it develops into one of the few good rock docs, by not singlemindedly focusing on a particular artist but bringing in his influences and surroundings, making an artistic portrait of an era. Great editing by his usual rock doc collaborator David Tedeschi, skips around in time and makes it work. Animals *and* birds?? “You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.” For…

People who watch movies for the human drama, the “empathy machine” people, are the overwhelming majority in the arthouse realm, leaving us bird people to scan every title and plot description for some sign of avian life and not bird-as-metaphor. Once a decade we hit absolute gold, and coincidentally the same month H Is For Hawk came out, right around when I was watching the egret of Alamar, this incredible crane movie popped up. This is what the cinema could be: vague stories featuring doc…

Why does Herbert Marshall do so much walking in this? Besides being very good at walking, he’s an important rich person with neglected wife Marlene Dietrich (shortly after her great Sternberg run), ditching her for work events in the same way as Ray Milland in The Big Clock but with much more charm than Ray. There’s a love triangle in Paris facilitated by Madame Pittypat, and Marlene starts secretly dating her husband’s old army buddy Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn is hunky and all, but extremely…

Edward G arranges for a desperate nazi to escape prison so he’ll lead them to the big man. Eddie (just after Scarlet Street) gets knocked out and loses the trail of his guy (K Shayne of a Boetticher noir), so he doesn’t see Orson Welles strangle Shayne in the woods, decides to hang around this Connecticut town until more leads turn up. When your old nazi friend drops in on your wedding day: Orson is so confident in his new wife Loretta Young (oscar winner the following year) that he admits to…

The title and premise sound exciting, but the movie is a sweaty bewigged newscaster (Roman Wilhelmi of Zulawski’s Chopin biopic The Blue Note, with Robert Picardo vibes) being tormented by everyone, including martians, who look like silver-spraypainted oompa loompas in puffy coats. Decaloguists Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Stuhr get a big scene each. The most believable detail is that the biggest music act in the country is called The Instant Glue. Gotta watch the blu extras and learn more about…

Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one…

La Disco Resplandece (2016, Chema Garcia Ibarra) Kids hangin’ out movie, getting into harmless trouble (breaking into a former dance club, arriving sleepless and temp-tattooed to a serious ceremony the next day). Common directorial themes I can connect to the feature include UFOs, but unfortunately not cockatiels. – Boogie Woogie Sioux (1942, Alex Lovy) Not amusing enough to be worth all the dated racism, story of a native tribe on a hot day and the rain-dance band that fortunately is driving…

Corey Atad: It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions. After convincing us for…

Having a difficult movie month here. Seijun Suzuki and The Cannibals were the best movies I’ve watched lately, but this one was the smartest decision. How do you follow up those, plus some major docs, a Jerry Lewis, the Arbuckles, the end of the Szulkin apocalypse series, and my big Cinema Scope roundup? With some brilliant late Cohen nonsense, of course. Gang: Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Cliffhanger) collapses while large-faced Eric Roberts is harassing her. But Eric is no casual…

In 1987 a middle-aged guy loves to spend time on the computer. He and his dog watch A Nightmare On Elm Street on broadcast television then “wake up” inside a customized fantasy videogame, rescuing a guy with a TV head and traveling by map. Once the movie gets into game mode, I flashed back to Hundreds of Beavers – which was more ambitious but had totally different manic vibes to this movie’s good-natured dreamscape.

Our guy is a notorious artist of sexy paintings (pop star Kenji Sawada has made good movie choices, playing leads in Hiruko the Goblin, Mishima, and Happiness of the Katakuris). His pretty young beloved is sick at home with her parents, wants to elope but not right now, so Yumeji enjoys a heavy romp with a prostitute, picks up another artist’s model, and becomes obsessed with a widow(?) and her bizarre story, until her husband (the crazy guy from Zigeunerweisen, even crazier) arrives and chases…

Another concert compilation film, this one taken from multiple years of folk fests. PP&M sing their hit song about having a hammer and a couple Dylan tunes, but more importantly Mary appears to have two moles on her neck in a vampire bite pattern. Seeger sings about creamed corn, some bluegrass guys tear it up, some blues guys chill it out. Joan Baez gets the best lines during an autograph session and an after-show interview, including telling fans “don’t get so hysterical,” which hits hard in…

Leonor falls in love with goth Luis Miguel, then is surprised when he acts all goth on their wedding night. The mismatched couple acts all doomed and stoic, allowing her stalker Diogo Doria and the narrator Oliveira Lopes to be pop-eyed loons in the opera’s background. I had decided that the title must be a metaphor, but for what? Then at the end of the second act, all the lead characters kill themselves, and a new group of men is introduced, who eat Luis Miguel, thinking him part of the bridal…

Ray Milland is a bad husband to Maureen O’Sullivan, working for toxic boss Charles Laughton. When the boss threatens to fire and blacklist Ray from the publishing industry if he leaves for a long-delayed honeymoon, Ray responds by standing up his wife and getting drunk with some strange girl (Rita Johnson, Ray’s fiancee in The Major and the Minor). Coincidentally the strange girl is the boss’s mistress, whom the boss murders that same night, calling in his cleaner Steve (Human Duplicator George…

Half fun and half dark and sour, dude gets out of prison having hidden away the stolen diamonds and tries to use them to help his crippled comrade, gets tangled up with the comrade’s sister, their former bosses go after him, and a ton of guys die. Both leads would return in Take Aim at the Police Van.

The champ, George Foreman, vs. the kid, Muhammad Ali, in Zaire And other politics involved in the affair Including rare footage leading up to the event Plus, interviews with VIPs, remembering the effects … We heard about that legendary clashing of the titans But could never have contextualized the metrics or environment Until, 90 minutes of history And images and music, I was riveted, infinity Listened/half-watched while assembling furniture after turning on Henry Fonda For President and…

Jerry gets a live-in job at a womens boarding house. It’s overwhelming but whenever he tries to sneak out, they tell him he’s important to them, so he stays. Movie has very little story, very few good jokes, but some of the best-ever set design. The girls include Gloria Jean, two decades after hurting WC’s ears in Never Give a Sucker, Billy Wilder regular Hope Holiday, and Kathleen Freeman, the only actor in Fritz Lang’s House by the River to also appear in Shrek. Buddy Lester is quite good as…

Oh Doctor (1917) Arbuckle’s doctor is a horrible man, abusing his son Buster, straying from his wife at any opportunity, and gambling away the family savings on a hunch. Some people try to scam him but he beats them up, steals a bunch of cash, prospers. An evil movie! – The Cook (1918) A whole different thing, Arbuckle & Keaton coordinating impossible stunts in a kitchen with a running gag that all food orders come out of the same giant pot. Sure it gets weird when The Joker arrives at the…

List of things that quicken the heart. Almereyda in Metrograph: The early 2000s happened to be a fallow time for me, and it was consoling to think big while gathering footage with a little camera. Magical things were always materializing, flashing by, almost as if the camera were inviting them to happen.

The ol’ movie blog is almost twenty years old, and for that entire time I’ve been reading Cinema Scope magazine. I subscribed after seeing Guy Maddin on the cover of issue 16 and stayed through Maddin’s cover of the final issue 97. It was a huge influence on what I chose to watch, and how […]