Porco Rosso, 1992 - ★★★★½

Why can’t I live on a picturesque Italian sea fortress that is also a luxe hotel & nightclub??

Hoooo-eeeee! This is that good shit. Love 2 watch a fave just really triple-down on all their personal creative kinks. Sun-dappled seaside towns; shimmering blue water and puffy billows of cloud that flank rolling green countrysides; thrumming planes, smoking engines and bespoke contraptions; disaffected veterans and plucky heroines. A squirming wave of adorable school-babies. Villainy by turns both chivalrous and cowardly. ¡Delizioso! 😋

Can’t stress enough how much I like this vibe of the fantastic, merely a gentle drift off history’s axis. Not quite magical realism per se but close; the same realm inhabited by Tintin for sure.

Slaughterhouse-Five, 1972 - ★★★½

For all this does well, I wish it felt a little less airless, but that’s the early-70s vibe for you. My guess is that the leap into another medium is the main thing: as much as this foregrounds the magic of the cut, it also highlights how different film editing is from prose. I’ve not read Vonnegut’s novel, but I can imagine the temporal displacement being much more disorienting there (& to good effect), with only the cues given by what the text deigns to mention. A movie has to commit to showing a lot more basically all the time, so the leaps from point to point are easy to see and follow.

Which is too bad because the key conceit of the novel & thus the film is great; ideal for the way the mind and memory work, and to show how life’s epiphanies and horrors can shatter all that. There’s a stiffness & tidiness to the filmmaking that kept me from really feeling that the way I’d prefer to, though. I think part of that may owe to how drawn I am to fractured narratives in general. My level of exposure to the form makes this early example feel more rote than it probably deserves.

The best moments come from the most poignant echoes across a life: highs echoing lows, the sublime echoing the foul. Sad how Billy Pilgrim seems at his most dynamic & vital only during the war, but it makes sense too. The clarity of crisis compared to the muddled ambience of everything else.

Apocalypse: Caught in the Eye of the Storm, 1998 - ½

Return to an era when “millennial anxiety” meant only this: fear that every last God-fearing human would vanish & pave the way for a vaguely-European but plainly American-accented head of the EU to pivot into world government and false-prophethood. What a moment!

Infused with Christian Zionist panic, textured with real clips of real human suffering to lend its Rapture some cred (how gross of you, movie!) plus real televangelist cameos on VHS tape, and all stuck mostly inside a breaking-news format that turns the apocalypse into something boring and repetitive; here we are at the bottom of the trash barrel.

Watched via Tubi, whose mid-roll ads became uniquely uneasy given the broadcast TV framing, each advertiser now a short hop away from slipping through the fourth wall to sit inside the movie and gain theologically sinister overtones. Dish soap cheerily proclaiming “DAWN” in all caps… K12 online homeschooling promising to put parents in control… Who’s in on it? Is it all of them??

Thought this was one of the Revelations-fueled Armageddon flicks I saw in middle/high school, likely in a youth group setting, but no (did more hunting & pretty sure it was The Omega Code). These things always struck me as a mix of cheesy and fascinating, even in my churching days; my wish was always to keep the apocalyptic weirdness, gnostic disaster riddles and conspiracy-tinged mindset, but jettison every last vestige of literal come-to-Jesus moments. (If they must be included, make them as unhinged as when the main hero man rushes to his pickup truck for a Bible to read out the verse from his dad’s gravestone, then goes back to the grave, digs up his dad’s coffin, opens the coffin, pulls out his dead dad’s Bible atop a neat pile of burial clothes — corpse got Raptured, natch — to at last read out another Bible verse. Whew!) When you tally it that way, it really comes into focus as ground zero of my continued soft spot for the broader post-apoc genre, heh.

Nukie, 1988 - ★

Is it possible that Steve Railsback’s role in this as some kind of roving NASA fixer hunting down an E.T.’s twin is what got him cast as abductee Duane Barry in the X-Files? Food for thought.

This is some real weird garbo, excellent for yelling at. Was it the movie or the edible that made the last half-hour narratively unintelligible, I can’t say. I think part of my brain was squinting to avoid psychic damage, like stealing watery-eyed glances at the sun. Too high to sink down & pluck at the film’s many ominous threads, that’s for sure. Unclear what exactly is going on in that South African village but it def seems kinda racist from from where I looked, stealing nervous glances downward from the giggling clouds!

Saved from half-star ignominy by the delightful stupidity of everything going on with the talking NASA supercomputer.

Also googling a castmember in this made me aware Canada’s got a town named Swastika, Ontario, which made me spiral even deeper into fits of dismayed laughter. ohhh, nooooooooo

The Falls, 1980 - ★★★★

A hypertext document in linear shape, incidentally answering the question What if Guy Maddin invented the SCP Foundation?

Pulls off being both bite-size and ponderous, using its exhaustiveness & the testing of a viewer’s patience as just more layers of cruft committing to the bureaucratic bit. Funny, creepy, often feeling built from found parts— of course the Quay Brothers would turn up involved in this too.

Really enjoyed the cumulative effect of [REDACTED]-themed ephemera creeping in around the edges & eventually spotlit in center frame; an echo of the ease toward conspiracy in any basically any sphere if one is possessed by sufficient fire & has enough contents to cross-reference. (Could also function as a long-winded setup for the cataclysmic punchline of Tanith Lee’s great horror short story “Black and White Sky”.)

Warriors of the Year 2072, 1984 - ★★★

Thought this was surely a post-apoc future-gladiator thing, given how it leans into the naming convention of so much Italian post-apoc fare, but it’s merely a dystopian future-gladiator thing. Also fine, but I missed seeing ruins of the future that post-apoc always promises.

This does offer a Blade Runner-ified skyline of Rome in miniature tho, which the movie is so proud of it shows off the same long dolly shot of it 2.5 times (pretty sure the third is played in reverse, thus half-credit). As they should! It looks dope, and the movie ends up at its best anyway when it’s inhabiting a vibey synth-driven music-video space. Riz Ortolani’s score slaps hard enough that a specialty vinyl reseller somewhere has probably lined up the kill shot on me even as I write this.

The Running Man came 3 years later, so Fulci scores points for not ripping that off, but loses more for failing to deliver on the premise as well. Also the lead dude here is like James Caan with the charisma dial turned down by about 80%. Shoulda made Fred Williamson the actual main guy.

I hoped for way more cheesy, satire-steeped TV producer machinations driving the twists and turns — elite pettiness that manifests as devastating cruelty visited on hapless plebs is the fuel that feeds the genre fire, c’mon! Are we having a gladiator rebellion here or not?? Plus I want the pulpy fun of bleak ad breaks & spokes-pitches and show hosts gossiping over footage of carnage to tele-friends at home, Moebius/Incal-style. Straight-up SS-outfitted villain henchman is a plus at least.

(This ends up much closer to what I anticipated Knightriders would be, but damn am I glad that film is what it is instead!)

The Phantom, 1996 - ★★★★

I’m a sucker for this movie’s whole deal & like it a bunch but everyone who decided not to scrap the screenplay in favor of one only about Catherine Zeta Jones’ aggressively hot sky pirate should go to jail.

also, when Treat Williams raises his voice it does a froggy thing that makes him sound like Nathan Lane, at points verging on Master Shake, both amazing to imagine as the villain

Highlander, 1986 - ★★★

I remember seeing part of this on TV ages ago, and being surprised that the title meant “guy from the Scottish Highlands” and not something more esoteric. That’s kind of emblematic of my whole experience watching this in full: oh huh, it’s like this eh?

The basics — swords, immortal guys, “there can be only one” — permeated pop culture so deeply I always assumed this movie was a Big Deal and not a theatrical flop turned home video sleeper fave. Doesn’t really gel for me on the whole (we get much less out of the prolonged flashback sequences than the movie invests, for one) but I gotta respect going so bombastically all-in on an original concept this weird. The first swordfight lands best imo, since both dudes look the right sort of dorky and awkward, as if trappings of modernity ride uncomfortably on their shoulders, letting the man-out-of-time nature of their existence feel like observable fact. Honestly good on the movie for never getting bogged down in silly lore about the “why” of it too, who cares!

Inland Empire, 2006 - ★★★★★

A film that exists in the cracks and unexplored hallways of other films, an inland empire as vast & eerie as any other. Its denizens doomed to roam the same nameless back alleys as that taxi company in My Winnipeg; to swim and half-drown in lightless depths with few moments afforded up at the surface to breath easy. Or as I overheard an audience member put it during the walk out through the lobby: “Fucking haunted movie.”

Whenever I see this particular lamp I burn to know if Lynch made it himself. I just feel him & his custom furniture-making habit all over it!

The Batman, 2022 - ★★½

Weirdly basic? I wasn’t bored, but it stimulated almost no reaction in me until the final half-hour. Pivoting the threat into a Boogaloo Boys-style terror plot is more interesting what happens before, all lukewarm riffs on Zodiac and Se7en. The stakes manifest as city-sized peril to a degree that’s more restrained than we get lately too.

Frustratingly there’s gestures at a take on the material I might like better, if it leaned even farther into spookier, quasi-horror territory. Why dress Batman like a tacticool sportscar when you could make the look more like this instead? Really lean into that Gothic cape! Plenty of the trappings around the edges are already in that vein, and the film’s greater interest in lighting and composition would go well with truly creepy vibes too.

But as-is, having the protag seem so generally impervious & with a bottomless pool of resources zaps a lot of the intrigue out of the proceedings this is inspired by. Like if Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith is suddenly an armored millionaire with whatever tech toys he deigns to invent/buy and a free hand to punch his way to answers, Zodiac becomes pretty boring too. (PG-13 rating on this also does no favors.)

I’m all for the emo & haunted mood of this, there’s just rarely a sense of human cost. As cut off as Bruce is, the formula for these movies means it doesn’t seem all that odd he spends all his time moping around in a cave. I did like one moment though when he hastily crams himself & Catwoman up against a wall to avoid detection during a break-in, then his body language bristles & turns awkwardly aware of their pressed bodies — that he’s so starved of human touch, even something that incidental would rattle him. For a moment it makes him come off as a real weirdo loner in a way that serves the character’s weak points; more please!

Lastly, this whole movie is building to an ending that would come if this were anything other than a franchise, i.e. him realizing he’s gotta abandon this whole gig. You could try to serve both masters by having him try & really fail to give it up, demonstrate he’s just too broken & can only settle for being an addict in moderation. But that would suggest true growth vectoring away from the status quo & we can’t have anything like that on the horizon now can we?

Maximum Force, 1992 - ★★

Like the last B-Movie Bingo flick, this is also a PM Entertainment direct-to-video actioner focusing on a handpicked team of the three rowdiest, revengiest, suspension-earningest cops on the force. So even though it looks like this one was made first, the shine done come off the apple to see so many of the same tropes pop up again here. Them’s the breaks.

More interesting dramatic lighting in this one at least, courtesy the many scenes in a music-video-ready warehouse full of drifting smoke. The RC car gambit is pretty off the wall too for a film otherwise so by-the-book. Just tiny car after tiny car, driving circles around gun-toting goons and all rigged to explode! If only Playing Dangerous could have let loose that way.

Battle for the Lost Planet, 1986 - ★★½

This is one of the most DIY sci-fi joints I’ve seen yet, and I’ve seen a few. For example, the end credits list a “Forest folk, mutants, aliens and what-not” catchall credit that includes at least 4 members of the director’s family. Love it. If I’m doing the math right, the budget was about three-fifths of one percent of one Star War. By that measure, it’s a masterpiece. Its worst crime is repetition to fill time, which unfortunatley there’s lots of (especially since at 100 mins it’s wayyy overshooting).

I quite like the premise that Earth gets conquered by crapsack aliens who have nothing going as a society other than big ships and guns. It feels almost Douglas Adams-y; we’re such a crummy backwater planet that only losers who probably couldn’t hack it anywhere else bother to invade. On the balance that feels more true yeah? Like it’s really patting ourselves on the back to think our precious jewel Earth could only be attacked by the crème de la crème of space villainy!

To add to the plus column, some things this has & Star Wars don’t:

• Alien picks nose • Alien flips another alien the bird • Hero hangs brain • Weed

Also, during the first act that’s basically a cheapie Moon, I had fun pretending Paula Poundstone was the voice of the ship’s computer. The stop-motion beasties are super rad too.

The Big Sleep, 1946 - ★★★★½

I’ve had this on my shelf for a year, kept meaning to watch it, but put it off because I thought a 2hr noir might be draggy. Absolutely not, this has crackle to spare. A fool I was to wait so long!

I’ve seen so many more neo-noirs and noir deconstructions that I was surprised by how novel it felt watching a competent gumshoe. Bogart’s Marlowe isn’t made out to be some kind of brain genius, but he is a smooth operator to the extreme. And I buy it! For once, a hero has Bond-level pull with every woman he meets and I feel like it makes sense, haha. Who is this slick intriguing snoop with a bottle of rye in his pocket? I suppose the only recourse is close shop early and head to the back room to find out, oh well!

It’s also interesting that this is a puzzle piece of the meme of Bogart as a kind of totem for old-school masculinity, but that seems partly a symptom of certain audiences seeing what they want to see. He’s a laconic wit sure, & uses that as a shield, but he’s not a stoic cipher, or an impervious roughneck. He’s kind of a shrimp; he gets beat up; most of his patter is making jokes about his various shortcomings.

My first real encounter with Lauren Bacall, and what a way to prove the value of the longer runtime. A bunch of scenes between her and Bogart were added in reshoots, & are a total vindication of the people who argued for them. She’s a big star, with a big face! Which I mean in a great way; stars with interesting faces are tops, especially when Hollywood too often selects for sameness. She and Bogart both pop in that way.

Eye of the Devil, 1966 - ★★★½

A film of ominous gazes, positively drowning in Gothic atmosphere. The restlessly gliding camera & authentic age of the shooting location (a huge boost to atmosphere) combine aesthetics of new and old in ways that line up very nicely with the film’s trappings of scarcely-concealed primal occultism. I can feel straight lines out from this to multiple works from horror short story writers (hello Laird Barron!) though since this seemingly didn’t make a huge splash, it may just be shared genre DNA.

Great use of David Hemmings’ sleazy energy, and of Sharon Tate’s ethereal charisma & sense of presence. She coulda thrown me off a parapet anytime.

Draws out its climax quite a bit too long, but otherwise a heady mood piece, especially to have never heard of. Feels more boxed in by convention toward the end, in ways that could make it ripe for an actually worthwhile remake. (That said, I think I rate this slightly ahead of Kerr’s similar film The Innocents, for how closely it hits my preferred horror mood.) Also, ignore the colorized header image! Wikipedia cites this as MGM’s last black-and-white release before going 100% color; a fine one to go out on. Losing the emphasis on pure light and shadow would’ve been a shame.

Star Wars, 1977 - ★★★★½

Ahh, parades of weirdos. Space hulks, garbage robots, bar lowlifes; the movie loves them, I love them, let’s have more of it in all movies please and thank you.

It’s the couple stretches that are more sealed off and light on the weirdos where I feel this super-zippy thing falter here & there. The curse of corridors strikes again! Even the best corridors in the biz are no defense.

Stumbling across this review of ESB made me excited to look at a Star War for the first time in a long time; I’d been thinking near-identical thoughts days before I happened to read it. Physical media bootlegs of theatrical print scans carefully digitized and lightly restored for 4k by internet randos? Don’t mind if I fucking do. Star Wars has never not been a brand, but it’s so refreshing to revisit it back before it was a BRAND™ kept fully within the hermetically-sealed bubble of milquetoast IP-life-support moviemaking.

All the later fiddling and rejiggering eats away at the true satisfaction of 1977 fundamentals — like the lightsaber never looking great while it powers up or down, so the sound FX squad goes extra hard to sell the noise of one turning off while we’re looking at a shot of something else. That’s the real movie magic that binds the galaxy together. Stuffing the frame with new CGI alien blompos or w/e is just litter.

Memoria, 2021 - ★★★★★

A theatrical experience in a way very few films try to be or allowed to be, outside of strains of gallery installation art. Layered on top of the excellent movie is a medium-transcending John Cage 4’:33” type of phenomenon that really lights up the ends of my brain. Being led to hyper-focus on the labored breathing or popcorn rustling of fellow audience members (plus the hums and breaths of the theatre itself) in a way that enriches not detracts; so great. And underneath all those proscenium arch deep thoughts, just a killer Tilda Swinton performance, and the kind of artistic ambiguity that lets viewers interpret the film’s themes and statements in so so many ways. 

Dersu Uzala kept coming to mind, for its own tendency to long stretches of quiet observation, of deep friendships of unspoken dimension, and appreciation of sweeping natural vistas. A little of Fitzcarraldo too, but mostly on the phenomenological level; remembering how the film’s enormous size and patient style of shooting allows the eye and mind equal time to wander (and wonder). Too rare.

Candyman, 1992 - ★★★★

Love the way the camera cruises around these buildings, and looks down on streets, cars, and plazas. Something about the cool, clinical smoothness evokes 70’s film — this really doesn’t feel like an artifact from 1992! (Also helps that the Scream Factory blu-ray looks spectacular.) Phillip Glass’ excellent score is matched only by the beautiful music of Tony Todd’s silky rumbling voice. Once he shows up the Barker-isms come out in force too.

The best meditation I’ve seen on the urban legend trope, even if it starts to wander more loosely as it goes, abandoning a straight path for loops and branches. I mostly don’t mind; the old folk horror stories feel beyond human understanding too — why these quirks, why these weaknesses, these fates. The ebb & flow of this one might be a glimpse of how our era looks from a couple centuries away. Also avoids inelegant after-school-special moral tidiness, though at the notable expense of theme.