It’s really crazy how much American action film has taken from Japanese film. More recently, it’s often explicit usually, but it wasn’t always in the past. I remember reading once there was a Japanese film that was a major inspiration for Star Wars and then I forgot. Well, it’s this one. Star Wars is far …
Much Ado About Nothing (2012, Joss Whedon)
Saikaku ichidai onna [The Life of Oharu] (1952, Kenji Mizoguchi)
This is one of those incessantly bleak Japanese tragedies that know of few comparables in the contemporary West. Think of it a bit as the Japanese proto Au Hasard Balthazar only it’s about a woman instead of a donkey. SPOILERS
Mandy (2018, Panos Cosmatos)
Would I have liked this insane, phantasmagoric film more if I had seen it at TIFF? That’s one question I’m asking myself. If I had been stuck in a theatre, unable to, say, look up the setting to see that it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense – if I had just been …
Poker Face (2022, Russell Crowe)
There is a subgenre of mystery where an extremely rich man invites a bunch of old friends somewhere remote to play a game, most recently seen in Glass Onion, but for me most memorably in The Last of Sheila. (See also Murder by Death and Clue where it’s strangers or acquaintances. Notably, all these are …
Robot Holocaust (1987, Tim Kincaid)
From the moment the narrator says the title with no emotion and no energy, you know you’re in for something with this movie. And, boy howdy, this is something. SPOILERS!
Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar (2022, directed by Garo Setian
The opening scene of this movie made me think it was going to be an all-timer. The villain was emoting heavily and wearing contacts to make his eyes look weird, and he was flanked by scantily clad women with guns. The CGI was atrocious and the prisoners were clearly in completely different rooms than where …
Allegiant (2016, Robert Schwentke)
This is the third Divergent film. Netflix does us the honour of not calling it The Divergent Series: Allegiant, though apparently that is the official title. But it does seem it a little less condescending than the second film. There’s a video message to explain what’s going on like in the second film, but it …
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014, Peter Jackson)
It’s really hard to know what to make of the third film in the ridiculously absurd 3-film adaptation of the 310-page novel The Hobbit for many reasons. One comes from my understanding that the source material for this mostly isn’t even the novel itself but some appendix or something. But that wouldn’t matter if the …
Untold: Johnny Football (2023, Ryan Duffy)
I admit I didn’t know much about Johnny Manziel before watching this, beyond his nickname, that he flamed out in the NFL, and that people went a little crazy about him while he was in College. (I’m not sure I remembered he won the Heisman, because I do not care about about college football one …
Scener ur ett äktenskap [Scenes from a Marriage] (1973, Ingmar Bergman)
As I noted elsewhere, before the Golden Age of Television in the US, it was unheard of for prestigious Hollywood filmmakers and actors to work in TV but that was not the case in Europe. In Europe, prestigious filmmakers would work in TV when they wanted to. I don’t know when that started but it …
Hotel Artemis (2018, Drew Pearce)
Imagine if the Continental Hotel from John Wick was a hospital, in addition to being a hotel, and it was the focus of the film, and the protagonist of the film was Lance Reddick’s character and you get some idea of this weird movie, but hardly all.
Long Shot (2019, Jonathan Levine)
This is a pretty funny movie based on an absurd premise that gets even less believable as it goes. Like any of these politician romance/romantic comedy films, you have to suspend your disbelief. This film at least is funny.
The Mirror Crack’d (1980, Guy Hamilton)
This is an all-star cast Agatha Christie adaptation with a setting that could have been a TV movie. (Though the budget was decent for a feature for its time, so I wonder how much was spent on that cast.) I felt like it wasn’t the best of her plots but apparently it’s partially based on …
Kumonosu-jô [Throne of Blood] (1957, Akira Kurosawa)
This atmospheric adaptation of Macbeth is the first of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations, but the last one I’ve seen. I watched Ran (King Lear) when I was quite young and I watched The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet) a decade or so ago. I can’t compare this one to those other adaptations because it’s been too long …
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018, Susanna Fogel)
This is a pretty funny buddy/action comedy vaguely along the same lines as Spy, but like a buddy version of it. I must admit I had zero interest in this movie and found myself laughing a lot and quite enjoying it.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell
This is my first Mitchell. I found it in a Little Free Library or on someone’s lawn and I just grabbed it because I’d seen Cloud Atlas (though never read it) and figured it could be interesting. I had zero knowledge of the story or setting.
Chaos on the Bridge (2014, William Shatner)
This is an entertaining but brief and hilariously over-directed documentary about the beginnings of Star Trek TNG. It feels like it was made as a DVD extra or for some TCM-type special but it turns out Shatner has made a few of these so maybe there was a series of them for some channel.
Untold: The Rise and Fall of AND1 (2022, Levin Wilson Jr.)
This is an interesting but too brief documentary about the AND1 clothing brand and, particularly their Mix Tape Tour. All I knew about this whole thing was Rafer Alston came from it, so I was definitely the intended audience.
The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015, Robert Schwentke)
This film – a film where the title really wants you to know it’s a sequel, in case you’re too dumb to figure that out yourself – begins with a truck with a video of Kate Winslet’s character summarizing the plot of the first movie. It’s literally a Plot Summary Truck. It has to be …
Werewolf Castle (2021, Charlie Steeds)
This is an extremely low budget fantasy/horror film that fails at both genres. It’s not scary and it doesn’t have any of the magic of fantasy. I knew that going in, of course, but this is one of those films that bad in many ways but it competent enough in terms of the production that …
West Side Story (2013) by the Joe Policastro Trio
This is the first of their albums and the the last one I’ve heard. That’s because it wasn’t available online until recently and I’ve stopped buying CDs, instead buying digital copies when I actually want to support the artist. (Too often I default to streaming, which doesn’t help them much.)
There Are No Fakes (2019, Jamie Kastner)
This is an absolutely crazy story about a potentially massive art fraud involving one of Canada’s most famous painters. The story gets far wilder, though, so I will do my best to avoid spoilers.
The Headspace Guide to Meditation & Mindfulness (2015) by Andy Puddicombe
I have never had any interest in meditation. “Zero interest” isn’t far off. I’ve never found the idea of sitting still for an hour appealing, and I’ve never been attracted to the supposed benefits. (There are people who claim they get ecstatic after meditating for hours or days and I couldn’t care less about that.) …
Heart of a Dog (2015, Laurie Anderson)
Most of my awareness of Laurie Anderson comes from Big Science and her relationship with Lou Reed. I’ve never listened to United States Live and really haven’t encountered much else of her work. (I’ve definitely encountered something else other than Big Science and some live stuff, but I can’t remember off the top of my …
The Report (2019, Scott Z. Burns)
This is a story that needs to be told, and I’m glad somebody told it. But this is not a great telling of this story.
Untold: The Race of the Century (2022, Chapman Way, Maclain Way
This Untold didn’t grab me at first. I don’t care about sailing. I’ve watched some bits of the America’s Cup here and there, but never paid much attention. I’ll watch a documentary about just about anything but this one really didn’t grab me to start.
Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut [A Man Escaped] (1956, Robert Bresson)
Somewhere in this film is one of the greatest prison escape movies ever made. But I think there are enough nitpicky little things that sap it’s full potential that I’m not sure it’s deserving of the the title.
Wham! (2023, Chris Smith)
This is a fascinating documentary about the British pop duo. Wham! does nothing for me and I can imagine younger me even having some ill will towards them – they are basically anti punk in ethos. (The one album of theirs I’ve heard is way too wannabe Motown for me.) But their story is far …
The Phantom Carriage (2016) by KTL
I feel like, when an early silent feature gets a new soundtrack, it regularly tries to (at least partially) ape the sounds we associate with early silent films. So there’s often a lot of Steinway piano and the sounds are often vaguely jazz-ish. Now, it’s been some time since I’ve seen a lot of early …