Dearest Sister (Nong Hak)

 Dearest Sister is the film Mattie Do did before one of this year's best surprises, The Long Walk. It's another great movie.

 Like The Long Walk it's a weird genre mishmash that straddles drama, supernatural horror and psychological thrillers (no science fiction this time, though) while mining a rich thematic vein. It also plays with its audience's sympathy and expectations with abandon; this is a highly unpredictable movie, more so than Long Walk. Oh, and it's beautifully shot and acted as well, featuring a few faces that would return for the later movie.

 The film follows Nok (Amphaiphun Phommapunya,) a village girl who's been hired by a distant relative she's never seen to go to the big city and be her live-in caretaker. Everything immediately seems hostile to her: She spends a whole day at the bus station she arrives at, seemingly forgotten, and is picked up by a foreigner who barely speaks at her, instead shouting at his phone in a foreign language.

 When they arrive at the house the help treats her with disdain, and her relative does not come out to meet her; Her new home doesn't seem to be very welcoming.

 When Ana, her relative (Vilouna Phetmany) does deign to meet her on the next day, she seems aloof, chilly, resentful of having to be sat upon by a stranger. The shouty foreigner turns out to be her husband Jakob (Tambet Tuisk,) and all this was apparently his idea; Ana is losing her sight and seems to be a victim or random accidents and injuries, so she really needs the help.

 There is a lot of baggage to figure out in the early going. Everybody seems to resent each other and victimize poor, vulnerable, sweet Nok. It almost feels like a triumph, or at least justified, when instead of sending her salary back to her family at the village she goes out and buys a few things for herself; now surrounded by opulence, it's easy to see how she would be tempted into thinking of herself, right?

 But even when things get a little better and Ana starts warming up to Nok and opening up to her, Nok keeps behaving like a twerp. Little things at first: minor secrets and betrayals that she rationalizes as standing up for herself or a revenge against being exploited. There's something innocent about how pettily selfish she is, but it gets harder and harder to condone as the film goes by.

 Especially once Ana reveals her secret: as her sight deteriorates, ghosts come to her and whisper things to her. She doesn't remember the messages, but she mutters them out loud while the apparitions seize her. Numbers. As Nok quickly realizes and capitalizes upon, winning lottery numbers. It's the ghosts, who sometimes turn violent, who cause Ana's mysterious wounds.
 (The whole numbers deal seems a bit random, but I remember while growing up in Argentina there was a lot of advice on how to choose winning numbers, some of it verging on the supernatural. Most corner stores used to have posters with different types of dreams, for example, and the numbers that were associated with them.)

 So this is a movie about (mostly) horrible people doing horrible things to each other, in a sort of Karmic shitstain contest: Nok keeps showing her colors as the film goes on. Ana is more of a victim - she's a bit of an asshole, but to be honest events end up justifying her attitude. Her husband has got a lot of dodgy shit going on. The housekeeper and her husband end up putting in a respectable showing, too.
 There's a very pulpy pleasure in seeing where the story goes next - how things will escalate, how low any given character will stoop.
 But there's also a powerful message tangled up in this ugly mess: everyone is judging everyone else, everyone feels they are being victimized, everyone interprets everything that happens in the worst possible light to remain angry, and use that outrage to justify their increasingly selfish actions. Even minor characters are taking advantage of others (and feel aggrieved when called out on it.) Inequality is a bitch.
 This is abstracted to the whole social situation; it's hard to miss the point when an Australian tourist acts as if he owns Nok just because he bought her a drink, especially when everyone in the movie has been treating her as a whore simply because she went to work to a house owned by a foreigner ("Off to find a white husband?") In fact, the only unambiguously good character in the movie is a different foreigner who appears soon afterwards and refuses to take advantage of the situation after rescuing Nok from the predicament she had unwittingly(?) gotten herself into, and even he paternalistically treats Nok like a country bumpkin.

 Dearest Sister is smart, bleak, insightful, powerful, and a damn entertaining movie to boot. It's not particularly scary, but that's almost besides the point. Two out of two for team Mattie Do/Christopher Larsen, now to track down Chanthaly...

Neither the Sea nor the Sand

 Neither the Sea nor the Sand is a great movie title, isn't it? Unfortunately it's definitely not a great film. Dull, poorly written and suffering from a really bad case of shitty and overtly intrusive early '70s music... well, it's pretty clear why this has been all but forgotten, only to be exhumed by streaming services in their endless and unholy hunger for #content.

 Annabelle (Susan Hampshire) is sightseeing along the Jersey island coastline when she runs into Hugh Dabernon (Michael Petrovitch) - a handsome, brooding, slightly douchey lighthouse keeper who proceeds to court her with juvenile philosophy and bargain-rack morbidity. These days she would laugh him off as a pretentious goth git, but I guess back then it was new and interesting. Susan is unhappy with her marriage, and after a short chaste courtship she decides to stay in Jersey with Hugh.
 The first half of this movie is basically these people hooking up. Some of it is cute, including a couple of well made, non-gratuitous sex scenes, some of it is shitty, but either way at forty-five minutes it still feels too long.

 Then, while fooling around (non-sexually) in a remote Scottish beach, Hughie just... drops dead. This is a very effective scene, and Susan Hampshire really gets to shine here; she gets a lot of mileage just from looking desperate and/or dejected, using her very expressive eyes to great effect. Hugh's soon pronounced dead from a heart attack by a country doctor with a brutal bedside manner.

 Later that night, Hugh comes back to Anna. At first it looks like it's going to be a haunting, but nope - everyone else can see Hugh just fine. He doesn't talk now, and is listless and barely responding to stimulus, but he follows Anna around like a puppy and seems alive enough.

 Once they return to Jersey, though, it's quickly established that Hugh is very much not alive. Anna has somehow returned only the semblance of life to her beau, basically turning him into an amorous zombie (it could be argued that Hugh's love drove him to return, but the actor doesn't really sell it as well as Anna.)
 And here the movie seems to run out of ideas on what to do next; there's a murder, because there need to be some stakes, I guess; there's some attempts to cast doubt on whether what's animating Hugh is indeed Hugh or something else. There are scenes where Anna needs to mislead the police as to what's happening, and another where  Anna is in denial and goes shopping... that sort of thing.
 But it's very clearly just pointless waffling. It ends how it needs to end; Not much in the way of surprises, but at least it ties into some of the bullshit Hugh spouts at the beginning - a solid ending to a movie that is too often on very shaky ground.

 Even at an hour and a half the movie is bloated and full of pointless scenes. The dialog is often really bad - this is another one of those movies where people often just don't talk or act like human beings; this kills the first half of the movie, where it needs to get you to care about these foolish young things' budding love affair, and introduces some unintended humor into the second half with random bits like how Hugh's brother reacts to his sibling's death, or even worse, with a character played by Michael Craze who I guess is just there to (unsuccessfully) introduce some tension; this guy is so fucking hilariously inappropriate that I can't fathom what the scritpwriters were thinking of when they wrote him in.

 Most of the cast seems to be just British TV actors, and except the delightful Scottish Landlords, no one has the chops to elevate the material. Hugh's actor in particular needed to be a lot more charismatic to make the character interesting or fun to watch, especially later on when he barely gets any dialog. Susan Hampshire is a honorable exception and deserves some recognition for making some of her dialog actually work.

 The photography can also be quite nice, with lots of lovely shots of dreary British coastland. Other than that it's a pretty pedestrian-looking movie. Don't expect much in the way of scares, carnage, or zombie makeup even when Hugh is supposed to be decomposing. And the music... oh god, it's terrible. Just fucking horrible pseudo-hippy shit.

 It's important to state that even though the film chickens out and there's no actual on-screen necrophilia, if you choose to take the movie literally (and why wouldn't you?) Zombie Hugh does bone Anna telepathically from a distance, replaying previous sex scenes in their minds. Psychic zombie sex! If there's any reason why this film should be remembered, that's as good as any.

Burial

 As far as alt-history goes, "What if the Russians had found Hitler's body before the Germans burnt it to ash?" is a pretty modest detail to change. I'm not spoiling much by saying that this is what Ben Parker's Burial hinges on, since it's heavily implied in the trailer and is right there in the official synopsis for the movie.

 The Russians extract the body from the bunker and Stalin orders it brought straight to Moscow under strictest secrecy. They want to keep the news secret for as long as possible, and, given that Russia seeded misinformation about what really happened for months in our world, well, it's less ridiculous than it sounds. The catch is that to keep as low a profile as possible a small group of soldiers is entrusted with the task, and need to make their way from Berlin to a train station in Poland.

 While Poland is occupied by the soviets, it's not exactly secured. Despite their precautions, such as burying the box Hitler's body is being transported in every night, the Russian detachment is soon ambushed by werewolves.
 And this is where I need to spoil the movie a little to talk about it. For all its genre red herrings, Burial really is a war movie, although a very pulpy one. As fun as soviet soldiers vs. vampire Hitler and Nazi lycanthropes would be, here they just bury the body so that if they're killed no one will find it, and werewolves just refers to a true-to-history sort of partisan Nazi resistance that was trained to use guerilla tactics in the wilderness.

 Not that verisimilitude is high on this movie's list of priorities. The Werewolves fight with hallucinogenic gas, for starters.

 So! The Russians are soon left without motorized transport after an ambush, and the second-in-command's (played with palpable douchiness by Dan Skinner) first decision is to split the group so he can head to a nearby village for some R&R. Which, it being wartime in an occupied country, is of course an euphemism for looting and raping. While separated both groups are ambushed by werewolves, and left to regroup in an old farm with a semi-sympathetic polish partisan (Tom Felton) where they are besieged by the Nazis, who are led by a couple of SS types who know about the dead Führer and have their own aims for it.

 It's a cheap-ish but great looking film. It unfortunately doesn't make great use of its novel post-war setting - the shelled-out husk of Berlin is soon left behind as the action moves to the Polish forests. And speaking of action, the (many!) shoot-outs and stabbings here don't always make sense - there's obvious tactics gaffes on both sides (particularly on the first few night-time ambushes; if they hadn't fucked around with the hallucinogenic gas and jus used their guns, the movie would be a hell of a lot shorter!) But other than that it's all fun, compelling and very bloody.
 The script, likewise, has some weak spots but mostly it's pretty smart. Parker has a great ear for dialogue and the movie has several weighty themes interwoven through it: for example, the more traditionally heroic Russian soldier is a bit deflated when he's forcibly shown that the polish locals might just see the Soviet army as another occupying army, not as liberators. And a framing story involving a neo-nazi, as well as the werewolves' agenda and a few discussions about who gets to write history, gives a bit more weight to the whole "make Hitler's fate be known" enterprise.

 Also, at one point a nazi brags about the Ahnenerbe to then immediately coo about what a lovely skull his captive has... I'm going to cut any movie with a phrenology joke as weird and funny as that a lot of slack.

 The acting is good throughout. Felton, Charlotte Vega (as the protagonist, a resolute Russian intelligence officer) and Barry Ward (as the previously mentioned heroic, and particularly death-resistant, soldier) make for very likeable heroes.

 I'm not going to lie, I'm still a bit annoyed at the genre misdirection going on here. But it's plenty good as 'just' a war story. Not the best war movie about a small group of Russian soldiers stranded in enemy territory I've seen (that would be The Beast), but still, pretty good.

The Dark Red

 The Signal is a pretty underrated anthology film from 2007 about a rage virus-style apocalypse; I liked it a lot. Out of its three creators, David Bruckner's done some other anthology films (some of which I've enjoyed) and is now doing the new Hellraiser; David Gentry's done a few indie films which honestly look pretty great (I will check them out) and Dan Bush's directed, among others, the fun but flawed The Vault (a film I don't remember much of except that I liked it right up to a really stupid ending.)

 The Dark Red is Bush's follow-up to The Vault. It's a Stephen King-style tale of people with psychic powers being victimized by a shady conspiracy that, unfortunately, doesn't work. The movie, I mean, not the conspiracy. Like The Vault, it's well-made enough to raise hopes that the good bits will make up for the rough patches and all the waffling, but it fizzles out in the end.

 It begins promisingly enough, with a social worker investigating a mobile home and finding the mother dead and a toddler locked away in a trunk. Then it cuts away to a some sort of institution where that kid, Sybil (April Billingsley), all grown-up, is locked away and is trying to convince a psychiatrist (Kelsey Scott) that she's not crazy, she has mind powers that let her read other people's minds, and that a conspiracy is trying to steal her blood so they can use those powers themselves. Oh, and that this conspiracy also stole her child from her womb. You can imagine how that goes.

 These sessions between Sybil and the psychiatrist unfortunately take up most of the movie. When not being bloated with unnecessary dialog to pad the movie's runtime (forgivable given the movie's obvious budget limitations, I guess) they serve as an exposition device as Sybil tells the story of how she met a dashing young man (scritpt co-writer Conal Byrne) at her mother's funeral, got knocked up, and then was betrayed by him as he handed him over to his 'family', the seemingly mom-and-pop illuminati that is trying to harvest her psychic blood (of an unknown blood type... really?) for their own gain.

 Sybil's drugged escape from the remote cabin and underground tunnels that serve as the conspiracy's headquarters is the movie's highlight - badass and suspenseful - and it sets up high expectations for the climax.

 Unfortunately the rest of the film consists of Sybil preparing and executing a stupid, stupid plan to get her baby back. Seriously, it's incredibly fucking dumb. But it works flawlessly, so she gets to the cabin and faces down the world's shittiest, least menacing psychic new-world-order conspiracy ever.
 Again, you've got to take the budget in consideration here, but still - they had a few more extras for other scenes, using them here to punch up the finale with a higher body count would have done wonders.

 As it is, by failing to deliver even a mildly satisfying payoff and not providing any consistency or believability to the reach and menace of the conspiracy or the powers of the bloodline, the movie ends up being extremely underwhelming. It reminded me more than anything else of Joe Begos's The Mind's Eye, a similarly Stephen King derived psychic fantasy that had a lot more fun with the premise on what was probably a fraction of this one's budget.

 The acting is kind of stilted in a very... "I'm a serious actor being all serious in a very serious role" way, in keeping with the films overtly sombre mood - not bad, necessarily, but not a lot to latch on to there. There are very little special effects to speak of, but what's there (the decomposing corpse at the beginning, a couple of bloody scenes) were very well done.

 So... yeah, I'd avoid this one.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

 Now this... this is something special.

 George Miller has made a bunch of movies in the last thirty-odd years; from Mad Maxes to Happy Feetses to Witches of Eastwick... They're all heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and have more thought and care put into them than most other things out there. Other than that it's a pretty eclectic list, isn't it?

 All of his stuff is pretty personal. But with the success of the latest Mad Max so far he got the clout to finish a passion project of his. So if Fury Road was 'a movie for them', what does 'a movie for me' even mean?

 We're talking about the man who followed up one of the purest story-book movies ever with (the wonderful, but very strange) Babe: Pig in the City. So yes, his new movie is weird, personal and dense. And oh yes it's good; So, so good.

 Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist* who seems to have her toes dipped in the realm of imagination. Despite being collected, completely logical-minded and pragmatic, hallucinations of fantastical and mythological characters often intrude into her life. She's learnt to ignore them.
 In light of this, Dr. Binnie isn't overtly surprised when, in an Istambul hotel room, she accidentally frees a Genie from a bottle. She is a bit concerned, though, when the Genie played by Idris Elba (always referred to by its more mythological name, Djinn - Ifrits make an appearance too!) won't politely go away.

 The Djinn, you see, needs Alithea to make three wishes - not just any wish, it needs to be something straight from the heart - before he can set free from his curse, or back to the bottle he goes.

 Alithea refuses to ask for anything at first. For one, she claims she's perfectly content with her life and insists she wants for nothing. And besides, as a student of stories and mythology, she's perfectly aware that in stories about wishes, irony and poetical justice prevail: they'll always come back and bite you in the ass.

 So they get to talking, and then swapping stories. The Djinn tells of how he was imprisoned by Solomon himself: It seems Solomon went to see the queen of Sheba (not the other way around - take that, Bible!) and he did not take kindly to the Djinn competing (futilely) for his affections.

 Moved by the story, Alithea tells of how she had an imaginary friend as a child whom she inadvertently killed in a fit of doubt. In turn the Djinn tells of his other 'incarcerations', as he ironically calls the previous times he was freed from the bottle. They're lovely little stories full of unexpected turns and tangents that take us from the golden age of the Ottoman empire to Byzantium to more modern times.

 Each story is lavishly and beautifully represented on the screen with an eye for detail and humorous moments and the sort of panache you'd expect from Miller.

 As they talk and exchange stories, Alithea (who has confessed she doesn't feel as others do - she only really feels emotions through stories) becomes lost in the Djinn's tales... and makes a wish.

 A pretty rotten one, as far as these things go, but it's granted by the genie with no protest. And I'll leave things there, because seeing how things progress is part of this movie's considerable charms.

 There is ugliness in its many stories, and it brings up that old chestnut that our modern world is hostile to magic. But at no point is there bitterness. Humanity and the fruits of science are celebrated to the end by one who stands metaphysically opposed to them. And despite everything, it's still an unapologetically romantic story.

 It's an incredible, beautiful, thorny movie that hides beneath its romantic exterior a tangle of themes and ideas that I'm still trying to unpick a few days later. It's the closest I've ever seen anything come to The Sandman - and I do not deploy this comparison lightly, since the full Sandman comic run is one of my favorite works of literature. It's easily the best and most original thing I've seen this year, which is high praise considering Everything Everywhere All the Time came out only a few months ago.

 I should mention the surfaces of this thing - bright primary colors, tightly composed images, well thought out camera moves and imaginative and cool visual effects, but also the music, the acting (both Idriss Elba and Tilda Swinton are superb) and the editing! Scene transitions are a marvel, smoothly progressing visually into the next, or linked by sounds that drift from one to another. A thing of beauty.

 However, I should say that this is a movie that feels as if it was made for me - from one of the segments being set in Byzantium to the focus on stories and mythology, I don't think I could be objective about it even if  I wanted to.

 Would I recommend this to anyone? I suspect a lot of people will find it too shapeless, too weird, or like some elements but not be engaged by others. And that's fine. But something this original and well put together deservers you at least give it a shot.

* - Surprisingly enough, it's a real field of study. Though I do wonder if they draw enough attention to run TED-talk-like seminars on the academic circuit...

Jabberwocky

 Sometime between Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Terry Gilliam decided he wanted to make his own movie, distanced from the troupe that he had helped make famous. Well, not too distanced - Michael Palin plays the main character, and Neil Iness and Terry Jones make an appearace... so, between them that's half of the Pythons (along with a load of '70s British comedians).

 But for good or ill, it's clear that this is Gilliam's show.
 It's clear in the production design, the framing of the shots, and the bleak, misanthropic worldview. As far as being, you know, good... well, that'd need to wait until the next movie.

 Palin plays Dennis Cooper, an apprentice cooper that is more interested in the business-side of coopering than on the actual barrel making. His father and employer loathes him for it, and disowns him on his deathbed.

 With no other means of sustenance, Dennis goes off to the big city to make his fortune so he can come back and ask for the hand of his grotesque childhood sweetheart. But the guilds have all the business sown up in town, to the point that a legendary cooper Dennis meets soon after sneaking into the city has resorted to cutting his own feet to make more money begging.
 No matter. Soon Dennis befriends a knight's page, who takes him under his wing, and they embark on a series of mildly funny adventures that will end up with Dennis going against the Jabberwock, a beast that's ravaging the land.

 Cooper is your quintessential Palin character, a good-natured goof with unending reserves of innocence and optimism who is then run through a wringer for comic effect. His bumbling attempts to help always backfire, and his modest aims in life (get a little business and return to his hometown sweetheart that clearly can't stand him) fail upwards tragically (he ends up getting the traditional happily ever after, except that it's at the expense of everything he actually wanted.)

 The filmmaking is great, if a bit unpolished - there's lots of imaginative shots and great use of darkness, and Gilliam's trademark lived-in clutter. The sets are a wonder (they were lucky enough to be able to reuse the run-down Oliver sets at Shepperton, just before they were demolished.) While their lines aren't always that great, the actors seem to be having a blast. Palin is likeable and annoying as ever - this is probably peak Palin as a role- and there's always something interesting going on somewhere in the frame.

 Unfortunately I just didn't find it very funny. Unlike Brazil or other later Gilliam films, the humor isn't subtle (or subtle-ish) or ironic or organic; Here it's wall to wall jokes and humorous situations. Except... that they're mostly pretty bland. Trying to distance itself away from the surrealistic humor of Monty Python, the script instead relies on standard farce, gross-out humour, very broad jokes and mugging hysterically to the cameras. Very of its time.
 The best jokes in the movie, like the way they end up deciding who wins a tournament, are very... well, Pythonesque. And the whole exaggeratedly dirty medieval look and casual violence, which might have carried some of the humor, was already familiar from Holy Grail.

 Even if there aren't a lot of laughs, it's amusing enough, in a very basic way. It's always interesting to look at as well, despite the low budget and rough edges, and the ideas it plays with are fun. I'd watched this before ages ago when I first became obsessed with Monty Python and didn't care for it at all. This time around, trying to let it be its own thing I liked it a bit better. I'd take Holy Grail or Time Bandits over this in a heartbeat, but I've watched way worse movies for the sake of completism.

Saloum

 Bangui's Hyenas are a trio of mercenaries operating throughout northern Africa. As the movie starts they're extracting a cartel dealer from a Guinean sting operation/massacre, but the plane they use to escape has been sabotaged. Before they run out of fuel they decide to set down in the Saloum region of Senegal, as one of them is familiar with the area.

 The mercenaries are a great bunch of characters: There's Chaka (Yann Gael), the leader of the outfit, young but always serious. Rafa (Roger Sallah) sports a mohawk and is the hot headed, impulsive one. and last but definitely not least is Minuit (Mentor ba) - the old hand, a white-haired grizzled shaman motherfucker who blows sleeping dust into people's faces. 

I'm team Minuit (the one on the left).

 Beyond looking badass and cool as all hell, they're all good actors with a loads of screen presence. Best of all, the dialog in the movie is really well written, with lots of room for their characters to be fleshed out. This becomes clear as the trio plus Felix the (mexican?) drug pusher (Renaud Farah) seek refuge on a weird compound/hostel ruled over by a charismatic old man who exchanges lodging for finishing chores.

 There's a great all-dialog scene where the new arrivals meet the other guests in the compound over dinner and a few complications are introduced. First, one of the guests, a deaf-mute woman named Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) recognizes them and demands they take her with them (with sign language, while the rest of the table remains clueless.) Then the chief of the local police arrives, and takes an interest in Felix.

 Soon it's revealed that Chaka had some ulterior motives for coming to this compound. As a result the old man that runs the place dies, all hell breaks loose, and the movie takes a turn towards supernatural horror.

 You see, the old man was dealing with a tribe of  deadly spirits, and with his death they break loose, turn the sky bone-white, and start hunting everyone down.

 The monsters are cool - an amorphous blob of locust-like specks of darkness, vaguely looking like horned humanoids. When they're killed (it turns out they're as vulnerable to bullets and knives to the face as your standard mook) they collapse into a heap of rags and bones. So the Hyenas (who, it's been revealed through the movie, aren't just honorable mercs but actual folk heroes) have to fight against the spirit infestation and try to protect the other survivors.

 We finally get some (low budget but well-made) action where the Hyenas face off against the spirits as they go look for fuel and  resin to repair their plane. But my favorite scenes all have to do with Chaka, Rafa and Minuit; in the best one Rafa stops everything to show his support for Chaka once he realizes the traumatic events he's been through, and Minuit joins in as well. There's a lot of empathy and true affection on display here, demonstrated to an extent that you wouldn't expect on a Hollywood movie.
 

 Once the surprise twists are out of the way, I was reminded more than anything else of From Dusk Till Dawn - not just the tonal shift, but the tone of the individual halves are an undeniable influence.
 The script is great when it comes to dialog, but unfortunately it isn't as good when it comes to telling its story. The back half is full of incidents and revelations, but things just run into each other without enough connective tissue to make it feel organic all the way to a finale that doesn't feel particularly satisfying given that it veers away from the action focus.

 The first few scenes had me a bit worried that the style would fall into that particular '90s thing - Tarantino by way of Guy Ritchie and all the other less talented hacks that did that; you know, lots of flashy cuts, freeze frames and subtitles, but thankfully it quickly calms down and goes for a more traditional look. There are a lot of lovely drone shots to introduce locations and some pretty striking imagery once the supernatural invades the movie.

 So yeah. It's got some issues but this is a good one and I'm glad I watched it; I would absolutely be down to see more adventures with the Hyenas, or Awa, or any combination of them.

See How They Run

 See How They Run is a fictional, jokey whodunnit built around the real West End theatrical run of Agatha Christie's Mousetrap back in the fifties.

 It's a very cute and pretty funny movie that falls flat in some respects (especially in its central mystery, and its attempts to either bring anything new or deconstruct the genre) but is saved by a game cast, a lot of mild but good gags, and a snappy pace.

 Detective Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and police constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to investigate the backstage murder of Hollywood director Leo Kopernick (Adrian Brody) during the celebration of the play's 100th performance. It quickly becomes clear that everyone wanted a piece of him, and they're soon awash in red herrings and complex motivations.

 The truth when it comes out of nowhere and is sure to disappoint anyone who was expecting a well-crafted mystery, but the modest joys in this movie are more related to the characters and their interactions. Detective Stoppard is experienced, easy-going, world-weary and often drunk, while PC Stalker is a young and bushy-tailed, diligent, highly excitable and will often just blurt out whatever comes to mind. Their dynamic together is a delight and scores some big laughs from tiny details like the way they greet each other by their titles. And as a bonus both get a bit of depth added to their characters, while everyone else is basically a caricature.

 I love Saoirse Ronan's work here. Like Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, she takes a potentially annoying character and makes it impossible to hate.

<3 P. C. Stalker

 Where the movie is less successful is in trying to get clever with structure and conventions. "What, Flashbacks?" says the fictional playwright who's been tasked with creating the script for a movie adaptation of Mousetrap, after the movie has indulged in a ton of flashbacks. "Next you'll ask to include a  title card that says 'Three weeks later...'" And of course, immediate cut to a title card that says "Three weeks later..."

 This, and some other stuff like this is... cute, and kind of clever, but not nearly as much as it thinks it is. Not as executed, anyways.

 Also, this is not much of a complaint but if there's any reason for there being a very obvious reference to The Shining here I completely missed it.

 Agatha Christie buffs might be more satisfied by the film as there are a few decent in-jokes in there. The best of which is a real-life factoid that comes up in the movie as one of the possible motives: The reason there's never been a movie adaptation of Mousetrap is that there was a provision made in the contract when the rights were sold to British producer John Woolf (who's one of the suspects here, played by Reece Shearsmith) stating that the movie could not be made while the play was still running. And... well, it still is. It went on hiatus for COVID, but it's back on now.

 Lines and scenes from Mousetrap also have some significance, as well as its origins in a true case. 

 Even if it doesn't work that well, it still moves at a quick pace, looks pretty good and again, the acting and character humor is a huge amount of fun. It won't set the world on fire or anything, but there are way worse ways to spend one hundred minutes.

Hot Rod

Hot Rod is a bizarre little comedy from the Lonely Island comedy group made while they were still putting out music videos through Saturday Night Live. It's produced by Lorne Michaels but it's not the  usual SNL-to-the-cinema formula of taking a shtick, adding a formulaic story, and running a the bit to the ground. Fortunately Lonely Island didn't have a single well-known character or recurring bit, so instead of getting a skit stretched to movie length and forced into a three-act structure, they wrote an original story and characters for their movie.
 Well, no, not exactly. They took a script (written by South Park's Pam Brady) that was originally slated to star Will Ferrell and did some heavy rewrites to make it fit their style better.

 It's... not a great comedy, but it's weird and surrealist and reflects their sensibilities and where they were at the time. And most importantly, it is pretty funny a lot of the time.

 Andy Samberg plays Rod Kimble, a self-designated stuntman still living with his family in American suburbia. His little brother (troupemate Jorma Taccone - Akiva Schaffer's on the director's seat) idolizes him, and he has a combative relationship with his stepfather. As in, he has to win in ritual combat against his dad to earn his respect (so far he hasn't managed to land a single blow.)

 He struts around town like he owns the place, the same way Emperor Norton must have in LA, always in his stuntman jumpsuit with a little cape. And with a similar amount of delusions. Rod, despite having a team behind him (his little brother and two others played by Danny McBride and Bill Hader) is just no good at what he does - his little moped can barely gain enough speed to mount a ramp, never mind jump off it.

 He's a likeable doofus, though; all intensity, self-absorption and childlike focus.

 Soon two complications enter his life. One is a love interest played by Isla Fisher (who unfortunately is just there to look adorable and let others' zaniness bounce off her.) The other is that his stepdad has a terminal disease and needs $50000 for the operation. Rod of course vows to raise the money so he can save his stepfather, so he can later beat the shit out of him.

 He and his team (which Denise, his crush, soon joins) set out to scrounge enough money through independent stuntwork so they can set up a jump over fifteen school buses, a stunt they're sure will help them gather the money somehow.

 It goes pretty much as you'd expect. It's a (purposefully) very dumb movie with a weirdly deadpan tone that makes its non-sequiturs and digressions all the funnier. Like - when life gets to be too much, Rod goes to the mountains and spends a few minutes angry-dancing to Moving Picture's Never while drinking and smoking at the same time (and then spends a similar amount of time falling down the mountainside.) Or an inspirational scene set to John Farnham's You're The Voice, full of triumphant slow walking and crowds gathering to back our heroes until things somehow devolve into chaos and rioting.

 The plot is not important, is what I'm saying. It's all in the specifics, asides, and character moments. A lot of it doesn't work, but I suspect just what it is that doesn't work most of its defenders would disagree about.

 
 It looks a bit drab, but then again you wouldn't really expect much visually out of an SNL-adjacent production. The music is a fine selection of '80s cheese, with  emphasis on hair metal. I have to respect a movie that has a bunch of Europe songs but not The Final Countdown. I kind of think that might even be a minor joke, maybe. It's that sort of movie.

 And it's got a killer roster of talent: Besides Rod and his crew there's Ian McShane, Sissy Spacek, Will Arnett, Chris Parnell... a lot of funny people, left to do their thing. You just know scenes were being rewritten until the very last moment as people kept coming up with ideas for their characters. It's chaotic and very uneven, but well, that's kind of its charm.

Relic

  Relic (not to be confused with The Relic, a 90's horror movie that like a lot of '90s horror is pretty crap) tells the story of Kay (Emily Mortimer) returning to her old family home with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) after she's informed her mother has gone missing.

 Grandma Edna (Robyn Nevin) lives alone in a large house in the woods and has a history of dementia. When Kay and Sam arrive at the house they find it recently abandoned and hunker down to either wait for Edna to return or to get some pretty grim news at night, and help with the police search during the day.
 Beyond all the mundane creepiness of an inhabited but slightly run down old house, there's also some hints of unnatural goings-on: strange sounds coming from behind the walls, shadows lurking along the edges of the frame... you know, subtle, haunting-style stuff.
 Kay also has a nasty nightmare about an old cabin with a withered corpse. This will become significant later.

I'm not a fan of the book, but after watching this I'd love to see Natalie James take on House of Leaves

 Edna returns after a few days, not much worse for wear, in a nightgown and sporting some new bruises. Sam and Kay decide to stay a couple of weeks with her to keep an eye on her. They also have some difficult choices ahead as to how best handle the situation.

 Cohabitation is difficult beyond the already fraught situation. Edna doesn't just forget things - she's sometimes difficult, even hostile towards her daughter and grandchild. But as these difficulties escalate, the strange incidents do as well, until the movie jumps the rails in the best way possible. What was a pretty low-key psychological horror film... well, remains a psychological horror film, but earns the batshit adjective. It includes impossible architecture and a monster chase; Way more fantastic than the slower, more buttoned-down first two acts would lead you to expect, is what I mean; Subtlety goes out the window.
 I adore it when movies surprise me like that. Even better when a) the movie was a good one to begin with, and b) it sticks the landing. Here, after some pretty cool mayhem, the script pulls a U-turn and ties everything together in a bittersweet and pretty affecting ending. Lovely stuff.

 While the horror elements seem a bit random at points, they are very effective at building up atmosphere and make thematical sense. And even without them, well, dementia is pretty fucking horrifying. Relic doesn't offer the most sensitive look at mental health issues, but it's very empathetic and uses them in a way that ultimately doesn't feel exploitative. Natalie Erika James' direction is top-notch, with lots of great suspense building and careful framing, and it gets a lot of mileage out of what must have been a fairly small budget.
 Honor compels me that this was helped reach production by the Russo brothers (along with Jake Gyllenhaal, of all people). Well done Russo Bros. You've still got a lot to make up for.

  This is a great movie - very well made, phenomenally acted, and with an excellent story in its black-mold-infested heart.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

 Amicus Productions is most famous for doing a run of horror anthology films in the sixties and seventies, and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is probably the best known of them. It's a fun collection of cheesy, punchy horror stories that are told with humor but (mostly) no overt jokes. I have a lot of affection for it, having seen it a few times, usually in fragments, over the years, and it holds up pretty well all things considered.

 Five travellers sharing a train carriage are joined by a sixth passenger - And it's Peter Cushing! So you know things are going to get macabre. Well, that and that the title of the movie, and that it's an Amicus film.
 Cushing plays Dr Schreck (which as one of the other characters helpfully points out, means Terror in German) with his usual melancholy, wit and gravitas - he's great, as always.
 When his bag tips over and the contents are scattered on the floor, a pack of tarot cards comes tumbling out. Questioned about it, he explains that every human being has two fates - one mundane and one supernatural, and that the cards reveal people's supernatural final fate.

To be fair, that is one cheap-ass-looking pack of tarot cards.

 You know the deal; each one of the passengers on the train gets a reading, which then turns into a separate horror short. and the whole thing ends with a shock to cap off the framing device. It's well constructed and actually answers some of the questions you assume are just going to be left dangling, so good on scriptwriter Milton Subotski, an Amicus regular.

 The story themselves vary in quality.

 The first one is fun, and the creepiest one of the bunch. An architect is called back to his ancestral home by the enigmatic widow who now owns the house to make some modifications. There he discovers that an ancestral curse is real and a werewolf starts attacking from the shadows. If you don't figure out who the villain is as soon as the menace is laid out, you haven't watched enough of these type of films.

 Next comes a goofy science fiction tale of... a killer ivy plant. It's played completely straight while still having a houseplant turning ominously towards the camera with the appropriate musical sting, or first a leafy shadow and then the vine itself approaching an unsuspecting victim shot like you would shoot an approaching gloved hand holding a knife.
 What makes it extra special is that the victim goes out to get some scientists to help out, and they provide some scientific-sounding exposition with absolute seriousness - the tone reminds me of... I guess rival studio Hammer's Quatermass films, but not nearly as good.

 The third movie is the story of a Jazz musician who while on the West Indies spies on a Voodoo ritual and decides to steal Damballa's sacred music to use in his compositions. It's got one of the best (and most overtly comedic) gags in the movie and three musical numbers.
 It's also pretty safe to say this was very cheesy even at the time it was released. It obviously hasn't aged very well, being pretty exploitative and all, but I don't think many would take offense at it anyhow: the white protagonist is an absolute dick throughout and clearly deserves his comeuppance. The problem is that when it finally comes it's ridiculously underwhelming. Easily my least favorite out of these.

 But that's all right, because next we finally get to Christopher Lee's fate. He plays the caricature of a smug, snobbish art critic with maximum relish (here and in the framing device) and it's a blast to see him having so much fun with the character.
 After thoroughly insulting an artist played by Michael Gough (British horror icon, Tim Burton regular, but best known in this house as Dr Flammond), the artist turns back the tables on the critic with a prank that exposes him as a sham.
 The artist is a less than gracious victor, and his constant barbs drive the critic to murder. But after death the artist's hand comes back from the grave, slowly clawing its way towards the critic. There's some great effects work here with a mechanical severed hand that can actually crawl, in addition to the creative framing that you'd expect so they can use a real hand.
 This is an excellent segment - just the acting alone, both from Lee and Gough, would make it great, but it's also a cool, fun (if derivative) little story that actually has themes and some depth. Great stuff.

 The last story features a very young Donald Sutherland as half of a newlywed couple who starts suspecting that his bride may be a vampire. It's a very plain, plodding tale that ends with a fun twist, but honestly even at fifteen minutes it drags a bit.

 And then the movie is done, after a final catchup with the six train passengers. The twist (because of course there's a twist!) is predictable, but it actually makes more sense than these things usually do, and is effectively creepy.

 So there you go. The main attraction here is the actors and the stories themselves. Anthology movies are famously uneven, but, and especially with ones like these that have a lot of stories and a short running time, they rarely overstay their welcome.
 The effects, with a couple of exceptions aren't great, and the cinematography, save again for a couple of neat shots (there's a rotating shot in the first story that I liked) doesn't really call attention to itself. It's... fine. As is usual for this timeframe, no gore - just bright red splatters of blood, used very sparingly.

 It's not even remotely scary, but that was never its intention. It's a fun horror movie. Now I need to re-watch The House that Dripped Blood.

Day Shift

 You could be excused if you completely discount Day Shift outright as a terrible-looking Netflix action movie. So many red flags: The red N, for a start, yet another modern urban fantasy mashup. Even worse, the tone of the trailer and the jokes... look pretty obnoxious. On the other hand it's directed by stuntman legend JJ Perry, who's been in the business since at least the first Mortal Kombat movie, and was a fight choreographer for Haywire and Undisputed 2; That's one hell of a resumé. And it's pretty safe to say stuntmen turned directors are doing pretty well these days.

 The movie starts well. Jamie Foxx, mid-pool cleaning gig, breaks out a hidden weapons cache, enters the house and picks a fight with the resident vampire. It's a great close-quarters gunplay and martial arts fight, full of cool reversals and great moves. The vampire moves a bit like Linda Blair when she crawled on the ceiling in the exorcist, but on speed, which makes for some nice bone-crunching shots - a cool and very original use of a contortionist in fight choreography.

 Once the fight is done and the scene moves out into mid-day LA, the camera pans up and we get a classic action movie title - it slams into the screen with a bang and there's flames and metal lettering and a stake for an I ... yeah, we're in good hands:

Now THIS is a title sequence.

The very next scene we're introduced to the movie's big bad - a pretty vampire realtor played by Karla Souza who, in the process of interring a vampire competitor, spews out that tired old "you know the definition of insanity?" quote, which quickly outs scriptwriters Tyler Tyce and Shay Hatten as either hacks or half-assing it. That's the sort of inane bullshit someone who's trying to sound smart would crowbar into a speech without saying anything intelligent*. And since this scene is working up a sweat to establish Karla as a credible threat... well, that's a pretty good indication of how bad the script for this is going to be.

 Oh, and it turns out that the vampire Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx's character) killed at the beginning was important to her. It's as good a plot kickoff as any other B-movie device.

 It turns out Jablonski uses pool cleaning as a cover for his real vampire hunting job - even after he's been kicked out of the vampire hunting union, he's able to scrape by selling fangs to the black market for a profit (why there's a black market for fangs, it's never explained.)  But in the sort of hacky contrivance that makes shit scripts like this tick, his ex-wife will be taking his child to Florida in a week unless he raises $5000. And to get the money, he needs better bounties.

 So off goes Jablonski to rejoin the Vampire Hunting union, from which he was fired for being a loose canon who played by his own rules etc. etc. He gets his old vampire hunter friend Snoop Dog (in cowboy getup and obviously having fun with the role) to pull some strings and get him back in.

 And it works... mostly. He's grudgingly admitted back into the Union, on probation, and he needs to take an overseer with him to make sure he doesn't break any regulations.

 And now it's a buddy action comedy. But, wait for it- his nanny is a straight-laced desk jockey (the normally dependable Dave Franco) who's never been in the field! He's got Photograph set as a ringtone, and his thing is to piss himself whenever he's in trouble! Hilarious, right?

 And so the stage is set for a series of vamp fights, with Karla as the boss at the end. Will the scriptwriters avoid the obvious cliché of  having her kidnap Jablonski's family and use them to get at our protagonist? Of course not, don't be stupid. Snoop Dog and a couple of vampire allies join the fray too for the final confrontation, including poor Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who gets a cool katana scene but also the worst and most underwritten and poorly set-up role in this whole sorry mess.

 The script for this movie is trash, and not good trash. At all. It's simultaneously overstuffed and half baked idiocy where the mythology is shit, no one acts like a human being, there's no interesting mystery (or... interesting anything) and none of the jokes land. People spout exposition at each other with information they both already know in the most inelegant way possible, and every. Single. Plot. Element is crap. There's nothing salvageable here, every element that's introduced is a shitshow.

 Wait, not every element! at one point Jablonski teams up with a douchy duo of fellow hunters (The Nazarian brothers, one of which is played by Scott Adkins), and they are actually funny! This was honestly a pretty big surprise, given the botched execution of every other single joke attempted in this film.

 But none of this can be laid at the director's feet - or indeed, any of the actors, other than the fact that they chose to run with the material. They do what they can with what they're given.

 The movie's considerable saving grace is that it's got a lot of great action sequences - not quite enough to fully redeem the script, because the pacing is off and it grinds to a screeching halt too often and for too long for some extremely unfunny business, but on the whole it makes it absolutely worthwhile. Doing justice to both genres in action comedies is hard (just ask Bullet Train, or so many Chinese martial arts movies); action this good deserves to be taken out of context and celebrated.

 The fights are fun, varied and inventive, and the one good thing I can say about the script is that it eventually facilitates them. As you'd expect from a stuntman director, there are a lot of acrobatics, tricky falls, and excellently choreographed mayhem.

Snoop Dog gets a Gatling gun, and gets to use it.

 I hope this does well and the talent involved gets chances to do more stuff - I'm eager to see what Mr. Perry does next. Lets hope he gets to do a decent script next time.

*You know who does the same thing expecting different results all the time? Scientists. Me, when rolling some dice. Stop using that glib piece of shit quote, and stop attributing it to Einstein.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

 Had you told me as a teen that I would skip watching a big budget Jurassic Park sequel that prominently featured dozens more species of dinosaurs than in the original, and had a huge setpiece around a giant volcanic eruption, I'd have thought you were nuts.

 Yet the first Jurassic World movie came out and was such an appalling mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a complete fucking lack of cinematic moments, that I not only completely avoided its sequel in the theaters. I've sat on it for four years, and the decision to watch it was made in a kind of resigned 'might as well watch it at some point' spirit.

 And you know what, it's a shit movie, but taken in the right spirit it's a fun shit movie, more than capably directed by J.A. Bayona. I'm happy to say it's beautiful, well paced and its individual, technical components are made with skill and care.

As well-made as the action is, it's just as poorly written and dumb as the rest of the movie.
 This little guy, for example, somehow tosses a dino twice as big as him through a high window.

 Unfortunately, Jurassic World mastermind Colin Trevorrow provided the script, and it's a wall-to-wall turdfest. Proceeds start out well enough with a short prelude where a group of shady contractor types  returning to the ruins of the partially submerged Jurassic World park to retrieve DNA from the first film's genetically altered dinosaur baddie find out that -gasp- maybe dinosaurs are dangerous.

 This establishes a few important things about the movie, mainly: a) It looks beautiful and has a lot of fun setting up its dinosaur attacks, and b) this is going to be a very, very dumb movie. Also c) these contractor types are really bad at their jobs. Like how the fuck haven't they shot themselves as soon as the were handed guns terrible.

 After this introduction we jump to the mainland, a few years past the Jurassic World massacre. It looks like a volcanic eruption is going to wipe isla Nublar and its captive dinosaur population; There's some fun speculation about the world's reaction to that, which ends up being a shrug.
 Bryce Dallas Howard, dinosaur businesslady from the first film, now turned dinosaur activist (her character's name is Claire, had to look it up despite just watching the movie) is forced to watch in horror as the situation unfolds. Luckily a millionaire long-time associate of John Hammond's intervenes and offers fund an operation to rescue them. The old man is played by the redoubtable James Cromwell, so you know he's on the level. His right-hand man, though, is played by Rafe Spall, so you know that betrayal is incoming. The whole setup is tired and obvious, and fits the rest of the script to a tee.

 Claire then gathers a team to go to Isla Nublar: two new completely forgettable characters I won't spend any more keystrokes on, and estranged love interest Chris Pratt the dinosaur whisperer. A character that's a large part of why I put off this movie for so long.
 I like Pratt as a comedian - and he does get to show off his comic chops here, particularly in a very funny scene where he needs to get away from some lava while heavily sedated - but holy shit he makes for a terrible straight leading action hero. And the script just piles on the douche on his dialog; It's not just that I find him utterly unconvincing as a rugged outdoorsman badass, I fucking loathe this character..
 Anyhow! Once on the island they meet up with a small private army of obvious villains, and at least the film wastes very little time before they betray our heroes and leave them to die in the volcanic eruption.
 Meanwhile, the contractors abscond with a bunch of dinosaurs to... sell for profit at an auction. Yes, seriously. That is the villain's plot. I know they're establishing parallels to the original Jurassic Park sequel, but this is dumber in any way that counts.

 But this island sequence is actually the high point of the movie - the protagonists need to flee the island escaping the volcano and a horde of scared dinosaurs. I mean, stupid stuff keeps happening, but it's beautifully shot and expertly handled. It's exciting! Bayona, a good director who has made good movies, classes up the joint even in nakedly, cynically manipulative moments such as when sad brontosaur is left behind to die in the island and wails piteously at the leaving boat.

 The quick pace continues as the dinosaurs are taken to the mainland - to a Resident-Evil-style secret facility built under the mansion belonging to the millionaire that funded the expedition. Sigh. Of course life finds a way during the auction, and people find out the hard way that attending an event with a bunch of live dinosaurs might be a bad idea. Special mention to just how fucking bad security is here; I mean, it's been terrible during the whole movie, but these guys really put some extra effort to earning their Darwin awards. A... lot of really fucking stupid stuff goes down, the good guys escape, the bad guys get their comeuppance. Yadda yadda.

 At one point a raptor jumps and runs away from an explosion like an action hero. This is where the dumb script and the talent behind the cameras line up and make the movie shine like... like a really, really dumb diamond.

 Of course another genetic hybrid dinosaur is introduced as the main menace, the equivalent to the first film's souped up T-Rex.
 This is carrying on from Jurassic World's brilliant insight that dinosaurs are not enough to get viewers interested, what people are after are genetically mutated dinosaurs. FUCK THAT SHIT. I mean, if you're trying to make them sexier, at least have the balls to give them bikini armor, jetpacks and monofilament whips; why the hell introduce these uber dinosaurs if in the end they're not going to be functionally different from regular dinosaurs? (And of course they're going to get their ass handed by regular dinos in the end, anyhow.)
 It's wrong-headed, self defeating and frankly kind of insulting.

 I'm really surprised to say this, but despite everything this is a worthwhile movie. I would not have had a bad time at the theatre. It's an appealing mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a lot of awesome cinematic moments.
 I'm happy Bayona got to play with such a big budget, and acquitted himself so well. But as always with this sort of thing I'd rather see him return to smaller, more personal stuff. Fun as this is, it's nowhere near as good as The Orphanage or Monster Calls.