6u532b

I’ve been wanting to watch this for a long time. It’s part kidnapping thriller, part police procedural, and part portrait of the inner-city class struggle in early 1960s Japan. Intense with great performances.

Apparently the original Japanese title is “Heaven and Hell,” which is way more appropriate.

13 years ago I projected the opening-night showing of this film on 35mm at ArcLight Hollywood. Before the screening I chatted with Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lobby about how much I loved “Brick.”

I’m not sure that “Looper” makes 100% airtight sense as a time-travel narrative, but there’s enough awesome here that it doesn’t really matter. Garret Dillahunt’s death scene is one of the sweetest moments in 21st Century cinema. And when I first saw the sequence where JGL rides what is essentially a speeder bike through a field of sugarcane, I said to myself that Rian should make a Star Wars movie. Five years after that he did, and I stand by that assessment.

The man knows how to fill a frame.

People are complicated. People are people.

A teenage girl is haunted by a fish-eye lens.

Short and to the point. Works well enough. I called the ending.

Having watched this twice now, I can confirm that it is JUST OKAY.

Full discussion coming to “Who’s the Bossk?” Episode 229.

Something is tonally off about this one, almost as though the movie itself and all the characters in it are sad that it’s the last adventure. And don’t tell me it’s because all of humanity is at stake, because it’s not like that hasn’t been the case in a bunch of these things.

Anyway it’s overly somber and not nearly as much fun as I would have wanted or hoped for a final installment, but I did think the rolling submarine sequence was cool and I liked the eclectic assemblage of character actors in the ing cast.

By the way, they really didn’t trust us to have rewatched or ed what happened in Dead Reckoning (Part One), did they?

This movie coasts by almost entirely on the charms of Charles Grodin.

It was cool seeing what the Grand Central Market looked like in the 80s, and I really liked the visual juxtaposition of Robert De Niro stranded in the Arizona desert.

It has to be Danny Elfman’s absolute worst score though, right?

Turns out I had only ever seen this in parts. Overexplains itself at the end but the rest is haunting.

And that’s why in the game of SPOILER, there’s only one rule: never fall in love.

I am Shiva, the god of death.

Full discussion coming to “Who’s the Bossk?” Episode 230.

We’re gonna see the new one this week so I wanted to rewatch this first.

It’s super, super dumb (in an extremely self-aware kind of way that allows it a lot of leeway) and also really, really fun. The action scenes are all aces.

I’ll never get tired of the gag where Shea Wigham tugs at people’s faces because he thinks they might be wearing one of those masks.

Impressively crafted and gloriously violent. Immediately ranks among my favorite entries in the franchise, maybe even topping the list— though I’d have to revisit the original again to be sure. Definitely makes me even more excited for “Badlands.”

Full review coming to LaughingPlace.com.

Guess I’m in an Errol Morris kind of mood this weekend. This one is really good, and I didn’t even know it existed until last night.

“History is chaos.”

As scattershot as the title implies, but also a little slight. At the same time I definitely appreciate the conspiracy-busting angle, and Morris’s style remains entrancing.

I’ve wanted to check this out since my grandfather recommended it to me growing up. It’s got a really intriguing sci-fi premise, but unfortunately it’s also shot, acted, and edited like a low-tier made-for-TV movie for the bulk of its running time. Was that an intentional choice? If so it didn’t quite work for me.

Thankfully it improves stylistically as it goes along and the final 30 minutes are genuinely creepy. Overall the ideas are definitely there, but for me their impact was softened a bit by shoddy execution. I also thought it was amusing that the villain is explicitly an ex-Disney Imagineer.

Of the Disney-era theatrical Star Wars efforts, this one is undoubtedly going to hold up the best (so far). The only things that really haven’t aged well nine years later are the deepfake Tarkin & Leia— and I’d like to think Lucasfilm has decided to move away from that kind of thing after the response to Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Rogue One is solid stuff, especially having a general idea of how it was cobbled together behind the scenes. Great cast, wonderful production design, mostly awesome effects and action. There are elements of the final battle that don’t quite add up for me, from both sequencing and dramatic standpoints, but in-universe you can probably chalk a lot of that up to the fog of war.

I’m glad Andor was able to be completed, adding even more weight to this story.

This played better for me on my second viewing without three decades’ worth of expectations weighing it down. It’s a fun legacy sequel that understands it’s a legacy sequel.

I still feel like there’s something off with Keanu Reeves’s performance— he’s obviously game, but it’s like he forgot how to play Ted or didn’t want to fully project his voice or something.

Also needs more Station.

Was not anticipating this being an *extremely* broad clone comedy. Like, beyond-Multiplicity levels of broad. At least in Multiplicity I understanding why the subsequent iterations of Michael Keaton all had different personalities.

This started off fun (Robert Pattinson is irably committed and everything looks neat outside of the CGI bugs) but the movie *really* fell apart for me in its second half. You should probably just watch Starship Troopers instead.

Hey are there any other adaptations of the same source material that I might be able to check out?

I do love movies about how Hollywood makes people go crazy.

This one is a bit on the cartoonish side, bordering on camp, and relies on a LOT of goofy expositional dialogue. Also its ending is lifted directly from Sunset Boulevard, which is a far superior take on similar subject matter. But gosh is it shot really nicely.

I mean if I lived at the most irritating boarding school in all of , I’d probably want to kill someone too.

But seriously, this movie looks great and is surprisingly fast-paced for 70 years ago. It also kinda plays like the creepiest, twistiest episode of Columbo there ever was. Was this the inspiration for Columbo?

Yeah I cried more than a few times. A pretty thorough and touching tribute to / dissection of one of the most influential pop-culture personalities of my lifetime. Learned a bunch too— for instance I did not know it was Shelley Duvall who recommended Tim Burton to Paul Reubens as a director. A whole lot of joy here, and a fair bit of frustration as well at watching the Hollywood / tabloid machine chew someone incredibly talented up and spit them out. I’m so glad he got a revival of interest after his “incidents” and some additional recognition before he ed away, and that I got to meet him a couple times and see his show at Club Nokia before it went to Broadway. Miss Paul and forever thankful for him teaching me, through Pee-Wee, that it’s actually pretty cool to be different.

Sorry but Skarsgard > Pacino, at least in this role. I would say Nolan might be an ever-so-slight step up stylistically, and I think it’s a more interesting choice to have Pacino’s version of the character be a less obviously terrible person/cop from the very beginning. I also feel like the added subplot in the American version about the Internal Affairs investigation helps the story make more sense overall, but I ired the climax and ending more here. I guess that means they kind of even out.

Has its moments (most of which involve the buffoonery of Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen’s bumbling alien characters), but by and large this wasn’t my thing. I liking the animated version quite a bit more.

Full review coming to LaughingPlace.com.

Opens on the Masturbating Bear, culminates in David Letterman making me cry, and closes with a dozen Mark Twains dancing to Neil Young’s “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World.” What’s not to love?

Preachers is creepy!

Some of the coolest-looking shots ever committed to film, marred a bit by extremely iffy child acting and a few awkward editing choices. But this movie undeniably has a unique and memorable villain, and the stylistic influence on so many of my favorites is obvious. Definitely worth watching.

“It’s a hard world for little things.”

Jeremy’s… iron?

Pretty sure I hadn’t seen this since the theater in 2002. Also I feel like maybe I hadn’t watched anything with Robin Williams in it since he ed away more than a decade ago. Is that possible? Anyway this isn’t my favorite Nolan but it definitely does its job. The name “Dormer” is a little on the nose. I should check out the (Stellan Skarsgard-starring!) Norwegian original.

At some point vampires have got to start learning to keep better track of the time.

Superbad meets Maximum Overdrive. There are a few fun moments here and there but mostly it just doesn’t work. I think Kyle Mooney may be overly preoccupied with the 90s.

Didn’t know they had these on here. Full review at Laughing Place.

I would argue that this is one of the most fascinating movies ever made. It’s not what you would call “good” in any sense of that word, but I have seen it literally dozens of times, will never get tired of it, and wouldn’t change a frame. In that way it is pretty much a perfect “bad” movie, but I also think it maybe should be studied? I will also say that that I genuinely like the production design and there are a handful of actual laugh-out-loud moments. The rest kind of defies description, again, in a really interesting train-wreck kind of way. “I won't have my sister, who was once the Queen of the Mardi Gras, sitting at a table with a pickle-shooting train!”

Depression is the real supervillain.

To me this remains the sole entry in the prequel trilogy where the stuff that works outweighs the stuff that doesn’t, and maybe just barely. A lot of that weight rests on the shoulders of actor Ian McDiarmid, whose delightful scenery-chewing stands out among the other dull, stilted performances. Also it’s still dumb that Yoda is friends with Chewbacca. The rest is just okay.

Pretty solid stream-of-consciousness documentary about a guy who was either a genius or was just really good at convincing other people he was a genius… which would kind of make him a genius either way. So much of my favorite comedy from the past 40 years or so owes its origins to Andy Kaufman and what he was able to pull off. I’d say this is a better memorial to his life and work than “Man On the Moon” was.