Dogma (1999)

Ugh, you can really tell this was one of my earliest posts.  I didn't know what the hell I was doing.  

A woman's health clinic worker (Linda Fiorentino) is tasked by the Metatron (Alan Rickman) to fulfill a holy mission:  stop two fallen angels, Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartelby (Ben Affleck) from re-entering heaven via a loophole provided by the Catholic Church.  The demon Azrael (Jason Lee) opposes her, but she has help in the form of a muse (Salma Hayek), an apostle (Chris Rock), and two prophets (Jay and Silent Bob).

This has not aged well, as I stated.  It's not as bad as I remember from the second watch, or as good as it was the first watch.  It's a Kevin Smith movie.  That's either make-it or break-it for you.  I do love that it ties in Rosicrucians, gnostics, and apocrypha.  Like a Dan Brown novel with dick jokes.  It is not available for streaming because of some bullshit with the Weinstein Company so physical media is your only option right now.  That's how I saw it in 2010, if I recall.  Netflix is now getting out of the disc business entirely, so look forward to not being able to see stuff like this in the future.  Viva la piracy.  Originally posted 04 Aug 2010.   I was surfing around Netflix right when I had first signed up for it, lining up my queue and what-not, when I ran across Dogma. "Holy shit," I thought, "I haven't seen this movie in forever. Why do I not own this one again?" I remembered that I liked it but I couldn't think of any particulars why. So I tossed it on the list.

I gotta tell ya, this movie was a lot funnier in 1999. And it's not that I don't like Kevin Smith, because I do, I just didn't love this movie any more. I even feel bad for having typed that. It's like having a first crush that you remember so fondly and finding out on Facebook that they've gotten bald and fat. It's terribly disappointing and makes you wonder what you saw in them in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, there are some funny moments in this film and some genuinely touching and thrilling ones. And Alan Rickman, who is always awesome. Yes, even in Love, Actually. He is not on screen nearly as much as I remember, however. Everything just felt kind of flat. I guess because I had seen it before and the elements in it aren't shocking anymore. I've seen Buddy Jesus bobbleheads in minivans.

I remember my friend, Hollana, and her parents boycotting the film when it came out because it was perceived as anti-Catholic. Now, that seems like a silly and quaint notion. Maybe because rationalism is the new name-of-the-game and professing a religion in public is akin to eating with your feet at the Ritz-Carlton. That's not really a judgment; I think things like this are cyclical.

But I digress. I guess if you're really into Jay and Silent Bob, you'll probably own this one already but for everybody else, I'd say rent it.

Boy & the World (2013)

  Finally getting to the last of the 2013 Oscar nominees.  Wish I could say it was worth the wait.

A little boy decides to follow his father from their farm into the city, moving through the various levels of human labor required to sustain the capitalist dystopia.  

This animated film is wordless except for nonsense sounds.  Everything is carried through the visual and ambient.  If that is your bag, you will probably fall head over heels for it.  I kept falling asleep.  That's not the movie's fault, though.  It just didn't connect with me, though I did appreciate the entire life cycle of the textile industry.  The animation is intentionally like a child's drawing interspersed with kaleidoscopic fractals moving in and out.  It was very pretty, from a purely aesthetic view.  I just didn't feel anything.  

If you're feeling nostalgic, meditative, and also anti-Fast Fashion, give it a shot.  It's currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Sleuth (1972)

  And the Movie Club pick for this week, which brings me up to current.  I've got about 5 episodes left on Justified season 3 that I'm hoping to get through in the next couple of days so I can have a fresh crop of movies ready by this weekend.  (Cinema Club pick was Stand by Me, which I'ave already reviewed.)

Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) is invited to the home of detective novelist Andrew Wyck (Laurence Olivier)  to discuss in a gentlemanly type way how Tindle has stepped out with Wyck's wife, Marguerite (Dame Not-Appearing-in-This-Film).  Wyck tries to make light of the situation while still being incredibly obviously furious about it, and proposes that although Milo's hair salons are doing well, he is never going to be able to provide the kind of luxury Marguerite requires without a little help.  Wyck has an aristocrat's view of taxation, in that he should be exempt from it, and coincidentally has a safe full of Marguerite's jewels and the name of a reputable fence in Amsterdam all ready to go, should Milo be amenable to a little light insurance fraud and a staged B&E between friends.  But as the games progress, it becomes very clear that at least one man is playing in deadly earnest.

I was hoping to like this film.  I like Michael Caine.  I like Laurence Olivier.  I love Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  I did not like this film.  The pervasive misogyny and rampant ethnic slurs (anti-Italian) date the script terribly and it felt very limited having just the two actors.  There was never a break.  Even the arrival of a maid or another voice on the phone would have provided a respite from hearing the same two voices (although a variety of accents, thank you, Olivier) for two hours and eighteen minutes straight.

It feels like a movie obsessed with its own cleverness, a flaw helpfully spelled out by Wyck's character.  But everyone else in Movie Club really liked it, so YMMV.  It is on YouTube only because of some weird licensing thing.  Make sure you get the HD version.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

  Movie club pick for last week!  This one slipped completely under my radar.  I haven't seen a Godzilla movie since 2012 and that was the original Gojira, which does feel like a direct predecessor of this 2016 version, as well as a special kind of bureaucratic hell.  It was released after the Fukushima environmental disaster but as Movie Club pointed out, could easily be prophesying pandemic responses.

What starts as a simple abandoned boat and a disturbance in the Tokyo harbor morphs into a much greater threat, but only low-level functionary Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasagawa) believes it is because of a giant monster.  The upper echelons of government are more interested in placating the public than investigating and/or containing until it's much too late.  Placing efficiency before hierarchy, Yaguchi assembles a team of unwanted experts and liaises with the ambitious Japanese emissary from the U.S., senator's daughter Kayoco Patterson (Satomi Ishihara) to trade for information.  They race against the clock to prevent international forces from committing an unimaginable tragedy against the people of Japan.

I really loved that Godzilla is basically just a plot device.  The story is Yaguchi and trying to navigate the muddy waters of high-level democratic policies.  There are no real bad guys (except the U.S., fucking it up for other industrialized nations once again), and Godzilla isn't motivated by malice.  We don't find out what the monster wants at all, just that its incursion is destroying human habitation and tanking the economy like any natural disaster.  It was refreshing to see Godzilla turned back into an allegory for nuclear contamination/environmental reckoning.  

Godzilla goes through a number of evolutions in the film and some of them are downright goofy (whomst among us hasn't had an awkward adolescent phase, though) but it is absolutely worth it to see him shoot a plasma ray and take down a bunch of high-rises.  That's great.  They also kept the original "guy-in-suit" quality and stock Godzilla roar, which was a nice nod to the progenitor.  All in all, this is a very fun monster movie that is unfortunately, only available for rental through Amazon.  

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

  I actually saw this two weeks ago but I was traveling and didn't get a chance to post it.  

After an unsuccessful bid to reverse his excommunicado status, Winston (Ian McShane) is demoted from Concierge and the Continental closed down.  He reaches out to John Wick (Keanu Reeves), still in hiding, and forms a plan.  Wick can solve all of their problems by defeating a member of the High Table in a duel, but to do so he must be a member of one of the families.  He was exiled in Chapter 2 so that's kind of a problem.  But the world runs on favors so it's not an insurmountable one and he is soon able to offer official challenge to the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), the very same asshole who destroyed Winston's hotel.  The Marquis is ambitious, not stupid, so he piles Wick's path with every low-level goon from Osaka to Paris, including a ringer in Caine (Donnie Yen), whose daughter's life hangs in the balance.

This clocks in at almost three hours but it never once feels like it.  You'd think you'd get bored seeing one guy against wave after wave of faceless stunt men but you'd be wrong!  It feels just as immediate and vibrant as the first one.  I also really like that Winston's character is developing into a more Machiavellian figure.  He's definitely on Wick's side but very much out for himself as well.  It will be interesting if that comes into conflict in future installments.  (They've left an out if they don't get a Chapter 5 but they are "in talks" so I remain hopeful.)

Donnie Yen steals every scene he's in and Rina Sawayama is an absolute star in her feature film debut.  Plus, this movie gave me Marko Zaror AND Scott Adkins (almost unrecognizable) AND Hiroyuki Sanada.  Shamier Anderson is a new face to me but instantly iconic as Mr. Nobody the Tracker.  Honestly, at this point, you know what you're getting with this franchise.  If that is your jam, this will be an easy win.  If it's not, no worries.  There are plenty of other films out there.

Currently, John Wick 4 is only available in theaters.

The Handmaiden (2016)

  All the praise heaped on this movie when it came out was completely deserved.  Content warning:  graphic sex, discussion of suicide, suicide (hanging), depictions of pornography

Sook-hee (Kim Tae-Ri) is a ladies maid.  Except she's really a pickpocket hired by Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo).  Who isn't really a count, but a forger of documents.  He was hired by Lord Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong) to secretly copy Kouzuki's priceless collection of Japanese erotica being sold.  Kouzuki is functionally broke but plans to marry his dead wife's niece, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), an heiress in her own right.  Fujiwara also wants that money, so he places Sook-hee in Hideko's employ as a maid to push his agenda as a suitor.  But Sook-hee realizes that Hideko is functionally a prisoner in her own house, forced to read her uncle's collection to creepy, horny old men.  Her sympathies soon come into conflict with the plan to marry Hideko to Fujiwara and then dump her in a nuthouse.

Even when you know there's a twist coming, it's so good that it still gets you.  I love Park Chan-Wook as a director and this is a phenomenal slow-burn LGBT heist/thriller.  Half the dialogue is in Japanese and half in Korean, delineated by different colored subtitles, which added a completely different dimension to the story.  It's not just about women in servitude, it's about an entire country's struggle with self-determination in the face of a hostile invasion.  The power dynamics are intricate and multi-layered and it is masterful.  And super skeevy without actually showing anything!  Like, all she's doing is reading a book and I was so grossed out by her audience's reactions that my skin was crawling.  

It is (surprisingly) an Amazon Original, so it is streaming on Prime.

Out of Africa (1985)

  The only reason I watched this is because it won 7 Oscars and beat The Color Purple in Best Picture and I wanted to see if it deserved it.  It did not.

Karen (Meryl Streep) is determined to do something with her life but the choices offered to her as a wealthy Danish woman of good breeding are 1) get married and 2) ???.  So she marries her friend Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a nobleman with no money and moves to Kenya to start a dairy farm.  Right away, there are problems because Bror didn't want the responsibility of cattle, so he bought coffee seeds with her money.  Coffee seeds that may or may not grow in the altitude and take 4-5 years to produce a decent crop.  Karen sets to, determined to succeed, but the advent of WWI disrupts things again.  She is viewed with suspicion by the British, dismissed by the patriarchy, and ignored by her husband.  Her only solace is friendship with big game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton (Robert Redford) who treats her like a person, not an obligation or a nuisance.  

While this is not as bad as it could have been, it centers Karen's white colonialist viewpoint like a bullseye.  Between the two films, The Color Purple seems timeless and classic while Out of Africa grows more dated with each passing year.  Nobody is clamoring to remake this one.

Redford is breezily charming, as always, and Streep is gonna Streep.  It was nice to see Michael Gough in something other than Batman and knowing that was only four years later is wild.  Supermodel Iman has a non-speaking role and Bond Girl Maryam d'Abo has one line early in the film.  

It's based on a true story of Karen Blixen, who wrote under a male pseudonym as Isak Dineson, if you're interested.  The movie is streaming currently on Netflix.

Rust and Bone (2012)

  I will straight up admit that I didn't get this movie at all.  Did not see the point in any frame.  Content warning:  amputation, nudity, bloodsport

Stèphanie (Marion Cotillard) trains killer whales for a water park in the south of France.  After a tragic (yet predictable because it's in the goddamn name 'killer whale') accident and the loss of her legs, Stèph struggles to go on.  In desperation, she reaches out to a bouncer from a club she used to go to who helped her home one night after a fight.  Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is barely scraping by, hopping from job to job and living at his sister's (Céline Sallette) house.  He gets the opportunity to join a bareknuckle boxing ring and has Stèph come in as his good luck charm because she is used to working with large, violent animals.  Together they find purpose and meaning in their lives.

I think.  I'm really just guessing at that last part.  Maybe more emotional people would like this film?  All I got from it was that all orcas should be released back into the wild and a living wage is a basic human right.

Rust and Bone is only available on streaming as a rental.  I got it on disc from Netflix.

The Storm Warriors (2009)

  Hey, remember back in 2012 when I watched a movie called The Storm Riders and hated it?  There's an even shittier sequel!

A Japanese warlord named Lord Godless (Simon Yam) has invaded China and imprisoned all the most renowned martial artists.  The greatest of them, Nameless (Kenny Ho), stages a prison break and a handful escape, including our old buddies Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Cloud (Aaron Kwok).  Realizing they are going to need more training if they are going to defeat Lord Godless, they flee to the domain of Lord Wicked (Tak-Bun Wong).  Wicked cut both his arms off rather than become evil and chooses to only train Wind, as his more gentle demeanor will keep him from succumbing to the desire for power.  Cloud, snubbed again, heads back to Nameless to train.  Meanwhile, Lord Godless has taken the emperor (Patrick Tam) and forced him to show Godless the secret Dragon Tomb where the power of China resides.  

Half this movie was a training montage.  And it's the better half.  

This wanted to be 300 so bad.  And it could have been really cool!  The concept isn't bad, the performances are sincere, costumes, makeup, and choreography are all good.  But the over-reliance on CGI for backgrounds, the extreme slo-mo shots, and sepia color palette scream rip-off.  

It's currently streaming for free on the Roku Channel.

Batman: SubZero (1998)

  This brings us to the end of my Batman: The Animated Series collection.  I think next canonically is Batman Beyond, which I've never seen but is supposed to be highly regarded.

A research submarine accidentally disrupts the hideout where Mr. Freeze (Michael Ansara) is keeping his cryogenically frozen wife, Nora, moving her from stable to critical condition.  Desperate, Mr. Freeze coerces his old research colleague, Dr. Belson (George Dzundza), into helping Nora with an organ transplant.  (They don't specify which organ, but Belson mentions that the donor will not survive without it so I'm assuming it's a heart.)  A search of potential matches turns up the name Barbara Gordon (Mary Kay Bergman) and Freeze immediately sets out to kidnap her, having apparently forgotten what the name "Gordon" is famous for in Gotham.  Unfortunately for him, Barbara is not only the police commissioner's daughter, but also Batgirl, meaning there are a whole bunch of highly motivated people out looking the minute she gets shoved in a van.  

This ret-cons the episode where Freeze is revealed to just be a head-in-a-jar with some spider legs, but I guess you could argue it comes before that point in the timeline.  It's not a bad movie but it really does seem like just an episode of the show.  There's nothing substantially different between the two as far as I could tell.  SubZero is probably just for the Batman completionists out there.  It's currently streaming on HBO Max.

M3GAN (2022)

  Finally got to see M3GAN!  You know I love some killer dolls.

After unexpectedly becoming caregiver for her orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), robotics inventor Gemma (Allison Williams) decides to pair the little girl with her newest idea: M3GAN (Amie Donald), a life-sized android designed to be the only toy a kid needs.  Because Gemma has apparently never seen Terminator.  Things are going great and Cady is seemingly moving on from her parents' death with zero emotional involvement from Gemma, but the more bonded M3GAN and Cady grow, the more Gemma starts to wonder about M3GAN's programming.  

People always forget to turn off the Be Evil button!  

This was one of the most talked about horror movies of last year and it is super entertaining.  If I had to nitpick, I'd say that they made M3GAN too sympathetic to be truly evil.  There's a fine line between villain and antihero and this skirts a little too close for me to be completely on board.  And I can't tell if it's just because it's a female villain (because Chucky sure as shit didn't feel the need to justify himself) or if it's part of a larger trend of romanticizing the bad guys.  

None of which matters if you're just looking to watch a 4' tall killing machine fuck up some irritating people.  If so, M3GAN is currently streaming on Peacock.

The Straight Story (1999)

Hey, all, I watched this a week ago and probably could have posted it then but I am actually on vacation this weekend, so I wanted to be sure I had something for you guys to read so I scheduled it for now.  Technology is neat.  Last week's Cinema Club pick is a G-rated David Lynch movie.  No, really.

Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is 73-years-old.  His hips are bad, his eyesight is failing, and he's in the early stages of emphysema, none of which really bothers him.  When he learns his estranged brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), has had a stroke, Alvin is determined to go see him and mend their relationship.  The problem is that he has no driver's license and neither does his developmentally disabled daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek).  But he does have a riding lawn mower and an imagination.  Over the course of six weeks, Alvin travels over 300 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin, sleeping out under the stars and gently interacting with a slice of the Midwest.

Is Midwestern Gothic a thing?  Because this feels like a Midwestern Gothic-Lite.  There's a layer of weird just under the surface of what is otherwise a sweet, heartwarming little story.  That's the Lynch influence.  I will admit, I've never really been interested in Lynch's films.  I wasn't impressed with Eraserhead and I couldn't get through Mulholland Drive.  He seems like an interesting dude, but his work just doesn't grab me.  This is probably the most accessible (maybe Dune, depending on the crowd) and I do like that he leaned into the humanity of Alvin's journey, but it's not something I would revisit.

It is currently streaming on Disney+ and is based on a true story.

After Life (1998)

  Movie Club pick for this week!  I had never even heard of it before but it was very sweet and kind of an antidote to recent weeks.

Two dozen recently deceased are interviewed in a kind of afterlife holding room.  They have a few days to determine their most precious memory, of the time when they were happiest, and have it recreated for them to dwell on for eternity.  One man, Watanabe (Taketoshi Naitô), realizes upon reflection that he can't think of a single happy memory and his exploration of his past hits close to home for Mochizuki (Arata Iura), one of the counselors.  

There's no twist, no edge, no bait-and-switch.  People are literally asked to choose their favorite memory and then the Community Theater of the Dead pulls together a set and recreates it for them.  It is completely charming and sweet, a balm for the soul.  Here lately it has seemed like everything is a slog but this movie felt restorative.

It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Cross of Iron (1977)

  I feel like Sam Peckinpah would have been an incredible Twitter shitposter based on his filmography.  Content warning:  war violence, death of a child, attempted rape

On the Eastern Front, a new captain (Maximilian Schell) arrives, filled with pompous surety that he will be awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery, despite the dire projections of the .  His commander (James Mason) recognizes him for the useless classist aristocrat he is and warns the platoon leader (James Coburn) that Captain Stransky is going to put the men in danger so he can get a medal.  But things turn murderous when Sergeant Steiner refuses to lie on Stransky's award recommendation.

It is a confident man who decides to take a book about Nazis in Russia and try and make them sympathetic.  Noble, even.  It definitely has a Dirty Dozen feel, with men barely hanging on to the last scraps of their humanity.  And it's probably Peckinpah's gayest movie in that he acknowledges gay people exist if only to be blackmailed for it.

Apparently the production was a total shitshow and the project ran out of money before filming finished so the ending is a little abrupt.  It ended up having all the prints sold off to pay debts and Peckinpah coughed up $90K of his own money to cover the technicians' pay so it's kind of a miracle this film exists at all.  Which may explain why it's not streaming anywhere.  

That's okay, though, because I can't in good conscience recommend this one.  It's interesting, sure, but there are better WWII films, better Peckinpah films, and damn sure better James Mason/James Coburn films.  Maybe we just let this one go.

Sahara (2005)

  This was much better than I remembered it being.  It's a fun popcorn flick and not nearly as ham-fisted as it could have been.

Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) and his best friend Al Giordino (Steve Zahn) are marine salvage specialists, AKA treasure hunters, working for a private company run by their old admiral (William H. Macy).  They accidentally get involved with an epidemiologist (Penelope Cruz) searching for Patient Zero of a possible outbreak along the Niger River.  Pitt is looking for a fabled Civil War era ironclad that rumors hold came to the coast of Africa in the late 1800s.  Wouldn't you know it, both goals are interconnected via a conniving Frenchman (Lambert Wilson) and a ruthless warlord (Lennie Jones).  

Dirk Pitt is the protagonist of a long-running adventure book series by Clive Cussler.  Now, if I remember correctly from damn near 20 years ago, he hated this adaptation so much he tried to have his name taken off of it.  A very cursory Google search turns up an article from The Guardian from 2007 where Cussler sued the production company because they drastically altered the plot despite telling him he had final authority over the screenplay.  I never read the book (I find Cussler too much of an Ian Fleming-wannabe) so I can't say how different it is.  The movie is big and loud and silly and fun.  Frankly, that's all it needed to be.  It absolutely bombed at the box office but it's worth a rewatch at home.

It's currently streaming on Paramount+.