We’re in a funny spot, where “movies are back!”, so to speak (witness the mountain of money made in its first four days by the terrific big-screen spectacle Top Gun: Maverick), but the World Of Cinema still feels a bit scrawny and undernourished. In the month that has just started, for example, there are a grand total of six wide releases, one of them having only gotten promoted to that status with in the last couple of weeks, and only two of them feel like they were actually designed in the hopes of making money. On the other hand, there are two animated films that are getting limited releases (one as a brief precursor to hitting streaming, more’s the pity) that I really loved, so I present this preview of a somewhat whiffy-looking month in their honor.
3.6.2022
Nothing says “summertime fun” like a David Cronenberg body horror picture about people who are erotically hung-up on gory body modification. But hey, if Crimes of the Future has somehow managed to get a wide release for itself, I’m not going to complain; it’s a mode I’ve been patiently waiting for the director to return to for basically the whole time I’ve been old enough to be aware of his career, and with Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart headlining, I am expecting absolutely terrific things, even if the whole thing feels like a dirty joke being played on the multiplexes of North America.
That film’s eleventh-hour promotion to a wide release means that we’re getting the rare horror double feature this weekend; Watcher looks extremely “horror movie with a social message”, which is quickly turning into my second-least-favorite current genre (“biopic of a musician” will always be at the bottom), but I have to admit, a film about how creepy it would be if Burn Gorman was always staring at you definitely feels like it’s onto something.
Did I say “biopic of a musician” is my least-favorite genre? “Biopic of a random 19th Century European that somehow gets marketed as an art film in America because it’s subtitled” is right down there, but we get so few of them that it doesn’t feel like quite as big a thorn in my side. Nonetheless, we have this week the French middlebrow costume drama Eiffel, about how Gustave Eiffel couldn’t design a tower until he fell in love, or some goddamn thing like that. More happily, the invaluable GKIDS is putting out a very lively, affable Japanese animated feature, Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, which finds Studio 4°C (of (Mind Game and Tekkonkinkreet) in an especially friendly and playful mood.
10.6.2022
If you have an opportunity to see Mad God in theaters, I beg you to do so (here’s the list in the U.S.). Starting on 16 June, it’s going to be streaming on Shudder, and that’s going to be a horrible way to watch it. The film is an oppressive, overwhelming wall of nightmare imagery and loud noise, and when I saw it at a festival screening, it benefited incalculably from the feeling of being imprisoned in a theater with it. The film itself is the decades-in-the-making passion project of visual effects artist Phil Tippett, who labored mostly alone on a stop-motion feature that plays like an apocalyptic vision of Return of the Jedi (which Tippett worked on) crossed with Hieronymus Bosch. Obviously that’s not for everybody, but if that sounds even a tiny bit intriguing, it’s an experience and a half, and I’m absolutely apoplectic that it’s going to spend the rest of time languishing in the cobwebby corners of a minor streaming service, probably without even a Blu-ray release to legitimise it.
Speaking of loud nightmares: Jurassic World: Dominion has proudly announced that it’s bringing an end to the Jurassic Park franchise once and for all after six entries, and to that I say: thank God. It’s weird for a film that is clearly shaping up to be one of the big hits, if not the big hit of the summer, but I cannot find a single, solitary person who actually thinks it looks good. God knows I am not the exception; I think, in fact, that it looks so bad that it’s going to finally unseat The Lost World: Jurassic Park as my least-favorite movie in the series, after 25 long years.
17.6.2022
Compared to JW: Dominion, absolutely anything looks good, but that’s the only way I can come up with a compliment to pay Lightyear, which is the 26th feature film by Pixar Animation Studios in 27 years. And in all that time and all those movies, I’ve never wanted to see any of their films less than I want to see this one. That’s mostly down to its convoluted trash barge of a concept: this is the movie that inspired the toy line that included the Buzz Lightyear action figure that Andy received at the start of 1995’s Toy Story. Even taking that at face value, I have two major complaints (Why doesn’t it look like a ’90s film, then? and The implication of Toy Story is that Buzz Lightyear was a Saturday morning cartoon show, wasn’t it?), and not taking it at face value, that is one of the bullshittiest concepts for a brand extension that that the Walt Disney Company has ever tied to put over on us.
24.6.2022
I just said that I hate musician biopics, yes? I also hate movies with running times of 2 hours and 39 minutes, so Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis has me on its bad side twice over, except: the reviews out of Cannes caught my attention. Specifically, the negative reviews, oddly enough, one of which groused that it’s like somebody cross-bred Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and the Wachowski Speed Racer, and when you put it like that, I’m not sure if I’ve ever wanted anything more than that. Luhrmann hasn’t made any film at all in ages, and he hasn’t made a good film in longer still, and that running time is deadly murder, but I admit that I’m now curious in a way that the dreadful trailers hadn’t gotten me.
Last up, an intriguingly grubby-looking horror film, The Black Book, in which Ethan Hawke plays a serial killer for his Sinister director, Scott Derrickson. And while Derrickson’s name instantly puts me on the defensive, Sinister is the one film of his I mostly like, so maybe lightning will end up striking a second time.
Okay, last last up, some limited releases: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On looks so twee I want to drink poison every time I see the trailer, and Flux Gourmet is a film by my beloved fetishistic weirdo Peter Strickland, that I think is about people who want to fuck food, so I’m obviously all the way onboard with that.