THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)
Peter Jackson / Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, Peter Jackson
"Maybe a tiny bit too long in the beginning? The Gandalf-visits-the-Shire stuff is pretty precious. Otherwise this holds up completely; some distance highlights in particular how excellently the horror elements work. Frodo putting on the Ring is some phenomenally psychedelic imagery without ever feeling tonally so"
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (2002)
Peter Jackson / Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, Peter Jackson
"Again the horror is the best part, this time in the unstatedly bizarre Dead Marshes and coming from Serkis, Dourif, and to a lesser extent Lee, who is mostly presence and little performance. Legolas and Gimli are starting to feel like real kids' movie stuff, even if the comic relief is necessary."
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO (2003)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Not really a Mariachi sequel, but Rodriguez finally gets to stretch his legs, pushing the action, comedy, and (oddly) the gore to the limit. Also benefits from the absence of romance, which in the previous films was at best cheesy"
MANDY (2018)
Panos Cosmatos / Panos Cosmatos
"Finally caught up with this and thought it was worth adding that "Starless" is the perfect opening track here. Not just because it matches the endless cosmic beauty in which the film is situated, nor because it's one of the greatest songs ever written, but because of its place in music history. See, there are those who claim that King Crimson's Red is the first true heavy metal album. And, while the sort of sonic philosophy of metal is there, if that makes any sense, you have to have dropped a whole lot of acid to believe that in any objective sense - there are still major ingredients lacking from the music, and the named metal wave wasn't influenced by it. Listen to that saxophone solo in "Starless" and tell me that could be a Metallica song. The debate speaks to the ethereal placelessness of Red, the ghost possessing the guitars of metal and prog rather than being possessed by either. Mandy shares iconography with those same cultures but itself is far sideways of either - it comes from that same animating spirit that also created Red."
BLACK SWAN (2010)
Darren Aronofsky / Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin
"Kinda weird that this movie has three writers and they're all dudes. I guess no one said they're straight. Once you get past the who the fuck gives a shit about ballet trappings this is a really fun thriller with an obviously great soundtrack (Swa/Lake), some zany body horror and body humpin, and a nice pre-packaged exegesis (Swa/Lake) that makes the artsy elements feel playful instead of pretentious. It's sort of a black comedy horror, the only other example of which I can think of at the moment is RARE EXPORTS"
PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987)
John Carpenter / John Carpenter (as Martin Quatermass)
"Probably some of the worst dialogue ever and some real iffy performances dependent on it (can't bring myself to blame Victor Wong), still as great as ever at translating Lovecraft to cinema. Some of the best imagery of Carpenter's career (bug man, the hand behind the mirror, any shot involving Alice Cooper). This was a re-watch after reading The Call of Cthulhu and recognizing the element of the shared dream."
QUATERMASS II / ENEMY FROM SPACE (1957)
Val Guest / Val Guest, Nigel Kneale
"These Quatermass movies are like everything good about the X-Files crammed into a 90 minute running time. They are so blindingly action-packed, and Brian Levy gives a strong enough performance to give them some heart and identity even though there's no time for character development. Quatermass' no bullshit, no time personality is entertaining and weird enough to start with (sort of like Sherlock Holmes on even more cocaine) that you're never ready to learn that oh, we were only in first (then second, then third) gear there."
JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS (2013)
Stephen Chow, Derek Kwok / Stephen Chow, Derek Kwok, others
"There's this great opening scene set across a waterside village, incredibly flexible and pleasantly comic when not surprisingly mean. The tone swaps to horror for another darkly comic vignette; thereafter follow 60 grueling minutes of attempted rape and emotional battery, passed off as comedy because the violence is slapstick and the perpetrator female. Never comes together as a whole, but more unpleasant than not."
THE US (2019)
Jordan Peele / Jordan Peele
"If this was a little direct-to-video slasher throwback I'd stumbled across on Netflix, I'd never have clicked play, but if for whatever reason I did, I'd say well at least it had a passable gimmick and a creative final act. As Hollywood's next big savior of the horror genre, it's awfully junky with derivative, predictable (therefore safe) action and an immaculately wasted premise (guess what the doppelgangers do? They run around stabbing people!). A couple great compositions, namely the one the movie's being sold on (the shadow family standing in a driveway), but some plain obnoxious (the deep focus expository scene near the end) and most which would be comfortable in a Platinum Dunes reboot."
HEAVY METAL (1981)
Gerald Potterton / A bunch. Dan O'Bannon contributed to the frame story and "B-17".
"Come on guys what the hell. How do you make a movie called HEAVY METAL and not include more than one heavy metal track? ("The Mob Rules" by Black Sabbath btw, great song). Even the Blue Oyster Cult songs that were recorded for the movie (and went unused - you can't miss where "Vengeance (The Pact)" is meant to be played) aren't at all metal, they're that sort of new wave-influenced classic rock being played by the Cars around the same time. Where's AC/DC? Iron Maiden? Priest? I love Cheap Trick but they aren't metal, and the songs used here aren't even mid-tier 'Trick. That really is all there is to say about the movie - it's clearly a sequence of music videos that had the soundtrack replaced with public domain orchestral music so it would be legal to upload to Youtube. Some of the shorts are better than others - the second, "Dan/Den" is the only one completely without merit. "Harry Canyon" has an interestingly detailed, heavy-pencil style; "Captain Sternn" actually plays as a music video and has a few notes of sophisticated animation (the witness stand transformation is outright good); "B-17" lacks a story but strikes hard with creepy imagery and atmosphere; "So Beautiful and So Dangerous" is a moronic cartoon with enough energy to keep your attention, and "Taarna" is a pretty legit riff on contemporaneous swords and sorcery that may as well be written by Robert E. Howard. The biggest positive I can give the movie is that I was never bored, even if most of what was happening was stupid."
TETSUO THE IRON MAN (1987)
Shinya Tsukamoto / Shinya Tsukamoto
"This is the real fuckin shit. Hardcore expressionist terror, no time to relax or process emotions, pure experience. Observing its stylistic debts to Lynch and Cronenberg doesn't in the least lessen the kind of visual genius required to generate this kind of unhinged, tactile imagery that on paper ought to be a cartoon but never feels like one. The b&w serves a practical purpose too: it renders the surreal imagery more believable, masking the rougher edges of animation that in color might look not unlike Robot Chicken, while pinning it just north of puke-worthy such that our eyes can process it before the stomach has time to turn. Not sure I would want to see what Tsukamoto does with a better budget."
MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (1986)
Stephen King / Stephen King
"As meaningless and ridiculous as a story can get and not nearly funny enough to justify it, but generous enough with explosions and automobile homicide to stay entertaining"
LAYER CAKE (2005)
Matthew Vaughn / J.J. Connolly
"With all the human scope and fun performances of the preceding Guy Ritchie films and a solid noir story too, this was a pretty purely enjoyable flick. Still, it could've been even better had it spent time on deeper characterization rather than long, empty, commercial-like shots of cars and drugs."
JOHN WICK CHAPTER 3: PARABELLUM (2019)
Chad Stahelski / Derek Kolstad etc.
"The first few fights scenes are hilarious as they are visceral, then some CGI, then some boring, then Halle Berry is the most off-putting actress on earth, then Shadow Dancer, then The Raid but bullets only count as punches now."
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (2003)
Peter Jackson / Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, Peter Jackson
"Oddly enough I'd say this is the worst one - hours of build-up to prolonged action climaxes which are ultimately subverted by needless cartoons. The Frodo content is character-wise at its best, with his arc of escaping nihilistic despair and Sam's of accepting sacrifice, but the giant spider is noisy and frantic where something more insidious is called for. Smeagol and the ring's curtain call is likewise undercut by a severely goofy fight scene where the little goblin bobs around like a marionette. It's nice to see Pippin and Merry finally get major arcs, but a little odd that the last of the trilogy is so heavily dedicated to minor characters when Two Towers got all the Gandalf and Aragorn stuff."
GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (2019)
Michael Dougherty / Michael Dougherty... but seriously, this isn't going in the auteur count.
"An alright one with good images and good designs used on action too noisy to ever fully enjoy. See full review."
GUNHED (1989)
Masato Harada/ Masato Harada, James Bannon
"Fairly dreadful James Cameron rip, though some great Battlebots miniature work in the final 30 minutes almost redeems it. If this isn't the inspiration for Armored Core, I'd like to know what is."
CHILD'S PLAY (1988)
Tom Holland / Don Mancini
"Effectively mines the pleasures of its premise, from the suspicious kid to the delirious mom to the ornate set-pieces necessary for a doll to kill. Not psychologically interesting but as entertaining as you can get for a killer doll movie."
CHILD'S PLAY 2 (1990)
John Lafia/ Don Mancini
"Not great, but better than expectations, with a frankly terrific factory floor climax that makes better use of the mechanics of the setting than the typically dark, nonsensical hell-factories of e.g. Terminator"
CHILD'S PLAY 3 (1991)
Jack Bender / Don Mancini
"K, now it sucks. Embarrassing teenage drama, pathetic and offensive kills (the only ones that even happen onscreen are a bludgeoning, a shooting, and a slit throat. One of the all-time great barber characters in cinema, though."
GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA II (1993)
Takao Okawara / Wataru Mimura
"The VS series totters between so stupid it's painful and so stupid it's great, within this very movie more than ever. Baby Godzilla, hilarious; Rodan the stepmom, awful. Psychics, outre as ever; abundance of phonetic English, incomprehensible. Pteranadon boy (played by the star of Gunhed, coincidentally), campy kiddy fun; his romantic subplot, not. Still, there's more good than bad, and any good at all puts it above Godzilla VS Mothra. I liked Mechagodzilla II's heavily armed design and the way it hovers around the battlefield, and Garuda is by far the best Super X relative. This movie sorta gets away with VS Godzilla's face turn, not asking him to defend or befriend humans at any point, though, as always, the characters are uncomfortably complimentary of a natural disaster that has killed thousands."
World Tour 19 - Korea, India, Germany, & Russia!
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
Joon-Ho Bong / Joon-Ho Bong, Sung-bo Shim
"A noirish tragedy of helpless masculinity, social commentary on police violence, grayscale morality play, and goofy character comedy. All forecast from the first moments, played out in parallel, not in series. Yep, we're in Korea."
ROAR (1981)
Noel Marshall / Noel Marshall
"Next time someone tries to claim Californians are the same species as the rest of us, show them this movie."
Abbas-Mustan / Robin Bhatt, Akash Khurana, Javed Siddiqui
"Operatic and featuring three central performances deserving of such, with particularly perfect musical sequences and an impressive, if not at all seamless, range of genre and tone; the best of which being a slasher / crime thriller situated in the middle that pulls a reverse-Psycho for switching sympathies."
Russian Animated Shorts (1969-1987)
"Vinnie-Puh", Eps. 1-3; "Cheburashka & Krokodil Gena", Eps. 1-2; "Tale of Tales", "Laughter & Grief by the White Sea" (Note: this is counted in the stats as 4 movies)
Various / Various
"Sad Russians, Soviet morals, and wonderful creativity with the form of animation. Vinnie-Puh is a living children's book (in a totally different style than A.A. Milne); Cheburashka is mechanically and thematically not unlike a Rankin/Bass special; Tale of Tales is too cryptic to register emotionally, but visionary nonetheless; and Laughter & Grief is as folksy as the name suggests, recalling a living tapestry."
FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG (1959)
Harald Reinl / Egon Eis, Jochen Joachim Bartsch, based on the novel by Edgar Wallace
"A bit too quickly cut to really sink into, but flashes of great creepy imagery. Between the editing, the clipped dialogue, the cavalcade of similar-looking men, and references to off-screen characters we've never met (presumably from an earlier, related novel?), the mystery was tough to follow, although in one regard that twistiness was interestingly novel: watching three different characters solve different pieces of the crime, only occasionally intersecting and rarely sharing knowledge.
It didn't remind me particularly of a slasher, but it did repeatedly call to mind the classic 60's Batman series. When we got a fight scene between two (judo-trained) heroes and an army of faceless goons shot at deeply canted angles and using cuts to punctuate blows, I was having a hard time believing it could be coincidence."
MR. INDIA (1987)
Shekhar Kapur / Salim-Javed
"Yakuza 3 meets Richard Donner's Superman in this family comedy about saving an orphanage and all India with the power of invisibility. Witty, sweet, creative, and fun; the 3+ hour runtime here providing substantial time for character development before we get to the inventive superhero crime-stopping capers. If this apes Superman, it's only in the best possible ways"
SOLARIS (1972)
Andrei Tarkovsky / Fridrikh Gorenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
"Counter the paralyzing imagery of 2001, it is the hypnotizing wonder and pervasive dread of a single, personal human experience that make this equally elemental in the nature of science fiction. That the dread is blurred and mixed and confused with hope is what makes it elemental in the nature of all existential art.
METROPOLIS (1927)
Fritz Lang / Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang, based on the novel by Thea von Harbou
"Again we move to a different pole, from Solaris's cryptic posthumanity to machines transfigured as Biblical symbolism, paired with spectacular action and enough perfect paintings to span the career of a world's greatest artist. Great creepy characters in the Thin Man and the Whore of Babylon, too. It's hard to be entertained by something like this, not for lack of action but because of the insistence on repetition, not unlike watching an opera."
DEEWAAR (The Wall) (1975)
Yash Chopra / Salim-Javed
"Thus far it seems the especial length of Indian movies, despite their typically epic scope, stems mostly from the abundance of detail, the kind of screenwriting chaff one expects to see in a TV drama"
BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998)
Ronny Yu / Don Mancini
"Funnier than not, especially the silly farcical manhunt stuff where the girl thinks the guy did it and vice versa, and their best friend thinks it was both of them. The campy self-aware dialogue is like nails on a chalkboard; Chucky himself is overfeatured to the point of taking away some of the charm; and Tiffany makes absolutely no sense (I think I get what they were going for - precious housewife with a weird serial killer fetish - but the weirdness is way too heavily foregrounded and turns the Martha Stewart references into bizarre pop-cultural non-sequiturs). But (and maybe this is just all the 3-hour subtitled movies setting in) it moves at lightning pace and always has something new to show."
SEED OF CHUCKY (2004)
Don Mancini / Don Mancini
"Pretty mediocre. There's a paper-thin satire of Hollywood that mostly sets up the movie's funniest bit, Tilly whoring herself for the part of the Virgin Mary, and Redman is admirably grounded among rapper horror cameos of the turn of the millenium. The John Waters cameo is great too. Good bits floating amidst an insubstantial (but brief) mass."
WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994)
Wes Craven / Wes Craven
"Kinda the same thing I said about Seed of Chucky, but with horror bits instead of jokes. The coffin attack is the best dream sequence since these movies were good, surreal images rather than an overarticulated journey, and I like the premise of Freddy emerging into the real world. But the movie does nothing to make the 'real' world seem any less cinematic than a Nightmare sequel, in particular everyone's casual acceptance of Heather's shrieking nonsense. Seeing the big guns cameo was a lot of fun, though I wish we got to see them die!"
ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938)
Sergei Eisenstein / Sergei Eisenstein
"Pretty indistinguishable from The Return of the King; a lengthy rallying of the troops, a battle that feels endless because of the paucity of spatial context, strung together from 'attacking the cameraman' close-ups, wide cavalry shots, and medium brothers-in-arms compositions. Throughout, the frame remains covered in bodies, unable to contain the masses of war. Then there's the real long ending where Frodo-Stalin is in slow motion."
THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck / Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
""
PATHER PANCHALI (1955)
Satyajit Ray / Satyajit Ray
""
PARASITE (2019)
Joon-Ho Bong / Joon-Ho Bong
"The angriest among Bong's films I've seen, yet the most self-consciously restrained, locked to its methodical parallel between two families. As per usual, employs outbursts of extreme emotion as punchlines without ever undermining their honesty. A madman stabbing a beloved young girl in the brief moment she disappers into her role as rich and carefree - she stabs back with cake."
DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978)
Don Taylor, Mike Hodges / Stanley Mann, Mike Hodges
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ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (1993)
Barry Sonnenfeld / Paul Rudnick
""
JOJO RABBIT AND THE FRIENDLY DUNE BUGGY (2019)
Taika Waititi / Taika Waititi
"Indecisive about what it wants to be and far too broad for something as specific and specifically appealing as the concept. The only people that would find this memorably funny or moving are the kind of people that are not going to see a movie with the concept 'wacky Hitler imaginary friend and a Nazi boy'"
KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952)
Phil Karlson / George Bruce, Harry Essex, Roland Brown, Harold Greene
"Not a good title but a fine cast of character actors for a lively tale of a strange caper and its aftermath"
CRISS CROSS (1949)
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CATS (2019)
/
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STATISTICS
Total - 45
Documentaries - Roar?
Foreign language - 17
Most frequent director - Peter Jackson (3)
Most frequent writer - Don Mancini (5)
Most frequent franchise - Child's Play (5)
$CURRENT_YEAR: 6
2010s: 9
2000s: 8
1990s: 7
1980s: 9
1970s: 5
1960s: 1
1950s: 4
1940s: 1
1930s: 1
1920s: 1
TOP FIVE*
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Metropolis
Solaris
Pather Panchali
Parasite
BOTTOM FIVE
Child's Play 3
Damien: Omen II
Gunhed
Jojo Rabbit and the Wonderful Kazoo
Maximum Overdrive
*excludes rewatches
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