Manchester by the Sea: Kenneth Lonergan

To read this review, go to: https://unseenfilms.blogspot.com/2016/09/nathanael-hood-travels-to-manchester-by.html.

7/10

I, Daniel Blake: Ken Loach

To read this review, go to: https://unseenfilms.blogspot.com/2016/09/nathanael-hood-is-rocked-by-ken-loachs.html.

9/10

Paterson: Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch's Paterson is a revelation, a heart-rending yet soul-uplifting story of a blue collar poet that reminds me why I love the cinema. I think the world had considered Jarmusch to be a director beyond his glory days, one of those old hat cinematic pioneers content to throw the odd project on the festival circuit every few years. But Paterson? Paterson is just as vibrant, vital, and stunning as anything Jarmusch has ever made. It might very well be my new favorite film of his. Adam Driver is wonderful as Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey. He spends his days writing poems in his head which he scribbles down before work and during his lunch break. He has an eccentric wife obsessed with black-and-white, a dumpy dog, and a run-down bar he likes to visit every night for a beer. The film takes place over a week, and like a fugue Jarmusch uses the repeated structure of Paterson's daily grind for revelations, discoveries, and chance encounters. This isn't just a film you watch, it's a film you inhabit. When I saw this film at the New York Film Festival, I remember thinking that I wish they would show it 2-3 more times instead of whatever else was on the program for that day (a wish I felt even more powerfully after sitting through the next film, João Pedro Rodrigues' interminable The Ornithologist [2016]). The characters become friends we become accustomed to. We feel like a passenger in Paterson's bar, and family member at his dinner table, a local at the bar he frequents. It is, in a word, sublime. And here's another word: essential.

9/10

Cutter's Way: Ivan Passer

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/blu-ray-review-cutters-way/.

7/10

Starship Troopers: Paul Verhoeven

I'm ALWAYS suspicious when directors claim their poorly received films were misunderstood because they were "satire." But yeah, Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers was DEFINITELY satire. The problem is that the film ITSELF forgets it's satire for the whole second half of its run-time. In the last half it becomes a standard war thriller. It makes us care too much for its characters, makes us too invested in their survival. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, with satire. Compare this film with Trey Parker's Team America: World Police (2004): there's not a frame of that film that doesn't remind you it's satire. If you were to accidentally catch just the last half of it on TV, you'd think it was a standard sci-fi thriller. The battle scenes are great and the effects still hold up. But the film fails to use them properly to achieve its satiric goals. It's a mess. A fun mess to watch, perhaps, but a mess nonetheless.

6/10

I.T.: John Moore

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-i-t/87369.

5/10

At All Costs: Mike Nicoll

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-at-all-costs/87143.

7/10

American Honey: Andrea Arnold

To read this review, go to: https://unseenfilms.blogspot.com/2016/09/nathanael-hood-looks-at-american-honey.html.

7/10

Gimme Danger: Jim Jarmusch

If I hadn't known going into Gimme Danger that it was directed by Jim Jarmusch, I literally would never have guessed that he had directed it afterwards. Which I suppose isn't a bad thing: Jarmusch's trademark slow, languid style wouldn't really match the story of Iggy Pop and the Stooges, one of the first and most influential punk bands in history. But that raises an interesting question: what's the point of Jarmusch making a documentary if it's not going to be inherently Jarmusch-esque? This film could probably have been made by any number of other documentarians. As it is, it's perfectly serviceable. My favorite parts explored how Iggy Pop took disparate elements of his musical upbringing--his playing drums for black blues musicians in Chicago, his love of avante-garde percussion albums, songwriting limited to 25 words or less inspired by the recommended length for fan letters to the children's shows of his youth--and created proto-punk. Alas, this is a Stooges documentary, not necessarily an Iggy Pop one, so we don't get any of his solo career exploits. That's a shame, too. I would have loved to hear about his exploits bumming around Berlin with Bowie.

6/10

Taipei Story: Edward Yang

Edward Yang's Taipei Story is a film which flows with the speed and rhythms of life itself. It's narratively indulgent, but visually beautiful, resplendent in the 80s/90s East Asian Polaroid look that I adore. I'm not entirely sure if I liked it, but I'm glad I saw it. I do have a couple of issues with it. For instance, I'm not sure it successfully followed through with what it wanted to say about commercialism and the newfound ubiquity of Western consumer goods and culture. The whole culture war aspect felt muddied, despite being a major point of focus. I occasionally had trouble following the plot since Yang doesn't always spell out exactly what's going on in any particular scene and how it ties together with the larger narrative. But I'm willing to chalk that up to the same problem Peter Bogdanovich reportedly had following the plot to Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958): he was too enamored with the visuals to pay close attention to what was actually happening. I'm not sure it deserves the same recognition as Yang's later masterpieces A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi (2000). But considering the rarity of Yang's work in the West, I would recommend jumping on any chance to see it.

7/10

Staying Vertical: Alain Guiraudie

Alain Guiraudie's Staying Vertical may not be the worst film I've seen this year at the New York Film Festival (it looks like that dubious honor will be going to Alison Maclean's The Rehearsal), but it's easily the stupidest. There's a scene in this movie where a straight man lovingly, tenderly sodomizes an old man to death. I just...what? I can't understand a single creative decision in this film. I think I get what it was going for: a slightly absurdist, deconstructionist view of the idea of humanity vis-à-vis the cycle of birth, life, death, and whatnot. But I don't know. It just doesn't work. Is this film comedic? Tragic? Serious? All three? What's the significance of any of it? Why do the hobos rob the main character naked? What literary agent would allow their client to shirk their writing responsibilities long enough to conceive and father a child while still financing them? Why did the same 2-3 characters keep popping up in everybody elses' houses? Why the constant shots of the main female character's vagina? Seriously, I think we may see more close-ups of her vagina than her face! I wasn't alone in thinking this film ridiculous, the other critics laughed at it, too.

2/10

The Fantastic Four: Oley Sassone

I can't in any good conscience call Oley Sassone's The Fantastic Four--the infamous unreleased Fantastic Four movie produced in part by Roger Corman--a good movie. But it is an entertaining one. It's colorful, wacky, weird, and delightful. Some of the performances are delightful--Alex Hyde-White shines as the enthusiastic yet reserved Reed Richards--while some of them are undeniably painful--Phillip Van Dyke was just...terrible as Johnny Storm. The special effects were bare-bone and cheesy, but in a weird way the film seemed proud of them. But most importantly, the film wasn't ashamed of its comic book origins. They treat Ben Grimm's plight with genuine pathos; the flights to outer space with sincere wonder and awe. And there's a real orchestral music score! Remember those? It's memorable, emotional, and more touching than any of the ones featured in recent comic books films. And in the face of all those super-serious superhero movies, it's a breath of fresh air.

6/10

My Journey Through French Cinema: Bertrand Tavernier

When I got out of Bertrand Tavernier's My Journey Through French Cinema--and forget whatever IMDb might call it, that's what it was called at the New York Film Festival--I joked on twitter: "Come for Tavernier's stories about Jean Gabin and Jean-Pierre Melville, leave for everything else." But perhaps I wasn't entirely joking. This sprawling 190-minute documentary isn't so much an exhaustive recount of Tavernier's love for French cinema as it is a rambling, amorphous mass of remembrances, anecdotes, and the occasional love letter to this director or that. What's most astonishing was that the credits suggested that this might only be the first part of a series that could easily be extended another 190 minutes as it examines more directors like Jacques Tati. Spare me. This film was enough of a chore to sit through. It made me pine for Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson's A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), a 225-minute beast of a documentary about...exactly what it describes in the title. Despite its greater length, it was endlessly absorbing and captivating for two main reasons. First, Scorsese's film was rigidly, meticulously structured whereas Tavernier's film staggers along with seemingly no direction whatsoever. Second, Scorsese is an actual documentarian. This might be Tavernier's second documentary, but if it's proof of anything, it's that he still hasn't fully grasped the medium and how to utilize it.

5/10

Neruda: Pablo Larraín

I don't think I've seen a movie use light to obfuscate interiors as brilliantly as in Pablo Larraín's Neruda, an odd almost-biopic, almost-detective thriller about the late career and exile of Nobel Prize winning writer Pablo Neruda. Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong makes entire rooms vanish with harsh lights, turning figures into opaque silhouettes, suggesting a world where nothing is socially transparent; even daylight can't blot out the corruption infecting the Chilean government. More than anything, Neruda is an astonishingly beautiful film, easily one of the most visually stunning I've seen all year. But the film doesn't know what to make of itself. The first third is a cat-and-mouse political thriller obsessed with shifting identities. The middle third is a biopic with occasional asides focusing on fictional detective Oscar Peluchoneau (Gael García Bernal), a police officer hired by the Chilean government to locate and humiliate Neruda internationally. The last third becomes a post-modern dalliance as it follows Neruda's flight out of Chile and Oscar's eventual revelation that he is nothing but one of Neruda's fictional characters. Even stranger, the film treats him as an incompetent idiot in the last third whereas he commanded a certain begrudged gravity in the first two-thirds. Neruda doesn't really work, but it isn't a complete failure either. I think a few wires just got crossed during production.

6/10

The Rehearsal: Alison Maclean

It's hard to figure out exactly what I hated most about Alison Maclean's The Rehearsal. Was it the fact that the protagonist was accepted into an elite acting school despite barely being able to act? Or was it the fact that the film felt like it lacked any and all narrative connective tissue, jumping from one plot cul-de-sac to the next with complete abandon? Was it its pretentious, post-modern nonsense, its out-of-the-blue character death 2/3rds of the way through, it completely unlikable characters? No, I think it has to be its refusal to condemn pedophilia and statutory rape. The main character, a college student, gets into a sexual relationship with a middle school girl (the movie doesn't specify exactly how old she is, but she's young enough that her father physically threatens the protagonist when he discovers the nature of their relationship). The film never punishes the college student. In fact, the film ends with them reconciling and essentially walking into an uncertain yet happy future together. And let's not ignore the fact that the girlfriend's sister, another minor, got into a sexual relationship with a 40-something tennis coach. The film seems to sympathize with the sister's grief over losing the relationship. Don't give me any bullshit that the point of The Rehearsal was artistic integrity and honesty, therefore its glossing over the pedophilia and statutory rape is somehow okay. It's not. Maclean chose not to. She should be held accountable.

1/10

Oh hey, check it out. I went ahead and wrote a review of this dung-heap.

http://theyoungfolks.com/review/nyff-review-the-rehearsal/88430.

Moonlight: Barry Jenkins

Despite having a number of things going for it--strong performances throughout, particularly from child actors; moments of intense beauty and visual poetry--Barry Jenkin's Moonlight doesn't fully come together. This cinematic triptych of the youth, adolescence, and adulthood of a gay black man from Miami took the Toronto Film Festival by storm, many critics proclaiming it one of the year's greatest triumphs. But again, the film doesn't fully come together. It tries to mix moments of intense hallucinogenic wonder such as a vision of his junkie mother moving backwards into a neon-lit doorway to yell at him with prolonged sequences of cinéma vérité dialogue. If the film had committed to either strictly oneiric or strictly realistic, it would have had more dramatic heft. But in trying to be both, it fails at both. The third act feels deflated and overlong, the middle third rushed and spotty. It felt like it was missing an essential something. Not sure what that something is, but it needed it.

6/10

A Family Affair: Tom Fassaert

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-a-family-affair/86828.

6/10

Sing Street: John Carney

John Carney's Sing Street was exactly the kind of movie I needed: a bit silly, a bit cheesy, but completely, 100% honest and earnest. I think only musicians will truly appreciate this story of a young boy who forms a band to impress a girl and hopefully get out of Ireland. Only musicians can understand how hilariously bad their early music is: the fidgety guitar work, the synth riffs played with two pointer fingers, the preposterous lyrics. They're little details that only people in the know can understand. The film is optimistic and has a happy ending, but it feels earned. Carney specializes in that kind of ending: the most notable other example being the end of Begin Again (2013) when Keira Knightley breaks up with her boyfriend but rides off into the night finally feeling free about her future (at least that's my interpretation). It may not be one of the best films of 2016, but it's destined to be one of my favorites.

8/10

Watership Down: Martin Rosen, John Hubley

Is it weird that the thing I find the most fascinating about Martin Rosen and John Hubley's Watership Down is the sound editing? It's so deliciously disconcerting. The actors each sound like they recorded their lines in completely different studios, some of them speaking with their lips right against the mic, other from across the room.  They're all set to the same audio level, though; the dialogue being just as loud during close-ups as with long shots. It creates a bizarre effect where the dialogue seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. The film is also gorgeous to look at: rustic, pastoral backgrounds with realistic animals tempered with just the slightest bit of anthropomorphism. It's violent and shocking, but that stays true to the book. Would I recommend it for children? Only when they're old enough to truly understand the difference between movies and reality.

8/10

The Vessel: Julio Quintana

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/the-vessel/.

7/10

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums: Kenji Mizoguchi

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/criterion-discovery-story-last-chrysanthemum/.

8/10

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Michael Radford

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/1984-2/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=Nineteen%20Eighty-Four%20is%20Here.

8/10

Fish Tank: Andrea Arnold

[Revisit Review]

I had forgotten how amazing Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is. The ending scene completely gutted me; it remains one of the best uses of hip-hop in film history. Although I had forgotten about the sequence where Mia, the protagonist, kidnaps Michael Fassbender's daughter. The scene where the girl falls into the river almost gave me a heart attack. Fish Tank may be Arnold's most brutal film. Yet it's also strangely optimistic.

9/10

Wuthering Heights: Andrea Arnold

Wuthering Heights may be my favorite Andrea Arnold film purely because she took a book I absolutely couldn't stand and created an astounding movie. She does three ingenious things to make the plot more bearable: she tells it from Heathcliff's point of view; removes the second half of the book involving the second generation of Wuthering Heights tenants; downplays how Heathcliff emotionally and psychologically tortured his wife Isabelle. Heathcliff is much more sympathetic when he isn't destroying innocent lives around him. But additionally, she also makes the film more about mood and atmosphere than the actual plot. Perhaps the film's one flaw is that people who aren't familiar with the novel might have some difficulty following what goes on. There's very little dialogue. Instead she focuses on what Heathcliff sees, smells, touches, and feels. I haven't seen a more tactile film since Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964).

8/10

Red Road: Andrea Arnold

I miss Dogme 85. I don't know if I ideologically agree with everything it stood for. But you can't argue that it didn't produce some stunning films. Take Andrea Arnold's Red Road. It's a ravishingly gorgeous film shot with only natural light which still manages to be both achingly colorful and luminous. It also helps that it has a fascinating mystery plot: a woman who works as a security cam guard begins stalking an ex-con fresh out of prison. Why does she do it? The reason may be a bit contrived, a bit too soap-opera for my tastes. But they work as a motivating force. I've never associated Arnold's work with tight plotting; she's a much more naturalistic director. But the demands of the mystery genre proved her ability to tightly weave a compelling storyline with satisfying twists and turns.

7/10

Adrift in Tokyo: Satoshi Miki

Watching Satoshi Miki's Adrift in Tokyo, one gets the sense of witnessing a tiny part of a much larger world. The characters will often enter a scene only to become bit players in larger stories: an elderly restaurant owner fighting with her abusive, middle aged son; a Rei Ayanami cosplayer being stalked by a panty thief with possible superpowers; and so on. But there's also a general coziness to Adrift in Tokyo; a warm, all-encompassing feeling of comfort and warmth like a mug of hot chocolate on an autumn afternoon. It's pace is languid, its narrative reveals--such as the cause of the yakuza boss' wife's death--are treated stoically. Much like the seemingly endless walk undertaken by the protagonists, the film seems content to drift along at its own pace, uncovering bits and pieces of plot and character at it's own leisure. Superb.

8/10

Wasp: Andrea Arnold

Suddenly American Honey (2016) makes a lot more sense. At times it seems like Andrea Arnold's debut short film Wasp is a pre-make of her later, nearly 3-hour road epic: it starts with a mother figure struggling to feed and take care of children; eventually the mother figure abandons the children in order to find fulfillment or personal happiness; everything ends with a sing-along. Even the cinematography seems the same, utilizing close-ups to chop-up scenes into individual parts like a Cubist montage. Wasp is a great film, devastating in its depiction of poverty and strained motherhood while ultimately happy and hopeful.

Starving the Beast: Steve Mims

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-starving-the-beast/86258.

5/10

Minions: Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda

Man...a lot of super-talented people worked on Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda's Minions. There's some shockingly good animation; the facial and body language alone is worthy of the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. But it's all wasted on a script more interested in being frantic and loud than in being actually funny. I don't oppose the Minions on a conceptual level. In fact, I quite like how they emphasize silent-era slapstick comedy. But everything went south in Minions from the very beginning when an ingenious opening sequence of the titular characters assisting the greatest villains of history was spoiled by unnecessary narration. That's the film's greatest problem: it's too concerned with being silly and overbearing than in actually telling a story. A lot of this humor could work. The characters are memorable--I loved Scarlet Overkill--and the Minions are charming in their own odd way. I also love how this is a children's film unafraid to show people and animals getting killed point blank. But it's simply too much. It needs breathing room.

4/10

La Promesse: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne

Is there a particular reason why the main character in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's La Promesse is named Igor? Is Igor a common name for Belgian men? Or is this another one of those on-the-nose bits of symbolism that the brothers are so fond of? After all, he is his father's assistant in his dastardly doings, smuggling and exploiting illegal immigrants. It's funny, though, because I see more of the mystic and the numinous in La Promesse than I did in The Kid with a Bike (2011), a film explicitly modeled after fairy tales. There's much talk of spirits and magic, mostly from the African immigrants who carry out mystic rituals. But what impressed me the most about La Promesse was the relationship between Igor and his father: there's genuine tension, fear, and love between the two of them. It made them fell human, even in the depths of their inhumanity.

7/10

Max Rose: Daniel Noah

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-max-rose/86028.

7/10

Kubo and the Two Strings: Travis Knight

The following is an excerpt of my review for my church's newsletter. To read the rest, check out the newsletter!

Stop. Before you go any further, please watch Travis Knight’s Kubo and the Two Strings. First, it’s a fantastic film that deserves to be seen. A stop-motion masterpiece from the wizards at Studio Laika, the film follows a young boy named Kubo (Art Parkinson) in ancient Japan as he sets out to collect three enchanted artifacts so he can battle his grandfather, the wicked Moon King (Ralph Fiennes). Aided by a talking Monkey (Charlize Theron) and an amnesiac samurai cursed with the body of a beetle (Matthew McConaughey), the film plays like a classic Hollywood serial operating with the same mythopoetic narrative logic as Star Wars. It’s fun, colorful, emotional, and one of the best family films in recent years. The film needs our support. Despite a stunning 96% approval rating on RottenTomatoes, the film flopped at the box office, barely making a fourth of its $60 million budget back. But the second reason you should see Kubo is that the rest of this article explores spoilers. You have been warned.

Despite its rollicking sense of adventure, Kubo is a film about grief. Living in a seaside cave away from society, Kubo tends to his ailing mother who seems to be losing her mind and memory a bit more every day. He longs for a normal family, something denied him since birth when the Moon King killed his father. He makes money putting on performances with enchanted origami figures he magically brings to life with his shamisen—a stringed musical instrument played like a guitar. But the sight of happy families is too much for him. When the village has a festival where they honor their dead ancestors with prayers and paper lanterns, he breaks his mother’s rule to never stay out after dark so he can pray for his dead father. When the sun sets, the Moon King finds Kubo and sends his twin aunts (both voiced by Rooney Mara) to hunt him down. His mother dies protecting him one last time as she uses the last of her magic to send him far, far away to a land where he can be safe.

8/10

Limelight: Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin's Limelight is one of those films you can't easily separate from its legacy: it's one of Chaplin's most personal films, one of his only sound triumphs, the film that saw him exiled from America while he was promoting it overseas. But it should be separated from its legacy. How else can people come to terms with the fact that it simply isn't very good? The film feels like all of the most drearily melodramatic moments from his silent films cobbled together into an uneasy whole. I admit that I like the dynamic of the washed up comedian and the depressed ballerina helping each other, alternating their roles as supporter and supported. But the film was simply interminable. Too many of the song-and-dance numbers are boring, too many of the routines rote. The sequence where Chaplin and Buster Keaton teamed up may be worth watching the whole film for, but there's not enough in the rest of it to make me want to ever revisit it.

4/10

Speedy: Ted Wilde

Watching Ted Wilde's SPEEDY (1928). That Coney Island date sequence is one of the purest distillations of joy I've seen in a silent film.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) August 24, 2016

The scene where Harold Lloyd and Ann Christy pretend to live in the back of the furniture truck...man...heartbreaking AND hilarious.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) August 24, 2016

SPEEDY > SAFETY LAST!

SL is woefully average until the last third. SPEEDY shines all the way through.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) August 24, 2016

SPEEDY contains slapstick worthy of Keaton and a wistfulness that never veers into the sappy melodrama of Chaplin. A singular achievement.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) August 24, 2016

9/10

Eureka: Nicolas Roeg

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/eureka-ive-found-it/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=Eureka!%20I%27ve%20Found%20It!.

4/10

Ghostheads: Brendan Mertens

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I went into Brendan Mertens' Ghostheads thinking that it was an Asylum knock-off. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a touching documentary on the fan culture surrounding the Ghostbusters franchise. It seems like a response to the pervasive toxicity surrounding the release of Paul Feig's remake, particularly from "Men's Rights" groups that harassed the cast and crew. We see many moving stories about how the fan culture transformed lives: how it was crucial for one woman as a coping mechanism during her recovery from alcoholism; how it changed the life of a family with a son suffering from cerebral palsy. There's even an extended sequence where a fan who transformed his car into a replica of Ecto-1 visits the Hook and Ladder fire station on this 30th birthday and stumbles onto the set of the remake. Make no mistake: it's the equivalent of a puff piece. But it's charming, sweet, and emotional without being too corny.

7/10

Jour de Fête: Jacques Tati

Few feature film debuts so perfectly encapsulated the themes and obsessions that would define the rest of their creator's careers as did Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête: gentle contempt for modernization, a preference for an idealized and pastoral rural lifestyle, a fondness for sight and audio gags. The film takes about 20 minutes to get going, but afterwards Tati treats us to surprisingly advanced slapstick. So many of the repeated jokes cracked me up: the cross-eyed gentleman who tends to throw or hammer things too far to the right; the stretch of country road infested by particularly aggressive mosquitoes. There are even quiet subplots filling up the corners of the film that go nowhere but make the soul feel happy for their inclusion, such as an abortive romantic relationship between a local villager and a traveling fair worker. The last 30 minutes, when Tati's postman character (and how weird was it to hear him talk?) decides to deliver his mail "American-style," is slapstick worthy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Tati would go on to make better, more important films. But pound-for-pound, Jour de Fête is his funniest.

8/10

Natural Selection: Chad L. Scheifele

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-natural-selection/85673.

3/10

Is That You?: Dani Menkin

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-is-that-you/85669.

5/10

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Jaromil Jireš

Jaromil Jireš's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is one of the more curious cinematic fairy tales I've come across. I don't just mean that because it's odd and surreal. I mean that because I'm not sure I've seen a fairy tale with such an ambivalent opinion of sex. Sex in this film is both a source of damnation--the evil vampire Richard and his pawns seduce their victims before killing them; virginity is highly prized and venerated, even in the end when the virgins gather around Valerie and serenade her--but it's also a source of salvation--Valerie heals one of the vampire victims by sleeping with her. I suppose the point is that sex is a tool and what matters is who's using it...and for what. In any case the film is a hypnotic tone poem of beauty.

8/10

Black Widow: Bob Rafelson

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/a-tame-black-widow/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=A%20Tame%20Black%20Widow%20(1987).

6/10

The Houses October Built: Bobby Roe

Comes a point where you stop caring about film characters who don't care about themselves. Bobby Roe's The Houses October Built is a fantastic documentary trapped within a mediocre horror film. It follows a group of friends who set out to make a documentary about the best Halloween haunted houses. These characters are a rarity among modern horror films: actual people, not annoying stereotypes. The footage they shoot at the various haunted houses--which I suspect was all authentic--is fascinating. I love those haunted house attractions and it was great to see them examined. These friends are seeking a mysterious haunted house called the "Blue Skeleton" which apparently moves from state to state each year. They have to go on the equivalent of a gossip scavenger hunt to locate it. But after a time they start getting stalked by haunted house workers who follow them across state lines, eventually breaking into their RV to steal their stuff. And yet, at no point do they alert the authorities. Unlike many horror protagonists, there's literally nothing to stop them from getting help at any given moment. They just choose to drive towards their obvious doom. There's much to like about The Houses October Built. But I can't stand it when characters act so stupidly.

5/10

Shiki-Jitsu: Hideaki Anno

Oh Hideaki Anno...I really should have predicted that your film Shiki-Jitsu would have ended with an extended therapy session where the lead characters scream at each other, working out their issues. If I can say one good thing about Shiki-Jitsu, it's that it's stylistically daring. Tentatively about the romance between an introverted animator and a Maniac Pixie Dream Girl, it seeks to depict their interior emotions via imagery. On the surface, this seems like a daring idea. But the film just wanders around without any direction or purpose. It deliberately repeats so many shots and sequences that sometimes it feels like it's lapping itself. The soundtrack is nothing to write home about; it's essentially just somebody noodling on a piano. When I first started watching Shiki-Jitsu, I was reminded of Shunji Iwai. But at their best, Iwai's films had momentum to carry them through their narrative looseness. This film doesn't have any. It staggers and collapses on the ground.

4/10

The Birth of Saké: Erik Shirai

Erik Shirai's The Birth of Saké is just as, if not even more, interested in the tactile, sensory side of the brewing process saké as the process itself: the feel of the raw rice, the dusty clouds of the mold, the hum of the machines. This is a film that seeks to replicate the feelings of exhaustion and monotony that dominate the lives of the saké-makers who have to live on-site away from their families for 6 months at a time. It's a lonely, thankless life. The workers at Yoshida Brewery, a 144-year old saké brewery in Ishikawa Prefecture, know that they're some of the only ones left in the industry who still make it by hand; it's a vanishing practice in this age of modernization. Shirai, a cameraman for Anthony Bourdain's superb show No Reservations, brings a visual panache to the film at once heartbreaking and astonishing. This could have been a rote food documentary, but Shirai opted for something more personal, more intimate. Perhaps, you could even say, handmade.

8/10

A Master Builder: Jonathan Demme

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/a-master-builder/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=A%20Master%20Builder:%20Ibsen%20vs.%20Demme.

7/10

Floyd Norman: An Animated Life: Michael Fiore, Erik Sharkey

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-floyd-norman-an-animated-life/85505.

6/10

Ben-Hur: Timur Bekmambetov

The following is an excerpt from my Church Newsletter review.

Having seen the film, I have come to the blasphemous conclusion that I liked Bekmambetov’s new version more than Wyler’s. There are several reasons; let’s begin with the most immediately apparent. Bekmambetov’s film condenses the sweeping story into a tight two hours and gives it an emotional immediacy noticeably lacking in Wyler’s version. In keeping with early Hollywood’s obsession with grand spectacle, Wyler’s film seems oddly detached from the story, pulling the camera back so the audience can soak in the expansive sets and legions of costumed extras. Much of the acting feels better suited for the stage than for the screen. But Bekmambetov keeps his camera close and intimate; there are relatively few long-distance shots of cities, battlefields, or chariot racing. Bekmembetov wants the audience to understand the emotions of its hero: his confusion during his betrayal; his fear during the naval battle—almost the entire sequence is filmed from inside Judah’s ship, giving us only occasional glances of the carnage through his tiny peephole; his terror during the chariot race. We don’t just witness the film, we experience it as Judah does.

But the other reason why I prefer the new Ben-Hur is how it handles the inclusion of Jesus Christ. Wyler’s Ben-Hur relegates Jesus to only two or three scenes; we never even see his face. The overall effect is that he was shoehorned in. But Jesus is a constant presence in Bekmembetov’s Ben-Hur. We see him in the streets of Jerusalem before and after Judah’s betrayal, preaching love and compassion as tools to fight Roman oppression. Roman officers and politicians discuss him with disgust and fear as a revolutionary force potentially more powerful than a full army of armed Zealots. We see Judas’ betrayal, Jesus’ arrest, and his crucifixion. And there are little touches that bespeak his presence: in one scene where Judah returns to Jerusalem to speak with his wife, we see people in the streets joyously carrying palm fronds. But most importantly, Jesus has a thematic purpose. His sacrifice seems to symbolize the reconciliation denied Judah and Messala—indeed, it is after he dies that the two brothers forgive each other. His death signals the beginning of a new life, both for the human race and Judah’s family. Unlike Wyler’s Ben-Hur, Jesus isn’t a supporting character: he’s the crux of the film.

7/10

The War Room: Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker

What a surreal documentary. I can appreciate Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room for its surface qualities--documenting the campaign headquarters responsible for Bill Clinton's landslide presidential victory in 1992. But as someone sitting in the middle of the 2016 election cycle, it's one of the strangest things imaginable: James Carville in jeans and T-shirts; baby-faced George Stephanopoulos playing phone tag; the Gennifer Flowers scandal eerily predicting the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and relative civility between the various candidates (emphasis on relative). It's so strange so see how an election worked before the internet and iPhones--at one point Carville and his staff scramble to identify and get their hands on a two-week old news broadcast from Brazil that could potentially damage Bush's campaign. And the fashion...oh, the fashion...

8/10

Little Dead Rotting Hood: Jared Cohn

Let me get this straight...there's an army of killer woods terrorizing a nondescript American town that can only be held at bay by some kind of "protector." Jared Cohn's Little Dead Rotting Hood begins with the current protector helping to kill and bury her granddaughter before performing a suicidal ritual which passes on her powers to her. Of course, I don't understand why she needed to pass on her powers: she seemed to still have plenty of life left in her. What's worse, the granddaughter doesn't seem particularly good at her new job. She has a nasty habit of only showing up to stop the killer wolves after they've killed people. Man, this is a stupid movie. The lore makes no sense. Why is there a pack of killer wolves there? Where do they come from? What do they want? How do the protectors get their powers? Why is the town next to a place called "Jawson's Creek?" Why is there an old-time hillbilly with a custom-made shotgun/flamethrower who seems more at home in a) the 1890s, b) the set of Tjardus Greidanus's The Final Sacrifice (1990)? I know the film's from The Asylum, but man...this one's just bad.

2/10

Summer Lovers: Randal Kleiser

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/summer-lovers/.

4/10