By: Henry J. Fromage –
I’ve gone on my Netflix binge and seen about all of their originals I’m liable to, so what’s next? Amazon, of course!
436. The Yellow Sea
Na Hong-Jin’s (The Wailing) big breakout film, yes, is a dour crime thriller starring a bona-fide Korean movie star. Ha Jung-woo plays a Joseonjo (North Korean living in China) man who sneaks into South Korea at the orders of a mafia boss (played by Chaser‘s Kim Yoon-seok) to kill a professor (The Wailing‘s Kwan Do-won) in return for forgiving his debts. Everything quickly goes to hell, and soon the police, the mafia, and the South Korean mob are after him. Good thing he’s fucking indestructible. Once the chase starts, Na never lets up, and both Ha and Kim take a borderline absurd amount of damage in their frantic cat and mouse. The plot’s a bit of a hash, but you’ll likely never see a more punishing gauntlet of an action film. It’s glorious. Three Beers.
437. Sherpa
I thought I was in store for another gorgeously shot, terrifying, but ultimately triumphant climbing documentary as it starts, following Sherpa Phurba Tashi as he prepares to summit Everest for the record-breaking 22nd time. After a devastating accident, it becomes something else entirely- a portrait of a century-old cultural relationship in crisis, and the revealing ways in which people on both sides of the divide think of and address it. Suffice it to say, opponents of the extraordinary resources expended in pursuit of the biggest feather in most adventurers’ ideal hat will find plenty of ammunition here. Two Beers.
438. Macbeth
For my money, Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, from bloody, muddy beginning to the hopeless (and original) ending coda is hands down the finest. In his first film since Sharon Tate’s horrifying murder, he dials up the blood, despair, occultism, and nihilism of the play and these iconic characters to a horrifying degree. Truly a masterpiece, despite all of the many fair reasons to dismiss it out of hand, from Polanski’s involvement to Playboy’s funding in a brief flirtation with legitimate moviemaking. A Toast.
439. Dark Places
The other, other Gillian Flynn adaptation besides Gone Girl and Sharp Objects to get an adaptation so far has the right pedigree with Charlize Theron in the knotty female protagonist role and an able supporting cast that includes Nicholas Hoult, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Tye Sheridan, and Corey Stoll. What it doesn’t have is the tight, blackhearted American Gothic thrills of the other two adaptations due to saggy writing and editing, some ill-fitting performances (especially Moretz’s, who seems to be in an entirely different film), and a denouement that doesn’t feel properly set-up and thereby fails utterly to shock in the way maybe it thought it was going to. Four Beers.
440. Mo Better Blues
Spike Lee made this Jazz drama during his heyday, and a cast including Denzel, Wesley Snipes, Spike himself, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson, and the late Robin Harris among others demonstrates how much. Here it feels like Lee is making his own Douglas Sirk melodrama, just sexed up, with all the positives and negatives that implies. The music (well, despite one unfortunate vocal performance) is superb. Three Beers.
441. The Connection
This French crime film dramatizes the other side of the very real French Connection, starring an against type Jean Dujardin as a driven anti-drug magistrate and Gilles Lelouche as the soulful but pitiless kingpin he’s trying to take down. Director Cedric Jimenez does a great job injecting stylized life into the the epic cat and mouse chase, even if admittedly the needle drops and fast editing have a familiar touch to them. It’s the acting that really elevates the film into the gangster epic it aspires to be. Two Beers.
442. The Swamp
This HBO documentary focuses on the special interest money and lobbyist-saturated swamp of Washington politics and a surprising mix of politicians pushing back against the all fundraising, all the time status quo of being in political office in 2020. This includes firebrand Matt Gaetz, who you may find yourself nodding along with at some points (well, not the shameless Trump ass-kissing). Still, despite all the dire facts and political grand-standing, you may experience something strange at the end of this. Is that… hope? Two Beers.
443. Ali’s Wedding
This winsome Australian comedy is about an underachieving son of the local multi-denominational Iraqi expat Imam and the Lebanese girl he’s wooing despite the arranged marriage he’s trying and failing to avoid. While it occasionally stretches a bit too far for a joke, overall it’s just a darn pleasant movie about a community thrown together by circumstance doing their best to preserve their traditions and still do right by their children who are quite literally growing up in a different world. Great characters, amusing script- pretty much impossible not to like. Three Beers.
444. Lucky Grandma
The main hook here is Tsai Chin’s central performance as a chain-smoking, heavy-gambling Chinatown grandma who ends up in the sights of a local gang and decides to hire protection in the form of a hulking, good-hearted bodyguard from a rival gang (Corey Ha). Chin is adorably crusty and director Sasie Sealy nails an arch yet amusing tone, but not a whole lot of note happens past the point of getting the premise together- certainly the climactic gunfight feels like something both out of an entirely different film and the most obvious direction to take. Still, well worth your time. Three Beers.
445. Spinster
Chelsea Peretti gets her long overdue star vehicle in this dryly sarcastic yet still earnest story of a woman whose latest boyfriend breaks up with her on her 39th birthday by moving out of his own apartment, pointing out in the process that people don’t just go to couples counseling as Peretti suggests after three months. Yes, going the conventional path isn’t yielding a lot of results, so she decides to… just be practical about romance and possibly doing without. While that may not sound super inspirational, this often hilarious and observationally on point flick does manage to deliver some good vibes. Presumably the sequel where she meets Jordan Peele and forms a power couple is in development… Two Beers.
446. Tread
I’m a sucker for high-concept Netflix documentaries, so when this one hit the service I pounced. On June 4th, 2004 Marvin Heemeyer drove a bulldozer he armored himself through many of the homes and businesses of small Granby, Colorado, a two hour rampage that was only halted when he got his tread stuck. My overwhelming takeaway from this wasn’t that Heemeyer was some sort of a hero, but rather a hate-filled sociopath with the skills to do something about his impotent rage. Since much of the film’s narration is his own cracked audio suicide letter about the indignities of small town governmental oversight, this is basically a pristine psychological profile of a Trumpublican. Yeah, the killdozer is cool, but the man behind it’s too disturbing to take much entertainment from it. Two Beers.
447. I Used to Go Here
Gillian Jacobs gets her own long-overdue star vehicle in this dramedy about a debut novelist and 30s-something single lady who returns to her college campus at the invite of her pompous literary professor (a perfectly cast Jermaine Clement) when the reception of her book doesn’t go so well. This is another well-produced comedy whose pleasures are modest but undeniable. The fact that it’s set in a fictional small-town Illinois college not unlike the one I went to is just icing on the cake. Three Beers.
448. Black is King
While this Disney + feature-length music video under the same Lemonade-like imprimatur of Beyonce has only a little bit to do with its purported inspiration/tie-in The Lion King, who cares? If Beyonce offers you 85 minutes of content, you’re damn well going to run 85 minutes of content. And it’s a glorious 85 minutes indeed, replete with awesome collaborators like Tierra Whack and Blitz Bazawule, lush costuming and production design drawing inspiration from African iconography (and being rich as fuck), and well, banging new Beyonce tracks. Even if she’s not your thing, if you’re a film or music fan at all, you’ll find things to appreciate. Two Beers.
449. The Mimic
This Korean horror film has a lot going for it- a definitely creepy premise about a demon who destroys and then represents itself as its victims to entrap yet more, and similar Korean animist/shamanistic imagery to that which helped make The Wailing so damn terrifying. What it doesn’t have going for it is a particularly original set of principal characters- a family moves into a creepy remote home after undergoing a terrible tragedy, yadda, yada, nor coherent character decision-making (this is one of those horrors where you’ll be yelling at the screen for the entire climax). Still worth your time, especially if you’re a Korean horror fan, but could have been so, so much better. Four Beers.
450. A Ciambra
This small Italian film about (and literally starring) a gypsy family steeped in small-time crime carries the imprimatur of Martin Scorcese as an executive producer, and it’s easy to see why. 33-year-old director Jonas Carpignano delivers a film that feels like it both lives up to the ideals of its Italian Neorealist forebears and is something new itself. Young actor Pio Amato and Koudous Seihun, both of Carpignano’s breakthrough film Mediterranea, deliver heart-breaking performances, and the rest of the Amato family acts like, well, only a family can. If Carpignano just sticks with this same cast forever, I’m sure he’s got several more masterpieces in him. Two Beers.
451. An American Pickle
The fish out of water shenanigans promised by the premise, in which an immigrant played by Seth Rogen falls into a pickle vat and awakens a century later in modern hipster Brooklyn and goes to live with his semi-loser great-grandson, also played by Seth Rogen, are great while they last. Unfortunately, that’s not long enough, as Rogen takes a page out of his mentor Judd Apatow’s playbook and ends with a slightly corny life lesson- the only difference is it’s about 60% of this film in stead of the 25% or so Apatow gives it. Still quite funny when it’s trying to be. Three Beers.
452. Waking Sleeping Beauty
This documentary about the late 80s/early 90s Disney Animation revival is directed by insider Don Hahn, which counter-intuitively allows it to be a surprisingly warts and all recounting despite its place alongside all of the much more corporate PC documentary content on Disney +. Hahn came up at the same time as names you might recognize like Tim Burton and John Lasseter, which also happened to be the nadir of The Black Cauldron. He also charts the rise of the Jeffrey Katzenberg and Bob Iger-led, Howard Ashman & Alan Menken years that changed the animation game forever- fascinating stuff from a true insider’s perspective. Two Beers.
453. Project Power
Netflix’s newest action “blockbuster” is similarly slick as previous offerings, and similarly personality-free. That’s not for lack of effort from directors Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, who ladle on as many filmmaking tricks in as they can to practically every scene, or even from the cast, with Jamie Foxx being his foxy self, Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing the complicated hero cop, and The Deuce breakout Dominque Fishback, who is best of all. However, the standard-issue corrupt government/crimelords plot never breaks out of its thoroughly generic cage, and the film never quite makes the most of its five minutes of animal-derived superpowers premise. Three Beers.
454. X-Men: Beware the Juggernaut
I later found out there’s a whole series of Uncanny X-Men fan films by these same folks, and while I’m tempted to watch further, I’ve only got so much time in a day. I did enjoy this 20 minute both stand-alone and episodic film, which shows some true Sweded spirit with its trashcan lid & foam-replete Juggernaut and the most gloriously middle-aged American normcore Wolverine you’re ever likely to see. All power to these guys. Three Beers
455. Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist
Quintessential middle America comic Jim Gaffigan tries something different with his latest comedy special, released straight to Amazon Prime. He spent time immersing himself while touring in Canada and Spain, and then wrote sets specifically for audiences in Kitchener and Barcelona full of local and national humor that landed at least with myself and obviously with the local crowds. It’s like the comedian’s equivalent of playing tennis with his hand tied behind his back, and it’s damn impressive (and yes, funny). Two Beers.
456. Followed
My struggles to remember something distinctive about this film are emblematic of its impact. I do have to give props to its ability to replicate the aesthetics and vibes of annoying Youtube shows, as the premise of this one is going on a bit of a run through a series of episodes of one such show that ended tragically when they hubristically decide to investigate the severely haunted Hotel Lennox (clearly modeled on LA’s The Cecil Hotel). The cast and production values are exactly as needed for this type of flick, and there are some good scares to be had, but it doesn’t elevate itself over other recent examples of the genre. Three Beers.
457. Slaxx
This short and sweet Canadian horror flick about a pair of killer jeans very much knows what it is- 70 odd minutes of devilishly tongue in cheek satire of fashion retail and delightfully ridiculous horror hi-jinks with a jot of social issue commentary that also serves to take things to an even stranger plane. A must for fans of the genre. Two Beers.
458. The Prey
This is 2020’s latest Most Dangerous Game-themed release, and like Bacurau and The Hunt, it gets the action entertainment job done just fine. This version pits rookie actor Gu Shangwei, playing a Chinese cop undercover in Cambodia, against a sadistic prison warden played entrancingly by Only God Forgives‘ Vithaya Pansringarm. Gu kicks ass, and the overall vibe is like something out of the new Indonesian action scene, with just a bit less budget (and hence polish). Three Beers.
459. Random Acts of Violence
Jay Baruchel’s directorial debut- like so many of his fellow actors turned directors- is in the horror genre, and some things, like the Hannibal-like horror tableaux or the welders masked psycho killer feel indebted to his influences. He’s ultimately trying for something different, though- interrogating our cultural obsession with violence and true crime in a way that holds up the mirror… well, at least until the next stylized horror scene. Still, it’s a promising debut- here’s hoping he gets the balance right for what he’s looking to accomplish the next time out. Three Beers.
460. Uncle Peckerhead
This is a delightfully deranged horror/comedy about a band who really needs to borrow a van and the drifter/roadie/cannibalistic demon for 13 minutes each night named Uncle Peckerhead who just so happens to have a van they can use. It’s successfully precisely because of how matter of factly it handles its premise, and due to the obvious chemistry between the bandmates and Peckerhead. Definitely one of the films that most successfully balances its comedy and horror in recent years. Two Beers.
