scumbelievable

I Would Like to See It: Throne of Blood

No one shoots a crowd like Kurosawa. Throughout Throne of Blood, loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, rooms and courtyards full of men fairly seethe with mass emotion. Whole formations of soldiers recoiling in fear as Lord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune, his dashing good looks rendered harsh by Noh-inspired makeup intended to make him seem more villainous) barrels through their midst. Ranked courtiers fall over themselves in terror at his wild behavior during a state banqu...

I Would Like to See It: The Boxer's Omen

A Buddhist monk travels to Hong Kong to do battle with a dark sorcerer. With a single gesture he reduces the man to a bubbling pile of slimy, greenish flesh which then crumbles away, a time-lapse shot of worms eating through the facsimile of of a body to expose the withered crone beneath, who in turn collapses and decays until a bat emerges from her mouth and flies to the monk’s palm. Returning to Thailand, the monk performs an intricate religious ritual at his monastery to bind and destroy...

I Would Like to See It: Klute

Among the fast-talking, hard-nosed, sexually aggressive ranks of film’s great noir detectives, its Marlowes and Gitteses, its Spades and Diamonds, John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is an oddity. He is soft-spoken and reserved, not sexless but not smooth either, and his lack of resources is neither dire nor romantic but rather a simple matter of circumstance. He never fires his gun. He doesn’t kill the bad guy. In fact he fairly fades into the wallpaper next to Jane Fonda’s electric, Oscar-...

In the Flesh: King Kong (2005)

No one could accuse Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation of King Kong of being a perfect movie. Its racist Adventure Film of Yesteryear elements look worse now than ever, some of its CGI feels unfinished and iffy, and it is without a doubt overstuffed in that lovingly nerdy way only Jackson can really pull off. What it does do well, though, it does with so much verve and craftsmanship that it’s easy to see why movies like this were once beloved mainstays of cinema. Forbidding...

In the Flesh: Cure

As inspector Takabe, Kōji Yakusho is like a crumbling monolith, his initial patience and even affect disintegrating as Cure progresses until either nothing remains of the man he was or else his true self is exposed. It all depends on how you look at it. “My wife is a burden,” he snarls at the imprisoned Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a man who seems to leave senseless ritualistic murder in his wake like a tanker trailing a black ribbon of crude oil. Mamiya has no memory, no ...

In the Flesh: Pulse (2001)

Little of what occurs in the first hour and a half of Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s seminal 2001 techno-horror flick, involves special effects of any kind. Aside from a single moment-long glimpse of an impressively real prosthetic throat, the rest is shadow and light, makeup and performance. It’s a high-tech thriller about cultural anxieties around isolation and aging sublimated into the more palatably intrusive presence of internet technology made with the lightest possible technolo...

I Would Like to See It: In the Cut

“The only thing I won’t do is beat you up,” says detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) at the end of a spiel about the kind of boyfriend he could be to Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan). He says it like it’s a selling point, a rare feature one might shop around for, and in the supersaturated wet dream that is Jane Campion’s In the Cut, it’s not hard to believe it might well be just that. That we know there’s a good chance he brutally beats Black teenager Cornelius Webb (Sharr...

In the Flesh: Dune (2021)

About five minutes into Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling adaptation of the first half of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic, it becomes abundantly clear that the high water mark of the film’s visual imagination is roughly equivalent to a 2000s-era HALO game. Boxy neutral-tone spaceships and body armor for the good guys, organic lines and a black and purple palette for the villains. Spacefaring vessels are big, uncomplicated geometric shapes — an oblong, ...

I Would Like to See It: Three Outlaw Samurai

Three samurai, retainers of a cowardly and treacherous magistrate (Hisashi Igawa), burst into the chamber where louche prettyboy swordsman Kikyo (Mikijirō Hira) lies smoking opium with his lover. In a flash the camera is on the move, whipping out through a narrow gap between sliding screens and then along a walkway as without us the action spills through the now-revealed structure. A sword slices through rice paper and bamboo. A body shakes a screen in its frame. Blood sprays the translucent...

I Would Like to See It: Andrei Rublev

Hundreds of bodies heave on cords of hempen rope, hauling a newly-cast church bell out of its casting pit as a crowd of thousands looks on in a rapture of nervous excitement. The hawsers creak. The scaffolds groan. Ton upon ton of human machinery strains against gravity and friction to unearth the skilled labor of dozens of craftsmen and hundreds of workers, months of toil hanging suspended in the air, an inch in either direction from being Art or debris. The tension as Andrei Tarkovsky’s h...

In the Flesh: The Perfection

The Perfection is an odd one for me. To start, it has multiple glaring flaws. The lighting is intermittently terrible, washed-out and lifeless. The dialog sometimes veers too deep into corny therapy-lite dreck. The “rewind” effect used to pull us through the ever-changing plot is hacky and drawn-out, and the film is unsubtle in borrowing heavily from The Handmaiden, but in spite of these shortcomings the resultant whole is one of the most propulsively exciting and erotic...

I Would Like to See It: What Keeps You Alive

“Why are you doing this?” Jules (Brittany Allen) sobs to her wife Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson as an adult, Charlotte Lindsay Marron as a young girl) after the other woman first attempts to murder her, then stalks her through the forest intent on finishing the job. Jules wants a reason. Everyone does, when a loved one begins to reveal their abusive tendencies. Over the course of the film Jules tries on explanation after explanation. You’re sick. Your parents did something to you. You�...

Goblins, Ghosts, and Gabaghouls 1.01: People Come Here to Die

A bloody hand slips from a butcher’s cleaver as a man collapses to the floor, leaving streaks of red across the polished steel. Boys with toy pistols run beside an empty swimming pool, mimicking the sounds of gunshots as the mouth of the forest yawns black and deep behind them. And in the entrance hall of a retirement home, aged matriarch Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand) hisses “People come here to die,” her long nails, sunken face, and hunched posture transforming her into a fig...

I Would Like to See It: Witchhammer

An altar boy sees an old beggar woman (Lola Skrbková) steal the host during mass. When he tells the priest (Jiří Holý), he sets off a chain reaction of suspicion and petty grudges which culminates in the devastation of the parish and the surrounding holdings of Countess de Galle (Blanka Waleská) by a ruthless, cynical inquisitor, sir Boblig von Edelstadt. Over the course of the film sir Boblig strips local landowners, merchants, and clergy of their property and wealth under the pretext o...

In the Flesh: Black Mass

The last time I reviewed Mike Flanagan’s work, I panned it. His The Haunting of Hill House-inspired adaptation of the same name was saccharine sludge, full of overwrought monologues and wooden performances, everything lit in a flatly ghastly greenish-gray like some kind of purgatorial office park interior, every set coldly impersonal. The bulk of the show’s CGI was lazy and slipshod, and in approaching the design, costuming, and makeup of its specters it showed a spectacular lack...

I Would Like to See It: The House that Jack Built

“I’m not stupid,” says Jack (Mat Dillon), the film’s eponymous serial killer, moments before we see him bluff his way into a woman’s (the great Siobhan Fallon Hogan) home by first claiming to be a police officer who’s lost his badge, then pivoting to revealing himself as a pension manager conducting some kind of obtuse double-blind survey. As the film is explicitly a series of recounted memories and Jack is by his own admission completely without trustworthy qualities, one imagine...

In the Flesh: Malignant

Malignant looks pretty good for a James Wan flick, which is to say it resembles a modestly ambitious episode of CSI — the original series, not the Florida one with David Caruso. Lighting is uniformly blue-gray, blood is shoddily CGI’d in, and every set looks like part of the same Holiday Inn. It has a few of Wan’s beloved wonky comic book angles, a touch of delightfully gonzo monster design, and a single fair to middling synth track it plows into the ground like Wile E...

I Would Like to See It: Hana-Bi

Why water dead flowers? Why fly a kite without wings? Hana-bi, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 Yakuza film, concerns itself largely with the beauty of caring for things that we’ve already lost. Kitano’s movie is structured around absences, from the specter of ex-cop Yoshitaka Nishi (Kitano) and his wife Miyuki’s (Kayoko Kishimoto) dead daughter to the empty tricycle in the front hall of their apartment building, the titular fireworks tube with its long-delayed discharge, and a thousand...

I Would Like to See It: Phantom of the Paradise

To paraphrase my dear friend the game designer Jeeyon Shim, William Finley understands that acting is a profession totally devoid of dignity. As Winslow Leach, the film’s titular phantom, Finley has a gangly, wild-eyed physical sincerity teetering on the verge of cartoonishiness, a larger than life vibe De Palma’s camera teases and twists into moments of tragic absurdity and inhuman attenuation. Even before his maiming and his adoption of the “Phantom” persona, Winslow plays as a comb...

In the Flesh: Faust (1926)

Vast black wings unfurl over a medieval German city. A sooty face grins from the shadow between them as smoke boils through the streets below. Faust himself, played with a hawkish yet vulnerable intensity by Gösta Ekman, hunches over his alchemical paraphernalia, his strong, severe countenance bathed in the glow of elements converting in a primal soup of fog and bubbling liquid. F. W. Murnau’s iconic adaptation of the classic German folk tale of Dr. Faustus, who renounces God and pledges h...

In the Flesh: Brand New Cherry Flavor

Disclaimer: One of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s three principal writers, Matt Fennell, is a friend of mine, though I didn’t know he’d worked on it until after I’d watched it

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Lost Highway, Under the Skin, and Videodrome, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s Brand New Cherry Flavor stirs its source material into a milkshake as sweet and addictive as its title suggests. A nine hundred-year-old body...

In the Flesh: Candyman (2021)

Who dies in horror movies, and why do they get got? Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a sequel of sorts to Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic horror film of the same name, seems to posit that you die for being bad and punchable, or for rote high school bullying, or for being an art critic. I can’t deny that many of my colleagues are indeed asking to get meathooked by Tony Todd, but a horror movie in which the huge majority of the main cast are never once in any kind of peril inevitably comes to...

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I Would Like to See It: Tale of Tales

You might be forgiven, after decades of Disney “fairytales” and their “twisted” reboots — universally safe, morally digestible, and bland — for forgetting what fairytales are really like. Director Mattea Garrone’s Tale of Tales, adapted from Renaissance poet Giambattista Basile’s collection of the same name, has not forgotten. Its occasionally overlapping but largely discrete stories are full of the arbitrary cruelty, stupidity, and just-so logic of the original mater...

I Would Like to See It: Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is an oddity in David Cronenberg’s long history as a filmmaker. It’s cold where his work typically runs hot, overwritten where he tends toward sparseness in his dialogue, and existential where he inclines toward a certain earthiness. Part of this is the source material, the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, but where DeLillo makes an art form out of probing the American penchant for trivial thinking and transparent projection, Cronenberg struggles to get at the meani...

I Would Like to See It: Naked

From the first moment Johnny Fletcher (David Thewlis) opens his mouth, the reason for both his constant success in charming strangers and his homeless and hated existence are both painfully obvious. He’s just smart and insightful enough to step right through social scripts and into moments of unguarded intimacy, but once he’s inside he can’t help but use those same tools to pick and prod and jab at the parts of human nature he can understand, or at least name. His only social tool is a ...

In the Flesh: The Suicide Squad

For better and for worse, Suicide Squad is James Gunn, aging shock jock and Troma alum, to the core. The camerawork is serviceable at best, the humor sometimes flatly sexist in a sneering adolescent way — think of the military junta’s secretary, her breasts constantly jiggling as she runs in and out of frame — and the freaks are the good guys, the suits the enemy. The end result isn’t anything particularly special, but it gets an easy leg up on the Disney war machine’s ceas...

I Would Like to See It: She Dies Tomorrow

At first blush, She Dies Tomorrow feels like the kind of deadpan social thriller we’ve seen so much of over the past decade. Think Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster or Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense — flat line deliveries mapping the absurdities of modern existence and mortality as the lives of faintly ridiculous characters spin out of control. Certainly it shares some of its DNA with these antecedents, its central animating idea is thornier and more com...

I Would Like to See It: Like Water for Chocolate

I’m beginning to suspect that if you’re not a complete dunce, filming food and cooking is a pretty good way to ensure your movie feels richly sensual and intimate. Food is a shorthand for all kinds of foundational human emotions and relationship patterns, a visual language more immediately intelligible than heraldry, more universal than pictograms or letters. Alfonso Arau’s adaptation of Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate literally sublimates its characters’ emotions...

I Would Like to See It: The Platform

Like La Grande Bouffe and other eating-as-class movies of its ilk, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform locates class struggle in the fairly pat metaphor of who gets to eat what. In a Cube-like tower built from identical two-person cells and connected by a single empty shaft, the titular platform descends each day from the gourmet kitchens above, freighted with a bounty of food which within a few floors has been thoroughly ransacked and despoiled. Each subsequent...