Recent watches (yes I've been catching up on Next Picture Show episodes)
A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)
Nominally a horror film, but most effective as a satire of late 50s beatniks with some interesting points about, well, the nature of art. It helps that the beatniks in question would not be out of place in Brooklyn (or Paris, or any big Western city I suspect) today. Julian Burton as the poet is particularly delightful, which I think gets at something that this film gets right: it doesn't show the environment with sneering contempt as much as light amusement. The two drunks we see in several scenes play a bit like audience surrogates, and their moments were often a highlight. I also like that Dick Miller doesn't even really try to hide the truth behind his sculptures: he doesn't exactly volunteer the information but he never denies it when confronted. With the way we constantly depict geniuses as being terrible people, it's pretty easy to see how he would just assume that what he did was one creative process like another... well, at first anyway.
As for the nature of art, I don't know that the film has a thesis about it as much as a general interest. It's about as substantive on the matter as a discussion with friends in a café would be, which I don't mean as a dig.
7/10
Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy, 2019)
Recent satires of the contemporary art world (The Square comes to mind) always strike me as unnecessarily mean-spirited, and inevitably use characters whose shallowness is supposed to be the point but makes for poor storytelling. This shows a bit more promise in that department, but throws it all away by being an uninspired horror film instead, with murder tableaux that look like rejected ideas for Hannibal, except perhaps for the Rene Russo one. So it falls at entertainment and doesn't really get there on the character front, which leaves only contempt.
3/10
Pokémon Detective Pikachu (Rob Letterman, 2019)
More of a children's film that I expected given the noir-y look... though really I was just confused by the movie's existence and premise. And I'm not sure the film really justified those choices: Ryan Reynolds is basically doing PG Deadpool in a film that seems to be going for a much more earnest tone, and you have Bill Nighy doing a cartoonish villain which should be fun but isn't really ? I don't know what to make of it. It has some very succesful ideas on how to use certain Pokémons (Mr. Mime, the earthy turtle ones I didn't remember from playing the game all these years ago), but I just don't know why you'd wrap a childrens films into a noir plot that's simultaneously confusing and predictable, with emotional payoffs that kinda work but not as well as they could have if the film wasn't just so busy with trying to do this weird juxtaposition of tones.
5/10
White Men Can't Jump (Ron Shelton, 1992)
Much smarter and introspective about issues such as race, relationships and addiction than I expected a 90s sports movie to be. Snipes and Harrelson are great, they nail this adversarial relationship, the kind where you do appreciate someone but wouldn't really put yourself on the line for them (as Snipes pointedly doesn't do at a crucial point late in the film) because our society is based on individualism and you have to look for yourself. It's nice that they did their own basketball playing, but I didn't find it to be shot very dynamically in general, especially the last game shown with its copious use of slow motion.
7/10
High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)
Part heist/business thriller, part exploration of a particular milieu and its underlying racial tensions, this is more stimulating than satisfying, and part of me wishes Soderbergh had chosen one of these two modes and stuck to it, because as is I felt like the late plot developments on the exploration of basketball as a microcosm of modern America. When the film explored the ways in which basket-ball (something I have zero knowledge about) intersects with race and disruptive capitalism through various characters (and strong performances), I really loved it... and I think I could have loved it in the form of a heist film as well, but in the end that part of it often felt rushed and underplayed for me, and distracting from the more interesting part of the film.
7/10
Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
I'm surprised by how seldom this is referred to as the primary source of inspiration for The Matrix, because there's a lot here. The bug-removal, the red pill (used differently, true), the general mindCINECAST!ery the character goes through juxtaposed with exceptional effects work and the cross between philosophical inquiries and badass action... anyway, this is probably the best possible use of the "was it all a dream" ending. None of the in-world narrative quite add up: you either have to take the first fifteen minutes at face value which means accepting Schwarzenegger as an average Joe (hah) and that he would be so frustrated with his life (which seems quite nice even before taking into account that his wife is Sharon Stone at her attractiveness peak) as to go to Recall... or you have to accept all the insanity that comes after that, including the bonkers final minutes. In the end, it plays as the most fun exercise in post-modern skepticism ever.
8/10
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
What an experience. Kaufman is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you and not all of it works (we're too familiar with the echography sound now for it to be as creepy as he wants it to be) but it adds up to one of the most effective horror films I've seen in terms of pure mood, and a perfect encapsulation of 70s liberal blues. Great cast, a willingness to experiment with effects, score and direction on top of a very simple and effective concept (as seen in the very lean original) and an unforgettable ending... amazing overall.
9/10