Psychospace
I thought Weapons-- Zach Cregger's brilliantly structured supernatural thriller about seventeen children running out their front doors and vanishing into the night-- was hot shit, arguably the best horror of 2025; along comes Kurosawa Kiyoshi saying "hold my beer."
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Movie opens with Tim Roth sitting in a diner telling Amanda Plummer the story of a man who walked into a bank. Hands a cellphone to a bank teller; voice tells teller man's daughter is held hostage and will die unless teller gives up money. Roth and Plummer then exchange endearments, pull out guns to announce a stickup. Blackout: guitar on soundtrack while titles in bright red and yellow crawl up the screen.
Welcome to the world of Pulp Fiction, one of the more memorable American films of 1994. Five were nominated for Best Picture Oscars last year: Four Weddings and a Funeral (lightweight); The Shawshank Redemption (pretentious); Quiz Show (plodding); Forrest Gump (simpleminded). Of the five Pulp stands out for being Not Nice, an aggressive, in-your-face ride through the fairly tangled mind of one Quentin Tarantino.
The lower depths
There's David O. Russell's approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is-- sexy, funny, fluid, profane-- and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way.
(Warning: details from the novel and film discussed in explicit detail)
Reading Dorothy B. Hughes' 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and watching Nicholas Ray's 1950 adaptation is like experiencing the difference between night and day: Hughes' novel takes place mostly at night it seems, in dense fog; you often confuse the misty Los Angeles evenings for Dix Steele's twilight view-- occasionally there's the glare of a passing streetlamp, but it quickly fades into the haze.
Ray's film feels as if it takes place mostly in sunlight; even its interiors radiate the glow of studio kliegs-- the film is described as a noir but if we adhere to strict definitions it breaks one rule of noir: not a lot of shadows onscreen. The look of Ray's films can diverge from the norm (see his debut work They Live By Night) but in this case he opts for the standard-issue brightness of a Hollywood production-- why?
Assassin's creed
Richard Linklater's Hit Man -- adapted from the Texas Monthly magazine piece of the same name written by Skip Hollandsworth-- is that rare news article adaptation that takes an interesting premise (ordinary joe poses as assassin-for-hire for New Orleans PD sting operation) and pushes it to its logical extreme, or at least as extreme as the director can manage. Glen Powell is Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor who teases his students with questions like "What if your self is a construction?" Linklater wastes no time testing that postulate: one day the operation finds itself without a plainclothes officer to deliver the sting, and Gary's colleagues coax him to step in instead.
Tattooed gangster
As Tikoy put it he grew up in a penitentiary (the Davao Penal Colony, or Depacol, where his father was prison auditor) learning how to box from one of the veteran convicts. With his six other brothers, all of them wearing shorts instead of long pants and speaking in a funny Tagalog accent instead of everyday Visayan, they attracted the attention and ridicule of all the other kids, not necessarily starting fights but finishing them wherever they went. Tikoy's ambition in life was simple: to get a tattoo, and be a gangster; he ended up working briefly in Hollywood, then coming back to the Philippines to become one of the finest filmmakers in the industry.
When you have to shoot shoot, don't talk
John Woo's latest brings to mind Norma Desmond's immortal lines: "There was a time when I had the eyes of the whole world. But that wasn't good enough for them O no-- they had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk talk talk...
"You'll make a rope of words and strangle this business. With a microphone to catch the last gurgles and Technicolor to photograph the red swollen tongue."
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(Warning: story and finale discussed in explicit detail)
Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon is three and a half hours long-- deal with it. Folks complain when a film's runtime ticks past the hundred minute mark or its pacing slows to a deliberate crawl; they seem to want more of the standard-issue Disney/Marvel fare either sequel or prequel or reboot with regular helpings of superpowered action, the usual cast of likable characters, the ironclad promise of state-of-the-art digitals. Amusement park rides, Scorsese once called them as opposed to cinema, and he isn't far wrong: even the twists and turns of plot are comfortingly familiar, recycled ad nauseam. Scorsese likes to challenge the status quo: his films, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, are steak to be chewed thoroughly and digested-- not tapioca pudding that can be gummed without effort.
Tikoy Aguiluz, who illuminated the world of toreros in Boatman, painted a portrait of the GRO girl in Segurista (Dead Sure), explores Manila's gambling casinos and railway communities in Biyaheng Langit.
The film was given an X rating twice by the Movie Television and Classification Board (MTRCB) for its frank sex and explicit violence, both of which have been described as “gratuitous.” Wouldn't know what “gratuitous” sex and violence looks like myself, but I do feel that if Aguiluz is to portray the heaven and hell of modern Philippine society with any sense of realism, he has to be free to show what needs to be shown. Also don’t believe in giving an X rating to any film, especially when this prevents the film’s commercial screening; it suggests the rather insulting idea that there are some images or subjects the adult Filipino can’t handle.
Hollywood's on hold at the moment, trying to retool its production line to create gentler more sensitive films, with nary a mention of the words 'bomb,' 'terrorist' or 'World Trade Center.' The cineplexes have been forced to keep movies playing three, four weeks at a time, for want of anything new to show-- I've been seeing the ads for Bridget Jones' Diary and The Princess Diaries practically forever, though I haven't been able to (and possibly never will) see them.
Enter by sheer blind luck (I hardly call it design) Chito Rono's La Vida Rosa (The Life of Rosa), a noir crime thriller about con artist Rosa (Rosanna Roces) and her lockpicking boyfriend Dado (Diether Ocampo). Rosa and Dado keep half a dozen schemes juggling in the air, anything from carnapping to blackmail to stealing gifts from a wedding reception; their main source of income, however, are the smuggling and housebreaking operations led by Tsong, a crime boss, and his right-hand man Lupo (Pen Medina). Dado and Rosa have a love-hate relationship with Tsong: they depend on him for jobs and protection, yet at the same time feel an irresistible need to 'sideline'-- commit freelance crimes-- behind his back.
