Hard Eight

Like many of the films that the writer-director has made since, Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature, Hard Eight, is built around human connections that are dramatically premised, at least in part, on clashing emotional or intellectual bandwidths. Anderson using the easily understood language of mentor-mentee relationships here to pick away at his characters, slowly revealing the private motivations that they otherwise keep hidden from each other. John C. Reilly plays John Finnegan, a penniless and presumably homeless gambler, first seen wrapped up in layers of polo shirts and flimsy jackets, spinning yarns about wanting to raise enough money to pay for his mother's funeral. He is approached and treated to cigarettes and a warm cup of coffee by Philip Baker Hall's Sydney, a supernaturally relaxed old timer who takes pity on John, teaching him how to manipulate casino staff into believing you are spending much more money with them than you actually are in order to leverage freebies like comped drinks or an overnight hotel stay. 

We then pick up the story years later with Finnegan firmly ensconced in Sydney's rootless racket, living comfortably and attempting to build a connection with Clementine, a flaky cocktail waitress played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Although cold, hard facts are revealed by the film's conclusion, throughout much of Hard Eight the audience is left to wonder about Sydney's motivations regarding this hopeless pair. Both John and Clementine initially suspect their benefactor of harbouring some sexual desire for them, these speculations clearly informed by grim experience, but Sydney dismisses John's harsh invective and Clementine's frozen, nails-in-thigh shock. An aside about Sydney having a daughter and son somewhere, who he clearly is no longer on speaking terms with, seems to be a more accurate insight into this man's intentions and why he spends a significant amount of time orchestrating, for an infantilised, impulsive protégé, situations and outcomes that do not particularly benefit the older man. Quite the contrary, in fact. On release, back in the mid '90s, the obvious disparities in not just presentation but intelligence between John and Sydney likely raised a few irony poisoned chuckles but, with the benefit of Anderson's wider catalogue now in play, this writer-director's inquiries into these mismatched relationships read as sincere, even tragic. 

The Killer by Michael DeForge

HulkHodn - Now

The Naked Gun

At eighty five minutes, with credits, director Akiva Schaffer's belated addition to The Naked Gun series absolutely breezes by. Liam Neeson squeezes in amongst rapid-fire gags as Frank Drebin Jr, the weepy, equally accident-prone son of Leslie Nielsen's sadly departed Police Squad cop. Neeson, an actor largely known for arthritic action films, is a physically gruffer presence than the oblivious, even childlike Nielsen. Neeson brings a different sort of energy to this piece then, a slower much more agitated kind of torpor. While Nielsen's Drebin was a straight man tumbling through farcical situations, Neeson's take is closer to a tweak on the sinkhole attention deployed in heavily delayed action movie sequels. He's the ageing but invincible pensioner who is still able to muddle through all sorts of sticky situations. If anything this absurdist take is a lot more honest about the flagrant sort of wish-fulfilment taking place in a movement of films where rickety elder bodies are able to physically crush and pulverise far younger, better maintained physiques. Aside from a spot of thermal voyeurism and some wonderful mime incredulity from Neeson, when asked to consider a glass of fizzing water, much of what lingers about this Naked Gun belongs to Pamela Anderson. The actress not only nailing the tone of her bumbling femme fatale but providing an otherwise flat and photographically unremarkable film with a face that cinematographer Brandon Trost can really pore over. 

Robert Palmer - You Are in My System (12" Mix)

Endless Withdrawal - A Garden Grows Between Us

Revolution+1

Revolution+1, from writer-director Masao Adachi (co-written with Junichi Inoue), takes an appropriately raw approach when recounting the motivations behind the assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. Soran Tamoto stars as Tatsuya Kawakami, a fictionalised, feedback-haunted version of real-life suspect Tatsuya Yamagami, a middle-aged loner brimming with grievance. You see, Kawakami's father committed suicide and left a successful construction business to his wife and young family, the former of which squandered this nest egg on donations to the Unification Church, a South Korean religious movement that, Kawakami repeatedly reminds us, demands its Japanese adherents live in poverty. This ascetic lifestyle intended as punishment and reparation for the atrocities committed by their home country during the Second World War. In Adachi's film - the director a veteran of experimental documentary filmmaking, softcore pornography, and a former member of the Japanese Red Army based out of Lebanon - Tatsuya Kawakami is presented as an unloved middle child, desperate but apparently unable to make a real, emotional connection with an indifferent mother, played by Satoko Iwasaki. 

Kawakami's mother, who is viewed entirely from the lead subject's aggrieved and icy perspective, is an equally cold even robotic woman, entirely focused on creating a life lived in gruelling penance. This self-mortification extends beyond herself, thwarting Tetsuya's academic aspirations and denying his older, deeply unhappy brother the lymphoma treatment he so desperately needed. As the film begins winding down, with Kawakami readying himself to blast Abe with a homemade shotgun that (disappointingly) this file-shared film does very little to explain the practicalities of, the soon-to-be assassin rents a pleasant car with the last of his life savings and drives to meet his mother. Although it isn't immediately revealed as such, Kawakami imagines a brief interlude in which he is able to approach and even impress his mother with this shiny new purchase. In Tatsuya's fantasies the two enjoy a rapport, his remaining parent eager to dispense with her mindless manual labour and spend the rest of the afternoon with her child. No sooner are things looking up for Kawakami than we are rudely ejected back to reality: Tatsuya sat in his car ignored and alone; watching his frail mother toil from an abashed distance. Adachi's film ruling then that for all of Kawakami's talk of Japanese nationalism or the hypocrisy of highly visible state actors who drum up business for parasitic churches, perhaps what this gunman really (dearly) hoped for was an ability to stake some claim on his mother's attention.

Prince - I Feel for You

Phases - Sunday Loop

Honda by Kosuke Miyagi

nalim. x elevenparis - Track08 [Salem Tape]

CoryaYo - Being

Captain America - Albert Pyun's Director's Cut

If nothing else, this posthumously released Director's Cut of Albert Pyun's famously disappointing, straight-to-video Captain America demonstrates that a conceptual boldness, when assembling lower budget material, can paper over many of the more obvious cracks in the overall piece. This isn't the first release of Pyun's film to present itself as the director's preferred edit though. During the 2010s Pyun himself sold DVDs and Blu-Rays through his website of an 'Unreleased Director's Edition' that took the theatrical (or, maybe more accurately, rental tape) cut and embellished it with dupe-level reproductions of one or two of the elided sequences seen here. This newly released assembly though - recently unearthed by his wife Cynthia Curnan and the Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Video label - was scanned directly from a celluloid print that Pyun owned but did not have the facilities to review and represents a massive reorganisation of the material that the director was able to get away with before the film's financial backers stepped in and locked him out of the production. 

When compiling their preferred version of the film, producer Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation opted for a literal, chronological procession of filmed events, beginning their release with scenes set during the Second World War before the viewer and Steve Rogers are catapulted into the modern day for some clipped, low-cost soul-searching. Pyun's approach is wildly different in both tone and execution, deliberately withholding the comparatively expensive, period-bound setpieces that detail the origin of Scott Paulin's Italian Red Skull or the rocket-bound adventures of Matt Salinger's Captain America. These moments, bold as they are, are hampered by the kind of obvious corner cutting deployed when struggling to impart scale in cash strapped productions. Massive environments that are intended to read as frightening or impressive are instead airy and poorly dressed; performances are hampered by a harried flatness or some other, unconvincing tonal note born of expedience. Plainly, when viewed in their video tape entirety, there just isn't enough of the kind of impressive, propulsive coverage required to cleanly navigate scenes designed (and failing) to be exciting. Pyun's Director's Cut solution is to break these moments up into arresting blips of information that are then deployed throughout a much more somber, downbeat film. 

We explore the simmering interior landscapes of the film's principle characters as they pick apart the lives that have trapped them in their current predicaments. Both Salinger's Steve Rogers and Paulin's Red Skull are fixated upon ideas of childhood or an innocence that they have subsequently lost. A heartbroken Rogers maintains an upbeat, gee-whizz facade but fails to reconnect with his former allies and worries incessantly about how he has contributed to the fallen world he now inhabits. This Red Skull, rather than the fanatical adherent of Adolf Hitler seen in the comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, is explicitly a kidnapped child. One who was mutated into a violent criminal to work in service of a power hungry, fascist state (in the modern era he counts American generals amongst his clients). Skull yearns to return to a parlour room within his childhood home, to play an interrupted arpeggio for his murdered family. Similarly, the rearranged sequences that turn over in the minds of super-soldiers are, fittingly, built with the storytelling language of serial cinema. Binary morals and motivation - not to mention super-powered rockets - are able to, momentarily, intrude upon a particularly downbeat interpretation of a 1980s struggling to free itself from an insidious and all-encompassing take on the military-industrial complex. Previously, viewers were asked to endure several minutes spent in a glaringly lit concrete bunker, complete with gleaming swastika, as resource poor filmmaking visibly strained to wring out something, anything, entertaining. Now we experience the same alarming iconography as the haunting, eidetic memory of an unnaturally strong man who believes himself to be a complete failure. 

Mai Yamane - (You and Me Still Keep On) Fall in Love

Gouki by Matías Bergara

Yuzo Koshiro - A Theme for All About Micom Basic Magazine III

nalim. - 97[EL]

Save the Green Planet!

Informed by a life filled with misery and brutal hardship, Shin Ha-kyun's Lee Byeong-gu has come to the inescapable conclusion that the Earth simply must have been covertly colonised by alien beings from the Andromeda Galaxy. So, how does Byeong-gu - an unhinged, one-man resistance - go about battling back against the oppressive forces orchestrating human tragedy? Kidnapping and torture, naturally. Writer-director Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! begins with Byeong-gu stalking his latest victim, a stingy pharmaceutical executive who, Byeong-gu believes, is an extraterrestrial capable of contacting his planet's poised invasion forces. Whether or not these fanciful deductions have any actual purchase within the piece Byeong-gu has, unmistakable, hit on something regarding the ways in which sadistic aspects of the establishment - specifically those who crave and cultivate power - treat those they deem to be inferior. Towards the end of Jang's film this idea is repeatedly underlined by a series of disconnected montages that vividly detail the kind of cruel impassivity that informs these revelations. 

First, there's a secret history of planet Earth as told by Baek Yoon-sik's shaved and scorched executive that either reveals the meddling hand of Andromedan invaders or, in the style of The Usual Suspects, confidently draws from the dogeared, conspiracy flavoured ephemera scattered about Byeong-gu's sunken, sweaty lair. Here mankind is described as a rolling mistake, incapable of overcoming their innate thirst for self-destructive violence. We see a vision of the biblical Adam, this hirsute hominid tethered via an umbilical cord to one of Stanley Kubrick's monoliths, and the creation of Eve via some genetic splicing. This Adam's instant reaction to the helpless, naked woman presented to him is to attack her with a cudgel then rape her. A second, less esoteric compilation flicks through the defining events of Byeong-gu's life: seeing his father's arm blasted away from his trunk in a mining accident; the ridicule and beatings he endured, from teachers, for his diminished station in life; and the violent death, at the hands of policemen, of a young woman he was fixated upon. In all of these moments the stunted and childlike Byeong-gu was an impotent observer, able only to endure what was happening to and around him. Although their subject matter varies wildly, both sequences hum with the same depressing note: a great many people are destined to suffer terribly in their lives, for no other reason than it provides amusement for those who hold authority over them. 

mej. - Cherished

Seb Gardner - Autumn Skies

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century

Daffy Duck (Mel Blanc) stars in director Chuck Jones' Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, a delightful vision of the far future in which shaving cream has become a scarce resource and every skewed surface is plugged into the grid, replete with curling wires that hum with incredible electrical energies. In Duck Dodgers all technology is both farcically convenient and fantastically violent. The benefits of the Atomic Age scaled up in such a way as to express a ubiquitous but explosive sense of expedience. So, rather than detonate at the slightest launchpad inconvenience, the rockets in this time are completely invincible. Able to be started in reverse and burrow deep into the ground, without harm, before their gears are correctly aligned to blast off towards uncharted star systems. The Dodgers persona, modelled after the derring-do of serial heroes and (much) later the subject of a short-lived television series, is perfect for a Daffy Duck who has, by 1953, evolved from a screwball foil for dopey hunters into an absurdist leading man. There's enough of a task in place to demand that Daffy continuously try his luck, battling the scuttling Martian competing for ownership of the barren Planet X, but not so much that you feel like any real importance has been attached to the assignment that powers this self-important lunatic. 

Clipse - By the Grace of God (feat. Pharrell Williams)

The Transformers by メカニカルボッツ

The Go-Go's - Vacation

Smuv - Stranded

Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins

A streaming-only prelude to a forthcoming feature (and itself structured like two episodes of a television series roughly glued together), director Takeshi Koike's Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins sees the gentleman thief framed for a terror attack on a seventies-presenting glimpse of the Soviet Union. Naturally, this detonation occurs on the eve of peace talks with this story's United States analogue. Given the expressive, inky property and the presence of an elasticity specialist like Redline (not to mention several wonderfully springy shorts screened during concerts for the boy band SMAP) director Koike, you'd be forgiven for expecting this net animation to explode into a riot of clashing colours and improbable physical dexterity. In the main though, Zenigata and the Two Lupins is, like its snowed-in setting, a chilly affair; far more excited about replicating the halting rhythms of pre-Glasnost espionage thrillers than cartoonish derring-do. There are a few dangling insinuations about secret islands where the rich and powerful are able to retreat from public life to indulge themselves - seemingly as much a reference to 1978's Lupin movie The Mystery of Mamo as it is the real-life practices of untouchable elites - but, largely, Zenigata and the Two Lupins focuses on stuffy police procedure and playacting politicians. This is not to say that Koike's piece completely fails to acknowledge the more lively, caddish aspects of Monkey Punch's original manga. The scarred double who sullies Lupin's good name is allowed to luxuriate in the kind of violent, sex-pest behaviour that was ironed-out of the character when the series made the jump from early issues of Weekly Manga Action to much more heroic adventures on the big and small screen. 

Burial - Comafields

Hard-Boiled by Michael DeForge

Ninajirachi - London Song // Infohazard

System96 - iRIDESCENT