Pale Rider

Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is a strange beast. Conceptually, it's an obvious retread of the actor-director's earlier western High Plains Drifter, to wit: a ghostly stranger appears out of nowhere to dispense a Biblical kind of justice on a threadbare settlement packed with wrongdoers. Whereas Drifter wallowed in cruelty and a windswept damnation, Rider position's Eastwood's phantom as a literal miracle, one that rides out of the imagination of a furious teenage girl, Sydney Penny's Megan, to answer her tearful prayers. Megan resides alongside a stream where her mother's partner, Michael Moriarty's Hull, sifts for enough gold to settle the debts he's accrued in the nearest town. The camp, little more than a dozen middle-aged men and their simpleton sons, are being pressured to abandon their duff claim by drunken, spoiling miners so that a greedy magnate can sweep in and unleash a deluge of industrial effluence on these autumnal lands.

Pale Rider, although routine in terms of premise is notable in how it contextualises its star. These means of presentation even differ based on who is currently appraising him. The audience, who are privy to whispered conversations and insert shots of an impossibly scarred body, are prompted to consider Eastwood's Preacher as a supernatural presence. A dead man returned to life to revenge himself on the killer who shot six bullets through him. Preacher is the same sort of wandering loner as Shane or Sanjuro; a kind of character that Eastwood has plenty of experience inhabiting and deconstructing. The defeated prospectors, used to a deranged sort of toil premised on fleeting shots at fortune, see him as their leader. A man of faith who is smart and resourceful enough to carry them to victory against their much braver and far more experienced, in the ways of warfare, persecutors. He's serene, self-assured and masculine in ways they cannot hope to be. 

Yet another interpretation comes from Megan and her mother Sarah, played Carrie Snodgress. They see this gunslinger in purely romantic terms, a figure of such tempestuous sexual energy that they both pick their moments to proposition him. Preacher demurs, at least in the case of Megan, reassuring these women that someone else - someone lesser - will find in themselves an ability to stick around, beyond the bloodshed he was summoned for, and make them happy. It's not even that Preacher is specifically sexless. After Sarah has confessed her hurried affections, he asks her to close the door of her sinking shack, to silence the echoing taunts of a crooked lawman, then he strides purposefully towards her. If anything his behaviour is suggestive of some pre-established, but fading, connection. Just as we are prompted to examine Preacher in archetypal terms, he also relates to others using similar parameters. Relationships are general; detail extraneous and unimportant. Even Eastwood's approach to violence in Pale Rider is unusual. Preacher's slaying of the seven lawman recruited to exterminate him is almost farcical in its arrangement. Eastwood concealing himself in ways that only make sense when considering this three-dimensional setting from the flat, two-dimensional perspective of a screen. 

Starscream vs. Grimlock by Geoff Senior

Ugly Duckling - A Little Salsa (People Under the Stairs Remix)

Blur - The Swan

Shin Kamen Rider

Notable as an action adventure film that doesn't make any attempt to conceal that it was shot under Covid protocols, Hideaki Anno's Shin Kamen Rider (listed as Shin Masked Rider on Amazon's streaming service) is a film concerned with tiny human figures broadcasting their thoughts to vast, empty arenas. Sosuke Ikematsu stars as Hongo, a socially withdrawn motorcyclist inexplicably granted people pulping powers by a mad scientist, played by the grand seigneur of cyberpunk, Shinya Tsukamoto. Naturally, Hongo is alarmed by his sudden ability to tear faceless goons limb-from-limb, as well as an attendant physical transformation that has hardened his skin into a cracked carapace. This mental and physical unease doesn't last though. Hongo quickly learns from Minami Hamabe's robotic Ruriko, his creator's indifferent daughter, that he can temporarily dump his anxiety-inducing metamorphosis by venting over-accumulated life energies. 

Lumbered by a storytelling model that prioritises isolated individuals, locked centre frame and delivering excruciating recaps, Shin Kamen Rider's most entertaining elements are the strange low budget scaffolding inherited from its parent television show: super-fights that are staged on desolate industrial estates; armoured costumes that don't completely tidy away the sweating human animal underneath; and hard cuts between locations to show that our heroes are permanently in a state of having arrived somewhere. Unfortunately, the film's fights are drowned out by a deliberately simplistic approach to computer generated figures. Shin Kamen Rider completely failing to build on the kinetic fluidity evident in Anno's extremely similar live-action adaptation of Cutie Honey - another 'Shin' film in all but branding. The director's most distinctive contribution then is a germophobic affect, one exacerbated by real-life social distancing rules that have gutted this concrete canvas of normal, non-superpowered people. Hongo, at least initially, is fixated on inspecting his hands. He flexes and curls his filthy leather claws, studying the spilt blood of vanquished heavies. 

Eagle Eyed Tiger - The Game

Lone Wolf and Cub by Daniel Warren Johnson

Blur - Barbaric

Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honour and Humanity opens on the mushroom cloud that devastated Hiroshima. The camera tilts, travelling up the stem before it arrives at the boiling cap of the atomic firestorm, the reveal accompanied by blaring, brassy horns. Fukasaku's film tracks a group of demobbed Japanese soldiers scratching out a living following their return to this shattered, occupied city. The young men fight their way across the open air markets that have congealed on these famished, irradiated ruins, seeing off thrashing mobsters and the American soldiers who roam in packs, preying on screaming civilian women. Although long passages of Battles revolve around the effortlessly charismatic Bunta Sugawara, it could hardly be said that his Hirono is the film's main focus. The low-level gangster spends as much time off-screen and in jail as he does at the centre of the frame. Instead, Fukasaku's film largely adopts an anthropological approach: an embedded camera that runs alongside its subjects, cramming into tiny rooms for a decisive meeting or jostling for an advantageous view on the constant quarrels. 

Literally post-apocalyptic, Battles describes an effort to act out an antiquated, pre-war idea of criminal chivalry. It's a stock kind of gallantry that, very obviously, didn't really exist. The film's many characters are enthusiastic novices with no clear connection to the organised crime fraternities they are emulating. Their ceremonial initiations are parroted and incomplete, each a strange sort of lark performed by arrested children who are playing at being hard-bitten men. The stakes are the same though, regardless of individual experience. It's not that Fukasaku's film betrays any great affection for how these things used to be done either. The older men who prey on these youngsters are greedy and self-centred, obviously the products of a system premised on the relentless exploitation of an imaginary but inflexible class system. The veterans reflexively rat out their subordinates, playing them off against each other and ensuring that they themselves can stake a claim to the lion's share of profits. In this way the police, usually an antagonistic force in crime cinema, become almost immaterial to the unfolding events. Since their dragnets are frequently directed by a snitch, they nearly always get their man. Battles Without Honour and Humanity then concerns the dawning realisation that genuine loyalties are forged between peers over decades, and cannot easily be recanted. 

Altered Sigh - Just a Phase

Akuma by Quasimodox

Alan Palomo - Meutrière (feat. Flore Benguigui)

The Flash

The most fascinating aspect of Andy Muschietti's The Flash is that Warner Bros. was convinced they had a smash hit on their hands. A picture so purely entertaining that it was capable of overshadowing the bizarre (not to mention well publicised) criminality of its lead actor and bid a fond farewell to an era of superhero filmmaking that has inspired a genuinely rabid level of affection. On the day, we are instead treated to a strangely fatalistic money pit that, at least initially, seeks to emulate the light comedic touch of Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future series before the studio edicts pile up then collapse in on themselves. Muschietti's film isn't always a boiling disaster though. Often it's even agreeable, usually thanks to one of the many Dark Knights skulking about. Ben Affleck briefly returns as Zack Snyder's Batman, this time behaving with the unhurried confidence of a Sprangian Scoutmaster. This burly grump is quickly overwritten, after Flash visits a temporal treadmill, allowing Michael Keaton's heavily merchandised take on the vengeful billionaire to spring back into action. 

Every moment spent in Keaton's company is a delight. The actor steering his untouchable take on Bill Finger and Bob Kane's crimefighter towards a kind of gravelly stoicism, one typically associated with Clint Eastwood - incidentally, another Warners mainstay. The Flash keeps on churning though, eventually sinking itself into a computer generated sludge thick with totemic marionettes choking on their own arrested adventures. These plastic depictions of a reality sinkhole are sort of stunning in their ugliness: Ezra Miller's twin speedsters the subject in an enormous colosseum stacked with conveyer belts that teem with hijacked imagery. Rather than tell an engaging story about a buffoon who treats his life like a series of video game checkpoints, we have a piece that literalises streaming services as a stinking cauldron of thwarted ambition. These century-spanning properties, and how they are expressed, are not special to the people cutting the cheques. It's all just content. Fit only to be piled on top of each other in an pulverising attempt to silence the bleating subscriber. No wonder the Discovery regime was so delighted: this Flash is a two hundred million dollar juggernaut premised on the idea that people should, in fact, just shut up and accept the slop that is served to them. 

Olivia Rodrigo - Vampire

Cammy by キシリ

ALISON & VIQ - Ardent

Rainy Dog

As with many Takashi Miike films, Rainy Dog centres around a character completely wrapped up in his own delusions and therefore incapable of reacting spontaneously. Rather than respond to events as they are happening, Show Aikawa's Yuuji continues muddling along a path he has predetermined in his own mind; unshakably acting out his idea of how an embattled hitman should behave when they have outlived their usefulness. Set in Taiwan during monsoon season, Yuuji is trapped by the incessant rain. Soaked through, he huddles in his mouldering apartment watching tiny, heavily compressed clips of Daiei monster movies. When the downpour does let up, Yuuji strides around town in billowing funereal whites, blowing holes through minor mob bosses. The casualness of his violence is striking in terms of how utterly unconcerned Yuuji is about repercussion. This particular Taipei neighbourhood is not, it seems, beholden to any form of law enforcement. People, not just Yuuji, kill with such impunity that the act has become a particularly ugly form of street theatre. 

Yuuji is a Japanese criminal - excommunicated from his organised crime syndicate, we learn - living abroad and, essentially, collecting scraps from the local gangs. His Taiwanese employers talk up their familial affection for Yuuji but, naturally, they see him only as a useful but expendable asset. Early in the film Yuuji's door is kicked in by a furious ex, who quickly reveals that not only is this hitman a father but a deadbeat one at that. Child firmly abandoned, the woman flees in a taxi, screaming at her driver for daring to question her trajectory away from this sodden hell. Yuuji doesn't so much take this development in his stride as not acknowledge that anything in his life has even changed. The child, a mute boy played by Jianqin He, follows his father around like a lost animal, quivering in the elements and feeding himself from bins while Dad stalks rival mobsters or visits a brothel. This strange (un)familial bond - in which a father does exactly what he likes even though he has a dependent in tow - is reminiscent of the one seen in the Lone Wolf and Cub films. By updating the relationship to the modern day, and stripping out all the ceremony associated with the suicidal moral codes of an uprooted samurai, Miike has hit upon a profoundly selfish expression of masculinity and fatherhood, one that sees trembling children as axis (or even distraction) when enacting your own, personal, Gotterdammerung. 

Drab Majesty - The Skin and The Glove

Rosentwig - Feather Light and Paper Thin

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Not sure how much stock can be placed in this observation but, as far as my own tastes are concerned, the Transformers features that have entertained the most are those willing to describe these reconfiguring creatures as biomechanical landscapes of incredible complexity and detail. The gold standard, of course, is The Transformers: The Movie, an 80s animated feature directed by Nelson Shin that begins with a nomadic metal globe braving the tidal forces of two overlapping stars to feast on a planet settled by a race of peaceful, intellectual robots. The destruction is described in excruciating detail: cities and their skyscrapers are crushed and consumed; countless millions of lives pulverised by continent-sized hydraulic teeth. All in an effort to power an engine of pure extinction. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts kicks off in much the same way - Movie Picture Company and Weta FX's computer generated vistas capturing the churning outline (if not the full, pulsating phantasmagoria) of Floro Dery's original Unicron design - but the apocalypse presented here is significantly less harrowing. 

Mandibles the size of tectonic plates do plunge into the home world of the Maximals - a futuristic Cybertronian faction hailing from Beast Wars: Transformers, a mid-90s toyline - but we are not confronted with either enormous collateral damage or an extended breakdown of the abstract biology inherent to a world-eating machine. Similarly, Steven Caple Jr's film might inherit the spine-ripping violence synonymous with Michael Bay's pass at the property but the execution is far less inclined to delight in the twitching disassembly. Bay appraised these spasming, mechanical nervous systems with a slow-motion photography designed to distend these agonies. Conversely, Caple Jr and his VFX vendors treat these decapitations as a repulsive (or even shameful) holdover from a previous regime. Blessed with likeable leads and a hip-hop soundtrack that finds room for many East Coast greats, Rise of the Beasts is the first of these live action adaptations that actually seems designed to appeal to children. It rejects the photorealistic, cybernetic musculature of its predecessors, preferring to depict these titans in toyetic and knowingly unreal terms. This breakfast cartoon affectation even threatening to pull in other, less successful, Hasbro properties for further big screen adventures. 

Feeble Little Horse - Steamroller

Doomlord by Geoff Senior

Feeble Little Horse - Freak

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

For its first five instalments, Mission: Impossible was a series defined by constant reinvention. Each film designed to behave as a blockbuster calling card for the high profile directors that actor-producer Tom Cruise had managed to flatter then recruit. These constantly transforming artistic objectives have meant that re-evaluation has rarely crept into proceedings. That is until Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. This film - director Christopher McQuarrie's third with a fourth hot on its heels - is riddled with allusions to Brian De Palma's originator, even terminating with another action sequence set upon a speeding train. These references go beyond seeing Cruise's Ethan Hunt back sporting a black v-neck jumper under a leather jacket, or bringing back Henry Czerny's IMF irritant Kittridge. The aesthetics of late twentieth century spycraft - windowless rooms stacked with CRT monitors running diagnostics - have logistical and mechanical purchase in a story that revolves around an all-powerful algorithm; one that has escaped clean room conditions to infect every input or interaction aimed at Hunt's crew. The digital sphere can no longer be trusted. Only analogue solutions can be relied upon. 

Dead Reckoning revolves around a phantom antagonist taking orders from a constellation of calculations; endlessly breeding blue thoughts that are suspended and swirling in a pitch black void that (literally) hangs over the film's sweating heroes. This sense of danger is so obviously all-encompassing that very little energy is expended tying the film's disparate set-pieces together. There's a sense that this issue cannot be settled - and indeed it is not in this episode - therefore the film is given over to describing solutions to ever-changing problems. This mode of storytelling is actually complimented by the strange frequencies inherent to Cruise: his take on Hunt is monastic and obsessive, a fanatic dedicated not to a country or cause but to the experts he has selected to be in the room with him. This drive takes on a metatextual quality in Dead Reckoning, a film that pivots on the relentless foregrounding of enormous and impeccable stunt work. This execution focused mindset means that Dead Reckoning reads like a thesis statement on filmmaking itself. Hunt and his earpiece support are a creative team, one constantly placed in situations where they have to play the cards dealt to them on the day then figure out an advantageous outcome. 

For a star as private and protected as Cruise, this framing seems positively autobiographical. Like Hunt, Cruise is the human bullet chambered by these enormous productions; prepped, against everybody's better judgement, to be the one blasted out into the abyss. He's an old-fashioned star in that sense, everything is balanced on his shoulders and his ability to hit his marks. Therefore he is charged to behave in a certain way. Dead Reckoning offers up a sanitised and mythologised appraisal of a human being suffering through these pressures: Hunt frequently talks his less experienced allies through hell with the tranquil detachment of the truly invincible. If there's a sour note in this restless film then, it's the ease with which Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust is replaced. It's not just that early glimpses of the actress feel digitally stitched in, it's that Hayley Atwell's pickpocket Grace instantly stakes such a strong physical claim on both Hunt and the moment-to-moment assembly of the film. While Faust is slowly becoming an afterthought, Grace is intertwined with Hunt, co-driving his car (another FIAT 500, Dead Reckoning presumably as much a fan of The Castle of Cagliostro as the comparatively antiseptic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and pulling the kind of screen filling startled-but-still-photogenic faces ill-suited to either Ferguson or Cruise's characters. 

Nightquest - For the First Time

Judge Dredd: Lawman of the Future by Geoff Senior

Max I Million - 24 Carat Gleam

John Williams - Helena's Theme

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

James Mangold's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny doesn't make the best first impression. The film's opening gambit is visually unappealing in ways that are both brand new and unnervingly ancient. Set in 1944, Harrison Ford's two-fisted archaeologist fights up and down a speeding Nazi plunder train, hoping to lay his hands on a religious artefact famous enough to have already inspired a mid-90s movie tie-in comic. The relic turns out to be a forgery (although this film's conclusion does allow for the idea that metal wrought in the twentieth century could be raised to the level of sainted icon after having slipped into the ancient past), so attention quickly turns to an incomplete, Archimedean gear; an item so complicated and out-of-time that it must conceal some terrible power. The flashback allows the Disney corporation yet another opportunity to scrub the mileage off a person of advanced age; in this instance, the actor who holds sway over one of their most prestigious pop culture purchases. 

This exorbitantly expensive makeover aims to fossilize bankable nostalgia in computer generated amber, a digital veil that conceals the flaws accumulated by time while also reversing perceived mistakes made by filmmaking regimes less obsessed with the relentless issue of instalments. Any spell the sequence could hope to conjure is immediately thwarted though when Ford opens his mouth and the gravely voice of a much older man is heard. The effect is very similar to that of the artificially extended version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that outstayed its welcome on home video formats: for scenes where only an Italian language track had been recorded, elderly actors were press-ganged into booths to record comparable English lines. The disconnection is compounded by the rubbery action a digital Harrison Ford is then subjected to. His body is tossed around, and comes to no harm, in a house-cracking explosion while a noose dangles around his neck. While a shot of him skipping along the length of a moving train reads as oddly (and obnoxiously) weightless, as if the stunt was undertaken by a half-stuffed rag doll. 

These blips might be a bit more excusable when considering Marvel characters, who spring from two-dimensional cradles, but Indiana Jones is a series famous for exemplary examples of real-life tuck-and-roll stunt work. Therefore the disapproval is instant and intense. Strangely, the highlight of this opening sequence is that the digital trickery employed conjures up a style of photography knowingly similar to the day-for-night shooting seen in the men-on-a-mission films of the 1960s and 70s - a genre that Ford has priors with thanks to Guy Hamilton's Force 10 from Navarone. Fortunately this derailment does eventually end, hurling us forward in time to a New York in the midst of celebrating the first moon landing. Dial of Destiny may retain the ungainly rhythms established on the treasure train - a tempo better suited to films asking to be considered on their dramatic, rather than hyperbolic, components - but the film does at least perk up when considering a much older, and physically present, adventurer. 

This Indiana Jones is suffering through bereavement and an acute feeling of redundancy as his working life draws to a close: Jones' students no longer sit enraptured, batting their eyelids at him, they're bored and restless. It's difficult not to sympathise with their drifting attentions. Dial of Destiny barks at it audience, gussying up the film's would-be peaks with information and dangling stakes that it, often, has no real intention of delivering on. Mangold's film careens from set-piece to set-piece, never quite finding the right gag or angle to really make any of this death-defying stick: a tuk-tuk chase through endless Moroccan streets doesn't registers as anything other than a pile-up of green-screened dodgems. A misjudged self-seriousness also permeates Dial of Destiny, with the light, comedic touch of franchise originators George Lucas and (most especially) Steven Spielberg almost completely absent. What yuks remain are largely apportioned to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's flirtatious Helena and Ethann Isidore's Teddy, a pair of bickering grifters designed to conjure up pleasant memories of Karen Allen's Marion or Ke Huy Quan's long absent Short Round. 

Dial of Destiny would be a thankless chore then where it not for its concluding chapters. Once we are deep in an elevated and undiscovered tomb - one that lies above a hollowed-out tourist trap - the film (finally) begins to click into place. The uncanniness of the ancient computer, that has has been laboriously tracked throughout the piece, begins to wash back over proceedings, sprinkling incongruity and mind-bending uncertainty into the well-worn situations of a series premised on tomb raiding. Mads Mikkelsen's true believer Nazi is certain he has in his possession a tool that will bend to his own, genocidal whims. As with the Ark of the Covenant or the cup of Christ, this ancient treasure has an agenda of its own and is unwilling to deviate from that specific function. The resulting folly, as expected, chews up and spits out avaricious trespassers but not before it has allowed a bloodthirsty American, dressed up as a Gestapo officer, the opportunity to fire on the invading armies of the first Reich. Indiana Jones receives rare reward too, a fleeting chance to babble in the presence of human antiquity. In its final few moments Dial of Destiny diverges from the pack, heaping hosannas on a real-life scientific genius rather than the mist and fog of myth. 

John Williams - Prologue to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Slash by のび (@n_ma17)

Endless Withdrawal - Smoke Signals

The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg's autobiography-cum-confessional, The Fabelmans, describes a person besotted with destruction and their ability to, eventually, have some control over the ways in which it is captured or expressed. We experience this bewitchment first in crude terms: the mix of horror and pleasure derived from witnessing a runaway train coming off its tracks then piling up in a heap. A young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, a blue-eyed cherub not completely dissimilar in look to Empire of the Sun era Christian Bale) gets the zap put on him by a luxurious appointed derailment from Cecil B DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. This special effects sequence spooks him to such a degree that he longs to repeat the sensation, eventually leveraging a series of Hanukkah gifts into a scale approximation - one that Sammy blasts directly at his own face. Later in the film this fixation is expressed in interpersonal terms. During the argument that marks the dissolution of his family our eyes are directed to a mirror where we see a teenage Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle) standing over his weeping sisters, prodding at them with his camera. 

This glimpse, an intrusive thought given an accusatory physical life, momentarily chides the young man for being unprepared to document this real-time collapse, before the conscious, present mind actually experiencing this trauma wakes up and banishes these cold-blooded insinuations altogether. Spielberg and Tony Kushner's screenplay revolves around a certain kind of loneliness then, one achieved through a lifelong dedication to emotional passivity all while possessing an incisive grasp on that which makes other, separate people tick. Michelle Williams' Mitzi Fabelman dominates both her son's life and the first half of this film; a mother churning through a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Her crumble marked by varying gradients of grinning terror. Mitzi's neuroses are so obvious and relentlessly acted out that they have, inadvertently, subordinated every other member of her family into the role of an appreciative audience. They are the extras or background players, condemned to swirl around this subject to very little effect. Mitzi is a sitcom character trapped outside of her natural habitat and suffering for this cruel displacement. Her husband (played with a strange, extraterrestrial heroism by Paul Dano) and children, are so numb to this never-ending performance that any recognition of impending doom is imparted solely to us, the audience, to note. 

Afterift - Kilodose

Slowdive - Kisses

Rollerball by Robert Ball