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.