Fast Five Reviews

I've been very bad at writing reviews lately, which is totally sucky of me because I have seen a lot of very good movies lately. So here, let us play a little game of catch up! These five movies here are, to varying degrees, worth some of your time, says me.

Monsters: Dark Continent -- When I finally realized about twenty minutes into this sequel to Gareth Edwards' surprise 2010 indie-hit that Scoot McNairy really wasn't going to be popping up at any point, well, I might have taken to chanting "Free Scoot! Free Scoot!" for a hot minute, I'll confess. But mostly just because it's fun to chant "Free Scoot!" - it didn't really have anything to do with this movie on its own. Turns out that this movie on its own is actually surprisingly effective - yeah it drops the Lovecraftian space-monster conceit down into an Iraq War allegory that feels about six years late, but its characters aren't the video-game ciphers I feared they'd be at the start (this is no Battle: Los Angeles, thank goodness) and it showcases some of the same low-budget shock + awe the first movie did. There's also just some fun monster design going on and lord knows I'm a big sucker for that junk.

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter -- I had myself a double-feature of Kumiko & Jauja over the weekend and I remember thinking to myself, poisoned by the false bounty the New York City Cinematic Experience allows for, that anybody who whines about the art of movie-making being dead just isn't looking at the right places. Kumiko is one of the right places. Oddball as all get out, blessedly so, and anchored by an actress (Rinko Kukuchi) that fits the wacko bill to a tee, this movie's a reason to go to the movies. Rinko never gets this sort of leading lady room to breathe her particular brand of particulate air all over the screen and what a gift, taking it in. My favorite strain of the film's loving side-eye at the Coens & Fargo though is how the tundra-stuck residents of this world and their homespun quirk are no match for this lady - all the "Aww Jeez"'s in the world just flatten out in front of real weirdness.

Spring -- You know how I always try to visit a horror movie location when I go on a trip somewhere? Well I wish I'd seen this movie before I'd gone to Italy last year so I could've had something other than Kit Harington's thighs on my mind when I wandered the wrecked streets of Pompeii. Not that I've got anything against Kit Harington's thighs of course. I'd love to have something against Kit Harington's thighs actually. But they're just not horrific, and horror is the game. Well Spring isn't entirely horror either - it's more like Richard Linklater directing an HP Lovecraft story. (This being the second time I'm bringing up Lovecraft in this post I am inclined to think on the parallels between Spring & the Monsters sequel - they do both have similar ground-breaking finales, for one.) 

Which is a pretty great thing to be more like! Spring sometimes gets lost in the wrecked streets of its own myth-making (I don't really need all of the gibberish science to suspend my disbelief; it actually sometimes gets in the way) but its saving grace is its embrace of its own silliness - it thinks nothing of allowing for a hysterically funny cutaway to a bunny rabbit mid-monster-montage, when I could see a lesser version of this movie suffocating itself with self-seriousness.

White God -- My mood slammed itself back and forth while watching White God - while I never quite got to the place a hefty chunk of the audience I was watching it with got where I was going to walk out mid-movie (I haven't seen so many folks storm out of a movie in quite awhile) I did find myself every so often looking at the people leaving with an envious eye. It's relentlessly downbeat and aggressively dark, sometimes (often) to its own detriment - I have never seen (and will never see) Iñárritu's film Amores Perros (I have had quite my fill of Alejandro González Iñárritu, thank you very much) but I wasn't surprised to read people comparing that film with White God because I sometimes got the "misery for misery's sake" feeling from the latter that's made Iñárritu my arch-nemesis. And yet White God is its own dark strange beast, and just so bizarre at times that, headache be damned (there's so much barking, you guys), I couldn't stop watching it. And I'm glad I didn't stop watching it because the last twenty minutes or so are just insane things.

Eastern Boys -- Eastern Boys reminded me a lot of Stranger by the Lake (which I just recently named my second favorite movie of 2013) in that they both use the jittery tension of thrillers to get at something tough in the heart of homosexual male relationships - both movies soak in the danger of not knowing that testosterone-addled beast climbing on top of you and the strange places your own hormone-blind impulses may lead you... like under a testosterone-addled beast, for instance. But Eastern Boys ultimately reveals a tenderness to this fella's transactions - there turns out to be love, and not just lust, here. Not to mention forgiveness, and a way out and through. Stranger's cynical allegory of manhood unchecked probably hits its mark a little cleaner, but Boys has the soul (and all the sloppiness that messy noun presupposes) that movie left beating off in the bushes.

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