Dear friend,
in the last couple of weeks, my spare time has been absorbed by different tasks and activities, and that’s why this roundup of my weekly film explorations comes a bit late. I’m confident you found a way to go on with your life anyway!
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I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House , written and directed by Osgood Perkins, US, 2016
Netflix still offers Perkins’ second film, so, post-Longlegs, I decided to revisit it. At least, I think I have watched it before, and that I didn’t enjoy it much. But I found out I never logged it, and none of it looked familiar, aside from what I might have inferred anyway from the Netflix screencaps. And in any case, more than watching a movie, it felt like having a 90-minute mindfulness session, where you focus on the moment (the images on the screen), but then your mind wanders until you are reminded to focus back. A truly unique experience. ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
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Wayne’s World , directed by Penelope Spheeris, written by Mike Myers, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, US, 1992
This one was definitely a rewatch, and as much fun as the first time. Most of it still holds well thirty years later, and there are many hilarious classic moments. Party on! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Wayne’s World 2 , directed by Stephen Surjik, written by Mike Myers, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner, US, 1993
My opinion on the second Wayne’s World hasn’t changed either: it feels like Myers has started his trajectory towards Austin Powers, with more spoof content, some Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-style nonsense, and in general an Airplane 2! impression that all the good gags are being rehashed from the previous film. As a detour, the wiki page explains that Myers had essentially prepared a script that was a rip-off of Passport to Pimlico and that this one was the result of a very hurried rewrite from scratch. I still wonder why nobody has re-done Pimlico, which seems so relevant in Brexit times. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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House/ハウス , directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, written by Chiho Katsura, Japan, 1977
This film feels like a live-action anime, with such delirious editing and transitions and special effects, that it would deserve five stars just for how crazy it is, starting with the seven girls identified by names that fully describe their characters (Gorgeous, Prof, Melody, Kung Fu, Sweet, Mac, Fantasy), like Snowwhite’s dwarves or Spice Girls. Unfortunately, the acting is so bad, that it makes it feel like a bad school play. ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
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Deadpool & Wolverine , directed by Shawn Levy , written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Ryan Reynolds, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy, US, 2024
Since this is the only MCU film this year, we would have deserved a good MCU film. But Deadpool films, despite being very funny, are undermined by their lack of a decent plot. This one, expected to be the first appearance of Deadpool (and Wolverine) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is rather a love letter to the Fox Cinematic Planets. And as is the case with many of the Phase 4/Phase 5 Marvel films, it will probably leave you cold if you don’t have a great deal of affection for a bunch of previous films and characters. Or if you’d prefer a film with an actual plot. That said, I laughed a lot, I was amazed by its title sequence (though I had guessed where it would go), and I was very pleased with a couple of the inevitable multiversal cameos. I’m less thrilled that in order to understand some of the jokes you need to be up-to-date with the actors’ personal lives because those jokes will get old quite soon. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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One Cut of the Dead/カメラを止めるな！ , written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda , Japan, 2017
This film was such a delightful surprise. Watching it knowing as little as everybody else about the plot (a film crew shooting a zombie film gets attacked by unscripted monsters), I had what I learnt is the standard reaction: what is this, why does it look so badly scripted and acted, and why does the story move so quickly?
Then the fun started. Loved it, rewatched it almost completely the day after (after seeing the film below), and despite knowing where it was headed, I loved it just the same. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ -
Coupez!/Final Cut , written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius , France, 2022
The French title for One Cut of the Dead was Ne coupez pas!, so obviously the title of the French remake had to be… Coupez! ? I knew of the existence of both these films, but I had no idea that one was a remake of the other.
Time and again, the film explicitly points out being a remake, and that what works for Japanese audiences doesn’t necessarily work for French ones.
Now, I’m not French, and this film doesn’t work for me at all; but I’m not Japanese either, and still, I loved the original; since the script has changed very little, I find my different appreciation of the two quite surprising. Maybe it’s just that I don’t enjoy Hazanavicius films in general (not even when he inexplicably wins Oscars), or maybe it’s the fact that the story works better if you believe the film is rubbish (which becomes harder to accept if the lead characters are well-known faces like Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo), or again the setting (a completely empty, uninteresting racecourse that doesn’t help viewers understanding the space the film takes place in; compare it with the abandoned water treatment plant, with three clearly-placed doors and visible stairs to the other floor, of the Japanese film), or the camera movements, almost completely flat in a flat space. Ultimately I think that it’s the tone that is wrong: everything looks too farcical to be sincere, from the maniacal acting of Duris to the anti-capitalistic, auteurs’-actor rants of Finnegan Oldfield’s ‘male lead’. On the plus side, for added meta-points, Hazanavicious cast his wife and his daughter Simone as the director’s relatives. And it made me finally go check the meaning of ‘Ken’ in French slang , which has raised so much fun on francophone social media around Barbie last year. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
In summary, 7 films:
- one horror film, 3 comedies, 3 horror/comedies
- 4 US films, 2 Japanese ones, and a French movie
- 4 original films, 2 sequels, 1 remake
- 4 first watches, 2 rewatches, and one that honestly I’m not sure about
- a film from the ’70s, 2 from the ’90s, 2 from the 2010s, 2 from this decade
No doubt in my mind that the film of the week is One Cut of the Dead.