When it’s working and we’re all psychically connected and the music’s taking us over, I can’t imagine anything more exquisite.”. Which is like saying that King Kong is big, Vincent Price’s performances are campy, and blood is red. Wong Kar-Wai’s “Fallen Angel” soundtrack. Borat, like practically all satirically minded comedy in the Trump era, has been swallowed up into the all-consuming maw of electoral politics. Annie’s (Jane Lowry) near murder, when she’s stabbed on the stairway, is framed in a prismatic image, with a mirror reflecting the assault back on itself and suggesting, once again, the intense insularity of this world. One memorable, repeated image of Anna’s family sitting at the table while clumps of hair descend from the cracks in the ceiling is so effective because it’s allowed to be eerie, rather than immediately undercut by a line about a support group for women with killer weaves. examination table. As a fellow traveler, Tsai seems to sympathize with its characters. Budd Wilkins, Before the flourishing digital age paved the way for social-media naval-gazing, YouTube, and selfies galore, The Blair Witch Project foreshadowed the narcissism of a generation, its success unsurprisingly paving the way for an army of imitators that failed to grasp the essence of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s terrifyingly singular and effortlessly self-reflexive genre exercise. Your Ticket Confirmation # is located under the header in your email that reads "Your Ticket Reservation Details". Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks is now available from Abrams. Rebels of the Neon God announces writer-director Ming-liang Tsai as a fully formed talent -- and remains one of the more accomplished debuts of the decade. Alienated from society and not willing to fulfill their so-called predetermined way of life, the young adults resort to apathy and violence. In other words, there’s a highly self-conscious, stylized, insulated innocence to the film that inspires distrust, as we’re invited to enjoy the sort of idyll proffered by many teen movies, yet we know we’re being played with. Though the film begins as something of a lecture on the topic of women’s bodies as a threat, it morphs into an array of sketches, images, and dramatizations of mankind’s fundamental inability to conceive itself outside of power and difference. T sai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God is, in one sense, an examination of several teenagers roaming the streets of Teipei, vacillating between their homes, an arcade, and a skating rink while displaying little capacity for introspection or outward explication of their plights. In "Rebels of the Neon God," Hsiao Kang(Lee Kang-sheng) is going through a bit of a rough patch as he wants to drop out of cram school. The interactions between Bad Hair’s characters already convey the domination of white beauty standards and how the self dissipates when capitulating to them, so the extra steps taken to underline these themes only works to dilute them. All Critics (33) While there are some elements to admire in this adaptation, particularly its being cast with mostly black performers, much of it falls into the category of Competent But Unnecessary Remake. However flagrantly artificial and constructed, the whole film feels uniquely alive. The “I wanna f**king die” energy of its musical themes brings such a nauseating distaste to the everyday lifestyle that we heed our many characters on. His corpse is then tied and shoved into the orphanage’s basement pool, and when a young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), arrives at the ghostly facility some time later, he seemingly signals the arrival of Franco himself. But in their latest, Synchronic, the filmmakers do the fitting for you. frustrated student, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), impales a cockroach He makes for quite the presence, but his hungers ultimately lead him to oblivion. (The police are shown to be restorers of order, though they serve that function almost inadvertently.) The essential valorizing of Jack Horner, the paternal porn director of Boogie Nights, eventually gives way to the richer, more fraught examinations of obsessive pseudo-father figures like Daniel Plainview, Lancaster Dodd, and Reynolds Woodcock, of There Will Be Blood, 2012’s The Master, and Phantom Thread, respectively. The gauntlet that his film’s heroine, a “final girl” who’s abducted and tortured by a religious cult straight out of a Clive Barker novel, is forced to endure is considerable. Don't have an account? Keith Watson, Near the conclusion of Häxan, an intertitle asks: “The witch no longer flies away on her broom over the rooftops, but isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” Such a rhetorical question is in keeping with the implications of Benjamin Christensen’s eccentric historical crawl through representations of evil. The obsessive nature of Anderson’s bold often “lateral” imagery is also enriched by the endless twins and doppelgangers that populate his films, suggesting that he’s chewing, with increasing sophistication, a set of preoccupations over and over, gradually triumphing over his fear of women as he sees his men with escalating clarity. Like Godard's "Breathless" and Wong's "As Tears Go By," "Rebels" cunningly synthesizes both B-movie and art film. However, that coda is replaced by a non-Dahl framing device voiced by Chris Rock that brings a new wrinkle to the conclusion which would be more enjoyable if it weren’t doing double duty as the launch pad for potential sequels or spin-offs. That’s akin to saying that all an apple ever really symbolizes is an apple, and that symbols and subtexts essentially don’t exist. Bad Hair unintentionally mirrors its characters’ own insecurities, teetering awkwardly between straight-faced camp and outright farce as it cuts the scare scenes to ribbons and makes jokes about itself, as if to preempt any disbelief from the audience. But the filmmakers fill out the familiar framework of Ruben’s dilemma with an acutely detailed portrait of a deaf community headed by the serene and compassionate Joe (Paul Raci), a former addict who lost his hearing during Vietnam and firmly believes that deafness isn’t a handicap. Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye, in which high school children come of age while moseying around the San Fernando Valley in anticipation of an undefined formal event, sets the audience up for a lark. The wrenching ambiguity of 2014’s Inherent Vice, in which Anderson fluidly dramatizes the psychosexual ecstasy, despair, and hilarity of corrosive commercialist annihilation, gives way in the book to Anderson’s 1997 breakthrough, Boogie Nights, which Nayman astutely sees as a virtuoso primitive work, an epic that (too) neatly bifurcates pleasure and pain into two distinct acts while disguising its sentimentality with astonishing camera movements and a tonal instability that’s probably equal parts intended and inadvertent. The most hideous of this film’s images is a shot of the back of Brian’s neck after Aylmer—an eight-inch-or-so-long creature that resembles a cross between a tapeworm, a dildo, and an ambulant piece of a shit along the lines of South Park’s Mr. Hanky—has first injected him, with its cartography of blood lines that are so tactile we can nearly feel Brian’s pain as he touches it. blood, to the alarm of his parents (Lu Yi-ching and Miao Tien). We as an audience get to see an erratic narration. A more interesting question: Why do we flock to films that revel in what is, in all likelihood, our greatest fear? Tsai attaches these affirmations most evidently to Hsiao-Kang, who sits around his parents’ flat, pointing and toying with his newly acquired pellet gun in a manner that deliberately recalls Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. |, August 23, 2018 Later on, Joe tells Ruben that “those moments of stillness, that place, that’s the kingdom of God. Udo Kier’s Count Dracula, unable to find virgin blood amid the sexually active women of a 19th-century Italian family, finds himself quite literally poisoned by change. There’s maybe two scenes in this entire movie that felt devised — otherwise, you could’ve fooled me that this footage was baked from high-quality documentation made from the likes of a filmmaker hooked-up on luring cinematography, attested shot-length proposals, and eerie sequencing patterns. Just below that it reads "Ticket Confirmation#:" followed by a 10-digit number. unfolds with a similar paucity of dialogue. The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror. A trip to the Texas State Fair—with Borat disguised, as he is for much of the film, as a grizzled hayseed with a Prince Valiant hairdo—would seem to offer endless opportunities for up-close-and-personal pranks, but instead it’s largely just the backdrop for a few sight gags. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. The film’s oh-so-1960s psychosexual subtext may be slightly under-baked, but that only serves to heighten the verisimilitude of its supernatural happenings. Anderson’s films toggle between valorizing and criticizing men of industry who’ve, with a few exceptions, made America in their own neurotic image. later features by the director, such as "What Time is There? After asking Dana Andrews’s comically hardheaded Dr. Holden how can one differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind, Niall MacGinnis’s wily satanic cult leader conjures up a storm of epic proportions to prove to the pragmatic doctor that the power of the dark arts is no joke. In other words, another piece of family-friendly-ish content to fill the yawning hours of pandemic confinement. Tsai Ming-liang’s debut is easily the finest coming-of-age phenomenon I’ve seen in a while, if you could even call it that? At times she’s a woke warrior, and at times she’s a helpless little girl. Download Rebels of the Neon God (1992) Torrent: Defying his parents, Hsiao Kang drops out of the local crammer to head for the bright lights of downtown Taipei. We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future. And as it turns out, the weaves are also alive, and they’re literally out for blood, at least those being offered at a mysterious salon where Anna, looking to make her mark on Cult as a VJ, is sent to by Zora. They won't be able to see your review if you only submit your rating. It seems so fresh and immediate you'd never know that it's 23 years old. He just does not know what he wants. The title of Adam Nayman’s Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks is misleading, evoking what the author refers to in the book’s introduction as “…cheerleading—the stroking, in prose, of already tumescent reputations.” While Nayman clearly reveres one of the most acclaimed and mythologized of contemporary American filmmakers, he’s willing to take the piss out of his subject, sveltely moving between Anderson’s strengths, limitations, and the obsessions that bind them, fashioning an ornate and suggestive system of checks and balances. What’s Borat to do? Nolasco alternates between explicitly sexual, neon-colored sequences that veer toward complete dreamscapes and the kind of European-film-festival-courting realism that Brazilian cinema is known for. funny how disaffected youth the world over recognize each other. Though Rebels Of The Neon God is missing the austerity and discipline that would make Tsai’s master-shot style so effective—and funny—its relatively conventional approach (including a recurring musical theme!) Yet, we must remember that gods are flawed too. Hsiao-kang stalks Ah-tze and his buddy Ah-ping as they hang out in the film’s iconic arcade (featuring a telling poster of James Dean on the wall) and other locales around Taipei, and ultimately takes his revenge. They’re all victims of Synchronic, a designer drug that literally sends young people, with their soft pineal glands, into the past—and just how far depends randomly on where they are in the present. hoisting it onto a tow truck.). An orphaned and unnamed young boy (Jahzir Bruno) is sent to live in with his kindly but starchy Grandma (Octavia Spencer). And the Quibi-sized trips to the past are the high points of Benson and Moorhead’s latest, evocative glimpses of a long and diffuse history, from the wooly mammoths and prehistoric men of the Ice Age, to the conquistadors and bayou alligators of colonization, to the racist rednecks of the early 20th century.