Trailers for Upcoming Films

[brundlefly]

Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland.

[brundlefly]

Adam Wingard is finally done with American Godzilla movies and starting filming on a thriller for A24 this month with Dan Stevens among the cast. Title is Onslaught.

Trailer.

[cantinflas]

Adam Wingard is finally done with American Godzilla movies and starting filming on a thriller for A24 this month with Dan Stevens among the cast. Title is Onslaught.

Trailer.

Yeah I'm keen on this. Back into The Guest territory but going harder.

Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man

[colinr0380]

I wonder if that is inspired by the 1995 Clint Howard film.

[brundlefly]

William and David Greaves' Once Upon a Time in Harlem.

[brundlefly]

I Want Your Sex: This is mid-tier Araki in a light, playful mood, and it's often funny with his-brand-of warm (which often feels cold!) The satirical gags about the art world are better than I Love Boosters (though Riley admitted in the Q&A that he didn't really care about a commentary on fashion or art itself, as much as serving a communist manifesto), but the real comedy and engagement with the audience comes from its central conceit about the allure of various relationship dynamics that achieve a unique type of intimacy, and how messy that becomes with competing wills at play. Wilde is boldly wild, and Cooper Hoffman proves once again that he can carry a romantic comedy as the lead. Charli xcx is unrecognizable purely because of the desexualized role she plays, and she nails it.

Teaser ...and a whole day later, the Trailer.

[brundlefly]

Whalefall. Perhaps kinkier than the Araki.

I'm a fan of Brian Duffield's pre-pandemic pandemic teen tragicomic romance Spontaneous, and though he's not the writer here, the tagline -- "The odds of being swallowed alive by a whale are not zero." -- has me hoping for a similar mix of tones. And Elisabeth Shue is in this, somewhere.

[The Curious Sofa]

I too am a big fan of Spontaneous (and was more lukewarm on No One Will Save You) but it looks like Duffield at least cowrote the screenplay with Daniel Kraus, whose novel this is based on,

[brundlefly]

Thanks for the clarification! Somehow looked right past his name, there.

No One Will Save You keeps getting pushed down my queue for one reason or another.

[brundlefly]

Georgia Bernstein's Night Nurse is a delightfully perverse good time, exploring the decidedly unconventional relationship that develops between a newly hired care provider at a retirement village and her primary charge, a senior citizen in apparent mental decline. From the opening credits, Bernstein's direction deftly toys with and undermines the erotic thriller genre trappings, and her script capably sets the audience up for an darkly romantic and bittersweet ending.

Bernstein's direction is assured and straightforward, with just enough stylistic flash on what is surely a miniscule budget to hint at what she might do with a larger production, but the film will be most memorable to me as a showcase for Bruce McKenzie, an actor whose primarily television-based work I'm not familiar with but whose piercing, erratic presence is the axis upon which the whole movie turns. From the first time he turns his gaze to the camera and our protagonist (first-time actress Cemre Paksoy, who is also often striking if maybe a bit too opaque at some key moments) to the last smile he gives her, he held my attention completely and carries the film through some of the bumpier parts of the narrative.

There are a few plot developments that are too elliptical for their own good, raising narrative questions that lack satisfying answers, but even while acknowledging its imperfections and shortcomings, I can say that Night Nurse serves as a great example of what I hope for in a Sundance movie: a fun introduction to new talents that whets the appetite for their future work.

Trailer.

[brundlefly]

Hot Spot (NSFW). From Agnieszka Smoczynska, who has apparently made others since The Lure, though this one reunites her with the writer of that one.

[colinr0380]

The trailer for Mamoru Oshii's 1985 film Angel's Egg released for the first time in UK cinemas as of yesterday, 17th June.

It was one of Oshii’s earliest feature length films (after two of the Urusei Yatsura features and Dallos) and is a fascinating alternate fantasy world parable that has Biblical connotations but mixed together with a distinctly Japanese approach to a narrative about angels, fate and the cycle of life. It has Japanese dialogue (the longest is one of the characters recounting a Biblical parable in the middle of the film), but to such a minimal extent that the film could mostly work as a silent film, with a succession of obscurantist, yet loaded with symbolism, images that are left up to the audience to divine deeper meaning from.

The plot involves a girl looking after an egg that could contain a creature that portends either the destruction or re-birth of the world, and we follow the journey through the streets of a gothic, empty, water-logged city collecting glass vials to fill. A young man comes to the city both via a kind of descending eyeball spaceship (which becomes a cathedral at the climax) and is associated with a returned soldier motif. He meets and then follows the girl through the city, and through their conversations about the nature of the world, the egg and what it contains, and what it all could mean, becomes almost a bigger brother protector figure (especially during the stunning ‘hunt’ sequence, in which the shadows of the city become floating fish with fishermen hunting them down – literally chasing at shadows of long extinct animals. It makes me want to know what Mark Jenkin would make of the film!). But it can only end in tragedy…

This film contains of lot of material within it that would continue onwards into Oshii’s later films Patlabor: The Mobile Police (the Biblical references) and Ghost In The Shell (the imagery of diving and reflections in particular); and the live action Polish language Avalon (the young girl guardian angel figure) and the film also contains artwork by Yoshitaku Amano, who would go on to create imagery for Final Fantasy and whose imagery influenced the Dark Souls video game series.

Although Angel’s Egg did appear in some fashion in the UK before this theatrical release, as we got a rather strange situation in the late 80s when the film was bought and intercut with live action inserts to create the 1988 American film, In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep, which was released straight to video in the UK and got occasional late night television showings on ITV in the early 1990s. In The Aftermath is a fascinating piece of work in its own right, which changes the meaning of the original work into something entirely different, mashing together the girl's protectorship of the egg with turning the young man literally into her brother in the dubbing, and combining it together with a post-apocalyptic, Stalker-mixed with-Mad Max inspired live action tone of bleak desolation in the live action sections, which feels really like the briefly glimpsed girl in a white dress skipping through the rubble of the war zone in Oshii's later Avalon! I guess you can cut up and transform the meaning of a film more easily when the original film is mostly silent and full of potent but gnomic imagery! If you want to know a bit about that version of the film, I wrote that up on when In The Aftermath: Angels Never Sleep received a surprise Blu-ray release from Arrow a few years back.

[pizza time!]

Not that familiar with Mamoru Oshii's other work, but Angel's Egg is one of the greatest animated films I've ever seen. I've been waiting for GKIDS to announce their blu-ray, since the Umbrella Entertainment one supposedly has playback problems, it also lacks the English dub which would be nice to have.

I've been hesitant to watch The Aftermath since the original is so crafted toward creating a subjective response, and having answers to its heaps of symbolism could only weigh it down, but it does look interesting.

[colinr0380]

It is quite rough, and how it treats the Angel's Egg material is borderline blasphemous(!), but I have a soft spot for In The Aftermath as stumbling across it late at night without knowing what it was may have been one of the highlights of watching films in my teens, perhaps only matched by watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man for the first time a couple of years later. The kind of thing that the late night TV schedules could throw out there and utterly melt the minds of anyone watching and wondering just where such a film came from, and being unable to guess at where it was going next!