I watched a movie about an ex-special forces guy who now sells insurance who must call upon his skills to protect a young girl from a gang that controls an entire town. you ever hear about anything like this? only instead of a 2025 jason statham movie called The Insurance Man it’s a 1978 japanese movie starring ken takakura called Never Give Up. it’s by the same guy who did Manhunt which also had a funky 70s score, incoherent editing, visible boom mics and just has kind of a cheap and shitty feeling to it despite apparently being some big budget huge success. Though manhunt had a bear played by a man in a bear suit chasing ken takakura, this had a bunch of tanks and helicopters in it. Did they forget how to make movies after like 1974 over there for a while or something? Maybe it’s just this guy.
ken is part of some secret self-defense force special forces group trained by an american green beret, some red army type guys take the us ambassador hostage, they go in and kill them. then they drop ken off in the woods as part of some training thing, there’s an incoherent montage of ken stumbling out of the woods and a village getting massacred. ken adopts the only surviving person, a young girl, who now because of the trauma of the massacre has psychic powers. another girl from the village who got killed has a twin sister in another town who is a journalist trying to uncover how some gangster family controls everything so ken goes there with his psychic daughter to watch over her.
you know what’s missing from jason statham movies? a young psychic girl he’s protecting pointing at the mob bosses son and saying “my dad’s going to kill you” right before he finally drops the attempts at placation and starts axing people to death. anyway he doesn’t do a good job protecting the twin sister, she ends up getting killed, there’s also a cop whose obsessed with arresting ken for the village massacre. it turns out he just killed the adopted girls actual dad, who had killed everyone else in his village because he went insane from parasites I guess at the same moment ken came stumbling out of the woods. ken of course does not bother explaining any of this either, he’s happy to take the blame.
this movie is like 2 and half god damn hours long and after the whole corrupt mob boss and journalism thing goes nowhere we never see those people again and they spend the last hour being chased through the woods by his special forces unit. there’s a part where ken sets up a trap and sets off a bunch of grenades but they don’t kill the guys chasing them, they knock down a bunch of trees in a triangle around the guys chasing them so ken can pop out and machine gun them to death. there’s a part where they meet up with regular sdf and act like their lost so they’ll escort them out but the special forces just kill them. there’s a part where the cop goes to get some water but he takes ken’s rifle and gives it to the girl and explains to her if she pulls the trigger a bullet will come out, then an enemy commando pops out and she shoots at him and misses and gets a knife thrown into her shoulder. ken is like “why did you give the gun to a kid?” the cop feels bad about this so he takes a truck and drives it into a tank which somehow makes the tank and truck explode. they show him rolling down the hill in his truck by just rotating the footage. then it suddenly cuts to a mine cart rail shooter section, with ken and the kid in a mine cart exchanging gun fire with a helicopter with ken’s former captain in it.
the kid ends up getting shot to shit and dies, there’s a flashback of the kid running on the beach and being happy and stuff even through the whole movie she mostly had this zonked out traumatized look on her face. then ken wraps his dead kid around his back and walks into a line of tanks coming after him firing his pistol and the movie ends. anyway, bad movie with an almost interesting ending, and at least a clear view of special forces as entirely the realm of evil psychopaths
I watched the live-action Clifford the Big Red Dog movie with my nephew over the break and, while terrible of course, there were a few genuinely funny gags sprinkled throughout:
Main Guy is an irresponsible uncle who lives in a van, and there is this recurring bit where he has not yet been forgiven for betting his neece while gambling in Atlantic City and then losing.
There is a character that just throws smoke bombs at the ground when in trouble. It is not set up that he does this, it is not paid much attention, and thus, it killed me every time.
Buster Bluth runs an extremely fucked-up biotech company that is attempting to grow enlarged animals to feed the world. Actually quite noble. All of the experiments are deformed monsters. He attempts to capture Clifford to learn the secret to his growth, which is not related to his experiments but is simply implied to be because Clifford was usually well-loved and thus was magically made huge.
I saw a great SOV short late last night called Bobo, where a horror writer, played by the director in a Kiss shirt, receives a haunted clown doll in the mail that vaguely matches the one he had drawn a picture of for his novel. It instantly comes alive and stabs him. All the puppetry is done marionette style, and the whole thing looks like it was edited deck to deck with a half broken s-video cable.
Also went to a surprise screening earlier in the evening of Thanksgiving classic The Granny. One of the topless ladies in that went on to be on Botched after her implants got infected. The DP went on to be Christopher Nolan’s guy.
This is one more great touch of the film… it’s exactly like human big game hunters, when you think about it. Well, not the current ones who are just millionaires who pay for a perfectly curated experience. But you know what I mean.
Watched Christmas in Notting Hill this weekend. It was bad but fun to notice things like how the main character who was visiting London from Indiana wore a different coat in pretty much every scene. I enjoyed pointing out continuity errors. The scene where they go to see the panto was 95% over-reactions to what was happening on stage. A bold choice.
this is accurate to the regular audience reactions at a panto. I had to sign into Channel 5’s streaming service to check it out and it looked like a completely normal pantomime experience
The Substance — i felt like i should wait for the right moment to watch this, but as it turns out, nothing can prepare you for it, and you’d never be ready for it.
I actually agree with that as a critique fwiw though I think you meant it as praise – it was one of the most “oh did a music video director make this?” movies I’d seen in a while. like not bad exactly but it did not have tolerable energy/pacing/characterization for a narrative film
tbqh i am not sure if i like it as per se, because i couldn’t stand to watch a fourth of the scenes in this movie — good job on that one though, the only other movie I’d rated highly but never want to see again is Utoya July 22, so that very short list has been doubled in size.
(also, many way more clever people said a lot of words on letterboxd about how this movie tackles image of your own body, the beauty craze, Hollywood gaze etc.pp — it def left an impression, that’s for sure)
JAY KELLY absolutely rules. like a perfect combination of 8 1/2 and The Trip. Baumbach is the only filmmaker on earth whose work has consistently improved while working exclusively with Netflix (suggests a character flaw but is undeniably true imo)
The thing that caught me off guard about The Substance was that I only ever heard about it from film critics, and generally when I hear of a horror movie only from those types it tends fall somewhere in the realm of “elevated horror”. But The Substance has no pretensions of being elevated. It has no subtext or subtlety at all. It is one of the most blunt movies ever made.
Went to a friend’s to watch some movies with his coworker (age 65) and, partway through the day, his son (age 5). Children just ask so many questions. The three of us agreed that, because one movie was Ghostbusters, that it needed to be started before the 5 year old came home, because the library ghost was the questionable content in the movie. The two of them were not aware of how much sex stuff was in the rest of Ghostbusters, but it flew over my head as a child, and it seemed like it flew over his as well. The part of the movie that seemed to really resonate with the 5 year old was Stay Puft; he had to run into 2 different rooms and yell that he’d just seen the biggest ghost. He was also incapacitated with laughter when Walter “Dickless” Peck was covered in sticky white stuff.
I’m aware that my friend has supplied alternate storylines to his child to explain that monsters aren’t bad guys (the kid loves monsters). I was unclear if the coworker, when the 5 year old demands that every individual shot of a movie be explained immediately, telling him that everyone in the movie was “the good guy” was because he wasn’t keeping up with the plot of the movie, or because he has history with children and is trying to supply a sanitized storyline.
I had a big ol’ list for movies I was going to watch this year, and I did indeed watch many of them. I watched a lot of old movies this year and most of them stuck in my mind more than recent films.
I only watched 35 movies this year, my list is short: Midwives (2022) and Pleistocene Park (2022). Both are documentaries about humanity and business. The latter one is more humorous.
Finished Ballers, that’s a great show for meals. I really love how every NFL/x-Sport/NBA/etc player in show treats the fans like the most foolish suckers to be exploited for money. If they keep this up for just one more quarter, they’ll inevitably make a move into the video game industry, shows that the whole industry is just another dull, purely profit-driven cash-grab. And Kojima and Sid Meier will sit a party around by supermodel and laughing at videogame players are cash cow like what they did irl. Thank goodness the show is over when they stepped in e-sports.
Rewatched Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and really think it’s one of the best documentaries ever. Timothy Tredwell was such a fascinating maniac, and I love the juxtaposition between his incredible (but deeply unethical to make) nature films, and his unhinged proto-vlogs.
I’ve been obsessed with this movie for 17 years, I notice something New every time
