"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’

Lost Phoenix

Thursday, March 28th, 2024

Fairly often I get emails from people who made low budget movies, sometimes they seem to be familiar with me, sometimes they don’t, but they’re trying to do the very hard work of getting people to notice their needle out there in the haystack of what’s available. I sincerely wish every one of them well, but I don’t take very many of them up on it. My fear is that 99.9% of the time it’s not gonna be some hidden gem, or even some crazy failure, it’s just gonna be okay for what it is. And I know I’ll feel bad for them and want to say nice things, but what good does it do them for a niche critic like me to be nice about their movie being okay? I don’t know.

But this particular one, LOST PHOENIX, I decided to watch. After a long time. I was kind of slow about it. But writer/director James Couche (who is also editor and fight choreographer) had a good pitch for it: it’s his micro budget take on “90s mid-budget action movies with shades of inspiration from Hong Kong thrillers.” He also mentioned EL MARIACHI as an inspiration, production-wise. But it takes place in September 2020, and was shot from October 2020 through October 2022 in Richmond, Virginia. I know there are a ton of COVID horror movies shot out in the woods somewhere while people were bored, but this is the first time I heard of an action one. (read the rest of this shit…)

Sick

Monday, January 16th, 2023

SICK is a new independently produced slasher picked up by Blumhouse and Miramax (?) but sent straight to the Peacock streaming service. For me it was a must-watch-immediately because it’s the latest from John Hyams, who has been a top director in my mind since UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION back in 2009. (See also: THE SMASHING MACHINE, RANK, DRAGON EYES, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING, ALONE). But outside these parts he’s not that well known, so the marketing is all about it being the latest from Kevin Williamson (SCREAM, THE FACULTY). He co-wrote it with Katelyn Crabb (whose only previous credit is as his assistant on SCREAM ’22).

I believe it’s a script they came up with and/or wrote during lockdown, so the gimmick is that it’s set during that surreal time of toilet paper scarceness and droplet paranoia, specifically April 3, 2020. A young man named Tyler (Joel Courtney, SUPER 8, THE EMPTY MAN) gets to be the Drew Barrymore of the cold open, getting creepy texts from an unknown number while he’s trying to buy groceries. (read the rest of this shit…)

Kimi

Thursday, February 17th, 2022

KIMI is the new straight-to-HoBoMax Steven Soderbergh joint. This one is a tight little thriller written by David Koepp (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, SNAKE EYES, PANIC ROOM) with all the breeziness and smarts you expect from Soderbergh, plus that knack he has for style that simultaneously seems retro and more of-this-very-moment than anything anybody else is making. Like, it seems like it’s shot pretty run-and-gun with modern, lightweight digital cameras and natural lighting and stuff, but the staging, framing (and credits) sometimes remind you of how the ‘70s suspense classics were crafted.

We could call it a techno thriller because the titular “Kimi” is a Siri or Alexa type device through which our heroine, Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz, THE BRAVE ONE, ASSASSINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT), accidentally hears a murder. Her job is to listen to recordings of times Kimi didn’t understand what people were asking for, figure out what the miscommunication was (a regional term, a pop culture reference, a word used incorrectly) and add new information to improve the algorithm. When she hears something disturbing in the background of a recording she does some sleuthing, tries to navigate the company’s dense protocols for handling such a situation, and becomes a target. (read the rest of this shit…)