4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy birthday to director Ryan Coogler! Ryan Coogler has made a star out of Michael B. Jordan, redeemed the acting career of Sylvester Stallone, introduced the rest of the world to Wakanda, and changed the way that film viewers talk about race in cinema. With all that in mind, it’s time for….
4 Shots from 4 Ryan Coogler Films
Fruitvale Station (2013, dir by Ryan Coogler, DP: Rachel Morrison)
Creed (2015, dir by Ryan Coogler, DP: Maryse Alberti)
Black Panther (2018, dir by Ryan Coogler, DP: Rachel Morrison)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022, dir by Ryan Coogler, DP: Autumn Durald Arkapaw)
Bleeding Love opens with a father (Ewan McGregor) driving his pickup truck across the desert. Sitting next to him is his 20 year-old daughter (Clara McGregor).
Over the course of Bleeding Love, we come to know quite a lot about these two. We know that the Father is divorced from the Daughter’s mother and that he has since remarried and has started a second family. We know that the Daughter has never met her Father’s new wife. We know that the Father has been sober for several years and now regularly attends AA, where he talks about the many regrets that continue to haunt him. We know that the Daughter grew up both loving her Father and also being scared of the way he would get when he was drunk. We know the Father is a landscaper. We know the Daughter is a painter who feels like she has lost whatever once inspired her. Father follows the rules. Daughter shoplifts tiny bottles of liquor from a gas station. Father talks a lot because he’s not sure what to say. Daughter is often silent for the same reason. Father is concerned about Daughter. Daughter barely survived and overdose just a few hours before Father announced they were going to see a friend of his.
We learn a lot about the Father and the Daughter but we never learn their names. (Father calls Daughter by her childhood nickname of “Turbo,” even though she specifically asks him not to.) They’re meant to be universal characters, standing in for all fathers and daughters who are trying to figure out how to relate to each other. Appropriately enough, the characters are played by an actual father-daughter team, Ewan and Clara McGregor. (Clara also had a hand in writing and producing the film.)
Bleeding Love follows Father and Daughter as they drive across the desert. (Father has told Daughter that they’re just visiting an old friend but what Daughter doesn’t know is that old friend also runs a drug rehab.) Along the way, they sometimes argue and they sometimes bond, especially over the music playing on the radio. (There’s a reason why this film is named after a Leona Lewis song.) They meet the usual collection of eccentrics that always tend to populate road movies like this. I liked Kim Zimmer’s performance as Elsie, the driver of a tow truck who takes Father and Daughter to her cousin’s birthday party. (At the party, Daughter tricks a man in a clown suit into giving her beer.) I also liked the performance of Vera Bulder, playing a prostitute named Tommy who helps Father and Daughter after the latter gets bitten by a spider. Not everyone on the road is as friendly as Elsie or Tommy, as both Father and Daughter eventually discover.
When Bleeding Love first started, I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not the film would work. There are a few moments where the film does seem to be trying a bit too hard to force an emotional response from the viewer. However, both McGregors are strong, likable, and sympathetic in their roles and their natural chemistry as father-and-daughter goes a long way towards making the relationship of their characters in the film feel real and poignant. Ewan pours himself into a scene where he talks about his past mistakes while Clara plays Daughter as someone who is angry and impulsive but not stupid. I related to Daughter and her relationship with her Father. There’s a lot of emotional truth to be found in their sometimes angry, sometime funny conversations on the road.
Thanks to Clara and Ewan McGregor, Bleeding Love works as a portrait of regret and addiction and a celebration of the bond between child and parent.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today is Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. Today, we pay tribute to Doyle’s most popular and influential creation. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Sherlock Holmes Films
Sherlock Holmes (1922, dir by Albert Parker, DP: J. Roy Hunt)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939, dir by Sindey Lanfield, DP: Peverell Marley)
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970, dir by Billy Wilder, DP: Christopher Challis)
Sherlock Holmes (2009, dir by Guy Ritchie, DP: Philippe Rousselot)
117 years ago today, Laurence Olivier was born in Surrey. The son of a clergyman, Olivier would go on to become one of the greatest stage actors of the 20th Century. He would also have a distinguished film career, one that led to him frequently being described as being the world’s greatest living actor.
He is perhaps best-known for his Shakespearean performances. He won multiple Oscars for directing and starring in 1948’s Hamlet. Today’s scene that I love comes from that film and features Olivier at his best, as both an actor and a director.
Alexis (Leila Anastasia Scott) is a San Antonio news reporter who, while sitting in a small cafe, is approached by a man named Joe (Jason Scarbrough).
At first, Joe just seems like an appreciative fan of Alexis’s reporting, albeit a bit of creepy and pushy one. But it’s only after Joe sits down, removes his glasses, and starts to speak about his life to Alexis that the truth becomes apparent. Joe says that he’s the serial killer who has been terrorizing San Antonio for the past few months. His trademark is that he mummifies the bodies of his victims. At first skeptical and then increasingly disturbed, Alexis listens as Joe calmly discusses his life, from his childhood as the son of a mortician to his time in the Army, to his current life as a killer. As the conversation continues, it becomes apparent that Joe has a connection to Alexis and her family.
First released on January 2nd (and therefore, the first film of 2024), The Mummy Murders is a low-budget serial killer film that was filmed on location in San Antonio. I have to admit that I’m a bit weary of serial killer films, just because there have been so many of them that they can sometimes feel rather interchangeable. There’s only so many times you can sit through someone giving a long-winded explanation of their motives and their techniques before you start to wonder what the point of it all truly is. Personally, I am of the opinion that Lars Von Trier pushed the serial killer genre to its logical conclusion with The House That Jack Built. Matt Dillon plunging into the abyss was not only a fitting end for his character but also a sign that we had learned just about everything that there was to learn about what makes a serial killer tick. There’s nothing left to discover.
That said, when taken on its own terms, The Mummy Murders is effectively creepy. Again, it’s an extremely low budget movie and, towards the end of the film, the boom mic makes a presumably uninvited appearance. There’s some holes in the film’s plot and I took issue with a lot of the choices that Alexis made throughout the film. But Jason Scarbrough gives an effectively unhinged performance as Joe and the film deserves a lot of credit for not trying to make him into some sort of erudite, witty Hannibal Lecter-style murderer. Instead, Joe is a believable creep who takes pride in his crimes because they’re the only thing for which he’s ever shown any ability. Joe looks at both Alexis and the audience with a thousand-yard state, leaving little doubt that there’s zero room for kindness or empathy in Joe’s death-obsessed mind. In an especially creepy moment, Joe talks about his excitement when, as a pre-teen, he discovered that the body of a girl on whom he had a crush had been brought to his father’s mortuary. It’s icky and it’s creepy but it’s probably a more realistic portrayal of the killer’s sick mindset than what is found in most films.
As a final note, The Mummy Murders was shot on location in San Antonio. San Antonio’s a lovely city. More films should shoot down there.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Since, as my sister has already pointed out, today is Dinosaur Day, it only makes it sense to continue to pay tribute to everyone’s favorite prehistoric marvels. It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Dinosaur Films
The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918, dir by Willis O’Brien, DP: Willis O’Brien)
One Million Years B.C. (1966, dir by Don Chaffey, DP: Wilkie Cooper)
Planet of the Dinosaurs (1978, dir by James Shea, DP: Henning Schellerup)
Carnosaur (1993, dir by Adam Simon, DP: Keith Holland)
I saw that today was Mr. T’s birthday and, for a while now, I’ve been reviewing T and T, a Canadian detective show that he starred in for three seasons. I figured I could have shared a scene that I love from T and T but there really aren’t any scenes from T and T that are worth loving. Besides, we all know what we immediately think of when it comes to Mr. T.
For today’s scene that I love, here’s Mr. T as Clubber Lang in Rocky III:
In the Pacific Northwest, animals are being killed and their blood is being drained. Some of the locals theorize that it’s the work of the Red Coat, a legendary creature that demands constant sacrifices to keep it at bay.
Reynolds (Guy Pearce, with a wild preacherman beard) doesn’t care about the Red Coat. He’s more upset about the fact that he and his buddies are feeling displaced in America. He’s been driven to rage by the fact that there’s a family named Loi living in his community. He hates immigrants. He blames minorities for every problem that America is facing. He says “ain’t” instead of “is not” because that’s the way this film lets us know that its characters are supposed to be blue collar.
Reynolds has murdered Mr. Loi (Chike Chin) and he’s targeting Yan Loi (Crystal Yu) and her teenage son, Edward (William Gao). Fortunately, the Loi Family has a protector. Fallon (Alex Pettyfer) wanders through the misty countryside with a grim look on his face and a darkly-colored wardrobe that is designed to let us know that he’s seeking vengeance. Along with defending the Loi Family, Fallon has a personal reason for seeking vengeance on Reynolds. Fallon also has an insatiable need for blood….
Sunrise is a somber, slowly-paced, and rather shallow-minded film. It takes itself very seriously and it definitely wants you to know that it has important stuff on its mind, unlike those other vampire films that just seek to be entertaining. Of course, as any student of the grindhouse knows, an entertaining film can often be the most effective form of propaganda around. People aren’t going to think about your message is they’re bored out of their mind.
At times, Sunrise seems to think that it’s the first film to ever use vampirism as a way to comment on current events, which I’m sure would be news to Bram Stoker, Jean Rollin, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Kim Newman, John Carpenter, Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Abel Ferrara, Guillermo del Toro, Kathyrn Bigelow, David Conenberg, Bill Gunn, Dan Curtis, and just about anyone else who has ever written or directed anything that involved a vampire. Reynolds rants and rave about his hated of immigrants in speeches that are so overwritten and so florid that they verge on parody. (At one point, he saps at a deputy for not drinking an American beer.) His character is a fever dream of what Leftists think blue collar workers sound like when they’re not cheering their favorite football team or laughing about climate change. I suppose the filmmakers deserve some credit for having enough discipline to realize that having Reynolds shout, “This is MAGA country!” would be a bit too heavy-handed for even this film but one can tell that the temptation was definitely there.
At first, I thought that the film’s cinematography would be its saving grace but eventually, I got bored with all of the artfully composed shots of the misty northwest. There’s really not much difference between Sunrise‘s visuals and the visuals of the Twilight films. Then I thought that Guy Pearce’s intensity might elevate the film but then I realized that Pearce has played this same character several times and he’s been more interesting in other films. As for Alex Pettyfer, he’s just as boring here as he was in MagicMike. In Magic Mike, he at least danced.
Interestingly, this film — with its portrayal of rampant racism in the American northwest — is an Irish production that was shot not in Washington or Oregon but instead in Belfast. That perhaps explains why the characters often sound like they learned how to speak by watching American cop shows on television. Personally, I am not amongst those who feels that people should only be allowed to make movies about their own countries. I don’t believe in limiting the imagination in that style. As an American of Irish (and Italian and Spanish) descent, I think that an American filmmaker would be totally justified in directing a film about Ian Paisley’s followers terrorizing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. (They could even shoot it around Austin, Texas.) Or maybe someone could make a movie about that Irish basketball team who refused to shake hands with an opposing team because the team was from Israel. All’s fair.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop over to twitter at 10 pm et, pull Defiance up on Prime, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag!
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1996’s Danger Zone, starring Billy Zane and Robert Downey, Jr!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Danger Zone on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
Through the Shattered Lens 