Comedy

Inherent Vice (2014)

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Inherent Vice has all the trappings of film noir. There’s a rumpled gumshoe who lives by a seemingly quaint moral code, a mysterious femme fatale and a hard-boiled cop with whom our protagonist has an ambivalent relationship. Los Angeles sizzles with corruption and sleaze, with the threat of violence simmering just below the sun-bleached surface. But the familiarity of these tropes allows masterful writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel — cinema’s first adaptation of the presumably unfilmable Pynchon, by the way — to explore more trippy, atmospheric stuff.

Set in 1970 L.A., Inherent Vice inhabits a dreamy space between the horror of the Manson Family murders and the imminently pervasive crookedness of Watergate. Joaquin Phoenix is Larry “Doc” Sportello, a hippie P.I. tipped off by his ex-old lady, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald), that her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), is in danger of being cheated out of his fortune by his wife and her lover. Faster than you can say “Zig-Zag papers,” however, the case digresses into a labyrinthine plot that makes Chinatown look like a game of Chutes and Ladders. A Black militant (Michael K. Williams, Lovecraft Country) asks Doc to track down a thug who works for Wolfmann, while a recovered heroin addict (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s Jena Malone) enlists our intrepid private eye to find her missing husband, a sax player named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson).

That these supposedly distinct cases wind up entwined is predictable, but less so is the shambling scope of it all. Hewing close to Pynchon’s text, Anderson packs in suspicious real estate deals, a heroin-smuggling cartel, the Aryan Brotherhood, dentists, a Ouija board, Richard Nixon, a mental asylum run by cultists, a running joke about cunnilingus and an acid-fueled house party in Topanga Canyon. The results are less madcap than fuzzily hallucinogenic, although the movie’s psychedelic vibe certainly has its funny moments. Doc is so consistently stoned, he can barely jot down detective notes to himself that convey anything more detailed than “something Spanish.”

Phoenix makes a terrific foil for the surrounding weirdness, but he receives able assistance from a cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Martin Short, Benicio del Toro, Maya Rudolph and musician Joanna Newsom. Best of all is Josh Brolin (of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thanos fame) as Doc’s LAPD nemesis, Lt. Det. Christian “Bigfoot” Bjornsen. Sporting a crewcut and exhibiting a Freudian penchant for chocolate-covered bananas, Brolin’s perpetual rage prove a nice complement to Phoenix’s pot-addled befuddlement.

But the real standout is Los Angeles itself, or at least the one imagined by Anderson and his frequent cinematographer, Robert Elswit. Boasting saturated colors and drenched in nostalgia, Inherent Vice is sly about its visual magnificence, as typified by a brief flashback in which Doc and Shasta comb beachfront streets searching for dope as Neil Young’s “Journey Through the Past” plays over the soundtrack. The scene is gorgeous, sexy and just a bit sad. Few filmmakers can capture mood better than Paul Thomas Anderson. —Phil Bacharach

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Martial Arts

Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 (2020)

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With a single-take fight sequence running 77 minutes, what are the odds Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 isn’t largely a gimmick? The answer aligns with the second half of the title.

Given that those 77 minutes constitute 84.6% of the Japanese film, the setup is as thin as the blades the samurai wield: In a prearranged duel, swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (Versus’ Tak Sakaguchi) faces hundreds and hundreds of students and mercenaries of the Yoshioka clan. Once the swords start slinging, the camera keeps going as Musashi keeps fighting, pausing only for gulps of water. He wipes his nose. It rains. And that’s all, folks!

It’s only natural your question to be, “Can they really sustain that for more than an hour?” The answer is yes and no, in that yes, they do, but no, it doesn’t hold your attention. In fact, the flick grows extremely trying within its first few minutes of battle. Things might be different if Death Trance director Yûji Shimomura had swayed to an extreme, whether to go for complete realism or leap over the top, Shogun Assassin-style.

Instead, he stays on neutral ground, where every spray of digital blood looks pixelated and the men surrounding Musashi do that thing heavies in kung-fu movies tend to do, which is exhibit wait-your-turn hesitancy as they rock back and forth, hoping to trick your peripheral vision into telling your brain more action is happening than actually is. Watching is like attending a Civil War re-enactment: Maybe it’s fun to participate?

It’s not clear whether we’re supposed to root for or against Musashi, given that he kills a child — a fraction of a second after cleanly bisecting a butterfly — in the prologue. The epilogue is the only section of Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1 that lives up to the hype; those balls-out final five minutes crackle with more motion, energy and engagement than everything before it. Then again, I might not be so spry after sitting on the shelf for nearly a decade, either. —Rod Lott

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Martial Arts

The Man from Hong Kong (1975)

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Hong Kong cinema entered the American mainstream when the cultural phenom Enter the Dragon added a dose of 007 DNA. However, it was Australia that best ran with Golden Harvest’s formula, producing the Ozploitation classic The Man from Hong Kong. To underline the Bond-ness of it all, they give it a catchy theme song in Jigsaw’s “Sky High” and even cast one-and-done 007 George Lazenby as the villain.

Hong Kong Special Branch Inspector Fang Sing Leng (Jimmy Wang Yu, Master of the Flying Guillotine) travels Down Under to extradite a scar-faced drug dealer (Sammo Hung, Eastern Condors). Crossbow-savvy crime lord Jack Wilton (Lazenby, Death Dimension) makes Fang’s assignment most difficult, if not downright impossible.

Another influence of Ian Fleming’s most famous creation? Putting Fang horizontal with beautiful women he’s just met. Chief among them is a journalist (Ros Spiers, Stone) who literally swoops into their first meeting on a hang glider; “Your kite is confiscated,” he says, ever the smooth-talker. His next conquest is a college student (Rebecca Gilling, Spiers’ fellow Stoner); “You’re my first Chinese,” she says, ever the statistician. (Let’s try to ignore how she then pulls her eyes back to slits, shall we?) In his sex scenes with both, Fang exhibits an interesting lovers’ technique: dragging his tongue across their face. Whatever works!

The first feature for Turkey Shoot director Brian Trenchard-Smith, The Man from Hong Kong contains some incredible action sequences. Aside from the hand-to-hand-to-foot combat on display, audiences get a couple of high-speed chases, a man on fire, a leap from a tall building and, yep, more hang gliding. One could draw a direct line from this ball-kicking bone-crusher to the groundbreaking work of Jackie Chan in the ’80s with Police Story, Armour of God and the like, so much so that a line of Wilton’s can be thrown back at the film: “Thank you for coming. You’ve been very entertaining.” —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

Darling Nikki (2019)

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WTFNot based on the same-named Prince song in which the Prince of Funk meets her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine, Darling Nikki is a transparent allegory of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, dripping in Day-Glo.

As played by co-writer/co-producer Nicole D’Angelo, Nikki works on a sexy cooking show called Edible Desires. She’s kind of like its Vanna White, if Pat Sajak were allowed to put things in her mouth. She’s also a loving girlfriend to the brilliant Ethan (Donnie Darko’s James Duval, here for name value), who’s very busy working on “something with binary sound waves.” And she’s also a prostitute, whose madame (Elana Krausz, 2017’s Ghost House) talks to a dog statue in her backyard.

“I knew you’d be quite popular,” the madame says as Nikki tucks a dirty wad of foreign bills into her cleavage. “Your parents would be so proud. If only they could see you now.” Indeed! Cue the montage of Nikki with various johns and fellow ladies, engaging in group sex, drinking champagne, having tickle fights, dancing in lingerie, being denied slices of Hickory Farms salami and, most unfortunately for the viewer, eating creamed corn in extreme close-up.

After being violently raped and left foaming at the mouth by a “mean man” some people call Maurice (Steve Polites, 2017’s Dementia 13), Nikki stumbles into an alternate reality. She gets there from the bathtub, thanks to what looks like a basket of Spree, adorned with the note “EAT ME.” Each time she takes one, it sparkles, sending her consciousness down the rabbit hole and to a near-death drowning once she comes to. (The movie’s “DRINK ME” equivalent is a mystery green liquid: Absinthe? Listerine? Hi-C Ecto Cooler?)

In the dreamworld, Nikki is dressed as a scorching-hot vixen version of Disney’s animated Alice. There, she encounters a giggling cat man who licks milk and himself, watches guys in drag and uses the flying guillotine. Back in the real world, events are hardly more lucid: While a celebratory Ethan has cracked the riddle of whatever he’s been doing with those pesky binary sound waves, Nikki’s having a flashback-cum-breakdown over being forced to eat cat food.

As with the other works of enigmatic director Gregory Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance), Darling Nikki marks an unofficial-family affair, using his regular players and co-conspirators; chief among them is the ambitious D’Angelo, increasingly a behind-the-scenes player in Hatanaka’s unnaturally prolific Cinema Epoch productions. She’s written herself a showcase for her striking beauty and an imaginative mind, but the story … well, that’s another story. So many ideas are presented to their own detriment, with none given enough attention to bear fruit — perhaps impossible in an abbreviated showtime of 62 minutes.

Put in simplest terms, it doesn’t make any sense. Viewers are given only a sliver of a chance to get their bearings before things go — in Nikki’s own words — “batshit mental-ward crazy.” As with Hatanaka/D’Angelo’s Heartbeat (one of seven collaborations in 2020 alone), overstuffing leads to delirium, as things that aren’t supposed to be funny are, and things that are supposed to be funny aren’t. That may have you wish to borrow another sentence or two from Nikki’s lips — namely, “Oh, enough of this nonsense. … How do I get out here?” — but please, resist that urge. Though baffling and quarter-baked it may be, an earnestness shines through akin to charm. Or something with binary sound waves. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Death Trip (2021)

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Discomforting and moody, the Canadian indie Death Trip feels like — and very well may be — a homemade movie from a group of friends. Admirably, it operates as if unconcerned with commerce, and more about just looking for a good excuse to splatter a little blood, get outside in the cold and run around the woods with a croquet mallet for non-croquet use. In no way is that meant as a negative; after all, first-time director James Watts demonstrates a firm grasp of the machinations of modern horror by opening with one of the more startling scares of recent memory.

Three young ladies (Tatyana Olal, Melina Trimarchi and Kelly Kay) road-trip with their male pal (Garrett Johnson) to his family’s cottage for the weekend. (All four are unprofessional actors and go by their real first names, which takes some pressure off the improvisation.) They eat, drink, toke, poke (or at least play Fuck, Marry, Kill) and peek on the undressing young woman next door (Zoe Slobodzian, who co-produced and handled wardrobe), whose father is rumored to have murdered her mom.

Just as Death Trip finishes setting up its board, Watts and co-scripter Kay (whose previous writing credits number several hardcore pornos) cease moving the pieces in order to overindulge on its worst mumblecore tendencies. Serving as the movie’s second act, an elongated party sequence is insufferable padding around the barest of character information, extinguishing the slow burn and revealing the needed for a beefed-up outline. I’m not saying the emperor has no clothes, but they’re definitely draped carelessly over a sofa and forgotten about for far too long.

Comparatively action-packed, the last third is practically an act of atonement, paying off the seeds planted throughout — namely, acts of violence Watts’ purposely disorienting editing heretofore teases. The film’s final face-off takes place atop a frozen lake, while some random dude just zooms around on a snowmobile to add a pinch of tension and one cup of absurdity. This ends on a literal high note, with crunched testicles. O Canada!

Death Trip would work more effectively if its millennial characters — neck tats, Bernie bumper stickers and all — were more likable. Then again, that they aren’t may be part of Watts and Kay’s point, given microcinema’s leaning toward the unorthodox. One thing remains certain: the power of the score. In his first time out as film composer, singer/songwriter Estan Beedell deserves massive credit for adding points to viewers’ blood pressure with a mere pluck of a string and roll of the drums. —Rod Lott

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