Unpredictable

Keeper (2025) - Perkins As in his other films - Longlegs, Monkey, Grethel and Hansel, Osgood Perkins has a penchant for creating dread with eerie images, this cabin in the woods movie is no exception. From the get-go, even before the ill-fated couple Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) arrive at the handsome, all-windows-n-angles modern log cabin, we see the glimpse of various women and their eventual fate in a series of striking portraits.

Once we are in the cabin, Liz feels an ominous presence in the dark corners and shadows. Maybe this trip upstate with someone she doesn't know well enough, for a city rat like Liz, wasn't a good idea. There's a cake in a box with smudged fingerprints sitting on the kitchen counter. It's from a caretaker Malcolm says, off-handedly. An unexpected, awkward visit from Malcolm's asshole brother with his Eastern European girlfriend, leaves Liz a little more rattled. After eating the whole chocolate cake in the middle of the night, creepy things start happening and Liz doesn't really know if they are dreams or real.

Malcolm is called off for his job as a doctor into the city, leaving Liz all alone. She is haunted by the vision of the women seen in the beginning of the film as well as feeling that she is not alone in the cabin.

The images Perkins and DP Jeremy Cox (Monkey) are truly unsettling. The creatures are extremely creepy and the competing saturated color palate is beautiful and dark and very effective for the location. Some transition shots are stunning, comparable to that of Park Chanwook even, the king of transition shots. Love his play with background and foreground perspectives also. Keeper develops into a delicious folk horror territory, but not a clearly defined plot. And like other Perkins films, narrative thread is not the selling point, but atmosphere is and unsettling images are. This film has a lot of that.

Maslany, who has one of the most interesting faces in cinema and serves as one of the executive producers of the film, is all game for a small cast and one location, atmospheric horror. Her natural delivery and demeanor, her quick wit is highlighted in basically a one woman show. I can see if it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it.

The Big Empty

Air Doll (2009) - Kore-eda Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll appears to be tackling the modern society's illness - urban loneliness and soullessness, the themes explored by by other prominent Japanese auteurs of its time, namely, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sion Sono and Shinji Aoyama, with Korean actress Bae Doona (Linda, Linda, Linda, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Host). The result is a mixed bag.

Adapted from a manga, about a blow-up sex doll, Air Doll is an odd choice for Kore-eda in his mid-career, because he had always been regarded as a Ozu's heir apparent with his gentle, life affirming, if not death obsessed films. It concerns a middle-aged man living alone with his sex doll (Bae), named after his ex-girlfriend Nozomi, as a companion. He talks to her and bathes her and has sex with her. While he is out working as a waiter at a restaurant, Nozomi comes to life and walks around the town. She even gets a job at a video rental store. People around her are unbothered by her demeanor or she has seam lines around her body. With her big eyes and blank expression, Bae approaches the role with pure wonder and innocence of a new born child.

Nozomi's accented Japanese narration serves well as an inanimate object which came to life and just gained a heart. Walking around and meeting people, observing and experiencing human conditions, she learns that there are others out there that compliment you and complete you to have a full life, that people need one another. She has an accident at the job and punctures her arm and deflates and her colleague Junichi (Arata) puts a plastic tape on her arm and blows air back into her navel. The romance begins. He says she and he are not unlike. He feels empty inside as well. He says many feel that way. She then experiences heartbreak, realizing that she is someone else's mere substitution.

She even tracks down her maker (Joe Odagiri). He philosophically explains that human life is both sad and beautiful. But when all is said and done, we are either burnable (humans) or unburnable (sex dolls, because of environmental restrictions) garbage. Yes, once it gets dark, it never lets up.

The film is closer to Spielberg's A.I- Dark yet saccharine. There are secondary stories of other characters we get only glimpses of, and don't quite resonate as it should. Air Doll is not quite the right fit for genteel filmmaker.

Use Your Illusion

The Last Movie (1971) - Hopper After the success of Easy Rider (1969), a movie which defined the counterculture/hippie generation, the Universal Pictures gave Dennis Hopper a carte blanche to make a new movie, fully expecting another hit with the youth audience. But what they got was jumbled, incomprehensible mess, a movie only a heavily drugged, highly egotistical Hollywood actor could dream of. The Last Movie has all the hallmarks of an ambitious and masculin epic possible-only-in-the-70s' feel to it - the exotic locations (shot in the high mountains of Peru), large sprawling cast including thousands of local extras, grand theme (film aping real life aping film) and recalls more successful, better articulated films of its day- Aguirre: the Wrath of God, El Topo, Heaven's Gate, The Days of the Locusts, etc.

The film 'loosely' tells the story of a Hollywood Stuntman Kansas (Hopper) doing stunt work on the set of a Hollywood western production, directed by Sam Fuller, up in the Andes. After the production ends and everyone goes back home, Kansas remains and shacks up with a local girl, Maria (Stella Garcia) and dreaming of having a good life - a house on the hills, with a swimming pool perhaps. His real motivations to stay is never clear.

In the meantime, there is a cult-like local group, unhealthily influenced by the presence of a Hollywood production, starts reenacting a movie production of their own, with cameras, lights and boom made out of sticks and firecrackers, and using real violence because they don't understand that the filmmaking process is fakery. The local priest (Thomas Milian) is not too pleased about it. It's a devil's doing, he says.

Kansas with his friend Neville (Don Gordon) try to suck up to Anderson, a rich, sleazy business owner and his bored lusty wife, for their expedition to find gold, and gets tangled up in sexual escapades, much to the distress of Maria.

As Kansas gets swepted up in the locals' 'movie production', he really gets hurt and is bedridden. But is it his drug filled imagination or is it real? With the non-linear narrative and no definite ending, it is up to the audience to decide.

Studded with appearance by Hopper's friends - Peter Fonda, Fuller, Kris Kristopherson, Toni Basil and the like, and heady with the metaphors for filmmaking, the US cultural colonialism and jump cuts and "scene missing" title cards, The Last Movie is full of grand ideas and stunning scenery (shot by László Kovács) but doesn't come together coherently. Panned by the critics, and its failure at the box office pushed out Hopper to an exile from Hollywood for a dacade after this film.

Dance Across the Rio Grande

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) - DaCosta Okay. Any movie that features Ralph Fiennes playing Duran Duran records and dancing and singing along is worth the admission. I admit that. But is this sequel to the projected trilogy of the 28 franchise worthwhile, other than Fiennes' presence? The thing is, Alex Garland is a terrible writer. I always hated his over-dramatic, yet simple world view. I hated the ending of 28 Days Later, which started the whole franchise. I always thought the Boyle/Garland combo is bad news - no amount of style is gonna make up for its terrible, shallow premise.

Garland has shown time and time again that he is incapable of making an entertaining film. His attempts at Hollywood action movies are marred by his extremely limited and stupid world view - it doesn't matter whether he is adapting from another source, his writing always ends up clunky, awkward, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. But now with The Bone Temple, it's Nia DaCosta, a prominent and highly capable director behind The Candyman reboot, which I enjoyed a lot.

Seeing this is the second film of the planned three, the clunky plot is somewhat forgivable. And DaCosta handles it well with the visuals. The Bone Temple begins promptly where the previous one left off. Our young protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is now one of the Jimmys in the ruthless Jimmy Gang, headed by track suit wearing, parkour practicing, satan worshipping Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, last seen as a hick vampire in The Sinners). Growing up watching Teletubbies and believing his pastor father was a satan who foresaw the zombie apocalypse, Jimmy with his handful of feral little Jimmies, runs around the zombie ravaged the countryside of northern England and kills bunch of survivors in the most gruesome way BECAUSE HE IS A SATANIST.

ON THE OTHER HAND, WE HAVE DR. KELSON (Fiennes), who is a sage-like survivalist who builds towering open air ossuaries to remember the dead and believes the virus infected zombies are curable. SO THOSE ARE THE TWO CHOICES YOU HAVE IN POST ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. GET IT??! AND OF COURSE, THERE WILL BE A CONFRONTATION OF THE TWO! All you have to do is say the premise of this franchise out loud and hear how ridiculously stupid you sound. See, this is why I hate Garland's writing.

There's always unintentional campy humor in Garland's writing. Fiennes goes along with it and makes the most of Dr. Kelson's eccentricities: his rendition of pumped up satanic rockstar act while blasting Iron Maiden is gold. But then again, we had to content with our young hero being reduced to a passive wimp throughout the whole film. Why do zombies not attack each other if they see uninfected as monsters? However scientific it pretends to be, The Bone Temple is not the movie that explains these gaping holes in the premise, but punches some more new holes instead.

Wildly uneven, but ten times better than its predecessor, The Bone Temple only exists to serve as a stepping stone for the third movie that links back to its original which came out in 2002, which made Cilian Murphy its breakout star. But this is all Ralph Fiennes. Me, an unabashed Fiennes fan, have no complaints.

Solidarity

The Black and The Green (1982) - Bourne In december of 1982, a group of Civil Rights activists from the US visited Northern Ireland, organized by the H Block Committee, an anti-British/loyalist group in Northern Ireland, named after the notorious H shaped jail cell blocks which saw 10 Irish republican prisoners died of the hunger strike a year before. This is the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This fact finding mission was to support and show solidarity between African Americans and the Irish people under British colonial rule. The roadblocks figuratively, and philosophically are present - how do you reconcile the racism of Irish Americans against blacks in the states? How do you reconcile the MLK's teaching of non-violence with armed struggle of the Nothern Island? For these Civil Rights activists, the trip is a self-reflection and teaching moment as well. They are grilled by an Irish journalists on their knowledge of the situation at hand and understanding of the context of the Trouble, but warmly received by people of Belfest and Derry.

St. Claire Bourne, founder of Chamba Mediaworks and unsung hero of documenting African American life in the 60s and 70s, records everything matter of factly with the help of Jean Carey Bond, a journalist who accompanied the trip as one of the delegates. She narrates the film.

This short documentary is a gem. It speaks of the past solidarity that existed internationally and we need more of this in these crazy times. "If opression exists anywhere in the world, then the entire world is unsafe." Happy MLK day everyone.