I finished LaBrava in a dark night of the soul a couple of days ago so maybe I’m still hungover but Clooney taking Leonard’s nuanced and naturalistic prose-dialogue and chewing it up into his formal experiment of movie star smarm while Steve’s house band mutilates Isleys tunes into Yo La Tengo 90s sleaze-twee in the background really rubbed me the wrong way? J-Lo is the best actor in this because her stilted delivery actually seems like an Elmore Leonard character?…

This Blu disc is incredible to look at. Big Nick is the zeitgeist.

A bunch of guys with death wishes, some of them successful, come up against a guy who’s smarter than they are and teaches them how to love again. The only justifiable movie franchise.

The Easter eggs in these are so good they almost don’t even as such, “big, bad Lieutenant” and the Sammy Davis trash dump from Ocean’s 11 here, the Del Amo mall and —…

People were really laying it on thick, saying this had something to do with Melville, and that’s not quite it — more like one of the scuzzy Euro thrillers from Belmondo in the 80s or that Roger Moore would do between Bonds. I was also going to compare it to French Connection II, but it never gets that scuzzy. It’s actually a good balance between that level of “realism” sleaze approaching something like Gomorrah and the cartoonish lifestyles of the…

The production design, creature work, and stunt choreography are among Amemiya’s best — there’s a real aesthetic clarity here that few others manage. And Toei and Bandai were willing to back it with money. Every shot of Fog’s lair looks like baroque velvet Elvis-Dracula painting. 

But it’s all oddly devoted to a paper-thin plot for kids (is environmental devastation the enemy, or are evil space aliens?), lacking ZO’s dreamlike music video logic. So it loses points, the diamond-hard purpose isn’t…

They’re challenging God, literally. 

No amount or strength of nostalgia will change that most of this is crawling around warehouses and office parks to no end with TV level artistry, except for a weird interlude where they do the Cat People pool scene but romantically (I’ve always found the love story aspect oddly poignant, in an outsider art by telenovela kind of way). But when Onizuka comes skulking out of the exploded box truck on fire, writhing and dying while…

I have this short shrift last year talking about the much later, sadder, and more surreal Dino western Christmas special, but this is really something else. We later watched a short bit of Sinatra’s own Christmas special with Bing (brought to you by Bulova and Chesterfield, “my cigarette” —Frank) and it’s amazing how much stiffer and more awkward Frank was about a decade earlier. Here, he and Dean riff off each other, sing beautifully, goof off, sing purposefully awfully, dance…