Cinema Basement

A review by Brooks Rich Using quarantine to catch up on reviews that should have been posted. Here we have a film perfect for quarantine viewing. The Witch director Robert Eggers follows up that masterpiece with this dizzying insane descent into madness, mermaids, and masturbation buoyed by two of the best performances from last year. The Witch was called a New England Folktale. The Lighthouse should be called a New England Fever Dream.  Two men are assigned with maintaining a lighthouse on a remote island in New England circa 1890. It's hard for me to describe what follows, but Eggers takes us on one of the a truly bizarre and disturbing journey. Eggers is a director that never lets his viewers relax.Like in The Witch, when we're nervous from the second the family leaves the safety of the community, we are tense the second our two characters set foot on the island. That tension doesn't stop until the screen goes to black and it says directed by Robert Eggers.  ...

A review by Brooks Rich Today I want to continue the discussion of toxic masculinity in the films of Walter Hill and what his films have to say about being a man. This recurring theme of his started all the way back in his first film, Hard Times from 1975. It's a portrait of the depression and how men, no longer able to be the breadwinners of their families, had to prove themselves in other ways. The way they choose to do so in this film is beating the fucking shit out of each other in back alley brawls and betting what little money they have left on those fights. Charles Bronson is Chaney, a drifter who is riding the rails during the depression and ends up in New Orleans. There he hooks up with back alley fight promoter Speed, an electric James Coburn. The two form a shaky but profitable partnership where Speed gets them fights and Chaney beats the shit out of anyone he faces. This film is teaming with toxic masculinity. I think the only one who can call themselves a real ma...

An editorial by Brooks Rich Let's discuss Michael Mann's 2004 film Collateral, where Tom Cruise plays a contract killer who forces cab driver Jamie Foxx to drive him around as he completes his jobs for the night. I was eighteen when this movie came out and thought it was the coolest fucking thing I had seen in years. I still really like this film but I think two aspects of it prevent it from achieving masterpiece status. This is an editorial for people who have seen Collateral so spoiler alert. I believe the third act betrays the rest of the film. For the first two acts Cruise and Foxx are playing a game of cat and mouse, each man looking to one up the other. It's a battle of wits punctuated by flashes of violence from Cruise. In the third act Cruise becomes a stereotypical villain chasing his prey. The sophistication of the interaction between the two men goes away and it's just Cruise chasing Foxx and the lady he met for five minutes and now feels he has to save. ...

An editorial by Azzam Abdur-Rahman A less sad thought but one that dawned on me as I have rewatched The Matrix like a thousand times in my life; as the directors careers and lives changed the films grew mode subversive and fascinating. When I saw it as a kid it was the coolest movie. It was the distillation of action films as a whole into this Uber film, blending Hong Kong martial arts, wild gun fights and sci-fi into a wild miasma of entertainment. Now, it screams to be a film about what it means to be trapped in a world where you feel like you wear a facade to survive. That your true self sits just beneath the surface and until you accept that you will slowly die in madness. But getting free comes at a cost, a cost when you consider that you are now alienated from the world you hated. One that has comforts and is the devil you know. It become a violent scary world that leaves you surrounded by a surrogate family who is there for you but you still miss that original warm bath. It’...

A review by Brooks Rich Amazon Studios is one of the more interesting film studios working today. I think A24 is the best studio but Amazon are up there. Their catalog is interesting and while not every film works and some can be pretty polarizing, it's clear they are striving to make a name for themselves. Eventually they'll score a Best Picture win and be up there with big studios. I'm hit and miss with their films and usually either adore them or hate them. For example I loved Manchester by the Sea but thought The Goldfinch was pretentious Oscar bait. Today I am discussing what might be Amazon's best film so far, Blow the Man Down. Sisters Priscilla and Mary Beth are living in a small fishing town in Maine. When they're mother dies, the sisters inherit their mother's fish shop, which has put the family in debt. Facing financial disaster and foreclosure on their home, they face an uncertain future. When Mary Beth has an encounter with a low life named Go...

A review by Brooks Rich Sometimes a film just goes under the radar. There is nothing wrong with the film and it should have an audience, but for some reason it is almost completely forgotten. Today we have a film that made no real splash and is perfect for exploring on Forgotten Film Friday. Let's take a look at the 2014 submarine heist movie, Black Sea. Jude Law plays Robinson, a veteran of underwater salvage who is let go from his job with a big corporate salvage company. While drinking with his buddies, a friend tells him about a German U-boat that was sunk in the Black Sea. This U-boat was carrying gold worth millions of dollars. Robinson and some former co-workers decide to salvage the gold right out from under the nose of Robinson's former employers. But with so much money at stake, there is no honor among thieves.  I'm being vague with the plot details because I don't want to give too much away. I am surprised this film has remained a total unknown b...

A review by Brooks Rich Walter Hill has made a lot of films about men. Masculinity, both its good and its bad sides, is a recurrent theme in his films. Sometimes Hill praises the masculine, sometimes he shows how being overly masculine can lead to someone's downfall. Both of these looks at masculinity can be found in his forgotten 1981 thriller, Southern Comfort.  A squad of National Guardsmen are doing a training exercise in the swamps of Louisiana. They get lost and decide to borrow some canoes they find, which turn out belong to four Cajun men who lived deep in the swamp. A miscommunication occurs between the guardsmen and the Cajuns and one of the guardsmen starts firing blanks at the Cajuns. This leads to a firefight where the head of the guardsmen is killed. The remaining guardsmen are then stalked through the swamp, battling both their adversaries and each other.  The catalyst for everything that happens is a display of machismo – a little man with a big gu...

A review by Brooks Rich I am going to be honest here. I am a fan of Steve Martin as a comedian, writer, and performer but not a huge fan of his filmography. I think Martin is brilliant and his work on Saturday Night Live is hilarious and he is a shockingly good author. But I am not a huge fan of a majority of his films. The Jerk is fine but I don't see it as a comedy classic like many others do and I am pretty lukewarm on most of the rest of his comedic films. I much prefer his more dramatic films, like The Spanish Prisoner, Shopgirl, and the film I'll be talking about today, my favorite Steve Martin film, 1992's Leap of Faith. Martin plays Jonas Nightengale, a "faith healer" who is the head of a traveling tent revival show. One of the trucks breaks down in the town of Rustwater, Kansas and Jonas and his crew set up to go to work on the town's population, despite suspicion from the local sheriff, played by Liam Neeson. Jonas soon finds that maybe this time...

A review by Brooks Rich Let's talk about Michael Mann. He is a director who had several huge hits from the '80s to the end of the 2000s'. Films like Heat, Manhunter, Collateral, and today's film, The Insider, established Mann as a slick stylish director. Mann has a style all his own, sort of like Ridley Scott's visual style but a little darker and more of a Neo-noir style. Mann's career ended abruptly with controversy surrounding the death of several horses on the set of the HBO show Luck and then scathing reviews for his disaster techno thriller Blackhat. Mann has never recovered from these career disasters and it's likely we'll never see another film from him. The Insider is in my opinion tied for Mann's best film with the crime masterpiece Heat. Both films are slick and stylish. The Insider is about a tobacco executive, played by Russell Crowe, who is let go for not playing ball with his company, who want to hide from the public how intentiona...

A review by Brooks Rich I have wanted to review this film since the first week of the blog. Maybe the most obscure film I've ever discussed on this blog, consider this a very forgotten Friday on a Thursday. The reason I have waited so long to talk about is that it's not streaming anywhere and can only be seen through a DVD or Blu-ray release. I waited to see if maybe it would hit a streaming site .... but, no luck. Let's discuss this sadly obscure crime film from 1978 that is my favorite Walter Hill film and one of my all time favorite crime films. Ryan o’Neal is the Driver, a wheelman in Los Angeles who is the best in the business. Bruce Dern is the Detective, a cop hell bent on catching the Driver, no matter what. He'll even step outside of the law just to catch this guy. The film chronicles their cat and mouse game, with every other character caught in the middle. I have discussed Ryan 'o' Neal before when I covered the excellent Paper Moon. See ...

Editor's note: Starting off Walter Hill month with the movie that would have been his biggest film if he had decided to direct it, instead of passing it off to the director of The Duelists, Ridley Scott. A Review by Forrest Humphrey  If there's a film I've covered thus far where I felt a tad out of my depth, its Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece, “Alien”. To elaborate, I don't think its actually possible to undersell the impact this film had, continues to have more than forty years later. A pinnacle work of both the Science Fiction AND Horror genres.  Numerous sequels, prequels, crossovers, comics, novels, video games and more spun from it. It launched the career of one of the most beloved actresses of modern film and spawned one of the most instantly recognizable and terrifying monsters to ever hit the big screen. The ongoing  legacy of  “Alien” would take dozens of pages to properly chronicle.  I'm not even going to entertain the question of “but doe...

For the month of May we will be covering the works of director, producer, and writer Walter Hill. Hill is an interesting director as he made some great films in the '70s and '80s but never achieved the status of his contemporaries like Coppola, Scorsese, and Spielberg. I'm sure everyone has seen 48 Hours and Alien, which he served as a producer on and was supposed to direct.We will of course cover those but we'll also look at the obscure and lesser known films that make up a majority of Hill's directing filmography and try to figure out why he didn't become a bigger household name. I hope after this month someone discovers how amazing the 1978 film The Driver is or how good Charles Bronson is in Hill's directorial debut Hard Times.

An editorial by Azzam Abdur-Rahman Do you remember when scores were fun? I forgot. I honestly forgot that. You see after mainstream film stopped trying to make scores interesting and in the rise of films using temp music I honestly just through bombastic Han Zimmer copies were all I’d ever hear again but in the rise of my depression I have watched more films from the 80’s and 90’s and while they were bland for their era the space between when I hear a jaunty blues influence pop line enter the film gives me so much space for character. There is something powerful about that. Music feeling like it’s a part of the story, character in every film not just films like Moonlight, using classical music in a film about a black boy’s experience in sexuality while surviving the cruelties of existence. My Cousin Vinny has a score that by all accounts shouldn’t matter but it does. The film has a quiet by the number score that comes up here and there and if you are looking for it its there but the ...