DON'T LAUGH AT MY ROMANCE (2007)

Mirume (played by Ken'ichi Matsuyama from the DEATH NOTE series) is a normal college student. He goes to school, but doesn't seem to be into it too much. One day a new Art teacher, Yuri (Hiromi Nagasaku), shows up and Mirume instantly falls for her, much to the concern of his friend En-chan (Yu Aoi). En-chan is secretly in love with Mirume (and probably has been her entire life), but she's too shy to ever tell him. Mirume appears to consider En-chan as a little sister or maybe even less than that. Either way, he's definitely not into her romantically.

Most viewers would probably be turned off by length of the film (137 minutes) compounded with the fact that pretty much the entire film is made up of long, extended shots where the camera never moves, but I loved every second of it. Was director Nami Iguchi channeling Yasujiro Ozu? The direct cut transition shots to static objects like buildings and roads, the limited use of music (including music heard by the characters), the minimalist camerawork, the character driven story and the lack of tracking shots makes me believe the answer would be yes, but we'll probably never know since I can barely find any information online about this film and she hasn't released another film in over 5 years. I find that to be very depressing because I really admired this film and I found myself thinking about it so much afterwards that I actually sat down and watched it again.

Favorite scenes: Yuri getting a drink out of the refrigerator; Mirume blowing up an inflatable mattress; Mirume showing Yuri how to add oil to the space heater; the fountain shot and every single scene with Yu Aoi. She was amazing. I rented this film because I'm a fan of Ken'ichi Matsuyama and ended up becoming a fan of Yu Aoi also. Well there's another 40 or so movies I'm gonna have to watch! =)

Highly recommended.

I like how the title is written on the screen in English but yet the subtitles are still wrong.

HAUNTERS (2010)

A dude has the psychic power to control anybody he sees. When he enters a room or area everybody is instantly under his control. He moves through life like a shadow. He stays in hotels for free, eats for free and makes any money he needs by going into little mom and pop loan places or pawn shops and taking their money. He's been doing this for years until one day he walks into a pawn shop and the guy who works there doesn't fall under his spell. This really pisses off our hero and confuses the shit out of the pawn shop dude.

This is a great idea for a movie and the possibilities of a story like that are endless. I especially liked the fact that the film didn't waste any time explaining the origins of these two guys powers. Problem is, instead of wasting time on origins back stories it wasted time with a bunch of bullshit unimportant to the story. The meeting between the two leads should have been closer to the beginning of the film instead it didn't take place until 27 minutes into the movie!

Once they meet, the film picks up and there's a couple of really fun fight scenes, but if you want to be realistic...the dude with the psychic powers should have killed the normal dude a dozen times over. Instead, he kept doing the old lazy writer trick of getting the guy in a deadly situation and then leaving. Just kill the motherfucker!

There are so many ways HAUNTERS could have been awesome and it just wasn't. I really, really wanted to like this movie and at moments I did but overall the distraction of what could have been outweighed what did happen. Worth a rent for sure, but don't expect anything life changing. Also what in the f was that final scene?

THE INNKEEPERS (2011)

Two adults (both with the maturity level of a 11-year-old) are the last two employees of an old hotel that's going out of business. For whatever reason they decide to spend their last few days at work (24 hours a day!) and sleep in empty rooms. There's plenty of empty room because there's only three guests. Nice set-up, I guess, so let's see what happens...

...not a motherfuckin' thing. I've had bowls of Boo Berry cereal that were scarier than this movie. The two hotel workers are both ghost enthusiasts and since the hotel is suppose to be haunted they spend their spare time looking for ghosts. So that means we, the audience, gets to watch them do hair-raising stuff like talking about ghosts, walking down empty hallways, looking at a ghost website and making sound recordings of empty rooms!!!!!! Wow! I hope you can handle that much excitement. Finally some stuff happens near the end, but honestly, it's so goddamn weak it's over before you can even say "This is fucking stupid.".

After the suckfests CABIN FEVER 2 and THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL I can't figure out how writer/director Ti West keeps making movies. Do these turds actually make money?! I like slow-burn movies just as much as the next guy, but goddamn it you eventually have to have something happen! Otherwise it shouldn't even be categorized as a Horror movie, but instead a Drama. A drama about two nerds who sit around talking for 95 minutes and then right when the film is about the end a ghost jumps out. Boo!

Skip it with a vengeance and never look back. If you need me I'll be in my room watching INSIDE or HEREDITARY.

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952)

[Update 09/27/2021: Need to rewatch and redo this review completely. Just deleted all the screenshots. Going to just restart this whole thing from scratch..as I find time, so expect this disclaimer to disappear around 2037.]

Revenge fueled noir about a police chief forced into an early retirement who nearly gets away with the perfect crime: tricking three wanted men into robbing an armored truck and then "accidentally" spotting them and turning them in for the $300,000 reward. Pretty slick plan and he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for florist delivery driver John Payne. You see florist delivery driver John Payne is the unsuspecting fall guy in the operation (the crooks use a double of his truck) and immediately after the robbery he's arrested then beaten and tortured for days by the police in an effort to get an confession. It's not until the vehicle double is found that he's released, but by now he's been fired from his job and his reputation drug through the poo-poo in the newspapers. The only thing left for him to do is catch (or kill) the robbers himself...especially since they're sitting on a million clams.

Some of the tough guy scenes are a little dated and cheesy, but the pace is nice, good story, awesome hard-boiled slang and a strong cast: John Payne, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Preston Foster and Coleen Gray. There's also a number uncredited appearances by lesser known actors like Carleton Young, James Conaty, Charles Cane, Lee Phelps (who starred in over 600 movies!!!), William Haade, Howard Negly and Roger Moore...no not that Roger Moore, the other one from the "Three Stooges" shorts and a ton of movies.

Definitely worth a purchase if you’re a noir fan.

HUNGER (2008)

After being so impressed with SHAME I decided to look into the previous Fassbender/McQueen collaboration HUNGER and...

It's alright. The story is about Bobby Sands' hunger strike during imprisonment and his death 66 days later. Interesting premise, but, if like me, you know absolutely nothing about who the hell Bobby Sands is or why he's starving himself to death HUNGER isn't going to clear things up for you. I literally had to pause the film about halfway in and do some quick reading online to figure out what was the story surrounding this film.

HUNGER opens with a cop getting ready for work. He's silent, distant and obviously internally scarred from beating and raping prisoners all day. Next we're introduced to a new prisoner. He's stripped naked, beaten then thrown into his small cell that's been covered from floor to ceiling with human shit by his cellmate. The new guy soon joins in the shit smearing. Finally we're introduced to fellow prisoner Bobby Sands who's is the leader of this cell block full of guys who refuse to wear clothes and like to doody all over the joint.

Stuff happens: cramming things up butts, screaming, spitting, kicking, shit smearing, pissing, maggots, etc., but unfortunately none of it fully explains what all the hubbub is about. All of the performances were powerful (and Fassbender's weight loss was visually shocking), but overall I found the whole thing to be unsatisfactory and slow. HUNGER succeeds in capturing a moment in time, but unfortunately I don't know what the context of that moment is.