Blackkklansman. Spike Lee. 2018.

I haven’t seen a Spike Lee movie in a while. Like a couple of decades. His early movies were really fresh and fun and really interesting on all levels (cinematography, story, style). He was like the US Lars von Trier for a couple of years. And then he made one boring movie, and then another boring movie, and then I stopped watching him.

But now I’m watching this, and loving it. It’s not very fresh or new or anything, but it’s a solid, interesting drama that’s not annoying in any way, which makes a change. It moves a long at a good pace, and it looks great, and it’s just very… well made. It’s like a movie that should win all the Oscars.

OK, that sounds like I’m totally slamming this movie, but I really like it, despite it not being very special. And that’s really special.

It’s really solid.

The only thing I had a hard time getting past was the wig the main character wears. There’s a lot of wigs in this movie, but they mostly look like, but the lead wig?

Dude

“John David [Washington]’s wig was made by myself and Chantell Carrtherol,” Pierre-Weston said. “She ventilated a few inches of his hairline and I just tracked the rest and colored it, picked it out. Shaun Perkins is my key. He really helped to shape the wig and give it that perfect roundness that we wanted.”

Yeah, that perfect roundness may have been what you wanted, but it screams FAKE in every scene.

The next-to-last bit (with the bomb plot) seems pretty contrived; it’s like they really wanted to have something super-dramatic, so they just dropped it in at random.

But then there’s the documentary coda.

Dude.

Last Stand At Saber River. Dick Lowry. 1997.

I pulled the director of this movie up in imdb-mode, and I got:

“Errr” I thought, but by default (sensibly enough imdb-mode doesn’t show TV productions). But then I hit `x’ (to display all the irrelevant crap), and got:

This is a TV movie! Made by a TV director.

Oops. That explains Tom Selleck starring in this thing. The reason I have this movie is because I got this Westerns box set, which has a lot of great movies.

So perhaps I should give this a chance anyway…

OK, I’m 45 minutes in, and I have no interest in this, so I’m aborting.

Jin-Roh. Hiroyuki Okiura. 1999.

Oh, it’s animated. This was a DVD I picked up at random in a used DVD shop some time back, and I assumed that it was a… Korean… action movie? For some reason?

But it’s an animated Japanese movie about some anarchists and the cops who hunt them down.

I really like the style of animation here. It’s more French than anything, and some of the characters have this slight insectile vibe to them that’s great.

And it moves slowly and is mostly unscored, so there’s nothing here to dislike, really. But despite all that, the storyline is just so… tentative… that I find it hard to keep concentrating on what’s going on, and instead I’m shopping for springforms on the Interwebs.

The documentary featurette on the DVD is fascinating. The writer (the Ghost in the Shell Guy) talks about how he wasn’t sure that Okiura was the right director for this movie, and that while he likes the results, perhaps he should have directed it himself. The director talks about how he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to do the movie, and set terms for the story that he thought the writer would refuse, so that he wouldn’t have to do the movie.

It’s like the anti-Hollywood documentary. I love it.