Second 'Verse, Same as the First

The pervasive sense that the movement of Time has lost all meaning isn't just for our own individual sliding-down-the-shower-wall moments any more! The movies have taken notice! Time Loop Movies might be somewhat more prominent in Japanese cinema right now -- I think it must have been the one-two-punch success of One Cut of the Dead and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which were then followed up by River and the upcoming horror flick Exit 8 (and I should note that every single movie I just mentioned is terrific and you should seek them all out). It's not like we haven't had our own love affair with this subgenre blooming in our cinematic margins, though -- look no further than the entire ouerve of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who've moved on up to the Marvel level of filmmaking after making a name for themselves with small-nudgeted mind-benders a la The Endless. 

Point being that while these sorts of movies have been around for ages they seem very hot right now if you know where to look, and where you should be looking is for the nearest theater playing writer-director-brothers Kevin and Matthew McManus' new movie Redux Redux, a wham-bammer or a brain-bender that's in theaters today. I missed it at Fantasia last summer but finally caught up with it this week and this should prove a calling-card of cinematic excellence for the filmmakers previously behind the unnerving horror The Block Island Sound. 

That movie also starred McManus sister Michaela, and here she turns up again to play our lead Irene, a broken woman who's taken to jumping through wormholes to chase down and murder the man who murdered her daughter -- and yeah okay so this is a multi-verse movie, not a time-travel movie, but it plays out basically the same as the process has becomes no less than a hyper-violent Groundhog Day for her. 

As in all of the previous movies mentioned the tech and special-effects are all lo-fi, battered and beaten crapola a la Ridley Scott's Alien freighter -- the focus remains on the way these science-fiction concepts are mangling with the emotions and mental-stability of our characters, and this quest that Irene is on is a doozy of one. Forcing her to re-live her trauma in an endless circle, violence begetting violence until the very idea of revenge reveals itself to be as empty and useless as it truly is. There can be no catharsis when her daughrter's killer inescapably remains in an infinite number of universes -- it's a brilliant way of showing that there is only sense in trying to fix ourselves, and that the monsters that haunt us will forever haunt us if we can't let them go or find some way to move on.

For Irene this comes in a couple forms -- she strikes up a sporadic one-sided love-affair with dreamy dude Jonathan (played by dreamy dude Jim Cummings), and she gets way too mixed up with another one of the victims of her daughter's killer, a young woman named Mia (Stella Marcus) who wants her own revenge. And to the filmmakers' extensive credit absolutely none of this plays out like we think it will -- their script swerves in all sorts of unexpected ways, managing to be an absolute thrill-ride while never losing sight of its profound emotional stakes. I'll just end with this -- if thoughtful genre movies like Redux Redux were what Hollywood was actually churning out right now we'd be so much better off. As movie-lovers, as a species. Go see this movie.   

Good Morning, World

Another gift for those of us who couldn't make it to TIFF this year (like those photos of beskirted James McAvoy & Friends that I shared on Monday) is the trailer for a short film called Disc that screened there that stars the great Jim Cummings... and if I had to guess judging by said trailer it stars the great Jim Cummings in just tighty-whities for the entire thing? Now that's cinema, baby. It about a "hookup gone wrong" and there are some good reviews for the short around if you google them. For our main concerns however just hit the jump for several more gifs and said trailer...

Today's Mood

Thank you for summing it up, Jim Cummings.

Good Morning, World

The first thing I saw when I flopped on my couch after a long annoying morning of travel back from Montreal yesterday was the above short film from Thunder Road and The Beta Test writer-director-actor slash MNPP fave Jim Cummings, and it couldn't have been more perfect -- as in I literally think it's a perfectly executed and written and performed comic short, and also as in it was exactly what I needed to decompress in that moment. If you'd like to hear Cummings talk about the short IndieWire spoke with him right here -- he says something lovely things about what it's like out there for somebody trying to make their own movies these days, and that's why we love him! Okay yes we also love him because he's friggin' adorable and... speaking of (ahem)... I don't want to ruin the last act of the short film if you haven't watched it yet, so watch it first and then and only then hit the jump for exactly what you should be expecting to see, once you've watched the film...

Good Morning, World

Well these sure were a delightful treat to stumble upon last night -- writer, director, and actor Jim Cummings (of Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow fame) linked via his Insta to some behind-the-scenes photos of him acting in a film (possibly a short?) called Disk being directed by Blake Winston Rice that seems to involve Jim...

... standing around in just tighty-whities for the majority of it. See what I said about "a delightful treat"? This is what I meant when I said that. Anyway I know Jim's got a lot of fans here on the site (as well he should) so enjoy! Hit the jump for them all...  

Jim Cummings Two Times

There's one of those new Apes movies out today that people seem to like -- I've enjoyed them well enough but find them immediately forgettable; I couldn't tell you what happened in any of them -- but the movie you really wanna see that's out today is the Coens-esque thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County, which stars our boy Jim Cummings here as a knife salesman who finds himself stuck at the wrong road-side diner at the wrong time with the wrong bunch of people. You can watch the trailer right here -- and you don't even have to get off the couch, it's available to rent in all the usual places like here on Amazon. It's got a terrific cast of familiar character actors faces that also includes House of the Devil actress Jocelin Donahue, Michael Abbott Jr. (from The Dark and the Wicked and The Death of Dick Long and of right Killers of the Flower Moon) and Gene Jones and Robin Bartlett and Faizon Love and Connor Paolo -- believe me, you will recognize all of their faces even if their names only ring vague bells. Anyway the movie is endlessly surprising and entertaining and really worth a pair of your hours. Oh and writer-director Francis Galluppi is making the next Evil Dead movie as well, so best get on-board now. Also we need to keep working on making Jim Cummings a big star too. So get to it! (pics via)

Good Morning, World

Happy Monday from me and from writer-director-actor-cutie-pie Jim Cummings, who shared this rare bit of beefcake on his Insta this weekend -- if you've never seen Jim's movies Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, or The Beta Test, I recommend each and every damn one of them. He's a true pleasure. It's possible you've seen him in an acting role outside of his own movies, too -- there's the profoundly strange and awesome movie Greener Grass (which I recommend to any weirdo like me) but as for more mainstream fare he is one of the cops who get killed by Michael Myers in Halloween Kills! Absolutely terrible movie but seeing Mr. Cummings was one of the few and far between highlights. Anyway let's get on with this Monday already...

The Beta Man

Multi-hyphenate hottie Jim Cummings, upon whom I am currently nursing a megaton of crush, has a new movie coming out in November called The Beta Test, and the trailer dropped today and I have it down below. I previewed this movie back when it screened at Tribeca earlier this year -- it's good! And if you like me are nursing a megaton crush on Jim then this movie is made for you. One thing I love about Jim's movies, which he writes and directs and stars in -- see previously The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Thunder Road -- is he seems to agree with me, that he is fucking adorable, and so he films himself flatteringly for our delighted consumption. On some I might read this as narcissism -- and heaven forbid an actor be found guilty of narcissism! -- but on him it works, because it's what I want. These are just the world's rules, sorry! 

Anyway The Beta Test is his leeriest-upon-himself movie to date, seeing him play a Hollywood agent in an endless array of very well-fitted suits (and less, much less) who gets sucked into a dangerous sex game where a mysterious purple envelope shows up inviting him to an anonymous hotel room tryst, and shit, as it does, inevitably goes wrong -- he is very good at playing an escalatingly panicked douchebag that you nevertheless want to have a hotel room tryst with, and he knows it, and so this movie is a treat. It's out in theaters and on digital on November 5th. Here's the trailer: 

In related news one of the few and far between highlights of the new Halloween movie out tomorrow, which I otherwise made swift evisceration of in my review yesterday, is that Mr. Cummings has a small role in one of its flashbacks! I had to look for highlights where I could find them among its dreck, and Jim popping up in uniform was definitely one of them. Hit the jump for a couple more gifs of him in the Beta trailer, along with its poster...

Get That Thing Into My Face

It's only a little over a month until the Tribeca Film Festival is back here in my beloved home of New York New York The City That Never Sleeps But Occasionally Gets Real Winded, and I did us a lil' preview of its coming attractions at The Film Experience last night -- check that out right here. I am wary of working myself back up into a fever of "everything's back to normal!'-ness just yet -- I read the papers, I know what is going on in other places -- but here in the city I gotta admit, things are feeling better. And I hope and atheist-pray this trajectory keeps. I have been to a movie theater once already (see below) and tonight one of my best friends of forever, who I haven't seen in nearly two years, will be in town and is coming over for dinner (we're all vaxxed and ready to hug)... really I just plan on copiously weeping the whole time. Anyway I hope y'all are safe, your loved ones are safe, and our new kind of normalcy, whatever it is, is right around the corner... 

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