Soy loco

Like Someone in Love

Crit

So that happened.

Most of this film proceeds in a tone of safe entropy--the college student working as call girl goes on call to a grandfatherly retired professor more intent on cooking for her than on having sex with her; the boy who claims to be her fiancé is jealous and possessive and even a bit temperamental, but seems harmless enough, even loving; the old man has people making inconvenient demands on his translation skills--but apart from a lot of driving around, nothing much is going on, except in the characters' heads. As with director Abbas Kiarostami's most recent previous film, Copie confirmé, what matters most is precisely that which is most difficult to get a real handle on, a condition here conveyed by the number of shots that show faces through glass or reflected in glass, identifiable but always distorted. I see that I referred to the previous film as "very nearly brilliant," and that's a fair tag for this one, too.

John Dies at the End

Crit

Holy crap! Remember Bubba Ho-Tep? Well, this is director Don Coscarelli's first feature since that one, ten years earlier, but I'm ready to class it with Repo Man, Wristcutters: A Love Story, The American Astronaut, and Panique au village in the pantheon of genuinely weird, genuinely wonderful films. A new street drug, "soy sauce," is making people prescient and psychic, at least until it takes over their bodies to breed insectlike like denizens of a parallel universe. Thank heavens for Bark Lee, humankind's best friend.