The MacGuffin

Sukiyaki Western Django – If you’re not familiar with Takashi Miike, then you should move out of the box you’re living in and get some culture – I say that, but by crawling out of that box, you’ll be opening yourself up for one of the most messed up minds in Japanese horror/gore/weird films. When Miike makes a western, you’ll pay attention. Sukiyaki Western Django is a samurai western – yes, Japanese cowboys with swords. Where’s the bad?!?

Anatomie De L’Enfer – This French film opens with a guy performing felatio on another man in an alley outside a club, and I don’t mean hinting at it – I mean full-on shows it. Viva la France! Inside the club, there’s a lot of gay men dancing and grinding on each other while a random girl strolls through the crowd. She’s on a mission to kill herself and tries to cut her wrists in the bathroom, but a guy stops her. He gets her fixed up and walks her home (she blows him on the way).

This is an Argentinean film about a 15-year-old girl, Christina, who goes in for a routine blood test and the doctors find something they don’t go public with right away. She has a pretty frank discussion with her mother about having kids and her mother is pretty weirded out by the questioning – you might think because of the girl’s age, but you’d be wrong.

Fracture – Anthony Hopkins plays an uber-intelligent psychopathic killer. Totally unlike what he usually plays and is famous for… no wait… that IS what he’s famous for. Ted (played by Hopkins) finds out his wife is cheating on him with a police officer. Ted waits until she gets home to confront her and then shoots her in the face. She doesn’t actually die, but is more or less brain dead.

Ashes of Time Redux (originally known as Dung che sai duk) is a Chinese film about a swordsman, Huang, who shows up at a friend of his’ house (Feng) with a jug of magic wine that makes people forget. He doesn’t believe it, but tries it anyway and actually forgets his past.

Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a traveling “termination manager” – he flies around the country working for companies downsizing and he fires people. He’s on the road (or the air) 95% of his time and actually complains if he has to spend time at home. His family doesn’t see him, he doesn’t get tied down with relationships or responsibility or commitments, and one day, his company decides they’re going to shift to an online version of what he does. Clearly he’s not happy.

Volver is a Spanish film about a family living in Madrid. The mother and father have passed away in a fire and the elderly aunt is getting up there in years and bit crazy. The daughter pops in to take care of the aunt and the aunt keeps talking as if the mother were still around taking care of her. She writes it off as crazy talk, but after the aunt dies, we find out the mother faked her death in the fire and has been taking care of the aunt. The mother goes and hides out at her other daughter’s house and pretends to be a Russian hair dresser and steers clear of the oldest daughter.

There’s a machine that changes men into mutants and it’s buried under the earth and its secret is protected by a secret cult. It’s been around since the medieval times, but has lasted through the year 2707, when four corporations rule the world.

Since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Brittany Murphy in it, I felt I owed it to her legacy to watch one of her films. This SyFy channel-appropriate movie is about earthquakes ripping through the country across faultlines and swallowing whole cities. The feds send in seismologists to research it and they don’t get very far. Brittany Murphy is one of those experts.

Despite some confusion surrounding the name of this film, it is not about a certain adult film star’s younger lesser talented brother. It’s about Sherlock Holmes, the world greatest detective and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. They solve a variety of crimes thanks to the amazing gift of combining minute pieces of information/evidence together into a story. This film iteration of the literary series stars Robert Downey Jr. playing Holmes and Jude Law playing Watson.