Unloved – Gentong Film LK21 https://gentongfilm.com Gentong Film LK21 Thu, 02 Oct 2025 05:30:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 The Unloved, Part 141: The Grudge & Wolf Man | The Unloved https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-141-the-grudge-wolf-man-the-unloved/ https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-141-the-grudge-wolf-man-the-unloved/#respond Thu, 02 Oct 2025 05:30:04 +0000 https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-141-the-grudge-wolf-man-the-unloved/

I have well established, for those with even a pittance of interest, that my taste in horror is not aligned with the mainstream. I mostly don’t respond to allegory, and I need the images to do more than flash and provide the gore, which I also like plenty of. In other words, I have never met another critic who likes either of the two movies I’m rhapsodizing today, the 2019 remake of “The Grudge” and Leigh Whannell’s 2025 take on “Wolf Man”: gory, widescreen odysseys about desperate people pushed into extranatural mysteries, breaking the chains of torment.

I found these films soulful and specific and riveting. I would love, as I do with every Unloved movie, for the world to take a chance on seeing things my way. I can only offer you my eyes for a moment. I hope you find them useful. 



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]]> https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-141-the-grudge-wolf-man-the-unloved/feed/ 0 The Unloved, Part 140: Shattered | The Unloved https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-140-shattered-the-unloved/ https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-140-shattered-the-unloved/#respond Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:47:18 +0000 https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-140-shattered-the-unloved/

I grew up with Wolfgang Petersen’s films. I saw them in theaters; they were always on TV. The fabled original cut of “Das Boot” seemed to be the holy grail of VHS collectors for a long time (it seems quaint now, in the age of boutique Blu-ray boxes, to imagine much being hard to find). But the one thing I missed was…well… his purpose. What did he want to say? The German films made sense to me; they’re probing post-war male studies, and “Das Boot” was specifically a story of his own German naval officer father (we can only assume uncomfortable questions about his service record must have come out before filming), and he shied away from neither controversy nor ugliness. But then he made “The NeverEnding Story,” and it was like a different director had taken over. The critique of the government went up and down, back and forth, until finally it became too much work to parse a political sensibility in movies that demanded you switch the light off in your frontal lobe and watch the dumb spectacle. “Enemy Mine,” “In The Line of Fire,” “Troy,” “Air Force One,” “Poseidon”—peaks and valleys. Didn’t seem worthy of all that much specialist scrutiny. 

And then I saw “Shattered.” 

Suddenly, I could see the whole story. He was swimming the dirty river of the American erotic cinema, the things you shut the door while watching in your bedroom. Not only did he make a grand entry in the subgenre, I’d argue that he produced the most satisfying high-budget, high-gloss erotic thriller of the era. Sure, it wants for some of Joe Eszterhas’s gymnastics in the dialogue, and could have used Verhoeven’s stark framing, sure, sure, yes. But what Petersen did here is so heedless, so charged, so…erotic that I stopped caring about anything about the flow of the images. This was a Sirkian melodrama (complete with “Magnificent Obsession’s” surgical fixation) taken by the endorphin rush of rediscovering identity through sexuality.

What Petersen understood was that people didn’t come to this genre for realism…or so he was led to believe by box office figures. Turns out everyone had limits. The film was one of his rare financial failures. Not me, though. I have no limits. And so I soaked up the hazy, sweaty vibes of the piece, awed by each new composition and lighting set-up. This is what American studio films ought to still look like. 



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]]> https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-140-shattered-the-unloved/feed/ 0 The Unloved, Part 139: “Wild Card” https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-139-wild-card/ https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-139-wild-card/#respond Sun, 03 Aug 2025 11:06:08 +0000 https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-139-wild-card/

Simon West auteurism is not for the faint of heart. Unlike Joseph H. Lewis or Phil Karlsen, his compromised studio work has less of a moral component and much more to do with what he can get away with in a lowdown, agreeably grotesque and decent-looking package. Whereas the journeymen of yesterday were placed in a studio and asked to make miracles out of whatever was handed to them, the hirelings of the ’90s, music video and commercial directors bumped up to the pros for their style and presumed malleability, have come to the international co-production stage of their careers much sooner.

In the late ’50s and ’60s, Hollywood directors like Karlsen, André de Toth, Jacques Tourneur, Sidney Salkow, George Sherman, Robert Aldrich, William Dieterle, Edgar Ulmer and more went to Italy to soak up funding and make largely undistinguished historical films (Lewis never made it that far, but he did film in pre-revolution Havana).

Many years later, West went to China to film for a few years. Like the directors of yore, he’s taken many a detour to survive, and that has placed him in a proud lineage of genre directors who refuse to stop or be pigeonholed. Before his first move, he remade the similarly undistinguished, frankly somnambulant Burt Reynolds movie “Heat” with a staggering A-list cast behind star Jason Statham, which nevertheless has a B-movie edge. “Wild Card” was just one more damned movie when it was new in 2015, but today it’s a wonderfully violent lowlife movie about the sheer love of the game. The game in this case: ruining lives, not least your own.

I’ve been a West fan since “Con Air,” and while I can’t say he’s always made it easy for me to follow him like Carmen Sandiego all over the globe and into projects both ludicrously insubstantial and unfashionably bitter, I hang on because he can still surprise me. Whether it’s the winning misanthropy of “Expendables 2,” the CGI athletics of “Skyfire,” the bisexual palette of “The Old Man,” the zesty theatrics of “Stolen,” or the perfect framing of “When a Stranger Calls,” West zigs when he could as easily zag. 



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]]> https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-139-wild-card/feed/ 0 The Unloved, Part 138: Rebel Moon | MZS https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-138-rebel-moon-mzs/ https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-138-rebel-moon-mzs/#respond Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:19:38 +0000 https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-138-rebel-moon-mzs/

As with Michael Bay, I was waiting (if not patiently) for the day Zack Snyder produced something I found essential, and even when it finally happened, it took a while to stagger out. Early reviews of his two-part, Hard R-rated “Star Wars” riff “Rebel Moon” weren’t kind, but rumours of an even more explicit director’s cut kept me in suspense. I could feel my kind of film coming up to the plate ready to swing.

I was not disappointed.

Suddenly, the abject Randian vision of his superhero movies found purchase in a narrative I could get behind. Here, the superiority of a few is not cause to destroy civilization or exalt in its frailty—there must be people that need saving to justify their heroics, and the superhero has to make the Herculean choice to share his gifts with a disgusting civilization. No, the heroes of “Rebel Moon” were flawed and wretched, inspired to become freedom fighters. Like Bay’s “6 Underground” and “Ambulance,” the spectacle was focused inward, towards the harm perpetrated against individuals as a mirror of the damage experienced by an entire people.

Everyone needs solidarity; everyone needs to feel their labor is not being stolen; everyone wants to believe a brighter tomorrow is on its way. Not much gives me hope these days, but I do know I’ve watched this beautifully composed symphony of gore quite a bit in the last year.



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]]> https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-138-rebel-moon-mzs/feed/ 0 The Unloved, Part 137: Immortals | MZS https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-137-immortals-mzs/ https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-137-immortals-mzs/#respond Mon, 02 Jun 2025 13:43:05 +0000 https://gentongfilm.com/the-unloved-part-137-immortals-mzs/

With the unforgiving heat of a global warming summer upon us, let’s look back at a blockbuster that made its money back but somehow didn’t end up with its director, the unimpeachably singular Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, whose career was put on pause in this country. While movies are now drained of color, his cinema was alive with it. He had a healthy attitude towards plot contrivance and never let the impossible stand in his way. He once gave one of my favourite quotes ever in an interview: “And for me, having traveled a lot, I always have to find out—when you show a movie to people, they just say, “Would you buy this?”

That’s one of the reasons you have origin films—like Superman or whatever—that takes so long in the West whenever you start to originate one, because you have to set up that this guy can fly because he is from another planet, has a nemesis, you can make him grounded when you give him Kryptonite, and all that stuff. You watch a Hindi movie, and they just say, “Hey, this guy can deflect a bullet with his ring because he is Amitabh Bachchan, so next question.” Literally, it is all about what each culture takes—to take as a MacGuffin and where they want the money spent.

We could all stand a little of that cavalier style these days. 



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