The Koumiko Mystery (1965)

Un film de Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil), set and filmed amid the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Koumiko Muraoka plays herself, a woman described as older than 20 but less than 30, starring in a movie. Specifically, this movie. Marker asks about her face, her race, what she expects from life, and about cats, horoscopes, and Japanese porn.

Koumiko’s answers aren’t stupid, but they’re what anyone with an IQ of 100 might say, and voiced fluffy, like she’s reciting poetry. It’s accompanied by interesting images of Tokyo, with repetitive visual glitches added, and eventually revealed to be inspired by an automobile’s windshield wipers.

This is 46 minutes that felt like two hours. I sighed a lot.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Krabi (1976)

This is a wordless 12-minute Czechoslovakian sci-fi cartoon, in a visual style vaguely reminiscent of Fantastic Planet. It’s pretty good, and I ought to just give it a thumbs up and say it defies description, but I like typing so I’ll say more:

The title translates as ‘The Crabs’. They’re robot crabs, designed to eat metal and shit parts. The parts can then be assembled to build more Krabi. But of course, things go wrong.

Here’s something else gone wrong: the only version of Krabi I could find has been pirated and vandalized twice, by idiots who added their logo in the corner. Stupidly, both idiots put their logos in the same corner, one on top of the other, so neither logo can even be read. It’s of course very distracting, and if I could figure out the vandals’ name and address I would happily mail each of them a week’s worth of my poop.

Verdict: YES, except for the upper left corner.

♦ ♦ ♦

Krakatit (1948)

I turn off movies when it becomes apparent that they suck, but this is the first flick I turned off because it was too good. I wasn’t in the right mindset for heavy thinking, so I stopped it and watched schlock instead, and returned to Krakatit a few days later.

“The story takes place in the fancy of a fevered dream,” equal parts noir and science fiction, beginning when a deliriously ill man is brought to a hospital.

Through dreams, hallucinations, and brief bouts of awakeitude, the doctors and audience learn that he’s Prokop, inventor of a process that can turn anything, perhaps everything, into an explosive. The military wants the recipe, as do foreign governments, but through his mental fog Prokop can’t remember much, and wonders whether he should intentionally forget what he remembers.

If I’m following the plot maze with no wrong turns, about half the movie happens only in Prokop’s head, which feels very true to life. Maybe some of my own clearest memories never happened, either.

Based on a novel by Karel Čapek, the story sounds like an allegory for atomic and nuclear weapons, and it is, though Čapek was dead well before The Bomb was a twinkle in Oppenheimer’s eye.

The film has heady visuals, clever cinematography that’s integral to the vibe, and gorgeous, sometimes jawdropping sets and matte paintings.

If this was an American film and in English, it would be hailed as a classic, but it’s in Czech with subtitles, and was barely released in America, so nobody’s even heard of it. Definitely worth watching.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

#Skyking (2026)

Richard “Beebo” Russell was a 28-year-old luggage handler at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. One day in August of 2018, he reported to work, then popped a passenger door on an Alaska Airlines De Havilland Dash 8-Q400 turboprop plane. Without any clearance or communication with Air Traffic Control (ATC), he snuggled himself into the captain’s seat, and took off.

Beebo was the plane’s only passenger, and once aloft, he answered ATC’s radio calls. Chatting amicably, he confessed that, yeah, he’d stolen the plane, and that he wanted to fly over Mount Rainier to enjoy the view. Which he then did.

So why did Beebo do it? That’s the movie’s question, and the filmmakers talk to his family and friends, but — here’s a spoiler. “I did a lot of research on, like, how to start it up and get it to go…,” Beebo explains, “but not how to land it. I wasn’t really planning on landing it.” In other words, the dude’s dead, so the question of why he did it cannot be definitively answered.

In his conversations with ATC, Beebo spoke about not liking his job and especially not liking the pay — which was less than the legal minimum wage, through some despicable quid pro quo between the airline and the government.

At one point, the voice in the tower said Beebo might be able to get a better job if he successfully landed the plane, and Beebo replied, “Nah, I’m a white guy.”

That was seized on by right-wingers to prove he was one of them, aggrieved and frustrated by the libruls. To my ear, though, the line was a joke, in keeping with Beebo’s generally airy and playful attitude in the flight transcripts.

Watching the film (three times), it’s impossible not to like Beebo. I want to take him to breakfast, my treat.

Why did he do it? My guess is that his marriage was stifling, job unsatisfying, the paycheck an insult, and nothing else in life outweighed being weighted down by all that. It’s not hard to understand, is it? This is America.

“I don’t feel like living any more,” Beebo told ATC, so he killed himself after an afternoon of adventure in the sky, successful executing a barrel roll before the plane ran out of gas and went down in smoke and smithereens on tiny Ketron Island, in Puget Sound.

That’s sad, heartbreaking for his family, but on the scale of human lives and deaths, it’s a pretty terrific way to go. Beebo’s a working-class hero, if you ask me. He chose his way of going out, enjoyed the hell out of his last hour alive, didn’t hurt anyone on his way out, and it cost his employer a $33-million plane.

#Skyking is engrossing and thought-provoking, leaning into questions bigger than the hijacking. It’s a documentary, but IMDB also classifies it (rightly) as a thriller, and at that it’s more effective than most scripted action-adventures. No quibbles worth writing.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hammer time

Our goal was simple: Undo this butchery: Notes from the underground of film preservation

10/10/2026

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer.
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If you can’t find a movie I’ve reviewed, or if you have recommendations, please drop me a note. And I mean it — if you ask, I will get you the movie.
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No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.