by ·Comments Off on The Green Knight (2021, David Lowery)

Dev Patel’s finest role, in a pleasingly confounding movie. Mostly grey-brown tale of a knight trying to prove himself by journeying to fulfill a bargain with an immortal. I didn’t realize how much of the movie would be the journey, since you only hear about the bookending scenes.

Dev P.

There’s silver plate photography, giants, a digital-ass fox. The king and queen are played by Prometheus costars Sean Harris and Kate Dickle, and his witchy mum is Mississippi Masala star Sarita Choudhury. Barry Keoghan ambushes him and steals his horse. There’s a whole ending where Dev becomes king, but he also died earlier, so I lost track of what’s real.

Barry K.

Adam Nayman in The Ringer calls out “its self-aggrandizing style and prepackaged gravitas.”

Lowery’s fable about a half-human, half-arboreal creature patiently cultivating a lethal debt against a crumbling civilization vibrates with a certain apocalyptic anxiety, one that’s been color-coded for maximum effect. Stoic, implacable, and only resigned to defeat in Round 1 because he knows his revenge is impending, the Green Knight … terrifies as a figure out of a woodcut … but he’s also an avatar of climate change.

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Shorts x5

The Amateurist (1998, Miranda July)

Miranda 1 “the professsional” is presenting her work on Miranda 2 “the amateur” to the viewer. I think 1 transmits numbers and patterns to 2, who paces a cell, reacting with hostility to these communications, while 1 watches lovingly. “A portrait of a woman on the brink of technology-induced madness”

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Pioneer (2011, David Lowery)

Another single-room two-person short. Will Oldham is an ageless man telling his stepson a bedtime story about how the boy was kidnapped and sought for over a hundred years, only to mysteriously reappear.

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Saute ma ville (1968, Chantal Akerman)

Whoa… teenage Chantal comes home, eats dinner, tosses the cat out the window, cleans the apartment, then kills herself on the stove. Jeanne Dielman in miniature – with less technical mastery, replaced with a playful sense of anarchy, extended to the dubbing (she sings in voiceover when not singing onscreen, and when lighting a match, the sound effect is a voice saying “scrrratch”). Watching the doc later, she calls it “the mirror image of Jeanne Dielman.”

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Asparagus (1979, Suzan Pitt)

Up there with Lynch in terms of having the most warped ideas and having the technical chops to get them onscreen. This is the height of color and form/space/scale weirdness while still maintaining some vague narrative trajectory, accompanied by bent spooky music, then it hits new heights when our heroine leaves the house (putting on a mask first, much appreciated), sneaks into a theater and unleashes her phantasmagoric cel-animated phallic-symbol madness on an unsuspecting stop-motion audience. A masterpiece, filmed from 1974 to 1978.

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Atlantiques (2009, Mati Diop)

Serigne boarded a pigogue heading to Spain and died on the way. However, Serigne sits around the fire with a couple of friends detailing the trip and his reasons for leaving. Obviously a ghostly precursor to the feature.

– bonus short –

Strasbourg 1518 (2020, Jonathan Glazer)

Exhausted repetitive dances in vacant domestic spaces.

Faster cutting between a larger set of dancers towards the end.

New music by Mica Levi is an irritating fast club beat with hints of bird calls

by ·Comments Off on A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery)

Shot in the Jauja ratio (square with rounded corners). Strange movie – I didn’t know where it was going, thought the much-discussed pie scene was fine, followed along through some wtf moments, and finally felt deeply moved at the end. The second great ghost film of 2017. Theme of writing down secrets and slipping them into rocks and walls, similar to the Wong Kar-Wai whispers. Writer/director Lowery has a bad mustache, makes lyrical indie dramas in between Disney live-action cartoons.

Rooney and Casey are married, argue sometimes, make love sometimes, then he dies in a car accident just outside the house and appears as a classic ghost (white sheet with eyeholes). Time moves fast – months pass while he makes a single round of the house. He terrorizes some new residents, observes a house party with a nihilist Will Oldham, and witnesses the demolition of the house and construction of a massive office building. Suddenly time resets and we’re in American settler times, then back to the house, where the strange new-house noises heard by Rooney and Casey appear to be the Casey ghost, making one wonder whether the ghost is even Casey after all. No need to write down what happens in the final minute, because I’ll never forget it.