by ·Comments Off on Taming the Garden (2021, Salomé Jashi)

One of those docs that seems to be covering an interesting situation per the description writeups (rich politician in Georgia buys giant/ancient trees and transports them over water for a private garden) but the experience of watching it is something else entirely, no facts given about the unseen owner, the garden only glimpsed at the end. Mostly we see the workers performing tree removal, the townspeople who are affected by this activity, and we hear each of these groups in idle conversation, arguing over what it all means. Visually, the movie likes playing with scale and duration, revealing things gradually, showing the reverse angle of what you’d expect. A holdover from last year’s T/F/ND/NF lineup.

Robert Koehler absolutely raved about this in Cinema Scope:

As in her astonishing debut, The Dazzling Light of Sunset (2016), Jashi’s art is complex, Chekhovian: she allows space for the viewer to realize that everyone has their reasons, to admire the sheer engineering prowess involved in this literal rape of living things from their native soil to suit the whims of an oligarch, and even permits a certain sense of beauty to bleed into the absurdist finale … What courses through every moment of Taming the Garden isn’t anger, which would be the easy way out; instead, Jashi’s movie plays honest witness to the practice of power in the 21st century, where the natural world is being remolded at irrevocable cost.

by ·Comments Off on What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021, Aleksandre Koberidze)

Post-La Flor digressive cinema! Young lovers are kept apart by a curse, trying to find their ways back to each other and to themselves… but then, why not instead follow some dogs who want to watch the World Cup, and isn’t all this just a distraction from larger global issues? Anyway, the main plot ends up with a documentary film screening allowing the romantic leads to see their true selves again. The movie’s somewhat slow and wandering, but the music (in all different styles, by the director’s brother) is fabulous and everything is sufficiently magical (I did close my eyes when the narrator said to).

From the Cinema Scope cover story, Koberidze’s filmmaking origin story is hilarious:

I came home one day and my mom told me she had seen a film by Guy Ritchie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. She told me she liked it and her opinions have always been really important to me, so I watched it and it was the first time in my life when I realized that if this is good, than I can make something good too. It was like a switch went off in my mind. I wasn’t very impressed with the film, so I figured it couldn’t be too hard to make something like this.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

[The director/narrator’s] tendency to over-direct the viewer, combined with a relative indifference to the ramifications of the basic premise, suggest that Koberidze’s true concerns lay somewhere else … Koberidze makes use of the the flowing Rioni River and other physical features of his location, the Georgian town of Kutaisi. Still lives, portraits, and landscapes are the real stuff of What Do We See, and it is here that Koberidze excels.

by ·Comments Off on My Happy Family (2017, Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Groß)

Manana is tired of her family, and one day walks out and gets her own apartment. Everyone tells her this is unacceptable and ridiculous and she’ll come crawling back, but she does not. She still sees her husband and kids and parents, reluctantly, but mostly keeps to herself even when home. Remarkably, the movie allows this to happen, doesn’t condemn or destroy her.

Michael Sicinski on letterboxd:

Nana & Simon’s choice to spatialize Manana’s rebellion allows them to literalize her movement away from the fold, a break which is then compromised by her older brother’s insistence that some dumb lugs in her building “keep an eye on her.” Unbeknownst to Manana, the patriarchy is everywhere. This is made even clearer, in far harsher terms, when some old friends of Manana’s divulge a secret about her past, something that she herself did not know.

That something is that her husband Soso (“ironically but accurately named”) had a long-term affair, something her friends assume Manana already knew, because why else would she have left. In fact, he has a son with this woman, and Manana meets him under the pretense of checking their gas meter. Meanwhile life goes on in the family she has left – one kid has a breakup, the other has a new (pregnant) girlfriend, and Manana’s parents and brother can never stop meddling.

Bilge Ebiri, whose review got me watching this in the first place:

The film unfolds as a series of long takes, as we follow characters in and out of rooms, staying close enough to register individual experiences while always making sure to keep the rest of the world in focus. But the camerawork isn’t that rough, handheld, vérité style we’ve become so used to; it’s fluid without being showy, immediate without being unbalanced.

Codirectors Ekvtimishvili and Gross made a previous feature called In Bloom, which is also about females in Georgia escaping their families. Soso starred in Aleksey German’s Under Electric Clouds, and I have no idea where Manana (Ia Shugliashvili) came from.

by ·Comments Off on General Orders No. 9 (2010, Robert Persons)

“You are not a witness to the ruin. You are the ruin. You are to be witnessed.”

The quote made me space out for a while, since people near me in the theater had been mentioning Collapse before this one started.

A slideshow of a movie, like a PBS version of The Tree of Life. It alternately seems to be a prayer, a history lesson, and a curse against the city of Atlanta. The movie never feels like explaining its ideas in depth, preferring to crossfade into the next evenly-spaced slide, having the unhurried narrator repeat something he said a half hour ago, valuing experience and images over explanation.

I was pleased that shots of N. Dekalb Mall were used as signifiers of the big corrupt city, since I’ve been angry at that place since I left a screening of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World covered in ants. Less pleased by the rumbly drone of the music, which only seemed to brighten once in a while.

Ebiri liked it.

“This isn’t a lament for the Old South, or even really for The Way Things Used To Be. There’s an abstractness to the imagery and to the discourse that suggests Persons is talking about a symbolic passing. … The film’s tendency to avoid humans comes across as an attempt not to seal itself off from experience, but to make its imagery even more subjective. … Persons’s lament – his surrender – doesn’t feel like a search. Perhaps because he understands the thing he seeks might never have been there in the first place.”

Cheers to Carros and Fearon for the sweet map graphics.

“The weathervane is the center of it all.”

by ·Comments Off on Wise Blood (1979, John Huston)

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

Huston, in his seventies, still had six more films to make and his fifteenth oscar nomination to earn. This movie was far weirder (and dirty, run-down & location-shot) than anything I thought a respected veteran hollywood studio filmmaker would produce. His might be a career I need to obsessively explore some day! We saw a square-ish 16mm print, which looked fine and dandy to me (I mean, the film looked like it’d been left in the glove box of Hazel’s car for some years, but looked fine ratio-wise), but I see the Criterion DVD will be 1.78:1.

Hazel Motes arrives back home to find his family gone, his childhood home looted and decrepit. Instead of trying to find them, he stalks a street preacher and daughter, then decides to preach his own church, one without Christ. Simpleton Enoch Emery follows Hazel trying to be his friend, eventually supplies a Christ for his church (pygmy mummy robbed from a museum). Hazel spooks the preacher into leaving town and (inadvertently) charms the daughter into shacking up with him. A con man likes Hazel’s game and emulates it by hiring his own preacher. Cars are run into ditches and lakes, much preaching is done, and Hazel refuses to warm to anybody, finally blinding himself to the delight of his landlady who now has someone helpless to take care of… but when she forces his hand, Hazel wanders off and dies on the streets alone. An extreme movie (and book), full of heresy and, supposedly, redemption. Film is a quite literal adaptation of the book, with a few omissions and modifications.

Professional crazy-actor Brad Dourif (crazy doctor in Alien 4, crazy Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings 2, crazy doll in Child’s Play) played Hazel Motes. Tron star Dan Shor was alright as Enoch Emery – I’d pictured him younger and dumber. It’s good (hell, it’s great) to see Harry Dean Stanton as the fake-blind preacher with daughter Amy Wright (who just appeared in Synecdoche New York). William Hickey (Toulon in the original Puppetmaster!) was the fake preacher hired by con artist Hoover Shoates (well played by Ned Beatty of Nashville). Mary Nell Santacroce (Atlanta native who appeared in another fake-preacher movie, an ill-advised remake of Night of the Hunter) is the landlady who takes over the last few scenes after Hazel blinds himself. And the fictional city of Taulkinham is ably played by Macon, Georgia.

Adapted and produced by the Fitzgerald family (friends of the author). Appalling music by Alex North starts out with bloopy keyboards and wheezing horns then cranks into comic-book twangy versions of recognizable standards. Sounds an awful lot like what someone from Chester Pennsylvania would image people in Macon listen to. Steve agrees the movie would be a masterpiece if you could cut that music out. Let’s hope Criterion has found a way.

Canby of the Times loved it, “lyrically mad and absolutely compelling even when we don’t fully comprehend it.”