by ·Comments Off on The Color Wheel (2011, Alex Ross Perry)

JR (Carmen Altman, whose twitter reveals that she’s a stand-up comedian, and that yes she’s the daughter of Robert Altman but not THAT Robert Altman) has just broken up with her professor/boyfriend and enlists her brother (writer/director/star Perry) to help her pick up some stuff from her apartment. I think they go from Pennsylvania to Boston – something like that – annoying the hell out of each other the whole way, berating each other’s lives and careers (he writes copy for focus group presentations, she is an aspiring news anchor). He has a Michael Cera voice with a relentless rapid-fire delivery, eventually gets in a minor fight with her Henry Chunklet-looking ex and helps carry her two measly cardboard boxes away. Then they have sex in their hotel room.

Shot in grainy black-and-white with no particular style besides “cheap indie”. Katy seemed to find it exasperating, says she saw the incest bit coming since the beginning. The dialogue is mostly funny, but otherwise I’m not sure why this is getting much attention – maybe funny dialogue is enough.

M. Sicinski

We soon begin to recognize the real pain these two are carrying around. Their pathologies, the film argues, are unique; those all around them are crushingly typical. By the end of The Color Wheel, J.R. and Colin are somewhere well beyond the reach of cultural or cinematic domestication, as is the film itself.

but later:

Alex’s films are designed to be hard to like. They are about people and scenarios and environments that are deeply offputting, about humor-in-inverted-commas that makes you feel a bit unclean. Part of what I find deeply intriguing about The Color Wheel is that for so much of the first half of the film, I want to get away from it.

Perry had author Philip Roth in mind.

People say you can’t make an honest film from one of Roth’s novels because it would be nothing but people talking, characters who only live inside their own heads, followed by unforgivable and reprehensible sex. Which is basically exactly what The Color Wheel turned out to be. … I think cynicism is sorely lacking from independent films. There is an edge that is missing, which confuses me because most of us are making films with no stakes. You can get away with anything when you raise your own budget as a passion project so I’m not sure why people seem unwilling to push things in a more aggressive direction.

by ·Comments Off on Edge of the World (1937, Michael Powell)

Grumpy sailor Andrew is assisting a couple of pleasure-cruisers (the man is played by Powell himself) who want to visit a deserted island. Atop the mountainous island, Andrew finds a tombstone and tells them his story in flashback. Just an amazing-looking movie, shot on “the lonely island of Foula,” an instant cure for my complaints that Design For Living was too talky with no visual imagination.

Andrew sees dead people:

Back before the island was deserted, Andrew (Niall MacGinnis, the reformed nazi in 49th Parallel) was best buds with Robbie, and liked Rob’s sister Ruth. Robbie had decided to leave the island, and there were few able young men left, especially after Rob’s decision became final when he died during a mountain-climbing race, so their fathers (Finlay Currie of Corridors of Blood, and prominently-sideburned John Laurie of The 39 Steps) and the other elders decide to gather their sheep and abandon the island. Meanwhile the couple can’t be together since Andrew is blamed for his sweetie’s brother’s death, but fortunately he got her pregnant, so her father says the hell with it and allows the wedding.

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

The film refuses to conclude with this couple – refuses to use them as a summing-up of what the picture is really about, as almost any American movie would. Eerily, these characters are dwarfed first and last by their awesome physical surroundings, and by the nurturing community they come from, which looms second largest in Powell’s sense of a natural order.

Sideburns falls off a cliff during a plot contrivance the evacuation, leaving behind a tombstone for Andrew to find years later. It’s kind of a negative movie, actually, but so wonderful to watch that it hardly matters. IMDB says Powell overshot the film and credits his editor for saving it.

I have Powell’s autobiography but haven’t the time to read whatever he wrote on Edge of the World just now – and apparently he wrote a whole separate book just on the making of this film.

Yachtsman Powell with his future wife Frankie Reidy:

Return to the Edge of the World (1978)

A lot like Agnes Varda’s DVD extras, returning to scene of a film made many years ago, reconnecting with some participants, but putting in real effort to produce more than a simple nostalgia (or marketing) piece. Alarming to watch them closely together and see everyone get old so fast.

by ·Comments Off on Design For Living (1933, Ernst Lubitsch)

An explosion of big names: Lubitsch (just off Trouble In Paradise) and Ben Hecht (between Scarface and Twentieth Century) adapting playwright Noel Coward, starring a young Gary Cooper, the great Miriam Hopkins, and Fredric March (The Best Years of Our Lives). Not actually a pre-code movie, but I guess the code wasn’t too strict in its early days, because it certainly plays like one. So it’s a saucy, delightfully-written love-triangle movie – and I enjoyed it but didn’t love it, trying to remember the whole time where I read that quote saying the art of cinema died when sound was invented and movies became stagey dramas featuring actors standing around talking to each other.

Playwright March and painter George awaken in their train car to find beautiful advertising designer Miriam, who decides she likes them both and comes to live with them (all these aspiring American artists in Paris reminds one of An American In Paris). The arrangement stays semi-platonic until March gets a play produced and moves away, so now Miriam is with Gary. Then she ends up with March somehow, I forget, but at some point she leaves them both for dreary E. Everett Horton, then ends up in her March and Cooper threesome again at the end. It’s really a four-person movie – fifth-billed is Preston Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn, who only has a few lines as March’s producer.

by ·Comments Off on Television 2013

Downton Abbey season 3
Please tell me something will prevent season four from ever happening, and the series will forever end with the shameful scene concluding the “Christmas episode”, the death of Matthew Crawley, who suddenly thinks himself too good to appear in a smash-hit show alongside Maggie Smith.

Parks & Recreation season 4
The Leslie-running-for-city-council season, versus Paul Rudd as an idiot millionaire and his ruthless campaign manager Kathryn Hahn. Entertainment 7Twenty goes out of business and Tom briefly quits the parks dept. Leslie wins despite a different mini-scandal every episode. Ron loves riddles.

I watched Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life and loved it (the re-enactments are better than ever, and there’s a slightly Adam Curtis tone to the commentary), then anxiously waited a few months until his Screenwipe review of 2012 came out (haha, “real life Titanic“), then that wasn’t enough so I watched his 2007 and 2010 specials, and some Christmas 2006 thing which is apparently different from the 2006 review special, then his new weekly TV show premiered – and abruptly ended after six episodes (the last of which was a clip show!). Must everything in Britain, even current-affairs shows, last only six episodes? Apparently he’s got a new scripted show called A Touch of Cloth.

Also rewatching The Wire with Katy – we’re up to season 3.

by ·Comments Off on Bernie (2011, Richard Linklater)

Feels a bit like The Informant!: a small-scope crime story with a nice fellow who becomes a criminal without losing our sympathy. Jack Black reigns it in, and even Shirley MacLaine, playing a crazy-mean old rich lady, doesn’t get to go gonzo, Linklater trying to keep anything from playing too Meet The Parents-broad. McConaughey arguably reigns it in too much, barely registering as himself. Katy didn’t love it, but dug the appearance of “76 Trombones”.

by ·Comments Off on Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

My first time watching this one, which is like a full-color, freakier 8 1/2 from the point of view of the director’s neglected wife (played by the director’s neglected wife, Giulietta Masina). Her husband has a much smaller role, not Mastroianni-worthy, merely Mario Pisu (Gloria Morin’s man in 8 1/2). Giulietta’s friends Valentina Cortese (Thieves’ Highway, Day for Night) and especially Sandra Milo (also a sexpot in 8 1/2 and Il Generale Della Rovere) lead her into temptation. Meanwhile, as per the title, a seance has opened her connection to the spirit world, leaving viewers like me unable to tell movie-spirit from movie-reality.

First wide/color movie watched on the Big New TV – lovely! I’ll have to find a way to capture screenshots while watching these. Next time around I’ll report more details – this viewing was just for sensual immersion.

J. Baxter for Criterion:

If the success of the psychoanalytical 8 1/2 persuaded him of anything, it was the need to examine even more thoroughly the sources of his creativity, which lay in dreams, and in his ambiguous sexuality.

by ·Comments Off on Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006, Bobcat Goldthwait)

Or “this dog blowjob movie,” as the movie’s own writer/director calls it. Sadly no major Bobcat cameo in this one. Supposedly he plays Roy Orbison towards the end, having sex with the protagonist’s mom in flashback, but not recognizably. Katy says the movie’s ultimate message, that truth is overrated and secrets should be kept from loved ones for their own good, is pretty common these days and not as subversive as Bobcat and I think.

Happy family + boyfriend – fuckup brother:

Amy invites her fiancee to her parents’ house for the usual awkward-family comedy setup – though usually there isn’t a racist meth-addicted brother (Jack Plotnick, star of Wrong) who goes to prison at the end of the movie, causing his mother to have a fatal aneurysm. Before all the prison and death, Amy and her man are having a “you can tell me anything” moment and he doesn’t take her confession well, plus the brother overhears and blabs to everyone.

brother + Posehn:

It’s not generally a laugh-out-loud comedy, but towards the end as Amy is dealing with her breakup, her mom’s death, brother’s imprisonment and dad’s unforgiving attitude, Brian Posehn stops by her place with just the best scene, saying a string of awkwardly terrible things. He and Amy’s father Geoff Pierson (my favorite Goldthwait actor, also playing authority figures in the other two recent ones) are highlights.

by ·Comments Off on Coming Attractions and other shorts

Coming Attractions (2010, Peter Tscherkassky)

Wow. Footage from advertising shoots repurposed by the master of footage-repurposing. He fashions a series of mini-movies using different techniques, each with its own title card. Possibly his best, or at least, his funniest film.

PT: “The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film.”

Depart de Jerusalem en tracteur:

Cubbhist Cinema #3:

Le Sang d’un poeme:

Cubist Cinema #1:

Swimmer (2012, Lynne Ramsay)

Young man swims and walks through a bunch of other movies (through their music and dialogue, anyway) in lovely black-and-white slow motion. There is some bow-and-arrow shooting, a favorite thing of Ramsay’s.

Drool (2011, Jeremiah Kipp & The Mandragoras Project)

A boy and a girl are covered in drool, slithering about in a white room. The bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises as a twisted love story, then swallowed and spit back out. Only four minutes long and still the slimiest movie I have ever seen.

Crestfallen (2011, Jeremiah Kipp)

Woman committing suicide in fancy bathtub flashes back to cheating husband, then flashes back to her young daughter and decides to live. Beautifully shot, with sweet music by Harry Manfredini. My favorite of the three dialogue-free shorts I’ve seen from Kipp… the third being Contact, which I watched again today – such an impressive little movie that I’m sorry I knocked the sound design last time I watched it.

by ·Comments Off on Attenberg (2010, Athina Tsangari)

Marina (Ariane Labed, gymnast of Alps) listens to Suicide, loves documentarian David Attenborough, is trying to figure out her own sexuality, spends time with her sick father. She does Monty Python silly walks and practices french-kissing with her friend Bella, and eventually hooks up with a beardy foosball-playing engineer with similar music tastes (Giorgos Lanthimos, dir. of Alps and Dogtooth).

Marina and Bella:

Tsangari:

I’m an avid, passionate admirer of all things Attenborough, I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl. He’s near and detached at the same time, like melodrama, as I call it. It really suits me as an aesthetic. He’s so gracious and has so much tenderness towards nature and his subjects. It’s a big example to me, in how to approach characters in cinema.

Completely delightful movie with great (or greatly-translated) dialogue and unusual movements. Marina talks explicitly about sex and cremation with her disillusioned architect father (“I’m boycotting the 20th century. It’s overated, and I’m not at all sorry to leave it.”) and eventually sends her slutty friend Bella to his hospital room to sleep with him. The movie starts out loony then tightens focus around his death towards the second half. NYTimes explains: “The deadpan stylization of Attenberg is a distancing device, or, more precisely, a sidelong path toward real, earned feeling.”

Marina and father:

Tsangari in Cinema Scope:

For me, it was crucial that the father-daughter relationship was one where both parties were trying to make it more equal. They were trying to negotiate the curse of the family tyranny … Our work was pure voice, pure body, pure language. I am not interested in Method acting, bringing in back story, talking about psychology. I worked with the cast as if the script was found footage and we had to re-enact it knowing nothing about its origins and its embedded meaning.

Tsangari was a producer on Dogtooth and Alps, and has a new short called The Capsule. She also appeared in Slacker and oversaw projections for the Athens Olympics. This won a couple awards at Venice, losing the big prize to Somewhere.