by ·Comments Off on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay)

“There is no point. That’s the point.”

I always enjoy a good Tilda Swinton performance, and was willing to put up with a grim school-shooting drama to get one. I wasn’t expecting the movie to be such a cartoon, though. Her son is portrayed as so single-mindedly hateful that I’m disappointed the movie didn’t turn into straight supernatural horror by the end. Stylized movie with blatantly unrealistic portrayals of human behaviour (there’s definitely, definitely no logic) are usually okay, but the movie acts like Tilda’s world, feelings, situation are to be taken seriously. I couldn’t put all the parts into a whole that made sense.

Tilda has a devil child who has hated her since birth. Movie flips back and forth in time, culminating in the shooting (with a bow and arrow!), before which Kevin (sadly not Devon Bostick of Rodrick Rules) also shoots his little sister (whom he partially blinded in an earlier scene) and dad John C. Reilly. It seems like the whole rest of the movie was his build-up, that everything Kevin has ever done was to make Tilda’s life miserable, which it finally is as the town’s parents sue for all she’s got, and she ends up working a shitty job at a travel agency, living in a shack, drinking herself to sleep, with no family, visiting her mute homicidal son every week. Then the movie sabotages its demon-spawn horror by almost making Kev seem human in the final scene – what for?

Based on a novel. Intriguing Jonny Greenwood score featuring old-timey songs, well-shot by Seamus McGarvey (Atonement).

F. Croce:

The symbiosis between anxious mother and psychotic son—is she absorbing his growing malevolence out of guilt or responsibility, or is she projecting her own bad vibes onto him?—is what gives the film its shape, the sense of a deforming bulge resulting from turmoil swept under the maternal rug. But Ramsay doesn’t let the horror arise from the material; instead, she pulverizes it with a cacophony of clashing sound bridges, crudely symbolic colors and overwrought edits. Like Steve McQueen’s Manhattan in Shame, Ramsay’s Connecticut is a netherworld of vacant signifiers (Home, Office, Hell) where blunt abstraction and blunt literalism wrestle for control.

by ·Comments Off on I Vitelloni (1953, Federico Fellini)

I’m still figuring out Fellini – his movies seem to fall into categories, but I’m not sure how to define those categories, since it’s been ages since I watched most of them. But however you divide it, I Vitelloni’s portrait of aimless, night-owl youth must sit near La Dolce Vita’s portrait of aimless, night-owl aristocrats. Unlike La Dolce Vita, I didn’t hate all the characters (only most of them). This was Fellini’s second solo feature after The White Sheik, but I’ve also watched four Rossellini movies he co-wrote.

The Guys: womanizing leader Fausto (Franco Fabrizi, also in Ginger & Fred, so maybe the longest-lived Fellini actor), cool Alberto (Sordi, title character in The White Sheik, later star of Mafioso), smarty Leopoldo (Trieste, lead newlywed in The White Sheik, later in A Farewell to Arms), singer Riccardo (the director’s brother), and young Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi, star of Shoeshine and I Vinti).

Fausto knocks up Moraldo’s sister (Leonora Ruffo of Hercules in the Haunted World), reluctantly marries her but keeps sleeping around and can’t keep a job. Leopoldo spends his nights writing a play, which he reads to a famous actor who turns out to be enthusuastic for Leo more than the play. Moraldo mopes around every night, makes friends with a newsboy, seems bewildered by this boy because he has a proper job instead of just fucking around all the time. Finally Moraldo has had it with the movie and leaves town. As his train pulls away from town, the camera pulls past all his sleeping friends, a fun visual touch in an otherwise realistic film.

A sad carnival:

T. Piazza for Criterion:

I Vitelloni marks a big step forward in Fellini’s ability to get deep into his characters’ psychology; it points ahead both to the bitter social satire of La Dolce Vita and to the great canvases of nostalgia and the artist’s nature, 8 1/2, Amarcord — and the neglected late masterpiece Intervista.
…
Against their narcissism and lassitude is posed the solidity and maturity of the town’s older men, who have assumed the standard responsibilities of middle-class family life. But admirable as they may be, these solid citizens — unimaginative, satisfied with their lot, stuck in claustral interior settings — are hardly made to seem a stimulating alternative, and at the end Moraldo leaves the town’s tape loop of foreclosed possibilities for another arena of possibility in the city.
…
Allergic to endings that sum things up too neatly, or that resolve in a definitive way the tensions set up in the film, Fellini once remarked, “Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train… But we must at least take them to the station… to a point of departure.” It is a striking image, one foreign to many popular storytellers: the ending of a story seen not as an arrival, but rather as a prepared departure. I Vitelloni, of course, brings us literally to the station at its end, with Moraldo’s departure from his provincial town. But on a deep level the film was Fellini’s point of departure, too—the beginning of his important work as a filmmaker, the place where he got serious. And as he made clear at the end of Intervista, the only thing that kept Fellini truly happy was his work; the end of any project was a kind of death, overcome only at the moment at which one was ready to begin again, to try and get it right one more time.

by ·Comments Off on Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan)

A traumatic year in the life of Lisa (not Margaret – long story) and her mother in New York. Straightforward character drama with some unique filmic touches (lots of half-heard side conversations, two 360-degree pans within a few minutes of each other in opposite directions). I would possibly have watched this based on the back-story (Lonergan made the beloved You Can Count On Me then spent six years in editing and legal limbo trying to get this one released), then probably not watched it based on the trailer (looked like a bland L.A. Crash-style character-intersection drama), but I finally watched it based on the few vocal critics who insist it’s the best, most criminally neglected film of 2011. They were right!

Mom and Jean Reno at the opera:

Mom and Lisa on the way to a different opera:

Great acting, and a truly impressive, screenplay. Character behaviors seem untidy and human, self-centered and confused. Lisa is a shrill teen, alterately excited and upset by everything, trying to deal with personal responsibility, growing up, family, too much all at once, leading to a beautiful ending. I watched the three-hour version. Not sure which sixth of the film was chopped for its brief theatrical and blu-ray releases – it’s hard to imagine, since there’s no repetition. For instance, whenever the story calls for one person to tell another some things we’ve already seen or heard, the camera pulls back, we see the beginning of the conversation but hear something else, just long enough to get the point then it cuts to the next scene. So, some of the story would have to be removed – maybe her classmate love-triangle, or a Broderick class session.

Lisa’s after-school job as a theater lighting technician:

The central event in Lisa’s life this year is her witnessing/causing a bus crash that kills Allison Janney. Lisa (Anna Paquin) lies to the cops, saying bus driver Mark Ruffalo had the right of way, but she keeps obsessing over the accident, wanting to talk about it with teachers (Matts Damon & Broderick) and friends and others – so she seeks out the victim’s best friend Jeannie Berlin (Charles Grodin’s new bride in The Heartbreak Kid) and Ruffalo, who is understandably defensive when a high schooler comes to his house wanting to talk about the truth behind the accident, which had already been ruled accidental.

Lisa, Jeannie and Jeannie’s lawyer friend:

Meanwhile Lisa’s stage actress mom (J. Smith-Cameron) is dating wealthy fan Jean Reno, but can’t quite deal with their cultural/social differences, and Lisa is planning a vacation with her estranged father (played by the director). Lisa ditches longtime best friend John Gallagher Jr. (Pieces of April) to have sex with bad Kieran Culkin, then she manages to seduce Matt Damon and ponders ruining his life by making a scene about it (shades of 25th Hour). And the bus-crash intrigue continues, with involvement by lawyers and detectives and the victim’s greedy next-of-kin. After mom breaks up with Jean Reno, he dies unexpectedly, and mother and daughter go to the opera together with the tickets he’d bought.

Lisa’s film-director dad:

The cast is great, but most importantly, nobody acts like a movie character acting out a plot with foregone conclusion. Lisa is inconsistent, eventually loses the threads of her attention-grabbing schemes, because she’s surrounded by people with their own ideas and feelings, not stock characters in a hack script designed to help or hinder her – which is how, as a self-centered teenager, she sees the world.

by ·Comments Off on Sight & Sound List 2012

Sight & Sound put out their big, big list of the best films ever, and everyone everywhere is talking about Vertigo. I love lists, but am more interested in the individual top tens than the consensus, seeking out the stray title which was ignored by everybody except for one person, who considers it one of the ten best films ever made. So I combed the website – so full of typos, mysteries (Scorsese got 12 picks?) and weird decisions (Manoel de Oliveira, best known for To Each His Own Cinema) – and made myself some must-see lists based on the critics, directors and consensus picks. I’m not making this into a big project-of-the-year and rushing to watch all of these, just making a note to cross ’em off the list if/when I ever get to them.

Unique films from the Directors’ top-ten lists that I haven’t seen:

Aaron Katz
US Go Home (Claire Denis)

Abel Ferrara
Hawks and Sparrows (Pasolini)
Cul-de-Sac (Polanski)
Prison (Bergman)

Agnieszka Holland
Diamonds of the Night (Nemec)
La Reine Margot (Patrice Chereau)

Aki Kaurismaki
Z (Costa-Gavras)

Andrew Kotting
Black Sun (Gary Tarn)
Moon and the Sledgehammer (Philip Trevelyan)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
La Captive (Akerman)
Rain/Regen (Ivens)

Ben Rivers
Fata Morgana (Herzog)
Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik)
Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait)
Soft Fiction (Chick Strand)
Weather Diary 3 (Kuchar)

Ben Russell
Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rudin)
Crossroads (Bruce Conner)
Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto)
Heart of Glass (Herzog)
Jaguar (Rouch)

Bong Joon-ho
The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young)

Bruce Robinson
I’m Alright Jack (John Boulting)
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward Cline)

Charles Burnett
Decision Before Dawn (Anatole Litvak)
Shop on Main Street (Jan Kadar)
Student of Prague (Henrik Galeen)
Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermano Olmi)

Chris Petit
Eat the Document (Bob Dylan)
The Giant (Michael Klier)
White of the Eye (Donald Cammell)

Corneliu Porumboiu
Faits Divers (Depardon)

Edgar Wright
Dames (Busby Berkeley)

Eugene Green
The Jester (Jose Alvaro Morais)

Fernando Meirelles
Iracerna (Jorge Bodanzky/Orlando Senna)

Fred Kelemen
The Second Circle (Sokurov)

Gaston Kabore
The Thorn Birds (Lee Stanley)
Ugly, Dirty and Bad (Ettore Scola)

Gerardo Naranjo
Possession (Zulawski)
Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder)
Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta)

Gregg Araki
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch)

Guy Maddin
Man’s Castle (Borzage)
After Life (Kore-eda)

Gyorgy Palfi
Love (Karoly Makk)

Jiri Menzel
Fireman’s Ball (Forman)
A Dog’s Life (Chaplin)

Joe Swanberg
Dillinger Is Dead (Ferreri)
Two Lovers (Gray)

John Gianvito
The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha)
Kuhle Wampe (Brecht/Ottwald)
Reason, Debate and a Tale (Ghatak)
Shiranui Sea (Tsuchimoto Noriaki)
Story of Kindness (Tran Van Thuy)
West Indies (Med Hondo)

Hirokazu Kore-eda
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong)

Les Blank
Paris at Midnight (E. Mason Hopper)

Lisandro Alonso
Le Havre (Kaurismaki)

Lukas Moodysson
Man on the Roof (Bo Widerberg)
A Swedish Love Story (Roy Andersson)

Mark Romanek
Heaven’s Gate (Cimino)

Michael Glawogger
Vivan las Antipodas! (Kossakovsky)
All My Life (Baillie)
How Yukong Moved the Mountains (Ivens)

Michael Mann
Confessions (Tetsuya)

Miguel Gomes
Francisca (Oliveira)

Mike Hodges
The Prowler (Losey)

Mike Leigh
How a Mosquito Operates (McCay)
The Emigrants (Jan Troell)

Miranda July
Blind (Frederick Wiseman)
Cheese (Mika Rottenberg)
Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra)
Somewhere in Time (Jeannot Szwarc)

Monte Hellman
Outcast of the Islands (Carol Reed)
Storm Over Asia (Pudovkin)

Olivier Assayas
Ludwig (Visconti)
Van Gogh (Pialat)

Patricio Guzman
Boxing Gym (Wiseman)
Cien Ninos Esperando un Tren (Ignacio Aguero)
Etre et Avoir (Philibert)
Gruningers Fall (Richard Dindo)
Mother Dao (Vincent Monnikendam)
S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (Rithy Panh)

Patrick Keiller
Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Lumiere)

Peter Davis
Sundays and Cybele (Serge Bourguignon)

Peter Tscherkassky
Adebar (Kubelka)
At Land (Deren)
The Pig (Eustache/Barjol)
Easy Out (Pat O’Neill)

Peter von Bagh
A Man There Was (Sjostrom)

Quentin Tarantino
Pretty Maids All in a Row (Roger Vadim)
Rolling Thunder John Flynn)
Sorcerer (Friedkin)

Raya Martin
Manila by Night (Ishmael Bernal)
Eruption volcanique a la Martinique (Melies)

Robert Gardner
Freeze, Die, Come Alive (Vitali Kanevsky)
My Life as a Dog (Hallstrom)

Rolf de Heer
Fearless (Peter Weir)
The Stud Farm (Andras Kovacs)

Samantha Morton
The Browning Version (Asquith)
Ladybird Ladybird (Loach)

Sean Durkin
Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg)

Shinji Aoyama
Hail Mary (Godard)
Killer Elite (Peckinpah)

Sion Sono
Turks Fruit (Verhoeven)

Terence Davies
The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder)
Victim (Basil Dearden)
Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas)

Terry Jones
I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles)

Thom Andersen
God’s Stepchildren (Oscar Micheaux)

Ulrich Kohler
D’est (Akerman)

Ulrich Seidl
My Little Loves (Eustache)

Wanuri Kahiu
Space is the Place (John Coney)

William E Jones
Ten Minutes to Live (Oscar Micheaux)

Unique films from the Critics’ top-ten lists that I haven’t seen:

Craig Keller
23rd Psalm Branch (Brakhage)

Chris Fujiwara
Man’s Favourite Sport? (Hawks)

Amy Taubin
Cosmopolis (Cronenberg)

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Red Viburnum (Vasili Shukshin)

Girish Shambu
Dil Se (Mani Ratnam)

Gary Indiana
The Death of Maria Malibran (Schroeter)

Jaime Christley
Ministry of Fear (Lang)

James Naremore
Variety (Bette Gordon)

J Hoberman
The Girl From Chicago (Oscar Micheaux)
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell)

Jonathan Romney
Street of Crocodiles (Quay Brothers)
Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz)

Jonathan Rosenbaum
Cuadecuc-Vampir (Portabella)

Kevin Lee
Under the Bridges (Helmut Kautner)

Laura Mulvey
La Signora di Tutti (Max Ophüls)

Mark Cousins
The Insect Woman (Imamura)

Mehrnaz Saeedvafa
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)

Michael Koller
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)

Mike D’Angelo
Exotica (Egoyan)

Nathan Lee
From the Notebook of (Robert Beavers)

Noel Burch
The Truth About Bebe Donge (Henri Decoin)

Noel Vera
Three Years Without God (Mario O’Hara)

Peter von Bagh
Angèle (Marcel Pagnol)

Quintin
La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso)

Richard Pena
Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin)

Scott MacDonald
Unsere Afrikareise (Peter Kubelka)

Tag Gallagher
From the Clouds to the Resistance (Straub/Huillet)

Tony Rayns
Scenes from a City Life/Dushi Fengguang (Yuan Muzhi)

Vadim Rizov
The Wedding Suit (Kiarostami)

Eight critics with a bunch of offbeat titles each:

Adrian Martin
Anna (1972, Alberto Grifi/Massimo Sarchielli)
Behindert (1974, Stephen Dwoskin)
By the Bluest of Seas (1935, Boris Barnet/S. Mardanin)
The Departure (1966, Jerzy Skolimowski)
L’Enfant Secret (Philippe Garrel)
Nuit et jour (Chantal Akerman)

Alexander Horwath
I am Twenty (1963, Marlen Khutsiyev)
Line Describing a Cone (1973, Anthony McCall)
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (Robert Beavers)
Reisender Krieger (1981, Christian Schocher)
Schwechater (1958, Peter Kubelka)

Christoph Huber
Arcana (1972, Giulio Questi)
Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur)
The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher)
The Ducksters (Chuck Jones)
Fiamma che non si spegne (Vittorio Cottafavi)
Ng Long Pat Kua Khuan (Liu Chia-Liang)
On The Silver Globe (1988, Andrzej Zulawski)
The Party (Blake Edwards)

Fred Camper
Egyptian Series (Brakhage)
El Dorado (Hawks)
What Goes Up? (Breer)
Yearning (Naruse)

Gabe Klinger
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 (creators unknown)
79 Springtimes (1969, Santiago Álvarez)
The Country Doctor (1909, D.W. Griffith)
Wagon Master (John Ford)

Ian Christie
The ‘?’ Motorist (1906, Robert Paul)
A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings)
Rainbow Dance (Len Lye)
The Sun (Sokurov)

Mark Webber
Eniaios (Gregory J. Markopoulos)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers)
The Tenant (Polanski)
Work Done (Robert Beavers)

Olaf Möller
Afrique 50 (René Vautier)
Dialogue With a Woman Departed (1980, Leo T. Hurwitz)
The Ditch (Wang Bing)
Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1972, Straub/Huillet)
Jom (1981, Ababacar Samb-Makharam)
Outrage (1950, Ida Lupino)
The Year Long Road (1958, Giuseppe De Santis)

Films from the aggregate critics’ top 250 that I haven’t seen, or just haven’t seen lately:

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)
Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Contempt (Godard)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
Shoah (Lanzmann)
Close-Up (Kiarostami)
Gertrud (Dreyer)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
The Mother and the Whore (Eustache)
Wild Strawberries (Bergman)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
L’Eclisse (Antonioni)
Beau Travail (Denis)
Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
Partie de campagne (Renoir)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
Yi Yi (Yang)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
Imitation of Life (Sirk)
Madame de (Ophuls)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard)
Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
Performance (Cammell/Roeg)
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Mouchette (Bresson)
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford)
Days of Heaven (Malick)
Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
L’Argent (Bresson)
Don’t Look Now (Roeg)
The Last Laugh (Murnau)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Alea)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson)
Marketa Lazarová (Vlacil)
Solaris (Tarkovsky)
Chimes at Midnight (Welles)
Brief Encounter (Lean)
In a Lonely Place (Ray)
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki)
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
Come And See (Klimov)
Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
A Trip to the Moon (Melies)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
Grapes of Wrath (Ford)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
The Music Room (Ray)
A Touch of Zen (King Hu)
Listen to Britain (Jennings)
Day of Wrath (Dreyer)
Thin Red Line (Malick)
The Conversation (Coppola)
Red Desert (Antonioni)
Kings of the Road (Wenders)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Daisies (Chytilova)
West of the Tracks (Bing)
The Big Sleep (Hawks)
Wanda (Loden)
The Devil Probably (Bresson)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
The Thin Blue Line (Morris)
The World of Apu (Ray)
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang)
Kes (Loach)
Three Colours: Red (Kieslowski)

Attn: BFI, Critics, etc – this is a personal checklist made from severely abridged selections from the Sight & Sound lists, but if I’ve reposted too much of your content, give a yell and I’ll take this post offline.

by ·Comments Off on Grey Matter (2011, Kivu Ruhorahoza)

A weird art movie in three parts.

An arty filmmaker with a screenplay called “The Cycle of the Cockroach” can’t seem to get his resources together to shoot: the equipment guy failed to get lights, the actors are restless and the government won’t fund anything that doesn’t carry straightforward public-service messages.

A madman locked in a cell listens to radio broadcasts warning about cockroaches, traps one in a glass, is offered his freedom (by a white hand holding a key).

Postwar siblings, the boy traumatized by images from the war and his murdered parents (invented, since he was studying abroad at the time), refusing to speak or paint, throwing buckets of water on the TV and hiding in the attic from imagined invaders. Older sister is paying for his treatment by sleeping with the psychiatrist. He seems to snap out of it when they attend a mass-grave excavation. But all this has taken a toll on the sister. In the end, she’s in a cell. A roach runs under the door into the cell of the madman next door.

Said to be the first-ever film by a native Rwandan. The director: “It’s a film about the brain and the tricks it can play on people when they go through really traumatizing experiences. . . We are a nation of traumatized people who never got any professional help, because how are you going to get professional help to millions of people?”

C. Bell: “Finally, we have a contemplative film on the disgusting tragedy that took place in the East African country, one that recognizes it as a severely traumatic, complicated, and long-lasting event and not something ripe for Oscar bait.”

by ·Comments Off on Canyon Cinema in Portland

Luckily, a Canyon Cinema program was playing at the university when we rolled into Portland, and I somehow got Katy to come along to the severely under-attended screening.

Our Lady of the Sphere (1969, Larry Jordan)

Occasionally amusing clip-art animation with a colorful circus theme, featuring a woman with a balloon head. But if amusing is what Jordan was going for, he’s about 20,000 leagues below Terry Gilliam. I assume there’s something else that eludes me. The sound was irritating. I give it slightly more credit for difficulty once I realized it was made in the 60’s with physically-clipped-art and not on a Macintosh in the early 90’s. Apparently this is one of his best-known works – it’s in the National Film Registry, whatever that is. Internet says it draws from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Dream Work (2002, Peter Tscherkassky)

Quiet (relatively) centerpiece of the Cinemascope Trilogy – a world of difference seeing this on a cinema screen vs. my laptop and television. So, so awesome. Katy watched with her eyes closed. I’ve seen it before on DVD, noted here.

Self Portrait Post Mortem (2002, Louise Bourque)

A decaying pattern scrolls up on left and right of frame, low frame rate but with a weird sliding motion. During the second half, a woman appears in the center of screen.

Happy-End (1996, Peter Tscherkassky)

The one composed from stock footage of a couple in the 60’s at different holidays (or is it just one holiday?), opening and drinking a ton of celebratory booze, dancing and posing for the camera. I’ve seen it before on DVD, noted here.

Very (2001, Stan Brakhage)

We saw a trailer for some upcoming Helen Mirren thing before the shorts started, and I was annoyed to see that the projectionist was running another trailer beneath this totally gorgeous, brightly-colored hand-painted Brakhage piece, but no, it looks like Stan ran out of blank film and painted over a trailer reel for the movie Quills, taking his title from the on-screen superlatives complimenting that movie and cast. Hilarious and wonderous.

Night Mulch (2001, Stan Brakhage)

Companion piece to Very, coloring over the shortened TV version of the Quills trailer. Katy loved these.

Mirror (2003, Matthias Muller)

The rare piece with original footage using actors and locations and lots of careful lighting, not hand-tooling some stock footage. Lots of darkness, and chairs.

The Observer: “The tableaux in which the figures stand like statues are animated by light alone. A light that glimmers, or suffuses a room like smoke, or crackles and fizzes from overhead lamps in long corridors. It polishes a grand piano, soothes the cheek of the pensive woman, surrounds the man with glassy halations and then makes him vanish, as if his part was over, before the room in which he stands disappears.”

Phantom Limb (2005, Jay Rosenblatt)

Title cards tell the story of Jay’s little brother who died as a boy, then a series of short pieces (home movies, some stock footage, some staged) are presented in order of the stages of grief. Katy didn’t approve of the birthing scene, and I was mesmerized by the sheep-shearing one.

by ·Comments Off on If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966, Chris Marker)

Part 1: The Castle

“The photo is the hunt. It’s the instinct of hunting without the desire to kill. It’s the hunt of angels… you track, you aim, you fire and–clic! Instead of a dead man, you make him eternal.”

A slideshow of photographs with a voiceover discussion about the nature of photographs, flipping rapidly all over the globe. Familiar sights: streets of Cuba, “commuter trains full of sleeping Japanese,” an owl in a flight museum, that shot I love of the Russian woman holding a turtle. Many references to things I don’t follow, but because of the great photos and the 50-minute length, this would make a great Intro to Marker – especially if there was better-quality video available.

They fawn over Russia for a while, moving to to lonely monasteries in Greece, then the first day of Algerian independence (below).

“One instant of happiness paid for with seven years of war and one million deaths. And the following day, the Castle was still there. And the poor are still there, day after day. And day after day, we continue to betray them.”

Part 2: The Garden

A montage of animal shots, then a tour of a Korea, and on to Scandinavia.

Different kinds of music, including bits of the electronic effects and percussion that would become more prominent in his later films.

“One needs to look closely at this Scandinavian man. He has everything, truly everything that nine tenths of humanity doesn’t dare to imagine in their wildest dreams. It’s for his standard of living that the Black, the Arab, the Greek, the Siberian and even the Cuban militiamen are striving. He has everything the revolutions promised. And when one shows him some Brecht – free moreover – in the Stockholm gardens, he doesn’t really get the message.”

How do you say elephant in Russian? Slon.

Then a tour of tombs and discussion of death. “I met a man who lived his own death” sounds like an alternate intro to La Jetee.

A yugoslavian hog considers the day to come:

After a wordless musical section, all fades out, but returns for a strange coda, a montage of torn posters with the sound of a screaming monkey, then final voiceover, which seems lovely when it accompanies the images, but didn’t make sense when I tried to transcribe here.

by ·Comments Off on Lisztomania (1975, Ken Russell)

I’d heard that Criterion will be releasing this, hopefully as a precursor to the uncut The Devils, and since I so enjoyed Tommy, I thought I’d check it out. But I got my wires crossed – Criterion is putting out Quadrophenia, the other post-Tommy, Who-related feature, not Lisztomania. Their loss! My loss too, I guess, since I probably would’ve rented this again just to hear what the commentary track would say about things like this:

Oh but wait, my DVD does have a commentary track by a sleepy Ken Russell, who rouses himself to tell us spectacularly obvious things about once per minute – I didn’t play through very much of it.

Train vs. Piano:

Roger Daltrey brings his boyish energy from Tommy straight into this, as enthusiastic womanizer and rock-star pianist Franz Liszt. He throws parties, hold concerts, flees from sword-wielding husbands, and generally ignores his own wife (Fiona Lewis of The Fury and Innerspace) and children. When his daughter Cosima marries his rival Richard Wagner (I already know how Russell feels about Wagner), Liszt must travel to Wagner’s castle (in a loopy Dracula parody scene) and prevent them from creating a nazi superman.

Vampiric Wagner:

Bored Liszt at home with wife:

In the middle of the film, Liszt goes to Russia and stays with Princess Carolyn (Sara Kestelman of Zardoz) in her penis-decorated palace, leading to a fantastic, cock-filled chorus-girl number. I don’t know why exactly, but Liszt joins the church (under Pope Ringo Starr) sometime later. This is what leads him to fight Wagner (Paul Nicholas, Tommy‘s sadistic cousin Kevin), who is defeated but resurrected as a Frankenstein Siegfried Hitler, who guns down Jews while Liszt’s daughter kills her dad with voodoo. But murdered Liszt returns to Earth from heaven in an angel-winged rocketship, gunning down FrankenWagner, achieving peace at last. All of this really happens. This movie is amazing.

Hitler/Wagner with electric-guitar machine-gun alongside Cosima and Superman-caped children brigade wearing Weezer/Wagner t-shirts:

Liszt with Piano Flamethrower:

Russell: “My film isn’t biography. It comes from things I feel when I listen to the music of Wagner and Liszt, and when I think about their lives.”

The Princess:

Senses of Cinema: “By Russell’s account, producer David Puttnam interfered with the project, insisting on more pop art and less context, and also adding the painfully stupid hoedown music to the opening scene.” They also point out visual references to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in the Russian scenes.

by ·Comments Off on Death Race (2008, Paul WS Anderson)

A stupid, jittery, high-energy action remake by Anderson, one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50, highlighting what is for me the biggest problem with auteurism these days. In the 1960’s, movies were made on a factory line, some better than others, mostly credited to studios and producers, until observant critics realized that certain directors put out work of consistently high quality – no huge surprise there – but that they also had thematic and structural consistencies throughout a body of films from varied writers and studios. Heroes were belatedly made of Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock, and their films from critically-unloved genres (comedy, western, thriller) were reassessed. Today the studio system is totally different and every director thinks of himself as an auteur. Since the hardcore auteurists have nothing to discover, instead of enjoying the new world of supposedly personal cinema, they stare at the studio genre movies that still get made, searching for new names they can take credit for discovering. My pick was Hong Kong-turned-Hollywood Ronny Yu (Bride of Chucky, Freddy vs. Jason), but I lost interest after Fearless. Mubi latched onto the late Tony Scott, and Cinema Scope loves Paul W.S. Anderson, responsible for three of the worst video-game adaptations I’ve seen in theaters (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator) and the underrated Event Horizon.

In a dystopian future, racing legend Jason Statham is set up for killing his perfect wife, and sent to a post-reality-TV prison, where he can earn his freedom by winning a few weapon-equipped car races which are, of course, rigged by the authorities (Joan Allen). He takes the place of a masked driver called Frankenstein (role reprised from the original by David Carradine), gets a mechanic (Ian McShane), a saboteur-spy sidekick (Natalie Martinez) and a rival (Tyrese Gibson, in the Sylvester Stallone role). After some ‘splosiony car races, Statham avenges his wife by killing mohawked driver Max Ryan and Pryzbylewski-looking guard Jason Clarke, then secretly teams up with Tyrese, easily breaking out of prison by shooting the walls with their missile-equipped cars, driving away to a Shawshank-esque incognito freedom.

Also, Ian McShane blows up Joan Allen:

Set in the dystopian future world of 2012. Will someone tell me again why future-movies always take place in the extremely near future? Followed by two sequels starring Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo. Produced by the great Roger Corman, in between Supergator and Sharktopus.

C. Huber in Cinema Scope calls him “the elder, least pretentious, and most consistently amusing Anderson of the current director trifecta: its termite artisan.”