Vincent Lindon was in prison, his son Marcus is maybe in trouble, but Vincent doesn’t like to talk about personal matters ever. Juliette Binoche has somehow been with this short-tempered cipher for years, and now she starts getting weird about her ex Gregoire Colin, who offers Vincent a job. Also with Bulle Ogier as one of their moms and Mati Diop as a pharmacist, this should all be great based on cast and crew, but it feels unfinished, full of long vague conversations.
Favorite shorts watched this year (chronological):
1. Rose Gold and Red Film (Sara Cwynar)
2. Les Escargots (1965, Rene Laloux)
3. The Human Voice (2020, Pedro Almodóvar)
4. By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging (2013, David Gatten)
5. Labor of Love (2020, Sylvia Schedelbauer)
6. Voyage d’une Main (1985, Raoul Ruiz)
7. On Memory (2021, Don Hertzfeldt)
8. O Black Hole! (2020, Renee Zhan)
9. Peter & the Wolf (2006, Suzie Templeton)
10. Kiev Frescos and Earthearthearth
11. True/False shorts In Flow of Words and Last Days of August
12. The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1970, Les Blank)
13. A La Mode and Science Friction (Stan Vanderbeek)
14. Owl (2019, Kelly Reichardt & Christopher Blauvelt)
15. Something to Remember (2019, Niki Lindroth Von Bahr)
16. Saturday and Strife of Love in a Dream and Grosse Fatigue (Camille Henrot)
17. Who Killed Cock Robin? and The Brave Little Tailor and The Band Concert
18. Wasteland series and Hoarders Without Borders (Jodie Mack)
19. Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder (2017, Fern Silva)
20. Messages 1-5 (2021, Pat O’Neill)
21. These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us and Polycephaly in D (Michael Robinson)
22. The Newest Olds (2022, Pablo Mazzolo)
23. Scaffold and Indefinite Pitch
24. Cilaos and La Bouche (Camilo Restrepo)
25. Notebook and Lights (Marie Menken)
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Favorite TV watched this year:
The Rehearsal
How To with John Wilson season 2
Kids in the Hall season 6
Irma Vep
Cabinet of Curiosities (1) (2)
Travel Man season 1
Favorite older movies watched this year:
1. Sign ‘o’ the Times (1987, Prince)
2. The Concert for Bangladesh (1972, Saul Swimmer)
3. Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960, Aram Avakian & Bert Stern)
4. Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg)
5. Miami Blues (1990, George Armitage)
6. Drifting Clouds (1996, Aki Kaurismaki)
7. Ginger Snaps (2000, John Fawcett)
8. Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, Dario Argento)
9. La France (2007, Serge Bozon)
10. Le Trou (1960, Jacques Becker)
11. Morvern Callar (2002, Lynne Ramsay)
12. Arrebato (1980, Ivan Zulueta)
13. Dragon Inn (1966, King Hu)
14. Roadgames (1981, Richard Franklin)
15. Rouge (1987, Stanley Kwan)
16. The Mission (1999, Johnnie To)
17. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972, Rainer Fassbinder)
18. Eating Raoul (1982, Paul Bartel)
19. Vanishing Point (1971, Richard C. Sarafian)
20. Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971, Lucio Fulci)
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Favorite rewatches of the year
(ranked by rewatch-experience, not necessarily quality of film)
1. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang) at the multiplex
2. RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven) at the Plaza
3. The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola) at the Plaza
4. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
5. Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki)
6. Trouble Every Day and High Life (Claire Denis)
7. SHOCKtober picks Prince of Darkness and The Fog and Bride of Chucky and Hellraiser III
8. Classic comedies A Night at the Opera and Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Chaplin Revue
9. Blood Simple (Coens)
10. Svankmajer shorts
The best 2022 movies:
1. Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg)
2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
3. The Girl and the Spider (Ramon & Silvan Zürcher)
4. Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)
5. Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller)
6. Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
7. Athena (Romain Gavras)
8. Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland)
9. After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico)
10. Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill)
11. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)
12. RRR (S.S. Rajamouli)
13. Neptune Frost (Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman)
14. Benediction (Terence Davies)
15. Glass Onion (Rian Johnson)
16. Nope (Jordan Peele)
17. Terra Femme (Courtney Stephens)
18. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
19. Nobody’s Hero (Alain Guiraudie)
20. Fabian: Going to the Dogs (Dominik Graf)
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The best from the previous five years, watched this year:
1. The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson)
2. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)
3. Old (M. Night Shyamalan)
4. The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski)
5. The Timekeepers of Eternity (Aristotelis Maragkos)
6. Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro)
7. Social Hygiene (Denis Côté)
8. Red Rocket (Sean Baker)
9. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo)
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen)
11. Procession (Robert Greene)
12. Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon)
Happy New Movie Year!
This year we returned to theaters, but not very often. The blog is more-or-less caught up.
I’m catching up with my own letterboxd list of all the must-see movies released in 2022, which does not include many titles on the year-end critics lists, since I don’t live in NYC so those will be 2023 movies here in the sticks.
Speaking of lists… just made myself a list of 1000+ titles to watch next year, which sounds impossible, but at least a hundred of them are shorts, so I’m feeling optimistic. I’m not putting it online, you have to guess.
Major movie projects in 2022 included the usual – SHOCKtober, Locorazo, True/False. Nothing innovative, just balancing work/life, and movie/music/reading, and moving to a new state.
The 2022 Lists:
New and Recent Movies
Older Movies and Rewatches
Shorts and TV
I didn’t mean to watch another crazy movie involving pedophilia so soon after The Scary of Sixty-First, but that’s what I get for not reading plot descriptions. It’s more of a twist ending in this movie, anyway. Jose Manuel is apparently helping out his sister whose daughter has been abducted, but really J.M. has helped abduct the girl and is now working on her twin sister. This is because he’s joined a minor UFO cult (half of whose members are named Raúl) whose leader asks for spiritual child sacrifices but is actually a child pornographer, illegal organ harvester, and probable murderer.
Made in Spain, played Locarno’s main section with Zeros and Ones and After Blue. It’s a likable, low-key absurdist movie with fun visual design and cool music, and you think you’re following a group of harmless kooks until the ending revelation. I take this as a critique on so-called harmless cults in general, that escape into conspiracy theory leads to ignorance of a darker reality. The Cinema Scope review isn’t online and I’ve misplaced half my issues in the move, damn, but in Cineuropa, Ibarra talks of working with nonprofessionals: “I look for that kind of natural spontaneity: I try to avoid them memorizing the text and have them read it only a few times … Nacho Fernández, the protagonist, is a guy from Alicante who works as a night watchman in a car park.”
From the Criterion Screwball collection. I’m not great at recognizing or remembering Loretta Young (The Bishop’s Wife) or Tyrone Power (Nightmare Alley), and besides a driving gig for Stepin Fetchit and a sputtering junior reporter scene for Elisha Cook Jr., we didn’t know any of the supporting cast. Fortunately Don Ameche plays Tyrone’s news editor, anchoring the film with his trusty mustache.
Years before Sam Fuller would hit the scene with Power of the Press, all newspaper men are portrayed as celebrity scandal chasers, and Tyrone is the sneakiest of the bunch. Loretta is a rich celeb with an off-again engagement to a count (George Sanders with a silly accent). After Tyrone tricks her into giving him a story, she takes revenge by claiming she’s marrying the reporter so he’ll be hounded by salesmen and other reporters using his own tricks against him. Not as inventive as it might be (and what’s with the hick sheriff’s office six minutes outside NYC whose prison doors keep falling off) and we couldn’t make out half the dialogue, but at least the energy stays high.
A sorry follow-up to Shin Godzilla – the editing and camera angles all wacky, dialogue too overtalky. SG was talky too, but it felt like a developing story, while this is more a season of television condensed into a feature. Ultraman saves the day, disappears, turns evil, fights himself… the girl who likes him disappears, turns giant… undersea kaiju are joined by two different scheming extraterrestrials… despite all this, the movie and its kaiju-defense-team characters are mainly concerned with Kaminaga, the handsome guy who uses a wiimote to transform into Ultraman. Can’t say I wasn’t entertained, though.
Unlike in the Godzilla movie, the human team does nothing useful here:
Higuchi is a Hideaki Anno associate, who directed the Attack on Titan movies and did effects for the 1990’s Gamera series. Anno wrote this as the start of a trilogy, is also working on a Shin Kamen Rider, and I didn’t realize the Evangelion theatrical reboot is part of the Shin project. Kaminaga played the rival lawyer in Ace Attorney, his coworker/love interest starred in Before We Vanish and Our Little Sister, and the Drive My Car dude is their boss.
Just a couple of aliens on the swings:
There’s a literal glass onion, and the Mona Lisa, and a revolutionary new source of fuel, and they all explode at the end. Good 2-part structure (and 2-part Monae), nice how it starts over zoom chats then wriggles out of covid restrictions using movie-logic. Katy’s first time at Movieland.