by ·Comments Off on The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt)

Regular family guy Josh O’Connor, haunted by his past life as an art thief in La Chimera, and in love with Arthur Dove, puts together a halfassed plan to steal four paintings from a local museum. All three of his accomplices turn on him (one drops out, one goes to the cops, and one goes to the mob, who re-steal the paintings), he borrows money from his parents that he can’t pay back, his wife is mad at him, the friends he’s staying with kick him out, he finally robs an old lady to afford a border crossing then gets randomly arrested while laying low in a protest march.

This has more of a commercial period genre feel than Reichardt’s other crime movies (Night Moves, First Cow, River of Grass) but with a pleasingly soft grainy look, and requisite time spent on important details (Josh laboriously negotiating a barn ladder while stashing the paintings). Rob Mazurek contributes the best score of the year.

Josh’s mom Hope Davis:

Robert Rubsam in Defector is really good.

The Mastermind is Reichardt’s third film in a row about a frustrated artist … These are lonesome characters, isolated by their means and their practice, persistently frustrated by the knowledge that they could accomplish something great, if only their true labor held any temporal or monetary value … Yet when it comes to his own heist, he’s more than happy to shunt the labor to his fuck-up friends, keeping his hands clean of criminal drudgery. You get the sense his career probably foundered long before the work dried up.

He seems infinitely more comfortable when stashing away the stolen goods than he does relating to his kids or pleading with his wife. Swaddled in the loving embrace of family and suburbia, he acts like a man living hand-to-mouth, creating new problems so that he — and the women in his life — can solve them. Like a cornered animal, he must do something, or die. It’s not so much a high-wire act as a slow ascent up a shaky ladder with no way to climb back down.

by ·Comments Off on Pink Flamingos (1972, John Waters)

Even lower-fi than expected. With a proper audience it’s probably more infectious than tedious. All this time I’ve avoid the acclaimed 1970s movie Cockfighter on account of chicken torture, then I stumble into the acclaimed 1970s movie Pink Flamingos with advance warning about shit-eating but no notice that a chicken gets fucked to death.

“How can a couch be out of order?” Divine and her ma Edie and roomie Mary are local menaces, while Mink and David are jealous pervert neighbors looking for an advantage over the notorious Divine. They try to ambush our heroes, but Divine fucks her son(?), eats shit, murders her rivals and wins the day. After Divine goes feral on a hot dog patron, Waters plays “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Also the scene where police are called to Divine’s trailer, and a gang of locals ambush and devour them was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Decoder (1984, Muscha)

Some fabulous images in here, this Muscha is a real visionary. It’s also the movie that knocked me unconscious the most times this year, so many times that we have a running joke that “watching Decoder” means going to sleep early.

Mostly we follow a guy with floppy hair (FM Einheit, a Neubauten percussionist). He’s either a slacker punk kid or a secret agent, or possibly the former who falls into being the latter. He ends up stealing some dissonant noise tech and turning it against the dominant burger restaurant chain, which gets him hunted by a world-weary government agent with access to total surveillance (New Yorker Bill Rice of Sleepwalk and Vortex).

A tape-dissonance operative standing in front of Fassbinder’s death notices:

The guy from Soft Cell shows up to sing “Sleazy City.” They can’t afford computer graphics so they film arcade games off a screen. Sometimes a guy with a hidden face talks in the voice of William Burroughs. The surveillance operatives are always watching a Fritz Lang movie on one screen (so am I). When cornered on a subway car, our guy starts drumming on the walls, the cop falls down covering his ears but nobody else in the car seems to mind. Also: death frogs.

by ·Comments Off on Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Werner Herzog)

We follow Fini, a deaf/blind advocate who visits her people in different family and institutional situations. It’s almost a public-service issues doc, showing sad disabled people and explaining how systems have failed them. But ever since watching Little Dieter I’ve known that Herzog likes to take his doc subjects to unusual places, and who else would take a party of blind women to a cactus garden?

Vogel: “confirms Herzog as the mysterious new humanist of the 1970s, light-years removed from the sentimentality of the Italian neorealists and the simplistic propaganda of untalented documentary film radicals.”

Hand communication:

by ·Comments Off on Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947, Hans Richter)

Occasionally returning to the Vogel book – after the Nazi section I skipped, a “Secrets and Revelations” round-up of bonus films closes part two “The Subversion of Content.” This is what got me watching Salesman (“an inevitable indictment of the commercialization of religion”) and now this and the Herzog.

Different episodes corresponding to customers of a dream consultant. Restrained surrealism, attempts at dream logic, but the look and voices and pace are all off. I don’t think Americans in the 1940s were able to do dreaminess, with one big exception. Vogel calls it “ambitious,” and at least it’s that.

All dialogue dubbed, or rather narrated. Framing story of man-without-qualities Joe who opens a dream consulting business as an excuse to cram together dream imagery in a style I’d call Shabby Cocteau. Also full of poetry, but the basic kind that keeps rhyming art with heart. One episode is just spirograph animations. Four-ish minutes are devoted to shots of a mobile. I can’t slam the songs – “prefabricated heart” sung by a pair of mannequins was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos)

So soon after Train Dreams, here’s another new movie people are attacking for botching its adaptation of an original work (in this case the Korean movie Save The Green Planet!) but which I watched in blissful ignorance of the original work and greatly enjoyed. Theoretically not a fun movie, as a conspiracy obsessive and his dim relative kidnap and torment a businesswoman into confessing that she’s a space alien, but I cackled more than once, then floated away happily after she escapes to her ship and kills all the humans.

Stone and Plemons and his cousin Aidan Delbis are the whole show, though Stavros Halkias shows up as a perv cop just long enough to get murdered by bees. Not until after the kidnapping and head-shaving does Jesse let us know that he thinks she’s an alien. More of his craziness is gradually unveiled (he’s a loner whose mom told him about mind control, he tells Stone “everybody denies it at first” revealing she’s not his first victim, she runs the major company where he works a menial job) and he seems to be making up space alien stuff as he goes along, so all his stories being true was the only decent twist the movie could have. I guess he and the cousin didn’t have to have their heads blown off after Jesse is tricked into murdering his comatose mom, and Stone escaping from an ambulance and running back to the crime scene seemed like padding, but the payoff is worth it.

Jesse flashes his tascam, pretty sweet:

Not all life! Just the humans:

by ·Comments Off on The Hyperboreans (2024, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León)

Actress is on a soundstage recreating a lost film with Cociña and León, in which everyone but her is replaced by puppets. She ends up entering a spreadsheet cheat code, entering the hollow earth, and arguing with the Hitler-worshipping filmmakers. I don’t know what it all meant for Chile or for cinema, but I enjoyed every scene. After The Wolf House and Los Huesos, dudes are on a roll – and I’ve just learned that they did effects for Beau Is Afraid.

Antonia Giesen and her rock & roll patient:

Shooting a flower-creature shadow with a camera-laser:

The “directors”:

by ·Comments Off on The Piano Accident (2025, Quentin Dupieux)

Pampered internet-famous masochist flies into a murder-suicide rampage after discovering that she might suffer a consequence for past actions. However, the makeup woman knew what was going on, and shouldn’t have stood under that piano. Adele Exarchopoulos is up for anything, as usual – her little speech mannerisms are the whole movie, more or less. Her long-suffering assistant is comedian Jerome Commandeur, and their blackmailer is Sandrine Kiberlain, who just wants an interview with the press-averse star, who would rather die than participate. Happy ending for the bird, at least! Nothing inventive here from Dupieux, just a misanthropic little comedy.

by ·Comments Off on Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)

Kane’s death, then newsreel segment on him, then the news editor asking the reporter to find out more, seek the rosebud angle. So meek reporter William Alland (producer of 1950s monster movies) goes to see washed-up widow Dorothy Comingore (of Three Stooges shorts), who sends him away, then he finds his way into a chronological backstory with the help of others. Kane’s mom inherits a gold mine by chance, sends son away from an abusive dad to boarding school with rich guardian George Coulouris. The reporter meets boring old school friend Joseph Cotten and delightful newspaperman Everett Sloane, who tell of Kane’s takeover of the paper and his political aspirations. Kane’s run for governor is destroyed when rival Ray Collins reveals Kane’s affair with showgirl Dorothy while he was married to Ruth Warrick. Now that we’re caught up with her backstory, the reporter returns to Dorothy for his interview, but never finds his rosebud.

Rewatching for the first time in a long while… thought about listening to the four audio commentaries and watching the docs and reading two or three books on Welles, but the year’s almost over and I’ve got lists to make.

Lights & Mirrors: