by ·Comments Off on Beduino (2016, Júlio Bressane)

Self-consciously arty/stagey flick, part of the Brisseau canon of horny old frenchmen filming in their apartments. Cut from a sleeping couple to their “dreams” on 4:3 b/w lo-gauge film, my second movie in a row to do that. Shots and setups take their time, but there’s no apparent story so it’s not like we have anywhere else to be. Opens with a camera roaming a film set peeping through a keyhole-shaped mask, and easily tops that in the scene where an electric train-mounted camera drives beneath a nude woman. Seems to devolve at the end, with a break for a misogyny mass murder montage, getting really into being eaten by gators and strangling blondes. Overall more engaging than my previous Bressane, seems to bode well.

by ·Comments Off on Gemini (2017, Aaron Katz)

Star actress Zoë Kravitz is shot dead at her home and her assistant Lola Kirke seems to have been set up. This has my favorite aspect of Katz’s Cold Weather – normal people pretending to be detectives. The celebrity aspect and introduction of actual detective John Cho derail some of its pleasures, but some of the neon-electric mood stuff sticks.

On Letterboxd: Guided by Voices “Strumpet Eye” (sorry)

Reminder that Mati Diop was in the last movie I watched:

by ·Comments Off on Hermia & Helena (2016, Matí­as Piñeiro)

Global, less insular Piñeiro universe than Viola, with actors from La Flor (and onscreen drawings like La Flor). Title of the movie comes from the Midsummer Night’s Dream characters played by a couple of minor players in rehearsals that we never see – there was more Shakespeare in the Kids in The Hall sketch I watched the previous day than in this.

Carmen is returning to Argentina from a NY institute and Midsummer translator Camila is taking her place, causing some identity confusion. Camila ends up dating Carmen’s institute guy Keith Poulson and getting visited by Carmen’s America-roaming friend Mati Diop. They’re supposedly at this institute to work but they spend more time worrying over their parting gift. Camila looks up her long-lost father (Sallitt) and her long-lost boyfriend (Dustin Guy Defa), and Ted Fendt is in the credits to round things out. There are strange turns and visits to Argentina and a sudden film-in-a-film and I’m not convinced it all works, but it’s also flirty and pleasant.

On Letterboxd: “Hermann Loves Pauline” by Super Furry Animals

by ·Comments Off on The Dreamed Path (2016, Angela Schanelec)

Schanelec movies suffer by reminding me of Zürcher movies just enough to make me wish I was watching those instead. This one isn’t as entrancing as it means to be, but slightly, seductively baffling. Down-and-out druggie couple starts out busking “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” before Kenneth is called home, his mom ailing in hospital, dad asking him to use his drug connections to find morphine for her. This first couple is last seen laying down on the earth, separately. Many years later a cop is leaving her husband, he rents his own place, and the time periods are mashing up in a non-obvious way.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

… an amorphous, exceedingly enigmatic trance film masquerading as a puzzle film. Puzzles fit together; this does not … These temporal leaps we’re taken through … become equal to every other narrative element. … Time, then, beyond language, becomes the decisive medium that negotiates and complicates characters’ emotional relations to one another, and Schanelec’s avoidance of distinguishing between “now” and “then” insures that the impact of every loss, every ruptured relationship, is held in an eternal suspension.

On Letterboxd: “Virginia Woolf” by Robyn Hitchcock

by ·Comments Off on Those Who Are Fine (2017, Cyril Schäublin)

Our second Locorazo movie in a row to end with the female lead character getting busted by the cops. No fire-murders this time, just Sarah scamming large amounts of cash from gullible grandmas around town. Not very straightforward about its narrative, the movie likes to follow side characters about their day, weaving in and out of plot. Clean digital look with some arresting compositions (photographing still figures against turbulent backgrounds), the human action often relegated to the lower third of frame. There’s somewhat too much business-as-usual – conversations about cellphone and insurance plans, endlessly reading account numbers aloud – but it’s worth the short runtime to hear Swiss people saying “hotspot.” Schäublin has made a couple shorts since, and has a new feature about an anarchist watchmaker, seems like someone to watch out for.

On Letterboxd: “Me, Myself & Wine” by Ron Sexsmith

by ·Comments Off on Madame Hyde (2017, Serge Bozon)

Welcome to Locorazo, the successor of LNKarno, during which we watch films that played the Locarno Festival a few years back.

After La France, I’m sorry this isn’t a musical, but the kids do get a rap performance about the uselessness of school. It’s an attractive looking movie, well-lit with a bright palette, bold camera moves. The story keeps pausing to demonstrate math lessons. Bozon is a better director here than writer, but it’s eccentric and unusual, and that’s what we like about Locarno.

Isabelle Huppert is a teacher who can’t handle her class, being investigated by higher-ups due to complaints that the students don’t learn anything. Malik is the most abusive of the lot, making Hitler jokes and humiliating the teacher for social points, though he remains an outcast. After Huppert is struck by lightning, she becomes a better teacher, finding new ways to engage the students and drawing out the crippled Malik through one-on-one lab lessons, but she’s also becoming a fire creature who torches a kid and two dogs to death. She’s assigned a trainee who takes crying breaks in the bathroom, and she’s given a promotion at work, but is eventually taken away by the police (“I was expecting you. Goodbye, students.”)

Wacky principal Romain Duris starred in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Mood Indigo. Her soulful house-husband José Garcia was a doctor in Trouble Every Day. Trainee Guillaume Verdier is a Bonello regular.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

In order … to elevate it to something that manifests beauty through experience as opposed to only being about it, Bozon – working with his cinematographer (and sister) Céline Bozon and editor François Quiqueré – amplifies the tactility of the images and the impact of the montage … Factor in the sustained emphasis on all the senses – bodies radiating, skin burning, hands wafting, noses sniffing – and you have an impression of a world that is real and embodied. The movie becomes a living object that breathes, and it excites its moments of beauty into something close to both lunacy and the ecstatic.

On Letterboxd: “Nothing to Hide” by Yo La Tengo

by ·Comments Off on Kimi (2022, Steven Soderbergh)

Zoë Kravitz is a traumatized OCD shut-in during a global pandemic, working remote for a shabby Siri competitor whose idiot bosses committed a crime within hearing range of their own product. Zoë flirts with neighbor Terry (Byron Bowers, currently on Irma Vep), sees a dentist over Zoom, pals around with Romanian hackers, and reports an apparent crime to company HR (led by Rita Wilson), who continually assure her that they take this very seriously. Will Zoë thwart the criminals, meet the nice neighbor, and leave her apartment, defeating her agoraphobia and the entire pandemic? Of course – it’s not a very serious movie despite the up-to-date pandemic/surveillance themes. She’s even the kind of home-coder who can take out the company hitman (Jane The Virgin’s Dad) and his two thugs using a nailgun. Top cameo by Devin Ratray, as her neighbor who comes over only to get immediately stabbed, named Kevin here in reference to his best role, “Tinfoil Kevin” on The Tick.

by ·Comments Off on Mikey and Nicky (1975, Elaine May)

Grungy camera work, uneven sound mixing, very Cassavetes-ish dialogue and behavior though apparently it’s an entirely May-created work, based on small-time gangsters she’d grown up around. It’s part 358 in my ongoing series “What Do People See in the Cinema of the 1970’s?” though it’s easy to admire after it’s over. Cassavetes is unpleasant to be around – racist, sexist, prone to fits of destruction and paranoia – and everyone wants him dead, including his friend Falk, who is informing hit man Ned Beatty of their movements across the city. As the peripheral women, we’ve got Joyce Van Patten (Monkey Shines mom) as John’s unamused wife, May regular Rose Arrick as Peter’s complicit wife, and the unknown Carol Grace as their lonely plaything/victim.

On Letterboxd: “Boyfriends and Girlfriends” by Low

Our happy boys, everything going great:

Ned, reflecting a marquee showing The Laughing Policeman and Fist of Fury:

by ·Comments Off on Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe (2022, Rice & Calleros)

The boys are misjudged as hardworking and brilliant and sent to space, where they cause some deaths and hop a wormhole into the future. Buncha plotty stuff about an astronaut-turned-congresswoman trying to murder them, the (w)hole point of the movie being to get them into situations where somebody nearby says “hole.” It’s no Matrix 4 or Bill & Ted 3, just minor brand extension / light entertainment.