by ·Comments Off on TV/Q1/2021

How To with John Wilson (2020)
Painting with John (2021)

Two low-fi HBO shows made by very different auteur-Johns. Both shows seem like each episode is a new random doc segment of a John’s life, then in the final episode you realize they’ve taken you on a journey with purpose. This is my new favorite kind of show.

“I crashed seven drones.” Lurie’s playfulness extends to the filmmaking, where he shows a domestic scene then replays it with added laugh track. Unlike the fishing show in a couple major ways: no celebrity guests, and John can actually paint.

Wilson’s show loves visual puns and sidetracks following unusual characters. In an episode on improving memory, while looking for a Zagnut bar he meets a supermarket inventory system developer who is obsessed with the Mandela Effect (“I found the one place where the worse your memory was, the more people liked you”), then he stumbles into the West Side Story remake set (“for the rest of the week it was hard to tell who was a human and who was an actor”).

from How To Split The Check, which leads John to a sad referee convention:

wildlife from How To Make Small Talk:

The other John:

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Central Park season 1 (2020)

Oh wow, a comedy musical with cast from Hamilton and Book of Mormon and Kimmy Schmidt and Veronica Mars… good characters and songs… would be the perfect show to watch with Katy except for its singleminded love of poop jokes. Doesn’t bother me, I’m waiting for season two.

Harassing owls:

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The Venture Bros. season 1 (2004)

Show is more bizarre than I realized. The title characters are useless, all the drama happening around them, and it steals characters (the Six Million Dollar Man, the Fantastic Four) from other shows at will. Foetus music, a Lydia Lunch reference. Twist: the Venture Bros are killed in an Easy Rider season finale.

Creator Christopher McCulloch voices the Monarch and a Venture, and worked on the The Tick #1, while Tick #2 voices bodyguard Brock Samson. The other Venture is prolific anime voice actor Michael Sinterniklaas, and their dad is James Urbaniak, who shares my birthday and is from New Jersey, so we’re practically family.

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Samurai Jack season 1 (2001)

Only after Primal came out did I belatedly realize I was stupid for never watching this. Demon sends samurai into an intergalactic future, what’s not to like. Wasn’t expecting the season to end with Aku telling fairy tales to kids, complete with a reference to The Shining.

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Among many online concerts, i attended the quarantine edition of SF Sketchfest, which opened with a montage of famous comedians saying no to Sketchfest. Fred Armisen welcome, Reggie Watts theme song, Eugene Mirman using a flowby during intermission, Triumph vs. Weird Al. Highlights were Jon Hamm’s movie trivia, Kumail vs. Emily, and the Kids in the Hall.

Attempted to watch The Shivering Truth – really sweet puppet animation, shame it’s wasted on so many unfunny jokes. Adam Fuchs did the titles! Also walked out on stand-up specials by Yvonne Orji, Jenny Slate, Eric Andre and Tiffany Haddish. I stayed through A Steven Wright Special (1985)

Alan Partridge: Welcome to the Places of My Life (2012) has some sweet puns and lots of editing humor.

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Nathan Barley (2005)

“It’s bad to have a bad uncle.” Julian Barratt is a pathetic angry guy who works for terrible website Trashbat run by Barley. Dan and his sister Claire room with DJ Nathan Fielder, and all of them discover they’re no better than the dummies they’re mocking. Barley torments a young Ben Whishaw, and Richard Ayoade and Benedict Cumberbatch are hanging around. When all your characters are annoying it’s hard for the show not to end up annoying, but as an intersection of post-Brass Eye Chris Morris, pre-Newswipe Charlie Brooker, and mid-Mighty Boosh everyone else, I was gonna have to watch it.

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Charlie Brooker had an early-quarantine special Antiviral Wipe, then the end-of-year Death to 2020. The highlight of both was the Barry Shitpeas quote on OUATIH: “Quentin Cappucino made a new version of that film he does.” The latter special featured some good fake celebrity commentators and websites.

by ·Comments Off on It’s Only Money (1962, Frank Tashlin)

A late television inventor’s missing heir is sought, and ends up being TV repairman Jerry Lewis. Unusual for Tashlin that the movie (from the writer of Pufnstuf and Lidsville) is TV obsessed but not in a negative way. Rich aunt Cecilia is Mae “Betty Boop” Questel, easily the highlight of the movie, meant to marry a thin-mustached man (Zachary Scott, sex criminal of Bunuel’s The Young One) who only wants the money. The hot house nurse is Joan O’Brien (Blake Edwards submarine movie Operation Petticoat), and Wait Until Dark baddie Jack Weston a hired killer. Also featuring robot lawnmowers, a classier-looking movie than necessary.

by ·Comments Off on The White Meadows (2009, Mohammad Rasoulof)

I got Naked Island flashbacks, people transporting water to different islands. Rahmat is a tear collector, witnessing dramas on each island he visits. He gains a stowaway named Nassim who tries to steal from him, they meet a blind man scavenging dead birds, a woman is sent screaming into the burning sea… death at every stop of the boat. Besides the tear bottle there’s a bag where people discard their sorrows, and a series of jars where they whisper their secrets. A rogue painter is tortured and forced to declare that the sea is blue, then sent away with the tear collector so his nonconformist views won’t spread. Another girl is sent away for being too beautiful.

I watched an old DVD of a then-recent film, for some reason transferred from a used print. I had to rewind when I saw lightning during a conversation about how it never rains – just a jagged film scratch. In the end, Rahmat bathes the feet of a government man who only asks “if everyone’s well.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

In a bold move that is quite the opposite of what we see from too many concerned filmmakers on the left, Rasoulof joined his increased anger and frustration not with greater literalism or artlessness, but with a shift into the allegorical, mythic register. While the bitterness and protest underlying The White Meadows are crystal clear, the film explores the state of Ahmadinejad’s Iran through a series of absurdist horror vignettes, staged against an unforgiving Lake Orumieh, and witnessed by a man condemned to merely observe and chronicle, but helpless to intervene … Rasoulof weaves this tale of interlocking allegories through visual as well as dramaturgical means. This is a strikingly beautiful film, simultaneously lush and austere, characterized by expansive, elemental landscapes and seascapes. Within these broad fields, human forms are enveloped, knocked hither and thither, struggling to maintain balance and dignity.

by ·Comments Off on Basic Instinct (1992, Paul Verhoeven)

Here I am, thirty years late, the last person in the country to watch Basic Instinct. I watched because it’s A Paul Verhoeven Film and on all the best-movies-of-whatever lists, but then, impressed by the degree of nudity in this I decided movies need more nudity and sought out more naked 90’s films. Unlike the others, this would seem to have little rewatch value – it’s kind of a brown/grey cop procedural. Some noirish aspects, Michael Douglas smart enough to draw connections but never the big ones, surrounded by smarter women who are playing him.

After Mr. Boz is killed with an icepick, Douglas and partner Gus question Boz’s girlfriend Sharon Stone, who got rich writing novels about icepick murders. Either she committed the dumbest murder, or one of the other psycho women in this movie is framing her – Stone’s hottie friend Roxy, or the police psychiatrist both investigating and sleeping with Douglas, Jeanne Tripplehorn. At the end a couple cops and suspects are dead and we don’t know for sure that Stone wasn’t the killer all along.

by ·Comments Off on Martin Eden (2019, Pietro Marcello)

A really compelling and beautiful movie. I love the cuts to period (and treated/original) clips, not trying to fool anyone by matching footage, just a good mood-setting effect. Martin is a sailor living on a boat. After he stops a security guard from beating on a boy, the boy’s family thanks him with dinner, lends him French books, and in no time he’s hyped over Baudelaire and sweet on their daughter. They’re happy to contribute to this poor soul’s education but the thought that he could become one of them is too much. A few scenes later he’s a pale staggering wreck and successful anti-socialist author heading out on a US tour.

Made more sense than Lost and Beautiful, though it started to feel caught in a historical-literature doomed-love trap. The Jack London book has been filmed about ten times, including once with Glenn Ford, twice in Czech, and a previous six-hour Italian version. Lead actor Luca Marinelli is gonna play the title role in a Diabolik remake. Martin’s sister was in season 4 (!) of the Gomorrah series, and his writer friend Brissenden starred in Stealing Beauty and The Red Violin.

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope:

… in freely adapting London’s novel, Marcello and Braucci have fashioned the title character into an emblem of the modern culture industry, whose neoliberal particulars London predicted with startling clarity.

by ·Comments Off on The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and Guy Maddin shorts

There’s a Guy Maddin retrospective on Criterion so I rewatched the great Saddest Music in the World, where everyone is tormented and traumatized except for cheesehead Mark McKinney, so he has to die in the end. Since this came out, Mark has starred in Superstore, which I heard was very good. Amnesiac Maria de Medeiros was in Son of Joseph and Pasolini. Serbian Ross McMillan was in a Dave Franco zombie/cannibal horror called Bad Meat. Canadian dad David Fox was in Jessica Chastain horror Mama. And Isabella… half the actors I’ve looked up this week have led to Two Lovers, so maybe it’s time I watch that thing.

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How to Take a Bath (2009)

In its original form, so the MPEGing transitions predate The Forbidden Room by a few years. Mmmm, that’s what bathing is all about.

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Lines of the Hand (2015)

Wow – another Forbidden-adjacent short. This one takes a John Ashbery poem, a Jean Vigo script, Vigo’s daughter Luce, and Udo Kier, and smooshes them into a colorful impressionist blob.

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Accidence (2018)

A music video masquerading as installation art. Single take, mostly wide shot of an apartment building where a murder/investigation is happening along with much hanging-out.

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The Rabbit Hunters (2020)

A sequel to My Dad Is 100 Years Old! This time Isabella plays Fellini, and the short is a dream fantasia with very funny dubbing. The rabbit hunters are discovered inside a bed, after searching in vain for the screening room of a movie premiere, and en route to a flight with Fellini’s ailing wife… it makes more sense while watching then written down.

by ·Comments Off on Monster Hunter (2020, Paul W.S. Anderson)

The opening scene is full-on nuts and very fakey looking, but i dunno that you need a sand-dune sailboat being attacked by giant duneworms to look “realistic.” Back in “our world” Milla Jovovich is an elite UN soldier(?) until a desert storm transports her to the monster-hunting world where her team is wiped out and she’s cocooned by skittering creatures in an underground insect Matrix until kidnapped by incredible archer Tony Jaa. She fucks up his shrine and they have a really violent fight, then they join forces and make her an arm-mounted grappling crossbow. “To kill a monster you need a monster.” Lost Boy Ron Perlman joins them, fighting off a stampede with flaming swords, then we go through the kidnapping / friendship thing again to fight a fire-breathing dragon. If I’m making this movie sound unbelievably awesome, that’s only because it is.

by ·Comments Off on Animated Shorts watched Feb 2021

Never Like the First Time (2006, Jonas Odell)

First-time sex stories. The participants seem youngish until the last guy tells a story set in the 1920’s. He and the first guy tell joyous stories of satisfaction, while for the women in the middle it was either disappointing or traumatic. The animation is a confusing mix of 2D photos and images composited into a 3D environment. Shared Golden Bears in Berlin that year with Sandra Hüller, Michael Winterbottom, and Andrzej Wajda. Ten years later Odell made a short called I Was a Winner, presumably not a reference to his Berlin prize, a short doc about video gamers as told by their game avatars, which sounds better than the new Rodney Ascher.

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The Tale of How (2006, The Blackheart Gang)

Extremely trippy story involving tentacle creatures and seagulls with teeth – a musical, set to an elaborate song, one suicide pact short of a Decemberists number. A South African movie, it doesn’t appear the Gang has remained in the movie business, except the composer with the great name of Markus Wormstorm. From the same omnibus as the previous film, but somehow I only found these two of the nine.

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Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936, Dave Fleischer)

Sindbad is just Bluto, lording over an isle of monsters and calling himself a most extraordinary fellow (is that from a Harold Lloyd film?). Highlights: each sailor introduces himself with his own theme song, and Wimpy tries to catch a duck with a meat grinder. There were a million Popeye shorts, so why is this one famous? Lost the oscar to The Country Cousin, not a great year.

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Quimby The Mouse (2009, Chris Ware)

Quimby is a domestic abuser who marries a severed head, makes it cry until sea levels rise, then uses it as bait to catch sea fishes, all set to a jaunty Andrew Bird song. Fun!

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Invention of Love (2010, Andrey Shushkov)

Beautiful shadow animation. Boy takes Girl to the steampunk towers where all plants and animals are machine replicants, and when she gets sick, he replicates her.

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Rowing Across the Atlantic (1978, Jean-Francois Laguionie)

Young adventurers attempt to cross the ocean in a rowboat, witness the Titanic sinking, fight and hallucinate and live their whole lives together on the boat. Some unexpected imagery, really nice. Laguionie made a couple of features last decade – I hear good things. This won best-short awards at the Césars (which also honored Dégustation maison) and at Cannes (which gave prizes to The Tree of Wooden Clogs, The Shout, and A Doonesbury Special).

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At the Ends of the World (1999, Konstantin Bronzit)

Delicate balance of comings and goings in a house perched on a mountaintop. Single-take until post-credits when disaster has relocated the house to a valley. Zagreb is a big fest for animated shorts, eh? This won its category, and The Old Man and the Sea took another.

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Fist Fight (1964, Robert Breer)

His most full-of-things film that i can recall, flickering edits of clippings and photos and drawings, musique concrète soundtrack involving bird sounds. Mice, cigar tricks, and eye-bending patterns. Proper figure animation, some Klahr-ish stuff, some Rejected paper manipulation – every technique Breer had at his disposal, like an itunes library of animation with their frames set on shuffle. Internet says it’s autobiographical, and Stockhausen-related.

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What Goes Up… (2003, Robert Breer)

Rotoscope-looking Jeff Scher-ish animation with flickering photograph injections. I attended a Breer program at Anthology Film Archives in the early 2000s, later discovered Scher, then Jodie Mack, and now I’ve forgotten all the original Breers. They are short and delightful and I should be watching them on the regular.