by ·Comments Off on Golem (1980, Piotr Szulkin)

Paranoid kafkaesque man is being given the runaround, everyone seems to know more about him than he knows about himself. The commentary notes the “sense of profound gaslighting” he experiences, but I let myself down by only playing the first 15 minutes of it and barely got out of the historical background section. Besides his mixed-up identity situation, our guy Pernat (the lead cop in Ga-Ga) gets involved in a murder conspiracy, and gets abducted by a scary ophthalmologist.

Goin to the movies:

USA 2025:

Krystyna Janda starred in everything (Interrogation, Mephisto, Man of Iron, Dekalog 2)

It was already pretty Brazil-reminiscent, then this guy rappels in:

by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later (2025, Danny Boyle)

Dad and son leave their tidal island home for a coming-of-age venture into zomb territory, and when their short trip gets derailed and extended they end up meeting skull collector Ralph Fiennes, a doomed Swede, and evil acrobat messiah Jack O’Connell. Second-most interesting part of this movie is learning that the rest of the world is normal modern, with internet and uber eats, and only England is zombie-quarantined – the most interesting is that Boyle is image-making here, not just telling a family/zomb story, and this has got more trick shots/edits in the first four minutes than the entirety of last week’s zombie junk The Sadness. Ends weirdly because they’re setting up a sub-trilogy, so the kid and his dad (Aaron T-J of one of the bad Godzilla movies) and other weirdos will return, but the kid’s mom (Bikeriders wife Jodie Comer), an elite zombie defender with terminal brain cancer, will not.

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2021/2025

It’s the seventh annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five* years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

*Oops, there was a global pandemic in 2020, so we’re switching things up this time. Skipping ahead to the 2021 selections, also looking through this year’s fest and seeing if there are any 2025 programmed directors whose earlier works I’ve been meaning to watch, or any 2025 Histoire(s)/Retrospective films I can catch up with.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d otherwise seen, unlinked are items of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Played Locarno 2021:

The Sadness (Robert Jabbaz)
Little Solange (Axelle Ropert)
She Will (Charlotte Colbert)
Mad God (Phil Tippett)
Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi)
The Case Of The Vanishing Gods (Ross Lipman)
From the Planet of the Humans (Giovanni Cioni)
The Balcony Movie (Pawel Lozinski)
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Edwin)
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico)
A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong)
Medea (Aleksandr Zeldovich)
The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)
Luzifer (Peter Brunner)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
Lynx (Laurent Geslin)
Brotherhood (Francesco Montagner)
Actual People (Kit Zauhar)

2025 Filmmakers:

Joachim Trier
Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (The Tale of King Crab)
Jafar Panahi
Radu Jude
Alexandre Koberidze
Dane Komljen
Ben Rivers
Abbas Fahdel
Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter (Space Dogs)
Kamal Aljafari
Sophy Romvari (Pumpkin Movie +2)
Radu Muntean
Lemohang Mosese
Park Sye-young (Fifth Thoracic Vertebra)
Julian Radlmaier

2025 Retrospectives:

Project A (1983)
A Diary for Timothy (1945)
The Stranger Left No Card (1952)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)
Nebraska (2013)
The Descendants (2011)
L’Atalante (1934)
Anno Uno (1974)
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Silent Light (2007)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
Hell Drivers (1957)
Night and the City (1950)
Obsession (1948)
Odd Man Out (1947)
The Passionate Friends (1949)
Peeping Tom (1960)
A Portrait of Ga (1952)
The Shining (1980)
Time Without Pity (1957)

by ·Comments Off on The Sadness (2021, Rob Jabbaz)

Starts as a mild relationship drama (she has a job, he is useless), then he goes outside and witnesses an extremely sudden citywide outbreak of The Crazies. The infected get red around their big black eyes, sport a big grin, and torture normals for fun, retaining their person skills (can talk and use weapons). After no living humans are in sight, the crazies have violent blood orgies. So our guy runs back home to come up with a plan, after the gardener neighbor cuts off a couple of his fingers, meanwhile the girl has taken the midnight meat train to work, uh oh. Rest of the movie is them trying to find each other, meeting up at a hospital, each trailing their own zombie archnemesis. I feel like it’s trying to be somewhat comical in an over-the-top gory kind of way, like Terrifier, but mostly ends up depressing (“charmless, sadistic“).

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of King Crab (2021, Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)

Gorgeous movie, multipart flashbacking story of drunk beardy Luciano, who gets very angry when the Prince locks a gate used by the shepherds, and burns down a building not knowing that his girl was inside. Later (Jay: “effectively morphing into a Western, like some lost Monte Hellman film as imagined by Lisandro Alonso”) he’s a false priest enlisted by pirates to find hidden gold in Tierra del Fuego with the help of a crab.

Maria Alexandra Lungu, star of The Wonders:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

The film’s very methodology implicitly questions the reliability of narrators and highlights the selective hearing of audiences; what is made clear is that we all contribute to the shape of the stories we tell. Somewhere amid the din of the elders’ conflicting or consenting voices, a narrative of questionable veracity is cobbled together that the film then proceeds to visualize. By revisiting the scenes from which the elders’ unofficial chronicle emanates, de Righi and Zoppis pry open the causal effects of narrative and reveal its mercurial mythmaking.

by ·Comments Off on Pumpkin Movie +2 (Sophy Romvari)

Pumpkin Movie (2017)

Sophy in one city is skyping with a friend in Halifax while they carve jack-o-lanterns and discuss sexist aggressions from the past year.

–
Norman Norman (2018)

Repeat appearance by the director’s Macbook as she looks up videos about dog cloning while her own dog (Norman, elderly, in rough shape) lays with her on the bed.

–
In Dog Years (2019)

Interviews with owners of messed-up dogs, some near the end of their lives, with all focus on the dogs and their stories, the owners’ faces not shown. “In memory of Norman,” oh no. I was supposed to follow these up with Nine Behind / It’s Him / Grandma’s House, but already shaken by dying dogs I couldn’t take on dying grandmothers.

by ·Comments Off on The Sparrow in the Chimney (2024, Ramon Zürcher)

The Girl and The Spider and Trauma, or, The Dead Little Cat. The sparrow escapes in first few minutes and doesn’t return – and good for it, given the violence and bad vibes that ensue. Family get-together for someone’s birthday, and everyone’s happy to see each other but also on edge, then the kids start taking turns telling the mom they hate her, escalating aggressions until the movie breaks with reality when the cat is found dead in the washing machine and mom has a freakout and maybe the house burns down, everyone smiling pleasantly at each other about it. Played Locarno last year, so I watched during this year’s Locorazo.

Vadim Rizov:

Sparrow begins by once again demonstrating the brothers’ John-Carpenter-level facility with weaponizing off-screen space, leaning into meticulously locked-off interiors that are repeatedly unexpectedly disrupted, often by animals … Part of what I liked most about Strange Little Cat was the ways it generated surprise from both its framing and unexpected structure, low on overt incident but subtly discombobulating; that the Zürchers’ subsequent films have leaned into greater degrees of melodramatic hyperbole isn’t where I want them to go.

The mom starred in at least two Angela Schanelec movies, her husband in All Good and Bloodsuckers, and her sister in Schwentke’s The Captain.

by ·Comments Off on A Diary for Timothy & The Stranger Left No Card

A Diary for Timothy (1945, Humphrey Jennings)

Narrator explains to Baby Tim on his birthday – also the fifth anniversary of Britain entering WWII – what we’re fighting for, and how we’ve got a difficult recovery ahead. He sketches out the next six months, closing by asking whether the kid will make the world a better place (spoiler: he did not). Starts out as boring wartime propaganda and gets increasingly complex, until by the end I almost see why this keeps popping up on best-movie lists.

–
The Stranger Left No Card (1952, Wendy Toye)

“They’d never seen anything like me before,” says the stranger, an overly facial-haired street magician, but that’s because Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals hadn’t been invented yet. All the townspeople take interest in this guy as he runs around being whimsical. Some sync sound issues, but mostly narrated by our self-delighted stranger (Alan Badel of Day of the Jackal and Children of the Damned). After establishing himself all week as someone who shows up everywhere playing harmless tricks, he shows up in a contractor’s office at closing time and revenge-kills the guy for sending him to prison years earlier. It’s the perfect crime, but it’s also the 1950s so he can’t quite get away clean, leaving a trail of glitter to the train as he’s leaving town.

by ·Comments Off on Project A (1983, Jackie Chan)

There’s a lotta plot here, but Jackie ends up working for his bar-brawl rival Yuen Biao (Rat/Weasel of Eastern Condors) and teaming up with gangster-gambler Sammo to fight corruption and then take on pirates. After a dumbass white admiral gets captured by dread pirate Lo (Dick Wei of Visa to Hell), Chan’s ex-coast-guarders go rogue, beat the shit out of a pirate collaborator to figure out how to contact them, and smuggle Sammo aboard in a barrel. When Chan goes through some gears then hangs from a clock tower, it’s hard to miss the classic silent comedy references, and since this is the week for great bicycle scenes, we get a chase where he beats up guys with a bike in ten different ways.

Jackie was just in Locarno:

I think back to when we made those films, and we had so many problems [on the set]. It would be raining terribly. Something serious not working. On Project A, we got seasick, the [scenes of the] pirates on the sea were so difficult to do… but we kept going, and no matter what, we finished the movie. Then when it came out it was a success, and 40 years later people are still watching it. That’s what I signed up for. You see so many movies, so many directors – and nobody remembers them today. But then a few movies, 100 years later, are still there. At some point, I said to myself: I want to make this kind of movie, no matter how difficult it will be. When I pass away, I want the next generations to say there’s Bruce Lee, there’s Chaplin, there’s Jackie Chan.