by ·Comments Off on People’s Park (2012, J.P. Sniadecki & Libbie Dina Cohn)

Single-take camera move (always on the move) through a crowded park in Chengdu, China – further into the center of the country than Katy will travel this month (while I watched this, she was some 900 miles east, in Shanghai). There’s dancing and games and crafts and napping and work and food and commercial demonstrations and so much music – I don’t think there’s a moment where you can’t hear live or recorded music playing.

The camera seems to be waist-high (I later learned that Cohen held the camera while Sniadecki pusher her in a wheelchair), and it’s not hidden – people stare back all the time, and most of my interest in the movie (since the park itself isn’t historically/architecturally fascinating) comes from watching the people, and seeing their reactions as they watch back. I wouldn’t say there’s enough people-watching interest to justify its full 75-minute length though, and roaming a park from my couch kept making me wanna get up and go outside. Funny how far removed this felt from last week’s people-watching doc Austerlitz. The ending is good, the camera circling around a crowd watching a dance routine then breaking through into the center, ending on a great image.

Dennis Lim got the press kit:

Over three weeks they shot 23 takes ranging from 45 to 100 minutes, with many more aborted because of mishaps like miscommunication with each other or children running into their path. The final film… uses a 75-minute segment from the 19th try.

F. Furtado:

In a film with such an evident voyeuristic aspect as this, one usually expects to see the shot at eyes height; but, instead, the vantage point in People’s Park is lower, an unexpected perspective which sometimes breaks with the more repetitive patterns of some of its moments and procedures … There is undoubtedly an element of intrusion in these images: people often look straight at the camera suggesting curiosity and, other times, irritation (the film never allows us to forget that the filmmakers are not an element that belong to that landscape; this is literally a foreign look).

Glimpsed through the crowd – man with rooster on a stick:

Vadim:

Bursts into musical numbers via karaoke fiends co-existing with refreshing indifference to each other, mass dances and sing-alongs to Cultural Revolution standards, the state otherwise conspicuous by its absence … Few people stand out in memory, the point being the democratic proliferation of things to watch.

Produced by the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (Sweetgrass, Leviathan). Codirector Sniadecki made earlier HSEL movie Foreign Parts, and later The Iron Ministry, and both were thanked in the Manakamana credits.

by ·Comments Off on LNKarno: Locarno in Lincoln 2012/2017

I noticed after watching The Ornithologist that Switzerland’s Locarno Festival seems to be the source of all the critically-praised movies that never end up playing theaters near me, or even coming out on video in many cases. At the same time, I was reading about the Locarno In Los Angeles festival and wishing we had something like that. So, now we do… presenting the first annual LNKarno Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago.

I’d already seen some of these – LNKarno-week viewings in red.

Main Competition:

The Last Time I Saw Macao (João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata)
The End of Time (Peter Mettler)
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)
Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
Jack & Diane (Bradley Rust Gray)
Greatest Hits (Nicolás Pereda)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington)
The Girl from Nowhere (Jean-Claude Brisseau)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

People’s Park (Libbie Dina Cohn, J.P. Sniadecki)
Ape (Joel Potrykus)
Orléans (Virgil Vernier)
Tectonics (Peter Bo Rappmund)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Motorway (Soi Cheang)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley)

Histoire(s) du Cinema (sidebar devoted to film history)

Life Without Principle (Johnnie To)
Down Terrace (Ben Wheatley)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher)
Capital (Sarah Morris)
AM/PM (Sarah Morris)

Open Doors (region-specific section – this year: Sub-Saharan Africa)

Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
Chocolat (Claire Denis)
Guimba the Tyrant (Cheick Oumar Sissoko)
Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety)
Wênd Kûuni (Gaston Kaboré)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé)

Pardi di domani (short films and special programs)

As the Flames Rose (Joao Rui Guerra da Mata)
Beauty and the Beat (Yann Le Quellec)
Chemin faisant (Georges Schwizgebel)
Overseas (Wichanon Somunjarn & Anocha Suwichakornpong)

by ·Comments Off on Aquarius (2016, Kleber Mendonça Filho)

Turned this off halfway through and continued a couple days later, but I thought about abandoning the movie because I knew how it was going to end up, and wasn’t relishing the idea. We’re following Clara (Sonia Braga of Moon Over Parador, Kiss of the Spider Woman) who lives in a nice seaside condo, has lived there forever, full of memories and good records, hanging out with friends and family. But the building has new ownership, and every tenant except Clara has sold and moved out, and the realty company is starting to act funny, and vague threats are being floated by the underhanded old developer Geraldo and his young project head (and grandson) Diego. As vibrant and well-liked a person as she is, Clara is not gonna be able to stand up to a determined developer with a seaside property – we’ve got another Leviathan on our hands. So imagine my surprise.

Flashbacks to 1980, starting with the birthday of an aunt, establishing Clara as a cancer survivor and a Queen fan, back when her husband was alive – now in her sixties minus the husband and one breast, the movie still manages to have plenty of sex scenes. Anyway, she talks to people who work with the development company, gets help from her lifeguard friend Roberval (Irandhir Santos, star of Neighbouring Sounds), digs up a scandal with help from her lawyer, finds the termite nest they’ve planted in her building and brings it, along with the paperwork/evidence, to their office, suddenly reminding me that the Cinema Scope article on this movie was titled “Termite Art.”

Barry Lyndon:

“People like you who took a business course but lack basic human decency, who have no character … no, I mean, you do have character; your character is money. Therefore, honey, you have no character.” It’s like a superhero movie, establishing a lead character on the side of good, gradually introducing her support team, then uniting against evil at the end.

With Roberval in the termite apartments:

Strike Team: niece/lawyer, nephew, brother

R. Koehler:

All of his narrative films, short or long, entail examinations of life in various urban spaces in his beloved coastal city of Recife, in the northern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. These spaces, sometimes simply street corners, sometimes — as in his extraordinary 2012 feature debut, Neighboring Sounds — city blocks, develop into zones of competing sources of power through the course of patiently crafted narratives … Even more than in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius contains a keen sense of history, and how the fundamental questions of identity and personal physical space can tie together memory and objects, music and the body, and how family itself is a living embodiment of history.

by ·Comments Off on Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011, Makoto Shinkai)

AKA Journey to Agartha… anime adventure story, which gets into some grand life-and-death mythology and re-enacts Orpheus… it didn’t exactly pull all of its component parts into a coherent whole, and it lacked the emotional impact of Your Name, but was full of incident and beautiful light and backdrops and fantastical beasts, so I have no major complaints.

Asuna has a pet cat, working mom, dead father, and no particular characteristics. One day she meets an underworld boy who saves her from a giant creature then promptly dies. Soon she travels to his land along with her cat, the dead boy’s twin brother, and her homicidally bereaved super-soldier substitute teacher, who plans to descend into the land of the dead with a magic crystal and a submachine gun and demand the resurrection of his late wife. It’s kind of a crazypants movie.

Also, the cat dies and is eaten by a Quetzalcoatl. And so are our heroes.

Shinkai’s third feature (Your Name is his fifth). Our copy was English dubbed, which seemed just fine, but the commentary is in subtitled Japanese, so I can’t really play it while working.

by ·Comments Off on A Screaming Man (2010, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)

After waiting years to watch this, it was finally pretty disappointing… even if the political/social criticism is on point, the movie felt slow and obvious. Former swimming champ Adam has worked at the same hotel pool for decades, along with buddy David (a miniaturized Danny Glover) and now his son Abdel. Adam pays off a local government dude to keep Adbel out of the civil war – we thought Dry Season took place post-civil war, but apparently this is a new civil war, which ended a few months before the film premiered in Cannes (winning third place to Uncle Boonmee and Of Gods and Men).

Parents and son at home:

A Chinese company buys the hotel, notes that there isn’t enough pool work to justify employment of these three men, so fires David and demotes Adam to gatekeeper. He claims he can’t afford to pay anymore – maybe true, or maybe he is mad about the job situation – so Abdel is quickly drafted and Adam gets his pool job back. All is well for a few days, then Abdel’s previously unseen pregnant girlfriend moves in, the town is evacuated as the rebels advance, and Adam goes off to an army hospital to kidnap his mortally wounded son and give him a river burial.

Adam was the baker from Dry Season, looking convincingly less weathered (or maybe it’s been too long and I’d forgotten what he looked like, because I thought they must be two similar-looking actors). Abdel had small roles in Caché and Indigènes. David was in Grisgris and Haroun’s lesser-known Sexe, gombo et beurre salé, and the chief was in Africa Paradis and a passenger in Night on Earth. The girlfriend Djénéba Koné, a singer who cries a lot, was in Bamako as the sister-in-law of that film’s crying singer.

Adam Cook:

The film is beautifully shot with strong performances, particularly from the soulful Youssouf Djaoro in the lead role, but his life changing decision… never quite rings true. It does make the second half dramatically powerful and moving, and it even makes sense on a thematic level, but it is hard to believe his character would ever make such a callous choice.

by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs and Concerts, part 3

Only watched a couple of these lately, but I’d better write ’em up before they get lost and forgotten…

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Baby Snakes (1979, Frank Zappa)

Definitely overlong and indulgent… don’t know why Zappa thought we needed to spend so much time backstage with his band goofing around and improvising with props for the camera – not exactly feature film material. And I detest audience participation at rock shows – it’s super fun for the two fans onstage, less so for the rest of us.

Gripes aside, the bulk of the movie is a terrific rock concert, and the highlight is the claymation work by brilliant, possibly crazed animator Bruce Bickford… complex cityscapes, crowd scenes, closeups, Frank and his bandmates and groupies, all constantly morphing into monsters.

Foreground: clay Frank at the clay film editing table
Background: Frank at the film editing table

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Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015, Brett Morgen)

I don’t feel a morbid urge to read the diaries of dead rock stars or watch their home videos, but I heard this was good, an immersive montage edited according to emotion more than narrative, not a traditional rock doc. But whoever wrote that had a pretty strict definition of traditional narrative, because this is a straightforward, chronological doc, trying to get inside Kurt’s head at the different stages of his life and fame. There’s some Scanner Darkly rotoscoping of reenactment footage (a good compromise) and halfway-decent flash animation of his teenage drawings to illustrate his confessional audio tape collection. Interviews with Krist and Courtney and Kurt’s parents and ex, lots of good photos and concert footage, and a terrific mocking impression he does of Chris Cornell (edit: RIP, Chris). I hadn’t really listened to Nirvana since the late 90’s and mostly the movie gave me the urge to do that – discovered that the bonus discs of concert stuff on the album reissues are reeeeally good.

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PJ Harvey in France on the Hope Six tour

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Chumbawamba in 1996

by ·Comments Off on Graduation (2016, Cristian Mungiu)

We closely follow Romeo (Adrian Titieni, one of Mr. Lazarescu‘s many doctors), sort of a sad Romanian Nick Frost, during the week of his daughter’s final exams. At first he’s a regular guy whose family has a string of bad luck, then things open up and we see that he’s cheating on his wife, that all the professional and government services are greased by favors and bribes, and that, in trying to help his daughter, he ends up dragging her into the small-town societal corruption that he was trying to save her from. We don’t know for sure if she’ll end up going off to Cambridge, or stay in town with her boyfriend and fall into the same traps as her parents, but I suspect the latter. At least the problems on display here aren’t as life-crushingly bad as in Leviathan.

Daughter Magda is Maria-Victoria Dragus (creepy bird-murdering kid of The White Ribbon). Mungiu tied with Assayas for best director at last year’s Cannes. I finally got to see it on opening day of this year’s Cannes (and also during graduation week).

V. Morton, who also has a nice bit on the film’s “egalitarian framing”:

Even as the film’s central narrative event happens (the assault on Romeo’s daughter on the eve of her baccalaureate exams), we see Romeo as an adulterer (later, we learn, with his wife’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” semi-connivance). We very promptly learn after the assault, even before the narrative implications have really been set up, that he and “Vlad Ivanov” had bribed their way out of the military draft and thus “owe” someone re a liver transplant. Romeo is a doctor. Graduation is not the story of a good man corrupted but a corrupt man trying to do “good” (when it serves him and his) because society runs on corruption.

by ·Comments Off on Heaven Knows What (2014, Safdies)

Harley (writer/subject Arielle Holmes) is sorry, and Ilya (Antiviral star Caleb Jones) is mad at her for cheating, so she attempts suicide, cut to title.

Harley and Mike:

Caleb must have a pretty bad cold:

The movie doesn’t get any more cheerful after that. They curse a lot, and take drugs, and seem to be excessively focused on obtaining and taking more drugs (what’s that all about?). She gets consolation sex from mutual friend Mike (Buddy Duress: what a name). They’re all terrible, it’s no fun to watch, and the camera keeps getting horribly close to the actors, so you can feel their pain, man. But we finally know they’ve hit rock bottom when we see them watching Hellraiser – but it’s in 4:3, and it’s the garbage sequel Revelations instead of the original.

Lovestruck kids Harley and Ilya finally get back together, do some petty crimes, then he ditches her on a bus, goes home and immediately catches fire and dies. I did enjoy some aspects of the movie, like the outer space keyboard music, and a scene I loved but cannot explain why where she tries to thread a needle. Watched this because it’s Cannes Month and the directors have a new one premiering, which I guess I can safely skip (edit: lol).

by ·Comments Off on Grindhouse (2007, Rodriguez & Tarantino)

Watched this again over a couple days… the Grindhouse version with trailers and interstitial stuff, not the extended director cuts released separately. I’m usually a nut for director’s cuts and extended versions, which is why I keep re-buying The New World and Michael Mann movies, but for some reason I’m satisfied with the theatrical edits here – maybe because the two “missing reels” are the best jokes in the movie.

Replacing my original writeup, which was pretty worthless. I didn’t know who most of these actors were at the time… going through ’em now with too many screenshots.

Machete:

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Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez)

I really enjoyed this the first time around, but conventional wisdom from critics in the intervening decade has been “Death Proof is a masterpiece, too bad it’s attached to that garbage Planet Terror.” So this time I was expecting to be disappointed in Planet Terror, to admonish my stupid youthful self for ever having loved it, but nope, still awesome.

Introduces a bunch of great characters in the first half, then brings them together at BBQ joint The Bone Shack, which gets invaded by zombies and catches fire in the missing reel, followed by the all-action showdown finale.

Pole dancer Cherry (Rose McGowan) is reunited with her ex, legendary biker El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez, “lopsidedly muscled” in Lady in the Water)… while scientist Abby (Naveen Andrews: Sense8, Lost) gets double-crossed by militia monster Bruce Willis

Scientist w/ wicked knife:

Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas) stops at JT’s Bone Shack, talks to proprietor Jeff Fahey:

Dr. Josh Brolin and his anesthesiologist wife Marley Shelton (Sin City, Pleasantville):

Sheriff Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese in The Terminator) and Deputy Tom Savini:

Drama: Cherry loses her leg in a car crash and gets a machine gun replacement. Brolin catches his wife cheating, sticks her hands full of numbing meds, then their young son shoots himself and her Southern gentleman dad (the late Michael Parks) joins up. Willis turns into a giant mutant and his colleague Tarantino gets severe eye trauma. Most everyone dies, the survivors retreat to Mexico.

Marley with messed-up hands:

Fahey and Cherry:

QT, staked:

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Werewolf Women of the SS (Rob Zombie)

This was actually kinda overlong and uninteresting and I was forgetting why I thought it was so great, and then came those magic words, “and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu” and suddenly I remembered.

Still love the voiceovers on Don’t (Will Arnett) and Thanksgiving (Eli Roth).

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Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino)

Opens with a great replacement-title gag, then there’s some editing humor and surface noise, and another “missing reel” right when something sexy’s about to happen, but then QT chills out with the self-reflexive filmmaking gags as his movie gets darker.

Three girls are out for drinks in Austin: local DJ Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier of last year’s Too Late and Netflix horror Clinical), Shanna (Jordan Ladd of Cabin Fever) and out-of-towner Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito of Spider-Man 2). QT and Eli Roth are in the house, then their friend Lanna Frank (Monica Staggs, Daryl Hannah’s stunt double in Kill Bill) finally shows up and the girls take off. Meanwhile, Stuntman Mike has been stalking them, agrees to give a ride to drunken Pam (Rose McGowan again) at the bar, then kills everybody. I remembered Pam getting bounced around in his open passenger area with Mike in the protected driver’s seat, but forgot the rest – he rams the other girls’ car head-on, just destroying it, and the movie jumps back in time to show each death in detail. Except for this gruesome couple of minutes, it’s practically QT’s most wholesome movie, 80% talking and 20% car chases.

Up front: Shanna, Lanna, Jungle Julia, Butterfly:

Pam at left, with bartender QT and patrons:

Planet Terror characters cameoing in Death Proof’s hospital scene:

And about that car chase… next, a bunch more girls, and I can’t maintain much interest in the dialogue after he’s just Psycho’d his entire cast and expecting us to care about a whole new one, but here goes. This time they’re all in the film business: makeup artist Rosario Dawson, actress/model Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the girl with hair like this), and two stunt women, Kim (Tracie Thoms of Rent, Wonderfalls) and Zoë Bell (as herself, lately of The Hateful Eight). Lee is left with some redneck while the others test drive his Vanishing Point car. Kim drives while Zoë does poses on the hood, then suddenly Stuntman Mike starts running them off the road. Some of Zoë’s hood antics here are unbelievable, and the chase goes on nearly forever, then at a stop Kim shoots Mike, who drives off crying until they catch up and beat the shit out of him. Mike is one of my favorite QT creations, a super-tough, scar-faced pervert predator who becomes an absolute whiny little bitch when the tables are turned.