by ·Comments Off on L’Humanité (1999, Bruno Dumont)

Slow cinema starring a vacant-eyed cop reacting to news of a raped/murdered little girl, whose body we get a nice long leering stare at. The cop just wants to hang out with his neighbor Domino, but she’s dating bus driver Joseph, whose route goes right past the murder site. After some investigation, he finds Joseph arrested in boss’s office, tearily confessing, then our cop goes home and has a long hug and cry with Domino, then cut to the cop in handcuffs. Think I liked this best of Dumont’s pre-Quinquin slow art films, though somehow I missed “a brief shot that shows Pharaon levitating in his garden.”

by ·Comments Off on Drowning By Numbers (1988, Peter Greenaway)

Joan, Juliet, and Joely (whom Greenaway probably stunt-cast based on their first names) each drown their husbands, and also the conspirator-turned-blackmailer coroner Captain Smith, while the captain’s doomed son helps the movie count to 100. Watched on the fourth of july (movie had fireworks).

by ·Comments Off on Uncle Kent (2011, Joe Swanberg)

Okay, there was a blu-ray sale and I’ve been itching to revisit Todd Rohal so I bought Uncle Kent 2, and I know I probably do not need to watch Uncle Kent first, and I’m currently feeling end-of-world vibes from the news and am certainly not watching bad/average/filler movies on purpose, but I convinced myself that Uncle Kent 1 could be better than average, it could be a real good time, a valuable way to spend a tuesday night – and I was right.

Kent hand-draws cartoons at home, gets high, uses dating sites. Kate comes over to stay for a few days but claims to have a boyfriend, and sleeps in another room – then they meet Josephine (Decker!) on craigslist and all make out together on the couch. The most dramatic thing that happens is when Kent messes up trying to copy a nude photo from Kate’s phone and destructively covers his tracks.

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 51-100

That’s the first hundred now.
A good batch, came out summer 1999 to summer 2001.

Movies I’ve written up here, roughly ranked:

Do The Right Thing
Vagabond
Brazil
For All Mankind
Black Narcissus
Cleo From 5 to 7
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Blood of a Poet
Written on the Wind
Kwaidan
I Know Where I’m Going!
Orpheus
Sisters
L’Avventura
Peeping Tom
Autumn Sonata
The 39 Steps
Sanjuro
Alexander Nevsky
Good Morning
Brief Encounter
Variety Lights
W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films
Testament of Orpheus
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pygmalion
The Harder They Come
The Bank Dick
And God Created Woman
The Blob
Hamlet
The Night Porter
The Magic Flute

Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Ivan The Terrible, Parts 1 & 2
Charade
Yojimbo
The Element of Crime
All That Heaven Allows
The Last Temptation of Christ
Fiend Without a Face
Rushmore
The Life of Brian
Le Million
The Third Man
Carnival of Souls
Beastie Boys Anthology
Gimme Shelter
Chasing Amy

Bonus Features:

Good Morning includes the equally great feature I Was Born, But… and extras by three of the greats (Rosenbaum, Cairns, Bordwell)

Back in my Gilliam-obsessive days I watched every cut of Brazil, saw all the extras, read the Jack Mathews book, and played at least one of those Life of Brian commentaries.

Enjoyed the 39 Steps commentary on a plane. Rented the OG disc of Carnival of Souls and dutifully watched all the industrial shorts. Seen everything on The Third Man and Rushmore. Didn’t love The Blob commentary, and don’t recall if I heard the Fiend Without a Face.

Ate up the Varda extras, which include the shorts The Story of an Old Lady and the very great L’Opera Mouffe.

I’ve probably seen quite enough about Powell and Pressburger by now, but Return to the Edge of the World was great and I wouldn’t mind catching the Mark Cousins doc.

Should go through the For All Mankind and Kurosawa extras sometime. Sirk too, though I recently saw Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, included on the All That Heaven Allows disc.

Bought Autumn Sonata but probably won’t ever get to the extended making-of features, and definitely won’t revisit the Magic Flute doc – the Fanny & Alexander extras look more enticing.

I have a feeling the Women of the Resistance doc will be more interesting than The Night Porter. The David Lean doc might be good. Watched the Lars Tranceformer doc back in the day and didn’t love it, but the other Element of Crime features look intriguing.

Love Cocteau’s Villa Santo Sospir, not sure how I missed the Edgardo Cozarinsky documentary.

Got the Eisenstein box and went through it all, but the Ivans need revisiting and we really need a Nevsky reissue with properly-recorded orchestral score.

Watched everything I could find on Do The Right Thing and read Spike’s making-of book which is even better than the audio/video extras.

Did watch the L’Avventura doc and commentary, while trying to understand what art cinema is – an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

Beastie Boys Anthology remains the most well-authored DVD I ever bought.

If western civilization survives long enough I’ll probably explore the next fifty – got ten left to watch, including some (Shinoda, the Czechs) I really want to see, and I’ve already got the annoying ones out of the way (Ruling Class, The Hidden Fortress).

by ·Comments Off on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Philip Kaufman)

Lot of recent references to spa town in films: Road to Wellville, Cure for Wellness, Days, now this. In the late 1960s DDL meets Juliette Binoche on a business trip but he’s already with hat girl Lena Olin, wants to keep both girls and for everyone to be friends. He’s a professional surgeon and casual writer, Juliette’s getting into photography, and when the Soviets invade Prague, his story gets him in trouble, and her photos of street protests get a hundred protestors in trouble. They escape to Switzerland but Juliette returns and he follows her, arriving smugly principled to a fallen society, where he’s demoted from brain surgeon to general practitioner to window washer, until they decide to live the rest of their (few) days with a friendly pig farmer. Director and actors (esp. Lena) do their best to save the movie from its clunky script, which is somehow by Bunuel’s writer and also got an oscar nomination.

by ·Comments Off on Through the Olive Trees (1994, Abbas Kiarostami)

Part one was a straightforward drama, part two was a reenactment of events that took place after filming that drama, and part three is a reenactment of the filming of part two, whew.

It spins off into a side drama, as the actors cast as And Life Goes On‘s newlyweds know each other – Hossein wants to marry Tahereh, her family says no, and she won’t say anything at all. After filming he follows her and… something happens in extreme-wide-shot which I simply couldn’t make out on the VHS when I first watched this, but seemed clearer now, before Godfrey Cheshire further complicated it.

Or possibly all three Koker movies were made to explore AK’s deep interest in homework, and we’d more accurately call it the Homework Quadrilogy.

Watched all the box set extras. The included Cinema de Notre Temps episode is fantastic, a precursor to 10 on Ten. Crew follows him around as he drives familiar routes and looks for people he knows and interacts with random pedestrians. He finds the Friend’s Home kids yet again, catches up with the star of The Traveler, and teases them all about their acting… talks about truth and fiction, philosophically and in the specifics of his films.

by ·Comments Off on The Smugglers (1967, Luc Moullet)

Excessively, whimsically French-new-wavey – a silly-ass low-budg indie comedy, more admirable than enjoyable. Brigitte (Francoise Vatel, a Brigitte in Brigitte and Brigitte) and Francesca are stuck with the same guy, a “customs officer”/smuggler. When they get cornered they keep rewinding the film until they figure out the right strategy for escape. Their schemes are successful, but it gets tiring so they move into the city and get government jobs. “Stealing a few minutes from the boss raises the personnel’s morale and efficiency.” The director: “Bresson praised the grace of the film. But did he mean it or was he just fucking with me?”

Kayak battle:

Most relatable scene: Francesca does the dishes by hyperballading them off a cliff:

by ·Comments Off on Variety (1983, Bette Gordon)

Christy needs a job, finds one in the box office of a porno theater alongside Luis Guzman. Inspired by her new job, she starts writing dirty stories and reciting them to people. This all scares away her uptight boyfriend Will Patton (boyfriend #1 of Janet Planet), so she lets stalker-customer Louie take her out to a Yankees/Red Sox game. When he leaves abruptly she goes detective mode and follows him to a shady under-bridge deal. After a few days of this she tells Louie she’s been following him and to meet her on a corner. This seems like a dangerous move, but the movie ends with a street shot (the corner?) over some nice John Lurie music, so maybe it worked out. Some lovely scenes of a fish market at night, though I wish they wouldn’t pick up the fishes by their eyeballs, and the meditation handshake montage is great. Written by sometime-Mekon Kathy Acker.

by ·Comments Off on Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh)

Spy/hunter Fassbender gets five potential spy/leakers together (including his wife Cate Blanchett) and pits them against each other, while he and Cate carry on like a low-budget True Lies. The rare movie where the polygraph test is the best scene. I accidentally just watched Naomie Harris’s earliest and latest movies about havoc caused when an internal science experiment is freed from its lab.