by ·Comments Off on Favorite Shorts watched in 2013

1. Night Music (Stan Brakhage)
It’s a cheat since I’ve covered this movie on the blog before, one day in the old apartment when I watched an entire disc of Criterion’s Brakhage set. But this film is easily lost in a crowd, being only 30 seconds long (including credits). I rediscovered it in the blu-ray edition and have been watching it on my laptop before every feature, and between shorts, and while writing or web browsing, and any time I need to clear my brain or vision – always silent and full-screen. Hell, I watched it twice while writing this paragraph.

2. La Villa Santo-Sospir (Jean Cocteau)
3. Artificial Light (Hollis Frampton)
4. John & Faith Hubley shorts
5. Cabale des oursins (Luc Moullet)
6. Coming Attractions (Peter Tscherkassky)
7. The Cloud Door (Mani Kaul)
8. Douro, Faina Fluvial (Manoel de Oliveira)
9. I Know Where I’m Going (Ben Rivers)
10. Lullaby (Andrzej Zolotukhin)
11. Cantico das criaturas (Miguel Gomes)
12. Cindy: The Doll is Mine (Bertrand Bonello)

I tend to write posts covering ten shorts at a time, so some of the above links will lead to the same post.

by ·Comments Off on Some 2013 Movies To Watch

Now with category names stolen from The Dissolve.

Essentials:
Upstream Color
Story of My Death
The Great Beauty
Under the Skin
Computer Chess
American Hustle
Nebraska

Auteur Obligations:
Before Midnight
Night Moves
Only Lovers Left Alive
Real
Closed Curtain
Side Effects
Stray Dogs
Bastards
Wolf of Wall Street
Her

Hollywood(ish):
Curse of Chucky
Hell Baby
Spring Breakers

Imported Goods:
A Field in England
Snowpiercer
A Touch of Sin
The Wind Rises
The Missing Picture
Drug War

Others:
Watermark
The Strange Little Cat
Vic+Flo Saw a Bear
R100
Hannah Arendt
A Fuller Life

by ·Comments Off on Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, Robert Bresson)

“Is there nothing more to life than carrying the burden of one’s past mistakes?”

Helene (the great Maria Casares of Orpheus) is engaged to Jean (Paul Bernard of some Jean Gremillon films), who misses their anniversary so she has dinner with Jacques instead, shortly before breaking up with Jean. It seems from the conversation to be a mutual agreement to part ways, but for her facial expressions and closing line (“I’ll have my revenge”).

Helene looks up old friend Agnes, a former dancer who has sunken to prostitution, with her awful mother living off her, and offers to help them out, puts them in an apartment where they can escape the men who hound Agnes, who now wants to see no one. But Helene manages to slyly hook her up with her recent ex Jean, and he falls for Agnes immediately but she takes some work.

“cabaret dancer” must be movie-code for prostitute:

Jean manages to get the reluctant Agnes (Elina Labourdette, later of Lola) to agree to marry him, and immediately after the wedding Helene reveals her plot: “You’ve married a tramp, now you must face the consequences,” an awful blow to a classy rich fellow. But scandal is no use – it’s assumed at the end that the couple ends up happy while Helene is bitter and alone.

Adapted by Jean Cocteau (the year before his own Beauty and the Beast) from a novel by Diderot (1700’s author of source novel for Rivette’s The Nun).

by ·Comments Off on Stranger by the Lake (2013, Alain Guiraudie)

A semi-thriller, methodically structured with a non-ending, set at a cruisy gay nude beach. I didn’t love it as much as the Cinema Scope critics did.

Our shiftless hero is Frank, who spends an awful lot of time at the lake. Frank befriends Henri, a not-nude not-gay not-fit dude sitting off by himself every day, and looks for love among the others. Early on, Frank witnesses mustached Michel kill his boyfriend, spends the rest of the movie dating Michel and avoiding the local cops. Michel kills Henri and chases Frank at the end – you wonder if Frank got away, but you wonder if he wants to.

No music! Produced by Sylvie Pialat (wife of Maurice), picked up a couple of Cannes awards, film of the year according to Cahiers.

by ·Comments Off on Stoker (2013, Chan-wook Park)

Kind of your standard family-secret homicidal-maniac twist-ending thriller, but Park makes it great. Every scene is amazing looking, not just well-shot but with attention-drawing effects like seamlessly transitioning Nicole Kidman’s hair into a field of grass.

Mia W. is our vaguely Rogue-looking heroine whose dad died the day she turned 18 – killed by his maniac brother, it turns out, who killed their youngest brother as a boy, then kills Mia’s would-be-rapist school acquaintance (Alden Ehrenreich, Bennie in Tetro), then almost kills her mom until finally Mia pulls out the hunting rifle that the movie has taken care to mention and blows him away. Then she drives off, killing a sheriff on the way out of town, having inherited her uncle’s taste for murder.

Other victims include family maid Mrs. McG (hidden in the freezer) and Auntie Jen (Jacki Weaver of Picnic at Hanging Rock) – great discovery scene as Mia calls auntie’s cell and hears it ringing underground. The shooting (by Park’s usual guy Chung-hoon Chung) and editing (by Nicolas de Toth, son of the House of Wax director) are thrilling. Matthew Goode (Firth’s dead boyfriend in A Single Man, kinda has a George Clooney voice) is crazy uncle Charlie, Mia Wasikowska is currently starring in Only Lovers Left Alive, and this is the first Nicole Kidman movie I’ve seen since Birth. Shoot, Harmony Korine was in this and I didn’t notice him.

by ·Comments Off on Insiang and shorts from the Philippines

After the storm devastation in the Philippines, I thought back on Independencia, the only Filipino movie that I can remember having seen, an excitingly stylized though thematically depressing attack on colonialism, and thought maybe I should watch some more – a Filipino film fest! Only made it through one feature and a bunch of shorts so far.

Long Live Philippine Cinema! (2009, Raya Martin)

How do you not open your Filipino film fest with a movie entitled Long Live Philippine Cinema!? I think Martin is perhaps being ironic, though. Woman working in a cinema back room is killed by some guys, who then burn the evidence. A film can is filled with dirt, and the title spirals onto it. Apparently the woman represents Mother Lily, a producer who is thought to have control over the Manila Film Festival.

Track Projections (2007, Raya Martin)

Silent, camera on its side shoots a partly sunny sky while futzing with the aperture. Gets kinda good around the 3-minute mark. Nice how the sideways camera combined with motion results in a filmstrip look.

Insiang (1976, Lino Brocka)

The Philippines’ all-time most beloved movie is a grimly realistic drama about a young woman whose mom takes in a younger man who starts raping the daughter. So much for escapism. Everyone is poor and hungry and has a bunch of kids they can’t afford, and young Insiang spends the movie bouncing from one pole of desperation to another.

Her mom Tonya is shitty to everyone. Possibly it’s a survival mechanism – can’t tell if the movie is judging her or not. Insiang has a fully pathetic puff-haired boyfriend called Bebot who finally gets her to sleep with him on the pretense of taking her away from rapist uncle Dado, a sleazy mustache-man with his own name tattooed in a heart on his chest.

“Maybe [your father] left because he couldn’t stand your mother” – these are meant as encouraging words in this movie – and “As soon as I get a better job we’re going to leave this place” is its mantra.

Finally Insiang gets her revenge on everyone at once. She cuddles up to Dado and asks a favor: for him to beat the living hell out of Bebot, which he does, knocking all his teeth out down by the river. Then Insiang (exaggerating) tells her mom that Dado just used the mom to get to the daughter, hates the mom and plans to leave her. Result: mom kills Dado and goes to jail. You’d think this is the movie’s idea of a happy ending, but just in case we saw a glimmer of hope in Insiang’s revenge and independence, she visits mom and says she feels no better.

At least there’s a character named Nan Ding. Nice Slint reference.

Our Daily Bread (2006, Khavn)

A woman digs through the trash, sells junk to buy baby food, returns to the trash and feeds the rest of her family with chicken scraps she finds. Gross.

Can and Slippers (2005, Khavn)

Two things at once here: first, it’s a fast-cut, handheld high-action percussively-scored short of a kid kicking a coke can through town and out to the makeshift goal, where he shoots/scores. One the other hand, the kid is revealed to have one leg, he doesn’t have a real ball, the town is infested with garbage and the goal is on a trash heap.

Rugby Boyz (2006, Khavn)

Group of boyz play ball (with a real ball this time), tell jokes, dance to karaoke, huff something in plastic bags, then go swimming.

by ·Comments Off on Live-Action Shorts watched Nov-Dec 2013

Castello Cavalcanti (2013, Wes Anderson)

Cute – Schwartzmann is a racecar driver who happens to crash in his ancestral village then decides to slow down and hang out for a while.

Aningaaq (2013, Jonas Cuaron)

The other side of a radio conversation Sandra Bullock has in Gravity, with a man in the icy wilderness who doesn’t understand her. It’s fun as a companion short but gets all its emotional weight from the Gravity recall.

Stephane Mallarme (1968, Eric Rohmer)

A visit with a typical pretentious french poet. Or I can’t tell if he’s pretentious since the spoken interview is translated but his written poetry excerpts are not. It’s all starting to seem odd, when the “documentary” short ends and the credits tell me Jean-Marie Robain (of Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer) played the poet, who died in 1898.

“In a society without cohesion, without stability, it’s impossible to create stable, definitive art.”

Weed (1996, Fatih Akin)

A corny-assed comedy starring Akin with Counting Crows hair, who tries to impress his new dance-club friends by claiming he has amazing weed at home, which he does not. So in order not to get killed once the lie has spun out of control, he brings them weeds from the garden, which they smoke and find to be amazing, because potheads have no standards I guess.

by ·Comments Off on The Grandmaster (2013, Wong Kar-Wai)

On one hand, I don’t think this is a perfect movie. Many of the scenes are beautiful by themselves, but I’m not sure that it comes together into a structure that makes sense. On the other hand, I’m fascinated with this movie, having watched the U.S. version twice in theaters then the original on blu-ray. The U.S. makes some major blunders, changes the order of events to the detriment of all emotional build-up and overuses title cards. But those title cards came in handy for me, and the original version made more sense for my having seen the other one first. Also, even though the U.S. is a half hour shorter, it somehow contains entire scenes that weren’t in the original.

My favorite edit:

Tony Leung has been in Red Cliff and Lust, Caution but I haven’t seen him since 2046. He plays Ip Man, a renowned martial artist and teacher, introduced fighting a hundred dudes including a final boss played by Cung Le (Bronze Lion) under the slow-motion rain. Action isn’t abstracted like in Ashes of Time – it’s actually more commercial-looking than usual for Wong, shot by new guy Philippe Le Sourd but edited by William Chang who worked on Ashes of Time and the others.

Ip moves away from his wife to Hong Kong then isn’t allowed to return. He and Zhang Ziyi have a mutual fascination, and the best part of the movie follows her story as she reclaims her father’s title from his traitorous former disciple Ma San. This sidetrack from the “Grandmaster” story plus the movie’s splintering into different versions make it seem more open-ended, like every character could unexpectedly lead his own movie. For instance, Chen Chang (male star of Three Times) has a minor scene in the U.S. cut, and two completely different scenes (including a major anti-government battle) in the original. Usually we hear rumors of trouble in the editing room then Wong delivers a final, completed film – this time he seems to have given in to artistic indecision. Or maybe it’s simply the Weinsteins’ fault – either way, I’ve enjoyed assembling the pieces in my mind, dreaming my own Grandmaster.

Jiang, for instance, deserves his own entire movie:

by ·Comments Off on Some Television watched in 2013

Black Mirror season 1 (2011)

Sci-fi/political satire anthology written by Charlie Brooker.
Of course I was gonna watch this.

101: “In a few minutes the Prime Minister will perform an indecent act on your screen.” Prankster kidnaps a British princess, demanding only that the prime minister have sex with a pig on live television. Sounds like the series is getting off to a ridiculous start, but with Charlie’s knowledge of media and politics, it’s a finely detailed story, with humor and tension in equal measure. PM Rory Kinnear was in the last couple of Bond movies.

102: Bing (Daniel Kaluuya of Kick-Ass 2) lives in a Pumzi world, spending his days stationary-bicycling to power whatever complex they all live inside, and his evenings bombarded by shit television, spending cycle-earned credits to skip ads and change channels. A cyclist girl likes him, but he falls for another (Jessica Findlay, Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey) and pays all his credits for her to get a shot on a singing competition show. After getting his dreams dashed by her treatment on the show (I did not realize Rupert Everett was one of the judges), Bing schemes to go back on the show himself, armed with a shard of glass from a shattered screen, speaking truth to the show’s viewers under threat of suicide. Bing is a hit and is offered his own show where he does this weekly, while back on the bike room people purchase “bing shard” to ornament their avatars.

103: Post-google-glass, people have a “grain” in their neck that records everything they see and hear all the time, and works as a DVR of their lives, which they can replay privately or stream onto a nearby TV. Toby Kebbell (in The East this year) is boring everyone by stressing over his latest work evaluation, while his wife (Jodie Whittaker, O’Toole’s crush in Venus, irritable white woman in Attack the Block) is concealing an affair with Tom Cullen (Lady Mary’s wide-mouthed love interest at the start of Downton season 4). Jealousy, threats and much creepy in-eye playback follows.

Paranoia Agent (2004, Satoshi Kon)

A supernatural mystery story that branches and builds, then goes bloody insane for a while, then starts to fall apart, then is revealed to have been one massive hallucination, the first “victim” of Shounen Bat having created him psychosomatically. It’s more complicated than that, though – there’s a whole episode about neighborhood women making up Shounen Bat stories they “heard”, a behind-the-scenes episode about a doomed cartoon series, an internet suicide club, a video game-fantasy cop, not one but two mysterious/magic elderly people, and a city-devouring black blob.

Look Around You season 2 (2005)

The fake-science show steps up its game for the second season. Wasn’t sure I liked the changes at first, but the episodes are less isolated here, building to a fantastic conclusion. Always nice to see Nick Frost and Mark Heap as well.

Special appearance by Tchaikovsky:

Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955)

Orson does a quick sketch, then tells a story for fifteen minutes or so, illustrating as needed. This used to be all that was needed for a TV program. Long intro about props and sketches, then stories of his beginnings in theater. In the second one he discusses a Boston performance gone bad, then “the negro Macbeth,” during which a racist critic was killed by a voodoo curse. In #3 Orson claims to have helped bring a brutal cop to justice after hearing the story of his beating a soldier into blindness. He continues on the topics of passports and authority into a great ending. #4 tells a comic story about Charles Lederer, then Houdini and magic tricks and John Barrymore. #5 is about how he scared everyone with his War of the Worlds broadcast, and #6 is a great bullfighting story.

At this point Katy and I are still in the middle of Dollhouse 2, Downton 4 and Sports Night 2, and I’ve started some Important Things and Futurama episodes and a miniseries on silent films called Hollywood. Chances of finishing any of these soon are looking slim.