by ·Comments Off on Design For Living (1933, Ernst Lubitsch)

An explosion of big names: Lubitsch (just off Trouble In Paradise) and Ben Hecht (between Scarface and Twentieth Century) adapting playwright Noel Coward, starring a young Gary Cooper, the great Miriam Hopkins, and Fredric March (The Best Years of Our Lives). Not actually a pre-code movie, but I guess the code wasn’t too strict in its early days, because it certainly plays like one. So it’s a saucy, delightfully-written love-triangle movie – and I enjoyed it but didn’t love it, trying to remember the whole time where I read that quote saying the art of cinema died when sound was invented and movies became stagey dramas featuring actors standing around talking to each other.

Playwright March and painter George awaken in their train car to find beautiful advertising designer Miriam, who decides she likes them both and comes to live with them (all these aspiring American artists in Paris reminds one of An American In Paris). The arrangement stays semi-platonic until March gets a play produced and moves away, so now Miriam is with Gary. Then she ends up with March somehow, I forget, but at some point she leaves them both for dreary E. Everett Horton, then ends up in her March and Cooper threesome again at the end. It’s really a four-person movie – fifth-billed is Preston Sturges regular Franklin Pangborn, who only has a few lines as March’s producer.

by ·Comments Off on Television 2013

Downton Abbey season 3
Please tell me something will prevent season four from ever happening, and the series will forever end with the shameful scene concluding the “Christmas episode”, the death of Matthew Crawley, who suddenly thinks himself too good to appear in a smash-hit show alongside Maggie Smith.

Parks & Recreation season 4
The Leslie-running-for-city-council season, versus Paul Rudd as an idiot millionaire and his ruthless campaign manager Kathryn Hahn. Entertainment 7Twenty goes out of business and Tom briefly quits the parks dept. Leslie wins despite a different mini-scandal every episode. Ron loves riddles.

I watched Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life and loved it (the re-enactments are better than ever, and there’s a slightly Adam Curtis tone to the commentary), then anxiously waited a few months until his Screenwipe review of 2012 came out (haha, “real life Titanic“), then that wasn’t enough so I watched his 2007 and 2010 specials, and some Christmas 2006 thing which is apparently different from the 2006 review special, then his new weekly TV show premiered – and abruptly ended after six episodes (the last of which was a clip show!). Must everything in Britain, even current-affairs shows, last only six episodes? Apparently he’s got a new scripted show called A Touch of Cloth.

Also rewatching The Wire with Katy – we’re up to season 3.

by ·Comments Off on Bernie (2011, Richard Linklater)

Feels a bit like The Informant!: a small-scope crime story with a nice fellow who becomes a criminal without losing our sympathy. Jack Black reigns it in, and even Shirley MacLaine, playing a crazy-mean old rich lady, doesn’t get to go gonzo, Linklater trying to keep anything from playing too Meet The Parents-broad. McConaughey arguably reigns it in too much, barely registering as himself. Katy didn’t love it, but dug the appearance of “76 Trombones”.

by ·Comments Off on Juliet of the Spirits (1965, Federico Fellini)

My first time watching this one, which is like a full-color, freakier 8 1/2 from the point of view of the director’s neglected wife (played by the director’s neglected wife, Giulietta Masina). Her husband has a much smaller role, not Mastroianni-worthy, merely Mario Pisu (Gloria Morin’s man in 8 1/2). Giulietta’s friends Valentina Cortese (Thieves’ Highway, Day for Night) and especially Sandra Milo (also a sexpot in 8 1/2 and Il Generale Della Rovere) lead her into temptation. Meanwhile, as per the title, a seance has opened her connection to the spirit world, leaving viewers like me unable to tell movie-spirit from movie-reality.

First wide/color movie watched on the Big New TV – lovely! I’ll have to find a way to capture screenshots while watching these. Next time around I’ll report more details – this viewing was just for sensual immersion.

J. Baxter for Criterion:

If the success of the psychoanalytical 8 1/2 persuaded him of anything, it was the need to examine even more thoroughly the sources of his creativity, which lay in dreams, and in his ambiguous sexuality.

by ·Comments Off on Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006, Bobcat Goldthwait)

Or “this dog blowjob movie,” as the movie’s own writer/director calls it. Sadly no major Bobcat cameo in this one. Supposedly he plays Roy Orbison towards the end, having sex with the protagonist’s mom in flashback, but not recognizably. Katy says the movie’s ultimate message, that truth is overrated and secrets should be kept from loved ones for their own good, is pretty common these days and not as subversive as Bobcat and I think.

Happy family + boyfriend – fuckup brother:

Amy invites her fiancee to her parents’ house for the usual awkward-family comedy setup – though usually there isn’t a racist meth-addicted brother (Jack Plotnick, star of Wrong) who goes to prison at the end of the movie, causing his mother to have a fatal aneurysm. Before all the prison and death, Amy and her man are having a “you can tell me anything” moment and he doesn’t take her confession well, plus the brother overhears and blabs to everyone.

brother + Posehn:

It’s not generally a laugh-out-loud comedy, but towards the end as Amy is dealing with her breakup, her mom’s death, brother’s imprisonment and dad’s unforgiving attitude, Brian Posehn stops by her place with just the best scene, saying a string of awkwardly terrible things. He and Amy’s father Geoff Pierson (my favorite Goldthwait actor, also playing authority figures in the other two recent ones) are highlights.

by ·Comments Off on Coming Attractions and other shorts

Coming Attractions (2010, Peter Tscherkassky)

Wow. Footage from advertising shoots repurposed by the master of footage-repurposing. He fashions a series of mini-movies using different techniques, each with its own title card. Possibly his best, or at least, his funniest film.

PT: “The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film.”

Depart de Jerusalem en tracteur:

Cubbhist Cinema #3:

Le Sang d’un poeme:

Cubist Cinema #1:

Swimmer (2012, Lynne Ramsay)

Young man swims and walks through a bunch of other movies (through their music and dialogue, anyway) in lovely black-and-white slow motion. There is some bow-and-arrow shooting, a favorite thing of Ramsay’s.

Drool (2011, Jeremiah Kipp & The Mandragoras Project)

A boy and a girl are covered in drool, slithering about in a white room. The bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises as a twisted love story, then swallowed and spit back out. Only four minutes long and still the slimiest movie I have ever seen.

Crestfallen (2011, Jeremiah Kipp)

Woman committing suicide in fancy bathtub flashes back to cheating husband, then flashes back to her young daughter and decides to live. Beautifully shot, with sweet music by Harry Manfredini. My favorite of the three dialogue-free shorts I’ve seen from Kipp… the third being Contact, which I watched again today – such an impressive little movie that I’m sorry I knocked the sound design last time I watched it.

by ·Comments Off on Attenberg (2010, Athina Tsangari)

Marina (Ariane Labed, gymnast of Alps) listens to Suicide, loves documentarian David Attenborough, is trying to figure out her own sexuality, spends time with her sick father. She does Monty Python silly walks and practices french-kissing with her friend Bella, and eventually hooks up with a beardy foosball-playing engineer with similar music tastes (Giorgos Lanthimos, dir. of Alps and Dogtooth).

Marina and Bella:

Tsangari:

I’m an avid, passionate admirer of all things Attenborough, I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl. He’s near and detached at the same time, like melodrama, as I call it. It really suits me as an aesthetic. He’s so gracious and has so much tenderness towards nature and his subjects. It’s a big example to me, in how to approach characters in cinema.

Completely delightful movie with great (or greatly-translated) dialogue and unusual movements. Marina talks explicitly about sex and cremation with her disillusioned architect father (“I’m boycotting the 20th century. It’s overated, and I’m not at all sorry to leave it.”) and eventually sends her slutty friend Bella to his hospital room to sleep with him. The movie starts out loony then tightens focus around his death towards the second half. NYTimes explains: “The deadpan stylization of Attenberg is a distancing device, or, more precisely, a sidelong path toward real, earned feeling.”

Marina and father:

Tsangari in Cinema Scope:

For me, it was crucial that the father-daughter relationship was one where both parties were trying to make it more equal. They were trying to negotiate the curse of the family tyranny … Our work was pure voice, pure body, pure language. I am not interested in Method acting, bringing in back story, talking about psychology. I worked with the cast as if the script was found footage and we had to re-enact it knowing nothing about its origins and its embedded meaning.

Tsangari was a producer on Dogtooth and Alps, and has a new short called The Capsule. She also appeared in Slacker and oversaw projections for the Athens Olympics. This won a couple awards at Venice, losing the big prize to Somewhere.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Left His Will On Film (1970, Nagisa Oshima)

A closed loop of a movie, unusual for Oshima in that you can guess where the story is going and how it will end, but there’s plenty of engaging craziness in between. Opens with a handheld shot of two people fighting over a camera. Someone with a camera suicides off a building, the cops apparently have taken the camera, and Motoki wakes up with his friends (or comrades – they seem to be a political media collective).

Nobody else seems to know anything about anyone jumping off any buildings, just that police attacked while the group was filming a protest in the park and took their camera, and Motoki had bravely tried to reclaim it (though they chide him for having a sense of private property about the group’s camera). Motoki swears to Yasuko that her boyfriend Endo killed himself this morning – though Endo was in the room with them all a few minutes before. Then he rapes Yasuko – why? A “seventh art series” video essay I found says that she was always his girlfriend, but when Motoki doesn’t seem to remember this she plays along, agreeing that she dates Endo.

He and Yasuko start acting like a couple, screen footage of seemingly random locations shot by another group member then set out to find these locations, each starting to “remember” events that may not have happened, and denying events that did. “The stupid asshole who made that movie didn’t exist!” Motoki seems to accidentally find his own parents’ house while reverse-location-scouting. He sets out to shoot the same landscapes in order to become the other cameraman, and Motoki stands in every shot, ending up hurt or raped each time. Finally we see a POV shot of the group confronting him to return their camera, and he runs – but in front of the handheld camera, as if there are two of him. Atop a building, Motoki appears, blocking his way back down, so he jumps – then we see a hand pick up his camera and run with it.

C. Fujiwara, in an excellent article on Moving Image Source:

The sense that The Man Who Left His Will on Film has come after something else, in a “post” period, is explicit in the Japanese title, Tokyo senso sengo hiwa, which means “Secret Story of the Period after the Tokyo War.” “Tokyo War” refers to the mass protests in November 1969 against Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato’s visit to the United States. This war is assuredly and emphatically not “the War” that serves as the main historical landmark for characters in other Oshima films, providing a (false) explanation and excuse for their actions (as with the officials in Death by Hanging and the father in Boy [1969]). The Man Who Left His Will on Film places itself within a later history, one perhaps not yet readable at the time it was made.

by ·Comments Off on Ronin Gai (1990, Kazuo Kuroki)

Random samurai movie watched on Criterion’s Hulu channel when it was free for a week – thought I’d pick something unlikely to come out on DVD anytime soon, since I’d never heard of the movie or director. It was surprisingly excellent, with assured, quality filmmaking and an exciting, complicated story – handily better than the Samurai trilogy.

1836: Bull, rough-looking with short black beard, is an ex-samurai so poor he lets people beat him up for money. He, drunken pimp Gennai and slightly more respectable Horo end up drinking together after a fight had seemed inevitable, turns out they’re all in love with one of the bar girls Oshin. Now, it gets a bit hard to follow because the main girls in the film are named Oshin, Osen, Obun, Otoku and Oyo – I tried to remember Osen as the “o-girl” for about ten minutes before realizing my mistake.

A dead woman is discovered:

Anyway, everyone is poor, struggling to survive in general, but now a group of rich moralists are killing girls every night. Bull acts as the women’s caretaker, is teaching them to read, and takes the murders very personally. And all the men would like to join the local clan, because then they’d get a salary. Local birdseller Doi’s sister Obun goes to the clan bosses to interfere in her brother’s behalf, essentially joins the prostitutes. Gennai starts dallying with rich clan woman Oyo, and Bull gets a job as a “dog”, servant to one of the seven asshole clansmen who turn out to be the murderers, eventually kills Oyo for his master. The clansmen decide to rip Oshin apart with bulls attached to ropes, and somehow the other two guys find out in time, come over and kill about fifty guys in the big climactic battle. Bull isn’t gonna get an easy out after slaying that woman, stabs through himself to kill his master. Postscript: Oshin leaves town with Gennai, Obun takes over the bar, and all surviving clan samurai are asked to commit harakiri for disgracing the shogun.

Oshin, about to be rescued:

Bull killing his master:

Director Kuroki died in 2006, made Evil Spirits of Japan in 1970. From the screenwriter of the Yakuza Papers series, based on a novel previously adapted in the 1920’s as a whole series of films. Nominated for a pile of Japanese academy awards, mostly beaten by Shinoda’s Childhood Days and Kohei Oguri’s The Sting of Death (though they also nominated Die Hard 2 for best foreign film, so it’s not clear they can be trusted).

Shintaro Katsu (Bull)’s final film – he was Zatoichi, Hanzo the Razor, and star of Man Without a Map. Gennai was Yoshio Harada, also of Manji and Farewell to the Ark. Young Oshin was Kanako Higuchi, the young painter’s mom in Achilles and the Tortoise, Obun was Kaoru Sugita, Sho Aikawa’s wife in Dead or Alive and Otoku was Moeko Ezawa of Kitano’s Getting Any?