by ·Comments Off on Gimme Danger (2016, Jim Jarmusch)

Intriguing structure for a rock doc, skipping the band’s rise and opening with their downfall and breakup. When the opening titles hit, the band is over and all its members are living with their parents, then we restart the story from the beginning, leading to the triumphant reunion. Mostly just the band members talking, then when they get dropped from their label we get a nice montage of more popular groups covering their songs. So, no innovative film but it’s a pleasure to spend so much time with Iggy Pop (“In the Ashetons I found primitive man”).

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Strummer (1993)

SD handicam mini-doc covering Joe and team mixing the soundtrack for Sara Driver’s When Pigs Fly. “Computers have ruined the kind of music I like. Ultimate control, that’s what people want.” One scene is just Jarmusch recounting his favorite jokes from This is Spinal Tap.

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French Water (2021)

Fashion ad starring Julianne Moore and Chloe Sevigny, lost at a party after hours, and a randomly materializing Charlotte Gainsbourg. The music was good, at least.

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Jim Jarmusch & Jozef Van Wissem: The Sun of the Natural World is Pure Fire (2012)

People in frilly pajamas float in the river, while one guitarist plucks gentle melodies and the other plays feedback. The music was good, at least.

by ·Comments Off on Jean Painleve shorts

The Fourth Dimension (1936)

Right after I watch the movie Deja Vu there’s a “Deja Vu” title card in It’s Not Me, then the first Painleve film I find is showing time as an image flipbook and imagining that higher-dimensional beings can change pages at will. Pretty dry science film but it’s fun that scientists have always been excited about time travel.

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The Octopus (1927)

Pretty random assortment of live and dead octopus…
Great doc, because octupusus are great.

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Sea Urchins (1929)

More cool sea creatures which become increasingly disturbing as you learn more about them, zooming into their spiny surface to discover a horrid living forest of waggling suckers and claws

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Daphnia (1928)

Nothing cool or cute about the microshrimp “water fleas,” ghastly transparent insectoid monsters, silently battling their nemesis The Hydra by the million in every lake and pond.

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Freshwater Assassins (1947)

This one has sound – enjoy some swinging horn jazz while underwater insects munch on even smaller insects, 24 minutes of weird shrimpies chowing down on each other.

by ·Comments Off on Deja Vu (2006, Tony Scott)

Denzel investigates a terror-bombing, focusing on a dead hotgirl (Ghost Protocol‘s Paula Patton) who apparently died before the explosion. He meets twenty round-faced white guys who all look the same, then gets pulled into a super-surveillance team with a magic technology that can see anywhere in the city four-and-a-quarter days ago, so they track Paula’s past in hopes of finding the bomber. This works out, but Denzel realizes he can influence the past through their portal and tries to stop the bombing before it happens.

“We’re combining all the data we’ve got into one fluid shot” – Scott loves a fluid shot. Branching universe theory: “is she alive or is she dead?” Some excellent pre-Tenet mind-twisters, including an incredible car chase where Denzel sees the current time through one eye and the past in the other.

Featuring Jesus Caviezel as the mad bomber, Adam Goldberg as the Jon-Wurstery scientist, Matt Craven as Denzel’s doubly-doomed partner. I worried this would be a dumb/bad movie reclaimed by the vulgar auteurists, but I have to admit it’s extremely awesome and I had the best time watching it.

Huber and Peranson in Cinema Scope (see also: John and Jake):

Deja Vu is upfront about the questionable nature of the whole government-funded enterprise; this is not about clearing your name (as in [Minority Report]). Saving the woman being watched, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), is not the goal, rather trailing her past will help the agents solve a terrorist bombing with echoes of both 9/11 and Oklahoma City. The projected futility of the investigation’s outcome for Claire makes Carlin’s obsession with her all the more poignant, but like in Vertigo the voyeuristic and necrophiliac aspects of his romantic feelings are foregrounded. “I get the weird feeling I’m being watched,” reads an entry in Claire’s diary after an uncomfortable Jumbotron-surveyed shower … More effective is his touching prior assertion to Claire: “Don’t you remember we held hands once?” It is also quite sinister, since this happened during her autopsy.

by ·Comments Off on Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Realtor Yang Kuei-mei (The Hole‘s downstairs resident) brings home her Eat Drink Man Woman costar Chen Chao-jung from the mall, and while she’s occupied, passerby Lee steals her house key. Now all three of them live part-time in the same apartment, semi-aware of each other. Nobody really feels great about any of this, or about their jobs or anything else.

Does all their work seem scammy, or do movies make all businesses look scammy? This won the Golden Horse (over Eat Drink and Chungking Express) and the top prize at Venice (tied with Before the Rain, over Heavenly Creatures and Ashes of Time), beating two different Wong Kar-Wai movies within three months.

by ·Comments Off on The Green Ray (1986, Eric Rohmer)

Marie Rivière (marriage-plotter of Autumn Tale) gets into a series of awkward social situations, some of them self-caused (she’s a preachy vegetarian), while increasingly feeling that her summer vacation is slipping away.

Won the Venice Golden Lion, same year as The Beekeeper and A Room With a View. I should have realized Green Flash Brewing is named after the same phenomenon. I didn’t love this as much as others seem to, but Jake and Lawrence wrote good justifications for its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on The Target Shoots First (2000, Christopher Wilcha)

Opens with Wilcha getting a marketing job with Columbia House because he understands the Nirvana phenomenon, ends with Wilcha quitting in the wake of Cobain’s death. In between he tries to reconcile his alt-punk roots with his corporate environment, spearheading a sardonic issue of their marketing catalog. Watched in prep for his latest, Flipside.

by ·Comments Off on Timestalker (2024, Alice Lowe)

Nobody really liked this, but I, a renowned Alice Lowe enjoyer, will surely like it. She keeps dying for the same guy then being reborn, like dumb The Beast. It has hardly any good jokes, then her 1980s fortune teller says maybe instead of dying for him over and over, it’s his turn to die, but it still takes forever to get to the end. And come to think of it I didn’t really like Prevenge – I was thinking of Sightseers. That one’s good.

by ·Comments Off on The Night Visitors (2023, Michael Gitlin)

Onscreen text, echoey voice clips, gentle electro music with handclap percussion, poetry, research – all presented as weirdly as possible. Focused primarily on being weird, secondarily on moths. Takes a long sidetrack to make fun of a Poe story, and another to discuss the dumbass scientist who imported the mega-destructive spongy (nee-gypsy) moths from Europe.