by ·Comments Off on Here (2023, Bas Devos)

Two bearded guys head home from a construction site and alas, we follow the guy with the less interesting beard, who makes a stew of everything edible in his fridge, like we did after thanksgiving. Long-take, follow-cam, 4:3, meditative fest-film – too quiet and patient for Katy, who ditched after five minutes.

The guy is getting his car repaired for a trip to his mom’s house, where he’s hinting he might stay for a long period, and in the meantime he visits coworkers and friends and family, dropping off bowls of soup. People talk about plants, and their dreams, and eat soup. He meets a woman who studies moss (whose thoughts we’d heard in an earlier scene) at a restaurant, then sees his sister Anca, and briefly dreams the movie’s best scene: crossfades and focus pulls in the forest. When he runs into the moss woman a second time he drops everything to follow her for a quiet day in the woods before finally exiting Brussels (leaving behind soup for her).

Devos in Cinema Scope:

“What is it that I want to do? I think it came down to wanting to make films about people being relatively OK with each other, and making that into something challenging and exciting enough to stand on its own.”

by ·Comments Off on Reality Bites (1994, Ben Stiller)

Ahead-of-its-time parody of MTV’s The Real World, also predicts the Almereyda Hamlet with chilling accuracy. Ben Stiller would go on to direct Heat Vision and Jack, but he and Janeane would never again be as cute as they are here. Ethan would arguably be cuter in the Before movies and even Hamlet. Winona is so cute in this that she bends time and space, creating a continuum of cuteness (a cuteinuum) with her other movies, rendering their relative cutenesses impossible to rank. Every scene in this has one good thing about it and the rest is just okay.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched December 2024

L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?

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The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)

Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.

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Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)

The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.

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The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.

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Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.

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The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)

Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.

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Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)

She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.

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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)

The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?

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and some auteur music videos…

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)

The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.

New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)

The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).

The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)

The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.

The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)

Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.

Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)

Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China and America (1997, Sammo Hung)

Cheesy, stupid movie whenever anyone is talking, but it’s also the most handsome-looking one of these movies in a while, and Jet Li is back, and his and Clubfoot’s action scenes are hot. The action is chopped up more than usual, but it works, until it doesn’t. Music is hit or miss – playing the OUATIC theme on Western instruments is cool but sometimes the composer plays a choir on a sampling keyboard, which is less cool. Wong loses his memory on a trip to America, joins a native tribe and hooks up with Agent Tammy Preston (in her only acting role outside of Twin Peaks). Sammo sure is trying some things to revive the series, sometimes successfully, but goes too broad and ends up with anti-racism for babies, nowhere near the heights of his Millionaire’s Express.

Our guys are joined by Billy (stuntman Jeff Wolfe), far right:

by ·Comments Off on Curling (2010, Denis Côté)

Cote loves shallow-focus shots (so do I). Watching this reminds me that his covid movie came out a hundred years ago, and Soderbergh’s is still not out?

Odd-jobs guy is over-sheltering his 12 year-old. Each of them finds dead bodies in the snow and keeps it as a secret: dad hides his body in the abandoned motel like The Wire season 4 and the daughter hangs out and chats with hers in a frozen field. They seem nice.

Director and actor won prizes at Locarno, where it played with fellow chilly films Winter Vacation and Cold Weather.

Côté in Cinema Scope 44:

People ask me, “Why curling?” Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl. The moment he hears about curling, there’s a spark in his eyes – the only positive thing in his life during the whole film is curling … The film is very simple: how do you connect with the world of the living?

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.