Long wikipedia-caliber intro with narration by Jeff Bridges (haha). He shouldn’t have compared CCR’s sales records to the Beatles in the intro then followed with a bunch of interview and tour diary clips where they are infinitely less witty and charismatic than the Beatles. But after a half hour of this feature-length stretching-out, the April 1970 concert begins and is pure fire.
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Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen (2012, György Pálfi)
Even more so than the Bouquets there’s no point in getting screenshots of this one: a generic boy-and-girl plot composed of shots from other movies. This is usually pretty nice and clever, a cute time waster, except in the “Put the Blame on Mame” musical montage when it is electrifying, with clever lipsync matching. The first movie Katy has watched/finished with me since Ren Faire, which was the first since May.
TV/Q3/2024
The Sympathizer (2024)
Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.
Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.
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Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)
Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.
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Painting With John season 3 (2023)
Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).
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Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)
101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.
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Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)
201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.
I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.
Rose Lowder’s Bouquets
Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995)
Excellent to see these with the intro by Gloria Vilches of a Barcelona film society, since she goes into Lowder’s history and filming methods – utilizing the 16mm bolex camera’s ability to advance or rewind to a specific frame and capture stills. So Lowder will shoot every other frame, then move to a new location and fill in the alternate frames, or any new pattern variation she thinks up on-location. Unusually for me, I’m watching these silent films without adding my own soundtrack, figuring they’re each one-minute complex creations and I need to pay strict attention.
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Poppies and Sailboats (2001)
From the Cinexperimentaux 5 disc – unfortunately the poppy field does not hold up under DVD compression, but this is the easiest way to catch on to the perceptual experiments. With an even blend of poppy frames and sailboat frames, the boats are sailing through the flowers. Start to adjust the rhythms and you get something else, a harder flicker or a poppy field with sailboat ghosts.
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Bouquets 11-20 (2005-2009)
Less interleaving, more slow/fast and even real-time focus on single moments, more attention paid to flying and walking creatures.
Rewatched these while reading her notebooks, less for the frame-by-frame structure of each piece than for the context and location (mostly small French organic farms). She emphasized that the films aren’t structually pre-planned, that the notebooks are documents of the filmmaking decisions that have already been made
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Bouquets 31-40 (2014-2022)
The online copy of 21-30 isn’t great, skipping for now. I’d like to hear how her definition of a Bouquet has changed, because for instance Bouquet 1 (rapid flicker of beachy fauna/flora) isn’t so similar to Bouquet 40 (long take of a leather worker with a chicken credits stinger). The Light Cone notes are detailed, revealing that some Bouquets are sequels to previous episodes, and also that the chickens at the end of #40 were eaten soon afterwards by a fox.
Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope 96:
Lowder creates constantly modulating patterns of outrageous intricacy. A more sustained accounting of these films would require taking their reels in hand and working frame by frame. While this would make available a more detailed description, it would not help with the fact that language requires placing one word after another, a process that plays out in a kind of time that is entirely remote from Lowder’s striving towards simultaneity – a richness of experience that is, for her, true realism. The images that we see in films such as the Bouquets, in some sense, don’t exist.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)
Environmentalism, nuclear power, aging and death and forgetting, found sounds as music, notes that sustain eternally and notes that don’t. He goes to the north pole to examine global warming effects, and records sounds of melting snow. Sakamoto has scored some great and less-great films, and not being a big soundtrack listener I don’t know his work well, so I started playing his albums (including the glitch-ambient Insen and cool 1980s Esperanto) in prep for the VR Big Ears concert which was quietly canceled after he passed away.
Ghosts of Mars (2001, John Carpenter)
I had rewatched O Brother and La Samourai the same week I saw a Rohmer movie and two by Claire Denis, so needed to counterbalance all that good art somehow. Between the hokey miniatures, the CG projectiles, instru-metal soundtrack, Star Trek-caliber fight scenes, the dodgy editing and cliche dialogue it does have all the marks of a Bad Movie, but the lead baddie’s babytalk gibberish barking has stuck with me over the years, and “Hellraiser In Space” is one of my favorite genres, and it’s a John Carpenter movie about a group of cops and criminals who come under assault in a precinct, so perhaps it’s actually good? I’m here to tell you that it’s not good.
Natasha “Species” Henstridge becomes team leader after Pam Grier is beheaded, assisted by rookie Jason Statham. The team’s mission before getting derailed by alien assault was to escort dangerous prisoner Ice Cube to a different facility, but of course it becomes necessary for cops and crooks to team up for survival against the invaders – who are not aliens really, but self-mutilating zombie humans a la Return of the Living Dead 3 led by the Marilyn Mansonesque Richard Cetrone (the merman in Cabin in the Woods), possessed by the spirits of the planet’s native inhabitants as a defense against colonizers.
Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:
Carpenter goes for an ambitious but not entirely successful mash-up of his earlier works … The film’s otherwise standard action template is given weirdly dreamlike shape through flashback-within-flashback narration and surreal superimpositions, to the point that it feels like a dirge for a type of filmmaking gone out of fashion. Even the KISS-style monster makeup confirms that nothing has changed since the ’80s, the red hell of Martian future just an apocalyptic projection of the capitalist wasteland we’ve been speeding into since the days of Reaganomics.
Subject (2022, Hall & Tiexiera)
A doc about docs and their fallout. The women who were teens when The Staircase was made about their family feel doubly exploited when The Staircase 2 comes out… a star of Hoop Dreams was one of the few participants covered here to profit from the film’s receipts and merch… Bing Liu’s family therapy in Minding the Gap somewhat backfired… Capturing The Friedmans guy wants to escape the shadow of the movie. Sometimes we’re just catching up with a subject later (The Wolfpack). After each example, a small team of scolds points out that there is no way to ethically create or consume art.
Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron)
“They all hate the gun they hire.” Second-person narrator, unusually well-written, puts us in hit man Frankie’s shoes as he gets a Christmastime job to kill a mustache guy with two bodyguards. First he has to deal with Ralph the beardo gun salesman (later of Shock Corridor). He goes to old flame Lori’s house on xmas (she’s Matt Dillon’s mom in The Flamingo Kid) but has no idea how to behave with a lady. Our killer is an out of towner, only knows 2 or 3 people in NYC but keeps bumping into them – this could have been easily avoidable by switching up his patterns. He gets his man, but messily, and doesn’t escape the city. Writer/director/star Baron went on to direct episodes of every 1970s TV show.
The Music Room (1958, Satyajit Ray)
Movie about an unemployed homeowner who burns through his savings to watch live music – I cannot relate. Spends a fortune inviting musicians to play living room shows, and throwing parties to one-up the neighbors. Insists his family come back from an overseas trip to attend, then they die in a cyclone, so he spends four years in mourning/seclusion. When neighbor Gangapada Basu comes to invite him to a show at his own house, our guy Roy (Chhabi Biswas, also of Devi) suddenly reopens his own house, hires away the neighbor’s musician and steals his party. Roy gets to gloat one last time with the remains of his fortune, then having lived the dream, dies suddenly.
The song and dance scenes are especially good – here’s beardy Ujir Khan guy getting jazzy:
Roy smoking with the neighbor on his last day alive:
