by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

by ·Comments Off on Red Rooms (2023, Pascal Plante)

Coolly obsessive Kelly-Anne camps outside the courthouse every night to attend a serial killer’s trial, along with very-uncoolly obsessive Clementine, who’s crushing on the killer. K-A bonds somewhat with Clem, as much as she can bond with anyone, since she’s a probable psychopath and we’re given little clue about her motivation. Her modeling job and her online gambling are all put at risk by the case, as she becomes a newsworthy attendee then a secret participant. She maybe has a change of heart at the end or maybe had a master plan all along, hard to tell. I thought of Serpent’s Path, with its torture/murder video producers destroying each other while manipulated by an outsider.

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2019/2024

It’s the sixth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

South Terminal (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
The Science of Fictions (Yosep Anggi Noen)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
Technoboss (João Nicolau)
Twelve Thousand (Nadège Trébal)
Isadora’s Children (Damien Manivel)
Echo (Rúnar Rúnarsson)
A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler & Henner Winckler)
Maternal (Maura Delpero)
Endless Night (Eloy Enciso)
A Girl Missing (K?ji Fukada)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
Bird Island (Maya Kosa & Sérgio da Costa)
The Tree House (Minh Quý Tr??ng)
Oroslan (Matjaž Ivanišin)
Nafi’s Father (Mamadou Dia)
Overseas (Sung-a Yoon)
Ivana the Terrible (Ivana Mladenovi?)
Here for Life (Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Adrian Jackson)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Adoration (Fabrice Du Welz)
Vagenda Stories (Natascha Beller)

Concorso Shorts

Carne (Camila Kater)
In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)
Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)
White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Giraffe (Anna Sofie Hartmann)
Felix in Wonderland (Marie Losier)
Wilcox (Denis Côté)

Moving Ahead (new forms and innovation)

Krabi, 2562 (Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong)
Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland)
The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary)
Distancing (Miko Revereza)
Lore (Sky Hopinka)
Un film dramatique (Eric Baudelaire)
Tourism Studies (Joshua Gen Solondz)
Color-Blind (Ben Russell)

by ·Comments Off on Krabi, 2562 (2019, Anocha Suwichakornpong & Ben Rivers)

Laconically follows a few main-ish characters: a visiting actor on an advertising shoot and an unrelated location scout, and locals such as a tour guide, a retired cinema worker, and a caveman. Their little barely-narratives intermingle with ghosts and legends and interviews with the real(?) people involved. I liked it – even more so after reading Michael Sicinski’s writeup.

by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

–
Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

–
In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

–
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

–
Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

–
White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

–
Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on The Science of Fictions (2019, Yosep Anggi Noen)

Some poor guy “went to a forbidden place” involving a fake moon lander and got his tongue cut out, now thinks about outer space and moves in slow-motion (perfect scenario for a severe 4:3 b/w mastershot festfilm). Soon as he gets back his mom dies, but Siman works hard despite his speed condition, makes a small fortune, apparently travels through time (and through color + aspect ratios; I can’t tell when different scenes are set), and builds himself a spaceship-shaped house out of broken appliances.

The director’s latest is a D.O.A.-style mystery that nobody is watching on netflix. Lead guy starred in Noen’s Solo, Solitude, a couple other actors were in Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Later that night I unpaused the first episode of MST3K season 4 on my laptop, and the first line I heard was “poor bastard thinks he’s a spaceman,” which is proof that I’m living in a simulation.

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)

Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.

Shot:

Reverse shot:

“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.

From Bamako to Dead Man:

by ·Comments Off on House of 1000 Corpses (2003, Rob Zombie)

Tourists stop at Captain Spaulding’s then foolishly decide to check out the nearby grounds of the Dr. Satan killings. Momma Karen Black was delightful – don’t think I knew who she was last time I saw this.

RIP Jennifer Jostyn (The Brothers McMullen), Rainn Wilson (Super), and the cooler and less condescending Chris Hardwick (RZ’s Halloween II). Final (but still doomed) girl Erin Daniels was on The L Word, her also-doomed dad played a cop in Humanoids from the Deep (alongside Deputy Walt Goggins), and Sheriff Tom Towles (Fortress) will sorta have his revenge in part two.

by ·Comments Off on Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)

Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”