by ·Comments Off on The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer)

Knew I should watch this but kept putting it off because I don’t need new ways to get depressed. Then I read this new Verso article and gave it a shot. Opens with a bang, the title slowly fading to black over a few minutes while Mica Levi’s crazymaking score drones and detunes.

The atmosphere (soldiers and smokestacks, constant half-heard sounds of horror) doesn’t get to anyone except Mrs. Hoss’s mom – in fact, Mrs. Hoss (Sandra Hüller) likes the house more than she likes her husband (Christian Friedel, star of Amour Fou and The White Ribbon), and when he’s transferred she doesn’t come along (“I’ll miss you, of course”).

Mr. Hoss’s new post:

Jake Romm in Verso:

The film is radically uninterested in its human subjects, which is part of why the constant critical invocations of Arendt’s banality of evil misses the mark. Höss, as many have pointed out, was not merely a “company man,” he was a committed Nazi — an early adopter, even — and a man who pursued his work with singular acumen. He is not a man who speaks or thinks only in cliché, who has subordinated his will or capacity for thought to the party. He is portrayed, rather, as a man with a unique genius and fervor for extermination, a quiet egomaniac with an investment in his work for reasons of personal satisfaction as well as professional and ideological reasons. But most of all, according to a letter of recommendation in the film, “He is a model settler farmer, and an exemplary German pioneer of the East”.
…
It is the Höss’s ownership of this nature, and the perversions of character such a nature produces, that are the subject of the film. Glazer’s formal choice to shoot the “action” by way of unobtrusive fixed cameras and microphones highlights the film’s impersonality. Characters move freely about the open spaces, filmed in wide angles as much to highlight the unimportance of the spaces’ human inhabitants as to give detail to the spaces themselves. We watch as if on a surveillance tape, an association that is almost literalized in the black and white night-vision interludes, in which a Polish servant furtively places apples in the dirt for Jewish slaves to find. Special equipment is required to film this act of solidarity and kindness: it is the negative image of the world, one which cannot be seen in the normal light of day.

A.A. Dowd killed it in his Vulture article about the movie’s ending.

The Zone of Interest presents Höss as a decidedly bureaucratic monster: the mass murderer as wormy careerist who sees the Holocaust — this unfathomable evil he’s directly committing — as a mere professional accomplishment … And so maybe what he’s seeing at the end of the hall is a future where no one appreciates what he’s done — not the technological ingenuity of his murders, not how efficiently the camp operated under his leadership. It’s his victims that people will come to Auschwitz to honor. He is a footnote on history, remembered as a mere cog of the death machine, if he’s remembered at all.

James Lattimer:

[Zone proves] his peerless control of the medium on the one hand while lacking most of the extra layers and spiraling messiness that made his previous works so rich. Although Glazer’s conceptual approach to depicting the Holocaust is typically astute, whereby the unrepresentable is kept strictly to the domain of the offscreen space, even the smartest of strategies begins to wear thin when applied largely without variation or development.

Train arriving just out of sight:

A.S. Hamrah:

The story turns into one we know. Daddy is promoted and the family will have to move out of their dream house, spoiling their happy life. This is the same plot as Vincente Minnelli’s Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis, filmed in Hollywood and released in American theaters during the exact same time frame in which The Zone of Interest takes place — 1943 and 1944.

by ·Comments Off on The Treasure (2015, Corneliu Porumboiu)

I was expecting pointless dreary toil – but remember, this is The Whistlers guy, not the Lazarescu guy or the Beyond the Hills guy – so they really do find treasure. Family man Costi is asked by neighbor Adrian who he barely knows if he’ll fund the neighbor’s treasure hunt in his family backyard. They hire a metal detector operator off the books and spend an entire day searching and digging. After they hit a metal box buried deep, the operator leaves and presumably calls the cops on them, but the Mercedes stock certificates within are grudgingly determined not to be of Romanian historical value and the men get to keep them. They’re millionaires, but Costi’s son is disappointed that the box just contained boring paper, so dad goes to a fancy jewelry store and buys enough pearls and gold to create a real treasure chest then lets the kids drag it all over the playground. Droll movie, and the end credits are somehow the best part as the camera swings up to the sun and blasts a Laibach song. Family man was also in Aferim! and Întregalde.

Began as a doc, but Porumboiu was disappointed that they didn’t find anything, so he kept the real setup and location, wrote a new ending, cast Adrian and the doc’s metal detector operator as themselves:

I was looking at the footage we shot and I had this strange feeling that we were lost in that garden, that it became this dark hole. In the beginning, the documentary was quite funny because Corneliu really screwed around with the machines and didn’t really know how they worked, so we were laughing – but after that, step by step, it grew sadder … [then in the fictional version] I wanted to have this sense of absurdity in the history. The characters speak about two revolutions, in the 1800s and the 1900s. I think Romania’s past is very fragmented. So they find something German … completely outside of their conception of the history of that place.

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

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Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

I’ve been biased against this movie since it first came out on video. At Georgia Tech anime kids would follow you around talking about anime, even if you don’t care about anime, as I did not, and Perfect Blue was their idea of a movie which would instantly convince the doubters. Nowadays I like anime just fine, including Satoshi Kon, whose Millennium Actress was good, and Paranoia Agent was incredible, so I finally gave this a chance. If anyone from Tech is reading… I’m sorry… I’m glad y’all have got your own Anime Fight Club, with its multiple-multiple personalities and identity twists and breakbeat soundtrack, but it’s not for me.

The words every girl wants to hear:

I can relate:

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

OK, boobs, I get it, we all love boobs. The most 1995 thing I’ve ever seen. The only thing I remembered from the VHS is that shot where the cyborg supersoldier pulls something so hard her arms come off, and it’s still the coolest thing here by far (the invisibility-suit effects also nice).

Android moral quandaries ripped from Robocop. It’s so talky in a self-important sci-fi cop-show way, but all this chatter is background noise to the actual plot (reminisce: Nemesis), which leads to a Lawnmower Man ending. The writer worked on Pistol Opera, which needs to come out on blu-ray.

This is who comes for you if you haven’t turned on multifactor authentication:

Jake Cole:

This really isn’t a thriller because the sporadic action merely punctuates a story that uses nearly every plot element as a macguffin to ruminate on the nature of identity and how technology alters our perception of self. The finale, in which a cyborg evolves to propagate itself, recasts the internet and global networking as the next stage of reproduction.

Adding this line to my resume:

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched June 2024

Sunflower Siege Engine (2023, Sky Hopinka)

“It’s time to go home and float breathlessly on currents of willow and pine.” Poetry and activism, photography and text, in a satisfying package. Love the nature with variable-color text overlay, less so when it changes mode to a laptop in dark room, since I am presently watching this short on another laptop in a dark room.

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E-Ticket (2019. Simon Liu)

A blast of images cut into strips, forming hypermotion image quilts – I loved it.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope – great article with an intro about lyrical films in general then following Liu’s career to this “relatively un-lyrical” short:

Liu pushes traditional image-making to the limit of legibility: the photographs are cut up and collaged, creating patterns of colour which dance in the manner of the visual music of 1930s and ’40s, while fragments of signifying material ranging across at least three continents flickers past, at times present onscreen for only the fraction of a second given over to each frame. What ultimately emerges, in contrast to the rapid movement through specific locations seen in the prior two films, is an abstract sense of global circulation as such, a fact of life in the age of air travel.

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Sun Song (2013, Joel Wanek)

Sun Ra gets the epigraph, but no song here: a silent bus trip, checking out light and faces and patterns. About as good as a silent doc filmed on a bus can be, I guess.

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Midnight (2024, Takashi Miike)

This is the best auteur-made phone ad yet, and the closest anyone’s gotten to touching Speed Racer in 15 years. The pure-imagination automobile action fares better than the human action scenes where the lead kids are supposed to be fighting off henchmen. Miike is adapting a Tezuka comic, cramming all the color and speed and story into a movie under the length of a Simpsons episode, and cutting to panels from the original drawings so you can see how faithful he’s being. Midnight is a psychic taxi driver who wears a mario hat and drives a souped-up supercar. He picks up a girl whose trucker father was murdered for his transit turf, and together they defeat transit gangsters led by a guy with an electroshock-blasting hand puppet.

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Pas de deux (1968, Norman McLaren)

Some of the best motion sculpture ever made, absolute loveliness. It almost loses a half-star because of the panpipes, but you can always mute those and watch it with a Bug Club album instead. Dancer in a black void is lit from the sides so her legs are only glowing outlines. Then she begins to multiply, leaving behind mario-kart ghost-riders that follow in her path. Future versions of her appear as poses for her to perfectly hit. She’s busy duplicating and mirroring when a new dancer appears, and together they leave incredible motion trails, as the camera gets ever closer to the action.

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Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969, Caroline Leaf)

Made entirely with black sand on white background, unbelievable. Peter hangs out with his friends crow, duck, and cat, but there’s a wolf on the loose – and the wolf seems to be aware that he’s made of sand, so his possibilities for disguise and escape are endless. I was prepared from the Suzie Templeton version to lose the duck, but now the wolf eats all three creatures, oh no. Peter sneaks up at night and demolishes it, somehow rescuing his buddies.

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I Met a Man (1991, Caroline Leaf)

A one-minute MTV short set to a not-very-MTV vocal song, illustrating a very windy day. Action-packed, impossible to convey through stills.

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Berlin Horse (1970, Malcolm Le Grice)

Footage of a silent film in which a horse runs in circles is processed in a multitude of ways, then split-screened with a variation of itself, out of sync. The music by Brian Eno is likewise running in circles and out of sync with itself, via editing or a delay pedal. I was going to calculate how many times you could watch Berlin Horse within the runtime of The Turin Horse, but watching it more than once in a row might drive a person mad, so maybe not.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

Someone’s four-legged friend runs round and round a small corral … until time slips a gear and the world bursts into flame. Horse becomes horses, white horse, black horses, shadows and negatives, looping and layered. A zoetrope, a merry-go-round, then the colours kick in: Muybridge on mushrooms.

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Visitation (2013, Suzan Pitt)

I really don’t know. There’s a poem of apocalyptic prophecy at the top and tail… shadow people and light people… a horse processing plant… a woman’s head cooked in the oven… closeups of shifting patterns over clattering percussion.

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The Dentist (1932, Leslie Pearce)

WC Fields kills a guy golfing then throws a tantrum, throwing his clubs and caddy into the pond, being a real asshole to everybody. Trying to keep patients at his dentist’s office while preventing his daughter from going out to meet the iceman. Filmed before Hollywood figured out that boom mics have shadows… I’ve seen Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist II, and it’s been a while but I don’t believe the two are very similar.

with patient Billy Bletcher (Owl Jolson’s dad in I Love to Singa):

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The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)

Finally we get to the WC Fields short with the best title, and it’s a different kind of silly movie than the others, awkward and unusual, drawing attention to its artifice. There’s no straight man here, everybody’s bizarre. He’s in an snowy fishing cabin, receives a friendly visit from a policeman, serenades him by playing a zither while wearing mittens – we see the song visualised, about a young man who drinks the fatal(?) glass then gets his face kicked by a salvation army girl. Fields takes his sled dogs home to his wife. Their son Chester comes home from jail, and after everyone has talked themselves in circles, they throw him out again.

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L’X Noir (1916, Leonce Perret)

The mysterious Black X is a New York diamond dealer by day, pestering rich women. He’s a criminal master of disguise with an undercover league of henchmen, but the first lady we see him try to rob spots him waving his X-flag around, then ties him up and gets help. Story ends with him escaping comfortably, setting up a franchise that never came. This is fine – I’d have rather folllowed the continuing exploits of resourceful rich lady Valentine Petit, who out-acts contemporary stars here, than loser X.

Silent, I played the new On Ka’a Davis album. Perret was a Feuillade accomplice (no surprise there) who worked into the sound era.

Tying a timecoded X to the bed by his neck:

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Max’s Holiday (1914, Max Linder)

Max has just been married in secret, and his new wife is excessively sad that he’s leaving to hang out with a bachelor uncle, so he helps her stow away in his train car then his suitcase. At the train station every extra looks into the camera… I don’t think they were extras, that must’ve been a real train station. Max continues stuffing the wife into uncomfortable places, then when they’re discovered he finally just tells the uncle he got married and he’s fine with it.

Linder was a comic film star before Arbuckle or Chaplin got into he movies, and 1914 was said to be his creative height before he went to serve in WWI. Lightly charming, can’t say I’m running off to get the blu-ray of his complete works, but can’t say I won’t consider it if the price comes down.

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The Water Nymph (1912, Mack Sennett)

This was the very start of Sennett’s Keystone Studios, when Mack was his own leading man. I like him, he looks like a Bob Odenkirk character. The gag is that before introducing his new girlfriend Mabel Normand to his parents, she’s going to hit on his dad at the beach. Everyone in this behaves like they’re eight years old.

by ·Comments Off on In Our Day (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

I watched this the same night as In Water just because they’re recent Hong movies with short runtimes, not looking for connections, but I noted characters saying “I’ll do my best / let’s do our best” in both movies. Two separate-but-similar three-person situations with no direct intersection, cutting back and forth between them, each chapter with a preceding descriptive intertitle like it’s a Dickens chapter.

1. Actress Kim Min-hee is staying with friend Song Sun-mi (also Kim’s friend in The Woman Who Ran), when young aspiring actress Park Mi-so comes for a visit/interview.

2. Older Gi Ju-bong (the dad in Hotel by the River) is a belatedly popular poet, Kim Seung-yun is at his place filming candid scenes for a documentary on him, aspiring poet Ha Seong-guk comes to visit/interview (these two costarred in In Water).

Different sorts of dramas ensue – in the first, the host’s cat escapes and the visitor helps recover him. In the second, the visitor is trying to kiss up and stay longer and helps the newly on-the-wagon poet get boozed up.

by ·Comments Off on In Water (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

The one where the shots are out of focus. This is bearable because the movie’s only an hour long, and each scene is differently out of focus, leading one to wonder whether the sharpness of the picture correlates to something in the narrative (he does say his idea is “a little blurry”) or a character state of mind. Three would-be film people are at a beach town on the young director’s dime to shoot his first movie, which he hasn’t written yet. He bristles at how much they’re all spending on food while he postpones the actual shoot, finally steals some ideas from his surroundings and from his past, calling up his ex to ask permission to use a song he wrote her, and playing it into the camera as he walks into the sea, closing the movie and the movie-in-the-movie. So his movie ends up pretty close to our movie, but presumably in focus.

If you could see ’em, the actors are Shin Seok-ho (the lead in Introduction) with Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun (both also in In Our Day).

by ·Comments Off on Little Murders (1971, Alan Arkin)

By the time Patsy brings her nihilist photographer boyfriend Elliott Gould home to her parents you’ll be thinking “this was obviously based on a play,” but at the same time there’s a happy realization that the characters are going to remain eccentric, untethered to realistic behavior. Of the movies I’ve seen written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, this was better assembled than the Alain Resnais.

Gould’s girl is Marcia Rodd and her family is: Hoffman’s mom in The Graduate, Mr. Mushnik, and Snowden in Catch-22. Guest stars are brought in to monologue: the director as a cop, the late Donald Sutherland as an existential priest, and Amazon Women‘s Murray as a judge.

Maybe we should’ve seen it coming from the title, or from the movie’s first scene where Gould is being attacked by a street gang, but the story takes a dark turn when Rodd gets randomly killed with a rifle, and city violence becomes the movie’s new main focus, ending with Gould shooting the director (offscreen). Memorial screening for Sutherland, and belatedly/additionally for Arkin.