by ·Comments Off on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023, Radu Jude)

I didn’t love Jude’s pandemic movie, but I’m extremely onboard with this one – everything down to the closing credits is delightful. It’s a very cynical movie about Romania and capitalism, starring Radu-regular Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an odd-jobs film-shoot worker.

Angela’s present-day is filmed in grainy b/w, her filtered selfie videos doing misogynist insult commentary are in low-detail digital color, then there’s another Angela who also drives a car for a living, via the 1982 film Angela Goes On, in beautifully restored 35mm color. That movie is the Poor Cow to the main feature’s The Limey, and its Angela appears in present day (the same actress/character) as the mom of a disabled worker hired to tell his story for a company safety video.

Radu Jude in Cinema Scope:

When I was young and reading all these stories about Herzog shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, it sounded so heroic. In the early days, when we were supposed to work 20 hours and then drive to another location, it felt magical and sort of heroic. I don’t see it quite that way anymore. You can fool yourself into thinking this way as a filmmaker, but for the people working around you, it’s not like that at all. They don’t care if your movie is going to win an Oscar, or if it’s going to be a piece of crap. They just want to finish the shooting and go home.

Translation issues:

From the mid-film wordless montage of roadside death markers:

Mark Asch in Little White Lies:

Angela’s set of wheels signify anything but independence: she’s cut off, honked at, catcalled, and constantly slamming brakes, swearing, and flipping off other drivers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ringtone, signaling the arrival of yet another task, is Beethoven’s 9th, the official anthem of the EU), appealing to her team spirit — and, implicitly, her economic precarity as a project-based worker — as they send her over to the airport to pick up a foreign guest, or to pick up lenses from a backlot where Uwe Boll is shooting a cheap nonunion monster movie.

Cemetery advertising:

Jude again:

I think the film is also a film about Bucharest. Why does Bucharest look so bad today compared to how it looked back then? Some of that is propaganda, as many images and films from that time were produced to show the most beautiful side of Bucharest, which is why I slow down those less beautiful moments from Angela Moves On — so you can see the other side. But even still, Bucharest is in much worse shape now, 30 years after the revolution. How did we let that happen? It’s more crowded now, more polluted—cars are on the sidewalk, buildings are falling down, etc. I read that it’s the second most congested city in the world. I think the film can show this by putting one image next to another, and in doing so maybe propose this question to the viewer.

by ·Comments Off on I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)

Much larger in scope than Jane’s previous movie – even though it’s still just two lead characters who spend their nights looking at screens. Two awkward students bond over a TV show named after a Cocteau Twins album, a Buffy/X-Files-ish thing with deep lore. They try watching it together but they’re both afraid of their stepdads and settle for trading VHS tapes. They attend Void High School “VHS,” home of the Vultures, and lead dude Owen (Justice Smith of that recent Dungeons & Dragons movie) starts talking to us, so the movie’s never going for naturalism.

The stars of the show-in-the-show are Helena “Madeline” Howard and Snail Mail. Also, a suspicious mention of Michael Stipe right before a TV episode about where the ice cream man goes in wintertime.

The older girl with a later bedtime is Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, a daughter in Bill & Ted 3), and she twice offers to take him away from it all. She runs away from home but he freaks out and doesn’t join her, then his mom dies and the TV show is canceled. Eight years later Maddie reappears and says she’s been living inside the show after having herself buried alive in Phoenix (haha), and says they need to (re)bury themselves now to save their TV avatars, but he pushes her down and runs. Twenty years later, he’s alone, has made no career progress, and has a Videodrome TV inside his body.

Good, mysterious movie, evoking thoughts on nostalgia and (super)fandom and friendship and risks not taken, even though the creator has said that it’s just about being trans.

Ice Cream Man in early season of The Pink Opaque, played by Albert Birney:

Nightbreed guy in the unreleased post-final season:

Not the biggest World’s Fair fan, I held off on watching this until I saw that pd187 approved of it.

Good Sam Adams article here despite the “ending explained” hook.

by ·Comments Off on Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)

Hot Pepper (1973)

Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.

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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?

Garlic & Flamenco:

by ·Comments Off on Fata Morgana (1970, Werner Herzog)

Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.

Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:

Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)

Almereyda’s followup to The Eternal, and my followup to the Olivier version. More voiceover-monologues here, with overall quieter speaking volumes. Opens with Ethan “Hamlet” Hawke watching standard-def video of his parents in happier times, and the play-within-the-play is a screening of Hamlet’s found-footage video project – Almereyda loves his low-res textures.

Is it irony that Ham is in the *action* section of Blockbuster while drearily whining about his indecision? Or is it meant to rhyme with the closing line, “and lose the name of action.” Olivier wrote out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for efficiency, while Almereyda makes a meal of their scenes and interjects them wherever he can. This entire movie was better than the Olivier except for the final swordfight, which – even though it features Paul Bartel in the Peter Cushing role – is anticlimactic when they all just shoot each other on a rooftop. My first priority when I get a job will be to buy Cymbeline on blu-ray.

Ethan Hawke vs. Kyle MacLachlan. I love Esko Nikkari but Bill Murray is now the best Polonius. Julia Stiles shrieks at the Guggenheim. They acknowledge the shadow of Romeo + Juliet by casting Juliet’s mom Diane Venora as the queen. Chuck Yeager as the ghost, Liev Schreiber (then of the Scream movies) as Laertes, and some really small cameos that make me think longer/extra scenes were shot and cut later. They manage to get one extra woman into the movie, by swapping out one of the ghost-spotting guards for Horatio’s girl (Katniss’s mom). Ophelia’s memento box looks suspiciously like the Smashing Pumpkins The Aeroplane Flies High box set re-pressed with White Stripes coloring.

Rosenbaum was a fan, notes Hawke as “better than you’d expect.” I thought of Lewis Klahr during the film-with-a-film screening, turns out Klahr really made it.

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)

Opens unpromisingly with text onscreen accompanying a narrator, but then we get a castle in the mist, the camera roaming to show off its fancy sets. I don’t think “this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” is from the original text.

Hamlet’s first monologue is in partial voiceover, a really good portrayal of someone tormentedly talking to themself. Elsewhere Ophelia narrates Hamlet’s wordless visit to her room, and he performs every word she’s saying in flashback-pantomime, a bit overkill. The zoom inside Hamlet’s head before “to be or not to be” was also odd. I would understand if other versions cut the scene where Hamlet gives long-winded direction to the actors before the play (and so they do). There are only two women in the movie and he throws both of them onto the floor. Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates before the finale, did I dream this?

HAM-let:

Queen, King, Ophelia, Laertes:

Won best picture over The Red Shoes, a travesty, and Olivier got actor, but at least John Huston beat him for director. The king-uncle was in Went the Day Well and Disney’s Treasure Island, the queen in John Huston’s Freud movie, Horatio in The Projected Man, Polonius in The Mummy, and Laertes in that movie’s sequel/reboot The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Speaking of mummies, we get Peter Cushing as the silly-ass courier, also officiating the swordfight. Ophelia is Jean Simmons of Guys and Dolls, Estelle in Great Expectations, soon to be seen in The Big Country.

The actors:

The duel:

The Peter Cushing:

by ·Comments Off on Wicked City (1992, Peter Tai-Kit Mak)

Not good in almost any sense but absolutely a must-see for the bonkers imagination factor. Full of hilariously suggestive images, making a mockery of sex and religion. Tsui Hark cowrote/produced this anime remake, though it feels less written and more like it’s making up its rules as it goes along, with world-building ambition way beyond the league of the physical effects and baby computer graphics teams (there’s a cellophane blob and some mighty morphing). It’s impossible to dislike, or to imagine that we could do any better today.

The aliens invading Hong Kong in human disguises mostly take the form of hot chicks, and mostly they murder hot chicks… the movie is overall a big fan of hot chicks (this is apparently accurate to the original version).

Windy and Daishu:

Human cop Leon Lai likes lightsaber alien Windy (they play the killer and his agent in Fallen Angels) after they save each other’s lives. Half-alien cop Jacky Cheung (lately Bucktooth So in OUATIC 1) likes human traitor cop Orchid (Carman Lee Yeuk-Tung of Burning Paradise and Detective vs. Sleuths), but Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping keeps them apart. Alien boss Daishu is captured by the cops and kept magnetically captive (this is movie royalty Tatsuya Nakadai, star of Harakiri, apparently game for anything) while his evil son Roy Cheung (one of The Mission boys, also City on Fire) runs rampant in the city, plotting to hook the whole city on a drug that will simply kill them in a couple days. As the movie’s nonsense intensifies, the son ends up juiced to death by a jet engine, and the aliens’ vacuum powers reverse the flow of time and a psychokinetic police force lands a plane atop a skyscraper.

Sgt Yuen Woo-Ping orders all men in this movie to wear glasses:

and sometimes glasses get dirty:

by ·Comments Off on Hotel (2004, Jessica Hausner)

German Chloe Sevigny gets a job at a haunted hotel where everyone is unfriendly then she disappears into the woods like her predecessor did. Think this was Hausner’s second feature – I looked it up after watching her sixth. Our girl’s sinister coworker was Birgit Minichmayr, star of Everyone Else.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q2/2024

All of this quarter’s television was watched on the exercise bike (:muscle:)
Still purportedly watching The Curse (not on bike) and I’ve started Lodge 49 s2 and Painting With John s3.

I’m a Virgo season 1 (2023)

Giant boy Jharrel Jerome (young André Holland in the middle section of Moonlight) is awkward because he has never socialized or even left the house, but after his first public appearance everyone is interested in him: an agent, a fashion company, a burger girl, a cult, a superhero, the teens. Burger girl becomes his girlfriend, has super speed powers. His friend with a car’s superpower is having a car. Their buddy Scat dies for a stupid reason, getting injured on his bike then turned away from the hospital for not having insurance, and this enflames the community, led by activist Jones. Meanwhile Cootie’s hero (“The Hero”) Walt Goggins is out busting protesters during evictions. Apparently lo-fi photography pulls out crazy technique when desired. Music by Tune-Yards. Showstopping didactic anti-capitalist rants and general anti-authoritarian vibe mix with The Hero’s identity crisis and random superhero stuff (Cootie’s parents have prepped a supervillain lair, some of the neighbors wake up fun-sized). Created by Boots Riley, who shared a list of further viewing/reading with Vulture:

One that is very inspiring is Matewan by John Sayles. There’s a book called Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns that just came out. A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis. There’s a movie called Seeing Red, it’s a 1983 film by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert.

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The Twilight Zone, Vol. 3 (1959)

106. Escape Clause

A basic deal-with-the-devil scenario, not even as interesting a concept as the pitchman from episode 2, but our lead idiot is good (David Wayne, the killer in Losey’s M). A hypochondriac who takes an offer from the devil (Thomas Gomez of Force of Evil, Key Largo) to be immortal, all he can think to do with his new vitality is throw himself in front of trains for kicks (and settlement money from the city). After only a week of this, the kicks aren’t enough, and when his wife (Virginia Christine of The Killers) falls off their apartment building trying to stop him from jumping, he takes responsibility so he can defeat the electric chair. But his lawyer gets him life in the pen, haha. I guess if he’d been good at thinking through consequences he wouldn’t have dealt with the devil in the first place, but Americans couldn’t be expected to know how to live immortally before Highlander came out.

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107. The Lonely

Jack Warden (best known for the Hubleys’ Dig) is losing his marbles alone on an asteroid, serving a prison sentence in solitary. Back home there’s political pressure to pardon Jack, who of course claims innocence, and/or abolish the asteroid prisons, possibly as much for its cruel-and-unusual nature as the difficulty of keeping the prisoners fed via rocketship deliveries. Space-warden John Dehner (killed by Gary Cooper the previous year in Man of the West) drops off a gift for Jack: an AI woman named Alicia (Jean Marsh, queen of Willow). It’s not implied that her womanness is a factor here, Jack just wants somebody to play chess with. He bonds with Alicia, then the captain brings a pardon for Jack on his next visit, and shoots Alicia in the face since she’ll be too heavy for the ship. New director Minnesotan Jack Smight would later make the post-apocalyptic Paul Winfield movie Damnation Alley.

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108. Time Enough at Last

Two man-alone-in-the-world episodes in a row? The one where banker Burgess “The Penguin” Meredith just wants some time to read but his horrid wife and boring boss (Vaughn Taylor, also the boss in Psycho) won’t let him. Time enough (and food enough, ammo enough) at last when he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear blast, but his glasses break on day two. Some nice-looking wreckage in the final stretch. Director John Brahm had made films in the 1940s, including a remake of The Lodger.

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109. Perchance to Dream

Nearly an it-was-all-a-dream episode. The title clues us in, and from a childhood watching Nightmare on Elm Street sequels I’m attuned to characters “just closing their eyes for a few seconds.” This one’s more of a narrated dream-flashback inside of a dream, as a nervous imaginative man with a heart condition explains to a psychiatrist that his subconscious has mixed up his sex/death drives and now a hot cat lady is trying to kill him with kicks (the Ann-Margret Kitten With a Whip kicks, not the Michelle Yeoh Executioners kicks). If he falls asleep he’ll fall off a rollercoaster / jump out the window, which he does. From the psych’s POV a guy he’s never seen before came into the office, lied down and promptly stopped living. Starting to think Serling created the show just so he could see every working actor play desperation in closeup. But this is the first one he didn’t write – Charles Beaumont (The Intruder) would become a regular on the series. Director Robert Florey had a long career, from the great silent short Life and Death of 9413 to the Marx Brothers, then 1930s and 40s crime movies. The psych later played Dirty Harry’s boss, lead dreamer Richard Conte was a noir regular.

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110. Judgment Night

Man onboard a British ship in dangerous waters during WWII has got an extreme combination of amnesia and deja vu. Carl (Nehemiah Persoff, father Mousekewitz in An American Tail) seems to have specific knowledge about German submarines stalking the ship, and when he goes down with the ship it’s revealed that Carl was that sub’s commander, and he’s in hell, nightly reliving the fate of his victims. A panic-stricken half-hour with a comforting message (the nazis that killed our family members are experiencing endless torment in the afterlife). His fellow doomed Brits include Patrick Macnee (originator of the Ralph Fiennes role in The Avengers, later in The Howling), Disney voice actor (and Sound of Music nazi) Ben Wright, and Cat o’ Nine Tails star James Franciscus.

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111. And When the Sky Was Opened

Two astronauts in recovery after a flight crash-landed, but Rod Taylor (The Birds) is in a complete panic because he claims there were three astronauts and that their friend Charles Aidman (narrator of the 1980s ‘Zone reboot) vanished and nobody remembers him ever existing except himself. We see them together in flashback then Aidman feels strange and says maybe we weren’t supposed to come back, and disappears from a phone booth, his beer magically gone with him and the headlines rewritten. Taylor responds the way people do in most Twilight Zones (and in all British horror), by blubbering and yelling and repeating himself. When he vanishes too, the remaining hospital-bound astronaut Jim Hutton (of Major Dundee, Timothy’s dad) knows he’s next. Director Douglas Heyes made Kitten With a Whip, and I didn’t know about him when I referenced that movie two episodes ago.

Taylor (right) with spaced-out Aidman:

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112. What You Need

There are plenty of salesmen in the Zone. This would seem to be an inspiration for King’s Needful Things, but our aged salesman (Ernest Truex of Christmas in July) isn’t malevolent, hands out humble objects that he predicts will help people in the future: a bus ticket for Read Morgan (a former baseballer playing a former baseballer) to get to his next gig, something for a lonely pretty girl (Arlene Martel, Spock’s fiancee) that gives her an excuse to meet a hunky (drunky) former baseballer. The salesman (whose character shares a name with the inventor of the Chia Pet) doesn’t want to deal with loser shithead Steve Cochran (White Heat) but the guy smells money and pesters then threatens the old man until he gets what he needs (a lifesaving tool, a bunch of money, an early grave). Based on a short story from the writers of The Twonky. Director Alvin Ganzer assisted on The Great McGinty and other 1940’s flicks then moved permanently to television.

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113. The Four of Us are Dying

A guy who the voiceover tells us is a real lowlife loser has the supernatural ability to face-shift and be other people. Apparently he’s pretty good at doing voices and knowing personal details about the people he imitates too, fooling friends and enemies. His default identity is Archie Hammer (Harry Townes), then he picks up the hot girlfriend (Corman/MST3K regular Beverly Garland) of late musician Ross Martin, then becomes late gangster Phillip Pine (loud and annoying in Murder by Contract) and runs off with a pocket full of dirty money, then to escape the gangsters he gets the face of Don Gordon off a boxing poster. Boxer Don (Bullitt, The Mack, gold miner in The Last Movie) was apparently such a lowlife that his dad shoots him (them) dead. A nice bluesy New York episode, features some fancy trick photography in the identity shifts, and some lazy edits when they didn’t need to be fancy. From George Johnson, story writer of Logan’s Run and Ocean’s Eleven.

Archie “Armie” Hammer: