by ·Comments Off on Every Man For Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard)

“Paul Godard” (Jacques Dutronc of a couple Zulawski films) leaves his hotel and is offered anal sex by the valet, my second JLG movie in a row to address that topic. Then he’s making weird incest jokes with the soccer coach of his daughter (actually Alain Tanner’s daughter), and the movie will stay perverse until the end. After Numero Deux we’re back to scripted domestic dramas with lovely photography, though Amy Taubin ties these two together, “both films dealing with the failure of intimacy and with marriage as hell, particularly for women.”

Divided into sections, also following TV producer Nathalie Baye (a Truffaut regular) and prostitute Isabelle Huppert (who’d just starred in a Chabrol). Marguerite Duras is an offscreen presence in the beginning. The “Slow Motion” segment (this whole film was known as Slow Motion in England) is post-production slow-mo, sequential freeze-frames. At the end we get nice payoffs for Paul’s annoying behavior and the movie’s big disruptive music which had seemed to bother the characters, as he gets hit by a car (in slow motion, of course) then his daughter and ex walk past the musicians playing the movie’s soundtrack.

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Scenario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979)

The rare making-of to come out before the feature, JLG explaining his intentions for the movie they hadn’t shot yet. He speaks of wishing to write vertically on a typewriter instead of horizontally. The two women move in opposite directions, Huppert in the direction of meaning, while the man tries to fly above it all… explains his philosophy of superimposition and dissolves, which I only half followed, and of slow motion which mostly makes sense. I wondered with his idea of the music being secretly diegetic if he’d seen Noroit and Duelle. Says he compared lighting notes with Wim Wenders, who I think was working on Hammett. He plans for a scene where Denise will go into a forest “and in the forest she’d run into Werner Herzog… who will introduce, with typical German madness, the world that lies behind things… Perhaps all this isn’t very clear.”

by ·Comments Off on Numéro Deux (1975, Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard in a dim room with a videocamera on him and a monitor, so he appears twice from different angles, talking an awful lot, but the main thing I remember is how he thinks puns are useful and wishes people took them more seriously.

Female narrator suggests what this film might be about while we see three TV screens and a dark figure in front DJing with tape reels.

TV monitor split-screens with bird sounds mixed with the dialogue.

Kinda turns into a family story and a sex-ed movie. “I sometimes look at my cock. That isn’t cinema, though.”

Amy Taubin calls it “a vitriolic indictment of the sexual politics of the nuclear family” and says it’s the first Godard feature in which Miéville’s influence is evident. In Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody says Godard had accepted a commission to make a Breathless follow-up, hence the title, and says the finished film “has the unpleasant aspect of a medical document.”

by ·Comments Off on Where the Devil Roams (2023, Poser/Adams/Adams)

Unpromising beginning with dodgy compositing and fake film distress as we’re told a long poem, then a bridge that reminds me of The Empty Man (everything reminds me of The Empty Man). Watching this after When Evil Lurks because I keep getting them confused with their similar titles, and Lurking definitively beat Roaming. This movie certainly does roam. Its three leads (family of hopeless carnie thief/murderers with a terrible musical act until they steal a better one from a devil-dealing finger-traumatist) are a real family, also the movie’s directors. They’d previously made Hellbender (metal music/witchcraft) and The Deeper You Dig (clairvoyant murder-suspense).

The devil-dealer is Mr. Tipps, who nightly cuts off his fingers for the crowd, then sews them back with cursed thread – he stole the thread originally, so it’s only fair that our trio steals it from him later. The girl of the family is said to be mute but I didn’t realize, since she sings in their act. The mom kills somebody in each town they pass through, and I can’t tell if this is supposed to be vigilante justice or if they’re just remorseless criminals. Dad gets WWI flashbacks when he sees blood (and is incidentally afraid of birds), so has to be blindfolded during the crimes, and eventually during their circus act. So it’s set in the past (1920s?) but doesn’t feel authentically past-tense, more of an antique shop present. The parents eventually get some limbs chopped off by an axe girl at a home they invaded (played by their other IRL daughter) and the dad becomes catatonic, but still performs his nightly onstage dance to the girl’s alt-rock song.

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.

by ·Comments Off on The Delinquents (2023, Rodrigo Moreno)

Moran robs the bank where he works, gives the money to unwitting Roman. Laura Paredes arrives to investigate, makes life hell for the remaining bankers. When Roman can’t take the pressure, he’s told to drop off the money on a mountainside, where he meets and falls for Norma – and flashbacks reveal that Moran had previously fallen for the same woman in the same spot.

Only three hours long – I think the reason it’s divided into two parts is that Laura Paredes only appears in multi-part features. Suspicious dialogue about mysterious flowers.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

Broken into two acts, with a cast of characters whose names are obviously anagrams of each other, The Delinquents is forward with its gamesmanship, and if the eventual resolution of its central conflict seems unsatisfying, that may be precisely the point … At one point Román ducks into a Buenos Aires arthouse and catches a few minutes of Bresson’s L’Argent, a sign that Moreno is more than happy to lay his cards on the table, allowing the viewer to infer a game of three-card monty where there actually is none.

Ehrlich called it “arguably the first slow cinema heist movie.” Jenkins calls their employer “the absolute worst bank in the world.” Cronk says it jumps off “from the central premise of Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) — a touchstone of Argentine film noir that many cinephiles of Moreno’s generation grew up watching on television.”

Rizov: “It’s no coincidence that the bank vault and the prison Morán ends up have their hallways laid out in the same way, a rhyme that’s brought home by the same actor (Germán De Silva) playing both Morán’s boss and a prisoner who extorts money for protection.” Moreno: “At the end of the day, what I wanted to make was a fable. I had no obligation to reality — my debt was to cinema. So I said, “Let’s do it, let’s play this game. Here’s an actor playing two roles.”

by ·Comments Off on Yannick (2023, Quentin Dupieux)

A tough one, awkward single-setting movie where it’s hard to tell what’s meant to be funny, where the loyalties lie. A three-person play is interrupted by a young guy who says he’s not being properly entertained, and so holds cast and audience at gunpoint while he rewrites the play. Good mixed ending, as Yannick’s new play proves to be a hit as the swat team closes in.

by ·Comments Off on Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)

A high-quality modern Western drama, solid cast and writing, with a couple of elevating factors. The stylistic trick of transitioning into flashbacks with a camera move instead of an edit or fade, past characters sharing physical space with the present, is impressive every time. And just when the story is wrapping up, when Chris Cooper learns that his late father Matthew McConaughey did not shoot the sheriff, he also learns that his old flame newly re-enflamed (Elizabeth Peña) is his half-sister… and they decide they can live with that.

Bad Sheriff Kristofferson’s final act:

Bar owner Otis later played a detective in The Empty Man. His estranged military son Joe Morton was the doomed robotics inventor in Terminator 2. Peña was in The Second Civil War, which it’s probably time to rewatch. Nominated for a bunch of awards that Fargo won, so it’s good to see key Coen critic Adam Nayman defending.

Its qualities of thoughtful, hard-edged sociological storytelling and analysis are currently in short supply. They don’t make ’em like this anymore … For all its skepticism about the American tendency to mythologize (and mass market) its sins away, the film is tender about the necessity of forgetting, or at least trying to. It’s a measure of Sayles’s superlative construction that a story that begins with something being unearthed ends with a plea to keep another secret buried — and of his empathy as an artist that the sentiment rings true.

Sisters Lovers:

Coen Connection:

by ·Comments Off on Sublime Frequencies double-feature

The James River Film Society, a mysterious organization which never emails me no matter how many times I submit my address to their subscription link, counterintuitively programmed a pair of hour-long Sublime Frequencies documentaries from director Hisham Mayet at a lovely large theater at noon on a beautiful Saturday, so I came out, along with as many as nine other people.

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The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel (2012)

Short riverboat setup, then it gets right into rocking and boogies down for forty minutes or so, each scene in a new location with a new musician or group. Apparently shot in Mali and Niger, there’s much dance, some cool structures and landscapes, and per the Sublime mission, no English translations or narration or titles. I figured the epic animal slaughter scene would be a good time to hit the restrooms – it’s also weirdly where the movie ended.

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Oulaya’s Wedding (2017)

More of a straight doc about a particular event, clearly explained to us. Group Doueh is a famed wedding band in Dakhla, a town on a coastline peninsula in Western Sahara, an area bordered by Mauritania and Morocco. The Doueh musicians’ own daughter is getting married, so they’re throwing the biggest party ever and inviting everyone. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the setup and prep in the first few days, then the event itself under a massive tent. Interviews with family and guests (spotlight on the gay male dancers). Plenty of music, so I could keep on bopping in my seat. We’ve long heard that Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen started as wedding bands, so the main attraction here was to see what these weddings are like.

by ·Comments Off on Segundo de Chomón shorts (1906-1908)

I’ve got no handy documentary on Chomon like I did with Alice Guy, just watching some films. I’d only previously seen The Golden Beetle – these all turned out to be less colorful and more coherent.

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Electric Current (1906)

Pretty good one-minute gag film. A couple steals from the grocer, has a picnic then goes back for more, but the grocer has rigged his wares to the electric lights. When they grab the food they’re paralyzed from electricity – and so are the cops who arrive to arrest the thieves, so they arrest the grocer instead.

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Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)

Splendid gravity-defying stunts, using the same which-way-is-up technique as Massive Attack’s “Protection” video. The actors really sell it, trembling and straining in their positions.

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En Avant La Musique (1907)

If we’re meant to believe that elite Japanese acrobats have developed incredible skills of strength and balance, this one tosses believability out the window. Just a Mr. B Natural-type conductor transforming the musicians into musical notation and miniaturized song-slaves.

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The Diabolical Pickpocket (1908)

A liquid-metal T-1000 criminal escapes two clueless cops by making a mockery of spacetime physics.
Looks like this was part of a series about uncatchable thieves in checkered suits, along with The Invisible Thief and Slippery Jim.

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The Electric Hotel (1908)

Before people knew what electricity could do, this imagines a fully automated hotel. Guests get a small electric switchboard and accompanying instruction manual. Each switch causes a whirl of stop-motion – shoe-shining, hair-cutting, suitcase-unpacking. One writes letters home using AI. I was waiting for something to go comically, catastrophically wrong, but all the tech works properly, until a drunken basement employee starts throwing switches haphazardly and all the hotel’s objects violently revolt against their masters.

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Legend of a Ghost (1908)

At 14 minutes this is over twice the length of the others, a de Chomon epic. Old fashioned set building and fireworks create a hellscape of dancing demons, or maybe tortured souls, or reveling partiers – in the cavernous set I can’t make out faces. Yeah, it’s either a Halloween parade float or the beginning of the apocalypse, maybe the point is not to know. Then we got hula-girl vikings in a Meliesian underwater scene? An anarchist blows up the parade float and we’re sent to heaven for a minute. It’s almost halfway through the movie before the grim reaper provides some transformative camera tricks, then back to cavorting with fireworks and costumes. The death parade reaches its cavernous destination and the participants celebrate with a scythe dance (The Seventh Seal was a remake of this). But the movie’s not over – the viking frog queen’s servants do an involved dance with the lizard people, layers upon layers. Morning comes and everyone lays dead, except for Death Himself, who transforms into a fancyman. Certainly more expensive than the shorter films, not necessarily more fun to watch.