by ·Comments Off on The Silence Before Bach (2007, Pere Portabella)

Instead of playing The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach alongside another movie from Vogel’s chapter on editing, I followed it with another Bach movie. This one places delicious performance footage within little conceptual scenes, cutting between scenes and eras like it’s no big deal (“juxtaposing past and present as if they were attractions in a theme park” per Rosenbaum).

Player piano rolls and spins slowly around a gallery.

Blind piano tuner goes to work

European trucker tells his story to a rider at a roadside cafe, rider impossibly plays a Bach piece on harmonica.

Wigged pipe organist alone in St. Thomas church, where Bach is buried

Close-up on hands during a harpsichord performance, first-person camera.

Tour guide goes to work performing as Bach – no music in this one.

Another tour – a boat, then a subway car full of cellists.

Mendelsson’s man goes to the market in 1829, the apocryphal backstory of how some of Bach’s compositions were discovered being used as wrapping paper.

Evoking the Holocaust, “music hurts,” a piano silently falls into the sea.

Connections start getting pieced together: a cellist goes on a trip to St. Thomas and speaks with a female descendant of Bach, while her husband is calling the trucker to set up a difficult crane delivery of an antique piano.

Manohla Dargis:

The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.

by ·Comments Off on The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968, Straub & Huillet)

A Bach concert film, solo and small/large ensembles performing his works chronologically, with narration from wife Anna’s diaries for context. As with all concert films (see my dislike for the Bowie movie) enjoyment is largely dependent on whether you like listening to Bach, and I’m getting from the reviews that the critics who love this are big Bach fans. I’m mixed here, but would freak out over a film called Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Zorn – either way it’s a vital entry in the biopic and concert film genres.

Difficult to understand Anna’s English narration as she rapidly, mechanically rattles off the words. Compositions are mostly static but they’re not afraid of a subtle or grand camera move. Scenes step on each other’s heels, the editor anxious to move on the moment a music piece has ended. Besides the musical performances we get great churches and lovely instruments – pre-piano keyboards such as harpsichords, clavichords and pipe organs – and closeups on (real?) historical documents. It’s an example film in Vogel’s “Assault on Montage” chapter, where he helpfully lays out the rules of “the received canon of editing” in order to show how some films break them. In this movie, “the refusal to move the camera or render the image more interesting and an insistence on real time… represents a frontal assault on the cinematic value system of the spectator.” In other words, anti-art people would call the movie boring.

Neil Bahadur:

Here we see the art go from the mind, to the page, to the finger, to the performer, and finally to the audience. In every performance Straub makes it so the hands are always totally visible, so we see the complexity that Bach/Gustav Leonhardt must transfer from the mind to the hands in full force.

by ·Comments Off on Heart of a Dog (2015, Laurie Anderson)

I’m figuring out who Laurie Anderson is before the Big Ears fest. This is a poem-essay film about “the connection between love and death”… still drawings and an animated Laurie give an introductory dream sequence about giving birth to her dog, then straight to the death of her mother over blurry, barely-there archive films and photos. The dog goes blind, Laurie has her make paintings and sculptures and play paw-piano (they show a long stretch of dog piano music, including live performance footage from a benefit concert), and Laurie speaks of dog perception and post-9/11 surveillance. Ends with Lou’s song “Turning Time Around” and in the closing credits you realize her real home movies were mixed with staged(?) archive-looking footage (and Chris Marker is thanked). I kinda loved this – all these years I assumed I would find it tedious. It can go either way with personal docs and poetry.

by ·Comments Off on Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016, Steve James)

Back-story catchup (it’s clear what point in time the film crew joined the story) then we follow a court case against a NYC family bank in the aftermath of the financial crisis, from the POV of the defenders. They’re not accused of subprime lending, but selling loans with improper paperwork and taking kickbacks from customers, and the state decided to make a (probably racist) example of them, trying/failing to prove the corruption went higher than some bad-egg loan officers. Good story, decent doc – oscar-nominated alongside Strong Island and Faces Places. Chicago critics gave it their best doc award, so James rewarded them by making his next doc there: the heartwarming success story of, uh-oh, Lori Lightfoot.

by ·Comments Off on Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, Martin Scorsese)

Prieto: “I used a LUT that emulated the beginning of color and still photography.” You do the best you can in the times you live in, and in Flower Moon and Hugo, Scorsese is idolizing early photography while living in a fallen digital world. I sat too close to the screen at Movieland, imagining I was watching a Scorsese Film and not an Apple Studios DCP, but ended up noticing the pixel borders, “watching television in public.” The sound was excellent, which is something to remember when I eventually rewatch at a proper distance from a nice TV to see the picture properly while getting the arbitrary surround-squished-into-stereo-speakers audio mix. You’re not Chris Nolan with your IMAX fetish, and Apple gave you a hundred million to make your dream project, so you do your best. But Kings of the Road on blu-ray looks better, so something has gone wrong.

I watched two movies this week where someone survives their spouse’s attempted murder by slow poisoning. Adam Nayman: “Scorsese opts for an agonizing realism that does not preclude two terrible possibilities. One, that Ernest truly loves his wife, though not enough to stop hurting her; and two, that Mollie understands what’s happening to her and is too heartbroken to fight back. ”

by ·Comments Off on Five More by Tod Browning (1929-1936)

The Thirteenth Chair (1929)

After London After Midnight came three more Lon Chaney pictures including West of Zanzibar. Now, Browning’s love for headscarves leads him to India, and his love for Hungary leads him to Bela Lugosi. This is quite good for a 1929 sound film, but it hurts to exchange the long, lingering silent facial expressions for inane upper-class British conversational pleasantries. There’s no transitional period, the movie is crammed wall-to-wall with dialogue as if spectators were paying by the word.

Madame LaGrange is played by an actress named Wycherly, which would’ve been a cooler name for her medium character. Yes, we’re back in Mystic territory, and to prove her authenticity she explains the mechanics of the usual tricks used by mediums, then proceeds to her spiritual work uncovering a murderer. Someone dies during the first of two lights-out seances (during which the movie achieves maximum talkie-ness, becoming a radio play) so Inspector Lugosi arrives, and star Conrad Nagel’s girl Leila Hyams emerges as chief suspect, but it turns out some other blonde lady killed both guys.

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Dracula (1931)

Written about this before… watching now with the Philip Glass / Kronos Quartet score, hell yes. The music is mixed higher than the dialogue, as it should be. Now that I’ve seen Thirteenth Chair I have to say this is extremely awesome in comparison, dispensing with the constant dialogue and returning to beautiful image-making with big Lugosi close-ups.

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Freaks (1932)

Wrote about this before, too. More movie-worthy characters in this hour-long film than in Browning’s whole pre-Dracula career combined. Over 50 years later Angelo had a plum role in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Before Dracula, Browning made that Outside The Law non-remake, before Freaks came boxing drama Iron Man, and afterwards was Fast Workers… a comedy?

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Mark of the Vampire (1935)

John Fordian Dr. Donald Meek busts into an inn just as idiot tourists are getting the talk about why we don’t go out at night (bad idea to watch the same night as Dracula since it’s all the same vampire explanations to incredulous people). Inspector Atwill, a large mustache man, arrives to investigate a mysterious death. Fedor and Irena are survivors, swoop-haired Otto is her guardian. Meanwhile, Dracula himself (played as a wordless zombie monster with no suave dialogue) and his undead daughter Luna lurk in a nearby castle. Professor Barrymore arrives to do some Acting, a welcome diversion, while Irena’s dead dad Sir Karell has become a zombie Drac-follower, and Irena has begun acting vampy herself.

Somehow the plot gets even more convoluted, and Browning and Lugosi’s involvement becomes an in-joke, because the “vampires” have only been performers in Barrymore’s Holmesian plot to make swoop-haired Otto confess to killing his friend, hypnotized into re-committing his crime. Good performances in this, though nothing else really works, and the rubber-bats-on-strings technology hadn’t improved since ’31. I liked how no two people manage to pronounce the character names the same way.

Clanker, the Jump-Scare Cat:

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The Devil Doll (1936)

Nobody told me this would be a Bride of Frankenstein ripoff cowritten by Eric von Stroheim. Maybe bitter that another director remade Tod’s Unholy Three with Lon Chaney, he goes ahead and rips that off too. Lionel Barrymore is a banker who got backstabbed by his partners and sent to prison, escapes to get revenge – wrongly(?)-accused man becoming a murderer on the run.

First stop is scientist Marcel (Henry Walthall, the yellow shut-in of Griffith’s House with Closed Shutters) to borrow his shrinking formula. He’s working on miniaturization to alleviate world hunger (isn’t this the plot of Downsizing?) but has a heart attack while shrinking the maid, so his devoted wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano, who’d worked with Barrymore on Grand Hotel) comes along to continue his research by shrinking some bankers, Lionel hiding in plain sight as an old woman running a doll shop.

First off is nervous mustache banker Arthur Hohl (a cop in The Whole Town’s Talking), then they use a devil-doll to rob the house of Robert Greig (who played butler-typed in Preston Sturges movies). The dolls are mind-controlled by their masters (I missed Marcel’s explanation for this) and this doll-heist setpiece is cool enough to justify the entire movie.. Barrymore wants to see his beloved family members now that he’s out, so he pays disguised visits to his blind mom (Lucy Beaumont, who’d played Lionel’s brother John’s mom in The Beloved Rogue) and his lovely grown daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan started acting at the dawn of sound cinema and died in 1998 in Scottsdale, so she may well have watched Fargo in Arizona like we did).

Malita and tiny assassin:

The third banker is Pedro de Cordoba (a circus player in Hitchcock’s Saboteur), who surrounds himself with police then sweatily confesses that he railroaded Barrymore right as his doll-sized colleague was about to stab him with paralysis/shrink syrup. Malita helpfully/fatally blows up the lab/shop because Barrymore’s mission is done but she wants to go on shrinking things. Happy-ish ending for Barrymore, who meets his daughter and her beau Toto atop the Eiffel Tower, but after all the murdering he’s got to stay on the run. Browning’s penultimate film – he’d turn in one more comedy before forced retirement.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 27: SHOCKtober 2023

Surveillance (2008, Jennifer Lynch)

The attraction here was Bill Pullman standing on a (lost) highway in a Lynch joint, but now that I’ve seen Boxing Helena I’m being more selective about my Lynches. On fast-forward the movie looks like 100% conversations in rooms and cars. Something has gone down in one of those cars as Julia Ormond (Inland Empire) dumps a body, then a rough-looking Pullman is explaining the murders we missed to cop hostage Kent Harper, we see them in slow-mo flashback with Bill in a gruesome mask. “You probably read the end of a book first, don’t ya? That is no way to live” – Bill is casting aspersions on the entire Last Ten Minutes project here! His girl Julia arrives and gets very turned on by murdering the remaining hostages. I think the twist is that FBI Agent Ormond was a serial conspirator all along. David Lynch sings over the closing credits.

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Chained (2012, Jennifer Lynch)

Another serial killer/hostage story with another past-his-prime actor, yay. Vincent D’Onofrio is hiding Angie in the crawlspace, her would-be rescuer is a vampire-looking boy in the garage. I think he’s Evan Bird of Maps to the Stars – these two turn the tables on Vincent and bury him down there. Evan was presumed dead, looks up his dad Jake Weber, but dad apparently did something dark relating to the kid’s disappearance so he has to die, then I guess the vampire boy goes home to the late serial killer’s house. No David song over the credits, just footsteps of the boy walking through the house. Between these Jennifer made an Indian snake-woman movie, and she has a couple of new things out, but let’s just act like she doesn’t.

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Saw VI (2009, Kevin Greutert)

Where we left off in volume 15, “bland-looking Costas Mandylor” was the only known survivor of whatever traps Dead Jigsaw is still laying. Big climax here with too many people and a minute left on the countdown clock. Amanda and Deathbed Tobin Bell both get flashback cameos, giving new context for stuff from part 3 which I haven’t considered since 2007. Peter Outerbridge is our man here, being taught a lesson in front of his wife and some business client he was cruel to. Jigsaw appears on VHS to explain how the client’s survivors can melt Peter with acid, which they promptly do. Costas barely, bloodily escapes from his head-smooshing trap. And I’m afraid Jigsaw’s voiceover was telling us the meaning of all this, but the mixing was bad and it got lost under the music. It’s hard to understand the titles, but next comes Saw 7: 3D: The Final Chapter, then Jigsaw, then Saw X (pronounced “socks”) which is part nine but numeral ten, what am I missing?

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Pulse (2006, Jim Sonzero)

They remade Pulse, which seems like the worst idea, but I’ve always wondered… co-adapted by Wes Craven and a writer on Greta. This is “free with ads” so it ain’t really free. Kristen V-Mars Bell has reached the server room, but reality around her is melting and she’s violently assaulted by the editor and the vfx, but before she can be drag-me-to-hell’d, Ian intervenes and uploads a killer virus to crash the system, but the ghosts reboot and the couple flees into an ugly 2006 apocalypse, when everyone was using CG but before it was good. Computer ghosts can break car windows and get punched in the face, ok. After this Sonzero crawled off to video games, but Craven must not have held Kristen Bell responsible since he cast her in Scream 4.

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Child’s Play (2019, Lars Klevberg)

While the Chucky sequels hadn’t even run out of steam they rebooted the original with Aubrey Plaza for some reason. Chucky is ugly now, and has the power to control all toys so he sends an army of quadcopter drones and teddy ruxpins after a toy store full of kids and parents. Or is it not a toy store – there’s a refrigerator section, and the kids fight back with a hedge trimmer. Aubrey is being held hostage so Andy lets his badly dubbed friends escape and goes on the attack, whacking Chucky with a RoboCop toy then stabbing him through the heart. Chuck is then shot by Brian Tyree Henry (where’d he come from) and decapitated by Plaza. I didn’t get to hear Mark Hamill say “give me the power I beg of you!!” Andy was already a veteran of Annabelle and Lights Out and went on to The Fabelmans, not a bad career. The director made another bad movie the same year, and the writer is already hard at work on next year’s bad movies.

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Renfield (2023, Chris McKay)

This year’s first Dracula movie reportedly had a fun Nic Cage performance and nothing else to recommend it. Oh no the music’s too loud again, and I came just in time to see Nick Hoult kill rival Jean-Ralphio then confront a wooden Awkwafina. Cage has no lines here, explodes into a CG batstorm, then during the big showdown we get flashbacks to Ren’s group therapy sessions. Then Nick and Hoult triumph and chop up Drac. Good tumblr joke, but then they repeat it, and the movie peters out. This is my tenth Nick Hoult movie and I have never once recognized him. McKay made The Tomorrow War, the writers are from Walking Dead and Rick and Morty.

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Alone in the Dark (2005, Uwe Boll)

I once thought it would be funny to watch some movies by Boll, with his reputation of being the worst to ever do it, but I checked out House of the Dead and it did me damage. Now every Shocktober I see his follow-up’s title pop up, so let’s consider its ending then put Boll’s name behind us forever. Christian Slater and gang are held at gunpoint by doomed Prof. Matthew Walker then they escape into a hell of CG beasts which is honestly no worse-looking than Pulse. Stephen Dorff has to sacrifice himself to blow up the beasties while Slater and Tara Reid escape to… the front yard of a nice large house, which they wander through, finding only a dead nun. All these movies just wish they were Resident Evil.

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C.H.U.D. (1984, Douglas Cheek)

Ever since the early video store days I’ve known I need to see this one – the trouble is that everyone says it’s bad. The chuds are gross mutants with flashlight eyes, but trapped Kim Greist (Brazil) has got a sword and starts choppin. Chris Curry (Starship Troopers) is radioing Daniel Stern (Home Alone), and I dunno which guy is John Heard, maybe the hero threatening this goverment flunky who’s risking/losing his life to cover up the waste disposal/mutant development project. Feels like if Larry Cohen’s idiot brother did an urban Swamp Thing reboot.

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All today’s movies found on amazon prime, which is a wasteland: searched titles appear multiple times, as free-to-watch, pay-to-watch, and unavailable, just like Amazon’s main store and its utter catalog confusion. Canceling plans to watch the endings of The Howling parts 2-6, because that’s an entire hour I can spend on a Tod Browning movie. I also made a Disney Plus list with both Haunted Mansions, both Hocus Pocuses, recent Marvel crap, Wrinkle in Time, Black Hole, Black Cauldron, etc, but gotta remember to stick to the mission and not watch bad movies for the sake of watching bad movies.

by ·Comments Off on Five by Tod Browning (1919-1927)

Katy’s out of town and there’s a new Criterion blu-ray, so we’re having a Tod Browning Halloween.

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The Exquisite Thief (1919)

Fragment of a lost film, found in Dawson City. A carnival barker turned blackface comedian turned melodrama film director, Browning had made six features before teaming up with the exquisite Priscilla Dean for a successful run. Here she is robbing everyone at a fancy dinner party before making her getaway. Her chauffeur steals Lord Chesterton’s car, accidentally also stealing the Lord (Thurston Hall, later a Karloff victim in The Black Room). It’s implied that the cops are about to find dirt on our Lord just as he’s turning the tables on his captor, but here the fragment ends.

How will Lord Chesterton get outta this mess:

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Outside The Law (1920)

Now Priscilla Dean is a reformed criminal, hanging out with her dad Madden at Chang Low’s bazaar in SF Chinatown. Gangster Lon Chaney shoots a cop while Chinese Lon Chaney(!) suspects a plot and tries to help, getting Madden arrested. The dad was in some major Griffith films, “Chang Low” is a white guy from Richmond VA who also played “Lu Chung” in an Anna May Wong movie.

Priscilla, her dad, Chinese Chaney, Chang Low:

There’s to be a heist, and the cops, the Chaney gang and the girl are all playing different angles. Priscilla gets away with Safecracker Bill, and their plan is to hang out in his apartment… for how long? Months? They invite over an annoying neighbor kid (Stanley Goethals died in 2000, and might well have seen The Matrix or the Matthew Broderick Godzilla) and let him play with a hatchet.

Sweet Priscilla goes outside the law:

Safecracker Bill is Wheeler Oakman of some very silly looking early-’40s Bela Lugosi films. Chaney surprises them and they try to keep him from finding the jewels. But they’ve both fallen for the annoying kid, and his shredded kite out the window provides a christly vision convincing the girl to go straight. The last couple reels of the film are as damaged as the kite – there’s a half hour of good movie in here within the sappy script. Browning would make a different crime film a decade later using the same title.

Non-Chinese Chaney, Priscilla, Safecracker Bill:

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The Mystic (1925)

In the time since Outside the Law, Browning made a bunch more Priscilla Dean pictures and Unholy Three. Zazarek, his assistant knife thrower Anton, and daughter Zara are traveling and being tailed by a Regular Looking Normally Dressed Man, who stands out among the loonies and drunks that are their usual clientele. When they finally corner him, he’s an investor offering to bring them to the States to do their act for wealthy people.

In their U.S. debut, police pre-inspect the room as if this is a crime and not a performance, which seems silly until it turns out he money man’s plan isn’t to get performance money from rich patrons but ghostly blackmail/trickery with Mystic Zara. The money man begins to fall for cute, round-nosed rich lady Doris (she was in Princess Nicotine in 1909 and lived long enough that she might’ve watched Edward Scissorhands). The team goes after her “guardian” Bradshaw, who’s working with the cops. Schemers turn on each other and it ends in a situation I’d imagined during Outside the Law – if the people who say they were gonna give back the stolen goods get nabbed before they can, there’s no way to prove good intent. The money man didn’t have good intent after all when it comes to the crimes, but he does follow the deported family to Hungary to find Zara, so that’s something.

Glad I stuck with the new Dean Hurley score instead of playing my own thing, enjoyed the foley effects. They seem like pretty minor actors. The money man appeared in Stella Maris with Mary Pickford, the knife thrower had been in The Big Parade, the father figure showed up in small parts everywhere, and Aileen “Zara” Pringle was a short-lived star. I thought there should be more knife throwing.

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London After Midnight (1927)

Browning’s lost follow-up to The Unknown, which I watched out of order in its TCM reconstruction from titles and stills. Halloweeny visuals, with a mad spookyfaced Lon Chaney renting a house, or something. The music was bad so I put on Secret Chiefs – but The Book Beriah, not Horrorthon. Unfortunately I swung too far in the other direction, now the music is 100 times better than the “movie,” and all the panning across still photos is tiresome so I’m dropping this 48-min program halfway through.

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The Unknown (1927)

Opens at Circus Zanzi (this guy and Z names), where all the gypsy circus gals lust after Malabar the Mighty. This is a terrific tragedy which I’ve watched before on TCM, but does it count as tragedy if the guy who loses the girl is actually evil? Lon Chaney is sweet on Zanzi’s daughter, who fears being touched, so the armless wonder Lon is a perfect confidante. But of course Lon has arms, he’s just hiding them for his act, and he strangles her dad after being discovered.

Lon foot-toasting Cojo:

Lon’s buddy Cojo says you can’t marry the girl or she’ll find out you have arms, so Lon blackmails a doctor with a dark past into arm-removal surgery. After all, he can light and smoke a cigarette with his feet, and the girl doesn’t know he murdered her dad, what could go wrong? But while he’s away in recovery she decides she’s not afraid to be touched after all, falling into the strong arms of Malabar. Even Cojo is a shitty friend, taunting Lon about his lack of arms. Crazed Lon tries to sabotage a strongman stunt and gets horse-stomped to death in the commotion.

Typical piano score, after 10 minutes I swapped out for Tortoise’s Remixed, which I’ve never appreciated on its own but as a movie score it’s fantastic. Zanzi was in Chaney’s Hunchback and Malabar was Christine’s beau in Chaney’s Phantom. The girl Joan Crawford went on to some fame in the sound era. Between The Mystic and Unknown/London, Browning and Chaney made The Blackbird and the half-surviving Road to Mandalay, and Browning went back to “Hungary” for The Show.

by ·Comments Off on Anatomy of a Fall (2023, Justine Triet)

Did Sandra Hüller push her husband out the window? Did he fall or jump? I don’t know – I strode in confidently seven minutes late, but there were apparently no trailers or ads so I missed the first scene or two. If anybody knows how the husband died please DM me.

All I wrote when I got home is “it’s no Sibyl.” Michael Sicinski agrees:

As is often the case [in November], we encounter a number of productions with solid pedigree and appropriate festival attention. Inevitably, many of these films are “good enough,” but never as interesting as they purport to be. These films are by no means bad, but there’s a sense that they are following well-worn paths to acclaim, striking appropriately literary poses without being formally audacious enough to really put anybody off … In the grand tradition, Justine Triet has been duly rewarded for becoming a less quirky, more conventional artist.