by ·Comments Off on Beau is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster)

Beau (2011, Ari Aster): Only 6 minutes vs. the main feature’s 179, so this felt like a good place to start. Beau is leaving his apartment to visit his mother when his keys get stolen, so he tries to stay awake long enough to catch the thief returning, and possible goes insane along the way. Good comic-action bit when he’s rushed by a guy with a pocketknife, but the knife folds in and cuts off the assailant’s own finger. Aster’s camera moves are cool, but he hadn’t learned how to shoot towards a sunlit window (or any light source).

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In the feature Beau is Joaquin Phoenix instead of the late Billy Mayo, his keys stolen in the same situation as the short, with the same line of dialogue afterward in the hallway (“you’re fucked, pal”). He lives in a nightmarish apartment in a hellish city, takes the “always with water” pills prescribed by shrink Stephen McKinley Henderson just as his water gets cut off, dashes across the street for bottled water and every scumbag on the block occupies and destroys his apartment.

I hadn’t read much about this in advance, and with all the movies’ focus on empathizing with their character/writer neurosis, even kids’ cartoons being ranked by most accurate panic-attack portrayal, I was surprised to see that it’s not all in Beau’s head – his fears are justified, even the ones about his mother. And for the first two hours it’s a hilarious anxiety comedy – probably best that I watched this alone at home since I was hooting and hollering. Wonderful to hear a George Harrison song since I was just watching the Scorsese doc about him – less wonderful to see pathetic Beau sporting the same shirt that I’ve been known to wear to work.

Divided into acts by Beau’s blackouts after various near-death experiences, he learns from a suspiciously Bill Hader-y UPS man that his mom died in a freak accident, he’s rescued/abducted by mega-pleasant family Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane until their daughter Kylie Rogers suicides by drinking paint, then they send a twisted army vet after him into the woods, where he gets into a whole forest theater situation inspired by the “Bachelorette” video. He gets home for the funeral and the movie’s still got another hour left. Beau runs into his childhood love Parker Posey before mom appears alive and he maybe matricides her. Posey and Patti LuPone as mom are both great, and I’m always happy to see Richard Kind, but his big Defending Your Life/Truman Show trial finale is bad.

by ·Comments Off on Animated Shorts watched in June

Bead Game (1977, Ishu Patel)

Stop-motion beads create a series of creatures devouring each other until inevitably, as most animated films do, it becomes a cautionary tale about senseless human violence. Really impressive work, fast and complex, synched to a percussion soundtrack, and I don’t know how they got that 3D light effect in the final minute. Up for the oscar that The Sand Castle won.

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Paradise (1984, Ishu Patel)

A completely different kind of thing, bright 2D animation, frames fading into each other to create a slow dreamy blur-motion on everything. All very bird focused. A black bird flies into a magic castle made of a million points of light and sees a human king and a parade of colorful exotic birds. Back in the real world he brutalizes all the local birds and flowers, stealing colors and patterns and props to make himself look prettier, does a crazy dance for the king who locks him outdoors in the cage of shame. After escaping, I guess he lives in harmony with his fellow wild birds. Lost the oscar to a shorter British thing I haven’t seen.

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Labirynt (1963, Jan Lenica)

This is exciting since I’ve watched the Lenica & Borowczyk shorts but not any of his solo work. Man in a wingsuit descends into the city and hides from various beasties and sees different animal-based horrors. Surreal low-motion clip-art animation, full of birds and moths and traps. He’s finally captured, scanned and identified, rescued by his hat-bird, then shredded when he attempts to escape in the wingsuit. Verdict: cool. This won a prize at Annecy, where Borow also won for his Concert de M. et Mme. Kabal.

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The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912, Wladyslaw Starewicz)

One-ups the Lenica by using actual dead bugs (with wire legs) as stop-motion puppets. A cheatin’ movie, a couple of beetles make out with other bugs and get caught. A jealous grasshopper films the husband with a hot dragonfly – including through their hotel keyhole – and projects it when the beetle couple go to the movies, causing a riot that ends with the beetles in jail. Robert Israel soundtrack on the now-rare DVD.

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The Frogs Who Wanted a King (1922, Wladyslaw Starewicz)

Clay frogs, a hundred times more expressive than the insect cadavers. Fed up with democracy, the frogs pray to the gods to be sent a king. He sends them a stone idol and they get pissy, so he sends a stork which eats all the frogs it can find. An original Aesop fable (he sent a water snake instead of the stork).

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Little Bird Gazouilly (1953, Wladyslaw Starewicz)

I can’t resist watching another bird short and catching Starewicz forty years later. It’s a beautiful one, adding camera movement to the complex stop-motion. Baby birds are born in the trees over the city, and the bulk of the story follows their first day in the human world, getting into hijinks. A bird gets mad at a mirror, just like my birds did earlier today. Wladyslaw had moved to France after 1917, and this film and many more were co-credited to his daughter Irene.

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There Will Come Soft Rains (1984, Nazim Tulakhodzhayev)

Opens with an egg, but it’s not another bird movie, it’s a breakfast-making machine. The humans have disintegrated but the household automation carries on. The concept (by Ray Bradbury) and illustration is cool, but the animation is nothing much. Aha, it’s a bird movie after all, as a bird flies in the open window while the automation is celebrating the new year 2027, and the anti-intruder robot arm tears the house apart. It doesn’t end great for the bird either.

Symphonie Diagonale (1924, Viking Eggeling)

Patterns of curved and diagonal lines rhythmically shift and unmake themselves. Good modern soundtrack by Sue Harshe.

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My Childhood Mystery Tree (2008, Natalia Mirzoyan)

A Russian kid whose main fear is that hawks will steal his teddy bear has an intricate dream of human-held cities of junk collectors atop a giant tree. After a dogged chase, he refuses to give up his bear when asked, leading to the collapse of their entire owl-bug society.

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Kitty Kornered (1946, Robert Clampett)

Porky has too many cats, tries to put them out for the night but they revolt and take over the house. I like that the red-nosed cat’s whole personality was “the drunk one.” Their leader is a proto-Sylvester. A shadow-puppet dog and a martian invasion get involved.

by ·Comments Off on Moon Warriors (1992, Sammo Hung)

Royals Maggie Cheung and Kenny Bee (Shanghai Blues) are in trouble, pursued through the bamboo forest by enemies sent by throne-stealer The 14th Prince, until whale(!) warrior Andy Lau helps them out. They visit the Lord of Lanling for advice and pick up his daughter Anita “Moony” Mui. But the wicked prince (Kelvin Wong of Supercop the same year) has a spy in Maggie Cheung, who attacks our heroes in a black disguise. Things settle down, Andy goes home and the 13th Prince is set to marry Moony, when baddies attack Andy’s village and murder babies, and Maggie double-crosses 14th and he kills her in front of the others. This is all too much violence to stand, so Andy’s orca Sea-Wayne whups 14th’s fuckin’ face, then the tomb of the ancestors smooshes his head in. Almost everyone dies, but Andy and his whale are okay, so there really should’ve been a sequel.

by ·Comments Off on Drunken Angel (1948, Akira Kurosawa)

Doctor Takashi Shimura (lead of Ikiru just four years later) is a drunken gruff pain in the ass, treating ingrate criminals and helpless local youths who won’t stop drinking the swamp water. He tries convincing young gangster Toshiro Mifune (in his first AK film) that his TB diagnosis is serious and to keep himself healthy. As an American viewer it takes a while to realize that both the doc and gangster are blunt and rough in an un-Japanese way.

AK didn’t have his regulars yet, so he borrows a Mizoguchi actor as the doc’s sober schoolmate who runs a respectable practice, and a Naruse actress as the doc’s assistant, hiding out from the gangster she used to be involved with. When that gangster returns to town, he gets his own theme song. Extremely anti-yakuza overall – wonder if the studio got threats. With the stagey acting from the doctor and rough condition of the film print, it feels a decade older than it is, but probably belongs in the pantheon, unlike the last classic Criterion disc I watched.

by ·Comments Off on And God Created Woman (1956, Roger Vadim)

Brigitte Bardot has absurdly great hair in this movie, and likes to sunbathe nude in the garden, so all the boys are after her, to the disapproval of her foster parents. Land baron Curd Jurgens (Richard Burton’s rival in Bitter Victory) is feuding with holdout landowner Christian Marquand (Flight of the Phoenix), and both think they’ve got a chance with Brigitte, but when she’s threatened with losing her home, wallflower J-L Trintignant steps up and marries her. Marriage isn’t much of an impediment to the other two guys, and J-L (beaten up by the local ruffian minutes after his wedding) isn’t strong enough to hold onto her, so people get shot and boats get burned up. Good-looking at least, from Clouzot’s usual guy. Not exactly a vital cinema classic, but in the early days of Criterion DVDs, we took whatever we could get.

by ·Comments Off on The Trouble With Harry (1955, Alfred Hitchcock)

The silliest Hitchcock movie. The trouble is that Harry’s dead and everyone in town believes they’re responsible. First there’s old hunter Captain Edmund Gwenn (Santa in Miracle on 34th Street). He and Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick of some major John Ford movies) have just the friendliest chat over the dead body, signaling that this is not going to be a suspense film. The Beaver gets involved, and his mom Shirley MacLaine is glad Harry’s dead, then admits to having killed him. Local artist John Forsythe is hopelessly poor then suddenly rich, and meanwhile takes an interest in marrying newly widowed Shirley – and Harry is buried then exhumed over and over while this all gets sorted out. Some sound recording issues, but incredible color. The NY Times raved: “it does possess mild and mellow merriment all the way.”

Conspirators:

This was also an influence on Blow-Up:

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q1/Q2/2023

Some TV watched the first half of 2023. I’ve also been watching Underground Railroad for over a year, and Yellowjackets s1 for all of 2023, and I’m only halfway through either of those. Hourlong shows are my kryptonite, unless they are The Kingdom. Also in the middle of a couple shows with Katy (Schmigadoon, The Diplomat) which I don’t know if she’ll want to finish. But here are some shows I actually watched.

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Painting With John season 2 (2022)

“Welcome to Painting With John season 2, the show where I do not teach you how to paint.” I heard season 3 was coming (edit: it’s here!), so it’s time to catch up. Some good birds in the paintings this time. It’s not all paradise; John tells us of his bats and termites and flooding. With the lo-fi composited segments (Synchronized Swimming and Cowboy Beckett) I started thinking of the Talking Heads song “Found a Job” – this could be the show he’s singing about.

I stopped keeping track of specific episodes, but they hide from the camera, turn potatoes into spearheads, speak to the show’s subtitler, relive the 1962 world series, get in an argument with the moon, tell a story I hope is true about a conference in Barcelona, and dance like nobody’s watching.

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The Last Movie Stars (2022, Ethan Hawke)

“Characters rub off under the actor. One of the areas of great discontent is they probably feel that as human beings they are merely a collection of old characters that they’ve played. I sometimes get that feeling about myself, that I have become a series of connectives between the parts of the characters that I really like and I’ve strung them together into kind of a human being.”

Really great doc about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, their lives and careers, getting deep into the art and philosophy of acting. A perfect lockdown series, largely archival footage with current actors reading interview transcripts from an old abandoned project, and Hawke zooming with the actors to discuss the movies and people involved.

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TraumaZone: Russia 1985-1999 (2022, Adam Curtis)

1. We run from 1985 to 1989 pretty quickly, moving on to the good stuff. Chernobyl, Georgian protesters murdered by Russian army, retreat from Afghanistan, managers partnering with gangsters to loot industry, the first two oligarchs, some local keyboardy post-punk.
2. Yeltsin becomes president as communist supply chain plan falls apart. Each ep has a personal story wound through it – this one is a woman traveling to visit her sister for a food swap, and a girl begging for cash in the city.
3. Ukrainian wedding across the street from a Stalin-era mass grave. Moscow coup attempt while Gorbachev on vacation, Yeltsin disowned it. Military killed a bunch of people. Things moved really fast in Aug-Nov 1991 – all the power shifts at the top, and the titles say “and nothing changed.”
4. “Shock therapy” free market experiment does not work.
5. Protestors destroy parliament… which was then shot up with tanks. A mini-economy rises around a “very affluent minority.” Russia becomes more racist and opts to distract from troubles at home by invading Chechnya.
6. Lot of murdering going on, as the Chechen invasion goes badly and the Oligarchs buy up the country’s remaining resources. Wow at the oligarchs promising that if you vote for them, you never need to vote again.
7. The series comes to a merciful end, better in theory than as a viewing experience.

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Atlanta season 2 (2018)

201. Alligator Man, feat. Katt Williams as Alligator Man
202. Al’s drug dealer robs him. Tracy (Khris Davis of the latest Space Jam) is staying w Al so Earn sleeps in a storage unit.
203. Clark County (RJ Walker of a Guy Pearce movie) has a manager who gets him advertising and soundtrack spots. Earn gets kicked out of every establishment trying to pay with hundreds – including Onyx, just down the street from Taqueria Del Sol.
204. Earn is a bad boyfriend, acts sullen at the Helen GA German festival then loses Van over a game of ping pong.
205. Al tries to get a haircut from hair/scam artist Bibby (comedian Robert S. Powell) who takes him on a ride of chaos through the city. Good one, and a welcome break from pitying Earn. Music by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, whoa.
206. Darius attempts to collect a free piano from the mansion of a tormented homicidal shut-in (Glover in albino-face). Get Out vibes.
207. Van goes to a New Year’s Eve party at Drake’s house, has encounters with guys attempting to be charming and coming off as creepy. Her friend Adriyan Rae ditches the group for another party… Danielle Deadwyler (star of Till) fails to start a fight with a white girl… Gail Bean gets too high, finds Darius who explains that the world is a simulation (and so was Drake).
208. Al’s celeb friend Ciara gives him advice on fame, but he’s not listening. So he tries to walk home, but gets robbed and threatened and chased and shot at and lost in the woods. Apparently filmed in East Point.
209. Trip to Statesboro on a bad campus visit. All their stuff gets stolen or destroyed, Earn loses a fight with Tracy (there for “security”) and maybe/almost gets fired.
210. Weirdly un-comic full-episode flashback. Al (in ROTC uniform) gets Earn out of trouble for wearing a bootleg shirt, deflects blame to another kid who kills himself. Filmed in Stockbridge, SE of the airport. Young Al played a bully in Brightburn, the suicidal kid is lately of Stranger Things.
211. On the eve of the Euro-tour, Earn is having doubts about his value and his future and his kid’s future, and I am calling bullshit because he’s rushed heading to the airport with a forgotten pistol in his backpack. But the show lets him get away, and Clark’s manager Matthew Barnes (lately of Creepshow: the series and Scream: the series) takes the fall.

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Poker Face season 1 (2023)

episode 1: RIP to Natasha’s best friend Dascha Polanco (Joy, In the Heights), the friend’s bastard husband Michael Reagan (Adult Swim Yule Log) and casino manager Adrien Brody. Unknown whether casino security Benjamin Bratt (Demolition Man) will recur (edit: yep). Natasha Lyonne hitting the road, Adrien’s dad swearing revenge.

2: RIP to Brandon Micheal Hall (Search Party), dispatched by local creep Colton Ryan for a winning lotto ticket. Natasha is helped out by John Ratzenberger (!) and goth chick Megan Suri (of the new Searching sequel Missing) while trying to save trucker Hong Chau (Downsizing, Showing Up) before the bad guys catch up to her. Alice Ju (Russian Doll) is our new writer.

3: RIP to BBQ king Larry Brown, smoked to death by his brother Lil Rel Howery (TSA buddy in Get Out) for the crime of watching Okja and turning vegan. Co-conspirator Danielle Macdonald (Patti Cake$ herself) goes down too, Natasha helped out by voice-shifting DJ Shane Paul McGhie. Writer Wyatt Cain (Prodigal Son: a Lou Diamond Phillips crime psychologist series) and director Iain MacDonald (Shameless).

4. RIP to young drummer Nicholas Cirillo, electrocuted by his bandmates to steal his song, which he stole from a TV theme. Chloë Sevigny, John Darnielle and GK Umeh are a pathetic metal band touring on an ancient hit, their only new original song “Merch Girl” inspired by Natasha. MVP Chuck Cooper as the roadie who knows about capacitors in vintage amps. Writer Christine Boylan worked on Katy’s show Castle, director Tiffany Johnson was on the Dear White People series. Darnielle’s first Rian Johnson movie since The Life of the World to Come in 2010.

5. RIP to Reed Birney, presumably the Strawberry Mansion director’s dad, poisoned by the gals he ratted on in the 1970’s: TV veterans Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson. Natasha is working at the old folks’ home, befriends and then turns on the drug-dealing domestic terrorists. Not a big fan of the FBI-good-guy (Simon Helberg!), hippie-bad-guy formula, but easily the best written episode so far, excellently directed by Lucky McKee (The Woman, Sick Girl).

6. RIP to Jameela Jamil from The Good Place. Actors Ellen Barkin and Tim Meadows pretend to be trying to murder each other onstage, Jamil gets killed instead, and this somehow makes it not a crime? A young actor catches on, and stagehand Natasha intervenes before they poison her as well, then pulls a confession via hidden mic. Katy is getting tired of all the bad people and the killings. New director Ben Sinclair (High Maintenance) with a writer from a long-running crime show called Leverage.

7. Nobody dies for once, but the joint tampering by Tim Blake Nelson and Charles Melton (Hot Reggie in Riverdale) on a racecar leaves TBN’s daughter hospitalized. Natasha meets both the moms and all the drivers, puts the plot together with no cop involvement. Especially good episode, from the director of ep 3 and a Bojack Horseman writer.

8. The stop-motion episode… mad sfx god Nick Nolte works on his hermit epic with assistant Natasha while film producer Cherry Jones kills her guy (Star Trekker Tim Russ) and Nolte, and archivist Luis Guzmán helps Natasha (who is also this ep’s director) put it all together.

9. Less sweet sfx in this snowy cabin-bound ep, mostly just CG deer, and more gnarly injuries than ever. Natasha is nearly killed two or three times by Joey Gordo-Levitt, who holes up with his buddy David Castañeda in a motel, murdering klepto car aficionado Stephanie Hsu to cover their tracks and reprosecuting the murder they did ten years prior. Rian is back, written by two Zuckermen, who worked on a couple shows Katy watched.

10. RIP to Ron Perlman, the big boss who’s been chasing Natasha across the country, murdered by his flunky Ben Bratt, who defected to mobster Rhea “no relation” Perlman. Agent Helberg is back, Natasha gets little sympathy from sister Clea DuVall (Carnivàle, The Astronaut’s Wife) and goes back on the run. Directed by Janicza “Zola” Bravo, with style to spare.

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Planet Earth (2006)

Apparently there’s also a U.S. version with Sigourney Weaver voiceover, so I suppose we’ll just have to watch this whole series again someday. Some of the footage felt familiar, and I just figured out why.

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The Kingdom season 1 (1994, Lars Von Trier)

Extremely film-grainy restoration of this show I originally watched on dubbed VHS.

Most actors are best-known for this or some other Lars movie. Mogge (young glasses prankster, son of an admin, doesn’t really work there) showed up in Flame & Citron. His blackmailer Hook played a doctor in Downsizing. Old Mrs. Drusse (orderly Bulder’s mom who can hear ghosts) was in the psychokinetic doppelganger film The Man Who Thought Life. Red-haired Rigmor, deluded because she likes Helmer, played the cave woman in Jauja. And Bondo, who transfers a rare cancer into his own body to study it, was in Dreyer’s Gertrud.

They locate the dead girl Mary, tormented in life by her father Udo Kier then kept in a glass display for decades until buried at Bulder and company. But the spirits are unappeased, as Dr. Judith gives birth to… Udo Kier.

by ·Comments Off on La Flor de la Vida (2017, Claudia Abend & Adriana Loeff)

Catching up on True/False films past with Katy. From an audition at an Uruguay theater, the filmmakers smartly choose a talkative man reminiscent of F. Murray Abraham. Full of himself (“I know I have certain theatrical talents”) with a wife who describes herself as “more withdrawn” and an extensive home movie record of their early relationship, the movie interviews Aldo and Gabriella with occasional cuts back to the theater, the other interviewees giving their perspectives on the topics of the moment. Gabriella played the submissive wife for 40+ years, then grew into the kind of person who doesn’t like being around Aldo, and divorced him.

Well-structured movie with a worthwhile central couple, but somehow light and unmemorable. It figures that the screenshot I grabbed and the official movie photo used in reviews is from the same scene – it’s the rare time the two of them are seen together, and it’s a nicer image than the airport scene.

by ·Comments Off on A Man and a Camera (2021, Guido Hendrikx)

Guido (Stranger in Paradise) is being confrontational in a new way: by walking up to people’s houses and filming them without speaking. He groups the chosen encounters by the type of reaction, so in early scenes everyone he meets is standoffish or defensive or aggressive, then a section of people who figure he’s up to something harmless and play along. The woman seen below introduces him to her baby, saying it’s also deaf & mute. It gets more tense than The Balcony Movie when people start letting him into their houses. One guy is very easygoing but warns Guido that the neighborhood groupchat has called the cops on him. In the end he’s making repeat visits to known-friendly houses. It’s kind of the essence of documentary, showing up and letting the subjects control what happens. Guido has a new one set in Sudan which premiered over a year ago.

from Mads Mikkelsen’s Cinema Scope article on interventionist documentaries:

The true protagonist of A Man and a Camera, however, is the latter half of the titular duo. There is a basic understanding at work here that the very act of filming is transgressive, and that being filmed generates an alienating self-consciousness in the unwilling subject of the camera’s attention. In any social situation, the presence of a camera makes for an uneven game; through his repeated acts of passive-aggressive monomania, Hendrikx simply amplifies this dynamic to study its effects.