by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 5: Los Pajaritos and other shorts

We’ve been watching bird movies. Here’s a final roundup.

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Alone Among Birds (1971, Janusz Kidawa)

Ornithologist Jerzy Noskiewicz lives on a nature preserve on a West Polish lake, watching and tagging the local and migrating birds. Beautiful and very birdy short, divided into chapters, with big doom music.

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Ptaki (1963, Kazimierz Karabasz)

Much more bird-appropriate music here, with light guitars and woodwinds. Doc of a homing pigeon competition – the pigeons are trucked away from their starting point then fly back and get ranked on speed. After the birds’ release the movie flies back home itself, showing a birds-eye view via aircraft. All their legbands are removed by the judges, so how does any breeder get their own bird back?

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Ptak (1968, Ryszard Czekala)

Opens with a beautiful animated bird made of free-floating triangles before following a lumpy crosshatch man with weird fingers who runs the public toilets. The man is in trouble with the government, and either the toilet job is his punishment or he’s paying the fine with toilet money. He frees the bird in the end. I didn’t get it. I saw Czekala’s The Roll-Call a few years ago, and he’s kind of a depressing dude.

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Birds (1968, Frans Zwartjes)

Trix is bobbing a toy bird on a string, but every five seconds the camera flash-edits to her bare legs instead, and back, and again, until despite the film’s short five-minute runtime, even Trix gets tired and goes to sleep.

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Los Pajaritos (1974, Antonio Mercero)

Air pollution montage then a bunch of dead birds, oh no. Royally costumed dude trades his getup for one of the last living birds, a woman with finely sculpted hair gets the only other bird in town, and they both lose their birds and give chase to recover, until they meet up at the park with two birds, making plans to flee the city. A silly dystopia, everything over-punctuated – I guessed it was by the Telephone Box guy pretty easily. Her bird chase is fun, using ever-larger chase vehicles, recruiting everyone she sees to help, and apparently having a grand time. Both leads also appeared in Luis García Berlanga’s Placido.

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Birds (2012, Gabriel Abrantes)

Meeting scene in a Haitian forest with halting dialogue. Second movie of my Birds series where someone’s spouse is transformed into an animal – this time a goat. Good closeup of a buzzard, then into town where everyone is jumping and shouting in full bird costumes. Meta-conversation accusing Abrantes of using “shitty theory.” Maybe it’s an arthouse/festfilm parody, I dunno.

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Bird Karma (2018, William Salazar)

Short, snappy and cartoony, produced by Dreamworks. Water bird has all the fish he can eat, but goes after the magic golden rainbow fish. Salazar worked on this year’s oscar short winner The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

by ·Comments Off on Anne at 13,000 Ft. (2019, Kazik Radwanski)

At least Anne is Deragh Campbell, otherwise I would’ve lost all patience with her. Childish and giggling too much, she works at a preschool where the kids like her because she’s one of them. She manages to meet a grown-up named Matt (Johnson of The Dirties and Blackberry), but plays a “joke” while taking him to meet her parents, falsely announcing that they’re getting married. Nice ambiguous ending, her first solo skydiving trip after she’d been acting increasingly erratic.

I thought it’d be nice to watch a skydiving movie on a plane, and the best part was pausing to explain to the curiously concerned guy next to me the concepts of non-streaming video (how can movie exist without internet) and of indie cinema (he thought it was some kind of Deragh Campbell livecam).

Josh Cabrita in Cinema Scope 80:

So as to even further distanciate the viewer’s perspective of Anne’s life from her own view of these same events, Radwanski continually constructs his scenes around missing or partial information … As in Radwanski’s previous films, the close-up is never a window into a subject’s soul, and possesses no exploratory power. Instead of being a lugubrious exercise in the most facile form of humanist filmmaking – a limited register wherein all that matters is the director’s and viewer’s supposedly generous response to an apparently difficult person – Anne takes a purely external viewpoint that allows for the contemplation of various surfaces.

by ·Comments Off on Will-o’-the-Wisp (2022, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Prince Alfredo’s dying flashback to 2011 flits from a forest musical to a dinner scene where Al (now curly-haired Mauro Costa) gives a dinner-table speech to camera about how older generations are failing us. He decides to become a fireman, is shown around by Affonso (André Cabral). The firemen train to The Magic Flute, and entertain themselves with nude reenactments of famous artworks. While Al is looking at a penis slideshow he gets a call saying his dad has died of covid and he must return to the royal family, but he’ll always remember his time with Affonso, who I guess becomes president of Portugal. A much sillier movie than The Ornithologist.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

Will-o’the-Wisp is a critical inquiry into Portuguese history staged as intellectual gay porno, a Hottest Hunks of the Fire Brigade charity calendar that lights upon the legacy of colonialism, Western visual culture, and the ornamental irrelevance of Portugal’s faded aristocracy.

Charles Bramesco in Little White Lies:

Sex should be fun and just a tiny bit goofy, an intuitively understood real-life concept that nonetheless eludes filmmakers all over the globe.

funeral fashions of the future:

by ·Comments Off on 2nd Chance (2022, Ramin Bahrani)

Catching up with a True/False film we missed at the fest, with special guest Katy’s Mom. After a traumatic incident, local man Richard invents bulletproof vest, promotes it endlessly by shooting himself and by publishing a newsletter counting the lives he’s saved. He’s not so interested in discussing lies he’s told or lives he’s endangered with a later revision to the vest that simply didn’t work as well, and confronted with Richard’s uncomplicated hero-story version of the truth, Bahrani interviews a “saved” cop who turned on his friend, wearing a wire to prove the company knew they were selling a deadly product. Most upsetting scene is when Richard gets his combat-addled dad to shoot him, most upsetting omission from the film is that Richard also invented explosive bullets to defeat his own vests. Instead of simply nailing Richard, who offered free guns to cops who’d kill the guys who shot them, Bahrani follows a redemption story of the fallen-out friend and his reformed attacker.

by ·Comments Off on Red, White and Blue (2020, Steve McQueen)

White Ed says John Boyega would make a good cop, and after the cops fuck up his dad (Steve Toussaint of the latest Game of Thrones thing) real bad for telling them they’re wrong, John joins the force to combat racial misunderstanding. His friends respond appropriately: “I thought you were cool. What happened to you?”

Weirdly, the racist police bosses don’t see what the new hires’ diverse backgrounds can add to the police procedures, but at least they drop charges against John’s dad since they’d lose anyway and they know John is a good PR pull. And weirdly, John’s very presence doesn’t make all the racism dry up, and weirdly he does everything right but still gets passed up for promotion.

Since I watched the last one of these, Criterion has issued a handsome box set, in which Ashley Clark says this movie and Alex Wheatle “form a compelling diptych exploring the true stories of two Black men whose vastly different lives are irrevocably shaped by negative interactions with the police,” so maybe I shouldn’t wait two years before checking out the next chapter.

by ·Comments Off on How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022, Daniel Goldhaber)

It’s Wednesday, so I checked the theater site to see what’s playing this weekend, or more specifically if Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is opening here, but nope. Hey the new Paul Schrader, that’s something. Pipeline‘s final showtime is this afternoon, after holding on for nearly a month – I’m very proud of it and Blackberry for their long theatrical lives, even though the only time I’ve personally been out since True/False was to see those city symphony shorts. Anyway, time to watch Pipeline on video like a chump (and later to chump-watch Blackberry and the Schrader and, alas, Showing Up).

And hey, it’s good! Speaking of Reichardt, I expected to be reminded of Night Moves, but this is more procedural, less psychological, with less murder and guilt, but still some heavy repercussions to the (successful) titular operation. Really good fakeout about a member of the group who’s spying for the cops – true, but she’s feeding them misinformation so half the group will stay anonymous.

I only knew Sasha Lane – also feat. Leo’s son from The Revenant, the Idaho girl from The Assistant, a Marvel kid, a White Lotus dude, a Woman King warrior, a Pixar dinosaur, Disney’s Pocahontas, and the bad boyfriend from the beginning of It Follows.

Based on a manifesto and adapted a la Fast Food Nation into a narrative, a level-up from Goldhaber’s Cam. In the excellent Filmmaker interview he says it was 19 months from conception to premiere, and calls it a heist film:

Nobody watches a bank robbery movie from the ’40s and says, “These people are trying to get people to go rob banks.” They see that movie and say, “This is a movie that’s talking about structural inequality and getting me to empathize with characters who feel like they have no other option than to rob a bank.” This movie follows eight young people who feel like they have no option but to blow up a pipeline. I don’t think of the movie as propagandistic, because there’s no cause and effect. They don’t blow up a pipeline and solve climate change. The doing of it is the narrative catharsis in the same way that it is in a heist movie. I want this movie to be given the same dramatic permission that genre is given.

by ·Comments Off on Enys Men (2022, Mark Jenkin)

The title might be the island name, not like there are men named Enys. I didn’t know. Rough-looking for a commercial film, with visible splices – I’m sure this is on purpose for textural reasons – and sometimes the image reverses, freezes or deteriorates. Mary Woodvine is very good as nearly the only human in the movie, scientifically observing an odd, plasticky flower on an island cliff. The island is haunted by miners, and by people lost and drowned at sea (represented by a tall rock memorial), and by Mary herself, suicidal in flashback and maybe in the present. She drops a rock down a deep hole every day, presumably in reference to “Hyperballad,” and starts to grow lichen when the flowers do. All sorts of thematic visions appear in the last half hour until Ghost Mary picks a flower and becomes the stone.

Brendanowicz: “I like that it tugs on a number of threads without insisting on any one of them as a skeleton key, which is a trickier feat of calibration than it appears.” Blake watched with a better sound system than I did: “Just as the image’s graininess never lets you forget that you’re looking at an image, conspicuous foley work verges on cartoonish, with isolated radio noise, footsteps and creaking doors amplified to the point where they become haptic. Zoom lenses and an infinite depth of field are likewise put to good use, destabilizing our sense of scale.”

by ·Comments Off on May 2023 Shorts

Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020, Eva Giolo)

Nice sound design in an a/g short, how rare. Sync sound effects, professionally blended between shots. Focus on hands and arms… slapping and clutching, spinning tops, clipping flowers, with and without a red filter. I take the film as an ASMR parody, with its hair-brushing and rubberband-snapping, edited too quickly to evoke whatever trance state the youtubers seek.

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Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019, Brandon Cronenberg)

“Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell.” Deragh is a brain-implant patient describing the dream states the device puts her in. Three dreams under different color filters, then a good ol’ glitching-video-signal nude freakout before the Twilight Zone ending.

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Tomb of Kafka (2022, Jean-Claude Rousseau)

Prague. A small room. The desk has a hat on it. One of the windows is green. Usually there’s a white-haired man without anything compelling to do. His activities have equal weight as the quick fadeouts or fidgets of the camera refocusing. Sometimes a cutaway to a forest or a dead bug. We watch the man read for a minute or two. Hey, I could be reading. Didn’t I get a new Laszlo Krasznahorkai book? I could’ve been reading that.

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Dear Chantal (2021, Nicolas Pereda)

Chantal is renting a place from the narrator’s sister, a painter. He’s an Akermaniac so asks to be in charge of communication, which we hear as flatly-narrated letters. Nice shot of brushing leaves from a skylight. Opens and closes with the quote: “Letters never written nonetheless exist.”

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Blank Narcissus (2022, Peter Strickland)

A “rediscovered” Midsummer Night’s Gay Porno with audio commentary by a director mourning his long-lost relationship with the star. Maybe Strickland isn’t as great as I’d been assuming.

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Open Sky, Open Sea, Open Ground (2022, Baus & Gills)

Ecuador… Grainy film with a wrecked water/shuffle soundtrack of people running across a beach from boat to truck, delivering containers of fish while besieged by pelicans and gulls. I was rooting for the pelicans.

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Emergence Collapse (2021, Rainer Kohlberger & Jung An Tagen)

Liquid cityscapes! Best guess is it’s nighttime photography turned into pure digital moosh with the color dial turned to eleven. Some of the most tripped-out shit I’ve ever seen. Loses a point for the nightmarish music, sort of a generative-autechre.

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Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, Sky Hopinka)

Wow, a convincing and succinct blend of earth, sky and water. Images upside-rightside overlapping, the sky masked by a person-walking silhouette, desert and plants blurred into blasted lines as if viewed out a rocket-car window.

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Mélodie de brumes à Paris (1985, Julius-Amédé Laou)

The only short I watched from the free offerings of Prismatic Ground, which was like most film festivals in not having very clear communication about its streaming program.

Opens on a dubbed guy having a breakdown out the window of an artificial-looking apartment, yelling at neighbors and passers-by to blow up the buildings of the oppressors (start with the bars, banks and pay toilets). He mutters himself to sleep on the can, the synth soundtrack alternating with a pop song repeating the film’s title. In the morning he walks through the fog to a bar, his thoughts still on bombs, is the only customer but still can’t get served (because of racism, not because they heard him advocating for the violent destruction of all bars). He finds his dead father and confesses to being a merciless killing machine during the Algerian war. That night he’s being harassed by a drug dealer when a white doorman starts being racist, the director yells cut but the doorman doesn’t stop, and the cast and crew start fighting with the white locals.

Good looking movie with nice fourth-wall-breaking and synth music. I do think a few of the voiceover lines were clunky (guy is haunted by the past, we know because he says “the past, the past”). Star Greg Germain also appeared in the similarly themed Soleil O and popped up in everything from Chabrol movies to Emmanuelle sequels.

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Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Farmhand Roscoe marries Mabel and they move into a cottage her parents buy when a shady realtor’s car breaks down outside their house. R&M sleep as far apart as possible inside, while outside his romantic rival the Hated Milk Machine conspires with some random thugs to … push their house into the ocean? Or it happens to slide away during a storm while HMM and the thugs are attempting to break in. Either way, they don’t become adrift until the last 7 minutes. The cops and parents somehow save them, meanwhile HMM and the thugs gamble all night, argue over the wad of cash, then all die in an accidental explosion. I know that watching silents while listening to Zorn is a cliche with me, but Cleric playing Bagatelles vol. 12 was perfect for this.

Mabel’s parents with villain Al St. John as the HMM:

by ·Comments Off on Don Juan (2022, Serge Bozon)

Tahar from A Prophet misses Virginie from Benedetta after their almost-wedding and becomes very sad, returns to his theater career where he keeps seeing her as different characters around town, then the actual Virginie arrives to act in his show. Nice-looking sophisticated movie full of song and dance, so I feel bad that I remember so little of it.