by ·Comments Off on The Time We Killed (2004, Jennifer Reeves)

Trying to get out more instead of staying on the couch, so it’s funny to go out and see a movie about someone who never goes out. Movie was righteous – finally some representation for people who watch the news, feel very bad, then just stay home drinking and looking at starlings out the window. If I’d watched this on video I’d be pulling so many good quotes from the narration, but since I’m me, I can’t remember a single one of them now. Lovely to see Tzadik and related groups in the closing credits of an experimental film, since that’s the music I play during silent experimental films anyway.

Reeves in 2004:

When I started shooting, without a script, I thought the film would evolve into a longish short film based on montage. I was inspired by Warren Sonbert’s work, and Jack Chambers’ Hart of London. I think the film grew into a longer narrative with montage elements, because I was going through about as many personal changes as the world was undergoing at that time. I worked on it between 1998-2003. There was a murder suicide next door, I moved, my father died, 9/11 happened, I ended a relationship and was alone, the invasion of Iraq happened. Original intentions or inclinations were not enough, almost irrelevant to me … My process was about wanting to weave together these different personal and universal themes which I felt were related, the idea of wanting to escape your reality … I’m also seeing the film as a product of fragmentation, in the flight from reality one mode of escape can fail, so then you’re looking for another kind of escape. Robyn’s job writing romance novels is one way of producing a fantasy life, of trying to have intimacy and sexuality. Remembering the past with great nostalgia is another escape from what’s going on right now: being an isolated shut in, violence nearby and militarism. I was trying to bring out the tension between wanting to be in the present and continually struggling to get out of it, out of the room.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer Reeves shorts

Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992)

Rapid-fire cut-ups of film and TV and sound clips, slowed down and distorted and strobed, about misogyny and other fun topics.

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Monsters in the Closet (1993)

Stories of queer youth: sex, crimes, and sex crimes. Sound and visual are again subject to speed tampering and flickering.

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The Girl’s Nervy (1995)

Single-frame flickers of beautiful colors covered in fractured-web patterns. Towards the middle a circular field in the frame makes me think nervy = optical nerve, then in the last segment we’re outside among flowers and the patterns look like veins in a plant leaf. Three 1930’s songs, the first of which sounds reversed.

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We Are Going Home (1998)

More reverse audio, images that look embossed, or posterized, whatever that photoshop filter was called. Double(?) exposures turn people into phantoms or twins, pull them apart from the background, the color flitting from pink to blue like a 3D movie in collapse. People walk slowly, someone is buried, breasts and toes get sucked on.

by ·Comments Off on Pear and Vogel 20 shorts

Pear (2024 Joel Potrykus)

Two-hander about trauma, and Joel’s second movie of the year about suicide. Woman re-grows her dead husband in the back yard, but he’s not the same.

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De Düva: The Dove (1968, Coe & Lover)

A silly-assed Ingmar Bergman parody in fake-Swedish (challenging Death to a game of badminton) has no business being this good.

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The Cuckoo Waltz (1955, Emile van Moerkerken)

Processions of people (or zoo animals), some serious and some less so, speed-manipulated so they dance back and forth in slow-fast-motion. Cute.

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Fashion (1960, Yoji Kuri)

No real build to this, just a five-minute boogie of film-scratch animation playing off some cut-out figures with an all-drums soundtrack for five minutes.

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Love (1964, Yoji Kuri)

Absurd love story – tall woman chases short man with a butterfly net until she captures him and makes him her pet. Much dialogue, but only the word “hi.”

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The Window (1965, Yoji Kuri)

Windows, more like it – apartment building with windows lighting up to follow the hijinks within.

by ·Comments Off on Toute Une Nuit (1982, Chantal Akerman)

Anthology of night scenes and into the next morning, mostly involving couples getting together or not – one her most lovely and compulsively watchable dream-films, looks to be an influence on Claire Denis and Tyler Taormina.

by ·Comments Off on Magellan (2025, Lav Diaz)

A daring thing to say in January but I’ll be surprised if we see a better pig sacrifice scene all year. Justin Chang compared this to Zama, but I dunno. This was less phantasmagorical, more of a bio/history pic than I wanted, and sitting up front at the digital screening felt like “TV in public.” Still some undeniable imagery here (with Serra’s DP, looking like Pacifiction) and Gael entering his Viggo era.

Lav in Slate:

It’s just one film for me—one whole thing. This is a continuing discourse. It’s all dealing with the suffering of other people, and not just particularly [that of] the Philippines.
…
I studied cinema as well, all the theories and everything. It’s very distracting, but it helps with discourse. Before you go into the process of filmmaking. It helps when you talk about the rigidness of Antonioni, the spirituality of Tarkovsky, and the humanism of Ozu. You mix all those perspectives and then just destroy them.

by ·Comments Off on Season of the Devil (2018, Lav Diaz)

Trancefilm, eases you into slow rhythms so you get alternately fascinated and bored. On one hand it’s a musical and I love it, on the other it’s about paramilitary violence and I was sick of that subject before pressing play. I had a few small beers, spaced out a little, and how’d we start hanging out with this drunk poet? Watched this movie featuring a Janus-headed military leader in anticipation of seeing Lav’s Magellan in theaters (a Janus Films release).

by ·Comments Off on High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

Documentary of high school life in the late 1960s. Actually incredible, and so was the post-film Q&A, where a bunch of 20 year-olds debated how hilariously wrong everything was in the Ancient America before their parents were even born, then the one attendee who personally experienced the late 1960’s said the movie documents a unique moment when the old authorities were starting to lose their grip.

by ·Comments Off on Half a Loaf of Kung Fu (1978, Chen Chi-Hwa)

Love the jesus christ superstar joke in the credits. Good cartoony music. Jackie fights a guy called King Kong in a henhouse; there is bird tossing. Popeye jokes, dream sequences, overall a very silly movie, the comedy/action ratio outta whack. Hundreds of actors in this, including James Tien, a Dragon Inn guy, and some Flying Guillotine veterans.

Heroes?

Birdie:

by ·Comments Off on The TAMI Show (1964, Steve Binder)

Rock performance show/film from the first wave of the British invasion. Killer opening title sequence, with a montage of artists heading to the show with a Beach Boys song about these same artists heading to the show. Chuck Berry opens with an invisible backing band, then Gerry and the Pacemakers takes over from Chuck mid-song to the delight of the crowd even though they are 10% as cool. Audience gets screamy so the sound mix isn’t great, but the crowd calms down whenever someone non-white is onstage. Some of the best music acts at the peak of their powers (and also Jimmy D Whoever, who’s a drag) play a handful of songs each, hosted by cheeseballs Jan & Dean. The prizes for dancing, vocal performance and stage presence all go to James Brown – a shame that pretty-decent dancer Mick Jagger has to follow him. Dave Kehr raves: “Shot on videotape and transferred to film, this was the first full-scale rockumentary, and it’s still a model of the genre, well paced and mostly in focus.”

Mick vs. the Santa Monica crowd: