by ·Comments Off on The Fall of Otrar (1991, Ardak Amirkulov)

The Odyssey from the Trojans’ POV. Guy with an eye injury arrives in town and does everything he can to get the king’s ear and warn everyone about Genghis Khan (the actor also played a Khan in Andrei Rublev), but is tortured and mocked for his troubles. The ruler destroys a caravan and finds a merchant with Genghis’s secret symbol, then kills Khan envoys, bringing total destruction upon his town, if it hadn’t been coming already, while the eye guy watches it all happen. Filmed in Kazakhstan over four years with great difficulty with finances and sets, my second movie this month like that.

Paul Duane gets it.

Kent Jones:

The narrative energy in The Fall of Otrar, just as in Khrustalyov, is generated by a beleaguered but headstrong character trying to cut through layer after layer of resistance to knowing the painful truth — the vanity of Kairkhan as a supreme leader, the duplicity of his Chinese advisers, the reflexive human habit of disbelief, and above all the sheer fact of torture and humiliation as the common currency of everyday life in this Eastern medieval world. If someone utters a thought that suggests a bad outcome, if they make a move or speak a word that somehow implies a violation of the absolute supremacy of the leader or the state, if they are even faintly suspected of anything at all, they are hung with chains from a crossbar in the blazing sun, burned with a hot iron, beaten to a pulp, or pushed to the ground and relieved of their tongue with iron shears.
…
In [Alexei] German’s films, and in Otrar as well, we are dropped into a mazelike world with no apparent points of entry or exit, where nothing is certain and where nothing makes complete sense apart from absolute power and its merciless enforcement. As the films unfold, the horizontal narrative progression is overtaken by a vertical accumulation of details, repetitions, strange proclamations and rituals, sudden capricious assaults, and coded transactions, layer upon layer of unease gradually evolving into horror.

by ·Comments Off on Obsession (2025, Curry Barker)

First the Spielberg and now this: the summer movies love to reference The Rehearsal. It’s never subtle either – our guy is delivering his romantic confession to a stranger, practicing to unleash the real thing on his bar trivia friend. The point is to set up how hopelessly awkward he is, so terribly bad at verbal communication (and decisions in general) that he can barely make a phone call or talk to his actual friends, so when things get uncomfortably supernaturally murdery, he’s even worse. The movie gets in a couple of good jokes about this, but unfortunately it’s a pretty dialogue-heavy story and we’re stuck with him for the endurance. Hopefully the kids will get over their love of terrible awkwardness and we can swing back to coherence.

Should Obsession 2 be Stick-and-Stacks or ChromaScope?

Great performance by Inde Navarrette, the bar trivia friend who becomes a horrifyingly clingy girlfriend after Bar Trivia Bear makes a wish that she’d love him. Apparently the real Inde is locked away in some hell dimension, replaced by the singlemindedly obsessed Girlfriend Inde until one of them dies. I noted the early setup of “I’ve got pills that’ll kill you” and “I know where dad keeps his gun” sidelined for 80 minutes, until they become Bear’s prime suicide options. The wishing thing is great, folding the supernatural into the everyday as smoothly as Weapons did. Best friends/casualties include the cute smart girl who actually likes him, and his doofy bestie Cooper – fortunately only young people get butchered, so Andy Richter is left alone.

Apparently there was much discourse, and most people (Sicinski, Marsh) disliked it, but my most trustworthy horror guy Adam Nayman said it was pretty good, so I watched it on the exercise bike, and it was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on La Captive (2000, Chantal Akerman)

Tense music cranks up as pretty, vacant young Simon (Almeyer, also in Oliveira’s La Lettre) realizes everyone is keeping secrets from him. His beloved Ariane (Sylvie Testud of Lourdes) loves to sleep, tells him nothing of substance, changes her stories.

After she sings a courtyard duet with a neighbor, Simon goes out to solve the mystery of women, asks some women about their relationships with each other, takes everything they say literally, then comes home and confuses his girlfriend, deciding they should break up, then deciding they should stay together, until she swims out and disappears in the sea.

Impeccable looking movie. I immediately read the Christine Smallwood book afterwards, a very good analysis of Akerman and Proust tied together with the right amount of autobiography.

Simon with his grandma Françoise Bertin, a Resnais regular:

Smallwood:

The film constantly switches registers. There is a softcore shower scene; conversations that are screwball in their absurdity; an expressionist dream of dramatic shadows; a line of simpering sex workers straight out of Fellini; a talky, Rohmer-esque conversation about love over drinks in a bar.

by ·Comments Off on Time and Water (2026, Sara Dosa)

Icelandic writer digresses about the loss of glaciers in the world, tells us his parents’ life story, and you can tell he’s self-satisfied about some plaque he wrote about a particular extinct glacier since they take their time building up to it. Pretty good as an essay film, pretty funny that Dosa followed her fire movie with an ice movie, and ultimately the incredible glacier photography put this over the top.

by ·Comments Off on The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973, Wojciech Has)

After Saragossa Manuscript, another Wojciech Has movie full of madness, beautifully filmed, and based on an eccentric novel, which didn’t really work for me. Jan Nowicki (Barrier) goes to a time-warping hospital to find his not-dead-yet dad, then wanders through fantastical episodes, full of delirious clutter (and copious cobwebs) in the tradition of Szulkin and Hard to be a God.

Opens with our guy getting directions from a blind train conductor, ends with him having become the conductor – I guess it all makes sense if you’d read the Bruno Schulz novel, or else making sense isn’t the point. I wasn’t expecting a musical number, but he visits the Jewish neighborhood and they can’t help themselves.

Smart guys like Jake and Yui and PD got it, I’m more on Paul‘s side.

Helmeted protag with his dead father and carnival birdheads:

by ·Comments Off on The Color of Money (1986, Martin Scorsese)

1961 original: downbeat, guys go broke and get injured, the girl dies
1986 reboot: a party, guys get rich and have a good time playing the game

“He’s gotta learn how to be himself, but on purpose.” The Hustler finds a hotshot kid named Vince who is such a hotshot that he busts into pool halls and beats everyone in the room while wearing a shirt that says VINCE. Newman says let’s apply some strategy to this skill, and the kid’s girl (M.E. Mastrantonio) hears him, but the kid (T. Cruise) doesn’t, and the guys end up playing vs. each other in a tournament.

Mouseover to refocus on the next generation:
image

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: C

Secret Weapons (1972, David Cronenberg)

In a 1977 future during the North American civil war, a drug company has taken over the country and “the holy police are experts in psychic attack.” Weird Jazz on the soundtrack, my favorite genre of late. Not bad, definitely feels like a Crimes of the Future (1970) followup. Inventor slips away and meets with the motorcycle gang resistance, some kind of TV pilot setup for a brainy urban sci-fi warfare thing that never came to be (unless you count the entire rest of Cronenberg’s career)

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Days Before the Death of Nicky (2024, Denis Cote)

Woman is driving. Cuts are accompanied by brief blackouts and quiet static, then each new shot rotates to a different type of film or video camera, always affixed to the middle of the back seat looking forward. It’s ten minutes before we hear a voice – her singing to herself. A few times we see the camera adjusted or acknowledged, a few times we see someone else, including the last scene when she’s gone missing and some guy discovers the car.

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Cruel Optimism (2017, Paul Clipson)

A tough one to blurb. Loud ambient music as brightly colored grass and clouds turns into skyscrapers and neon and back again, always with layers and particles and patterns flying every which way. Perfect HDTV demo material for some alternate reality avant-garde Best Buy. The music is by Lawrence English, an Australian who knows Merzbow and Xiu Xiu.

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Light Year (2014, Paul Clipson)

Ambient grumbling string music this time. The focus is on light glistening off river water as seen through various metal bars and fences. Even if it doesn’t fit the theme of the film, he can’t help himself from rushing into the neon city night again towards the end. So far everything I’ve seen by Clipson has been great. Music is by Tashi Wada, a Californian who knows Julia Holter.

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Ten Second Film (1965, Bruce Conner)

Ten seconds of rapidly edited film leader and demo stuff, nice.

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Permian Strata (1969, Bruce Conner)

Scenes from a bible movie where people get stoned set to Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” Do you get it? I hope so, because that’s all there is.

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Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976, Bruce Conner)

Slow sepia-toned scenes of things grounded and heavenly and spectral, while foreboding ambient music plays. Real good, my favorite since Cosmic Ray.

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Cosmetic Emergency (2005, Martha Colburn)

She adds disfiguring layers of paint to magazine models, then finds a quote that the US military gets free cosmetic surgery so she adds breasts and lipstick to pictures of army guys. One of the only movies to feature a Jad Fair song.

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Time Travelers Overture (2024, Martha Colburn)

Another musical cutout collage spectacular, this time to an antic Brian Marsella track. Besides making really fun animations, Colburn has some of the best music taste in the business.

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The Nail Clippers (1969 Jean-Claude Carriere)

Michael Lonsdale checks into a hotel with his wife, and things start vanishing as soon as he looks away from them, including soon all his possessions, his wife, then himself. Carriere was mainly a writer, alternating at this time between Luis Bunuel and Pierre Etaix – and it shows.

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As Long As There Is Breath (2020, Emily Chao)

Looking out windows, whooshing around, the soundtrack whooshing too. At only two minutes, it felt like a trailer for itself.

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No Land (2019, Emily Chao)

Two more minutes, a slow zoom in and (reversal) out of a tree-mounted TV playing a flicker film. Maybe the challenge was to reference Wavelength and Arnulf Rainer at the same time? Silent.

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Baby Blue Benzo (2024, Sara Cwynar)

On the widest screen possible she constructs another self-conscious super-montage with overlapping narrations about desire, consumerism, images, automobiles.

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Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000 (1962)

Wow, Cocteau sits in La Villa Santo Sospir, faces the camera, and talks for 25 straight minutes, the camera cutting closer and closer to his face. It’s no The Human Voice. I got distracted and looked up whether the villa is still standing – yes, they did a pandemic-era restoration of the place, but it’s hard to get details from their broken website: “Today, the restoration is ne few final details left to perf living tribute to its remarka blending modern updates Jean Cocteau’s visionary ar his work as relevant and ev.”

by ·Comments Off on New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way.

The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way.

Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria:

After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982 were too busy having weird sex to go out to movies or shows. Almost everything here is offputting, but the staging of some closeups and quick zooms are pure cinema, unfortunately.

by ·Comments Off on Othello (1951, Orson Welles)

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations.

I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting) stealing the movie in the last fifteen minutes.

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Filming Othello (1978)

Such a ponderous intro, it’s ten minutes before he gets into any details beyond the movie’s title, then it gets good as he shows scenes from the feature – photographed by Early Welles and re-edited in the fast Late Welles style. He quotes a critic speaking of the film’s “tortured compositions, grotesque shadows and insane distortions,” tells a hilarious story of winning a prize at Cannes with his “film without a country.”

“The thing to do was somehow to make a movie” – sometimes it feels like an elegy for the studio age. In the second half he stages a long, slightly loopy conversation with Iago and Desdemona’s dad, Welles getting the final word via retakes and overdubs.

Me after ten minutes: “Rosenbaum was making a point about film canons and Welles’s late filmography by putting this minor doc on his top thousand films list.”
Me after an hour: “Rosenbaum was a coward for not putting this great work on his top hundred films list.”

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Return to Glennascaul (1952, Hilton Edwards)

A short made by the two guys above during an Othello filming break. Narrator and framing story participant Orson picks up Cassio on the road, who tells his spooky story of giving a ride to a couple of Irish women. He drives them to their titular home, they turn out to be ancient ghosts who’ve vanished when he returns to the now-delapidated house a few minutes later. Pretty deliberate and obvious, with some nice photography.