by ·Comments Off on The Tale of Silyan (2025, Tamara Kotevska)

People who watch movies for the human drama, the “empathy machine” people, are the overwhelming majority in the arthouse realm, leaving us bird people to scan every title and plot description for some sign of avian life and not bird-as-metaphor. Once a decade we hit absolute gold, and coincidentally the same month H Is For Hawk came out, right around when I was watching the egret of Alamar, this incredible crane movie popped up. This is what the cinema could be: vague stories featuring doc footage of storks eating frogs, and by that measure the greatest movies would be this and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

That said, there’s much time spent on non-crane activity, as the movie contrasts fallen corrupted human economic life with timeless biological bird life. Priced out of farming, a Macedonian man spends his time helping an injured stork.

by ·Comments Off on Angel (1937, Ernst Lubitsch)

Why does Herbert Marshall do so much walking in this? Besides being very good at walking, he’s an important rich person with neglected wife Marlene Dietrich (shortly after her great Sternberg run), ditching her for work events in the same way as Ray Milland in The Big Clock but with much more charm than Ray. There’s a love triangle in Paris facilitated by Madame Pittypat, and Marlene starts secretly dating her husband’s old army buddy Melvyn Douglas. Melvyn is hunky and all, but extremely elegant people belong together, so the marriage is saved.

Senses of Cinema:

As much as any film made under the Production Code, Angel dares to challenge the ready-made conventions of vice and virtue, good and evil, light and dark on which mainstream Hollywood entertainment has traditionally been based. It is subversive cinema of the most glittering and highly polished order – and all the more radical for being produced on a lavish Paramount budget.

by ·Comments Off on The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles)

Edward G arranges for a desperate nazi to escape prison so he’ll lead them to the big man. Eddie (just after Scarlet Street) gets knocked out and loses the trail of his guy (K Shayne of a Boetticher noir), so he doesn’t see Orson Welles strangle Shayne in the woods, decides to hang around this Connecticut town until more leads turn up.

When your old nazi friend drops in on your wedding day:

Orson is so confident in his new wife Loretta Young (oscar winner the following year) that he admits to killing the “little man,” then when she doesn’t take this news well, he plots to murder her too. Eddie helps tie up loose ends but it’s Loretta who shoots Orson before he’s stabbed by the town clock (my second movie this month to end in a big clock). Clockworker Richard Long is Loretta’s brother, appeared with Orson the same year in Tomorrow Is Forever. The beginning of Welles’s dubbing problems, which would last the rest of his career.

Also rewatched Magnificent Ambersons on the new blu, and learned some Welles tidbits. Simon Callow explains the musical structure of the original cut very convincingly, making a case for what was lost when the studio recut the film. Apparently Pearl Harbor was bombed on the last day of filming, then Orson disappeared to Brazil to shoot It’s All True on the studio’s dime during editing. I just got derailed by a couple other books, but trying to get to the James Naremore biography.

by ·Comments Off on War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981, Piotr Szulkin)

The title and premise sound exciting, but the movie is a sweaty bewigged newscaster (Roman Wilhelmi of Zulawski’s Chopin biopic The Blue Note, with Robert Picardo vibes) being tormented by everyone, including martians, who look like silver-spraypainted oompa loompas in puffy coats. Decaloguists Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Stuhr get a big scene each. The most believable detail is that the biggest music act in the country is called The Instant Glue. Gotta watch the blu extras and learn more about the music. Dedicated to H.G. and Orson Well(e)s, so in addition to finishing Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy I can add this to my ongoing Orson project.

Any government building during covid:

by ·Comments Off on Tattooed Life (1965, Seijun Suzuki)

Fighting Elegy star Hideki Takahashi is Tetsu, an assassin whose life is saved by artist Kenji (star of Black Snow, not that one). Broke, our guys try to find anonymous manual work, but get tangled up with women and get themselves noticed (and implicated in murders and explosions). Kenji sketches the boss’s wife naked, which doesn’t go over well with the boss, and now Tetsu has to avenge his stupid brother. Suzuki brings mad style to the final ten minutes – which is an improvement over the one minute of mad style in Kanto Wanderer.

by ·Comments Off on Rock and Roll Shorts watched in March

La Disco Resplandece (2016, Chema Garcia Ibarra)

Kids hangin’ out movie, getting into harmless trouble (breaking into a former dance club, arriving sleepless and temp-tattooed to a serious ceremony the next day). Common directorial themes I can connect to the feature include UFOs, but unfortunately not cockatiels.

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Boogie Woogie Sioux (1942, Alex Lovy)

Not amusing enough to be worth all the dated racism, story of a native tribe on a hot day and the rain-dance band that fortunately is driving through town.

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V:

–
— ——- (A Rock and Roll Movie) (1967, Thom Andersen)

Fantastic montage of contemporary rock-related things, from the sensual (dance and performance) to mechanical (pressing plants and jukeboxes). Snippets of every rock single of the time, the sound cutting with the picture but never synced to what we see on the screen.

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Parade, or Here They Come Down Our Street (1952, Eames)

Toys and dolls and marionettes puppeted into a parade to the usual Sousa theme. This would appear to have been an influence on my former employer’s Boomerang network packaging. Gives the sense of a serious collector showing off his classic toys.

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Odessa Crash Test (2013, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Repeatedly/gratuitously showing the actual spine-crunching fate of a baby sent down the stone stairs in an uncontrolled buggy. Either my copy was glitchy or the filmmakers thought static and freezing would add more fun to their experiment.

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I Thought The World of You (2022, Kurt Walker)

Wow, a short doc about Lewis. No spoken words, just written messages on screen, light sound design gradually building to the full songs – a more delicate take on the rock biography for an elusive subject. Apparently this is what “hauntology” is.

by ·Comments Off on Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath)

Corey Atad:

It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions.

After convincing us for three hours that Henry Fonda represents America itself, weaving film and interview clips and bringing in political history and Henry’s outspoken actor kids, the doc closes on a shot of pelicans, affirming its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on The Ambulance (1990, Larry Cohen)

Having a difficult movie month here. Seijun Suzuki and The Cannibals were the best movies I’ve watched lately, but this one was the smartest decision. How do you follow up those, plus some major docs, a Jerry Lewis, the Arbuckles, the end of the Szulkin apocalypse series, and my big Cinema Scope roundup? With some brilliant late Cohen nonsense, of course.

Gang:

Janine Turner (Northern Exposure, Cliffhanger) collapses while large-faced Eric Roberts is harassing her. But Eric is no casual harasser, he’s a true stalker, devoted to figuring out why this girl (whose last name he doesn’t know) seems to have disappeared from the medical system after being taken away in a weird ambulance. He goes to a real hospital where he enlists his reporter roommate Red Buttons, and involves police officers James Earl Jones and Megan Gallagher, before uncovering a clonus-horror conspiracy of secret medical experiments and pilfered body parts.

Eric and Red:

Vint:

Coincidence? Cop Richard Bright was in Panic at Needle Park with Alan Vint, and in this movie they go searching for the ambulance drivers with only a uniform that says VINT as a clue. The story is nonsense and Roberts is a nut, but it plays well. Terribly choreographed fight scene between the ambulance drivers and a street gang. Eric was some years after Star 80 and Runaway Train, not long before he started appearing in 10+ movies per year. Eric plays a Marvel Comics artist under Stan Lee, in Stan’s first non-doc appearance – his second being Mallrats. Megan was in a Costas Mandylor movie, oh no. The evil doctor who ends up kidnapping Red Buttons as well as Janine had previously brought on the AI-pocalypse in Colossus: The Forbin Project. Most important is the incredible James Earl Jones performance, hammy but dignified, a must-see.

Dignity, even in death:

Uh-oh, ambulance:

by ·Comments Off on OBEX (2025, Albert Birney)

In 1987 a middle-aged guy loves to spend time on the computer. He and his dog watch A Nightmare On Elm Street on broadcast television then “wake up” inside a customized fantasy videogame, rescuing a guy with a TV head and traveling by map. Once the movie gets into game mode, I flashed back to Hundreds of Beavers – which was more ambitious but had totally different manic vibes to this movie’s good-natured dreamscape.