by ·Comments Off on A Different Man (2024, Aaron Schimberg)

Watched this because I wondered if it had the same plot as The Substance – not really! Sebastian Stan is an Adam Pearson-looking pathetic guy with a tentative friendship with hot playwright neighbor Renate Reinsve, then gets revolutionary medical treatment causing him to look like Sebastian Stan, changes his job and identity, then tries to get cast as his former self in the play Renate wrote about her ex-neighbor’s life. This is going fine for Stan until the real Adam Pearson shows up oozing charisma and steals his role and his girl. Plot hole: Renate doesn’t recognize Adam despite having a Chained For Life poster in her living room.

by ·Comments Off on The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)

Dumb Mulholland Drive. Even more gleefully artificial than I Saw the TV Glow, its length allows more emphasis and repetition than is really needed – I keep remembering how much Body Melt accomplished in 80 minutes, while after all the buildup, only a couple bodies melt in this one.

After Demi is fired from a TV network for being too old, she gets the inside scoop on the substance, which creates a younger you from the current you, and the two yous alternate weeks of consciousness. Her first day as Qualley she gets her old job back from squishy boss Dennis Quaid, then Demi wastes her own weeks eating junk food in her apartment, then the second week she starts stealing extra youth time, which causes Demi to age rapidly/erratically. It’s a huge problem that neither of them has self control. They start videodroming (Q pulls a chicken leg out of her bellybutton) then body-melting (Q gets the idea to substance herself, then drops a boob out her eyehole on live TV).

by ·Comments Off on The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini)

Civil War union boys attempt to patrol out west. Non-period-accurate dialogue, the actors apparently just told to say whatever’s on their minds, it loses me whenever they speak religion or philosophy. I wondered with a half-hour left where this is all heading, and decided it’s heading nowhere and will have an open non-ending, and yup.

As far as movies where women don’t exist, this isn’t as good as Chevalier. The DP (who also wrote the music) uses some unusual lens, dark on the edges with blurry backgrounds, editor also works with the Dardennes.

by ·Comments Off on Gush / Guts & Glitz (2023, Fox Maxy)

Plentiful digital crud here but also so many creatures. Tyra Banks is in more scenes than you’d expect. Constant music flow, all voices have been processed. Composed tripod shots cut rapidly with scraps of handheld phone videos (terrific editing).

Milisuthando vibes, but not as bad. This is the most-halfway I’ve half-watched a movie all year, the TV seeming to demand “do not turn me off, nor give me your full attention.” Maybe generation gap or general blues, but I just sat transfixed by two Twin Peaks episodes so it’s not a lack of attention.

by ·Comments Off on Rebel Ridge (2024, Jeremy Saulnier)

Mid-Sized Sedan is an elite ex-military dude trying to bail out his doomed brother, but a corrupt small-town sheriff’s department decides to fuck with him, so MSS must take revenge with the help of a cute whistleblower. Mostly this is tense and excellent, but it gets too tangled and plotty. They could’ve taken a lesson from another movie about a one-man war against crooked authority figure Don Johnson by streamlining the story in the movie’s second half, not adding more and more story.

by ·Comments Off on The Tuba Thieves (2023, Alison O’Daniel)

There are tuba thefts, and even a halfway-explanation for them, but they’re hardly the point of this experimental false/true movie, which has great sound design and unusual use of captions, and grows to encompass John Cage and Bruce Conner.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

There are also “fictional” passages in The Tuba Thieves, although one gets the clear sense that, in the post-Iranian New Wave fashion, these people are playing versions of themselves. O’Daniel shows us a group of friends from the L.A. Deaf community, but mostly focuses on a young couple, Nyke and “Nature Boy”. Nyke is expecting, and this has prompted her to think back on moments of her own childhood, which she discusses with Arcey, her father. NB, meanwhile, is traveling a lot for his work and, at the start of the film, is becoming increasingly irritated with his audiologist’s hearing tests. Declining to repeat the words on the test, he instead composes a dense, Surrealist poem in ASL, using most of the same words.

Alissa Wilkinson in NY Times:

The 1979 final punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club shows up, as does a surprise free 1984 show that Prince played at Gallaudet University, the nation’s only liberal arts university devoted to deaf people. They’re all driving toward a similar point: Listening means more than just hearing, and in fact doesn’t requiring hearing at all. But the sounds, the vibrations, the racket and clamor and buzz of everyday life are as important in their presence as in their absence. O’Daniel’s scrutiny of them is somehow rigorous and abstract, serious and playful, and provocative in a way that makes us take in the world differently.

by ·Comments Off on Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)

I can’t believe another sci-fi stop-motion feature exists with the same plot as Mad God – Phil Tippett must’ve been so steamed when he saw this. Both movies’ worlds are packed with lore and backstory, which they mostly don’t bother us with, as we follow a little guy who descends into lovingly-detailed hellish depths on some doomed mission. This guy’s human body has been mangled so he’s been robocopped into a doll head and roboticized. Early in his trip he’s ripped apart by worms and takes a mission-endangering head knock, then is re-roboticized into a science lab servant, and fails (but with great effort) to complete a quest to retrieve some mushrooms. The little guy kills a monster and rescues one of his mole-man friends – he does not save humanity or return to the surface, but a sequel is due next year.

by ·Comments Off on Alex Wheatle (2020, Steve McQueen)

Seventeen months after the last episode I’m finally getting around to part four of Small Axe. Alex is in prison re-living his life in flashback, particularly the year he arrived in London, met a bunch of cool people and got really into reggae. Jerking back and forth in time, I only figured out Alex was a real person towards the end when he got out of jail. Most critics disliked this episode for its biopic nature or its wonky script, I liked it very much because it’s an hour long and full of cool music. Then I listened to disc one of The Trojan Dub Box and now I’m good for the rest of the year. Alex (Sheyi Cole) was later in Soderbergh’s Full Circle, which I’d forgotten all about.

Alex’s cellmate says the name of the next Small Axe movie:

Alex says the name of McQueen’s follow-up to Small Axe:

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 13: The Secret Cinema

The Secret Cinema (1967, Paul Bartel)

Jane’s bf Dick dumps her for not caring enough about the cinema, she runs home crying and tears down her Jacques Tati poster, then the next day she overhears her sexual-harasser boss complaining at the bf over the phone that he went off-script during the breakup. Turns out a cinema society is ruining Jane’s life while covertly filming it, and all the cool cinephiles in town are laughing at her in nightly screenings. Are they bowfingering Jane (I haven’t seen Bowfinger)? Jane is killed off as conspirator Helen is chosen as the next subject. Why has it taken me so long to catch up with Bartel’s films?

Jane accepts the boss’s invitation to a club:

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Black TV (1968, Aldo Tambellini)

Shakily filming a flickering TV set, sometimes zooming rapidly in and out, then the image edited and split-screened to a different edit so they never match up. The sound is harsh noise then a loop of the aftermath of Senator Kennedy getting shot, then (blessedly) back to the harsh noise. Pretty intense – “TVs screaming at you” summarized one lboxd viewer. Once again I didn’t have the patience or viewing conditions for The Flicker, this was a good substitute.

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Damon the Mower (1972, George Dunning)

Poetry and animation, with the full page and frame numbers visible, then two animations side by side. The right half is usually the mower (old-school sickle-style) and the left is anything from dancing creatures to exploding mills. Cool at the end when the swish of the sickle starts to reposition the animation paper within the frame. Looks like Dunning made a ton more shorts and also Yellow Submarine.

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UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz)

Super trippy video animation with equally trippy electronic music. This might have spawned both Pac-Man and the phrase “liquid television.” I’ve seen her Pixillation, and I guess she made lots more movies if you can find ’em.

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H2O (1929, Ralph Steiner)

Steiner gets just the kinds of wild patterns that Schwartz would painstakingly produce with her video equipment, by aiming his camera at the surfaces of water in motion. Reproduces pretty poorly as stills, the movement is the point.