by ·Comments Off on The Spiders (1919-1920, Fritz Lang)

Part 1: The Golden Sea

I watched this in college on bootleg VHS for an ill-fated report on Lang’s cinema, and remembered pretty much nothing. A story in two parts, initially set in America with rival adventurers Kay Hoog and Lio Sha. These are meant to be American names? Kay is rich as hell, going after Peruvian gold despite Lio’s gang The Spiders warning him away. Even this early, Lang was into surveillance tech – Lio has an electric mirror showing a view of the next room: a webcam 100 years ahead of its time.

Kay in foreground, Lio being molested at the tables, Georgia flag in Mexican cantina:

Our teams travel to Mexico, hop a balloon over Chile, Kay parachutes out and immediately rescues the Princess of the Sun from a snake. Lio is safely captured, is to be sacrificed, while the Princess swoons for Hoog in her secret waterfall cavern. I love that the drama is less that a girl is gonna get sacrificed and her nemesis is launching a reluctant rescue mission, it’s that the Princess performing the sacrifice doesn’t wanna but her dad says she has to. A chaotic rescue, they find and steal the gold on their way out, then the spiders start killing each other in a frenzy over the gold, and also light the “holy candle” which is a bomb fuse, flooding the cave. The movie opened with a message in a bottle, and nearly ends with Hoog and rescued/kidnapped Princess adrift in a basket. It actually ends back at the Hoog Mansion when he runs out for an errand, returns to find his princess dead with a toy spider on her.

Princess Dagover in over her head:

The servants get into the wine:

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Part 2: The Diamond Ship

Lio seeks a stone for a Chinese client. The opening robbery is filmed at an angle that just doesn’t work, not high enough, very un-Lang. Kay aims to stop the Spiders, still miffed that they killed his princess. With a single edit, Kay jumps off a plane onto a rooftop, hmmm. He hangs out in an opium den to scout for clues, spots Lio and takes her hostage, but they drop him through a trap door into a flooding pit from which he improbably manages to escape. I would’ve been happy watching Kay Hoog continue to escape from implausible scenarios, but the movie feels compelled to set up a big score for us, team Spider swimming in their full black bodysuits (with shoes and masks) to a diamond-laden boat. Somehow this leads to a final fight in a poison cave in the Falkland islands, a four-fingered villain and another kidnapped daughter, but it’s hard to pay attention whenever Kay isn’t falling through trap doors. Ultimately the plastic spiders and the Kay Hoog t-shirts weren’t selling, so the series was cancelled before they made a third episode.

Nemeses:

Kay was Carl de Vogt, who worked long enough to appear in a 1960’s Mabuse. His arch-nemesis Lio Sha’s real name was the just-as-unlikely Ressel Orla. A Jew in Berlin, she escaped the holocaust by dying of illness in the early 1930’s. Lil Dagover (of Lang’s Harakiri the same year) played the Princess of the Sun, and part two’s Diamond King (with the kidnapped daughter) was Rudolf Lettinger (in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari the same year).

Conference Call:

Caligari Man with Kidnapped Daughter:

Ben Model’s music seems fine, but after five minutes I realized I could be playing Zorn’s Nostradamus: The Death of Satan instead, so I did… then The Ninth Circle… so, the Simulacrum crew of Hollenberg / Medeski / Grohowski, and adding Marsella in the second half of The Golden Lake. For part two I played Harriet Tubman’s The Terror End of Beauty. If you keep falling asleep, resuming the movie where you left off the next night but starting the album over, Harriet Tubman is like the miracle of the oil lasting eight nights. But ultimately the movie is too long, so I moved on to their previous LP Araminta feat. Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet.

Dave Kehr says it best, as usual:

Fascinating … though it no longer plays particularly well. Already at this primitive stage in his development Lang was conjuring vast international conspiracies and drawing his hapless heroes into intractable webs of fate. The form is here, the meaning would come later. The visuals too are stamped with Lang’s personality; no one carved up screen space with his precision and expressiveness.

by ·Comments Off on The Tsugua Diaries (2021, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro)

Miguel’s covid-era meta-movie, the days edited in reverse order, the title a reversal of an earlier feature. The movie starts as a light threesome drama, then begins to be about the complications around its own making. For all its formal games, it has a time-killing feeling of “no other movies being made during lockdown, so we made one” – there’s time-lapse and slow-mo and Gomes all but admitting he doesn’t know what happens in the film.

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope:

Within the context of a playfully narrative feature, The Tsugua Diaries comes close to capturing what moviemaking actually feels like—at least moviemaking as practiced in the free-and-easy manner of Fazendeiro and Gomes. When the actors convey to the filmmakers their worries that the scenes aren’t working, Gomes’ response highlights a fact of life that auteurist critics in particular ignore at their peril: he informs the cast that he, Fazendeiro, and Ricardo are “finding that, overall, it’s been a good performance.” Gomes here demonstrates that he knows that actors drive the action, not directors—a notion that he takes all the way on Day 7, when he must accompany Fazendeiro to a prenatal exam, and tells his actors to direct themselves. How, they ask? “Work it out,” says Gomes—which could be the slogan for every film set.

Most importantly, there are two parrots, and baby peacocks:

by ·Comments Off on Licorice Pizza (2021, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Both the movie and its lead dude Cooper Hoffman move fast. He gets Alana Haim to be his chaperone on a promotional trip for his acting career, then things escalate, until he’s arrested for murder while selling waterbeds at a teenage fair, and flooding the house of Barbra Streisand’s boyfriend. She directs the ads for aspiring politician Benny Safdie, he opens a successful pinball palace. Haim gets to run a lot. The final scene, I dunno, but hey, why not.

by ·Comments Off on The Worst Person in the World (2021, Joachim Trier)

Julie falls in love with older comic artist Aksel after he breaks up with her. She wanders into a wedding, meets Parquet-Courts-lookin’ guy Eivind, they exchange secrets and pee in front of each other. Time stops for 24 hours, she sees Eivind while Aksel is pouring coffee, then she decides to leave Aksel without any plan of what to do next. Turns out Eivind is the titular worst person, in comparison to his girl Sunniva who wants to save the world – he leaves her for Julie. Aksel re-enters the story when diagnosed with fatal cancer. I knew this was a relationship drama, but did not expect it to be an Almodovar-level weeper.

Julie and Eivind:

Thelma made me suspicious of Trier, but this was quite a bit better. The great Renate Reinsve has a couple of A24 features coming soon. Rejected comic artist Aksel is Anders Danielsen Lie (Personal Shopper, star of two other Triers) and PC-lookin’ Eivind is Herbert Nordrum (of some important-looking Norwegian historical dramas, also something called Pornopung).

Aksel and Bobcat:

by ·Comments Off on Belovy (1992, Victor Kossakovsky)

After watching three Kossakovsky features, I love when he applies grand visual ideas to ordinary topics, so it’s disappointing that this one looks like an unrestored Sokurov video in brownscale SD.

Enjoyed the two minutes of hedgehog-related drama, not the half hour of a family arguing at the dinner table. Nice pre-Gunda spotlight on farm animals, some sweet long takes, some good rants. A Tarr-worthy final shot justifies the effort – the wife listens to tapes, laughing, crying, then dancing, the camera getting up and dancing with her, her belligerent brother passed out in a corner of the room having fallen on his head from the table.

“Abracadabra. Potatoes, dig yourselves up!”

Peaceful hedgehog:

Hedgehog being protected from very upset dog:

by ·Comments Off on A Night at the Opera (1935, Sam Wood)

I thought this would be a cut above the other Marx Brothers movies since Zeppo isn’t in it, but there’s… opera. Right there in the title. Also the film’s editor doesn’t know what “comic timing” means. And anyway it’s not all madness and opera, the Zeppo romance plot is just shifted to some alternate nobodies. The Marxes made five features for Paramount, and this was the first of their plottier, less anarchic MGM era.

The lovely Rosa is Kitty Carlisle, not really a nobody, her career spanned through Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. Her hopelessly unfamous singer boyfriend Ricardo is Allan Jones of Show Boat, and the jealous spotlight-hogging star Rodolfo is Walter Woolf King (who also sang in Laurel & Hardy movies). The Bros are mostly reduced to opera singer managers in order to keep the plot moving. Once they get to the opera house finale and start swinging across the stage on ropes, it looks high-rent for one of these.

L-R: Ricardo, Rodolfo, Rosa

Harpo innocent:

by ·Comments Off on The House (2022)

An animated anthology released on netflix, so almost everyone has seen it according to letterboxd stats (as many as Kimi, 3x more than Phoenix or Mad God, 5x more than Downton Abbey 2 or Beavis & Butthead 2) and practically none of the critics/publications I follow have covered it. It got a TV movie nomination at Annecy, winning second place to a short called My Year of Dicks. All three are stories about absolutely doomed attempts at house renovation, something a lotta people can relate to, and it’s all extremely high-quality work.

1. After a visit by some shitty rich relatives, dad goes outside drunk and sad and makes a midnight deal with the satanic spirit of a phantom architect to build the family a glorious new house. The house comes fully furnished, with daily meals and newfangled electric lighting, but after they move in the house starts changing, the architect making “adjustments.” The kids find their old house in the basement of the new house, then crawl lost through the walls, while the parents go mad, burning all their old stuff in a trance then transforming into furniture. The baby falling down the stairs was a rare action highlight.

Small faces on big fuzzy heads, and an all-star cast: the little girl is Mia Goth, her dad is Matthew Goode (crazy uncle of Stoker), and the architect’s rep is Mark Heap. The previous mid-length movie by directors Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels won awards at Toronto and Annecy.

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2. A flipper/investor mouse has fired his construction crew, is working on a renovation by himself during a recession. As soon as the house is finished he discovers a beetle infestation, which he tries to hide during the open house (at which he’s the only one wearing the little shoe-booties). An Odd Couple loves the house and decides to sleep there, then takes it over without paying – they turn out to be supermutant rat forms of the beetles. He goes mad, of course. As a new homeowner myself, I’m not concerned about this at all, nope.

Director Niki Lindroth von Bahr is Trevor’s Stockholm neighbor. I thought I’d seen all her shorts (though I’ve only written up Tord & Tord) but I’m just learning of a recent one; see below.

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3. Cat Rosa is having a bad time fixing up the apartments she rents out, because the tenants don’t pay. It turns out new-agey tenant Helena Bonham Carter has a hippie handyman boyfriend, and Rosa is thrilled when he offers to help out. But he’s removing the floorboards to build a boat. The hippies turn out to be right, Rosa in denial, as rapidly rising water levels have doomed the house (actually it sails away too, providing the anthology an unearned happy ending).

Lead cat is Susan Wokoma of a Sherlock Holmes teen spinoff series, the broke artist Will Sharpe of The Wrong Door, and the handyman Paul Kaye of Game of Thrones. Director Paloma Baeza also acts, is married to Alex Garland.

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Bonus short:
Something to Remember (2019, Niki Lindroth von Bahr)

Feels like The Burden part two. A continuous dreary song of hopeless depression, begun by a child in the first scene, continued into each subsequent scene by a character who was present in the previous one – from an empty zoo, through a mattress store and doctor’s office, culminating in nuclear disaster. Pretty catchy song actually, but the delightful innovation here is the clothing design on the birds, moles, beetles and slugs. Funny, the opening shot made me think of Roy Andersson, and Indiewire says she works with Roy’s set designer.

by ·Comments Off on Benediction (2021, Terence Davies)

See Also: A Quiet Passion, for which I wrote: “Spoiler alert for a Terence Davies movie: her heart is full of poetry and yearning but her adult/love life doesn’t turn out very happily.”

Siegfried “Vidal” Sassoon is a sensitive soul, deeply marked by the war, witty and strong-minded but sweet, who has affairs with a string of bitchy bitter young men, and finally grows into a bitchy bitter old man himself. Jack Lowden (friendly lawyer of Mangrove) is brilliant as younger Sassoon. Feels like a large movie for Davies, more characters and stock footage and party scenes and time periods than usual. The well-done morphing effect is back. The other fine actors included Simon Beale (husband of Deep Blue Sea), Jeremy Irvine (star of War Horse), Gemma Jones (Oliver Reed’s eventual wife in The Devils).

With a new Downton Abbey movie out, it’s really time we rewatch Gosford Park, which also featured Ivor Novello as a character. Stephen Tennant is mainly shown wearing colorful scarves, but after visiting his wiki page, I resent the movie not mentioning that Tennant’s stepdad Lord Grey was a bird lover whose older brother was the namesake for Earl Grey tea. Sassoon’s son George taking an interest in UFOs in the 1970’s and writing “The Radio Hacker’s Codebook” in the 90’s are just more reasons this movie needs a sequel – all these would’ve been cooler codas than Sassoon aging into Peter Capaldi, converting to catholicism in the 1960’s and being horrible to family and friends.

My first movie at the Landmark Midtown Art since Portrait of a Lady on Fire in early 2020. Glad to see some things haven’t changed (audio bleed through thin walls, indifferent projection quality) and some things have (they’ve stopped labeling which movie is on which screen, the lobby seems more haunted).

by ·Comments Off on Crimes of the Future (2022, David Cronenberg)

Story of a man who simply wants to eat breakfast.

On second viewing I’m still confused as to the repair workers’ murderous motivations, or how Timlin heard the conversation about tattooing anchors and “mother” and snuck inside that kid. If the cop is lying about everything that could explain it. On third viewing I’ve decided the movie’s double-agent loyalties and its inconsistency about scar tissue are nothing to fret about.

Scott Speedman costarred with Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld series, which have Resident Evil-ish posters, which makes me tempted to watch them. Ah no, I guess not.

Best movie I’ve seen in a while. Some hits from the sites:

David Cairns in Shadowplay [comparing to eXistenZ]:

There are factions in ideological conflict over questions of authenticity, but instead of Phildickian Big Question #1 (What is reality?) this is more about Phildickian Big Question #2 (What is a human being?). Evolution seems to be getting out of hand… is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Kristen Stewart in Vulture:

It’s really fun to have three scenes. If you don’t nail it, you’re wallpaper. Timlin is so locked up, self-oppressed, wants to be good at her job, and totally represents the rigidity of the government that they live under. And she experiences an awakening in a split second … I’m very rarely asked to play weird little characters like that.

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

No lines are overtly comic in the sense of being meant as funny by those delivering them, but the audience always knows when to laugh at a particularly weird exchange even as Shore’s score keeps a straight face … A lot of the dialogue is unapologetically Big Picture thematics, repeatedly drawing links between suffering and its ability to generate art while wondering if the two are really inextricable. But this thematic flexing, which is simultaneously direct and vague (and hence seemingly infinitely suggestive without actually committing to anything), is less absorbing than Cronenberg’s style, a finely honed, mysterious ability to make medium-shot coverage of characters talking on chiaroscuro-shaded stage builds weirdly entrancing.

Amy Taubin and David Cronenberg:

AT: I laughed throughout.
DC: You are the right audience.
AT: And I cried a lot.
DC: And that’s even better.