by ·Comments Off on A Woman of Paris (1923, Charles Chaplin)

Parents in these movies are all stern, stiff and disapproving, eagerly disowning their kids for dating somebody. Jean’s dad drops dead rather than say goodbye. When Jean doesn’t show at the station due to his dead father, Edna gets on the train and goes to Paris without him. A year later she’s a rich society chick, kept in jewelry and hats by Adolphe Menjou, when Jean shows up to act all righteous then lose her yet again. After a defeated Jean shoots himself, Edna does what all penitent rich women do: open an orphanage.

Adolphe and Edna:

After meeting up again Jean is hired to paint Edna:

I know Chaplin wrote original music for this but I ran my silent movie playlist instead, and heard Cluster, Takako Minekawa, Sly/Family Stone, Shigeru Umebayashi, London Sinfonietta, Sir Richard Bishop, Seefeel, Jacob Mann, Sun Ra, Hania Rani, Squarepusher, Neu, Cyro Baptista, Bar Kokhba, Matmos, bunch of Zorn Book of Angels tracks. Good acting, good cast, good final scene – it seems like Chaplin was determined to prove himself in an area outside his wheelhouse, and unlike Polanski he succeeded.

by ·Comments Off on Sirat (2025, Oliver Laxe)

End-times movie, as our characters drive through the desert of Morocco from one rave to another while WWIII appears to be starting offscreen. The main Spanish guy (from Pacifiction and Pan’s Labyrinth) loses his son while searching for his daughter, movie randomly ends up in a minefield where we lose half the remaining characters. Filipe calls it stupid and evil, I rather liked it but couldn’t figure out its point.

by ·Comments Off on Nouvelle Vague (2025, Richard Linklater)

Mostly it’s a casting triumph – they take inventory of the new-wavers with onscreen labels whenever somebody shows up. I could say that this doesn’t have much value if you’re not already a Godard/Breathless fan, but I suppose in that case why would you be watching movies at all? It’s not the first Linklater movie that’ll mess you up with its postscript text. Everyone looks like they had fun – that’s what is important.

by ·Comments Off on Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater)

Ethan Hawke showcase, playing a songwriter whose partner has found success with a different partner. He flails around his favorite bar, chatting with bartender Bobby Cannavale and random patron EB White, waiting for Margaret Qualley to show up (script is based on letters they wrote each other), but she mostly wants to meet ex-partner Rodgers, the man of the hour. Feels more filmed-theater than Nouvelle Vague, besides whatever effect they used to shrink Hawke so everybody will dwarf him, but I had a better time with this one.

by ·Comments Off on Nausicaa and more by Agnes Varda

Nausicaa (1971)

Episodic in different styles, like The Silence Before Bach, and more engaging about Greece than her friend Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy. A big improvement over Lions Love. Varda’s last movie before Mathieu was born and she took a few-year break, returning with Daguerrotypes.

Interview with Pericles, arrested and tortured in Greece after the 1967 coup. Flamboyant sketch about greek art led by advertising guy Mr. ID, jeered by an unseen audience when it ends. Salesgirl selling greek art books instead of bibles (of course you can pay in installments). Newscaster-like guy gives us a history lesson on the coup. Interview with a greek soldier who fled. A geologist found work as a night watchman, misses the sun and the sea, his friends and family now in prison.

Varda makes her first appearance in the next segment, a gathering of exiled Greeks, and a drama starts to come together. We get a recurring character in the salesgirl, and some scripted drama as a young Gerard Depardieu steals her books. The girl and her roommate are hosting a Greek refugee journalist in her apartment until he can get his own place.

Street interviews with tourists who love Greece and don’t think about the politics, and a visit to the Club Med office. A scene purportedly set in Greece, but the backdrop of sea and mountains is transparently fake. Narration by one of the guys who tore down the nazi flag from the Parthenon during WWII. Skit with a girl named Democracy being whipped by her authoritarian mother, asked to sign a loyalty oath.

Democracy hiding under the table:

Episode narrated by Varda about her family history. She talks about a harbor trip she took with the actor playing the refugee journalist, throwing her producers under the bus for not having enough crew to capture sound on their trip.

A factory secretary tell the journalist her secret family history – she turns out to be the mom of one of his hosts, the one from Golden Eighties. After he sleeps with the non-Eighties girl, instead of having them speak to each other, Varda reads both their lines from the script as narration.

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Documenteur (1981)

A vaguely depressing one, made during Varda’s second Los Angeles residency, the same year as Mur Murs (and also interested in street murals). Sabine Mamou (Varda and Demy’s editor) and her son (Mathieu Demy) are in LA, she is a typist bouncing between residences, staying with friends until she gets her own place. The movie is very into watching local people, not clear where the actor/documentary line is drawn, with wordy narration, full of wordplay and association.

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Pasolini/Varda/New York (2022)

Shot on a walk through NYC in 1966, with sound and editing done the following year, then lost until Rosalie restored it in 2022. Pasolini has essential thoughts about New York and filmmaking.

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Ô Saisons, Ô Châteaux (1958)

Maybe her most picturesque movie, an elegant tour of fortresses and castles, with a light jazz soundtrack and poetry excerpts. Torn between thinking this is great and thinking it’s a piece with the tupperware advertisement she directed. Reading the Carrie Rickey book now, which says this was an important step in getting Varda connections and respect and funding for her next steps after La Pointe Courte.

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One Minute for One Image (1983)

Commentary on photographs by (mostly) other artists. Old woman’s face, naked boy held by old women, boats with person in foreground, hand surgery, family in open house, mass grave (this has second narrator Jacques Monory), handshake with fish hand (below), family portrait (with guest commenter Agnes’s mom), mud wrestling, hippie facing soldiers, mirror shard and purse contents on street (a still from Cleo from 5 to 7), kids on a Chinese wall, nude mirror polaroids.

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Les Enfants du Musée (1964)

Short doc of a youth program at the museum for aspiring artists.

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Les 3 Boutons (2015)

No shade on Varda, this is just an overpriced fashion commission. Teen girl leaves her goat farm after receiving a package full of magic fabric, floating through the city in a robe, losing three buttons and gaining three wishes. Good color, nice focus tricks, and standard ugly CG. Also checked out the DVD extras/follow-ups to Daguerrotypes and a couple others – there is a wealth of material on Criterion.

by ·Comments Off on No Other Choice (2025, Park Chan-wook)

That’s it, the final nail – capitalism is finished. Tired of getting mixed up with the Parasite guy, Park decided to make his own Parasite and win Best Picture himself – which he should. Dad (Lee Byung-hun, lead cop in I Saw the Devil, Storm Shadow in the GI Joe movies) was laid off from the paper factory, is having a bad time on the job market. He stages fake job interviews to find all the candidates in similar positions and eliminate them, so next time there’s an opening he’ll be the only candidate.

by ·Comments Off on Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025, Cattet & Forzani)

If I’m following the story (lol), Young Mr. Diman (Yannick “brother of Jeremie” Renier) played Superspy John in a movie series, got recast after his movie vs. diamond Serpentik failed. Now older Connery-looking Mr. Diman (Fabio Testi of a Zulawski movie) is getting kicked out of his hotel after trying to pay with fake diamonds, and thinks Older Serpentik (Maria de Medeiros) might be living next door.

But really it’s just a fragmented romp of distilled genre pleasure. Maybe half dreamed/imagined (there’s a character who hypnotizes victims into believing they’re in a film). A surprisingly high number of Hellraiser-reminiscent scenes, what with the fishhook-haired woman raking people’s faces off, all the skin-cutting in closeup (sometimes with hooks), and fragments of victims’ exploded faces on the ground. Sicinski liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Grand Tour (2024, Miguel Gomes)

On the run from his fiancee Molly, our guy Edward goes from Burma to Singapore to a train derailment to a farming village to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila. He gets feverish and so does the movie. On to Osaka to a temple in the north mountains, deported to Shanghai, hop a boat up the Yangtze, to Chengdu. This is 90% b/w with unexplained color segments, set in 1917 but with modern vehicles plainly visible and sometimes anachronistic clothes. Edward hanging out while his guide stops to smoke opium, the movie suddenly switches to Molly.

Molly loves Burma, soon runs into Diogo Doria. In Saigon, Ngoc says her master Mr. Sanders wants to marry Molly, so the girls run away from him together. The movie does a good job of making me want to visit Vietnam. In China they visit the same giant Buddha we saw. Molly gets sick, pushes hard but dies along the way.