by ·Comments Off on Two by Tsai Ming-liang: Sand and The Night

Sand (2018)

A Walker feature – 80 minutes of walking extremely slowly. I was in heaven – Katy tried to ignore me. Emerging from a pipe onto a beach, past tents and hovels, the surroundings become more industrialized as his journey goes on. Other people sometimes heard in the distance, never seen. Where does he end up? Somewhere indoors, but not heading towards what looks like the exit. That long final shot transitions from machine noises on the soundtrack to the sound of ocean waves. Maybe the walker’s going in circles indoors but dreaming himself back to the sea. 16 shots in 80 minutes, filmed in Taiwan’s Zhuangwei Sand-Dune Visitor Service Park.

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The Night (2021)

Bustling Hong Kong nightlife – not in a party sense, doesn’t seem like a party section of town, just everyone is out and moving around. Closes with a song about being sad the night has to end. Watched in headphones and thought I could hear the cameraman softly humming in my left ear. 13 shots in 20 minutes, no walker to be found.

by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 5 (1982-1994)

Unconscious London Strata (1982)

Defocused colory blorbs. Some nice reds in there. Tiny flickers of what might be a street scene (London?), or water, or a person, but mostly it’s very defocused, the image scrambling back and forth, cutting to a new blorb every couple seconds. SB says he’s exploring the depths of the unconscious here. I played the first four tracks of Mary Lattimore’s Collected Pieces II and it was extremely peaceful.

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Boulder Blues and Pearls and… (1992)

This is my kind of stuff. Boulders and streams and such, overlaid with frantic single-frame paintings that turn on and off, get more and less intense, all picture frequently fading to black. Good music, a light spazzy buzzing. SB says he’s showing the inside of the mind, and viewers say this one’s frightening, but I dunno.

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The Mammals of Victoria (1994)

Brakhage goes on a beach vacation, sometimes patiently watching the tide come in, sometimes darting like a fish through the shallows. Shooting from every possible angle, of course, and mixing in hand painted sections, and what looks like shots from a microscope – even scrambled pay-per-view shot off the hotel TV. All kinds of lighting and composition and movement, the green film grain sometimes clashing with the waves, brief shots of fire and sky for contrast. A really beautiful movie, I watched with Mary Lattimore’s “A Unicorn Catches A Falling Star In Heaven” and “What the Living Do” (I’d reverse their order next time).

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From: First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (1994)

Wow, a hyperactive flicker of colors and patterns with poetry in between, the handwritten text not limited to opening and closing titles anymore. Words by Novalis, a “late 18th century mystic poet.” Watched with Mary’s “Princess Nicotine,” which was written to score a different silent film, but it’s a minute too long.

by ·Comments Off on The Power of the Dog (2021, Jane Campion)

I was supposed to go out and see Nightmare Alley, the first of a wave of Christmas-week movies, but the 3pm show was filling up and I didn’t want to be around other humans, so watched this on the TV instead. Obvs, I liked it.

1925 Montana, gentle friendly rancher Jesse Plemons weds sad widow Kirsten Dunst who has bookish son Kodi Smit-McPhee (Young Nightcrawler in the last X-Men), and they all move in with Jesse’s alpha-bully brother Benedict Cumberbatch. Seems like it’s all going in an unpleasant direction, but as BC begins to soften, the kid calmly plots revenge on Benedict for driving Kirsten to drink.

Sophie Monks Kaufman in LWL:

Campion is a master of intertwining character and plot, so that a revelation of one nudges the other along. In this, her first film explicitly centring male psychology after a career of female character studies, she makes observations about masculinity and power that defy classification. She has blown these subjects wide open and we can but stand still and try to catch the fragments as they rain down.

by ·Comments Off on Benedetta (2021, Paul Verhoeven)

“Intelligence can be dangerous” – is this a quote from the movie, or something I wrote while watching it? A plague is going around, both within and without the movie, so I watched at home and took cryptic notes.

Benedetta’s dad pays for both his daughter and a beaten incest girl named Bartolomea to enter a convent under abbess Charlotte Rampling. Bene dreams that a cartoon superhero Jesus saves her from violent rapists then attacks her, also sees dodgy CG snakes and other miracles on the regular. The higher-ups decide she’s faking but keep that to themselves and make Bene the new abbess. She invites Bartolo to her bed, but sexual pleasure is not allowed in historical times, so both nuns must be tortured, per church leader Lambert Wilson.

The plague takes Rampling, and suicide takes her daughter/spy Louise Chevillotte (Synonyms and the last couple Garrels). Bene (Sibyl star Virginie Efira) lives out the rest of her days at the convent in a postscript title, and I already can’t remember if Daphne Patakia (the mimic of Nimic) lives or what. Fun movie with witty writing, but it’s still a nun drama, one of my least favorite genres.

by ·Comments Off on What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021, Aleksandre Koberidze)

Post-La Flor digressive cinema! Young lovers are kept apart by a curse, trying to find their ways back to each other and to themselves… but then, why not instead follow some dogs who want to watch the World Cup, and isn’t all this just a distraction from larger global issues? Anyway, the main plot ends up with a documentary film screening allowing the romantic leads to see their true selves again. The movie’s somewhat slow and wandering, but the music (in all different styles, by the director’s brother) is fabulous and everything is sufficiently magical (I did close my eyes when the narrator said to).

From the Cinema Scope cover story, Koberidze’s filmmaking origin story is hilarious:

I came home one day and my mom told me she had seen a film by Guy Ritchie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. She told me she liked it and her opinions have always been really important to me, so I watched it and it was the first time in my life when I realized that if this is good, than I can make something good too. It was like a switch went off in my mind. I wasn’t very impressed with the film, so I figured it couldn’t be too hard to make something like this.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

[The director/narrator’s] tendency to over-direct the viewer, combined with a relative indifference to the ramifications of the basic premise, suggest that Koberidze’s true concerns lay somewhere else … Koberidze makes use of the the flowing Rioni River and other physical features of his location, the Georgian town of Kutaisi. Still lives, portraits, and landscapes are the real stuff of What Do We See, and it is here that Koberidze excels.

by ·Comments Off on La vie de Jésus (1997, Bruno Dumont)

Finally getting to Dumont’s debut. Parts of this movie about a dimwit boy in a nowhere town look familiar from Lil Quinquin – a yard where they fix up their car even looks like a location from that movie, and there’s a character named Quinquin. But this was before Dumont had learned to be funny or unpredictable, from his punishing slow art cinema days. Maybe the crappy marching band was supposed to provide levity, but in the end it’s simply no fun to watch a crappy marching band. This doesn’t give me much hope for L’Humanité – I’m guessing that’s as misleading a title as this one, which follows a kid who Dumont wants to portray as a sensitive soul, with his epilepsy and pet finch and cute girlfriend. But the kid’s also a horrible racist, and finally catches the Arab guy he’d seen hanging around with his girl, and uses his head as a soccer ball. The non-pro actors in this stayed non-pro. I was surprised to recognize the finch-song contest from Arabian Nights.

Nicholas Elliott for Criterion:

Rather than a description of the film’s contents, the title is an unusually active element of the viewing experience, a riddle that prompts the viewer to see beyond the low horizons of Freddy’s existence and imagine how the spiritual might be reintroduced into this context. In the trickiest of ways, Dumont titles the film to prime us to look for good where there is evil. Yet he does not ask us to like Freddy, only to accept that he exists…

by ·Comments Off on Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021, Sion Sono)

I paused this halfway since Katy wanted to watch To the Ends of the Earth, which features a lead actor from Sono’s Tokyo Tribe – kinda thinking I should’ve rewatched Tribe instead of this. As Sono’s movies get wackier, I lose more interest… I hated Noriko’s Dinner Table, but it at least felt like he was aiming for something more than prefab cult movies for festival midnight sections and Alamo Drafthouses. Anyway, most of us are here for Nicolas Cage, and he’s good – the production design > acting > editing > writing. It’s written by an American cartoon voice actor and an actor from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – Sono’s tendency to slow down and repeat everything does the weak script no favors.

Sofia in Ghostland:

The Cult of the Mushroom Cloud:

Escape from New York meets that Rutger Hauer movie Wedlock where the convicts wear exploding collars. This time there are multiple little bombs in his jumpsuit, so Cage can lose an arm or a testicle and survive to the next scene. He’s a bad dude (frequent slow-mo flashbacks to a bank robbery where his partner went all Michael Madsen on the customers), as is Governor Bill Moseley who hires him to retrieve escaped daughter Sofia Boutella (Atomic Blonde and Climax). The Ghostland isn’t such a bad place, compared to anywhere else in this movie, it’s just everyone there has mass delusions. The baddie with a nuclear-melted face turns out to be Cage’s psychotic criminal partner, and Cage turns his half-arm into a weapon – what horror movie fan could’ve seen either of those developments coming?? MVP the Ratman.

Discovering Sofia:

Psycho Nick Cassavetes beneath my favorite banner:

Ratman at left:

by ·Comments Off on To the Ends of the Earth (2019, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Katy’s Criterion Channel pick is my first Kiyoshi in a few years, having skipped the alien visitation movies. I found it barely recognizable as a Kiyoshi, not sensing the horror atmosphere that others mentioned in reviews. A few days in the life of Yoko, on location in Uzbekistan with an easily defeated TV crew (when one segment falls through they don’t have any backup plans, hadn’t even read Lonely Planet: Tashkent on the plane). They each become familiar over the fairly long 120 minutes: director, cameraman, flunky, and translator – though the viewer is always on Yoko’s side (Seventh Code star Atsuko Maeda).

The movie gives us a symbolic goat which the TV crew pays to free, then pays again after it gets recaptured, then Yoko sees it in the hills at the end. The one time the camerawork feels complex is when Yoko wanders into an opera house and gets jump-cut between ornate rooms before finding herself both in the seats and onstage. After visualizing her inner yearning, KK shows the absolute lack of imagination of her coworkers – the translator suggests shooting in that opera house, explains its specifically Japanese origin and his rich emotional history with the place, and the director shrugs it off, saying their viewers wouldn’t care.

by ·Comments Off on A Good Marriage (1982, Eric Rohmer)

Opens with 80’s dance music… I’ve been thrown off by the music in my early-decade French films lately. Sabine is Béatrice Romand from Autumn Tale, and the good marriage is all in her head – her boyfriend is married to someone else, but she starts fantasizing and telling everyone she’s getting married. As soon as that proves impossible, she meets André Dussolier at a wedding, and gets ahead of herself again, quitting her job, believing that she’ll marry him and not have to work anymore, even though he keeps ditching her for work reasons. Good ending on a train, leaving the future open.

Dave Kehr:

The second installment of Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” is, like The Aviator’s Wife, a study in destructive imagination and the limitations of personal perspectives — which is to say that the characters talk as much as they did in the “Six Moral Tales,” but no one really hears what they’re saying.

Romand got an award at Venice, where Wenders and Zanussi also took prizes. Her blonde painter friend is Arielle Dombasle, last seen as the “American” in Time Regained.