by ·Comments Off on TV/Q4/2021

Atlanta season 1 (2016)

Paper Boi experiences the weirdness of semi-fame while Earn pretends to be his manager. Darius gets kicked out of a shooting range. Highlights: “Black people don’t know who Steve McQueen is,” Glover’s fake Bieber song, Jane Adams’ mistaken identity plot turning weird, white guy who loves black people at the rich party – so, pretty much all the racial-clashing material – plus every word LaKeith Stanfield says. Locations: the L5P Zesto (which just announced it’s closing). Earn tries to go on a cheap date in Kirkwood on the same block as Le Petit Marche. The Cameli’s where Blogger Zan works apparently isn’t a real location. Wonder if their calzones are still incredibly good. Van is fired from her teaching job at KIPP Vision Primary, a few blocks from the Starlight Drive-in. I can’t find whether the Primal nightclub was filmed in a real club or a set.

–
Rick & Morty season 5 (2021)

501: Morty’s girlfriend Jessica is a Time God, Rick has an archrival, they destroy another civilization. Was that a Matter of Life and Death reference?
502: “Someone just killed the decoy family”
503: Morty falls for female Captain Planet, Rick and Summer go on a planetary apocalypse tour
505: Hellraiser/Ferris Bueller/Transformers mashup
506: National Treasure x Thanksgiving
507: Voltron x Casino, very great
509: Morty gets into mortal combat with psycho portal boy Nick, Rick becomes obsessed with two crows. Was that a two-parter? I thought I’d remember these better than I do.

This ep wasn’t even called A Morty of Life and Death:

–
Nathan For You season 2 (2014)

Lately his thing is embarrassing himself about personal issues in front of clients. After defrauding people into buying souvenirs on camera using a fake Johnny Depp, Nathan has to prove to a judge that he was making a real movie with these people as actors, so he starts a film festival to win it an award and gain credibility, and hopefully cast a love interest who will agree to be his girlfriend. Nathan hires a focus group to make him more likable, sells liquor to minors, uses fear to make people lose weight, hires 40 maids to clean a house in six minutes. Towards the end of the season his business ideas start failing harder: a pregnant woman refuses to give birth in a cab to promote a taxi company, then Nathan gets kicked out of a hot dog place and ambushes the customer who messed up his plan. MVPs Fake Johnny Depp and Dumb Starbucks.

–
Ultra City Smiths (2021)

Watched after Tom Waits Mode since he narrates. Mostly a bust, despite it being doll-head stop-motion crime/conspiracy plot with many good actors – those star names on the opening titles are mostly for minor characters who get a few lines, and the whole thing feels like a setup for future seasons, which I’m not watching unless there are new writers. An odd repetitive rhythm to the overtalky dialogue which I wasn’t feeling. Nice to see something unique though, and Bobby Bare Jr. sings the theme song.

–
Sampled the first episode of a few shows… Breeders with Martin Freeman is really unpleasant, A Black Lady Sketch Show uneven, and I’m undecided on I Think You Should Leave – got some chuckles, but it’s pretty poop-centric humor. The big winners are Devilman Crybaby (my favorite anime director made a pornographic satanic hellraising series, I am psyched)… Detroiters (thought this would be sketch comedy but I guess it’s about guys who run an ad agency, less cringey than Nathan For You)… Only Murders in the Building… and Mythic Quest.

Got 10 minutes into When I Come Home, which was too loose and fuzzy for my mood that night. But I hit play by accident and it actually played even though my laptop was connected to the external monitor. Between this and the new wifi extender, it could be a new era of streaming, we will see.

–
Other Things Unfinished this year:
Daniel Barnett’s Science Without Substance
Spielberg’s Duel
The Chaplin Revue
The Terror
Bo Burnam: Inside (features editing humor, my favorite kind)
The Beatles: Get Back

by ·Comments Off on Petrov’s Flu (2021, Kirill Serebrennikov)

DNF*

Guy coughing in a packed bus admits to having the flu while a loud racist spouts off – pretty much the worst nightmare of 2021. He’s removed from the bus and given a rifle to execute some well-dressed people, returned to the bus, removed again by a bald cop in a hearse. A guy talking dirty to a child gets his teeth knocked out. A black-haired librarian (the Former Mrs. Petrov) goes Hellraiser-eyed and destroys a violent poet. I think it’s floating in and out of fantasy, displaying the worst parts of society – a dipshit Hard to be a God.

Some good single-take camera tricks, but I did not have the patience for this. After an hour I skipped rapidly through the rest – saw UFOs, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a long stretch in black and white.

*I have rules about this sort of thing – if I only watched half a movie, I don’t mark it “seen” on the database, don’t log it on letterboxd, don’t write a blog post, etc… usually I’ll just mention it at the bottom of whatever I watched next, or in a round-up post. But I feel I should mark that hour I watched of Petrov’s Flu, since I never intend to finish it, and file it away somehow. Not gonna start watching the first halves of movies in order to get more posts in, also not gonna pretend this never happened. Setting a precedent, but who cares?

Librarian:

Romance!

Russia turned upside down:

by ·Comments Off on Daguerrotypes (1978, Agnes Varda)

In which Varda proves she can find good cinema anywhere, by wandering down the street into all the small shops and turning her neighbors into movie stars. There’s too much of the magician, but his magic show serves to bring together the people we’ve been seeing in separate shops into one space. Since I can’t take screenshots off the Criterion channel, I’ve stolen a still from their website.

by ·Comments Off on Everything Goes Wrong (1960, Seijun Suzuki)

Jiro (Black Sun star Tamio Kawaji) is a tormented James Dean type. Once I caught onto the fact that he tears off running at the end of every scene, it was always funny. A youth-gone-wild movie, all the parents lived through hell in the war, now their kids are all owowowowoe is me. Even if I hate all the whiny characters, it’s still a great-looking film that moves like a bullet.

There’s an abortion plot, plenty of money troubles, some muggings and car theft, then Jiro kills his widowed mom’s boyfriend with a wrench, and drives into the night to his own death. A bartender gets the last word, “Jiro was a nice boy,” but no he wasn’t.

Yoshiko Nezu is good, was in two more Suzuki movies in the next year, then disappeared:

by ·Comments Off on One, Two, Three (1961, Billy Wilder)

Cagney is a Serious Fast Talking Businessman who yells all his lines in Cold War Germany. He’s a Coca Cola executive (which means a lotta references to Atlanta), pitting pop culture and business against commie mentality. The German language jokes are sharp and funny, from former Berliner Wilder. Oscar nominated b&w cinematography by Daniel Fapp, who shot color oscar winner West Side Story the same year. The jokes and politics are good, as is most of the farce stuff, but Cagney is a disaster.

The daughter is with beau Horst Buchholz, just off The Magnificent Seven:

“You want the papers in triplicate or the blonde in triplicate?”
“See what you can do.”

Sexy secretary Ingeborg was in Rivette’s The Nun, the boss’s Southern party-girl daughter was in the following year’s State Fair, and her dad had been in Shockproof. The boss isn’t doing a Southern accent, exactly, but I like that all you can see out the window of his Atlanta office is parking lots. References to Omaha, La Dolce Vita, and Playboy.

Atlanta:

Commies:

by ·Comments Off on Roma (1972, Federico Fellini)

Voiceover on opening titles tells us it’s a city film and has no story, good to get that out of the way. Italian folklore involves praising the ducks for helping the army? (google says it was geese). As expected, everyone is crazy for the pope. Memories of filmgoing with obstructed-view seats. The rainy highway sequence is a highlight. I know my standards have been lowered by a recent Argento, but sometimes the dubbing is almost good, like somebody gave a shit. Cheerfully profane once it gets to the theater for a variety show. Ancient artworks are discovered beneath the city, then minutes later the air exposure destroys them. Significant time spent with prostitutes, of course. Corny holy fashion show, and an outstanding Anna Magnani cameo. Bikers ride through the city at night, and okay so it’s not a narrative movie, but it really lacks an ending.

by ·Comments Off on The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971, Roman Polanski)

Thought I’d pair this with the Coen version, not realizing the latter wouldn’t come out till early next year. A terrific looking movie, reportedly in part due to newly-designed anamorphic lenses – almost technically impeccable, a few dubbing issues. I like the idea of turning parts of the monologues into voiceover, although it means the actors have to silently react to their overheard thoughts, which is harder to pull off than speaking the lines. It gets gruesome between Macduff’s slaughtered kids, the king’s guards being dismembered, and a man taking a crossbow bolt to the forehead – also some clumsy clanking armor battles (these are all compliments). The only time I felt the 1970’s was in the “dagger I see before me” scene.

Polanski’s first film after his wife was murdered – he’d been prepping What? but thought it’d appear crass(er), and Hugh Hefner(!) was looking to add respectability by getting into the Shakespeare business and losing a bunch of money. Opens with the witches on a beach… the second prophecy scene is zany, and culminates in a good mirror scene.

In the chronology of filmed Macbeths, Werner Schroeter’s obscure hourlong TV version came out the same year, a TV miniseries the year before, but there hadn’t been a major film since Throne of Blood. The next would probably be in ’79, the TV movie with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. Never heard of a single person in the cast, besides MacB (Frenzy star Jon Finch). Lady M Francesca Annis would star in back-to-back sci-fi epics Krull and Dune. Macduff would become a Gilliam regular, and Banquo was in Dennis Potter’s Cream in My Coffee.

Macduff would like some revenge please:

by ·Comments Off on Zola (2020, Janicza Bravo)

Waitress/stripper Taylour “Zola” Paige joins new friend Riley Keough for a work/vaca trip to Tampa, not realizing the dude along for the ride is Riley’s pimp (Colman Domingo, Paige’s Ma Rainey costar). Instead of either participating or getting the hell out of there, Zola gets cut into the management side, negotiating Riley higher pay for her work. This all culminates in a fatal hostage situation caused in part by Riley’s suicidally dumb bf Nicholas Braun (of the Poltergeist remake), and our heroes survive mostly intact. I assume this is basically Spring Breakers, but with better music and based on a true story.

by ·Comments Off on Passing (2021, Rebecca Hall)

Seems like a pretty faithful adaptation of the 1929 novel, according to the wikis, right down to the ambiguous cause of Ruth’s fall from a high window at the end. Really well visualized by Hall (British actress, star of Christine) and acted by protagonist Tessa Thompson, husband Andre Holland, and frenemy Ruth Negga. Also the first movie I’ve watched at someone else’s house since Batman Returns seven years ago (unless we’re counting the cabin).