Straightforward doc, named after the rock club that caught fire during a show, killing 20-some people (including most of the band), leading to massive public protests and a change of government. After 30-some more concertgoers died horribly from bacteria due to lack of care in local hospitals – a real-life Death of Mr. Lazarescu – Nanau followed the story through a reporter for a sports magazine, who does his own investigation, enraged by the corruption he uncovers: the hospitals all used disinfectants that had been diluted unto uselessness. The incoming health minister says he’ll operate with transparency, and he does, to the point of allowing the crew to follow him around. So we follow him for most of the second half of the film, also checking in regularly with a survivor of the fire, whose hands were badly injured. She does fashion shoots, gets robotic hands, and stays frustratingly apolitical. The post-film Q&A was interesting – this was early March, and parallels to more immediate government-botched health crises were becoming apparent. Opener Eli Fola played solo sax , but apparently there was a luggage snafu, he arrived sans equipment, and sax isn’t even his primary instrument… very good improv.
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Some Kind of Heaven (2020, Lance Oppenheim)
Slick and professional, as it should be with its impressive opening production credits, with tight editing. Sets up like it’ll be an exposé of this perfect-seeming Florida retirement community, but I think they needed official community support to film there, and the subversive takedown never comes. Instead, we follow a Boston widow looking for a companion who hangs out with a parrothead called the Margarita Man… a van-dwelling parasite who ends up settling for whatever woman will let him stay with her… and a guy who gets into drugs then legal trouble to the consternation of his wife. Movie is in 4:3 with popping colors, the music too high in the mix where we sat. We thought the whole thing too surface-level, and I found The Mole Agent to be a welcome corrective. Appropriately, slicky professional band Loose Loose opened – Katy appreciated their cornet.
T/F 2020 Shorts: Rouge
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (Giacconi & Pennuti & Fabbri)
Does different things with colored stage lights, including flashing fullscreen in a mesmeric flicker, story of a musician’s vision loss added at the end to explain the visual scheme.
Secret Screening Short 1
Passing strangely through space and process, works popping into empty spaces, contextual history at the end.
The Sea, The Stars, A Landscape (Alison O’Daniel)
L.A. smog, small groups around the hideous city. Mostly I was engaged by wondering how this short work ties into the filmmaker’s larger project about tuba theft.
Lost Three Make One Found (Atsushi Kuwayama)
Quirky guy drives through Portugal looking for a mythical fountain that can bring peace after a breakup. Funny movie, good translation humor in the subtitles. They interview a hitchhiker about his own life and outlook, then play the interview back for him the next day while filming his reaction – this turns out to have been a genius idea, one of the best scenes of the fest.
The Metamorphosis of Birds (2020, Catarina Vasconcelos)
Long, and feels long. Few living birds, glimpsed in the distance, two dead ones, some feathers, sounds of owls and peacocks. Life and death of parents and grandparents, becoming trees and birds. Imagery of water, using mirrors and photos, watching a photo develop, brings to mind Strong Island until I realized Oliveira must be an influence. Reversing (adding leaves to the trees), time-lapse (flowers opening). Dad reads the movie’s script and quibbles with the details. They burn their grandparents’ letters, she says they’re the private words of a couple who happens to be their grandparents, but we are free to imagine their words – and so we do. She asserts her right to imagine her own family stories, connects to historical artworks, seeing her family in an unrelated painting. Katy compares to Beaches of Agnes – ways to structure memory, using frames + mirrors, life as theater or frames artworks.
My favorite movie of the fest. Tortoise-lite trio Square Peg Round Hole opened, we both liked. The Butch Jones at Cafe Berlin combines their apples + sausage with pancake/egg/bacon, and is the best conceivable breakfast. Overall a good morning in Columbia.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020, Bill & Turner Ross)
A constructed doc of real-ish people in a fake bar on its closing night. This movie should have been a dream – arriving in town tipsy and dramamine-woozy, sitting up front at the Missouri Theater for a packed screening of a boozy bar movie, but I probably saw 60% and dozed through the rest. Nobody gets a bloody nose, no pockets are empty, nobody even pays. I’m wary of archness from the very start, the opening titles in a 1980’s TV-sitcom font. We talk about finding truth and empathy in these things, but is it a documentary, or a goof on documentaries, or a fascinating hybrid? Katy is suspicious of the constructed nature of the thing… taking addicts and unfortunates and laughing at them… putting real people in artificial situations, the definition of reality TV (The Real World: Las Vegas Bar). Clunky-sounding indie rockers Cowgirl Jordy opened.
Goodbye to Language (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)
Shots seem indifferently framed, scenes make no sense, the cameras seem low-grade… but his films are far-between now, and this showed up on best-of-decade lists, and in particular the experimental/avant-garde/art list I’ve been following… and Godard has spent more time than anyone thinking about the moving image, so even if I’m not especially entertained, there must be something here.
The sound pans, then cuts abruptly, as does the picture. Was that… a fart joke? Yup, and a conversation about pooping later. Really a lot of nudity and flickering televisions. At least one of the nude couples is an affair (“What does your husband do?”). I assumed while watching that the couples in the first half and second half were the same, maybe at different times, but no, the wikis tell me they were “intentionally cast to physically resemble each other.” The four lead actors were not well-known – their recent roles at the time included Woman in tears, Boxing trainer, Hotel receptionist, and French woman #3.
Originally, I put this off because I couldn’t see it in 3D, and maybe I should’ve put it off some more, because THE SHOT is missing in my version.
Beginning of THE SHOT:
A quarter of the movie is Godard taking his dog for a walk. White God came out the same year, so Godard’s dog Roxy had to settle for the Palme Dog runner-up. I’d still like to see Mommy and Mr. Turner and Saint Laurent from that year’s competition, the others not so much.
AO Scott called it “baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.” There’s more writing, and I meant to watch this twice, but who’s got time anymore. I liked it about as much as other Godard features I’ve seen from this century: Notre Musique, In Praise of Love, Film Socialism… but give me Nouvelle Vague any day.
Endless Poetry (2016, Alejandro Jodorowsky)
At end of the last movie, the family was moving from seaside town Tocopilla to Santiago. Mom still sings all her lines, dad is still violent, but this time young Alejandro is the lead character, discovering art and poetry and breaking away from his parents. Just as the kid’s performance is starting to feel limited, we jump a few years so he can be played by Adan Jodorowsky, the filmmaker’s son and director of Echek, for the rest of the film.
The mix of realistic (and not) effects, JR-style retrofitting of modern buildings, dreamlike sets with visible stagehands rearranging furniture, Orpheus references, random nudity, shock color, head shaving, prankster poets, sad clowns and street parades, with the poetry and deaths and parental issues… it all worked for me.
Shot by Chris Doyle! The first I’ve seen from him since The Limits of Control.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Céline Sciamma)
Oh wow, this was as good as advertised. Must see again.
Painter Noémie Merlant will soon appear in Jumbo, in which she falls in love with a carnival ride.
I saw Adèle Haenel a couple weeks ago in Deerskin, plus she was great in The Unknown Girl and has been in at least two Bonello movies – and on my drive to this movie I noticed his Zombi Child is playing the Plaza, but it was the night before True/False, so, too late.
Young Luà na Bajrami was recently in a Village of the Damned sort of thing and a Catherine Deneuve movie. And mom Valeria Golino is mostly known for acting in 1990’s American trash movies, but has won best actress awards twice in Venice for Italian films, and directed two films that played Cannes.
Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon (2019, Becher & Phelan)
A cute blue psychokinetic alien child crash-lands on the farm, and Shaun and the sheep have to avoid the farmer and his dog and a government alien detection agency to send the little fella home. Movie is fully charming, and just an explosion of bright colors – I watched on the plane where everyone around me was watching dirty, dull-looking movies like Joker and Tolkien on their 4-bit seatback screens, and felt that my movie’s color on the laptop seemed radioactive by comparison. The only note I took at the time was “argh, pop songs.”
