by ·Comments Off on Television watched early 2017

Search Party season 1 (2016)

Awful young NY woman, with too much money and not enough responsibilities, gets obsessed with finding a former classmate gone missing, whom she never even knew or liked very much. I read MZ Seitz’s review (“The condition of believing oneself sensitive while feeling very little has rarely been examined with such exactness”), realized it stars Alia Shawkat, and set to watching immediately. I keep seeing Shawkat in tiny roles (Night Moves, Damsels in Distress, 20th Century Women) so the star turn here is appreciated.

Dory is joined by weak-willed boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds, a cop on Stranger Things) and self-obsessed friends Portia (Meredith Hagner of Hits) and Elliott (John Early). They get help/hindrance from crazy person Rosie Perez, the missing girl’s ex Griffin Newman (Vinyl) and private investigator Ron Livingston (Office Space), crashing the missing girl’s vigil, a wedding and a Parker Posey-led cult on their way to the ridiculous truth.

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Metalocalypse seasons 3 & 4,
and The Doomstar Requiem: A Klok Opera (2009-2013)

Two more seasons of fun and violence and ridiculous humor, leading to the musical masterpiece that is The Doomstar Requiem.

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Archer season 5 (2014)

The gang loses their spy agency but gains a large shipment of cocaine, which they spend all season trying to unload. Sterling Archer is a father. I’m not crying, you are.

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Charlie Brooker’s 2016 Wipe

Things have gotten more grim and less funny, but I appreciate Brooker sticking with it.

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Twelfth Night (2017, Simon Godwin)

Not television or movies, but we watched a really nice filmed National Theatre broadcast with a rotating set, and Tamsin Greig (Black Books, Green Wing) as Malvolia, greatly tormented in the second half.

by ·Comments Off on Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)

It’s an offbeat movie featuring some cross-dressing guys (some are gay, some transsexual, some I dunno), and also it’s a movie about the making of an offbeat movie, and also a semi-doc about the men/women participating in the movie, with oblique references to current politics (riot police on TV). Scenes are repeated, there are flashes of avant-garde weirdness (and harsh blasts of annoying music, just to let you know it’s the late 1960’s). Then they get high and just dance and fuck around for ages.

Fake-bearded director of the film-in-the-film is named Guevara:

There’s an Oedipus story in here somewhere… I think young Eddie killed his mom, and after taking over the Bar Genet from his boss/rival Leda, Eddie later turns out to be sleeping with his own dad, then pokes his own eyes out. But the bulk of the movie is this free mix of Godard formal weirdness, Oshima rebel 1960’s flavor, goofs and retakes, title cards and poses, and plenty more tricks which seemed to indicate that the central plot wasn’t so important.

Memorial screening for writer/director Toshio Matsumoto, who died in mid-April, and made plenty more excitingly weird-looking movies. Pîtâ (Eddie) was later in Ran (and, unfortunately, Guinea Pig 4). The dad (and owner of the club?), Yoshio Tsuchiya, had smallish roles in Kurosawa movies, and the murdered mom, Emiko Azuma, had been in Insect Woman, later Suzuki’s Kageroza. Not the first drama I’ve seen to include out-of-character actor interviews in the middle of the movie. Kubrick stole the bit where they play action scenes in fast-motion with organ music for A Clockwork Orange.

Oedipus Rex:

Same:

by ·Comments Off on That Touch of Mink (1962, Delbert Mann)

A year after Lover Come Back, Delbert Mann and Doris Day returned with another mediocre comedy featuring high-powered executives, mistaken identity, psychiatry, and lots of running around making vague sexual references. This time it’s Cary Grant instead of Tony Randall, which you’d think would be a step up, but Tony was my favorite part of the last movie. Cary’s a business owner who tries to make hot, unemployed Doris his mistress, but things don’t work out and they end up getting married.

Gig Young (Katharine Hepburn’s boss in Desk Set) is the CFO whose psychiatrist thinks he’s gay for Grant, Audrey Meadows (Alice in The Honeymooners) is Doris’s protective roommate, and John Astin (Gomez in The Addams Family series) is a horny sap Doris uses to make Cary jealous at the end. Also featuring Darrin from Bewitched, and the New York Yankees. Years before watching this, I used one of its automat scenes in my acclaimed “Light Up Gold” music video.

by ·Comments Off on Paterson (2016, Jim Jarmusch)

A lovely little movie, spanning a week in the life of Paterson bus driver Paterson (Adam Driver), who lives with quirky, fashionable Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly, Chicken With Plums, Shirin) and a bulldog (deserved Palm Dog winner).

William Harper (The Good Place) stalking Chasten Harmon:

Paterson with poetry whisperer Masatoshi Nagase (Maiku Hama himself):

“He was a weaver… an anarchist weaver” – the Moonrise Kingdom kids discuss historical figures from Paterson NJ:

Richard Porton:

Paterson is now known to New Jerseyans, if they know anything about it at all, as a poor city, avoided by tourists and locals alike and plagued by gang warfare. Jarmusch’s non-naturalistic conception of Paterson … is instead a cinephilic haven with a cozy repertory cinema that enables the happy couple to attend a screening of Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls … Despite a few minor skirmishes in the bar among soused patrons, Paterson and Laura’s soulful English bulldog named Marvin is responsible for the film’s only bona fide act of violence. Marvin’s almost unforgivable act of aggression suffuses the film with a genuine melancholy … Unlike Loach, with his penchant for didactic political fables, Jarmusch favours a more intimate critique of everyday life, as well as savouring the utopian possibilities that might emerge if we reject the inanities of our consumer society and, say, combine bus driving with poetry.

B. Ebiri:

There are many moments that, in other films, could presage the beginning of something more dramatic: a shouting match; an automotive failure; a random, puzzling encounter or two. But the film keeps its even keel. So maybe there are two sides to Jarmusch’s manifesto: Finding joy and beauty in the everyday is not just an aesthetic priority, he seems to suggest, but an existential imperative for the uneasy soul.

Watched for Cannes Month – of the movies I wanted to watch from last year’s fest, I’ve already seen 13, missed 7… 4 are opening soon, and 12 have dropped off the face of the earth (I don’t understand how film distribution works).

Dec 2021: Watched again with Katy – I love this movie even more now.

by ·Comments Off on The Lost City of Z (2016, James Gray)

It turns out that it wasn’t watching the movie The Lost City of Z that satisfied me, so much as the quest to watch the movie The Lost City of Z, the confident hope that The Lost City of Z would be a great movie, based on the reviews of my James Gray-obsessed film critics. The movie itself – it’s okay, a quest picture where a determined Charlie Hunnam neglects his family to search repeatedly for Z, stopping only for WWI and to raise funds to return to his quest, eventually aging to the point where his oldest son can join him – then they both disappear forever, having either found their destination or been murdered by cannibals.

D. Kasman:

Fawcett … insists that this city, which he dubs “Zed,” not only exists, but that it represents a corrective to the very society whose recognition and acclaim he had once so passionately sought … Because Gray shows only the barest traces of what his protagonist discovers in the jungle, one is unable to precisely define how Z comes to assume such majestic proportions in Fawcett’s mind. Originating as a self-interested means to escape from the restrictive prejudices of English society, his search for Z increasingly comes to seem like a quixotic attempt to discover a greater, purer form of human dignity…

Rob Pattinson is very good as Hunnam’s loyal co-adventurer, Angus Macfadyen is irritating as an awful man who joins one mission then quits and sues, and barely in the movie are Hunnam wife Sienna Miller (upper-floor temptress of High-Rise) and son Tom Holland (the latest Spider-Man). The forest and the river and the light are all lovely, and I loved a match-cut from colored liquid seeping in a line to a train moving in the same direction… and the final shot of Miller leaving the National Geographic Society having received mixed news about her lost husband and walking out into the jungle.

Gray: “How do you take the classical form and do something with it? The last twenty minutes, something starts to break down in the film.”

N. Bahadur:

Where Lost City of Z becomes truly special for me … is within its final thirty minutes, where he starts to free himself from narratological function and let his formal syntax do the work – it’s a big step for him I think, because I believe it allows him to drive even closer to something idiosyncratic and distinctive – for most of the runtime it is a decent film, with some ok ideas, just like any other film… but suddenly, if just for a few minutes, we enter the realm of a visionary.

by ·Comments Off on Loving (2016, Jeff Nichols)

Quiet, lumpy Joel Edgerton (fourth movie I’ve seen him in, maybe I’ll recognize him next time?) marries sweet Ruth Negga (Ethiopian, of World War Z), they just want to be left alone with their kids and their auto repairs and home building and what not, but they’re arrested because they live in a racist Virginia shithole, and forced to move out of town. The NAACP hears about this and decides to use their case to challenge federal law, hires a shaky-looking local lawyer (comedian Nick Kroll), and Life sends photographer Michael Shannon, who gets them national attention. A slow-paced, good-natured movie with a happy ending – what’s not to like?

by ·Comments Off on Their Finest (2016, Lone Scherfig)

Right after I watched Five Came Back, here’s its inverse: British documentary filmmaker is asked by the war office to make a rousing feature, since nobody enjoys newsreels. Columnist Gemma Arterton (The Girl With All The Gifts, Byzantium) is hired as screenwriter, and washed-up detective-franchise star Bill Nighy as actor, and the movie mostly follows Gemma as she tries to make good work while falling for her cowriter Sam Claflin (a fantasy/action franchise specialist), while breaking up with her not-really-husband Jack Huston (John’s grandson – another Five Came Back connection!).

The movie’s fine, with some weird choices (near the end everything gets bright and quiet when Claflin is killed by some rickety film equipment), some in-fashion feminism, and the same old “yay, people who helped the WWII war effort” which is starting to give me the sinking feeling that that’s the last time people worked together for the common good – since then it’s been harsh wars and solo heroes. Original novel title Their Finest Hour and a Half was lots better, written by a TV writer/producer. Director Scherfig made An Education, which I thought was supposed to be good, but apparently not good enough to make my must-see list. I’ll be seeing at least one more Battle of Dunkirk movie this year – wonder how it’ll compare.

Bill Nighy is great, and refreshingly not dead (I got him confused with Alan Rickman). Erlich: “Alas, the lanky British baritone has no business being the standout of a story that exists in order to celebrate the value of female storytellers; Bill Nighy is many things, but a woman isn’t one of them.”

by ·Comments Off on Personal Shopper (2016, Olivier Assayas)

Watched this twice… it doesn’t quite make sense, and a half hour of screen time is spent watching Kristen Stewart texting, but it’s just about the most electrifying thing I’ve seen in theaters lately.

Kristen spends the night in her late brother’s old house, and sees a ghost, but it’s not him. Dropping off clothes for her employer Kyra (Austrian Nora von Waldstätten of Carlos) she runs into Lars Eidinger (Clouds of Sils Maria), tells him she’s not sure she believes in an afterlife (though we just saw her see a ghost). Soon after this, an unknown number starts texting Kristen asking personal questions, and she is intrigued enough to keep responding as she travels from Paris to London and back.

Things get crazy… we see Kristen drop some bags with super-expensive, high-fashion jewelry in Kyra’s apartment just before discovering Kyra dead and seeing shadows move in back of the apartment with rhythmic sounds, then leave without the bags. She returns to call the cops, which we mostly don’t see – then later, the jewelry bags are at her own place. Unknown Caller (everyone has guessed that it’s Lars at this point) drops off a hotel room key, and she goes to the room in Kyra’s dress with the bags… then he arrives… then the camera tracks an unknown presence leaving… then he leaves and has a shootout with waiting police.

Anyway, Kristen meets Erwin (Anders Danielsen Lie, star of a couple Joachim Trier films), the new boyfriend of the late brother’s ex Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz, a small role in Eden), and we get a glimpse of the brother’s ghost. Then Kristen, who has been avoiding her boyfriend Gary, decides to join him in Oman, where she encounters… something… herself. “I don’t know you.”

If she was killed in the hotel room (as the departing spirit would suggest), what’s she doing meeting new people (Erwin) and having normal conversations and going on trips? But if she didn’t, then what happened in the room, and why does she never mention it? I suppose we know that ghosts can become visible and pick up glasses, so maybe they can masquerade as their sisters and carry bags of jewelry across the city… but no, that doesn’t make sense either. Anyway, this unknowability of the story, the lapses in logic and storytelling, only add to the movie’s great mixture of the mundane and the mysterious which has kept me thinking about it all month.

Tied with Mungiu’s Graduation for best director at Cannes last year. DP Yorick Le Saux is on a roll, with this film following A Bigger Splash, Clouds of Sils Maria and Only Lovers Left Alive. I read a bunch of articles which I won’t quote from… David Ehrlich’s family grief essay/interview was a favorite personal take, and V. Rizov’s “Anxiety of Economic Influence” article approaches the movie from a fascinating angle.

by ·Comments Off on Your Name (2016, Makoto Shinkai)

An exciting anime feature, which we got to see on a big screen thanks to the Alamo (in a dubbed version which was refreshingly free of slumming Hollywood celebs). Jumps between protagonists, between bodies, between time and space, then throws in a town-destroying meteor. Incident and action piles up, more and louder, until the body-swapping boy appears to have saved hundreds of lives and we fast-forward to the couple’s first real-life (chance) meeting.

M. D’Angelo:

The film’s body-swapping setup foregrounds questions of identity, beginning with the way that both teens react to their new, temporary genders; Taki-as-Mitsuha spends so much time feeling up his own breasts, for example, that it becomes a running gag. Meanwhile, Mitsuha-as-Taki starts flirting heavily with a slightly older female co-worker at the restaurant where Taki works, and it really looks as if Mitsuha herself is smitten, rather than merely doing Taki a favor while she’s in control of his actions.

D. Ehrlich:

Like all of Shinkai’s films, the richness of the light coats everything it touches with such an evocative hue of nostalgia that the plot only puts a damper on things (and there’s a lot of plot here). Watching these colors bleed between Taki and Mitsuha’s divergent lives is all you need to appreciate the beauty of being in this world together, and the tragedy of how that same beauty always seems to slip through our fingers.