by ·Comments Off on New Family Shorts (2017)

One of the Roughs, a Kosmos (Carmine Grimaldi)

It was late… let’s see if I remember… a girl and her very beardy dad doing farm things on the farm. She climbs trees. There’s a laptop… and ducks. My notes say “like a more fun Ben Rivers film,” which I meant as a great compliment.

–
All Good Things (Chloe Domont)

Daughter records her parents, who are still married and living together, but mom has a new boyfriend, who she’s been seeing for a couple years. He comes and goes, accepted in theory by the husband, though their comic bickering makes the film worth watching, more than just home movies of an unusual family.

–
Happy Happy Baby (Jan Soldat)

Oh shit. It’s intense to watch five films in one day, and we maybe should’ve gone home or checked if the Cafe Berlin concert wasn’t sold out, but instead here we were, tired at 11:30pm, watching a long-take mini-doc shot in dimly lit basement, where an “adult baby” has playtime with his fellow-kink friends then goes to bed in a giant crib, then his much younger “daddy” explains how he got involved in all this. Or what does he explain? I don’t recall because we raced into the cold night the instant it was over, the other two shorts forgotten, Katy railing against Happy Happy Baby, saying it went against the spirit of all the other films we’d seen by presenting people with unusual kinks and holding them up like zoo animals.

by ·Comments Off on Quest (2017, Jonathan Olshefski)

Eight years in the life of a Philly family. Dad runs a local recording studio, but his star artist Price is progressing further as an addict than a musician. Mom makes peanuts working at a shelter. Their older son has a kid but can’t look for work due to his cancer treatments, and their bright, active daughter gets an eye shot out from gang fighting down the street. Style of the film is low-key observational, and overall mood (when nobody is getting shot) is of great generosity and warmth.

Amy Taubin:

Their daughter P.J. grows from a lively 8-year-old to a high school graduate during the course of this 105-minute film, and when something traumatic happens to her, half the audience at the screening I attended gasped “Oh no!” Quest opens with the 2008 Obama election, and his eight-year presidency is a source of pride and hope, but it doesn’t raise their income above the poverty line.

Photos from a promo site, can’t remember if they appear in the film:

by ·Comments Off on Manifesto (2017, Julian Rosefeldt)

I knew this was a new feature edit of a multi-screen installation piece in which various Cate Blanchetts recite historical manifestos, but didn’t realize it would have such terrific photography and production design, or be entertaining and engaging enough to captivate a huge, packed theater at 10:00 AM. Cate solemnly recites the dada manifesto at a funeral, prays one at the dinner table, spits and curses one as a bearded homeless man, performs one as a puppeteer, sneers one as a backstage rock star, bounces one between a pair of newscasters (with a twist artifice-revealing ending) and teaches a few I recognized (Brakhage, Herzog, Von Trier) to schoolchildren.

Ideas about conceptual art, realistic art, the meaning or need for art, the future of art, freedom and dreams, reality and unconscious, truth and imitation and authenticity (thanks to Katy for taking notes) all complement and contradict each other from Cate to Cate. It’s not a 90-minute speech, either – there are moments of silent wonder like this one:

by ·Comments Off on Rat Film (2016, Theo Anthony)

A bunch of… things. Sometimes it seemed like the movie was taking different aspects of Baltimore life/history/politics and rat life/history/infestations and tying them together into a beautiful conspiracy web, and sometimes it seems like the pieces did not fit together but he doggedly left them in the movie.

The part everyone’s talking about is the movie’s discussion of “redlining” (via sci-fi voiceover), preventing certain (ahem, black) areas of town from getting investment and development, and how the redline maps from eighty(?) years ago line up closely to today’s maps of the city’s worst poverty, education, etc. The part nobody’s really talking about is the drag racing footage, or why he takes the very effective opening title scene of a rat trying to escape a trash bin and repeats it later in the movie.

Other bits from most-to-least-relevant:

– city employee who treats rat infestations and speaks the movie’s premise (the rat problem in Baltimore is really a people problem)

– scientist who studied population concentrations by building a rat High-Rise and documenting civilization collapse

– video game footage textured with Baltimore aerial maps, giving a post-apocalyptic meltdown feeling, discussing how the universe creeps in through the seams of the imperfect 3D environment

– rat hunters (couple of guys with baseball bat and fishing pole, and one with an array of guns)

– rat’s-height roving drone cameras, both real and VR

– a couple watching TV with their pet rats

– stylistic quirks (clicking sounds on edits, piercing electronic noise, white flashes)

Relevant:

Less Relevant:

The ending, in which Baltimore is leveled and begun again, bothered Katy, who says that suddenly telling an obviously fictional story and presenting it on equal ground as the rest of the segments calls all the movie’s facts into question.

Our screening was preceded by a short talk by Sarah Jeong which started by pondering a possible plot hole in the Star Wars film series (both the jedi and the empire have “long-distance” video chat capabilities, so why do the rebels fly around with their precious plans on a physical disc?), then presuming it’s because all the best communications technologies are held by governments and regular shmoes have no access to intergalactic data transmission, ending with a plea for modern net neutrality – genius.

Jordan Smith:

Rat Film embraces an off-kilter essayistic form that digs through the city’s legislative history of systematic segregation (in its way reminding me of Robert Persons’ mournful General Orders No. 9) and rat-infested back alleys of the city’s tenements, subversively suggesting along the way that the countless minorities left amongst the wreckage of unjust codification have been little more than rats in a failed experiment run by white bodies. Meticulously researched and eerily presented by an ethereal Siri-like voiceover, Rat Film‘s crushing thesis lands with a serious crunch that reminds of the death and detritus that’s been institutionalized since the city’s inception.

J. Fox:

What really gives Rat Film its charge is its interest in mapping, and in the ways that maps intervene on the world by representing them. The rat provides a convenient metaphor for the social, or at least the social envisioned as a disease-spreading mass — intellectual, economic, racial or microbial — that must be contained … When Rat Film engages a number of actual maps, from those redlining diagrams to 3D urban real estate models and VR platforms, it does so in order to stretch them to their pre-programmed limits, revealing those spots where they fray at the seams. What is left at the end is a world of precarity, one of predominantly African-American people made precarious by these instruments of social engineering, and of a world in need of new models for living.

by ·Comments Off on Distant Constellation (2017, Shevaun Mizrahi)

Our first movie at the 2017 True/False Film Fest, which was an overwhelmingly great long weekend. We were among the last three people let in via the Q for this one, sat in scattered chairs and loveseats lined up in a comfy space behind a coffee shop.

Slow and dreamy visit with the residents of a Turkish retirement home, sheltered indoors while a major construction project goes up across the street (Mizrahi goes out and joins the construction workers in the final minutes of the film). Looping atmospheric sounds instead of music, patterns changing with each scene. Focused on the people, their behavior and stories, with a few great visual moments (I’m thinking of the lineup of 4-5 women sitting down watching one who gets up to leave, the same scenario repeated later in the film). Presented as a test screening, so it might be released in a different form later, though I can’t imagine it’ll get much of a commercial release in the States. Judging from the reaction to one glorious long take, it’ll have to remain in the film – two guys stand in the elevator having long conversations, pressing the buttons to go up and down repeatedly, then to their annoyance a woman in a wheelchair is rolled in, and after a long minute she looks up and grins into the camera. It’s hard to explain in words why this was so wonderful.

Memorable characters: A photographer with serious vision trouble fumbles with his camera gear speaking in helpless loops. A man with breathing problems talks in his sleep (“Merry Christmas”). A woman over 100 years old survived the Armenian genocide and is still suspicious of authority and afraid of persecution, asks to use a pseudonym on camera. And one man we revisit a few times, realizing at the end that he had a strategy all along. He reminisces about reading Lolita. He reads us one of his own erotic stories, and mentions that he prefers intimacy with a couple (no more than three!) more than the sex parties he’s attended. He boasts about the time he gave a 31 year-old woman an orgasm though he was much older at the time. Finally he proposes to the (30 year-old) director. I believe she turned him down, though we left before the Q&A, successfully sneaking into another movie.

J. Cronk:

This pairing of industrial upheaval with the burden of socio-historic tribulation can’t help but recall the docufiction experiments of China’s greatest living filmmaker, Jia Zhangke (particularly Still Life and 24 City), while Mizrahi’s formal acumen and rigorous compositional sense nod to the self-professed influence of Portugal’s Pedro Costa, whose Fontainhas trilogy similarly exposed and personified the souls of a neglected community on the brink of extinction.

by ·Comments Off on Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade)

Sounds like an American-ready comedy premise (which is why there’s a rumored remake): uptight daughter gets a visit from her goofball dad who tries getting her to lighten up. Generic versions of this story have been made before, but this one uses some unique characters to change the trajectory, eventually revealing the daughter was maybe right to hide her true nature beneath a serious businesswoman facade, because when she lightens up, she’s almost psychotically awkward (shades of Ade’s debut The Forest for the Trees).

The infamous nude scene was different than I expected, at least. You figure a nude scene will be about sex in some way, and it’s not. Out of a combination of the quirky strangeness that her dad’s visit has perhaps inspired and frustration at a dress zipper, Ines (Sandra Hüller: Requiem, Amour Fou) answers the door to her party guests in the nude, then starts insisting they disrobe as well. Meanwhile her dad Winfried/Toni (Peter Simonischek) has dramatically upped his costume game from a moppy wig and false teeth to a giant Bulgarian hair-monster costume, and arrives at the party without saying a word, freaking out the already scared naked party guests. It’s clearly a very good movie, and even if I have trouble understanding Cinema Scope’s film-of-the-year acclaim, this may be the scene of the year.

Ade, probably predicting the failure of next year’s remake:

When I tried to shorten the film, it gets very banal and less complex. The film needed a certain length … The moment you take out 20 minutes, then you have the father coming, he’s an idiot, she’s a businesswoman… it gets very simple, very fast.

by ·Comments Off on Cameraperson (2016, Kirsten Johnson)

Scenes and pieces from decades of filmmaking. In the first scene you hear her breathing and whispering behind the camera, making little gleeful sounds whenever the shot works out, then a gasp and sneezing right before the title, so immediately drawing attention to the filmmaker, making you see the rest of the movie as moments shared, not just captured.

She returns to some people and locations over the course of the film: memories of her alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, conversations with Muslim Bosnian survivors (some with inconsistent stories), a boxing match that doesn’t go well, and it’s punctuated with one-offs: a stray Michael Moore interview with a defecting soldier, post-Citizenfour evidence destruction, Jacques Derrida trying to keep Kirsten from running into traffic while filming him. The blu extras discussing the production and editing process are essential, and rewatching some of the scenes really brings back what a wonderful (meta-)documentary this turned out to be.

M. Sicinski:

Not only does Kirsten Johnson bring together two forms of filmmaking (nonfiction advocacy cinema and poetic / associative diary) that typically have nothing to do with one another. She finds that the two modes can strengthen each other, making something vital and unique, rather than watering each other down… The power of Cameraperson is a cumulative one, because we have seen these building blocks before, but they are usually arranged into a very different kind of edifice, one far less idiosyncratic and alive.

Johnson:

My experience is that when you make a documentary you decide on one story, when in fact in the making of that you’re experiencing many, many, many stories. That’s a part of what I wanted to evoke and, you know, the fact that it is fragmentary indicates how many more stories could have been told.

M. Almereyda in the Criterion essay:

Johnson studied painting and literature in the late 1980s at Brown University, where she had a political awakening, stirred by the anti-apartheid movement roiling the campus. Upon graduation, making an uncommon move, she transplanted herself to Senegal and interned there on a film written by the great Ousmane Sembène. In 1991, she was the first American to enroll at La Fémis, the French national film school, where she entered the camera department and discovered a vocation.

–
The Above (2015, Kirsten Johnson)

Nice photography of the US surveillance blimp above Kabul, Afghanistan, and then the similar one over Maryland, ending with a terrible quote from officials saying that whether the blimps have cameras or not, people behave differently when they’re visible. This is where the ferris wheel shots in Cameraperson come from.

–
Project X (2016, Laura Poitras & Henrik Moltke)

Kirsten didn’t shoot this, but she’s worked with Poitras, and we just missed this short playing at True/False, so I thought I’d catch it online. Sinister shots of an AT&T building where the NSA camps out to collect all our communications, explained by titles and celebrity voiceover. Blueprints and guidelines for covert travel to collection sites in unmarked cars. Pairs very well with The Above.

by ·Comments Off on Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele)

Daniel Kaluuya (my favorite Black Mirror actor) is dating Allison Williams (my fourth-favorite Girls actress), comes to visit her parents Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford and brother Caleb Landry Jones (Antiviral) in an aggressively white suburb. At first there’s the socially-awkward but not overtly threatening kind of racial tension: dad brags about his Obama support and all the white family’s employees are black. But things get weirder after the mom hypnotizes Kaluuya and now he can’t tell if he’s being paranoid or if there’s a conspiracy, until it’s too late and he’s tied to a chair in the basement being prepped for brain surgery, so the highest bidder (blind Stephen Root) can flee his aging white body and live fifty more years inside Kaluuya’s.

A finely crafted thriller, and I’d never in a million years guess it was from the writer of Keanu. I could tell that Peele had made a super-effective movie when the white Nebraska audience at my crowded screening erupted in cheers when Allison Williams got shot (or maybe she’s just their least-favorite Girls actress as well). Betty Gabriel (The Purge 3) and Marcus Henderson (Insidious 4) play the grandparents play-acting as servants (she’s especially good – coldly suspicious then briefly vulnerable). Keith Stanfield (Short Term 12 and Atlanta, Snoop in Straight Outta Compton) is the party guest who yells the title line at Kaluuya when a camera flash wakes him from “the sunken place.” And comedian Lil Rel Howery is Kaluuya’s buddy in the TSA who gets all the best lines.

Some of the reception has focused on whether it’s a scary/effective horror movie, which is the same kind of horror-purist bickering that lowered appreciation for Cabin in the Woods and The Witch. Come on everyone, break out of your genre holes. Peele more accurately calls it a “social thriller,” and says he’s working on four more.

Alan:

One minute in, this movie that will play every mall in America makes it viscerally clear that it’s not black guys who are scary – it’s neighborhoods packed with sheltered dopes who quake at the very thought of black guys … Get Out is searing satire, with scary/comic riffs on slavery and assimilation, but it’s also a smashing crowd-pleaser of a horror film, complete with mad science, cult-like crazies and a creep-out homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin … But even as Peele brings the house down, we see the serious toll of all this horror on Chris’ face and body. Neither the movie nor anybody watching can take it all as a joke.

–
April 2024: Rewatched on a whim… now I’ve got a whim to rewatch US and NOPE. Peele might be the major filmmaker whose first three features’ titles have the fewest letters.

Presumably Stephen Root never wakes up… it’d be even worse if he does:

I forgot about the scene where Howery explains his theory to the police:

by ·Comments Off on Life, Animated (2016, Roger Williams)

Owen is graduating soon, getting his own place, in a relationship, finding employment. He’s also got autism, and didn’t speak for years as a kid until his parents figured out that he’d memorized all the Disney movies they had on video, and learned to speak to him in character with Disney dialogue. So the movie follows Owen now, and through photos and home videos from the past, drawings and cartoons by French effects company Mac Guff, and editing of Disney emotions into real events. Owen and his dad do decent character voices, and someone on letterboxd writes “This is the happiest you’ll ever be to see Gilbert Gottfried.”