by ·Comments Off on Special Screenings and HD Rewatches, 2016

Most of these I first watched 20+ years ago on videotape. Some I didn’t remember at all, a few I remember quite well, and a few I’ve never seen before. Half I watched at home on shiny new blu-rays, the rest at The Ross or the Alamo. Ranked based on presentation and rediscovery (I don’t actually like Varieté and Mad Max 2 better than Colonel Blimp). It makes sense to me. I don’t have to explain myself to you people.

1. Variety (1925, E.A. Dupont)
With live music by Alloy Orchestra at The Ross

2. Possession (1981, Andrzej Zulawski)
3. The Devils (1971, Ken Russell)
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978, Philip Kaufman)
Three of my favorite horrors, beautifully presented at the Alamo

5. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, George Miller)
6. Ali (2001, Michael Mann)
7. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, Jacques Demy)
8. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy)
9. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992, David Lynch)
10. News From Home (1977, Chantal Akerman)

11. Only Yesterday (1991, Isao Takahata)
12. Wendy & Lucy and Old Joy (2008, Kelly Reichardt)
13. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004, Hayao Miyazaki)
14. Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
15. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell & Pressburger)

by ·Comments Off on Favorite Shorts of 2016

I watched 200+ shorts this year, so this took some figuring out.

1. The Exquisite Corpus (2015, Peter Tscherkassky)

2. Masterworks of Avant-Garde Film

This blu-ray from Flicker Alley needs its own section, or else its individual films would’ve dominated the shorts list. Some revelatory works, beautifully restored. Links to the writeups, and my favorite creators from each:
Part one – Robert Florey, Ralph Steiner, Jay Leyda, Fischinger, Watson & Webber
Part two – Maya Deren, Rudy Burckhardt, Bute & Nemeth
Part three – Jim Davis, Hilary Harris, Bruce Baillie, Francis Thompson
Part four – Larry Jordan, Bruce Posner, Brakhage & Solomon

3. Lumière!

I’ve only watched part of the disc so far, so look for the second half to turn up on next year’s list.
Chapters 1 & 2
Chapters 3 & 4

4. Der Apfel (1969, Kurt Weiler)
5. Father and Daughter (2000, Michael Dudok de Wit)

6. Animations by Rein Raamat

Lend (1973)
a bunch more

7. Piper (2016, Pixar/Alan Barillaro)
8. Black Soul (2000, Martine Chartrand)
9. The Danish Poet (2006, Torill Kove)
10. Jammin’ the Blues (1944, Gjon Mili)

11. Four by Vuk Jevremovic

12. Uncle Yanco (1967, Agnès Varda)

13. By Brakhage, Volume 2
Program 2 (1967-1976)
Program 3 (1972-1982)

14. Spies (1943, Chuck Jones)

15. Carmen and Papageno (1933/35, Lotte Reiniger)

16. False Aging (2008, Lewis Klahr)
17. Lorenzo (2004, Disney/Mike Gabriel)
18. Harvie Krumpet (2003, Adam Elliot)
19. Blinkity Blank (1955, Norman McLaren)
20. We Can’t Live Without Cosmos (2014, Konstantin Bronzit)

by ·Comments Off on 2016 Movies To Watch

Not every 2016 must-see, but a few notable ones.

I don’t understand theatrical distribution, never know what’s gonna play in town. Some movies I definitely missed or they came out on video without playing theaters here. Some have either been announced to play here in Jan/Feb or IMDB lists a U.S. release in 2017. And some exist in that Queen of the Desert limbo where nobody’s currently talking about it and you can’t tell if it’s opening next weekend or in six months or never. Anyway the distinction is important when deciding what’s safe to watch on video.

Movies I (Probably) Missed:

April and the Extraordinary World
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Manchester By The Sea
Kate Plays Christine
Creative Control
Under the Shadow
American Honey
Lo and Behold
Cameraperson
Indignation
Happy Hour
Creepy
Fences
Loving
Krisha
Demon
13th

Movies (Probably) Still to Come:

I Am Not Your Negro
The Lost City of Z
Personal Shopper
The Red Turtle
Things to Come
The Salesman
Toni Erdmann
Fire At Sea
Evolution
Paterson
Julieta
Silence
Jackie
Elle

Movies In Limbo:

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki
Yourself and Yours
The Ornithologist
The Dreamed Path
Hermia & Helena
A Quiet Passion
Endless Poetry
Voyage of Time
Son of Joseph
Daguerrotype
Kékszakállú
Aquarius
Christine
Nocturama
Neruda
Tower

by ·Comments Off on Goodbye First Love (2011, Mia Hansen-Løve)

Paris, 1999: Sullivan and Camille are young and in love. He moves to South America, letters arrive less frequently, and flash forward to 2003, Camille has a serious haircut and is taking architecture courses. We see scraps of her life as the years go by, trying to get over Sullivan, dating married professor/architect Lorenz, moving in with him. When Sullivan finally returns to Paris, they get together, but not for long. “I’m leaving you because it’s too late or too soon to start again.”

My first Hansen-Løve movie and it’s a good one, with the beautiful Lola Crèton (Justine in Bastards) made ever-more beautiful by regular Jacques Audiard cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine. The look sometimes made me think of Rohmer, but the way the story and the scenes moved was something else, which I’m apparently not smart enough to describe accurately (Peter Labuza says “sensually naturalistic yet carefully calculated frames“).

In fact I have a hard time defining what makes this a great movie, but I’m convinced that it is. The talk about light in building design reminded me of La Sapienza, a movie I rated more highly than this one on a year-end list, but they could easily switch positions. Ben Sachs’ article in Mubi is a good one:

The movie seems to advance by intuition … Nothing happens comfortably or predictably: Hansen-Løve will devote several minutes to a seemingly mundane action, then advance the plot several months into the future with a simple, unassuming edit. (The greatest elisions, usually skipping over a few years at a time, are denoted by slow fade-outs that suggest the line breaks in a poem.) … The film ends abruptly, and yet at exactly the right moment. Hansen-Løve doesn’t sustain Camille’s final epiphany, which only makes it feel more true to life. The character, now a grown woman capable of elegizing her youth, hasn’t experienced a lifetime of love and regret – she only thinks that she has.

by ·Comments Off on Los Muertos (2004, Lisandro Alonso)

A straightforward journey film. Vargas is released from prison, then rides and walks and canoes to deliver a letter to his friend’s wife and to find his own daughter, slaughtering a goat on-camera along the way.

Final moments alive for this goat:

I’d read that Alonso’s first three features were more realistic than the crazy-looking Jauja (also a journey movie where a solitary man looks for his daughter) and was afraid they’d be a drag to watch, but I needn’t have worried. Wish the DVD had looked better, though.

Quintín on the opening:

Alonso went on location with a cameraman and shot a scene – actually, one long take – of the main character holding a knife in his hand, leaving behind the bodies of his dead brothers: a mysterious, intriguing sequence with sophisticated camera movements and a sense of tragedy. The blood theme was there, as were the dead of the title. It was a highly remarkable, virtuoso shot. And a shot that made money. Shown to foundations, producers, sales agents and TV buyers, this homeopathic sample allowed the movie to be finished.

by ·Comments Off on Punch-Drunk Love (2002, PT Anderson)

Rewatched on the fancy new blu-ray. I’m not this movie’s biggest fan (some of my favorite film critics revere it) but its depiction of two socially awkward people in love is pretty delightful to watch, and feels more true than your Silver Linings Playbook and other recent attempts. The plot reads like a total Little Miss Sunshine quirk-fest (man finds harmonium on the street, gets robbed and stalked by phone sex operators, buys thousands of puddings in order to make a big romantic gesture) but in practice it never seems lame or trite. This time around I appreciated how the music gets weirder, pinging and scratching, according to Sandler’s frame of mind.

A. Cook:

There is an attractive spontaneity here that is largely absent elsewhere. More importantly it is the first, and perhaps only, Anderson film that feels wholly his. It is much harder to pick out the filmic references this time around. No doubt both Boogie Nights and Magnolia were intense labours of love but this film shows Anderson free from the shackles of Scorsese, Altman and his other inspirations and free from audience and critical expectation.

by ·Comments Off on The Prophet (2011, Gary Tarn)

The soothing voice of Thandie Newton reads us soothing philosophy from The Prophet.

From the description, Tarn “traveled around the world with his 16mm and HD camera and filmed people, situations and places that resonate with, rather than illustrate, the text’s themes.”

Watched to get in touch my my Lebanese roots. Actually I planned to double-feature with the animated version but didn’t get to it. I didn’t usually love the photography, but the cumulative effect of it with the voiceover worked for me.

by ·Comments Off on Silence (1971, Masahiro Shinoda)

Set during whatever era of Japan when Christianity was outlawed, the story follows dour missionary Rodrigues and Garrpe, his balding friend who is less good at dialogue acting, as they arrive in a small town to clandestinely spread their religion. This turns out to be harder than they suspected, and they’re eventually captured and brought to their predecessor and teacher Ferreira, who has abandoned Christianity and tries to convince them to do the same.

Rodrigues:

Obviously watched in preparation for Scorsese’s upcoming remake. I didn’t find it all that engaging or convincing, which I suppose means there’s more hope for remake improvement than there was for Infernal Affairs / The Departed. I tend to make a really big deal out of less-than-convincingly delivered dialogue, so I generally favored the Japanese cast in this movie, who I couldn’t understand, over the English speakers, who I’m afraid the director couldn’t understand. And unrelated to the film’s quality, I couldn’t make it play in proper full-screen on my TV, so it’s the last Filmstruck movie I’m watching until they get Roku support.

Iwashita:

Looking around online, I’m not the only viewer who was reminded of Apocalypse Now (which this movie predates by eight years). Played at Cannes with fellow crisis-of-confidence films Solaris and Images. The white guys haven’t been in much else, but Ferreira was the prolific Tetsuro Tanba (grandpa in Happiness of the Katakuris). The supposedly Christian guy who sells out Rodrigues to the cops was Mako, Bob Hope’s companion in The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell. And Shima Iwashita, convinced to apostatize when her husband (Woman of the Dunes star Eiji Okada) is buried to the neck and nearly trampled by a horse, was a regular Shinoda star, also in The Demon and Sword of the Beast.

Tanba:

by ·Comments Off on Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve)

Saw this right after rewatching Kubo and the Two Strings over Thanksgiving, noticed how they both refer to a person’s life “story,” then realized this was based on a book called Story of Your Life. So the two movies go together nicely is what I’m saying.

Amy Adams is a linguist and Jeremy Renner a physicist who are recruited by Forest Whitaker to communicate with the aliens whose giant ships have appeared across the planet. We see Adams do lots of linguistics but don’t see Renner doing any physics, and I think Adams’ final language-comprehension-enabled time-reading abilities break some movie paradox laws (she can learn from her future self), but the whole thing is so beautifully done I could care less. Also interesting that the emotional resonance of world peace is much less than the story of Adams’ own doomed marriage and child.

D. Cairns:

Dennis Villeneuve makes beautiful images, perhaps tending to exploit shallow focus a little TOO much, but in doing so he uses it in unexpected ways, sometimes throwing the whole subject of the shot into an artful blur.

Damn this movie being great, because now I have to care about Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel. An Advanced Movie, it relies on our knowledge of flashback rules in order to trick us by breaking them. Waited in my seat until the music credit came up. I liked the Jóhann Jóhannsson score but I guess I really noticed the bookending Max Richter piece. This was the academy’s exact justification for excluding Jóhannsson from award consideration, somewhat unfairly.