by ·Comments Off on Paul (2025, Denis Côté)

Told K this isn’t a doc when she asked, but it turns out all of Paul’s social media stuff is real, oops. Paul’s in his oversharing era with public video diaries and Q&As with followers. The #1 thing I like about the movie is the record-crackle sound on certain edits.

by ·Comments Off on Histoire d’Adèle H. (1975, Francois Truffaut)

Obviously watched this in tribute to my own Adele H., but the two Adeles wouldn’t seem to have much in common.

Isabelle Adjani travels to Halifax from France during the American Civil War to stalk her ex Lt. Pinson (Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson), telling everyone different stories about who he is, lost in love with a loser gambler who doesn’t respect her at all. She takes to trying to ruin his life, bribery, hypnotism, hiding her belatedly-revealed identity as the daughter of Victor Hugo or using it as suits her needs, until she ends up getting rescued from her doomed quest and gets locked in an asylum for the next sixty years.

Reminded me of the Sternberg/Dietrich Morocco – before indie rock was invented people didn’t know how to process these feelings. Adjani is gorgeous, of course, and the movie often looks nice, but it doesn’t make a strong case for itself with the monotonous story and inelegant editing.

Dreaming of drowning:

Isabelle gone Barbados:

by ·Comments Off on Poison (1991, Todd Haynes)

Seven year-old Richie Beacon shot his dad then flew off the balcony, filmed in color news-reportage style, the picture stretched out horizontally.

Nancy Olson interrupts Dr. Graves, who then ingests pure, distilled sex-drive potion and becomes the leper sex killer, in 1950s b/w.

A thief goes to jail for the umpteenth time, meets old acquaintance Bolton. “I still could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”

Rosenbaum:

The most exciting moments in Poison are those that create a momentary confusion about which of Haynes’s three stories one happens to be watching — moments of vertigo during which two or more of the three stories seem to fuse (or, perhaps more to the point, “bleed” together).

by ·Comments Off on L’Humanité (1999, Bruno Dumont)

Slow cinema starring a vacant-eyed cop reacting to news of a raped/murdered little girl, whose body we get a nice long leering stare at. The cop just wants to hang out with his neighbor Domino, but she’s dating bus driver Joseph, whose route goes right past the murder site. After some investigation, he finds Joseph arrested in boss’s office, tearily confessing, then our cop goes home and has a long hug and cry with Domino, then cut to the cop in handcuffs. Think I liked this best of Dumont’s pre-Quinquin slow art films, though somehow I missed “a brief shot that shows Pharaon levitating in his garden.”

by ·Comments Off on Drowning By Numbers (1988, Peter Greenaway)

Joan, Juliet, and Joely (whom Greenaway probably stunt-cast based on their first names) each drown their husbands, and also the conspirator-turned-blackmailer coroner Captain Smith, while the captain’s doomed son helps the movie count to 100. Watched on the fourth of july (movie had fireworks).

by ·Comments Off on Uncle Kent (2011, Joe Swanberg)

Okay, there was a blu-ray sale and I’ve been itching to revisit Todd Rohal so I bought Uncle Kent 2, and I know I probably do not need to watch Uncle Kent first, and I’m currently feeling end-of-world vibes from the news and am certainly not watching bad/average/filler movies on purpose, but I convinced myself that Uncle Kent 1 could be better than average, it could be a real good time, a valuable way to spend a tuesday night – and I was right.

Kent hand-draws cartoons at home, gets high, uses dating sites. Kate comes over to stay for a few days but claims to have a boyfriend, and sleeps in another room – then they meet Josephine (Decker!) on craigslist and all make out together on the couch. The most dramatic thing that happens is when Kent messes up trying to copy a nude photo from Kate’s phone and destructively covers his tracks.

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 51-100

That’s the first hundred now.
A good batch, came out summer 1999 to summer 2001.

Movies I’ve written up here, roughly ranked:

Do The Right Thing
Vagabond
Brazil
For All Mankind
Black Narcissus
Cleo From 5 to 7
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Blood of a Poet
Written on the Wind
Kwaidan
I Know Where I’m Going!
Orpheus
Sisters
L’Avventura
Peeping Tom
Autumn Sonata
The 39 Steps
Sanjuro
Alexander Nevsky
Good Morning
Brief Encounter
Variety Lights
W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films
Testament of Orpheus
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pygmalion
The Harder They Come
The Bank Dick
And God Created Woman
The Blob
Hamlet
The Night Porter
The Magic Flute

Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Ivan The Terrible, Parts 1 & 2
Charade
Yojimbo
The Element of Crime
All That Heaven Allows
The Last Temptation of Christ
Fiend Without a Face
Rushmore
The Life of Brian
Le Million
The Third Man
Carnival of Souls
Beastie Boys Anthology
Gimme Shelter
Chasing Amy

Bonus Features:

Good Morning includes the equally great feature I Was Born, But… and extras by three of the greats (Rosenbaum, Cairns, Bordwell)

Back in my Gilliam-obsessive days I watched every cut of Brazil, saw all the extras, read the Jack Mathews book, and played at least one of those Life of Brian commentaries.

Enjoyed the 39 Steps commentary on a plane. Rented the OG disc of Carnival of Souls and dutifully watched all the industrial shorts. Seen everything on The Third Man and Rushmore. Didn’t love The Blob commentary, and don’t recall if I heard the Fiend Without a Face.

Ate up the Varda extras, which include the shorts The Story of an Old Lady and the very great L’Opera Mouffe.

I’ve probably seen quite enough about Powell and Pressburger by now, but Return to the Edge of the World was great and I wouldn’t mind catching the Mark Cousins doc.

Should go through the For All Mankind and Kurosawa extras sometime. Sirk too, though I recently saw Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, included on the All That Heaven Allows disc.

Bought Autumn Sonata but probably won’t ever get to the extended making-of features, and definitely won’t revisit the Magic Flute doc – the Fanny & Alexander extras look more enticing.

I have a feeling the Women of the Resistance doc will be more interesting than The Night Porter. The David Lean doc might be good. Watched the Lars Tranceformer doc back in the day and didn’t love it, but the other Element of Crime features look intriguing.

Love Cocteau’s Villa Santo Sospir, not sure how I missed the Edgardo Cozarinsky documentary.

Got the Eisenstein box and went through it all, but the Ivans need revisiting and we really need a Nevsky reissue with properly-recorded orchestral score.

Watched everything I could find on Do The Right Thing and read Spike’s making-of book which is even better than the audio/video extras.

Did watch the L’Avventura doc and commentary, while trying to understand what art cinema is – an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

Beastie Boys Anthology remains the most well-authored DVD I ever bought.

If western civilization survives long enough I’ll probably explore the next fifty – got ten left to watch, including some (Shinoda, the Czechs) I really want to see, and I’ve already got the annoying ones out of the way (Ruling Class, The Hidden Fortress).