Author: Brandon

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Shorts Month 2026: C

August 24, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

Secret Weapons (1972, David Cronenberg)

In a 1977 future during the North American civil war, a drug company has taken over the country and “the holy police are experts in psychic attack.” Weird Jazz on the soundtrack, my favorite genre of late. Not bad, definitely feels like a Crimes of the Future (1970) followup. Inventor slips away and meets with the motorcycle gang resistance, some kind of TV pilot setup for a brainy urban sci-fi warfare thing that never came to be (unless you count the entire rest of Cronenberg’s career)

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Days Before the Death of Nicky (2024, Denis Cote)

Woman is driving. Cuts are accompanied by brief blackouts and quiet static, then each new shot rotates to a different type of film or video camera, always affixed to the middle of the back seat looking forward. It’s ten minutes before we hear a voice – her singing to herself. A few times we see the camera adjusted or acknowledged, a few times we see someone else, including the last scene when she’s gone missing and some guy discovers the car.

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Cruel Optimism (2017, Paul Clipson)

A tough one to blurb. Loud ambient music as brightly colored grass and clouds turns into skyscrapers and neon and back again, always with layers and particles and patterns flying every which way. Perfect HDTV demo material for some alternate reality avant-garde Best Buy. The music is by Lawrence English, an Australian who knows Merzbow and Xiu Xiu.

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Light Year (2014, Paul Clipson)

Ambient grumbling string music this time. The focus is on light glistening off river water as seen through various metal bars and fences. Even if it doesn’t fit the theme of the film, he can’t help himself from rushing into the neon city night again towards the end. So far everything I’ve seen by Clipson has been great. Music is by Tashi Wada, a Californian who knows Julia Holter.

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Ten Second Film (1965, Bruce Conner)

Ten seconds of rapidly edited film leader and demo stuff, nice.

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Permian Strata (1969, Bruce Conner)

Scenes from a bible movie where people get stoned set to Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” Do you get it? I hope so, because that’s all there is.

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Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976, Bruce Conner)

Slow sepia-toned scenes of things grounded and heavenly and spectral, while foreboding ambient music plays. Real good, my favorite since Cosmic Ray.

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Cosmetic Emergency (2005, Martha Colburn)

She adds disfiguring layers of paint to magazine models, then finds a quote that the US military gets free cosmetic surgery so she adds breasts and lipstick to pictures of army guys. One of the only movies to feature a Jad Fair song.

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Time Travelers Overture (2024, Martha Colburn)

Another musical cutout collage spectacular, this time to an antic Brian Marsella track. Besides making really fun animations, Colburn has some of the best music taste in the business.

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The Nail Clippers (1969 Jean-Claude Carriere)

Michael Lonsdale checks into a hotel with his wife, and things start vanishing as soon as he looks away from them, including soon all his possessions, his wife, then himself. Carriere was mainly a writer, alternating at this time between Luis Bunuel and Pierre Etaix – and it shows.

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As Long As There Is Breath (2020, Emily Chao)

Looking out windows, whooshing around, the soundtrack whooshing too. At only two minutes, it felt like a trailer for itself.

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No Land (2019, Emily Chao)

Two more minutes, a slow zoom in and (reversal) out of a tree-mounted TV playing a flicker film. Maybe the challenge was to reference Wavelength and Arnulf Rainer at the same time? Silent.

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Baby Blue Benzo (2024, Sara Cwynar)

On the widest screen possible she constructs another self-conscious super-montage with overlapping narrations about desire, consumerism, images, automobiles.

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Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000 (1962)

Wow, Cocteau sits in La Villa Santo Sospir, faces the camera, and talks for 25 straight minutes, the camera cutting closer and closer to his face. It’s no The Human Voice. I got distracted and looked up whether the villa is still standing – yes, they did a pandemic-era restoration of the place, but it’s hard to get details from their broken website: “Today, the restoration is ne few final details left to perf living tribute to its remarka blending modern updates Jean Cocteau’s visionary ar his work as relevant and ev.”

New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

August 24, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way.

The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way.

Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria:

After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982 were too busy having weird sex to go out to movies or shows. Almost everything here is offputting, but the staging of some closeups and quick zooms are pure cinema, unfortunately.

Othello (1951, Orson Welles)

August 23, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

Blackface Orson stars as a wife-killer, duped by his evil comrade Iago (a stage actor who later played Oscar Wilde on TV). Iago uses the handsome blonde idiot Cassio to achieve his goals, poor lovely Desdemona (Marcel Carné’s Juliette) innocent of all accusations.

I watched the extras until they started to repeat themselves, and after hearing about the whole extended and troubled production, I can forgive the movie’s inconsistent sound. Nobody talks about Iago’s wife Fay Compton (The Haunting) stealing the movie in the last fifteen minutes.

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Filming Othello (1978)

Such a ponderous intro, it’s ten minutes before he gets into any details beyond the movie’s title, then it gets good as he shows scenes from the feature – photographed by Early Welles and re-edited in the fast Late Welles style. He quotes a critic speaking of the film’s “tortured compositions, grotesque shadows and insane distortions,” tells a hilarious story of winning a prize at Cannes with his “film without a country.”

“The thing to do was somehow to make a movie” – sometimes it feels like an elegy for the studio age. In the second half he stages a long, slightly loopy conversation with Iago and Desdemona’s dad, Welles getting the final word via retakes and overdubs.

Me after ten minutes: “Rosenbaum was making a point about film canons and Welles’s late filmography by putting this minor doc on his top thousand films list.”
Me after an hour: “Rosenbaum was a coward for not putting this great work on his top hundred films list.”

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Return to Glennascaul (1952, Hilton Edwards)

A short made by the two guys above during an Othello filming break. Narrator and framing story participant Orson picks up Cassio on the road, who tells his spooky story of giving a ride to a couple of Irish women. He drives them to their titular home, they turn out to be ancient ghosts who’ve vanished when he returns to the now-delapidated house a few minutes later. Pretty deliberate and obvious, with some nice photography.

The Furious (2025, Kenji Tanigaki)

August 23, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

Handyman’s daughter is kidnapped, the police are useless and hostile and corrupt, deciding to investigate him instead of the crime. Fortunately, the handyman is ballsy and badass, tracks down the baddies, crashes into their clubs and warehouses and makes a mess of their henchmen. He runs into a reporter guy whose wife is also missing and they team up against various child trafficker tough guys, including Mad Dog from The Raid as a cop-killing bowman, and the rich Heir Trafficker who accidentally murders his own pregnant bride in the movie’s most digital-bloody scene.

There’s a lot of cool fighting but it felt more ridiculous than thrilling at the end – I wonder if Baby Assassins is better. From the director of Enter the Fat Dragon, with Sub-Zero as the journalist, also featuring one of the buttplug guys from Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Shorts Month 2026: B (II)

August 21, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

The Cat Came Back (1988, Cordell Barker)
Runaway (2009, Cordell Barker)

Another good batch: two movies where a cow is on the railroad tracks. The cow makes a quick appearance in The Cat, while cow vs. train is the whole show in Runaway. The train engineer runs off with a passenger leaving the coal boy in charge as the train goes out of control after hitting the cow (which survives, unlike the engineer who gets incinerated). The Cat I’d seen ages ago and was afraid to rewatch lest the song get stuck in my head, but it gets stuck in my head just thinking about rewatching it, so what’s the harm. My recollection was that the guy keeps getting rid of the cat, it keeps returning and wrecking his house, but actually he keeps failing every attempt to get rid of it, until the perfect ending when it haunts him into his afterlife. Canadian animation #1 forever, I must find Barker’s latest, Good Luck to You All.

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Love and the Zeppelin (1948, Jiri Brdecka)
Prince Copperslick (1980, Jiri Brdecka)

My first by Brdecka, here’s a very early and a very late one. The first is about flying machine invention mania, pretty girl likes the inventor and not the important rich man she’s set to marry, animation recalls the Khitruk Winnie-the-Pooh movies. The late one is about a prince who only eats meat in a happy marriage with a princess who only eats fruits and veg, hiding from her that he’s a carnivore until he’s discovered in his secret meat room (his 13th chamber, so a Bluebeard parody) and promptly chokes to death. More limited animation here, using that style where still images are crossfaded.

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The Three Sisters (2025, Konstantin Bronzit)

At least this guy’s second movie about people living in a house on a steep hill. The sisters compete for the attention of their new sailor tenant. Cute, wordless.

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Venice Pier (1976, Gary Beydler)

Camera faces down a pier from the shore end, then jump ahead to a different time of day or another day, jump again and again, each time our position moves a little further down the pier, until it gets to the end and we get a timelapse shot out to sea. Lovely work, would be greatly improved if I had a decent quality copy.

Canyon: “Shot spatially out of order over the course of a year, Gary recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology, so some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or backward in time.”

Gary had a short filmmaking career, giving up after getting no interest for this film.

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Pigs! (1965, Carroll Ballard)

Nicely edited wordless piece about pigs, with little montages showcasing their terrible snouts, then their horrible tails, then their awful feet, and so on. Ballard shows us cuter animals (sparrows, geese, sheep) looking disdainfully at the pigs, even the film music mocking the beasts. They do have their moments.

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Naughty Nurse (1969, Paul Bartel)

Nurse Dorothy cries about being so besotted with a doctor that she nearly killed her patient, then we instead follow a naughtier nurse to a hotel where she torments a blindfolded man. A cop comes to “arrest” them, but is really in on the game – all three are having a semi-scripted, sexy romp on their lunch break.

Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

August 20, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.

Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:

Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:

Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.

Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.

Shorts Month 2026: B (I)

August 19, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B)

Kidnapper/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels improvised except for the Doctor’s and Lydia’s big speeches, not so much an actual movie as Decoder was.

The last thing you see before going into the black box:

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I-94 (1974, Bette Gordon & James Benning)

Flicker film, strobing between a woman walking away from camera and a man walking towards, with a man’s and a woman’s voice talking about the way they’re seen by other people, the tapes running at the same time but each voice distinct so you can focus on one person’s story or the other (but not both). Among the earliest work by either director.

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69 (1969, Robert Breer)

Thin-lined geometric shapes swing through white 3D space, then flicker fill colors are added, until the whole thing goes bonkers in the last minute.

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70 (1970, Robert Breer)

Escalation of 69, the color-flicker shapes are still swinging through space, with added sprays and blobs, and less chaos.

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Fuji (1974, Robert Breer)

My favorite of his, conceptually. A few shots of a train ride past Mt. Fuji have been traced and re-traced, rotoscoped with different treatments, until the mountain becomes a vague spray pattern, a triangle, a line, all rapidly and entertainingly shuffled together.

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Now You Tell One (1926, Charley Bowers)

Very good Bowers stop-motion adventure (he has a magic potion that can make anything grow, such as shoelaces, or a tree full of cats) wrapped in a needless backstory (he tells his tale at the local Liars Club and they give him a medal) with a good punchline (“sir I’m in love with your daughter” / “you idiot, that’s my wife”).

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A Visit from the Incubus (2001, Anna Biller)

Great theme song, explaining the Incubus tale. The rest of the songs don’t measure up, but the colors and costumes are top notch, and she gets real mileage out of having modern actors act like they’re in a 1950s technicolor musical western. Her long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch should be coming any month now.

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Matin’s Breakfast (1974, Patrick Bokanowski)

The most interesting bits are when an actor appears to have been graphicized, or he’s running through a composited picturebook scene. But sometimes I wonder if they didn’t film the titular breakfast scene (chaos in a kitchen) and it wasn’t working, so they turned the footage into a slow-mo/freeze-frame avant-Begotten art film.

Shorts Month 2026: A

August 18, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100

August 17, 2026 by Brandon·Comments Off

I wanted to celebrate the American semiquincentennial in some way, but it was too hot to go out for fireworks, so I watched all twenty of my still-unseen movies on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1998 list of American movies, from his “List-o-Mania” response to the AFI 100 list. Rosenbaum’s lists and writings have been as important to my movie hobby as Cinema Scope has. Discovering this article online in 2000 or 2001 was especially eye-opening, realizing that you could just put Dead Man on a list of greatest films instead of Star Wars. Of course my reaction was to watch everything Rosenbaum says is good, and I’ve slowly chipped away at his top-1000 from the Essential Cinema book while also chipping away at a hundred lists from other sources, and catching up with films from favorite directors and stars and companies, trying to keep up with new releases and reissues, and so on. One of these days I’ll run out of good movies, but for now here’s my vaguely-tier-ranked roundup of Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100.

“Selecting America’s 100 greatest movies has to be an ongoing, perpetual activity of exploration and discovery — something that can only happen if we stop to consider what we still don’t know about the subject and try to set up some channels for educating ourselves.”

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Dead Man (1995)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Eraserhead (1978)
The Killing (1956)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Sunrise (1927)