A goof on Salvador Dali (who is played by multiple actors wearing the same mustache), and another meta-game after The Second Act. Journalist (Bird People star Anaïs Demoustier) repeatedly schedules interviews with a preposteous, self-obsessed Dali, and he keeps walking out. Even more Buñuelian than the last Dupieux/Demoustier movie Incredible But True, the action loops and rewinds, roles swap, there’s Black Lodge reverse motion, and it ends with everyone watching the interview film which was never made.

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

I’ve been liking the still with the parrot from this movie all year – turns out that is its one really cool image, from a rare time when the image mutates and deforms its subjects into digital moosh. Roving fisheye handheld through city streets, following people (are they characters, or just people?). The camera isn’t sure either, and wanders off. Once it stood between two people talking and just spun in circles – Katy hated that. I guess it’s innovative(?), and the cinema contains multitudes, but it’s pretty harsh to watch this the same week as Days of Heaven.

Our people are kids with nothing going on, so it’s not clear why we want to listen to them talk for ages. But then sometimes one of them can fly, and sometimes the camera gets lost or glitches way out. I think I figured out that it’s a spherical google-maps lens, when the kids roll it down a hill at the end – Williams apparently framed the shots in post with a VR headset.

Michael Sicinski calls it:

a film so aggressively forward thinking that it leapfrogs over the concept of a second installment — features characters who enter stations in Peru and exit in Taiwan or Sri Lanka. In addition to creating a world of travel that moves at the speed of thought, an almost physical remapping of the planet, The Human Surge 3 dispenses with ordinary zones of dramaturgy, instead staging lengthy sequences in the middle of the water or on an arduous hill. As Williams melds different space-times into single scenes, even the basic rules of gravity are up for debate. Like living clip-art, people occupy the same location, but cannot possibly share a contiguous environment.

They don’t make movies like this, and they never did. I thought I remembered this well, but I was missing most of the second half, plus the quality of light, some acting and scenery particulars, and lines like “a single wobbly stone can pry you loose from the path and serenade you with the whistling wind of the death-plummet,” so it’s always worth watching again.

George Toles named the movie’s town Tolzbad, haha. After Johan’s mountain-madness incest-suicide, his brother Kyle gets a job at the Count’s castle, then hears his mom saying she only ever cared for the count. Kyle kills the count in a duel, leading mom to kill herself in front of mute cobwebbed haunted attic-dwelling brother Franz. The late Johan’s girlfriend Klara gets a job in the mines, tries to enlist Kyle to kill her dad.

Bogart Marlowe is hired by wealthy recluse with two daughters: wild Carmen and tough Lauren Bacall. Bookseller Dorothy Malone helps him spot a gambler who’s thought to be involved, but the gambler turns up dead, and so does another guy, then Bacall brings up a new blackmail plot, then yet another guy gets killed, and finally Marlowe helps the cops wrap it up and all is finished.

But it can’t be finished – there’s still a half hour left and I haven’t seen Elisha Cook Jr. yet. Here he is, offering to sell info about another plot – all this time Bacall has been covering for evil landlord Eddie, whose thug Bob Steele poisons Elisha. Bogart Marlowe liked Elisha (who wouldn’t?) and takes this one personally, goes to Eddie’s hideout and blasts those fuckers instead of informing his cop friends.

Nerd Dorothy:

Bacall and Eddie:

Elisha, in over his head:

Happy New Movie Year!

Once again I made a letterboxd list of all the must-see movies released during the year. I’ve watched about 60 percent of these, which is good, for me. We went to the movie theater fewer times than any year in history, for reasons not worth mentioning, so I especially need to catch up with late-year releases like Anora and Queer and Juror #2 – but I live in a city that is not New York, so Oh Canada and Hard Truths and Nickel Boys and The Brutalist are 2025 movies. At least I fixed https and some of the character encoding issues mentioned a year ago on the ol’ blog. Writeups have been pretty tossed-off these days, ho hum, what are you gonna do.

The 2024 Lists:

2024 Favorites: New and Recent Movies

2024 Favorites: Older Movies and Rewatches

2024 Favorites: Rock Docs and Shorts

The best 2024 movies:

1. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
2. She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico)
3. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
4. Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
6. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
7. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
8. The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)
9. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
10. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

The best from the previous five years, watched this year:

1. May December (Todd Haynes)
2. The Kingdom 3: Exodus (Lars Von Trier)
3. Detective vs. Sleuths (Wai Ka-Fai)
4. The Kid Detective (Evan Morgan)
5. Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
6. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)
7. The United States of America (James Benning)
8. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
9. Gemini Man (Ang Lee)
10. Evangelion 4.0: Thrice Upon a Time (Hideaki Anno)

The filmmaker of the year award goes to Tsui Hark. After beginning 2024 with his Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, I moved on to the six-film Once Upon a Time in China series, stopping between episodes to check out other films he directed (Green Snake, The Blade, Love in the Time of Twilight) or produced (Iron Monkey, Burning Paradise, Dragon Inn) and related Wong Fei-hung stories (Drunken Master 2, The Magnificent Butcher).

Favorite non-Tsui Hark older movies watched this year:

1. Fanny & Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)
2. Minnie and Moskowitz (1971, John Cassavetes)
3. The Decline of Western Civilization (1981, Penelope Spheeris)
4. U.S. Go Home (1994, Claire Denis)
5. Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)
6. Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1978, Raoul Ruiz)
7. Messiah of Evil (1973, Willard Huyck)
8. Body Melt (1993, Philip Brophy)
9. Cobra Verde (1987, Werner Herzog)
10. Brief Encounters (1967, Kira Muratova)
11. Deep Cover (1992, Bill Duke)
12. Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980, Les Blank)
13. Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986, Piotr Szulkin)
14. Junk Head (2017, Takahide Hori)
15. Serpent’s Path / Eyes of the Spider (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
16. The Music Lovers (1970, Ken Russell)
17. Gerry (2002, Gus Van Sant)
18. The Doom Generation (1995, Gregg Araki)
19. Demon Knight (1995, Ernest R. Dickerson)
20. The Right Stuff (1983, Philip Kaufman)
21. Body Bags (1993, John Carpenter & Tobe Hooper)
22. The Big Gundown (1967, Sergio Sollima)
23. The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)
24. The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
25. À nous la liberté (1931, René Clair)
26. National Gallery (2014, Frederick Wiseman)
27. Red Psalm (1972, Miklós Jancsó)
28. Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)
29. Torque (2004, Joseph Kahn)
30. Pauline at the Beach (1983, Eric Rohmer)

Favorite rewatches of the year (alphabetical):

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, John Carpenter)
Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington)
Careful & Archangel & Gimli Hospital (Guy Maddin)
Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)
Fallen Angels (1995, Wong Kar-Wai)
Flesh for Frankenstein & Young Frankenstein
Lancelot of the Lake (1974, Robert Bresson)
Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda)
Naked (1993, Mike Leigh)
Sense and Sensibility (1995, Ang Lee)
The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
Twin Peaks season 3 (2017, David Lynch)
Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000, Béla Tarr)