by ·Comments Off on 28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)

I was gonna say “the movie looks artfully shot, too bad my copy is smeary low-res for some reason” – but no, it turns out they shot it on mini-DV. I don’t need to rewatch part two before the third movie, but don’t remember this one at all. Coma victim Cillian awakens into the post-apocalypse, after the extremely infectious rage virus is released from a lab by idiot activists and England is destroyed by Crazies®. He’s rescued by Naomie Harris, and they find a girl whose dad is Brendan Gleeson, and they go on adventures together, getting a flat tire in a rat tunnel, having a Grandaddy-soundtracked grocery shopping spree. Fun’s over after Gleeson gets infected by a crow and the others find a mad group of rapist soldiers. Cillian (a bike messenger who just woke from a coma) turns elite commando and wipes out the squad to save the women. Nayman and Lewis.

by ·Comments Off on The Rehearsal season 2 (2025)

“They gave me a blank check as long as I don’t go over budget.” The aviation safety season – Nathan discovers a problem that only he can solve, bringing some Nathan For You energy into The Rehearsal. He thinks social difficulties between copilots prevents them from speaking up when they see something wrong, and aims to solve this by having pilots role-play during flights. Along the way he starts a game show inside the fake airport he built, then the fake crew of his fake singing competition start covertly giving fake therapy to the real pilots. “I’ve always felt that sincerity was overrated.” He goes to Colorado with a couple of cloned dogs, rehearses one dog to live the life of his original (has Fielder read The Boys From Brazil?) then Nathan speed-runs episodes from Captain Sully’s life to understand his mind (always claiming he wants to help others then turning back on himself). “I began studying footage of other comedians who went before congress” – he shows a fake senate his pilot dating reenactments, but not even HBO’s lobbyists and the help of an autism center (who all but directly state that Nathan is obviously autistic) can get him into the real senate, so he has to become a licensed pilot himself and fly a planeload of people safely around in a circle. I’m not sure what any of this proves, but every episode succeeded in being more bonkers than the last.

by ·Comments Off on Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

I’ve gotta stop sitting so close to the screen – between the closeness and the frantic editing, I’m not sure how our small team survived when fifty vampires, who’ve been shown as lightning-quick and super-strong, bust into the house. Bold music throughout, and the music not just incidental but vital to plot and theme. I’d be interested in reading about influences, since it turns From Dusk Till Dawn to Django Unchained. A little too neatly tied together, with the late revelations of the twins’ Chicago adventure (not actually becoming rich gangsters but stealing big from two rival gangs then running away while the gangs blamed each other) and the tolerant local whites’ less-tolerant motivations, and each of the three main dudes meeting a woman at the same time, then those six being the main survivors. Mostly as good as advertised though, taking place in a single day, plus a delicious Buddy Guy postscript.

The near-white girl is Hailee from True Grit, and the other Michael Jordan’s woman played the wife in His House… we saw a preview for the evil white vampire’s next horror movie 28 Years Later… the girl Sammy likes will supposedly star in a Running Man remake… I never recognize Lola “Gemini” Kirke, who doesn’t look enough like her sister… the Chinese woman who must have died in that climactic rampage is in the new Alma & The Wolf… the doorman was in Miracle at St. Anna and plays Raphael in the recent Ninja Turtle things… plus Delroy Lindo on harmonica.

by ·Comments Off on Trails / Barefoot (João César Monteiro)

Trails aka Paths (1978)

Some kind of montage of folk tales, fables, poetry, with some gratuitous nudity.

White-haired guy is a relentless storyteller. A good section where a guy is running side-quests for a sheep thief, followed by too many scenes where admittedly cool-looking people stand still and recite lines. One guy gets imprisoned by gunmen for setting their slave-labor free. I got very tired and spaced out, but we reached present day somehow. The main(?) characters are a young couple in love, of course, or maybe multiple couples, since at one point she’s stabbed and thrown into the sea, and later she and her baby get killed by werewolves. Whatever’s going on here, Monteiro sure knows how to frame a shot.

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He Goes Long Barefoot That Waits For Dead Men’s Shoes (1965)

Early short containing some of his later preoccupations (doomed couples, mirrors, Luis Miguel Cintra).

by ·Comments Off on Doors (2022, Christian Marclay)

We regret that we couldn’t stay for all 24 hours of The Clock in Minneapolis some years ago, so while in Boston it was easy to catch all 60 minutes of Doors, which plays on a loop with no beginning or end. People from classic movies (with some modern-auteurist exceptions: Phantom Thread, Lost Highway) enter doors, then we cut to the opposite angle and they’ve transformed into somebody different. I thought the cuts were going for maximum contrast (old person to young, man to woman, black/white to color), and I thought he was purposely choosing cheapie Brit dramas so we’d never recognize a clip/actor, but every time I thought I’d found a pattern he’d switch it up. Very funny to me that it’s 95% G-rated harmless scenes (some light gunpoint threats) except for the two minutes a class of small children was being ushered in, then it switched to Fire Walk With Me / Scream horror, and the kids were ushered right back out. We also saw Sara Cwynar’s Alphabet exhibit and her giant awesome mural in the lobby, where the desk people told me it’s pronounced “swinn-arr”. Katy watched Rose Gold with me when we got home, and felt eight minutes was long enough so she didn’t want to check out Glass Life afterwards.

by ·Comments Off on Strange Codes + 3 (Arthur Lipsett)

Strange Codes (1975)

I meant to pair this with Everything Everywhere Again Alive but fell behind, so put together a little Lipsett fest instead – good thing, too, since I fared better with the earlier shorts. Lone eccentric makes a film at home, playing with all his props and displaying his collection of weird objects and games and papers, without coming up with an exciting way of presenting these thing cinematically. The sound alternates between Chinese opera and a cut-up monologue about 1962 computer technology. “Maddeningly impenetrable,” raves Cinema Scope. Will Sloan watched the extras.

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Very Nice, Very Nice (1961)

Audio and photographic montage, good fast editing and very nice photo choices, I’m into it.

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21-87 (1964)

The montage technique (not as flipbook-fast as Very Nice) with motion footage, a great 1960s time capsule with a cut-up audio track that keeps returning to religious music/topics.

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Free Fall (1964)

Highly variable cutting speed, from flipbook to long-held stills, now mixing photos with motion footage while intercutting human and animal/insect portraits and behaviors. A lotta fun, especially on the audio track.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched May/June 2025

Naked Blue (2022, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie)

Not actually naked, but wearing a blue skeleton suit, a girl is hanging around a studio, then the smoke machine turns on and she dances for a camera, but not ours, which seems more of a low-fi behind-the-scenes angle, giving the sense of a backstage parent filming their kid’s motion capture performance for a video game or music video. No sync sound, big classical music slapped on top of it – oh, now I see the music is the whole point of this, it’s a new piece by Devonté Hynes. The dancing girl is the daughter of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Louis Garrel.

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Five Days Till Tomorrow (2022, Lewis Klahr)

Klahr does more of his thing, this time to a minimalist piano piece. There are recurring characters but I couldn’t come up with a story except maybe “Luchador at the World’s Fair is haunted by circular objects.” I like how he uses cut-out characters with missing edges or word-bubble fragments, character art perfection not being the goal, also dig the subliminal flash-frame edits.

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Om (1986, John Smith)

This guy again. Really good gag short, a misty monk turns out to be a barber’s cig-smoking customer, his tape-looped infinite om doubling as the sound of the electric razor.

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Atman (1975, Toshio Matsumoto)

This is the Funeral Parade of Roses director pulling out some Takashi Ito moves, spinning around a seated demon in a breezy outdoor space, the camera moving and zooming at every speed from freeze-frame to freak-out. Pretty nice weirdo-loop music by Yoko Ono’s first husband.

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Relation (1982, Toshio Matsumoto)

Another short from the long gap between Funeral Parade and Dogra Magra. Early 80s video art that actually holds up. Starts with an ocean scene split-screen at the horizon line, with the sky in fast-motion over a slow sea, then adds more frame splits and pictures-in-pictures after replacing the clouds with a left-to-right scrolling graphic finger, making the ocean look like a claw-machine of the gods.

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How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007, David Gatten)

Crossfaded shots of (perhaps) large wrinkly paper sheets with charcoal drawings hanging under a slight breeze. Then bottles and hands, a bit of a nice green color after I’d thought it was a black and white movie. Opens with still text about patience in love affairs, ends with crossfaded sentences on black about colors and waiting, all silent.

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Swain (1950, Gregory Markopoulos)

Young man is freaking out at the zoo so he goes to the sculpture park instead and has a nice wholesome time. He moves on to the botanical garden, but he’s being chased by a bride. Pretty sweet despite the quality of my copy – don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance to see this properly. The Maya Deren vibes are pretty strong. Silent, so I played the first three tracks of Def Jux Presents volume 1, as the director no doubt intended. What ever happened to Cannibal Ox… oh wow, their third album came out this year and nobody liked it.

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Bliss (1967, Gregory Markopoulos)

Vacation slides cut into vertical strips and visually jukeboxed together, flashing and overlaying, then joined by burning icons. I turned off RJD2 because this one has brief barnyard sounds over black halfway through, but then it’s back to silent church strobing for the second half.

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Dance Chromatic (1959, Ed Emshwiller)

Ed edits a dancer in time and space across the screen, turning her into a graphic element, then does motion paintings in response to her moves. Very cool, somebody get Norman McLaren on the phone. Clangy percussion score.

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The Bones (2021, Cociña & León)

Oh hell yeah. It’s got the house-destruction and wall-paint-creep from Wolf House and the walking-in-place trick from the PJ Harvey video, but the focus this time is stop-motion puppets. A girl unearths a pile of bones, reverse-burns them into a jumble of fleshy body parts, then Mr. Potato-Heads them in various configurations, marries them to each other, and disappears. Presented as if it were a reconstructed film from 1901, but even if so, there was no need to distress the soundtrack (increasingly disturbed piano music) since they didn’t have audiotape in 1901. Also, having just watched Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921), I can vouch that movies back then were not as satanic as this one.

Zero Kama in the studio:

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Conversations of Donkey and Rabbit (2020, Ildikó Enyedi)

Are there really 20+ of these? I don’t think so. Long distance conversation: Rabbit has been reading Plato and is excited about birds and flowers, Donkey casually disagrees with her about how trees work. Nicely staged and photographed, very pandemic-feeling.

by ·Comments Off on Soldier (1998, Paul W.S. Anderson)

Little-mustached Col. Meekham brings his new genetically-enhanced soldiers to Gary Busey, who commands unenhanced soldiers raised by the military from birth, and the new guys win, so Kurt Russell, damaged and decommissioned, is dumped on a waste disposal planet which for some reason has breathable air, and gains a conscience when the locals who helped him recover start dying when their planet is used as a super-soldier training grounds. Admirably little dialogue, making the soldiers rarely speak pays off.

Lodge 49‘s Wyatt Russell plays Young Kurt, of course, and Kurt’s rival (“Caine,” of course) is Jason “Scott” Lee of Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision. Mustache is Jason Isaacs, who I just saw in A Cure for Wellness. Absolute bonanza of foreground stuntmen vaulting through the air while something explodes behind them. No opening credits, but if you explained to me over the final scenes that Paul W.S. Anderson directed this between Event Horizon (space mission gone badly wrong) and Resident Evil (a company soldier takes revenge upon her creators) I’d reply “shhh, I’m watching the movie.”

by ·Comments Off on Leaves From Satan’s Book (1921, Carl Dreyer)

Satan and Judas:

The Spanish Inquisition:

French Revolution:

Russian-occupied Finland:

A Finn girl named Siri kills herself rather than fall into Russian hands, and this sacrifice releases Satan from his thousand-year punishment. Movie was pretty good, but I had an incredible time watching it while blasting the latest albums by:

    Ikue Mori
    Ches Smith
    Kris Davis Trio