by ·Comments Off on Misc Shorts, Q2 2015

World of Tomorrow (2015, Don Hertzfeldt)

Emily Prime is contacted by her third-generation clone, discussing memory, robots, love and life in the outernet of the future.

Only 16 minutes long but I watched it seven times.

Choose You (2013, Spike Jonze & Chris Milk)

Written by Lena Dunham and directed by Spike Jonze – and yet it’s terrible? I think that’s because it’s a corporate-sponsored short made for a music video awards show. Anyway, subtitled and censored, club dude’s ex-gf is now dating DJ Michael Shannon, some girl he doesn’t even know freaks out about this, then Jason Schwartzmann hosts a choose-your-own-adventure ending and double suicide is chosen.

The Discontented Canary (1934, Rudolf Ising)

A sad caged canary gets his chance to escape, but nature beats the hell out of him, so he returns home, learning to appreciate his captivity. At least he wasn’t hit by lightning like the feral cat. Moral: life is just horrible.

The Alphabet (1968, David Lynch)

Now in high-def!

Les jeux des anges (1965, Walerian Borowczyk)

Heads roll.
Pipe organ becomes firing squad.
Angel wings.
Infinite scrolling.

Mouseover for decay:
image

The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918, Winsor McCay)

Didn’t realize this was a WWI propaganda film. “Germany, once a great and powerful nation, had done a dastardly deed in a dastardly way.”

Intro explaining how difficult the movie was to create, and plenty of title cards, so the nine minute short has maybe four minutes of animation. But the animation is real good stuff, all water and smoke.

We Give Pink Stamps (1965, Friz Freleng)

Absurd fun in a department store as the Pink Panther torments the night janitor.

Closed Mondays (1974, Will Vinton & Bob Gardiner)

Great claymation. Wino wanders into an art gallery, hallucinates (?) all the paintings and sculptures coming to life.

Night Mail (1936 Wright & Watt)

I’ve heard this is one of the greatest short documentaries. True, it’s admirably put together, showing all the moving parts in a great, manned machine that moves the mail across England and Scotland really damn fast. And it makes you marvel at the heights of human endeavor. And it ends with a post office rap song. So yeah I was gonna say it’s just a doc about a mail train, but I guess I see their point.

Monster (2005 Jennifer Kent)

Beginnings of The Babadook (there’s a pop-up book and everything). Monster-doll grows into full monster and attacks son, mom screams at it, tells it to go to its room.

Fears (2015, Nata Metlukh)

Terrific 2-minute animated short linked by Primal.
A man literally embraces his fears.

Restaurant Dogs (1994, Eli Roth)

Student film in which an evil brigade of fast-food restaurant mascots is bloodily defeated by a young dude who’s given a mission from the Burger King himself to save his daughter the Dairy Queen. Something like that, anyway. I thought the guy only wanted to buy a milkshake, and suspected he was drunk, so I’m surprised he signed up for the murderous mission so quickly.

Given all the trademarked properties being mixed with nazi images via Terry Gilliam-style cut-out animation, I thought I’d better watch this as soon as I heard about it, rather than wait until our corporate overlords remove it from the internet like they did the Soderbergh cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey which I’d been meaning to watch. Besides Reservoir Dogs, there’s some Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in the grimace/hamburglar flashback scene.

Ritual (1979, Joseph Bernard)

Under three minutes, viewed online as a trailer for the new Bernard blu-ray, which I obviously need. Drawings, figures, people and scenes and stuttering colors cut together into changing rhythms and overlays. My favorite bit has an overlay of two scenes, one of which is cutting, an effect I don’t see often.

by ·Comments Off on The Passing (1992, Bill Viola)

Soundtrack is the heavy breathing of a person trying to fall asleep, so the movie segments are dreams, I suppose. Lights, cloth, water, children, landscapes. Some movies are described as journeys, but this is one of the few that actually feels like one.

Some of the low-light video is great. It has a very different look from film, and is something you don’t see often, even though video technology has been everywhere for decades.

Official description says it “juxtaposes personal pictures of his mother’s death with images of his own son’s birth to explore foundational and potent themes of beginnings and endings, the cycle of life and the movement of generations” – I can buy that.

by ·Comments Off on Bergman Island (2004, Marie Nyenröd)

“I’m actually scared of everything.”

This is the source of the short introductions and DVD extras that begin with video of Bergman’s car arriving at his house. Filmed interview segment is just okay, but Bergman tells good stories and the editing of stock footage and his own films into the interviews is done well.

This was originally three one-hour episodes with more focus on the theater, later recut into a single, cinema-focused feature. The director: “I was the first and only journalist who was ever allowed to step into the world of Bergman on its lonely cape on Fårö.”

Asked about his conscience after abandoning so many families: “I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is mere affectation. It’s a way of achieving a little suffering that can’t for a moment be equated to the suffering you’ve caused.”

by ·Comments Off on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher)

Fincher brings his sleek style to an exasperating, overlong, coincidence-filled thriller. If I was a proper auteurist the story wouldn’t matter and I’d go on about the great technique – but I’m not, so I was bored.

A Man Without a Country:

Disgraced journalist Daniel Craig is hired by Christopher Plummer of a rich nazi family to discover who killed Plummer’s granddaughter forty years ago – and since there’s no body, we already know that Racer X is really Speed’s bro… I mean that the girl is still alive. Halfway through the movie Craig meets (hooks up with) antisocial goth hacker Rooney Mara. First part of the movie sets up horrible, dangerous people: the businessman who sues Craig, Rooney’s rapist parole officer, Plummer’s evil nephew Stellan Skarsgard, then in the end our heroes take bloody revenge on all of them.

Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck:

Stellan’s fiery end:

I love that everyone knows all about Craig’s life and work – for an investigative journalist he’s quite bad at keeping secrets. A few amusing parts: most of the dragon-tattoo hackery-fakery, and Stellan soundtracking his torture chamber with an Enya song. Rooney Mara won best actress at Cannes (for Carol) the same day I watched this.

by ·Comments Off on You and the Night (2013, Yann Gonzalez)

Fully bizarre and exceptional movie, which I think I need to watch again before attempting to say anything about it. Immortal couple with their undead “maid” hosts orgy which never quite gets off the ground, as participants exchange (hi)stories, then one host sneaks off and kills himself. Great lighting and imagery, action taking place in a stylish, dream-logic void.

Kate Moran (Goltzius and the Pelican Company) and Neils Schneider (Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother) are the hosts, Nicolas Maury (Regular Lovers) the “maid”. Guests include The Stallion (former soccer star Eric Cantona), The Star (Fabienne Babe of Rivette’s Hurlevent), The Teenager (Alain-Fabein Delon) and The Bitch (Julie Bremond).

Special appearance by whip enthusiast Beatrice Dalle (The Intruder, Inside):

Surprising restraint on use of music considering the director is a member of M83.

by ·Comments Off on Nostalgia for the Light (2010, Patricio Guzman)

All I knew from Guzmán was The Battle of Chile, which is newsreel documentary with explanatory postscript. I heard this was another doc about Pinochet horrors made forty years later and thought ah, more of the same. But this is something very different: a poetic, visual doc encompassing early man, human history and the cosmos, past and present colliding in beauty and horror.

One of the movie’s subjects, Lautaro Núñez, explains:

The astronomers created an enormous telescope … They are in the present recording a past which they have to reconstruct. They have only minute clues. They are archaeologists like us. … Why are there archaeologists and astronomers in the same place? The answer is simple. Here, the past is more accessible than elsewhere. The translucency of the sky is, for the archaeologists of space, what the dry climate is for us. It facilitates our access to evidence from the past.

Guzmán: “And yet, this country has not yet considered its past. It is held in the grasp of the coup d’etat which seems to immobilise it.”

Guzmán slowly brings the focus from ancient archaeology to more recent, focusing on a group of women who have combed the desert for decades looking for the graves of their relatives who were murdered and disappeared by Pinochet’s men. Then he connects even this to the cosmic, all with beautiful photography.

Astronomer Valentina Rodríguez’s parents are among the dead. “Astronomy has somehow helped me to give another dimension to the pain, to the absence, to the loss. I tell myself it’s all part of a cycle… we are all part of a current… like the stars which must die so that other stars can be born… nothing really comes to an end.”

by ·Comments Off on Surviving Life: Theory and Practice (2010, Jan Svankmajer)

Stop-motion cut-out animation of psychoanalytic dream-imagery.

Yes there’s a story – a married man attempts to carry on an affair with a woman in his dreams – but it’s the imagery and editing tricks and invention and sidetracks (eggs, fruit, flowers, suit-wearing coworker with dog head, fighting Freud and Jung portraits, reptiles, tongues, doppelgangers) that kept us endlessly entertained. Svankmajer’s features tend to feel overlong with their obsessions and repetitions but this one (though it opens with an extended apology from the director) was completely wonderful.

by ·Comments Off on La Distancia (2014, Sergio Caballero)

I loved Caballero’s Finisterrae, putting it in my top five of the year. Didn’t feel the magic with this one. Maybe it’s me and not the film. I feel like I’m being too harsh, but everything felt contrived, jokey and pandering – a conscious desire to create a cult success.

Three psychic dwarfs are hired by an imprisoned performance artist to steal a macguffin from an abandoned factory, which is guarded by a solitary man and his haiku-spouting bucket. I love the clay-faced artist, baby foxes, matching cars and campers. But there aren’t enough of these moments of pleasure – mostly it’s slow, talky, committed to its pointless plot. Still holding out hope for his 25-minute horror/comedy also released last year.

Lynch, but with more crotch-sniffing:

All three of the dwarf actors appeared in Blancanieves, Pablo Berger’s Snow White movie, obviously.

by ·Comments Off on Welcome To Me (2014, Shira Piven)

Kristin Wiig goes off her meds and spends her lotto ticket winnings on a talk show with no guests, spending hours each week just talking about things she loves, doing things she enjoys, gradually gaining an audience of hipsters, driving her producers (Joan Cusack, Wes Bentley and Cyclops) insane, and unknowingly insulting everyone who loves her, including best friend Linda Cardellini. More mental illness than comedy, though her televised reenactments of traumatic events from her past (using real names, which gets the studio sued) are good. Wiig gets fired by her psychiatrist Tim Robbins, romances Wes and tears the studio apart, then all gets wrapped up nicely at the end.