by ·Comments Off on Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)

Long-take first-person camera to the point of absurdity, with eye blinks. Our guy, swearing to himself he’s not a junkie, smokes some bad drugs. We are Oscar, but it turns out you shouldn’t yell “I have a gun, I’ll shoot” to the police, and then we become Ghost Oscar floating above his body then roaming the city, clipping through walls.

Your first destination as an invisible ghost: the strip club, to watch your sister have sex with some guy in a back room. Sister (Paz de la Huerta, who got naked in The Limits of Control) flashes back to her happy childhood with Bro Oscar until their parents die in a car crash, while Bro remembers meeting Cool Alex who lent him a book of the dead. I guess Oscar’s obsession with his sister, watching psychic steam emanate from sexual encounters, leads to his getting reborn through her?

me, watching this movie:

We’re all watching this because of his Region Centrale camera, right? It bounces back and forth in time but never gets more than a half hour into his post-death, repeats and belabors its points too much, should’ve taken more hits from Je t’aime, je t’aime. Follow-cam with head-piercing sounds, not such fun to watch – Massive Attack’s “Protection” video is both cooler and shorter. At least it’s funny that, in retrospect, by the time Noe made his 3D porno Love, it was the most tame thing he’d done.

by ·Comments Off on Life and Nothing More (1991, Abbas Kiarostami)

A city filmmaker is driving post-earthquake with his kid – per the commentary this is a re-enactment of a trip the director made with his son in the days after the quake – talking to his son with more patience and respect than young Ahmed ever got in the previous movie. For the first half hour they don’t give away the reason for the trip, then he finds a guy from Koker and shows a picture of Ahmed.

So we’re in a new fiction film responding to real events that involve the previous fiction film – but it gets more complicated. “A film has its own truth.” They find the guy who played the slow hunchback in part one, now playing “himself” with his house still standing after the quake, but he breaks character and calls this his “movie house,” says his real house was destroyed and he lives in a tent.

The kid, not understanding the scope of the situation, wants to buy a coke then complains that it’s warm. Later, to a mourning mother: “your daughter’s lucky she died – she’ll never have to do homework.” But the kid getting distracted from his dad’s trip and wanting to hang with some locals and watch soccer gives the movie its title: “The World Cup comes once every four years, and life goes on.”

One of the blu extras opens with an admiring quote from the other AK. Kiarostami made some 200 advertisements before working on features, and he supervised road repairs, which makes a lot of sense.

by ·Comments Off on When the Levees Broke (2006, Spike Lee)

My blu-ray of Treme is arriving tonight and I just realized I’ve never watched its prequel. I know I started it at least twice, but pretty sure I’ve never made it to part two before, because I don’t recall armed police “defending” the bridges from residents of other parishes.

Historian Doug Brinkley: “I’ve never seen such a time when the US government turned its back on people in need to this degree, to have a people in such dire need getting such little help from the federal government while they’re screaming for help, I think it’s unprecedented.” Maybe in 2005/06 that was new, but it’s doubly depressing to watch this the week FEMA is getting dismantled. Movie opens with Mayor Ray Nagin under great suspicion, then by episode two he becomes a great populist hero fighting for the people, so imagine my disappointment when I pulled him up on wikipedia to see where he went next (to jail for corruption). Fighting for the people might now have gone permanently out of fashion. Very good music, at least.

by ·Comments Off on Fireworks (1997, Takeshi Kitano)

It’s been a minute (twenty years) since I’ve seen this. Officer Kitano lives a depressing life in forced retirement with his sick wife, one friend dead, another crippled and suicidal, and loansharks after him. So he robs a bank, funds the suicidal friend’s new painting hobby, and takes his wife to the beach, fighting off the gangsters and capitulating to the cops.

Won the top prize at Venice, same year as Ossos, Chinese Box, The Tango Lesson, and 4 Little Girls. As usual, Josh Lewis gets it.

by ·Comments Off on Walk Up (2022, Hong Sang-soo)

Male filmmaker (gasp) Byungsoo (Kwon Hae-hyo, of everything) takes his daughter Jungsoo to visit interior designer Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young, dying actress of In Front of Your Face), hoping she’ll take the girl on as an apprentice.

Next visit, the daughter is gone, having quit the interior design business after a month, and Ms. Kim introduces the guy to a big fan of his films. They drink quite a bit, of course. Later, he’s living with the fan Sunhee (Song Sun-mi, who usually plays Kim Min-hee’s friend) in Ms. Kim’s upstairs apartment.

Later still, he’s living there alone even though Ms. Kim is a crappy landlord, and seeing a realtor (the main kid’s mom in Introduction). He goes down to the street and runs into his daughter and… I can’t remember if anything else happens. I enjoyed myself though.

by ·Comments Off on Sly Lives! aka the Burden of Black Genius (2025, Questlove)

Mostly standard talking-heads rise-and-fall music doc. Sometimes the interviewees address the subtitle topic, sometimes they use a deep-1980s Sly interview, sometimes there’s concert footage, and all those things are very good. Surprisingly given all the past-tense involved, Sly really does live (update: RIP Sly).

by ·Comments Off on 24 City (2008, Jia Zhang-Ke)

I struggle with Jia’s movies sometimes, but when they’re great, they are great. Catching up with his most major work I hadn’t yet seen in anticipation of Caught by the Tides, and it is major indeed. An interview doc with Chengdu former factory workers, but some of the interviews are being reenacted by actors. The woman talking about gaining inspiration from a Joan Chen movie… I think she’s Joan Chen.

Jake gets it. Neil analyzes further.

Sean Gilman: “Factory Leaving the Workers”

by ·Comments Off on City of Women (1980, Federico Fellini)

Mastroianni plays our director’s stand-in again. Following a hot woman off a train in the middle of nowhere, he stumbles into a hidden hotel hosting a theatrical feminist convention. The women drive him into the night in a crazed caravan until he’s rescued by a dude with plenty of weapons and dogs… sees a telekinetic performance… descends a giant slide while reminiscing about various hot chicks… then the women put him on trial for sexism, ho hum.

No part of this is realistic, all dream-logic. Does it play circus music whenever things get zany? Sure as hell it does. We love Marcello, and Fellini is good at filming beautiful people and things, but it’s a Petrov’s Flu situation.

by ·Comments Off on A Moment of Innocence (1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

Re-enactments upon re-enactments! A decade after watching Kandahar, I’m on a new Kiarostami kick but still haven’t seen most of Makhmalbaf’s work. I’m assuming the meta-cinema ideas came from A.K. via Close-Up, though Makhmalbaf had made a semi-autobiographical feature before then, and a couple of cine-referential features since.

The online synopses say the director tracked down the policeman he’d stabbed as a teenager, but the movie opens with the policeman coming to Mohsen’s house. After a casting call the two men select their young selves, tell the young actors their own stories, then figure out how to stage the big event, leading to the big final freeze-frame which became the movie’s poster and original title (Bread and Flower).