by ·Comments Off on Shall We Dance (1937, Mark Sandrich)

Elements of this movie in order of importance:

1. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dancing on roller skates
2. Eric Blore (Sullivan’s valet) as an uppity hotel manager
3. The awful “you say potato, I say po-tah-to” song
4. E. Everett Horton as Fred’s fretful manager
5. A bunch more Gershwin songs, not that I can remember them
6. The plot

Famous ballet star Fred with a fake-Russian stage name is a closet jazz enthusiast, arranges to be on the same ocean liner as pop-musical star Ginger. As they get to know each other, a rumor spreads through the boat then the media that they’re already married. She is pissed at the rumors, goes home to marry her boring fiancee (there’s always a boring fiancee). Complications arise, a fake scandal is manufactured using a Ginger-faced mannequin, and Ginger agrees to secretly marry Fred so they can get publically divorced. But they stay together in the end. More importantly: they dance on roller skates.

by ·Comments Off on The Horse’s Mouth (1958, Ronald Neame)

Alec Guinness, a few years after The Ladykillers, plays dedicated painter Gulley Jimson, introduced getting out of prison and shooing off devoted fan Nosey. Jimson is a gruff-voiced wreck, living on a leaky boat at the docks, spending his days at the bar run by Cokie (Kay Walsh, Guinness’s costar in Oliver Twist and Last Holiday) or harassing a man who owns some of his work (Ernest Thesiger of The Old Dark House in one of his final roles) until he can afford enough paint to create more.

Jimson is extremely interested in feet:

Gulley and Cokie:

“Of course you want to be an artist. Everybody does once, but they get over it, like measles and chicken pox.” Jimson compares his artistic drive to a sickness – more like a drug addiction, taking down everyone around him in his weird quest to create (and sometimes destroy) new works. He finds a rich holidaying couple interested in art and installs himself in their apartment, selling their furniture to buy paints and food, as a similarly obsessed sculptor (Michael Gough, of Horror of Dracula the same year) takes the apartment below. Then he orchestrates a huge wall painting using art students to finish on schedule before the wall is to be demolished, and finally collapses it himself as the students clash with the construction crew.

Michael Gough:

The author gave his beloved creation a Catch-22 ending – Jimson escapes, sailing out of the harbor, contemplating new works on ever-larger canvasses.

I noticed an awkwardly dubbed line in the apartments, and even figured out that the sculptor was originally telling Nosey to “drop dead”. IMDB says the actor playing Nosey did drop dead a few days after shooting, hence the line change.

Film Quarterly liked it: “Guinness’ screenplay and performance amount to a rare comic achievement that speaks of serious things from behind surface flippancies and outrageous hokum.”

Also on the disc:
Daybreak Express (1953, D.A. Pennebaker)

New York train ride, jazzily edited and set to a train-sounding tune by Duke Ellington, really wonderful.

by ·Comments Off on Samurai Trilogy (1954-56, Hiroshi Inagaki)

An epic trilogy, obviously conceived as a single story – it would be foolish to watch just one. It might, in fact, be foolish to watch all three. A weighty, picturesque drama with restrained emotions, occasional action, and side characters I kept losing track of, adding up to a decent story about a great fighter learning to be a great person.

1600 AD: Toshiro Mifune (in his follow-up to Seven Samurai) is violent, spontaneous Takezo, whose weak-willed friend Matahachi (Rentaro Mikuni, lead of the first segment in Kwaidan, son in chains of Profound Desire of the Gods) joins him in going to war, leaving behind Matahachi’s mom and his fiancee Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa, who starred in Madame Butterfly between sequels). Their side is wiped out, and the two misfit warriors wash up with a mother and daughter, where they recover from battle wounds amidst sexual tension cued by rape attempts.

wide-eyed Matahachi and grim Takezo at war:

Takezo up a tree:

Mother and daughter survive by stripping dead samurai and selling their equipment – just like in Onibaba. Takezo flees after defeating the bandit that torments the women, then shrugging off the mom when she throws herself at him. She changes the story: “He attempted to assault me. He’s a savage.” Matahachi marries the mom, while his ex, Otsu, joins the search for Takezo, who is repeatedly captured by a smiling priest, who finally locks T. up in an attic full of books. T. emerges years later, calmer and wiser, renamed Musashi Miyamoto, tells Otsu to wait, and wanders off.

Akemi, Matahachi and Oko:

Otsu left behind:

Part two opens with a duel, MM telling a young kid called Jotaro to leave the arena. But of course he doesn’t, and tags along behind our hero after he kills the chainfighting Old Baiken. Akemi (Mariko Okada, married to director Yoshishige Yoshida, also star of some Ozu films), the girl whose mom married Matahachi is now darkly obsessed with MM, also pops up to torment Otsu, seems to be everywhere. Most of the movie concerns MM challenging the master of a fighting school, who will not fight him honorably so MM kicks the asses of some hundred students instead. By the end, the teacher mans up and meets MM, who does not kill him, after remembering how pissed everyone was when he killed the chainfighter.

MM vs. the chainfighter:

MM controlling his rage at the second duel:

Meanwhile some dickish birdslaying swordsman, supposed to remind us of young MM, wants to duel MM. And Otsu keeps pining after MM, who insists that he needs to keep training. I like the brief moments of animation (a lightning strike, cartoon birds flying across a painted sky) and the catchy theme music.

Akemi:

Part 3: predictably, Akemi has met the birdslayer. MM is still an undefeatable warrior, but now believes it’s best to avoid conflict. He postpones the birdslayer’s duel challenge and lives in a farming town with the kid and ever-suffering Otsu. The town is under siege by bandits (what peaceful small town in ancient Japan was not under siege by bandits?), and Akemi makes a deal with them. The siege goes wrong – MM kills many bandits and they kill Akemi shortly after she fights Otsu with an axe.

Bird guy:

MM and his little follower:

MM finally decides to give up his sword and marry Otsu, but first has to kill the birdslayer, which he does with a wooden sword, keeping the sun behind himself so the other man won’t notice.

by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Memorial Shorts

A night of avant-garde shorts watched in memorium of a fellow enthusiast who died young.

Let Me Count The Ways (Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6) (2004, Leslie Thornton)

“August 6, 1945 – Dad observes the bomb drop on Hiroshima from a reconnaissance plane” Processed stock footage, some of it labeled “dad”. Motion seems sped up. Japanese dialogue, a woman is questioned about having lived through the Hiroshima explosion. “Not one white person was burned.” Onscreen text about plant mutations. Flyover camera with a blue circle flashing on and off, scrolling faster and faster. Stills of Hitler striking poses warp into one another, with confusing voiceover in German and English.

The Whitney uses big words: “By editing together controversial or transgressive material, she creates discursive cinematic spaces in which to consider humanity’s inexplicable behaviors, as do fellow avant-garde filmmakers Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman. . . . Thornton’s employment of footage relating to Hiroshima and the atomic age, elucidating her preoccupation with anxiety, trauma, and culpability, derives in part from her grandfather’s and her father’s roles in developing the atomic bomb and from her up-close childhood experience of the Cold War.”

Tusalava (1929, Len Lye)

Animation that looks like it’s inspired first by cellular biology, then at the end by an abusive relationship, all with great piano music.

Glimpse of the Garden (1957, Marie Menken)

Brief static and longer motion shots of the garden, with nice extreme close-ups. It’s all set to the ceaseless chirping of a bird whose song I know well, since my parents had a mechanical singing version. But which bird?

Wintercourse (1962, Paul Sharits)

Quick movement and fast cuts form light patterns with recognizeable images: trees, statues, a gutter gushing water, flashes of nudity. The movie pauses to watch some TV, then goes on and on. I dozed, but I think there was a wedding near the end.

Pixillation (1970, Lillian Schwartz)

I liked the inky liquid-on-glass effects more than the computer graphics, though those are probably impressive for 1970. Music that gets increasingly harsh, loud and grating, so I kept turning it down. Didn’t count on me being able to do that, huh Gershon Kingsley? Lillian Schwartz did computer animation on The Lathe of Heaven.

Dirty (1971, Steven Dwoskin)

Two topless girls drink a bottle of wine then roll around in bed, printed with differing levels of extreme slow motion, the light all pulsating. There’s supposed to be music but I just hear a staticky rumble

Yantra (1957, James Whitney)

A million colored specks slide into different patterns, surely animated by some mathematical obsessive. Soundtrack goes from annoying to nice and quickly back – sounds computery, but this was 1957 so maybe not.

Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968, Joyce Wieland)

Illustrating current politics using rats, wonderful. Nightmarish soundtrack: from a siren to a sax solo to carnival music to the beach boys (but covered in buzzing flies). Joyce was married to Michael Snow at the time – wish he’d provided some lighting or sound editing help.

Valentin de las Sierras (1968, Bruce Baillie)

A Mexican family at work and play, shot in extreme close-up, with music and some voice on the soundtrack.

Carabosse (1980, Larry Jordan)

More madcap cutout animation, made less madcap by the dour piano tune on the soundtrack. Maybe cropped at the top?

by ·Comments Off on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay)

“There is no point. That’s the point.”

I always enjoy a good Tilda Swinton performance, and was willing to put up with a grim school-shooting drama to get one. I wasn’t expecting the movie to be such a cartoon, though. Her son is portrayed as so single-mindedly hateful that I’m disappointed the movie didn’t turn into straight supernatural horror by the end. Stylized movie with blatantly unrealistic portrayals of human behaviour (there’s definitely, definitely no logic) are usually okay, but the movie acts like Tilda’s world, feelings, situation are to be taken seriously. I couldn’t put all the parts into a whole that made sense.

Tilda has a devil child who has hated her since birth. Movie flips back and forth in time, culminating in the shooting (with a bow and arrow!), before which Kevin (sadly not Devon Bostick of Rodrick Rules) also shoots his little sister (whom he partially blinded in an earlier scene) and dad John C. Reilly. It seems like the whole rest of the movie was his build-up, that everything Kevin has ever done was to make Tilda’s life miserable, which it finally is as the town’s parents sue for all she’s got, and she ends up working a shitty job at a travel agency, living in a shack, drinking herself to sleep, with no family, visiting her mute homicidal son every week. Then the movie sabotages its demon-spawn horror by almost making Kev seem human in the final scene – what for?

Based on a novel. Intriguing Jonny Greenwood score featuring old-timey songs, well-shot by Seamus McGarvey (Atonement).

F. Croce:

The symbiosis between anxious mother and psychotic son—is she absorbing his growing malevolence out of guilt or responsibility, or is she projecting her own bad vibes onto him?—is what gives the film its shape, the sense of a deforming bulge resulting from turmoil swept under the maternal rug. But Ramsay doesn’t let the horror arise from the material; instead, she pulverizes it with a cacophony of clashing sound bridges, crudely symbolic colors and overwrought edits. Like Steve McQueen’s Manhattan in Shame, Ramsay’s Connecticut is a netherworld of vacant signifiers (Home, Office, Hell) where blunt abstraction and blunt literalism wrestle for control.

by ·Comments Off on I Vitelloni (1953, Federico Fellini)

I’m still figuring out Fellini – his movies seem to fall into categories, but I’m not sure how to define those categories, since it’s been ages since I watched most of them. But however you divide it, I Vitelloni’s portrait of aimless, night-owl youth must sit near La Dolce Vita’s portrait of aimless, night-owl aristocrats. Unlike La Dolce Vita, I didn’t hate all the characters (only most of them). This was Fellini’s second solo feature after The White Sheik, but I’ve also watched four Rossellini movies he co-wrote.

The Guys: womanizing leader Fausto (Franco Fabrizi, also in Ginger & Fred, so maybe the longest-lived Fellini actor), cool Alberto (Sordi, title character in The White Sheik, later star of Mafioso), smarty Leopoldo (Trieste, lead newlywed in The White Sheik, later in A Farewell to Arms), singer Riccardo (the director’s brother), and young Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi, star of Shoeshine and I Vinti).

Fausto knocks up Moraldo’s sister (Leonora Ruffo of Hercules in the Haunted World), reluctantly marries her but keeps sleeping around and can’t keep a job. Leopoldo spends his nights writing a play, which he reads to a famous actor who turns out to be enthusuastic for Leo more than the play. Moraldo mopes around every night, makes friends with a newsboy, seems bewildered by this boy because he has a proper job instead of just fucking around all the time. Finally Moraldo has had it with the movie and leaves town. As his train pulls away from town, the camera pulls past all his sleeping friends, a fun visual touch in an otherwise realistic film.

A sad carnival:

T. Piazza for Criterion:

I Vitelloni marks a big step forward in Fellini’s ability to get deep into his characters’ psychology; it points ahead both to the bitter social satire of La Dolce Vita and to the great canvases of nostalgia and the artist’s nature, 8 1/2, Amarcord — and the neglected late masterpiece Intervista.
…
Against their narcissism and lassitude is posed the solidity and maturity of the town’s older men, who have assumed the standard responsibilities of middle-class family life. But admirable as they may be, these solid citizens — unimaginative, satisfied with their lot, stuck in claustral interior settings — are hardly made to seem a stimulating alternative, and at the end Moraldo leaves the town’s tape loop of foreclosed possibilities for another arena of possibility in the city.
…
Allergic to endings that sum things up too neatly, or that resolve in a definitive way the tensions set up in the film, Fellini once remarked, “Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train… But we must at least take them to the station… to a point of departure.” It is a striking image, one foreign to many popular storytellers: the ending of a story seen not as an arrival, but rather as a prepared departure. I Vitelloni, of course, brings us literally to the station at its end, with Moraldo’s departure from his provincial town. But on a deep level the film was Fellini’s point of departure, too—the beginning of his important work as a filmmaker, the place where he got serious. And as he made clear at the end of Intervista, the only thing that kept Fellini truly happy was his work; the end of any project was a kind of death, overcome only at the moment at which one was ready to begin again, to try and get it right one more time.

by ·Comments Off on Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan)

A traumatic year in the life of Lisa (not Margaret – long story) and her mother in New York. Straightforward character drama with some unique filmic touches (lots of half-heard side conversations, two 360-degree pans within a few minutes of each other in opposite directions). I would possibly have watched this based on the back-story (Lonergan made the beloved You Can Count On Me then spent six years in editing and legal limbo trying to get this one released), then probably not watched it based on the trailer (looked like a bland L.A. Crash-style character-intersection drama), but I finally watched it based on the few vocal critics who insist it’s the best, most criminally neglected film of 2011. They were right!

Mom and Jean Reno at the opera:

Mom and Lisa on the way to a different opera:

Great acting, and a truly impressive, screenplay. Character behaviors seem untidy and human, self-centered and confused. Lisa is a shrill teen, alterately excited and upset by everything, trying to deal with personal responsibility, growing up, family, too much all at once, leading to a beautiful ending. I watched the three-hour version. Not sure which sixth of the film was chopped for its brief theatrical and blu-ray releases – it’s hard to imagine, since there’s no repetition. For instance, whenever the story calls for one person to tell another some things we’ve already seen or heard, the camera pulls back, we see the beginning of the conversation but hear something else, just long enough to get the point then it cuts to the next scene. So, some of the story would have to be removed – maybe her classmate love-triangle, or a Broderick class session.

Lisa’s after-school job as a theater lighting technician:

The central event in Lisa’s life this year is her witnessing/causing a bus crash that kills Allison Janney. Lisa (Anna Paquin) lies to the cops, saying bus driver Mark Ruffalo had the right of way, but she keeps obsessing over the accident, wanting to talk about it with teachers (Matts Damon & Broderick) and friends and others – so she seeks out the victim’s best friend Jeannie Berlin (Charles Grodin’s new bride in The Heartbreak Kid) and Ruffalo, who is understandably defensive when a high schooler comes to his house wanting to talk about the truth behind the accident, which had already been ruled accidental.

Lisa, Jeannie and Jeannie’s lawyer friend:

Meanwhile Lisa’s stage actress mom (J. Smith-Cameron) is dating wealthy fan Jean Reno, but can’t quite deal with their cultural/social differences, and Lisa is planning a vacation with her estranged father (played by the director). Lisa ditches longtime best friend John Gallagher Jr. (Pieces of April) to have sex with bad Kieran Culkin, then she manages to seduce Matt Damon and ponders ruining his life by making a scene about it (shades of 25th Hour). And the bus-crash intrigue continues, with involvement by lawyers and detectives and the victim’s greedy next-of-kin. After mom breaks up with Jean Reno, he dies unexpectedly, and mother and daughter go to the opera together with the tickets he’d bought.

Lisa’s film-director dad:

The cast is great, but most importantly, nobody acts like a movie character acting out a plot with foregone conclusion. Lisa is inconsistent, eventually loses the threads of her attention-grabbing schemes, because she’s surrounded by people with their own ideas and feelings, not stock characters in a hack script designed to help or hinder her – which is how, as a self-centered teenager, she sees the world.

by ·Comments Off on Sight & Sound List 2012

Sight & Sound put out their big, big list of the best films ever, and everyone everywhere is talking about Vertigo. I love lists, but am more interested in the individual top tens than the consensus, seeking out the stray title which was ignored by everybody except for one person, who considers it one of the ten best films ever made. So I combed the website – so full of typos, mysteries (Scorsese got 12 picks?) and weird decisions (Manoel de Oliveira, best known for To Each His Own Cinema) – and made myself some must-see lists based on the critics, directors and consensus picks. I’m not making this into a big project-of-the-year and rushing to watch all of these, just making a note to cross ’em off the list if/when I ever get to them.

Unique films from the Directors’ top-ten lists that I haven’t seen:

Aaron Katz
US Go Home (Claire Denis)

Abel Ferrara
Hawks and Sparrows (Pasolini)
Cul-de-Sac (Polanski)
Prison (Bergman)

Agnieszka Holland
Diamonds of the Night (Nemec)
La Reine Margot (Patrice Chereau)

Aki Kaurismaki
Z (Costa-Gavras)

Andrew Kotting
Black Sun (Gary Tarn)
Moon and the Sledgehammer (Philip Trevelyan)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
La Captive (Akerman)
Rain/Regen (Ivens)

Ben Rivers
Fata Morgana (Herzog)
Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik)
Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait)
Soft Fiction (Chick Strand)
Weather Diary 3 (Kuchar)

Ben Russell
Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rudin)
Crossroads (Bruce Conner)
Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto)
Heart of Glass (Herzog)
Jaguar (Rouch)

Bong Joon-ho
The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young)

Bruce Robinson
I’m Alright Jack (John Boulting)
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Edward Cline)

Charles Burnett
Decision Before Dawn (Anatole Litvak)
Shop on Main Street (Jan Kadar)
Student of Prague (Henrik Galeen)
Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermano Olmi)

Chris Petit
Eat the Document (Bob Dylan)
The Giant (Michael Klier)
White of the Eye (Donald Cammell)

Corneliu Porumboiu
Faits Divers (Depardon)

Edgar Wright
Dames (Busby Berkeley)

Eugene Green
The Jester (Jose Alvaro Morais)

Fernando Meirelles
Iracerna (Jorge Bodanzky/Orlando Senna)

Fred Kelemen
The Second Circle (Sokurov)

Gaston Kabore
The Thorn Birds (Lee Stanley)
Ugly, Dirty and Bad (Ettore Scola)

Gerardo Naranjo
Possession (Zulawski)
Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder)
Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta)

Gregg Araki
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch)

Guy Maddin
Man’s Castle (Borzage)
After Life (Kore-eda)

Gyorgy Palfi
Love (Karoly Makk)

Jiri Menzel
Fireman’s Ball (Forman)
A Dog’s Life (Chaplin)

Joe Swanberg
Dillinger Is Dead (Ferreri)
Two Lovers (Gray)

John Gianvito
The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha)
Kuhle Wampe (Brecht/Ottwald)
Reason, Debate and a Tale (Ghatak)
Shiranui Sea (Tsuchimoto Noriaki)
Story of Kindness (Tran Van Thuy)
West Indies (Med Hondo)

Hirokazu Kore-eda
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong)

Les Blank
Paris at Midnight (E. Mason Hopper)

Lisandro Alonso
Le Havre (Kaurismaki)

Lukas Moodysson
Man on the Roof (Bo Widerberg)
A Swedish Love Story (Roy Andersson)

Mark Romanek
Heaven’s Gate (Cimino)

Michael Glawogger
Vivan las Antipodas! (Kossakovsky)
All My Life (Baillie)
How Yukong Moved the Mountains (Ivens)

Michael Mann
Confessions (Tetsuya)

Miguel Gomes
Francisca (Oliveira)

Mike Hodges
The Prowler (Losey)

Mike Leigh
How a Mosquito Operates (McCay)
The Emigrants (Jan Troell)

Miranda July
Blind (Frederick Wiseman)
Cheese (Mika Rottenberg)
Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra)
Somewhere in Time (Jeannot Szwarc)

Monte Hellman
Outcast of the Islands (Carol Reed)
Storm Over Asia (Pudovkin)

Olivier Assayas
Ludwig (Visconti)
Van Gogh (Pialat)

Patricio Guzman
Boxing Gym (Wiseman)
Cien Ninos Esperando un Tren (Ignacio Aguero)
Etre et Avoir (Philibert)
Gruningers Fall (Richard Dindo)
Mother Dao (Vincent Monnikendam)
S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (Rithy Panh)

Patrick Keiller
Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Lumiere)

Peter Davis
Sundays and Cybele (Serge Bourguignon)

Peter Tscherkassky
Adebar (Kubelka)
At Land (Deren)
The Pig (Eustache/Barjol)
Easy Out (Pat O’Neill)

Peter von Bagh
A Man There Was (Sjostrom)

Quentin Tarantino
Pretty Maids All in a Row (Roger Vadim)
Rolling Thunder John Flynn)
Sorcerer (Friedkin)

Raya Martin
Manila by Night (Ishmael Bernal)
Eruption volcanique a la Martinique (Melies)

Robert Gardner
Freeze, Die, Come Alive (Vitali Kanevsky)
My Life as a Dog (Hallstrom)

Rolf de Heer
Fearless (Peter Weir)
The Stud Farm (Andras Kovacs)

Samantha Morton
The Browning Version (Asquith)
Ladybird Ladybird (Loach)

Sean Durkin
Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg)

Shinji Aoyama
Hail Mary (Godard)
Killer Elite (Peckinpah)

Sion Sono
Turks Fruit (Verhoeven)

Terence Davies
The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder)
Victim (Basil Dearden)
Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas)

Terry Jones
I’m No Angel (Wesley Ruggles)

Thom Andersen
God’s Stepchildren (Oscar Micheaux)

Ulrich Kohler
D’est (Akerman)

Ulrich Seidl
My Little Loves (Eustache)

Wanuri Kahiu
Space is the Place (John Coney)

William E Jones
Ten Minutes to Live (Oscar Micheaux)

Unique films from the Critics’ top-ten lists that I haven’t seen:

Craig Keller
23rd Psalm Branch (Brakhage)

Chris Fujiwara
Man’s Favourite Sport? (Hawks)

Amy Taubin
Cosmopolis (Cronenberg)

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Red Viburnum (Vasili Shukshin)

Girish Shambu
Dil Se (Mani Ratnam)

Gary Indiana
The Death of Maria Malibran (Schroeter)

Jaime Christley
Ministry of Fear (Lang)

James Naremore
Variety (Bette Gordon)

J Hoberman
The Girl From Chicago (Oscar Micheaux)
Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell)

Jonathan Romney
Street of Crocodiles (Quay Brothers)
Three Crowns of the Sailor (Ruiz)

Jonathan Rosenbaum
Cuadecuc-Vampir (Portabella)

Kevin Lee
Under the Bridges (Helmut Kautner)

Laura Mulvey
La Signora di Tutti (Max Ophüls)

Mark Cousins
The Insect Woman (Imamura)

Mehrnaz Saeedvafa
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)

Michael Koller
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán)

Mike D’Angelo
Exotica (Egoyan)

Nathan Lee
From the Notebook of (Robert Beavers)

Noel Burch
The Truth About Bebe Donge (Henri Decoin)

Noel Vera
Three Years Without God (Mario O’Hara)

Peter von Bagh
Angèle (Marcel Pagnol)

Quintin
La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso)

Richard Pena
Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin)

Scott MacDonald
Unsere Afrikareise (Peter Kubelka)

Tag Gallagher
From the Clouds to the Resistance (Straub/Huillet)

Tony Rayns
Scenes from a City Life/Dushi Fengguang (Yuan Muzhi)

Vadim Rizov
The Wedding Suit (Kiarostami)

Eight critics with a bunch of offbeat titles each:

Adrian Martin
Anna (1972, Alberto Grifi/Massimo Sarchielli)
Behindert (1974, Stephen Dwoskin)
By the Bluest of Seas (1935, Boris Barnet/S. Mardanin)
The Departure (1966, Jerzy Skolimowski)
L’Enfant Secret (Philippe Garrel)
Nuit et jour (Chantal Akerman)

Alexander Horwath
I am Twenty (1963, Marlen Khutsiyev)
Line Describing a Cone (1973, Anthony McCall)
My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (Robert Beavers)
Reisender Krieger (1981, Christian Schocher)
Schwechater (1958, Peter Kubelka)

Christoph Huber
Arcana (1972, Giulio Questi)
Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur)
The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher)
The Ducksters (Chuck Jones)
Fiamma che non si spegne (Vittorio Cottafavi)
Ng Long Pat Kua Khuan (Liu Chia-Liang)
On The Silver Globe (1988, Andrzej Zulawski)
The Party (Blake Edwards)

Fred Camper
Egyptian Series (Brakhage)
El Dorado (Hawks)
What Goes Up? (Breer)
Yearning (Naruse)

Gabe Klinger
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 (creators unknown)
79 Springtimes (1969, Santiago Álvarez)
The Country Doctor (1909, D.W. Griffith)
Wagon Master (John Ford)

Ian Christie
The ‘?’ Motorist (1906, Robert Paul)
A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings)
Rainbow Dance (Len Lye)
The Sun (Sokurov)

Mark Webber
Eniaios (Gregory J. Markopoulos)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers)
The Tenant (Polanski)
Work Done (Robert Beavers)

Olaf Möller
Afrique 50 (René Vautier)
Dialogue With a Woman Departed (1980, Leo T. Hurwitz)
The Ditch (Wang Bing)
Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1972, Straub/Huillet)
Jom (1981, Ababacar Samb-Makharam)
Outrage (1950, Ida Lupino)
The Year Long Road (1958, Giuseppe De Santis)

Films from the aggregate critics’ top 250 that I haven’t seen, or just haven’t seen lately:

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)
Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
Mirror (Tarkovsky)
Contempt (Godard)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
Shoah (Lanzmann)
Close-Up (Kiarostami)
Gertrud (Dreyer)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
The Mother and the Whore (Eustache)
Wild Strawberries (Bergman)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
L’Eclisse (Antonioni)
Beau Travail (Denis)
Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
Partie de campagne (Renoir)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
Yi Yi (Yang)
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
Imitation of Life (Sirk)
Madame de (Ophuls)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard)
Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
Performance (Cammell/Roeg)
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Mouchette (Bresson)
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford)
Days of Heaven (Malick)
Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul)
L’Argent (Bresson)
Don’t Look Now (Roeg)
The Last Laugh (Murnau)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Alea)
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson)
Marketa Lazarová (Vlacil)
Solaris (Tarkovsky)
Chimes at Midnight (Welles)
Brief Encounter (Lean)
In a Lonely Place (Ray)
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki)
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks)
Come And See (Klimov)
Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
Notorious (Hitchcock)
A Trip to the Moon (Melies)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
Grapes of Wrath (Ford)
Paris, Texas (Wenders)
The Music Room (Ray)
A Touch of Zen (King Hu)
Listen to Britain (Jennings)
Day of Wrath (Dreyer)
Thin Red Line (Malick)
The Conversation (Coppola)
Red Desert (Antonioni)
Kings of the Road (Wenders)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Daisies (Chytilova)
West of the Tracks (Bing)
The Big Sleep (Hawks)
Wanda (Loden)
The Devil Probably (Bresson)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman)
The Thin Blue Line (Morris)
The World of Apu (Ray)
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang)
Kes (Loach)
Three Colours: Red (Kieslowski)

Attn: BFI, Critics, etc – this is a personal checklist made from severely abridged selections from the Sight & Sound lists, but if I’ve reposted too much of your content, give a yell and I’ll take this post offline.

by ·Comments Off on Grey Matter (2011, Kivu Ruhorahoza)

A weird art movie in three parts.

An arty filmmaker with a screenplay called “The Cycle of the Cockroach” can’t seem to get his resources together to shoot: the equipment guy failed to get lights, the actors are restless and the government won’t fund anything that doesn’t carry straightforward public-service messages.

A madman locked in a cell listens to radio broadcasts warning about cockroaches, traps one in a glass, is offered his freedom (by a white hand holding a key).

Postwar siblings, the boy traumatized by images from the war and his murdered parents (invented, since he was studying abroad at the time), refusing to speak or paint, throwing buckets of water on the TV and hiding in the attic from imagined invaders. Older sister is paying for his treatment by sleeping with the psychiatrist. He seems to snap out of it when they attend a mass-grave excavation. But all this has taken a toll on the sister. In the end, she’s in a cell. A roach runs under the door into the cell of the madman next door.

Said to be the first-ever film by a native Rwandan. The director: “It’s a film about the brain and the tricks it can play on people when they go through really traumatizing experiences. . . We are a nation of traumatized people who never got any professional help, because how are you going to get professional help to millions of people?”

C. Bell: “Finally, we have a contemplative film on the disgusting tragedy that took place in the East African country, one that recognizes it as a severely traumatic, complicated, and long-lasting event and not something ripe for Oscar bait.”