by ·Comments Off on Summertime Shorts

Orderly or Disorderly (1981, Abbas Kiarostami)

Like an expanded version of Two Solutions to One Problem, A.K. films some situations in two ways each: chaotic and organized, to demonstrate that ordered efficiency leads to happier results. First it’s school children, in line vs. every-man-for-himself. Then they attempt to film traffic patterns, first outside the city then inside. But the traffic cop helping them with their “organized” model is no match for city drivers and pedestrians. Each scene begins with a slate, and at the end A.K. says “cut,” but in certain situations (“disorderly” schoolkids taking forever to board a bus, multiple unsuccessful attempts to get “orderly” traffic patterns) you hear the director and crew talking, discussing their results and the purpose for the film – an early example of A.K.’s love of behind-the-scenes stories and slyly demystifying the filmmaking process (sly because he re-mystifies it in various ways, like the final shot of 10 on Ten, or most of Through the Olive Trees).

stubbornly disorderly traffic:

M. Saeed-Vafa in Senses:

What is normally non-humorous is seen and heard as humorous, ridiculous, or absurd through Kiarostami’s films. Similar to Tati’s Playtime, Kiarostami’s fantastic short Orderly or Disorderly derives its power and humor through shot composition, the use of sound, and, in particular, Kiarostami’s voice over. The high angle long shots of the children in the school-yard lining up to drink water or getting on the bus, as well as the impatient drivers who complicate traffic in a Tehran intersection, reveal the humorous nature of chaos and order in public spaces.

Rotterdam Europoort (1966, Joris Ivens)

A really strange one – you think it’s going to be a doc portrait of the city, but it goes full-on poetic instead. This makes perfect sense once I realize that Ivens is the guy who made A Valparaiso and A Tale of the Wind. I’d gotten him confused with Bert Haanstra somehow, whose movies are just as exciting, but more straightforward and focused, documentary-like. Repeated dialogue (err, monologue), talks about work, old age and youth, the nature of man. Monumental, inexplicable. I watched it twice. IMDB says Chris Marker adapted the narration for France. Shot by Etienne Becker (L’Amour Fou, Malle’s Calcutta) and Eduard van der Enden (Haanstra’s Glas and Fanfare, Tati’s Trafic).

from the Ivens site:

After more than thirty years of work abroad, Ivens was invited by the municipality to make a film in Rotterdam again, where he had shot his well-known The Bridge (1928). Rotterdam-Europoort, whose production took two years, became a layered hybrid of fact and fiction, poetry and legend: a modern interpretation of The Flying Dutchman. Not devoid of critical remarks, it was a challenging way to promote the port.

Grunes:

The figure of a lost soul, who is at one point addressed (by an opera singer) as “Captain,” is Ivens’s and, if we are of a certain age, our own surrogate. This elegant, mysterious, mystified man is embroiled in a scattered existence, at least partly caused by the war, the ongoing burden of its memory, and the onslaught of youth who kill time rather than people.

mysterious Captain in a skirt shows up halfway through:

I Am (Not) Van Gogh (2005, David Russo)

Thinking about Little Dizzle again, I looked up Russo and discovered he has a short I haven’t seen. I’m not crazy about the voiceover – Russo explaining the premise of his proposed short film to a skeptical arts festival council – but the visuals are just what I’d hoped for, more of the chaotic/precise stop-motion of Populi and Pan With Us, this time amongst a festival crowd, flitting rapidly behind the animation, out of time like that Orbital video. I loved the rolling clock – also great are a swimming fish on cut-out paper and an animated mouth lip-synched to David’s flustered narration.

78 Tours (1985, Georges Schwizgebel)

Better than the others I’ve seen by Schwizgebel. Nothing but excellent animation and imaginative transitions as everything morphs into everything else for four minutes, to a catchy accordian theme.

S. Katz: “For 78 Tours Schwizgebel drew out ellipses at varying angles to indicate the positioning of the characters in relations to the camera. Some of these plan views are so complex they look like technical drawings for an engineering project.”

Squirtgun Stepprint (1998, Pat O’Neill)

Black and white water-droplet (squirtgun?) patterns that sometimes seem to flow, but usually just flicker and jitter, seeming to double back on themselves (step print?).

Description by somebody who understands: “O’Neill applied film developer to film stock using a squirt gun, then rearranged the results into rhythmic repetitions.”

stills don’t really make sense for films like these:

Coreopsis (1998, Pat O’Neill)

Line-drawing (or scratching) patterns, abstract, though I tried to make them into faces, bodies, fireworks, footballs. Again with the jittery repeated patterns in the motion. Sometimes a focused bunch of overlapping figures on screen, but just as often a sparse batch of small lines in a vast darkness. The lines get thicker and fuzzier towards the end. After the previous short, I realized this would be silent and played some late Ennio Morricone over it, not to brilliant effect, turning the film into a sitcom title sequence.

Details found online: “O’Neill scratched directly on the film, then altered it using an optical printer.”

by ·Comments Off on Brave (2012, Mark Andrews & Brenda Chapman)

Princess Merida, with the most awesome red hair I’ve seen in any movie, doesn’t want to be won in a contest by the first-born sons of the tribal leaders, so she competes to win her own freedom. That night, as the good-natured annual party (led by her father the Bear King) threatens to devolve into full-on war, Merida creeps away and asks a witch to change her controlling mother. So mom is changed into a bear. Now Merida has to save her mom from her bear-hunting father, and break the spell, and figure out what to do about the marriage thing before war breaks out.

Katy called it “rambunctious” and said she likes at least ten other Pixar features more than this one. We both felt a bit chastised for not recognizing the film’s full greatness after reading L. Loofbourow’s brilliant article Just Another Princess Movie.

Late director Mark Andrews helmed Pixar’s One Man Band and co-wrote John Carter of Mars, replacing original writer/director Brenda Chapman (co-dir. of Prince of Egypt).

La Luna (2011, Enrico Casarosa)

The moon is covered with tiny shooting stars, and as it rises each night, a couple of boatmen lean a ladder against it, climb up and sweep them into place to form the proper crescent shape. More golden light and wide-eyed wonder than is typical for Pixar. Writer/director Casarosa was an artist on Ratatouille and Up. Too-big music by Michael Giacchino (Super 8, Cars 2). Katy and I liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2007, Dave Willis & Matt Maiellaro)

Rented this and Haywire for some mindless comedy and action downtime between complex euro-art films. Haywire brought the action, but Aqua Teen sputtered on the comedy. Should I blame myself for losing my sense of humor, since I always liked the show in the first couple seasons, or did the movie’s need to cram in familiar characters and plot points and locations, concoct an origin/creation story, and yet waste enough time on total nonsense to keep from violating the who-gives-a-shit spirit of the show, what was I talking about?

Jon Benjamin played a cop.

A. Nayman at Cinema Scope compares the summer’s animated films:

“What moron would pay to see something they can see at home for free?” asks Homer early in The Simpsons Movie. Besides reflecting the affectionate disdain (or is it just disdain?) the series’ writers developed for their ever-more-obsessive fanbase, this query is funny because it’s essentially true. “Your money is now our money, and we will spend it on drugs,” shriek the nasty snacks at the beginning of Aqua Teen. Equally true, considerably funnier, and fair enough.

by ·Comments Off on Summertime Non-Movies

Beautiful Frenzy (2004), a 50-min doc on The Ex, which I put on while writing, hoping it’d be more full songs and concert footage than subtitled interviews in Dutch, but no such luck.

Jesus Lizard Sho(r)t (1996), ten minutes of not-great promo video followed by twenty-five of the good concert footage I’d desired from The Ex movie.

A little-known fact: Pixar reissued four of their recent films to theaters last month. Katy and I rewatched Up, which I’m ready to declare a masterpiece, and Wall-E (at which we were the only two people). I’d been looking forward to seeing that one again, and surely it’s wonderful, but its story and characters suffer in comparison to Up.

Movies watched on Rifftrax lately:

Island of Dr. Moreau: Crazypants, bonkers (“pants-crapping insane”) version of Island of Lost Souls. I was surprised that Brando dies so early, followed by Kilmer than Fairuza Balk. Our hero-by-default David Thewlis gets away.

Batman & Robin: It struck me just how expensive this movie looks. There’s a bit of CG fakery but it’s mostly money on the screen. Not that this excuses Schwartzenegger’s dialogue or Silverstone’s acting.

Jaws: Haven’t seen it since I was a kid, and maybe it’s the Rifftrax talking here, but I don’t think I like this movie one bit. Well, maybe ONE bit – the scene where Dreyfuss pretends to be tough by crushing his plastic cup.

Daredevil: fully deserving of the riff-treatment, a real stinking pile of unintentional humor. Things I can’t believe: that Colin Farrell played the villain, that this movie got a spin-off, and that the director was allowed to make another superhero movie (Ghost Rider).

Battlefield Earth: Barry Pepper can’t be to blame for this. Even though the movie is obviously horrible, he throws enough physical energy into his lead performance to somewhat transcend the muck. I haven’t seen Travolta in anything since, and hope I never do.

More Rifftrax: Terminator 3, Terminator 4, Jurassic Park (with Weird Al), X-Men and Transformers.

Rented Steve Coogan: Live ‘n Lewd (1994), which wasn’t the least bit funny.

Steve Coogan: The Man Who Thinks He’s It (1998) had the same characters, so I skipped a lot, but stopped for the Alan Partridge segment and all the bits with Simon Pegg.

Pegg with Julia Davies:

Rewatching The Wire with Katy. In the middle of season three now, where we’ve been stuck for a couple months.

Also checked out a good video essay by E. Lavik on the show’s style: strict chronological order without flashbacks, unobtrusive camerawork, no non-diegetic music or narration, with documentary-influenced camera moves (the camera shouldn’t know things that we don’t, like moving to the next speaker before they begin speaking). He spends time on subtle camera technique (lines, frames within frames, mirror shots and 180-degree rule: the usual stuff of visual analysis) and puts together a compelling argument that the show’s style is more interesting than it’s given credit for.

Also rewatched The Thick of It first season over a couple of days, to remember the characters before I see the next one.

And we finished Arrested Development season 2. I can hardly believe how good it is. I’m gonna have to watch the series over and over like Jeremy does.

by ·Comments Off on A Wife Confesses (1961, Yasuzo Masumura)

One of the most stylishly shot courtroom dramas ever, beating Clouzot’s La Verite. Ayako Wakao, star of Seisaku’s Wife, is again the titular wife, again with marital problems. This time she’s defending herself in court, accused of self-widowing on a mountain climb so she could marry her lover and climbing buddy.

The facts are laid out right from the start: the married couple fell and Kouda was holding on, with Ayako in the middle and her husband dangling below. Kouda couldn’t pull them both up. She cut the rope below her, letting her husband fall to his death.

She testifies that she and her husband (Eitaro Ozawa: Minobe in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Kinichi’s dad in Kiss) were never in love, but he wouldn’t allow a divorce. Meanwhile young, ambitious Kouda (Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Kinichi in Kiss) is engaged to his best client’s high-haired daughter Rie, but is spending all his time with the accused Ayako.

Kinichi and his dad, in love with the same woman:

Rie testifies:

The court case continues, experts are called in, stories are told by witnesses, a flashback within a flashback, as they try to determine whether Ayako had to kill her husband in order to save her own life. It has become a wide-open secret that the two surviving climbers are in love, and the day before the verdict, they go to the beach together as the soundtrack plays haunted string music. The next day she’s proclaimed innocent.

Kouda is dumping his fiancee and marrying Ayako, but surprised that she’s so quick to start spending her life insurance windfall. He grills her, and finally we get to see the fateful climb, as she confesses that she took the opportunity to get rid of her hateful husband, then Kouda calls her a liar and runs back to Rie. Ayako poisons herself, and Rie gets the last word: “Mr. Kouda, you killed her. If she’s a murderer, you’re also a murderer. Goodbye. I won’t be seeing you again.”

Shot the year before Masumura’s Black Test Car, from the writer of three of Kurosawa’s most famous later films.

Berkeley: “combines the pessimistic observations of film noir with the sensuality that Masumura would pursue further in later films… an early film to deal openly with a woman’s feelings about sex… Within an unusually complex narrative structure, Wakao beautifully develops contradictory desires in her heroine – her lust to live and her wish to die – and somehow makes them one.” Rosenbaum: “A powerful metaphor for Japanese interdependence, this rope connecting the members of a romantic triangle is also tied, one might say, to Masumura’s major theme: the tragedy as well as the necessity of individual choice and desire in a highly interactive society.”

by ·Comments Off on Inquietude (1998, Manoel de Oliveira)

“Men were vulgar. They wanted to forget their history. Only funerals seemed true, as they passed streets of dirty houses, like tombs for the living.”

Almost an anthology film – three stories with no overlapping characters, set maybe in the 1920’s or 30’s. An adaptation of three separate works – a fact I didn’t catch in the opening credits. Very strange, but as magnetic and thrilling as Non.

The Immortals

A burst of music over the opening, then the first line, from a father to his son, is “Kill yourself.” Both father (Jose Pinto of Abraham’s Valley) and son (Luis Miguel Cintra, star of Non) are the most famous scientists of their respective generation. But the father is feeling washed-up and forgotten, and urges his son to die at the height of his fame.

Time out for a picnic with Marta (Isabel Ruth of The Uncertainty Principle), an old student/flame of the father’s, then back to the apartment. The son won’t be convinced, refuses to swallow cyanide, but agrees to fix his father’s curtain rod over the back door, at which time his dad pushes him over the balcony, then jumps after, yelling about immortality.

I’d noted that the movie felt like theater, the old man playing towards an imagined crowd instead of his son, in a single location except for the cutaways to the picnic and a downstairs neighbor’s place as the men fell to their deaths – and it was theater after all. A half hour into the movie, a curtain raises, and we begin to follow a couple groups of friends who have been watching the play, never to return to the scientist family.

Suzy

Square-jawed Diogo Doria of Non and his friend David Cardoso are paying as much attention to a pair of courtesans/prostitutes in another box as to the play. Cardoso meets the girls and reports back, having claimed Gabi (Rita Blanco) as his own, and later, Doria starts spending much time with Suzy (the ever-present Leonor Silveira), though he remains rational when he sees her out with other men.

All along, I’m suspicious that this will be another play, even though the atmosphere has changed – it’s more realistic, mostly shot in long takes (as was the first episode), but still held at a strange remove, with ellipses of undetermined lengths between scenes.

Suzy: “I have wealthy lovers, dresses by the best seamstresses, everything, except happiness.” Eventually she’s seeing Doria less often, though they exchange letters. In the end, Suzy has died in hospital during an operation (“she said: it’s a small thing”), but he keeps writing the letters. Cardoso stops by to visit his pathetic friend, and tells him a story.

Mother of the River

Young Fisalina (Leonor Baldaque, star of The Portuguese Nun) is in love with Ricardo Trepa (who played her husband in Christopher Columbus, The Enigma). But it’s not that simple: there are customs, rules, meddling parents and a small, stifling village. So she sneaks off to see the Mother of the River (Irene Papas, greek singer in A Talking Picture, also star of Z). “I love a boy with pretty teeth. I do not know how to marry him… curse me, but set me free.” So the mother takes Fisalina through a candlelit cavern to the edge of the water.

The next day Fisalina notices her fingertips are golden. She hides them from everyone, but no longer feels urgent towards her boy, and seems at peace with the village. During a candlelight festival, the light shines off her fingers and she is discovered, a witch! “Fisalina, reckless, fated, has chosen to live beside the deep water, where she will wait a thousand years before swapping lives with someone else.”

Goldfinger:

Trepa, despondent:

Oliveira has returned to these writers: his A Caixa was a play by Prista Monteiro (The Immortals), and he’s done at least four major films based on stories by Agustina Bessa-Luis (Mother of the River).

D. Kehr says the segments are “all centered on themes of death and eternity and presented sequentially as social comedy, existential tragedy and lyrical epic,” but Rosenbaum, more correctly I think, says it’s “the theme of existential identity” that unites the stories.

by ·Comments Off on Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh)

Back with his rival/writer Lem Dobbs of The Limey and Kafka, but I don’t see much point in celebrating the reunion since this was a straightforward double-crossed super-spy story. If not for the Soderbergh name and the A-list cast that always follows the Soderbergh name, this would be filler content on HBO starring Edward Furlong or the like. I’m starting to think that I’ve been suckered into believing that Soderbergh is some important auteur, when really he just makes slick entertainments rather well. But I guess he goes back and forth – some turns out better than others – and this one is firmly on the slick-entertainments side of things.

The reviews focused entirely on whether action hero Gina Carano can act in the non-action scenes, and the answer is “well enough”. More surprising is that the stars (particularly Fassbender and Tater) can keep up with Gina in the fighting scenes, also well enough.

Gina is a spy/mercenary/thing working for Ewan McGregor’s private organization, rescues a Chinese fellow from kidnappers along with her buddy “Tater” Channing, then accepts a quick follow-up assignment with British agent Michael Fassbender at the house of Mathieu Kassovitz (Amelie‘s photo-booth boyfriend), where she finds the dead Chinese guy, realizes she’s being framed, gets jumped by Fassbender and shoots him dead after a struggle.

But wait, the movie starts in the middle, where she’s met by Tater in a diner while being tracked by Ewan’s people, kicks Tater’s ass but does not kill him, then kidnaps a dude named Scott (the kid who was shot by Stephen Root in Red State) to escape. Now she’s off to clear her name, tracking down Ewan (traitor with a bad haircut who gets left to drown Ted Danson-style), Tater (killed by Ewan), Michael Douglas (gov’t good guy who helps slightly). We know the big baddie at the end will be Antonio Banderas, since we saw him with a Castro beard early in the film then he never came back, and he wouldn’t just have the one cameo. Help also comes from her dad Bill Paxton (his first movie since 2007, and the first I’ve heard of since ’04).

According to the IMDB, shot and edited by Soderbergh under pseudonyms, well enough.

by ·Comments Off on Il Generale Della Rovere (1959, Roberto Rossellini)

First some context from the always-reliable Tag. By 1958/59, Rossellini “hated commercial cinema with a vengeance,” but was broke as usual, so “was selling himself to a producer for a project that wasn’t his own.” Films about the Italian government’s WWII collaboration with nazis had been forbidden for years, and as this ban was lifted, Rossellini shared the golden lion at Venice with Mario Monicelli (The Great War) for breaking taboos. So, sucked back into a system he hated, he ended up with his biggest success since Open City.

Adapting the true story about a fake leader of the anti-fascist resistance planted in a political prison to try and ferret out the real resistance leaders, Rossellini was assigned fellow neorealist director Vittorio de Sica as a lead actor. And he’s excellent, I thought, but Tag says R.R. considered VdS a ham, and utilized tricks to make him tone down his huge performance. Either way, it’s an engrossing movie about sordid wartime subjects.

De Sica is Bardone aka Grimaldi, a local during the occupation who meets nazi Colonel Muller (Hannes Messemer, POW camp commandant in The Great Escape) on the street and gives him directions, then proceeds to his usual past time, which is scamming his countrymen whose relatives are in jail, collecting gifts to pass on to the imprisoned, and money for their release, then gambling it away. His girl Valeria (Sandra Milo of Juliet of the Spirits and 8 1/2) leaves him, and while looking for a sucker to buy some fake jewelry, he visits Olga (Giovanna Ralli, star of RR’s follow-up Escape By Night), an ex working in a brothel.

Valeria:

Olga:

Meanwhile, in a botched capture attempt, General Della Rovere of the partisan underground is killed. And Bardone is arrested, turned in by a girl he was trying to scam (Anne Vernon, Deneuve’s mom in Umbrellas of Cherbourg), promising to free her husband who had already been executed. Bardone pleads his case passionately, saying he’s providing a great service to the locals by providing false hope in a hopeless time, and Col. Muller gets an idea.

Anne Vernon:

The second half of the movie is traitorous Bardone doing time in a political prison, trying to identify captured leaders of the underground so they can be tortured for information. But Bardone spends enough time faking that he’s General Della Rovere that he starts to believe it, taking to heart the letters he receives from Rovere’s wife. “When you don’t know which path to take, choose the hardest one.”

His new friend Banchelli the barber (Vittorio Caprioli, plant manager in Tout va bien) is tortured to death, and Rovere is tortured as well, as Muller gets tired of waiting for results. In the end, Bardone/Rovere meets the leader of the resistance, but goes voluntarily to the firing squad without divulging the secret, a patriot at last. Yeah, it’s a bit melodramatic.

Banchelli:

Film Quarterly said the first section, before Bardone is arrested, was “much too long.” This may be true if you’ve read the true story, or are expecting a prison movie. But I thought it was perfectly timed out, because we get to know him before prison, see what a scoundrel he is, and how he deals with friends and strangers. Then his turn in prison from early nervousness to pride in his (false) position of honor to partisan has more meaning.

by ·Comments Off on Snow White and the Huntsman (2012, Rupert Sanders)

A fairy tale for today’s mob of Twilight-raised, grimly serious gothic youth who prefer the Christian Bale Batman to the Michael Keaton Batman. Pretty obvious movie, and no part is more obvious than James “Newt” Howard’s big, big score. Alternates between patient carefully-composed images and too-close, too-frantic action scenes. Overall pretty good, especially when Evil Queen Charlize Theron is around.

After Charlize takes over the kingdom and kills all flowers and happiness, the imprisoned princess grows up to be Twilight Stewart and realizes there might be trouble in the kingdom when her cellmate Lily Cole leaves to see the queen and returns as an old hag, so Twilight escapes by slashing Theron’s albino brother Sam Spruell in the face. She meets her reluctant protector Thor Hemsworth and they go adventuring, collecting the exiled Duke’s army and the all-important dwarfs to help.

Pity doomed Lily Cole:

First it’s into the dark forest, which is extremely menacing to Twilight until she passes out, then it leaves her alone. It doesn’t bug Thor at all, making me wonder if he’s the actual Chosen One who will defeat the Queen with his beauty, but that was a false lead, because soon they meet a bridge troll, whom the princess charms with her sleepy Twilight stare. Then they visit the city of scar-faced women, and get it burned down, oops. Now the dwarfs, who were played by digitally-shrunken full-size actors – and this is why movies should bring back opening credits. I’d have surely recognized Dwarf Bob Hoskins and Dwarf Toby Jones (and maybe Dwarf Ray Winstone) if I’d been looking for them, but unaccustomed to seeing them so short and beardy, we only figured out Dwarf Nick Frost (in about one second) and Dwarf Ian McShane. Then all nine venture into the Fairy Garden, where CG animals go to relax between Tim Burton and Brendan Fraser movies, and they meet a white moose made out of butterflies. Finally to the Duke’s palace, where Twilight meets her boyfriend from when she was seven, now grown into a dreamy archer.

Thor w/hammer:

Evil Queen Charlize tires of all this, makes herself into a Dreamy Archer Terminator and delivers the poison apple (via doomed CG crows, in the third scene of bird death in this movie. Snow White of the Huntsmen hates birds!). Real Dreamy Archer cannot wake Twilight with his kiss, and when all hope seems lost, Thor makes a successful attempt. Queen’s palace by the seaside, dwarves in the sewer, arrows and boiling oil, too-close/too-frantic sword fighting, and Charlize is done in by Twilight’s Pure Love & Light (actually a model rocket dagger).

Screamy Queen Charlize:

Sanders has made Nike and X-Box commercials. One writer was behind Drive, and the other writes/directs Dennis Quaid movies. Newt Howard scores every laughably over-serious movie of recent years (The Last Airbender, Water for Elephants, The Dark Knight, Breast Cancer: The Path of Wellness & Healing) and the Australian D.P. shot Spider and Bright Star.