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).

by ·Comments Off on Homework (1989, Abbas Kiarostami)

Honestly a documentary about homework, interviewing kids about their homework in order to make points about schooling and parenting. AK discusses not knowing what kind of movie he’s making at the beginning (“it’s not really a film, more a piece of research”), and at the end he breaks up the format to engage more deeply with a boy who didn’t want to be interviewed.

Two kids’ ambitions:

During the interviews (the central bulk of the movie) he cuts to the cameraman really frequently, presumably for sound edits. My main takeaway was the kids answering yes/no questions with a clicking sound, which I like even more than the “mmm!”-with-head-nod I picked up from anime.

by ·Comments Off on Un Chant d’amour (plus Goldin and Giolo)

Un Chant d’Amour (1950, Jean Genet)

Contact between adjoining prison cells. Almost narrative, then it doubles back on itself or fantasizes itself out of the prison, or introduces a murderous prison guard.

Basically the same image in Be Sure to Behave:

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The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (2022, Eva Giolo)

Objects and processes, an excellent example of this sort of thing, nicely edited with a great focus on sound.

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Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose (2023, Eva Giolo)

Scenes from bigger spaces, ambient outdoor sounds in less controlled environments, cut with short snips of people indoors making noises on everyday objects when used unusually. How does a horn sound when you rub it, or a plant when you hug it, videotapes when they’re stacked? “Stop filming a train station, you’re not Chantal Akerman,” I demanded of the movie, not realizing it was made as a tribute to her, part of an omnibus feature. Forgot I’d watched one of Eva’s a couple years ago. Her follow-up to this was filmed on an island and her latest short sounds anthropological, getting further from the enclosed spaces of Demands and Flowers.

Michael Sicinski makes the new one sound pretty fun, and writes that these two:

exhibit Giolo’s particular brand of editing, which tends to allow individual shots to play out before being replaced by an entirely different sort of material. Shots with humans tend to be followed by ones without, landscapes succeeded by interiors, brown, natural colors followed by saturated reds and blues.

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The Other Side (2021, Nan Goldin)

One of the famous slideshows, and it is really a slideshow, a parade of images (sometimes images of parades) with short crossfades, set to a mixtape. I probably liked two of the seven songs and most of the images, many of which were in vertical formats ill-suited to my wide TV.