by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched June 2024

Sunflower Siege Engine (2023, Sky Hopinka)

“It’s time to go home and float breathlessly on currents of willow and pine.” Poetry and activism, photography and text, in a satisfying package. Love the nature with variable-color text overlay, less so when it changes mode to a laptop in dark room, since I am presently watching this short on another laptop in a dark room.

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E-Ticket (2019. Simon Liu)

A blast of images cut into strips, forming hypermotion image quilts – I loved it.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope – great article with an intro about lyrical films in general then following Liu’s career to this “relatively un-lyrical” short:

Liu pushes traditional image-making to the limit of legibility: the photographs are cut up and collaged, creating patterns of colour which dance in the manner of the visual music of 1930s and ’40s, while fragments of signifying material ranging across at least three continents flickers past, at times present onscreen for only the fraction of a second given over to each frame. What ultimately emerges, in contrast to the rapid movement through specific locations seen in the prior two films, is an abstract sense of global circulation as such, a fact of life in the age of air travel.

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Sun Song (2013, Joel Wanek)

Sun Ra gets the epigraph, but no song here: a silent bus trip, checking out light and faces and patterns. About as good as a silent doc filmed on a bus can be, I guess.

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Midnight (2024, Takashi Miike)

This is the best auteur-made phone ad yet, and the closest anyone’s gotten to touching Speed Racer in 15 years. The pure-imagination automobile action fares better than the human action scenes where the lead kids are supposed to be fighting off henchmen. Miike is adapting a Tezuka comic, cramming all the color and speed and story into a movie under the length of a Simpsons episode, and cutting to panels from the original drawings so you can see how faithful he’s being. Midnight is a psychic taxi driver who wears a mario hat and drives a souped-up supercar. He picks up a girl whose trucker father was murdered for his transit turf, and together they defeat transit gangsters led by a guy with an electroshock-blasting hand puppet.

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Pas de deux (1968, Norman McLaren)

Some of the best motion sculpture ever made, absolute loveliness. It almost loses a half-star because of the panpipes, but you can always mute those and watch it with a Bug Club album instead. Dancer in a black void is lit from the sides so her legs are only glowing outlines. Then she begins to multiply, leaving behind mario-kart ghost-riders that follow in her path. Future versions of her appear as poses for her to perfectly hit. She’s busy duplicating and mirroring when a new dancer appears, and together they leave incredible motion trails, as the camera gets ever closer to the action.

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Sand or Peter and the Wolf (1969, Caroline Leaf)

Made entirely with black sand on white background, unbelievable. Peter hangs out with his friends crow, duck, and cat, but there’s a wolf on the loose – and the wolf seems to be aware that he’s made of sand, so his possibilities for disguise and escape are endless. I was prepared from the Suzie Templeton version to lose the duck, but now the wolf eats all three creatures, oh no. Peter sneaks up at night and demolishes it, somehow rescuing his buddies.

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I Met a Man (1991, Caroline Leaf)

A one-minute MTV short set to a not-very-MTV vocal song, illustrating a very windy day. Action-packed, impossible to convey through stills.

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Berlin Horse (1970, Malcolm Le Grice)

Footage of a silent film in which a horse runs in circles is processed in a multitude of ways, then split-screened with a variation of itself, out of sync. The music by Brian Eno is likewise running in circles and out of sync with itself, via editing or a delay pedal. I was going to calculate how many times you could watch Berlin Horse within the runtime of The Turin Horse, but watching it more than once in a row might drive a person mad, so maybe not.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

Someone’s four-legged friend runs round and round a small corral … until time slips a gear and the world bursts into flame. Horse becomes horses, white horse, black horses, shadows and negatives, looping and layered. A zoetrope, a merry-go-round, then the colours kick in: Muybridge on mushrooms.

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Visitation (2013, Suzan Pitt)

I really don’t know. There’s a poem of apocalyptic prophecy at the top and tail… shadow people and light people… a horse processing plant… a woman’s head cooked in the oven… closeups of shifting patterns over clattering percussion.

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The Dentist (1932, Leslie Pearce)

WC Fields kills a guy golfing then throws a tantrum, throwing his clubs and caddy into the pond, being a real asshole to everybody. Trying to keep patients at his dentist’s office while preventing his daughter from going out to meet the iceman. Filmed before Hollywood figured out that boom mics have shadows… I’ve seen Brian Yuzna’s The Dentist II, and it’s been a while but I don’t believe the two are very similar.

with patient Billy Bletcher (Owl Jolson’s dad in I Love to Singa):

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The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)

Finally we get to the WC Fields short with the best title, and it’s a different kind of silly movie than the others, awkward and unusual, drawing attention to its artifice. There’s no straight man here, everybody’s bizarre. He’s in an snowy fishing cabin, receives a friendly visit from a policeman, serenades him by playing a zither while wearing mittens – we see the song visualised, about a young man who drinks the fatal(?) glass then gets his face kicked by a salvation army girl. Fields takes his sled dogs home to his wife. Their son Chester comes home from jail, and after everyone has talked themselves in circles, they throw him out again.

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L’X Noir (1916, Leonce Perret)

The mysterious Black X is a New York diamond dealer by day, pestering rich women. He’s a criminal master of disguise with an undercover league of henchmen, but the first lady we see him try to rob spots him waving his X-flag around, then ties him up and gets help. Story ends with him escaping comfortably, setting up a franchise that never came. This is fine – I’d have rather folllowed the continuing exploits of resourceful rich lady Valentine Petit, who out-acts contemporary stars here, than loser X.

Silent, I played the new On Ka’a Davis album. Perret was a Feuillade accomplice (no surprise there) who worked into the sound era.

Tying a timecoded X to the bed by his neck:

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Max’s Holiday (1914, Max Linder)

Max has just been married in secret, and his new wife is excessively sad that he’s leaving to hang out with a bachelor uncle, so he helps her stow away in his train car then his suitcase. At the train station every extra looks into the camera… I don’t think they were extras, that must’ve been a real train station. Max continues stuffing the wife into uncomfortable places, then when they’re discovered he finally just tells the uncle he got married and he’s fine with it.

Linder was a comic film star before Arbuckle or Chaplin got into he movies, and 1914 was said to be his creative height before he went to serve in WWI. Lightly charming, can’t say I’m running off to get the blu-ray of his complete works, but can’t say I won’t consider it if the price comes down.

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The Water Nymph (1912, Mack Sennett)

This was the very start of Sennett’s Keystone Studios, when Mack was his own leading man. I like him, he looks like a Bob Odenkirk character. The gag is that before introducing his new girlfriend Mabel Normand to his parents, she’s going to hit on his dad at the beach. Everyone in this behaves like they’re eight years old.

by ·Comments Off on In Our Day (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

I watched this the same night as In Water just because they’re recent Hong movies with short runtimes, not looking for connections, but I noted characters saying “I’ll do my best / let’s do our best” in both movies. Two separate-but-similar three-person situations with no direct intersection, cutting back and forth between them, each chapter with a preceding descriptive intertitle like it’s a Dickens chapter.

1. Actress Kim Min-hee is staying with friend Song Sun-mi (also Kim’s friend in The Woman Who Ran), when young aspiring actress Park Mi-so comes for a visit/interview.

2. Older Gi Ju-bong (the dad in Hotel by the River) is a belatedly popular poet, Kim Seung-yun is at his place filming candid scenes for a documentary on him, aspiring poet Ha Seong-guk comes to visit/interview (these two costarred in In Water).

Different sorts of dramas ensue – in the first, the host’s cat escapes and the visitor helps recover him. In the second, the visitor is trying to kiss up and stay longer and helps the newly on-the-wagon poet get boozed up.

by ·Comments Off on In Water (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

The one where the shots are out of focus. This is bearable because the movie’s only an hour long, and each scene is differently out of focus, leading one to wonder whether the sharpness of the picture correlates to something in the narrative (he does say his idea is “a little blurry”) or a character state of mind. Three would-be film people are at a beach town on the young director’s dime to shoot his first movie, which he hasn’t written yet. He bristles at how much they’re all spending on food while he postpones the actual shoot, finally steals some ideas from his surroundings and from his past, calling up his ex to ask permission to use a song he wrote her, and playing it into the camera as he walks into the sea, closing the movie and the movie-in-the-movie. So his movie ends up pretty close to our movie, but presumably in focus.

If you could see ’em, the actors are Shin Seok-ho (the lead in Introduction) with Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun (both also in In Our Day).

by ·Comments Off on Little Murders (1971, Alan Arkin)

By the time Patsy brings her nihilist photographer boyfriend Elliott Gould home to her parents you’ll be thinking “this was obviously based on a play,” but at the same time there’s a happy realization that the characters are going to remain eccentric, untethered to realistic behavior. Of the movies I’ve seen written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, this was better assembled than the Alain Resnais.

Gould’s girl is Marcia Rodd and her family is: Hoffman’s mom in The Graduate, Mr. Mushnik, and Snowden in Catch-22. Guest stars are brought in to monologue: the director as a cop, the late Donald Sutherland as an existential priest, and Amazon Women‘s Murray as a judge.

Maybe we should’ve seen it coming from the title, or from the movie’s first scene where Gould is being attacked by a street gang, but the story takes a dark turn when Rodd gets randomly killed with a rifle, and city violence becomes the movie’s new main focus, ending with Gould shooting the director (offscreen). Memorial screening for Sutherland, and belatedly/additionally for Arkin.

by ·Comments Off on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023, Radu Jude)

I didn’t love Jude’s pandemic movie, but I’m extremely onboard with this one – everything down to the closing credits is delightful. It’s a very cynical movie about Romania and capitalism, starring Radu-regular Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an odd-jobs film-shoot worker.

Angela’s present-day is filmed in grainy b/w, her filtered selfie videos doing misogynist insult commentary are in low-detail digital color, then there’s another Angela who also drives a car for a living, via the 1982 film Angela Goes On, in beautifully restored 35mm color. That movie is the Poor Cow to the main feature’s The Limey, and its Angela appears in present day (the same actress/character) as the mom of a disabled worker hired to tell his story for a company safety video.

Radu Jude in Cinema Scope:

When I was young and reading all these stories about Herzog shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, it sounded so heroic. In the early days, when we were supposed to work 20 hours and then drive to another location, it felt magical and sort of heroic. I don’t see it quite that way anymore. You can fool yourself into thinking this way as a filmmaker, but for the people working around you, it’s not like that at all. They don’t care if your movie is going to win an Oscar, or if it’s going to be a piece of crap. They just want to finish the shooting and go home.

Translation issues:

From the mid-film wordless montage of roadside death markers:

Mark Asch in Little White Lies:

Angela’s set of wheels signify anything but independence: she’s cut off, honked at, catcalled, and constantly slamming brakes, swearing, and flipping off other drivers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ringtone, signaling the arrival of yet another task, is Beethoven’s 9th, the official anthem of the EU), appealing to her team spirit — and, implicitly, her economic precarity as a project-based worker — as they send her over to the airport to pick up a foreign guest, or to pick up lenses from a backlot where Uwe Boll is shooting a cheap nonunion monster movie.

Cemetery advertising:

Jude again:

I think the film is also a film about Bucharest. Why does Bucharest look so bad today compared to how it looked back then? Some of that is propaganda, as many images and films from that time were produced to show the most beautiful side of Bucharest, which is why I slow down those less beautiful moments from Angela Moves On — so you can see the other side. But even still, Bucharest is in much worse shape now, 30 years after the revolution. How did we let that happen? It’s more crowded now, more polluted—cars are on the sidewalk, buildings are falling down, etc. I read that it’s the second most congested city in the world. I think the film can show this by putting one image next to another, and in doing so maybe propose this question to the viewer.

by ·Comments Off on I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)

Much larger in scope than Jane’s previous movie – even though it’s still just two lead characters who spend their nights looking at screens. Two awkward students bond over a TV show named after a Cocteau Twins album, a Buffy/X-Files-ish thing with deep lore. They try watching it together but they’re both afraid of their stepdads and settle for trading VHS tapes. They attend Void High School “VHS,” home of the Vultures, and lead dude Owen (Justice Smith of that recent Dungeons & Dragons movie) starts talking to us, so the movie’s never going for naturalism.

The stars of the show-in-the-show are Helena “Madeline” Howard and Snail Mail. Also, a suspicious mention of Michael Stipe right before a TV episode about where the ice cream man goes in wintertime.

The older girl with a later bedtime is Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, a daughter in Bill & Ted 3), and she twice offers to take him away from it all. She runs away from home but he freaks out and doesn’t join her, then his mom dies and the TV show is canceled. Eight years later Maddie reappears and says she’s been living inside the show after having herself buried alive in Phoenix (haha), and says they need to (re)bury themselves now to save their TV avatars, but he pushes her down and runs. Twenty years later, he’s alone, has made no career progress, and has a Videodrome TV inside his body.

Good, mysterious movie, evoking thoughts on nostalgia and (super)fandom and friendship and risks not taken, even though the creator has said that it’s just about being trans.

Ice Cream Man in early season of The Pink Opaque, played by Albert Birney:

Nightbreed guy in the unreleased post-final season:

Not the biggest World’s Fair fan, I held off on watching this until I saw that pd187 approved of it.

Good Sam Adams article here despite the “ending explained” hook.

by ·Comments Off on Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)

Hot Pepper (1973)

Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.

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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?

Garlic & Flamenco:

by ·Comments Off on Fata Morgana (1970, Werner Herzog)

Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.

Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:

Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)

Almereyda’s followup to The Eternal, and my followup to the Olivier version. More voiceover-monologues here, with overall quieter speaking volumes. Opens with Ethan “Hamlet” Hawke watching standard-def video of his parents in happier times, and the play-within-the-play is a screening of Hamlet’s found-footage video project – Almereyda loves his low-res textures.

Is it irony that Ham is in the *action* section of Blockbuster while drearily whining about his indecision? Or is it meant to rhyme with the closing line, “and lose the name of action.” Olivier wrote out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for efficiency, while Almereyda makes a meal of their scenes and interjects them wherever he can. This entire movie was better than the Olivier except for the final swordfight, which – even though it features Paul Bartel in the Peter Cushing role – is anticlimactic when they all just shoot each other on a rooftop. My first priority when I get a job will be to buy Cymbeline on blu-ray.

Ethan Hawke vs. Kyle MacLachlan. I love Esko Nikkari but Bill Murray is now the best Polonius. Julia Stiles shrieks at the Guggenheim. They acknowledge the shadow of Romeo + Juliet by casting Juliet’s mom Diane Venora as the queen. Chuck Yeager as the ghost, Liev Schreiber (then of the Scream movies) as Laertes, and some really small cameos that make me think longer/extra scenes were shot and cut later. They manage to get one extra woman into the movie, by swapping out one of the ghost-spotting guards for Horatio’s girl (Katniss’s mom). Ophelia’s memento box looks suspiciously like the Smashing Pumpkins The Aeroplane Flies High box set re-pressed with White Stripes coloring.

Rosenbaum was a fan, notes Hawke as “better than you’d expect.” I thought of Lewis Klahr during the film-with-a-film screening, turns out Klahr really made it.