by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (2023, Ryan Daly & Will Oldham)

A feature-length music video for the latest Bonnie Prince Billy album, made of scanned 16mm film, much of it zoomed out so we can see the sprocket holes and optical soundtrack. Some real on-the-nose footage selections – guess what’s onscreen during the songs about types of trees. I was waiting to see what he got for “Satan did a dance with me and I danced right along,” and it didn’t disappoint. I liked the fuzzy neon street scenes of “Blood of the Wine.” If I was allowed to take screenshots from streaming, I would’ve picked the woman covered in pigeons during “Kentucky is Water.” “Queens of Sorrow” MVP, juxtaposing commercial imagery of dolls with women’s-rights marches. The Bonnie Man makes the briefest in-person appearance. I’ll bet this was fun to edit. It’s very inessential as cinema, but if they want to start putting entire BPB albums on Criterion Channel that’s alright with me. Do I Made a Place next.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched April 2024

Woman Haters (1934, Archie Gottler)

An entire Three Stooges short with dialogue in rhyme! And usually not so great. The plot goes that new members of the titular club have sworn off women, then each one is caught alone with the same blonde girl (Marjorie White of sci-fi musical Just Imagine). They sing too much in this one and the rhyming doesn’t work, but they do hit each other a whole lot.

Not trying to make sense of the historical context of these shorts, I ended up watching “the first official Three Stooges short” per a professor of Stoogeological Studies. Director Gottler wasn’t a Stooges guy but had a regular gimmick (his other movies feature “dialogue all in rhyme” and “young men competing for the affections of a beautiful blonde”).

Aged Stooges:

–
World of Glory (1991, Roy Andersson)

And I rewatched this, after catching up with You, The Living.

by ·Comments Off on Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971, Melvin Van Peebles)

Wild pedophiliac opening. Disorienting movie, the repeated lines of dialogue and action both odd. Feels like a cross between a quickie semi-competent crime flick and an advanced experimental film (at least three times I thought of Kenneth Anger). They’ll shoot multiple takes and instead of choosing, just use all of them strung together. The music (by the filmmaker and Earth, Wind & Fire) anxiously stops and starts. Since I am culturally and historically challenged, when I heard the song “C’mon Feet” I realized it must be a blaxploitation parody – but it’s not, this was credited with inventing the genre.

Our guy gets a front seat to some police brutality, snaps and beats two cops half to death. Sweetback is arrested but the locals torch the police car and he takes off. A motorcycle gang makes him duel their boss, a woman with long red hair – offered the choice of weapon, SB suggests fucking. The cops always close behind, at the end he’s injured, on the run for Mexico, the soundtrack chorus chanting “run Sweetback, run motherfucker!”

In the great Criterion essay, Michael Gillespie provides a useful list of films to watch next:

It’s vital to appreciate that not all Black films of the seventies can be adequately labeled as blaxploitation but that many were made possible by the popular cycle, even though they ultimately exceeded the expectations of the industry, critics, and moviegoing public, including Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973), Claudine (John Berry, 1974), and Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1974).

by ·Comments Off on The Tree House (2019, Truong Minh Quy)

Suspicious noise on the soundtrack, sounds exactly like the interference I get when I put my digital audio recorder in the same pocket as my phone. Second movie in a row with suspected audio glitches? A slow art-fest-film that raises more questions than it answers. When there’s an unexplained scene of people sitting in a field eating a white paste wrapped in leaves I just wanted to know why they were wearing plaid shirts with collars instead of something more field suitable. Anthropological doc camerawork. I skipped ahead – I hereby invoke the Petrov’s Flu Precedent. I like the director’s narration voice, at least, sounded very sad. It did end up having a point, maybe, becoming self referential about filmmaking. Per Daniel Kasman, “an evocative but purposefully inconclusive essay on a precarious indigenous existence”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Beauty (2013, Paolo Sorrentino)

Welcome to Cannes Fortnight at Casa Brandon. Last held in 2022, this year the focus is on watching movies by 2024 Cannes directors who are completely unfamiliar to me, such as Sorrentino. For a while there, every couple years he released a new must-see film (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, Youth), which I would never see, and The Great Beauty is the Criterion-crowned consensus favorite.

Initially more avant-garde than expected. I thought the sound mixing in first scene was cool – we hear a choir but no dialogue or sound effects as some minor tourist drama plays out – but it turns out the scene was mixed normally and I had the headphones plugged in halfway. Paolo’s muse Toni Servillo plays an unproductive writer who knows everyone in Rome and can go everywhere attending all their parties. So we get to go everywhere, making me wonder who is Sorrentino that he has such access. It’s a splendidly expensive-looking movie if nothing else. Seems to be an attempted remake of La Dolce Vita – for me, Fellini’s least interesting movie, so this was an improvement.

by ·Comments Off on Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.

Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.

In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the

brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business — though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).

by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony: