Oh look, someone went to Wisconsin with a hefty prop budget and a thick book of storyboards, and made a movie just for me. The tagline “possibly thousands” is killing me…
Author: Brandon
Brandon's the guy who runs this site.
Owen Land films (1966-1977)
I’ve seen one short Owen Land film before and wasn’t so high on it, but I’m ever intrigued by the idea of a structural-experimental parody artist, or whatever he was, so I’m checking out everything I can find. All these were credited to George Landow – he changed his name soon afterwards.
Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc. (1966)
Approx a one-second loop repeated a couple hundred times. Possibly one of those color reference images. Mekas was a fan. Why add film projector sound when any proper screening (not on a digital file in my living room) would have its own film projector sounds – is that part of the meta nature of the project or was it added during the video transfer?
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Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)
1. A few-second loop of a boat exiting a tunnel while a person (real? animatronic?) waves on the left side
2. Three porthole views of the same image distributed across a mostly black screen
3. The image begins to get replaced with the bubbly butterfly-wing textures of celluloid melting or dissolving
4. Replacing the porthole views, we get fullscreen strobing freezeframes of the melt-dissolve textures
5. Left/right split-screen of film melts in motion
Fully silent.
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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
“This is a film about you … not about its maker.” That’s more like it, layers upon layers. A woman dreams a classroom, a man jogs in place in front of a screen of someone jogging, an alarm sounds while we read about phony teaching techniques at a preordained pace, and why not throw in a commercial for pre-cooked rice.
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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)
An annoying one – high-contrast images of street scenes, closeups and a trade show, while overlapped sound loops are praising God/Jesus. Pretty short, at least.
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Wide Angle Saxon (1975)
Lively one with usually-sync sound, cutting between all sorts of things. Bible stories, and stories of modern people influenced by bible stories. Repeated outtakes of a reporter self-conscious that he can’t remember Panamanian generals’ names but who keeps pronouncing “junta” with a hard J. A terrified artist pouring red paint on things and people, who gets his own title sequence. “Oh it was a dream” – does this end with the woman from the beginning of Remedial waking up? Were the six years between films all her dream?
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New Improved Institutional Quality (1976)
Woman is giving exam instructions on the soundtrack, and the guy onscreen is following them. The instructions involve writing numbers on a photograph, so the guy goes inside the photograph, writing the numbers with a giant pencil. Then he shrinks further when confronted with a woman inside the picture, nestles in her shoe, and then flies silently through some previous Land films (Film In Which, Remedial). Weird, I would not have got the references if I hadn’t been watching these together.
new improved sprocket holes, edge lettering:
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On The Marriage Broker Joke (1979)
People in panda suits introduce versions of films about the marriage broker joke, which it sort of eventually gets around to telling. Marketing discussion with an offscreen speaker doing a bad Japanese stereotype accent. Ends with more religion stuff. The onscreen text was probably meant to be readable, but my video copy is horrendous. Rosenbaum called it an “obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist Christianity”
P. Adams Sitney in Artforum:
From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.
He had no scruples about mercilessly making fun of his fellow filmmakers (and of me) so long as he prominently mocked himself and his own works, as he did with wry humor in films such as New Improved Institutional Quality and On the Marriage Broker Joke. His religious convictions never dispelled his fascination with the absurdities of human behavior. The drives for possessions, certitude, beauty, sex, money, and food — especially sex — make Land’s fictive humans ridiculous, confused, and devious. His ability to invent and to people his films with memorably ridiculous characters was unmatched, even by the late George Kuchar, among American avant-garde filmmakers.
Land:
I… developed the technique of fabricating fantastic stories about myself and relating them in a perfectly deadpan manner so as to convince my hearers of their authenticity. This was not done maliciously, but out of a sense of the absurdity of all phenomena and the arbitrariness of all information. This may be a form of poetry, which in Greek means making—as in “making it up.” Usually it is called “lying.”
Once Upon a Time in China II (1992, Tsui Hark)
Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan are back, taking vacation with Foon (now played by Max Mok, Sammo’s buddy in Pedicab Driver), apparently with no hard feelings after Foon teamed up with the disruptive Iron Vest in part one. Strange for this episode to be the follow-up, since the first one begins with Wong Fei-hung wishing to expel all foreigners, and here his enemy is a violent flaming-arrow-shooting cult which wishes to… expel all foreigners. Kidnapping Rosamund for owning a camera and burning down Jet’s medical conference are direct attacks, true.
The baddest-ass fighter isn’t even a cult member (though the cult’s bulletproof mystic is pretty good, played by Jet’s stunt double), it’s a cop who’s happy to play-fight Wong but won’t help out the children the cult is trying to murder. The cop is Donnie Yen in his breakout year, with Tsui casting him in this and the Dragon Inn remake. Both these guys die in the end, after some magical wire work, as does friendly David Chiang (the dandy of Boxer from Shantung), but beloved Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (Zhang Tielin of The Magic Crane) escapes safely to begin his revolution.
In the extras, Yen casually refers to himself as “the ultimate martial arts opponent for Jet Li” and explains the difference between being a great martial artist and a great martial arts actor.
Every Man For Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard)
“Paul Godard” (Jacques Dutronc of a couple Zulawski films) leaves his hotel and is offered anal sex by the valet, my second JLG movie in a row to address that topic. Then he’s making weird incest jokes with the soccer coach of his daughter (actually Alain Tanner’s daughter), and the movie will stay perverse until the end. After Numero Deux we’re back to scripted domestic dramas with lovely photography, though Amy Taubin ties these two together, “both films dealing with the failure of intimacy and with marriage as hell, particularly for women.”
Divided into sections, also following TV producer Nathalie Baye (a Truffaut regular) and prostitute Isabelle Huppert (who’d just starred in a Chabrol). Marguerite Duras is an offscreen presence in the beginning. The “Slow Motion” segment (this whole film was known as Slow Motion in England) is post-production slow-mo, sequential freeze-frames. At the end we get nice payoffs for Paul’s annoying behavior and the movie’s big disruptive music which had seemed to bother the characters, as he gets hit by a car (in slow motion, of course) then his daughter and ex walk past the musicians playing the movie’s soundtrack.
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Scenario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979)
The rare making-of to come out before the feature, JLG explaining his intentions for the movie they hadn’t shot yet. He speaks of wishing to write vertically on a typewriter instead of horizontally. The two women move in opposite directions, Huppert in the direction of meaning, while the man tries to fly above it all… explains his philosophy of superimposition and dissolves, which I only half followed, and of slow motion which mostly makes sense. I wondered with his idea of the music being secretly diegetic if he’d seen Noroit and Duelle. Says he compared lighting notes with Wim Wenders, who I think was working on Hammett. He plans for a scene where Denise will go into a forest “and in the forest she’d run into Werner Herzog… who will introduce, with typical German madness, the world that lies behind things… Perhaps all this isn’t very clear.”
Numéro Deux (1975, Jean-Luc Godard)
Godard in a dim room with a videocamera on him and a monitor, so he appears twice from different angles, talking an awful lot, but the main thing I remember is how he thinks puns are useful and wishes people took them more seriously.
Female narrator suggests what this film might be about while we see three TV screens and a dark figure in front DJing with tape reels.
TV monitor split-screens with bird sounds mixed with the dialogue.
Kinda turns into a family story and a sex-ed movie. “I sometimes look at my cock. That isn’t cinema, though.”
Amy Taubin calls it “a vitriolic indictment of the sexual politics of the nuclear family” and says it’s the first Godard feature in which Miéville’s influence is evident. In Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody says Godard had accepted a commission to make a Breathless follow-up, hence the title, and says the finished film “has the unpleasant aspect of a medical document.”
Where the Devil Roams (2023, Poser/Adams/Adams)
Unpromising beginning with dodgy compositing and fake film distress as we’re told a long poem, then a bridge that reminds me of The Empty Man (everything reminds me of The Empty Man). Watching this after When Evil Lurks because I keep getting them confused with their similar titles, and Lurking definitively beat Roaming. This movie certainly does roam. Its three leads (family of hopeless carnie thief/murderers with a terrible musical act until they steal a better one from a devil-dealing finger-traumatist) are a real family, also the movie’s directors. They’d previously made Hellbender (metal music/witchcraft) and The Deeper You Dig (clairvoyant murder-suspense).
The devil-dealer is Mr. Tipps, who nightly cuts off his fingers for the crowd, then sews them back with cursed thread – he stole the thread originally, so it’s only fair that our trio steals it from him later. The girl of the family is said to be mute but I didn’t realize, since she sings in their act. The mom kills somebody in each town they pass through, and I can’t tell if this is supposed to be vigilante justice or if they’re just remorseless criminals. Dad gets WWI flashbacks when he sees blood (and is incidentally afraid of birds), so has to be blindfolded during the crimes, and eventually during their circus act. So it’s set in the past (1920s?) but doesn’t feel authentically past-tense, more of an antique shop present. The parents eventually get some limbs chopped off by an axe girl at a home they invaded (played by their other IRL daughter) and the dad becomes catatonic, but still performs his nightly onstage dance to the girl’s alt-rock song.
When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)
An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”
Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.
Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:
This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.
The Delinquents (2023, Rodrigo Moreno)
Moran robs the bank where he works, gives the money to unwitting Roman. Laura Paredes arrives to investigate, makes life hell for the remaining bankers. When Roman can’t take the pressure, he’s told to drop off the money on a mountainside, where he meets and falls for Norma – and flashbacks reveal that Moran had previously fallen for the same woman in the same spot.
Only three hours long – I think the reason it’s divided into two parts is that Laura Paredes only appears in multi-part features. Suspicious dialogue about mysterious flowers.
Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:
Broken into two acts, with a cast of characters whose names are obviously anagrams of each other, The Delinquents is forward with its gamesmanship, and if the eventual resolution of its central conflict seems unsatisfying, that may be precisely the point … At one point Román ducks into a Buenos Aires arthouse and catches a few minutes of Bresson’s L’Argent, a sign that Moreno is more than happy to lay his cards on the table, allowing the viewer to infer a game of three-card monty where there actually is none.
Ehrlich called it “arguably the first slow cinema heist movie.” Jenkins calls their employer “the absolute worst bank in the world.” Cronk says it jumps off “from the central premise of Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) — a touchstone of Argentine film noir that many cinephiles of Moreno’s generation grew up watching on television.”
Rizov: “It’s no coincidence that the bank vault and the prison Morán ends up have their hallways laid out in the same way, a rhyme that’s brought home by the same actor (Germán De Silva) playing both Morán’s boss and a prisoner who extorts money for protection.” Moreno: “At the end of the day, what I wanted to make was a fable. I had no obligation to reality — my debt was to cinema. So I said, “Let’s do it, let’s play this game. Here’s an actor playing two roles.”
Yannick (2023, Quentin Dupieux)
A tough one, awkward single-setting movie where it’s hard to tell what’s meant to be funny, where the loyalties lie. A three-person play is interrupted by a young guy who says he’s not being properly entertained, and so holds cast and audience at gunpoint while he rewrites the play. Good mixed ending, as Yannick’s new play proves to be a hit as the swat team closes in.
