by ·Comments Off on 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.”

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)

A high-quality modern Western drama, solid cast and writing, with a couple of elevating factors. The stylistic trick of transitioning into flashbacks with a camera move instead of an edit or fade, past characters sharing physical space with the present, is impressive every time. And just when the story is wrapping up, when Chris Cooper learns that his late father Matthew McConaughey did not shoot the sheriff, he also learns that his old flame newly re-enflamed (Elizabeth Peña) is his half-sister… and they decide they can live with that.

Bad Sheriff Kristofferson’s final act:

Bar owner Otis later played a detective in The Empty Man. His estranged military son Joe Morton was the doomed robotics inventor in Terminator 2. Peña was in The Second Civil War, which it’s probably time to rewatch. Nominated for a bunch of awards that Fargo won, so it’s good to see key Coen critic Adam Nayman defending.

Its qualities of thoughtful, hard-edged sociological storytelling and analysis are currently in short supply. They don’t make ’em like this anymore … For all its skepticism about the American tendency to mythologize (and mass market) its sins away, the film is tender about the necessity of forgetting, or at least trying to. It’s a measure of Sayles’s superlative construction that a story that begins with something being unearthed ends with a plea to keep another secret buried — and of his empathy as an artist that the sentiment rings true.

Sisters Lovers:

Coen Connection:

by ·Comments Off on Sublime Frequencies double-feature

The James River Film Society, a mysterious organization which never emails me no matter how many times I submit my address to their subscription link, counterintuitively programmed a pair of hour-long Sublime Frequencies documentaries from director Hisham Mayet at a lovely large theater at noon on a beautiful Saturday, so I came out, along with as many as nine other people.

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The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel (2012)

Short riverboat setup, then it gets right into rocking and boogies down for forty minutes or so, each scene in a new location with a new musician or group. Apparently shot in Mali and Niger, there’s much dance, some cool structures and landscapes, and per the Sublime mission, no English translations or narration or titles. I figured the epic animal slaughter scene would be a good time to hit the restrooms – it’s also weirdly where the movie ended.

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Oulaya’s Wedding (2017)

More of a straight doc about a particular event, clearly explained to us. Group Doueh is a famed wedding band in Dakhla, a town on a coastline peninsula in Western Sahara, an area bordered by Mauritania and Morocco. The Doueh musicians’ own daughter is getting married, so they’re throwing the biggest party ever and inviting everyone. We get a behind-the-scenes look at the setup and prep in the first few days, then the event itself under a massive tent. Interviews with family and guests (spotlight on the gay male dancers). Plenty of music, so I could keep on bopping in my seat. We’ve long heard that Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen started as wedding bands, so the main attraction here was to see what these weddings are like.

by ·Comments Off on Segundo de Chomón shorts (1906-1908)

I’ve got no handy documentary on Chomon like I did with Alice Guy, just watching some films. I’d only previously seen The Golden Beetle – these all turned out to be less colorful and more coherent.

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Electric Current (1906)

Pretty good one-minute gag film. A couple steals from the grocer, has a picnic then goes back for more, but the grocer has rigged his wares to the electric lights. When they grab the food they’re paralyzed from electricity – and so are the cops who arrive to arrest the thieves, so they arrest the grocer instead.

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Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)

Splendid gravity-defying stunts, using the same which-way-is-up technique as Massive Attack’s “Protection” video. The actors really sell it, trembling and straining in their positions.

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En Avant La Musique (1907)

If we’re meant to believe that elite Japanese acrobats have developed incredible skills of strength and balance, this one tosses believability out the window. Just a Mr. B Natural-type conductor transforming the musicians into musical notation and miniaturized song-slaves.

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The Diabolical Pickpocket (1908)

A liquid-metal T-1000 criminal escapes two clueless cops by making a mockery of spacetime physics.
Looks like this was part of a series about uncatchable thieves in checkered suits, along with The Invisible Thief and Slippery Jim.

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The Electric Hotel (1908)

Before people knew what electricity could do, this imagines a fully automated hotel. Guests get a small electric switchboard and accompanying instruction manual. Each switch causes a whirl of stop-motion – shoe-shining, hair-cutting, suitcase-unpacking. One writes letters home using AI. I was waiting for something to go comically, catastrophically wrong, but all the tech works properly, until a drunken basement employee starts throwing switches haphazardly and all the hotel’s objects violently revolt against their masters.

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Legend of a Ghost (1908)

At 14 minutes this is over twice the length of the others, a de Chomon epic. Old fashioned set building and fireworks create a hellscape of dancing demons, or maybe tortured souls, or reveling partiers – in the cavernous set I can’t make out faces. Yeah, it’s either a Halloween parade float or the beginning of the apocalypse, maybe the point is not to know. Then we got hula-girl vikings in a Meliesian underwater scene? An anarchist blows up the parade float and we’re sent to heaven for a minute. It’s almost halfway through the movie before the grim reaper provides some transformative camera tricks, then back to cavorting with fireworks and costumes. The death parade reaches its cavernous destination and the participants celebrate with a scythe dance (The Seventh Seal was a remake of this). But the movie’s not over – the viking frog queen’s servants do an involved dance with the lizard people, layers upon layers. Morning comes and everyone lays dead, except for Death Himself, who transforms into a fancyman. Certainly more expensive than the shorter films, not necessarily more fun to watch.

by ·Comments Off on To Die Like a Man (2009, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Tonia wants an operation to become a real woman. Meanwhile her life is falling apart and everyone is being extremely mean to her. Her army son shoots a coworker and runs, her junkie thief boyfriend kills the fish and sets the dog on fire, her employer says she’s gotten too old for her job. The boyfriend sobers up and settles back into his dressmaking work for the drag shows, and in a bit of good luck, they get lost and stumble across the couple who buried the son’s victim as “the unknown soldier,” so the body was never found by the authorities. In less-good luck, Tonia’s leaking breast implants have to be removed, and now she’s de-transitioning and dying.

by ·Comments Off on Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, John Carpenter)

Starts as a decent movie with great music, then a bereft revenge dad comes into the defunct police station pursued by a gang of killers, their initial attack kills the lesser actors, and the second half of the film is nothing but perfection.

That first attack: seemingly infinite guys getting blown away trying to climb through windows, like a zombie invasion. When the cops start tossing guns to their prisoners to help defend the station, you know Carpenter means business. Afterwards, the gang hides the bodies outside and lays low waiting for the next wave, while passing patrol cars get reports of gunfire but can’t see anything. Prison transporter Starker is among the dead, and the sick prisoner, and a police secretary – we’re left with her coworker Leigh, Death Row Wilson, Lt. Bishop, and Prisoner Wells, who makes it underground to a getaway car but gets blown away by thugs hiding within. The other three, low on ammo, hold off the second attack with the help of a mobile barricade and some explosives.

Remade, reportedly not very well, with Laurence Fishburne and Ethan Hawke in the 2000s. The late Starker was rewarded for his service with roles in three more Carpenter pictures. Leigh starred in a Jean Eustache movie of all things, then disappeared so hard that there was a documentary about the attempt to locate her. Wilson was a TV non-regular with a small part in Eraserhead. Wells became a regular in the Rocky franchise the same year. And I hope Bishop had a fine theater career because his other movies looked terrible, until 40+ years later when Carpenter fan Rob Zombie cast him in 3 From Hell.

by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”

by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 6 (1995-2003)

I Take These Truths (1995)

It took a frustrating few minutes to figure out how to play albums alongside silent movies on the new TV setup, but it was worth it… Brakhage films are up to 10X more effective at relaxing the mind after a work day than Three Stooges shorts. I Take These Truths is one of the hand-painted films, full of color and texture, and there’s not much else I can say except that I love it very much. Sometimes it feels like you’re seeing a flicker party of unrelated images, every frame a painting, and sometimes you catch a vertical line and feel the film flying through the projector, and if you’re locked in you can fly along with it.

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The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997)

These first two were silent so I played the new Prefuse 73 album. It’s a basic groove compared to the wildness of the films and I wondered if I should’ve put on something more crazy or abstract, but maybe it’s good to just have some beats and let the film do the talking. We’re back to photography – both the cat and the worm make appearances, and for a green realm there’s an awful lot of orange and pink and yellow. Seems like the realm might be the backyard, but the camera is so very close to every leaf and blade of grass (worm’s-eye view?) that the yard is reduced to blobs.

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Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997)

Now I’m picking songs to match the length of the movies, and I do have a 17-minute song, an eerie ambient piece from the new Kevin Drumm record. Instead of a rush of imagery in a particular style, this one edits all the styles together, a rush of rushes of imagery. I keep feeling like there’s a Framptonian pattern to crack in the edits, but maybe he just chopped together some mothlit leader, hand painted pieces, too-close photography, shots of whipping the camera around fast enough to leave trails, and the sun sparkling on turbulent water, at semi-random and appreciated the synchronicity.

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… Reel Five (1998)

This one has its own music, an avant-piano piece. We spend some minutes adjusting to the music over a blank screen, then the background turns blinding white, with light black and colored patterns flickering across.

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Persian Series 1-3 (1999)

Persian 1 gives us peak swirling oil painting flicker action, then #2 bends our minds by tracking into and out of the frame, an effect I can feel without being able to tell how they’re doing it without a consistent background to zoom into, and #3 cranks the pace into overdrive and adds a Rorschach mirror effect. Just outstanding. I played an anxious saxey Sons of Kemet song, a good fit.

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Chinese Series (2003)

Just white scratch-figures on widescreen windowboxed black background for a brief, light ending to the program. I unwisely played a heavy Zappa-quoting Pere Ubu track.

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For Stan (2009, Marilyn Brakhage)

Marilyn traces the landscape with her own camera and provides valuable footage of Stan filming in a cave wearing a Canyon Cinema shirt – and also walking into a wall because he couldn’t see where he was going. I played the Simon Hanes album – track 2 made the film too cartoony, then track 3 settled in nicely.

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By now it’s been forever since I watched some of the other shorts on this blu-ray, and instead of pining for the 400-ish Brakhage films that it’s very hard to see, I could watch one from this set daily on a loop, forever. It’s not like I run the risk of memorizing them or tiring them out.

Loved the Brakhage on Brakhage series in the extras, like a scrapbook of choice Stan quotes, speaking clearly and sensibly about his work.

…the scratching of titles directly onto the film surface which had this effect: that from the beginning the viewer was given the rhythm of the very projector that was going to show them the rest of the film. They were given the sense of the film’s surface itself.

There’s crazy footage of him filming in the field. He says he edited a film for Joseph Cornell in Maya Deren’s apartment, talks about learning from Marie Menken, and his thoughts on the labels “experimental” and “avant-garde” and “underground.” Then the Sunday Salon segments are Q&A pieces about one film at a time:

  • Psalm Branch is a Freud film, Stan is a big Freud fan
  • Under Childhood was recognizing the dark side of his children’s existence
  • Murder Psalm was a “trance-state miracle” made in a rage after a nightmare about killing his mother
  • Boulder Blues: “I wanted the film to be composed of things that are mostly in people’s peripheral vision.”
  • Worm’s Green Realm: you can attempt to follow narratively with the “kinds of feelings that are intrinsic to story” but are purely visual