With the frantic pace of the first film and my useless writeup, I worried we wouldn’t know what’s going on in this movie. But it’s just Spider-man, dealing with his usual Spider-man teenage problems while also trying to prove himself to the interdimensional society of Spider-men who say Miles only became a Spider-man through infinite improbability when a spider from Universe 42 warped into his version of New York. Attempts to save the universes from a Jason Schwartzman-voiced Watchmen-looking portal beast, then the movie cuts off before the next battle, Miles and his buddies facing off against an Evil Miles who became Venom The Prowler. Looks somewhat less splendid and amazing than the first movie because we made the mistake of skipping it in theaters and watching at home.
Author: Brandon
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Kings of the Road (1976, Wim Wenders)
Wenders apparently working without a script, just putting two guys together and following them around – a good idea, turns out.
Rudiger* Vogler isn’t a writer/photographer this time but a traveling film-projector maintainer. He picks up rider Hanns Zischler after watching him roar his Volkswagen into a river, and they barely speak, just proceed along the route of small movie theaters in western East Germany.
One night they’re woken by a guy despondent over his wife’s suicide – second Wenders in a row where a suicide causes a mood shift. Hanns walks off to the town where his father lives, visits/harasses him at his newspaper office. After this cathartic visit he thinks Rudiger should also have a cathartic visit home, so they borrow a motorbike and sidecar. After all the not-talking, they do finally get drunkenly combative and introspective, but part on pretty good terms.
Hanns and the sad man in the jukebox-equipped back of the truck:
Commentary says the photography was an homage to Walker Evans, the photographer who also inspired Upland Stories. I’ve seen the rider in a few things, including Clouds of Sils Maria and Dr. M. Man who lost his wife was in a bunch of Fassbinders – he’s the landlord in Fear Eats the Soul. Alice’s mom (of the Cities) works at a theater in one town, a Lang Mabuse actor plays the rider’s dad.
*Okay, first all my old posts‘ diacritics went bad, and now my macbook isn’t letting me make new ones by holding down vowel keys.
Alice’s mom with Rudiger:
Shadowplay:
Essential equipment for long drives:
Hard-Boiled (1992, John Woo)
Watched on beautiful 35mm at Plazadrome, antidote to the DCP Blues. The culmination of Woo’s HK career before he moved to Hollywood and had to make movies with Van Damme and Travolta and Lundgren for a decade. Chow Yun-fat’s first obstacle at the bird bar is machine-gunner Jun Kunimura (most recently seen as the filmmaker friend in Audition, but he’s in everything). His partner is killed, so Chow stays on the arms dealer case. The cops have got informant Little Ko, who cashes out after directing them to the illegal armory beneath a city hospital, and undercover agent Tony Leung, who teams up with Chow. Leung betrays Kwan Hoi-San (a ship captain in Project A) to get close to big boss Anthony Wong (the year before Heroic Trio). Wong’s lead muscle Mad Dog (played by one of the Five Deadly Venoms) fires more bullets and throws more grenades than anyone else here (or anywhere). Teresa Mo (who costarred with Sammo Hung a year earlier) attempts to save the babies while Wong plots to blow up the hospital (hospital bombings are in fashion these days).
Before this, also on 35mm, was In the Mouth of Madness. Given my particular tastes, it’s an even more perfect movie than Hard-Boiled, though it doesn’t feature anybody firing two guns whilst jumping through the air AND holding a baby. Movie connections: Freddy’s Dead… Stranger Than Fiction… The Empty Man.
The Silence Before Bach (2007, Pere Portabella)
Instead of playing The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach alongside another movie from Vogel’s chapter on editing, I followed it with another Bach movie. This one places delicious performance footage within little conceptual scenes, cutting between scenes and eras like it’s no big deal (“juxtaposing past and present as if they were attractions in a theme park” per Rosenbaum).
Player piano rolls and spins slowly around a gallery.
Blind piano tuner goes to work
European trucker tells his story to a rider at a roadside cafe, rider impossibly plays a Bach piece on harmonica.
Wigged pipe organist alone in St. Thomas church, where Bach is buried
Close-up on hands during a harpsichord performance, first-person camera.
Tour guide goes to work performing as Bach – no music in this one.
Another tour – a boat, then a subway car full of cellists.
Mendelsson’s man goes to the market in 1829, the apocryphal backstory of how some of Bach’s compositions were discovered being used as wrapping paper.
Evoking the Holocaust, “music hurts,” a piano silently falls into the sea.
Connections start getting pieced together: a cellist goes on a trip to St. Thomas and speaks with a female descendant of Bach, while her husband is calling the trucker to set up a difficult crane delivery of an antique piano.
Manohla Dargis:
The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.
The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968, Straub & Huillet)
A Bach concert film, solo and small/large ensembles performing his works chronologically, with narration from wife Anna’s diaries for context. As with all concert films (see my dislike for the Bowie movie) enjoyment is largely dependent on whether you like listening to Bach, and I’m getting from the reviews that the critics who love this are big Bach fans. I’m mixed here, but would freak out over a film called Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Zorn – either way it’s a vital entry in the biopic and concert film genres.
Difficult to understand Anna’s English narration as she rapidly, mechanically rattles off the words. Compositions are mostly static but they’re not afraid of a subtle or grand camera move. Scenes step on each other’s heels, the editor anxious to move on the moment a music piece has ended. Besides the musical performances we get great churches and lovely instruments – pre-piano keyboards such as harpsichords, clavichords and pipe organs – and closeups on (real?) historical documents. It’s an example film in Vogel’s “Assault on Montage” chapter, where he helpfully lays out the rules of “the received canon of editing” in order to show how some films break them. In this movie, “the refusal to move the camera or render the image more interesting and an insistence on real time… represents a frontal assault on the cinematic value system of the spectator.” In other words, anti-art people would call the movie boring.
Here we see the art go from the mind, to the page, to the finger, to the performer, and finally to the audience. In every performance Straub makes it so the hands are always totally visible, so we see the complexity that Bach/Gustav Leonhardt must transfer from the mind to the hands in full force.
Heart of a Dog (2015, Laurie Anderson)
I’m figuring out who Laurie Anderson is before the Big Ears fest. This is a poem-essay film about “the connection between love and death”… still drawings and an animated Laurie give an introductory dream sequence about giving birth to her dog, then straight to the death of her mother over blurry, barely-there archive films and photos. The dog goes blind, Laurie has her make paintings and sculptures and play paw-piano (they show a long stretch of dog piano music, including live performance footage from a benefit concert), and Laurie speaks of dog perception and post-9/11 surveillance. Ends with Lou’s song “Turning Time Around” and in the closing credits you realize her real home movies were mixed with staged(?) archive-looking footage (and Chris Marker is thanked). I kinda loved this – all these years I assumed I would find it tedious. It can go either way with personal docs and poetry.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016, Steve James)
Back-story catchup (it’s clear what point in time the film crew joined the story) then we follow a court case against a NYC family bank in the aftermath of the financial crisis, from the POV of the defenders. They’re not accused of subprime lending, but selling loans with improper paperwork and taking kickbacks from customers, and the state decided to make a (probably racist) example of them, trying/failing to prove the corruption went higher than some bad-egg loan officers. Good story, decent doc – oscar-nominated alongside Strong Island and Faces Places. Chicago critics gave it their best doc award, so James rewarded them by making his next doc there: the heartwarming success story of, uh-oh, Lori Lightfoot.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023, Martin Scorsese)
Prieto: “I used a LUT that emulated the beginning of color and still photography.” You do the best you can in the times you live in, and in Flower Moon and Hugo, Scorsese is idolizing early photography while living in a fallen digital world. I sat too close to the screen at Movieland, imagining I was watching a Scorsese Film and not an Apple Studios DCP, but ended up noticing the pixel borders, “watching television in public.” The sound was excellent, which is something to remember when I eventually rewatch at a proper distance from a nice TV to see the picture properly while getting the arbitrary surround-squished-into-stereo-speakers audio mix. You’re not Chris Nolan with your IMAX fetish, and Apple gave you a hundred million to make your dream project, so you do your best. But Kings of the Road on blu-ray looks better, so something has gone wrong.
I watched two movies this week where someone survives their spouse’s attempted murder by slow poisoning. Adam Nayman: “Scorsese opts for an agonizing realism that does not preclude two terrible possibilities. One, that Ernest truly loves his wife, though not enough to stop hurting her; and two, that Mollie understands what’s happening to her and is too heartbroken to fight back. ”
Five More by Tod Browning (1929-1936)
The Thirteenth Chair (1929)
After London After Midnight came three more Lon Chaney pictures including West of Zanzibar. Now, Browning’s love for headscarves leads him to India, and his love for Hungary leads him to Bela Lugosi. This is quite good for a 1929 sound film, but it hurts to exchange the long, lingering silent facial expressions for inane upper-class British conversational pleasantries. There’s no transitional period, the movie is crammed wall-to-wall with dialogue as if spectators were paying by the word.
Madame LaGrange is played by an actress named Wycherly, which would’ve been a cooler name for her medium character. Yes, we’re back in Mystic territory, and to prove her authenticity she explains the mechanics of the usual tricks used by mediums, then proceeds to her spiritual work uncovering a murderer. Someone dies during the first of two lights-out seances (during which the movie achieves maximum talkie-ness, becoming a radio play) so Inspector Lugosi arrives, and star Conrad Nagel’s girl Leila Hyams emerges as chief suspect, but it turns out some other blonde lady killed both guys.
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Dracula (1931)
Written about this before… watching now with the Philip Glass / Kronos Quartet score, hell yes. The music is mixed higher than the dialogue, as it should be. Now that I’ve seen Thirteenth Chair I have to say this is extremely awesome in comparison, dispensing with the constant dialogue and returning to beautiful image-making with big Lugosi close-ups.
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Freaks (1932)
Wrote about this before, too. More movie-worthy characters in this hour-long film than in Browning’s whole pre-Dracula career combined. Over 50 years later Angelo had a plum role in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Before Dracula, Browning made that Outside The Law non-remake, before Freaks came boxing drama Iron Man, and afterwards was Fast Workers… a comedy?
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Mark of the Vampire (1935)
John Fordian Dr. Donald Meek busts into an inn just as idiot tourists are getting the talk about why we don’t go out at night (bad idea to watch the same night as Dracula since it’s all the same vampire explanations to incredulous people). Inspector Atwill, a large mustache man, arrives to investigate a mysterious death. Fedor and Irena are survivors, swoop-haired Otto is her guardian. Meanwhile, Dracula himself (played as a wordless zombie monster with no suave dialogue) and his undead daughter Luna lurk in a nearby castle. Professor Barrymore arrives to do some Acting, a welcome diversion, while Irena’s dead dad Sir Karell has become a zombie Drac-follower, and Irena has begun acting vampy herself.
Somehow the plot gets even more convoluted, and Browning and Lugosi’s involvement becomes an in-joke, because the “vampires” have only been performers in Barrymore’s Holmesian plot to make swoop-haired Otto confess to killing his friend, hypnotized into re-committing his crime. Good performances in this, though nothing else really works, and the rubber-bats-on-strings technology hadn’t improved since ’31. I liked how no two people manage to pronounce the character names the same way.
Clanker, the Jump-Scare Cat:
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The Devil Doll (1936)
Nobody told me this would be a Bride of Frankenstein ripoff cowritten by Eric von Stroheim. Maybe bitter that another director remade Tod’s Unholy Three with Lon Chaney, he goes ahead and rips that off too. Lionel Barrymore is a banker who got backstabbed by his partners and sent to prison, escapes to get revenge – wrongly(?)-accused man becoming a murderer on the run.
First stop is scientist Marcel (Henry Walthall, the yellow shut-in of Griffith’s House with Closed Shutters) to borrow his shrinking formula. He’s working on miniaturization to alleviate world hunger (isn’t this the plot of Downsizing?) but has a heart attack while shrinking the maid, so his devoted wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano, who’d worked with Barrymore on Grand Hotel) comes along to continue his research by shrinking some bankers, Lionel hiding in plain sight as an old woman running a doll shop.
First off is nervous mustache banker Arthur Hohl (a cop in The Whole Town’s Talking), then they use a devil-doll to rob the house of Robert Greig (who played butler-typed in Preston Sturges movies). The dolls are mind-controlled by their masters (I missed Marcel’s explanation for this) and this doll-heist setpiece is cool enough to justify the entire movie.. Barrymore wants to see his beloved family members now that he’s out, so he pays disguised visits to his blind mom (Lucy Beaumont, who’d played Lionel’s brother John’s mom in The Beloved Rogue) and his lovely grown daughter (Maureen O’Sullivan started acting at the dawn of sound cinema and died in 1998 in Scottsdale, so she may well have watched Fargo in Arizona like we did).
Malita and tiny assassin:
The third banker is Pedro de Cordoba (a circus player in Hitchcock’s Saboteur), who surrounds himself with police then sweatily confesses that he railroaded Barrymore right as his doll-sized colleague was about to stab him with paralysis/shrink syrup. Malita helpfully/fatally blows up the lab/shop because Barrymore’s mission is done but she wants to go on shrinking things. Happy-ish ending for Barrymore, who meets his daughter and her beau Toto atop the Eiffel Tower, but after all the murdering he’s got to stay on the run. Browning’s penultimate film – he’d turn in one more comedy before forced retirement.