by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: B (II)

The Cat Came Back (1988, Cordell Barker)
Runaway (2009, Cordell Barker)

Another good batch: two movies where a cow is on the railroad tracks. The cow makes a quick appearance in The Cat, while cow vs. train is the whole show in Runaway. The train engineer runs off with a passenger leaving the coal boy in charge as the train goes out of control after hitting the cow (which survives, unlike the engineer who gets incinerated). The Cat I’d seen ages ago and was afraid to rewatch lest the song get stuck in my head, but it gets stuck in my head just thinking about rewatching it, so what’s the harm. My recollection was that the guy keeps getting rid of the cat, it keeps returning and wrecking his house, but actually he keeps failing every attempt to get rid of it, until the perfect ending when it haunts him into his afterlife. Canadian animation #1 forever, I must find Barker’s latest, Good Luck to You All.

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Love and the Zeppelin (1948, Jiri Brdecka)
Prince Copperslick (1980, Jiri Brdecka)

My first by Brdecka, here’s a very early and a very late one. The first is about flying machine invention mania, pretty girl likes the inventor and not the important rich man she’s set to marry, animation recalls the Khitruk Winnie-the-Pooh movies. The late one is about a prince who only eats meat in a happy marriage with a princess who only eats fruits and veg, hiding from her that he’s a carnivore until he’s discovered in his secret meat room (his 13th chamber, so a Bluebeard parody) and promptly chokes to death. More limited animation here, using that style where still images are crossfaded.

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The Three Sisters (2025, Konstantin Bronzit)

At least this guy’s second movie about people living in a house on a steep hill. The sisters compete for the attention of their new sailor tenant. Cute, wordless.

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Venice Pier (1976, Gary Beydler)

Camera faces down a pier from the shore end, then jump ahead to a different time of day or another day, jump again and again, each time our position moves a little further down the pier, until it gets to the end and we get a timelapse shot out to sea. Lovely work, would be greatly improved if I had a decent quality copy.

Canyon: “Shot spatially out of order over the course of a year, Gary recomposed the footage in editing to make it proceed consistently forward in space, resulting in an intricate mixing up of chronology, so some cuts could represent a jump of months either forward or backward in time.”

Gary had a short filmmaking career, giving up after getting no interest for this film.

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Pigs! (1965, Carroll Ballard)

Nicely edited wordless piece about pigs, with little montages showcasing their terrible snouts, then their horrible tails, then their awful feet, and so on. Ballard shows us cuter animals (sparrows, geese, sheep) looking disdainfully at the pigs, even the film music mocking the beasts. They do have their moments.

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Naughty Nurse (1969, Paul Bartel)

Nurse Dorothy cries about being so besotted with a doctor that she nearly killed her patient, then we instead follow a naughtier nurse to a hotel where she torments a blindfolded man. A cop comes to “arrest” them, but is really in on the game – all three are having a semi-scripted, sexy romp on their lunch break.

by ·Comments Off on Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

Chiwetel is divorced and depressed, living in his discount furniture shop, until he discovers a world beneath the world, with layers and layers of increasingly corrupted copies of the ground floor, like Us squared. Text is reversed or mutated, everything’s clipping into the walls, people have the wrong number of eyes, like a discount AI office park. Chiwetel gets his employees involved in documenting and mapping (leading to too much period-accurate VHS footage), then they disappear in there.

Every horror movie needs a couple of dummies to kill off. These two are TV stars from Shrinking (also about a therapist) and the Jodie Foster season of True Detective:

Anyone who has played dungeon games on Apple II knows how to deal with the backrooms:

Cut to the perspective of his therapist Renate, who makes a solo wellness check and manages to find Chiwetel, who is thriving in the backrooms. But she should’ve realized from the crayon wall drawings that her patient had gone ’round the bend, and he should’ve realized that the movie’s gonna become a therapy-backstory drama for a while. He tries to escape this by kidnapping her and showing her around to his new (edible) friends.

Finally we get back to proper horror when Carl is eaten by Giant Pirate Carl, who chases the therapist through ever more messed-up environments, until her apparent rescue by some white guys. We’ve seen these guys before, running their own backrooms explorations, setting up A/V equipment and apparently alarm-activated canisters of gas-that-does-nothing. Movie ends with her being interrogated by Phil, who does not imply that she’ll be safe or released, reminding me of the “rescue” at the end of 28 Years Later.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: B (I)

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B)

Kidnapper/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels improvised except for the Doctor’s and Lydia’s big speeches, not so much an actual movie as Decoder was.

The last thing you see before going into the black box:

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I-94 (1974, Bette Gordon & James Benning)

Flicker film, strobing between a woman walking away from camera and a man walking towards, with a man’s and a woman’s voice talking about the way they’re seen by other people, the tapes running at the same time but each voice distinct so you can focus on one person’s story or the other (but not both). Among the earliest work by either director.

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69 (1969, Robert Breer)

Thin-lined geometric shapes swing through white 3D space, then flicker fill colors are added, until the whole thing goes bonkers in the last minute.

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70 (1970, Robert Breer)

Escalation of 69, the color-flicker shapes are still swinging through space, with added sprays and blobs, and less chaos.

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Fuji (1974, Robert Breer)

My favorite of his, conceptually. A few shots of a train ride past Mt. Fuji have been traced and re-traced, rotoscoped with different treatments, until the mountain becomes a vague spray pattern, a triangle, a line, all rapidly and entertainingly shuffled together.

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Now You Tell One (1926, Charley Bowers)

Very good Bowers stop-motion adventure (he has a magic potion that can make anything grow, such as shoelaces, or a tree full of cats) wrapped in a needless backstory (he tells his tale at the local Liars Club and they give him a medal) with a good punchline (“sir I’m in love with your daughter” / “you idiot, that’s my wife”).

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A Visit from the Incubus (2001, Anna Biller)

Great theme song, explaining the Incubus tale. The rest of the songs don’t measure up, but the colors and costumes are top notch, and she gets real mileage out of having modern actors act like they’re in a 1950s technicolor musical western. Her long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch should be coming any month now.

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Matin’s Breakfast (1974, Patrick Bokanowski)

The most interesting bits are when an actor appears to have been graphicized, or he’s running through a composited picturebook scene. But sometimes I wonder if they didn’t film the titular breakfast scene (chaos in a kitchen) and it wasn’t working, so they turned the footage into a slow-mo/freeze-frame avant-Begotten art film.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: A

The Artificial Humors (2016, Gabriel Abrantes)

Half-hour short about a soccer ball-shaped floating robot, its AI programmer, and the girl it’s in love with. The three of them leave the village where it’s been training and go to Sao Paolo, where it’s reprogrammed to be a successful stand-up comedian. Big movie music, seamless effects, cool parrots.

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The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady (2019, Gabriel Abrantes)

Another very slick-looking half-hour short that ultimately feels simpler and less interesting than his best work. An obvious comparison would be Night at the Museum, if I’d seen that.

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Lupo the Butcher (1987, Danny Antonucci)

“Sonamabeetch I keel you” says the butcher as he accidentally chops himself to death. Good animation – this got the director a string of MTV gigs, then he created Ed, Edd n Eddy. Marv Newland was involved in this somehow.

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She Puppet (2001, Peggy Ahwesh)

Someone is playing Tomb Raider, not very well. Feminist(?) machinima, Lara Croft dies over and over, with the exact same sound effect, and sometimes different narrators reflect on the nature of humanity. Made me wish I was watching the one Spaced episode where he feels like drowning things. Sun Ra and Michael Snow both appear in the credits.

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Il Capo (2010, Yuri Ancarani)

Wordless HD close-up on the guy on the ground who directs the heavy machinery tearing up a marble quarry. I learned that they shovel sand and rubble under the slab to give it a cushion to land on. Closeup on the guy’s hand with missing fingertip was a nice callback to Lupo the Butcher. Played True/False the same year as The Interrupters, The Arbor, and Fake It So Real.

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Aliens (1993, Michael Almereyda)

“David Fincher didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” Cameraman films two kids playing an Aliens video game under an Aliens poster. They have a distracted, casual conversation about massive box office hits and Sam Raimi movies, making UHF references.

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To The Unknown (2017, Michael Almereyda)

That’s more like it – piano and poetry (by Kenneth Koch) as Almereyda films a crippled cat on different days.

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Moonshine (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A strange one, with meta intertitles, referring to the actors and stunts and extras. Our guys are lawmen after a gang of underground bootleggers. Arbuckle keeps getting captured, and does a quick pillsbury-doughboy giggle whenever they poke him in the belly with a rifle, then fakes his own death and is immediately recaptured. Alice Lake gets into the stunts as well, Al St. John is a reliable foil.

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Swing Shift Cinderella (1945, Tex Avery)
The Screwy Truant (1945, Tex Avery)
The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945, Tex Avery)

A good batch to watch together, since they all reference each other. Wolf & Hotgirl are main characters in Cinderella and McGoo, and she does a wolfy song and dance in both. Wolf appears with Bugs Bunny knockoff Screwy Squirrel in Truant, which borrows the opening title gag from Cinderella, Droopy plays Dan McGoo, and a lotta wolves and dogs get hit with a lotta hammers.

by ·Comments Off on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100

I wanted to celebrate the American semiquincentennial in some way, but it was too hot to go out for fireworks, so I watched all twenty of my still-unseen movies on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1998 list of American movies, from his “List-o-Mania” response to the AFI 100 list. Rosenbaum’s lists and writings have been as important to my movie hobby as Cinema Scope has. Discovering this article online in 2000 or 2001 was especially eye-opening, realizing that you could just put Dead Man on a list of greatest films instead of Star Wars. Of course my reaction was to watch everything Rosenbaum says is good, and I’ve slowly chipped away at his top-1000 from the Essential Cinema book while also chipping away at a hundred lists from other sources, and catching up with films from favorite directors and stars and companies, trying to keep up with new releases and reissues, and so on. One of these days I’ll run out of good movies, but for now here’s my vaguely-tier-ranked roundup of Rosenbaum’s Alternate 100.

“Selecting America’s 100 greatest movies has to be an ongoing, perpetual activity of exploration and discovery — something that can only happen if we stop to consider what we still don’t know about the subject and try to set up some channels for educating ourselves.”

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Dead Man (1995)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Eraserhead (1978)
The Killing (1956)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Sunrise (1927)

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Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Bigger Than Life (1956)
Freaks (1932)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
Greed (1925)
The Lady From Shanghai (1948)
Love Streams (1984)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
Point Blank (1967)
Rio Bravo (1959)
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Scarlet Street (1945)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
The Steel Helmet (1951)
Trouble in Paradise (1932)
Woodstock (1970)

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An Affair to Remember (1957)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The Crowd (1928)
Foolish Wives (1922)
The General (1927)
Johnny Guitar (1954)
Judge Priest (1934)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Park Row (1952)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
To Sleep With Anger (1990)

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Ace in the Hole (1951)
The Big Sky (1952)
The Black Cat (1934)
Christmas in July (1940)
The Docks of New York (1928)
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974)
11 x 14 (1976)
Force of Evil (1948)
Gilda (1946)
Housekeeping (1987)
Killer of Sheep (1978)
The Ladies’ Man (1961)
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Lonesome (1929)
Man’s Castle (1933)
The Naked Spur (1953)
Nanook of the North (1922)
The Nutty Professor (1963)
Panic in the Streets (1950)
The Phenix City Story (1955)
The Shooting (1967)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
That’s Entertainment! III (1994)
This Land Is Mine (1943)
Thunderbolt (1929)
Wanda (1971)
While the City Sleeps (1956)
Zabriskie Point (1970)

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Cat People (1942)
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933)
The Hustler (1961)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Laughter (1930)
Love Me Tonight (1932)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971)
Scarface (1932)
Scenes From Under Childhood (1967)
The Scenic Route (1978)
Shadows (1960)
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The Strawberry Blonde (1941)
Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

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Avanti! (1972)
Broken Blossoms (1919)
The Great Garrick (1937)
The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
My Son John (1952)
Real Life (1979)
Track of the Cat (1954)

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The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
Intolerance (1916)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969)
Try and Get Me! (1950)
The Wrong Man (1957)
Vinyl (1965)

by ·Comments Off on Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad’s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn’t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by Gish at the end.

Terrence Rafferty:

[Screenwriter James] Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were.

David Ehrenstein:

The Night of the Hunter has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it’s a curious and highly eccentric sort of folk fable, mixing, as it does, rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. … It may be frightening, but not in the melodramatic manner of a conventional thriller. Its story is told from a child’s viewpoint, yet it has nothing in common with the likes of Disney or Spielberg. Then, there is its style to contend with—an incredible mixture of naturalistic three-dimensional space on view one moment, replaced by theatrical two-dimensional images the next. It is clear what the film is aiming at: images from our nightmares, brought into the lucid light of day.

Only instance in history of an adult in a movie believing a kid over another adult:

Bad shadow:

Good shadow:

by ·Comments Off on The Tarnished Angels (1958, Douglas Sirk)

Sirk with the same great cast as Written on the Wind – inconsistent dubbing, but the greatest widescreen staging and overheated actors. Our doomed lovers are even more inevitably doomed than ever before, since they are daredevil pilots with engine problems.

Inspiration for Slack Bay:

In 1932, after Robert Stack’s own plane crashes he attempts to sell his wife Dorothy Malone to hotheaded businessman Ord in exchange for a new busted plane. Stack’s loyal mechanic Jack Carson gets the Ord plane working, but not well enough to keep it from plowing into the sea. Rock Hudson is an audience-surrogate reporter who becomes obsessed with this group, is fired from his outlet for insisting on covering air shows, then fails to pick up Dorothy after her husband dies.

Yui is the best, despite his allergy to capital letters.

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Crankin’ Hank, later the villainous foreman of Days of Heaven:

The kid’s a star, also in Hitchcock, Boetticher, and Nick Ray movies:

by ·Comments Off on Laughter (1930, Harry d’Arrast)

Starving artist Glenn Anders (Lady From Shanghai) loves Nancy Carroll (Broken Lullaby), but Nancy loves Parisian Fredric March (romantic lead(s) of I Married a Witch), but she is married to older Frank “The Wizard of Oz” Morgan. She’s right to prefer March – he’s a charming nut, playing piano duets with the servants and romping around wearing bear rugs. Among all this romantic intrigue, the husband makes eight million dollars on a business deal and nobody in the family can be bothered to care. There’s a cute stepdaughter, and the artist tries smooching her, but ultimately decides to shoot himself since he can’t have Nancy, an act which shocks her into leaving her rich husband for March.

Bonding with stepmom:

Moments before they’re arrested for breaking into this house:

by ·Comments Off on While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang)

Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it’s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just inherited the company, playing power games by creating an executive director position and watching the company leaders fight for it. In the game: big brit George Sanders, big eyebrows Thomas The Kid Mitchell, and small mustache James Craig (Side Street). Free agent Dana Andrews is a TV newsman trying to get away with his fiancee before getting pulled into all this drama. For once the women are just as important in the story. Rhonda Fleming is Price’s hotwife, sleeping with the small mustache guy, which somehow lands him the big job. Ida Lupino is Sanders’ gal, kissing up to Dana to coerce and/or blackmail him into helping. Sally Forrest (star of a couple Lupino-directed dramas) is Dana’s gal, who he puts in danger by trying to bait the killer. All this leads to more and more inter-office drama, the news people caring less about the actual serial killer, who tries to reassert himself with some serial killings, but gets caught in a futile newspaper exclusive. Last-minute scale-tipping rewards the (relatively) virtuous and interferes with an employee’s honeymoon, as was always happening in 1950s workaholic movies.