by ·Comments Off on Saint Omer (2022, Alice Diop)

A movie of people standing very still and talking, named after the town where the crime took place in late 2015. Subtly cinephiliac movie – Rama is teaching a lesson on Duras, shows the shaved-head scene from Hiroshima Mon Amour in class – all the white actors in this movie have been in Resnais films. Rama is weird and closed-off around family, never mentions she’s leaving town to witness a murder trial.

The judge was in Mon oncle d’Amérique as a kid:

Laurence is the accused, is quoted as having said that she killed her baby to “make life easier” but pleads innocent: “I don’t think I’m the responsible party.” The judge questions the much-older, married boyfriend, a real shithead, then asks for L’s whole life story. Meanwhile Rama has lunch with the accused’s mom, reveals that Rama is pregnant, and at the hotel she frames through Pasolini’s Medea.

Laurence’s mom: Salimata Kamate of Intouchables

Movie ends, having made its point(s), without wrapping up the trial. But it’s based on an actual trial, which Diop attended in 2016 in the same courtroom where they filmed, and which ended in a 20-year sentence.

Leila Latif for BFI:

The acting is uniformly superb, even when it’s simply dispassionate testimony that’s being dispatched. [Kayije] Kagame plays Rama in a state of continual displacement, ill at ease at dinner with her mother, uncomfortable on the streets of Saint-Omer and conspicuous in the courtroom; [Guslagie] Malanda evokes profound pain through the tiniest cracks in her expressions and voices as she revisits traumatic memories.

by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 3: Feathers (2021, Omar El Zohairy)

AKA the Egyptian chicken movie. A guy setting himself on fire is quite a prologue. During a birthday party magic trick, the husband goes into a box, chicken comes out, embarrassed magician can’t undo it. The wife then mutely chases after the magician, getting screwed over by her landlord and friends and associates. When the chicken gets sick, she helps it recover. When she reports her husband missing so her son can take his factory job, the cops give her a comatose homeless man. We get more than enough shots of her standing perfectly still looking dead inside, and not enough exploration of the chicken-ness of the husband – it’s less a bird movie than a missing husband movie.

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Birds of a Feather (1931, Burt Gillett)

Significantly better and more chicken-focused than the feature, one of those early Disneys where all the woodland creatures move and sway in time with the soundtrack, doing little species-specific actions. Belated drama of banding together to rescue a stray chicken from a hawk, including a great POV-attack shot. Minor message that polluted lakes harm the geese, thanx. IMDB says Eisenstein was a fan.

by ·Comments Off on That is the Dawn (1956, Luis Buñuel)

Getting back into Buñuel after recently rewatching Nazarin.

Kids interrupt their game of savagely throwing rocks at each other to help a collapsed woman – this is Angela, wife of slick-haired doctor Valerio. She’s desperately bored with this town, but he won’t leave his post, so sends her off alone. His buddy Sandro also has an ailing wife Magda. But while the doctor takes up with a hot new visitor named Bernadine, Sandro stands by his wife to the detriment of his work, and gets fired by shitty capitalist Gorzon, who he later murders, justifiably. The doctor, always helping people, tries to hide the killer as his wife returns home with her meddling dad, who sniffs out Sandro.

Things people are calling this film: sincere (agree), revolutionary (ehh), a study in morality (sure), anti-capitalist (yeah). IMDB Trivia points out subtle insults against other artists hidden in the visuals. Bunuel’s first French movie since L’age d’or. The Doctor had smaller parts in some major Bunuel movies, Clara starred in a couple of Antonionis I haven’t seen, the capitalist in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 2: All That Breathes (2022, Shaunak Sen)

Daniel Fienberg in Hollywood Reporter:

Depending on your level of investment, All That Breathes could be a documentary about climate change and the crucial need to understand how animals are adapting and how humans need to adapt. It could be a spiritual piece about the webs of synergistic connectivity between, well, everything that breathes. It could be a humanist meditation on how we treat each other, how we tear people down by comparing them to animals, but how really we should treat everything and everyone just a bit better. Or it might just be 91 minutes with a couple of brothers who really like birds.

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Bird Suite (1994)

Semi-anonymous Australian VHS, following our bird theme. A solid hour of birds doing bird things, with no titles or narration, just symphonic music. Great work showing birds hanging in the air, a good segment showing different species in apparently natural environments in close-up then zooming out to show they’re in a human city. It also made pelicans look graceful, which is an achievement.

by ·Comments Off on The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)

Remarkable-looking movie with time-slippage editing. I think the Coens were taking style notes. Hopefully they took better plot notes than me – I wrote “a surreal kinda movie,” probably because it was late and I lost track of story details. Pretty gay and horny, overall. For all they didn’t care about sound sync, the Italians know good music (notably, the action moving from Italy to France doesn’t fix the sync). Brilliant cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor, One From the Heart), but this only got a writing nomination(?), losing to The French Connection(??).

Trintignant is a handsome, remorseless fascist assassin who had a traumatic youth. He takes a mission to murder an old friend, he and his wife (Stefania Sandrelli, the wimpy guy’s mom in Jamón, Jamón) get into a love triangle with the friend’s daughter Dominique Sanda (who’d reunite with Sandrelli in 1900), then he betrays pretty much everyone except his wife.

Mike D’Angelo on lboxd:

I’m something of a Sorrentino apologist, but rewatching The Conformist made me realize that he’s too often wedding maximalist formalism to equally emphatic performances, hat-on-a-hat-style; here, Trintignant’s opaque stillness is at disarming odds with all the canted angles, expressionistic colors and triumphalist architecture, and it’s the contrast that conveys meaning.

Trint’s dad, in a marble nuthouse:

by ·Comments Off on Bird Movies 1: The Language of Birds (2022, Erik Bullot)

Hands flipping through archival media, yep.

Postapocalpytic framing story, check.

Much of the movie is people holding up objects, more exciting stuff than D’Ambrose.

People singing bird songs in resonant rooms.

In chapter 1 we only hear birds… in chapter 2 we finally see some.

I liked this better than most people did. It’s the rare bird movie that follows through on its title. We are celebrating the video release of All That Breathes with a festival of bird movies, beginning with this one.

by ·Comments Off on Knock at the Cabin (2023, M. Night Shyamalan)

Gay couple in Pennsylvania gets tied up by apocalyptic home invaders. Jon “King of Hamilton” Groff gets a concussion, Ben Aldridge of the latest Michael Showalter movie tries to fight and reason their way out, pokes holes in their story. But Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird (the only member of Old Beach here) and Abby Quinn (Shithouse) are not to be reasoned with, and they ritual-sacrifice fourth member, Racist Rupert Weasley. Two sacrifices and three world-historic catastrophes later, our guys gain the upper hand, then Ben kills Jon to make the planes stop falling out of the sky.

by ·Comments Off on Ann Arbor Film Fest 2023, part 2

Blood of the Family Tree (Christine Panushka)

Symbolic animated film… maybe the MOST symbolic animated film. Red on white, cut-out humans becoming family trees. I made it less than ten minutes into this hour-long feature, up to the part where it’s just blood-related words/text on screen. Reminder not to watch movies with “inherited/generational trauma” in their descriptions.

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Mud Man (Chikako Yamashiro)

People in a mud field chat vaguely, trying to understand their circumstances. They find a stock footage war scene montage over a beatbox soundtrack. Joyous movie, this is someone to watch out for.

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Assemblage No. 2 (Nik Liguori)

Chiming bells… blurry closeups of flowers, then again through a prism. Experimental cinema 101.

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Forms with Space and Distance and Hills (Jason Moyes)

More exp. cin. 101 – filming electric towers on Scottish hills, degrading the image, adding color filters, while messing around with a a lecturer’s voice on the soundtrack. This one worked for me though.

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Beautiful Figures (Soetkin Verstegen)

Beautiful is right… figure animation on a scientific notebook. Text at right angles, nerve-rattling music on the soundtrack, tides come in and out, invisible water lines cutting characters into cross sections.

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Laika (Deborah Stratman)

Deborah brings her star-person mirrors to the beach, reflecting sun and sea. Mammal-eyes shine in infra-dark. A space capsule parachuting to sea reverses, catching a thermal back into space. Sound “Laika” by Olivia Block.

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Jill, Uncredited (Anthony Ing)

Background actor Jill rubs elbows with Meryl Streep, Topol, Anthony Hopkins, Mr. Bean and more. No narration, just some nice music and ka-klunk steenbeck sfx. Playing “spot Jill” becomes more fun as the movie goes on and her credits rack up, ending with a a title stating this was only 5% of her screen appearances. Reverse Shot: “Something about these many cinematic universes is exposed to be a sham. Indeed, the film’s intense attention to details that are not supposed to be noticed borders on conspiratorial.”

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Looking Backward (Ben Balcom)

A hard one to describe. Stammering professor talks over depopulated images of buildings, then becomes coherent and profound when we finally see people in the stock footage. Really well done.

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Light’s Return (Kathleen Rugh)

Cool frog sounds! Somebody took their camera down by the lake and filmed nothing much, then superimposed things over each other.

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Der Blaue Reiter (Marcin Gizycki)

Color-field horses in motion interspersed by Kandinsky quotes and backed by dance music, ehh.

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Of Wood (Owen Klatte)

Impressive work, a stop-motion carving, getting deeper into a chunk of wood as the film progresses. Relief drawings of wood-based nature and civilization advances, then a wooden human figure emerges and spends a few minutes just getting pummeled by all the objects springing from the tree (baseball bat, lincoln logs, “Between the World and Me” in hardcover) until he escapes at the end to read “Walden” under what’s left of the tree. Would’ve got the point just fine without some blocks spelling out “consume more.”

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All the Blue Cats Look Like the Same Color (Wenzhe Xu)

Mannequins roam the deserted city (Scott Stark would approve), an apartment fills gradually with sand, a funeral parade mechanically walks by. Supposedly about internet slang replacing human language so I thought there’d be… any language… but I guess the lack of it is the point.

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The Moon Rises During the Day (Na Li)

Abstract line patterns transmogrify across the page, sometimes forming figures, shapes, faces, and sometimes roaming free in their natural spaghetti mode.

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Pigment-Dispersion Syndrome (Jennifer Reeves)

Brakhage-flicker of color blob corrosion, the occasional image relating to vision or color peeking through. Three sections with different audio: ambient music reversed, ambient music, mad science lab. Lovely.

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Lo-Tech Reality (Guillermo Garcia Lopez)

Bookending narration of aliens coming to Detroit and finding no people, just vibrations. The rest is a drum loop music video of remixed urban decay, finding morse code in blinking lights and broken windows, with some nice compositions of dead buildings mirrored against the sky.

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In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket (Yoko Yuki)

“Here I am again, trapped in my sanity.” Peak Japanese cartoon-color explosion, ranting comic chaos with intertitles. Great widescreen design. I’ve gotta post this at work if it comes out on vimeo. Music by Honninman, who is on bandcamp.

by ·Comments Off on The Bride With White Hair (1993, Ronny Yu)

Opens with the story of a flower on a snowy peak that can cure illness and restore youth – I’ve heard this one before… Green Snake? The Spine of Night?

A hazy, gauzy, unexpectedly hot movie with some Ashes of Time slo-blur-mo in the action. I don’t usually know what is happening but I had a good time. Sensitive Leslie Cheung is told that he has to be fierce and brutal. His main girl Brigitte Lin doesn’t even get white hair until the last ten minutes, after which she immediately kills every other woman in the movie.