by ·Comments Off on The American Sector +4 (2020, Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez)

I got a (cheap!) Metrograph subscription to watch this, with accompanying shorts and a live Q&A, already paying dividends. Velez & Stephens traveled and filmed in 16mm whenever they had time over the past five years, aiming to shoot all the sections of the Berlin Wall on display in the USA. Clearly a lot of thought went into editing and sound design, and instead of a rigorous Benning approach, they take each wall location on its own terms and include chance encounters with locals, forming a kind of meditative Profit Motive road movie / snapshot of America in a breezy 70 minute package.

This guy in Suwanee seems cool:

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Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt (2017, Pacho Velez & Yoni Brook)

A pleasing top-down angle on the subway turnstiles, where among the general bustle an extremely minor drama unfolds when a yellow sweatshirted fellow’s card won’t let him through. Can’t decide whether to root for Mr. Sweatshirt or be mad at him for holding up traffic.

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Perfect Fifths (2020, Courtney Stephens)

“All stability is temporary.” Narrator named JJJJJerome, unseen except his hands, is a philosophical piano tuner. Focus on piano, with pictureboxed (interlaced) cutaways to construction scenes, soft piano soundtrack. I don’t know if the beach scenes were supposed to be visual analogies for the talk about time intervals, but it really worked for me, mad bonus points for the inclusion of pelicans.

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Mating Games (2017, Courtney Stephens & KJ Relth)

I’ve been using tags to quietly keep track of movies that feature cat tossing or bird tossing, but it’s apparently time for a girl tossing category. Slow-mo home movies of bodybuilders and gymnasts showing off at Los Angeles beaches in the 1950’s/60’s, set to music.

Muscle Beach seems like an intimidating place – reading online that Danny Trejo used to hang out there, while downstairs my dad is watching Grindhouse. Seeing all the girl tossing through the lens of this movie’s title makes human existence seem head-spinning.

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The Starting Line (2017, Pacho Velez & Nicole Salazar)

Official USA/Mexican border crossing and surrounding area on the day Obama’s presidency ended – vague talk on the TV news, but normal daily life on the ground.

by ·Comments Off on The Souvenir (2019, Joanna Hogg)

I am in my forties, so when am I gonna start making up my own mind about movies? Here’s a doomed-young-love-addiction story that looks and sounds unappealing, like not really my sort of thing, and it makes the year-end lists and I think oh that’s a good movie I should watch, but low priority, and then the sequel is announced for Cannes and suddenly I need to watch it right away, but it turns out somewhat unappealing, like not really my sort of thing. And then a week after I watch it, reviews are coming in for the sequel, a working-through-grief story that looks and sounds unappealing, and I am almost definitely gonna see it.

Me watching The Souvenir II next year:

I do appreciate watching cinema in which characters argue over what is cinema, and also hearing The Fall in a movie. Tilda Swinton’s daughter is charmingly Tilda-Swinton’s-daughter-like, and her mom plays her mom – a lovely moment where she sleeps over and cries with her unhappy daughter. I didn’t get the post-it trail to a car bomb, but maybe that was a typical British activity in the 80’s. Honor’s heroin boy (Tom Burke, just played Welles in Mank) once steals her stuff, then gets her to apologize for being mad about it after some vague excuse that he’s keeping civilization safe, so maybe he bombs cars for the queen. Richard Ayoade MVP.

by ·Comments Off on Border (2018, Ali Abbasi)

I finally watched the movie where airport shame-sniffer Tina, who attracts lightning and can detect SD cards full of child pornography, meets Vore, a tailless sex-inverted creature like herself, and kicks out her useless boyfriend Roland to invite Vore to stay over. I cracked the film wide open, writing in my notes: “she works the border, he is her boarder.”

by ·Comments Off on The Story of Three Loves (1953, Gottfried Reinhardt & Vincente Minnelli)

I heard about a Jonathan Rosenbaum lecture series on 1950’s cinema, and thought it’d be fun to catch a couple nights, using it as an excuse to watch the titles on the schedule I hadn’t seen before (this and Bitter Victory). We watched the movies on our own, then met for the discussion. I sat in bed with a beer, imagining joining hundreds of others watching a J.Ro performance from a stage or lecture hall somewhere, but whoops, there were only ten of us for a cameras-on small-classroom situation.

It’s an anthology feature, the first and third segments (and I think the framing pieces on a cruise ship) by Reinhardt (a former Lubitsch protege). Part one is about Moira Shearer doing what Moira Shearer does best – but the wrinkle is she has a heart condition and can’t dance or she’ll die. But she says she can’t live without dancing – so, very Red Shoes, but also brings to mind Le Plaisir, an anthology film from two years earlier which also opened with a dancer collapsing. Shearer sneaks away from her keeper Agnes Moorehead and meets theater director James Mason, who is writing a whole new dance around her style, and this all ends in tragedy but it’s fun while it lasts.

Upsetting my auteurist preconceptions, the Minnelli segment in the middle was my least favorite – in part because it’s starring and narrated by an obnoxious little boy (oh no, this is 12-year-old Ricky Nelson, only 6 years before Rio Bravo). He detests his governess Leslie Caron (soon after debuting in An American in Paris) who reads mushy French poetry all day, so a witch (late-career Ethel Barrymore) agrees to make him grown-up for one night so he can experience independence. But when he’s grown-ass Farley Granger, he suddenly develops a taste for French poetry and for Leslie Caron.

Ricky and the witch:

Granger in the best scene, not with Caron but with… Zsa Zsa Gabor!

In the final story, disgraced acrobat Kirk Douglas rescues suicidal bridge jumper Pier Angeli, then since he needs a new trapeze accomplice and since she has nothing to lose, he trains her for his next big act. Most of the rest of the movie is these two being impossibly fit, doing legit aerial stunts. I don’t buy a single thing in this segment, but it has a good ending and it’s great fun. The Reinhardt segments really shine by showcasing talented people exercising their skills.

Aside from the movie – after all the books and articles I’ve read by Rosenbaum, finally I’m seeing him live, in an underlit room on a Zoom meeting, talking about orgasms. As to whether the film seemed hokey, “it’s the kind of hokiness I’d like to take a bath in.” Reinhardt and the actors were discussed, and the stories and why/whether they succeeded, and realism. The part that got me was his talk about existentialism, which apparently does not mean what I’d assumed it meant, the stories being all about the present tense. “The fact that you exist is more important than why you exist.”

by ·Comments Off on The Hand (2004, Wong Kar-Wai)

I half-remembered this from watching Eros at the Landmark way back then, and the new remaster gives us a good excuse to revisit. Gong Li is a high-class call girl, whose life/career hits a rocky patch, then she has to move into a dank moldy place and gets the croup. Chen Chang is her devoted tailor in good times and bad. Besides all the perfect costuming and sumptuous dim-light photography, highlight is a scene of erotic dumpling stuffing.

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There’s Only One Sun (2007)

Found this short, nonsensical spy drama on vimeo, with horrid video compression compared to The Hand blu-ray. It’s a commissioned television ad that culminates in Amélie Daure of Frontier(s) making out with her flatscreen. Before that, there’s some talk off finding an untraceable person(?) named The Light, a flashback structure, a couple murders – that’s a lot for Wong, who likes to let his camera linger, to pull off in eight minutes. Mostly it seems designed to show the brightest colors possible, bleeding into each other, to impress the rubes when the brightness is cranked up at the Best Buy video wall. No need for too many new ideas – songs are reused from the 2046 soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.

by ·Comments Off on Green Snake (1993, Tsui Hark)

Extremely fun movie, opening with a powerful monk capturing an evil old man who’d been training for 100 years to ascend to human form, and I don’t know a whole lot about Chinese mythology but supermonk (Vincent Zhao, who took over the Once Upon a Time in China series after part 3) seems kinda like the bad guy. This is confirmed towards the end when he’s singlemindedly pursuing his enemies while carelessly destroying temples and drowning monks as collateral damage.

Green and Supermonk:

Supermonk has a tentative alliance with two snake sisters. White Snake (Joey Wong, lost in the huge cast of Eagle Shooting Heroes, also in the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy) is older and more powerful, while Green Snake (Maggie Cheung, at the tail end of her period of starring in ten films per year) is more bold and curious. They seduce some local guy (Wu Hsing-Guo), who will die along with White in the climactic supermonk-caused catastrophe.

Meantime we get colorful sets, giant snake tails, ludicrous side plots, tons of flying, great staging and action.

Wu Hsing-Guo, resurrected:

Previous stories and films based on this folktale have been named White Snake, so the titular focus on the younger sister indicate Tsui’s and Farewell My Concubine writer Lillian Lee’s intention to turn tradition on its head.

by ·Comments Off on Women Make Film (2018, Mark Cousins)

Massive, forty-part series reviewing many of the things that can be done in (narrative) cinema, and ways to do them, only using films directed by women.

It took us a half-year to get through this… I kept no notes or screenshots, so I’m happy to see a few letterboxd lists collecting the titles we saw clips from.

We had mixed results with the narrators and topics and examples, but it is always nice to learn about movies.