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.

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 01-50

Back in the day there was an urge to watch all the Criterion movies – after all, they’ve got completist-friendly catalog numbers and are self-described as “important.” Now I have lists, and lists of lists, and I don’t need to rely on any one distributor as a gatekeeper of excellence, but there’s still that urge, and I still keep track of what they put out, and subscribe to their streaming service, and believe in the back of my mind that if I was stuck at home for a long time, like say if there was a global pandemic, it’d be fun to watch them all. Early this year I realized I’ve seen almost all of their first 50 releases, so I decided to catch up with the last couple David Lean/Dickens films and some odds and ends.

These were released 1998-1999 before I had a DVD player, but I’d pick one up whenever I saw a sale, ended up owning about ten (or their reissues). 30 have come out on blu, and I’m not gonna count how many on streaming.

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Movies I’ve written up here, roughly/hastily ranked:

Beauty and the Beast
The Red Shoes
The Seventh Seal
The 400 Blows
Amarcord
Diabolique
Walkabout
Wages of Fear
The Lady Vanishes
Branded To Kill
Nights of Cabiria
Grand Illusion
High and Low
Picnic At Hanging Rock
Alphaville
Summertime
Andrei Rublev
Great Expectations
Oliver Twist
The Most Dangerous Game
And The Ship Sails On
The Long Good Friday
The Killer
Henry V
A Night To Remember
Samurai trilogy
Blood For Dracula

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Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Black Orpheus
Tokyo Drifter
Shock Corridor
Seven Samurai
The Naked Kiss
Time Bandits
Flesh For Frankenstein
Dead Ringers
Taste of Cherry
Fishing With John
This Is Spinal Tap
Robocop
Nanook of the North
M
Hard Boiled
The Silence of the Lambs
Sid & Nancy
Lord of the Flies
Insomnia
Armageddon
Salo

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Bonus Features:

The Lady Vanishes add-on feature Crook’s Tour was decent.

The Steamroller and the Violin is on the Rublev blu.

Peter Weir’s Homesdale was on the Picnic at Hanging Rock reissue.

Haven’t caught most of the M extras or all ten hours of the Seven Samurai features.

I played every single thing on the Seventh Seal reissue, including the Bergman Island doc, not to be confused with the new Mia Hansen-Love feature.

Can’t remember which of the Beauty/Beast commentaries I’ve played, but reading Cocteau’s making-of diaries was enough… I didn’t make it very far into the Philip Glass opera audio option.

Not too interested in the Night to Remember material.

I see the Amarcord disc is full of good stuff and Walkabout has an hour-long David Gulpilil doc.

Even if I go on a John Woo kick, not sure those commentaries would be easy to find anymore (and why is Roger Avary on one?).

Missed the two shorts on the Insomnia disc.

I can’t remember how many of the Fishing With John audio commentaries I’ve heard, but I know I’ve played that Lounge Lizards music video more than a few times.

The new Taste of Cherry blu has a Kiarostami-produced “sketch film” I’d like to see and an A.S. Hamrah essay I just read online, but on the last half-price sale I bought the Koker Trilogy instead.

I remember flipping through The Red Shoes extras one day long ago, didn’t recall there being so much Jeremy Irons participation.

I probably did listen to that Armageddon commentary with Affleck’s infamous Michael Bay impression, and the Time Bandits commentary, but who knows for sure.

The Dead Ringers disc was one of my prize possessions, and I’ve watched that movie a couple times too many.

Haven’t seen the Clouzot doc, and ran out of steam before finishing all the Rublev docs.

I should get the two Sam Fullers for the interviews and TV clips and the Typewriter doc… oh wait, they’re all on streaming, I just saved $40.

Nine left to watch in the 51-100 block, but maybe I’ll mix it up and watch all the 700’s next time, or watch them in reverse order, or never revisit this project again, I dunno.

by ·Comments Off on Great Expectations (1946, David Lean)

Mostly I experienced flashbacks of reading this for the first time in one high school’s English class, or performing it in another high school’s drama class. This preceded Lean’s Oliver Twist, which also opens with strikingly-shot whipping-wind outdoor scenes.

Beat out The Ghost and Mrs. Muir for a cinematography oscar, pretty impressive. Standout acting by Bernard Miles (who’d do a Nicholas Nickleby film the next year) as Pip’s decent brother in law, and Finlay Currie (just off I Know Where I’m Going!) as the convict/benefactor… I liked Young Pip better than Adult Pip, surprisingly.

by ·Comments Off on Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov)

Movie opens with “uncle” yelling at unseen hole diggers, then a boy with a (comically? horribly? we don’t know yet) hoarse voice comes out and curses into the camera. For maybe a decade I’ve been half-meaning to watch this movie because it’s supposed to be great, then avoiding it since it’s a horrors-of-war through eyes-of-a-child story. Turns out it’s not the depressing slog I imagined, but has big Emir Kusturica energy, hardly ever stops being amazing even when it starts being completely brutal. Let’s keep avoiding Son of Saul for the time being, though.

Our boy Fliora finds a gun, so is allowed to leave his family and join the Belorussian soldiers in WWII – then he’s ordered to swap his good boots for an older soldier’s, and gets left behind. No fighting yet, already a good amount of crying. He soon teams up with older Glasha and they dodge bombings and forge minefields and swamps, as Fliora and Glasha become ever-more traumatized by their experiences. We get the post-bombing tinnitus sound – I didn’t think they were doing that in the 1980’s. The explosions in this movie look unlike normal war-movie explosions – they look dangerous! It’s an angry movie, also bringing to mind Hard To Be a God, and gets extremely brutal as it goes on.

Bird Content: Fliora stomps on a nest full of eggs (boo), but later a beautiful stork looks in on our heroes (yay).

Mark Le Fanu for Criterion:

The film’s working title, before it turned into the biblical exhortation Come and See, was Kill Hitler. Klimov was always careful to explain in interviews that this was not to be taken in its literal meaning but rather as referring to a sort of universal moral imperative: “Kill the Hitler that lurks potentially in all of us!”

Klimov was married to Larisa Shepitko, whose films I’d very much like to see. Cinematographer Aleksey Rodionov would later work with Sally Potter. Lead kid Aleksey Kravchenko kept acting, was recently in The Painted Bird. Filmed in Belarus, which was in the news for arresting dissidents the morning after I watched this.

by ·Comments Off on Voyage of Time (2016, Terrence Malick)

Years after not being able to see this because we don’t have an imax theater, I realized it had been quietly released on blu-ray. Watched the 90-minute Cate Blanchett version after revisiting The Tree of Life. I’d heard this was a feature-length version of that movie’s merciful dinosaur scene, but it’s a blend of natural hi-res photography and computer trickery – not always easy to tell these apart – and low-grade social-unrest scenes. After a long prehistory, early man leads quickly to huge modern cities.

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“What lasts?”

by ·Comments Off on Sound of Metal (2019, Darius Marder)

Maybe I should’ve watched Whiplash… was looking for drumming, got a hippie-ass lesson-drama about accepting yourself. It was a good call casting sensitive Riz Ahmed in a Rudimentary Peni t-shirt as the lead, though the story calls for 5% sensitivity and 95% frustration. After belligerently touring through his increasing hearing loss, drummer Riz finally goes almost completely deaf, is checked into a rural community run by Paul Raci for dealing with deafness, then kicked out at the end for selling all his music gear to pay for hearing aids, because Raci believes deafness is something to live with, not to overcome. Reuniting with his gf/singer Olivia Cooke at her dad Mathieu Amalric’s house… per AS Hamrah, “In this part of the movie we learn, inadvertently, that deafness is a class position and that class mobility is not possible.”

by ·Comments Off on Buzzard (2014, Joel Potrykus)

Another Potrykus movie where Josh Burge plays a slacker / scammer / gamer, and his life gets increasingly complicated and dire.

Two great additions here: a Freddy Krueger power glove, and the director playing Josh’s friend/rival Derek. Per Mike D’Angelo, “Obviously, Chekhov’s Gloveblades dictate a climactic moment of violence.”

I’m the oddball who watched the director’s followups The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer before finally getting to this, so it’s funny seeing all the contemporary reviews about the great promise Potrykus shows. Promise fulfilled, more specifically than they imagined: Josh gaming on the couch, all decade long.

The Stranger by the Lake issue of Cinema Scope makes a cameo in a convenience store magazine rack, and Potrykus got a feature story a few issues later.

Growing up, European cinema was always exotic and incredibly distant. I wasn’t prepared for the tables to turn. Suddenly I felt like we were the ambassadors of not so much American independent cinema, but of the Midwest as a landscape. Ape‘s empty city streets and mundane convenience-store bureaucracies were now the exotic.