by ·Comments Off on The Three-Sided Mirror (1927, Jean Epstein)

Three women are into one guy – I’m not sure if he loves and leaves each one of them in series, or if he flits between each in his suicidally fast car. Pearl is a rich socialite, Athalia a rich artist, and Lucie an ordinary city girl, and he affects different personas around each: a strong tyrant type, a weaker type, and a caring type – until his reckless driving finally catches up with him.

Our dude, carefree:

I’d forgotten most of the plot by the next day, rewatching scenes now to remind myself, was just paying attention to style – Epstein bringing his great flair for composition and editing and overlapping images to the kind of melodrama he was making earlier in the decade. It feels like he wanted the climactic speed-and-death montage to go on forever.

Athalia worrying aloud to a friend:

Based on a novel by white supremacist Paul Morand, who also adapted Don Quixote for GW Pabst… Lucie appeared in Renoir’s The Sad Sack, and our main dude starred in a possibly-lost 30’s version of Judex.

by ·Comments Off on Mangrove (2020, Steve McQueen)

Frank (Shaun Parkes of the current Lost in Space reboot) is the restaurant owner and social center who gets all the soulful closeups, Altheia (Letitia Wright) is the requisite movie star, a pregnant Black Panther, Darcus (Malachi Kirby of the latest Roots reboot) is a self-representing defendant who gets all the best speeches, and Barbara (Rochenda Sandall, who used to play a character named McQueen) has the best hair, and a spiel about how the children are our future. That leaves whiteys Jack Lowden (Dunkirk) as their lawyer who looks like Austin Powers’ buttoned-up brother, and Sam Spruell (Russian baddie of Taken 3) as the racist pig leader.

Kirby:

First half is in the streets and the restaurant, figuring out how to make a life without getting hassled by the pigs (impossible), second half has real based-on-a-true-court-case energy, as indeed it was. The lines aren’t as head-smacking as they were in Widows, and McQueen finds some evocative visuals every so often, but mostly powering through this to get to Lovers Rock.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q4/2020

TV roundup for the second half-ish of 2020

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On Cinema at the Cinema seasons 1-? (201?)

On Labor Day, since I’d already seen Bisbee ’17 I watched season one of On Cinema on the Adult Swim roku app while repainting the furniture… then I drank some, and watched seasons two and three? Or maybe also season four… or just season two, I don’t know how to figure this out.

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Search Party season 3 (2020)

Dory and the gang become absurd anti-celebrities during their murder trial. We know she is found guilty because of the flash-forward intro of the first episode, but this turns out to be a good fakeout – after being declared innocent, she’s kidnapped by a maniac. Not my favorite season – I’ve never loved court dramas, and the final episode is too Seinfeld, but I’m still here for whatever’s next.

Newbies: Dory’s rookie lawyer is Shalita Grant of the series You, and Drew’s lawyer is Louie Anderson. The all-business prosecutor is Groundling Michaela Watkins, lately of Brigsby Bear and Sword of Trust. Wallace Shawn is a shady businessman who gets Chantal arrested by the FBI.

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Russian Doll season 1 (2019)

“This is like The Game. I’m Michael Douglas!” Writing this up is a lotta pressure because since finishing this I’ve watched time-loop movies Tenet and I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Bill & Ted Face the Music, and it seems like there are a lotta details in this four-hour existential comedy that I’ve forgotten. Natasha Lyonne keeps dying then waking up back at her birthday party hosted by Greta Lee (Inside Amy Schumer) with “Gotta Get Up” playing, and tries to discover why this is happening, then runs into fellow time-looper Alan (Charlie Barnett of TV’s You). I think it’s possible that everything gets fixed at the end, but maybe not since a second season is rumored.

The slimy-Cagney-lookin guy she goes home with is Yul Vazquez… her psychiatrist is Elizabeth Ashley of Treme… her drug dealer is Waris Ahluwalia (The Life Aquatic)… Tinfoil Kevin is a regular at the bodega run by Ritesh Rajan (Mowgli’s dad in the latest Jungle Book), and her mom in flashback is Chloe Sevigny. Co-created by Amy Poehler, directors include Leslye Headland (Terriers) and Jamie Babbit (But I’m a Cheerleader).

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The Tick season “two” (2019)

“Destiny is on the phone. It’s a party line and we’re all invited!”

Such good writing – even if I saw some of the season-long story endings coming, each episode is full of pleasures. Dot discovers she has powers, can see the near future, and their father-in-law Walter has been an agent under deep cover. Tick’s new nemesis/partner is a bank-robbing lobster. Aegis Commander Ty Rathbone, who has a black-hole heart, recruits Arthur and Tick and Lint to the Flag Five, which is sabotaged by Dr. John Hodgman. Superion spends a few episodes depressed on the moon deciding whether to spin the earth backwards to reverse time. Lint’s sidekick is a computers/weapons whiz named Edgelord.

Writers include original Tick comics creator Ben Edlund, two Detective Pikachu writers, two writers of teen comedy On My Block, and Kit Boss (King of the Hill). Directors include a DP of Dexter and True Blood, a Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Black-ish director with over a hundred other credits, the script supervisor of Mallrats and Dogma, the editor of Roger & Me, and an AD on Buffalo Soldiers. Flexon is on the new Snowpiercer series, the Aegis paperwork twins are in The Assistant.

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Documentary Now! season 2 (2016)

The Bunker is a War Room parody, Hader doing a southern accent.

Juan Likes Rice and Chicken is a celebrity-chef doc about a difficult little restaurant that makes a basic dish but with impossibly high standards.

Location Is Everything is a Spalding Gray parody! Lennon Parham (personal advisor to Veep) plays his girl Ramona, who is onstage refuting all his stories.

Globesman is of course Salesman, which I’ve still never seen, but I doubt the original involves a rival atlas salesman who stalks and torments our protagonists.

Final Transmission is a really specific Stop Making Sense parody with Armisen as Byrne, Hader as Tina, Maya Rudolph and Jon Wurster, I am in heaven. Why did they stick a Tom Waits parody into this?

“As a bald kid with a dead dad, movies became my refuge.” Double episode Mr. Runner Up is doing The Kid Stays in the Picture, which I didn’t realize, about an awards-obsessed movie producer who’s only constitutionally able to create schlock, mostly starring his unfunny Italian comic friend Enzo.

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Primal season 1 (2019-2020)

Gruesome and lovely. Caveman and Dinosaur each saw their families eaten by predators, but found each other as friends and protectors. Perfect show, with one heck of a finale – introduction of a woman with metal implements and a spoken language, collapsing even more of history together. I think of Genndy as the Dexter’s Lab/Powerpuff guy, but everyone involved in this also worked on Samurai Jack, which I probably should not have skipped.

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Barry season 2 (2019)

Maybe less fun than season one, but deeper, as Barry tries to control his rages and stop killing people, and leads the acting class in experimenting with telling personal truths. In the end, of course, he falls into a massive rage and kills many people, Fuches turns on him tragically and repeatedly, and the people who cop out on personal truth and tell lies are rewarded for it.

Noho Hank’s Chechen bestie Cristobal (Michael Irby of True Detective s2) forms an unstable alliance with Ester, head of a Burmese crime family (a deadpan Patricia Fa’asua). Sally’s abusive ex Sam (Joe Massingill of Die Hard 5) returns to stalk her. Gene tries to reconcile with his estranged son Leo (Andrew Leeds of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist), and is told that Barry killed his girlfriend Janice. Janice’s ex-partner Loach (John Pirruccello, a Twin Peaks s3 deputy) tracks down Barry and gets Fuches to wear a wire. And most wonderfully, the Loach plot ends in the one time Barry and Fuches work together all season, when Loach “hires” Barry to kill the guy sleeping with Loach’s wife, a stoned Tae Kwon Do master (stunt/action regular Daniel Bernhardt) with a feral daughter.

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Also sampled quite a few shows:

– Star Trek Lower Decks seems bad
– Central Park seems good, going to see if Katy wants to watch it (we still haven’t returned to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend)
– Black Jesus is good but I dunno if it’s got a whole season in the tank.
– Infinity Train looks imaginative, but for kids, not for me.
– Los Espookys seems up my alley, would watch more.

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And of course I watched a pile of concerts and livestreams and other things, including Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer, which probably would’ve gone to theaters, had there been theaters.

Waco Brothers:

Robyn & Emma:

Cave:

Pigface:

by ·Comments Off on Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)

My notes include things like “Ives leads red team splinter group to recover algorithm,” which didn’t even make sense at the time, so I’m skipping the attempted plot summary of this cinematic Sator square. Branagh is an arms dealer helping execute attacks from the future, smuggling in reverse-kinetic objects and backwards-moving people. His abused wife is Debicki, the helpless woman only concerned for her child’s safety while the real men do all the work. Those men are serious spy-dude Washington and his chill buddy Pattinson. Bits of exposition via Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Martin Donovan! I took some advice and just watched the hell out of this (with subtitles) without insisting that it make any sense – though I guessed early on that anyone half-glimpsed in the first half of the movie would turn out to be our reversed heroes in the second half – and had a good time. It never stops talking utter nonsense for 150 minutes, and none of the action scenes were as impressive as expected. Michael Sicinski on Patreon: “But then again, I’ve never seen a building un-blow-up on the top, only to re-blow-up on the bottom. That was cool.”

by ·Comments Off on Terence Nance shorts, vol. 1

Found these on Criterion, whoopee!

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No Ward (2009)

Short doc focused on hurricane refugees in Texas, dreaming of life in nearby suburban Carrollton. Cocorosie and Four Tet provide glitchy drone music that wouldn’t be out of place in Tenet.

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Their Fall Our All (2014)

A long way from the doc, with beautiful photography and sci-fi editing, transporting a few women and girls between realms. Mirrors reflect different people, identities get mixed up, and there’s a subplot involving a senator being blackmailed. Really good.

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You and I and You (2015)

An apparently single-take video to two songs by The Dig (not the “why don’t you believe, believe in your own god” Dig), a couple and their kid walking along a road, accosted by different mystical groups until they’ve been separated and transformed.

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Jimi Could Have Fallen from the Sky (2017)

“Nance humor is so chaotic,” writes a letterboxd reviewer. An imagined origin story of Jimi Hendrix in seven minutes, with a bunch of actors (incl. Nance, a purple-haired kid, a skydiver) playing Jimi, with dance scenes and audio trickery. Probably the only great biopic.

by ·Comments Off on Sibyl (2019, Justine Triet)

This Triet was a real treat… hmu if you need pull-quotes for the 8K reissue. Snappy movie with shocking editing, scenes overlapping, no time wasted – a temporal pincer as complex as Tenet but an hour shorter and possible to follow.

Sibyl is Virginie Efira (of Elle, and soon Benedetta), a therapist cutting back on her case load so she can write novels, then actress Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color) shows up with all kinds of twisted drama (she’s pregnant by her famous costar Gaspard Ulliel, who’s supposed to be with their director Sandra Hüller). Eventually Adele will only speak to Sibyl, so the film production flies her out to Stromboli as a go-between. Of course Sibyl is stealing all this for her writing, which the movie keeps slipping inside, shifting all the roles and drama, while in reality Sibyl is losing her sobriety and her family.

Triet’s Age of Panic and Victoria also got good reviews. This played Cannes 2019 in competition with ten other films I’ve now seen – it’s easier to catch up when there’s no Cannes 2020 to distract me.

by ·Comments Off on David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020, Spike Lee)

A fun concert movie of a Byrne show, starring the man himself in fine vocal form, a full barefoot band, and two excited theater kids. Unfortunately it’s impossible to watch this without comparing with Stop Making Sense, the best concert film ever made, especially when they keep performing the same songs, giving me flashbacks to those performances, the staging, the lighting from 35 years earlier. Byrne even does his signature dance moves during “Once in a Lifetime,” which doesn’t work great for me, despite being a crowd pleaser… in fact, I realized during “Burning Down the House” that it’s mirroring SMS‘s decision to not show the audience except in occasional scraps. I made note of some fave songs… “I Zimbra” is very fun, the first song with the entire band, and I need to revisit “Everybody’s Coming to My House” and “Toe Jam.”

Byrne with his understudy and Mary Jo Pehl:

Leading the barefoot band:

by ·Comments Off on Millennium Mambo (2001, Hou Hsiao-hsien)

The opposite of what I just said about Undine (“thought the overall structure of the movie only kinda worked, but moment-to-moment I was quite thrilled to be watching it”) – in this case I didn’t appreciate any particular scene at the time, but ended up thinking it was great.

Set ten years in the future, telling a story about the past (then-present) year 2001, when raves were still in fashion. The Assassin star Shu Qi is Vicky, stuck with her abusive and controlling man Hao-hao (Duan Chun-hao of Long Day’s Journey Into Night). She’s with rich Jack (Hou lifer Jack Kao) for a while, but movie is a cycle – I like the pulsing music under all the action that sometimes rises and takes over. Beautifully mobile camera, I dig how it moves from outside to inside Jack’s place via security cam. I guess I’ve seen half of Hou’s major films now, but I still don’t have a strong sense of what he’s on about.

by ·Comments Off on Undine (2020, Christian Petzold)

Johannes breaks up with mythological creature / freelance historian Undine (Paula Beer of Transit), and a few minutes later professional diver Franz Rogowski introduces himself, and they have a romantic moment that gets them banned for life from the local cafe.

Reverse angle of the poster shot:

Johannes tries to inject himself back into the mix, and gets killed for his efforts, while Franz was true but unfortunate, and gets resurrected.

Franz and coworker Maryam Zaree:

I need the relevance of the city planning lecture stuff explained to me, and thought the overall structure of the movie only kinda worked, but moment-to-moment I was quite thrilled to be watching it, if only as Transit-afterglow.