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.

by ·Comments Off on The Last of the Mohicans (1992, Michael Mann)

A very historical-fiction adventure, not my favorite sort of thing, and I’m pretty sure I prefer Late Mann, beginning around Ali. The last of his theatrical features I hadn’t seen, though half of those are due a rewatch. That leaves The Jericho Mile… the proto-Heat L.A. Takedown… some early doc shorts that are probably unavailable… and I’ll probably never get to the TV series (Miami Vice, Crime Story, Vega$). This was about the twentieth filmed version of the novel, but the credits specify that it’s a remake of the 1930’s Randolph Scott film.

The Mohawk are joining the Brits fighting against the French, but the French have got Magua (Wes Studi) who has a huge vendetta against a Brit major whose daughter Madeleine Stowe (12 Monkeys) falls for Mohican DDL. They’re all trapped in a fort under siege, led by a tyrant major, who has a falling out with the other major (I noted that both majors are terrible).

I only knew two things about this from the advertising: that DDL is the last of the Mohicans (it’s actually his friend), and that the movie’s about him looking for a woman after telling her to stay alive, and that whatever may occur, he will find her (he finds her two scenes later, on the same day).

by ·Comments Off on The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019, Armando Iannucci)

Hey, I remember this one, it had some bright colors in it. Not like Bridgerton-bright, but pretty nice. According to the ol’ blog, I watched another adaptation of this with Katy 13 years earlier, which neither of us remembers.

Cowritten with Simon Blackwell (Veep, Breeders) and Charles Dickens (Scrooged, Oliver & Company). Dev Patel starred, Ben Whishaw the villain, Hugh Laurie and Benedict Wong were in there somewhere.