Even more so than the Bouquets there’s no point in getting screenshots of this one: a generic boy-and-girl plot composed of shots from other movies. This is usually pretty nice and clever, a cute time waster, except in the “Put the Blame on Mame” musical montage when it is electrifying, with clever lipsync matching. The first movie Katy has watched/finished with me since Ren Faire, which was the first since May.
Tag: 2010s
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017, Stephen Schible)
Environmentalism, nuclear power, aging and death and forgetting, found sounds as music, notes that sustain eternally and notes that don’t. He goes to the north pole to examine global warming effects, and records sounds of melting snow. Sakamoto has scored some great and less-great films, and not being a big soundtrack listener I don’t know his work well, so I started playing his albums (including the glitch-ambient Insen and cool 1980s Esperanto) in prep for the VR Big Ears concert which was quietly canceled after he passed away.
Krabi, 2562 (2019, Anocha Suwichakornpong & Ben Rivers)
Laconically follows a few main-ish characters: a visiting actor on an advertising shoot and an unrelated location scout, and locals such as a tour guide, a retired cinema worker, and a caveman. Their little barely-narratives intermingle with ghosts and legends and interviews with the real(?) people involved. I liked it – even more so after reading Michael Sicinski’s writeup.
Concorso Shorts 2019
Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019
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Carne (Camila Kater)
I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).
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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)
Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.
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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)
A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.
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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)
Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.
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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)
Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.
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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)
Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?
The Science of Fictions (2019, Yosep Anggi Noen)
Some poor guy “went to a forbidden place” involving a fake moon lander and got his tongue cut out, now thinks about outer space and moves in slow-motion (perfect scenario for a severe 4:3 b/w mastershot festfilm). Soon as he gets back his mom dies, but Siman works hard despite his speed condition, makes a small fortune, apparently travels through time (and through color + aspect ratios; I can’t tell when different scenes are set), and builds himself a spaceship-shaped house out of broken appliances.
The director’s latest is a D.O.A.-style mystery that nobody is watching on netflix. Lead guy starred in Noen’s Solo, Solitude, a couple other actors were in Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Later that night I unpaused the first episode of MST3K season 4 on my laptop, and the first line I heard was “poor bastard thinks he’s a spaceman,” which is proof that I’m living in a simulation.
Ham on Rye (2019, Tyler Taormina)
“Porking is the ultimate purpose.” Three teens get left behind from the pairing-up ritual set at a shabby restaurant and are now stuck for life while all their friends and classmates get raptured. It’s a metaphor, perhaps.
The people who made this are associated with the Topology of Sirens people and the Eephus people, and to me this is a cinematic universe worth exploring.
The director did a letterboxd writeup: “The good criticism and the bad criticism are both quite painful for me … Please don’t compare it to Yorgos Lanthimos.”
South Terminal (2019, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
It’s time for Locorazo 2019|2024, kicking off with a competition title about a doctor who becomes interesting to at least two groups of warlords. Ramzy Bedia is good as the doctor, and wherever this country is (they’re not quite saying it’s Algeria) I would get killed there immediately, so let’s not visit. His buddy who helps him escape at the end was Slimane Dazi of Only Lovers Left Alive, and his boss who does not help at all is Slimane’s Forbidden Room costar Jacques Nolot.
The Treasure (2015, Corneliu Porumboiu)
I was expecting pointless dreary toil – but remember, this is The Whistlers guy, not the Lazarescu guy or the Beyond the Hills guy – so they really do find treasure. Family man Costi is asked by neighbor Adrian who he barely knows if he’ll fund the neighbor’s treasure hunt in his family backyard. They hire a metal detector operator off the books and spend an entire day searching and digging. After they hit a metal box buried deep, the operator leaves and presumably calls the cops on them, but the Mercedes stock certificates within are grudgingly determined not to be of Romanian historical value and the men get to keep them. They’re millionaires, but Costi’s son is disappointed that the box just contained boring paper, so dad goes to a fancy jewelry store and buys enough pearls and gold to create a real treasure chest then lets the kids drag it all over the playground. Droll movie, and the end credits are somehow the best part as the camera swings up to the sun and blasts a Laibach song. Family man was also in Aferim! and Întregalde.
Began as a doc, but Porumboiu was disappointed that they didn’t find anything, so he kept the real setup and location, wrote a new ending, cast Adrian and the doc’s metal detector operator as themselves:
I was looking at the footage we shot and I had this strange feeling that we were lost in that garden, that it became this dark hole. In the beginning, the documentary was quite funny because Corneliu really screwed around with the machines and didn’t really know how they worked, so we were laughing – but after that, step by step, it grew sadder … [then in the fictional version] I wanted to have this sense of absurdity in the history. The characters speak about two revolutions, in the 1800s and the 1900s. I think Romania’s past is very fragmented. So they find something German … completely outside of their conception of the history of that place.
The Tree House (2019, Truong Minh Quy)
Suspicious noise on the soundtrack, sounds exactly like the interference I get when I put my digital audio recorder in the same pocket as my phone. Second movie in a row with suspected audio glitches? A slow art-fest-film that raises more questions than it answers. When there’s an unexplained scene of people sitting in a field eating a white paste wrapped in leaves I just wanted to know why they were wearing plaid shirts with collars instead of something more field suitable. Anthropological doc camerawork. I skipped ahead – I hereby invoke the Petrov’s Flu Precedent. I like the director’s narration voice, at least, sounded very sad. It did end up having a point, maybe, becoming self referential about filmmaking. Per Daniel Kasman, “an evocative but purposefully inconclusive essay on a precarious indigenous existence”