by ·Comments Off on Valley of the Gods (2019, Lech Majewski)

Tried to watch a movie at the airport soon after a major thunderstorm caused cascading delays, and I fortunately/accidentally chose one that is broken into numbered chapters, so I could watch a segment every time I found a seat after changing gates and terminals and flights. It’s either a very silly movie that takes itself quite seriously, or a major work of art that doesn’t take itself seriously at all – given my jumbled first viewing, it’s hard to tell.

0. Josh Hartnett (!) drives a long way through the desert, watches someone pour sand into an ATM, reaches his mountain destination, unloads a writing desk from his SUV and starts writing.

I: Tauros – Vagabond John Malkovich is hit by a car while fleeing, post-apple-theft, then enters a secret brick portal to ride a crystal elevator to a cloud-height mansion over the city, met by butler Keir Dullea… so Malkovich is clearly Batman, and Dullea is an aged-up 2001 astronaut.

II: Leetso – Corporate toady on TV debating a local chief who aims to protect people from land poisoning… Angry Guy (Power Ranger Steven Skyler) watching this at the bar has a public tantrum then goes home to abuse his wife, returns to briefly confront Hartnett.

III: Flight – Josh in the chase car as his wife (Katy-show regular Jaime Ray Newman) rides a glider, then domestic scene where she leaves him over his writing quirks and childlessness. They are very rich even though he’s an ad agency copywriter. The work psychiatrist says he should shake up his routine, so he tries mountain climbing with pots and pans tied to his legs, then he walks backwards through the city until tripping over Hobo Malkovich.

IV: Loverock – Angry Guy climbs a sweet mountain and makes love to it.

V: Blueblood – Josh activates the Wyze doorbell retina scanner at the cloud mansion’s golden door and it shows him a montage of his life.

VI: Stonechild – Angry Guy wants his son back from Elder Whitehair Guy (Joseph Runningfox of Ravenous), but the son now weighs a ton.

VII: Museum of Poverty – Skyfall‘s Bérénice Marlohe wants her son(?) back, was hired to pretend to be Malk’s dead wife. Back in the desert, Josh receives divorce papers on his car fax machine so sets the car on fire. Angry Guy punches him for starting fires on protected land, the most honestly grounded thing that happens in the movie.

VIII: Sand Painting – Josh meets the fake wife at the mansion party, where Malk catapults a fancy car off a cliff, and meets his own wife in the desert.

IX: Masters of Fiction – Malk speaks with Josh about his super-rich sadnesses while the Fake Wife attempts escape but gets caged in the basement with the other party guests. BTW, Josh was writing ad copy for Malk’s uranium-based power company that is exploiting Angry Guy’s Navajo lands, so all these things are somewhat related. Or maybe Josh has heatstroke and is supposed to be writing all this stuff at his desert desk.

X: When Mountains Walk – Keir’s giant 2001 space baby rampages through a major city while Malk play-acts death with an ornate mummy routine. Real good songs in this movie – a country tune at the bar, something Nick Cave-ish whenever Josh drives around. Some alarming images. Peter Sobczynski: “The film may be nuts but it certainly isn’t boring.”

by ·Comments Off on Now Something Is Slowly Changing (2018, Menna Laura Meijer)

Therapy and training sessions – no context, all different kinds of approaches, but consistent fixed-frame camera style and clean look to all the rooms. The people who touch sleeping pigs are a nice tie-in to Gunda.

“It is left up to the spectator to decide whether these mindfulness training programs and coaching courses symbolize something bigger.” This feels like one of those noncommercial docs that T/F found in a museum or academic project, like The Task or Segunda Vez.

by ·Comments Off on Saint Maud (2019, Rose Glass)

In the mood for some horror, but this was barely horror, just a character piece about a religious nut set to churchy mope music. Jennifer Ehle has spinal problems, Maud is hired to take care of her. But Maud is judgy and has a dark past and probably isn’t supposed to be there, fired for attacking Ehle halfway through the movie then develops stomach pains, like a weak, voiceover-filled First Reformed. Maud is bad at socializing, has major masochistic tendencies, ends up walking on nails then returning to Ehle’s house and stabbing her with scissors before setting herself on fire. Ehle blameless as usual, Morfydd Clark (Love & Friendship) overcooked along with the rest of the thing.

by ·Comments Off on Siberia (2019, Abel Ferrara)

“It’s impossible to live without reason.” A series of unreal scenarios.

After talking about being afraid of the sled dogs on trips to northern Canada with his dad when he was little, cut to Willem Dafoe bartending in northern Canada with sled dogs out back – I buy this, this is the most grounded the movie is gonna get. He’s watching a guy play video slots when they’re both suddenly attacked by dogs. A pregnant woman gets naked for him in front of her grandma. He goes into the basement and is suddenly sliding down a rock cliff… has conversations with other Willems Dafoe… by the time he sleds past a scene of mass executions towards a cave that becomes a madhouse of nudes, the movie still has no coherent reality and is nearly half over. Since there’s no real cause and effect, one scene bleeds or jerks into the next – he goes from tundra to desert to greenery, he has sex with a girl who turns into his mom, he sleeps outside then a fish talks to him. It almost has the unstuck-in-time feeling of Je T’aime X2, but it’s more unstuck in different Dafoe movies. There are a lot of bare-breasted women; Ferrara still knows what’s important. Maybe it’s meant to be a fragmented story of a haunted guy with guilt over his parents’ deaths and a failed marriage seeking solace in the black arts?

The best piece I’ve found is Neil Bahadur in In Review:

The figure of Dafoe’s character Clint himself seems to be on a quest to narrativize his own life, only just barely possessing a grasp on reality by journey’s end, having montaged his life’s experiences and ideas throughout the film’s runtime instead … The terror of Siberia (possibly Ferrara’s first true horror film) is in Clint’s back to nature resolve, only to discover that the dreams of the 60s have shattered and nature is nothing if not ruthless. The true horror is determinism — the entire film is driven by an anxiety that people cannot shake their past … not just in choice but even in their own genetic code.

by ·Comments Off on MS Slavic 7 (2019, Sofia Bohdanowicz)

“The effort of everything to become language…” Audrey unpacks in a hotel to church music, reads family letters in a library research room, then explains the nature of correspondence to someone unseen at a bar – more than halfway through the movie we’ll finally see this person, Audrey’s translator, who has a different take on the letters. Aunt Anya has a different take on Audrey’s entire project, having donated the letters in the first place, apparently without permission, and saying Audrey isn’t a proper curator. After the relative stillness of the previous films, this disagreement counts as a major action scene.

Revelations in the Cinema Scope cover story: Campbell was improvising some of the stories about her grandmother to the unseen translator. Nayman frames it well, the hook being that Canadian films don’t have sequels, then building up to the evolution from Never Eat Alone through Veslemøy’s Song to this one.

Campbell: One thing that I’m really excited about is that in the next film with Audrey we’re going to give her a friend.
Bohdanowicz: She needs a friend.

–
Also watched her short The Hardest Working Cat in Showbiz (2020). Dan Sallitt doesn’t have as good a narrator voice as Deragh Campbell, but tells a good story, tracing the film appearances of a cat who appeared in Tourneur’s Stranger on Horseback and supposedly many other movies over decades.

by ·Comments Off on Tempting Devils (2018, Jean-Claude Brisseau)

AKA Let The Devil Take Us Away

Young stranger Suzy meets blonde Camille who lives with Clara, not home yet, while the first two have a frank sex conversation one minute after meeting. This is Brisseau’s familiar apartment from Girl From Nowhere, his media collection on full display near a nice tube TV with a DVD player. Clara comes home and after their inevitable threesome, they open the door for a guy who is threatening them with a gun. This is Suzy’s ex Olivier, and Clara decides to rescue him from the cops and have sex with him until he completes his novel, living in another apartment with Tonton, an uncle who “causes hallucinations.”

Everyone opens up about their pasts and their feelings – it gets philosophical about family and relationships and sex and acting. Camille demonstrates her greenscreen photoshop art, winking within Brisseau’s homebound prosumer-grade cinema which uses the same effects for Tonton’s astral projections.

by ·Comments Off on Lux Aeterna (2019, Gaspar Noé)

Looong split screen dialogue, Béatrice Dalle doing most of the talking, with Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing “themselves.” They discuss experiences on movie shoots, death by fire, nudity, and creepy producers.

Next, a producer is telling bald DP Max to take over the movie from director Dalle before the production falls apart, and a cameraman is tasked with spying on her. Meanwhile, Karl from Love is wasting people’s time, trying to get them to sign onto his own film.

The shoot ends with Gainsbourg (and Fury Road’s Abbey Lee) tied to (digitally) burning stakes when the lighting goes haywire. She and Dalle, tormented from all sides, have breakdowns as the picture devolves into flashing blue and red fields.

by ·Comments Off on Laida Lertxundi and Akosua Adoma Owusu

Laida Lertxundi:

We Had the Experience but Missed the Meaning (2014)

Two sections, each introduced with half of the film title. First, a woman waters the plants indoors, then waters herself, stepping clothed into the shower. Somebody speaks of wishing her friend Veronica was a real sister over a mild garden scene superimposed over ocean waves. Second, driving slowly through an alley, and projecting images onto the pages of a book.

–
Live to Live (2015)

A desert mountain pan. EKG reading of her own self, heartbeat synched to a Rushmore soundtrack song. High altitude mountain clouds over drone music. Self consciously showing the filmmaking elements, with light flares as film runs out, sync sound clapper, changing exposure. Ends with a minute of flashing red and blue color fields over atonal sounds (“a recording of an orgasm, which was then put through a synthesizer wave”), so basically the same ending as Lux Aeterna.

–
025 Sunset Red (2016)

The mountains are red, then they are not. Someone hums through a harmonica for ages. I dig the film-damaged wild-west segment over electric guitar, but of course I would. I take it from the red paint and faded photographs over a Neilyoungian tune that a politician in the 70’s was murdered? Fortunately no, the politician is her father, former head of the Communist party and still alive.

–
Words, Planets (2018)

Squeezing a lemon to death… hand-mutilating filmstrips in a cactus patch, then screening the mutilations. Gentle film scratches play over an old pop song. A love-entanglement logic problem is read aloud. The sound recordist begins to appear in the shots – she is into messing with sound and sync in her films. Constructed in response to a Raul Ruiz essay.

–
A Film Comment interview reveals she is from the Basque country in Spain, her professors were Peter Hutton and James Benning and Thom Andersen and Peggy Ahwesh, and she had a formative encounter with Hollis Frampton’s Lemon. Andrew Busti is in the credits of these movies – I’ve seen his name around – and We Had the Experience was made with Fern Silva, with thanks to Raya Martin. Starting to think that every filmmaker knows each other.

–
Akosua Adoma Owusu:

Intermittent Delight (2007)

Katy recommended this, said it recalled Jodie Mack. This adds split screens and jittering camera, and it splices in scenes of the production of the textiles instead of the production of the film, the whole thing intercut with classic American TV ads.

–
Tea 4 Two (2006)

Black girls with a white doll advertised as Beautiful Chrissy wear horrible white plaster Halloween masks and straighten their hair so they can be beautiful too. A letterboxd commenter points out the Fanon connection.

–
Boyant (2008)

Oh wow, someone wearing a Trash Humpers Michael Jordan mask spends a long time prepping to jump into a swimming pool, while the audio plays insane lock grooves leading up to God’s Gonna Trouble the Water.

–
Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us (2019)

Travel footage, with quotes from W.E.B. Dubois in the 1920’s about Brazil not allowing Black visitors into the country. Confirmed that the title is a Michael Jackson reference. Owusu keeps cutting to a film artifact, a color field with a single sprocket hole, which weirdly ties the whole thing together. Learned from Sicinski that Pelourinho was “ground zero for the African slave trade in Brazil,” and that it’s referencing current right-wing racism in Brazilian politics as well as the past.