Tag: 2010s
Martin Eden (2019, Pietro Marcello)
A really compelling and beautiful movie. I love the cuts to period (and treated/original) clips, not trying to fool anyone by matching footage, just a good mood-setting effect. Martin is a sailor living on a boat. After he stops a security guard from beating on a boy, the boy’s family thanks him with dinner, lends him French books, and in no time he’s hyped over Baudelaire and sweet on their daughter. They’re happy to contribute to this poor soul’s education but the thought that he could become one of them is too much. A few scenes later he’s a pale staggering wreck and successful anti-socialist author heading out on a US tour.
Made more sense than Lost and Beautiful, though it started to feel caught in a historical-literature doomed-love trap. The Jack London book has been filmed about ten times, including once with Glenn Ford, twice in Czech, and a previous six-hour Italian version. Lead actor Luca Marinelli is gonna play the title role in a Diabolik remake. Martin’s sister was in season 4 (!) of the Gomorrah series, and his writer friend Brissenden starred in Stealing Beauty and The Red Violin.
Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope:
… in freely adapting London’s novel, Marcello and Braucci have fashioned the title character into an emblem of the modern culture industry, whose neoliberal particulars London predicted with startling clarity.
The Day Shall Come (2019, Christopher Morris)
“Lenny’s a racist, but he’s one of the good ones.” Filipe’s short letterboxd review kept coming to mind, “the overall absurdism does have its moments and Morris’s anger comes through,” especially when the movie ends with cops and feds getting cheerfully promoted for destroying the lives of cool weirdos. Lead weirdo is Moses, who runs a black militant duck farm. Agent Anna Kendrick is looking for people to set up to take credit for saving the world from terrorism I guess. The feds determine Moses’s crew is no threat, but after Moses sells fake uranium to nazi cop Jim Gaffigan (!), the higher-ups get involved and everybody below goes to jail.
Moses presides:
Danielle Brooks (Clemency the same year) gives Santa a touch-up:
Afrika nails informant Kayvan Novak (Four Lions):
Synchronic (2019, Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead)
Anthony Mackie (currently having a superhero moment on TV) and his partner Jamie Dornan (Barb & Star) are New Orleans paramedics investigating a bad drug scene in a crazy long take. Mackie has an unusual brain tumor, dreams of flooding coffins, and as they discover a wave of deaths from the titular drug which lets you “experience time as it actually is” (?), Dornan’s teen daughter takes it and vanishes. Since Mackie is dying anyway and has a suspiciously coincidental pineal gland abnormality, he sets off trying to rescue his friend’s daughter from a series of pasts. “The past fucking sucks,” he accurately reports after every few-minutes-long jump back attempts to kill him. He even World-of-Tomorrows to the ancient tundra, very exciting. Things work out for the girl, if not for Mackie. More conventional than Benson & Moorhead’s other features, but as long as they keep making time-loop thrillers, I will keep watching them.
Our dudes go to the fair:
Bird Island (2019, Sergio Da Costa & Maya Kosa)
Sketch of a movie following a narcoleptic young man as he takes over for the retiring rat breeder at a bird sanctuary. Flute music over the rat intro gives unavoidable Rat Film flashbacks. Ordinarily I’d be all over a bird movie, but I’m torn on this one. Cutting a rat to bits with scissors isn’t great, but feeding it to an injured owl moments later compensates. Pulling shards from a swan’s wound isn’t great, even though the bird is being helped (Katy ditched at this point). Finally some escaped rats have their revenge on the injured birds (offscreen) and a little birdy has to be euthanized (onscreen). Next time let’s have more birds, less death, no humans.
No No Sleep (2015, Tsai Ming-liang)
I’d just rewatched Walker with Katy, hoping she’d want to go on a multi-part Walker journey before graduating to Stray Dogs, but nope that was quite enough for her, so I watched this recently-surfaced movie alone.
The walker is slower than ever, an even more hardcore viewing experience than the first movie.
Lovely urban digital photography.
Suddenly we are nude bathing with Miike (and Nightmare Detective) actor Masanobu Andô!
Cold Weather (2010, Aaron Katz)
Gail and Doug are siblings living together – he studied forensic science but has a job at an ice factory. Ice worker Carlos moonlights as a DJ, meets Doug’s ex Rachel when she’s in town then becomes concerned when she skips a date… and belatedly/charmingly this hangout movie swings into mystery mode, our three heroes investigating Rachel’s whereabouts with ever more brazen detective tricks.
Great music by local Oregonian Keegan DeWitt who later worked with Robert Greene and Alex Ross Perry. Carlos was later in We The Animals and Unsane, Gail starred in Infinity Baby and last year’s haunted house movie Girl on the Third Floor. My first movie by Katz, whose Gemini I missed a few years ago. Looking back at his contemporaneous interview in Cinema Scope, he describes the next two films he was writing, neither of which sounds like the next two films he made.
Vitalina Varela (2019, Pedro Costa)
Costa loves his very low-light digital cinematography (very cool, Lois Patiño-esque) with actors being extremely still, until he faces a challenge in the second half with a jittery Ventura – either the actor or his priest character is now afflicted with Parkinson’s. Everyone in this movie is desperate, all zombie-walking through spaces, only VV has any passion left. Her confrontation with Ventura is intense, and her big backstory monologue takes place on the toilet.
The Little Drummer Girl (2018, Park Chan-wook)
Park’s followup to The Handmaiden doesn’t reach the same heights as Stoker, his other English-language movie, held back by the writing and the six hours of buttoned-up spies underplaying to survive. Big actory dialogue though – by episode three I decided I wasn’t buying any of it, but it’s pretty fun so I watched to the end. On the plus side, cool sets and costumes and cars. Park can really throw light exactly where he needs to, is excellent at photographing multi-level architecture. Michael Shannon has a wonderful laugh, but we maybe hear it once, given he’s playing a tormented Israeli agent on a convoluted revenge mission. Most importantly, Florence Pugh has the most openly expressive face of any actor right now, so what’s she doing in a spy movie? Well, it’s complicated, but she plays an actress hired by Shannon to get caught up with the Palestinian bombers so they can eventually be trapped or killed. Kidnappings and love letters and multiple fake relationships as she becomes a terrorist-in-training… as far as U being who U pretend to be, I wonder if Mother Night is out on blu-ray.
Pugh dances with Alexander Skarsgård:
Pugh practices with evil mastermind Khalil:
