by ·Comments Off on The Plagiarists (2019, Peter Parlow)

“The whole lo-fi video look, wasn’t that a thing already in the 90s?”

Shot in 4:3 handheld SD video… Tyler and Anna’s car breaks down, older man Clip helps them, and the three hang out. Tyler is a freelance cameraman impressed by Clip’s vintage camera collection, and Anna is a writer impressed by a long story he tells, which later turns out to have been memorized from a book.

“It’s not quoting – there was no attribution!”
“No air quotes?”

Months later, Anna discovers the source of the quote, and nobody else can understand why she’s upset over this. Meanwhile, Tyler has lots of Opinions, and is obsessed with race, keeps bringing it up, cannot have a casual encounter with a Black person without becoming insufferable (my notes say “she should leave Tyler, everyone should, he won’t shut up”). They both vent at mutual friend (of theirs and Clip’s) Allison, who looks like they are stressing her out. Ends with Allison writing a long inspirational letter to Anna… which I’m guessing was cribbed, since after all, the movie title is plural.

Seems to be of academic interest, but it’s one of those indie movies that is purposely foul-looking and filled with annoying people. Instead of re-reading the Cinema Scope article that first drew me to it, I spent my research time trying to figure whether the director is related to Kathleen Parlow, the violinist discussed in Veslemøy’s Song. On letterboxd, V. Rizov says it’s “dead-on in its depiction of an endlessly fractious, mildly nightmarish couple” and Preston and Sicinski discuss the movie’s take(s) on authenticity.

by ·Comments Off on Four by Sky Hopinka

Visions of an Island (2016)

Portrait of an Aleutian island, interview of a local man with attention to language and landscape and animal life. Doubling and overlaps, adding and removing sounds, manipulating the colors (with a cool moment where you see the before and after). A town in the sky, the sea in the sky. Seals and jellyfish… this has got everything.

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Space Without Path or Boundary / Anti-Objects (2017)

Rough/archival sound recordings, and rough audio editing to go with it. Wilderness and city, with some of the most abstract color-field, motion-smear and hand-marked imagery I’ve seen yet from Hopinka. Focused less around descriptive text like the last one, more conceptual.

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Fainting Spells (2018)

A whole different sort of thing. Letters written to a friend (who sometimes passes out) scroll from right to left, while the imagery ranges from vertical landscapes seen through an eyeball lens to invisible hooded persons against abstract backdrops to roads along burned-up hills to all sorts of landscapes.

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Lore (2019)

At band practice playing a Bo Diddley song, but more usually, on an overhead projector shuffling through colored films, a poetic correspondence spoken throughout.

by ·Comments Off on The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps (2019)

“If you do keep drinking, you will die.” Opens with Martin in the hospital, then hangs out as he curates a Chills exhibit from the lifelong collection of mementos and toys in his home, and narrates his own chronological Chills history through his clipping and media archives. A pattern is set: his band makes a record, tours, breaks up, he starts a new band. As always with these things, it assumes the audience cares most about the glory days, not the recent past, so we skip Silver Bullets and go straight into the recording of Snow Bound. Some insight into major label finance: Warner Bros says he owes them $425,000. Very average rock doc, assumes the viewer already believes Martin to be a tormented genius, and doesn’t bother trying to convince newcomers. Some nice vintage concert video, at least.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Daïchi Saïto

Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (2009)

Time-lapse impressions of trees, or the light through and around trees, gives way to flicker impressions, colored like abstract stained glass, gives way to fast smeary movement, the trees now only occasionally recognizable as trees. Set to a manic violin drone by Malcolm Goldstein.

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Engram of Returning (2016)

More black than image in this one, the picture coming through in snatches… maybe a snowy hillside, or a body of water, the camera shutter pulsing with the tide. Halfway through we get superimposed landscapes, then things break down very colorfully towards the end. I like that his movies shift from one kind of indescribable thing at their beginnings into completely different kinds of things. Buzzing insect of a soundtrack by Jason Sharp (that was a saxophone??).

The description calls it a “metaphysical travelogue,” fair enough. Saito cofounded a Canadian film collective with a pretty good manifesto. I also re-read Jordan Cronk’s Cinema Scope piece, which is too complex to excerpt here.

by ·Comments Off on Crawl (2019, Alexandre Aja)

Haley (Kaya Scodelario of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights) is a student swimmer who stupidly drives into a hurricane evac zone to find her stupid father Barry Pepper, who is trapped in the crawlspace of his house because the storm flooding brought alligators. It’s a fight for survival and escape, and you assume the body count will be low, but we get looters then cops then rescuers, all of whom become gator chow. Not impressed by the characters or dialogue, but the storm looked cool and the lighting was excellent.

From the two writers of Carpenter’s The Ward. I haven’t caught up with Aja in a while – after Haute Tension and The Hills Have Eyes Remake came Kiefer Sutherland horror Mirrors, horror-comedy Piranha Remake, Last Ten Minutes entry Horns, then a psychological thriller nobody saw.

Rescuers: Down Under

by ·Comments Off on The Assistant (2019, Kitty Green)

Portrait of a hostile work environment. Full of small insults and ironies: she gets a papercut opening a dinner invitation from the White House. The two guys sharing her office space only pitch in to help when she has to write apology emails to the boss (“I won’t let you down again”). Interesting approach to never show the monster boss, and to follow someone who’s an indirect victim, not one of the casting-couch hotties or the girl from Idaho (the actress actually from Norway) who shows up to work with no experience and is being put up in a swanky hotel where the boss keeps visiting. For a while I thought the boss’s activities would remain a background buzz and never be directly addressed, but no, her conversation with a real wormy HR guy (the 2005 Mr. Darcy) is the movie’s centerpiece. The movie isn’t Akermanian exactly, but it’s more Akermanian than most films. Star Julia Garner is from Ozark and Sin City 2.

A.S. Hamrah in The Baffler: “The Assistant is the only film in which I’ve seen the shame-filled, eating-in-a-Manhattan-bodega aspect of life in New York City portrayed so acutely, or at all.”

by ·Comments Off on Doctor Sleep (2019, Mike Flanagan)

“Running away from myself, I guess.” From the moment Ghost Scatman appeared to dump exposition, we know this is gonna be a big obvious movie. This was my token stinker of the month, which I watched in segments while falling asleep after having watched a proper movie… most of my notes consist of the timecode where I left off, and variations on “movie is so bad.”

“I know that head of yours is like a radio sometimes” – nice True Stories reference. Shining-era flashback actors are recast, and present-day Danny (Ewan McGregor) teams up with his 12-step sponsor (Cliff Curtis of M. Night’s Last Airbender) and a young psychic named Abra. Meanwhile, King turns this into a mini-Stand, the villains also gathering. We get an intro to Rose The Hat’s vampire gang who feeds on shining-kids when Rose (Rebecca Ferguson of the Missions: Impossible) recruits Snakebite Emily Alyn Lind (who was in Enter The Void when she was six, oh my) outside of the Plaza Theater (!) and we meet the others, led by Carel “it is happening again” Struycken, who soon dies of shining-starvation.

Billy dies when our heroes ambush the baddies, killing most of them, then Danny leads Rose to the Overlook to trap her somehow. He chats with Lloyd the bartender doing a mild Jack impression, played by the E.T. kid (another Spielbeg-Kubrick crossover so soon after Ready Player One). Danny blows up the hotel (what, again?) to kill the vengeful ghosts that killed Rose, I guess. Think I heard a Dark Tower reference… definitely noticed one house address was 1980 (ugh). Real TV-movie energy with very talky villains – the actors seem game, so I’ll blame this on King and Flanagan.

by ·Comments Off on About Endlessness (2019, Roy Andersson)

Vignettes, sometimes connected… or maybe they’re all connected, but since they’re all populated with similarly pale-faced middle-aged people, I can’t recognize recurring characters. A chill, pleasant-voiced female narrator redundantly tells us the basic idea of each scene – I think she might be the person flying over the city in the opening scene / poster shot.

People are sad or tormented or drunk. Not sure it’s all happening in the same era – I was not expecting Hitler’s bunker, for instance. Not sure it all adds up to anything either – “I saw a man who had trouble with his car,” then geese fly by, a choir rises, movie ends. Maybe it’s less of a movie than a mournful motion painting to quietly contemplate.

Michael Sicinski on Letterboxd:

Apart from the major throughline of the priest (Martin Serner) who has lost his faith — a problem that a totally-administered society has no time for — there is a complete lack of narrative progression in this film. One could take it as a formal return to Andersson’s commercial-advert style, or a series of short films yoked together under a general theme … we are intended to experience them not as sequential but as a core sample of humanity … his title is a clue: this is a film that could conceivably go on forever.

by ·Comments Off on One Cut of the Dead (2017, Shin’ichirô Ueda)

A really cleverly constructed movie, would be fun to watch again. Either I never read much about this, or I’d forgotten, but I assumed the first half of the movie was the entire movie, so the end credits appearing halfway through came as a surprise, and the second half was pure joy.

Starts out with a film crew making a zombie movie, which is already going badly when they’re invaded by actual zombies and have to fight to survive – all in a single take. The young leads are struggling as the director unloads on them for being inauthentic. They chill with the makeup artist (who happens to be studying self-defense) when the crew outside begins to get attacked. The director is so excited – finally, something real – and runs around in manic glee with a handheld camera. A rooftop showdown ends with the female lead killing her costar and the director with an axe. The single-take idea is cute, and it’s all timed well, but the movie has poor color and lighting…

But the second half has normal editing, and reveals that this isn’t even a horror movie… the director is really a director, taking on an assignment for a one-take zombie horror, the lead actress and makeup artist from the first half are actually his family. On shoot day for the movie, the table read goes badly, lead actress refuses to do anything gory, two actors are in a car accident and can’t come to set, and the cameraman gets uselessly drunk. So, family and crew fill in as actors, and everyone improvises new lines and situations while it’s all being filmed live. All the cameras and identity shifts (an actor plays an actor playing a zombie who becomes a zombie) must have been hard to keep straight.

This was barely even supposed to be a movie – a low-budget workshop film shot in 8 days that turned out amazing. Hardly anyone has seen Ueda’s other features, though Matt Lynch saw his follow-up Special Actors and called it disappointing. The Director followed up with a kids movie, and his daughter did a voice in that Xenoblade game I’m always playing.