by ·Comments Off on The Lighthouse (2019, Robert Eggers)

Watching The Shallows, I was delighted that Blake Lively and the movie allow their injured seagull to survive to the end, but now I realize this avian assistance was the key to Blake’s survival, because Rob Pattinson’s luck turns bad when he cruelly murders an injured gull, and after a descent into pain and horror and madness, he ends up gull food. Let these sister films be warnings to any who would wish harm to our seagull friends.

Eggers sounds like a delightful interview subject:

My understanding is that they were rescue birds that were injured and rehabilitated, and after that rehabilitation couldn’t really survive back in the wild again. So giving them things to do makes them happy. So they were very eager to learn how to fly on a windowsill, peck a windowpane three times, and jump off, and then get a little food reward. Actually the seagulls were incredibly easy to work with, unlike a certain black goat that, I mean, I have no fond memories of working with.

Set in 1890ish Maine, Rob Pattinson is on the run under another man’s name, spilling his beans to crusty old Willem Dafoe, as the two of them tend a lighthouse for a season. Unclear how much time passes, or what is real vs. hallucinated, but it’s all very beautifully shot, and if this Eggers makes another dark film about witches or lighthouses I will go see it.

by ·Comments Off on Ash Is Purest White (2018, Jia Zhang-ke)

Another Zhao Tao movie set in three distinct time periods with multiple aspect ratios, this one with an unusual synth score. Qiao is with small-time gangster Bin (Fan Liao of Black Coal, Thin Ice), and after she does five years in prison for firing a gun to save his life during an attack, Bin hides from her, leaving his new girl to explain his absence.

Also there is ballroom dancing – that’s Bin with the mustache wearing all black:

Interesting sidetrack where she spontaneously runs off with a man running a UFO tourism company. On the train he confesses he only runs a convenience store, then she abandons him while he sleeps. Back where she started a decade later, she has internalized the gangster ethos and runs a mahjong parlor, while a pathetic, stroke-crippled Bin has slinked back into her life, only to walk out again after she helps him back on his feet. The final shot of Qiao searching for him as seen through her security system has got nothing on Zhao dancing alone in the snow, but what does? I haven’t loved any of Jia’s pre-2010 films so far, but I’m glad I stuck with him, because A Touch of Sin and Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White have made him one of my favorites of this decade.

James Lattimer in Cinema Scope:

Alongside settings and structural conceits, many of these moods and registers seem to have wandered in from Jia’s other works: the rapid-fire martial-arts stylings of A Touch of Sin; the backdrop of Datong familiar from Unknown Pleasures; the three-part structure and repeated pop songs from Mountains May Depart; or the exquisite melancholy of 24 City, to name just a few, while the presence of Zhao Tao, whose wonderfully understated acting style reaches new heights here, equally conjures up all the other characters she’s played over the years. Of all the references to Jia’s cinematic past, the most explicit ones come from Still Life, as Qiao takes the same ferry down the Yangtze as in the previous film, wearing the same shade of yellow and carrying the same water bottle her spiritual cousin Shen Hong did all those years ago, with the same UFO later passing overhead. Despite these similarities, though, everything is different, as what used to be the present has now become the past. This change is visible both in Zhao Tao’s face and in one of the images shared by both films, a shot of a sign on the river bank showing the projected level of the reservoir. One points to a future yet to happen, the other to a past that only exists in memory, the original now buried under so much water.

Geography: they start in Datong in Shanxi, some four hours west of the center of Beijing. After prison, she travels to Fengjie in Hubei province – this makes nearly a right angle south of Xian and east of Chengdu – crossing the Yangtze halfway there. The man on the train is headed for Karamay in Xinjiang, way the hell in the northwest.

Fengjie:

by ·Comments Off on The Wolf House (2018, Joaquí­n Cociña & Cristóbal León)

Maria flees her town and moves into a house in the woods along with two pigs that she transforms into children and names Pedro and Ana. I think they’re hiding from a wolf outside, and after they almost die in a house fire Pedro drinks honey and turns white, and Ana swallows a songbird and gets a golden voice, then Maria is rescued after they try eating her… I dunno, I was too busy marveling at the look of this thing.

Smeary, drippy painting inside a real (model?) house, with doorways and props. But painted scenes will overwhelm doors and props as if they weren’t there, then form free-standing stop-motion models within the room, 2D artworks interacting with 3D objects, the wall art constantly shifting and the models always making and unmaking themselves, styles of the characters changing. Rustling and rubbing sounds accompany all the visual shifting, wires and cellophane hold the models in place, and I think it’s all fluid transitions with no traditional editing.

I’d forgotten about the brief TV-footage framing story, but did wonder why Maria sometimes spoke German. Apparently this is a fairy-tale reference to a notorious German-led cult and Pinochet torture compound, active in Chile for decades.

Cartoon Brew:

During the research process, the filmmakers discovered that the German members of the community used to call their Chilean neighbors ‘schweine’. This led them to conceive of the two children in the story as piglets, and depict their progressive transformation into Aryan humans as an ironic joke aping the community’s racial ideology.

Walker has an interview with the directors, including some amazing production details, and their self-set rules for animation and sound design:

We had a literary script, with the dialogues of the film, a really simple storyboard, basically with one image per scene … Our day-to-day work was to find a way to connect one image with the other … The specific actions of each scene were improvised.

by ·Comments Off on Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017, Mouly Surya)

“You’re pretty, but alone.” Marlina’s husband is freshly dead and sitting upright in the living room when a man comes to inform her that seven men are coming soon for her and her money and livestock, to settle the husband’s debts. They turn out to be very matter-of-fact criminals, discussing logically who should rape her first as others take the animals away. This is all just business as usual, which is why they don’t see it coming when she poisons most of them with chicken soup and beheads another, then goes on the run.

Marlina takes the severed head, teams up with pregnant friend Novi, hijacks a truck, and dodges two head-hunting motorcycle men, while being stalked by a decapitated ghost. After an anticlimactic visit to a police station, there’s a machete showdown back at the house, the women victorious.

Pretty perfect-looking specimen of International Art Cinema, with wonderful Western-movie music, sparely used. Seemed unsatisfying though – guess I was expecting the ghost to be more prominent when watching this at the tail end of SHOCKtober. As far as 2019 rape/revenge movies go, I enjoyed it much more than The Nightingale.

by ·Comments Off on Good Manners (2017, Marco Dutra & Juliana Rojas)

In a fancy Brazilian apartment building in 2010, young, pregnant, white Dona Ana hires Clara, a woman with no experience or references, as nanny on instinct, because she does this:

The two start sleeping together, but it turns out both women are behind on their rent, Ana’s friends and family don’t speak to her anymore, and she gets cat-eyed and bitey on nights of full moons. Finally a were-baby bursts out of Ana’s belly, killing her, and after weighing her options, Clara grabs it and runs.

The movie has been pretty typically shot, with fine lighting and color even in the dim scenes, but it adds some new flavors around the halfway point. Ana’s were-pregnancy backstory is told with still drawings, the child is probably a CG-enhanced puppet, and as Clara makes her escape, a homeless woman sings a warning song.

The second half jumps to present day, and the main stylistic addition is a CG wolf-boy that’s not quite there. But first, a bunch more plot, as Joel is turning seven, and starts to rebel against his restrictive diet and being chained in a dungeon on nights of full moon. Clara is a busy nurse now, so Joel is alone and the landlady feeds him meat, then things spiral. He sneaks into the mall at night and rips his best friend to shreds, then sneaks off to the school dance and almost kills his girlfriend before mom intervenes with a gun. She again can’t bear to kill him or leave him behind, so the movie ends beautifully with them preparing to take on a mob of angry neighbors together.

I had a flashback to this movie during Parasite:

A Locarno prizewinner, playing alongside Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun and The Wandering Soap Opera and A Skin So Soft, a bizarre lineup. Isabél Zuaa (Clara) has got range, was in last year’s anthology slavery horror The Devil’s Knot. The writer/directors have been working (mostly together) since the 1990’s, with some shorts and one musical comedy horror about gravediggers.

by ·Comments Off on Rubber (2010, Quentin Dupieux)

“No reason.”

Dupieux’s third feature, made between Steak and Wrong Cops. The Mr. Oizo music is always a plus in these, and at first I thought it was excellent until anyone opened their mouth, and it became too self-conscious about its own wackiness. In the end, I think it’s his most watchable movie, even as it breaks all the rules of storytelling.

First victim:

And last:

Cops led by Stephen Spinella of Ravenous plus a briefcase-toting accountant (Mr. Show’s Button Gwinnett) hand out binoculars to a group of spectators, who view the birth of the Scanners-powered killer tire, then all die from poisoned turkey – except for one veteran-looking wheelchair dude played by Wings Hauser (of Beastmaster II and Watchers III) who doesn’t eat.

Spinella and Button, showing that none of this is real:

Wings continues to observe the carnage for three days, and when the cops rig a dummy with explosives to trap the tire, he busts into their part of the movie to tell them it’s a stupid idea. “It’s not the end! He’s been reincarnated as a tricycle, c’mon!” The tricycle blows up Wings then continues with a growing tire army towards Hollywood.

The director is hilariously unpretentious in Cinema Scope: “Obviously there is no meaning … Obviously I made a movie about a living tire so I want to have fun.”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Buster (2018, Peter Bogdanovich)

Rounding up some of the foremost comics and filmmakers, P-Bog opens with the greatest authority on film history – himself, of course. It’s extremely easy to find people with nice things to say about Buster Keaton, and to fill the rest of a 100 minute documentary with highlight clips from Keaton’s terrific films, and P-Bog does exactly that. In fact, the whole thing begins to feel like an advertisement for Buster and his great features – and it is, produced by Cohen Media Group, who is currently releasing the Keaton films on blu-ray, and also happens to own the Landmark theater where this doc played. But even if P-Bog doesn’t turn in something on the level of his epic Tom Petty doc, this was a fun way to revisit some Keaton. He peppers the “sad later years” section with highlights from Keaton’s forgotten advertisements and cameos, and puts this section in the middle of the film, so he can start strong with the shorts, and end strong with the features.

by ·Comments Off on The Mountain (2018, Rick Alverson)

Posting these out of order, but I watched this right after The Nightingale, making for a 4:3 double-feature – perverse, since no screens are shaped like that anymore. Tim & Eric and Neil Hamburger aren’t in this, so it seemed like a good starting point, and damn, now I need to watch Alverson’s other four features. In fact, I might need to watch this one again, since I suspect Denis Lavant’s big speech at the end should’ve had subtitles.

Doctor Jeff Goldblum tours hospitals, with a former patient’s introverted semi-orphan son (Tye Sheridan of Ready Player One) in tow, performing lobotomies with a seemingly low success rate. Sounds like a real drag, so I can’t explain why I loved it – the squared-off compositions, the bleak period-postcard look, Goldblum, Udo Kier as Tye’s late father, and a seething Lavant are all pluses for sure.

Benjamin Mercer in Reverse Shot:

For our fictionalized lobotomist, the object of the westward-leading circuit is to outrun the strengthening professional headwinds, the first wave of antipsychotic pharmaceuticals having recently been introduced, leaving fewer and fewer institutional decision-makers with an appetite for the operation in question, with its barbaric follow-through and uninspiring “success” rate … Andy learns that sharing a hotel room with Fiennes, not just a reckless physician but an alcoholic skirt chaser to boot, is its own special kind of hell, and he begins to sympathize more and more with the patients he’s charged with photographing for medical posterity.

Lavant’s daughter / Tye’s love interest played young Lois Smith in Marjorie Prime. Cowriters include the guy who made Person to Person and the star of Alverson’s first two features.

by ·Comments Off on Tokyo Tribe (2014, Sion Sono)

Japanese gang-war rap musical, opens with an epic long take, then blonde gang boss Mera (Ryôhei Suzuki of Kurosawa’s Seventh Code) explains the local gangs and neighborhoods to a noob cop he has stripped and threatened with a knife, and we already know what the movie is like: it’s gross and loud and sexist, and kinda fun as hell.

Mera ambushes his hated rivals, the peaceful gang Musashino led by Kai, and kills a guy, and his body is wheeled back home with a new girl in tow (Nana Seino). Meanwhile, Mera ally Lord Buppa (played by a pop-eyed Riki Takeuchi, a classic Miike star I haven’t seen since Battle Royale 2) is sent two elite fighters by the High Priest to recover HP’s missing daughter Erika (the new girl, obvs), and previously unknown gang the Waru is activated.

A holographic message from the wise High Priest:

Kai bands together all the Tokyo tribes, including the Gira Gira Girls and Neri Muthafuckaz and probably a couple more, to fight this new threat. It all looks impressively choreographed and real, neon lights and stunt fights, then a super-fake CG tank comes along and blows it. Still, for a full two hours of rap mayhem, this doesn’t lose steam. I’d been avoiding Sion Sono since Noriko’s Dinner Table, but this and Why Don’t You Play In Hell were fun, so maybe I should watch his four-hour masterpiece Love Exposure sometime.