by ·Comments Off on 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?

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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.”

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Beauty (2013, Paolo Sorrentino)

Welcome to Cannes Fortnight at Casa Brandon. Last held in 2022, this year the focus is on watching movies by 2024 Cannes directors who are completely unfamiliar to me, such as Sorrentino. For a while there, every couple years he released a new must-see film (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, Youth), which I would never see, and The Great Beauty is the Criterion-crowned consensus favorite.

Initially more avant-garde than expected. I thought the sound mixing in first scene was cool – we hear a choir but no dialogue or sound effects as some minor tourist drama plays out – but it turns out the scene was mixed normally and I had the headphones plugged in halfway. Paolo’s muse Toni Servillo plays an unproductive writer who knows everyone in Rome and can go everywhere attending all their parties. So we get to go everywhere, making me wonder who is Sorrentino that he has such access. It’s a splendidly expensive-looking movie if nothing else. Seems to be an attempted remake of La Dolce Vita – for me, Fellini’s least interesting movie, so this was an improvement.

by ·Comments Off on Poetry (2010, Lee Chang-dong)

Grandma (major 60s/70s actress Yoon Jeong-hee) takes care of grandson Wook, whose friend group raped a classmate until she suicided. She tries to get enough cash from the rich disabled guy she attends for the payoff to the dead girl’s mom. Her Alzheimer’s diagnosis adds to her inner struggle but doesn’t affect the plot. When she visits the dead girl’s mom but talks only of apricots is it because the disease made her forget her reason for coming there, or was she distracted by the poetry or nature, or is she avoiding hard conversations. I have no qualms with her fellow poets but the employers, the fathers, the kids – most people in the movie are living comfortably, contemptibly.

I spend at least an hour a day saying this:

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope 43:

There is no simple cause and effect between the initially cautious [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis and her decision to sign up for a poetry class … That doesn’t mean, however, that the viewer is denied such a cause-and-effect reading if they choose one, and Lee isn’t a filmmaker to either encourage or discourage it. This is perhaps the most notable aspect of the evolution of Lee’s screenwriting – rewarded at Cannes with the screenplay prize – starting from the unmistakable determinism of Green Fish and the elegant but closed geometrics of Peppermint Candy. Like his camera, which allows viewers to make their own compositions and choices within the larger frame, his narrative approach trusts in granting characters their own lives, so much so that one gets the sense that they frequently surprise Lee himself with the choices they make.

Auteurist foreshadowing:

by ·Comments Off on It Must Be Heaven (2019, Elia Suleiman)

A film about a Palestinian filmmaker leaving home, traveling to meet with producers, who don’t understand his film (“not Palestinian enough”), returning home. Includes a highly relatable bird scene. Don’t know if it meant much of anything but I get positive vibes from Suleiman’s scene composition and onscreen persona, need to watch more of these.