by ·Comments Off on A Screaming Man (2010, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)

After waiting years to watch this, it was finally pretty disappointing… even if the political/social criticism is on point, the movie felt slow and obvious. Former swimming champ Adam has worked at the same hotel pool for decades, along with buddy David (a miniaturized Danny Glover) and now his son Abdel. Adam pays off a local government dude to keep Adbel out of the civil war – we thought Dry Season took place post-civil war, but apparently this is a new civil war, which ended a few months before the film premiered in Cannes (winning third place to Uncle Boonmee and Of Gods and Men).

Parents and son at home:

A Chinese company buys the hotel, notes that there isn’t enough pool work to justify employment of these three men, so fires David and demotes Adam to gatekeeper. He claims he can’t afford to pay anymore – maybe true, or maybe he is mad about the job situation – so Abdel is quickly drafted and Adam gets his pool job back. All is well for a few days, then Abdel’s previously unseen pregnant girlfriend moves in, the town is evacuated as the rebels advance, and Adam goes off to an army hospital to kidnap his mortally wounded son and give him a river burial.

Adam was the baker from Dry Season, looking convincingly less weathered (or maybe it’s been too long and I’d forgotten what he looked like, because I thought they must be two similar-looking actors). Abdel had small roles in Caché and Indigènes. David was in Grisgris and Haroun’s lesser-known Sexe, gombo et beurre salé, and the chief was in Africa Paradis and a passenger in Night on Earth. The girlfriend Djénéba Koné, a singer who cries a lot, was in Bamako as the sister-in-law of that film’s crying singer.

Adam Cook:

The film is beautifully shot with strong performances, particularly from the soulful Youssouf Djaoro in the lead role, but his life changing decision… never quite rings true. It does make the second half dramatically powerful and moving, and it even makes sense on a thematic level, but it is hard to believe his character would ever make such a callous choice.

by ·Comments Off on Graduation (2016, Cristian Mungiu)

We closely follow Romeo (Adrian Titieni, one of Mr. Lazarescu‘s many doctors), sort of a sad Romanian Nick Frost, during the week of his daughter’s final exams. At first he’s a regular guy whose family has a string of bad luck, then things open up and we see that he’s cheating on his wife, that all the professional and government services are greased by favors and bribes, and that, in trying to help his daughter, he ends up dragging her into the small-town societal corruption that he was trying to save her from. We don’t know for sure if she’ll end up going off to Cambridge, or stay in town with her boyfriend and fall into the same traps as her parents, but I suspect the latter. At least the problems on display here aren’t as life-crushingly bad as in Leviathan.

Daughter Magda is Maria-Victoria Dragus (creepy bird-murdering kid of The White Ribbon). Mungiu tied with Assayas for best director at last year’s Cannes. I finally got to see it on opening day of this year’s Cannes (and also during graduation week).

V. Morton, who also has a nice bit on the film’s “egalitarian framing”:

Even as the film’s central narrative event happens (the assault on Romeo’s daughter on the eve of her baccalaureate exams), we see Romeo as an adulterer (later, we learn, with his wife’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” semi-connivance). We very promptly learn after the assault, even before the narrative implications have really been set up, that he and “Vlad Ivanov” had bribed their way out of the military draft and thus “owe” someone re a liver transplant. Romeo is a doctor. Graduation is not the story of a good man corrupted but a corrupt man trying to do “good” (when it serves him and his) because society runs on corruption.

by ·Comments Off on Heaven Knows What (2014, Safdies)

Harley (writer/subject Arielle Holmes) is sorry, and Ilya (Antiviral star Caleb Jones) is mad at her for cheating, so she attempts suicide, cut to title.

Harley and Mike:

Caleb must have a pretty bad cold:

The movie doesn’t get any more cheerful after that. They curse a lot, and take drugs, and seem to be excessively focused on obtaining and taking more drugs (what’s that all about?). She gets consolation sex from mutual friend Mike (Buddy Duress: what a name). They’re all terrible, it’s no fun to watch, and the camera keeps getting horribly close to the actors, so you can feel their pain, man. But we finally know they’ve hit rock bottom when we see them watching Hellraiser – but it’s in 4:3, and it’s the garbage sequel Revelations instead of the original.

Lovestruck kids Harley and Ilya finally get back together, do some petty crimes, then he ditches her on a bus, goes home and immediately catches fire and dies. I did enjoy some aspects of the movie, like the outer space keyboard music, and a scene I loved but cannot explain why where she tries to thread a needle. Watched this because it’s Cannes Month and the directors have a new one premiering, which I guess I can safely skip (edit: lol).

by ·Comments Off on Austerlitz (2016, Sergey Loznitsa)

Black-and-white static camera setups of tourists browsing a former concentration camp. Some are on organized tours, some use personal listening devices, and some are just reading the signs. Lots of photos, some selfie sticks, some chatty groups and solo lingering. I won’t catalog all the terrible t-shirts people wear to the site, since someone on Letterboxd has already done that. At first I thought “these people are simply awful,” but they’re not – it’s just that those few bad t-shirts stand out, and it’s not clear why they so badly want photos of each other in front of the “arbeit macht frei” sign, but at least they’ve made the effort to come to this place and maybe learn about history instead of getting drunk at the beach. Anyway, the movie is exactly as simple as I’d heard, while the thoughts it provoked were much more conflicted than I expected.

I was in a strange mood one night during Cannes Month, and thus became the first person to ever double-feature Austerlitz with Death Proof. This didn’t actually play Cannes, but Death Proof did, because life is strange.

Sicinski:

Exhibiting a simplicity and intellectual acuity that is far too rare in the field of documentary, Loznitsa has created a film whose cumulative impact will stay with you long after you watch it, tinting and shading the way that you experience a multitude of previously ordinary cultural practices … Austerlitz is about the disconnection between the greatest horror of the 20th century and our inability to adequately convey it to the 21st. Loznitsa captures this tragedy in the form of a young dude bopping through the gates of Sachsenhausen, his t-shirt emblazoned with last year’s meme: “COOL STORY BRO.”

J. Kuehner:

The deep-focus photography of DP Jesse Mazuch accentuates the choreographic shuffle of the crowds en masse, their collective amble posing an unsavoury contrast to the bodies once confined here. The connotation is that grief has been repressed or is altogether absent, the free bodies hemmed in by social etiquette but not too hard put-upon by the gravity of the place. It’s hard to tell if this is the look of an aggregate vigil, several generations removed, or that of an amnesiac drift.

by ·Comments Off on Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (2017, James Gunn)

I forgot lots of important things and characters from the first movie (Michael Rooker and his whistle-controlled flying spear, Gamora’s psychotically evil sister Nebula), but they came back gradually. Also forgot that these are really good movies – funny and stylish, with exciting (and comprehensible) action. Chris Pratt discovers that his real father is a god-planet which takes the form of Kurt Russell, impregnating planets and women across the galaxy, and when he finally locates a son who carries some of his powers, he uses Star-Lord (like Magneto uses Rogue in X-Men 1) to amplify his energy and attempt to make all planets into parts of himself. Fortunately there’s the wiseass raccoon, the big loud warrior, the swordswoman, the baby cartoon tree, and now Rooker and Nebula and an empath named Mantis to stop him. No Benicio Del Toro, sadly, but we get cameos by Michelle Yeoh and Ving Rhames.

by ·Comments Off on Colossal (2016, Nacho Vigalondo)

First Nacho movie I’ve watched since Timecrimes – I missed his Extraterrestrial and didn’t hear much about Open Windows. Anne Hathaway, not a fraction as messed up as she was in Rachel Getting Married, a movie that has been on everyone’s minds lately, is still somewhat messed up, moving to her old town and hooking up with Jason Sudeikis (Floyd in 30 Rock), then with younger Austin Stowell (Whiplash), causing Jason to unfurl his rage and become a supervillain. Anne can become/control a giant beast stomping Korea by stepping into a local playground at a certain time in the morning, and Jason can become a giant robot, and they have drunken childish playground wars while real people die (we assume, all off-camera) across the world, until he gets fully out of control and she travels to Korea and turns the tables, her avatar now in America facing down the puny Sudeikis.

Tim Blake Nelson, who I’ve seen in six movies and never recognized, is a bar buddy who Jason badly offends then he never returns, and Matthew Crawley is Anne’s ex who returns to rescue her from this nowhere small town.

M. D’Angelo:

Colossal never quite decides whether it’s about the unwitting havoc caused by an alcoholic or the toxic behavior of a closet misogynist, and it veers uncertainly between goofy comedy and genuine ugliness. Furthermore, placing the giant avatars in another country suggests barbed commentary on collateral damage caused by American foreign policy — rich potential that the movie ignores … Even at its most muddled, Colossal taps into the universal secret conviction that one’s most trivial actions and emotions are somehow world-consequential.

Preceded by the Peter Huang short 5 Films About Technology – episodes about people’s lives being ruined by cellphone technology – which I guess fits thematically with Colossal in that Katy points out that ever since Certain Women she’s realized all modern movies are about alienation and peoples’ inability to connect.

by ·Comments Off on Bird People (2014, Pascale Ferran)

Gary (Josh Charles of Sports Night) checks into a Paris hotel for a business trip before an important meeting, then calls work to say he quits, and calls his wife to say he’s never coming home. Typical movie behavior would have him drop these bombshells on stunned boss and family then walk away, but Gary spends half the movie on phone and skype, helping his coworkers deal with his sudden absence and discussing the sudden separation with wife Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill).

Meanwhile, student Audrey (Anaïs Demoustier, Isabelle Huppert’s daughter in Time of the Wolf), a bit of a voyeur, is dispirited by her job as a part-time hotel maid. While cleaning a suite the power goes out, and Audrey becomes a sparrow. She flies around the airport area, going in and out of hotel rooms through open windows, and we hear her voice puzzling things out and gasping in sheer delight – at least when we bird-lover film viewers can hear her over our own delighted gasps. You don’t want the movie to come down to earth, and her to inevitably meet Josh Charles, but all things must end.

First meeting, on a moving walkway in the airport:

From Mike D’Angelo’s great review (spoiler-free, he says “Audrey poses nude for a Japanese artist staying at the hotel, and is paid in Pringles” without mentioning she’s a bird at the time):

Only two characters figure prominently in Bird People, Pascale Ferran’s alternately mundane and magical tale of extreme liberation, which is set almost entirely at a Hilton adjacent to Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport. Before getting hermetic, however, Ferran serves up an expansive prologue in which her camera flits and darts, birdlike, among the diverse passengers of a commuter train, eavesdropping on their conversations, their music, and their random thoughts. None of this has any bearing on the twin stories that follow (though one of the two protagonists is briefly seen); it’s just the movie’s way of suggesting, in advance, that the anxieties it explores are universal. We could potentially wind up following any of these people, and each journey might be every bit as unexpected.

Said to have been inspired by Haruki Murakami novels. Audrey’s bird-transformation wasn’t entirely unexpected – the last movie I watched with “bird people” in the title also featured bird people, not just a metaphor. I think this is Ferran’s fourth feature – she’s also a Céline Sciamma associate and cowriter of The Red Turtle. Played in Cannes UCR 2014 with Jauja and Force Majeure and winner White God, which it turns out wasn’t even the best animal movie in that lineup.

by ·Comments Off on On Tour (2010, Mathieu Amalric)

Parisian Rocky (director Amalric) is taking an American burlesque show on tour through France (but not Paris, because he can’t get a venue). It’s not the most sharply defined storyline, so you just have to enjoy hanging out with this crew, which I did.

Amalric gives himself a weird character tic, always asking hotels and bars to turn off their TVs and music, and stealing handfuls of candies and matchbooks from sample bowls. He drags his kids to a couple of tour stops, and everyone sings a Radiohead song in a hotel lobby.

It’s a warm-hearted movie, nothing amazing until the (amazing) last few seconds. I’ll watch Amalric in almost anything (not Quantum of Solace), and I gradually became able to tell the women apart and get a sense of who they were, but really need another couple of hours.

by ·Comments Off on The Lost City of Z (2016, James Gray)

It turns out that it wasn’t watching the movie The Lost City of Z that satisfied me, so much as the quest to watch the movie The Lost City of Z, the confident hope that The Lost City of Z would be a great movie, based on the reviews of my James Gray-obsessed film critics. The movie itself – it’s okay, a quest picture where a determined Charlie Hunnam neglects his family to search repeatedly for Z, stopping only for WWI and to raise funds to return to his quest, eventually aging to the point where his oldest son can join him – then they both disappear forever, having either found their destination or been murdered by cannibals.

D. Kasman:

Fawcett … insists that this city, which he dubs “Zed,” not only exists, but that it represents a corrective to the very society whose recognition and acclaim he had once so passionately sought … Because Gray shows only the barest traces of what his protagonist discovers in the jungle, one is unable to precisely define how Z comes to assume such majestic proportions in Fawcett’s mind. Originating as a self-interested means to escape from the restrictive prejudices of English society, his search for Z increasingly comes to seem like a quixotic attempt to discover a greater, purer form of human dignity…

Rob Pattinson is very good as Hunnam’s loyal co-adventurer, Angus Macfadyen is irritating as an awful man who joins one mission then quits and sues, and barely in the movie are Hunnam wife Sienna Miller (upper-floor temptress of High-Rise) and son Tom Holland (the latest Spider-Man). The forest and the river and the light are all lovely, and I loved a match-cut from colored liquid seeping in a line to a train moving in the same direction… and the final shot of Miller leaving the National Geographic Society having received mixed news about her lost husband and walking out into the jungle.

Gray: “How do you take the classical form and do something with it? The last twenty minutes, something starts to break down in the film.”

N. Bahadur:

Where Lost City of Z becomes truly special for me … is within its final thirty minutes, where he starts to free himself from narratological function and let his formal syntax do the work – it’s a big step for him I think, because I believe it allows him to drive even closer to something idiosyncratic and distinctive – for most of the runtime it is a decent film, with some ok ideas, just like any other film… but suddenly, if just for a few minutes, we enter the realm of a visionary.