by ·Comments Off on The Congress (2013, Ari Folman)

“Lousy choices, that’s your whole story, lousy movies,” someone says to Robin Wright, playing “herself.” This one’s not exactly great, but better than lousy – at least we get interesting topics and some fun animation. Getting around to watching this due to one of those topics – the idea of movie studios scanning actors then using their digital images indefinitely is back in the news.

Harvey Keitel as her agent gets a good monologue during the scan procedure, then Robin takes her money (they never say how much) and goes home with her hard-of-hearing kite-obsessed son Kodi Smit-McPhee. Twenty years later she enters the “animation zone” to attend a contract renegotiation party. The company which has successfully controlled and redefined her image for so long (one of her future sci-fi films is named RRR) stupidly puts Actual Robin in front of a live mic. There’s a revolution, real or imagined, and Robin is stuck in animated form so they freeze her body for future scientists to deal with. This is where Paul Giamatti comes in – he specializes in explaining insane situations to people in movies.

by ·Comments Off on George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011, Martin Scorsese)

Feels like an outtakes shuffle of pre- and early-Beatles stories with long lingers on old photos and scraps of George solo songs, then finds its footing as the Beatles start losing theirs, around the 1hr mark as drugs turn to meditation and Ravi Shankar and the gurus enter the picture. As he uses clips from the Get Back sessions and the Concert for Bangladesh, my Beatles movies are starting to eat each other. Conclusions: George was a beautiful man, and Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles – Eric Clapton did.

by ·Comments Off on La Flor de la Vida (2017, Claudia Abend & Adriana Loeff)

Catching up on True/False films past with Katy. From an audition at an Uruguay theater, the filmmakers smartly choose a talkative man reminiscent of F. Murray Abraham. Full of himself (“I know I have certain theatrical talents”) with a wife who describes herself as “more withdrawn” and an extensive home movie record of their early relationship, the movie interviews Aldo and Gabriella with occasional cuts back to the theater, the other interviewees giving their perspectives on the topics of the moment. Gabriella played the submissive wife for 40+ years, then grew into the kind of person who doesn’t like being around Aldo, and divorced him.

Well-structured movie with a worthwhile central couple, but somehow light and unmemorable. It figures that the screenshot I grabbed and the official movie photo used in reviews is from the same scene – it’s the rare time the two of them are seen together, and it’s a nicer image than the airport scene.

by ·Comments Off on Anne at 13,000 Ft. (2019, Kazik Radwanski)

At least Anne is Deragh Campbell, otherwise I would’ve lost all patience with her. Childish and giggling too much, she works at a preschool where the kids like her because she’s one of them. She manages to meet a grown-up named Matt (Johnson of The Dirties and Blackberry), but plays a “joke” while taking him to meet her parents, falsely announcing that they’re getting married. Nice ambiguous ending, her first solo skydiving trip after she’d been acting increasingly erratic.

I thought it’d be nice to watch a skydiving movie on a plane, and the best part was pausing to explain to the curiously concerned guy next to me the concepts of non-streaming video (how can movie exist without internet) and of indie cinema (he thought it was some kind of Deragh Campbell livecam).

Josh Cabrita in Cinema Scope 80:

So as to even further distanciate the viewer’s perspective of Anne’s life from her own view of these same events, Radwanski continually constructs his scenes around missing or partial information … As in Radwanski’s previous films, the close-up is never a window into a subject’s soul, and possesses no exploratory power. Instead of being a lugubrious exercise in the most facile form of humanist filmmaking – a limited register wherein all that matters is the director’s and viewer’s supposedly generous response to an apparently difficult person – Anne takes a purely external viewpoint that allows for the contemplation of various surfaces.

by ·Comments Off on B’Twixt Now and Sunrise (2011/2023, Francis Ford Coppola)

I put off watching Twixt for so long that a new director’s cut blu-ray came out with a modified title, so I can just watch that instead. Movie is a digital delight, getting spectral fast and never wrapping up its loose ends. Based on the wikis, those loose ends and the final scene of Val quietly mourning are the main differences from the 2011 version, which was stuffed with more deaths and incidents and postscripts.

As a washed-up horror author, Val Kilmer looks convincingly washed-up. Blocked, he takes sleeping pills to dream an ending for his new novel (FFC wrote the movie after waking in the middle of a dream and wanting to know the ending). At a dead-end town on a book tour, he meets a vampire ghost girl (Elle Fanning) and seeks advice from the late Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin).

It’s a war on the youth: Val is haunted by his daughter’s death, the town is haunted by the murder of a bunch of kids by a minister, and Sheriff Bruce Dern wants to blame all current troubles on the “evil slut” young people across the lake.

Good time to catch up with this, FFC’s latest released film, since he’s supposedly working on his decades-delayed Megalopolis. In the behind-the-scenes doc by granddaughter Gia Coppola: Francis explaining why everything takes so long, and a line producer explaining the importance of having great food for lunch every day. FFC’s son/Gia’s dad is the ghost haunting the film, as this version’s abrupt ending makes clear.

by ·Comments Off on This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)

4:3, excellent color, trendy arthouse long takes, unusual sound mix. Great looking/sounding, reminds of Jauja. Per the commentary, the trajectory of the long takes were designed to mirror cycles of life.

She is Mantoa, is told her son has died (in her introduction scene, the movie’s best), and that the town will be resettled and a dam built. Enter a low-voiced narrator, and another entry in the “rural woman goes to the city and deals w bureaucracy” genre, more enjoyable at least than A Gentle Creature. Her house burns down. A kid dies. It is a burial, pretty much.

by ·Comments Off on Monos (2019, Alejandro Landes)

The monos are a bunch of commando kids entrusted by a larger organization with the care of kidnapped English native speaker “La Doctora” (Julianne Nicholson of Blonde). The monos are armed, with military training, but they’re also horny fuckup kids, who immediately/accidentally kill the cow they’ve borrowed from the townsfolk, and repeatedly let the Doctora escape. She kills one of them, one suicides, one manages to escape. Movie opens promisingly with a blindfolded soccer game and some Beau Travail moves, and stays watchable throughout, even if it never really goes anywhere. The music is nuts, in a good way, from Under the Skin composer Mica Levi. A Sundance premiere, which makes sense, since it reminded me (but in a kinda good way?) of Mayday.

by ·Comments Off on Wild Goose Lake (2019, Yi’nan Diao)

Beautiful right from the start, every scene a marvel. Gorgeous lighting, precise framing, the real deal This kind of discovery is the whole point of Rotterdance… oh, did I mention that it’s Rotterdance? I started it kinda late and am writing it up even later, but we spent a week or two watching movies that played recent editions of Sundance and Rotterdam fests. The Cathedral played both after premiering in Venice, and this one came to Rotterdam after Cannes.

“A gangster on the run sacrifices everything for his family and a woman he meets while on the lam,” sure, let’s leave it at that. He’ll (probably) star in Wong’s Blossoms movie/series/whatever. The girl helping him and the cop chasing him costarred in Diao’s Black Coal, Thin Ice.

by ·Comments Off on Searching for Sugar Man (2012, Malik Bendjelloul)

Failed folk musician goes decades without realizing his records became a bootleg sensation in South Africa, flies there for massive concerts then returns to his humble Detroit life. “It remains too strange to be true.” Archive footage, some of it just vintage mood stuff, bit of rotoscoping, some fun jump cuts. Repetition or rambling in the interviews is preferable to the dodgy dialogue editing we usually get in these things. This won an oscar (vs. three govt/military stories and an AIDS activism doc) and Rodriguez has now played a bunch of live shows, for which he hopefully got paid, since he’s getting nothing from the oscars or those album sales.