by ·Comments Off on The Color Wheel (2011, Alex Ross Perry)

JR (Carmen Altman, whose twitter reveals that she’s a stand-up comedian, and that yes she’s the daughter of Robert Altman but not THAT Robert Altman) has just broken up with her professor/boyfriend and enlists her brother (writer/director/star Perry) to help her pick up some stuff from her apartment. I think they go from Pennsylvania to Boston – something like that – annoying the hell out of each other the whole way, berating each other’s lives and careers (he writes copy for focus group presentations, she is an aspiring news anchor). He has a Michael Cera voice with a relentless rapid-fire delivery, eventually gets in a minor fight with her Henry Chunklet-looking ex and helps carry her two measly cardboard boxes away. Then they have sex in their hotel room.

Shot in grainy black-and-white with no particular style besides “cheap indie”. Katy seemed to find it exasperating, says she saw the incest bit coming since the beginning. The dialogue is mostly funny, but otherwise I’m not sure why this is getting much attention – maybe funny dialogue is enough.

M. Sicinski

We soon begin to recognize the real pain these two are carrying around. Their pathologies, the film argues, are unique; those all around them are crushingly typical. By the end of The Color Wheel, J.R. and Colin are somewhere well beyond the reach of cultural or cinematic domestication, as is the film itself.

but later:

Alex’s films are designed to be hard to like. They are about people and scenarios and environments that are deeply offputting, about humor-in-inverted-commas that makes you feel a bit unclean. Part of what I find deeply intriguing about The Color Wheel is that for so much of the first half of the film, I want to get away from it.

Perry had author Philip Roth in mind.

People say you can’t make an honest film from one of Roth’s novels because it would be nothing but people talking, characters who only live inside their own heads, followed by unforgivable and reprehensible sex. Which is basically exactly what The Color Wheel turned out to be. … I think cynicism is sorely lacking from independent films. There is an edge that is missing, which confuses me because most of us are making films with no stakes. You can get away with anything when you raise your own budget as a passion project so I’m not sure why people seem unwilling to push things in a more aggressive direction.

by ·Comments Off on Bernie (2011, Richard Linklater)

Feels a bit like The Informant!: a small-scope crime story with a nice fellow who becomes a criminal without losing our sympathy. Jack Black reigns it in, and even Shirley MacLaine, playing a crazy-mean old rich lady, doesn’t get to go gonzo, Linklater trying to keep anything from playing too Meet The Parents-broad. McConaughey arguably reigns it in too much, barely registering as himself. Katy didn’t love it, but dug the appearance of “76 Trombones”.

by ·Comments Off on Coming Attractions and other shorts

Coming Attractions (2010, Peter Tscherkassky)

Wow. Footage from advertising shoots repurposed by the master of footage-repurposing. He fashions a series of mini-movies using different techniques, each with its own title card. Possibly his best, or at least, his funniest film.

PT: “The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film.”

Depart de Jerusalem en tracteur:

Cubbhist Cinema #3:

Le Sang d’un poeme:

Cubist Cinema #1:

Swimmer (2012, Lynne Ramsay)

Young man swims and walks through a bunch of other movies (through their music and dialogue, anyway) in lovely black-and-white slow motion. There is some bow-and-arrow shooting, a favorite thing of Ramsay’s.

Drool (2011, Jeremiah Kipp & The Mandragoras Project)

A boy and a girl are covered in drool, slithering about in a white room. The bathhouse scene from Eastern Promises as a twisted love story, then swallowed and spit back out. Only four minutes long and still the slimiest movie I have ever seen.

Crestfallen (2011, Jeremiah Kipp)

Woman committing suicide in fancy bathtub flashes back to cheating husband, then flashes back to her young daughter and decides to live. Beautifully shot, with sweet music by Harry Manfredini. My favorite of the three dialogue-free shorts I’ve seen from Kipp… the third being Contact, which I watched again today – such an impressive little movie that I’m sorry I knocked the sound design last time I watched it.

by ·Comments Off on Attenberg (2010, Athina Tsangari)

Marina (Ariane Labed, gymnast of Alps) listens to Suicide, loves documentarian David Attenborough, is trying to figure out her own sexuality, spends time with her sick father. She does Monty Python silly walks and practices french-kissing with her friend Bella, and eventually hooks up with a beardy foosball-playing engineer with similar music tastes (Giorgos Lanthimos, dir. of Alps and Dogtooth).

Marina and Bella:

Tsangari:

I’m an avid, passionate admirer of all things Attenborough, I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl. He’s near and detached at the same time, like melodrama, as I call it. It really suits me as an aesthetic. He’s so gracious and has so much tenderness towards nature and his subjects. It’s a big example to me, in how to approach characters in cinema.

Completely delightful movie with great (or greatly-translated) dialogue and unusual movements. Marina talks explicitly about sex and cremation with her disillusioned architect father (“I’m boycotting the 20th century. It’s overated, and I’m not at all sorry to leave it.”) and eventually sends her slutty friend Bella to his hospital room to sleep with him. The movie starts out loony then tightens focus around his death towards the second half. NYTimes explains: “The deadpan stylization of Attenberg is a distancing device, or, more precisely, a sidelong path toward real, earned feeling.”

Marina and father:

Tsangari in Cinema Scope:

For me, it was crucial that the father-daughter relationship was one where both parties were trying to make it more equal. They were trying to negotiate the curse of the family tyranny … Our work was pure voice, pure body, pure language. I am not interested in Method acting, bringing in back story, talking about psychology. I worked with the cast as if the script was found footage and we had to re-enact it knowing nothing about its origins and its embedded meaning.

Tsangari was a producer on Dogtooth and Alps, and has a new short called The Capsule. She also appeared in Slacker and oversaw projections for the Athens Olympics. This won a couple awards at Venice, losing the big prize to Somewhere.

by ·Comments Off on Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, Colin Trevorrow)

Aubrey Plaza (more upbeat here than as April Ludgate) works for douchebag magazine reporter Jake Johnson (of the similarly-titled No Strings Attached) checking up on a shady fellow (Baghead director Mark Duplass) who posted a classified ad looking for time travel partners. Aubrey falls for him, but he predictably discovers her identity as reporter, putting their partnership on shaky ground. They’re followed all along by the most ineffectual government agents ever, while Jake spends a couple days with an ex and hooks up his socially awkward flunky with some loose young girls. I was happy to see Mr. Show’s Mary Lynn Rajskub as the magazine boss, and Katy was excited to see Kristen V-Mars Bell as Duplass’s ex-girlfriend who leads Aubrey that he’s maybe nuts after all, before she decides to trust him at the end and they disappear in his floating time machine.

Happily, the seemingly time-filler sidetracks actually add up to something. Aubrey and Jake state they want to travel back in time to prevent people they love from dying. Duplass is living in a weird place between past and present, fixated on his ex-girlfriend Bell, who he falsely tells Aubrey has died. Meanwhile Jake is trying to relive his past in multiple ways, by leading the young flunky towards a sexual experience, and reconnecting with his own youthful fling Liz, who finally proves to be too mature for Jake.

by ·Comments Off on Argo (2012, Ben Affleck)

A fair pick to win all the oscars: a based-on-true-story thriller about a daring Hollywood-assisted hostage rescue with a happy ending. Affleck casts himself as a world-weary CIA hostage expert working for Malcolm’s Dad, who teams up with movie producers Alan Arkin and John Goodman to rescue U.S. embassy workers in newly Ayatollah Khomeini-run Iran hiding out at the Victor Garber-led Canadian embassy.

Comic book legend Jack Kirby did storyboards for the fake movie that the CIA pretended to be shooting while collecting hostages. Shot full of 1970’s grain by Rodrigo Prieto (25th Hour, Frida, Broken Embraces) and edited by William Goldenberg, who was double-nominated for Zero Dark Thirty (and won for this).

by ·Comments Off on Target (2011, Alexander Zeldovich)

“There’s nothing in the world that can’t be quantified.”

Hyped as a mindblowing modern Russian sci-fi story, but I found it overall disappointing – sleek and mildly weird, but not terribly interesting.

Boring mega-rich Viktor and youth-obsessed wife Zoya (Justine Waddell, lead nurse in The Fall) team up with her brother, totally awful TV announcer Mitya (or Dmitri?), and a jockey for some reason, flying to a tiny town around an abandoned science experiment in the middle of nowhere, where Dmitri falls for fellow tourist Anna. The five spend the night inside a giant cosmic-ray accumulator, and supposedly now they will never age.

“In nature there are no ethically neutral substances.” Viktor is obsessed with these blue-glowy glasses that can detect the amount of good and evil in anything. His wife Zoya runs off and has an affair with the jockey, who has killed some guys at work and needs to escape. Dmitri/Mitya starts making an on-air mockery of his job. A girl named Taya has come back with them from the Target, is going to meet her boyfriend in front of the ballet. Their affair had become too intense so they agreed to separate for 30 years. Same thing is happening to Dmitri and Anna, so they make the same agreement.

Dmitri and Anna:

Zoya and youth-mask:

At the end, Viktor is killed, then Zoya commits suicide as the jockey leaves town in hiding. It’s a pretty tightly paced movie for being three hours long, but the eternal youth aspect, the good/evil thing and the relationship weirdness never come together, so I didn’t see its point. I don’t mean to be obvious and compare every Russian movie to Tarkovsky, but you’ve got a movie about a few travelers who visit a mysterious, underpopulated area and are exposed to radiation that changes their physiology and behavior, which sounds like Stalker meets Solaris – just much less subtle and mysterious.

by ·Comments Off on The Strange Case of Angelica (2010, Manoel de Oliveira)

Isaac (Ricardo Trepa, star of Eccentricities) is called to a rich estate in the middle of the night to take final photographs of a just-deceased girl (Pilar Lopez de Ayala, star of In the City of Sylvia), whose image he falls in love with, then it starts coming to life in his photographs (if MdO can embrace digital sfx then anybody can). Isaac spends his days photographing field laborers and his nights dreaming of Angelica, to the concern of his meddling landlady Justina. Excellent shot at the end: sick Isaac rises trance-like from bed, pushes the doctor aside then collapses, as his spirit continues out to the balcony and flies away with Angelica.

Mouse-over to hallucinate like Isaac does:

There are few indications that the movie is set in any recent decade until we see cars in the last half hour. This is by design: old-fashioned, simple-living photographer Isaac seems overly interested in old-fashioned things. I’m not sure of the significance of his being Jewish, but it’s mentioned a lot.

Film Quarterly explains:

As a Jew, Isaac is a stranger to the community, but he’s fascinated by Portugal’s religion, dying agricultural traditions, and quasi-mystical, late-romantic literature. (The Strange Case of Angelica grew out of a film Oliveira wanted to make in the 1950s, dealing with Jews who migrated to Portugal after World War II.)

I didn’t spot Leonor Silveira, but trusty ol’ Luis Miguel Cintra (Inquietude, Non) stays at the same boarding house. That’s him above with Ana Maria Magalhães of The Age of the Earth.

Mouse-over to awaken Isaac from his dream:

Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931, Oliveira)

The DVD guys have kindly included Oliveira’s first short, documenting workers on the river (as Isaac documents them in the fields – but not precisely). He pulls shots in and out of focus, gets in every striking angle he can muster, edits still and motion shots together in jarring ways. Definitely some staged situations. A truck driver, distracted by a passing plane, bumps an ox cart which then runs over a young man. The man is okay, but starts beating the oxen in anger until a policeman shows up, and he and the beasts make up.

I only played a few minutes of the very good (so far) commentary, instead watched an Oliveira monologue. He is against television, pornography and violence. He is for fantasy, Melies and Avatar. He methodically lists all the well-known great filmmakers, saying they’re the ones who maintain proper separation between the private and public spheres – an ethical discussion that I didn’t follow, then methodically lists the exact same filmmakers a few minutes later as if we didn’t just go over this. Cinema as an art should be “a reflection of the more critical, richer, graver and higher aspects of the human condition.”

by ·Comments Off on Dreileben trilogy (2011)

A different kind of trilogy, three filmmakers born in different decades each makes his own feature film set in the same town at the same time, rotating around a central event: a convicted murderer escapes from a hospital and kills again.

Quotes in italics below are from Dennis Lim’s great article in Cinema Scope, which is what got me watching the trilogy in the first place.

Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold)

Clean-looking picture. Follows young hospital flunky Johannes. Broken up with Sara, a hospital director’s daughter, he picks up a girl he sees getting dumped by a band of motorcycle thugs and takes her home. Johannes proves to be a bit of a stalker, and Ana sees him following her everywhere, which is why I keep thinking this movie was the chapter entitled Don’t Follow Me Around, but no, that’s the next one. Hard to tell Johannes’s intentions – he seems entranced with Ana, but at the end I wonder if he was using her to get back with Sara. She’s not a good match for him – makes lots of bad decisions then cries about them. Either way, he does end up with Sara after Ana attacks her at a company party, and they go off to Berlin together. Johannes never realizes that the door he clumsily left open at the hospital last week allowed the killer to get free, nor that the killer eventually stalks Ana (just like Johannes has been doing) and kills her as he’s driving out of town.

Petzold inscribes cold, hard truths of class and money into almost every scene, fusing erotic tensions with socioeconomic ones.

Don’t Follow Me Around (Dominik Graf)

A deceptive story with a grainier look and a less driven feel than the first movie. Psychiatrist Jo (Jeanette Hain of that Kate Winslet movie The Reader) is dispatched to Dreileben to assist the police with the manhunt. Jo arrives, stays with old friend Vera and her husband Bruno, who seem to be having relationship trouble. The escaped-killer plot is mostly dropped as she sets her investigative skills towards her friend, discovering that they both dated the same man shortly before they met. Meanwhile, Jo’s work in town is cryptic until halfway through the movie it’s revealed that she never came to work on the killer case, but to investigate corruption, leading to the arrest of six local officers. Once this is wrapped up, Jo does work on the other case, enlisting an artist to bait the killer. Meanwhile, Vera leaves home suddenly, paying a visit to the mutual unseen ex, returning having learned more secrets as the movie reveals that he’s the father of Jo’s daughter. Despite (or because of) its sidetracks, it’s the most richly engrossing of the three movies.

Talky and witty, packed with revealing tangents and glancing micro-observations. Shot by Michael Wiesweg in soft-toned Super 16 – a striking contrast to the crisp, controlled visuals of the other two entries – Graf’s film makes a virtue of skittishness. The distractable camera snoops, wanders, lingers on odd details, and the narrative likewise keeps shifting its attention.

One Minute of Darkness (Christoph Hochhausler)

This one suffers from having nothing much to say. It follows the killer, Molesch (Stefan Kurt, who got to play Albert Speer in a Hitler movie), whose history, escape, various sightings, then capture have already been addressed in the other two movies. Here we see the escape in greater details – Molesch wandering through a back door (left open by Johannes) while in hospital to see his just-deceased mother. Then it’s on to narrow escapes (movie briefly becomes The Fugitive during a bridge scene), police incompetence, and Molesch’s unlikely (but quite typically movie-likely) truce with a runaway girl. And just as inspector Marcus (I love that the music has ringing tones, in tune with his tinnitis) figures out that Molesch was innocent of his original crime, Molesch of course kills Ana from the first movie (after stopping to burn down his dead mum’s house).

[the titular piece of missing surveillance footage] speaks to the impossibility of certainty in the absence of observable evidence, the danger of imposing stories onto what we cannot know for sure. This conundrum is, of course, intimately linked to the de-dramatized cinema of the Berlin School: the fear of narrative as, to quote Hochhausler, something that “contaminates the picture,” a lie, and what’s more, a lie that could become the truth.

Petzold has made at least two films I’ve read about: Barbara and Jerichow. Graf has done a lot of television, including something called Doktor Knock, which is what I’m going to name my metal band. Hochhausler made a few films I’ve never heard of.

Graf was born in 1952, Petzold in 1960, Hochhausler in 1972, and each has a distinct relationship to the now decade-old “new German cinema” that has come to be imprecisely known as the Berlin School. Graf, a respected senior figure and a stalwart of German television, predates the Berlin School’s emergence, and has criticized what he sees as the reticence and passivity of many of the films. Petzold is often identified as one of the movement’s de facto founders, part of the pioneering wave that studied at the dffb in the ’80s and ’90s. Hochhausler belongs (with Benjamin Heisenberg and Ulrich Kohler) to the Revolver-aligned second generation, whose careers have progressed and diverged in ways that reflect the constant sense of flux, born of habitual self-examination, that defines this loose group.

Indiewire:

Dreileben is not an epic story. A term like that is generally saved for adventures that are years long or involve arduous journeying. Instead of offering something like that, these three German filmmakers have given us a very dense, abstruse, enclosed saga; full of knotty liaisons and unsolved conflicts … Coincidences are played with often (some big, some small, some even unnoticeable) and certain elements/traits, such as deafness, carry over to different characters and situations. Rather than composing a grand narrative, the directors went above and beyond to provide a wealth of substance and meaning.