by ·Comments Off on Zorn I-III (2010-2022, Mathieu Amalric)

Zorn I (2010-2016)

Rehearsing bands, mixing albums… setting up and breaking down equipment, cleaning his sax, unglamorous work. It documents JZ’s first time working with Nate Smith at The Stone, which is such a small place. Amalric is recruited to read some Rimbaud on the Conneries album. No onscreen text but if you cross-reference with Discogs you can figure out when some of the scenes took place. When I am rich, after buying every Tzadik album I’d like to find or recreate the black t-shirts Zorn is always wearing with his different ensemble designs.

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Zorn II (2016-2018)

“It was terrible when John started working with people who could actually read music. It fucked things up for the rest of us” – Ribot. Zorn and Dave Lombardo played a duo set at the Louvre. They soundtrack Harry Smith films, and during a dance scene Amalric cuts in some Maya Deren. This episode is more concert-backstage, shows and rehearsals, almost wall-to-wall music, and is therefore great.

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Zorn III (2018 – 2022)

Emails between Barbara Hannigan and JZ combines with some Cobra philosophy scenes to make this one about the composer’s relationship with the musician, really good. Prepping a difficult vocal piece which will be Hannigan’s JZ debut in Lisbon with Gosling as her pianist. Gave me a better appreciation for that first BH/JZ CD, which I’d written off as “not my thing” a few weeks earlier. Amalric seems intent on making each of these movies a different type of thing (this one is intensive prep/process) instead of just “more adventures in the life of Zorn.” Good quotes:
“You’ll see me start to die. That’ll be your cue.”
“You can go relatively satanic on this one.”
“I keep forgetting you people have to breathe.”

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Must hear soon:
Masada box
Moonchild trio
Psychomagia
Zorn/Hannigan 1 and 2

by ·Comments Off on Here (2023, Bas Devos)

Two bearded guys head home from a construction site and alas, we follow the guy with the less interesting beard, who makes a stew of everything edible in his fridge, like we did after thanksgiving. Long-take, follow-cam, 4:3, meditative fest-film – too quiet and patient for Katy, who ditched after five minutes.

The guy is getting his car repaired for a trip to his mom’s house, where he’s hinting he might stay for a long period, and in the meantime he visits coworkers and friends and family, dropping off bowls of soup. People talk about plants, and their dreams, and eat soup. He meets a woman who studies moss (whose thoughts we’d heard in an earlier scene) at a restaurant, then sees his sister Anca, and briefly dreams the movie’s best scene: crossfades and focus pulls in the forest. When he runs into the moss woman a second time he drops everything to follow her for a quiet day in the woods before finally exiting Brussels (leaving behind soup for her).

Devos in Cinema Scope:

“What is it that I want to do? I think it came down to wanting to make films about people being relatively OK with each other, and making that into something challenging and exciting enough to stand on its own.”

by ·Comments Off on The Serpent’s Path (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

French remake of Kurosawa’s own film with Ko Shibasaki (Miike’s Over Your Dead Body) in the Sho Aikawa role, and Staying Vertical star Damien Bonnard as Creepy. This one is more straightforward, less cryptic than the original (especially in Ko/Sho’s plan and motivation), maybe more grounded and less absurd. As a spiraling-revenge film chock full of cool French actors (kidnappees, in order, are Amalric, Gregoire Colin, and Slimane the Temple Woods guy) I was bound to enjoy this, but after watching the original and its companion this year, and in the wake of the great Chime, this can’t help but feel superfluous.

by ·Comments Off on Kinds of Kindness (2024, Yorgos Lanthimos)

1. Plemons is married to Hong, living according to strict instructions from Dafoe, until they have a disagreement and Plemons is cut loose, extremely pathetic on his own. Qualley is part of the organization, also under Dafoe, and Stone appears to be the new Plemons, until Jesse figures out how to get back in his employer’s good graces. The music is all doom-piano or moaning choir. Goes nicely with Yorgos’s project of deconstructing human behavior.

2. Plemons is a cop, Athie his partner, his wife Emma has been missing and arrives home acting strange, so he tells people that she’s not his real wife, then finds ways to prove it (cw: finger trauma). Good commitment to casting quirky people all down the line in these.

3. Plemons and Stone in another Dafoe cult, this time one whose members only use water from a tank that Hong has cried in. Qualley is twins, Alwyn a rapist husband, and in an episode three exclusive, Hunter Schafer of Cuckoo is an attempted resurrectionist.

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022, Chad Stockfleth)

Memorial screening for Will Hart. You go your whole life without hearing Olivia Tremor Control in public, then you put on the new Ted Danson show a few minutes after watching this doc, and “The Opera House” plays over the closing credits. One of those docs (see also: The Sparks Brothers) where there’s such a wealth of interesting archival material and diversity of cool music that you can’t help but make a compulsively watchable movie out of it all.

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.