by ·Comments Off on The Klezmer Project (2023, Koch & Schachmann)

Listened to Cracow Klezmer Band at work, had a Czech lager, watched a klezmer movie – good day. Wedding videographer Leandro likes musician Paloma, fakes that he’s making a klezmer documentary to get her interest, then follows through, traveling from Argentina to Austria to Ukraine to Romania to Moldavia, chasing music that no longer exists in its origin lands (we hear plenty of performances but are told that technically they’re not klezmer, ha). It’s a true-falsey travelogue through folk tales and tunes, adding up to nothing much narratively but quite a lot cinematically.

Victor Covaci, Romania:

Morris Yang:

The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza … The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.

by ·Comments Off on We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023, Joshua Gen Solondz)

We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023)

Lotta different modes here, gradually cutting or blending between them. I really liked the strobe-trance section where someone is adjusting a white mask over their black stocking mask. Just a note: instead of pulsing harsh noise over this kind of scene, could experimental filmmakers not try repeating a gentle chime or alternating a couple nice chords? At least when movies are silent I can put on a Coil or Matmos album and be the perpetrator of my own punishment. Nice blend of check-the-gate 8mm and extreme digital editing. Love the metal-font intertitles too. Some pretty late voiceover then the sound of a crackling fire. After Ken Jacobsing some guys early on, he Martin Arnolds them later. Katy was reading on the couch, looked up at the halfway point and declared the movie “dumb.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

We Don’t Talk is part travelogue and part diary film, a combination of the artist’s bizarre version of domestic bonhomie and his resistance to reducing the larger world to consumptive tourism. Setting these two elements into dialectical action, Solondz produces an aggressive, throbbing film ritual that alludes to common experiences — travel, physical affection, scenes from daily life — but thwarts the tendency to reduce them to mere spectacle … Solondz alternates between different moments of a singular action, with a sharp electronic burble heard in every other image. A figure in a black hood is placing the N95 over their face in one half of the edit, and is removing it in the other. In addition to being a potent image, one that creates a kind of circular pumping action onscreen, it also provides a new twist on Solondz’s fixation on the body in space, as an interior that both threatens and is threatened by the outside … This concern with the body under duress, and the comprehensive breakdown of domesticity and public life, takes on a more direct valence in this film because, in a sense, the air is quite different in the COVID era.

–
Tourism Studies (2019)

Opens with whispering about Tupac Shakur(?) before the soundtrack gets typically harsh. Strobe-edits between shots with different aspect ratios, compositions squared-off vs diagonal. Racetrack and test pattern and more homemade costumes. “Psychotronic savagery” per Sicinski.

by ·Comments Off on The Day The Earth Blew Up (2024, Peter Browngardt)

Palate cleanser after all this week’s zombie movies (28 Years Later, The Sadness, Weapons) and antisocial behavior (Golem, The Beast To Die). I mean sure, this is also a zombie movie (the population gets possessed by alien chewing gum) full of antisocial behavior (Daffy), but with a different tone, and animated. Zippy and funny, the 74 credited writers should be proud (their other works include Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Samurai Jack, SpongeBob, Camp Lazlo, She-Ra, and Brigsby Bear).

by ·Comments Off on Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens)

Feels like 10% doc, 90% light indie drama. There will be production noise (“cut… and that’s a wrap on Paul!”) in the blackout between scenes, puncturing the story of daughter Callie Hernandez following up on her late father’s inventions, interviewing friends/investors and other participants. But the actual documentary quantity is unknown, since people are playing version of themselves (others are played by fellow indie filmmakers), and the inventor dad was also real, playing himself in archival appearances on local TV. Courtney unpacks the precise true/false nature in a good Filmmaker interview, where they also discuss dads, “the mythology they have around themselves, and even fantasies about themselves, which as someone’s child you often enter because you’re very little, and it’s the way to be close to them and to love them.”

by ·Comments Off on Weapons (2025, Zach Cregger)

I noticed the parasite stuff on the classroom board long before it came up again via zombie-fungus-ant TV show, argh. The most mystifying was Handsome Family’s “Don’t Be Scared” (the “wake up, Paul” song) playing on the car radio to a cop named Paul. My conspiracy theory is that everything after Paul’s night at the bar with the teacher is his dream, that he fantasizes finding the missing kids (with help from his crack-addict tormentor) and almost saving them before getting paralyzed by a witch and then killed by his ex-girlfriend.

Pulp Fictioned-out story that keeps rewinding and changing perspective. Is it ironic that Brolin writes WITCH on the teacher’s car and the the villain turns out to be an actual witch? Effective blend of fairy-tale horror (pied piper children-napping by evil mind-control witches) with suburban dread/investigation drama. As for investigation, the cops are portrayed as even more ineffective than usual – the one we follow fucks up his home life, falls off the wagon, keeps getting stabbed by a crackhead, brutalizes civilians while disabling his car camera, then gets conquered by the witch, and killed with his own gun. As for the rest of the force, supposedly working hard on the case, nobody thought to check what direction the kids were running and then walk in that direction until the lines intersect – a parent figures this out a month too late.

Movies gain an automatic extra star when seen on the big screen. Packed weeknight crowd tittered at the suspense scenes, but their biggest reaction was upon seeing Justin Long The Mac Guy for some reason. Good movie but Parker isn’t wrong.

by ·Comments Off on The Sadness (2021, Rob Jabbaz)

Starts as a mild relationship drama (she has a job, he is useless), then he goes outside and witnesses an extremely sudden citywide outbreak of The Crazies. The infected get red around their big black eyes, sport a big grin, and torture normals for fun, retaining their person skills (can talk and use weapons). After no living humans are in sight, the crazies have violent blood orgies. So our guy runs back home to come up with a plan, after the gardener neighbor cuts off a couple of his fingers, meanwhile the girl has taken the midnight meat train to work, uh oh. Rest of the movie is them trying to find each other, meeting up at a hospital, each trailing their own zombie archnemesis. I feel like it’s trying to be somewhat comical in an over-the-top gory kind of way, like Terrifier, but mostly ends up depressing (“charmless, sadistic“).

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of King Crab (2021, Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)

Gorgeous movie, multipart flashbacking story of drunk beardy Luciano, who gets very angry when the Prince locks a gate used by the shepherds, and burns down a building not knowing that his girl was inside. Later (Jay: “effectively morphing into a Western, like some lost Monte Hellman film as imagined by Lisandro Alonso”) he’s a false priest enlisted by pirates to find hidden gold in Tierra del Fuego with the help of a crab.

Maria Alexandra Lungu, star of The Wonders:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

The film’s very methodology implicitly questions the reliability of narrators and highlights the selective hearing of audiences; what is made clear is that we all contribute to the shape of the stories we tell. Somewhere amid the din of the elders’ conflicting or consenting voices, a narrative of questionable veracity is cobbled together that the film then proceeds to visualize. By revisiting the scenes from which the elders’ unofficial chronicle emanates, de Righi and Zoppis pry open the causal effects of narrative and reveal its mercurial mythmaking.

by ·Comments Off on The Sparrow in the Chimney (2024, Ramon Zürcher)

The Girl and The Spider and Trauma, or, The Dead Little Cat. The sparrow escapes in first few minutes and doesn’t return – and good for it, given the violence and bad vibes that ensue. Family get-together for someone’s birthday, and everyone’s happy to see each other but also on edge, then the kids start taking turns telling the mom they hate her, escalating aggressions until the movie breaks with reality when the cat is found dead in the washing machine and mom has a freakout and maybe the house burns down, everyone smiling pleasantly at each other about it. Played Locarno last year, so I watched during this year’s Locorazo.

Vadim Rizov:

Sparrow begins by once again demonstrating the brothers’ John-Carpenter-level facility with weaponizing off-screen space, leaning into meticulously locked-off interiors that are repeatedly unexpectedly disrupted, often by animals … Part of what I liked most about Strange Little Cat was the ways it generated surprise from both its framing and unexpected structure, low on overt incident but subtly discombobulating; that the Zürchers’ subsequent films have leaned into greater degrees of melodramatic hyperbole isn’t where I want them to go.

The mom starred in at least two Angela Schanelec movies, her husband in All Good and Bloodsuckers, and her sister in Schwentke’s The Captain.

by ·Comments Off on Petite Solange (2021, Axelle Ropert)

Locorazo screening number one. A change in the formula this year, we’ll get into it later. Really nice to see a soft, grainy movie from this decade that doesn’t look like digital glop.

Solange was doing fine at school until her parents decided to get divorced – now she gets detention, steals from a store, cries during class. Mom (Lea Drucker, very good as usual) is an actor, dad (one of the guys I didn’t mention who Juliette Binoche dates in Let The Sunshine In) runs a guitar shop and has been seeing his coworker. Solange says she knows her parents don’t love each other, but she’ll try to stay alive anyway. Axelle wrote La France and Mrs. Hyde and Don Juan, and plays the dean in Bozon’s Mods.