Mid-Sized Sedan is an elite ex-military dude trying to bail out his doomed brother, but a corrupt small-town sheriff’s department decides to fuck with him, so MSS must take revenge with the help of a cute whistleblower. Mostly this is tense and excellent, but it gets too tangled and plotty. They could’ve taken a lesson from another movie about a one-man war against crooked authority figure Don Johnson by streamlining the story in the movie’s second half, not adding more and more story.
There are tuba thefts, and even a halfway-explanation for them, but they’re hardly the point of this experimental false/true movie, which has great sound design and unusual use of captions, and grows to encompass John Cage and Bruce Conner.
Michael Sicinski on Patreon:
There are also “fictional” passages in The Tuba Thieves, although one gets the clear sense that, in the post-Iranian New Wave fashion, these people are playing versions of themselves. O’Daniel shows us a group of friends from the L.A. Deaf community, but mostly focuses on a young couple, Nyke and “Nature Boy”. Nyke is expecting, and this has prompted her to think back on moments of her own childhood, which she discusses with Arcey, her father. NB, meanwhile, is traveling a lot for his work and, at the start of the film, is becoming increasingly irritated with his audiologist’s hearing tests. Declining to repeat the words on the test, he instead composes a dense, Surrealist poem in ASL, using most of the same words.
Alissa Wilkinson in NY Times:
The 1979 final punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club shows up, as does a surprise free 1984 show that Prince played at Gallaudet University, the nation’s only liberal arts university devoted to deaf people. They’re all driving toward a similar point: Listening means more than just hearing, and in fact doesn’t requiring hearing at all. But the sounds, the vibrations, the racket and clamor and buzz of everyday life are as important in their presence as in their absence. O’Daniel’s scrutiny of them is somehow rigorous and abstract, serious and playful, and provocative in a way that makes us take in the world differently.
Seventeen months after the last episode I’m finally getting around to part four of Small Axe. Alex is in prison re-living his life in flashback, particularly the year he arrived in London, met a bunch of cool people and got really into reggae. Jerking back and forth in time, I only figured out Alex was a real person towards the end when he got out of jail. Most critics disliked this episode for its biopic nature or its wonky script, I liked it very much because it’s an hour long and full of cool music. Then I listened to disc one of The Trojan Dub Box and now I’m good for the rest of the year. Alex (Sheyi Cole) was later in Soderbergh’s Full Circle, which I’d forgotten all about.
Alex’s cellmate says the name of the next Small Axe movie:
Alex says the name of McQueen’s follow-up to Small Axe:
Watched to bring my mind peace on the 5th – in retrospect, the last evening when “slow monk in front of Washington Monument” inspired happy thoughts. Walker keeps on walking, while his Days co-star Anong makes some noodles.
Our guy Samet is a village schoolteacher who has been reported to the school board for getting too friendly with the girls. He’s defensive and petulant – I knew things would go badly for him when he hooked up his roomie Kenan with a girl (Nuray) then rolled his eyes at everything the friend said at their first meeting. Samet practically tells his students that he’s too good for this place, and he immediately, publicly punishes the girl who ratted on him when he illicitly discovers her identity. He laughs weird and talks too much when he’s lying or scheming. He finds it easy to believe the allegations against Kenan while insisting his own allegations are lies. He sleeps with Nuray – she says don’t tell Kenan, and he tells him immediately. In the end he’s getting what he wanted, a job in the city, where I’m sure he’ll be just as miserable – I hate him so much.
I had this quote in my head the whole time (see also: Preston and Lawrence):
A different sort of thing for Maddin, his most restrained feature. More Bunuelian perhaps, tricking viewers with a political arthouse drama with Cate Blanchett then gradually accumulating unnatural quirks until the giant brain in the woods is only a distraction from whether sentient pedo-hunting AI has Lawnmower-Manned all communications in an apparently depopulated Germany. Seven world leaders were in a gazebo hard at work crafting the most bland and vague statement they could, when they found themselves cut off from outside contact. Each one gets their standout moment, but Canada (the most emotional and least respected) steps up during the crisis, triumphantly editing and reading their final statement aloud to the masturbating bog people.
Germany is the Australian Blanchett, Canada is Roy Dupuis (I think he’s the woodsman who yells “strong men!” in Forbidden Room, which also features a giant brain). UK is late Shyamalan fave Nikki Amuka-Bird, USA is the inexplicably British gent Charles Dance (who I just saw in The First Omen). Then there’s Italy (I got nothing on Rolando Ravello), France (Denis Ménochet, the violent PTSD guy in Beau Is Afraid), and Japan (Takehiro Hira of the new Shogun). They come across two suicidal European Union workers: Zlatko Buric of Triangle of Sadness, and Alicia Vikander, subject of the best joke in the movie (they think the brain’s influence has got her speaking in ancient lost languages, but it turns out to just be Swedish).
Of course I’d watch the movie where Irish music enthusiasts unleash ancient ghosts by stealth-taping forbidden songs. They’re Alex and Anna, and are bad at the stealth part, bad at knowing the details of what they’re after, and can’t interpret the songs, so they enlist help from folk music expert Agnes, who beats them to the song-knower’s house, steals the song, and steals Alex.
Song-knower:
The song-knower’s puppeteer son Breezeblock Concannon (!) comes home to find his mom has been murdered by ghosts, so he revenge-kidnaps Anna, and they track down the others by breaking into the library to see who’s checking out ancient Irish dictionaries. By now Alex is possessed by the viral song, emaciated and only wants to fuck, while Agnes works on the song and takes care of him. When Anna arrives she isn’t happy about any of this and starts stabbing people, but the Reborn Combination AlexAgnes eats her and then goes on its way.
“A digital cinema package by Paul Duane,” who codirected the great Natan. Since then he’s made The Dead Zoo and Best Before Death, the guy has got a thing for death. The drunken song-knower mum is the only character who is cool – it figures she was in The Northman – and Agnes played Ashley Laurence’s mom in Warlock 3.
The only movie this year that I’ve begun at 4:00am. I was sick and unable to sleep, and when the rooster next door started crowing I thought “might as well put on the longest, slowest movie I’ve got.” The new nun in town is NT Free of that M. Night TV series that I can’t figure out whether I would enjoy or not, and the wide-eyed elder nun is Aquarius star Sonia Braga. NT discovers her new convent to be as suspicious as that Cuckoo hotel, as the movie brings Rosemary’s Baby (or more generously The Sect) into its Omen backstory and impregnates the youngest nun with the devil.
All movies set in Italy involve a dramatic encounter with an art restoration:
Bilge called it “actually good” and Nayman qualifies “never quite great.” But I have prequelphobia, and as much as I love quoting “it’s all for you” from the original, the callbacks here annoyed me more than the high-quality performance and hair stylings of NT pulled me in. Also appreciate the ally priest being recast as the dad from The VVitch, and the opening-scene death of the U.S. President of Rumours, anyway.
Hunter Schafer (Kinds of Kindness) just lost her mom and is reluctantly stuck with her dad’s family for the season, working for suspicious Dan Stevens at a secluded German hotel where people are always barfing in the gift shop. Sometimes there’s an attack or a freakout and the whole movie gets stuck in a fluttery time loop. She’s joined by Lando (Jan Bluthardt from Singer’s also-cool Luz) who wants to eliminate the alien creatures Dan is fostering, which include Hunter’s half-sister, so she’s now trying to save her family from both these men and the evil mom-aliens with her one good arm, a knife, and a half-working walkman as protection from alien time-screams. Gets a little bit too explainy – I’m looking for my bizarre rural euro-sci-fi to be narratively calibrated somewhere between this and Earwig.
With this and Longlegs, murderous moms are in vogue:
Hunter’s music sounds cool, too:
