Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”
Online/lockdown movie starring the white girl from Zombi Child who creates Barbie sitcoms, plays a Simon game that’s impossible to lose, and watches videos of her hero Patricia Coma (who starred in P. Garrel’s Sauvage Innocence).
Sometimes there’s a serial killer interview or animation or day-for-night dream-limbo or an Unfriended homage (zoom call intruder, hand in blender) or a Nocturama homage (surveillance split-screen). Bookended with over-sincere subtitle essays. “Is this horror?,” I wrote (it’s not). Bonello in Cinema Scope: “Horror films were the first kind of cinema that I really liked when I was a kid. I think I know them quite well, and was trying to put some of their codes in here.”
Byington continues to be the most consistently funny dude in the movies. This didn’t make me die laughing like Frances Ferguson, still a very good time, watching Carter (David Krumholtz) suffer. Lousy thinks that he’s dying, turns out his charts got mixed up, then he’s immediately murdered.
Not a great title, I keep forgetting which movie this was. It’s more like Mexican Parasite – Emiliano (Robe of Gems) is searching for his disappeared activist mom and after a tip from a dying cop he gets a job with a rich social-media-artist family, and hangs out with their daughter while things fall apart between a local religious cult and the cartels and the family’s own secrets and greed.
Lovely and not mysterious at all until suddenly it is. The community responds to a tourism company: “The very essence of this village is at stake.” The company has sent a couple of know-nothing PR types – main dude Takumi pokes holes in their plan but also drives them around and indulges the guy’s desire to do manly backwoods things like chop wood. Then Takumi’s daughter goes missing, and the PR dude must be killed to maintain nature’s balance (I guess). No big stars – the woman who runs the local noodle shop and wants to maintain the water quality for her broth costarred in Happy Hour. Hamaguchi reveals in Cinema Scope that it was put together rather experimentally, says his own perspective is usually closer to the invading PR people than the rural residents.
The PR people surprised to hear they have to protect their grounds from deer:
The deer they never considered:
I should’ve done this in a TV roundup with The Sympathizer since I have nothing to say about it, but too late, I already created the post. Long doc about Texas Renaissance Festival founder “King” George’s half-hearted attempts to delegate and hand off power (and to date young women with natural breasts at the olive garden) and the employees and would-be successors whom he keeps screwing over. Lance shoots the hell out of it. Good enough to make us consider his sperm doc.
Lance is aware of the artifice and performance, wishes for a “documentary-subject performance” oscar in his Vulture interview.
Some unimportant details:
– He always plays classic rock hits in the car, and we’ll see the song start and end, but his trip has been edited down visually, so the music and the picture run on different timelines, Dunkirk-style.
– He won’t sell his cassettes for a coworker, but lends the guy all his cash then has to sell a cassette anyway to afford the gas home.
– I know the movie title references the Lou Reed song he plays in his apartment, but then is his niece Niko’s name a Nico reference?
Bilge Ebiri has got the important stuff.
Just as charming as people are saying it is. I still don’t like Glen Powell enough to watch his Twister sequel. The girl was in the Irma Vep remake, and the cop who Glen replaces as a fake hit man also starred with him in Everybody Wants Some. I love the ending so much, the movie letting them get away with murder then saying ha ha, it’s just a movie.
