by ·Comments Off on The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)

Dumb Mulholland Drive. Even more gleefully artificial than I Saw the TV Glow, its length allows more emphasis and repetition than is really needed – I keep remembering how much Body Melt accomplished in 80 minutes, while after all the buildup, only a couple bodies melt in this one.

After Demi is fired from a TV network for being too old, she gets the inside scoop on the substance, which creates a younger you from the current you, and the two yous alternate weeks of consciousness. Her first day as Qualley she gets her old job back from squishy boss Dennis Quaid, then Demi wastes her own weeks eating junk food in her apartment, then the second week she starts stealing extra youth time, which causes Demi to age rapidly/erratically. It’s a huge problem that neither of them has self control. They start videodroming (Q pulls a chicken leg out of her bellybutton) then body-melting (Q gets the idea to substance herself, then drops a boob out her eyehole on live TV).

by ·Comments Off on The Damned (2024, Roberto Minervini)

Civil War union boys attempt to patrol out west. Non-period-accurate dialogue, the actors apparently just told to say whatever’s on their minds, it loses me whenever they speak religion or philosophy. I wondered with a half-hour left where this is all heading, and decided it’s heading nowhere and will have an open non-ending, and yup.

As far as movies where women don’t exist, this isn’t as good as Chevalier. The DP (who also wrote the music) uses some unusual lens, dark on the edges with blurry backgrounds, editor also works with the Dardennes.

by ·Comments Off on Gush / Guts & Glitz (2023, Fox Maxy)

Plentiful digital crud here but also so many creatures. Tyra Banks is in more scenes than you’d expect. Constant music flow, all voices have been processed. Composed tripod shots cut rapidly with scraps of handheld phone videos (terrific editing).

Milisuthando vibes, but not as bad. This is the most-halfway I’ve half-watched a movie all year, the TV seeming to demand “do not turn me off, nor give me your full attention.” Maybe generation gap or general blues, but I just sat transfixed by two Twin Peaks episodes so it’s not a lack of attention.

by ·Comments Off on Rebel Ridge (2024, Jeremy Saulnier)

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.

by ·Comments Off on The Tuba Thieves (2023, Alison O’Daniel)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Alex Wheatle (2020, Steve McQueen)

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:

by ·Comments Off on Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-Liang)

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.

by ·Comments Off on About Dry Grasses (2023, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

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):

by ·Comments Off on Rumours (2024, Maddin/Johnson/Johnson)

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).