by ·Comments Off on The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer)

Knew I should watch this but kept putting it off because I don’t need new ways to get depressed. Then I read this new Verso article and gave it a shot. Opens with a bang, the title slowly fading to black over a few minutes while Mica Levi’s crazymaking score drones and detunes.

The atmosphere (soldiers and smokestacks, constant half-heard sounds of horror) doesn’t get to anyone except Mrs. Hoss’s mom – in fact, Mrs. Hoss (Sandra Hüller) likes the house more than she likes her husband (Christian Friedel, star of Amour Fou and The White Ribbon), and when he’s transferred she doesn’t come along (“I’ll miss you, of course”).

Mr. Hoss’s new post:

Jake Romm in Verso:

The film is radically uninterested in its human subjects, which is part of why the constant critical invocations of Arendt’s banality of evil misses the mark. Höss, as many have pointed out, was not merely a “company man,” he was a committed Nazi — an early adopter, even — and a man who pursued his work with singular acumen. He is not a man who speaks or thinks only in cliché, who has subordinated his will or capacity for thought to the party. He is portrayed, rather, as a man with a unique genius and fervor for extermination, a quiet egomaniac with an investment in his work for reasons of personal satisfaction as well as professional and ideological reasons. But most of all, according to a letter of recommendation in the film, “He is a model settler farmer, and an exemplary German pioneer of the East”.
…
It is the Höss’s ownership of this nature, and the perversions of character such a nature produces, that are the subject of the film. Glazer’s formal choice to shoot the “action” by way of unobtrusive fixed cameras and microphones highlights the film’s impersonality. Characters move freely about the open spaces, filmed in wide angles as much to highlight the unimportance of the spaces’ human inhabitants as to give detail to the spaces themselves. We watch as if on a surveillance tape, an association that is almost literalized in the black and white night-vision interludes, in which a Polish servant furtively places apples in the dirt for Jewish slaves to find. Special equipment is required to film this act of solidarity and kindness: it is the negative image of the world, one which cannot be seen in the normal light of day.

A.A. Dowd killed it in his Vulture article about the movie’s ending.

The Zone of Interest presents Höss as a decidedly bureaucratic monster: the mass murderer as wormy careerist who sees the Holocaust — this unfathomable evil he’s directly committing — as a mere professional accomplishment … And so maybe what he’s seeing at the end of the hall is a future where no one appreciates what he’s done — not the technological ingenuity of his murders, not how efficiently the camp operated under his leadership. It’s his victims that people will come to Auschwitz to honor. He is a footnote on history, remembered as a mere cog of the death machine, if he’s remembered at all.

James Lattimer:

[Zone proves] his peerless control of the medium on the one hand while lacking most of the extra layers and spiraling messiness that made his previous works so rich. Although Glazer’s conceptual approach to depicting the Holocaust is typically astute, whereby the unrepresentable is kept strictly to the domain of the offscreen space, even the smartest of strategies begins to wear thin when applied largely without variation or development.

Train arriving just out of sight:

A.S. Hamrah:

The story turns into one we know. Daddy is promoted and the family will have to move out of their dream house, spoiling their happy life. This is the same plot as Vincente Minnelli’s Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis, filmed in Hollywood and released in American theaters during the exact same time frame in which The Zone of Interest takes place — 1943 and 1944.

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

–
Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.

by ·Comments Off on In Our Day (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

I watched this the same night as In Water just because they’re recent Hong movies with short runtimes, not looking for connections, but I noted characters saying “I’ll do my best / let’s do our best” in both movies. Two separate-but-similar three-person situations with no direct intersection, cutting back and forth between them, each chapter with a preceding descriptive intertitle like it’s a Dickens chapter.

1. Actress Kim Min-hee is staying with friend Song Sun-mi (also Kim’s friend in The Woman Who Ran), when young aspiring actress Park Mi-so comes for a visit/interview.

2. Older Gi Ju-bong (the dad in Hotel by the River) is a belatedly popular poet, Kim Seung-yun is at his place filming candid scenes for a documentary on him, aspiring poet Ha Seong-guk comes to visit/interview (these two costarred in In Water).

Different sorts of dramas ensue – in the first, the host’s cat escapes and the visitor helps recover him. In the second, the visitor is trying to kiss up and stay longer and helps the newly on-the-wagon poet get boozed up.

by ·Comments Off on In Water (2023, Hong Sang-soo)

The one where the shots are out of focus. This is bearable because the movie’s only an hour long, and each scene is differently out of focus, leading one to wonder whether the sharpness of the picture correlates to something in the narrative (he does say his idea is “a little blurry”) or a character state of mind. Three would-be film people are at a beach town on the young director’s dime to shoot his first movie, which he hasn’t written yet. He bristles at how much they’re all spending on food while he postpones the actual shoot, finally steals some ideas from his surroundings and from his past, calling up his ex to ask permission to use a song he wrote her, and playing it into the camera as he walks into the sea, closing the movie and the movie-in-the-movie. So his movie ends up pretty close to our movie, but presumably in focus.

If you could see ’em, the actors are Shin Seok-ho (the lead in Introduction) with Ha Seong-guk and Kim Seung-yun (both also in In Our Day).

by ·Comments Off on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023, Radu Jude)

I didn’t love Jude’s pandemic movie, but I’m extremely onboard with this one – everything down to the closing credits is delightful. It’s a very cynical movie about Romania and capitalism, starring Radu-regular Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an odd-jobs film-shoot worker.

Angela’s present-day is filmed in grainy b/w, her filtered selfie videos doing misogynist insult commentary are in low-detail digital color, then there’s another Angela who also drives a car for a living, via the 1982 film Angela Goes On, in beautifully restored 35mm color. That movie is the Poor Cow to the main feature’s The Limey, and its Angela appears in present day (the same actress/character) as the mom of a disabled worker hired to tell his story for a company safety video.

Radu Jude in Cinema Scope:

When I was young and reading all these stories about Herzog shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, it sounded so heroic. In the early days, when we were supposed to work 20 hours and then drive to another location, it felt magical and sort of heroic. I don’t see it quite that way anymore. You can fool yourself into thinking this way as a filmmaker, but for the people working around you, it’s not like that at all. They don’t care if your movie is going to win an Oscar, or if it’s going to be a piece of crap. They just want to finish the shooting and go home.

Translation issues:

From the mid-film wordless montage of roadside death markers:

Mark Asch in Little White Lies:

Angela’s set of wheels signify anything but independence: she’s cut off, honked at, catcalled, and constantly slamming brakes, swearing, and flipping off other drivers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ringtone, signaling the arrival of yet another task, is Beethoven’s 9th, the official anthem of the EU), appealing to her team spirit — and, implicitly, her economic precarity as a project-based worker — as they send her over to the airport to pick up a foreign guest, or to pick up lenses from a backlot where Uwe Boll is shooting a cheap nonunion monster movie.

Cemetery advertising:

Jude again:

I think the film is also a film about Bucharest. Why does Bucharest look so bad today compared to how it looked back then? Some of that is propaganda, as many images and films from that time were produced to show the most beautiful side of Bucharest, which is why I slow down those less beautiful moments from Angela Moves On — so you can see the other side. But even still, Bucharest is in much worse shape now, 30 years after the revolution. How did we let that happen? It’s more crowded now, more polluted—cars are on the sidewalk, buildings are falling down, etc. I read that it’s the second most congested city in the world. I think the film can show this by putting one image next to another, and in doing so maybe propose this question to the viewer.

by ·Comments Off on I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun)

Much larger in scope than Jane’s previous movie – even though it’s still just two lead characters who spend their nights looking at screens. Two awkward students bond over a TV show named after a Cocteau Twins album, a Buffy/X-Files-ish thing with deep lore. They try watching it together but they’re both afraid of their stepdads and settle for trading VHS tapes. They attend Void High School “VHS,” home of the Vultures, and lead dude Owen (Justice Smith of that recent Dungeons & Dragons movie) starts talking to us, so the movie’s never going for naturalism.

The stars of the show-in-the-show are Helena “Madeline” Howard and Snail Mail. Also, a suspicious mention of Michael Stipe right before a TV episode about where the ice cream man goes in wintertime.

The older girl with a later bedtime is Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, a daughter in Bill & Ted 3), and she twice offers to take him away from it all. She runs away from home but he freaks out and doesn’t join her, then his mom dies and the TV show is canceled. Eight years later Maddie reappears and says she’s been living inside the show after having herself buried alive in Phoenix (haha), and says they need to (re)bury themselves now to save their TV avatars, but he pushes her down and runs. Twenty years later, he’s alone, has made no career progress, and has a Videodrome TV inside his body.

Good, mysterious movie, evoking thoughts on nostalgia and (super)fandom and friendship and risks not taken, even though the creator has said that it’s just about being trans.

Ice Cream Man in early season of The Pink Opaque, played by Albert Birney:

Nightbreed guy in the unreleased post-final season:

Not the biggest World’s Fair fan, I held off on watching this until I saw that pd187 approved of it.

Good Sam Adams article here despite the “ending explained” hook.

by ·Comments Off on 2551.01 (2021, Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

Laborious “Mad God but not good” vibes. The strobing pounding metal grotesque masked riot scene was a decent open, continues with monochrome cruelty (in every scene there’s some poor sucker who the others are beating). Throw in clowns and banana peels, silly music/sfx (laugh track?) in case we take the grim masked drama and Abu Ghraib references too seriously. The sudden stop/start of fast electro music just made me wonder if I could find the “Come On My Selector” video in high-def. In the end, it’s just an excuse to make lots and lots of masks, some of them really cool. Apparently during pandemic year one I spent an evening watching Nor-Pfaf movies, but now in the post-pand 2020s I remember nothing of previous years and rely on the movie memory blog more and more.

by ·Comments Off on Pictures of Ghosts (2023, Kleber Mendonca Filho)

Vital viewing for fans of Neighbouring Sounds, showing the history of Kleber’s family in their apartment where that movie was filmed. Funny, I mentioned Chris Marker in my writeup of his Green Vinyl, and the first thing I notice in his apartment is Marker’s book “Staring Back” – and I referenced Do The Right Thing in the same post, and here’s Kleber wearing a Do The Right Thing shirt. As Tsui Hark says, we all have the same references so we all make the same films. “Fiction films are the best documentaries” he says in part two, about the disappeared cinemas of Recife, Brazil, while reviewing the only known footage of certain destroyed landmarks in the backgrounds of features. The third part is the shortest, literally turning the locals into ghosts.

The director in Cinema Scope, on shooting digital:

At the end of the day it’s not the celluloid that makes a film, it’s the attitude that goes into each and every move … It’s quite perverse. I remember in the ’80s when CDs were introduced, the industry sold the idea that vinyl was nothing and you should get rid of it. It was part of the strategy to get CDs into people’s homes. In my family we kept the vinyl and also bought CDs. I like the idea of adding new ideas and experiences. I don’t understand why the industry always has to sell subtraction. With 35mm and digital, the best thing would be for me to have more options. But capitalism always finds a way to fuck everything up.

by ·Comments Off on The United States of America (2022, James Benning)

Title card says city/state, we see a two-minute shot of a location in that sate, and on to the next one. I knew the gimmick ahead of time – that each shot was actually made in California – but it didn’t harm the viewing experience at all. Movie says you’re in the future, you imagine the future. Movie says the past, you picture the past. Movie says Omaha Nebraska, who am I to argue? It’s well-researched, because Katy looked at the Minnesota shot and said that must be Hibbing, which is what the title card told us. Possible references to previous Benning films (there’s a train and a sky). Usually ambient sound but every eighth or tenth state there’s a voiceover about oppressed people. Aside from the game-playing and real/imagined locations, it’s a very relaxing movie to watch, even more so than the slower-paced Allensworth, but my imagination ran wild on Allensworth while this mostly felt picturesque.

Hibbing MN:

A remake of sorts, per Film Comment.

Benning:

“My main idea for this film was to set up a problem that is almost insolvable, which is what America is at this particular time … it’s not a film I made to fool anybody. I think it’s an important statement about how we can create what we think the U.S. is, and take it as real, even when it’s completely false. I think any construction of meaning for the U.S. can only be false, because how can you include everything? There’s always a contradiction.

Ajo AZ:

A James Benning history lesson from Erika Balsom in Ten Skies:

Benning’s interest in structure is of no recent vintage: his Grand Opera (1978) pays explicit homage to Snow and Frampton … [yet] the bulk of his production comes definitively after [structural film’s] heyday and breaks with some of its key features. As the seventies wore on, many came to see the purging of content characteristic of structural film as a dead end and began to re-engage with narrative. Formal rigour was not so much abandoned as it was increasingly complemented by concerns with subjectivity and the social. Benning’s practice, particularly as it developed through the eighties and nineties, is best understood as part of this multifaceted response to avant-garde cinema’s high modernist moment.
…
By Ten Skies (2004), Benning had left behind the discursivity of earlier works … to adopt a metric form almost entirely free of written or spoken language. From the new talkies to the newer silents. The film is, in some sense, a resurrection of the reductionist, phenomenological impulse that Sitney saw as being at the heart of structural film. In the early twenty-first century, as cinema migrated and mutated under the pressures of technological change, such ontological inquiries assumed a renewed relevance.
…
If, for structural film, the screen was primarily a surface, for Benning it is both surface and window. His interest in structure is not a matter of making content subsidiary to outline but in exploring the tension that exists between the two … As Benning describes Ten Skies, ‘The structure itself is rigid, and then what it’s containing is fluid. It’s almost like a sieve.’

Durkee OR:

Benning in Film Comment again:

Artists are often afraid of humor. And then when people write about my films, they want to shy away from it, too, because somehow [they think] humor demeans the work. But I don’t believe that at all. I think things are funny. And sometimes you don’t make them up. Like the shot of the horses in the film that are staring at the camera. They’re motionless except for their ears, which move a little bit. They’re completely hilarious, but in a very sad way. Or the racetrack shot, with just five cars in the race, and one car getting further and further behind. It’s kind of a pathetic race, even though the audience really seems to be enjoying it. I think that’s hilarious.