by ·Comments Off on Where the Devil Roams (2023, Poser/Adams/Adams)

Unpromising beginning with dodgy compositing and fake film distress as we’re told a long poem, then a bridge that reminds me of The Empty Man (everything reminds me of The Empty Man). Watching this after When Evil Lurks because I keep getting them confused with their similar titles, and Lurking definitively beat Roaming. This movie certainly does roam. Its three leads (family of hopeless carnie thief/murderers with a terrible musical act until they steal a better one from a devil-dealing finger-traumatist) are a real family, also the movie’s directors. They’d previously made Hellbender (metal music/witchcraft) and The Deeper You Dig (clairvoyant murder-suspense).

The devil-dealer is Mr. Tipps, who nightly cuts off his fingers for the crowd, then sews them back with cursed thread – he stole the thread originally, so it’s only fair that our trio steals it from him later. The girl of the family is said to be mute but I didn’t realize, since she sings in their act. The mom kills somebody in each town they pass through, and I can’t tell if this is supposed to be vigilante justice or if they’re just remorseless criminals. Dad gets WWI flashbacks when he sees blood (and is incidentally afraid of birds), so has to be blindfolded during the crimes, and eventually during their circus act. So it’s set in the past (1920s?) but doesn’t feel authentically past-tense, more of an antique shop present. The parents eventually get some limbs chopped off by an axe girl at a home they invaded (played by their other IRL daughter) and the dad becomes catatonic, but still performs his nightly onstage dance to the girl’s alt-rock song.

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.

by ·Comments Off on The Delinquents (2023, Rodrigo Moreno)

Moran robs the bank where he works, gives the money to unwitting Roman. Laura Paredes arrives to investigate, makes life hell for the remaining bankers. When Roman can’t take the pressure, he’s told to drop off the money on a mountainside, where he meets and falls for Norma – and flashbacks reveal that Moran had previously fallen for the same woman in the same spot.

Only three hours long – I think the reason it’s divided into two parts is that Laura Paredes only appears in multi-part features. Suspicious dialogue about mysterious flowers.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

Broken into two acts, with a cast of characters whose names are obviously anagrams of each other, The Delinquents is forward with its gamesmanship, and if the eventual resolution of its central conflict seems unsatisfying, that may be precisely the point … At one point Román ducks into a Buenos Aires arthouse and catches a few minutes of Bresson’s L’Argent, a sign that Moreno is more than happy to lay his cards on the table, allowing the viewer to infer a game of three-card monty where there actually is none.

Ehrlich called it “arguably the first slow cinema heist movie.” Jenkins calls their employer “the absolute worst bank in the world.” Cronk says it jumps off “from the central premise of Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) — a touchstone of Argentine film noir that many cinephiles of Moreno’s generation grew up watching on television.”

Rizov: “It’s no coincidence that the bank vault and the prison Morán ends up have their hallways laid out in the same way, a rhyme that’s brought home by the same actor (Germán De Silva) playing both Morán’s boss and a prisoner who extorts money for protection.” Moreno: “At the end of the day, what I wanted to make was a fable. I had no obligation to reality — my debt was to cinema. So I said, “Let’s do it, let’s play this game. Here’s an actor playing two roles.”

by ·Comments Off on Yannick (2023, Quentin Dupieux)

A tough one, awkward single-setting movie where it’s hard to tell what’s meant to be funny, where the loyalties lie. A three-person play is interrupted by a young guy who says he’s not being properly entertained, and so holds cast and audience at gunpoint while he rewrites the play. Good mixed ending, as Yannick’s new play proves to be a hit as the swat team closes in.

by ·Comments Off on Stopmotion (2023, Robert Morgan)

Young animator Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) is completing her dying mom’s final stop-motion film, then tries to turn it into her own work. But Aisling has no ideas of her own. Where do ideas come from? She tries asking her man’s sister for psychedelic drugs, then starts listening to the girl down the hall who doesn’t actually exist. She begins animating in a trance state, believing the monster they created inside her film is after her, and it does finally eat the girl they also created. In the meantime, Aisling pushes her bf Tom down the stairs, and his character name must be a Peeping Tom reference since she kills his sister with a tripod. Unfortunately the movie we’re watching isn’t a stop-motion horror but a mediocre live-action indie movie. I’ve tried to make it sound eventful, but the twist is that it’s ponderous and tiresome, offering nothing fresh, and that’s a crushing disappointment from the creator of the brilliant Bobby Yeah.

by ·Comments Off on Quantum Cowboys (2022, Geoff Marslett)

Live and/or animated actors and props over distressed rotoed backgrounds, all talking philosophy and quantum physics, like Waking Life: The Western. The infinite universes concept ties into the animation/visual style changing from scene to scene, shot to shot – it doesn’t always work but it’s a big swing. Funny unintentionally as often as on purpose, which was often enough to keep me watching. Announces itself as Part One of The Arizona Antilogy (def: “a contradiction in terms or ideas”).

Our guys are Frank and Bruno, and I can’t prove that writers Marslett and Howe Gelb meant this as a Franklin Bruno reference but I’m gonna assume so. Frank is caught in a time-loop, robbing a store which leads to the death of singer Blackie (Gelb), and his buddy (doing a silly accent) is trying to save him from fate at the hands of killers-from-the-future (who go around the Old West claiming to have written Led Zeppelin songs), then Lily Gladstone helps them sort it all out. There’s an interdimensional camera crew which includes Gary Farmer, plus scenes with Neko Case (the reason I’m watching) and veterans of other surreal westerns. There’s a Timecrimes-ish bit, an it-was-all-a-dream bit, ends on a Schrödinger’s cat joke.

by ·Comments Off on The Other One (2023, Henry Threadgill)

It’s hard to make time for the movies at Big Ears, but sometimes they’re programmed at 10am so you can watch one without missing any concerts. I would’ve loved to see The Tuba Thieves but it conflicted with Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and I later heard that Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave and subsequent interview got delayed by an hour, which would’ve made me miss Secret Chiefs 3 and Kronos Quartet. This didn’t conflict with anything except brunch, and I’d already seen Threadgill’s Very Very Circus ensemble and knew I like his music. This was consumer-looking-video of a few interwoven Threadgill covid-era projects. Primarily it’s a concert performance of a new piece, music played by a small orchestra he’s conducting with pauses to read poetry off projected pages (their layout and typography being as good as the language). There are sections where he’s arranging small mystical objects while yelling at cloud in voiceover, and slideshows of the photographs he took of junk New Yorkers put out on the sidewalk when they had to actually inhabit their apartments due to the pandemic.

by ·Comments Off on Look Into My Eyes (2024, Lana Wilson)

Rae Fitzgerald again, solo this time, and better suited for the Globe venue. No music during the psychic/medium sessions – was there any music at all? Some false leads and wrong guesses during the sessions, some spot-on apparent knowledge of strangers’ lives, and lots of affirmation – it’s posed as a form of counseling/therapy, for the mediums as well as their customers. Present, but uncaptured by DP Stephen Maing (who was down the street introducing Union) were the ghosts of beloved partners, children, a great(x5) grandfather, and a bearded dragon. Some humor but the crowd never laughing at the film’s participants, and breaking scenes to talk to the director/crew is left in, the cameras welcomed to the mystery. An A24 release so hopefully this will play out, and all the Everything Everwhere / Past Lives fans will watch it.

Scott Tobias in The Reveal:

Most admit that they’re improvising through uncertainty, working from an intuition that often betrays them. A cynic might consider them con artists. Wilson’s film frames them as seekers.