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.

by ·Comments Off on Daughters (2024, Angela Patton & Natalie Rae)

I’d read a little about this movie beforehand, and didn’t bring any kleenex, so stood outside the Missouri Theater staring up at its walls thinking “I am the brick, I am the mortar, I will not cry at the movie,” and this pretty much worked. Slyly highlights the broken horrors of the prison system through personal stories from inside and outside, the two sides meeting at the father-daughter dance, an invention of activist and co-director Patton. The dads are told to use the dance as a promise to change and be present for their families, and soon some are getting out but others are being shut away for decades (the movie never says why any of them are inside). A particular five year-old is so open, talking lovingly and often of her feather, then in postscript she’s eight, acting completely distant on a phone call with him. Older jaded kids have trouble with the concept, but give in when it’s dance time. A lovely movie that will go far unless it’s immediately dumped onto streaming and lost in the content ocean. At least twenty producers, and a production company that did Faya Dayi and The Territory. Opener Good Looks was a noisy four-piece rock group.

by ·Comments Off on Girls State (2024, Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine)

More wide-ranging than Boys State, the governor race not the only thing going. Conservative girl Emily is the star (has she mentioned she’s conservative?), decisively losing the governor race then quickly putting together an article about the differences in funding, prestige, and programming between Girls and Boys State, and winning a scholarship. Complaints in the air that the boys have triple the budget, participation from elected officials, and more discussion of real issues. Nisha doesn’t get a supreme court seat, so becomes the judge of a lower court that sends a case on forced pre-abortion counseling to the supreme, where Tochi is the DA arguing the state’s opinion while believing the opposite. It’s all super slick and heartwarming – they had so many cameras running. Production company Concordia worked on some of the big T/F titles: Time, Bisbee 17, Bloody Nose. We stayed for the Q&A, with three Missouri-based subjects in attendance. Rae Fitzgerald played too softly for a noisy noontime crowd, even with her rhythm section.

David Ehrlich in Indiewire:

The closer Girls State gets toward its climactic elections, the more it confronts the same patriarchal bias and performative empowerment that might have girl-bossed the life out of a lesser film (although this one still plays a particular Taylor Swift song over its end credits). And the more it confronts the role those phenomena manage to play on the university campus where the Boys and Girls State programs are being held at the same time for the first time in Missouri history (but still completely separate from one another in order to avoid sins of the flesh and whatnot), the more frighteningly it reflects a near-future — or now present — in which political agency is just something young women get to pretend they have if there’s room in the budget for a bit of make-believe.

by ·Comments Off on A Photographic Memory (2024, Rachel Elizabeth Seed)

Good photography (by others) and music (by Mary Lattimore) but this falls straight into the personal/parents doc template with the usual outcomes. Mom died before Rachel was two, R doesn’t remember her, so she goes on a journey to find footage and associates. Goes where mom went, meets who she knew, makes mom’s ex-boyfriend cry while Rachel is breaking up with her own husband. I don’t feel like they came up with compelling way to turn their audiotape archives into cinema – re-enactments with faces hidden, video of tape machines, the old kachunk-slideshow from Sr. She performs as her mom, edits herself into film of her mom, interviews other girls who didn’t have moms, generally makes everything about herself and her loss. The stuff about the nature of photography and memory was more interesting than the parental pinings. Her dad seems cool anyway. Some good voices in this, but not the director’s, which is who we’re mostly hearing. When looking for trailers I found one from a decade ago – this was shot and kickstartered back then, and it took this long to finish. Somewhere in the long process it picked up producers who worked on Joonam, Hottest August, Aquarela, Her Smell, and Cameraperson, and the editors of Crip Camp and The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Horns and drums by Gora Gora Orkestar made the trip to the Jesse worthwhile.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Michael Andrianaly

Gwetto (2023) and Todisoa and the Black Stones (2013)

“Economically disadvantaged,” they call themselves in Gwetto – true of both movies, though the displaced people of Todisoa are also geographically disadvantaged. They’re forcibly relocated by white exploiters who run a mine with local labor. A guy carrying charcoal to the next town inevitably reminds of the much more interesting Makala. Gwetto is car wash kids who are stressed that the neighbors think they’re thugs. Katy calls it impressionistic – we don’t get to know these guys individually. One bit of excitement outside a carnival where you can see people in the background clambering on the outside of the ferris wheels. Andrianaly won a T/F career award, but Katy and I are suddenly less interested in catching up with his Nofinofy.

Gwetto: