by ·Comments Off on True/False Impossible Shorts

Ben LaMar Gay opened, solo with recorder, conch, mini gong, rattles and drones. The cornet was by his side but he didn’t feel inspired to pick it up, or miscalculated how much time he’d get. Q&A after, with Lynne Sachs and team giving context on their piece, and the Two Sun director all alone.

Amma ki katha (Nehal Vyas)
Four stories/myths/dreams/histories told by the elephants holding up the world. Mythic and symbolic about India in ways I didn’t usually follow. Some paper animation, a high-school play, some mothlighting. Didn’t see any of this coming after the simple hair-braiding intro.

The Sketch (Tomas Cali)
The speaker is new in Paris, learning to draw. He connects with a trans life model, represented with different drawing styles and also nude/real, the protag visually sketchy until self-realizing at the end. Better than it sounds.

Four Holes (Daniela Muñoz Barroso)
After a half hour of serious metaphor, this one’s comically-presented camera tech issues brought down the house. DIY solo golfer and filmmaker both have hearing issues, hanging out, playing with her sound equipment together.

Two Sun (Blair Barnes)
Dense in language, speech, music, and edit, but light in tone. A poet friend of the filmmaker’s puts on a fashion show for the camera and shares deep thoughts.

Contractions (Lynne Sachs)
Performers with hidden faces in the parking lot outside a former (due to repressive new laws) abortion clinic in Memphis, voiceover of clinic workers’ experiences, fears, and thoughts on the current situation. Artfully done, lovely.

by ·Comments Off on Magic Mountain (2023, Mariam Chachia & Nik Voigt)

Our first T/F/2024 movie opened with BSA Gold, a chill jazzy trio. Soviet hospital. Ends with narrator in “the nightmare of my country, where the future seems certain and the past keeps changing.” A patient (haha) trip to the secluded building, and inside. We meet patients and staff, but this is equally a portrait of the hospital building itself – a secluded palace now shabby and doomed. Short doc, and slow, so in the middle they place a lively montage of fun outtakes to keep us engaged. Graceful final shot, demolishing the last wall, camera following its dust up into the mountain. A minor movie but well constructed – my second Georgian film watched with Katy. Directors are new, the film’s editor worked on The Red Turtle.

by ·Comments Off on Menus-Plaisirs & La Danse (Frederick Wiseman)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009)

Paris Opera, from classes to group and individual rehearsals to grand public performances. The final duo dance was the first music I recognized, a string piece. After my jazz era maybe I’ll get into ballets. At least one Pina Bausch piece, at least I can recognize those. Clicking the dancers’ names on lboxd for fun, I found actors from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, early straight-to-netflix movie Divines, a Binoche feature, two obscure Deneuve movies, and Bonello’s Sarah Winchester short.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope 42, after quoting C. Huber calling FW’s work the “Great American Novel”:

La Danse … represents both a bend in the river for Wiseman and a sort of coming-to-the-fore of tendencies that were probably there all along but whose presence was difficult to discern … This is a Wiseman film with virtually no struggle on the sociological scale … upping the spectacle and downplaying those detailed, Zolaesque dimensions for which his great novel is usually vaunted … One starts to get the sense that, at this point in his career, the filmmaker may be starting to see the value in letting non-intervention tip over into tacit boosterism.

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Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023)

We got caught up in the kitchen drama, but none of the customer/restaurant scenes are as memorable as the one in The Truffle Hunters. Nobody comments on the situation, which I think about constantly, where a French tire company gets to decide which eateries worldwide are legendary/great/decent. More from Will and Filipe.

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope 97:

The four-hour runtime here mimics that of a multi-course sit-down meal, digestible in its digressions … There is no cultural or institutional polemic here … Detours to various rendezvous with suppliers, whose respective practices of raising cattle, goats, and legumes reveal deep commitments to the land and its biodiversity, lessons on the necessity of minimal intervention in nature, but they also lack the immersive tendencies of Wiseman’s more cynical work due to the rather perfunctory blocking of the encounters between chef and farmer, suggesting a choreography of content that inevitably flatters both parties. While not hagiographic, Wiseman’s portrait of this culinary dynasty is no doubt conditioned somewhat by a persistent PR apparatus.

by ·Comments Off on The Holdovers (2023, Alexander Payne)

Quality movie, the three leads as good as promised, their characters as beautifully sad as necessary to win all the acting awards, probably Payne’s funniest work due almost entirely to Paul Giamatti. But what I wanna talk about is how it’s set around Christmas 1970 and Tully has a WC Fields poster on his dorm wall. I just happened to watch some Fields shorts, and quoted a Screen Slate article saying: “Fields’s work enjoyed a revival in the ‘60s and ‘70s among college kids who took him as an anti-authoritarian hero.” So, nice piece of production design.

by ·Comments Off on Ferrari (2023, Michael Mann)

Biopic-ass movie about a businessman, joining BlackBerry in the ranks of corporate cinema. I do like watching the little cars zip around. His racing team gets a new driver (Gabriel Leone, star of Julio Bressane’s Kid of all the damn things) who’s dating a celeb (Cronenberg regular Sarah Gadon) – or maybe a different driver is dating her. When I realized how many drivers there were, I stopped looking them up. A scene where he introduces them all made me think this is like The Right Stuff from VP Johnson’s POV. Of course you gotta keep replacing these guys – the notorious crash scene in the climactic cross-country race shows a Ferrari car blowing a tire and hurtling through the air into a whole line of CG spectators. Among the mismatched performances I did appreciate how you get used to seeing grey-haired Adam and grim/pissed Penelope, then the flashbacks of happier days when their son was alive really pop.

I’ve seen twice as many Driver films as Cruz films, I’m doing something wrong. Weirdly, my second 2023 Patrick Dempsey movie this week. Bilge and Preston liked it. I need to rewatch some* by Mann, but… Heat* > Vice > Blackhat > Ali > Thief > Mohicans > Collateral* > Insider* > Enemies* > Manhunter > Ferrari > Keep.

by ·Comments Off on It Is Night in America (2022, Ana Vaz)

Long pan across a blue-tinted skyline… slow, fast, then way too fast. From the city streets to individual animal portraits at a rescue/rehab/zoo. Back to human landscapes, then close focus on animals – including wild monkeys and hawks, back and forth. What sound like distant processed animal calls over the city scenes… long takes of traffic and a waterfall. I can’t tell if all the fidgeting with focus is meant for artistic effect, or if they just can’t keep it stable. We see a fox rescue operation, and learn that otters make awesome sounds and that anteaters are cool in general. Between Bestiaire and Sr and this, sometimes you gotta watch slow arthouse zoo films.

Love the credits, which scrolled top to bottom:

by ·Comments Off on Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

It’s not shocking that I, a habitual enjoyer of Yorgos movies, greatly enjoyed the one where Emma Stone plays a grown woman with a baby brain raised by a chopped-and-sutured Willem Dafoe then taken into the world by a ham-comic Mark Ruffalo. Doesn’t quite track as an On The Count of Three reunion – Jerrod Carmichael is an intellectual friend of Hanna Schygulla – in different scenes/country from Chris Abbott: Emma’s former husband, “The General,” who they lobotomize so everyone can live together happily.

The critics are mostly angry over the fisheye lens. Also: “the movie’s provocations are all at the level of its ghastly aesthetic, which feels like a prank on the viewer” per Brendanowicz, it’s “infantilizing and visually one-note” per Josephine, and I dunno what Ali and Jon‘s issues are. Movie funny, movie good. Some people get it.

by ·Comments Off on Strange Way of Life (2023, Pedro Almodóvar)

On Valentine’s Day I watched the Ethan Hawke gay cowboy movie. He’s a lawman, and says his old flame Pedro Pascal’s no-good son killed someone, so Pedro shoots Ethan so the son can get away. Pretty good sketch of a movie, not as fully-formed as The Human Voice. Cheap digital cinematography, “maybe an ad for something” I wrote, and I think it’s the clothes – costumed and produced 15 years posthumously by Yves S/L, whose Bonello biopic I should watch one of these days.

by ·Comments Off on Club Zero (2023, Jessica Hausner)

Mia Wasikowska is new at boarding school, teaching “conscious eating” to five students, either because they’re weight-watching or environmentalists or looking for an easy grade. It’s a culty class, but everything in these kids’ lives is culty. She has them eating less and less, then nothing. “You could be among the few who could actually live, when the rest of the world is going under.” She’s fired for associating with a pupil in private, because she took Fred to the opera, not for endangering their lives. Some kids take the course more seriously than others – environmentalist Elsa loses her mind completely – and at Christmas break four of the kids disappear.

Great soundtrack. My first Mia movie since Piercing, but that’s on me for missing Bergman Island. Funny to watch this right after Thanksgiving – both movies feature a trampoline and electric carving knife. That movie had more horrific deaths but this one has more disclaimers in its credits. Blake took it seriously in Filmmaker.

Fred, Ragna, Helen, Elsa, Ben: