by ·Comments Off on Beau is Afraid (2023, Ari Aster)

Beau (2011, Ari Aster): Only 6 minutes vs. the main feature’s 179, so this felt like a good place to start. Beau is leaving his apartment to visit his mother when his keys get stolen, so he tries to stay awake long enough to catch the thief returning, and possible goes insane along the way. Good comic-action bit when he’s rushed by a guy with a pocketknife, but the knife folds in and cuts off the assailant’s own finger. Aster’s camera moves are cool, but he hadn’t learned how to shoot towards a sunlit window (or any light source).

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In the feature Beau is Joaquin Phoenix instead of the late Billy Mayo, his keys stolen in the same situation as the short, with the same line of dialogue afterward in the hallway (“you’re fucked, pal”). He lives in a nightmarish apartment in a hellish city, takes the “always with water” pills prescribed by shrink Stephen McKinley Henderson just as his water gets cut off, dashes across the street for bottled water and every scumbag on the block occupies and destroys his apartment.

I hadn’t read much about this in advance, and with all the movies’ focus on empathizing with their character/writer neurosis, even kids’ cartoons being ranked by most accurate panic-attack portrayal, I was surprised to see that it’s not all in Beau’s head – his fears are justified, even the ones about his mother. And for the first two hours it’s a hilarious anxiety comedy – probably best that I watched this alone at home since I was hooting and hollering. Wonderful to hear a George Harrison song since I was just watching the Scorsese doc about him – less wonderful to see pathetic Beau sporting the same shirt that I’ve been known to wear to work.

Divided into acts by Beau’s blackouts after various near-death experiences, he learns from a suspiciously Bill Hader-y UPS man that his mom died in a freak accident, he’s rescued/abducted by mega-pleasant family Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane until their daughter Kylie Rogers suicides by drinking paint, then they send a twisted army vet after him into the woods, where he gets into a whole forest theater situation inspired by the “Bachelorette” video. He gets home for the funeral and the movie’s still got another hour left. Beau runs into his childhood love Parker Posey before mom appears alive and he maybe matricides her. Posey and Patti LuPone as mom are both great, and I’m always happy to see Richard Kind, but his big Defending Your Life/Truman Show trial finale is bad.

by ·Comments Off on A Man and a Camera (2021, Guido Hendrikx)

Guido (Stranger in Paradise) is being confrontational in a new way: by walking up to people’s houses and filming them without speaking. He groups the chosen encounters by the type of reaction, so in early scenes everyone he meets is standoffish or defensive or aggressive, then a section of people who figure he’s up to something harmless and play along. The woman seen below introduces him to her baby, saying it’s also deaf & mute. It gets more tense than The Balcony Movie when people start letting him into their houses. One guy is very easygoing but warns Guido that the neighborhood groupchat has called the cops on him. In the end he’s making repeat visits to known-friendly houses. It’s kind of the essence of documentary, showing up and letting the subjects control what happens. Guido has a new one set in Sudan which premiered over a year ago.

from Mads Mikkelsen’s Cinema Scope article on interventionist documentaries:

The true protagonist of A Man and a Camera, however, is the latter half of the titular duo. There is a basic understanding at work here that the very act of filming is transgressive, and that being filmed generates an alienating self-consciousness in the unwilling subject of the camera’s attention. In any social situation, the presence of a camera makes for an uneven game; through his repeated acts of passive-aggressive monomania, Hendrikx simply amplifies this dynamic to study its effects.

by ·Comments Off on Evil Dead Rise (2023, Lee Cronin)

OK, sure, I guess. But every time I’m almost having a fun time with the dour zombie-action movie, it stops for some “fan service” callback to the Sam Raimi movies.

Evil Mom is Alyssa Sutherland of shipbound nazi vampire movie Blood Vessel, her dead necronomicon-meddling son Morgan Davies was in a Willem Dafoe movie, and her sister who survives while rescuing only the youngest kid is Lily Sullivan of a Picnic at Hanging Rock remake.

IMDB says Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground “premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2019 to critical acclaim,” but that’s not how I remember it.

Will Sloan:

“What if they did Evil Dead in an apartment instead of a cabin in the woods?” is not an interesting enough spin on the material.

by ·Comments Off on Burial (2022, Emilija Skarnulyte)

Onscreen text, no narrator, the music all howling wind and doom tones. I thought this might be the coolest feature at the Ann Arbor fest – and so far I’m right – but it wasn’t part of their online program so I had to find it separately.

Uranium factoids, then settles into a kinda observational doc about a gigantic nuclear plant being dismantled in Lithuania, but keeps distracting itself with colors and artworks and models and the snake from the movie poster. Where’d they get the underwater mine photography, wow. The archive footage is all credited at the end, but I can’t tell if that was archival – the director was also production designer and swimmer in one awesome wide shot, and the new footage is seamlessly blended with the borrowed stuff.

by ·Comments Off on Tina (2021, Daniel Lindsay & TJ Martin)

An upsetting movie to watch after Tina’s death. It recounts how she had a bad life with Ike, then divorced him but the press kept saying “haha where’s Ike” so she did an interview to say Ike was abusive, so the media wanted to know “HOW abusive” so she wrote down her life story about the bad times with Ike, so the media wanted her to talk about Ike more, then they made a feature film, and Tina sat at the Venice premiere next to Angela Bassett saying she hasn’t seen the movie and doesn’t want to, and just wants everyone to leave her alone about Ike already. Funny that Tina was initially as unenthused about her signature solo song as I am, complaining that it’s not her kind of music. Barely a glimpse of her superior work in Tommy and Thunderdome.

by ·Comments Off on Petite Maman (2021, Céline Sciamma)

A change in mood from my last French movie, the actors perfect little models through the supernatural events – nobody cries, while Léa Seydoux rarely stopped.

Trying to watch this again with Katy, if she’ll agree. A short and straightforward pandemic project with just a few actors – but writing a story that depends on the performance of identical eight year-olds seems risky, and damn, they pulled it off.

Courtney Duckworth’s Cinema Scope writeup is the one.

by ·Comments Off on One Fine Morning (2022, Mia Hansen-Løve)

Lovely French movie about life being complicated, starring the great Léa Seydoux, whose Blue Is the Warmest Color co-star I saw last night in The Five Devils. She’s a professional translator whose philosopher dad (Rohmer and Assayas regular Pascal Greggory) is losing his memory and stability and vision and needs to go into a home. The movie’s about heavy things but it moves beautifully.

Léa meets Melvil Poupaud, a cosmo-chemist who studies meteorites like in that Herzog movie, but he’s married, and goes back and forth with his intentions, as her dad gets moved to worse and then better facilities… it’s more like one fine year (the film is named after the dad’s unfinished autobiography).

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “In a year with no shortage of similarly themed French films (see Claire Denis’ [Both Sides of the Blade] and Emmanuel Mouret’s Chronique d’une liaison passagère), One Fine Morning makes a case for itself not by upending conventions, but by applying them with care and consideration.” Key review by Vadim Rizov, who liked it not as much.

by ·Comments Off on The Five Devils (2022, Léa Mysius)

Five Devils is unfortunately just the name of a sports complex where Adele Exarchopoulos works with her disfigured ex-friend Nadine – the movie isn’t about devils, but a girl with an incredible sense of smell. Her mom Adele tends the pool, and her dad Jimmy’s a fireman, so fire and water. Dad’s sister Julia comes to stay, after spending time in jail for the fire that messed up Nadine, so everyone’s on edge.

The girl Vicky makes jars of special scents, which cause her to black out and visit past events from before she was born – invisible to all except Young Julia, who panics whenever the girl appears. After the fire ruptures the two young couples (Adele and Julia, Jimmy and Nadine), mom and dad end up together, so V wouldn’t have been born if she hadn’t (passively) prompted the fire.

Fun movie to think about, and to watch – despite its three different “Total Eclipse of the Heart” scenes. Nadine also starred in Nimic with Matt Dillon. Hugo Dillon plays a fireman here, apparently no relation.

Mike D’Angelo:

I kinda loved it, perhaps because I’d given up hope of ever again being caught off guard by what I think of as the “La Jetée”/Twelve Monkeys theory of time travel, in which visiting the past means that you were always present there. Mysius and her co-screenwriter, Paul Guilhaume, deploy their eternalism in a unique fashion (homemade perfume as proxy-Proustian time machine, with a silent, watchful Vicky visible only to her future aunt) and for singularly perverse ends—this is basically a dual tragic love story rooted in kids’ inadvertently destructive power, acknowledging that their mere existence in the world (crucially, Vicky never actually does anything during her visitations) can fuck up adults’ lives, and leaving startlingly open the question of whether or not parents’ deep, abiding love for them is worth it.

by ·Comments Off on Will-o’-the-Wisp (2022, João Pedro Rodrigues)

Prince Alfredo’s dying flashback to 2011 flits from a forest musical to a dinner scene where Al (now curly-haired Mauro Costa) gives a dinner-table speech to camera about how older generations are failing us. He decides to become a fireman, is shown around by Affonso (André Cabral). The firemen train to The Magic Flute, and entertain themselves with nude reenactments of famous artworks. While Al is looking at a penis slideshow he gets a call saying his dad has died of covid and he must return to the royal family, but he’ll always remember his time with Affonso, who I guess becomes president of Portugal. A much sillier movie than The Ornithologist.

Michael Sicinski on Patreon:

Will-o’the-Wisp is a critical inquiry into Portuguese history staged as intellectual gay porno, a Hottest Hunks of the Fire Brigade charity calendar that lights upon the legacy of colonialism, Western visual culture, and the ornamental irrelevance of Portugal’s faded aristocracy.

Charles Bramesco in Little White Lies:

Sex should be fun and just a tiny bit goofy, an intuitively understood real-life concept that nonetheless eludes filmmakers all over the globe.

funeral fashions of the future: