Catching up with a True/False film we missed at the fest, with special guest Katy’s Mom. After a traumatic incident, local man Richard invents bulletproof vest, promotes it endlessly by shooting himself and by publishing a newsletter counting the lives he’s saved. He’s not so interested in discussing lies he’s told or lives he’s endangered with a later revision to the vest that simply didn’t work as well, and confronted with Richard’s uncomplicated hero-story version of the truth, Bahrani interviews a “saved” cop who turned on his friend, wearing a wire to prove the company knew they were selling a deadly product. Most upsetting scene is when Richard gets his combat-addled dad to shoot him, most upsetting omission from the film is that Richard also invented explosive bullets to defeat his own vests. Instead of simply nailing Richard, who offered free guns to cops who’d kill the guys who shot them, Bahrani follows a redemption story of the fallen-out friend and his reformed attacker.
Tag: 2020s
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022, Daniel Goldhaber)
It’s Wednesday, so I checked the theater site to see what’s playing this weekend, or more specifically if Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is opening here, but nope. Hey the new Paul Schrader, that’s something. Pipeline‘s final showtime is this afternoon, after holding on for nearly a month – I’m very proud of it and Blackberry for their long theatrical lives, even though the only time I’ve personally been out since True/False was to see those city symphony shorts. Anyway, time to watch Pipeline on video like a chump (and later to chump-watch Blackberry and the Schrader and, alas, Showing Up).
And hey, it’s good! Speaking of Reichardt, I expected to be reminded of Night Moves, but this is more procedural, less psychological, with less murder and guilt, but still some heavy repercussions to the (successful) titular operation. Really good fakeout about a member of the group who’s spying for the cops – true, but she’s feeding them misinformation so half the group will stay anonymous.
I only knew Sasha Lane – also feat. Leo’s son from The Revenant, the Idaho girl from The Assistant, a Marvel kid, a White Lotus dude, a Woman King warrior, a Pixar dinosaur, Disney’s Pocahontas, and the bad boyfriend from the beginning of It Follows.
Based on a manifesto and adapted a la Fast Food Nation into a narrative, a level-up from Goldhaber’s Cam. In the excellent Filmmaker interview he says it was 19 months from conception to premiere, and calls it a heist film:
Nobody watches a bank robbery movie from the ’40s and says, “These people are trying to get people to go rob banks.” They see that movie and say, “This is a movie that’s talking about structural inequality and getting me to empathize with characters who feel like they have no other option than to rob a bank.” This movie follows eight young people who feel like they have no option but to blow up a pipeline. I don’t think of the movie as propagandistic, because there’s no cause and effect. They don’t blow up a pipeline and solve climate change. The doing of it is the narrative catharsis in the same way that it is in a heist movie. I want this movie to be given the same dramatic permission that genre is given.
Enys Men (2022, Mark Jenkin)
The title might be the island name, not like there are men named Enys. I didn’t know. Rough-looking for a commercial film, with visible splices – I’m sure this is on purpose for textural reasons – and sometimes the image reverses, freezes or deteriorates. Mary Woodvine is very good as nearly the only human in the movie, scientifically observing an odd, plasticky flower on an island cliff. The island is haunted by miners, and by people lost and drowned at sea (represented by a tall rock memorial), and by Mary herself, suicidal in flashback and maybe in the present. She drops a rock down a deep hole every day, presumably in reference to “Hyperballad,” and starts to grow lichen when the flowers do. All sorts of thematic visions appear in the last half hour until Ghost Mary picks a flower and becomes the stone.
Brendanowicz: “I like that it tugs on a number of threads without insisting on any one of them as a skeleton key, which is a trickier feat of calibration than it appears.” Blake watched with a better sound system than I did: “Just as the image’s graininess never lets you forget that you’re looking at an image, conspicuous foley work verges on cartoonish, with isolated radio noise, footsteps and creaking doors amplified to the point where they become haptic. Zoom lenses and an infinite depth of field are likewise put to good use, destabilizing our sense of scale.”
May 2023 Shorts
Flowers Blooming in Our Throats (2020, Eva Giolo)
Nice sound design in an a/g short, how rare. Sync sound effects, professionally blended between shots. Focus on hands and arms… slapping and clutching, spinning tops, clipping flowers, with and without a red filter. I take the film as an ASMR parody, with its hair-brushing and rubberband-snapping, edited too quickly to evoke whatever trance state the youtubers seek.
–
Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019, Brandon Cronenberg)
“Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell.” Deragh is a brain-implant patient describing the dream states the device puts her in. Three dreams under different color filters, then a good ol’ glitching-video-signal nude freakout before the Twilight Zone ending.
–
Tomb of Kafka (2022, Jean-Claude Rousseau)
Prague. A small room. The desk has a hat on it. One of the windows is green. Usually there’s a white-haired man without anything compelling to do. His activities have equal weight as the quick fadeouts or fidgets of the camera refocusing. Sometimes a cutaway to a forest or a dead bug. We watch the man read for a minute or two. Hey, I could be reading. Didn’t I get a new Laszlo Krasznahorkai book? I could’ve been reading that.
–
Dear Chantal (2021, Nicolas Pereda)
Chantal is renting a place from the narrator’s sister, a painter. He’s an Akermaniac so asks to be in charge of communication, which we hear as flatly-narrated letters. Nice shot of brushing leaves from a skylight. Opens and closes with the quote: “Letters never written nonetheless exist.”
–
Blank Narcissus (2022, Peter Strickland)
A “rediscovered” Midsummer Night’s Gay Porno with audio commentary by a director mourning his long-lost relationship with the star. Maybe Strickland isn’t as great as I’d been assuming.
–
Open Sky, Open Sea, Open Ground (2022, Baus & Gills)
Ecuador… Grainy film with a wrecked water/shuffle soundtrack of people running across a beach from boat to truck, delivering containers of fish while besieged by pelicans and gulls. I was rooting for the pelicans.
–
Emergence Collapse (2021, Rainer Kohlberger & Jung An Tagen)
Liquid cityscapes! Best guess is it’s nighttime photography turned into pure digital moosh with the color dial turned to eleven. Some of the most tripped-out shit I’ve ever seen. Loses a point for the nightmarish music, sort of a generative-autechre.
–
Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, Sky Hopinka)
Wow, a convincing and succinct blend of earth, sky and water. Images upside-rightside overlapping, the sky masked by a person-walking silhouette, desert and plants blurred into blasted lines as if viewed out a rocket-car window.
–
Mélodie de brumes à Paris (1985, Julius-Amédé Laou)
The only short I watched from the free offerings of Prismatic Ground, which was like most film festivals in not having very clear communication about its streaming program.
Opens on a dubbed guy having a breakdown out the window of an artificial-looking apartment, yelling at neighbors and passers-by to blow up the buildings of the oppressors (start with the bars, banks and pay toilets). He mutters himself to sleep on the can, the synth soundtrack alternating with a pop song repeating the film’s title. In the morning he walks through the fog to a bar, his thoughts still on bombs, is the only customer but still can’t get served (because of racism, not because they heard him advocating for the violent destruction of all bars). He finds his dead father and confesses to being a merciless killing machine during the Algerian war. That night he’s being harassed by a drug dealer when a white doorman starts being racist, the director yells cut but the doorman doesn’t stop, and the cast and crew start fighting with the white locals.
Good looking movie with nice fourth-wall-breaking and synth music. I do think a few of the voiceover lines were clunky (guy is haunted by the past, we know because he says “the past, the past”). Star Greg Germain also appeared in the similarly themed Soleil O and popped up in everything from Chabrol movies to Emmanuelle sequels.
–
Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916, Roscoe Arbuckle)
Farmhand Roscoe marries Mabel and they move into a cottage her parents buy when a shady realtor’s car breaks down outside their house. R&M sleep as far apart as possible inside, while outside his romantic rival the Hated Milk Machine conspires with some random thugs to … push their house into the ocean? Or it happens to slide away during a storm while HMM and the thugs are attempting to break in. Either way, they don’t become adrift until the last 7 minutes. The cops and parents somehow save them, meanwhile HMM and the thugs gamble all night, argue over the wad of cash, then all die in an accidental explosion. I know that watching silents while listening to Zorn is a cliche with me, but Cleric playing Bagatelles vol. 12 was perfect for this.
Mabel’s parents with villain Al St. John as the HMM:
Mutzenbacher (2022, Ruth Beckermann)
Formally superior to the True/False Venus movie we half-watched, it’s a casting call of men (all men) reading aloud from the eponymous book, a girl’s early-1900’s sexy diary, assumed to have actually been written by a creepy old man. This opens certain conversations – one guy wants to know why we speak of toxic masculinity but not toxic femininity, another won’t read the page he’s assigned because it’s too vulgar (then the off-camera director, the only female voice among a hundred men, reads it to him). But mostly it’s not interrogating or contextualizing the text. And it’s not an audiobook movie – the film somehow remains focused on the delivery of the words, more than the words themselves. Neither is it scolding the men (always in pairs) or the viewer for participating, but rather it becomes celebratory in scenes where all the readers gather and chant passages from the text in unison. A strange and wonderful movie.
real film heads would know you don’t hire a boom operator for a casting call:
Beckermann’s career sounds worth exploring, as laid out by Darren Hughes in Cinema Scope (there’s also a book on her out there by the Austrian Film Museum). Beckermann:
I like to be surprised. I didn’t know these men before. There was a waiting area with a buffet, and then I just asked my assistant to bring two or three in. So I didn’t even know who would be with whom … Today there are many taboos. At the time when Mutzenbacher was written you had Sigmund Freud, and people talked about sexuality probably more than today.
if a guy with an ear-horn comes along, you absolutely put him front and center:
M3gan (2022, Gerard Johnstone)
I was stressed to learn I’d been tricked, that this was only cowritten by Malignant‘s James Wan, actually directed by the NZ guy who made Housebound, but it didn’t turn out to matter – good movie about twisted AI, quite timely. Doll scientist Allison Williams is running secret experiments behind the back of idiot boss Ronny Chieng, cutting corners (like parental controls) to get an evil doll to befriend her newly orphaned niece. Then after the company discovers the doll’s capabilities and decides to mass produce it, Allison switches to trying to interrupt the public launch by proving the doll did murders (she did – chasing a creepy boy into traffic after ripping his ear off, and melting the neighbor’s face with lawn chemicals).
This happens to all murder-droids in the end, and it only makes them angrier:
Rewind & Play (2022, Alain Gomis)
Grungy documentary outtakes, then a French TV studio – the idea being that Gomis is showing the rushes from a conventional half-hour Thelonious Monk TV appearance. We do get to hear him play more than once, first in a traveling shot around the studio where everyone else is chatting and not paying any attention, then for a few songs in a row after the interviews have gone badly.
A Michael Caine-ish host talks about Monk to the viewers in French while leaning on the piano, then they do retakes of the interview questions until it feels like Monk is caught in a Lynchian limbo. Monk suggests they forget the interview and go to dinner, they can’t have a conversation because the interviewer wants to rephrase everything in French and Monk won’t repeat the same answer twice in the same way. And certain topics are forbidden as “not nice.” This movie landed with good timing for me, as I’m “getting into jazz” and just watched a trio whose latest album is a Monk tribute.
Michael Sicinski on lboxd:
Gomis’s presentation of the material, largely untouched, not only displays the technical mechanics involved in “making TV,” although there’s that. When Monk doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to Renaud’s questions, the crew adopts a plan-b mode, showing Monk playing during extended shots, and then later shooting B-roll with Renaud pretending to listen appreciatively. But more than this, we are seeing how a media apparatus deals with an artist it finds difficult or uncooperative. French TV is trying to sell a product called “Thelonious Monk,” and the man himself is perceived as an impediment to that pandering.
Max Goldberg in Cinema Scope:
Rewind & Play brings to light the violence of getting an artist to say what you want them to say. Not coincidentally, it also centres the musical performances recorded for Jazz Portrait, allowing them to flow together as a solid block of song. Taken together, the two things insinuate a sharp critique of the standard music documentary.
Saint Omer (2022, Alice Diop)
A movie of people standing very still and talking, named after the town where the crime took place in late 2015. Subtly cinephiliac movie – Rama is teaching a lesson on Duras, shows the shaved-head scene from Hiroshima Mon Amour in class – all the white actors in this movie have been in Resnais films. Rama is weird and closed-off around family, never mentions she’s leaving town to witness a murder trial.
The judge was in Mon oncle d’Amérique as a kid:
Laurence is the accused, is quoted as having said that she killed her baby to “make life easier” but pleads innocent: “I don’t think I’m the responsible party.” The judge questions the much-older, married boyfriend, a real shithead, then asks for L’s whole life story. Meanwhile Rama has lunch with the accused’s mom, reveals that Rama is pregnant, and at the hotel she frames through Pasolini’s Medea.
Laurence’s mom: Salimata Kamate of Intouchables
Movie ends, having made its point(s), without wrapping up the trial. But it’s based on an actual trial, which Diop attended in 2016 in the same courtroom where they filmed, and which ended in a 20-year sentence.
Leila Latif for BFI:
The acting is uniformly superb, even when it’s simply dispassionate testimony that’s being dispatched. [Kayije] Kagame plays Rama in a state of continual displacement, ill at ease at dinner with her mother, uncomfortable on the streets of Saint-Omer and conspicuous in the courtroom; [Guslagie] Malanda evokes profound pain through the tiniest cracks in her expressions and voices as she revisits traumatic memories.
Bird Movies 3: Feathers (2021, Omar El Zohairy)
AKA the Egyptian chicken movie. A guy setting himself on fire is quite a prologue. During a birthday party magic trick, the husband goes into a box, chicken comes out, embarrassed magician can’t undo it. The wife then mutely chases after the magician, getting screwed over by her landlord and friends and associates. When the chicken gets sick, she helps it recover. When she reports her husband missing so her son can take his factory job, the cops give her a comatose homeless man. We get more than enough shots of her standing perfectly still looking dead inside, and not enough exploration of the chicken-ness of the husband – it’s less a bird movie than a missing husband movie.
–
Birds of a Feather (1931, Burt Gillett)
Significantly better and more chicken-focused than the feature, one of those early Disneys where all the woodland creatures move and sway in time with the soundtrack, doing little species-specific actions. Belated drama of banding together to rescue a stray chicken from a hawk, including a great POV-attack shot. Minor message that polluted lakes harm the geese, thanx. IMDB says Eisenstein was a fan.
