Inspired by Montage of Heck, they wanted to make a musical but found a poet as their subject. Virginia Tech mass-shooting was cut from the film because test audiences thought it gave our complicated figure too much of a movie-triumph moment. Opens more spacey and abstract (the people in front of us, terrified of abstraction, fled before the movie even started) before settling into a portrait of the late-career artist, recently reconciled with her son and getting to know her granddaughter. Poetry spoken in context with her life story and media appearances worked great, much better than the written samples I read on my phone to prep for the movie. Katy thinks it didn’t get inside Nikki, that it’s all public image. The filmmakers signal that we’re not gonna get some late-life emotional breakdown by including TWO instances when Nikki refuses to answer Q&A queries about painful moments in her past. Michèle has previously made a couple of Haitian/Dominican docs, Joe has made a Giancarlo Esposito drama, and most recently they made “a magical realist, immersive, episodic virtual reality experience” about American racism.
Tag: 2020s
Serotonin Shorts
Moomin (Zach Dorn)
Desktop video (cellphone in portrait mode) dude telling story of trying to win a claw-game moomin for his Canadian girlfriend. After they break up he combs through their text messages emphasizing the in-joke importance of the moomin, then fails to win one in an online app. Fine as a short opener, demonstrates the difference between cute and good.
Love at First Byte (Felizitas Hoffmann & Theresa Hoffmann)
Sentient public transit surveillance system falls in love with a passenger. Blurry and repetitive, Katy has tried to forget this ever happened.
Example #35 (LucÃa Malandro & Daniel D. Saucedo)
Cubans love Santiago Alvarez! Reversed and inverted images, okay, but leave your colonoscopy footage at home, please.
No Elements (Barbara VojtaÅ¡áková)
A broken-up couple had shot lots of film around the city and down by the river, her film project that he’d picked up during their relationship and now wants to take over and complete, while she is ambivalent. Nice reversed-footage tricks.
While The Night Falls (Amir Aether Valen)
You Are Not Here (Nastia Korkia)
Afraid I didn’t take notes on these two, but recall that Katy was concerned about consent in the Russian funeral film. That movie’s director Korkia was returning to T/F after her feature GES-2 played last year.
Crossing Voices (2022, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré)
Our seventh True/False. Travel is exhausting, so we took Thursday off and started early on Friday… earlier than musician Cemone James, who arrived late. Seems like only her guitarist and keyboardist were awake. The movie is a quite long and rambling montage of archive footage, still photos, video, film, computer map imagery, and radio broadcasts. Protests and strikes, neverending for decades, trying to be able to live and thrive in their own land. At one point Touré nicely sums it up, panning over the photos and posters covering the wall of his room, saying “life is a struggle” again and again and again. He stays in France, spends a few months a year back in Mali. Between protests he became a photographer and hung out with Med Hondo. He died in early 2022, his close collaborator Grisey finishing the film.
In Front of Your Face (2021, Hong Sang-soo)
Two sisters go out for a walk and the stars of the previous movie I watched walk by – it’s another day in the Hongverse.
Lee Hye-young is a former actress back in Korea and staying with her sister Cho Yun-hee (lead guy’s mom in Introduction‘s restaurant scene). She has a meeting with director Kwon Hae-hyo (Yourself and Yours) who wants to film a feature with her, but would settle for a short film, but would settle for sleeping with her. She tells him (before telling her sister) that she’s dying, has a few months, and he leaves her a bittersweet message the next morning (“What I promised yesterday can never happen.”). Elsewhere on the trip, she haunts the house where she used to live, reminiscing and coping (“I believe heaven is hiding in front of our faces”) and visiting the cafe run by her nephew (the star of Introduction).
Antoine Thirion in Cinema Scope:
In a body of work whose narrative scope seems to diminish a little more with each film, In Front of Your Face is still surprisingly laconic: its story unfolds over 24 hours and has barely ten scenes, one of which takes up a good third of the film … While the film’s deceptive structural simplicity seems to adopt its heroine’s fixation on presence and the present, things never cease quietly going off the rails.
Introduction (2021, Hong Sang-soo)
Matter-of-fact lboxd plot description “Youngho goes to see his father who is tending to a famous patient. He surprises his girlfriend, Juwon, in Berlin where she is studying fashion design. He goes to a seaside hotel to meet his mother and brings his friend Jeongsoo with him.”
Maybe the title is because scenes and conversations start and don’t reach expected conclusions. We don’t see Youngho talk with his dad who asked to see him, he doesn’t go back into the restaurant after ditching his mom and the famous actor.
Youngho with his dad’s assistant Ye Ji Won (Turning Gate, Ha Ha Ha):
Youngho is Shin Seok-ho, the neighbor who complains about cats in The Woman Who Ran‘s standout scene. Girlfriend Park Mi-so will return in the 2022 films. The girlfriend’s mother and the actor are both from the second scene in Grass.
Eo (2022, Jerzy Skolimowski)
Amazing opening, EO introduced as circus donkey to Sandra Drzymalska, some strong scenes and visuals, finally dribbles to a less amazing ending, Eo being marched to execution.
He’s repoed from the circus and spends some time with a horse breeder… mopes around a petting zoo, escapes after a visit from his former owner… wanders through a wolfy forest into town where he becomes a football team’s mascot then is beaten half to death by rival hooligans… after recovering, he violently refuses to take part in an animal slaughter operation. We were watching Poker Face the same week, and besides the Okja veganism, the two shows share socially awkward truckers getting into serious trouble.
Outside Noise (2021, Ted Fendt)
Some women “wander around and talk,” per the unusually accurate lboxd description. Everyone is having trouble sleeping. One of them runs a small press with her ex, and has a sweet balcony. Director Ted finally shows up, meets everyone and tells them where to find good cake and snow globes. We go from NY to Berlin to Vienna in an hour-long movie, and if you think that means it’s tightly paced and eventful then hahahaha.
Nice Wanda reference:
Four Half-Hour Shorts (Wong, Tsai, Gomes, Mandico)
One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart (2021, Wong Kar-wai)
Making a Wong film out of outtakes fom other Wong films. It’s a cute idea – pushes its egg-metaphor too much, but gives us some scenes that I honestly can’t recall if/how they existed in the source features since I don’t watch his movies often enough.
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Wandering (2021, Tsai Ming-liang)
A woman walks through Tsai’s installation, watching a scene from each of the eight Walker films, alone except when the director appears at the end, transfixed by his own footage of Lee in a bath. A nice introduction and/or culmination to the slow monk project, with some new-to-me scenes, including a non-Lee monk in a white void.
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Redemption (2013, Miguel Gomes)
Four sections of archive footage illustrating narrated letters from the past. The end credits is where things get exciting, revealing the narrators and the letter writers (Maren Ade reading Angela Merkel!) then immediately revealing that all the letters were made-up. Per Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker, the letters are by “some of contemporary Europe’s least-liked leaders,” and the end result “a sympathetic but also fundamentally facile experiment.”
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Dead Flash (2021, Bertrand Mandico)
A scrapbook for Mandico completists – rushes and backgrounds with a mood-music mixtape. Extended shots of a multiple-stabbed dude, a double-dicked light-up crystal statue, the usual. Then the second half is ape-people as model and photographer (both played by Elina Löwensohn) in split screen with dialogue (“I want you to magnify this dirty memory”).
Fellow Mandico completist Gianni helps spot the source films on lboxd:
Outtakes from previous shorts (Extazus, Niemand, A Rebours and Huyswomans – Huyswomans is reproposed integrally) plus a brand-new short film about two anthropomorphic monkeys … the outtakes of Extazus have been released separately in a dvd box-set – Ultra Pulpe et autre chairs – with the title of A Black Sunset Upon a Violet Desert.
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bonus shorts from Criterion Channel:
Dream City (1983, Ulysses Jenkins)
Music and theater performances and other assorted stuff, mixed together with muddy sound recording and early video chroma effects.
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Black Journal: Alice Coltrane (1970, Stan Lathan)
Short, effective doc portrait on Alice at home and playing music. Beyond a few photographs previously seen, this is now everything I know about Alice.
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And we got access to that animation streaming site that I already forgot the name of, and watched two of this year’s oscar-nominated shorts that I already forgot the name of.
Incredible But True (2022, Quentin Dupieux)
Another unique Dupieux movie – this one’s light and focus is weird, smeary at the edges and backgrounds, with Wendy Carlos-ish music not by Mr Oizo. Gondry actor Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker of In My Skin have bought a new house that has a hole in the basement that makes you lose 12 hours but emerge 3 days younger. His boss (Pacifiction star Benoît Magimel) comes over for dinner with wife Anaïs Demoustier (Bird People), wants them to be impressed by his new electric penis. The penis malfunctions and catches fire, and Drucker becomes younger but full of insects.
