by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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:

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on Skinamarink (2022, Kyle Edward Ball)

Crazy low-light texture, the picture swimming in so much grain that you can’t tell if things in the rooms are moving or not. Perverse framing from angles that rarely show the characters. Doors and windows appear and disappear, leaving blank walls with a humming sound. Mention of the boy having fallen down the stairs while sleepwalking, back now from the hospital, though we don’t see any of this. He takes a break from watching public domain cartoons (The Cobweb Hotel) to visit the master bedroom, where dad is blairwitching and vanishing like the windows, replaced by mom. Most dialogue is whispered, and the jump scares are bad. A distant doom voice orders Kevin to sleep. Scene in a cartoon where a character disappears plays on loop to demonstrate a point before a toy in the room also disappears.

Movie itself isn’t scary, but it productively made me remember actual nightmares I had as a kid… the sense of being in a dark house with strange light where time and space can’t be trusted. It rules that this barely-narrative experimental nightmare was in theaters for a month.

Reverse Shot:

The dread that pulses through the film’s empty spaces soon gives way to a permeating melancholy, as it becomes clearer just how helpless Kevin and Kaylee are within their own home. Toys and cartoons, at first objects of childish comfort, begin to be manipulated by the malevolent force within the house, reminders of the fear induced by pseudo-parental control. Time in the house becomes deliberately indefinite to create a perpetual night, a horrific extension of Kevin and Kaylee’s daily reality.

by ·Comments Off on Triangle of Sadness (2022, Ruben Östlund)

Social awkwardness cinema, mocking fashion brands in the intro, not funny yet. Carl (Beach Rats) and Yaya (Death Race 3) fight over money (he says he wants her to pay, to defy gender roles). The same couple on a cruise, Carl reports the crew member she ogles for being shirtless on duty, the ship’s captain hiding in his room. The movie finally comes alive in the storm, as everyone vomits and Captain Woody Harrelson takes the all-call mic to tell them they should pay their taxes. Postscript on an island where they all wash up, service worker Abigail declaring herself captain since she’s the only one there with any practical skills.

Precisely framed, not very interesting, but a good open ending. Palme d’or winner, and only the third 2022 Cannes competition movie I’ve seen after Decision to Leave and Crimes of the Future – still gotta catch Eo, Pacifiction, RMN, Tori & Lokita, Armageddon Time and Stars at Noon.

by ·Comments Off on A New Old Play (2021, Jiongjiong Qiu)

Rotterdance continues (concludes?) with a Locarno/Rotterdam movie.

Qiu is an apparently dead actor, demons Horsey and Ox come to collect him, we flashback to 1920 and make our way through Q’s life. He gets married in the 1940’s, their adopted daughter dies, their son is sad when his dad is declared a political criminal. Richard Brody: “The movie is filmed as theatrical tableaux, complete with blatantly contrived sets and supernatural fantasy sequences, which virtually shout at viewers not to take the depicted events as literal truth.” In the end it’s another movie about how life under communism was horrible – and it’s a misty, foggy movie, which the streaming video turned into shit soup.

by ·Comments Off on On the Count of Three (2021, Jerrod Carmichael)

“Happiness is overrated.” Val (director Jerrod) wants to die, so he breaks his suicidal buddy Kev (Chris Abbott, both of these guys great) out of psych hospital so they can die together. Kev stalls, says let’s die at the end of the day, and they set out to right some wrongs (beating up Val’s dad, bringing cash to pregnant gf Tiffany Haddish, murdering abusive doctor Henry Winkler), then Val decides to live as they flee the cops. Of course he does – it’s a Sundance movie – but Abbott still gets to die, and the long postscript closing shot is necessary to come down from the tension (similar to Good Time). Won a writing award, nice music by Final Fantasy, and wow, I correctly identified The Free Design on the soundtrack.