by ·Comments Off on Panahi / Sanzgiri / Igwe / Sycorax

Hidden (2020, Jafar Panahi)

Meta-remake of Panahi’s Three Faces. Camera 1 is a dash-mounted phone, Camera 2 is held by his daughter Solmaz in the back seat. A woman they know has asked them to help convince a girl with an incredible singing voice to join a theater group, but the girl’s mom won’t let her leave the house and keeps her hidden behind a sheet.

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Where Are You, Jafar Panahi (2016, Jafar Panahi)

The most heated I’ve seen Panahi, who rants about the government preventing him from making dramas about social issues and saying they force him to turn the camera on himself. Majid Barzegar in the car, I assume they’re talking about his film A Very Ordinary Citizen, from which Panahi’s cowriting credit was removed. The reason for the drive is to visit Kiarostami’s grave, but Panahi doesn’t get out of the car, sends Barzegar alone with the flowers.

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020, Suneil Sanzgiri)

Writing, culture, politics in India… stock footage and mothlighting and history. Some things I haven’t seen before: rotating 3D models within a film frame with sprocket holes, seamless blending of different techs and formats. I got lost in the names and events, but it’s a cool and dense piece.

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At Home But Not At Home (2020, Suneil Sanzgiri)

More history, Goa vs. Portugal. Full of scenes from classic films. Titles printed in the center of screen give translation or context or philosophy. Good music in both of these.

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Vever (2018, Deborah Stratman)

This fits in surprisingly well with the previous few, with philosophical titles in center screen and big music. Color film from 1975 Guatemala, a phone interview with the cinematographer. This turned out to be a mix of some big-time artists – footage and interview by Barbara Hammer, text/audio by Maya Deren, drawings and music by Teiji Ito.

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Sycorax (2021, Patino & Pineiro)

They sit in a public square, “casting” their Tempest from the townsfolk passing by, but no Witch Sycorax is found so they hold tryouts… 14 women and we watch the whole thing. Another collaboration – theater and trees, featuring some really nice nature crossfades and very green fern branches.

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No Archive Can Restore You (2020, Onyeka Igwe)

Either these are outtakes from A So-Called Archive or Igwe has found another abandoned, termite-infested media library. “Commerce, gentlemen – commerce brought us to Africa.” Slow roving camera, the audio is sounds that might’ve once filled the spaces.

by ·Comments Off on After Yang (2021, Kogonada)

Colin Farrell is oscar-nominated for Banshees, and I think we should give Colin 3 or 4 oscars, but Yang is also very beautiful in this (Justin Min of nothing else). Colin lives with Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim) and their girl Mika, and unfortunately Yang was an out-of-warranty refurb technosapien and unfixable, so he’s being donated to research, which, if these things are so proprietary-secretive, should be against the license agreement. Colin tries to understand Yang’s chosen memories and discovers his hang-out buddy, clone Haley Lu Richardson. A major Lily Chou Chou reference, for some reason, and Yang had a Pentax camera if that’s anything. A weepy movie: “His existence mattered – and not just to us.”

by ·Comments Off on Infinity Pool (2023, Brandon Cronenberg)

An hour before seeing this I learned that an NC-17 version played Sundance, but decided a missing shot or two of Skarsgard’s penis and busted face wouldn’t keep me from the theatrical experience. The Movieland’s dirty screens act similarly to 35mm film grain in helping digitally composited shots look more natural. Great title design, decent Tim Hecker score. Despite the title, we never get to see the pool. I hope he was referencing Michael Snow in some early shots… even if not, it made me think about Snow, which is always a good thing. The color-washed orgy montage a highlight. Which version/clone of Skarsgaard survives to ditch his flight in favor of the abandoned resort? What is the real motivation for the Mia Goth-led group leading him through these ordeals? Is it all a dream or a drug trip? Doesn’t matter!

by ·Comments Off on The Cathedral (2021, Ricky D’Ambrose)

Flatly factual narrator, feeling very director-filming-his-childhood. At age 13 the kid develops an interest in filmmaking, imagine that. The frame not always completely still, I noticed a couple of slow zoomouts. Shooting floors and walls and tablecloths seems to excite Ricky – also the light playing on the carpets, but Terence Davies he ain’t.

Early celebration with excited father:

Richard meets Lydia in 1986 (he played the President in Dark Phoenix and Officer Krupke in West Side Story, and she was just in the new Top Gun). Richard fights over money with Lydia’s dad Nick. I forget which grandma is which – Josephine stays a few months with Pianist Robert, and Claire dies before our main couple breaks up in 1997. Lydia meets Peter and has a deaf second child, Richard marries Judy, a Trinidadian who scams him. Jesse is going to Chicago after high school, and will presumably be making short films in The Souvenir Cathedral Part II.

Later celebration with terrible ventriloquist:

by ·Comments Off on Moonage Daydream (2022, Brett Morgen)

The artistic life of Bowie. Good interview bits, ok visuals – Morgen’s free-association clips of computer graphics and classic film clips don’t usually work for me (the Sparks doc was more coherent). Surprisingly the interview segments were better than the concerts, and both have horrible lighting.

by ·Comments Off on Confess, Fletch (2022, Greg Mottola)

Not the second coming of lightweight studio comedy as claimed, but pretty good. Jon Hamm is less annoying than he seems from that one weird promo photo everyone is running. This fits into Poker Face Premiere Month nicely since Fletch isn’t a detective, but a journalist who keeps getting mixed up in investigations. The girl who looks like April Ludgate on the poster is Chilean Lorenza Izzo, an Eli Roth regular – suspiciously second-billed then barely in the movie. Roy Wood Jr. and Ayden “Griz” Mayeri are investigating the dead girl in Fletch’s apartment while he’s investigating the kidnapping of his girlfriend’s dad and some stolen paintings that Kyle MacLachlan is mixed up with. I appreciated the Caldor reference.

by ·Comments Off on Aftersun (2022, Charlotte Wells)

It’s a squishy film, because there are dreams and visions, unexplained (inexplicable?) actions and motivations – and that’s probably the point, that memory is imperfect or that her dad is unknowable. 95% young Sophie on a lazy beach vacation with divorced/troubled dad Paul Mescal (Normal People) and 5% older Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall) in her apartment.

RW Knight: “No answers, because life isn’t solvable like that; things just happen, meaning accrues … What’s important is feeling adrift, a prisoner of time collapsing.”

Preston: “One wonders what the film is building up to – violence? disappointment? just cringe in general? – but its trump card is that the girl is so accepting, or not exactly accepting but too caught up in surveying the world around her … to engage in the usual third-act histrionics; all she really wants is a dad, which he’s able to supply intermittently, a low-stakes reserve that’s very touching.”

by ·Comments Off on The Fabelmans (2022, Steven Spielberg)

A complicated movie, currently being discussed in every publication, so I needn’t bother. He is still The Most Popular Filmmaker Of All Time, and some of the dialogue is really “hit the themes on the head” and “spell out the character motivations” clunky/obvious, yelling out the ideas so nobody can miss them, rather than letting us make connections. But I can’t be mad about it, because even the stuff I knew would be coming was really beautiful on screen… that last five minutes with Lynch/Ford was perfect, and the final shot (re-framing the horizon line) made me gasp.

by ·Comments Off on Something in the Dirt (2022, Benson & Moorhead)

Wedding photographer John and bartender Levi discover supernatural phenomenon in Levi’s apartment and shoot a documentary about it. Maybe his closet is a gateway to another dimension. Finding symbols and coincidences in Los Angeles, like Silver Lake or Lodge 49, but this time it’s not just one conspiracy/coincidence, it’s ALL of them.

“Why did you play yourselves in the recreations?” Feels pandemicky, the writers/directors playing the lead roles, set in an apartment. As they start to mistrust each other, doc interviewees cast doubts on the histories and findings, and the movie we’re watching itself, speaking of visual effects tests to create the floating crystals and stuff. But it ends – in typical Benson/Moorhead fashion – with a possible callback to a previous film (someone falling inexplicably from a great height).