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).

by ·Comments Off on The Banshees of Inisherin (2022, Martin McDonagh)

Weirder and more pathological than expected. Yes I’ve seen In Bruges, but that starts out in a violent context while this is about gentle island people in 1923. We get a hell of a character from Brendan Gleeson, who abruptly wants to be left alone to write fiddle tunes, showing he’s serious by psychotically mutilating himself until he can’t play anymore. We get a sick payoff to Barry Keoghan finding a stick with a hook (“What would you use it for, I wonder… to hook things that were the length of a stick away?”), the loss of a great donkey, a shitty cop, some terrible loneliness, and a nearby civil war nobody seems to comprehend.

by ·Comments Off on Tár (2022, Todd Field)

Mostly set in Berlin. Lydia’s former protege Krista has killed herself and “grooming” accusations have been made, wife Sharon is leaving and taking their kid, new cellist Olga might live in a crumbling ghetto or be a ghost. This joins Nope as a movie less satisfying in the moment than thinking about afterwards (and I’ll bet Nope would be more fun to rewatch). Really enjoyed the Dan Kois article in Slate. Shout out to Caroline Shaw!

by ·Comments Off on The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022, Werner Herzog)

Fascinating alternate take on the Krafft legacy, with the same footage but a different focus from Fire of Love. That one’s story goes that their volcano research and publicity saved lives, while Herzog opens by saying they’ve been criticized for convincing others to move closer to the same eruption that caused their deaths. FoL tries to get inside their relationship, Herzog compliments the technical excellence of their filmmaking and photography while showcasing the destructive forces of nature. The Ernst Reijseger requiem music perhaps goes too big, but Herzog’s fourth(?) volcano movie is predictably great.