by ·Comments Off on No Sudden Move (2021, Steven Soderbergh)

A few guys get a job to camp out menacingly in a family man’s house until he retrieves some documents from his workplace, but the documents aren’t so easily retrieved, and somebody dies, and who’s really working for who? It’s that sort of movie, and I could do a whole plot rundown but it’s twisty and fun so I’d rather just forget the particulars and watch it again in a few years. I’ll say that everyone’s sleeping around, all the women are dangerous, the documents are about the auto industry wanting to avoid pollution regulation, and Soderbergh shoots the action with a widescreen lens that perversely distorts everything on the sides.

Besides the superstars, we’ve got family man David Harbour (star of the Hellboy remake which I accidentally bought on blu-ray for a few bucks thinking it was the original, dammit)… his wife, hostage Amy Seimetz (director of last year’s finest film)… and Ray Liotta’s wife is Julia Fox (Uncut Gems).

Not how you want to meet Don Cheadle:

You do not impress Bill Duke:

You don’t want Brendan Fraser pointing his napkin at you:

by ·Comments Off on Fauna (2020, Nicolas Pereda)

I’m glad I gave Pereda another shot after Greatest Hits. This starts out rough, but leads to some likeably awkward scenes when Luisa’s new man Paco is failing to make an impression on her dad. Luisa’s brother Gabino is visiting at the same time (played by Gabino, who plays “Gabino” in all of Pereda’s films). Paco is an actor with a nonspeaking role on a season of Narcos, and the others want to see him perform, so he creates a larger speaking role for an impromptu acting showcase at a bar. The master-shot real-time thing, playing with performance and identity, all pretty appealing. But just like Greatest Hits replaced Gabino’s father halfway through (one of the fathers is playing his father again here), this movie shifts modes, becoming a story created by Luisa about strangers meeting at a hotel, all the actors from the first half as different people. It all feels minor but I was smiling the whole time.

by ·Comments Off on Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021, Josh Greenbaum)

Newly unemployed, middle-aged Nebraskans (!) take a rejuvenating vacation at the same time a would-be supervillain plans to destroy Vista Del Mar as revenge for a childhood humiliation. Barb and Star take turns seducing the villain’s henchman Jamie Dornan and end up saving the town. Probably more than half the jokes hit (Damon Wayans Jr.’s self-defeating spy was in the other half), so we had fun. I would tentatively agree to watch Barb and Star go on further adventures, or maybe just Bridesmaids, also created by Mumolo and Wiig.

by ·Comments Off on Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020, Jia Zhang-ke)

At first glance this is more of a straight doc than I Wish I Knew. Interviewing a handful of writers, with pillow daily-life scenes in the cities the writers are from. Soft piano or string music, when there’s any. Between chapters someone will read aloud from the previous writer’s work, followed by a repeated line from the same passage in subtitles over black screen.

by ·Comments Off on Summer of Soul (2021, Questlove)

Superbly assembled from the original footage, news stories and present-day interviews. Some songs are allowed to stand on their own, some are used as montage fodder, or backdrops for related stories. Mainly I appreciate a music doc that never lets the music stop playing.

Stevie Wonder gets drum and piano solos. David Ruffin has a very high voice and long legs on “My Girl.” Nina Simone and Sly Stone in top form. I wasn’t expecting the gospel section to be so strong – Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson walked off with the movie.

Abby Sun in Filmmaker:

Politically, the films’ interviews and archival footage holds no bars. The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s sermons are woven throughout … The film is explicitly pro-Black Panthers, pro-Young Lords, pro-interracial and transnational solidarity movements. It is conscious, as its organizers were, of the complex mapping of the formation of Black identity — in style and hair, musical expression and commercial ownership, political position, Afro-Caribbean modalities — and against mainstream media narratives, while putting forward a multi-sensorial view of a festival space, integrating attendees’ memories of the smell and taste of being present.

by ·Comments Off on The American Sector +4 (2020, Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez)

I got a (cheap!) Metrograph subscription to watch this, with accompanying shorts and a live Q&A, already paying dividends. Velez & Stephens traveled and filmed in 16mm whenever they had time over the past five years, aiming to shoot all the sections of the Berlin Wall on display in the USA. Clearly a lot of thought went into editing and sound design, and instead of a rigorous Benning approach, they take each wall location on its own terms and include chance encounters with locals, forming a kind of meditative Profit Motive road movie / snapshot of America in a breezy 70 minute package.

This guy in Suwanee seems cool:

–
Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt (2017, Pacho Velez & Yoni Brook)

A pleasing top-down angle on the subway turnstiles, where among the general bustle an extremely minor drama unfolds when a yellow sweatshirted fellow’s card won’t let him through. Can’t decide whether to root for Mr. Sweatshirt or be mad at him for holding up traffic.

–
Perfect Fifths (2020, Courtney Stephens)

“All stability is temporary.” Narrator named JJJJJerome, unseen except his hands, is a philosophical piano tuner. Focus on piano, with pictureboxed (interlaced) cutaways to construction scenes, soft piano soundtrack. I don’t know if the beach scenes were supposed to be visual analogies for the talk about time intervals, but it really worked for me, mad bonus points for the inclusion of pelicans.

–
Mating Games (2017, Courtney Stephens & KJ Relth)

I’ve been using tags to quietly keep track of movies that feature cat tossing or bird tossing, but it’s apparently time for a girl tossing category. Slow-mo home movies of bodybuilders and gymnasts showing off at Los Angeles beaches in the 1950’s/60’s, set to music.

Muscle Beach seems like an intimidating place – reading online that Danny Trejo used to hang out there, while downstairs my dad is watching Grindhouse. Seeing all the girl tossing through the lens of this movie’s title makes human existence seem head-spinning.

–
The Starting Line (2017, Pacho Velez & Nicole Salazar)

Official USA/Mexican border crossing and surrounding area on the day Obama’s presidency ended – vague talk on the TV news, but normal daily life on the ground.

by ·Comments Off on The Killing of Two Lovers (2020, Robert Machoian)

Tight, tense movie in grainy 4:3 with amazing sound design, the soundtrack playing sfx in a doom-loop, predicting what’s going to happen next. In a very small town, David (Clayne Crawford, the Mel Gibson character in TV’s Lethal Weapon) can’t be cooly anonymous while stalking his wife’s new lover because he’s always running into people he knows. Movie introduces David attempting to murder them in their sleep then sets him on a long road to a sort of redemption, through work and caring for the kids and, in the end, winning pity when the new man makes the first move in the violence game. The wife is Sepideh Moafi of The Deuce, new man is Chris Coy (Treme and also The Deuce). Both Mikes D’Angelo and Sicinski covered this one well.

by ·Comments Off on Gunda (2020, Victor Kossakovsky)

Cows, pigs, roosters in three farms in different countries. Terrific high-framerate steadicam, long takes, great lighting in their custom-built sty. I wondered how much of that was natural light, and remembered reading about the house in Turin Horse, which turned out an apt comparison, per the British Cinematographer article I read.

Structurally it’s:
– baby pigs are born
– chickens interlude
– pigs growing up
– cows interlude
– pigs taken away from momma pig

And it’s almost a perfect movie, but for the cows, who do nothing except swat away flies (or more often, failing to swat away flies). You just can’t make cows interesting, though apparently Andrea Arnold will be the next to attempt it.

by ·Comments Off on The Grocer’s Son, the Mayor, the Village and the World (2020, Claire Simon)

Finally coming full circle, we watched a streaming documentary about people starting a site to stream documentaries. The team’s founder is a film nut whose dad was the local grocer, but it’s not a town of film nuts and their group isn’t doing much outreach, so instead of a doc-crazy Columbia MO situation, it just seems like some outsider weirdos in a town that has no need for them. Sturdy, observational doc by Simon, who makes pretty nice movies but I’ve missed why she’s considered a master of the art. Anyway, nobody was ever hanging out on the online chat channels T/F set up for Teleported attendees, so I had to look to twitter for a sense of film-viewing community.