No music, little camera movement, background noise from others in the house or from a laptop tuned to Nollywood TV, otherwise all focus is on Delphine. Raped + pregnant at 13, prostitution to get by in Cameroon and Belgium, proposed to by two white men and due to circumstances she married the one she’s not in love with. Shunned by family after a sick niece died in her care, but that’s all forgotten after she moves to Europe and they assume she’s rich. She speaks English with a heavy dialect and French mixed in – Katy thinks it’s shady that the subtitler rephrased her dialogue when we can hear her speaking different words. All the titular prayers come at once, in a breakdown near the end. Better than most single-subject monologue films I’ve seen, still not my preferred mode.
Tag: 2020s
Rock Bottom Riser (2021, Fern Silva)
I’d meant to play this movie again the next day at work, just listening in the headphones, because the unexpected music and the way every interviewee had a different sort of audio processing on their voice was striking. But the rental expired and I had to settle for the Smog song.
Definitely on the avant-garde side of the documentary spectrum, but with terrific sound. Some very joyful edits. Before watching I read the Sicinski Cinema Scope article twice, and now want to watch all of Silva’s movies. Already by the time the opening title hit, the movie’s physical nature was nothing like I’d imagined. The talking heads are never shot in standard doc style, and he talks around the issues we imagined it’d confront head-on, but productively. The island/ocean nature calls back nicely to our last T/F movie of 2020, and still the last movie we’ve seen in theaters, MaÅ‚ni. Volcanic lava and disputed native lands, with Rat Film levels of digression.
By showing us a collage of discontinuous moments from a given lifeworld, Silva expresses the density of any given social formation, its atmospheric pervasiveness and resonance. As such, his films show us things that serve to emphasize just how much we cannot know … What Silva shows quite clearly through his oblique strategy of creative nonfiction is that the radical flattening of culture and history on which global capital thrives actually has its limits.
Aleph (2021, Iva Radivojevic)
“Buenos Aires is a city of birds” was a promising statement, but the movie ended up being full of humans philosophizing in monotone, with very few birds. Clara is disaffected, claims to have no feelings, later a girl in another city will claim to feel too much. We visit Greenland, Kathmandu… oh I was gonna list more, since I screengrabbed the credits, but ND/NF uses more serious copy protection than Sundance, and my shots all came out black. Too bad – the shots would’ve been the only way I could’ve sold this one (edit: stole some shots from a trailer). Rented based on its description as a Borgesian puzzle, mostly got narrators flatly declaring Borgesian ideas. The universe is being dreamed, or is in a speck of dust, you know. The long misty riverboat ride with a whispering ghost would’ve put me to sleep on a normal night, but fortunately I watched this in the afternoon. Montage of close-ups of eyes in Mexico City was nice.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Jane Schoenbrun)
Casey is eating string cheese in the opening scene, says she’s taking the World’s Fair Challenge. Repeats the words, stabs herself with a pin, then hits play on a video which based on the reflections on her face appears to be the end of Lux Aeterna. Alex G music and Albert Birney video game animation. Abandoned strip mall aesthetic when she goes outside. Multiple creepypasta and Paranormal Activity references. “I love horror movies and I thought it might be cool to try actually living in one.” She’s using Photo Booth app for video recording, I don’t think that’s a thing? Sleep?walks to the shed and admires daddy’s rifle, then watches ASMR videos. Commenter JLB sends her a laughing-clown twisted picture of herself, claims to be “nobody” just wants to help her. We soon see JLB, a bald Tim Roth-ish guy. Then a cheap cinematic adaptation of the same story as an autoplay video. I like that she’s going through all this and her channel videos only have 50 views… but what is she even going through? And what does JLB know, or is trying to help her from? She makes a response video addressed to him, a tarot card reading accusing him of being pathetic. Problem with found footage films is that in seeking authenticity, your movie looks very bad. 70 minutes in the major event that’s happened as a result of her Challenge is that she’s torn up her favorite stuffed animal then cried about it – or maybe this was normal sleep deprivation / moody teen / youtube overdose behavior. “They’re just videos” JLB: Casey… “That’s not even my name” She calls him a pedophile and hangs up. A year later she contacted him and they met up in NY. After Saint Maud this is my second movie of the month that hints at horror but ain’t horror.
T/F/ND/NF/ETC 2021
True/False announced their May 2021 plan for outdoor screenings back before we had any idea of vaccine rollout schedules, so we opted for the “Teleported” home experience, which included a giant box of goodies sent to our house. Of the 16 feature selections this year we were only offered 7 – plus the shorts programs, so that’s 11/20. Miffed as I was not to have Summer of Soul as a viewing option, we still did better than the in-person crowds, who could only watch one outdoor screening per night for a maximum of five. But five (or seven) movies in five nights is not how we do True/False – so I also rented multiple titles (including T/F films not included in Teleported) from the concurrently running New Directors/New Films festival and some earlier docs from elsewhere, to curate our own particular festival. The final schedule:
B’s pre-screenings:
Aleph (ND/NF)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (ND/NF)
Tue:
Rock Bottom Riser (T/F via ND/NF)
Wed:
Delphine’s Prayers (T/F)
Coyote Shorts (T/F)
Thu:
Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, from a T/F director)
No Kings (T/F)
Radiograph of a Family (ND/NF)
Fri:
A Thousand Suns (2014 T/F)
Town Bloody Hall (1979)
Songs That Flood the River (T/F)
A So-Called Archive (2020, from a T/F director)
Sat:
From the Wild Sea (T/F)
All Light, Everywhere (T/F via ND/NF)
Now Something is Slowly Changing (2019 T/F)
Sun:
Gunda (2020, from a T/F director)
Faya Dayi (T/F via ND/NF)
The Grocer’s Son (T/F)
Plus four shorts from the other T/F programs.
Did Not Finish:
We / Nous (ND/NF)
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010)
Unwatched T/F:
Dirty Feathers
Homeroom
Inside the Red Brick Wall
Petit Samedi
Sabaya
Summer of Soul
This Rain Will Never Stop
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
Users
Mandibules (2020, Quentin Dupieux)
Manu (Grégoire Ludig of Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out) picks up his friend Jean-Gab (David Marsais) in a stolen car to get paid to deliver a briefcase, but they sidetrack upon discovering a giant fly in the car’s trunk, then take over an old man’s camper as a training ground to teach to the fly to rob banks. After they burn down the camper attempting to cook a meal, blonde India Hair (Staying Vertical) mistakes Manu for her classmate and brings them home. “Rich girl fridge!” “Gimme that ham!” Brain-damaged Adèle Exarchopoulos rats on them, the fly eats a dog, things work out in the end. Fun and short, I will keep watching Dupieux movies forever.
Minari (2020, Lee Isaac Chung)
The cool guy from Burning and his wife (Yeri Han of the recent Wolf Brigade remake) are professional chicken sexers starting an Arkansas farm to grow Korean veggies in their spare time. Yuh-Jung Youn (Sense8 and a couple Hong Sang-soo films) is MVP as their grandma. The kids hide from parental arguments and reluctantly spend time with grandma, who feeds them weird things and teaches them to be aggressive card players. Potential dangers include snakes, a heart murmur, a cross-dragging Christian (Will Patton), and drought + trash fire, which strikes when grandma, struggling after having a stroke, accidentally burns down the storeroom while the others are in Tulsa. Funny timing since this week I was playing an album for the first time in decades that I bought in Tulsa when our family drove down from Arkansas. The sympathetic, struggling family and personal resonance wasn’t enough to make the actual movie, a brownish wood-paneled drama, especially great.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021, Adam Curtis)
You had me at “Ayn Rand follower befriends Lee Harvey Oswald and creates parody religion called Discordianism, spreading the Illuminati myth as a prank codenamed Operation Mindfuck, accidentally creating the modern conspiracy theory.” We also trace the fall of the communist revolution (and ALL revolutions), invention of mass electronic surveillance in order to catch the Red Army Faction, how counterculture transformed into consumerism, and of course, flawed and simplified models of human thought and behavior leading to widespread disaster. Kill the cop in your head.
Monster Hunter (2020, Paul W.S. Anderson)
The opening scene is full-on nuts and very fakey looking, but i dunno that you need a sand-dune sailboat being attacked by giant duneworms to look “realistic.” Back in “our world” Milla Jovovich is an elite UN soldier(?) until a desert storm transports her to the monster-hunting world where her team is wiped out and she’s cocooned by skittering creatures in an underground insect Matrix until kidnapped by incredible archer Tony Jaa. She fucks up his shrine and they have a really violent fight, then they join forces and make her an arm-mounted grappling crossbow. “To kill a monster you need a monster.” Lost Boy Ron Perlman joins them, fighting off a stampede with flaming swords, then we go through the kidnapping / friendship thing again to fight a fire-breathing dragon. If I’m making this movie sound unbelievably awesome, that’s only because it is.
