We regret that we couldn’t stay for all 24 hours of The Clock in Minneapolis some years ago, so while in Boston it was easy to catch all 60 minutes of Doors, which plays on a loop with no beginning or end. People from classic movies (with some modern-auteurist exceptions: Phantom Thread, Lost Highway) enter doors, then we cut to the opposite angle and they’ve transformed into somebody different. I thought the cuts were going for maximum contrast (old person to young, man to woman, black/white to color), and I thought he was purposely choosing cheapie Brit dramas so we’d never recognize a clip/actor, but every time I thought I’d found a pattern he’d switch it up. Very funny to me that it’s 95% G-rated harmless scenes (some light gunpoint threats) except for the two minutes a class of small children was being ushered in, then it switched to Fire Walk With Me / Scream horror, and the kids were ushered right back out. We also saw Sara Cwynar’s Alphabet exhibit and her giant awesome mural in the lobby, where the desk people told me it’s pronounced “swinn-arr”. Katy watched Rose Gold with me when we got home, and felt eight minutes was long enough so she didn’t want to check out Glass Life afterwards.
Tag: 2020s
Pavements (2024, Alex Ross Perry)
After the tenth straight minute of split-screen I realized that Perry must’ve seen the Velvet Underground doc, thought it’d be funny to the same for Pavement, then the whole thing got out of control.
Misericordia (2024, Alain Guiraudie)
It brings me no pleasure to report that the weird gay french movie is 10x better than the Cannes-winner. I really don’t mean to be contrarian, this only makes it harder to predictably find movies I’ll enjoy.
Jeremy the French Bill Hader-via-James McAvoy (actually Felix Kysyl, Gorin in the Hazanavicius Godard movie) is from Toulouse, returned to the small town where he used to live for a baker’s funeral. Jer stays with widow Catherine Frot (of the Belvaux trilogy), and his presence bristles deep-voiced Hermit Walter and especially the late baker’s Big Quinquin-looking son Vincent. The Vincent rivalry gets heated to the point that Jeremy ends up killing him with a rock in the woods, burying him in a shallow grave, which doesn’t seem great for the future of his relationship with V’s mom.
Enter Phillippe, the best movie priest of the year, who becomes a co-conspirator and helps Jer, who’d been making up new night-of-the-crime stories whenever his old ones got busted. Phillippe says that murder is fine, and achieves his goal of getting naked in bed with Jer, this scheme being more complex and better thought-out than the murder conspiracy itself. If I’m not making it sound strange enough, there’s a cop who keeps sneaking in at night and trying to get Jer to confess to the crime in his sleep.
Priest, Widow Martine, and Unwitting Widow Annie:
from his Film Stage interview:
I think that I work a lot on emotions and I work a lot on questions that I want to provoke in the spectator. But I always have the feeling, by the time the film is over, that I’ve somehow missed something … by the time I get to the stage where we’re at now, I don’t quite remember what my intention was from the beginning … I’m not sure that what I even had intended was doable or realizable from the start.
Anora (2024, Sean Baker)
Celebrating Cannes week by watching last year’s winner, part of a Cannes strip-club double-feature. Annie dances for a Russian guy who looks like Rodrick, then agrees to marry him in Vegas so he can stay in the US, but he runs when his parents send two hapless thugs after them, and Annie is stuck with the thugs while they search, finally catching him back at the strip club with her rival Diamond. There’s a lotta sex and dance music in this. It stretches on forever, then she fucks Igor, and that’s the ending?
Education (2020, Steve McQueen)
Kingsley loves outer space, wants to be an astronaut but can’t read, gets in trouble in school and is busted down to a kindergarten-level special school. A bit upsetting that the night after watching Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii I’m subjected to a fake schoolteacher singing “House of the Rising Sun” in its entirety. Nice little story with crazy end credits music. Naomi Ackie plays an activist exposing the new school for being completely useless, and it ends (ironically I assume) with them putting their hope in an up-and-coming politician named Margaret Thatcher.
Sicinski called this and Wheatle the weakest episodes: “Still, even understood as fundamentally educational efforts, these films are much more adept than the work of Loach and [Paul] Laverty when it comes to articulating the complexities of systematic oppression.”
Walk Up (2022, Hong Sang-soo)
Male filmmaker (gasp) Byungsoo (Kwon Hae-hyo, of everything) takes his daughter Jungsoo to visit interior designer Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young, dying actress of In Front of Your Face), hoping she’ll take the girl on as an apprentice.
Next visit, the daughter is gone, having quit the interior design business after a month, and Ms. Kim introduces the guy to a big fan of his films. They drink quite a bit, of course. Later, he’s living with the fan Sunhee (Song Sun-mi, who usually plays Kim Min-hee’s friend) in Ms. Kim’s upstairs apartment.
Later still, he’s living there alone even though Ms. Kim is a crappy landlord, and seeing a realtor (the main kid’s mom in Introduction). He goes down to the street and runs into his daughter and… I can’t remember if anything else happens. I enjoyed myself though.
Sly Lives! aka the Burden of Black Genius (2025, Questlove)
Mostly standard talking-heads rise-and-fall music doc. Sometimes the interviewees address the subtitle topic, sometimes they use a deep-1980s Sly interview, sometimes there’s concert footage, and all those things are very good. Surprisingly given all the past-tense involved, Sly really does live (update: RIP Sly).
Nosferatu (2024, Robert Eggers)
Dickensian intro in “Germany” with Warboy “Steve” Hoult as a green realtor sent to the Count’s castle. Sure are a lot of dream sequences in this. It’s got more narrative than the other versions, at least, and definitely more dream sequences, and references to Possession and The Exorcist. The music is very “Mica Levi but bad.” It must not feel great to have made the longest and worst Nosferatu movie, but if you rank it with all the Draculas it’s probably somewhere in the middle – I recall Dracula 2000 being quite painful.
Willem Dafoe plays an alchemist who knows the VVitch Dad. Lily-Rose sacrifices herself to free the town from a plague. At least the vampire’s death scene was good.
Cloud (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Ryosuke and Akiko are a young couple driven by money (he’s new, she starred in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). He quits his factory job to get rich buying junk (like pricey Sailor Moon snowglobes) and reselling it online, guided by schoolmate Muraoka (the First Love guy) and with help from very loyal assistant Sano.
But somebody is after him from the beginning, laying tripwires in his bike path and throwing car parts through his window, and soon his online identity gets doxxed and a gang of aggrieved customers who got ripped off by his fake designer handbags are after him, breaking into his house and Serpent’s Path-ing him for revenge. I’m not sure what all this double-crossing gun intrigue adds up to, besides the dreamlike final scene which spells out that unchecked greed will lead you to hell.
The Arkanoid Conspiracy:
Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:
The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic.