by ·Comments Off on The Klezmer Project (2023, Koch & Schachmann)

Listened to Cracow Klezmer Band at work, had a Czech lager, watched a klezmer movie – good day. Wedding videographer Leandro likes musician Paloma, fakes that he’s making a klezmer documentary to get her interest, then follows through, traveling from Argentina to Austria to Ukraine to Romania to Moldavia, chasing music that no longer exists in its origin lands (we hear plenty of performances but are told that technically they’re not klezmer, ha). It’s a true-falsey travelogue through folk tales and tunes, adding up to nothing much narratively but quite a lot cinematically.

Victor Covaci, Romania:

Morris Yang:

The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza … The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of King Crab (2021, Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)

Gorgeous movie, multipart flashbacking story of drunk beardy Luciano, who gets very angry when the Prince locks a gate used by the shepherds, and burns down a building not knowing that his girl was inside. Later (Jay: “effectively morphing into a Western, like some lost Monte Hellman film as imagined by Lisandro Alonso”) he’s a false priest enlisted by pirates to find hidden gold in Tierra del Fuego with the help of a crab.

Maria Alexandra Lungu, star of The Wonders:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

The film’s very methodology implicitly questions the reliability of narrators and highlights the selective hearing of audiences; what is made clear is that we all contribute to the shape of the stories we tell. Somewhere amid the din of the elders’ conflicting or consenting voices, a narrative of questionable veracity is cobbled together that the film then proceeds to visualize. By revisiting the scenes from which the elders’ unofficial chronicle emanates, de Righi and Zoppis pry open the causal effects of narrative and reveal its mercurial mythmaking.

by ·Comments Off on Gaucho Gaucho (2024, Dweck & Kershaw)

From Long Island car people to Italian dog people to Argentine horse people, Dweck gets around. Real beauty in every moment of this, and I’m not just saying that because my cinephile senses are stimulated by the black-and-white photography, but maybe just a little bit. The gauchos try to keep juvenile cows safe from the hated condors, teach their kids the skills, excel at rodeo competitions, fight against the school dress code, and reflect on their cool lives.

by ·Comments Off on When Evil Lurks (2023, Demián Rugna)

An ancient evil is going to be born into the world unless two dummy brothers can stop it (spoiler: they cannot). The movie is torn between needing to explain itself so we know the stakes, and wanting to withhold information for suspense. So we’re told there are seven rules to follow (that’s more than twice the number of rules for Gremlins so you know it’s serious) but one rule remains secret until the end. And since there are set rules for demon possession, and specialists with suitcases of equipment, and the local cops and government have procedures in place, we know this has all happened before, elsewhere, so if this particular demon gets loose it’s probably not the end of the world, just maybe of this town. But despite all this knowledge and procedure, the dummies keep losing ground, because (per Matt Lynch) “everyone in this forgets what’s happening to them every three to five minutes.”

Still it’s a good gruesome, apocalyptic time at the movies, and the actors are game for its grievous head injury theater.

Two attempts to shoot evil with a gun:

This is Argentina so of course somebody was in La Flor – that’s lead brother Ezequiel Rodríguez, a go-to demonic horror guy lately between Legions and The Witch Game. Brother Demián Salomón is right there with him, starring in Satanic Hispanics, Welcome to Hell, and Into the Abyss. Somebody needs to look into the current wave of Argentine horror. These guys discover the neighbor’s tenant’s kid has become demon-bloated so they drive it some hours away so it can become someone else’s problem. Too late: it gets to the neighbor, and to Ezequiel’s wife (who kills one of her kids) and dog (who kills another). The brothers drive off with the remaining (possessed, autistic) kid and their mom, pick up a demon hunter, and head to the Village of the Damned where they’d dumped the body. The spooky kids there defeat the exorcism plot pretty easily, barely even moving around much, a new evil is born, and the autistic kid eats his grandma.

by ·Comments Off on The Delinquents (2023, Rodrigo Moreno)

Moran robs the bank where he works, gives the money to unwitting Roman. Laura Paredes arrives to investigate, makes life hell for the remaining bankers. When Roman can’t take the pressure, he’s told to drop off the money on a mountainside, where he meets and falls for Norma – and flashbacks reveal that Moran had previously fallen for the same woman in the same spot.

Only three hours long – I think the reason it’s divided into two parts is that Laura Paredes only appears in multi-part features. Suspicious dialogue about mysterious flowers.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

Broken into two acts, with a cast of characters whose names are obviously anagrams of each other, The Delinquents is forward with its gamesmanship, and if the eventual resolution of its central conflict seems unsatisfying, that may be precisely the point … At one point Román ducks into a Buenos Aires arthouse and catches a few minutes of Bresson’s L’Argent, a sign that Moreno is more than happy to lay his cards on the table, allowing the viewer to infer a game of three-card monty where there actually is none.

Ehrlich called it “arguably the first slow cinema heist movie.” Jenkins calls their employer “the absolute worst bank in the world.” Cronk says it jumps off “from the central premise of Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) — a touchstone of Argentine film noir that many cinephiles of Moreno’s generation grew up watching on television.”

Rizov: “It’s no coincidence that the bank vault and the prison Morán ends up have their hallways laid out in the same way, a rhyme that’s brought home by the same actor (Germán De Silva) playing both Morán’s boss and a prisoner who extorts money for protection.” Moreno: “At the end of the day, what I wanted to make was a fable. I had no obligation to reality — my debt was to cinema. So I said, “Let’s do it, let’s play this game. Here’s an actor playing two roles.”

by ·Comments Off on Rotterdance 2024 shorts

Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma (2021, Topaz Jones & Rubberband)

Alphabet of sketches, like The ABCs of Death, but of Black culture in Montclair NJ. Each letter-sketch is a different approach, from wordless avant one-shots to interviews about reframing slavery, food apartheid, code switching, therapy or owning your own work, with home movies and music videos in between letter segments.

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The Driver Is Red (2017, Randall Christopher)

Animated thriller about spy stuff in 1960 Argentina, self-drawing sketches upon papery background with unstable color, covered in faux film grain. Our narrator/hero has tracked and identified Adolf Eichmann, then takes the time to explain some details of the holocaust, in case we haven’t heard. Back to 1960, he calls in his mates and they successfully abduct the guy and bring him to trial, back when Isr**l had a sense of proportion.

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A Short Story (2022, Bi Gan)

This whimsical fantasy AFX-composited sci-fi short incongruously proves that the director of An Elephant Sitting Still had a shot of helming a marvel movie. I guess a cat dresses as a scarecrow and visits three “weirdo” beings who might have some precious thing he can give a girl for her birthday.

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The Rifleman (2021, Sierra Pettengill)

The guy who shot Ramon Casiano later became head of the NRA, mutating the group’s mission from hobbyist sports towards political lobbying. The Drive-By Truckers song is better than this movie (archival footage with strange music), but both are enlightening.

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Rubber Coated Steel (2016, Lawrence Abu Hamdan)

An Isr**li bodyguard killed two kids in the W*st B*nk, and a forensic audio analyst (the director himself, if I didn’t misunderstand the credits) explains in court how it was done. Visual is a long take, roving around a shooting range, the mechanical target holders bringing forth pictoral representations of bullet sounds. For a movie about sound, the audio track is pretty useless – words from the trial are subtitled, including lines stricken from the official record, then the end credits are spoken.

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Goodbye Jerome! (2022, Farr/Selnet/Sillard)

Jerome goes to heaven to find his true love, she breaks up with him, so he suicides and is rebuilt by ants. Really nice animation.

by ·Comments Off on Trenque Lauquen (2022, Laura Citarella)

Two movies really, with full credits for each part. Not much here to gaze upon, and my copy looked like streaming mush; it’s all narrative. Chapters give different characters and perspectives (I like how their titles are tied together with song lyrics) as the missing Laura is tracked by her more arrogant boyfriend Rafael and her secret boyfriend Ezequiel (Ez’s job in the movie is to not follow what people are saying so everything has to be repeated). Ez had been helping Laura with her private project, following a love story through letters hidden in books donated to the library, but he doesn’t know about her second mystery, getting involved with scientist Elisa Carricajo who’s hiding a lake beast at her house. The music at the end of part one gets sci-fi in anticipation of this section. At the end of part two the picture goes widescreen as Laura disappears – having followed two great mysteries, she becomes one herself. Cast and crew are all returning from La Flor, and I hope they keep making these wheel-spinning mixed-genre movies.

A sort-of decade-later follow-up to the director and star’s Ostende. Citarella in Cinema Scope:

By trying to make a film in similar terms to Ostende, something else happened: a mutant film appeared, a plural idea of cinema. I like that Trenque Lauquen can’t be classified, that you can’t say the film is going this way or that way, or even that the film is this or that. It’s always trying to outrun this idea of being classified – it’s like the experience of reading a novel that takes a rhizomatic approach to storytelling, where each chapter proposes something new and mysterious. For me, the difference between the two films is that in Ostende, Laura is someone who wants to have a lot of lives – to live in fiction – but ultimately decides to go back to her normal life with her boyfriend. In Trenque Lauquen, Laura lives all those possibilities, and finally gets lost.

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Trenque Lauquen (2023, Laura Citarella & Mariano Llinás)

During the Trenque Lauquen city premiere of the Trenque Lauquen double-feature, Citarella sits alone at a cafe across from the theater, the sounds of the film overlaying the town, noting walkouts (one) and people arriving to watch Barbie. Good to see Ezequiel in the crowd, I dunno why Paredes and Carricajo are backstage wearing fake mustaches. This was part of a Film Fest Gent online shorts collection pairing directors with composers, so I suppose the music in here by Eiko Ishibashi (Drive My Car, Drag City) isn’t from the feature film.

by ·Comments Off on Hermia & Helena (2016, Matí­as Piñeiro)

Global, less insular Piñeiro universe than Viola, with actors from La Flor (and onscreen drawings like La Flor). Title of the movie comes from the Midsummer Night’s Dream characters played by a couple of minor players in rehearsals that we never see – there was more Shakespeare in the Kids in The Hall sketch I watched the previous day than in this.

Carmen is returning to Argentina from a NY institute and Midsummer translator Camila is taking her place, causing some identity confusion. Camila ends up dating Carmen’s institute guy Keith Poulson and getting visited by Carmen’s America-roaming friend Mati Diop. They’re supposedly at this institute to work but they spend more time worrying over their parting gift. Camila looks up her long-lost father (Sallitt) and her long-lost boyfriend (Dustin Guy Defa), and Ted Fendt is in the credits to round things out. There are strange turns and visits to Argentina and a sudden film-in-a-film and I’m not convinced it all works, but it’s also flirty and pleasant.

On Letterboxd: “Hermann Loves Pauline” by Super Furry Animals

by ·Comments Off on Liverpool (2008, Lisandro Alonso)

Loner sailor Farrel takes shore leave when his gigantic ship docks in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and sets off to look for his mom. He catches a ride to his family’s town, drinking heavily, passes out in a shed and is carried to the family home, where his dad berates him. Mom is alive but far gone, doesn’t recognize him. He gives a younger girl (Scope says this is his abandoned daughter, not a little sister like I’d thought) some money and a souvenir trinket, then “I’m off,” but the movie stays with the girl. Minor evolution from the laboring guy in La Libertad to the journeying (and daughter-seeking) guy in Los Muertos, but it barely can predict the new textures of the (journeying, daughter-seeking) Jauja (and I haven’t caught up with the movie theater-set Fantasma).

Alonso in Cinema Scope 36:

Liverpool is the result of throwing the ingredients of Fantasma into La Libertad and Los Muertos … I think that simply filming someone is the best way to demonstrate what I think about the human being – about his lack of communication, his isolation, and his incomprehension about himself and the world … I’m very interested in describing characters’ environments. I think that these environments may even be more important than the characters themselves.