by ·Comments Off on Hawks and Sparrows (1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

The rare movie with a bird title that is not a metaphor, two guys (long-faced comedian Toto and the curly-haired young guy from every Pasolini movie, both of them very good) are sent by St. Francis to spread the good word to the hawks and the sparrows. They spend a year in a field until Toto learns to talk to hawks and tell them about god. Stalking sparrows in a churchyard, Toto attracts a following, getting overrun with townspeople building a festival around him, finally begs forgiveness then rampages through the place, pelting nuns with ricotta. When they see a hawk eat a sparrow, they inform St. Francis and he tells them to start over. Back in the present-day framing story, I don’t like how the film crew keeps pulling the talking communist crow by a string. Not sure if the plot disintegrated in the last third or if I’d had too many beers, but Toto gets as tired of the dubbed crow as I did, and eats it.

It’s not a serious movie:

St. Francis, also of Rossellini’s Cartesius:

Philosophy:

by ·Comments Off on Send Help (2026, Sam Raimi)

The first Sam Raimi movie since Drag Me To Hell, from the writers of Freddy vs. Jason. Humiliated office worker Rachel McAdams has the upper hand when a plane crash kills all her idiot coworkers except Dylan “Twinless” O’Brien, who cannot build shelter or a raft or find his own food, but still tries to pull rank on her. Fun back-and-forth as they poison each other, and she tries to stay lost by avoiding rescue boats. Despite the all-natural setting Raimi doesn’t know it’s even possible to make a movie without adding ugly CG characters, in this case a wild boar, but thankfully non-CG is Rachel’s pet cockatiel, which survives the mayhem.

by ·Comments Off on Two Cabins (2011, James Benning)

Benning constructs his own versions of Thoreau’s and Kaczynski’s cabins and films the trees through their windows (on his property in California) synced with audio recorded in Massachusetts and Montana. Part of a larger art/cabin/unabomber project for Benning.

Each cabin gets one 15-minute shot, so there’s not much to look at, just sounds. Odd to hear a big-ass truck drive past Thoreau’s place, distant clanking and traffic near Ted’s. I took the opportunity to listen for birds. Merlin mostly refused to cooperate, finally IDing a nuthatch. Birdnet picked up a house wren, but I had to hand-select its call, couldn’t just leave the app running, and bringing the birdnet-pi downstairs would’ve messed with my backyard stats. So, the movie didn’t work to get me in the mood for our own trip to the cabin, where Merlin always hears plenty of birds, including actual merlins.

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of Silyan (2025, Tamara Kotevska)

People who watch movies for the human drama, the “empathy machine” people, are the overwhelming majority in the arthouse realm, leaving us bird people to scan every title and plot description for some sign of avian life and not bird-as-metaphor. Once a decade we hit absolute gold, and coincidentally the same month H Is For Hawk came out, right around when I was watching the egret of Alamar, this incredible crane movie popped up. This is what the cinema could be: vague stories featuring doc footage of storks eating frogs, and by that measure the greatest movies would be this and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

That said, there’s much time spent on non-crane activity, as the movie contrasts fallen corrupted human economic life with timeless biological bird life. Priced out of farming, a Macedonian man spends his time helping an injured stork.

by ·Comments Off on Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath)

Corey Atad:

It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions.

After convincing us for three hours that Henry Fonda represents America itself, weaving film and interview clips and bringing in political history and Henry’s outspoken actor kids, the doc closes on a shot of pelicans, affirming its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on Alamar (2009, Pedro González-Rubio)

Kid is visiting Dad, who catches fish and lobsters along the coral reef.

I chilled out to the movie’s rhythms, and could’ve fallen asleep if not for this excellent egret.

The producer is a powerhouse, the director has some little-seen followup films, and you could (and probably should) watch three of ’em together in the same runtime as the Henry Fonda doc.

Adam Nayman writes that Gonzalez-Rubio “gets a film’s worth of astonishing footage, almost all of it shot by the filmmaker himself with a single HD camera,” and they discuss the “fiction inside the story” (the egret was an unstaged wild encounter). G-R: “I wouldn’t have been honest if I had shot this intimate story and then slept at night in another place, rather than in the palafitte on a hammock, waking up with the first rays of the sun.”

by ·Comments Off on The Ice Tower (2025, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Think I prefer Luci-Hadz’s bizarre movies where I don’t ever know what’s happening to the ones where a runaway girl hides out on a movie set, ending up as stand-in then rival to the movie’s diva star, the titular Ice Queen. Feels like they’re telling a story but not getting anywhere with it, all long pauses and people staring silently, while that approach seems to work for me if I’m as lost as the characters. Either way, Hadz has conjured another couple hours of splendid images.

Marion Cotillard (only the second time I’ve seen her in the last decade) is our Queen, Clara Pacini the runaway, August Diehl (A Hidden Life) a sinister assistant. The Ice Queen movie doubles as Clara’s childhood storytime and present fantasy world. There’s a crystal / refraction / kaleidoscope theme, the movie’s distorted ending recalling the fever dreams of Mysteries of Lisbon.

by ·Comments Off on Listers (2025, Owen Reiser)

Absolute charmer of a birdwatching doc – free on youtube and better than most fest-premiering docs we’ve seen lately. Clear from the opening credits that Owen has got visual ideas to spare. His brother Quentin gets most of the face time and has got the charisma to back that up. Most importantly we see hundreds of beautiful birds.

by ·Comments Off on Deborah Stratman: Land, Birds, Circuit

O’er the Land (2009)

Military marching, war reenactments, an RV sales pitch, immigration cops, narration by a guy who ejected from a plane and bounced through a thunderstorm.

Guys who refer to machine guns as “freedom”
Firefighters, flamethrowers, waterwall

Wild birds in some kind of audio experiment
If i understand the credits, the archival-sounding stories were performances

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Ray’s Birds (2010)

Ray runs a raptor center – Stratman films his public demonstrations and splinters them into fragments.

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Hacked Circuit (2014)

The first voice we hear is someone getting a crank call from a flock of birds, so there are birds in all her movies. High-tech studio where a foley artist is recreating sounds from The Conversation. Our camera roving, invisible, goes into the studio and back outside in a loop, and jeez, that wasn’t a single take, was it? Michael Sicinski saw it at True/False.