Our first-ever T/F guest viewer agreed with Katy that the movie was sad and hard to watch. Seals, dolphins and swans, rescued and released by British + Irish orgs. Some delightful seal/swan antics, less-direct wounded animal shots than Bird Island. Per Paste, “a story of slow, tiring disaster.”
Tag: birds
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.
Exotica (1994, Atom Egoyan)
One of those everyone-is-connected dramas, but with birds. Most of the birds are either fake/decorative, or an offscreen plot device (smuggled hyacinth macaw eggs) but it’s still appreciated.
Egg-smuggler Don McKellar runs a pet shop that is being audited by tormented beardo Bruce Greenwood (Meek, of the Cutoff) who is obsessed with stripper Mia Kirshner who works at the titular nightclub with her ex Elias Koteas and boss Arsinée Khanjian. Victor Garber is in here, in a wheelchair, with daughter Sarah Polley, and they both spend uncomfortable time with the beardo, knowing that he’s erratic and messed up ever since his daughter’s murder. Koteas and Kirshner had just met when they discovered her body years earlier. And the pet shop boy is seduced by an egg-thieving customs agent and blackmailed by his auditor into spying on the strip club.
Elias one-way-mirroring Bruce:
Don is intimidated by Mia:
What is wrong with Egoyan that he makes such sad movies? The revenge trip turning into a sad reconciliation was a motherfucker – it’s hard to write good people who get fucked up by misfortune and still hold onto some goodness – but for me the knife in the heart is the final two seconds, after a movie full of birds a cat walks into frame.
Victor and real bird:
Arsinée and fake bird:
Jane Fonda in Klute & Barbarella
Klute (1971, Alan Pakula)
“What I would really like to do is be faceless and bodyless, and be left alone.”
Jane won an oscar for playing the first-ever prostitute treated with respect in a movie. Lots of audiotape in this, from the opening titles to the climax. I thought movie was just pretty good – solid investigation story teaming reluctant Jane with a stone-faced Donald Sutherland. Jane is set up as the villain after family man Tom goes missing, since she’s the mysterious hot girl Tom knew in New York. Then after Donald catches up with her, Tom is assumed to be the villain, disappeared to the city due to a dark obsession with poor, harassed Jane. Eventually it’s revealed that some whiteburns guy I hadn’t cared about, Donald’s boss I think, has been stalking Jane and killing people she knows. Along the way Jane wears some good outfits, and the team meets junkies and a pervy Roy Scheider – she and Donald have pretty good characters, though the final villain showdown was lame, the murderous boss confessing everything to the point of playing audiotape of his killings, then abruptly jumping out a window as justice approached. Whiteburns was Charles Cioffi of Shaft, which also won oscars this year, along with The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, and Fiddler on the Roof.
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Barbarella (1968, Roger Vadim)
“Decrucify him or I’ll melt your face.”
Jane won an oscar for this too… no wait, it says here that Katharine Hepburn tied with Barbra Streisand, somebody must have made a mistake. I avoided this movie for years, hearing it was “bad,” but that’s obviously untrue. It’s a light, funny sci-fi feature with outrageous sets and costumes, anchored by a playful but unwinking Jane. This was Jane and Vadim’s follow-up to Spirits of the Dead, and it was seeing a screenshot from that movie on my screensaver that got me thinking I should watch more Jane Fonda movies.
Jane is nude through the first ten minutes, answering a call from the President of Earth and getting fitted out with gear like a shameless Bond ripoff. She goes looking for the evil Duran Duran, conked on the head and kidnapped by some Thunderdome lost boys who sic carnivorous dolls on her until she’s rescued by Mark the Catchman, who introduces her to sex. Pygar, the last of the omnithropes, introduces her to Dr. Ping, who can fix her spaceship. Revolutionary Dildano saves her from carnivorous parakeets, I dunno, there were so many wonderful things I lost track of them all. Art directed to hell and back, shot by Claude Renoir, inspiration to Matmos and Ghostbusters II and Futurama, a justifiable cult classic.
Jane meets David Hemmings:
Marcel Marceau, looking like a Tom Kenny character:
Anita Pallenberg as the blade-wielding Great Tyrant:
The Big Boss (1971, Lo Wei)
This is the second movie I’ve watched this year after Cold Weather that partly takes place at an ice factory. In this one, incompetent drug dealers are hiding packets of heroin inside blocks of ice… which are transparent. When a couple of employees find the nondescript packets, the baddies tell them there’s heroin inside, then murder the entire workforce. Strange logic abounds, but this is also a movie that was partly written during filming – per Matthew Polly in the extras, the first half was Bruce Lee’s screen test, and it was decided during filming that James Tien would get killed off and Lee take over the movie.
James, far right, wondering if he’s doomed:
A good, violent movie, though it was touch-and-go during that first half. Mostly low-rent and effective, badly dubbed with a bit of style (aka whip-pans). Even in the modern Criterion HD remaster the music sounds like it’s being played on a faulty tape machine. All the movie’s precision comes in the form of Bruce. Said to have been a dancer who fights with a cha-cha tempo, his first action scene makes the flailing clumsiness of the movie’s first half disappear.
Bodies in the ice:
The drug dealers are led by Big Boss Ying-Chieh Han – before Bruce kicks his ass, he frees the Boss’s pet parakeet as a power move. To get to this confrontation, every single person Bruce knows has to be murdered, so the movie’s death toll is high. Some weird humor in here too – Bruce apparently doesn’t know how liquor works and downs a half-bottle of cognac while out with his boss. Later he’s making growling monkeywolf noises as he Wile-E-Coyotes a guy through a wooden wall.
Marketa Lazarova (1967, Frantisek Vlacil)
Whoa, big movie… I was hoping for something Tarkovsy-esque, but if anything it was closest to Andrei Rublev. Too plotty, full of unhappy Christians doing desperate things. Choir music, the voices dubbed with a mesmerizing echo effect. Some proto-Hard To Be a God ancient miserablism. The movie is full of birds – generally a good thing, but with a notable bird death.
Catching up on the storyline via wikipedia, and most of this is news to me. I did not realize that Kozlik (the bald guy with a crack in his head) and Lazar (Marketa’s dad) were rival clan leaders, both under assault by the King’s captain. I got the relationship and revenge-killing stuff, with thanks to the descriptive title cards before each chapter, but not that one-armed Adam’s other arm was removed as punishment for sleeping with his sister. The arrows being shot into everyone in the last hour look unnervingly real.
Bird Island (2019, Sergio Da Costa & Maya Kosa)
Sketch of a movie following a narcoleptic young man as he takes over for the retiring rat breeder at a bird sanctuary. Flute music over the rat intro gives unavoidable Rat Film flashbacks. Ordinarily I’d be all over a bird movie, but I’m torn on this one. Cutting a rat to bits with scissors isn’t great, but feeding it to an injured owl moments later compensates. Pulling shards from a swan’s wound isn’t great, even though the bird is being helped (Katy ditched at this point). Finally some escaped rats have their revenge on the injured birds (offscreen) and a little birdy has to be euthanized (onscreen). Next time let’s have more birds, less death, no humans.
Knocking (2021, Frida Kempff)
“At least it’s more lively than Possum,” I wrote in my notes, trying hard to look on the bright side after a long movie day. Molly is released from the psych ward and set up in an overheating apartment with a stain on the ceiling, crying in the vents, and a constant S.O.S. knocking sound in the walls. She keeps bugging the neighbors and the cops (complete with a rare use of body-strapped Pi-cam) trying to get to the bottom of the sound, afraid that somebody is in trouble. Bad use of birds – a precious birdie dies, a finch keeps slipping off a metal railing – some cool cranes appear in a video, at least. At the end, she’s crazy AND she’s right, but I’m tired of playing “is this real? OMG is anything real” in these movies.
Wolfwalkers (2020, Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)
Okay, Soul had its moments, but it’s almost a shame that just a few days later we watched this movie which so thoroughly blew it away. Such intricate illustration and character design, fun perspective tricks, it all looks so handcrafted and amazing.
No shocker after Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea that the plot concerns Irish mythology, and as in Kells there’s a supernatural girl on the outskirts of a besieged town. This time the girl is leading the wolf army they’re all afraid of, and new girl Robyn’s dad is hired to trap and kill them, but Robyn (with her cool pet falcon, oh my heart) ventures into the woods, meets the red-haired wolf girl, and accidentally becomes a wolfwalker herself. Later her dad will become one, and they’ll turn on the wolf-hating tyrant who rules the town. Not a grim, doomsy movie at all – the baddie is the only death, and there’s nearly as much friendly romping as there is story.
