by ·Comments Off on Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975, Keith Lock)

Color fields, electro-tones, patterned text onscreen, with the main camera action being Canadian farmers. A barn raising is interrupted by color fields. A pig is killed, but then, pigs are portrayed as horrible disgusting creatures (I thought the one playing with the dogs was cute). It’s an ambitious title for an experimental re-edit of your home movies from some months at the cabin, but I’m not mad that I spent the time watching this, and at least it will always be filed alphabetically next to an oscar winner.

Joshua Minsoo Kim in Cinema Scope:

At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal, humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he heard such sounds coming from the images themselves … It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, numbers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle behind glass.

by ·Comments Off on Universal Language (2024, Matthew Rankin)

“Isn’t this the same movie you watched last night,” said K when I put on Where Is The Friend’s House the night after this. Besides a couple of distinct Friend’s House references (the dickhead teacher in the opening scene, the guy inside a tree) I’m pretty sure there was some White Balloon (finding tools to retrieve money from under the street). An extremely specific kind of weird thing, in which the director plays “himself” as both a Canadian and Iranian, and his selves and cities swap and merge. Of course I love it.

Mouseover for the reverse angle:
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by ·Comments Off on Oh, Canada (2024, Paul Schrader)

Opening in Richmond VA, Richard Gere is playing a Coward Errol Morris being interviewed via his own interrotron while dying of cancer. In flashback he’s Jacob Saltburn Elordi, first knocking up Alicia then turning to Amy, then Amanda. In the present he’s with Uma Thurman, and everyone is playing two roles, like a prosaic Cloud Atlas. He’d been a young draft dodging womanizer, then a trendy doc filmmaker, now full of regret – so it goes.

Can’t argue with the Phosphorescent soundtrack, very pretty. On the film shoot are Rene (looks somewhat like Emily Watson, was actually in the Devil elevator – the develevator – and Tulse Luper Suitcases) and idiot PA Sloan (of the latest bad Hellboy remake) and Malcolm (he played a missionary in The Addiction, justifying my Heretic double feature).

by ·Comments Off on Curling (2010, Denis Côté)

Cote loves shallow-focus shots (so do I). Watching this reminds me that his covid movie came out a hundred years ago, and Soderbergh’s is still not out?

Odd-jobs guy is over-sheltering his 12 year-old. Each of them finds dead bodies in the snow and keeps it as a secret: dad hides his body in the abandoned motel like The Wire season 4 and the daughter hangs out and chats with hers in a frozen field. They seem nice.

Director and actor won prizes at Locarno, where it played with fellow chilly films Winter Vacation and Cold Weather.

Côté in Cinema Scope 44:

People ask me, “Why curling?” Well, first of all, curling is a collective sport, so he could get closer to his community if he would curl. The moment he hears about curling, there’s a spark in his eyes – the only positive thing in his life during the whole film is curling … The film is very simple: how do you connect with the world of the living?

by ·Comments Off on Archangel (1990, Guy Maddin)

The madness, montage, and absurd deadpan humor has all been doubled in intensity from Gimli Hospital. Veronkha is married to amnesiac Ari Cohen (Page’s dad in The Tracey Fragments). One-legged Kyle McCulloch’s dead beloved was Iris, a lookalike of Veronkha. Michael Gottli (Gimli’s Gunnar) is blind again, with a wife who (I think) is not Veronkha. What happens in the second half, though? Maybe the least memorable Maddin movie, it casts an amnesiac spell on the viewer.

Jonathan Rosenbaum agrees… from Essential Cinema:

The superimposition of a late-20s / early-30s style over a story set around 1917 yields a movie that is oddly ahistorical and that seems set adrift from any sustained sense of place, time, or even meaning. The film’s true subject, in fact — if it has one at all — is amnesia: virtually all the major characters suffer from it acutely, to such a degree that they can barely grasp their own identities — or anyone else’s, for that matter. And the film induces a kind of existential free fall in the spectator that is oddly akin to the helplessness of the characters.

My HD copy was not HD, so the stills look crappy, but there was a nice shot of a wreath with the words “dispatched by wounds innumerable” on a little banner.

by ·Comments Off on Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988, Guy Maddin)

Cat tossing. Occasional sync dialogue. Pretty calm editing for Maddin. A variety of ancient crackling songs in different languages. Framing story is children being told the hospital’s history to distract them from their dying mother.

In quarantine from the epidemic, Einar is jealous of fellow patient Gunnar for his popularity with the hot nurses. Gunnar is a widower because he rejected his beloved Snjófridur on their wedding night when she revealed that she also had the epidemic, and so she promptly dropped dead. Now, due to their shared interest in fish bark cutting (scissoring pieces of tree bark into fishy shapes), Gunnar learns that Einar has defiled his dead wife and stolen her shears. G goes blind and starts stalking E like a vengeful ghost, and this leads to a weary showdown where they mutilate each others’ asses and faces. Maddin’s career of made-up histories starts off with a bang.

fish bark appreciation:

I belatedly realized the fish bark appreciation homage in Hundreds of Beavers:

by ·Comments Off on Queens of the Qing Dynasty (2022, Ashley McKenzie)

Indie-stilted drama with amazing music. A world of screens with Superjail pencil tests on every one of them. Suicidal Star bonds with counselor An. He passes his citizenship test.

Per Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope, “These characters feel unique to Canadian cinema, contemporary, micro-budget, or otherwise, and the actors inhabit them to the point where they don’t really seem to be acting at all … the slightly surrealist weave of images is heightened by the tour-de-force soundscaping of Andreas Mandritzki, who interlaces Autechre-ish electronica with musique concrete and stylized foley work.”

The director:

With my shorts and with Werewolf I was really inspired by my environment, its working-class history and textures. The logical representation of that was a social-realist film made in a verité style. That style fit my other movies well, and made a lot of practical sense too, but I did start to feel like it was limiting the way I thought about crafting characters, building scenes, and writing dialogue. Then Star and An started to emerge as complex, vibrant, and talkative creatures, and naturalism couldn’t contain them: their creative ways of conceptualizing and expressing themselves necessitated that I find new ways to engage. The entire movie is a sort of experiment in burrowing into their brains and vibing on their frequency.

by ·Comments Off on BlackBerry (2023, Matt Johnson)

A pretty normal corporate drama with nothing-special camerawork and fun acting. I like the section intros cut to rock songs from their era (Elastica, Strokes, White Stripes), and the score is overall good, feeling like video game music at times. But if you make time for Barbie and BlackBerry then where does it stop, do you cruise through Air and Tetris then end up postponing watching The Kingdom: Exodus because Hungry Hungry Hippos is getting good reviews?

Co-CEOs: white-haired awkward techie Mike is Jay Baruchel of Goon and balding power-businessman Jim is Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny. Mike’s headbanded bestie is director Matt (seen this year in Anne at 13,000 Ft) and the tough-guy COO they’re warned not to hire is Scanners villain Michael Ironside. I assume there’s some Social Network-like detail-fudging for narrative convenience, since it’s too delicious that it ends with their Chinese-made units working poorly and buzzing like the shitty intercom from the start of the film. The Cinema Scope cover story is focused on its specific Canadianness and how the weirdos from The Dirties ended up making a big-budget bio(?)pic. We need a new name for these… productpic.

Watching the iPhone launch announcement:

by ·Comments Off on That Kind of Summer (2022, Denis Côté)

The first ten minutes are in extreme closeup, making up for the wide shots in Social Hygiene. Côté’s longest movie is a quiet character piece about a summer camp for sex addicts (it surely would’ve sold more tickets with the title Sex Addict Summer Camp). Between therapy sessions the three girls and their three counselors maintain a delicate balance of trust and spend some solo time dealing with their own issues. Come for the bondage and the girl having sex with an entire soccer team, stay for the CG tarantula, the Diabolique reference, a lovely owl, and the climactic dance party to “Across 110th Street”. Counselor Octavia is from Undine, Sami from A Christmas Tale, and two others were in Ghost Town Anthology.

My fourth by Côté and I’m not seeing much that connects this to the people yelling in fields or the kinda-thriller or the zoo doc, but fortunately we have Katherine Connell in Cinema Scope:

Across Côté’s varied career is a recurrent fascination with isolated characters who act in perplexing, unexplained ways and resist being known … These cryptic if subtly rebellious protagonists form the connective tissue of a filmography that probes the dynamics that erupt from the refusal of normative social structures like marriage, domesticity, wellness, and community.