by ·Comments Off on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023, Radu Jude)

I didn’t love Jude’s pandemic movie, but I’m extremely onboard with this one – everything down to the closing credits is delightful. It’s a very cynical movie about Romania and capitalism, starring Radu-regular Ilinca Manolache as Angela, an odd-jobs film-shoot worker.

Angela’s present-day is filmed in grainy b/w, her filtered selfie videos doing misogynist insult commentary are in low-detail digital color, then there’s another Angela who also drives a car for a living, via the 1982 film Angela Goes On, in beautifully restored 35mm color. That movie is the Poor Cow to the main feature’s The Limey, and its Angela appears in present day (the same actress/character) as the mom of a disabled worker hired to tell his story for a company safety video.

Radu Jude in Cinema Scope:

When I was young and reading all these stories about Herzog shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God or Coppola shooting Apocalypse Now, it sounded so heroic. In the early days, when we were supposed to work 20 hours and then drive to another location, it felt magical and sort of heroic. I don’t see it quite that way anymore. You can fool yourself into thinking this way as a filmmaker, but for the people working around you, it’s not like that at all. They don’t care if your movie is going to win an Oscar, or if it’s going to be a piece of crap. They just want to finish the shooting and go home.

Translation issues:

From the mid-film wordless montage of roadside death markers:

Mark Asch in Little White Lies:

Angela’s set of wheels signify anything but independence: she’s cut off, honked at, catcalled, and constantly slamming brakes, swearing, and flipping off other drivers. HQ keeps her on a leash (her ringtone, signaling the arrival of yet another task, is Beethoven’s 9th, the official anthem of the EU), appealing to her team spirit — and, implicitly, her economic precarity as a project-based worker — as they send her over to the airport to pick up a foreign guest, or to pick up lenses from a backlot where Uwe Boll is shooting a cheap nonunion monster movie.

Cemetery advertising:

Jude again:

I think the film is also a film about Bucharest. Why does Bucharest look so bad today compared to how it looked back then? Some of that is propaganda, as many images and films from that time were produced to show the most beautiful side of Bucharest, which is why I slow down those less beautiful moments from Angela Moves On — so you can see the other side. But even still, Bucharest is in much worse shape now, 30 years after the revolution. How did we let that happen? It’s more crowded now, more polluted—cars are on the sidewalk, buildings are falling down, etc. I read that it’s the second most congested city in the world. I think the film can show this by putting one image next to another, and in doing so maybe propose this question to the viewer.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q2/2024

All of this quarter’s television was watched on the exercise bike (:muscle:)
Still purportedly watching The Curse (not on bike) and I’ve started Lodge 49 s2 and Painting With John s3.

I’m a Virgo season 1 (2023)

Giant boy Jharrel Jerome (young André Holland in the middle section of Moonlight) is awkward because he has never socialized or even left the house, but after his first public appearance everyone is interested in him: an agent, a fashion company, a burger girl, a cult, a superhero, the teens. Burger girl becomes his girlfriend, has super speed powers. His friend with a car’s superpower is having a car. Their buddy Scat dies for a stupid reason, getting injured on his bike then turned away from the hospital for not having insurance, and this enflames the community, led by activist Jones. Meanwhile Cootie’s hero (“The Hero”) Walt Goggins is out busting protesters during evictions. Apparently lo-fi photography pulls out crazy technique when desired. Music by Tune-Yards. Showstopping didactic anti-capitalist rants and general anti-authoritarian vibe mix with The Hero’s identity crisis and random superhero stuff (Cootie’s parents have prepped a supervillain lair, some of the neighbors wake up fun-sized). Created by Boots Riley, who shared a list of further viewing/reading with Vulture:

One that is very inspiring is Matewan by John Sayles. There’s a book called Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns that just came out. A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis. There’s a movie called Seeing Red, it’s a 1983 film by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert.

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The Twilight Zone, Vol. 3 (1959)

106. Escape Clause

A basic deal-with-the-devil scenario, not even as interesting a concept as the pitchman from episode 2, but our lead idiot is good (David Wayne, the killer in Losey’s M). A hypochondriac who takes an offer from the devil (Thomas Gomez of Force of Evil, Key Largo) to be immortal, all he can think to do with his new vitality is throw himself in front of trains for kicks (and settlement money from the city). After only a week of this, the kicks aren’t enough, and when his wife (Virginia Christine of The Killers) falls off their apartment building trying to stop him from jumping, he takes responsibility so he can defeat the electric chair. But his lawyer gets him life in the pen, haha. I guess if he’d been good at thinking through consequences he wouldn’t have dealt with the devil in the first place, but Americans couldn’t be expected to know how to live immortally before Highlander came out.

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107. The Lonely

Jack Warden (best known for the Hubleys’ Dig) is losing his marbles alone on an asteroid, serving a prison sentence in solitary. Back home there’s political pressure to pardon Jack, who of course claims innocence, and/or abolish the asteroid prisons, possibly as much for its cruel-and-unusual nature as the difficulty of keeping the prisoners fed via rocketship deliveries. Space-warden John Dehner (killed by Gary Cooper the previous year in Man of the West) drops off a gift for Jack: an AI woman named Alicia (Jean Marsh, queen of Willow). It’s not implied that her womanness is a factor here, Jack just wants somebody to play chess with. He bonds with Alicia, then the captain brings a pardon for Jack on his next visit, and shoots Alicia in the face since she’ll be too heavy for the ship. New director Minnesotan Jack Smight would later make the post-apocalyptic Paul Winfield movie Damnation Alley.

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108. Time Enough at Last

Two man-alone-in-the-world episodes in a row? The one where banker Burgess “The Penguin” Meredith just wants some time to read but his horrid wife and boring boss (Vaughn Taylor, also the boss in Psycho) won’t let him. Time enough (and food enough, ammo enough) at last when he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear blast, but his glasses break on day two. Some nice-looking wreckage in the final stretch. Director John Brahm had made films in the 1940s, including a remake of The Lodger.

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109. Perchance to Dream

Nearly an it-was-all-a-dream episode. The title clues us in, and from a childhood watching Nightmare on Elm Street sequels I’m attuned to characters “just closing their eyes for a few seconds.” This one’s more of a narrated dream-flashback inside of a dream, as a nervous imaginative man with a heart condition explains to a psychiatrist that his subconscious has mixed up his sex/death drives and now a hot cat lady is trying to kill him with kicks (the Ann-Margret Kitten With a Whip kicks, not the Michelle Yeoh Executioners kicks). If he falls asleep he’ll fall off a rollercoaster / jump out the window, which he does. From the psych’s POV a guy he’s never seen before came into the office, lied down and promptly stopped living. Starting to think Serling created the show just so he could see every working actor play desperation in closeup. But this is the first one he didn’t write – Charles Beaumont (The Intruder) would become a regular on the series. Director Robert Florey had a long career, from the great silent short Life and Death of 9413 to the Marx Brothers, then 1930s and 40s crime movies. The psych later played Dirty Harry’s boss, lead dreamer Richard Conte was a noir regular.

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110. Judgment Night

Man onboard a British ship in dangerous waters during WWII has got an extreme combination of amnesia and deja vu. Carl (Nehemiah Persoff, father Mousekewitz in An American Tail) seems to have specific knowledge about German submarines stalking the ship, and when he goes down with the ship it’s revealed that Carl was that sub’s commander, and he’s in hell, nightly reliving the fate of his victims. A panic-stricken half-hour with a comforting message (the nazis that killed our family members are experiencing endless torment in the afterlife). His fellow doomed Brits include Patrick Macnee (originator of the Ralph Fiennes role in The Avengers, later in The Howling), Disney voice actor (and Sound of Music nazi) Ben Wright, and Cat o’ Nine Tails star James Franciscus.

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111. And When the Sky Was Opened

Two astronauts in recovery after a flight crash-landed, but Rod Taylor (The Birds) is in a complete panic because he claims there were three astronauts and that their friend Charles Aidman (narrator of the 1980s ‘Zone reboot) vanished and nobody remembers him ever existing except himself. We see them together in flashback then Aidman feels strange and says maybe we weren’t supposed to come back, and disappears from a phone booth, his beer magically gone with him and the headlines rewritten. Taylor responds the way people do in most Twilight Zones (and in all British horror), by blubbering and yelling and repeating himself. When he vanishes too, the remaining hospital-bound astronaut Jim Hutton (of Major Dundee, Timothy’s dad) knows he’s next. Director Douglas Heyes made Kitten With a Whip, and I didn’t know about him when I referenced that movie two episodes ago.

Taylor (right) with spaced-out Aidman:

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112. What You Need

There are plenty of salesmen in the Zone. This would seem to be an inspiration for King’s Needful Things, but our aged salesman (Ernest Truex of Christmas in July) isn’t malevolent, hands out humble objects that he predicts will help people in the future: a bus ticket for Read Morgan (a former baseballer playing a former baseballer) to get to his next gig, something for a lonely pretty girl (Arlene Martel, Spock’s fiancee) that gives her an excuse to meet a hunky (drunky) former baseballer. The salesman (whose character shares a name with the inventor of the Chia Pet) doesn’t want to deal with loser shithead Steve Cochran (White Heat) but the guy smells money and pesters then threatens the old man until he gets what he needs (a lifesaving tool, a bunch of money, an early grave). Based on a short story from the writers of The Twonky. Director Alvin Ganzer assisted on The Great McGinty and other 1940’s flicks then moved permanently to television.

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113. The Four of Us are Dying

A guy who the voiceover tells us is a real lowlife loser has the supernatural ability to face-shift and be other people. Apparently he’s pretty good at doing voices and knowing personal details about the people he imitates too, fooling friends and enemies. His default identity is Archie Hammer (Harry Townes), then he picks up the hot girlfriend (Corman/MST3K regular Beverly Garland) of late musician Ross Martin, then becomes late gangster Phillip Pine (loud and annoying in Murder by Contract) and runs off with a pocket full of dirty money, then to escape the gangsters he gets the face of Don Gordon off a boxing poster. Boxer Don (Bullitt, The Mack, gold miner in The Last Movie) was apparently such a lowlife that his dad shoots him (them) dead. A nice bluesy New York episode, features some fancy trick photography in the identity shifts, and some lazy edits when they didn’t need to be fancy. From George Johnson, story writer of Logan’s Run and Ocean’s Eleven.

Archie “Armie” Hammer:

by ·Comments Off on The Big Gundown (1967, Sergio Sollima)

The Big Movie Series #2. This is my third show in a row (after Nemesis and I’m a Virgo) where a lead character belatedly realizes they’ve been doing damage not out of righteousness but as a tool of capitalism. Lee Van Cleef is a ruthless lawman chasing escape artist Cuchillo because corrupt rich guys say he’s a criminal. Lee is as badass as you could hope for, but Cuchillo (Tomas Milian of Identification of a Woman and Four of the Apocalypse) still runs off with the movie. All I knew about this previously was the Morricone score – he and the writer and producer followed up with Once Upon a Time in the West, while Sollima went on to make a reportedly-great Charles Bronson revenge flick.

Just some doomed outlaws:

Our guys:

Hotwife Manolita Barroso:

by ·Comments Off on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)

Jimmy Stewart throws away his dreams to run his dad’s bank while his brother Harry is off being a war hero. Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell of every great movie in 1939) loses a bunch of money, putting the bank at risk of takeover from evil rival Potter (Mark of the Vampire star Lionel Barrymore). Jimmy tries to kill himself but angel Clarence (The Invisible Man scientist Henry Travers) saves him, shows him that Harry and Billy and his wife Mary (Donna Reed of Scandal Sheet) and the guy at the drugstore (HB Warner, DeMille’s Jesus) would’ve all been ruined without him (Potter would be fine). The townspeople contribute to pay Jimmy’s bank’s debts and he’s newly happy to be alive. Good movie while watching, the moment it’s over I always get annoyed by it again.

by ·Comments Off on The Store (1983, Frederick Wiseman)

Coincidentally right after we entered Wiseman Mode a website put this online for free, so we enjoyed the current fake-HD (with interlacing) digital version. Whether a bunch of guys in giant 1980s glasses can sell a sable coat this holiday season is less interesting than how the public library will meet its annual education and inclusivity goals under budget, but we get some good overhead shots of elevators. Neiman Marcus is in the business of sales, we’re told – not a controversial statement – and everything revolves around sales. The department heads telephone their best customers to lure them back, trying to prevent them from spending money anywhere else. After witnessing the entire library system full of thoughtful workers, the sudden switch to top-down capitalism is enlightening – the only person who says anything of substance here is fearless leader Stanley Marcus. No matter how well the company protects its high-class image, it can’t prevent Wiseman from capturing an employee laughing hysterically at her birthday gift of a stripper chicken.

by ·Comments Off on Ferat Vampire (1982, Juraj Herz)

Part of Shadowplay‘s Project Fear. The Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004, and has no immediate plans to leave (or “czexit”). I’m seeing no Britain connection, though Å koda Motorsports’s website says one of their cars won a British rally the year this was filmed, so it’s probable that some British racers were present at the 8th International Å koda Rally, where this film’s climax was shot. Also, our hero Jirí Menzel would later shoot an award-winning adaptation of I Served the King of England.

The titles appear in a black void revealed behind a canvas being pulled away by hooks – then illustrations of a car getting progressively evil via crossfades, sparking brief hope that the design of this movie would live up to the high standards of Polish film posters. No such luck, it’s mostly guys in drab clothes having conversations… though a sinister low-angle camera and atonal doom music introduce the Vampire: a prototype Å koda Super Sport which runs on blood drawn from the driver’s pedal foot. “With today’s energy crisis, blood is the cheapest fuel I know.”

Mouseover to see the car become More Evil:
image

Two flirty ambulance drivers chase down the Vampire after it causes an apple-truck accident, and they chat briefly with Luisa, Ferat’s hired racer who complains of foot pains then drives off and dies immediately. Ambulance medic Merak follows up, an amiable morgue attendant telling him it looks like someone bit the racer’s foot off.

“She wants to be bitten again. It’s like a drug.” Professional conspiracy theorist Kaplan pins down Merak and explains the vampire car principle by showing scenes from Nosferatu (source of the Ferat name), but a fake version of that film starring our director Herz(e) in the title role. Meanwhile, Merak’s ambulance-driving sweetie Mima is applying for the vacant position of Ferat racecar driver. Kaplan: “It might be circling around Prague now, and during every push on the accelerator pedal your loved one’s blood is travelling through its internals.” The movie is still mostly drab-looking dialogue scenes, but Herz is trying to keep things visually engaging – his mobile camera runs up and down hallways, and he opens one scene with Mima blasting the camera with a hose.

conspiracy theorist:

“I haven’t been myself lately” says Luisa’s identical-twin sister Klara, right after blaming Team Ferat boss Cross for the auto death, and right before seducing Merak. They discover bottles of blood at the sister’s place, and Merak dreams of the car as a Cronenbergian flesh machine. I can’t tell whether the repeated images of Merak being chased by cars are part of the dreams, or if he keeps running into traffic like an idiot. After a major rally race, Mima is rushed to the hospital for blood loss

“We’ll start from where the truck opens. Play it again from there.” It’s increasingly clear that doctor Merak is being played, and Madame Ferat has been encouraging his investigation and filming events – the phantom director of the very film we’re watching – cutting them into promotional materials for the commercial release of the car, driving huge pre-sales. I thought the “vampire car possessing its drivers” concept might be a metaphor for how perfectly nice people like Mima become huge assholes when they get behind the wheel of a car, but the movie ends on a more cynically anti-capitalist message: “Hundreds of people can’t wait to feel the thrill of dying in a Ferat.”

Herz was a prolific director, working almost up until his death last year. Ferat Vampire came a decade after his Cremator and a few years after his acclaimed Beauty and the Beast. Story by Josef Nesvadba, writer of both my favorite 1970’s Czech time-travel comedies, Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea and I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen.

Lead medic Merak is played by Closely Watched Trains director Jirí Menzel. Ambulance-turned-racecar driver Mima is Dagmar Havlová of time-traveling sci-fi miniseries The Visitors, VÄ›ra Chytilová’s The Inheritance, and at least a couple movies with exceptional posters – also, she would later marry the President. Luisa/Klara is Jana Brezková of Chytilová’s Panelstory, and conspiracy theorist/participant Kaplan is Jan Schmid of Chytilová’s Fruit of Paradise.

As far as vampire/zombie/possession movies go, this falls chronologically between 1981’s semi-comic zombie-town Dead & Buried and 1983’s possessed-car movie Christine. Thematically, it’s got the auto-executive intrigue of Black Test Car mixed with the car-crash penetration-fetish of Ballard & Cronenberg’s Crash mixed with… I dunno, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Something where our investigative lead finds out the horrible truth at the end, but nobody cares and capitalism triumphs. The fact that the car was German seems significant, since most of the Czech movies I came across while researching actors were WWII-related – and this movie had a cool German title (Der Autovampir). Maybe the time is right for Tarantino to film a remake – a fast car that sucks on women’s feet seems right up his alley.

by ·Comments Off on Taming the Horse (2017, Tao Gu)

Tao catches up with his old buddy Dong, a former photographer who’s figuring out what to do next while being needled by his family, wishing he could just stay drunk and hang out with his friends and listen to punk rock, dreaming of returning to his pastoral home town far to the north. Dong’s mom works with fabric, dad sells flutes, and Dong is coerced into starting a jade business. This doesn’t work out – Tao films Dong listening to a jade dealer explain what kinds of stones to buy and how to convince customers into spending more than a piece is worth, then venting into the camera later about this business being an elaborate scam, and that’s the end of the jade story. Dong has lived his whole life in Post-Mao China but still can’t adjust to capitalism.

I’m not always clear on chronology or location. We’re in Kunming in 2011 on Dong’s 30th birthday talking about taking a trip to Hailar, then “Spring arrived in 2013,” and Dong is on a train, pointing to cities on the schedule, talking about his parents and his childhood in Hailar. So, we assumed it’s 2013 and the trip has begun, before realizing a few scenes later that it’s still Dong’s 30th birthday and they’ve gone nowhere, will go nowhere (except for the jade expo) until the final minutes of the movie.

Watched because of a specific interest in China this year, to be further explored soon. Kunming is in the far (central) south of the country, and Guangdong (the jade expo, and the beach where the promo stills were shot) is far to the east, on the south side near Hong Kong. Beijing is in the northeast of the country, but Hailar is even further northeast, around the eastern tip of Mongolia, a stone’s throw from Russia. According to the description of his previous film, post-earthquake survival semi-doc On the Way to the Sea, Tao Gu and his family are from Wenchuan, just northwest of Chengdu and not near any of his Taming the Horse locations. I haven’t figured out the part where drunk, crying Dong says he wants to kill himself in Yanjiang where he first saw the sea, since Yanjiang appears to be just on the other side of Chengdu from Gu’s hometown, 15 hours from the nearest ocean.

Punk Rock tells the Truth:

by ·Comments Off on Support The Girls (2018, Andrew Bujalski)

A good pick to follow up Beale Street and Leave No Trace – another movie full of loveliness. Of the three, this will be the endlessly rewatchable one – extremely sharp dialogue, editing and performances – especially from Regina Hall as a restaurant manager having a complicated day. I love this movie so much, but don’t want to write about it now, will instead link to Mike D’Angelo in AV Club.

Having a hard time figuring how the same filmmaker made the unwatchably mumblecore Mutual Appreciation, the playfully bizarre Computer Chess, and this much slicker, almost mainstream comedy.

by ·Comments Off on Nightcrawler (2014, Dan Gilroy)

Slimeball Donnie Darko is introduced stealing wire and chainlink fence then beating up a security guard, but he’s not your ordinary lowlife – he wants to be an entrepreneur, learns everything he knows from online courses and speeches and always speaks formally to others, like a corporate simulacrum of a person. Good movie about ruthless capitalism, with amoral, manipulative Donnie destroying some lives and ending up on top.

Donnie watches a comedy on TV:

Donnie watches his coworker dying on TV:

“Our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs.” After running into freelance videographer Bill Paxton at an auto accident, Donnie cuddles up to news anchor Rene Russo, hires flunky Riz Ahmed, and gets rich partly through calculated plotting and partly by being at the right crime scenes at the right time.