by ·Comments Off on Vanya on 42nd Street (1994, Louis Malle)

Relaxed film, supposedly a full rehearsal of the Chekhov play in a disused theater, director Andre Gregory and the small audience only seen at the beginning and during act breaks. Camera crew is onstage, so it’s an immersive drama that doubles as a distancing experiment. Everyone loves the important professor, come to his country home with hot new wife Julianne Moore, but as the days go on, all the men fall for Julianne and lose respect for the professor, who plans to repay their years of work on his estate by selling it off and making them homeless. Local doctor who never seems to go home is Larry Pine, the professor in Q, and thankfully I didn’t recognize this movie’s professor as the Police Academy commandant because that would have been so distracting. MVP Brooke Smith (the girl who puts the lotion in the basket in Silence of the Lambs).

Wallace Vanya with Moore and Lynn Cohen:

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Sept 2024

Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting:

by ·Comments Off on Winter Sleep (2014, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

The longest Palme d’or winner. Some similarities to Leviathan in style. That one seems angry about the individual’s plight against the corrupt state and religion (although the individual’s drinking problems aren’t helping any), but this one has more general, philosophical matters in mind: the ability of people from different classes to sympathize with each other, a single woman’s place in society, self-glorifying acts supposedly for the benefit of others, so on. Variety said it was “considerably more accessible” than the great Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – not sure that I’d agree, since I thought that one more explicitly explained what was on its mind.

Inspired, as are all Ceylan’s films apparently, by Chekhov stories. Aydin is a major landowner in a beautiful location. He’s made a hotel out of his family home carved into the side of the hills, where he lives with sister Necla and young wife Nihal. Discontent appears almost immediately, when out with his driver/assistant, their tenant’s son throws a rock at their Jeep window. Three hours later, after a series of very long conversations (I timed one at 19 minutes), it’s clear why nobody likes Aydin. M. Smith writes that “no contemporary director has a better compositional eye than Ceylan,” and that’s part of what keeps this 3+ hour talkfest compelling – it’s so beautiful. The endless speeches are tiring, but also draw you into the characters, until at the end, nothing much has happened and nobody has progressed from where they started, but it feels like the world has shaken.

B. Croll for Twitch:

At first, Aydin seems like a perfectly reasonable person … He’s happily married, charitable and polite. He’s good natured, cultured and hospitable to all. He seems on his face to be the agreeable avatar of contented middle-agedom, and yet by film’s end we recognize in him a malicious, almost tyrannical villainy.

G. Kenny:

The talk, for all its abstractions, gradually lays bare the poor regard with which most of the characters hold each other, and, at about the halfway point, when Aydin (played with glum tenacity by Haluk Bilginer) calls his put-upon spouse (Melisa Sözen) a “bored neurotic,” the fur really begins to fly. … The accumulation of images imbues the film with a kind of bleak coziness that brings to life the accusation that Aydin’s sister Necia (Demet Akbag) levels at him: “In order not to suffer, you prefer to fool yourself.” The strength of Winter Sleep is not so much in what any of the characters say as much as what it needs its near-monumental length to actually show: which is the way the most seemingly banal circumstances can throw you into a dark night of the soul before you even know what’s going on, a state of wide-awake despair so calamitous one has no choice but to make a companion of it.