Still haven’t finished I’m a Virgo, not too far into The Curse, and one episode of Mindhunter was plenty. But I did get into some shows.


How To With John Wilson season 3 (2023)

1. John tricks a self cleaning toilet stall into running while he’s inside it, briefly decides to prep for nuclear emergency, gets kicked out of more places than usual, rides a party bus, spontaneously goes to burning man for a week but isn’t allowed to air any footage. A very poopy episode.

2. He cleans his ears and notices new sounds, interviews people who live in unusually loud apartments or who make an awful lot of noise, learns about a pollution detox place, interviews electrosensitive people – and notices that the common element everywhere is people arguing with their neighbors.

3. He asks a compulsive masturbator how to stay motivated, gets a cat photographer to take “before” photos of his body, but the photog’s cameras get stolen so he asks a mystery author to help find the thief by reviewing John’s footage… interviews the personal trainer of one of the 9/11 hijackers, films his own rejection from an awards season HBO afterparty, wonders what he’s doing in television, sadly tries to connect with old college life, then stumbles into the world of competitive pumpkin growing.

4. He goes to a rained-out Mets game, goes home with a superfan… has to clean up to host a sports party but his vacuum is broken, so goes to a vacuum convention and finds some moving personal stories there.

5. He digs up scandal in the birdwatching community – this leads inevitably to UFO abduction stories, lie detector test, wondering whether things from previous episodes were real. Everyone thinks his show is fake, which it sometimes is, so he tries making a different kind of movie, a doc on the titanic sinking. “There was fake news right from the beginning” says a guest expert. “What does Anne Frank have to do with this?” I saw the car explosion coming, I’ve seen movies before.

6. He asks a psychic where his missing package went and gets the death card. Looks into pizza delivery and medical/organ shipping, gets piano-organ shipping instead, so he drives to Arizona with an organ shipping truck, meets a guy who freezes dead customers, and goes to a party full of people with sci-fi-ass beliefs (The Matrix comes up more than once). Meets an employee who watched The Bachelor ten hours a day and made a complex excel sheet. RIP this show, it was very good.

From Alissa Wilkinson’s Vox interview:

Wilson can’t physically be everywhere, of course. The show’s team includes a second unit, who get what Wilson describes as a “scavenger hunt” list of types of shots to find that might be included in episodes. It sort of wrecks their brains, Wilson said: “Even after we’ve wrapped the season, they’ll continue to send me images of things that were on the scavenger hunt list, like houses that look like faces or something like that. Until they get a new list of things to shoot, they can’t turn off the part of their brain that’s trying to locate this stuff in their environment.”

Wilson interviewed in Filmmaker:

I feel like knowing that this was going to be the last season, I was able to unlock a few different things that I was afraid to put in previously. It allowed us to be more ambitious narratively and what we reveal about the production in terms of the spectacle of the whole thing. Also, what we reveal about how the show has impacted my life, which was something that I wanted to do … I did want the show to potentially have some kind of real-world impact, even though it was done through goofy, satirical means sometimes.


Archer season 9: Danger Island (2018)

Archer’s a one-eyed pilot who keeps crashing or getting shot down, his mother a business owner – everybody reimagined on a post-WWII island full of snakes and quicksand and cannibals, all after some treasure/plutonium. Kreiger gets to play a parrot, leaving the nazi role free for Cyril, so everyone can try on some new accents, and David Cross is an anthropologist studying the cannibals.


The Twilight Zone, Vol. 2 (1959)

Continued from late 2023… the workout routine isn’t very routine yet…

104. The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine

Sunset Blvd was a decade earlier, and Rod has clearly watched it, but he takes the story of a washed-up movie star obsessively reliving her glory days in a different direction. For a story about classic Hollywood, you get a classic Hollywood director: Mitchell Leisen, also past his glory days, who’d recently wrapped up his film career (whether he knew it or not) with some Jane Powell fluff. The great Ida Lupino qualifies for the part – she’d most recently been tenth-billed in Lang’s While the City Sleeps. For once there’s no hint of anything supernatural or even unrealistic until the twist finale. Ida sits alone every day in her screening room watching her roles from 20 years ago with the handsome young Jerry. Her agent/friend Martin Balsam (jury foreman of the 12 Angry Men) tries to get her to live somewhat in the present-day. He finds her a minor film role but she gets into an insult match with studio head Ted de Corsia (villain of The Naked City), and the agent arranges a visit from her former leading man but she’s upset to find he’s now a middle-aged supermarket mogul (Jerome Cowan, who appeared in High Sierra with Lupino). Finally she leaves reality behind and disappears into her eternal-youth film screen.


105. Walking Distance

Gig Young (Katharine Hepburn’s boss/bf in Desk Set) is an NYC hotshot worn down by the grind, come to visit the small town where he grew up, but he finds it’s in the same state he left it 20+ years ago – exactly the same state, complete with his eleven-year-old self. As he starts to figure things out he confronts his parents and neighbors, freaking everyone out. Cool canted angles as he frightens his young self off a merry-go-round, giving both of them a leg injury. Finally he has a surprisingly level-headed convo with dad (Frank Overton, a general in Fail Safe), who says maybe look for some joy in your own time and place and stop haunting us. Appropriately, director Robert Stevens returns from the first episode, which was also about a guy flailing around an out-of-time small town. Little Ronny Howard plays a local kid, and they shot on the Meet Me In St. Louis street.


The Kingdom season 3: Exodus (2022)

Old woman Karen (star of The Idiots two decades prior) watches The Kingdom on DVD, says “that’s not an ending” then sleepwalks with Hellraiser eyes into a waiting taxi to the hospital, where reception tells her the show is fictional and calls Trier an idiot. The story is that the hospital is real, and a combination of its personnel and some actors starred in the series – so we swing between pretend-documentary (Kingdom-show tourists walking the hallways) and straight sequel. I’m not sure it all comes together in the end, but also can’t complain about getting five new episodes.

The hospital’s soul is in trouble again, leading up to Christmas, threatened by murderer Krogshoj (who they’ve allowed to stay and run an opium den for emeritus staff), and giant baby Udo Kier (now in a bleaching pond ghost-realm), and the evil antimatter doppelgangers of Karen and her spiritual son Balder (also a hospital porter in De Palma’s Domino), and of course the selfish and useless Helmer Jr (the actor just played Dag Hammarskjöld in a biopic), and the devil himself: Willem Dafoe. It’s fun how the show manages to pile further abuse on ol’ Helmer even though he’s long dead. Halfmer’s quirky department co-head is Ponto (Lars “brother of Mads” Mikkelsen), his fellow Swede who alternately helps and sues him is Anna (Tuva Nuvotny, died first in Annihilation) and we’ve got some new admin staff and a computer hacker. Still around from previous seasons is Udo’s mother Judith, Mogge Moesgaard in a propeller hat, and Helmer’s gal Rigmor, who maybe dies in a building-climbing wheelchair incident.

The owls are exactly what they seem:

Adam Nayman in New Yorker:

Karen’s condition is played simultaneously for laughs and for a kind of implicit empathy. As black as the show’s hell-is-other-people humor can be, it’s rooted in a tender sense of human frailty. It is not particularly scary in a horror-movie sense, instead accessing a more ephemeral, existential sort of terror that, in von Trier’s hands, is indivisible from comedy … At once confrontationally repulsive and mesmerizingly abstract, [The House That Jack Built] was easy to interpret as a self-portrait of sorts, the story of a loner trying to reconcile his aesthetic impulses with his depressive misanthropy. It featured clips from von Trier’s own filmography, giving the proceedings a valedictory air. The same could be said for The Kingdom Exodus, with its endearing, old-school echoes of its predecessor. But, like The House That Jack Built, the series is ultimately too thorny to function as a victory lap. In 2017, Björk accused von Trier of sexual harassment on the set of Dancer in the Dark; he claimed that he’d only hugged her. In the new series, he coyly includes a running subplot about Halfmer’s alleged (and utterly hapless) impropriety toward a female colleague — a spoof of P.C. culture from the experienced but untrustworthy vantage of somebody who’s spent decades working and living on the edge of cancellation.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

[Overgrown Baby Udo Kier] becomes one of The Kingdom‘s primary plot strands, and it tends to signify von Trier’s loss of interest in real-world matters like the abuses of science and industry on the Danish people. Instead, Kier’s malformed sacrificial lamb permits The Kingdom to double down on its most obtuse, lunkheaded ideas … if The Kingdom gradually reveals itself to be a case of diminishing returns, that’s because the series initially asks to be taken somewhat seriously as an artistic enterprise, but winds up abandoning any pretense of commentary or real-world purchase in favor of a cosmic shaggy-dog story that insists on pointing out how self-aware it is of its overall lack of substance.

A Danish student film concerning some friends of the director, a couple in a long-term but stagnant/sporadic relationship. The couple identifies notable moments from their time together, each telling their own side, then watches these moments re-enacted by actors playing them (cast gender-blind based on the kinship they feel to each scene from their own relationships). I thought the couple would stay together and in that context didn’t think the scenes they chose were especially impactful, but in the end that’s the point, that they keep staying together in a noncommittal way because he wants to avoid direct conflict. One of the actors finally gets it after performing a scene, says he realizes he has to go home and break up with his girlfriend, which is what our two stars (Malik & Laura) also do after these performative therapy sessions.

Zoé Samudzi for Film Comment:

Eventually — so named, the director said, for the rock band Tame Impala’s elegiac breakup song from their 2015 album Currents — made its international debut at the festival … In the Q&A, Nørgaard revealed each person’s reasons for participating in the project: Laura, always the more invested of the pair, needed closure, and Malik, whose subsequent relationships fell into the same pattern, needed something of an intervention. As the two of them try to articulate what their love actually means, Eventually reminds us that love is not just a sensation or a noun but an active verb, requiring introspection and movement.


Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory)

Wow, opening short played clips from Iranian films over 40 years. Onscreen poetry from different sources, showing artistic strategies around the political repression which forbade human touch in film. Before the short, Zap Tura played solo bedroom pop on vox, keyboard and tapes.

Asger is a bad cop – we don’t know this yet, but can assume from context – forced, along with his supervisor, to a desk job working emergency phones until a little matter gets cleared up. He catches a kidnapping case (which nobody else on the overnight shift seems as excited about) and does a bunch of things wrong (some also illegal) trying in earnest to help the woman caller who has been abducted by her ex husband, leaving their two kids home alone.

The whole movie is confined to a call center, the second half in a private room after Asger decides he doesn’t want coworkers listening in, so it’s a one-man show with little visual flair. Asger eventually discovers she’s being taken to a psych hospital because she just stabbed one of their children to death, but she escapes and is gonna jump off a bridge, and it’s his fault, so he monologues about his own crime, essentially confessing to murder in front of a bunch of cops. Mostly I bought the kidnapping twists, but I’m not sure about this ending.

Won the audience award at Sundance last year in the world drama competition along with Pity, Rust, and a bunch I still haven’t heard anything about. This is Möller’s feature debut, after a short which was also about a woman in a psych hospital. The movie is Danish, but Asger is Swede Jakob Cedergren. The day after watching, I learned about the Jodie Foster remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

A Danish engineer (Viggo Mortensen) and his teen daughter Ingeborg are in 1880’s Argentina. The locals spread rumors about Zuluaga, a savage desert killer with supernatural powers. Ingeborg runs off with young soldier Corto, Viggo gives chase and finds Corto has been killed. Now he seeks to rescue his daughter from Zuluaga.

Whaaaat that sky:

Sounds like a fine Western, but this is one unusual and beautiful movie. Picture is windowboxed with rounded corners, and the colors are extremely vivid (I think blues or greens were boosted), shot by Kaurismaki’s DP Timo Salminen. The story moves slowly when it moves at all, but the film isn’t its story – it’s more a moving postcard of a barely understood past.

Viggo is injured, his gun and horse stolen, and continues on foot armed with his sword. A dog leads him up a mountain (“what a shit country,” he complains of the rocky ascent) to a cave inhabited by a woman (Ghita Norby, narrator of Babette’s Feast) who may be his daughter many years older.

Cave Woman:

Young Ingeborg wakes up in a massive house in modern-day Denmark, is told by a guy in the yard that her dad’s out, and her dogs are developing nervous rashes because she leaves them alone for so long. Then a shot of sea lions on the rocks of Argentina.

Future Ingeborg:

Viggo also made an Albert Camus movie last year, is clearly in a different headspace these days than during his Lord of the Rings and David Cronenberg eras. Ingeborg’s parents are actors, both on Borgen and The Killing.

Quintin in Cinema Scope:

Needless to say, [the ending] turns the entire film upside down, in an even more radical way than the original last scene from La Libertad, where Misael laughs with the film crew and the whole ethnological dispositif is erased, revealing the entire enterprise as only a film with an actor, as artificial as any other film (perhaps more artificial, in fact). That scene, however, isn’t in the final cut of the film: it was edited out under pressure from Cannes, who requested its removal as a condition to program the film in Un Certain Regard. Thirteen years later, Alonso—whose films have always screened in Cannes, but never in the Competition—was able to retain his intended ending for Jauja, though once again there was pressure from the festival to remove it. Cannes, like many major festivals, prefers to screen films where content and style are clear, distinguishable, uniform, rather than deal with a film where not even the filmmaker knows what exactly is going on. And Alonso is one of those few filmmakers—I can only think of Kiarostami or Monte Hellman as other examples—who understand cinema as the sole medium where there’s no real divide between true and false, dream and reality, film and filmmaking.

I haven’t read all the articles online, but it looks like this was rapturously received by my favorite critics back in March. Won a prize at Cannes, too.

Viggo with Lt. Pittaluga

Alonso:

In the beginning, it was a little bit linear but then after the girl disappeared … the film breaks itself a little bit and starts to have distortions in time, space, and reality. I mean, there’s no way to keep on in the film after he realizes that he’s not going to see the girl again. He has no horse, and he has not even a hat to protect him from the sun. He’s a man in a desert, and he loses all that he has, his daughter.

A. Martin:

Ingeborg speaks of her desire to own a dog – one that will follow her everywhere, that will live only for her. And what does Dinesen become, 30 minutes into the film, but precisely that, abandoning his mission in a heartbeat and blindly following her every trace … Alonso takes Jauja more in the direction of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, or Miguel Gomes’s celebrated Tabu – a type of cinema in which the materiality of landscapes and political histories is melded with the magical, transformative elements of fairytale and myth.

B. Ebiri: “Alonso has a lot on his mind, but he’s interested in casting a spell more than sending a message, in texture, sound, and image more than narrative.”

Alonso again:

We composed the film in 1.85:1, which is more panoramic, a little bit more modern. But then, when I asked for the transfer from the lab, I just asked them to give me a full frame, and I started editing in 4:3 … I was thinking that if I go with a more ‘scope film, people maybe would get the wrong idea about Viggo, the swords, and the horse, and they’ll look more for action. Is he going to kill the Indians? And that is not the film. So if I put it in an old frame, they will start seeing the film another way, not waiting for more action. It’s a better perspective to have.

Funny, that’s the opposite of what Serra did with Story of My Death, shooting 4:3 then reframing in ‘scope.

Zuluaga in Jauja:

Zuluaga in Letter for Serra:

Alonso is one of Cinema Scope’s 50 Under 50 – a quest I’d put on the back burner, then considered abandoning after suffering through Story of My Death this summer. Serra came to mind while watching Jauja, and probably not coincidentally, the two filmmakers know each other, and I’ve found an hour-long 2008 discussion between the two of them. Serra seems more lively and interesting than his films do. Alonso on the difficulty of creating a film: “Perhaps the scene in question was easy to film … the difficult thing is putting one shot after another and adding sound and creating an atmosphere around it.” Serra is focused on Honor de Cavalleria, Alonso on his “Lonely Men Trilogy” of La Libertad, Los Muertos and Liverpool. I abandoned the interview after a half hour and watched something else: there was a 2011 project called Correspondences where filmmakers made video “letters” to each other, and Alonso and Serra participated. Skipping Serra’s section for now because it’s two and a half hours long.

Letter for Serra (2011)

Long takes, just a few shots in 20+ minutes. Among tall grasses and twisted trees, we follow a nervous rifleman taking a shot in the woods. Then an axe man walking with his dogs. We watch the dogs in the woods, then a narrator takes out some notes and tells the story of the axe man Zuluaga – a backstory for Jauja, it would seem.

Lovely natural-light drama spanning many years in the lives of two puritanical Danish sisters. Muchache Man Lorens loved one of them, and the following year a French singer loved the other, but the sisters end up with only each other – and French cook Babette (played by the great Stephane Audran of so many Chabrol films).

sister Filippa and Mr. Papin the opera singer:

sister Martine and Lorenz:

Eventually it’s revealed that Babette was head chef at a world-class French restaurant, and after preparing the sisters’ very simple meals for thirty years, she spends her lottery winnings on one extravagant dinner for the sisters and their church friends (including a visiting Mustache Man Lorens).

Katy and I liked it. We watched on Valentine’s Day, coincidentally the week director Gabriel Axel died, and during the first earthquake I’ve felt while living in Atlanta. Adapted from a Karen Blixen story. IMDB claims it’s the current pope’s favorite movie.

M. Le Fanu:

We can agree, at any rate, that Audran’s performance is serene and authoritative. Could the woman she is playing have been based on a once living person? At bottom, one never really knows where stories come from, especially the good ones. Dinesen’s story has an absolute “rightness” about it that we recognize from classical fairy tales. Its tone, its humor, its kindness, its flashes of sardonic wit, the ease and confidence of its storytelling—all these attributes seem, at times, self-perpetuating, and independent of mere human agency. It is as if the best stories, miraculously, write themselves. Axel’s film manages to capture this anonymous and folklorish quality. Faithful to the story, he has made grace visible, and given us, in addition, a wonderful lesson in courtesy.

Kind of a good movie. Directed by a Danish woman from the Dogma movement who is about to make a movie based on a Low album.

Our man Jacob (I like to call him Mads) was a wreck, cheating on his girlfriend and leaving her in India then dedicating the rest of his life to helping orphans (so: a Good Man). All his ventures fail so he needs funding. Enter rich, dying Jorgen, married to Mads’s ex, who has three kids. Eldest is actually Mads’s and the twins are Jorgen’s. Jorgen, also a Good Man, wants someone to take over for him after he dies, love his wife and kids for him, so he tricks Mads into coming to Denmark by funding his Indian thing. Mads stays, leaving his Indian kids behind, a happy ending for all.

Of course all of this is gradually revealed, not laid out neatly in order, but as soon as Mads shows up at the eldest daughter’s wedding and shares a look with Jorgen’s wife, we (I?) know the daughter is his.

Shot grainy and handheld. Good story, acting, etc… nothing wrong here. Most interesting how movie stays tense with no “bad guy”, all buncha decent people. I guess the daughter’s new husband turns out to be a shit… that details after the Indian intro brought back The Namesake a little.

IMDB reviewer says “I haven’t been this moved since I saw I Am Sam and that’s saying something!”

Completely unhinged Danish animated movie… yes, two Danish movies premiering in one week, something like 15% of all the Danish movies I’ve ever seen. Very calm intro, lead guy walking around the neighborhood, slow and simple, than roooar into the opening credits. Love it. Rest of the movie sticks mostly to the roar side of things, with some truly audacious scenes.

August moves in with sister Christina, but boyfriend Charlie spends a lot of time there too. After an eviction threat, they plot to blackmail the landlord to let them stay, so August, always with his video camera, tapes his underage sister having sex with the landlord, and voila. This might be what leads August to piss off and become a missionary priest for a few years.

Comes back, sister has just died, her little daughter Mia is staying at a whorehouse, and Charlie runs a media empire selling Christina’s body on video and magazines. Only bloody revenge can ensue! August blasts his way to the top with Mia in tow. Weird ending though… go to a huge party at C’s house, but C doesn’t even seem to be home. A has hidden a bomb in M’s doll, M runs inside with it, A runs after her, boom.