by ·Comments Off on Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker)

Sin-Dee is back on the L.A. streets after a month in jail, finds out some new girl has been fucking her man/pimp James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire s2) and goes on a rampage looking for either of them, enlisting her friend Alexandra for help.

The color and lighting in this movie is unusual – I guess it was shot on consumer equipment and tweaked in post. But the motion is different too, and I couldn’t figure out why until I looked through the screenshots I grabbed while watching… there’s almost no motion blur. Even when people are walking rapidly, which they usually are, every shot is crisp. So it’s an arresting-looking movie that starts out very annoying (every other word is “bitch”) then gets increasingly engaging and wonderful until it finally ends anticlimactically, with one of the lead characters (an Armenian cab driver named Ramzik) shamed in front of his family. Sure, he shouldn’t have been sneaking off from family holidays to have sex with transsexual prostitutes, but given that the movie’s other main characters are all transsexual prostitutes, that’s not the moral lesson I was expecting.

Family crisis at the Donut Time:

Baker made four previous features and a TV series, and has a new one out this year getting great reviews.

by ·Comments Off on Film Socialism (2010, Jean-Luc Godard)

Slogan on cover of the press book: “Ideas separate us, dreams bring us together.”

An essay film without the essay? At least he’s removed the parts of his argument that would allow a simpleton like me to follow along. So far my experiences with Late Godard: I loved Nouvelle Vague even if I rarely understood it. Repetition, layering, stolen quotes as dialogue, showy editing of picture and stereo sound. Also, traditionally gorgeous cinematography and a somewhat decipherable story – both of which disappeared for Histoire(s) du Cinema and Éloge de l’amour, where the layering is increased and I’m less able to follow what he’s on about. Couldn’t make head nor tail of Notre Musique, which I saw in theaters with no preparation.

So now Film Socialism(e) seems like an Éloge de Histoire(s), the onscreen text and stuttery editing and quoting, rambling scenes and an (apparent) essay film with an (apparent) narrative short dropped in between them, all to mysterious purposes. A mix of cameras: wind noise and low-res picture, then sleek HD with the colors enhanced. Apparently full of wordplay that makes no sense in translation, hence the poetically incomplete English subs in the premiere (not the version I watched). Hard stereo panning, as I discovered re-listening to the movie in headphones while searching for articles online.

“It’s impossible to propose an off-the-cuff interpretation of an object we wouldn’t know how to describe” – the Film Socialisme Annotated article found on Moving Image Source.

Film Socialisme in the news: an economist in the first section was killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack and the boat on which it was filmed sank.

Focus of the third section:

“The day will come when language will turn itself against those who speak it,” presumably related to his next feature Adieu au langage, but I prefer to think of Pontypool.

Played in Cannes alongside I Wish I Knew, Aurora and The Strange Case of Angelica.

“Let’s bring back duration.”

Excerpts from A. Picard’s article for Cinema Scope:

The first section of Film Socialisme, or “movement” (as this film, also, is about notre musique, our harmonies and disharmonies), takes place on a cruise ship touring the Mediterranean; the second follows the French family Martin who run a garage and are hounded by a camera crew after one of its members announces a candidacy for the local elections; and the third is a coda collage … Editing images so that they emerge as the visual equivalent to his infamous aphorisms, Godard has increasingly become “interested not only in thought, but in the traces of thought.” … French philosopher Alain Badiou delivers a speech on Husserl to a large, empty room filmed in a long shot emphasizing the space and weight of absence. Godard says an announcement was made over the loudspeaker inviting all passengers to attend and not a single soul showed up.

Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye:

from Godard’s interview in Telerama:

“Palestine is like the cinema: it’s searching for independence.”

“[People] have the courage to live their life, but they don’t have the courage to imagine it.”

by ·2 Comments

A making-of-itself filmmaking rabbit-hole containing mysteries with no answers. It’s hilarious to me that I leave my movie-filled laptop and go to the theater to see a movie that opens with a DVD-R entitled Road to Nowhere inserted into a laptop, with a looong slooow zoom into the screen – a zoom that will be repeated into a digital photograph over the closing credits, and which reminds me that one of the last times I was at this particular theater was to watch Wavelength. Very pleasing countryish music by Tom Russell over key scenes. All shot digital, I assume. Strange, intriguing movie in many ways.

Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan, Methyl from Little Dizzle) is directing the within-film, also called Road to Nowhere and also shot digitally, with local gossip and other details provided by blogger Natalie (Dominique Swain, title character in the Jeremy Irons Lolita) and carpenter Bruno (Waylon Payne, Jerry Lee Lewis in Walk the Line). Their movie stars Cary (Cliff De Young of movies I remember from cable like F/X and Dr. Giggles and Pulse – the one where the house’s electricity comes to life and wants you dead, not the one where Japanese ghosts come to life and want you dead) as Tachen together with Laurel (Shannyn Sossamon, the cute pink haired girl in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) as the doomed amour-fou couple of a small town.

But are they doomed? And is Laurel in fact Velma Duran, the very girl she’s portraying in the movie? And is Bruno in fact an insurance investigator who’s on to Velma’s scheme, trying to retrieve the hundred million dollars that she and the real Tachen stole when they died/disappeared? And is Mitchell, as the dialogue and the dialogue-within-the-dialogue both proclaim, in over his head? The movie doesn’t directly say, but rather shuttles between present filmmaking reality, the scenes being shot, and flashbacks which could be real or imagined. I was surprised then, given all the mystery, that the road doesn’t lead to nowhere like Lost Highway but to a definite ending, the girl shot to death by Bruno and Mitchell in jail. I guess all the noir elements and the in-too-deep stuff had to explode eventually, but I enjoyed the ride more than the conclusion.

Written by Steven Gaydos, a longtime Hellman collaborator who cowrote Iguana and helped produce Cockfighter.

NY Times:

Road may also be as significant to the indie feature as Avatar is to the popcorn movie: the entire film was shot on what is essentially a still camera (the Canon 5D Mark II), while looking like a mega-million Hollywood production. “The great thing about this camera is you don’t need permits because no one knows you’re shooting, said Mr. Hellman. … They shot in the streets of London, in Verona, in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, in front of Michelangelo’s Moses and the tomb of Pope Julius II – permitless. “They thought we were tourists,” Mr. Hellman said.

by ·Comments Off on [Rec] (2007, Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza)

Finally, a great horror movie set in Barcelona (Carriers was directed by Barcelonans but set in the U.S., a missed opportunity). Although, it takes place entirely inside one small apartment building, so it could have been set anywhere – which was Hollywood’s point when they remade it in English as Quarantine.

The most fun thing about this movie is that the cinematographer (Pablo Rosso) is also a lead character, a news cameraman following young reporter Angela (Manuela Velasco of the upcoming Spiderland, which I’m hoping is a Slint bio-pic). I’m not up-to-date on my Spanish horror viewing, so haven’t seen any of these actors before. IMDB says the leads return for [Rec] 2, but I don’t see how that’s possible since everybody dies at the end. I don’t get why a sequel (plus two more in development) would be desirable either – having flashbacks of the hilariously stupid Blair Witch 2.

Fluff reporter Angela is following fire fighters for a night when they’re called to an apartment to check on a disturbance. Said disturbance is the old woman upstairs eating one of her neighbors. They soon find out they’re being sealed inside the building by the Spanish CDC, and that people the old woman bites seem to become flesh-eating zombies.

Panic ensues. There’s a nervous, power-crazed cop who likes to draw his gun, a cute widdle girl and her mother, a young doctor, and some more zombie-fodder residents. The fireman and the reporter/cameraman nearly escape but he gets bitten. The news crew lock themselves in the penthouse, where a crazy (you can tell because there are newspaper clippings all over the walls) but organized (if the clippings weren’t enough of a plot device, there’s a tape machine) mad scientist was conducting experiments on a zombie… who is… STILL IN THE APARTMENT OH MY GOD AND it kills them both and that’s the end.

by ·Comments Off on The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002, Ken Russell)

“Help me someone! There’s a crazy woman in here trying to castrate me!”

The Poe-injected story goes that rock star Roddy Usher killed his wife in a fit of madness so now he’s in hospital under the care of Dr. Calahari. But “story” is just an excuse for Ken. He got himself a DV camera (with built-in microphone), grabbed every silly prop and goofy actor he could find, and set to work making a camp comic “horror” flick. The credits say “Designed, Photographed, Edited, Produced & Directed by KEN RUSSELL (who also did the Cooking),” so this was a backyard hobby project. That page doesn’t even mention writing (he shares credit with Poe) or acting.

Starring: Ken Russell

And have I mentioned it’s a musical? Full of puns and hammy awfulness and prank props and silly-ass music. Sounds nightmarishly awful, and I’m not some super-freakish Ken Russell fan who would forgive him a terrible movie. But, surprise! Shock! It’s not a terrible movie! At least I didn’t think so, as I quickly went from groaning at the self-conscious awfulness to laughing along. Mad Ken must be on the same camp-wavelength as me, which I should have guessed after seeing his Trapped Ashes episode.

Usher:

Of course it helps that I liked the music, composed by Usher himself James Johnston (who also played a rock star in Clean – Maggie Cheung’s dead husband). Upsettingly, Nurse ABC Schmidt (Marie Findley) hasn’t appeared in other films. Sweet Annabelle Lee (Emma Millions) played “Tart” in Ken’s short Lion’s Mouth – bad move not including that on the Usher DVD. Russell’s wife played Usher’s sister (also a mummy in the second half) and the guy who played Igor (he stayed behind a mask) has been in Russell movies as far back as the 60’s.

This guy, an experimental patient whose life Ken has been prolonging through chemicals or electricity or something, portrayed “Death” in a recent Woody Allen film.

Oops…

I’d be afraid to watch this again. It doesn’t seem in retrospect like anything I would’ve enjoyed, so it might’ve just caught me in a perfectly receptive mood. As of this viewing, my only complaint is that there weren’t enough musical numbers in the second half.

Amazingly, this nearly decade-old movie is Ken’s most recent full-length, coming a few years after his string of not-at-all-acclaimed TV movies.

Ken looks dismayed at his lack of DVD sales:

by ·Comments Off on Sweetgrass (2009, Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Ilisa Barbarsh)

For a few minutes I was mad at the Tara for projecting the film out of focus, not an unreasonable thought given previous disasters at that theater, but then I realized the movie was shot on low-grade DV – probably a good financial choice for a two-person three-year project, but less than ideal for landscapes, which the camera turns into mud. A would’ve-been-lovely shot of pack horses parading before distant mountains ended up looking like a blurry painting. K Uhlich agrees: “As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect. For every gorgeously low-res image (a blobby, white sea of sheep racing heedlessly toward their pen), there’s a correspondingly ineffectual visual or vista that one wishes had been captured with higher-end equipment and a keener cinematic eye.”

Jimmy wasn’t bothered by the camerawork so much as the editing, saying that each shot lingered too long, which became cumulatively frustrating. But we agreed it was neat overall, even if most of its value was in teaching us city folk how ranching works.

by ·Comments Off on In Praise of Love (2001, Jean-Luc Godard)

“The resistance had its youth and it had its old age, but it never went through adulthood.”

Godard already in his mournful history/memory/holocaust phase (of course, I keep forgetting this was made after Histoire(s) du Cinema). Very nice black-and-white photography and lovely, sad string music, then after an hour it turns to super-saturated color, very unique and wonderful looking. Story/character/intent-wise, though, I didn’t get the movie at all.

Part of it is self-referentially about making a film, trying to cast it. There are mentions of Henri Langlois, Robert Bresson, Hannah Arendt, Juliette Binoche, May ’68 and Max Ophuls. Didn’t feel any more like a proper narrative film than Notre Musique did. I’d say that maybe the small-screen experience wasn’t cutting it and I needed to see in a theater, but I saw Notre Musique in a theater and fell asleep. Maybe I’m not smart enough, or wasn’t prepared enough to tackle this one… it’s the kind of thing I’d be better off reading a bunch of articles before watching. I never figured out the love story, or the flashback structure, and even the filmmaking story seemed elusive. But probably it’s just because I’m an American, and it’s not for me.

“Americans have no real past. They have no memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the pasts of others, especially those who resisted.”

There’s some anti-U.S. business, a character hating on the fact that U.S. residents call themselves “Americans,” textually taking ownership over both continents, and a slap at Spielberg (“Mrs. Schindler was never paid. She’s in poverty in Argentina”). Godard reportedly took time at Cannes to attack Spielberg further… guess he’s not thrilled that the current Cahiers crowd voted War of the Worlds as their #8 pick of the decade. C. Packman at IMDB says: “The film is a critique on Hollywood and how capitalism is destroying cinema and love. … The film succeeds in offering a philosophical problem, but demonstrates philosophy’s inability to enter into any realm other than the abstract. Godard here follows Marx’ dictum: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’.”

“When did the gaze collapse?”
“Before TV took precedence over life.”

No actors I’ve heard of before, and the one I liked best (Audrey Klebaner, above, as Eglantine) has never been in another film. Shot on 16mm b/w film and color video by Julien Hirsch (Notre Musique, Lady Chatterley) and Christophe Pollock (Up/Down/Fragile, Class Relations), but I can’t figure out who shot which. Punctuated by repeated title cards and blackouts.

Salon is ruthless:

Godard’s artistic deterioration has been particularly heartbreaking because, as his sensibility has atrophied, his visual gifts have matured. … The burnish of the images in First Name: Carmen, combined with the flow Godard shows in the editing rhythms and in the use of Beethoven string quartets to underscore the images, can lull you into thinking that something is actually going on in the film. … What it adds up to, though, in In Praise of Love as in the films that have preceded it, is a retreat, a shutting out of the world.

Slant calls it “an inscrutable rumination on memory and history that only Godard is meant to fully grasp.” I’m looking for raves, not pans – I watched this because it was on multiple best-of-decade lists. Reverse Shot goes gaga over the use of images, touches lightly on the story, and complains that the original title Éloge de l’amour (WordNet defines “elegy” as “a mournful poem; a lament for the dead”) has been translated to In Praise of Love.

by ·Comments Off on *Corpus Callosum (2002, Michael Snow)

This was both wonderful – an inventively whimsical little ride of a rigorous art film – and tedious in that way that non-narrative films can be. It wouldn’t be a Snow work if it didn’t test my patience a little – it’s part of his charm. This kind of thing is always very different with an audience, not that I think it’s likely I’ll ever get the chance. I picked up visual similarities to Presents and Sshtoorrty… not so much Wavelength unless you count every zoom as a reference to Wavelength (which I guess some critics do).

People walk through a door with the title printed on it (this is where the zoom comes in), while we hear Snow, offscreen, instructing each on the entrance of their timing. Cut to inside the office, and the camera rolls to the right, an infinite camera move since the set is digitally joined at the seams. He electrocutes all his actors, a chair disappears in a lap dissolve, blatant digital effects pop up, then the picture twists like a ribbon as it transitions to next scene. Apparently these are many different actors dressed similarly to give the appearance of a regular cast of characters, but I can’t see subtleties like that on my VHS copy… a shame.

A family sits in their garishly (digitally) decorated living room with a wall mirror reflecting the camera until objects fly off the wall and destroy themselves while the people sit still staring at the sky inside their television. Obnoxious noise permeates, except when one would expect a sound effect (during an explosion, say) when it goes silent.

A classroom is shot from above until the kids notice the camera, stack their desks so they can reach it.

Two people enter a too-small doorway at the same time, fusing and morphing into a slow-moving doorway-shaped block, which lumbers back into the infinite-loop office set. The credits show up before the hour mark and begin to lap themselves. The whole movie rewinds. Then at the end a couple enters a cinema and sits down to watch an early animated work by Snow.

J Hoberman calls it “that rarest of things—a summarizing work. Like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman or Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, it could be used to conclude Motion Pictures 101. … Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics – Wavelength and La Région Centrale – announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.

Hoberman again: “a bonanza of wacky sight gags, outlandish color schemes, and corny visual puns that can be appreciated equally as an abstract Frank Tashlin comedy and as a playful recapitulation of the artist’s career.”

Pop Matters:

Similarly, domestic life in *Corpus Callosum is irrevocably altered by innovations. The home is filled with televisions, pizzas, and empty glasses. Intense oranges and pinks make the living room seem alive and breathing. The walls are decorated with paintings, an eye-test chart, a crutch, and a skeleton. A mirror reflecting what appears to be Snow and his film crew forms the focal point, reminding us that this film has an author, just as our own environments have human creators. In one 12-minute sequence, objects on the walls begin exploding, one at a time, into beautiful pixel starbursts. Snow, the reflected “god” (for he is creator of this space and the characters who dwell within) appears here to be an Old Testament type: he can give and he can take away.

NY Times:

In keeping with his lighter side, *Corpus is also fun … But then it starts to feel as if things are going on for too long. Mr. Snow realizes he is literally playing with time, though, and even jokes about it: he inserts the credits in the middle of the picture. … We get the point, but the movie goes on and on, using repetition to comment on repetitive behavior.

Rosenbaum, who ranked it his #1 movie of 2002, above even Platform: “Not counting the asterisk, the title refers to the tissue connecting the hemispheres of the brain, an apt reference given the prodigious and joyful inventiveness on display.”

In Snow’s description he says:

The sound – electronic like the picture – is also a continuous metamorphosis and as the film’s “nervous system”, is as important to the film as the picture. Or: the sound and the picture are two hemispheres joined by the artist. *Corpus Callosum is resolutely “artificial”, it not only wants to convince, but also to be a perceived pictorial and musical phenomenon.

… a shame, since my copy had lousy sound.

Funny that I watched this the day after The Last Movie, since it turns out Snow put out a record called “The Last LP”.

Snow, interviewed:
“Although it was all done in the computer, so there isn’t any film in it except for a little tiny bit at the end which is something I did in 1956 and is in a sense my first film. The film I usually refer to as my first film A to Z which is a cut out animation film in 1956. Where as what appears at the end here is, well something which we used to call flimsies. You see I started out in animation and that is how I got involved with film. We used to make the drawings on tracing paper, we would put them on pins with one over the other on a light box and you would draw them. And I did this little sequence of this leg stretching in 1956, but I never shot it, I just kept it as a flimsy. So I guess that is in a sense my first film or at least it was intended to be shot as film. But it was not shot as a film.”

Offscreen: Has it changed over the years, the audience reception?

Michael Snow: Yes. I don’t know what is happening to people but they are not as tough as they used to be. … I really want to make physical things so that the experience is a real experience and not just conceptual. Well yes there are ideas in the works, but they are also body affects, like the panning, for example in Back and Forth. I’ve seen someone get sick and people have fainted with La Region Centrale, so I must be doing something right.

by ·Comments Off on In Vanda’s Room (2000, Pedro Costa)

Interlacing! Surly women argue over heroin. Nhurro takes a shower. Vanda sells lettuce. Bunch of one-shot scenes, disconnected from each other – I mean, they’re in the same neighborhood with some regular characters, but one doesn’t narratively follow the last. Sometimes the movie seems to be challenging me not to watch it, like when a man with a needle in his arm compares awful blood-clot stories with a friend, or when a girl will not stop scraping a tabletop with a razor.

S. Hasumi: “All of Pedro Costa’s shots have a vertical power that breaks the viewer free from the story’s linear cause and effect. The pleasure of exposure to that liberation has, ever since F.W. Murnau, been a privilege allowed only to film.”

It’s Carrefour!

Caught references to Cape Verde and to a woman who either sold, killed or abandoned her baby (the story is not well remembered – nothing around here is). Other than that, no Jacques Tourneur film-love or even a Wire bootleg on a boombox, just pure miserable reality. Of course it’s not exactly reality, as pointed out by the commentary – shots are staged, there were retakes, dialogue was thought out before the scene.

More than two hours in, Soon after the girls talk about their childhood in this neighborhood, when drugs weren’t around, or at least were better hidden, the song “Memories” is playing on a TV, cutting after the line “I remember the time I knew what happiness was.” What, is the movie belatedly remembering that it’s a movie? I didn’t enjoy the first half, thought it was getting worse, then felt increasing sympathy for it during the final hour.

Cyril Neyrat sees revolution while I struggle to stay awake and not to get annoyed:

Costa bought a Panasonic DV and went to Fontainhas alone, every day. Vanda and Zita had invited him into their room: “Come, you’ll see what our lives are really like. You used to ask us to be quiet; now we’re going to talk, you’re going to listen. That’s all we do, talk and take drugs.” Over six months, alone with his DV camera, a mirror he found on-site, and cobbled-together reflectors, Costa reinvented his cinema: facing the bed, he looked for frames and strove to master the light that came in through a single tiny window, as in a Dutch painting … After the six months, a sound engineer came to lend a hand from time to time. He recorded the girls’ speech, the murmur of Fontainhas, the sounds of the bulldozers and the mechanical diggers tearing the condemned neighborhood’s houses down one by one. The miracle of In Vanda’s Room is that of a new agreement between the world and the film, of a recovered equality between the two sides of the camera.

Costa reinvented a solitary, craftsmanlike cinema, operating at the pace of everyday life: going into the neighborhood each morning, looking, working, doing nothing, picking from the stream of life and energy flowing before the camera something that might give rise to a scene. And then repeat it, do it over—up to twenty times—until the beauty and the intellectual and imaginary power of a sculpted reality made dense and musical are revealed. With In Vanda’s Room, Costa strips cinema bare, but far from wallowing in an aesthetic poverty that would add to the humiliation of the underprivileged of Fontainhas, he rediscovers in this subtraction the aura of the great primitive and classic cinemas, and their ability to reveal and celebrate the beauty of the world, the beauty of sounds and colors, of a ray of light passing through shutters to illuminate three bottles set on a wood table.

“It looks like a film, it is a film in some sort of way,” opens Pedro defensively in the DVD commentary, before proceeding to tell us about the difficult sound work they did in post-production. “It’s a bit pretentious but the ambition with Vanda in sound, image, everything, was to recompose, offer, unveiling the secret that really doesn’t exist, going against the cinema-machine…” it’s a rambling commentary, but it’s a three-hour movie so there’s no hurry. It rambled me straight to sleep, twice in the first hour, so I finally gave up halfway through.