by ·Comments Off on Moosa Lane (2022, Anita Mathal Hopland)

Oops, we picked a bum closing film… should’ve caught Hummingbirds on Thursday, and gone home after Mariachi on Sunday. Living Hour was good at least – a chill 5-piece from Winnipeg. Norwegian-Pakistani-Danish filmmaker visits her dad’s family in Pakistan over 15 years, watching her cousins grow up and start their own families and/or die young from cancer. Weak attempt to universalize the story via poetic narration about othering and inbetweenness, really it’s just home movies.

Hopland has previously made her own variation on The Road Movie with On the Edge of Freedom, a portrait of Russian stunt jumpers that’s been described as “a one hour compilation of a bunch of YouTube videos.” The producer worked on a Mads Brügger movie I haven’t seen, and the editor also did Venus.

by ·Comments Off on Feet in Water, Head on Fire (2023, Terra Long)

From the Blue Note balcony, feat. Landlady again. Hand-processed(?) 16mm shot in Coachella Valley, CA. Date palms, fault lines, Salton Sea. Local culture in form of a Scheherazade parade. Interviews with a shopkeeper and the current and former owners of date farms. A sloth, a parrot. A real inventory of things – the look of the film and its location holding all the things together, but just barely.

by ·Comments Off on Milisuthando (2023, Milisuthando Bongela)

The Onions opened, incongruously to the film, three goofy white guys playing bright pop songs. Movie starts with a way-zoomed-in cellphone video of a woman disrobing before a Mandela statue. Director’s family is from South Africa, grandma disparages Mandela for ending apartheid. Then we get educational segments on history of the black-only Transkei district, featuring excessively unedited news archives interviewing relentlessly optimistic Black kids and their parents on the eve of integration. Movie goes off the rails with two (not just one!) extended conversations between the filmmaker and her white friends about privilege and prejudice revealed by some minor personal interactions, the visual in these sections just subtitles over an annoyingly dark-grey screen with a couple lines visible on the edges.

by ·Comments Off on Three Women (2022, Maksym Melnyk)

Bjork-voiced loop-harpist Moriah Bailey opened, then after the film we saw her again at a free concert in a church. Good crowd response to this one, beginning before the film started when the one-minute fest trailer had no sound so we provided the footstep foley by stomping at our seats. Fun to see the director in person who we’d just watched onscreen too – Ramona might’ve been our True/Falsiest film this year, but this was our True/Falsiest theatrical experience. The three women are Post Office Worker, Poop Scientist, and Lonely Widow Hannah. Maksym and his cameraman “The German” start out in observational mode, then befriend Hannah and the movie becomes about their little community. She cooks for them, they buy her a pig. We also follow the scientist counting cave bats and witness her great triumph in finding bear shit in a field.

by ·Comments Off on Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2022, Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster)

Inspired by Montage of Heck, they wanted to make a musical but found a poet as their subject. Virginia Tech mass-shooting was cut from the film because test audiences thought it gave our complicated figure too much of a movie-triumph moment. Opens more spacey and abstract (the people in front of us, terrified of abstraction, fled before the movie even started) before settling into a portrait of the late-career artist, recently reconciled with her son and getting to know her granddaughter. Poetry spoken in context with her life story and media appearances worked great, much better than the written samples I read on my phone to prep for the movie. Katy thinks it didn’t get inside Nikki, that it’s all public image. The filmmakers signal that we’re not gonna get some late-life emotional breakdown by including TWO instances when Nikki refuses to answer Q&A queries about painful moments in her past. Michèle has previously made a couple of Haitian/Dominican docs, Joe has made a Giancarlo Esposito drama, and most recently they made “a magical realist, immersive, episodic virtual reality experience” about American racism.

by ·Comments Off on Crossing Voices (2022, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré)

Our seventh True/False. Travel is exhausting, so we took Thursday off and started early on Friday… earlier than musician Cemone James, who arrived late. Seems like only her guitarist and keyboardist were awake. The movie is a quite long and rambling montage of archive footage, still photos, video, film, computer map imagery, and radio broadcasts. Protests and strikes, neverending for decades, trying to be able to live and thrive in their own land. At one point Touré nicely sums it up, panning over the photos and posters covering the wall of his room, saying “life is a struggle” again and again and again. He stays in France, spends a few months a year back in Mali. Between protests he became a photographer and hung out with Med Hondo. He died in early 2022, his close collaborator Grisey finishing the film.

by ·Comments Off on The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022, Werner Herzog)

Fascinating alternate take on the Krafft legacy, with the same footage but a different focus from Fire of Love. That one’s story goes that their volcano research and publicity saved lives, while Herzog opens by saying they’ve been criticized for convincing others to move closer to the same eruption that caused their deaths. FoL tries to get inside their relationship, Herzog compliments the technical excellence of their filmmaking and photography while showcasing the destructive forces of nature. The Ernst Reijseger requiem music perhaps goes too big, but Herzog’s fourth(?) volcano movie is predictably great.

by ·Comments Off on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019, Xavier Burgin)

Opening with Birth of a Nation seems cool – I’ve been uninterested in ever watching that film, but watching it as a horror would be an idea. Higher priority, I should watch the Blacula movies… less so Def by Temptation.

A real podcast-hangout kind of doc, and not usually in a good way. Contains a blatant promo for Tales from the Hood 2. The doc is leading up to Get Out as the culmination of Black horror art, allowing Jordan Peele to talk about that and the original Candyman (which was problematic, has room for improvement, possibly with a remake?). This could be a blu extra on the Get Out disc, easy.

Ken Foree and Keith David: