by ·Comments Off on Kansas City / Jazz ’34 (1996, Robert Altman)

Finally a period movie that acknowledges that everyone is named Johnny. Altman took note of Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Hudsucker Proxy‘s 1930s and cast her in his own 1930s flick. It’s less a follow-up to Hudsucker than a precursor to Uncut Gems (someone tears around town making a lot of noise and pissing people off until they are shot in the head).

Rosenbaum calls the story “borderline terrible”:

It counts on the dubious premise that a gangster (Harry Belafonte) would fritter away a whole night deciding what to do with a thief who rips him off — thereby enabling the thief’s significant other (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to kidnap a society lady (Miranda Richardson) and Altman to crosscut to his heart’s content as he exposes the inner workings of a city on the eve of a local election.

“Democrats: they’re whatever they’re paid to be.” I could take or leave the Belafonte plot with Dermot “Johnny” Mulroney or the election rigging plot with Steve “Johnny” Buscemi (another actor cribbed from the Coens’ period films), but greatly enjoyed hanging out with Leigh and Richardson, the stars of Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Spider.

Jane Adams:

Christian McBride:

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Jazz ’34

All the music performances from Belafonte’s club in Kansas City allowed to run at their full length, with multiple narrators giving context. Not exactly a rock doc, but not far off – 1990s jazz guys pretending to be 1930s jazz guys, but they’re actually playing the music, so it’s a concert film. It is popular to say that this movie is better than parent film, but only I have the bravery to say: they are both good.

Ron Carter:

by ·Comments Off on A Diary for Timothy & The Stranger Left No Card

A Diary for Timothy (1945, Humphrey Jennings)

Narrator explains to Baby Tim on his birthday – also the fifth anniversary of Britain entering WWII – what we’re fighting for, and how we’ve got a difficult recovery ahead. He sketches out the next six months, closing by asking whether the kid will make the world a better place (spoiler: he did not). Starts out as boring wartime propaganda and gets increasingly complex, until by the end I almost see why this keeps popping up on best-movie lists.

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The Stranger Left No Card (1952, Wendy Toye)

“They’d never seen anything like me before,” says the stranger, an overly facial-haired street magician, but that’s because Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals hadn’t been invented yet. All the townspeople take interest in this guy as he runs around being whimsical. Some sync sound issues, but mostly narrated by our self-delighted stranger (Alan Badel of Day of the Jackal and Children of the Damned). After establishing himself all week as someone who shows up everywhere playing harmless tricks, he shows up in a contractor’s office at closing time and revenge-kills the guy for sending him to prison years earlier. It’s the perfect crime, but it’s also the 1950s so he can’t quite get away clean, leaving a trail of glitter to the train as he’s leaving town.

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year 90 Nine Zero / Phony Wars (Godard)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)

Bursts and scraps, especially impressive in headphones.
“Now that the cold war is over, being American is pointless.”

Lemmy Constantine travels through Germany, speaks three languages. Good stuff.

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Phony Wars (2023)

More scrapbooky than ever, and made of smaller scraps – his scrappiest one yet, but charmingly homemade in its montages and handwriting, without the typed titles.

Still, even when directors seem to have fully ignored or subverted the assignment, I continue not to like shorts commissioned by fashion companies. May ’68, tho. :raised-fist:

by ·Comments Off on Fellow Citizen & First Graders

Toothache (1983)

I hurt my tooth on a potato chip, so what better time to catch up on some early Kiarostami films. I’ve had the Koker blu box set for a couple years now, so it’s time to watch that, but first checking out the films he made just before Where Is The Friend’s House.

This would be a completely uninteresting educational short – first half follows a kid who doesn’t like to brush his teeth, and second half is a lecture from his dentist. The one thing that gives it an edge is that during the entire dental lecture you can hear the kid and other patients squealing and crying while getting poked and drilled.

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Fellow Citizen (1983)

Stress-inducing condensed hour at work with a traffic guard tasked with preventing people from driving into the city center unless they have a permit or a special exception. Guess what, it turns out every single automobile driver in the city is a very special person with very special circumstances who deserves to be let through. Our guy lets them all through but feels increasingly taken advantage of and starts denying access more and more, among nonstop yelling and honking. Ends with a pure frustration montage set to the most psych-rock song of any Kiarostami film.

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First Graders (1984)

After an attendance-taking intro, we spend the day in the principal’s office doing conflict resolution. Unlike the people at the traffic stop, the participants here seem unaware of the camera. They are little kids with undeveloped concepts of right, wrong, truth, etc., and you can see their big puzzled thinking faces in closeup. Halfway through, the camera unexpectedly follows the kid on crutches home, getting a bicycle lift from his dad. Overall some suspiciously posed/staged camera angles for a straight doc. It also follows an American Beauty plastic bag, as AK keeps changing his mind about what kind of movie to make.

by ·Comments Off on Two Diaries of a Chambermaid

Diary of a Chambermaid (1946, Jean Renoir)

New maid Paulette Goddard (Modern Times) gets off on the wrong foot with mistress Judith Anderson (a chambermaid herself in Rebecca) by joking with the bearded master (Reginald Owen, the 1938 Scrooge), not realizing who he is. She meets desperate maid Louise, cook Marianne, and asshole valet Joseph, and gets to work. But this place is annoying and creepy: the valet (Francis Lederer, who started out in Pandora’s Box) is after her, the mistress is dressing her up for a visit from long-lost son George (sickly, secretive Dorian Gray), and the next door neighbor (Goddard’s husband Burgess Meredith) keeps breaking the family’s windows and eating their flowers. She announces she’s quitting and the valet goes mad, announces that he’s stealing the family’s treasures, then robs and murders the neighbor while the police are having their annual parade. Weird that I’d follow up Murder a la Mod with another movie that opens with a diary and features icepick murders.

Paulette, Burgess, and squirrel:

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Diary of a Chambermaid (1964, Luis Buñuel)

The French director had made an American film, then the Spanish director makes a French one. Now the maid is less headstrong, and has been hired to care for Madame’s dad, who wants to grab her leg while she wears special boots and reads to him. For Buñuel’s whole career everyone blabbered about surrealism, while he just wanted to put women’s legs on the big screen.

Everything is darker and more explicit in this version – Master Piccoli is allowed to sleep with the maids as long as he doesn’t get them pregnant, and Valet Joseph wants to open a Cherbourg cafe and pimp out the maid to soldiers. The valet is still a celebrated bird torturer, also a racist activist, whose 1934 “down with the republic” march gets the movie’s final words (while Renoir’s parade featured “vive la republique” fireworks). Instead of robbing the neighbor, he rapes and kills a local girl, the same day the old man dies. The maid works on helping the cops convict Joseph (and fails), but there’s no son to swoop in and save her from these awful men, so she ends up marrying the neighbor – no escape, no justice.

Madame in her laboratory:

Unlike the Renoir this one has no pet squirrel, but we do see a mouse, a frog, ants, a boar, a rabbit, a basket of snails. Supposedly Buñuel’s only anamorphic widescreen movie – maybe he regretted its mind-warping effect whenever he moved the camera. Starring Jeanne Moreau the year after Bay of Angels, and Master Piccoli after Contempt… Valet Joseph is also in A Quiet Place in the Country, Madame in Chabrol’s Bluebeard. Watched these on oscar night… they won no oscars, but Moreau got best actress at Karlovy Vary.

The Mirbeau novel was adapted again in France with Lea Seydoux, but directed by a notorious pedophile, so it’s both tempting and not tempting to watch. The book has the girl’s (not the neighbor’s) murder and Joseph stealing the family silver, then unlike both of these movies, the maid marries him and moves to Cherbourg. Randall Conrad in Film Quarterly compares the films, championing the Bunuel over the Renoir (which has no eroticism and a “deficiency in conception”):

At the least, Celestine is a moral witness to the bestiality of Joseph, something she tried to stop and couldn’t. But perhaps her secret attraction, her fear of it, and her individual powerlessness make her an accomplice to Joseph’s rise. In that case, Joseph’s assertion – “You and I are alike, in our souls” – takes on full meaning … [Buñuel] returned in his film to the France he left in the thirties, and created its portrait … The film has the closed structure characteristic of Buñuel: the end is a beginning. An individual’s gesture toward freedom not only fails but lays the ground for still worse oppression. The era that has begun, as the [fascist] demonstrators turn the corner and march up a street in Cherbourg, is the one we are still living in.

by ·Comments Off on Fistful / Sucker (Sergio Leone)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

What a picture. Clint comes to town and meets the grey-haired bartender next door to the busy coffin carpenter, proceeds to get paid by both sides of the warring criminal families, then after Clint does a good deed by rescuing an imprisoned girl, he and his bartender are tortured. The coffin maker secrets Clint away to a cavern so he can recover then return and slaughter everybody.

Been a while since I saw the not-really-sequel – this is just as good, though it suffers from lack of Lee Van Cleef. The girl was in Franju’s Spotlight on a Murderer, the lead Rojo gangster in Le Cercle Rouge, his main brute in Dead Pigeon, and at least two others are from Viridiana. If nobody has yet made a supercut of atrociously dubbed children in Italian movies, nobody ever should.

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Duck, You Sucker (1971)

Real class-warfare pervert stuff, right from the start. “He doesn’t know anything” says the white man’s mouth in grotesque Svankmajer-esque extreme closeup about the peasant their coach picks up, unaware they’ve picked up bandito Rod Steiger. The bandits next encounter a fellow criminal, explosives-rigged James Coburn, so they team up. Coburn is fighting for a cause, Steiger for cash, but after the idiot bandito gets pulled into the revolution and the government slaughters his family he becomes a true believer.

Steiger is the Run of the Arrow guy, and Coburn is the oscar winner for Affliction who was also in 100 other movies I haven’t seen. I’d preferred the alternate title A Fistful of Dynamite but once you hear Irish Coburn say his catchphrase moments before his bombs go off, you realize Duck, You Sucker is correct. He drops the accent almost immediately, but Steiger lays his on so thick I had to turn on subtitles – at long last the Italians are working with sync sound, and it’s actually worse than before. Ultimately the movie gets tedious, and the Leone apologists out there making excuses for Steiger are wrong, but some stuff blows up real good.

Coburn + parakeets:

by ·Comments Off on Flannery & Wildcat

Flannery (2019, Coffman & Bosco)

PBS bio-doc about fellow Georgian O’Connor. A couple of crazy details in here. She was terrified of catching lupus, the disease that killed her beloved father, so when she did catch it, her doctors and family told her she had arthritis. And attending the Iowa Writers Workshop, Southern fiction and Faulkner were all the rage, yet the students there mocked her accent. Movie trips over itself trying to explicate her racism, otherwise a good introduction.

“I know they’re stupid and all, but they have a lot to be proud of”

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Wildcat (2023, Ethan Hawke)

Some wild visuals, much weirder than it seems from outside. Not a mild prestige biopic drama, but something more prickly, a Flannery Naked Lunch, spinning the stories into the biography. So this is my second movie in a week to combine artist biography with adaptation of their work, and Hawke easily beats Guadagnino. I’m not saying it always works, but it’s refreshing.

Some of the same quotes used in the doc. Flannery likes Cal, the suicidal environmentalist of First Reformed, and holds out hope of living a normal life until rejection and disease send her into writing seclusion. The Licorice Pizza kid looks too Elonesque in this, and I hate to say but Laura Linney is the weak point. It sure is fun to try on a new accent, and I know it’s stupid to ask this, but why not cast southerners in the role of southerners?

by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs: 20 Feet & Trances

20 Feet from Stardom (2013, Morgan Neville)

Expertly put together, a great show. Attempts a late swerve into pathos because all of their solo stardom didn’t take off, which clashes with the early sentiments about being all about the music. In the discussion of who treated the singers better or worse, Jonathan Demme and Joe Cocker and Sting and Luther Vandross come out well, Ike Turner and Phil Spector less so. I thought about Kelly Hogan at least every couple minutes.

“Rock and roll… saved our lives.”
“You get hooked on music, you’re fucked.”

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Trances (1981, Ahmed El Maanouni)

An ambient rock doc – if it’s not self-evident that the music is good, if you don’t know why these guys are big, nobody’s gonna tell you. The band is called Nass El Ghiwane, and we get a mix of performance, rehearsal, and, not exactly interview, but pointing the camera at a band member until he starts talking.

I dunno about “a free-form audiovisual experiment” or “pure cinematic poetry” per the Criterion press, but it’s got nicely edited archive film and some really good closeups. The group (with two original members) was still playing as recently as last year.

by ·Comments Off on Flesh + Blood (1985, Paul Verhoeven) +2

Oddball adventure movie post-Conan the Barbarian with modern slang/language, setting up a love triangle for young JJ Leigh between dim warlord Rutger Hauer and rich wannabe-scholar Tom Burlinson (title role in The Time Guardian), both of whom are dicks to her anyway. Sure it’s full of raping and pillaging, and a nun gets conked in the brain, and plague meat is catapulted over the walls, but most of the fun is in guessing Leigh’s intentions as she goes from captor to queen of the gang after they conquer a castle, earning Rutger’s respect by teaching him to eat with a fork, then trying to rescue both of her men during the final showdown.

Rutger vs. Octopus:

Untrustworthy bounty hunter Jack Thompson is in all the big Australian movies I haven’t seen (Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright, Jimmie Blacksmith), Rutger’s ex-pregnant ex-queen Susan Tyrrell specialized in weirdo comedies (Forbidden Zone, Cry-Baby, Big Top Pee-Wee). Brion James pops up a fair amount. Matt Lynch: “an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone’s full of shit, survival is the only cause.”

Displaced Barbarian Queen Susan:

Brion James fate foretold:

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Starship Troopers (1997)

“Oh Johnny it’s us… it’s home.” All the kids are supposedly South American but no two people can agree how to pronounce “Ibanez.” Holds up, never looks cheap, Verhoeven firing on more cylinders than on the 1985 movie. Neil Bahadur: “One gets the sense that Verhoeven took this god-awful script and flipped it without changing a word.”

Where’d these people end up? Jake “Son of Gary” Busey played murderers in The Frighteners and Contact. Dizzy was a cop in the first four Saw movies. Caspar has only ever appeared in two other movies: Sleepy Hollow and Alita, both of which are due a rewatch, and Denise was in Edmond and Wild Things, which, same. Sgt Clancy “Mr. Krabs” Brown has achieved Vaguely Recognizable status after I’ve seen him in twelve movies. Michael Ironside is so cool that I might actually watch that Bob Odenkirk revenge movie now that I know he’s in it.

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Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Semi-rewatch while assembling furniture, really much better than part two if you’re not looking directly at the screen, despite tediously starting with the final showdown instead of making up a cool secondary pre-credits adventure.