by ·Comments Off on Noroi: The Curse (2005, Kôji Shiraishi)

Found-footage horrors are rarely good – I’m thinking of Willow Creek and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and V/H/S and its sequels (which also suffer from being anthology horrors, which are also rarely good). If nothing else, the found-footage conceit is an excuse for shitty handheld camerawork, and we’ve got that here, and also clips from fake TV programs with insufferable narrators and graphics. Movie is also not nice to birds. Still, pretty good, I’d check out the director’s torture video Grotesque.

Ghost investigator on the trail of a kidnapped girl pieces together a documentary stitching various hauntings he filmed that turn out to be related. Doc guy Kobayashi pulls in haunted actress Marika and foil-hat “super psychic” Hori, and they have a blairwitchy experience at the dammed/damned lake where a village once existed. Apparently the village had a ritual to keep demons at bay, no longer being performed as everyone moved away, now wherever the demon-possessed abortionist from the drowned village goes, her neighbors are driven murderously mad from the sounds of her ghost babies. Our team tracks her down, the doc guy rescues her hostages, but fails to banish the evil, uh oh. Not to be confused with magic pirate revenge movie Noroît. The actors here also appeared in various Rings and Grudges, and two were in Kurosawa’s Retribution.

by ·Comments Off on Underground (1995, Emir Kusturica)

Blackie and his bestie, the thinner-mustached Marko are communists in 1941. The nearby zoo is bombed, panicking Marko’s brother, the stuttering zookeeper Ivan, and nazis overtake the town. Enter Natalija, Blackie’s girl, an actress also beloved by Marko and Nazi Franz. Marko hides Blackie and his fellow revolutionaries in a basement and when the war ends he decides not to tell them, so he keeps Natalija above ground and the undergrounders keep manufacturing weapons for him to sell. When a monkey blows a hole in the wall during Blackie’s son’s wedding they escape, come across the set of the film reenacting Blackie’s war heroism, and he starts killing German actors. Thirty years later as Yugoslavia is violently dissolving, Ivan finds his lost monkey then everybody dies tragically.

Young Ivan and flock:

Marko and Nat preparing to take drastic measures:

Inserting Blackie into documentary footage from the era was well-done. I think the internet is saying the movie is pro-genocide, but I don’t follow why. Even if so, this is counterbalanced by the movie’s major macaw presence. Won the top prize at Cannes versus Dead Man, City of Lost Children, Shanghai Triad, Hou, Oliveira, Terence Davies, and a pissed-off Theodoros Angelopoulos. Blackie appeared with a couple of James Bonds and played Santa Claus in the nutty-looking anthology Goodbye 20th Century. Marko was in Ozon’s Criminal Lovers, and Franz was in Ozon’s Frantz. Natalija came to Hollywood and ended up hundredth-billed in Maid in Manhattan, playing a maid, that’s embarrassing.

Old Blackie:

Old Ivan finds Old Marko:

by ·Comments Off on Something in the Dirt (2022, Benson & Moorhead)

Wedding photographer John and bartender Levi discover supernatural phenomenon in Levi’s apartment and shoot a documentary about it. Maybe his closet is a gateway to another dimension. Finding symbols and coincidences in Los Angeles, like Silver Lake or Lodge 49, but this time it’s not just one conspiracy/coincidence, it’s ALL of them.

“Why did you play yourselves in the recreations?” Feels pandemicky, the writers/directors playing the lead roles, set in an apartment. As they start to mistrust each other, doc interviewees cast doubts on the histories and findings, and the movie we’re watching itself, speaking of visual effects tests to create the floating crystals and stuff. But it ends – in typical Benson/Moorhead fashion – with a possible callback to a previous film (someone falling inexplicably from a great height).

by ·Comments Off on Landscape Suicide (1986, James Benning)

We’re in structural a-g territory here, a tennis player woking on his serve, over and over with precise editing. But then it’s twin true-crime re-enactments, actors playing murderers in interrogation.

A California teen girl is stabbed to death in 1984. The sound of typing throughout, cuts to black between her responses, ties to the novel Devil House, landscapes and artifacts. We have to listen to an entire song from Cats while watching a girl with perfect 80s hair talk on the phone. I don’t wanna have to think about the cost of music royalties when watching a movie, but putting a song from Thriller in your experimental documentary is okay?

Another girl is found dead at a Wisconsin farm in 1957. Static composition takes from around town, same as we just did in other town, listening to a radio preacher. Woman dancing alone to the worst version I’ve ever heard of “Tennessee Waltz.” This time no typing on the interview scenes, some ambient industrial sound.

It’s some pretty cool work by Benning, but I feel like I was tricked into watching a serial-killer movie, and I should’ve put on that four-hour George Harrison documentary instead. As far as my relative interest in musicians/murders go, I’ve skimmed the wiki on Ed Gein and though “oh no, that pretty much sucks” then moved on and never thought about him again. But I’ve considered George Harrison every day this year, and maybe that’s because I think I could pretty easily be a serial killer, but could never play guitar in a good group.

by ·Comments Off on The Nowhere Inn (2020, Bill Benz)

For Rotterdance this year I focused on movies that involve music, and this felt like a good opening night pick. Going for a surreal/absurd tone in the opening scene with Annie Clark in the back of a limo, then we’re treated to a big Kraftwerkian rock band performance of Fear the Future, very different from the solo version I saw.

But soon Carrie Brownstein’s “behind the scenes doc” takes over the plot, and it’s weird to watch because it’s two musicians I like whose actual personalities I don’t know, pretending to be in a fake documentary. Carrie makes Annie paranoid that she’s an uninteresting person offstage (“I can be St. Vincent all the time”), Annie summons her to the bedroom to shoot sex scenes with her “girlfriend Dakota” (Johnson of Suspiria), then starts being weird and unfriendly to Carrie, who decides to quit the tour until vaguely threatening family members convince her to stay on. “Let’s only document things I can control.” Dakota leaves Annie for being weird, Annie takes control of the movie and Carrie loses her mind. I think the movie is for bigger fans than me, daring us to care about who’s the REAL St. Vincent. Sharp photography anyway – Burr is a Portlandia director. Fake-doc enthusiast Bobcat Goldthwait worked on this, and it’s exciting to see Enon’s Toko Yasuda get a supporting part.

by ·Comments Off on Windy City Heat (2003, Bobcat Goldthwait)

Perry Caravello is a local celeb comedian with Steven Wright hair and a high hoarse voice who gets involved in various challenges and pranks. Here he has called in all his comedy buds for a fake fake-documentary in which his frenemies Don and Mole get him cast as the star of a film that everyone but Perry knows isn’t real. But I don’t get this, because within the scope of this film, it seems real, and the rug is never pulled out even after the successful premiere. What’s the point in telling us it’s a ruse if we never see the ruse, like watching straight episodes of The Truman Show without ever seeing backstage or anything breaking down.

Everyone on set has stolen names, like a mistreated assistant named Burt Ward, and director Goldthwait is amusing as… the director of Windy City Heat. And there is a lot of yelling.

by ·Comments Off on Between Two Ferns (2019, Scott Aukerman)

Guess I should’ve watched the show instead of the movie, because the antagonistic interviews with celebrities are very fun, but I didn’t need the framing story of Zach G and his crew road-tripping to conduct a certain number of interviews in a week for boss Will Ferrell. After binging On Cinema episodes, maybe it was bad timing to watch another show about a deluded low-rent awkward talk-show host.