by ·Comments Off on Special Effects (1984, Larry Cohen)

Having a very Larry Shocktober. This one’s not as good as It’s Alive III, more like Murder a la Mod without the mods, but it fits in nicely with the meta-slasher Scream movies. And despite a lower budget, crappy music and some shady editing tricks, it’s a much more lively doppelganger movie than Enemy turned out to be.

Enemy would burst into flame if exposed to this much bright color:

Zoe Lund (Ms .45 herself) plays two characters with at least three names. First she’s an aspiring actress working in a nudie club, pushy but not smart, getting herself into the apartment of famed/troubled filmmaker Eric Bogosian (the Talk Radio guy), whose kink is murdering girls on camera (see also: Dangerous Animals).

Bogosian in his Freddy Krueger sweater:

He can’t be that bad, he’s got a cockatoo:

Now things get twisted, as the detective (the cabbie killed in opening scene of Island of the Alive) is convinced the girl’s estranged husband killed her, so the director offers to help by making a film in which the murderer husband will relive his crime on camera, casting a lookalike (Zoe Lund again, as a do-gooder with a His Girl Friday voice) as his/their victim. The cop is offered a technical advisor position, gets obsessed until the director bars him from set for interfering. Happy ending: New Zoe falls for Dead Zoe’s husband even though he’s a dick, and they electrocute the director in his own pool.

by ·Comments Off on After Life (1998, Hirokazu Kore-eda)

It’s me, the cynic who didn’t love After Life, a movie which appears to have stolen Brain Candy‘s plot of people re-living their happiest moment and turned it into a dry, quiet portrait of a bureaucratic limbo (and film studio). It’s also me, the guy who lost it at the end, when one of the counselors who’d refused to pick a happy moment for decades, relents: “I’ve learned I was part of someone else’s happiness. What a wonderful discovery.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen for Criterion:

One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who’s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that After Life quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.

by ·Comments Off on Deborah Stratman: Land, Birds, Circuit

O’er the Land (2009)

Military marching, war reenactments, an RV sales pitch, immigration cops, narration by a guy who ejected from a plane and bounced through a thunderstorm.

Guys who refer to machine guns as “freedom”
Firefighters, flamethrowers, waterwall

Wild birds in some kind of audio experiment
If i understand the credits, the archival-sounding stories were performances

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Ray’s Birds (2010)

Ray runs a raptor center – Stratman films his public demonstrations and splinters them into fragments.

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Hacked Circuit (2014)

The first voice we hear is someone getting a crank call from a flock of birds, so there are birds in all her movies. High-tech studio where a foley artist is recreating sounds from The Conversation. Our camera roving, invisible, goes into the studio and back outside in a loop, and jeez, that wasn’t a single take, was it? Michael Sicinski saw it at True/False.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Knife (1955, Robert Aldrich)

Dour noirish plotty Hollywood blackmail thing, mostly valuable for getting to watch Ida Lupino’s eyes for half the movie. She’s the estranged wife of Jack Palance, back at their fancy house to try convincing him to reclaim his art and not sign a lucrative long-term contract with a crap producer. Various friends and gangsters and agents get themselves involved, but Palance signs to make the bad guys go away, then goes upstairs and kills himself. Just six months after Kiss Me Deadly, with fancier lighting – not the kind of drama I go for, but very nicely shot and acted.

Rod “Run of the Arrow” Steiger as the producer, getting overexcited:

Singin’ in the Rain lipsyncer Lina Lamont knows everyone’s secrets:

Shelley Winters (shortnin’ bread in The Visitor) knows too much:

Welles fave Everett Sloane as the agent, with a naked Palance:

by ·Comments Off on Through the Olive Trees (1994, Abbas Kiarostami)

Part one was a straightforward drama, part two was a reenactment of events that took place after filming that drama, and part three is a reenactment of the filming of part two, whew.

It spins off into a side drama, as the actors cast as And Life Goes On‘s newlyweds know each other – Hossein wants to marry Tahereh, her family says no, and she won’t say anything at all. After filming he follows her and… something happens in extreme-wide-shot which I simply couldn’t make out on the VHS when I first watched this, but seemed clearer now, before Godfrey Cheshire further complicated it.

Or possibly all three Koker movies were made to explore AK’s deep interest in homework, and we’d more accurately call it the Homework Quadrilogy.

Watched all the box set extras. The included Cinema de Notre Temps episode is fantastic, a precursor to 10 on Ten. Crew follows him around as he drives familiar routes and looks for people he knows and interacts with random pedestrians. He finds the Friend’s Home kids yet again, catches up with the star of The Traveler, and teases them all about their acting… talks about truth and fiction, philosophically and in the specifics of his films.

by ·Comments Off on Blue Velvet docs

Catching up with some Lynch-related artifacts, I’ve got two different behind-the-scenes docs about Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet Revisited (2016, Peter Braatz)

Movies are magic, but making movies is dull. Occasionally has sync sound, asking unenlightening Qs to Lynch, or sometimes overlaying shoot audio, or sometimes just playing trippy music, flashing up the old footage with fancy titles – it’s tough when you’re trying to piggyback your art off one of my favorite films.

It’s a Strange World (2019, Shane Callahan & Benedict Fancy)

In the first five seconds someone says the town was like a character in the film. Director of the first doc appears in this doc. Props guys tell stories about the ear, the “In Dreams” worklight mic, the brain splatter, a steadicam shot on the stairs, some random little things.

by ·Comments Off on Oh, Canada (2024, Paul Schrader)

Opening in Richmond VA, Richard Gere is playing a Coward Errol Morris being interviewed via his own interrotron while dying of cancer. In flashback he’s Jacob Saltburn Elordi, first knocking up Alicia then turning to Amy, then Amanda. In the present he’s with Uma Thurman, and everyone is playing two roles, like a prosaic Cloud Atlas. He’d been a young draft dodging womanizer, then a trendy doc filmmaker, now full of regret – so it goes.

Can’t argue with the Phosphorescent soundtrack, very pretty. On the film shoot are Rene (looks somewhat like Emily Watson, was actually in the Devil elevator – the develevator – and Tulse Luper Suitcases) and idiot PA Sloan (of the latest bad Hellboy remake) and Malcolm (he played a missionary in The Addiction, justifying my Heretic double feature).

by ·Comments Off on Two by Mark Rappaport

Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992)

Would’ve been a neat essay film about Rock’s secret gay life as interpreted through his film scenes, but a few things lost me. Putting made-up words into Rock’s voice is one thing, but why show the Rock-voice narrator onscreen, who is that guy supposed to be?

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Two For The Opera Box (2021)

I prefer these 15-minute pieces – this one’s not as deep as Turhan Bey, just examining the reuse of props and sets in classic Hollywood, particularly a theater with distinctive opera boxes that showed up in different films for decades.

by ·Comments Off on Daaaaaali! (2023, Quentin Dupieux)

A goof on Salvador Dali (who is played by multiple actors wearing the same mustache), and another meta-game after The Second Act. Journalist (Bird People star Anaïs Demoustier) repeatedly schedules interviews with a preposteous, self-obsessed Dali, and he keeps walking out. Even more Buñuelian than the last Dupieux/Demoustier movie Incredible But True, the action loops and rewinds, roles swap, there’s Black Lodge reverse motion, and it ends with everyone watching the interview film which was never made.