by ·Comments Off on The Party (1968, Blake Edwards)

The same day I wished I was watching Mon Oncle during the WC Fields three-story house routines, I end up watching Blake and Peter Sellers make an American Tati movie. And like the Fields movie this has barely a plot (inept foreigner is fired from a movie and accidentally invited to the studio boss’s fancy party), is more about putting a comedian in a setting where he can get into hijinks. The normally racially-sensitive Edwards decided Sellers should be in brownface, because white British men weren’t permitted to be as socially weird as the script requires until the 1990 invention of Mr. Bean.

The hot French girl (mainly known for having shot her boyfriend) likes our guy, but is menaced by her McHale’s Navy costar Gavin MacLeod. Party host Alice was in anti-marijuana picture Assassin of Youth, and the film director was downgraded to a TV director in The Fortune Cookie. Drunk Waiter Steve Franken is the breakout star, went on to appear in some late Jerry Lewis films.

Sellers and the Drunk Waiter:

by ·Comments Off on The Hyperboreans (2024, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León)

Actress is on a soundstage recreating a lost film with Cociña and León, in which everyone but her is replaced by puppets. She ends up entering a spreadsheet cheat code, entering the hollow earth, and arguing with the Hitler-worshipping filmmakers. I don’t know what it all meant for Chile or for cinema, but I enjoyed every scene. After The Wolf House and Los Huesos, dudes are on a roll – and I’ve just learned that they did effects for Beau Is Afraid.

Antonia Giesen and her rock & roll patient:

Shooting a flower-creature shadow with a camera-laser:

The “directors”:

by ·Comments Off on The Ice Tower (2025, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Think I prefer Luci-Hadz’s bizarre movies where I don’t ever know what’s happening to the ones where a runaway girl hides out on a movie set, ending up as stand-in then rival to the movie’s diva star, the titular Ice Queen. Feels like they’re telling a story but not getting anywhere with it, all long pauses and people staring silently, while that approach seems to work for me if I’m as lost as the characters. Either way, Hadz has conjured another couple hours of splendid images.

Marion Cotillard (only the second time I’ve seen her in the last decade) is our Queen, Clara Pacini the runaway, August Diehl (A Hidden Life) a sinister assistant. The Ice Queen movie doubles as Clara’s childhood storytime and present fantasy world. There’s a crystal / refraction / kaleidoscope theme, the movie’s distorted ending recalling the fever dreams of Mysteries of Lisbon.

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.