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.

by ·Comments Off on The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

by ·Comments Off on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024, David Hinton)

Feels like more of a Scorsese movie than some other docs he supposedly directed, but the main appeal here is to watch lovely HD clips of the best P&P movies you’ve seen before and learn about all the others. I wanted Marty to tell me that the little-seen post-Hoffman movies were masterpieces waiting for rediscovery, but he did not.

by ·Comments Off on Last House on Dead End Street (1977, Roger Watkins)

Looks and sounds like shit right from the start, with spectacularly out-of-sync sound recording. Manos: The Last House on the Left Hands of Fate, about a misanthrope making snuff films, made by a (presumed) misanthrope and looking like an actual snuff film. “This isn’t my cup of tea. I’m not interested in art.”

Dirtbag Bill, about to drill-kill:

Terry, who looks like Dirtbag Bill Hader, gets out of jail for drug dealing and says he’ll show ’em all. Filmmaker Bill isn’t getting much play from his softcore lesbian dramas and blackface whipping scenes. They kidnap some people and murder them on camera, then a voiceover tells us they were all apprehended, ok. An incoherent, possibly evil movie. The cinematographer later shot Avengers: Infinity War, which makes sense.

Despite this movie’s rocky/aborted release it definitely predates the Misfits song: