Set in Beijing leading up to a grand lion king dance event. For a friendly sporting competition, a lot of guys sure get set on fire or catch spears through the chest. Focus is less on individual kung-fu, more on lion-head spectacle, though enemy-turned-ally Clubfoot (Xiong Xinxin, villain of The Blade) is the breakout star of the former. The comedy and romance get pretty bad – in fact anything that isn’t a lion-head dance is wasted time, and Foon is the worst offender. The photography is sharper than ever though, especially when Rosamund is around, and there’s some good shadowplay. Rosamund’s Russian motion-picture supplier turns out to be an assassin, caught in the act by his own tech.

New stunt coordinator Yuen Bun did Dragon Inn and the Royal Tramp movies the same year, later went on to work with Johnnie To on greats like Throw Down and Sparrow. Interesting to hear Tsui in the blu extras complain about lack of originality in modern film – everyone studies the same references and produces the same movies.

Vital viewing for fans of Neighbouring Sounds, showing the history of Kleber’s family in their apartment where that movie was filmed. Funny, I mentioned Chris Marker in my writeup of his Green Vinyl, and the first thing I notice in his apartment is Marker’s book “Staring Back” – and I referenced Do The Right Thing in the same post, and here’s Kleber wearing a Do The Right Thing shirt. As Tsui Hark says, we all have the same references so we all make the same films. “Fiction films are the best documentaries” he says in part two, about the disappeared cinemas of Recife, Brazil, while reviewing the only known footage of certain destroyed landmarks in the backgrounds of features. The third part is the shortest, literally turning the locals into ghosts.

The director in Cinema Scope, on shooting digital:

At the end of the day it’s not the celluloid that makes a film, it’s the attitude that goes into each and every move … It’s quite perverse. I remember in the ’80s when CDs were introduced, the industry sold the idea that vinyl was nothing and you should get rid of it. It was part of the strategy to get CDs into people’s homes. In my family we kept the vinyl and also bought CDs. I like the idea of adding new ideas and experiences. I don’t understand why the industry always has to sell subtraction. With 35mm and digital, the best thing would be for me to have more options. But capitalism always finds a way to fuck everything up.

Talia “no relation” Ryder slips away from a school trip to DC and goes on adventures. Friendly professor Simon Rex offers her a place to stay and she wakes up under a swastika comforter. I think they’re watching the DW Griffith Edgar Allen Poe movie? She gets work on a film shoot, and the next guy to help out (Rish Shah) hides her in a barn so his gun-cult brother doesn’t find out. Ensuing gunfight kills film shoot’s star (Coppola’s Elvis), oops. Watched this after reading Pinkerton’s Bombast issue 2, but first I should’ve watched Hotel des invalides, then a Luc Moullet movie or two (maybe Origins of a Meal and Essai d’ouverture).

Charles Bramesco in LWLies:

A vessel for the views and experiences of those around her, she’s defined by her passivity and vacuity in her tendency to repeat the last thing she heard to the next person she meets. She sits and listens until the vibes sour, then simply walks away.

Adam Nayman’s is the only review I’ve seen to mention The Scary of 61st (and I didn’t even realize one of its lead actors had a cameo in this).

Conceptually, The Sweet East is as rigorously digressive as its author’s (best) film criticism, stringing together relevant references to a host of American iconoclasts and styling each of Lillian’s (mis)adventures as exercises in projection wherein her acquaintances — be they crusty vegan “artivists,” sad-sack domestic terrorists, trendy independent filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri), It Boy movie stars (Jacob Elordi), or Butthole Surfers (a quick visit by Gibby Haynes) — treat the pretty, vacant interloper as a blank canvas for their artistic ambitions and/or sexual desires (and, given the general influence of Lolita, these things are usually implied to be one and the same).

A good-time action-comedy that I could see myself watching a few more times (if not as many times as The Nice Guys) starring our most charismatic action-comedy lead Ryan Gosling as a stunt guy who got injured then set up by his boss (Aaron T-J of Bullet Train and Bad Godzilla) and has to team with his director/ex Emily Blunt (of Edge of Tomorrow, which it’s past time to rewatch) and stunt coordinator Winston Duke (Us, ditto) to clear his name and stop the real criminals by harnessing all their movie-stunt skills and trickery.

A film about a Palestinian filmmaker leaving home, traveling to meet with producers, who don’t understand his film (“not Palestinian enough”), returning home. Includes a highly relatable bird scene. Don’t know if it meant much of anything but I get positive vibes from Suleiman’s scene composition and onscreen persona, need to watch more of these.

A pure info-dump doc – I took no pleasure in watching, though I instantly flagged the narrator as Jodie Foster. Very busy visuals, the audio chopped half to death. I noted one interview with especially yucky sound editing: Pamela Green… the movie’s own director! Just re-record! Motion graphics, desktop cinema stuff and zoom calls. I learned what I needed to know about Alice, anyway – she hired both Lois Weber and Louis Feuillade. She had her own studio until Edison’s patent racket drove the filmmaking world from NJ to CA. Studio fire, divorce, and investment problems all hit at once in 1918, ending her cinema career. Gotta give it up for the outstanding location scout sequence where they superimpose her films onto their present day locations, and good work weaving her post-career 1920s-40s correspondences with the filmmaker digging up a 1957 interview.

Then I attempted to enjoy some Alice Guy films…


Falling Leaves (1912)

String music by Tamar Muskal was far more engaging than the movie, a standard-looking drama with its one famous plot point, young girl tying leaves onto the trees after hearing her sister will be dead of consumption before the leaves have fallen. A passerby sees this behavior and announces the following.


Cupid and the Comet (1911)

A silly crossdressing comedy, everyone gesticulating wildly. The doc got its title from Alice Guy’s studio motto: “Be Natural” – but there’s none of that here.


The Consequences of Feminism (1906)

Comedy portraying a woke society where women hang out and drink and are sexual predators while the men iron and watch the children and make themselves pretty. Big modern music by Max Knoth, I liked it.


A Story Well Spun (1906)

Dude crawls into a barrel and a prankster pushes it downhill, causing much chaos. Later remade as 2000 Maniacs. Hope the editor got in trouble for leaving in those couple frames of the stagehand crouching behind the barrel.


On the Barricade (1907)

The barricade doesn’t hold for two seconds before the military run right over it and execute its constructors. Some kid who excitedly joined the battle claims he’s not a combatant, the soldiers let him go home, then he guiltily returns ands demands to be executed, but his mom protests and he’s spared a second time, how embarrassing. Somewhat shorter than the other movie I’ve seen about the Paris Commune.

Franz breaks up his marriage to Ben because he’s fallen for Adele. Ben starts going with Erwan, Franz wants to get to get Ben back while keeping Adele. Everyone gets sick of Franz’s shit and he ends up alone. A typical love triangle story, only set apart by the unusually hot leads and strong use of Franz’s nude thrusting ass and his ridiculous wardrobe.

The only screenshot I took was the music credits… which song was I looking for? Brendanowicz says it’s “the best designed/lit/composed/colored film I’ve seen all year, but I didn’t find it very interesting,” so maybe Laura Citarella should write a movie for Ira Sachs to shoot.

Shot (digitally) with major grain, in Savannah/Tybee. Natalie Portman comes to visit the scandal-couple to prep for a role, portraying criminal wife/mom Julianne Moore. Portman learns how to wear the makeup and do the lisping voice, and seduce Charles Melton, and that might be all she learned.