by ·Comments Off on Universal Language (2024, Matthew Rankin)

“Isn’t this the same movie you watched last night,” said K when I put on Where Is The Friend’s House the night after this. Besides a couple of distinct Friend’s House references (the dickhead teacher in the opening scene, the guy inside a tree) I’m pretty sure there was some White Balloon (finding tools to retrieve money from under the street). An extremely specific kind of weird thing, in which the director plays “himself” as both a Canadian and Iranian, and his selves and cities swap and merge. Of course I love it.

Mouseover for the reverse angle:
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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 A Different Man (2024, Aaron Schimberg)

Watched this because I wondered if it had the same plot as The Substance – not really! Sebastian Stan is an Adam Pearson-looking pathetic guy with a tentative friendship with hot playwright neighbor Renate Reinsve, then gets revolutionary medical treatment causing him to look like Sebastian Stan, changes his job and identity, then tries to get cast as his former self in the play Renate wrote about her ex-neighbor’s life. This is going fine for Stan until the real Adam Pearson shows up oozing charisma and steals his role and his girl. Plot hole: Renate doesn’t recognize Adam despite having a Chained For Life poster in her living room.

by ·Comments Off on The Substance (2024, Coralie Fargeat)

Dumb Mulholland Drive. Even more gleefully artificial than I Saw the TV Glow, its length allows more emphasis and repetition than is really needed – I keep remembering how much Body Melt accomplished in 80 minutes, while after all the buildup, only a couple bodies melt in this one.

After Demi is fired from a TV network for being too old, she gets the inside scoop on the substance, which creates a younger you from the current you, and the two yous alternate weeks of consciousness. Her first day as Qualley she gets her old job back from squishy boss Dennis Quaid, then Demi wastes her own weeks eating junk food in her apartment, then the second week she starts stealing extra youth time, which causes Demi to age rapidly/erratically. It’s a huge problem that neither of them has self control. They start videodroming (Q pulls a chicken leg out of her bellybutton) then body-melting (Q gets the idea to substance herself, then drops a boob out her eyehole on live TV).

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

I’ve been biased against this movie since it first came out on video. At Georgia Tech anime kids would follow you around talking about anime, even if you don’t care about anime, as I did not, and Perfect Blue was their idea of a movie which would instantly convince the doubters. Nowadays I like anime just fine, including Satoshi Kon, whose Millennium Actress was good, and Paranoia Agent was incredible, so I finally gave this a chance. If anyone from Tech is reading… I’m sorry… I’m glad y’all have got your own Anime Fight Club, with its multiple-multiple personalities and identity twists and breakbeat soundtrack, but it’s not for me.

The words every girl wants to hear:

I can relate:

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

OK, boobs, I get it, we all love boobs. The most 1995 thing I’ve ever seen. The only thing I remembered from the VHS is that shot where the cyborg supersoldier pulls something so hard her arms come off, and it’s still the coolest thing here by far (the invisibility-suit effects also nice).

Android moral quandaries ripped from Robocop. It’s so talky in a self-important sci-fi cop-show way, but all this chatter is background noise to the actual plot (reminisce: Nemesis), which leads to a Lawnmower Man ending. The writer worked on Pistol Opera, which needs to come out on blu-ray.

This is who comes for you if you haven’t turned on multifactor authentication:

Jake Cole:

This really isn’t a thriller because the sporadic action merely punctuates a story that uses nearly every plot element as a macguffin to ruminate on the nature of identity and how technology alters our perception of self. The finale, in which a cyborg evolves to propagate itself, recasts the internet and global networking as the next stage of reproduction.

Adding this line to my resume:

by ·Comments Off on She Is Conann (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Elina Löwensohn plays a dog in this one.

Some kind of framing story gives an excuse to recount Conan the Barbarian’s life.

I prepared for this, but not enough.

Each time Conann ages into a new actor, she kills her previous self.

I think maybe Ultra Lux kills everyone at the end?

The Mandico Connected Universe continues to pay great rewards.

She’s giving Toby Dammit vibes:

by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on The Real Presence (1984, Raoul Ruiz)

Rivettian by his own confession, it’s an AI universe-is-simulation all-is-theater sort of movie. Only an hour long, I intended it as another Ruiz double feature with Life is a Dream, but it was too heady and intense and I had to put on something more straightforward afterwards.

The traitor-foot blind man in my Three Crowns screenshots was the star here, playing an actor who sees himself on video saying things he never said. Timely – Q: “Does this mean we will never get paid for the scenes we filmed where our real presence could be reasonably put to doubt?” – A: “If we paid you, we would have to admit the real existence of possible worlds.” He talks to the programmer (who is creating photorealistic AI on an Apple II), then visits another actor to discuss the situation, then attempts suicide. Then we fall into a vortex of different realities, confusing characters, acting/theater metaphors and layers. “He understands that the dream that was haunting him for years was only a theatrical performance.”