by ·Comments Off on Holy Smoke (1999, Jane Campion)

A good bird movie, with emus and cockatoos and budgies. Kate Winslet falls in with guru Baba and decides to stay in India, so her parents trick her into returning home and hire cult deprogrammer Harvey Keitel. But he lacks his required assistant and fucks up the assignment – the sight of Kate nude leads to a fully degraded Harvey selling out his whole plan. Keitel in the Emil Jannings tradition, a master of playing an apparent tough guy who becomes a blubbering mess. When his would-be assistant does arrive it’s Pam Grier, who I just saw in Ghosts of Mars.

L-R: Kate, Cockatoo

L-R: Robbie (Chopper), Yvonne (Muriel’s Wedding), Tim (Farscape)

Harvey, tough as nails, uncorruptable:

Ah, well, nevertheless…

by ·Comments Off on The Music Room (1958, Satyajit Ray)

Movie about an unemployed homeowner who burns through his savings to watch live music – I cannot relate. Spends a fortune inviting musicians to play living room shows, and throwing parties to one-up the neighbors. Insists his family come back from an overseas trip to attend, then they die in a cyclone, so he spends four years in mourning/seclusion. When neighbor Gangapada Basu comes to invite him to a show at his own house, our guy Roy (Chhabi Biswas, also of Devi) suddenly reopens his own house, hires away the neighbor’s musician and steals his party. Roy gets to gloat one last time with the remains of his fortune, then having lived the dream, dies suddenly.

The song and dance scenes are especially good – here’s beardy Ujir Khan guy getting jazzy:

Roy smoking with the neighbor on his last day alive:

by ·Comments Off on True/False Impossible Shorts

Ben LaMar Gay opened, solo with recorder, conch, mini gong, rattles and drones. The cornet was by his side but he didn’t feel inspired to pick it up, or miscalculated how much time he’d get. Q&A after, with Lynne Sachs and team giving context on their piece, and the Two Sun director all alone.

Amma ki katha (Nehal Vyas)
Four stories/myths/dreams/histories told by the elephants holding up the world. Mythic and symbolic about India in ways I didn’t usually follow. Some paper animation, a high-school play, some mothlighting. Didn’t see any of this coming after the simple hair-braiding intro.

The Sketch (Tomas Cali)
The speaker is new in Paris, learning to draw. He connects with a trans life model, represented with different drawing styles and also nude/real, the protag visually sketchy until self-realizing at the end. Better than it sounds.

Four Holes (Daniela Muñoz Barroso)
After a half hour of serious metaphor, this one’s comically-presented camera tech issues brought down the house. DIY solo golfer and filmmaker both have hearing issues, hanging out, playing with her sound equipment together.

Two Sun (Blair Barnes)
Dense in language, speech, music, and edit, but light in tone. A poet friend of the filmmaker’s puts on a fashion show for the camera and shares deep thoughts.

Contractions (Lynne Sachs)
Performers with hidden faces in the parking lot outside a former (due to repressive new laws) abortion clinic in Memphis, voiceover of clinic workers’ experiences, fears, and thoughts on the current situation. Artfully done, lovely.

by ·Comments Off on Mahanagar/The Big City (1963, Satyajit Ray)

Madhabi “Charulata” Mukherjee is the wife of banker Anil Chatterjee (The Cloud-Capped Star). They’re barely making ends meet, supporting kids and parents, so she gets a sales job. Grandpa would rather guilt his former students into buying him favors than accept lady-money, but after Anil’s bank goes under, Madhabi gets promoted and becomes the sole breadwinner. Without anything to do all day, Anil suspiciously follows his wife around. Ultimately she’s too principled to be a capitalist, and quits in solidarity with one of her coworkers. An obvious sort of social issues drama, but with a very excellent performance by Mukherjee at its center.

Written as a follow-up to Pather Panchali (and set in 1954) but not produced for eight more years.

Chandak Sengoopta for Criterion:

The Big City was awarded the Silver Bear for best direction at the Berlin Film Festival in 1964, but it was at a festival nearer home that it had its greatest impact. When screened during a 1964 international film season in Dhaka (the capital of Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, now Bangladesh), enormous crowds, including thousands of women, queued for tickets for the three scheduled shows. The lack of seats precipitated a mini riot, and after more than a hundred people were beaten up by the police, the festival organizers were forced to schedule ten extra shows, running consecutively over twenty-four hours.

by ·Comments Off on RRR (2022, S.S. Rajamouli)

The moviest movie ever made, featuring the two most insanely talented and indestructible guys of all time. They are enemies due to circumstances and misunderstandings, but also they are best friends. Along the way is a surprising amount of brutality (Brits call a young girl’s mom “brown rubbish” then execute her, cop Ram is ordered to publicly torture his buddy Bheem) and joy (dance-fighting, an amazing CG-animals setpiece) and really good music. I accidentally watched the Hindi version and not the original Telugu, so I will simply have to watch this again.

by ·Comments Off on That Cloud Never Left (2019, Yashaswini Raghunandan)

I took no notes on this one, and am starting to forget it, but I take exception to the stills and description playing up the connection to recycled Bollywood film reels, incorporated into the toys produced by the village where this film is set, and into the film itself in quick colorful segments, since this accounts for about a minute of the runtime. Besides producing toys, they prepare for an eclipse, and make a sort of viewing tower. Lovely to sit in Big Ragtag again, beer in hand, happy flashbacks to The Grand Bizarre and Distant Constellation. James Tillman opened, on keyboard, guitar, and dying laptop.

Denoise (2017, Giorgio Ferrero & Federico Biasin)

After the feature, we finally visited the VR-cade, dodged the Kevin Lee thing about terrorist propaganda, and slipped into the dark room where I got randomly assigned this experience, a 360+ degree but position-locked, fixed-duration selection of scenes about industrial work. My first-ever VR experience – I was impressed by the overall feel, but not by the resolution of the goggles, which felt not at all like real life, but like a video, sitting too close to the screen. Impressive sensations: after a scene cut, a man on a catwalk talking to me, and I wondered “if he’s on the catwalk where am I,” so I look straight down and I’m hovering in space. Our physical selves are standing in the dark room at retro arcade consoles – I’ve got a steering wheel to orient myself in the real world, and at one point I look down at my hands, expecting to see them grasping a steering wheel, but visually, my hands don’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on Atman (1997, Pirjo Honkasalo)

We picked up a biscuit with butter and jam from a biscuit-focused food truck, stopped at Gunther Hans, then headed to the Globe for a double feature… and there was The River Arkansas again, still good. I believe this was a new restoration – shockingly clear photography with lots of close-ups. Journey film with slightly confusing storyline, though it seems like it should’ve been straightforward, intertitles explaining each phase. Katy is concerned with shooting India as an outsider, not understanding the Hindu rituals or family dynamics. I don’t know what anyone else thinks, since this was missing from letterboxd until now, but the Finnish director was present to tell horror stories of the difficulty of filming (or maybe I read that in the Neither/Nor book afterwards, I forget).

by ·Comments Off on Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts 2018

Black Sheep (Ed Perkins)

A true/falsey one, with interviews and re-enactments shot in the neighborhood where the story takes place. A British kid is moved into the countryside by his African-born parents where he encounters life-threatening racism and adapts by bleaching his skin, making friends with his tormentors and becoming one of them.

End Game (Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman)

The best of the bunch, focused on patients in varying states of mobility with varying family situations, all with terminal illnesses and only weeks or months to live. This is San Francisco, and the terminal patients are given palliative care (treating only the pain, since the symptoms are determined to be incurable) and told to make their peace. It’s a movie, so you know one of them is gonna beat the odds – they don’t. The directors are old-school – Epstein made The Times of Harvey Milk, and Friedman collaborated with him on The Celluloid Closet, Paragraph 175, and a Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfried.

A Night at the Garden (Marshall Curry)

Stock footage of a well-attended 1939 pro-nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. The movie gives little context, just plays around with slow-motion, inviting us to research the rest, so here goes. As I’m writing this, yesterday was the event’s 80th anniversary, and a few days ago the film was projected onto the side of MSG. The man rushing the stage was a Jewish plumber named Isadore Greenbaum, and the speaker was the German-born Fritz Kuhn, leader of a Hitler-worshipping group called the Bund. In the aftermath, Greenbaum was ordered to pay a $25 fine for causing a disturbance. Kuhn was investigated for stealing from his own organization, arrested at the end of ’39, and would spend the rest of his life in various prisons. Curry previously made a Cory Booker doc, a kart-racing doc, and a look inside the Earth Liberation Front.

Lifeboat (Skye Fitzgerald)

Following the (late) captain of a German rescue boat that tries to pick up Libyan refugees from their leaky lifeboats. Spends a couple minutes “putting a human face on the global refugee crisis” by interviewing rescued Libyans, the rest of the time on rescue operations with the crew, and reminds you that the world is completely horrible. Katy said it reminded her of Fire at Sea, which is not a good thing. The director works regularly on issues docs – acid attacks on women, unexploded landmines in Cambodia, the Syrian civil war, and a new one on gun violence.

Period. End of Sentence. (Rayka Zehtabchi)

After the racism, death, nazis and desperation, it was lovely to end on this story of community women outside Delhi working to manufacture and distribute sanitary pads. Much fun is had discussing the forbidden topic of menstruation, and they have dreams of conquering the country and improving women’s lives, but I became annoyed upon realizing that the movie is an advertisement. A feature came out the same year on the same topic, called Padman.

by ·Comments Off on The Lunchbox (2013, Ritesh Batra)

Two people with dissatisfying home lives meet via lunchbox misdelivery. The delivery service won’t correct the error because they insist their system is flawless, so the two communicate via lunch notes, while he (Irrfan Khan of The Namesake) deals with an overeager and underskilled accounting subordinate, and she (Nimrat Kaur of sci-fi series Wayward Pines) deals with an extremely inattentive husband. Heads in the obvious direction, but Khan is more crotchety than expected and the movie overall more finely made. The story didn’t linger in my mind after watching, but every minute of the movie was enjoyable, so it’s an Indian food-romance John Wick. Batra’s follow-ups were the Broadbent/Rampling Sense of an Ending (also about a grumpy old man) and the Redford/Fonda Our Souls at Night (also about lonely strangers making a connection).