by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2021/2025

It’s the seventh annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five* years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

*Oops, there was a global pandemic in 2020, so we’re switching things up this time. Skipping ahead to the 2021 selections, also looking through this year’s fest and seeing if there are any 2025 programmed directors whose earlier works I’ve been meaning to watch, or any 2025 Histoire(s)/Retrospective films I can catch up with.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d otherwise seen, unlinked are items of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Played Locarno 2021:

The Sadness (Robert Jabbaz)
Little Solange (Axelle Ropert)
She Will (Charlotte Colbert)
Mad God (Phil Tippett)
Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi)
The Case Of The Vanishing Gods (Ross Lipman)
From the Planet of the Humans (Giovanni Cioni)
The Balcony Movie (Pawel Lozinski)
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Edwin)
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico)
A New Old Play (Qiu Jiongjiong)
Medea (Aleksandr Zeldovich)
The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara)
Luzifer (Peter Brunner)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé)
Lynx (Laurent Geslin)
Brotherhood (Francesco Montagner)
Actual People (Kit Zauhar)

2025 Filmmakers:

Joachim Trier
Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis (The Tale of King Crab)
Jafar Panahi
Radu Jude
Alexandre Koberidze
Dane Komljen
Ben Rivers
Abbas Fahdel
Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter (Space Dogs)
Kamal Aljafari
Sophy Romvari (Pumpkin Movie +2)
Radu Muntean
Lemohang Mosese
Park Sye-young (Fifth Thoracic Vertebra)
Julian Radlmaier

2025 Retrospectives:

Project A (1983)
A Diary for Timothy (1945)
The Stranger Left No Card (1952)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021)
Nebraska (2013)
The Descendants (2011)
L’Atalante (1934)
Anno Uno (1974)
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Silent Light (2007)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
Hell Drivers (1957)
Night and the City (1950)
Obsession (1948)
Odd Man Out (1947)
The Passionate Friends (1949)
Peeping Tom (1960)
A Portrait of Ga (1952)
The Shining (1980)
Time Without Pity (1957)

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 51-100

That’s the first hundred now.
A good batch, came out summer 1999 to summer 2001.

Movies I’ve written up here, roughly ranked:

Do The Right Thing
Vagabond
Brazil
For All Mankind
Black Narcissus
Cleo From 5 to 7
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Blood of a Poet
Written on the Wind
Kwaidan
I Know Where I’m Going!
Orpheus
Sisters
L’Avventura
Peeping Tom
Autumn Sonata
The 39 Steps
Sanjuro
Alexander Nevsky
Good Morning
Brief Encounter
Variety Lights
W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films
Testament of Orpheus
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Pygmalion
The Harder They Come
The Bank Dick
And God Created Woman
The Blob
Hamlet
The Night Porter
The Magic Flute

Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Ivan The Terrible, Parts 1 & 2
Charade
Yojimbo
The Element of Crime
All That Heaven Allows
The Last Temptation of Christ
Fiend Without a Face
Rushmore
The Life of Brian
Le Million
The Third Man
Carnival of Souls
Beastie Boys Anthology
Gimme Shelter
Chasing Amy

Bonus Features:

Good Morning includes the equally great feature I Was Born, But… and extras by three of the greats (Rosenbaum, Cairns, Bordwell)

Back in my Gilliam-obsessive days I watched every cut of Brazil, saw all the extras, read the Jack Mathews book, and played at least one of those Life of Brian commentaries.

Enjoyed the 39 Steps commentary on a plane. Rented the OG disc of Carnival of Souls and dutifully watched all the industrial shorts. Seen everything on The Third Man and Rushmore. Didn’t love The Blob commentary, and don’t recall if I heard the Fiend Without a Face.

Ate up the Varda extras, which include the shorts The Story of an Old Lady and the very great L’Opera Mouffe.

I’ve probably seen quite enough about Powell and Pressburger by now, but Return to the Edge of the World was great and I wouldn’t mind catching the Mark Cousins doc.

Should go through the For All Mankind and Kurosawa extras sometime. Sirk too, though I recently saw Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, included on the All That Heaven Allows disc.

Bought Autumn Sonata but probably won’t ever get to the extended making-of features, and definitely won’t revisit the Magic Flute doc – the Fanny & Alexander extras look more enticing.

I have a feeling the Women of the Resistance doc will be more interesting than The Night Porter. The David Lean doc might be good. Watched the Lars Tranceformer doc back in the day and didn’t love it, but the other Element of Crime features look intriguing.

Love Cocteau’s Villa Santo Sospir, not sure how I missed the Edgardo Cozarinsky documentary.

Got the Eisenstein box and went through it all, but the Ivans need revisiting and we really need a Nevsky reissue with properly-recorded orchestral score.

Watched everything I could find on Do The Right Thing and read Spike’s making-of book which is even better than the audio/video extras.

Did watch the L’Avventura doc and commentary, while trying to understand what art cinema is – an experience I’d recommend to anyone.

Beastie Boys Anthology remains the most well-authored DVD I ever bought.

If western civilization survives long enough I’ll probably explore the next fifty – got ten left to watch, including some (Shinoda, the Czechs) I really want to see, and I’ve already got the annoying ones out of the way (Ruling Class, The Hidden Fortress).

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: True/False 2017-2024

True/False Fest is happening now and we are skipping it for budgetary reasons. We discovered the fest in 2017 and faithfully attended (virtually in 2021) for eight years, with all the t-shirts and posters to prove it. Sure, I complained about the quality of films the last couple years and started making alternative “False/True” lists of movies that should’ve played the fest, but we’re always happy to be there in packed theaters, applauding movies destined for streaming which will never be seen on the big screen again, with their directors present for intros and Q&As, grabbing beers and pierogis and talking about pictures and stories instead of our regular lives for one long weekend. We’ll try to think of something to replace it this year, but in the meantime here’s a roundup of those years (not counting shorts, since this is already long enough).

2017:

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Brimstone & Glory
Casting JonBenet
Communion
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Dina
Distant Constellation
Donkeyote
Gulistan, Land of Roses
HyperNormalization
I Am Not Your Negro
Lindy Lou, Juror Number 2
Long Strange Trip
LoveTrue
Manifesto
Mimi (2003)
Quest
Rat Film
Step
Still Tomorrow
Stranger in Paradise
Strong Island
The Challenge
The Graduation
The Grown-Ups
The Road Movie
Venus
Whose Streets?
* Austerlitz
* Dawson City: Frozen Time
* Escapes
* Fire at Sea

2018:

Adriana’s Pact
America
American Animals
Bisbee ’17
Black Mother
Caniba
Combat Obscura
Crime + Punishment
Gabriel and the Mountain
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Handsworth Songs (1987)
Kinshasa Makambo
La Flor de la Vida
Lovers of the Night
Makala
The Next Guardian
Of Fathers and Sons
Primas
Shakedown
Shirkers
Taming the Horse
The Task
Testament (1988)
The Family
The Rider
Three Identical Strangers
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
* Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
* Faces Places
* Infinite Football
* Narcissister Organ Player
* A River Below
* Wormwood

2019:

Amazing Grace
American Factory
Apollo 11
Atman (1997)
Caballerango
Chinese Portrait
Cold Case Hammarskjöld
Finding Frances
The Game
The Grand Bizarre
The Hottest August
Island of the Hungry Ghosts
The Magic Life of V
Midnight Traveler
Mike Wallace is Here
Mr. Soul!
Now Something Is Slowly Changing
One Child Nation
Segunda Vez
Tanjuska and the 7 Devils (1993)
Treasure Island
Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary
Up the Mountain
* Aquarela
* Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
* Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
* What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?

2020:

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
Boys State
Catskin
Collective
Crestone
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Dope is Death
The Faculties
The Giverny Document
Malni, towards the ocean, towards the shore
The Metamorphosis of Birds
The Mole Agent
Ridge
So Late So Soon
Some Kind of Heaven
Still/Here (2001)
Talking About Trees
That Cloud Never Left
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
Time
The Viewing Booth
* The American Sector
* Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
* In Transit (2015)
* Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
* This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth
* The Truffle Hunters

2021:

All Light, Everywhere
Delphine’s Prayers
Faya Dayi
From the Wild Sea
The Grocer’s Son, the Mayor, the Village and the World
No Kings
Rock Bottom Riser
Songs that Flood the River
Summer of Soul
The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman
This Rain Will Never Stop
Users
* Can’t Get You Out of My Head
* Gunda
* Her Socialist Smile
* In the Same Breath
* A Man and A Camera
* The Mole: Undercover in North Korea
* Radiograph of a Family
* Terra Femme
* Town Bloody Hall (1979)

2022:

2nd Chance
After Sherman
The Balcony Movie
Brotherhood
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)
Children of the Mist
Dos Estaciones
Eventually
Fire of Love
I Didn’t See You There
It Runs in the Family
Last Days of August
Mija
No U-Turn
Octopus
Riotsville, U.S.A.
Sirens
The Territory
We Met in Virtual Reality
Where Are We Headed?
* Burial
* Il Buco
* Language of Birds
* Mutzenbacher
* Procession
* Rewind & Play
* Taming the Garden
* Topology of Sirens
* The United States of America

2023:

Anhell69
Art Talent Show
Bad Press
Bobi Wine
Crossing Voices
Dogwatch
Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Forms of Forgetting
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Going Varsity in Mariachi
Hummingbirds
Last Things
Milisuthando
A Moment of Innocence (1996)
Moosa Lane
Our Body
Ramona
Three Women
Time Bomb Y2K
* All That Breathes
* The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft
* Reality
* Subject
* The Tuba Thieves

2024:

Agent of Happiness
Alien Island
As the Tide Comes In
Daughters
Girls State
Gwetto
Ibelin
Look Into My Eyes
Magic Mountain
The Other Profile
A Photographic Memory
Spermworld
Sr
There Was, There Was Not
Three Promises
Union
* Dahomey
* Flipside
* Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
* The Night Visitors
* Pictures of Ghosts
* Ren Faire

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2019/2024

It’s the sixth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

South Terminal (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
The Science of Fictions (Yosep Anggi Noen)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
Technoboss (João Nicolau)
Twelve Thousand (Nadège Trébal)
Isadora’s Children (Damien Manivel)
Echo (Rúnar Rúnarsson)
A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler & Henner Winckler)
Maternal (Maura Delpero)
Endless Night (Eloy Enciso)
A Girl Missing (K?ji Fukada)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
Bird Island (Maya Kosa & Sérgio da Costa)
The Tree House (Minh Quý Tr??ng)
Oroslan (Matjaž Ivanišin)
Nafi’s Father (Mamadou Dia)
Overseas (Sung-a Yoon)
Ivana the Terrible (Ivana Mladenovi?)
Here for Life (Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Adrian Jackson)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Adoration (Fabrice Du Welz)
Vagenda Stories (Natascha Beller)

Concorso Shorts

Carne (Camila Kater)
In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)
Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)
White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Giraffe (Anna Sofie Hartmann)
Felix in Wonderland (Marie Losier)
Wilcox (Denis Côté)

Moving Ahead (new forms and innovation)

Krabi, 2562 (Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong)
Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland)
The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary)
Distancing (Miko Revereza)
Lore (Sky Hopinka)
Un film dramatique (Eric Baudelaire)
Tourism Studies (Joshua Gen Solondz)
Color-Blind (Ben Russell)

by ·Comments Off on Differently, Molussia (2012, Nicolas Rey)

Rey’s description: “Prisoners sitting in the pits of an imaginary fascist state, Molussia, transmit one another stories about the outside world like a series of political and philosophical fables.” This was based on fragments of a German novel from the 1930s, written while the author was married to Hannah Arendt. Nine chapters which you can watch in any order – I think my shuffle version worked out nicely.

6. Extremely grainy urban landscapes… modern cube-shaped buildings… the camera sits, then pans, then spins like crazy. Olo and Yegussa discuss circumstances and causes of actions over ocean footage, then we see the narrator at his mic.

5. The camera camps outside factories and industrial buildings. Story of the “displaced rurals” who became “typical city scum.” Some non-narrating people, a woman on her computer, the grain is now big jagged chunks like someone is mothlighting the film with confetti.

2. Ah a grainy shot of a factory, ok. The movie’s techniques seem pointedly primitive, like the silent soundtrack suddenly clicking into static background noise. Olo and friends discuss how peace and health are imperceptible, only war and sickness are noticed.

9. Opens with images of the narrator this time, then quick story of a futile vendetta, then a grainy beach scene. Lot of why-am-i-watching-this imagery in this movie, but also some grain so thick it’s transcendent, and another camera spin – the sky is the ground when you’re upside down.

8. A thunderstorm.

1. Early spinning, on a roadway. Burru wants to be “elected by the vanquished.” Election malfeasance, then all becomes grain.

4. What do they mean by “pariahs”? Story of a dangerous smart person who started proving untruths to impress people.

3. Burru leads his people into bloody war.

7. Good choice for a final chapter, story of a sailor who pre-wrote years of montly postcards to his mother as he lay dying, then she died too, and his friend kept sending the postcards “from the deceased to the deceased.”

–
Better Late Than Never:
Cinema Scope’s Top Movies of 2012
(their picks, my ranking)

Holy Motors
Cosmopolis
Moonrise Kingdom
Room 237
Leviathan
Django Unchained
Barbara
Bestiaire
Viola
Tabu
Neighbouring Sounds
The Master
Last Time I Saw Macao
Differently, Molussia
In Another Country

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2018/2023

It’s the fifth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua)
Hotel by the River (Hong Sangsoo)
La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
A Family Tour (Ying Liang)
Genesis (Philippe Lesage)
Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham)
Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor)
Alice T. (Radu Muntean)
Diane (Kent Jones)
Yara (Abbas Fahdel)
M (Yolande Zauberman)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)
Sophia Antipolis (Virgil Vernier)
A Family Submerged (María Alché)
Dead Horse Nebula (Tarik Aktas)
All Good (Eva Trobisch)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
Blaze (Ethan Hawke)
Birds of Passage (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego)
Ruben Brandt, Collector (Milorad Krstić)
Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)
Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka)
Liberty (Leo McCarey)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)
How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Eugène Green)
A Room with a Coconut View (Tulapop Saenjaroen)
Erased, Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani)
Man in the Well (Hu Bo)
Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Veslemøy’s Song (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
Communion Los Angeles (Peter Bo Rappmund & Adam Levine)
Sedução da Carne (Júlio Bressane)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Narcissister Organ Player (Narcissister)
Acid Forest (RugilÄ— BarzdžiukaitÄ—)

Other Sections and One-Offs

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)
Words, Planets (Laida Lertxundi)
Seymour: an introduction (Ethan Hawke)
L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont)
and a full Leo McCarey retrospective

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2016/2017/2022

It’s the fourth annual* Locorazo Festival, formerly known as LNKarno, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five or six years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

LNKarno-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Main Competition:

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec)
Hermia & Helena (Matías Piñeiro)
Gemini (Aaron Katz)
Good Luck (Ben Russell)
Madame Hyde (Serge Bozon)
The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)
Good Manners (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra)
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Travis Wilkerson)
La Telenovela Errante (Raúl Ruiz & Valéria Sarmiento)
Bangkok Nites (Katsuya Tomita)
Correspondências (Rita Azevedo Gomes)
By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong)
Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude)
Mister Universo (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel)
9 Doigts (F.J. Ossang)
Lucky (John Carroll Lynch)
A Skin So Soft (Denis Côté)
Winter Brothers (Hlynur Pálmason)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Withered Green (Mohammed Hammad)
Those Who Are Fine (Cyril Schäublin)
Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa)
The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams)
The Challenge (Yuri Ancarani)
3/4 (Ilian Metev)
Distant Constellation (Shevaun Mizrahi)
Destruction Babies (Tetsuya Mariko)
El Futuro Perfecto (Nele Wohlatz)
This Time Tomorrow (Lina Rodríguez)
Dark Skull (Kiro Russo)
Le Fort des Fous (Narimane Mari)
Milla (Valerie Massadian)

Critics’ Week (documentary section organized by a swiss film journalist group)

Communion (Anna Zamecka)
Monk of the Sea (Rafal Skalski)
The Family (Rok Biček)
Las Cinéphilas (Maria Alvarez)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)
Good Time (Ben & Joshua Safdie)
I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
Let the Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani)
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet)
The Big Sick (Michael Showalter)
Into the Forest (Gilles Marchand)
I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach)
Moka (Frédéric Mermoud)
The Tunnel (Kim Seong-hun)
The Girl With All The Gifts (Colm McCarthy)
Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (Maria Schrader)
Chien (Samuel Benchetrit)
Tomorrow and Thereafter (Noémie Lvovsky)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

Beduino (Júlio Bressane)
All the Cities of the North (Dane Komljen)
Rat Film (Theo Anthony)
Cocote (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias)
Ouroboros (Basma Alsharif)
Ascent (Fiona Tan)
Pow Wow (Robinson Devor)
The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me (Anka & Wilhelm Sasnal)
In Praise of Nothing (Boris Mitic)
Panoptic (Rana Eid)
Phantasiesätze (Dane Komljen)
Surbiles (Giovanni Columbu)
The Dead Nation (Radu Jude)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

The Reagan Show (Pacho Velez & Sierra Pettengill)
A Young Girl In Her Nineties (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi & Yann Coridian)
Where Is Rocky II? (Pierre Bismuth)
July Tales (Guillaume Brac)
Rise & Fall of a Small Film Company (Jean-Luc Godard)
Prototype (Blake Williams)

Shorts:

Scaffold (Kazik Radwanski)
Plus Ultra (Helena Girón & Samuel M. Delgado)
Cilaos (Camilo Restrepo)
Among the Black Waves (Anna Budanova)
Indefinite Pitch (James N. Kienitz Wilkins)
The Hedonists (Jia Zhang-ke)
The Hunchback (Ben Rivers & Gabriel Abrantes)
Wasteland no. 1: Ardent, Verdant (Jodie Mack)
A Brief History of Princess X (Gabriel Abrantes)
A Train Arrives at the Station (Thom Andersen)
Edge of Alchemy (Stacey Steers)
Arrière-saison (Jean-Claude Rousseau)
Per una rosa (Marco Bellocchio)
Si loin, si proche (Jean-Claude Rousseau)
Rhapsody (Constance Meyer)

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Criterion 01-50

Back in the day there was an urge to watch all the Criterion movies – after all, they’ve got completist-friendly catalog numbers and are self-described as “important.” Now I have lists, and lists of lists, and I don’t need to rely on any one distributor as a gatekeeper of excellence, but there’s still that urge, and I still keep track of what they put out, and subscribe to their streaming service, and believe in the back of my mind that if I was stuck at home for a long time, like say if there was a global pandemic, it’d be fun to watch them all. Early this year I realized I’ve seen almost all of their first 50 releases, so I decided to catch up with the last couple David Lean/Dickens films and some odds and ends.

These were released 1998-1999 before I had a DVD player, but I’d pick one up whenever I saw a sale, ended up owning about ten (or their reissues). 30 have come out on blu, and I’m not gonna count how many on streaming.

–
Movies I’ve written up here, roughly/hastily ranked:

Beauty and the Beast
The Red Shoes
The Seventh Seal
The 400 Blows
Amarcord
Diabolique
Walkabout
Wages of Fear
The Lady Vanishes
Branded To Kill
Nights of Cabiria
Grand Illusion
High and Low
Picnic At Hanging Rock
Alphaville
Summertime
Andrei Rublev
Great Expectations
Oliver Twist
The Most Dangerous Game
And The Ship Sails On
The Long Good Friday
The Killer
Henry V
A Night To Remember
Samurai trilogy
Blood For Dracula

–
Watched in the pre-blog dark days, ranked by how urgently I need to revisit:

Black Orpheus
Tokyo Drifter
Shock Corridor
Seven Samurai
The Naked Kiss
Time Bandits
Flesh For Frankenstein
Dead Ringers
Taste of Cherry
Fishing With John
This Is Spinal Tap
Robocop
Nanook of the North
M
Hard Boiled
The Silence of the Lambs
Sid & Nancy
Lord of the Flies
Insomnia
Armageddon
Salo

–
Bonus Features:

The Lady Vanishes add-on feature Crook’s Tour was decent.

The Steamroller and the Violin is on the Rublev blu.

Peter Weir’s Homesdale was on the Picnic at Hanging Rock reissue.

Haven’t caught most of the M extras or all ten hours of the Seven Samurai features.

I played every single thing on the Seventh Seal reissue, including the Bergman Island doc, not to be confused with the new Mia Hansen-Love feature.

Can’t remember which of the Beauty/Beast commentaries I’ve played, but reading Cocteau’s making-of diaries was enough… I didn’t make it very far into the Philip Glass opera audio option.

Not too interested in the Night to Remember material.

I see the Amarcord disc is full of good stuff and Walkabout has an hour-long David Gulpilil doc.

Even if I go on a John Woo kick, not sure those commentaries would be easy to find anymore (and why is Roger Avary on one?).

Missed the two shorts on the Insomnia disc.

I can’t remember how many of the Fishing With John audio commentaries I’ve heard, but I know I’ve played that Lounge Lizards music video more than a few times.

The new Taste of Cherry blu has a Kiarostami-produced “sketch film” I’d like to see and an A.S. Hamrah essay I just read online, but on the last half-price sale I bought the Koker Trilogy instead.

I remember flipping through The Red Shoes extras one day long ago, didn’t recall there being so much Jeremy Irons participation.

I probably did listen to that Armageddon commentary with Affleck’s infamous Michael Bay impression, and the Time Bandits commentary, but who knows for sure.

The Dead Ringers disc was one of my prize possessions, and I’ve watched that movie a couple times too many.

Haven’t seen the Clouzot doc, and ran out of steam before finishing all the Rublev docs.

I should get the two Sam Fullers for the interviews and TV clips and the Typewriter doc… oh wait, they’re all on streaming, I just saved $40.

Nine left to watch in the 51-100 block, but maybe I’ll mix it up and watch all the 700’s next time, or watch them in reverse order, or never revisit this project again, I dunno.

by ·Comments Off on T/F/ND/NF/ETC 2021

True/False announced their May 2021 plan for outdoor screenings back before we had any idea of vaccine rollout schedules, so we opted for the “Teleported” home experience, which included a giant box of goodies sent to our house. Of the 16 feature selections this year we were only offered 7 – plus the shorts programs, so that’s 11/20. Miffed as I was not to have Summer of Soul as a viewing option, we still did better than the in-person crowds, who could only watch one outdoor screening per night for a maximum of five. But five (or seven) movies in five nights is not how we do True/False – so I also rented multiple titles (including T/F films not included in Teleported) from the concurrently running New Directors/New Films festival and some earlier docs from elsewhere, to curate our own particular festival. The final schedule:

B’s pre-screenings:
Aleph (ND/NF)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (ND/NF)

Tue:
Rock Bottom Riser (T/F via ND/NF)

Wed:
Delphine’s Prayers (T/F)
Coyote Shorts (T/F)

Thu:
Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, from a T/F director)
No Kings (T/F)
Radiograph of a Family (ND/NF)

Fri:
A Thousand Suns (2014 T/F)
Town Bloody Hall (1979)
Songs That Flood the River (T/F)
A So-Called Archive (2020, from a T/F director)

Sat:
From the Wild Sea (T/F)
All Light, Everywhere (T/F via ND/NF)
Now Something is Slowly Changing (2019 T/F)

Sun:
Gunda (2020, from a T/F director)
Faya Dayi (T/F via ND/NF)
The Grocer’s Son (T/F)

Plus four shorts from the other T/F programs.

Did Not Finish:
We / Nous (ND/NF)
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010)

Unwatched T/F:
Dirty Feathers
Homeroom
Inside the Red Brick Wall
Petit Samedi
Sabaya
Summer of Soul
This Rain Will Never Stop
The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman
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