by ·Comments Off on Demons 2 (1986, Lamberto Bava)

Sally dances to Morrissey then goes to her room to watch horror movies alone during her own birthday party, relatable. She finds a TV movie about other young people uncovering demons (some idiot hellraisers a dead demon by bleeding into its open mouth) – but this is not the movie Demons. Then a demon videodromes through the TV, demonogrifies her, and she murders all her party guests then… melts(?), and her cursed acid blood plays hell on the apartment building below. Everyone acts like they’re the character in a TV commercial who needs a miracle product to perform a simple task, and no miracles are here, just the manic unstoppable demons of an Evil Dead movie.

Movie is properly disgusting – a demon child breaks into a woman’s apartment then convulses as an Audrey II-mouthed rubber alien bursts out of his chest and chases the woman around until defeated by a murphy bed. There’s an elevator shaft escape, an ineffectual parking garage showdown, and the hetero couple ends up at a quirky movie theater TV studio (which is maybe supposed to evoke the movie theater of Demons 1 but really only reminded me of Scanners 3). Among the doomed women is Asia Argento. Half the crew followed this with Dario Argento’s Opera and prospered, the other half made Graveyard Disturbance and did not. Speaking of Opera, I wrote “Argento characters never behaving like actual humans makes the movies more phantasmagorical,” and that’s sure true of the dialogue here – but I’ve never been to Italy, and what if the people there are really like this?

Hetero couple triumphant:

by ·Comments Off on Happy as Lazzaro (2018, Alice Rohrwacher)

Innocent Lazzaro works on an illegal tobacco farm slave plantation, and while his young master is enlisting him in a kidnapping extortion scheme, the others are being discovered by authorities and freed into the real world. Laz falls down a mountain and wakes up years later (unaged and part-wolf) to find his old friends.

by ·Comments Off on Pinocchio (2022, del Toro & Gustafson)

After Don’t Look Now and The Church, I’m on edge when there’s an artist on scaffolding in a movie. Pinocchio (the puppet) is a real horror, created in a drunken rage. Fascists insist that P go to school, but carnie Christoph Waltz wants to kidnap him into the circus instead.

When you are being puppeted by a monkey:

The technical “perfection” doesn’t work in the movie’s favor – it doesn’t look handmade, but composited. Feels like the voices are on one plane, visuals on another, and they are not in unison. At least Waltz (who cannot pronounce Italian names) is having a flamboyantly good time. And have I mentioned it’s a musical for children?

Have I mentioned Pinocchio is Jesus Christ:

When you meet Dragon Cate Blanchett in the afterlife:

–
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964, Larry Roemer)

I had never seen this before, at least not in living memory. Mildly distressing to discover it has better songs, better voice acting, and better stop-motion than the Guillermo. Nobody ever talks about the team’s follow-up, a James Cagney Smokey the Bear movie.

by ·Comments Off on Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974, Francesco Barilli)

Silvia runs a lab of brightly colored liquids in bubbly beakers, and in the evenings she alienates her boyfriend then has traumatic flashbacks to the time she saw her mom having sex with some guy. Paura all around. You gotta watch at least one nonsensical Italian movie per shocktober.

Finally something happens: friend Francesca shows up dead in the tub. “They said the water must’ve been too hot… her heart couldn’t handle it.” Then Silvia splits in two, her adult and child selves having a conversation like the poster of The Tale. Young Self kills the neighbor’s cat, Older Self kills the neighbor. They murder a few more sexual harassers, and all seems to be going well, then Young Self pushes them off a roof, leading to a culty final scene where the men she’d killed gather around her body and eat her guts.

Barilli also made Hotel Fear (Pensione paura), his cowriter worked on Who Saw Her Die?, and the DP shot the Carmelo Bene movies and Padre Padrone. Older Self is Four Flies star Mimsy Farmer, and oh no, Young Self grew up to star in Ghosthouse.

Follow the trail to the titular perfume:

by ·Comments Off on Caro Diario (1993, Nanni Moretti)

Eclectic mix of good songs on the soundtrack, which is fortunate since we’re mostly following him tool around in his vespa and listening to music. It’s very False/True: half the movie is him/us just viewing the Italian scenery from the bike, but he finds time to stop for silliness (he gets insulted by Jennifer Beals, funny bit at Stromboli asking american tourists about soap opera developments). Moretti thinks he can literally coast through an entire feature on scenery, music and charm – and he’s right. Rosenbaum

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of King Crab (2021, Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)

Gorgeous movie, multipart flashbacking story of drunk beardy Luciano, who gets very angry when the Prince locks a gate used by the shepherds, and burns down a building not knowing that his girl was inside. Later (Jay: “effectively morphing into a Western, like some lost Monte Hellman film as imagined by Lisandro Alonso”) he’s a false priest enlisted by pirates to find hidden gold in Tierra del Fuego with the help of a crab.

Maria Alexandra Lungu, star of The Wonders:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

The film’s very methodology implicitly questions the reliability of narrators and highlights the selective hearing of audiences; what is made clear is that we all contribute to the shape of the stories we tell. Somewhere amid the din of the elders’ conflicting or consenting voices, a narrative of questionable veracity is cobbled together that the film then proceeds to visualize. By revisiting the scenes from which the elders’ unofficial chronicle emanates, de Righi and Zoppis pry open the causal effects of narrative and reveal its mercurial mythmaking.

by ·Comments Off on Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII (1972/74, Adrian Maben)

Live for no audience, the original pandemic livestream. The editing is out of control – there’s more picture-in-picture and rotoscoping than you would imagine, or desire. It’s lovely to see some pure uncut source material that inspired This Is Spinal Tap, the restoration is beautiful, and it all builds to the band’s improv blues song with a dog on guest vocals. Guess this was released as an hour-long concert film then they added 20 minutes of pre-Dark Side interview junk a year later, including a regrettable scene where Wright(?) gets defensive about the band running their technology and not vice-versa like some people say.

by ·Comments Off on The Great Silence (1968, Sergio Corbucci)

This one’s your standard sort of mysterious-stranger spaghetti-western with a few twists. Firstly, it’s a white western, snowbound like Track of the Cat (and moving around in the snow can go slowly, so you’ve gotta undercrank your movie a little). Hero Jean-Louis Trintignant (just before Maud’s and Conformist) is mute, hence the title. Then you’ve got a killer “Tigrero” who is always calm and polite, so they cast “Loco” Klaus Kinski (the spoken words and subtitles don’t always agree). The biggest twist for me is the ending, as the villains (corrupt bounty hunters) kill the sheriff, the hero, his girl, then all the families he was trying to protect.

The girl was much later in To Sleep with Anger:

L-R: corrupt Pollicut (a Bay of Bloodsman), the sheriff of Salvatore Giuliano, jailed Kinski

by ·Comments Off on Il Posto (1961, Ermanno Olmi)

Aka The Job, I watched this to see what it must be like to have a job (it sucks). Older brother goes to Milan to find work so maybe his little bro will be able to stay in school. First you gotta pass the interview, which seems to be one easy math problem, then a physical, which weeds out the desperate old guys. Then you’re mercifully given a post with nothing to do as a delivery boy’s assistant, and eventually a desk, along the way attending the saddest company holiday party ever, and attempting to connect with a hot girl who’s also the only person around your age.

After work:

Forgot I’d already seen something by Olmi – he did the best segment of Tickets. This was gloriously shot, a poetic upgrade to the early neorealists. Per Lawrence: “A collection of brilliant moments, some fleeting and improvised, others punchy and precise, fused together with an outlook at once generous and satirical”

Desk anxiety:

Kent Jones:

To say that Olmi identifies with Domenico, the young hero of Il Posto on the verge of a “job for life,” is to put it mildly. The pull of his narrative is fitted to Domenico’s inner turmoil, his curiosity and his romantic longing, like two pieces of wood joined by an expert carpenter. Even the lovely section in which the story veers off course to examine the private lives of Domenico’s future office mates (there are oddly similar tangents in Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us and Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, made around the same time) feels like an illumination of Domenico’s own perceptions: these hushed vignettes represent the lay of the adult land, as well as a set of possible futures.