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Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

A Don Hertzfeldt dystopian jukebox musical? This made my heartbeat shift in a weird way. I’m going to try to stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, will revisit at a later date.

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GUO4 (2019, Peter Strickland)

Montage of still photographs set to (good) pounding noise music. Nude male locker room wrestling? Filmed after In Fabric, a time when he was clearly going through some things.

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Notes on Monstropedia (2017, Koji Yamamura)

I think it’s Edward Gorey with some Adult Swim thrown in, and inexplicable harpsichord music – either the combo isn’t working or the translation is off or it’s just not clever enough. A lesser work from the Mt. Head / Country Doctor animator.

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The Curse of Dracular (2023, Jack Paterson)

Cute claymation retelling of the British Dracula movies as written by the director’s dad when he was nine. Worth it for the ending, when a five year-old says “don’t like you” and kills Dracular easily.

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The Tell-Tale Heart (2008, Robert Eggers)

Ornate live-action movie with stop-motion tendencies, maybe Quay-inspired, and the rich old man played by a muppet. This movie loves clocks, and it’s right, clocks are cool. Shocking to hear spoken dialogue for the first time three-quarters through the film. The actual heartbeat part is very short, this guy is driven mad pretty easily. What is this “inspired by” credit when it’s a straight adaptation?

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The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence (2015, Tilman Singer)

In a similar secluded fancy euro-house to the Cuckoo home, tennis girl opens a package unleashing a self-expanding white balloon that consumes everything. Everything I watch this weekend reminds me of The Prisoner. I don’t know that this was “any good” or “made sense” but it is fun to make and watch movies.

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The House of the Plague (1979, Zlatko Pavlinic)

The plague is personified as a purple-eyed woman in mummy bandages. This is animation in a loose sense, drawings cross-faded. A woman coming home into town gets blackmailed into bringing the plague along. The plague-process images are cool but the movie’s main stylistic triumph is the rhyming (in Croatian) roboticized narrator.

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Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Tomonari Nishikawa)

I’m glad this rhythmically edited montage of fireworks with a garbage soundtrack brought joy to the avant-garde cinephiles last year. Fireworks are cool, it’s true.

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Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (2007, Koji Yamamura)

Yamamura made Mt. Head, which I saw a bunch of times when it came out and now don’t remember so well anymore. When a choir starts narrating in song it is clear that this isn’t a great Kafka story adaptation, but the design and animation are very cool. Heads keep deforming, voices keep double-tracking, while hairy loops and bubbly blobs float over the image.

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Jefferson Circus Songs (1973, Suzan Pitt)

There is some kind of human stop-motion here, kids (all the actors are kids) dressing in fancy doll clothes and moving like robots or Svankmajer creatures – insane and dreamlike, not always in a good way. No idea what this meant, it’s completely out of the blue – even the credits don’t make sense. Apparently made in Minneapolis, the kids created their own roles, and even the distributor calls it “a string of puzzling little episodes.”

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Flo Rounds a Corner (1999, Ken Jacobs)

Extremely Arnoldized clip of a girl in pink rounding a corner, the picture strobing and the frame sometimes splintering into sections that Arnoldize at their own separate pace. Had I known it was going to be silent, I would’ve thrown on “Light’s New Measure” by Black Duck.

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Jackals & Fireflies (2023, Charlie Kaufman)

Like a music video for a poet. Eva HD’s work also appeared in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and she is a fan of David Berman and Nico. Kinda works as “overheard in new york: the movie” – I’ll bet the movie plays better if you enjoy the voiceover poem and its delivery.