by ·Comments Off on The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”

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 One Fine Morning (2022, Mia Hansen-Løve)

Lovely French movie about life being complicated, starring the great Léa Seydoux, whose Blue Is the Warmest Color co-star I saw last night in The Five Devils. She’s a professional translator whose philosopher dad (Rohmer and Assayas regular Pascal Greggory) is losing his memory and stability and vision and needs to go into a home. The movie’s about heavy things but it moves beautifully.

Léa meets Melvil Poupaud, a cosmo-chemist who studies meteorites like in that Herzog movie, but he’s married, and goes back and forth with his intentions, as her dad gets moved to worse and then better facilities… it’s more like one fine year (the film is named after the dad’s unfinished autobiography).

Jordan Cronk in Cinema Scope: “In a year with no shortage of similarly themed French films (see Claire Denis’ [Both Sides of the Blade] and Emmanuel Mouret’s Chronique d’une liaison passagère), One Fine Morning makes a case for itself not by upending conventions, but by applying them with care and consideration.” Key review by Vadim Rizov, who liked it not as much.

by ·Comments Off on Crimes of the Future (2022, David Cronenberg)

Story of a man who simply wants to eat breakfast.

On second viewing I’m still confused as to the repair workers’ murderous motivations, or how Timlin heard the conversation about tattooing anchors and “mother” and snuck inside that kid. If the cop is lying about everything that could explain it. On third viewing I’ve decided the movie’s double-agent loyalties and its inconsistency about scar tissue are nothing to fret about.

Scott Speedman costarred with Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld series, which have Resident Evil-ish posters, which makes me tempted to watch them. Ah no, I guess not.

Best movie I’ve seen in a while. Some hits from the sites:

David Cairns in Shadowplay [comparing to eXistenZ]:

There are factions in ideological conflict over questions of authenticity, but instead of Phildickian Big Question #1 (What is reality?) this is more about Phildickian Big Question #2 (What is a human being?). Evolution seems to be getting out of hand… is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Kristen Stewart in Vulture:

It’s really fun to have three scenes. If you don’t nail it, you’re wallpaper. Timlin is so locked up, self-oppressed, wants to be good at her job, and totally represents the rigidity of the government that they live under. And she experiences an awakening in a split second … I’m very rarely asked to play weird little characters like that.

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

No lines are overtly comic in the sense of being meant as funny by those delivering them, but the audience always knows when to laugh at a particularly weird exchange even as Shore’s score keeps a straight face … A lot of the dialogue is unapologetically Big Picture thematics, repeatedly drawing links between suffering and its ability to generate art while wondering if the two are really inextricable. But this thematic flexing, which is simultaneously direct and vague (and hence seemingly infinitely suggestive without actually committing to anything), is less absorbing than Cronenberg’s style, a finely honed, mysterious ability to make medium-shot coverage of characters talking on chiaroscuro-shaded stage builds weirdly entrancing.

Amy Taubin and David Cronenberg:

AT: I laughed throughout.
DC: You are the right audience.
AT: And I cried a lot.
DC: And that’s even better.

by ·Comments Off on France (2021, Bruno Dumont)

Léa Seydoux is a famous TV newscaster, known for onsite foreign reports and for giving playfully confrontational questions to the president at home, lives with husband and kid in an insane performatively-rich house. At work she gives too much on-camera direction, saying “got that?” a half second after every speech – her segments must be a nightmare to edit. There’s a minor car crash (she rear-ends a motorcyclist) and a major one (her husband and kid plunge off a cliff), and every personal tragedy or professional fuckup is just another tabloid headline. She starts actually caring about the stories she covers, but the public image and end result is the same.

France will be seen next in the Cronenberg, her TV producer is in the brand-new Quentin Dupieux and her husband was in Personal Shopper. Doesn’t feel very Dumontian, except when accident victim Baptiste is around. It’s all very nice-looking (and with great music by the late Christophe) but a traditional media/celeb satire seems like small fries after Slack Bay.

France with producer:

France with husband:

by ·Comments Off on The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson)

Back in theaters for this one. I love going into Wes movies with absurdly high expectations, because he always meets them. I’ll read the hater critics some other time – maybe they were looking for something more than an endless parade of favorite actors and impeccable production design, but I wasn’t. Much of the movie is in 4:3 black and white, and either my screening was over-matted or the titles appear at the extreme top and bottom of frame.

Bookending segments in the newspaper office, with editor Bill Murray alive in the first piece and dead in the second. Bicycle tour through the town of Ennui by Owen Wilson. Story 1 is relayed by Tilda Swinton, involving art dealer Adrien Brody patronizing imprisoned painter Benicio del Toro whose guard/model is Léa Seydoux (they get some actual French people in here sometime). I was least involved in the middle piece, about faux-May’68 student revolutionary Timothée Chalamet’s affair with reporter Frances McDormand. Then Jeffrey Wright is reporting on celebrated police chef Steve “Mike Yanagita” Park, who helps foil a plot by Edward Norton to kidnap chief Mathieu Amalric’s son.

Michael Sicinski (Patreon) also liked the Benicio story best:

By contrast, Anderson’s snotty riff on May ’68, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” succumbs to the director’s worst comedic instincts, essentially declaring that political desire is nothing more than sublimated horniness … The final segment, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” sort of splits the difference, although it is elevated considerably by a fine performance from Jeffrey Wright, channeling James Baldwin as a melancholy ex-pat uncomfortable with his journalistic distance. The story itself is mostly just a riff on The Grand Budapest Hotel‘s portrait of courtly civility as a bulwark against anarchy. But it’s Wright’s representation of honest inquiry, and humanistic curiosity, that makes it far less silly than it should be.

Watched again a month later, with Katy this time.

by ·Comments Off on The Lobster (2015, Yorgos Lanthimos)

I love when an absurd movie by a foreign filmmaker starring a pile of my favorite current international actors opens in town… and plays the multiplex. Judging from the turnout, they won’t be making that mistake again.

We open with the situation I knew from the trailer: Colin Farrell and acquaintance-turned-rival John C. Reilly are at a hotel where they are given thirty days to find a compatible mate or else they’ll be turned into an animal of their choosing. They go for daily treks in the woods to shoot escaped loners – for each one they bag, they’re given an extension of their hotel stay. In desperation, each man tries to fake compatibility with a woman – Reilly gives himself nosebleeds to get paired with pretty young nosebleed-prone Jessica Barden (because these are the kinds of surface similarities that make successful couples) and Farrell acts heartless to get matched with champion hunter Angeliki Papoulia. After this fails catastrophically and she murders his brother (a dog), he escapes into the woods, later returning to forcibly turn her into an animal (he also murders double-agent maid Ariane Labed, which means he dispatches both stars of Alps).

It’s no better in the woods, as leader Lea Seydoux has even stricter rules against coupling. Unfortunately, during their covert trips to the city (where Seydoux is pretend-paired with Michael Smiley of Kill List), he and his travel companion Rachel Weisz fall in love, and she is blinded as punishment, which leads to a hilarious/horrifying finale (remember the nosebleeds).

Also at the hotel: Peep Show star Olivia Colman as the manager, Ashley Jensen (Extras) as a sad woman who fails to get Farrell to like her, and Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas) as the “limping man”. I’ll have to watch again – when listing islands, did someone say “Chevalier”?

M. Singer:

Combined, [the film’s segments] add up to this cautionary tale about the way rigid governments impose their values on their citizens, and how close-minded people try to convince others (and often themselves) that their beliefs are not only the correct ones but the only ones. In the end, that sort of thinking can leave you blind to the truth that happiness can’t be regimented or regulated. And right now, that feels like a pretty timely message.