by ·Comments Off on Entertainment (2015, Rick Alverson)

Knowing a bit about Neil Hamburger, and seeing this called “anti-comedy,” I skipped it at the time. Now, after Alverson’s great The Mountain (and seeing Neil in concert telling one of my favorite jokes of the decade), I’m catching up, and… maybe I was right to skip this. I dunno, you’ve got Neil’s whole thing with the dirty jokes, Alverson’s patient formal construction (this time super-widescreen instead of 4:3), Tye Sheridan as a clown – it’s more academically interesting than it is a joy to watch.

Gregg Turkington is on an increasingly sad comedy tour through the desert, stopping in each town between gigs to take whatever local tour they’ve got, then to call his kid, promising he’ll get home. He visits cousin John C Reilly who offers advice on Gregg/Neil’s choice of onstage subject matter: “If you wanna appeal to like, all four quadrants, you know like all the different age groups… semen and all that… it’s a little bit much.” After a heckler attacks him post-show and breaks his glasses, he descends into a deeper nightmare than the one in the movie I just watched called The Nightmare.

Jagjaguwar logo in the credits – composer Robert Donne, whose drone soundtrack was a bit much (so it fit in perfectly here, where everything is a bit much) was in their band Spokane with vocalist Rick Alverson! To get onto Turkington’s wavelength, I watched an episode of his show On Cinema with Tim Heidecker, which I will definitely watch more of.

by ·Comments Off on Deux Rémi, deux (2015, Pierre Léon)

LNKarno continues with a Signs of Life entry… these are “aiming to explore frontier territories within the seventh art throughout novel narrative formats and innovation in filmic language”… only in its second year when this screened.

Remi & Remi:

Opening titles are over a photo montage of the director’s cat, not a good sign, but the cast includes a Truffaut and a Bozon, a Mazuy and a Raynal, so a whole gang of filmmakers, or their kids. Remi is Pascal Cervo of White Nights on the Pier. He’s secretly platonic friends with the boss’s daughter – the Truffaut – then he has an awkward chat with the boss as she flees. The girl’s dad is Bernard Eisenschitz, a Cahiers critic who has only been in a few movies, but only the most choice roles (an angel in Wings of Desire, a pornographer in Out 1), and the girl’s mom is filmmaker Patricia Mazuy.

Remi & Mazuy:

Recounting the cast is more fun than recounting the plot – Remi has nothing much going on, in fact he worries that he has no inner life. Then one day there are two Remis, the new one more confident and charismatic, attempting to take over, and nobody much minds that there are suddenly two until Original Remi’s brother takes his side at the end. We’ve seen this before, but I love a good dopplganger story, and this is pretty fun and quite short.

by ·Comments Off on Winter Song (2015, Otar Iosseliani)

Our first LNKarno competition title. I’ve seen Iosseliani’s name around now and then, ever since first learning about him with a film still of a stork from Adieu, plancher des vaches! in a magazine over a decade ago. He’s a fest regular who I’ve never noticed out in the indie-commercial film world – The Ross, Plaza, Tara, Landmark, Alamo, Videodrome, Criterion sort of places – an old dude, taught by Dovzhenko, working for sixty-some years.

From a period execution scene to the title, then a battle, rapey soldiers, a mass baptism, a pickpocket gang then a drunk flattened by a steamroller like a cartoon, it seems the movie’s gonna be all over the place. But it soon settles down in a central location, with apartment concierge (and arms dealer) Rufus, his skull-collecting friend, a down-and-out baron, a bickering couple – it’s kind of a light magical comedy darkened by memory of the execution from the intro (it reminds us, with images of guillotines and severed heads). And of course I’m regretting that my first Iosseliani movie isn’t the one with storks, and then Rufus wanders into a secret garden full of every kind of bird.

A timid man resorts to dirty tricks to get a cute girl to talk with him. Pierre Etaix is in there somewhere, and as per French law, Mathieu Amalric has a role, hand-building a stone house out in a field. The production has rented a wind machine and is determined to get its money’s worth. Jump cuts and trick editing – it all sounds more scattered than it is, the bulk of it maintaining a consistent tone, dignified and upbeat despite the breakups and evictions.

Jonathan Romney in Film Comment:

Winter Song is the sort of rambling, multi-stranded crazily populous ensemble frieze that he has specialized in since moving from Georgia to France for 1984’s Favorites of the Moon… at times it resembles less any familiar form of cinema than it does a sort of sprawling, melancholic circus performance … It’s a world of horror and absurdity, where war is always being waged underneath the surface of civilization. But it also reveals a constant background hum, a sort of laconic joyousness in which the human folly and the melancholy of mortality are at least mitigated by friendship, drink, and the pleasures of close harmony singing, and the redemptive, civilizing poetry of a neatly executed sight gag.

by ·Comments Off on The Nightmare (2015, Akiz)

Now something from the Filmmakers of the Present, a section for first and second features. This would be at least Achim Bornhak’s third feature if letterboxd is to be believed – I see an oil-driller bomb-thriller from 1998 and a commie/model/groupie biopic in 2007. The director now goes by Akiz, because the name Bornhak allows for cheap puns in English-language reviews.

A thumping dance beat movie with strobey lights – Gaspar Noe influenced? Three girls, speaking German, attend a party and become concerned that a Tommy Gnosis-looking boy they know has shown up. Leaving the party in handheld wide-angle, Tina gets super-killed by a passing car while picking up a necklace – or she had a premonition of this happening – or she saw a cellphone video of it happening to someone else and simply passed out.

Either way, Tina isn’t quite the same when she gets home, having nightmares of a creature that raids her parents’ fridge at night. Her psychiatrist tells her to touch the beast and prove it’s real, so she does, and it is – and it’s blind and clumsy, and psychically linked to Tina, so she starts taking care of it until they’re discovered and separated by the government. So Tina dresses for a night at the club and heads to the hospital for a covert rescue operation.

Or maybe it’s Neon Demon influenced, I dunno, it seems somehow derivative even though I keep naming films that came out after this. Cutting back and forth on the beat between domestic/hangout scenes and club scenes is cool, but mostly reminded me of that great Michael Smiley episode of Spaced, and the movie is probably much more enjoyable if you can stand rave music.

by ·Comments Off on I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015, Marianne Lambert)

LNKarno opening night is an Akerman doc, watching as prep for LNKarno closing night No Home Movie. I ended up enjoying the doc, with its discussions of editing strategies in the feature, more than the feature itself. I am a sucker for these things.

Akerman worked at a gay porn theater’s box office, raising money for her early shorts, then stole boxes of expired film to shoot Je, Tu, Il, Elle. “My mother was at the heart of my work,” flashbacks to News from Home. Wonderful to see Saute ma ville, which I just watched, intercut with Jeanne Dielman, discussion of their similarities and her mother’s take on the latter feature. Gus Van Sant, whose Last Days was Akerman-inpired, weighs in. The doc has the same closing credits shot as True Stories.

by ·Comments Off on LNKarno 2015/2020

It’s the third annual* LNKarno Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed on my couch** in Lincoln***. The real Locarno was happening last week… or was it? They send me daily emails, and I have yet to really figure out what’s happening over there – I think a mix of in-person and online screenings of movies from previous years, and some panels about films that had to interrupt production this year. Anyway, that’s a problem for 2025 (if man’s still alive), because this weekend it’s all about looking back to 2015.

* skipped last year, we had a mini true/false weekend instead
** bed *** Atlanta

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:

No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello)
Entertainment (Rick Alverson)
Winter Song (Otar Iosseliani)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)
Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski)
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)
Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
On Football (Sergio Oksman)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

The Nightmare (Achim Bornhak)
Kaili Blues (Bi Gan)
The Movement (Benjamín Naishtat)
Olmo & the Seagull (Petra Costa & Lea Glob)
Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce)

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

Call Me Marianna (Karolina Bielawska)
Brothers (Wojciech Staron)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Ricki and the Flash (Jonathan Demme)
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow)
Summertime (Catherine Corsini)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

Deux Remi, deux (Pierre Leon)
88:88 (Isiah Medina)
Academy of Muses (José Luis Guerin)
Machine Gun or Typewriter? (Travis Wilkerson)

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

The Glory of Filmmaking in Portugal (Manuel Mozos)
Estratos de la imagen (Lois Patiño)
Noite sem distancia (Lois Patiño)
Riot (Nathan Silver)
Topophilia (Peter Bo Rappmund)
Le bois dont les reves sont faits (Claire Simon)
L’architecte de Saint-Gaudens (Julie Desprairies & Serge Bozon)

Others on the program, including a Sam Peckinpah retrospective:

I Don’t Belong Anywhere – Le cinema de Chantal Akerman (Marianne Lambert)
Kid (Júlio Bressane)
The Girl Chewing Gum (1976, John Smith)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Ride the High Country (1962)
Major Dundee (1965)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
Straw Dogs (1971)
The Getaway (1972)

by ·Comments Off on Our Sunhi (2013, Hong Sang-soo)

Last year I closed LNKarno with the top prizewinner Girl From Nowhere, but I’ve already suffered through Story of My Death once, so this year I picked a closer from competition which I was sure to enjoy. It’s somewhat of a comedy, coming out between In Another Country and Hill of Freedom – I’m gradually filling in the gaps of recent work but still haven’t caught anything pre-2010. We get a series of scenes of people in conversation drinking too much in no-fuss compositions interrupted only by the occasional reframing zoom – just what we were hoping for.

Sunhi out drinking with the Professor:

Sunhi (Yu-mi Jung: Oki, also in Train to Busan) is visiting the city where she attended school, aiming to get a letter of recommendation from her professor (Sang-Jung Kim, the main guy’s friend in The Day He Arrives) for a graduate film program. They meet up in the park, and he turns in a letter that’s fairly complimentary, but also says she might have good ideas but he wouldn’t know since she’s too reserved and doesn’t work well with others.

Sunhi out drinking with Munsu:

She spots her ex Munsu (Sun-kyun Lee of Hong’s other 2013 student-teacher relationship movie Nobody’s Daughter Haewon) and calls him up to where she’s having a lonely drink, says she saw his film and that it was good but too much about their relationship. These two talk for hours (he orders a bottle of soju, then after a cut there are four on the table) and he blurts out “if I make films till I die, they’ll all be about you” and demands to know why she broke up with him, so she walks out and he goes off to bother his ex-friend Jaehak (Jae-yeong Jeong, lead of Right Now, Wrong Then).

Sunhi out drinking with Jaehak:

Sunhi asks the professor about the reference letter, hangs out over drinks with him, he explains that he wrote it in a hurry and can probably do better, then runs off to tell Jaehak about this wonderful girl he likes. Later, Sunhi spots Jaehak and they go out, as captured in an epic 10+ minute shot. They talk about the other two guys, Jaehak puts the pieces together, but he’s falling for Sunhi. Now all three guys are mooning over her, but Sunhi’s got her own life, collects the much-improved recommendation from the professor and ditches all three guys at the park.

Alice Stoehr on Letterboxd:

She drinks too much soju and leans on them in the street. The men speak with each other, repeating phrases they’d said to her. Deja vu permeates Our Sunhi, as it resounds both with echoes of Hong’s earlier work and with its own internal rhymes … She’ll always be embittered and mistreated and a little too drunk. The men will always be selfish, in performances that are broad enough to be quite funny but still true enough that they hurt.

–
Besides checking Letterboxd, Critics Round Up and Cinema Scope for reviews of the LNKarno movies I watched this week, I went looking for 2013 festival coverage by media sites that haven’t folded and vanished since then…

Michael Pattison in Slant recommends The Green Serpent and Costa da Morte, and says The Unity of All Things “caused more walkouts in its first 10 minutes than any other.”

Richard Porton in Cineaste talks up Manakamana, A Masque of Madness, and the restoration of Batang West Side (“certainly the most notable film to ever take place in Jersey City”).

Agnieszka Gratza in Frieze covers Exhibition and Lo que el fuego me trajo, and found Pays Barbare more gripping than I did.

Based on Jaimey Fisher’s writeup in Senses of Cinema, El Mudo, Wetlands, and maybe the Aoyama sound good.

by ·Comments Off on Mouton (2013, Gilles Deroo & Marianne Pistone)

This one has an odd structure, opening with a long scene of Mrs. Bouvier being given limited visitation rights to her son Mouton (“Sheep”) in a lawyer’s office, but she is never seen again.

The main section of the film follows Mouton’s work life as an assistant chef at a seaside restaurant. Long takes, long scenes of daily routine – it’s a Slow Cinema thing – then shorter scenes of the same old thing. Mouton starts dating coworker Audrey, but the movie isn’t giving anyone much of a personality or narrative, just spending time with Mouton and the others. Then after an hour, a narrator appears, and at a festival on the jetty some dude drunkenly attacks Mouton with a chainsaw, cutting his arm off.

Group shot: Mouton at far right

Mouton moves away but the movie stays in the same town (Courseulles, on the north coast just across the bay from Le Havre). His friend Louise works at a butcher, gets married to Mimi, has a kid. They live the rest of their lives, as a title card says. Nothing in the movie is especially interesting, but I do keep pondering its unusual structure.

Mimi and Louise:

They remember Sheep:

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope:

Each scene is invested with an interrogatory naturalism that seems to be imploring just what, exactly, one should be looking for, only to dissolve and leave in its absence the sense that in searching one may be missing the plenitude of the moment. Call it narrative fleecing.
…
“Life goes on, right?” implores Louise, now with child and no time to write to Mouton. It’s a familiarly wistful sentiment, particularly well suited to cinema’s temporal qualities, but rarely explored with such structural audacity and unsensational curiosity as in Mouton. A vague sense of indifference is immanent in our daily lives, however vigilantly we attempt to observe our departed. Mouton, for all its brute realism, is rather forgiving in this regard, locating pockets of grace in the seemingly forgettable gestures that constitute the hours of a day, and the texture of a life.

by ·Comments Off on Master of the Universe (2013, Marc Bauder)

“This might sound strange, but the whole social infrastructure is slowly crumbling.”

This could be a companion piece to Collapse – it’s another monologue/interview with a lone man about how fragile and doomed our economic system is. Filmed evocatively in the empty office spaces of an abandoned bank, Rainer Voss was a top investment banker, now washed up and telling all about the operations, the personalities, the daily work life, the lies they told to their customers and themselves.

“Is deregulation to blame? No. Was it a prerequisite? Yes.”

He also discusses his family life, and sounds like a terrible dad. For the first half I thought his scarf was a fashion statement, then I realized it’s winter and the empty building is unheated. This movie sounds dry from a description, but people like me who are sure that society as we know it is dying, but not sure how it’s gonna go down, ought to find it gripping