by ·Comments Off on Murder à la Mod (1968, Brian De Palma)

A tale of two icepicks and a handful of murders, in De Palma’s first Blow Up remake. Jumping back and forth in time, we follow Karen, who’s dating reluctant pornographer Chris, and her friend Tracey, who is withdrawing all her family valuables from the bank and putting them in an envelope under the seat of her illegally parked car then leaving the windows open. Introducing a creepy voyeur in a way that feels as if either De Palma or we the viewers might also be creepy voyeurs, and finally the movie’s secret weapon Otto, an undercranked maniac prankster, but not (on purpose) a murderer. Right as the murder mystery was escalating, Otto’s silent comedy bit takes over, his racing thoughts narrating the action.

Decent music, nice photography – the DP went on to shoot Basket Case and Brain Damage for Henenlotter. Against all odds, some of these people worked in movies again. Tracey is in Desert Hearts, Chris starred in a Fulci picture, and Otto became a De Palma regular, most notably starring as The Phantom of the Paradise.

by ·Comments Off on Abraham’s Valley (1993, Manoel de Oliveira)

Not the most compelling story, but the film itself is so lovely. It’s been a minute since I watched an Oliveira but this has got to be among his greatest color cinematography, shot by Mário Barroso who’d soon move on to Monteiro films when Oliveira started working more in French and English. Came out between Non and Inquietude – there are seven other 1990s features I need to catch up with. The actors wait patiently while the narrator speaks their thoughts or backstory, or talks about them telling stories or doing actions we don’t see them doing, then they carry on with their scripted business.

Doctor Luís Miguel Cintra is set up with the beautiful young Ema, who is really too young until her aunt dies and she turns into wide-eyed Leonor Silveira. Time accelerates, and soon enough she’s sleeping with violinist Narcisco who is her daughters’ age. Nobody figures out how to have a successful relationship or marriage, eventually all of them die.

Leonor/Ema with Luís Lima Barreto and young Diogo Dória:

Moments before Luís tosses this cat straight into the camera:

Per Rosenbaum:

“This is a lyrical film,” Oliveira has aptly written. “It is so in the way a woman resists men, who represent power, on the strength of her poetic outlook on the world, even if it is mere illusion… This is the theme of Abraham’s Valley: how poetry will lead Ema to her own agony, how she will construct her death on the basis of a poetic view of the world and finally, how she will, step by step, organize such agony poetically.”

Young Ema:

I thought I was a bad viewer getting time periods mixed-up, but Michael Sicinski:

Part of what makes Oliveira’s cinema so constantly disarming has to do with this auteur’s disarming use of time, a factor that became much more pronounced in his later years. Take Abraham’s Valley, a film more than three hours in length. The characters in the film, particularly married couple Ema and Carlo and their servants, scan as aristocratic holdovers from another age, the same type of subjects who so often populate Oliveira’s cinema. Looking at their dress and behavior, one would place them in the mid-19th century. But only after 90+ minutes of screen time is it affirmed that Abraham’s Valley takes place in the present day (1993).

Unhappy Family:

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 Inventing the Future (2020, Isiah Medina)

“Such protests are registered only in the minds of their participants, bypassing any transformation of social structure.” Dense sentences on voiceover with dense images flickering by. When it switched to a table of young guys discussing collective economies, I got tired real fast.

Sound and picture editing are hyperactive and wandering, some segments repeating, and clarity of the voiceover is sometimes sacrificed to the random sfx. Not random though – the movie has a particular look despite all the jumping around. A fascinating object, though the VO is too academic to follow for any length of time, reading political essays aloud. Sometimes even the movie itself tires of the narrator and fast-forwards her. And when the essays go on too long they start to overlap and destroy themselves, the visual flitting from swans to mathematics to abstractions to vibrators to legos.

Freedom and power… AI vs. the human mind… the meaning of work. The politics are advocating for three-day weekends, and given that I had time to watch the movie because of a three-day holiday weekend, I would agree. Other works this reminded me of: All Light Everywhere, Ken Jacobs’ Seeking the Monkey King, the less narrative Adam Curtis docs.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope speaks of the difficulty of watching this in the covid era, and pulls the movie into editing software to analyze it further.

Though its pace and intensity will be familiar to those who have followed Medina’s earlier work, Inventing the Future marks a major step forward in terms of density and, in turn, musical or motific intricacy.

by ·Comments Off on Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson)

Precocious children with parental issues, highly-organized secret plans and old-fashioned craftsy props surrounded by superstar actors including Bill Murray – so yes, it’s like any Wes Anderson movie, but it’s a good one. He has a unique talent for collapsing different locations into one hermetic snowglobe of a film. The visual/conceptual unity is helped by the soft, grainy 16mm cinematography, and that fact that all the action takes place on an island.

In the celeb-actor world, Frances McDormand is cheating on husband Bill Murray with local cop Bruce Willis. Edward Norton leads a troop of scouts, hopes to join his idol, scout commander Harvey Keitel, at the big convention where Jason Schwartzman is some kinda mercenary merchant. And Bob Balaban is a sort-of-present character/narrator.

But one of the movie’s strengths is that it focuses primarily on its young heroes, Sam and Suzy, who run off together and camp on the beach, leaving the celeb-actors as background players. Willis and Norton lead search parties as two threats approach: an epic storm, and Tilda Swinton of Social Services, coming to take Sam to a home.

Katy liked it more than she thought she would.