by ·Comments Off on Nadja (1994, Michael Almereyda)

Since I just watched his New York Hamlet, here’s New York Dracula. With two Hal Hartley actors, My Bloody Valentine music, David Lynch cameo, black and white film with additional low-res Fisher Price material, hot lesbians in the city, and perverse ending, it’s the most cool-’90s vampire film.

Nadja, Pantera:

Nadja is Elina Löwensohn, daughter of the late Dracula. Peter “Van Helsing” Fonda and his man Martin Donovan (married to Lucy) are on the case, making sure Nadja can’t resurrect her father. Nadja flees to Romania with Van Helsing’s daughter Suzy Amis (The Usual Suspects) in tow. The others catch up and kill her, but her spirit has possessed Suzy, who then marries Nadja’s brother Jared Harris.

The Harkers:

by ·Comments Off on Blast of Silence (1961, Allen Baron)

“They all hate the gun they hire.” Second-person narrator, unusually well-written, puts us in hit man Frankie’s shoes as he gets a Christmastime job to kill a mustache guy with two bodyguards. First he has to deal with Ralph the beardo gun salesman (later of Shock Corridor). He goes to old flame Lori’s house on xmas (she’s Matt Dillon’s mom in The Flamingo Kid) but has no idea how to behave with a lady. Our killer is an out of towner, only knows 2 or 3 people in NYC but keeps bumping into them – this could have been easily avoidable by switching up his patterns. He gets his man, but messily, and doesn’t escape the city. Writer/director/star Baron went on to direct episodes of every 1970s TV show.

by ·Comments Off on Peter Hutton shorts

New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972)

Not the kind of work that holds up great on SD video, but I’ve come across Hutton’s name enough times and want to know what he’s about. Everything I’ve got is silent, so I’m playing the Sean Ono Lennon Asterisms album, and the first track synced up just right with this film, which was extracted from a Screening Room episode. It’s all about light, apparently, light coming through holes and forming patterns, mostly indoors with a couple outdoor portraits of unnamed people, leading to its most complicated and beautiful setup, a chair on a raft.

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Florence (1975)

Yes, light is going to be the main thing. Unmoving camera, quick fades between shots, makes you wonder why he didn’t go into still photography instead, then there’s just enough motion in the images (water, clouds) and light shifts to answer that question.

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New York Portrait chapter 1 (1979)

Some incredible skies, great rainy streets, making constellations from asphalt sparkling under streetlights (most of this was shot at night). A murmuration or two – in this house we give bonus points when your movie focuses on birds. It’s not Hutton’s fault that the Lennon title track is less to my tastes than the first three songs. Since I’m already being offensive to avant-garde purists by playing music, I’ll also say that these films feel kinda ambient, like they’d be good to project on the wall behind the cinema-themed bar I’m gonna open when I retire.

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New York Portrait chapter 2 (1981)

This one’s on the Wendy & Lucy DVD, where Kelly(?) calls them “thoroughly observational documents … Hutton transforms the act of looking into a cause for silent meditation.” More flooded streets, an insane street drain, a great shot with a blimp moving between two silhouette buildings, what looks like a jet fleet leaving behind a morse code pattern. Seems less explicitly light-focused than the others, or perhaps I’m getting used to his particular photographic style, or I’m distracted since I ran out of Lennon tunes and it started playing Titan to Tachyons.

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New York Portrait chapter 3 (1990)

All of these are from different sources, and this source is the worst – why are there no blu-ray companies focused on fringe silent shorts collections? I appreciate the fireworks in this one since I’m watching on the 4th of July, even thought Hutton hasn’t solved the problem that seeing fireworks in a movie is never especially cool. A rare bit of human drama towards the end as he films a medical emergency from straight overhead. Return of the murmuration in the final seconds, beautifully done.

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Boston Fire (1979)

The easiest one to remember its images from the title – something in Boston is on fire, and Hutton is fortunately here to film the smoky light with the dark stream of firehose water cutting across the image. My favorite of the bunch, possibly influenced by my recently reading Ten Skies.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

A nearly perfect distillation of Hutton’s aesthetic, Boston Fire also harks back to the earliest days of cinema. It is an actualité, an observational eight-minute record of a dramatic human event. And, in terms of Hutton’s mature films about the Hudson River [1996 and later], Boston Fire serves as a kind of inversion. Instead of humans struggling to move across a placid natural surface, here it is nature that is the (destructive) agent, with humans desperately trying to beat it back.

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)

Almereyda’s followup to The Eternal, and my followup to the Olivier version. More voiceover-monologues here, with overall quieter speaking volumes. Opens with Ethan “Hamlet” Hawke watching standard-def video of his parents in happier times, and the play-within-the-play is a screening of Hamlet’s found-footage video project – Almereyda loves his low-res textures.

Is it irony that Ham is in the *action* section of Blockbuster while drearily whining about his indecision? Or is it meant to rhyme with the closing line, “and lose the name of action.” Olivier wrote out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for efficiency, while Almereyda makes a meal of their scenes and interjects them wherever he can. This entire movie was better than the Olivier except for the final swordfight, which – even though it features Paul Bartel in the Peter Cushing role – is anticlimactic when they all just shoot each other on a rooftop. My first priority when I get a job will be to buy Cymbeline on blu-ray.

Ethan Hawke vs. Kyle MacLachlan. I love Esko Nikkari but Bill Murray is now the best Polonius. Julia Stiles shrieks at the Guggenheim. They acknowledge the shadow of Romeo + Juliet by casting Juliet’s mom Diane Venora as the queen. Chuck Yeager as the ghost, Liev Schreiber (then of the Scream movies) as Laertes, and some really small cameos that make me think longer/extra scenes were shot and cut later. They manage to get one extra woman into the movie, by swapping out one of the ghost-spotting guards for Horatio’s girl (Katniss’s mom). Ophelia’s memento box looks suspiciously like the Smashing Pumpkins The Aeroplane Flies High box set re-pressed with White Stripes coloring.

Rosenbaum was a fan, notes Hawke as “better than you’d expect.” I thought of Lewis Klahr during the film-with-a-film screening, turns out Klahr really made it.

by ·Comments Off on The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

Interesting tone in this movie, a perfect-crime hijack-ransom plot pulled off by a crack criminal team, but instead of no-nonsense city police on the other side of the phone line we get a droll workplace drama starring Walter Matthau as lead transit cop, a sickly coward mayor (Lee Wallace, who’d also play the mayor in Batman), and timely jokes on camera-toting Japanese tourists and women in the workplace.

Robert Shaw (Robin and Marian‘s sheriff) is the lead baddie, serious about his deadlines and their consequences, and on his team is the ex-train operator who knows the system, the loose cannon, and the guy without a strong personality. The city scrambles to come up with the money, which it does in time to save almost all the hostages, then Matthau turns to preventing the color-coded criminals’ escape. One is killed by a cop, the other by his own men, and the leader third-rails himself to avoid capture. They track the final guy (Martin Balsam, later of Mitchell!) by looking through the records of fired train operators, recognizing the sick criminal during an apartment interview by his sneeze, previously heard over the intercom, and I ask you, is this the final shot of a serious crime movie?

by ·Comments Off on Panic Room (2002, David Fincher)

Jodie Foster is divorcing a pharma boss, diabetic daughter Kristen Stewart in tow, moving into the Manhattan home of a dead guy with a missing fortune, and nobody here has ever seen a scary movie before. On their very first night, entitled rich kid Jared Leto breaks in with corrupt security expert Forest Whitaker and psychopath Dwight Yoakam, and the standoff begins. I remember this being the most tense movie I’d ever seen in theaters – obviously not as wild the second time around two decades later, but a real good time.

Not the panic room but the elevator:

I’m reading the Adam Nayman book on Fincher and rewatching a couple movies. Production of this one (and all his movies, haha) was difficult. Adam says the cinematography has a “floating, disembodied aesthetic” and he compares it to other apartment movies and contemporary thrillers.

Jodie’s ex Patrick Bauchau (La Collectionneuse) gets involved:

by ·Comments Off on Hotel Monterey (1972, Chantal Akerman)

After reading Beatrice Loayza’s essay for the new box set, I had to watch an Akerman movie. But I cannot tolerate silence in a home screening, so, per the artist’s original intent, I made a playlist with Colleen then Titan to Tachyons then Tomeka Reid Quartet.

Static camera, hanging around in the hotel lobby and hallways and especially elevators, even getting into a couple rooms. Then back to the hallways… long static takes of hallways. Then movement! Dolly up a hallway, looking out the window at NYC, impressive jump cut from night to day, back up and down the hallway. Movie ends on the roof, slow rotation looking out at the city, the movement reminding of La Chambre. Akerman had moved to NYC and made these films with DP Babette Mangolte, both artists influenced by Michael Snow, then Mangolte shot Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew the following year.

by ·Comments Off on Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017, Frederick Wiseman)

Katy is never up for watching the final hour of that cartoon we started, but gets right on board for a long doc about the NY library system. Expansive look at the work and mission of the public library, from branch meetings and funding talks to gala events. Sharply edited, every five minutes another facet of an institution devoted to knowledge. Tom Charity in Cinema Scope goes into the details, calls it “almost intelligentsia porn.”

by ·Comments Off on Past Lives (2023, Celine Song)

Pretty good movie, well-deserved star turn for Greta Lee. Inspired by the director being in the exact position of the opening scene, sitting at an NY bar between a husband and an old flame, wondering how she looked to outsiders.