by ·Comments Off on 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011, Abel Ferrara)

Another good downbeat movie about the last day on earth. Willem Dafoe very relatable on his last day: he complains about being allowed to sleep, he skypes some friends and when they start playing blues guitar he mutes them. Excellent scene with a delivery driver. Dafoe lives across from the old Essex Market location, over a Popeyes Chicken on Delancey Street. He fights with his ex, and his current girl (of Go Go Tales) freaks out. He sees his buddy Paul Hipp (Bad Channels) at a drug dealer’s apartment – there’s some last-minute grappling with drugs and sex and religion (all Ferrara hallmarks). I’m way behind on my Ferrara films – this came between some late-2000s documentaries and the 2014 Pasolini and Welcome to New York, none of which I’ve seen.

Al Gore whining about climate change, Willem Dafoe singing the blues:

When the world is ending and also your laptop battery is dying:

Before the world ends you should always check in with Natasha Lyonne:

by ·Comments Off on The Time We Killed (2004, Jennifer Reeves)

Trying to get out more instead of staying on the couch, so it’s funny to go out and see a movie about someone who never goes out. Movie was righteous – finally some representation for people who watch the news, feel very bad, then just stay home drinking and looking at starlings out the window. If I’d watched this on video I’d be pulling so many good quotes from the narration, but since I’m me, I can’t remember a single one of them now. Lovely to see Tzadik and related groups in the closing credits of an experimental film, since that’s the music I play during silent experimental films anyway.

Reeves in 2004:

When I started shooting, without a script, I thought the film would evolve into a longish short film based on montage. I was inspired by Warren Sonbert’s work, and Jack Chambers’ Hart of London. I think the film grew into a longer narrative with montage elements, because I was going through about as many personal changes as the world was undergoing at that time. I worked on it between 1998-2003. There was a murder suicide next door, I moved, my father died, 9/11 happened, I ended a relationship and was alone, the invasion of Iraq happened. Original intentions or inclinations were not enough, almost irrelevant to me … My process was about wanting to weave together these different personal and universal themes which I felt were related, the idea of wanting to escape your reality … I’m also seeing the film as a product of fragmentation, in the flight from reality one mode of escape can fail, so then you’re looking for another kind of escape. Robyn’s job writing romance novels is one way of producing a fantasy life, of trying to have intimacy and sexuality. Remembering the past with great nostalgia is another escape from what’s going on right now: being an isolated shut in, violence nearby and militarism. I was trying to bring out the tension between wanting to be in the present and continually struggling to get out of it, out of the room.

by ·Comments Off on Early films by Ken Jacobs

Orchard Street (1955)

Doc with good color, up and down a short NYC commercial street, staring at the shops and the workers and patrons. Pretty wonderful. Watching some Varda films this week, so this brings Daguerrotypes to mind. These are silent so I’m testing my new music mix, had to cut some Orbital.

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The Whirled (1961/63)

Different unreleased segments stitched together. In the first couple, Jack Smith prances through the streets of NYC. This has sound, but it’s generic silent movie music, so I thought it would be funnier to watch Jack prance to the new Nine Inch Nails Tron soundtrack. Then we get filmed-off-the-TV footage from when Ken appeared on game show Play Your Hunch along with Carolee Schneeman. Then Jack prances through a graveyard.

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Window (1964)

Both the Les Rhinoceros and the LCD Soundsystem songs that shuffle chose were inappropriately high-energy for this camera test looking at and through a building’s window and other materials (mirrors and rainy tarp).

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Blonde Cobra (1960/63)

We’ve reached Peak Jack Smith, as Ken films Jack doing face/body antics and also records Jack on an audio commentary doing voice/speech antics. “Mother, mother, mooootheeerrrrr.” Too much improv nonsense over black leader, I’ll be glad to be finished with Jack for a while. “What went wrong?!”

by ·Comments Off on The Daytrippers (1996, Greg Mottola)

Family goes on a trip to the city to investigate Hope Davis’s husband’s goings-on, finds him smooching another man, as was all the rage back then. In a movie full of 90s darlings, it turns out Ben Stiller’s mom is the best actor around.

by ·Comments Off on The Warriors (1979, Walter Hill)

A 1979 movie set in “the future”, which looks like… 1980. Cyrus is holding a conclave, wants to unite all street gangs to overthrow the cops and run the city, but so many gangs show up to the meeting and a Vincent Gallo-looking guy shoots Cy from the crowd then fingers the only witness as the shooter. After all this commotion the Warriors have to get back to their home borough with every creep gunning for them, but they don’t even figure out until the movie’s last 20 minutes why everyone’s mad at them. The action choreography is not great, nor sometimes are the goofy costumes (the overalls-and-rollerskates “punks” being the worst). But the comic-book Escape from New York adventure is compelling, and it was already giving West Side Story vibes with its gang stylings when I realized that the shooter is Jerry Horne, whose Twin Peaks costar Dr. Amp was in West Side.

Exactly the pose you make when you’re about to get shot:

Jerry Horne, cartoon version:

Warriors:

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.