I watched this the same night as In Water just because they’re recent Hong movies with short runtimes, not looking for connections, but I noted characters saying “I’ll do my best / let’s do our best” in both movies. Two separate-but-similar three-person situations with no direct intersection, cutting back and forth between them, each chapter with a preceding descriptive intertitle like it’s a Dickens chapter.

1. Actress Kim Min-hee is staying with friend Song Sun-mi (also Kim’s friend in The Woman Who Ran), when young aspiring actress Park Mi-so comes for a visit/interview.

2. Older Gi Ju-bong (the dad in Hotel by the River) is a belatedly popular poet, Kim Seung-yun is at his place filming candid scenes for a documentary on him, aspiring poet Ha Seong-guk comes to visit/interview (these two costarred in In Water).

Different sorts of dramas ensue – in the first, the host’s cat escapes and the visitor helps recover him. In the second, the visitor is trying to kiss up and stay longer and helps the newly on-the-wagon poet get boozed up.

Grandma (major 60s/70s actress Yoon Jeong-hee) takes care of grandson Wook, whose friend group raped a classmate until she suicided. She tries to get enough cash from the rich disabled guy she attends for the payoff to the dead girl’s mom. Her Alzheimer’s diagnosis adds to her inner struggle but doesn’t affect the plot. When she visits the dead girl’s mom but talks only of apricots is it because the disease made her forget her reason for coming there, or was she distracted by the poetry or nature, or is she avoiding hard conversations. I have no qualms with her fellow poets but the employers, the fathers, the kids – most people in the movie are living comfortably, contemptibly.

I spend at least an hour a day saying this:

Robert Koehler in Cinema Scope 43:

There is no simple cause and effect between the initially cautious [Alzheimer’s] diagnosis and her decision to sign up for a poetry class … That doesn’t mean, however, that the viewer is denied such a cause-and-effect reading if they choose one, and Lee isn’t a filmmaker to either encourage or discourage it. This is perhaps the most notable aspect of the evolution of Lee’s screenwriting – rewarded at Cannes with the screenplay prize – starting from the unmistakable determinism of Green Fish and the elegant but closed geometrics of Peppermint Candy. Like his camera, which allows viewers to make their own compositions and choices within the larger frame, his narrative approach trusts in granting characters their own lives, so much so that one gets the sense that they frequently surprise Lee himself with the choices they make.

Auteurist foreshadowing:

It’s hard to make time for the movies at Big Ears, but sometimes they’re programmed at 10am so you can watch one without missing any concerts. I would’ve loved to see The Tuba Thieves but it conflicted with Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant, and I later heard that Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave and subsequent interview got delayed by an hour, which would’ve made me miss Secret Chiefs 3 and Kronos Quartet. This didn’t conflict with anything except brunch, and I’d already seen Threadgill’s Very Very Circus ensemble and knew I like his music. This was consumer-looking-video of a few interwoven Threadgill covid-era projects. Primarily it’s a concert performance of a new piece, music played by a small orchestra he’s conducting with pauses to read poetry off projected pages (their layout and typography being as good as the language). There are sections where he’s arranging small mystical objects while yelling at cloud in voiceover, and slideshows of the photographs he took of junk New Yorkers put out on the sidewalk when they had to actually inhabit their apartments due to the pandemic.

Ben LaMar Gay opened, solo with recorder, conch, mini gong, rattles and drones. The cornet was by his side but he didn’t feel inspired to pick it up, or miscalculated how much time he’d get. Q&A after, with Lynne Sachs and team giving context on their piece, and the Two Sun director all alone.

Amma ki katha (Nehal Vyas)
Four stories/myths/dreams/histories told by the elephants holding up the world. Mythic and symbolic about India in ways I didn’t usually follow. Some paper animation, a high-school play, some mothlighting. Didn’t see any of this coming after the simple hair-braiding intro.

The Sketch (Tomas Cali)
The speaker is new in Paris, learning to draw. He connects with a trans life model, represented with different drawing styles and also nude/real, the protag visually sketchy until self-realizing at the end. Better than it sounds.

Four Holes (Daniela Muñoz Barroso)
After a half hour of serious metaphor, this one’s comically-presented camera tech issues brought down the house. DIY solo golfer and filmmaker both have hearing issues, hanging out, playing with her sound equipment together.

Two Sun (Blair Barnes)
Dense in language, speech, music, and edit, but light in tone. A poet friend of the filmmaker’s puts on a fashion show for the camera and shares deep thoughts.

Contractions (Lynne Sachs)
Performers with hidden faces in the parking lot outside a former (due to repressive new laws) abortion clinic in Memphis, voiceover of clinic workers’ experiences, fears, and thoughts on the current situation. Artfully done, lovely.

I’m figuring out who Laurie Anderson is before the Big Ears fest. This is a poem-essay film about “the connection between love and death”… still drawings and an animated Laurie give an introductory dream sequence about giving birth to her dog, then straight to the death of her mother over blurry, barely-there archive films and photos. The dog goes blind, Laurie has her make paintings and sculptures and play paw-piano (they show a long stretch of dog piano music, including live performance footage from a benefit concert), and Laurie speaks of dog perception and post-9/11 surveillance. Ends with Lou’s song “Turning Time Around” and in the closing credits you realize her real home movies were mixed with staged(?) archive-looking footage (and Chris Marker is thanked). I kinda loved this – all these years I assumed I would find it tedious. It can go either way with personal docs and poetry.

Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (2007, Koji Yamamura)

Yamamura made Mt. Head, which I saw a bunch of times when it came out and now don’t remember so well anymore. When a choir starts narrating in song it is clear that this isn’t a great Kafka story adaptation, but the design and animation are very cool. Heads keep deforming, voices keep double-tracking, while hairy loops and bubbly blobs float over the image.


Jefferson Circus Songs (1973, Suzan Pitt)

There is some kind of human stop-motion here, kids (all the actors are kids) dressing in fancy doll clothes and moving like robots or Svankmajer creatures – insane and dreamlike, not always in a good way. No idea what this meant, it’s completely out of the blue – even the credits don’t make sense. Apparently made in Minneapolis, the kids created their own roles, and even the distributor calls it “a string of puzzling little episodes.”


Flo Rounds a Corner (1999, Ken Jacobs)

Extremely Arnoldized clip of a girl in pink rounding a corner, the picture strobing and the frame sometimes splintering into sections that Arnoldize at their own separate pace. Had I known it was going to be silent, I would’ve thrown on “Light’s New Measure” by Black Duck.


Jackals & Fireflies (2023, Charlie Kaufman)

Like a music video for a poet. Eva HD’s work also appeared in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and she is a fan of David Berman and Nico. Kinda works as “overheard in new york: the movie” – I’ll bet the movie plays better if you enjoy the voiceover poem and its delivery.

Inspired by Montage of Heck, they wanted to make a musical but found a poet as their subject. Virginia Tech mass-shooting was cut from the film because test audiences thought it gave our complicated figure too much of a movie-triumph moment. Opens more spacey and abstract (the people in front of us, terrified of abstraction, fled before the movie even started) before settling into a portrait of the late-career artist, recently reconciled with her son and getting to know her granddaughter. Poetry spoken in context with her life story and media appearances worked great, much better than the written samples I read on my phone to prep for the movie. Katy thinks it didn’t get inside Nikki, that it’s all public image. The filmmakers signal that we’re not gonna get some late-life emotional breakdown by including TWO instances when Nikki refuses to answer Q&A queries about painful moments in her past. Michèle has previously made a couple of Haitian/Dominican docs, Joe has made a Giancarlo Esposito drama, and most recently they made “a magical realist, immersive, episodic virtual reality experience” about American racism.

See Also: A Quiet Passion, for which I wrote: “Spoiler alert for a Terence Davies movie: her heart is full of poetry and yearning but her adult/love life doesn’t turn out very happily.”

Siegfried “Vidal” Sassoon is a sensitive soul, deeply marked by the war, witty and strong-minded but sweet, who has affairs with a string of bitchy bitter young men, and finally grows into a bitchy bitter old man himself. Jack Lowden (friendly lawyer of Mangrove) is brilliant as younger Sassoon. Feels like a large movie for Davies, more characters and stock footage and party scenes and time periods than usual. The well-done morphing effect is back. The other fine actors included Simon Beale (husband of Deep Blue Sea), Jeremy Irvine (star of War Horse), Gemma Jones (Oliver Reed’s eventual wife in The Devils).

With a new Downton Abbey movie out, it’s really time we rewatch Gosford Park, which also featured Ivor Novello as a character. Stephen Tennant is mainly shown wearing colorful scarves, but after visiting his wiki page, I resent the movie not mentioning that Tennant’s stepdad Lord Grey was a bird lover whose older brother was the namesake for Earl Grey tea. Sassoon’s son George taking an interest in UFOs in the 1970’s and writing “The Radio Hacker’s Codebook” in the 90’s are just more reasons this movie needs a sequel – all these would’ve been cooler codas than Sassoon aging into Peter Capaldi, converting to catholicism in the 1960’s and being horrible to family and friends.

My first movie at the Landmark Midtown Art since Portrait of a Lady on Fire in early 2020. Glad to see some things haven’t changed (audio bleed through thin walls, indifferent projection quality) and some things have (they’ve stopped labeling which movie is on which screen, the lobby seems more haunted).

At first glance this is more of a straight doc than I Wish I Knew. Interviewing a handful of writers, with pillow daily-life scenes in the cities the writers are from. Soft piano or string music, when there’s any. Between chapters someone will read aloud from the previous writer’s work, followed by a repeated line from the same passage in subtitles over black screen.