Ahead-of-its-time parody of MTV’s The Real World, also predicts the Almereyda Hamlet with chilling accuracy. Ben Stiller would go on to direct Heat Vision and Jack, but he and Janeane would never again be as cute as they are here. Ethan would arguably be cuter in the Before movies and even Hamlet. Winona is so cute in this that she bends time and space, creating a continuum of cuteness (a cuteinuum) with her other movies, rendering their relative cutenesses impossible to rank. Every scene in this has one good thing about it and the rest is just okay.
Tag: pop music
Shorts watched December 2024
L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)
Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?
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The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)
Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.
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Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)
The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.
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The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)
If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.
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Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)
A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.
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The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)
Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.
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Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)
She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.
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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)
The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?
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and some auteur music videos…
PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)
The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.
New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)
The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).
The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)
The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.
The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)
Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.
Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)
Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).
Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)
I read Mad Magazine in the 1980s, I know this is the worst movie ever made, but what this post presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? At first I thought it’s a “bad movie” because the lead guys are playing cheesy songwriters, and people weren’t used to hearing “bad” music in a movie? Turns out it’s because behind-the-scenes drama, power struggles, and budget overruns made it a laughingstock before it even opened, a boring reason to pile on a movie.
Our guys are ditched by their girls (Tess Harper of No Country for Old Men, and Carol Kane) and take a deal to do shows in the titular city (country?), where they’re immediately accosted by spy Isabelle Adjani whose murdered boyfriend has hidden a treasure map. Beatty is helping her, while Hoffman is spying for CIA Charles Grodin. There’s an overly helpful local kid named Abdul, because it was 1987. Cute movie.
In Cinema Scope, Christoph Huber calls out the
brilliantly “believably bad” songs composed for the film by Paul Williams (whose work here rivals his inspired compositions for Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, another long-underrated satiric dismantling of the entertainment business — though Ishtar in some ways one-ups it with its critical allegory of Hollywood colonialism via the fusion of entertainment and politics).
June 2022 Shorts Part 3: Bertrand/Yann
ApprivoiseÌ (2017, Bertrand Mandico)
Music video with unsubtitled intro. Flamboyant feather-boa skeleton-hand guy is set loose on a dinner party, his frost breath bestowing jeweled rings and necklaces and cocks upon the guests, but he cannot be stopped, and dismembers their host. Extremely great, obviously.
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Niemand (2019, Bertrand Mandico)
Another music video, this time sung in German, the story about a woman who keeps getting in car crashes, after which neon-eyed cannibal angels steal and eat whatever body part she’s injured.
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Fou de Bassan (2021, Yann Gonzalez)
Checking in with Mandico’s buddy Yann. This is a bit of free-for-all perversity, a misty night scene lit by spotlights and artificial moon.
Mija (2022, Isabel Castro)
Our feelgood closing film was the opposite of Sirens, which claimed not to be a “rock doc” but was one. Castro set out to make a rock doc, but the subject dropped out, so she followed pop star Cuco’s jilted manager Doris instead, as Doris discovers a possible new star in Jacks. None of this was my kind of music, especially when played “live” (as in Sirens, we only get one concert before the pandemic hit), but the story goes to interesting places. The inter-generational immigrant experience brought back The Namesake, and Doris’s dad getting his green card was the fest’s biggest moment since the kidnapping, and the second time we heard mid-film applause. Opener Andreas Kapsalis plays classic covers on fancy acoustic guitar – I remember him from previous fests, and had the same reaction: annoyance at the Pink Floyd song, then warming up to his captivating style.
The Nowhere Inn (2020, Bill Benz)
For Rotterdance this year I focused on movies that involve music, and this felt like a good opening night pick. Going for a surreal/absurd tone in the opening scene with Annie Clark in the back of a limo, then we’re treated to a big Kraftwerkian rock band performance of Fear the Future, very different from the solo version I saw.
But soon Carrie Brownstein’s “behind the scenes doc” takes over the plot, and it’s weird to watch because it’s two musicians I like whose actual personalities I don’t know, pretending to be in a fake documentary. Carrie makes Annie paranoid that she’s an uninteresting person offstage (“I can be St. Vincent all the time”), Annie summons her to the bedroom to shoot sex scenes with her “girlfriend Dakota” (Johnson of Suspiria), then starts being weird and unfriendly to Carrie, who decides to quit the tour until vaguely threatening family members convince her to stay on. “Let’s only document things I can control.” Dakota leaves Annie for being weird, Annie takes control of the movie and Carrie loses her mind. I think the movie is for bigger fans than me, daring us to care about who’s the REAL St. Vincent. Sharp photography anyway – Burr is a Portlandia director. Fake-doc enthusiast Bobcat Goldthwait worked on this, and it’s exciting to see Enon’s Toko Yasuda get a supporting part.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020, David Dobkin)
Not quite Barb & Star caliber, and not quite Rachel McAdams’ best comic performance (but probably Dan Stevens’) but it’ll do nicely. The only great review is by Mark Asch on letterboxd, who got more out of this film than any of us did.
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, The Lonely Island)
Lovers Rock (2020, Steve McQueen)
A house party movie without a talky main plot about some kid trying to score. Finally someone made a film where the slow-motion camera weaving through a hot dance floor isn’t a stylistic highlight in the middle of a narrative, but the whole point of the thing. Wasted dudes take over the dance floor later in the night – nothing great lasts. They still make time for a villain, and two near-wordless rescues from danger, and finally someone does score but it doesn’t feel contrived.
People whose names I figured out include lead girl Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, her friend who ditches early Shaniqua Okwok (of new 80’s-set miniseries It’s a Sin), love interest Micheal Ward (The Old Guard) and roundfro villain Francis Lovehall.
