by ·Comments Off on Dragon Dilatation (2024, Bertrand Mandico)

Another part of the Conann expanded universe, this one entirely in split-screen. Funny to watch this experimental remake of his previous film right after Funny Games US. The first half is a ballet adaptation containing music videos and animated bits. After Puppet Petrouchka becomes a ghost, each character gets a solo dance and debrief.

The butt-faces remind me of Tsukamoto, but the film is dedicated to Terayama Shuji:

Part two, The Deviant Comedy, is a victory lap through the Conann story with our buddy Rainer, and some changes (did any of the women have bat-wings for arms in the previous films?).

by ·Comments Off on The Hyperboreans (2024, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León)

Actress is on a soundstage recreating a lost film with Cociña and León, in which everyone but her is replaced by puppets. She ends up entering a spreadsheet cheat code, entering the hollow earth, and arguing with the Hitler-worshipping filmmakers. I don’t know what it all meant for Chile or for cinema, but I enjoyed every scene. After The Wolf House and Los Huesos, dudes are on a roll – and I’ve just learned that they did effects for Beau Is Afraid.

Antonia Giesen and her rock & roll patient:

Shooting a flower-creature shadow with a camera-laser:

The “directors”:

by ·Comments Off on Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024, Bros. Quay)

Joseph comes to visit his dying father and gets trapped in a hazy somnambulist stuttering time-loop zone. I didn’t like the devil man who destroys bird nests. I guess it’s a Bruno Schulz adaptation, but the story is less important than the Quays using their little puppets to create images nobody has ever seen before.

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Ancha es Castilla, N’importe Quoi (2014, Sergio Caballero)

Extremely homemade puppetry, as in Sergio is refusing to use any construction materials that weren’t already in the house – if it didn’t say 2014 I’d swear this was a pandemic project. Divided into chapters/episodes, like the Quay (and as hard to follow), but more primitive and absurd.

by ·Comments Off on Cauleen Smith volcano shorts

Cauleen Smith came to town to open an art exhibit and screen two nights of shorts programs – I made it to one of those.

Songs for Earth and Folk (2013)

Subtitle conversation between EARTH and FOLK
Soundtrack by The Eternals, aka Damon Locks

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Sine at the Canyon, Sine at the Sea (2016)

Racism and outer space
Seems tragic that letterboxd just lists “Cast: Richard Spencer”
Learned: Kelly Gabron = Cauleen Smith.

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Triangle Trade (2017)

Volcano and puppets
Collaborators include Jérôme Havre, a Toronto sculptor, and Camille Turner.
Music by Justin Hicks.

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My Caldera (2022)

Part one of The Volcano Manifesto (this + Mines + Deep West). Volcano Manifesto is also the title of an actual manifesto, released as a chapbook at an art exhibit, which was also titled My Caldera, and featured the handmade banners people were holding in Deep West. Metal soundtrack by Salvadore & Diego Rafael Rivera. “Cameraless print” process, awesome. Per the notes: “The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35mm film then rendering it in 4k as an artifact of the original footage.”

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Mines to Caves (2023)

Geology / wild animals
This one’s also an installation.

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All The Money (2024)

Photographs / fire
Music video for a Moor Mother song from her insane album The Great Bailout.

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The Deep West Assembly (2024)

“to understand the world through extraction”
populations irrupt / volcanoes erupt
Closes with a sign-language interpretation of a Nina Simone song.

–
see also:
Last Things (Deborah Stratman, rocks)
Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, volcanoes)

from Cauleen’s essay “The Association for the Advancement of Cinematic Creative Maladjustment”:

The Maladjusteds liberate image from narrative. Narrative is the oppressor of the Moving-Image … the Moving-Image can and must do more than slave for narrative. The Moving-Image must rise up and reclaim the power it has for so long surrendered to story.
…
The Maladjusteds project their love of the Spectator onto the screens. The Maladjusteds resist corporate pressure to fuel the desires of the Spectator. Rather they seek to excavate her needs.
…
The Maladjusted Spectator does not expect to be pleased. She expects to be respected … When she watches a Moving-Image, she revels in the freedom of being responsible for her heart and mind, while trusting the filmmaker to expand and enliven both.

by ·Comments Off on Jan Svankmajer shorts

J.S. Bach Fantasy in G Minor (1965)

Organist wedges an apple in his mouth and gets to work. The rest is a Bach music video, focused on decaying walls, locks and grates, with stop-motion interludes of gashes and holes appearing in pulsating rows. Finally all the doors are thrown open and the camera rushes into the streets, confronted with a whole new world of decaying walls and locks.

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Et Cetera (1966)

Exuberant little movie with better music than the Bach (sorry). Three parts in seven minutes, each piece an action that reaches a loop point then fullscreen letters exclaim ETC, ETC, ETC. Of course the film begins with FINE so when it reaches the end, the entire piece is a loop, ETC ETC, until the film material melts in lovely stop-motion.

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Punch and Judy (1966)

Incredible, two puppets fight over the price or possession of a live guinea pig, burying and mutilating each other in turn. Jan’s editing and close-ups have never been better.

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Historia Nature Suite (1967)

Different families of animals in rapid montage (birds obvs. the best segment), combining artistic/scientific drawings, taxidermy, and live creatures into an edited whirl, each part ending with an extreme closeup of a guy eating creature-meat.

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The Garden (1968)

Gardener takes his guest Fred home, tries to show off his prize rabbits but Fred is too distracted by the garden’s living fence (a chain of humans around the property holding hands). The gardener tells some secrets about the fencemen, unheard by us, and the guest immediately joins the fence. Live actors and the vaguely folk-horror scenario set this one apart.

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Don Juan (1970)

Juan’s dad won’t lend him money, so the Don smashes his dad’s head in. Juan’s chosen girl’s dad disapproves, so the Don cuts the old man’s face off. Juan’s brother Felipe, beloved of the girl, seeks Juan in the forest to take revenge, so the Don stabs his brother full of holes. Then the girl’s dad returns as a vengeful ghost who sends Don Juan to hell. Some of the usual delights, and the effect of actors wearing giant eyeless marionette-suits is fun, but much of this is the people/puppets standing around and announcing their dialogue.

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The Castle of Otranto (1977)

Documentary interview with a researcher who discovered that a Czech castle was the setting for an old Italian novel, with nearby caves and secret passages and armor fragments matching those in the book. Svank and the viewer grow tired of this at about the same time, and he switches focus to animating the book’s illustrations, retelling the story of a young woman being chased around by all the castle’s men until the castle is destroyed by a giant, who also interrupts the (fake) interview.

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Another Kind of Love (1988)

Music video for a bland-looking British singer (Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers) who seems to have been patient with the stop-motion process and allowed his clay doppelganger to be hilariously mutilated. Snappy editing.

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Virile Games (1988)

Viewer watches a soccer game on TV but it’s a harlem-globetrottin’ version of soccer where points are scored by attacking the opposing players’ faces with foreign objects until their clay heads implode. The ball gets kicked through the viewer’s apartment window and the game is relocated to his cramped living room, not that he notices. Also: the viewer, the ref, and all the players are the same actor.

by ·Comments Off on Asylum (1972, Roy Ward Baker)

Dr. Robert Powell (Ken Russell’s Mahler) arrives at the titular asylum to work for Dr. Starr, but is met by his assistant Patrick Magee instead. Magee says Starr is now a patient, locked safely upstairs with a trusty electrical system controlled by this button (I’ve heard that one before), and challenges Mahler to correctly identify the doctor. Mahler heroically pads the film on the way upstairs, and the orderly (who I correctly/immediately guessed as the doctor) lets him into each room, one at a time… yes, it’s a corny anthology horror, the same year Magee and Cushing and Dr. Orderly appeared in Tales from the Crypt. 1972 would seem to be too late for this kinda thing, but British people such as Edgar Wright think all this is great.

Bonnie (Barbara Parkins of The Mephisto Waltz and A Taste of Evil) isn’t even the murderer in her story – her boyfriend Richard Todd (the least famous person in House of the Long Shadows) chops up his harpy wife (Sylvia Syms, appropriately of Victim) and puts her in the basement freezer, but her butcher-paper-wrapped body parts reanimate, strangling him and attacking the unwitting Bonnie with the hatchet until the police arrive to blame the whole mess on her.

Tailor Bruno (Barry Morse of The Changeling) was brought the Man in the White Suit material by mysterious customer Peter Cushing, who planned on using dark magick to resurrect his dead son with the suit, but the tailor’s wife puts the suit on a mannequin which comes to life instead.

Barbara (young Charlotte Rampling, whoa) seems the most culpable so far. She starts by blaming Lucy (Britt Ekland of Wicker Man) for murdering her brother (James Villiers of Mountains of the Moon) and the nurse (Megs Jenkins of The Innocents), but Lucy might be an invented personality of Barbara’s.

Dr. Byron (Herbert Lom of The Sect) is at least a doctor of something – I don’t know how we’re supposed to imagine that the previous three were actually psychologists based on their stories. But Lom’s specialty is transmitting his consciousness into sub-Puppet Master wind-up dolls. The new visitor must’ve inspired a rampage, since he and Dr. Orderly go on the attack.

by ·Comments Off on Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys (2004, Ted Nicolaou)

“Sci Fi Pictures presents”

The Full Moon era has ended. Sci Fi are producers of hundreds of TV movies I’ve never heard of, most of them involving sharks, and a few craptastic sequels (Species 3, Stir of Echoes 2, Firestarter Rekindled, Return of the Living Dead 4+5, lots of Lake Placid movies).

“Written by Courtney Joyner”

A cowriter on part 3, also video store faves Class of 1999 and Doctor Mordrid.

“Directed by Ted Nicolaou”

Ted made Bad Channels, which you’ll recall got mashed up with Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and also made TerrorVision and the Subspecies movies, so he seems like the right man for the job.

It’s a Christmas movie! The Demonic Toys have been rebranded as Christmas Pals by a toy company run by Vanessa Angel (the fake woman in the 90’s Weird Science TV series). In a Child’s Play / Halloween III mashup, she’s helping a demon destroy humanity, and step one is getting cursed toys into every household.

Angel + Henchman Julian:

Meanwhile across town, Disgruntled Suburban Ruffalo Scientist Bobby Toulon has got a full collection of crucified puppets in his basement, is trying to bring them to life using ol’ Andre’s notes. It’s a funny thing to say about circa-2004 Corey Feldman, but he gives one of the finest performances of the franchise – I like the gruff crank voice he’s doing. He’s assisted by loyal daughter Dani Keaton (already a horror vet from Pinocchio’s Revenge and Carpenter’s Village of the Damned). Everyone else in the movie is Bulgarian, since that is a very cheap place to shoot a movie.

All the nazi-fighting magic is turned into toy company espionage. I don’t love the attempt to cross dark puppet magic with christianity, but whatever. Each side runs into setbacks: Six Shooter blows up the lab and all the puppets catch fire, and Angel is scrambling for a human sacrifice on Christmas eve and has to bleed her receptionist in the iron maiden.

It’s definitely a proper Puppet Master movie, in that it’s crowded with Toulon family mythology bullshit, and feels long at 90 minutes. Angel needs the Toulon secrets to complete her evil plan and kidnaps the daughter, but Corey upgrades the puppets’ weaponry, and they fuck up some demonic toys. The demon (wearing a santa suit, nice) is displeased and drags Angel to hell.

by ·Comments Off on The Twentieth Century (2019, Matthew Rankin)

When your eccentric silent-film-worshipping Canadian indie feature opens with a credit for Louis Negin you’re definitely admitting a Guy Maddin influence. Convoluted, fictionalized story of Mackenzie King, a politician introduced at the Hospital for Defective Children falling for a harpist. Just in chapter one there’s an Isle of Dogs cable car, a muppet cockatoo, and Negin as King’s mother – with nine chapters to go, it’s all a bit much. That’s not a complaint, it’s an admission that I need to watch a second time.

Lotta androgyny and excellent deco designs… guy who looks like De Niro in Brazil with a cactus hand, and love interest who looks like a young Pearl Forrester (this is Catherine St-Laurent of Tu dors Nicole)… I had fun.

Justine Smith in Little White Lies:

In one sequence, a series of candidates pledge their allegiance to the Great Disappointment (aka the Canadian flag) and engage in a series of mediocre competitions to test their passive-aggressiveness and thresholds for shame. Far from being a representation of Canada’s best vying for leadership, the sequence reveals a succession of pitiful and desperately vain men who act as though becoming prime minister is their birthright. They wish to govern the country not to make it better but to facilitate their own ambitions.

L-R: muppet, dad, Mackenzie

by ·Comments Off on Annette (2021, Leos Carax)

Brutish Adam Driver and delicate Marion Cotillard get together and have a magical singing baby, to the consternation of accompanist Simon Helberg – and it’s all performed as an opera written by Sparks, who appear (along with the director and his daughter, the film’s dedicatee) with the cast in the great opening number. A good pick for my first movie back in theaters for over a year.

I read so many articles on this, and have gone back and forth about aspects of it, but it seems like a movie that’s gonna last. Bilge’s second Vulture article helped with the ending (which I didn’t love at the time), Sicinski’s analysis also useful (“even its flaws are kind of endearing”), and the GQ interview with Simon Helberg gives insight into Carax’s methods. And from the NY Times:

At first, Carax turned down the offer, not wanting the film’s fraught father-daughter relationship to confuse his own teenage daughter, Nastya, or invite speculation on the parallels between the film and his life, given his tendency to transform his male leads into proxies of himself. He reversed course, however, when she took a liking to songs Sparks had sent him, creating the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings.