by ·Comments Off on The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold)

Ann Seyfried totes her little brother (Lewis Pullman of a Salem’s Lot remake) as she discovers a Christian sect called the Shakers, marries Chris Abbott but can’t have kids, gets arrested and returns as their messiah, moves to America and leads the group as they grow and inevitably diminish, since her main rule is strict celibacy. The US arrests her for being a treasonous witch but releases her for lack of evidence, then vigilantes burn their place down and murder a bunch of them – this country was cursed from the start.

A musical of the best sort, the looping rhythmic hymns reminding me of Lungfish songs. I assume the great Seyfried won all the awards, but I’m clicking on the awards link and getting distracted by which movies the Golden Globes consider a “musical or comedy.”

by ·Comments Off on Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson)

Priest Josh Brolin, Gardener Thomas Haden Church, and Doctor Jeremy Renner conspire with Glenn Close to perform a miracle, but she kills them all, confounding disheveled priest Josh O’Connor until our guy Blanc figures it all out.

The bar with a hell theme has a Ricky Jay poster:

by ·Comments Off on The Holy Girl (2004, Lucrecia Martel)

Strange focus and framing, really attractive. Amalia’s dad is having twins with a new girl, while her mom Helen is hosting a doctor conference at her hotel. One visiting doc presses his dick against Amalia in a crowd, and later when Dr. Jano has become friendly with mom, Amalia recognizes him as the street pervert. Amalia’s friend gets busted with her boyfriend and tells the adults Amalia’s secrets to distract them. The holy part fades away, and movie ends before either revelation drops – real “formal excellence plus narrative withholding.”

The girl went on to direct A Family Submerged, which played Locarno. Mom is from La Cienaga and costarred in a couple Gael Garcia Bernal movies.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

Like La Ciénaga, The Holy Girl ends with sensorial obscurity, this time with sound, smell, and even weightlessness. As in the former’s conclusion, the setting is once again a swimming pool. Amalia and her best friend Josefina take a dip, and we witness a wave of uncertainty and disturbance briefly overcome Josefina. “Do you notice that smell?” she asks, and Amalia does. “Orange blossom.” Josefina promises to take care of her like a sister would, and the two recline. Floating in the water, an unidentified woman approaches to ask them both, “Did you hear?” which ends the film. It’s a startlingly open-ended and fitting conclusion to this tale of spiritual non-awakenings — cinema as a transitory state, elongated into permanence, stagnation, and aimlessness.

by ·Comments Off on Amazing Grace (2018, Alan Elliott)

“Everyone say amen for the technical difficulties … give the technician a big hand for the difficulties.”

Aretha murdered the audience, then the choir, then the band leader, and the movie’s only half over. The choir leader (who is named Alexander Hamilton) survived. Please give everyone in this church a bottle of water.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Franklin conceived the album as a return to her spiritual roots (her father, also a reverend, delivers a moving speech in the last quarter of the movie), and one of the reasons she set out to record it live rather than in a studio was to capture that feeling which could only be generated by audience participation. Apart from being a musical document of the highest order, Amazing Grace emerges as a skillful orchestration of communal rapture.

Max Goldberg, 13 issues later:

Whatever they say, the music documentary gets jittery in the face of actual music. Perhaps it’s not so surprising: the most potent element of the movie — in some real sense its reason for being — is the one thing the filmmaker had no part in. Is it so hard to imagine this situation creating ambivalence, even anxiety? The film needs to do something, so it cuts … For me, the story of Amazing Grace serves as a kind of parable, articulating our wildest hopes for the music documentary: to bring sound and image back into alignment, to make the music whole again.

by ·Comments Off on Heretic (2024, Scott Beck & Bryan Woods)

“That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us.” Hugh Grant invites in a couple of mormon girls who don’t quite talk like real people, but maybe that’s the point. He quickly proves to be weirder than they are, with his dogeared bibles of all religions and specific theological questions they can’t answer, his never-seen but oft-mentioned wife, the metal in his walls preventing cell signals. Hugh puts on a Hollies LP and calls the Book of Mormon a “zany regional spinoff edition” of the Bible over “The Air That I Breathe,” then drops the gentle facade and locks them in his Barbarian basement with an apparently dead woman. Resurrection, afterlife, and simulation theory are proposed, the girls realize they need to outwit Grant at his own theological game and call out some inconsistency in his story, leading to a final showdown which kills Sophie Thatcher (of the new Companion), leaving only the quieter Chloe East (Wolf of Snow Hollow) alive to escape, no thanks to Elder Topher Grace who’d been searching for them. Decent movie, we should cast Hugh Grant as a verbose psychotic in more movies.

by ·Comments Off on Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

Watched the miniseries version, which lived up to its high reputation. Kids grow up in wealthy theater household, where everyone’s got their eccentricities and all the husbands are sleeping with the maids. Theater owner dad (Allan Edwall, who bought a theater after appearing in this) has an episode during a rehearsal and dies, then after a year, mom Ewa Fröling marries bishop Jan Malmsjö (Scenes from a Marriage) and moves the kids into his severe, forbidding household.

Family members have been pathetic or horrible, but mostly in an entertaining way, while the new stepdad is horrible in a horrible way. Knowing how Bergman loves mixing religion and punishment, I figured this would be the bulk of the movie and lead to everyone’s ruin, but the kids’ grandmother and her friend Isak (Erland Josephson, Hour of the Wolf baron and Nostalghia madman) plot a successful rescue operation.

L-R: the bishop, uncle Jarl Kulle (guy who loves dueling in Smiles of a Summer Night), uncle Börje Ahlstedt (I Am Curious x2)

“I don’t understand why I always have to see dead people,” says Alexander, ahead of his time. In addition to theater, there are ghosts and dreams and stories and magic in every episode. In the last half hour, instead of simply wrapping up, the movie introduces trans psychic Ismael, giving the sense that the kids’ lives will stay richly weird for a while longer.

by ·Comments Off on Alice, Sweet Alice (1976, Alfred Sole)

Alice is a creepy kid who loves masks and torments her popular little sister Brooke Shields. After Brooke is murdered in church and her mom’s shitty sister is repeatedly stabbed in her legs and hands, Alice is brought in for questioning. The parents take her home against psych recommendations, and more people get stabbed, but the masked raincoat killer has been the family’s psycho-catholic housekeeper (a Spike Lee regular)… all along? It’s confusing since Alice wears the same getup, but given the movie’s half-giallo half-Don’t Look Now influence, it’s probably meant to be confusing.

Unlike Tucker & Dale we got real filmmakers in charge, though you wouldn’t know it from checking their other credits – Sole made porn and did production design for the Wishmaster and Donnie Darko sequels, the producers and DPs made nothing, and the editor cut The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. But for a brief moment in the mid-70s they made a beautiful slasher film in which the vibes are so far off.

by ·Comments Off on The Suspended Vocation & Of Great Events (1978, Raoul Ruiz)

The Suspended Vocation

Very nice photography of a monk in a black-and-white film crosscut with his counterpart in a color film. Unfortunately “interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice” is not a topic that keeps me alert and engaged. The lead monk is played by Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer in color, and Didier Flamand (one of the Dalis in the new Dupieux) in b/w. Based on a novel from Pierre Klossowski, a biographer of Nietzsche and de Sade.

Ruiz in Rouge:

This book talks about all the quarrels inside the church, of different factions in the Catholic church. This was not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America. Which is not so strange when you think that this movement was composed of ex-Catholics. They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left; this is one of the ways you can read the political movements in Latin America.

–
Of Great Events and Ordinary People

That’s more like it – the truefalsiest movie. It announces itself as a doc on Paris’s 12th during election season, but it’s really a doc about making that doc, then a doc about making docs in general, as it gradually swallows itself.

I think Ruiz has seen News From Home, since he opens a slow 360+ degree pan on its poster, and Adrian Martin points out the movie’s closing Le Joli Mai parody.

Martin:

Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right …). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films.