by ·Comments Off on Red Hook Summer (2012, Spike Lee)

Not a Do The Right Thing sequel at all, except for some embarrassingly distracting cameos by Spike as Mookie, still delivering pizzas. Except for Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters’s performance and one crazy shot when his church’s holy-cross-shaped fluorescent lights reflect in his eyes as he goes on a defensive preaching rant, almost the whole movie is embarrassing.

Frohawked Atlantan kid named Flik Royale (okay, the names are good) is dumped on his grandfather Enoch in New York for the summer. They don’t get along, grandpa forbidding junk food and yelling about Jesus all the time, and Flik hiding behind his iPad and hanging out with asthma-having girl Chazz. What do we know will happen when someone in a movie has asthma? Yeah, that happens. Flik almost bonds with his grandpa after Enoch’s friend gives him some good advice, but suddenly a dude named Blessing crashes into the church accusing Enoch of child abuse years ago in Georgia. This takes over the movie – the preacher gets beat down by some gangster kid who’d stolen Flik’s iPad earlier, and Isiah “Sheeeeeeee” Whitlock “eeeeit” Jr. appears as Detective Flood in his third Spike joint. Then Flik, having learned nothing but at least made a friend in the asthma girl, goes home.

Thomas Jefferson Byrd of Girl 6 and He Got Game plays a drunk deacon. A character named Mother Darling is played by Tracy Johns, star of She’s Gotta Have It. Movie has a couple of blatant Michael Jackson references (note Spike’s other movie this year is an MJ documentary) and some amusing DTRT references: the phrases “do the right thing” and “that’s the truth, ruth” show up in the dialogue. Seems harmless until “do the right thing” comes back as a terrible song towards the end. Overall the music is innocuous, picture is unexceptional (with digi noise) and dialogue is groany.

by ·Comments Off on We Have a Pope (2011, Nanni Moretti)

I only know Moretti from a couple of cute shorts in different anthology projects. This could’ve been another cute short – I expected something weightier, but it had little to say about the Pope, Vatican, religion, just an occasionally funny little story about an elected pope who disappears, spends some time on his own, and returns to proclaim that he can’t accept the job.

Michel Piccoli (in two of the movies I anxiously want to see from this year’s Cannes festival) is the confused pope and Jerzy Stuhr (star of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff) is a large-faced official spokeman who tries to take care of the situation. Moretti himself plays a psychiatrist hired to visit the vatican and help the new pope, but when the pope escapes (covered up by Stuhr by having a guard hide in the pope’s quarters, eating expensive food and rattling the curtains to indicate his presence) Moretti has nothing to do and isn’t allowed to leave, so organizes a volleyball tournament, dividing the cardinals by home country – my favorite part of the movie. Piccoli meanwhile visits Moretti’s estranged wife Margherita Buy. You’d expect something to come of this, soon-to-be-divorced psychiatrists each treating the same troubled pope, but no. The movie really amounted to a pleasurable afternoon watching the great Piccoli, nothing more.

The Guardian points out that the movie got mixed reviews from Vatican reviewers, then proceed to give it a mixed review themselves. In competition at Cannes the year Tree of Life won.

Moretti quoted in Indiewire: “People may have wanted me to do something different, but I wanted to surprise them actually. Some people thought I’d denounce some areas of the Vatican but that is why I chose not to do that… I wanted the story to be a surprise.”

by ·Comments Off on The Flowers of St. Francis (1950, Roberto Rossellini)

A very light-hearted, beautiful, episodic film about a group of monks who follow St. Francis. I didn’t know Rossellini was capable of humor and lightness – this comes as pleasantly surprising as Smiles of a Summer Night. The monks look silly running everywhere they go, and they take in a village idiot who never quite gets the hang of things, so I thought for a while that this was a religion-mocking predecessor of Life of Brian, but the underlying seriousness about their faith and Francis’s lessons on humility come through by the end.

Rossellini:

“As the title indicates, my film wants to focus on the merrier aspect of the Franciscan experience, on the playfulness, the ‘perfect delight,’ the freedom that the spirit finds in poverty and in an absolute detachment from material things. . . . I believe that certain aspects of primitive Franciscanism could best satisfy the deepest aspirations and needs of a humanity who, enslaved by its greed and having totally forgotten the Poverello’s lesson, has also lost its joy of life.”

I. Francesco returns from Rome with his companions, having been given the Pope’s permission to preach. Someone has taken over their old hut, so they wander off in the pouring rain to build a new one.

II. Brother Ginepro gave away his clothes to a beggar. Francesco tells him not to do this anymore.

III. Francesco talks to birds. Wrinkled ol’ Giovanni The Simple is given permission to join the group. I can’t remember where I read this, but it said the actor who played Giovanni was too drunk to learn any lines, so they’d shove him in front of camera to improvise his scenes. He’d played a monk earlier in L’Amore.

Francis with bird:

IV. Sister Chiara comes to visit, has dinner with Francesco. It’s said that she first became a nun in their chapel, but I thought they just built the chapel in the middle of nowhere. Guess not.

V. Troublesome Ginepro cuts off the foot of a neighboring farmer’s pig to offer to a sick comrade. The farmer gets understandably angry. Ginepro tries to apologize.

VI. A wordless section: “How San Francesco, praying in the forest at night, met the leper.” Francis silently commisserates.

VII. Ginepro again, makes enough stew to last two weeks so the guys don’t have to stop preaching to cook. Francesco is impressed, gives him permission to go preach, but he must always begin by humbly saying “Baa, baa, baa, much I say, little I do.”

VIII. Ginepro “baa baa”s his way into a violent village of warrior-thugs, who beat the shit out of him and play jumprope with his body. He gets a private conference with heavily armored warlord Aldo Fabrizi (the priest of Rome Open City – I didn’t recognize him in the mop wig and fake mustache) who finally figures out that Ginepro is obviously not a threat.

IX. Francesco is sad because he sees a bandit killed. He and brother Leone try to preach at a house but get tossed out into the mud. He explains that this suffering is “perfect happiness.”

X. The group breaks up. Francesco has everyone spin in circles until they fall down dizzy – whichever city they’re now facing is where they must go preach.

M. Porro: “Rossellini said that his film was a humble and austere work, realistically describing the spirit of the story. … In the cinema, biblical and evangelical subjects took the form of big American films. Think of a film like The Bible by John Huston, The Robe, King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told. The rhetoric of these films interferes with the spiritual message.”

by ·Comments Off on Santa Sangre (1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

This was pretty incredible. Nude man in asylum thinks he’s a monkey. Flashback to when he was a young boy in a false mustache in the circus, watching a tattooed hottie force a deaf-mute girl to walk a burning tightrope. The boy’s mom is chief priestess at the santa sangre temple, which is torn down after being disavowed by the church, claiming the armless woman they worship is not a saint. Later she catches her awful drunken husband with the tattooed lady, and he cuts off her arms then kills himself, and the young mime tightrope walker is driven away from the traumatized boy.

Then after that first 45 minutes, the unthinkable happens: the movie got boring. Later I changed my mind about this, figure it just changed mood and speed and I wasn’t able to follow along, because retracing the story through the million screenshots I took, it sure doesn’t look boring. Anyway, now the boy and his armless mom have a stage act where he hides behind her, being her arms, imagining himself invisible. A bunch of people, including the tattooed woman and a cross-dressing wrestler, get brutally murdered – mother commanding son to kill with his/her hands. He hooks up with his midget best friend from the circus, who may have never existed. Only when he finds the mime girl does he stand up to his mother (and stab her to death), then he and the girl walk outside to start a new life together. No just kidding – they walk outside to find themselves surrounded by police.

Too old to play the young lead himself, Alejandro has his son Axel play the lead, with younger son Adan as young Axel, Blanca Guerra (also in Walker) as his mother and Guy “Dean’s brother” Stockwell as his father. It’s possibly the most coherent Jodorowsky movie I’ve seen, a true horror bursting with ideas and excellently filmed. I hope all the dead or dying animals were just special-effects this time.

D. Lim (who also makes a howler mistake, calling La Cravate a lost film years after it was rediscovered and issued on DVD):

Psycho is hardly the only cinematic influence on Santa Sangre. The circus grotesquerie suggests Fellini, though Tod Browning’s big-top movies Freaks and The Unknown are perhaps even more relevant. James Whale’s The Invisible Man is glimpsed on the television at one point. Also apparent is the lurid imprint of the film’s producer and co-writer Claudio Argento, brother of schlock-horror maestro Dario. But for all its sundry inspirations, Santa Sangre never seems derivative. Jodorowsky’s anything-goes alchemy has a cumulative power, as does the documentary energy of his location photography. It’s a movie bursting with life — interrupted frequently by processions and pageants, shot in actual slums and red-light districts.

You can’t tell from the dim screenshot that this is a white bird rising from an open grave:

by ·Comments Off on The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (2009, David Russo)

This came recommended by my Sundance-attending coworkers, and I would have eventually sought it out myself once I realized that the great Russo (Pan With Us + Populi, two of my favorite short films) had made a feature.

Ethyl:

Once it started (actually, as early as when I saw the “sponsored by credit card company” DVD menu) I realized I was in for a Sundancey indie toilet-humor quirkfest, not my favorite kind of thing, but it was hopefully to be more Donnie Darko than Waydowntown. First half was entertaining as all hell, with fabulous editing, surprisingly good music (by “Awesome”) and some of that chaos-reining stop-motion from Russo’s shorts. After a while it gets quieter and slower, becomes a slave to plot and its characters’ emotional arcs and gives me more time to wonder at the allegory, if any. Wouldn’t call it a hidden masterpiece, but it surely lived up to potential. Make more movies, Mr. Russo.

Little Dory and buddy O.C.:

Dory quits his datameister gig in a huff, and goes religion-hopping while working as a janitor with punk artists Ethyl and Methyl (fake Stanley Kubrick in Trapped Ashes) and O.C. (of Clay Pigeons) and Weird William. Natasha Lyonne (Slums of Beverly Hills) gives them test batches of experimental self-warming cookies, to which they all become addicted, and which cause the men to give birth to fluorescent blue fish, which makes them quite emotional and gives Dory new religious meaning to ponder. Finally he decides not to shut down the evil corporation that’s sneaking awful chemicals into junk foods, but to let the cookies into the world, to allow other snack-craving men with meaningless lives to experience the pain and joy of creating new aquatic life.

by ·Comments Off on A Serious Man (2009, Coen Bros.)

The Coens follow up their grim oscar-winner with the star-studded, absurd and murderous Burn After Reading and then a star-less (recognized one guy from Spin City) return to excellence. Like Miller’s Crossing, it’s a series of perfect scenes, building and building, and leading to… ambiguity. Would need to watch a few more times to work out the film’s philosophy. Part of the problem is all the biblical references (IMDB trivia: “His son Danny’s looking at the oncoming tornado recalls God speaking to Job from out of the whirlwind, saying He will not explain why these bad things have happened to him.”) and I’ve only skimmed Revelations looking for the parts about the seas running red with blood (I think that’s actually in the Necronomicon), so I miss certain allusions.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry leads a pitch-perfect cast (relative unknowns or not, the actors must be the best ensemble of the year, Inglorious Basterds their only rival). His wife is leaving him for a smarmy neighbor just as he’s up for tenure, a student is threatening/bribing him, his kids are pains in the ass, his brother is a closeted, medically-impaired couch physicist, and the rabbis offer no help at all. The story builds to a final tragedy (presumably bad news from the doctor, which we never hear, directly after Larry caves on the bribery issue) and a final mystery (a tornado outside the son’s school) but shortly before the denouement comes the son’s quiet, nervous post-bar-mitzvah visit with the elder rabbi which just explodes the movie’s long-held tension when the old man’s handed-down wisdom consists of quoted Jefferson Airplane lyrics.

G. Kenny calls it “something new in the Coen oeuvre: A completely seamless hybrid of their putatively mature mode with their outrageous cartoonish one.”

Bright Lights:

To watch A Serious Man – their most morally sophisticated work – is to feel what it’s like to be Joel or Ethan Coen, to see the world as a pointless series of endless sufferings and inconveniences, surrounded by insufferable buffoons and irrational cretins. This is not a world of their making. This is the world they live in.

Slate:

You could know the Kabbalah inside out and still struggle with these mysteries every bit as fruitlessly as Larry does. And that’s just how his creators want it. Though the movie concerns a specifically Jewish crisis of faith (and paints a satiric but lovingly precise portrait of Jewish-American culture), A Serious Man unfolds in a moral universe that’s recognizable from earlier Coen films. It’s a cruel and ultimately inexplicable place. What Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem’s pitiless mass murderer, was to No Country for Old Men, the Hebrew God is to this movie.

I should also mention that this movie had one of the best trailers of the year, a montage of annoying sound effects and cries for help set to the rhythm of Larry’s head being banged into a chalkboard. If not for that propulsive Arcade Fire song on Where The Wild Things Are, I’d have to give it top honors.

by ·Comments Off on The Desert Within (2008, Rodrigo Plá)

Did anyone know it was illegal to be catholic in Mexico in the 1920’s and/or 30’s? That there was some kind of war going on? Thanks to my schooling history of dry, unengaging, U.S.-based history classes, I am barely aware that there is a country called Mexico, so my ignorance of its religious-political history can’t be surprising.

Elías lives with his mom and very pregnant wife, has seven kids and a leaky roof. Wife falls down fixing the roof, thinks her baby is dying, so asks Elías to fetch the preacher. Problem: the government has declared Catholicism illegal so getting a priest is risky. Now either the priest is leaving town, or he’s getting a group together to fight the gov’t, but Elías interferes and everyone (incl one of his sons) is killed. E. himself escapes but now everyone is mad at him so he grabs his newborn son, his newlydead wife and his remaining six kids and heads out to live all reclusive in the desert, building a church to atone for the killing of all those people.

Years pass! Youngest kid grows up sickly then gets better. A boy dies raising the church bell, two boys die of plague, and a girl goes mad and drowns herself looking for signs from god. Another boy visits his grandmother, who thinks he is Elías so he ends up living quietly with her and starting a family. The church is finished but Elías isn’t sure that he has been forgiven, frets about it and starts wrecking the church wall to rebuild it until he gets it right. Meanwhile, the two remaining kids, boy Aureliano and girl Micaela, start having sex with each other. She dies, father kills himself, Aureliano lives to narrate this movie in framing story.

Movie comes off as your standard prestige-pic, professionally made but without anything interesting to recommend it. It’s bummer city for the first half hour, then seems to go on forever and I’m thinking things will get better with the whole church-building, but tragedy and madness slowly follow until the movie dumps us off right back in bummer city where we started. I mean I guess Aureliano is free now, but the death of his sexy sister puts a damper on that, and the thing with the brother taking his father’s place at gramma’s could be fascinating if it was given more than a minute of screen time. Surprised to hear that this swept the Mexican academy awards, leaving the AFF’s big-deal closing-night pic Rudo y Cursi empty-handed.

by ·1 Comment

Firstly, the “Ceddo” are the outsider townspeople. Took me half the movie to figure that one out. The town is converting to muslim, and the local imam is becoming more powerful than the king. A small group of traditionalist men kidnap the princess to protest the forced religious conversion. Meanwhile, a white christian missionary is looking for followers but is not doing so well.

While the king and imam disagree over how to proceed and the imam’s men plot to overthrow the throne, three younger men – the king’s potential successors and the princess’s potential husbands, depending which rules you follow – aim to rescue the princess, bringing guns to a bow-and-arrow party. Biram is kind of a compromise choice between mirror-wearing king-loyalist Saxewar and committed muslim Fall, but Biram is easily killed by an arrow. Saxewar goes next, dies stabbed through the throat by the kidnapper. Fall becomes suspicious of the imam and renounces his position, and finally the imam carries through his threat of deposing the king (who dies offscreen) and has the lead kidnapper killed, freeing the princess. She marches right back into town, grabs a rifle and blows away the imam herself. Damn, Sembene was good with endings.

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Much of the story revolves around slavery. A white trader is in town accepting slaves in exchange for wine and guns, so Ceddo are trading members of their own families for guns to fight the muslims. One reason people are converting to islam in the first place is because law prohibits children who are born muslim to become slaves, so if young adults convert, they might still become slaves but their children will be born free. The christian missionary has no such promise, and at most manages to collect one follower, or at least a curious onlooker to the white man’s sermon. This leads to a wonderful dream sequence, a large modern (as opposed to the no-specific-year historical period of the rest of the film) crowd is gathered as this new guy reads a memorial service for the white priest, seen in a coffin… dreams of a successor, unfulfilled, as the christian is killed unceremoniously later in the movie.

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Watched this from a very good print with strong color rented from recently-folded New Yorker Films – we were warned that this may be the last screening of this particular film for a long time. This was made two years after Xala – seems that this is the turning-point film for me in Sembene’s career, since I’ve enjoyed this one and everything after it (Guelwaar, Faat Kiné, Moolaadé) more than everything before it (Xala, Emitai, Black Girl). Can’t put my finger on why I like the later ones more… better color, stronger characters, easier-to-follow narratives? I don’t know why I like movies, but this one was damn amazing. We’ll see how unseen early film Mandabi and late Camp de Thiaroye hold up.

The princess appeared 20+ years later in Faat Kiné, and Prince Biram played an interpreter in Coup de torchon

We were always looking for the camera’s reflection in Saxewar’s mirror:
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From the valuable article by J. Leahy at Senses of Cinema:

Sembène goes so far as to articulate something completely ignored in the discourse of the male protagonists of the village’s internal war: the desire of this strong, silent, beautiful young woman. This is revealed in what I read as a subjective flashforward to a possible future, similar to that of the priest. It is characteristic of the complexity of Sembène’s analysis of the interaction between the individual, history and traditional practice that this shows her married to her kidnapper and finding happiness in the role of a traditional wife serving her husband. Others have read this as flashback to their first encounter. Even if this is so, the moment remains equally evocative in terms of the possibilities it suggests.

by ·Comments Off on Ordet (1955, Carl Th. Dreyer)

Proud father of three Morten Borgen has carved out a name for himself in the community. A devout Christian farmer, his beliefs differ somehow (I wasn’t exactly sure how) from those of the local prayer group and he’s trying to win more converts to his side. His son Mikkel’s wife Inger, the only woman of the house, is a mother of two with a third on the way.
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Son Johannes was supposed to be a religion scholar, but he had a terrible time with Kierkegaard and lost his damned mind, now walks the house claiming to be Jesus Christ when he isn’t wandering the countryside lost.
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Youngest son (right) Anders wants to marry the daughter of Peter Petersen (left), leader of the town prayer group, but he’s disallowed because of the two older men’s religious feud.
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When Inger’s pregnancy is suddenly in trouble, Peter wishes her death.
His wish is granted.
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Johannes reappears mid-funeral during a reconciliation of the two stubborn men, who put aside their differences of belief so their children can be together. In front of the men, the kids, the doctor and Inger’s atheist husband Mikkel, Jesus-Johannes raises Inger from the dead.
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Movie is set in 1925, so only the doctor has a car. Moves rather slow, glad I had some coffee in me. Didn’t seem like my thing for a while – flashbacks to Gertrud, a movie I didn’t get – but an hour later I’ve gotta admit it’s one of the most beautiful works of cinema ever made. Just look at these fucking stills. I’m sure there’s more reading I could do, tons and tons of articles written about it, but I’m gonna skip ’em and let it stand for itself right now.