Coffee-obsessed Mato (a Leningrad Cowboy) and his mechanic Matti (painter of La Vie de bohème) go on a road trip, give a couple of foreign women a lift (title star Kati Outinen, and Balalaika performer Kirsi). One of AK’s most straightforward premises and films, as its hour-long runtime would indicate.
Tag: road trip
Drive-Away Dykes (2024, Ethan Coen)
Not the only movie I’ve watched this month to be set in 1999.
Pretty cute.
Trenque Lauquen (2022, Laura Citarella)
Two movies really, with full credits for each part. Not much here to gaze upon, and my copy looked like streaming mush; it’s all narrative. Chapters give different characters and perspectives (I like how their titles are tied together with song lyrics) as the missing Laura is tracked by her more arrogant boyfriend Rafael and her secret boyfriend Ezequiel (Ez’s job in the movie is to not follow what people are saying so everything has to be repeated). Ez had been helping Laura with her private project, following a love story through letters hidden in books donated to the library, but he doesn’t know about her second mystery, getting involved with scientist Elisa Carricajo who’s hiding a lake beast at her house. The music at the end of part one gets sci-fi in anticipation of this section. At the end of part two the picture goes widescreen as Laura disappears – having followed two great mysteries, she becomes one herself. Cast and crew are all returning from La Flor, and I hope they keep making these wheel-spinning mixed-genre movies.
A sort-of decade-later follow-up to the director and star’s Ostende. Citarella in Cinema Scope:
By trying to make a film in similar terms to Ostende, something else happened: a mutant film appeared, a plural idea of cinema. I like that Trenque Lauquen can’t be classified, that you can’t say the film is going this way or that way, or even that the film is this or that. It’s always trying to outrun this idea of being classified – it’s like the experience of reading a novel that takes a rhizomatic approach to storytelling, where each chapter proposes something new and mysterious. For me, the difference between the two films is that in Ostende, Laura is someone who wants to have a lot of lives – to live in fiction – but ultimately decides to go back to her normal life with her boyfriend. In Trenque Lauquen, Laura lives all those possibilities, and finally gets lost.
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Trenque Lauquen (2023, Laura Citarella & Mariano Llinás)
During the Trenque Lauquen city premiere of the Trenque Lauquen double-feature, Citarella sits alone at a cafe across from the theater, the sounds of the film overlaying the town, noting walkouts (one) and people arriving to watch Barbie. Good to see Ezequiel in the crowd, I dunno why Paredes and Carricajo are backstage wearing fake mustaches. This was part of a Film Fest Gent online shorts collection pairing directors with composers, so I suppose the music in here by Eiko Ishibashi (Drive My Car, Drag City) isn’t from the feature film.
Kings of the Road (1976, Wim Wenders)
Wenders apparently working without a script, just putting two guys together and following them around – a good idea, turns out.
Rudiger* Vogler isn’t a writer/photographer this time but a traveling film-projector maintainer. He picks up rider Hanns Zischler after watching him roar his Volkswagen into a river, and they barely speak, just proceed along the route of small movie theaters in western East Germany.
One night they’re woken by a guy despondent over his wife’s suicide – second Wenders in a row where a suicide causes a mood shift. Hanns walks off to the town where his father lives, visits/harasses him at his newspaper office. After this cathartic visit he thinks Rudiger should also have a cathartic visit home, so they borrow a motorbike and sidecar. After all the not-talking, they do finally get drunkenly combative and introspective, but part on pretty good terms.
Hanns and the sad man in the jukebox-equipped back of the truck:
Commentary says the photography was an homage to Walker Evans, the photographer who also inspired Upland Stories. I’ve seen the rider in a few things, including Clouds of Sils Maria and Dr. M. Man who lost his wife was in a bunch of Fassbinders – he’s the landlord in Fear Eats the Soul. Alice’s mom (of the Cities) works at a theater in one town, a Lang Mabuse actor plays the rider’s dad.
*Okay, first all my old posts‘ diacritics went bad, and now my macbook isn’t letting me make new ones by holding down vowel keys.
Alice’s mom with Rudiger:
Shadowplay:
Essential equipment for long drives:
Wrong Move (1975, Wim Wenders)
Adding more characters than Alice in the Cities and a backstory for Rüdiger Vogler’s travels (clearly frustrated at home, his mom gives him money to roam and become the writer he dreams of being). I wasn’t so sure about the move to color film, but I should’ve known to trust Wenders/Müller. Based vaguely on a Goethe story, very freely adapted by Peter Handke, the commentary says they wanted to show a man who sets out to find himself, but doesn’t.
The crew: Vogler, actress Hanna Schygulla (a couple years after Petra von Kant), scammy ex-nazi/athlete Hans Blech (also of Wenders’ Scarlet Letter which sounds bad), mute teen acrobat Nastassja Kinski (in her debut), and poet Peter Kern (in a couple Fassbinders the same year). The movie is definitely being weird on purpose, and the group is carefree until they meet a suicidal industrialist who ruins the vibe, then they begin to turn on each other.
now playing: Emmanuelle and The Conversation and Watch Out, We’re Mad!
Wenders belatedly realized they were shooting in the same hotel as Machorka-Muff so he paid tribute by having our heroes watch a Straub/Huillet movie on TV. This won all the German film awards that year, sharing some with Alexander Kluge & Edgar Reitz. I wrote “Alice in the Cities as mission statement, philosophy of photography and travel,” but I’m not sure I knew what I meant by that – anyway, looking forward to the third road movie and exploring some of the box set extras.
Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)
Early Wenders muse Rüdiger Vogler drives past Richmond, gets to NYC and sells his car, then goes to Shea Stadium – I like this guy already. He’s a writer/photographer disowned by his editor for wandering the States and ignoring his story and deadlines, but he’s got enough cash to fly home. After he meets a woman and her daughter at the airport then the woman disappears, the movie sneakily adopts my least favorite movie plot of all (aimless adult gets stuck with precocious child), but somehow remains good. Robby Müller did nice work in Goalie, kills it here. Almost Kaurismäkian in its large-heartedness – rare that I watch a movie from the 1970s and think things were better back then. Rüdiger keeps behaving in a very relatable manner (he drops the girl at a police station and goes to a Chuck Berry concert).
Rüdiger on TV: “All these TV images come down to the same common, ugly message: a kind of vicious contempt. No image leaves you in peace. They all want something from you.”
Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin)
Memorial screening for Friedkin. I thought about rewatching Bug, but should really check this out – I’d avoided it after deciding Wages of Fear couldn’t be topped. And maybe not, but nearly equaled. Same story of two trucks with redundant supplies of unstable dynamite heading for an oil-well fire over treacherous terrain, but this time the drivers are more desperate than ever, after an extended intro showing each of their criminal enterprises that led them to hide out in South America under fake names. 1970s Lead Character Roy Scheider drives with shady Francisco Rabal, and in the other truck is gentleman fraudster Bruno Cremer (a Brisseau star) and Jerusalem bomber Amidou (later in the Friedkin-indebted Ronin).
The great Filipe Furtado:
What for Clouzot is social need, for Friedkin is self-punishment. First world crimes reimagined in a third world purgatory, an amusement park of unforgiven nature. The beauty is that everything is translated in pure action … Francisco Rabal’s taciturn killer is the film’s heart and Bruno Cremer’s masochist banker it is clear-eyed soul.
The Puffy Chair (2005, Jay & Mark Duplass)
A movie about slackers and fuckups, shot with usually-in-focus handheld with little dodges and zooms. The soundtrack is the most professional part – an Of Montreal song follows a Spoon song. The legacy is that this was a key mumblecore movie along with Mutual Appreciation – movies about difficult nobodies which are discussed more for their very low budgets than for any craft.
I didn’t hate the story, but started to hate codirector Mark as he finally loses his shit over the difficulties involved in buying and retrieving a puffy chair for his dad over the internet. Tagging along is his brother Rhett Wilkins, whose open and impulsive character nicely balances Mark’s. And Katie Aselton (recently of She Dies Tomorrow and Synchronic) as “the girl.” I dunno about mumblecore, but if She Dies Tomorrow was the end result then I’m happy to pay respects to its roots.
The movie ends up where all movies must: driving into Atlanta
Midnight Run (1988, Martin Brest)
Memorial screening for Charles Grodin and Yaphet Kotto, here playing a criminal banker and an FBI agent with his identity stolen, respectively. Robert De Niro is the bounty hunter returning Grodin from NY to LA. It’s a wacky crime comedy road movie, with the cops and the gangsters (led by Dennis Farina) and RdN’s rival hunter Marvin (John Ashton of Beverly Hills Cop) all after them, so it’s sufficiently incident-packed to be a hugely successful commercial hit. Throwing in a sad visit to RdN’s family, and morally letting the criminal off the hook at the end turns it into a solid 80’s classic (pretty sure I saw it in theaters on first release) and also a semi-remake of Remember The Night. Got tired of Marvin, didn’t buy that the criminal snipers would open fire on the cops, otherwise lives up to the legend.