by ·Comments Off on Live Flesh (1997, Pedro Almodóvar)

After a shooting during a Buñuel movie, aggrieved pizza guy Liberto Rabal goes to jail while his mom Penelope Cruz is dying of cancer and his crackhead girlfriend Francesca Neri marries the cop Javier Bardem who the pizza guy put in a wheelchair. This all makes the pizza guy crazed for revenge, so he plans to ruin everyone’s lives (also everyone has sex with everyone else).

Crackhead, Pizza Guy:

Josh Lewis:

If for nothing else this should be on your radar for the excellent early Javier Bardem performance as the sexy Madrid cop turned paralympic basketball star who spends most of the movie in various Tasmanian Devil t-shirts while he goes voyeur-detective mode on this guy he suspects is Cape Fear-ing him and his wife, and instead unraveling all kinds of secret affairs, domestic abuse and sexual obsessions that the characters eventually start pointing guns at each other over.

by ·Comments Off on Szamanka (1996 Andrzej Zulawski)

Movie is off like a shot, the credits and characters both in a big hurry to get going. Iwona (a non-actor, whoa) is a chaos demon who should be followed by a cleanup crew at all times, Michael (star of Blind Chance) is a creep professor whose fiancee is out of town, and together they get the amour fou in this sordid missing link between Possession and Cosmos. Possibly the most sex-crazed Zulawski movie, though with too much synth and marching band music.

He is an anthropologist studying a just-unearthed shaman mummy, so I figured it would awaken and kill them all. I did not see it coming that she would smash his head and Hannibal his brains, then a minor character would set off a small nuclear bomb.

by ·Comments Off on Anora (2024, Sean Baker)

Celebrating Cannes week by watching last year’s winner, part of a Cannes strip-club double-feature. Annie dances for a Russian guy who looks like Rodrick, then agrees to marry him in Vegas so he can stay in the US, but he runs when his parents send two hapless thugs after them, and Annie is stuck with the thugs while they search, finally catching him back at the strip club with her rival Diamond. There’s a lotta sex and dance music in this. It stretches on forever, then she fucks Igor, and that’s the ending?

by ·Comments Off on Queer (2024, Luca Guadagnino)

Has its moments. It’s my own fault that I stopped reading Burroughs long ago and let the Cronenberg version take over my imagination. Daniel Craig’s love interest is Drew Starkey of the latest Hellraiser remake. Craig convinces the kid to go on a South America trip to find ayahuasca, but becomes messed up from drug withdrawls along the way.

Mike Leigh muse Lesley Manville protects the ayahuasca – that’s Lisandro Alonso in the background:

Bill Lee’s Space Odyssey finale:

by ·Comments Off on Spermworld (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

He’s outdone himself in camerawork and subject matter. Needs slightly less focus on megafather Ari, whose psychosis has already attracted other doc-makers. Finds an amazing source of cringe in having people read their text messages aloud.

Read: Mark and Rafa and Neil, but mainly the Filmmaker interview.

Lance:

I think there’s the bigger questions that the movie ended up becoming really about: What exists of me when I’m no longer here? All these people are chasing something bigger than themselves. They want to be bigger than life and feel in different ways that they haven’t achieved that sense of importance. I relate to that. That’s more or less why I make movies, right?

by ·Comments Off on Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974, Chantal Akerman)

Chantal/Elle spends a month alone in a plain apartment eating spoonfuls of sugar out of the bag. Voiceover narrates the action, but not exactly, and not in sync with what we’re seeing (messing with sound sync was all the rage in 1974). The first sync dialogue comes after an hour, when she’s left the house and is riding around with a trucker. I would not have guessed it’d end in an extended sex scene, probably with the ex she was mourning while eating all that sugar. Feels far more electric than the depopulated Hotel Monterey.

Trucker Niels Arestrup was also in Stavisky this year, went on to collect awards for playing in Audiard movies (lead prison gangster in A Prophet), and the girl at the end, Claire Wauthion, was in La Mémoire Courte.

by ·Comments Off on Numéro Deux (1975, Jean-Luc Godard)

Godard in a dim room with a videocamera on him and a monitor, so he appears twice from different angles, talking an awful lot, but the main thing I remember is how he thinks puns are useful and wishes people took them more seriously.

Female narrator suggests what this film might be about while we see three TV screens and a dark figure in front DJing with tape reels.

TV monitor split-screens with bird sounds mixed with the dialogue.

Kinda turns into a family story and a sex-ed movie. “I sometimes look at my cock. That isn’t cinema, though.”

Amy Taubin calls it “a vitriolic indictment of the sexual politics of the nuclear family” and says it’s the first Godard feature in which Miéville’s influence is evident. In Everything is Cinema, Richard Brody says Godard had accepted a commission to make a Breathless follow-up, hence the title, and says the finished film “has the unpleasant aspect of a medical document.”

by ·Comments Off on Poor Things (2023, Yorgos Lanthimos)

It’s not shocking that I, a habitual enjoyer of Yorgos movies, greatly enjoyed the one where Emma Stone plays a grown woman with a baby brain raised by a chopped-and-sutured Willem Dafoe then taken into the world by a ham-comic Mark Ruffalo. Doesn’t quite track as an On The Count of Three reunion – Jerrod Carmichael is an intellectual friend of Hanna Schygulla – in different scenes/country from Chris Abbott: Emma’s former husband, “The General,” who they lobotomize so everyone can live together happily.

The critics are mostly angry over the fisheye lens. Also: “the movie’s provocations are all at the level of its ghastly aesthetic, which feels like a prank on the viewer” per Brendanowicz, it’s “infantilizing and visually one-note” per Josephine, and I dunno what Ali and Jon‘s issues are. Movie funny, movie good. Some people get it.

by ·Comments Off on That Kind of Summer (2022, Denis Côté)

The first ten minutes are in extreme closeup, making up for the wide shots in Social Hygiene. Côté’s longest movie is a quiet character piece about a summer camp for sex addicts (it surely would’ve sold more tickets with the title Sex Addict Summer Camp). Between therapy sessions the three girls and their three counselors maintain a delicate balance of trust and spend some solo time dealing with their own issues. Come for the bondage and the girl having sex with an entire soccer team, stay for the CG tarantula, the Diabolique reference, a lovely owl, and the climactic dance party to “Across 110th Street”. Counselor Octavia is from Undine, Sami from A Christmas Tale, and two others were in Ghost Town Anthology.

My fourth by Côté and I’m not seeing much that connects this to the people yelling in fields or the kinda-thriller or the zoo doc, but fortunately we have Katherine Connell in Cinema Scope:

Across Côté’s varied career is a recurrent fascination with isolated characters who act in perplexing, unexplained ways and resist being known … These cryptic if subtly rebellious protagonists form the connective tissue of a filmography that probes the dynamics that erupt from the refusal of normative social structures like marriage, domesticity, wellness, and community.