by ·Comments Off on 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.

by ·Comments Off on An Elephant Sitting Still (2018, Hu Bo)

A few doomed people in a Chinese megasuburb gradually intersect over a fateful day, captured in fluid long takes, followed and circled by the camera. Each of their lives was ruined this morning, now they’re in a slow simmering funk, deciding whether they should stay and fight, stay and surrender, or leave town for Manzhouli (near Hailar where the Taming The Horse kids wanted to go) to see a depressed elephant.

Schoolboy Bu pushes the school bully down the stairs, fatally. The bully’s older brother (Yu Cheng of Year of the Everlasting Storm and Snipers) was found sleeping with his best friend’s girl, so the friend threw himself out a window. Schoolgirl Ling has been caught in an affair with an administrator. And an older guy (Li Congxi of Devils on the Doorstep) is being kicked out of his kid’s apartment and sent to a home – and his dog got killed.

Movie feels massive, the long takes and stretched-out day usually working to great effect. Sometimes we’re simply killing time, walking from one place to another, looking at the backs of heads and shirt collars, but then there’s a great moment when we realize time has rewound and we’re seeing the opposite angle on a previous scene.

By the end of the day the old guy gives up his escape plan and heads back home, saying things are just as bad everywhere. Red-jacketed boy with a stolen gun stupidly involves himself, and dies. Floppy-hair guy ends up injured and outcast, and the younger two take a train trip to maybe witness a creature even more despondent than themselves.

with the old man’s granddaughter:

Jonathan Romney:

It’s inevitably tempting to read the film as some sort of suicide note, as an expression of a desperation that envisaged no remedy. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll find no shortage of evidence in a film built around four deaths (one accidental, one canine, two suicides); in its final moments, a character yells at the people around him (and essentially, at the entire world), “You are all going to hell!” Indeed, everyone here seems already to inhabit an earthly hell; yet the journey that some characters take in its closing stretch suggests some hope, insofar as they’re at least curious enough to go and take a look at an unfamiliar corner of their desolate world.

Romney also ties the elephant to the Werckmeister Harmonies whale and says Hu “was briefly a student of Tarr, traces of whose influence are visible,” and I’m in the middle of reading the Werckmeister source novel so this all tracks.

Celluloid Liberation Front:

But whereas Tarr’s cinema articulates itself through metaphysical absorption, Hu’s films retain the carnality of punk and operate on a lower stratum of perception, like an obsessive bassline from a Joy Division song. Despite his very young age, the craft and style of his opera prima are anything but derivative, and are in fact the outcome of an uncompromising vision.
…
The level of emotional repression is such that virtually every exchange in the film implies the possibility of an aggressive confrontation, with the film’s livid photography chromatically translating a ubiquitous feeling of resentment.
..
With human agency reduced to its basest instincts, the only way for the four protagonists to come together is by mere coincidence. Their convergence towards the sitting elephant is inertial rather than proactive, as much of their previous lives must presumably have been. The only moments where life is not stoically endured but actually lived are when the characters plot to or deliberately harm someone, be it a random passerby or a next of kin.

Vadim Rizov:

The film takes place over a single day but doesn’t sweat continuity, veering between morning, afternoon and evening light throughout. Unmoored in time, viewers are stuck in a perpetual morass. The context for this bad mood is not unfamiliar: with its emphasis on chaos and sudden invitations to violence, Elephant recalls Huang Weikei’s Disorder and Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin.

by ·Comments Off on On the Count of Three (2021, Jerrod Carmichael)

“Happiness is overrated.” Val (director Jerrod) wants to die, so he breaks his suicidal buddy Kev (Chris Abbott, both of these guys great) out of psych hospital so they can die together. Kev stalls, says let’s die at the end of the day, and they set out to right some wrongs (beating up Val’s dad, bringing cash to pregnant gf Tiffany Haddish, murdering abusive doctor Henry Winkler), then Val decides to live as they flee the cops. Of course he does – it’s a Sundance movie – but Abbott still gets to die, and the long postscript closing shot is necessary to come down from the tension (similar to Good Time). Won a writing award, nice music by Final Fantasy, and wow, I correctly identified The Free Design on the soundtrack.

by ·Comments Off on Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021, Dominik Graf)

Some things I wrote down:

absolute pre-war depravity
urgent manual camera movement mixed with drone shots, real bizarre
a cinephile nazi movie
german Inland Empire

Tom Schilling is our man, falling for barmaid law student Saskia Rosendahl (both actors from Never Look Away), getting fired from his cigarette advertising job, dealing with the suicide of rich political friend Albrecht Schuch (the new All Quiet on the Western Front). This would make a cool double-feature with Transit by Graf’s Dreileben buddy Petzold, both movies ending with a person waiting hopefully in a cafe waiting for someone who will never appear.

Frames within frames:

Hidden name on an artboard, gone when cutting to the next angle:

Hell of an accidental death for our man:

by ·Comments Off on The Beta Test (2021, Jim Cummings & PJ McCabe)

Startup company is like that Ashley Madison cheater-dating site but without the participants’ knowledge or initiation, so it leads to some hot blindfolded sex, but also some misunderstandings and murders. Codirector Cummings boldly plays the lead Jordan, a guy whose side we’re not on from the very start (from my notes: “why is everyone getting killed but Jordan, when does he get killed?”) tracking down how he got caught up in this conspiracy, and doing a really good job of it. The murder-suicide by vape pen was novel. Jordan’s wife was The Death of Dick Long‘s Virginia Newcomb, and his hotel hookup was in Song to Song.

by ·Comments Off on Stroszek (1977, Werner Herzog)

It’s strange to see space alien Bruno S. playing someone besides Kaspar Hauser. Here he’s playing a version of himself, as are many of the actors, who autobiographically collaborated with Herzog on his hastily-written Germany-to-USA adventure. Reformed criminal/music lover Bruno helps Eva Mattes (Petra von Kant‘s daughter) while she’s on the run from her thug pimps (one of whom would later play Vigo in Ghostbusters II). The thugs barge in, assault Bruno and break his accordion. The neighbor who looks after Bruno (Kaspar Hauser fan-favorite Clemens) is leaving for Wisconsin, so Bruno and Eva join him.

Bad luck right off the bat as customs confiscates Bruno’s mynah bird (using its real voice, which is a big deal for birds in cinema). Werner discovers Weird Wisconsin immediately, filming two neighboring farmers on tractors with rifles. Bruno’s house is taken away for non-payment… not making enough cash as a waitress, Eva returns to prostitution and runs off with some truckers… and Clemens is arrested for robbery (the bank was closed so he robs the barber next door). Everything around him going to hell, poor Bruno wanders a live-bird amusement park then kills himself on a ski lift.

The credits thank Errol Morris, Les Blank and the documentarian who discovered Bruno in West Berlin. Supposedly Ian Curtis killed himself right after watching this movie, and yeah it’s a downer, but one night earlier I’d coincidentally watched New Order’s live set from Coachella 2013, and after seeing what a crank Bernard Sumner can be, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame the film.

by ·Comments Off on A Gentle Woman (1969, Robert Bresson)

As mentioned in the Loznitsa movie, I attempted to repeat White Nights Fest here, only to realize the Loznitsa was far from a straight adaptation. But once again, Bresson can be counted on for Dostoevsky fidelity. After reading the short story I rewatched the Piotr Dumala short, which makes more sense now as an adaptation, though he added the nudity and insects. In fact there’s more sex in all the movie versions than in the book, unless it’s implicit there and I missed it. No insects in the Bresson though, just monkeys, both alive and skeletal.

Our lead pawnbroker had been a bank manager in his dark past (a soldier in the book). Bresson’s film contains much media outside the main story – she listens to LPs of tinkly instrumental music, they go to the cinema to watch a Piccoli/Deneuve film, and to the theater for a Hamlet swordfight (practice for Lancelot). Bresson solves the problem of the entire book being an internal monologue by the pawnbroker after his wife has died, simply by having him speak aloud to the maid. The actors perhaps more actory than in his previous films – deadwife Dominique Sanda would go on to a long career, eventually appearing with Piccoli herself (and if not Deneuve then Nico and Bulle Ogier and Léa Seydoux and Isabelle Huppert ain’t bad).

by ·Comments Off on The Night House (2020, David Bruckner)

The second Rebecca Hall movie where someone shoots themself in the head – this time it’s her husband. Afterwards, she finds a House of Leaves floorplan of the house, and eventually, a half-built mirror-house across the lake with a hellraiser torture figure inside. Going in a really good direction, from trauma movie to occult horror, then it takes a left turn into Flatliners territory, like a Final Destination for grown-ups.

Ugh, I wrote the above ramble without realizing that Bruckner made the upcoming Hellraiser reboot, a “hulu original” so thank goodness it’ll have no cultural legacy – he previously made segments for Southbound (guy in abandoned hospital) and V/H/S (large-eyed girlbeast in East Atlanta).

by ·Comments Off on Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson)

The Bresson movie with the most fashion and music and humor, even an action scene. Bresson cuts absolutely loose – it’s practically a musical by his standards. I loved it very much.

On night one, dreamer Jacques convinces Marthe not to jump off a bridge. Day 2, Jacques paints, records a primitive podcast on a tape deck, then entertains an unexpected visitor who spouts art philosophy. Marthe Backstory: she fell for her mom’s boarder shortly before he went to America, promising to meet up in a year – a year and three days ago. No major progress day three (he records some pigeons in the park). Night four she gives into Jacques love for her, says they will live together, then drops him in an instant when the old boarder walks by.

Shot by Pierre “The Man” Lhomme (Army of Shadows), played Berlin along with The Decameron. Isabelle Weingarten was in The Mother and the Whore after this, and The State of Things/The Territory, and married two major filmmakers. Why does everyone on my letterboxd hate this? At least I got Rizov and Rosenbaum on my side (J.Ro was an extra!). Adaptation of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, and now I’m contemplating watching the Visconti and the Vecchiali for a White Nights Trilogy.