by ·Comments Off on Caught by the Tides (2024, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Mark Asch:

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

Vadim Rizov:

Li has aged much more dramatically than Zhao but both their transformations over nearly a quarter-century are inevitably poignant. Does that generate anything beyond a reflexive effect? I think so; Caught by the Tides is a multiverse manifestation rather than nostalgia trigger — or, at least, this is a lot of neat footage, and it’s fun to see it find a home. Above all else, Zhao is a seemingly infinite performer whose affect hasn’t really been unpacked yet. Her stony unreadability is broken by unpredictable responses to others, manifestations of interest punctuating the deadpan surface of inscrutable women who, over the long haul, are reconfigured as martyrs or stoic survivors. Caught by the Tides reminds us that we’re all lucky as viewers that she and Jia found each other; it’s maybe the actress-director partnership of the ages.

by ·Comments Off on Megalopolis (2024, Francis Ford Coppola)

Once again an online review affected the viewing experience, and I spent much of this movie giggling at its “Cheesecake Factory aesthetic.” I had a good time watching this with my bottle of Coppola wine, and since it is (more or less) the American Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, I’m going to use the same approach and just post the notes I took while watching it:

Julia out partying, someone who isn’t her dad picks her up, Claudio is hanging round her, ah her dad is Mayor Cicero, she can see Adam’s time stoppage
LOL at the dialogue
Laurence tells us an empire begins to die when its people no longer believe in it, uh oh
Rich banker Crassius’s son is Claudio, those girls are his sisters the Claudettes, he’s hot for ’em
Mayor’s daughter Julia is a big part of this

Vesta wears invisible dress Cesar invented
Doddering super-rich uncle Voight is marrying Wow, is Cesar’s uncle
Shia is good in this, schemes to show vid of Cesar in bed with girl singing about her purity pledge, she might be good singer but you gotta be a good lipsyncer to be in a movie

No characters in this movie, just narrators – the dialogue is all terrible but the lighting is very good, so we’ll call it even.
During Driver’s scandal he loses his time control
He gets new girl preg, he’s married to Sunny
Only Shia and Adam are thriving here

Mayor will confess to hiding Cesar’s wife’s body if Cesar leaves the preg daughter
Tattoo guy sends a 12-yr-old to assassinate Cesar for Claud
Wow and Shia plot to take over the bank from Voight
So the movie is about rival family members of the world’s richest banker both trying to become populist revolutionaries
Movie bad.

by ·Comments Off on The Dreamed Path (2016, Angela Schanelec)

Schanelec movies suffer by reminding me of Zürcher movies just enough to make me wish I was watching those instead. This one isn’t as entrancing as it means to be, but slightly, seductively baffling. Down-and-out druggie couple starts out busking “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” before Kenneth is called home, his mom ailing in hospital, dad asking him to use his drug connections to find morphine for her. This first couple is last seen laying down on the earth, separately. Many years later a cop is leaving her husband, he rents his own place, and the time periods are mashing up in a non-obvious way.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

… an amorphous, exceedingly enigmatic trance film masquerading as a puzzle film. Puzzles fit together; this does not … These temporal leaps we’re taken through … become equal to every other narrative element. … Time, then, beyond language, becomes the decisive medium that negotiates and complicates characters’ emotional relations to one another, and Schanelec’s avoidance of distinguishing between “now” and “then” insures that the impact of every loss, every ruptured relationship, is held in an eternal suspension.

On Letterboxd: “Virginia Woolf” by Robyn Hitchcock

by ·Comments Off on Memoria (2021, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Tilda doesn’t even seem unhappy about The Sound, she’s just very interested. On her quest for understanding, everyone she meets – sound engineer Juan Pablo Urrego, archaeologist Jeanne Balibar, fish scaler Elkin Díaz – is open to her about their work, inviting her to sit down with them and participate. It feels utopian about human connection before we even reach the final stretch, then Elkin’s death and resurrection reaches Tsai-like duration, and the alien time-wormhole source of The Sound (and Juan Pablo being potentially the same person as Elkin) turn the movie into a cosmic puzzle. I haven’t seen a movie on the big screen at The Plaza in years, and was very happy to return with this one.

Will Sloan:

The compositions and edits offer suggestive juxtapositions that Apichatpong trusts you to generate meaning from. As usual with Apichatpong, scenes unfold in long, static takes, and important information is revealed without fanfare in hushed conversations that you really need to pay attention to. The urban settings of the first half are grey and overcast, and the rural setting of the second half is sumptuous, but Apichatpong does little with his camera to underline the ugliness or sweeten the prettiness.

by ·Comments Off on Old (2021, M. Night Shyamalan)

Writer M. Night doing good work with the premise, not so good with the dialogue and details – and Director M. Night just going to town with the photography. Love the roving wide-angle long takes especially, but the whole thing looks ravishing. DP Michael Gioulakis also shot Us and It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and is currently one of my favorite people.

AKA Old Beach: The Beach That Makes People Old, but most of them die one-by-one from various misfortunes, only Gael and Vicky make it to cute-elderly status. Dr. Rufus Sewell goes mad, or was mad from the start, and stabs Underground Railroad star Aaron Pierre before Vicky gives him fast-action blood poisoning. Sewell’s wife Abbey Lee (one of the Fury Road wives) has brittle bones and dies in agony chasing the kids through a cave. Ken Leung (cop in Saw) simply drowns trying to escape. Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending) has fatal seizures, funny since the mad scientists studying curative drugs in unwilling time-accelerated test subjects call her case a success. The kids are more complicated since they’re played by multiple actors, but most notably by siblings Alex “Hereditary” Wolff and Thomasin “Soho” McKenzie, and as Alex’s short-lived girlfriend: Beth March of Little Women.

Adam Nayman sums up my pleasure in talking about a different film: “The fun of Malignant is watching Wan apply such sophisticated technique to ridiculously dumb material.” Also wrote down a line from Social Hygiene the next night: “Stupid and useless things are often the most beautiful.” Great movie.

by ·Comments Off on Woman is the Future of Man (2004, Hong Sang-soo)

Two old friends get together, the larger Munho (Yoo Ji-Tae of Oldboy the year before) is a married teacher, and the glasses-wearing Hyeongon (Kim Tae-Woo of Joint Security Area) a wannabe filmmaker. Seonhwa (Hyun-Ah Sung of a couple Kim Ki-duk films) is introduced being abducted by a former schoolmate.

drunken hanging-out:

Things begin repeating and skipping through time, both guys with Seonhwa at different points, then they’re reminiscing and visit her again… she is basically mistreated, and they’re both kinda pathetic. Multiple sex scenes, a fun soundtrack. I’m being short and inspecific since I watched this too long ago.

by ·Comments Off on I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman)

Does it become a horror movie when the parents show up, or was it always one? Toni Collette kinda launches the whole thing into outer space. My own parents would’ve ditched before this point – very confused by the coworker who said she’s watching this with her whole family. Seeing all your own paintings and poetry as plagiarized, hmmmm. Buckley hard to get a handle on, Collette and David Thewlis leaping through different times of their lives/ages. This would be worth watching again now that I’ve read the theory that the school janitor is Plemons imagining his own past, real and fantasized. I know Buckley from Wild Rose, and I’ll always think of Plemons as the young master from The Master.

by ·Comments Off on Wonderstruck (2017, Todd Haynes)

Better than Hugo from the same author, which was also a Christmas-release historical city-roaming kids’ adventure by a sometimes-favorite filmmaker. Ben, a 1970’s boy suffering recent hearing loss, runs away to New York, meeting a friend named Jamie and hiding out in museums. This is cut with scenes of 1920’s Rose (the magnificent Millicent Simmonds) in a similar situation, visiting some of the same spots. As soon as Ben meets up with grown Rose (Julianne Moore) the fun back-and-forth editing games end, and we’re caught up on the fifty intervening years through long exposition scenes, a shame. I also thought Personal Shopper did a better job dramatizing onscreen text (Ben and Grown Rose have to speak via notepad), but overall this was charming.

by ·Comments Off on Final TV Roundup of 2017

Veep season 4 (2015)

I’d planned to watch this right after Girls season 4, then wasn’t in the mood to hear anything about politics for a while, so postponed with more than a few seasons of Archer. Finally I returned to Veep, and you know it’s sorta about politics, but mostly just 30-minute episodes of nonstop insult humor, and I love it. Meyer has become president, and during her re-election campaign almost everyone resigns or is fired over scandals and personality conflicts.

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Rick & Morty season 3 (2017)

It’s hard to love Rick & Morty while trying not to be one of those people who loves Rick & Morty, but it’s also impossible for me not to love Rick & Morty. This is like my TV Tarantino.

1. A series of mind transfers and brutal killings lets Rick escape from insect jail, rejoining Morty in a mad quest for fast-food szechuan sauce.

2. Dad moves out, Summer is alienated, Rick takes the kids to a Mad Max dimension, Morty gets a super-arm.

3. Pickle Rick nearly avoids going to family therapy with Beth and the kids.

4. R&M join the Vindicators, an Avengers knockoff, for an adventure in which Drunk Rick is the master villain.

5. “Rick & Jerry episode!” Rick takes Jerry on an adventure, admits to breaking up the family, Summer has body image issues.

6. R&M are addicted to adventures, while on vacation Toxic Rick and Ideal Rick get separated.

7. Set on the Citadel of Ricks, a sort of Godfather, Chinatown, Willy Wonka mash-up.

8. Morty’s Mindblowers is the new Intergalactic Cable.

9. Beth revisits the world Rick created for her as a kid, finds a friend who disappeared there, while Jerry is dating a warrior alien.

10. While Rick duels the President of the United States, the rest of the family reunites.

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Superjail season 2 (2011)

I watched this entire season (under two hours long) whilst scanning book pages and probably drinking, and can’t recall any of it to mind. But it was great, and I took some screenshots. A+, would watch again.

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Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017)

A satisfying conclusion, if that’s what it turns out to be, with the ex-campers grown up (sort of) and employed (somewhat), reuniting in 1991 among current campers to save the camp from an evil and somewhat confusing Presidents Bush & Reagan nuclear plot. Nearly everyone from the series and movie returned, in one way or another, plus Adam Scott, Alyssa Milano as a suspicious nanny, Sarah Burns (Enlightened) and Dax Shepard (Idiocracy).

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Black Mirror: White Christmas (2014, Carl Tibbetts)

Snowed into a cabin at the end of the world: chatty Jon Hamm and another dude who has barely spoken in years (Rafe Spall, Life of Pi, an Andy in Hot Fuzz), so Hamm tries to draw him out by sharing his own backstory, being paid to give live social/dating advice to awkward people while others watch on a shared party line, until one call ends in a client’s death. Since this was a longer, special episode, we get a second technology, demonstrated by Oona Chaplin of The Hour: the ability to copy your own consciousness into a “cookie,” like an Alexa or Echo run by a second self instead of a computer program – but the copied self considers itself the Original and its spirit has to be broken by manipulating time in the cookie, making it sit idle for years with no stimulation until it’s happy to perform menial tasks. This being Black Mirror I’ve now caught on that Hamm and the quiet guy are in some kinda interrogation device, which is why the circumstances of their years trapped in a cabin together have never been explained, and Rafe finally tells his story, of how he got “blocked” by his wife, who moved away and had another man’s child, and after the wife died in an accident, Rafe busted her dad’s head with a snowglobe. After a job well-done, Hamm is pulled out of the simulator, and a cop spontaneously speeds up the cookie clock, sentencing Spall to a near-eternity alone in the cabin.

Jon Hamm controls the cookie:

Mouseover to block Rafe Spall:
image

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One Punch Man (2015)

Saitama is a young bald guy who enjoys acting like a superhero in his spare time, and is incidentally the most powerful man in the world. He attracts an android sidekick named Genos and they sign up to the league of heroes, the jokes being that the league members are mostly interested in themselves and their press and official hero positions, and that Saitama just wants a good fight but ends up defeating all foes with a single punch. A great assortment of heroes and villains which recalls The Tick, and a damned good opening theme song.

Genos vs. Mosquito Queen:

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Currently stalled or proceeding slowly: The Deuce, The Knick, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Master of None, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Atlanta, The Thick of It, Blackish, Key & Peele, Futurama, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Enlightened, Review, Documentary Now, Lady Dynamite, Louie (yikes), Assy McGee and Steven Universe.