by ·Comments Off on Fantastic Planet (1973, René Laloux)

In the back of my mind I figured I’ve seen this years ago and just forgotten most of it, but nope, I couldn’t have forgotten this – a jaw-dropping sci-fi story (with funky music). Humans are pests and pets, the planet controlled by blue gill-eared giants. A highly-placed alien child calls his pet human Terr, which grows up and starts playing pranks and spying, eventually defecting to lead the tiny human revolution. Truce is called after the humans build miniature rockets, travel to the Wild Planet and laser down the alien sex statues.

Michael Brooke for Criterion:

Over four decades after its May 1973 premiere, it remains more or less unique. Its peculiar universe, designed by Roland Topor and realized by a team of Czechoslovak animators in Prague, is instantly recognizable from virtually any freeze-frame, and the film as a whole is so rich, strange, and sui generis that nothing has emerged since to retrospectively blunt its impact … [Topor] cofounded the Panic Movement with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky, named after the god Pan and intended to make surrealism as shocking as it had been in the 1920s, before its imagery and ideas were co-opted and diluted by the mainstream … he wrote the 1964 source novel for Roman Polanski’s disquietingly paranoid The Tenant (1976), appeared in DuÅ¡an Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, as the lunatic Renfield).

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Les Temps Morts (1965)

I’ve seen Laloux’s earlier Monkey Teeth short, but this is when he teamed up with Topor. A grim little anthropological study of man’s propensity for murder. I think their sensibility worked better when applied to a fictional scenario – and the animation is in very rough form here, illustrations cross-faded in sequence, drawings shuffling Gilliam-style, but mostly the camera panning around stills. Some sharp stills, though – if you cut the live-action atrocity footage it’d make a good picture-book of horrors.

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Les Escargots (1966)

A different kind of apocalyptic movie, this one really takes a turn. Farmer realizes his crops will only grow if he cries on them, so he walks around the field holding cut onions, reading sad books, and wearing an ass-kicking machine. The giant plants attract snails, which also grow giant, slide over to the nearest major city and utterly destroy it. Little Shop of Horrors may have been an influence.

by ·Comments Off on The Reagan Show (2017, Sierra Pettengill & Pacho Velez)

Watched in prep for the director’s True/False movie. An archival doc of Reagan footage, ok. Doesn’t go as far into the off-air camera-setup territory as Adam Curtis does, and we weren’t very interested in Reagan, but it was either this or Bigbug.

by ·Comments Off on Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019, Beth B.)

Opens with Lydia’s kidnapping pervert child abuse story – I appreciate that childhood trauma lasts a couple minutes then we’re straight into NYC punk. But we spend maybe ten minutes on her music career, then follow her around just goofing off. I love how loose it is. I cringed when Richard Kern came up, but he seems kinda normal now. Weird how this movie explains the cycles of sexual abuse better than any scripted film ever has – and unlike those movies, this one’s got Jim Foetus, Donita Sparks, and a cartoon of Lydia pissing in a stairwell.

by ·Comments Off on Beats (2019, Brian Welsh)

There were some beats I actually know in this, including some by Liquid Liquid, whose music was ancient when this takes place, the reissues still a couple years off. Two loser kids, a dark mophair with downturned mouth called Johnno, and fuckup Spanner with a drug-dealing bully brother, just wanna go to raves, at the time when Britain is trying to make dance music illegal. The notorious law-loophole soundtrack with no repetitive parts comes into play. Black and white except for the little red lights on stereos, and psych-freakout imagery when the kids take their pills.

There’s violence and breakups and hurt feelings and reconciliations – the whole coming-of-age teen period drama isn’t my thing, but I kept watching for the cool accents. The kids finally have their party, a moment of bliss, but the cops and the drug dealers are both descending, the plot needing to pummel the vibes, making it no better than the government order to punish ravers. It’s got nothing on the Michael Smiley episode of Spaced. Spanner ended up on Bridgerton and Johnno’s on some kinda submarine mystery.

by ·Comments Off on Two Docs That Don’t Rock: Sleep and Meredith Monk

Speaking of Dance: Meredith Monk (1996 Douglas Rosenberg)

An absolute monologue, MM’s head against black, talking about her personal history and what she’s aiming for in her work. For those of us who don’t know her work and watched this program to find out, it’s boring – but the clips of her actual dance and vocal performance work are neat, aand much more exciting than the couple of CDs I’ve heard.

Meredith invents dabbing:

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Max Richter’s Sleep (2019 Natalie Johns)

Los Angeles performance of an all-night composition during which the audience is allowed/encouraged to sleep. Neither composer nor audience speaks very well about what this is or what it means, the filmmaker going for artsy widescreen shots for whatever purpose, making the Meredith Monk doc less pretty but more informative. I slept through the middle section myself, which only seems appropriate. The audience applause after a ten hour performance feels well-earned, and the last 15 minutes is music as underscore while everyone raves about how much they love Max. Apparently the shots with heavy film grain were from previous Sleeps and provided by Richter’s collaborator Yulia Mahr.

The director, in Mubi:

What happens when we begin to dream all together? When we are vulnerable, together? Even as a documentarian of real life, I’d never actually filmed anyone falling asleep in front of the lens before. So one of the biggest challenges of the film would be to make it without disrupting its sleeping audience, who are, in Mahr and Richter’s words, “an extension of the work.”

by ·Comments Off on Slow Machine (2020, Joe Denardo)

A storytelling movie, with lots of warnings and reassurances – I was drawn to it by Vikram’s AV Club mention of Rivette. I didn’t follow the timeline structure and just took each scene on its own, so I’m missing the overall purpose, but it’s all fine. A better Rotterdance pick than Nowhere Inn.

Stephanie is as close as we get to a lead character – a blonde Swedish actress doing a Texas accent for a role. Due to a roommate situation, she hangs out at Eleanor Friedberger’s practice space. She keeps running into Gerard, who claims to be a gov’t counterterrorist hit man. Redhaired Scott Shepherd should be good at this from his Wormwood experience, but it’s hard to realistically deliver dialogue this confidently paranoid. Stephanie is also friends with Chloe Sevigny for some reason. Scary stories are told, Gerard either dies or disappears, and it’s all very film grainy, with some light flares at the end of scenes.

by ·Comments Off on The Nowhere Inn (2020, Bill Benz)

For Rotterdance this year I focused on movies that involve music, and this felt like a good opening night pick. Going for a surreal/absurd tone in the opening scene with Annie Clark in the back of a limo, then we’re treated to a big Kraftwerkian rock band performance of Fear the Future, very different from the solo version I saw.

But soon Carrie Brownstein’s “behind the scenes doc” takes over the plot, and it’s weird to watch because it’s two musicians I like whose actual personalities I don’t know, pretending to be in a fake documentary. Carrie makes Annie paranoid that she’s an uninteresting person offstage (“I can be St. Vincent all the time”), Annie summons her to the bedroom to shoot sex scenes with her “girlfriend Dakota” (Johnson of Suspiria), then starts being weird and unfriendly to Carrie, who decides to quit the tour until vaguely threatening family members convince her to stay on. “Let’s only document things I can control.” Dakota leaves Annie for being weird, Annie takes control of the movie and Carrie loses her mind. I think the movie is for bigger fans than me, daring us to care about who’s the REAL St. Vincent. Sharp photography anyway – Burr is a Portlandia director. Fake-doc enthusiast Bobcat Goldthwait worked on this, and it’s exciting to see Enon’s Toko Yasuda get a supporting part.

by ·Comments Off on The Woman Who Ran (2020, Hong Sang-soo)

Kim Min-hee visits with two friends, and each time an unreasonable man comes to the door, then meets a third friend by accident. First up is Seo Young-hwa (Glasses Woman from Grass). They’re hanging out, conversing and eating with a young neighbor, when a new neighbor rings the bell to ask them to stop feeding stray cats, which they politely refuse – this is my vote for favorite scene, which even ends with one of Hong’s trademark Random Zooms on a cat. We also get chickens and crows, more animals than usual.

Friend 1 and a collision of neighbors:

The next friend is Song Seon-mi (Kim’s assistant in On The Beach), who slept with a local poet and now he’s obsessed, knocking on her door every day. This is not as enjoyable a meal (Song burns the dinner) or confrontation as the first one. Friend 3 is Kim Sae-byuk, also of Grass, married to an author who Kim used to date. Kim runs into Kwon Hae-hyo, the guy with cool hair in Yourself and Yours, and it’s awkward – she closes with “You really should just stop talking.” Daniel Kasman in Mubi figured out what it all means.

Comfy with Friend 2:

Less Comfy with Friend 3:

by ·Comments Off on Joy Ride (2021, Bobcat Goldthwait)

“Still can’t look at the audience telling that story.” Just a road trip doc with Bobcat and Dana Gould on tour, off to a rocky start with a car crash. Alternates them chatting in the car with stage performances, which I had to pause a couple times just to catch my breath. Some good attacks on Louis CK and Jerry Seinfeld, with a self-deprecating edit gag. I could’ve been in this movie had I known about their Highland Inn gig – oh well, I wouldn’t have been able to pause in person, and might’ve just collapsed. Produced by Chavez’s guitarist’s brother.