by ·Comments Off on A Good Marriage (1982, Eric Rohmer)

Opens with 80’s dance music… I’ve been thrown off by the music in my early-decade French films lately. Sabine is Béatrice Romand from Autumn Tale, and the good marriage is all in her head – her boyfriend is married to someone else, but she starts fantasizing and telling everyone she’s getting married. As soon as that proves impossible, she meets André Dussolier at a wedding, and gets ahead of herself again, quitting her job, believing that she’ll marry him and not have to work anymore, even though he keeps ditching her for work reasons. Good ending on a train, leaving the future open.

Dave Kehr:

The second installment of Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” is, like The Aviator’s Wife, a study in destructive imagination and the limitations of personal perspectives — which is to say that the characters talk as much as they did in the “Six Moral Tales,” but no one really hears what they’re saying.

Romand got an award at Venice, where Wenders and Zanussi also took prizes. Her blonde painter friend is Arielle Dombasle, last seen as the “American” in Time Regained.

by ·Comments Off on The Velvet Underground (2021, Todd Haynes)

The Flea of this movie is Jonathan Richman, who attended many VU shows and analyzed their vibrations. A terrifically assembled doc – instead of making me want to listen to the Velvet Underground at all, it made me feel like watching experimental film.

by ·Comments Off on The Sparks Brothers (2021, Edgar Wright)

Edgar overusing “funny” stock footage, and it’s all people telling the band’s story chronologically with the music in background. Standard rock doc format, but I knew very little of their background and smiled through the whole thing – wonderful to see their visual history, all the promo stuff and album cover art outtakes.

The only good bit of analysis comes from Flea: “Something that’s always kind of confounded me in popular music is people’s inability to take humor seriously.” Ron says punk felt like an attack on what they were doing. They invented electro dance pop, and entered their current phase with 2002’s Lil Beethoven. The canceled Tati movie is covered, and the Tim Burton, but not the Guy Maddin Bergman – not even a Forbidden Room clip.

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.

by ·Comments Off on The Two-Headed Eagle (1948, Jean Cocteau)

A perfectly fine historical drama with some fab lighting and good faces (La Pointe Courte‘s Silvia Monfort). Coming between Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, it lacks most of the sfx magic of those, but it’s so neglected I was half-expecting it to be lousy. I didn’t even have the correct title, knowing it as The Eagle Has Two Heads, while The Two-Headed Eagle makes more sense.

Monfort is the audience-surrogate newcomer to a castle where the widowed queen has shut herself away for ten years, and is about to hold a ball. Queen Edwige Feuillère (just off starring in a Dostoevsky adaptation) is surprised by a visitor at her window who looks exactly like King Jean Marais, and the bulk of the movie is psychological spy games between these two. She calls him “My Death” (which is very Cocteau) since he’s meant to be an assassin, the corrupt cops outside pretending to search for him. He is of course a poet, and she of course falls for him, in a dignified/suicidal way.

Police chief Jacques Varennes (La Poison) hides in a treehouse, and he and the queen run around giving everyone contradictory orders, until she gets to die with her king as she’s always dreamed (Marais taking a nice fall down the stairs).

The queen uses a room-sized model palace as a shooting gallery:

by ·Comments Off on L’amour braque / Mad Love (1985, Andrzej Zulawski)

Still stuck in 2021-catchup until we get to the next Chaplin. This was a mid-1980’s ensemble movie where every one of the 20 lead characters is “the crazy one.” It’s like Vampire’s Kiss if Nicolas Cage played all the parts. For a while I was over the moon, but an hour in I hit my fill of wackiness.

After a successful bank robbery, the four thieves led by Tchéky Karo (Full Moon in Paris) meet a new friend on the train, latch onto Sophie Marceau (of a Pialat the same year), then declare war on the four Venin brothers who wronged her. Leon from the train (Francis Huster, star of Demy’s Parking the same year) takes over as the lead, falling for Karo’s girl Marceau, his eyes glowing yellow when he gets overeager. I lost track of everyone else, all of whom end up dead anyway, but a guy from Amer was in there, a guy from Malle’s The Lovers, a character named Andrzej Zulawski – and a flamethrower. Inspired by The Idiot, but certainly doesn’t follow that novel’s storyline… still, with the Bresson, I made an accidental Dostoevsky double-feature.

by ·Comments Off on 2021 Favorites: New and Recent Movies

The best 2021 movies:

1. Mad God (Phil Tippett)
2. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)

3. Summer of Soul & The Velvet Underground & Get Back

4. The American Sector (Stephens/Velez) & Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi)

5. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

6. Monster Hunter (Paul W.S. Anderson) & Malignant (James Wan)

7. Gunda (Victor Kossakovsky) & Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva)

8. Siberia (Abel Ferrara) & Annette (Leos Carax)

9. Strawberry Mansion (Birney/Audley) & Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir)

10. The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian)
11. The Green Knight (David Lowery)
12. Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito)

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The best from the previous five years, watched this year:

1. Wolfwalkers (2020, Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart)
2. The Empty Man (2020, David Prior)
3. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020, Werner Herzog & Clive Oppenheimer)
4. The 20th Century (2019, Matthew Rankin)
5. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016, Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone)
6. Martin Eden (2019, Pietro Marcello)
7. MS Slavic 7 (2019, Sofia Bohdanowicz)
8. Vitalina Varela (2019, Pedro Costa)
9. Let Them All Talk (2020, Steven Soderbergh)
10. Valley of the Gods (2019, Lech Majewski)

by ·Comments Off on 2021 Favorites: Older and Rewatches and Shorts

Favorite older movies watched this year:

1. Sparrow (2008, Johnny To)
2. Big Time (1988, Chris Blum)
3. Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov)
4. Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson)
5. Three Lives and Only One Death (1996, Raoul Ruiz)
6. The White Meadows (2009, Mohammad Rasoulof)
7. Exotica (1994, Atom Egoyan)
8. Johnny To’s Vengeance & Drug War & Heroic Trio & PTU & Throw Down
9. Caravaggio (1986, Derek Jarman)
10. Francisca (1981, Manoel de Oliveira)
11. Baron Prasil (1961, Karel Zeman)
12. Yakuza Apocalypse (2015, Takashi Miike)
13. 1949 duo The Set-Up (Robert Wise) & Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis)
14. Green Snake (1993, Tsui Hark)
15. A Town Called Panic (2009, Aubier & Patar)
16. SHOCKtober picks Devil’s Candy & Vampire’s Kiss & Office Killer & Detention
17. Storm Over Asia (1928, Vsevolod Pudovkin)
18. Jean Renoir le patron (1967, Jacques Rivette)
19. Barbarella (Roger Vadim) & Cotton Comes to Harlem (Ossie Davis)
20. El Bruto (1952, Luis Bunuel)
21. Criterions Laura & Macbeth & Fist of Fury & The Passenger & I Wanna Hold Your Hand
22. 2014 duo Buzzard (Joel Potrykus) & Blind (Eskil Vogt)

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Favorite shorts watched this year:

1. Point and Line to Plane (2020, Sofia Bohdanowicz)
2. Perfect Fifths (2020, Courtney Stephens)
3. Maat Means Land (2020, Fox Maxy)
4. a bunch by Guy Maddin and Bertrand Mandico
5. a bunch by Stan Brakhage (2) (3) and Robert Breer
6. Metaphor or Sadness Inside Out (2014, Catarina Vasconcelos)
7. Tsai Ming-liang: No No Sleep & Sand / The Night
8. Train Again (2021, Peter Tscherkassky)
9. a bunch by Borowczyk & Lenica and Harry Smith
10. Onyeka Igwe’s A So-Called Archive & The Names Have Changed
11. Cityscape (2019, Michael Snow)
12. Olla (Ariane Labed) & Nimic (Yorgos Lanthimos)
13. Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique and other Vogel shorts
14. animations Chanson de Prevert & Brothers Bearhearts & The Tale of How

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Favorite rewatches of the year
(ranked by rewatch-experience, not necessarily quality of film)

1. City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
2. Videodrome & Crash (David Cronenberg)
3. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)
4. Hudsucker Proxy & Barton Fink (Joel & Ethan Coen)
5. The Matrix (Wachowskis)
6. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)
7. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
8. Before Sunset & Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
9. Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola) & Ravenous (Antonia Bird)
10. The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin)

And I don’t know where else to put this, but I’ve watched all the monthly movie shows by The Mads (ex-MST3K), which have been a highlight of the year.

by ·Comments Off on Happy New Movie Year 2022

Happy New Movie Year!

Again I kept a letterboxd list of all the must-see movies released in 2021, though I’ve removed a few because my definition of “released” keeps changing.

I did not make a list of streaming concerts and such, but enjoyed watching Clipping, Deerhoof, Mary Timony, Decemberists, Waxahatchee, Jon Langford, and everyone at Gonerfest.

Trying to prioritize watching the new releases I think I’ll like, and the older ones I keep telling myself I need to watch – and that sounds like an obvious and stupid statement, but in past years whenever I’ve chosen titles I simply must watch next, there is no way in hell I’m gonna be watching those next.

I want to see more classic experimental stuff, so I’ve started going through Amos Vogel’s book and watching the titles within, from Storm Over Asia to The Goalie’s Anxiety – still many more chapters to go. I also want to watch more recent experimental stuff and not get hung-up in the 1940’s thru 70’s forever. Been collecting lists of less-commercial works assembled by a few writers – spending more time organizing the lists than watching the films, but that led me to Fauna this year, and shorts by Lertxundi and Asili and Nishikawa.

Also got some larger must-see lists, an ever-growing pile of favorite directors, a few animated shorts collections, True/False docs, rock docs, various projects with Katy, rewatches of favorites, the Criterions, and the blu-rays I keep renting and buying (most recently World of Tomorrow). Thinking of swinging the other way than usual (seek out the most popular/acclaimed stuff I haven’t seen) and choosing the weirdest title from each list to have a Weird 2022. But I know I’ll just keep watching whatever I feel like.