by ·Comments Off on Undine (2020, Christian Petzold)

Johannes breaks up with mythological creature / freelance historian Undine (Paula Beer of Transit), and a few minutes later professional diver Franz Rogowski introduces himself, and they have a romantic moment that gets them banned for life from the local cafe.

Reverse angle of the poster shot:

Johannes tries to inject himself back into the mix, and gets killed for his efforts, while Franz was true but unfortunate, and gets resurrected.

Franz and coworker Maryam Zaree:

I need the relevance of the city planning lecture stuff explained to me, and thought the overall structure of the movie only kinda worked, but moment-to-moment I was quite thrilled to be watching it, if only as Transit-afterglow.

by ·Comments Off on The Last of the Mohicans (1992, Michael Mann)

A very historical-fiction adventure, not my favorite sort of thing, and I’m pretty sure I prefer Late Mann, beginning around Ali. The last of his theatrical features I hadn’t seen, though half of those are due a rewatch. That leaves The Jericho Mile… the proto-Heat L.A. Takedown… some early doc shorts that are probably unavailable… and I’ll probably never get to the TV series (Miami Vice, Crime Story, Vega$). This was about the twentieth filmed version of the novel, but the credits specify that it’s a remake of the 1930’s Randolph Scott film.

The Mohawk are joining the Brits fighting against the French, but the French have got Magua (Wes Studi) who has a huge vendetta against a Brit major whose daughter Madeleine Stowe (12 Monkeys) falls for Mohican DDL. They’re all trapped in a fort under siege, led by a tyrant major, who has a falling out with the other major (I noted that both majors are terrible).

I only knew two things about this from the advertising: that DDL is the last of the Mohicans (it’s actually his friend), and that the movie’s about him looking for a woman after telling her to stay alive, and that whatever may occur, he will find her (he finds her two scenes later, on the same day).

by ·Comments Off on The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019, Armando Iannucci)

Hey, I remember this one, it had some bright colors in it. Not like Bridgerton-bright, but pretty nice. According to the ol’ blog, I watched another adaptation of this with Katy 13 years earlier, which neither of us remembers.

Cowritten with Simon Blackwell (Veep, Breeders) and Charles Dickens (Scrooged, Oliver & Company). Dev Patel starred, Ben Whishaw the villain, Hugh Laurie and Benedict Wong were in there somewhere.

by ·Comments Off on Favorite 2020 Movies

1. She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz)
2. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
3. Uncut Gems (Ben & Joshua Safdie)
4. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
5. The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)
6. Frances Ferguson (Bob Byington)
7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
8. Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
9. Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
10. Atlantics (Mati Diop)
11. Sibyl (Justine Triet)
12. The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)
13. What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (Roberto Minervini)
14. Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
15. Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux)
16. Jeanne (Bruno Dumont)
17. Malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (Sky Hopinka)
18. Bill & Ted Face the Music (Dean Parisot)
19. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)
20. Undine (Christian Petzold)
21. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho & Juliano Dornelles)
22. The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson)
23. Collective (Alexander Nanau)
24. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)
25. The Mole Agent (Maite Alberdi)

by ·Comments Off on 2020 Favorites: Recent & Older & Shorts

Favorite movies from the last five years, first watched this year:

1. Asako I & II (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
3. Little Joe (Jessica Hausner)
4. One Cut of the Dead (Shin’ichirô Ueda)
5. Shadow (Zhang Yimou)
6. Sixty Six (Lewis Klahr)
7. In Transit (Albert Maysles & Lynn True & David Usui)
8. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (Ben Wheatley)
9. Winter Song (Otar Iosseliani)
10. Endless Poetry (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
11. Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat)
12. Ouroboros (Basma Alsharif)

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Favorite older movies watched this year:

1. Dusty Stacks of Mom (2013, Jodie Mack)
2. Cemetery Man (1994, Michele Soavi)
3. In a Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray)
4. Footlight Parade (1933, Lloyd Bacon)
5. The Match Factory Girl (1990, Aki Kaurismaki)
6. Invention for Destruction (1958, Karel Zeman)
7. The Devil’s Nightmare (1971, Jean Brismée)
8. A Day in the Country (1936, Jean Renoir)
9. Salome’s Last Dance (1988, Ken Russell)
10. Beauty and the Beast (1978, Juraj Herz)
11. Time Regained (1999, Raoul Ruiz)
12. The Steamroller and the Violin (1960, Andrei Tarkovsky)
13. The Hands of Orlac (1924, Robert Wiene)
14. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)
15. Medium Cool (1969, Haskell Wexler)
16. The Whole Town’s Talking (1935, John Ford)
17. Tales from the Hood (1995, Rusty Cundieff)
18. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Sam Peckinpah)
19. How to Disappear Completely (2013, Raya Martin)
20. The Vanishing (1988, George Sluizer)

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Favorite shorts watched this year:

1. Visit (2020, Jia Zhang-Ke)
2. Asparagus and Pinball by Suzan Pitt
3. World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020, Don Hertzfeldt)
4. Ballad of the Green Wood and Projekt by Jiri Barta
5. Aria (2001, Pjotr Sapegin)
6. ExtaZus (2019, Bertrand Mandico)
7. Hampton (2019, Kevin Jerome Everson)
8. Lucifer Rising (1972, Kenneth Anger)
9. Engram of Returning and Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis by Daïchi Saïto
10. The Capsule (2012, Athina Rachel Tsangari)
11. Nose Hair and How to Kiss by Bill Plympton
12. Seeking the Monkey King (2011, Ken Jacobs)
13. House of Small Cubes (2008, Kunio Kato)
14. Four by Sky Hopinka
15. What Did Jack Do? and Fire (Pozar) by David Lynch
16. Veslemøy’s Song (2018, Sofia Bohdanowicz)
17. The Fall and Strasbourg 1518 by Jonathan Glazer
18. Stump the Guesser (2020, Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson)
19. The Amateurist (1998, Miranda July)
20. Night Without Distance (2015, Lois Patiño)

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

1. In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-Wai)
2. Naked Lunch (1991, David Cronenberg)
3. The Grand Bizarre (2018, Jodie Mack)
4. Before Sunrise (1995, Richard Linklater)
5. Diabolique (1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot)
6. Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988, Shinya Tsukamoto)
7. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra)
8. Andrei Rublev (1969, Andrei Tarkovsky)
9. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988, Stephen Chiodo)
10. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988, Tony Randel)

by ·Comments Off on The Movie Year in Review, 2020

Happy New Movie Year!

Again I kept a letterboxd list of all the must-see movies released in 2020 – I’ll finalize it next week. I’ve currently seen around a third of those, which isn’t so bad considering home life and work life were weird, we moved cross-country, I stopped watching current films at all for a while, and Shocktober lasted two months.

Early in the year I scoured the year-end and decade-end lists of some less commercially-minded film critics and tried to watch those… that’s where my interest in Lois Patiño and Arthur Jafa came from, for instance… got through about 20% of that list, not bad, and I’ll see if there are more titles I can add this year.

And other projects and lists, which I’m not getting into, and didn’t do so well on, but the whole point is to keep watching good movies, and feeling good about them, and that’s been going alright.

I also watched a bunch of online concerts and livestreams and archival shows, and bought audio concerts and things on bandcamp… these shows helped the time pass, though they all place a distant third to actual concerts we attended pre-lockdown by Sloan and Kelly Hogan.

by ·Comments Off on I Was at Home, But… (2019, Angela Schanelec)

A movie where the main dialogue scene is about finding truth in film performances, which also spends 15+ minutes watching middle schoolers perform Hamlet. Bookend scenes feature a dog who hunts and eats a rabbit palling around with a quiet donkey. Someone hops a fence and collapses at a gravesite to an M. Ward song. Happy to see Franz Rogowski in a small part.

Astrid deals with a kid who’s in trouble at school, and a defective bicycle she bought secondhand from a disabled man. She meets a director whose film she hated and talks his ear off about his poor cinema decisions. A good-looking movie, I enjoyed spending time with it, even if I haven’t figured out what it’s on about. Been hearing about Schanelec for a while, mostly from Cinema Scope – before this came out, Blake Williams called her films “notoriously evasive” and says she “presents us with only enough narrative so that we feel our desire for narrative.”

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.