by ·Comments Off on Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950, Otto Preminger)

Oops I’d been trying to avoid police brutality movies, then put this on without knowing what it’s about. Got what I deserved with the icky ending, a beaten wife pledging to wait for her new man, a crooked violent cop heading to jail for killing a man and framing her dad.

Cool trick shot, the two cops are the same guy:

Dana “Night of the Demon” Andrews is bad cop Dixon, busted down a rank by bignose lieutenant Karl Malden, determined to prove himself by busting chill sniffy gambler Gary Merrill (All About Eve the same year). While shaking down one of Gary’s players for info, Dana knocks the guy’s block off then spends the rest of the movie covering up his crime. Besides the trick shot above (seriously, I was glad for once that the characters begin every other line by saying each other’s name, since they all kinda look the same) there’s a neat bit where time passes via light-play on a miniature(?) of the city. The Girl is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir star Gene Tierney, separated wife of the newly-dead guy, who falls for her husband’s killer even as her sweetie dad Tom Tully is being held for the murder.

by ·Comments Off on What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2018, Roberto Minervini)

Louisiana and Mississippi, cutting between different threads. After the lovely and gentle Stop the Pounding Heart led to the intimate look of The Other Side led to the racist militia at the end of that movie, it’s nice to reset and spend time with the New Black Panther Party. And after a month of watching movies on the laptop screen, it’s nice to see this on the big(ger) screen, experiencing as close as I’ll get to cinema this summer.

Michael Sicinski on Mubi via letterboxd:

As with Minervini’s previous films, there is something both startling and a bit disconcerting about the degree of access he achieves, as well as the fact that his camera crew is almost never acknowledged. How does he get so close, capturing key emotional moments like Judy’s cousin Michael finally visiting his mother’s gravesite, or Judy herself meeting a fellow addict and describing her years of abuse? One of the things that Minervini accomplishes in What You Gonna Do…, both with these scenes, the New Black Panther meetings, and in some consciousness-raising moments in Judy’s bar, is a careful depiction of free black discourse, the kind of discussion about identity, politics, and culture that a community can have when they are not worried about how outside listeners will misconstrue their words.

by ·Comments Off on Jeanne (2019, Bruno Dumont)

Halfway through Jeannette, little Lise aged-up to older Jeanne Voisin, and now due to a casting snafu, she’s aged back down to Lise for the battles and trial. It’s Jeannette Redux for the battles – all conversations in the desert, Joan “sings” a song in voiceover, her horse dances to a drumbeat then all the horsemen dance around her in a choreographed pattern. Mostly notable here is Lord de Rais who looks 18 with lion-hair.

Why does the king (Rohmer actor Fabrice Luchini), who everyone respects, act like such a sleazy scumlord and wear a juicer-hat?

The start of the trial is all talk, but livened up by the actors, especially church master Nic l’Oiseleur (below, right), a Quinquin-caliber performer. The church is an infinitely more gaudy setting than the Passion or the Bresson, and all the non-Joan actors are more interesting than those in the other films – shot mostly in close-up but it’s a large echoey room so they’re all shouting. It’s maybe a more eccentric movie than the first, and for the better… not a big fan of the vocal songs, but the instrumental music is just great.

by ·Comments Off on Le Corbeau (1943, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

WWII-era French town descends into paranoia when someone is writing letters accusing other townspeople of various crimes. I’m a fan of the sharp-looking Clouzot fast-paced b/w thrillers, though I watched this while tired and my notes make little sense (“everyone in church got forged letters arranging them to meet… no 13 suicided after letter… Rolande is someone”).

Key players:

Doctor Germaine: Pierre Fresnay, lead dude of The Devil’s Hand

Hotgirl Denise: Ginette Leclerc, “stupid wife” of the remade Late Mathias Pascal

Old Man Vorzet: Pierre Larquey, a Diabolique professor, 8th billed so nobody guesses he’s the villain

Young Goodwife Laura: Micheline Francey of a late 30’s Phantom Carriage remake

Dave Kehr:

Polished, impersonal work, it puts forward little more than a spirit of free-floating misanthropy. Remade (and improved) by Otto Preminger in 1951 as The Thirteenth Letter.

by ·Comments Off on Shirley (2020, Josephine Decker)

“You know how insulted I am by mediocrity.” Timely quarantine movie about Shirley Jackson not leaving her house for months… come to think of it, The Invisible Man also had a bit about Moss not leaving the house.

Rose and Fred (stars of Assassination Nation and Indignation) take live-in jobs assisting Myth & Folklore professor Michael Stuhlbarg and his reclusive wife, celebrated author Shirley Jackson. Shirley is writer’s-blocked until she takes interest in a local missing girl. Rose becomes the girl and starts Persona-ing Shirley, who begins to return to work.

Great music (by Tamar-kali, who also did The Assistant), bass and piano with choir. Good actors, obviously, otherwise it’s less my thing than her other movies, pretty traditional screenplay plus dream sequences.

by ·Comments Off on Five by Kevin Jerome Everson

At True/False we saw a couple movies by Everson: the one-take-whatever Partial Differential Equation, and the very great Hampton. So I’m checking to see what else is out there.

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Workers Leaving the Job Site (2013)

Silent handheld shot of the titular workers leaving the titular job site. Five minutes in – an edit! But it just cuts to another minute of the same thing. My least favorite film of workers leaving a job site, after the Lumiere and the Kaurismaki – or maybe it’s a tie for last with the Farocki.

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Three Quarters (2015)

Silent again, medium shots of two guys doing magic tricks with cards and string and quarters, a hundred times more fun than watching them leave the job site.

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Ears, Nose and Throat (2016)

1. Grainy outdoor night photography with fireflies, punctuated by left/right hearing-test tones.

2. Doctor with unsynched sound explains to patient that she has misaligned vocal cords and that’s why her voice gets tired.

3. She’s in a sound booth, unsynched again, telling about an argument she witnessed leading neighbor Chris to kill his friend DeCarrio. We’re outside the booth and I’m wondering if the opening scene was where the shooting happened.

4. We’re in the sound booth with her, hearing the tones she’s hearing.

5. Back at doctor’s office, room tone.

Ohhhhhh wow, DeCarrio was the director’s son, and the sound-booth woman a witness to his murder. That is a hell of a thing to make a film about.

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Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau (2019)

Two music performances, living room gospel and pickup truck rap, merged at the end by messing with the sync. The film title plus shots of a woman looking at a hillside through binoculars gives a (geo-)anthropological feeling, like the music is in the land and you can find it if you look hard enough.

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Black Bus Stop (2019)

College(?) kids having non-sync discusions with imprecise focus and framing, start talking about a black bus stop and the sound doubles up on itself, cut to night with performance-art stances and choreographed performances and songs, I think all of them school/greek-related… then back to the meta-cacophony about the bus stop. Shot at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, codirected with History Department chair Claudrena Harold.

by ·Comments Off on Black Is King (2020, Beyoncé)

Lemonade for children… all the Beyoncé glam you could ever desire, plus “black is beautiful” lyrics and Lion King dialogue. That said… those visuals, and costumes, and dances, all 100% all the time. So this is probably the best extended music-video of a tie-in album to a movie remake that could possibly be made.

Filmed in at least six countries, with a few special guests we recognized and plenty we did not. Segment directors include The Burial of Kojo guy, and someone who recently collaborated with Terence Nance… the cinematographers worked with Spike Lee and Solange (and John Mulaney), the production designers did Black Panther, Moonlight, and Room. Anyway, the youth of today is gonna grow up with images from this and Black Panther in their heads when they hear the word “Africa,” which is certainly a change from the “starving children on TV ads” impression I grew up with.

by ·Comments Off on The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011, Chad Friedrichs)

I know we have to be precious about everything now, and make time in our redlining documentaries for a guy to play a flute solo, but it’s sometimes nice to choose a topic, do the research, and put out a well-edited interview/narrator doc about that topic and how it fit into the history and culture. It’s also nice to take a thing whose name is synonymous with failure and close your doc with women who say they loved the failed thing, and it was the best thing in their lives, and you believe them and it makes you love it too. The topic here was a complex of high-rise low-income housing in St. Louis, which would’ve been great if it’d stayed 1956 forever, but instead turned into a Colossal Youth ghost story mixed with a The Wire crime scene, before being demolished in 1972.

by ·Comments Off on The Fearless Hyena (1979, Jackie Chan)

Criterion had a bunch of these movies, and I needed something to watch in weekday installments during a horrid week.

Jackie is tired of training with his mocking grandpa.

So he joins a gang and dresses like an idiot servant and a pretty girl to hustle suckers into fighting him.

But eventually he’ll have to content with the evil wizard who killed his dad (and grandpa).

Is he up to the task? Totally, yes.

Grandpa was James Tien of the Bruce Lee movies. Baddie Yen Shi-Kwan was in the first two Once Upon a Time in China movies. The year after starring in Drunken Master, this was 25-year-old Jackie Chan’s directorial debut.