by ·Comments Off on The Nightmare (2015, Akiz)

Now something from the Filmmakers of the Present, a section for first and second features. This would be at least Achim Bornhak’s third feature if letterboxd is to be believed – I see an oil-driller bomb-thriller from 1998 and a commie/model/groupie biopic in 2007. The director now goes by Akiz, because the name Bornhak allows for cheap puns in English-language reviews.

A thumping dance beat movie with strobey lights – Gaspar Noe influenced? Three girls, speaking German, attend a party and become concerned that a Tommy Gnosis-looking boy they know has shown up. Leaving the party in handheld wide-angle, Tina gets super-killed by a passing car while picking up a necklace – or she had a premonition of this happening – or she saw a cellphone video of it happening to someone else and simply passed out.

Either way, Tina isn’t quite the same when she gets home, having nightmares of a creature that raids her parents’ fridge at night. Her psychiatrist tells her to touch the beast and prove it’s real, so she does, and it is – and it’s blind and clumsy, and psychically linked to Tina, so she starts taking care of it until they’re discovered and separated by the government. So Tina dresses for a night at the club and heads to the hospital for a covert rescue operation.

Or maybe it’s Neon Demon influenced, I dunno, it seems somehow derivative even though I keep naming films that came out after this. Cutting back and forth on the beat between domestic/hangout scenes and club scenes is cool, but mostly reminded me of that great Michael Smiley episode of Spaced, and the movie is probably much more enjoyable if you can stand rave music.

by ·Comments Off on I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015, Marianne Lambert)

LNKarno opening night is an Akerman doc, watching as prep for LNKarno closing night No Home Movie. I ended up enjoying the doc, with its discussions of editing strategies in the feature, more than the feature itself. I am a sucker for these things.

Akerman worked at a gay porn theater’s box office, raising money for her early shorts, then stole boxes of expired film to shoot Je, Tu, Il, Elle. “My mother was at the heart of my work,” flashbacks to News from Home. Wonderful to see Saute ma ville, which I just watched, intercut with Jeanne Dielman, discussion of their similarities and her mother’s take on the latter feature. Gus Van Sant, whose Last Days was Akerman-inpired, weighs in. The doc has the same closing credits shot as True Stories.

by ·Comments Off on LNKarno 2015/2020

It’s the third annual* LNKarno Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed on my couch** in Lincoln***. The real Locarno was happening last week… or was it? They send me daily emails, and I have yet to really figure out what’s happening over there – I think a mix of in-person and online screenings of movies from previous years, and some panels about films that had to interrupt production this year. Anyway, that’s a problem for 2025 (if man’s still alive), because this weekend it’s all about looking back to 2015.

* skipped last year, we had a mini true/false weekend instead
** bed *** Atlanta

LNKarno-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Main Competition:

No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello)
Entertainment (Rick Alverson)
Winter Song (Otar Iosseliani)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)
Chevalier (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski)
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)
Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
On Football (Sergio Oksman)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

The Nightmare (Achim Bornhak)
Kaili Blues (Bi Gan)
The Movement (Benjamín Naishtat)
Olmo & the Seagull (Petra Costa & Lea Glob)
Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce)

Critics’ Week (documentary section organized by a swiss film journalist group)

Call Me Marianna (Karolina Bielawska)
Brothers (Wojciech Staron)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Ricki and the Flash (Jonathan Demme)
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow)
Summertime (Catherine Corsini)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

Deux Remi, deux (Pierre Leon)
88:88 (Isiah Medina)
Academy of Muses (José Luis Guerin)
Machine Gun or Typewriter? (Travis Wilkerson)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features and shorts by established filmmakers)

The Glory of Filmmaking in Portugal (Manuel Mozos)
Estratos de la imagen (Lois Patiño)
Noite sem distancia (Lois Patiño)
Riot (Nathan Silver)
Topophilia (Peter Bo Rappmund)
Le bois dont les reves sont faits (Claire Simon)
L’architecte de Saint-Gaudens (Julie Desprairies & Serge Bozon)

Others on the program, including a Sam Peckinpah retrospective:

I Don’t Belong Anywhere – Le cinema de Chantal Akerman (Marianne Lambert)
Kid (Júlio Bressane)
The Girl Chewing Gum (1976, John Smith)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Ride the High Country (1962)
Major Dundee (1965)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
Straw Dogs (1971)
The Getaway (1972)

by ·Comments Off on Naked Lunch (1991, David Cronenberg)

First movie watched on the New TV, and first time I’ve seen this in hi-def. The creature/typewriter effects hold up, as does the circular story blending the Burroughs stories with his own strange life, and the acting by Peter Weller and Judy Davis (same year as Barton Fink, wow).

“Rewriting is censorship.” Exterminator Bill is in trouble at work because his wife is shooting up his bug powder (“It’s a Kafka high; you feel like a bug”). “I am your case officer,” says the anus of the bug the cops leave him with, “Your wife is not really your wife.” After Bill catches writer Hank on top of his not-wife Joan, they do the ol’ William Tell act, then the bigger bug at the bar gives him a ticket to Interzone and says he’s to write a report.

Sands, Kiki, Eclectus:

Hitlery Hans (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman) introduces him to Kiki, who introduces him to another Joan’s husband, typewriter aficionado Ian Holm (I forget how Julian Sands fits in, but he’s there, in a white suit of course). Sinister doctor Roy Scheider reappears as a lesbian mind-control druglord at the end, and the whole thing combines sex, drugs, death, literature and insects in ways that nothing else ever has.

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Shorts x5

The Amateurist (1998, Miranda July)

Miranda 1 “the professsional” is presenting her work on Miranda 2 “the amateur” to the viewer. I think 1 transmits numbers and patterns to 2, who paces a cell, reacting with hostility to these communications, while 1 watches lovingly. “A portrait of a woman on the brink of technology-induced madness”

–
Pioneer (2011, David Lowery)

Another single-room two-person short. Will Oldham is an ageless man telling his stepson a bedtime story about how the boy was kidnapped and sought for over a hundred years, only to mysteriously reappear.

–
Saute ma ville (1968, Chantal Akerman)

Whoa… teenage Chantal comes home, eats dinner, tosses the cat out the window, cleans the apartment, then kills herself on the stove. Jeanne Dielman in miniature – with less technical mastery, replaced with a playful sense of anarchy, extended to the dubbing (she sings in voiceover when not singing onscreen, and when lighting a match, the sound effect is a voice saying “scrrratch”). Watching the doc later, she calls it “the mirror image of Jeanne Dielman.”

–
Asparagus (1979, Suzan Pitt)

Up there with Lynch in terms of having the most warped ideas and having the technical chops to get them onscreen. This is the height of color and form/space/scale weirdness while still maintaining some vague narrative trajectory, accompanied by bent spooky music, then it hits new heights when our heroine leaves the house (putting on a mask first, much appreciated), sneaks into a theater and unleashes her phantasmagoric cel-animated phallic-symbol madness on an unsuspecting stop-motion audience. A masterpiece, filmed from 1974 to 1978.

–
Atlantiques (2009, Mati Diop)

Serigne boarded a pigogue heading to Spain and died on the way. However, Serigne sits around the fire with a couple of friends detailing the trip and his reasons for leaving. Obviously a ghostly precursor to the feature.

– bonus short –

Strasbourg 1518 (2020, Jonathan Glazer)

Exhausted repetitive dances in vacant domestic spaces.

Faster cutting between a larger set of dancers towards the end.

New music by Mica Levi is an irritating fast club beat with hints of bird calls

by ·Comments Off on Athlete A (2020, Jon Shenk & Bonni Cohen)

It’s cool when you end up on netflix, though you’d prefer it not be because your friend’s daughter was the primary whistleblower in a sexual abuse scandal.

Respect to athletes, none for US olympics gym admin/staff.

by ·Comments Off on Palm Springs (2020, Max Barbakow)

Groundhog Day but “the pain is real,” which adds a haunting edge. It’s still a Lonely Island adjacent movie, often funny and extremely likeable, and I assume the phrase “dark edgy Groundhog Day” has already been claimed by Russian Doll, so I am allowed to say this. Samberg (argh, Brigsby Bear) picks up Cristin Milioti (lead captive of USS Callister) at her sister’s wedding and ends up trapping her in his time loop, along with his archenemy JK Simmons, who chills out once he realizes the pain is real.

Not a remake of the 1930’s David Niven gambling cowboy movie. Director Barbakow has met Werner Herzog! We saw five Sundance/True/False crossover features this year, and after Shirley last week, this is my second film from the USA Drama section.

by ·Comments Off on If You Could Only Cook (1935, William A. Seiter)

Nearly the same plot as Spaced: two down-and-out strangers apply for a couples-only newspaper ad. But here, another popular 1930’s plot is thrown in: the rich guy pretending to be a commoner. Trouble in Paradise star Herbert Marshall is a futurist auto mogul, God’s own Jean Arthur (same year as The Whole Town’s Talking) can cook very well, and they’re hired as cook-and-butler by some fellas. He’s trying to stay in charge of the company he founded, she is arrested when his secret auto designs are found in her possession, their criminal employer Leo Carrillo proposes to Jean, Herbert doesn’t fool anyone for long and when he returns to his old life, Leo kidnaps him from his society wedding – it’s a lot for a 70-minute movie, and it mostly works thanks to the cast.

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.