by ·Comments Off on Mirai of the Future (2018, Mamoru Hosoda)

This stupid year is trying to kill my blog, but it still lives.

Movie follows tantrummy four-year-old boy Kun, voiced very unconvincingly by an 18-year-old girl, as he gradually learns simple lessons. He resents his new sister Mirai until she visits from the future and shows him scenes from their family history. He becomes the family dog, goes on a motorcycle ride with his post-WWII grandpa, flies around with the swallows, and gets Christmas Caroled into being nicer to his baby sister. I never got over Kun’s voice – maybe the English version is better.

Now I’ve seen all of the 2018 animated feature oscar nominees – the worthy winner, an all-time fave, two disappointing sequels, and… this. We’re following Hosoda’s career but seeing diminishing returns.

Cool train station agent, tho:

by ·Comments Off on Ouroboros (2017, Basma Alsharif)

Dawn: very sweet drone shots, then when we reach the ground, a Ben Russell follow-cam in reverse (literally, Ben is the cinematographer on this), music very droney. Woman walks through fruit trees then a large house, adjusting things here and there… I get the impression she doesn’t live in the house but works there. We recede from the grounds, then Sky Hopinka reads us some words about home and place and loss.

Noon: Inside a different house, a black man sings Dixie for the mostly-white others – ah, they’re all rehearsing something. Bald neck-tattoo guy casually walks in and out of houses and conversations, nobody seems to mind him.

Dusk: Much of the movie is in reverse. We see some ouroboros drawings to remind us what we’re watching. Bald guy seems oddly peaceful for someone with the word RIOT tattooed on his wrist.

Night, then Dusk, then Noon again. Fifty minutes in, our man asks “would you like to see a magic trick” – is this the first time he’s spoken? A phantom ping-pong match is unexpected, ghostly superimpositions, Metamorphosis of Birds leaf-play, a drone in a fancy sitting room that turns out to be diegetic. The movie ends quite wonderfully with a dance remix of itself!

Droneman:

The official description says it “turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak,” and says our lead guy is Diego Marcon, an ontology-questioning visual artist whose latest short played Rotterdam.

Michael Sicinski:

We don’t know anything more about our traveler than we did when we began, but Alsharif has provided us with a utopian conception of lived space. In cinema, perhaps, begins responsibility.

–
Deep Sleep (2014, Basma Alsharif)

Trancefilm, again shot with Ben Russell in Palestine and elsewhere. Footsteps, and columns, and pointing. Like the feature, it slips between locations. Picture (and sometimes sound) will have full-color flicker freakouts.

by ·Comments Off on Beyond Clueless (2014, Charlie Lyne)

We didn’t buy the essay part, but were mostly watching for the clips… and even that backfired when it kept focusing on horror, and Katy had to cover her eyes through scenes from Final Destination and Idle Hands.

by ·Comments Off on Belly of an Architect (1987, Peter Greenaway)

Having a rough week, I considered pulling out the emergency relief film, Paddington 2, but Brian Dennehy had just died, and I’d long wanted to see it, so chose to watch the movie about a man in constant pain whose professional and personal life falls apart until he commits suicide – great fuckin’ idea.

Composer Wim Mertens does a serviceable Michael Nyman impression – or maybe that was Glenn Branca, one of his few film credits. Architect Dennehy is in Rome with wife Louisa (Chloe Webb, just off starring in Sid & Nancy) outlining the exhibition he’s preparing on an obscure French architect. Webb is pregnant, and having a blatant affair with Lambert Wilson, who is also stealing money and discrediting Dennehy so he can take over the exhibition, and whose photographer sister Stefania Casini (Jessica Harper’s murdered friend in Suspiria) is trying to seduce Dennehy. I like how Dennehy finds her room full of photographs of previous scenes, as if whenever Casini is offscreen, she’s filming the movie we’re watching.

by ·Comments Off on Crestone (2020, Marnie Ellen Hertzler)

A rapper named Sloppy moved with his friends to rural Colorado to grow weed and live in a utopian community. We missed the True/False premiere of this, so caught its online 4/20 screening. Katy thought it did not engender empathy… I thought there wasn’t much of interest going on, and the guys aren’t actors so you can hear in their voices the moment true turns into false. Sloppy hasn’t posted a new song in a year, and I forget the other guys’ handles, but maybe that Crestone bologna life hasn’t been good for productivity.

by ·Comments Off on Beauty and the Beast (1978, Juraj Herz)

After amazing opening title artwork, we open with a festive animal-slaughter montage, why? So far so familiar – golden-haired beauty Julie (Zdena Studenková, also of a Sleeping Beauty movie) loves her merchant father, whose entire fortune is in a wagon train that gets violently lost when it strays too close to a cursed castle. Julie’s sisters are actually nice to her until the family’s fortune turns, then they become horrible. Dad is imprisoned in the castle when he searches for the lost shipment, and when released for a day to say goodbye to his family, he’s mid-conversation when Julie grabs a horse and rides off to take her father’s place.

It’s halfway through the movie before we see the beast’s face – he’s a BIRDBEAST! – and fifteen minutes to the end before Julie sees it. The castle and its furnishings are alive in a shady and sinister way, overall more of a horror movie than any other adaptation I’ve seen, always whispering to Beast that he should kill Julie. There’s also no Gaston equivalent, nobody from town looking for Julie, and after she visits home and everyone’s a pain in the ass to her, she runs back to her Beast, who transforms out of love, to a really nice piano theme by Petr Hapka (whose music was in Ferat Vampire and The Grandmaster!)

The sisters: Jana Brejchová was in Return of the Prodigal Son and Baron Prasil and I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen, and Zuzana Kocúriková was in, uh oh, an Alain Robbe-Grillet film. Dad was in Murder Czech Style. Vlastimil Harapes is under the bird-beast makeup, had a smallish role in Marketa Lazarová.

by ·Comments Off on Sixty Six (2015, Lewis Klahr)

Quick stop-motion pans across photograph backgrounds
Cutouts and objects (paper, flowers) puppeteered across the photos,
some set to dramatic music

Circles/dots, repeating as texture, single circles used as punctuation

Multiple episodes, a series of shorts, made over 13 years.
Dedication at the end of each one, then title of the next.

Some episodes have music, some have audio from a movie or show, some silent.
Halfway in, one uses music in reverse.

Pretty consistent visual approaches, with some surprises.
Round and rectangular chiclets appear in scenes.

Long hypodermic story at the end is the most narrative yet
Word bubbles and actions that tell a story, woman seems to be in afterlife.

by ·Comments Off on Evergreen (1934, Victor Saville)

Musical in which Jessie Matthews (in one of Hitchcock’s least-known movies the same year) plays a stage star who disappears to have a secret daughter, and years later plays the secret daughter, who gets a job onstage impersonating her mother. Intro music hall scene reminds of the beginning of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, not in a good way, but the movie picks up. Jessie’s love interest Barry MacKay played Fred Scrooge in A Christmas Carol a few years later, and I could tell you more about the movie if I hadn’t let 45 quarantine days pass before trying to write about it.

by ·Comments Off on The Long Good Friday (1979, John Mackenzie)

Local crime boss Bob Hoskins gets back into town, and quickly has to figure out what’s going on when some of his top men start getting killed right when Bob was gonna go legit by signing with real estate developer Eddie Constantine and profit off the 1988 olympics. Turns out some of his guys took a side deal from the IRA, stole from them, and now his whole organization is under attack.

Eddie, Helen, Bob:

Bob’s in his first starring role, Helen Mirren is his unamused sister, their curlhaired partner Jeff is Derek Thompson (just off the rock musical Breaking Glass) and Paul Freeman (villain of next year’s Raiders of the Lost Ark) is Bob’s buddy who gets stabbed to death by none other than Pierce Brosnan (twelve years before his performance in The Lawnmower Man landed him the James Bond role). Bob won’t accept defeat, takes on the IRA at a demolition derby, and it almost looks like his plan’s gonna work. Decent 1980’s movie, does not live up to expectations of being an early Criterion release that I’ve been wanting to watch since it came out… in fact, the DVD release was late 1998, which is closer to the release of the original film than it is to the month I finally watched it.