by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched September 2019

Peter Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope Trilogy

I’ve watched these before, first in 2008 and at least once since then, but this time I thought to play them on the big TV while listening in headphones to better hear the audio textures over the noise of our air conditioner – a good idea!

L’arrivée (1999)

One short scene: a train arrives, woman gets off and hugs the guy waiting for her, but given every available footage treatment within its two minutes, soft fluttering on the soundtrack.

–
Outer Space (1999)

The crazy one – this holds up better than ever in HD. As much care given to the soundtrack as the visuals, full of fluttering, looping and reversing.

–
Dream Work (2001)

Dedicated to Man Ray. This is my jam… appreciation of classic cinema while also interrogating/destroying it. This same day I read a couple of articles mentioning nostalgia in cinema, Letterboxd’s interview with Rick Alverson, and a Ringer review of the new Refn series, which gets compared to Twin Peaks: “Showtime gave the auteur free rein under the pretext of Twin Peaks nostalgia, even if Lynch ultimately sought to weaponize those feelings against his audience.” I think Weaponized Nostalgia needs to be a new genre.

–
Shot-Countershot (1987, Peter Tscherkassky)

Ooooh, never seen this before. Scene from a classic film, slightly processed, of a guy playing harmonica, drawing his gun, and getting drilled. It’s a single camera take, so I assume the title is a gunshot joke. This 20-second bit of silliness does not detract from my love of his major works.

–
Crossroad (2005, Phil Solomon)

Argh, machinima. A dude in Second Life acts bored in a rainstorm, and runs in circles through a forest, a bouquet of flowers spinning nearby as if suspended from a string. I did appreciate the way the 3D objects clipped as they spun too close to the camera, revealing themselves as origami structures of 2D surfaces. Dedicated to David Gatten. I’ve only seen one other film by Solomon, in Nashville a decade ago. This was codirected with Mark LaPore, who died the same year.

–
Liberian Boy (2015, Mati Diop & Manon Lutanie)

I felt guilty finally watching my first Mati Diop film without African Studies Katy, while she sat unaware in the other room, but I’m not sure she’d have gotten much out of this white kid doing (very good!) Michael Jackson moves against a greenscreen whilst holding a knife. Lacking any African studies scholars in the room, I don’t know what it meant, but it’s a cool piece. The kid also appears in the latest Nobuhiro Suwa film.

–
Shoot (2014, Gaspar Noe)

The camera is a soccer ball (representing France?), kicked around in a courtyard – pretty nice La Region Centrale rig with an unpleasant soundtrack of percussive kicks mixed with tinnitus whine.

–
Nectar (2014, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Nectar is collected from the body of a flower-eating woman. Hive-honey harvesters seduce men into a Matrix global pollination scenario. Olga from Film Socialisme plays the Queen of Bees.

–
Two-Gun Mickey (1934, Ben Sharpsteen)

Minnie is cruel to animals. Mickey rescues her after a shootout with Pegleg Pete and his men. The movie promotes automatic weapon use, and makes an overweight, handicapped foreigner the villain.

–
The Fly (1980, Ferenc Rofusz)

Pleasantly short fisheye (flyeye?) lens animation from a fly’s POV, entering a house and being vanquished by a resident. Won the oscar, the only other nominees being one by the Evolution guy and one by The Man Who Planted Trees guy. The Hungarian director was still making shorts as of 2017.

–
Toy Sequence (1990, Péter Szoboszlay)

Fun, short Toy Story prequel, a nursery coming to stop-motion life in the night, the pieces transforming and rearranging themselves, and the dolls being generally creepy.

–
Filmstudie (1926, Hans Richter)

Richter the dark Master of light, pattern and pacing, a hundred years ahead of his time. I’ve previously raved about three of his other shorts – was not impressed with my terrible copy of his late collaboration with Cocteau, but overall it looks like I’ve loved his work and need to check out his feature Dreams That Money Can Buy. Anyway this one is mostly eyeballs and wands of light, but it’s impressive.

–
Night Music (1986, Stan Brakhage)

I forget just how short this is, not counting titles and credits. The film I’ve watched the most times.

by ·Comments Off on Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018 Gabrielle Brady)

Part three of our True/False Makeup Weekend. A counselor works with imprisoned refugees, while outside, millions of small crabs are freely migrating across the island. It’s a metaphor, you see – an irresistible one, with the bright crabs giving the film more visual texture, something entrancingly alien to cut to between close-shot stories of human suffering.

The movie opens with an escape, a man scaling a fence then hurtling through the woods, a staged version of something we hear about which may not have even happened, since we learn that the authorities are being misleading on purpose. The counselor’s view is that she can’t be helpful from just a single conversation, and there’s no guarantee if or when she’ll get to visit with her patients again. The final scene shows her packing up to leave the island with her family, the whole endeavor possibly a failure.

Mouseover to migrate the crabs:
image

In an essential article, The Guardian says the filmmaker and counselor Poh Lin Lee are friends, that the film was made from multiple visits over four years, and that interviews conducted on the island were filmed in secret from the government.

Slant:

Poh Lin uses a tableau of sand and small toy figures to help one woman process her trauma, poetically describing the grains of sand as mountains that have been reduced to their finest form, but mostly she just listens, and listens, and listens. She’s a willing sponge for their guilt, at one point moving over to sit next to and comfort the Syrian man who weeps as he remembers the various separations that have plagued his young life. It comes as no surprise to subsequently learn that Poh Lin is also in therapy.

by ·Comments Off on One Child Nation (2019 Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang)

Nanfu explores Chinese policy through the personal histories of her own family and neighbors, then expands to the country’s legacy of international adoption and a quest to trace adopted kids to their birth parents. As the country’s present-day propaganda shifts towards telling people that the perfect number of children to have is two, Nanfu tries to get people who lived through the previous era – parents who abandoned newborn children to die in the marketplace, party official abortionists, local government leaders who tore down the homes of residents who disobeyed the policy, families who made a business of selling abandoned babies to adoption agencies only to be imprisoned for human trafficking – to denounce the policy. But after decades of indoctrination, she manages to get one person to say it was a good idea, “but they took it too far.” Feels like too massive of an issue (and a country) for a single doc to cover, but the way she weaves the politics through her family’s own stories and memories makes it work beautifully – one of the best of this year’s T/F docs.

by ·Comments Off on Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2019 Ben Berman)

We had a True/False Makeup Weekend to celebrate One Child Nation‘s release in local theaters on the same day Amazing Johnathan premiered on streaming. As with this year’s fest itself, our programming was about half successful. We followed this one for a while, but as the filmmaker lost exclusive access to his subject, who also refused to quit or die, the director turned the movie towards himself (and itself) and tried to manufacture drama and stunts. Given how it ends up being about his competition with other Amazing Johnathan documentaries, and this one’s “twist ending” is its own executive producer credit, I’m surprised they didn’t film an addendum with our dude filming himself signing the Hulu deal. The other finished doc, Always Amazing, apparently scored a David Copperfield interview. In interviews, AJ says he likes the other movie just as much, which Berman says is impossible.

by ·Comments Off on True Stories (1986 David Byrne) and D.A. Pennebaker shorts

Katy suggested watching some Criterion Channel, and had never seen True Stories, one of my all-time favorite celebrations of special-ness. She liked it! Hard to believe that things like this could get released theatrically by Warner Bros. Looks like it was released around the same time as Under the Cherry Moon, Howard the Duck, The Mission, Deadly Friend and Little Shop of Horrors – an overall weird year for a major studio. Despite its studio backing it was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, but beaten for cinematography by that $138 million-grossing indie film Platoon, and for best first feature by Spike Lee (fair enough).

IMDB reports that two of the “Hey Now” kids went on to be voice actors, one in Disney movies and video games, the other on tons of dubbed anime including Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Summer Wars.

and in memory of D.A. Pennebaker…

Baby (1954)

One of those 1950’s shorts where people were just discovering that you can take the camera outdoors and make short docs with jazzy editing. Brakhage’s Desistfilm and The Way To Shadow Garden (admittedly both shot indoors) came out the same year. This one stars D.A.’s young daughter wandering through a zoo.

Shake! Otis at Monterey (1967/87)

A Monterey Pop bonus performance film – D.A. and Maysles and Leacock and others filming the hell out of a short, fiery performance by Otis Redding. This was Redding’s big break in June 1967, and he was dead in December. Superb concert footage of a tight 20-minute set, each song with its own visual look/flow, so an appropriate closer to a night begun with a David Byrne movie.

by ·Comments Off on Rafiki (2018 Wanuri Kahiu)

The most colorful African movie we’ve seen – well-acted, a high-quality production with a timely subject. Shame about the weak and obvious script. At least that was my position before reading Sarah-Tai Black’s Cinema Scope article, which basically says to shut up about the conventional structure and narrative, since it’s a groundbreaking film in other, important ways.

Kena (right) and Ziki should’ve known better than to hang out near these spies:

Kena’s dad is a shopkeeper who recently ditched Kena’s very religious mom to start a new family, and he’s in a political race against Ziki’s dad (Dennis Musyoka, a small role in Sense8). Kena starts ditching her would-be-boyfriend Blacksta and the daughter of the local gossip when she meets Ziki, and the two start growing closer until, inevitably, they get caught, beaten, arrested, preached-at and prayed-for, and permanently separated. I’m pretty sure Kena becomes a doctor at the end and Ziki moves away.

Kena hashes things out with Blacksta, but spies are everywhere:

Katy and I have also seen Kahiu’s awesome dystopian short and her feature drama about people connecting in the wake of Kenyan embassy bombings, and will be sitting tight waiting for the next one.

by ·Comments Off on Under The Silver Lake (2018 David Robert Mitchell)

In which the conspiracy uncovered by burnout loser Sam (an extremely likeable Andrew Garfield) turns out to be true. Gathering clues from Topher Grace, the Mulholland Dr. diner guy with the eyebrows, a pop-up local rock band, the Homeless King (David Yow!) and hospital boss Barrow from The Knick (in heavy old-age makeup as a secret apex popular songwriter), Sam discovers that his hot neighbor Riley Keough disappeared into a bunker to die (eventually) with a famous rich guy, and that he is not going to rescue her in the end.

I deny the Southland Tales comparisons, will happily loop this in with Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice, a trilogy of hapless L.A. detectives with different styles and tones. This was hilarious and terrific to look at, and probably warrants a rewatch, as well as catching up with his first film during the presumably long wait for his next, since this seems to have flopped.

Secret owls on the dollar bill:

Mike D’Angelo:

Under the Silver Lake dunks on its dipshit of a protagonist (beautifully played by Garfield as haplessness incarnate, right down to the way he walks and runs throughout; that puppy-dog quality no doubt gets in the way of folks recognizing that he’s meant to be kind of awful)… but it’s also achingly sincere about the innate human desire to believe there’s some secret code that will reveal the key to everlasting happiness, or at least enable some basic understanding of what the hell’s going on.

Matt Singer in Screencrush:

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see the film is poking fun at Sam, and at the urge to search for buried meanings in things in order to avoid the painful reality staring you in the face. And Sam’s sexuality is part of that; Mitchell openly compares his hunt for life’s little Easter eggs to the act of masturbation. Some viewers seemed to miss the joke altogether — even though Under the Silver Lake is a movie where former Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield buys an old issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that then gets stuck to his hand.

by ·Comments Off on Shoplifters (2018 Hirokazu Kore-eda)

Spends a significant amount of time with a makeshift family who adopt/kidnap a neighbor from an abusive home. Their daily life and care for each other is seen up close for the first hour, until just like in yesterday’s movie Too Many Husbands, the decision of how to arrange their own family is taken out of their hands when the Morality Police show up and straighten it out according to the Law. Suddenly each member of our close movie family is revealed as a low-class criminal, reduced to a mugshot and named by their crime (thief / murderer / kidnapper / fraudster). It’s an extremely effective sympathy tactic – a moving film even though I could see the gears turning.

The first Kore-Eda I’ve watched since Nobody Knows, 15 years ago, even though the eight he made in between were variously acclaimed, making top-ten lists and Criterion blu-rays… I guess the Palme d’Or finally got me. Sakura Andô (Love Exposure) won Japan’s top acting award as the mother. One of the final films by Kirin Kiki (Suzuki’s Zigeunerweisen and Pistol Opera) as the grandma.

by ·Comments Off on A Silent Voice (2016 Naoko Yamada)

A middle-school bully turned high-school pariah tries to humbly make amends, finds it isn’t so simple, goes on adventures. Multiple suicide attempts later, our group of misfits manages to find some peace. Nice visual expression of our dude’s alienation, his classmates with X’s on their faces as he stares at the ground. A high-quality production, earnest and emotional – maybe not my kind of thing under normal circumstances, but the movie had my sympathy since we were watching in memory of the 30-some people at Kyoto Animation who were murdered last month.