by ·Comments Off on Two by Bi Gan

Kaili Blues (2015)

Watched this on Criterion to see what this Bi Gan guy is about, since Long Day’s Journey had apparently bypassed our city… then it opened the following weekend and we ran out to see it. They’re both set in the same area – Kaili is southeast of Chengdu, halfway to Hong Kong. Both movies center around an epic long take, the camera traveling all over town following a protagonist in pursuit of something. And they both have a slow, dreamy atmosphere. I thought of Tarkovsky more than once, and in the Kaili Blues extras he says watching Stalker changed his feelings about filmmaking, and I thought yes, of course.

Mirrors, watches/timepieces, a “wild man”, and talk of being in a dream. It’s kind of a journey film, as Chen heads to Zhenyuan (a two hour drive, if Chen had a car) to find his nephew. Characters are named Crazy Face and Piss Head, Chen gets rides from a rock band and a bullied guy, fails to deliver a shirt given by his doctor friend, also fails to pick up the nephew, though we’re led to believe the kid is fine. But there are ghosts and doubles along the way, subtle suggestions that we’ve become unstuck in time and narrative, and Shelly Kraicer’s Cinema Scope article does a good job sorting them.

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A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018)

Darker, more sumptuously dreamy, and certainly longer than its predecessor (with a longer and more apparently complicated single take at the end). The Tara didn’t care to show it in 3D, I guess. Its New Year premiere in China was controversial for supposedly tricking people into seeing a slow art movie that nobody understood, but the one person I talked with in China who’d watched it said it was great.

Luo wanders Kaili, haunted by the deaths of his father and a friend, searches for a lost love (Wei Tang, Thor’s girl in Blackhat), and runs into his friend’s mom (Sylvia Chang the boss of Office, which IMDB has decided to rename Design For Living). We also meet people who may exist in alternate or dreamed timelines, which is to say that Luo beats his own non-existent son at ping pong.

Blake Williams in Cinema Scope:

By car and by foot, Luo follows her, much to her concern, and then loses her, much to his recurrent perplexion. Unable to grab onto anything solid in the present, he dips into his memories with her, flashing back to their days of being wild (circa the turn of the millennium), when her materiality was less unstable. Crime and jealous boyfriends adorn the architecture of Luo’s memories, which are presented in murky enough vignettes that we’re never sure if he’s recalling an actual event or some movie he once saw; most likely, he’s fusing the two together … If Bi’s cinema has been clear about anything so far, it’s that he is completely unburdened by narrative cohesion.

by ·Comments Off on Experiment in Terror (1962, Blake Edwards)

Lee Remick (of Wild River and A Face in the Crowd, great in this) is a banker who gets phoned up by a psycho and threatened into stealing some money, in a 5-minute close-range opening scene with no music. Warned not to contact police, she calls Glenn Ford anyway, and he investigates, talking with Patricia Huston, who ends up dead.

Patricia is discovered by the landlord, “Mr. Curry” in my notes but maybe I just wrote that cuz he looks like Tim Curry:

A stoolie named Popcorn gives Glenn some leads, the killer’s girlfriend refuses to cooperate and says he’s a good man who pays for her son’s medical treatments. The baddie eventually kidnaps Lee’s sister Toby (Stefanie Powers, future star of Hart to Hart) to guarantee compliance, and arranges the handoff at Candlestick Park during a Giants/Dodgers game, where things go wrong for him, and he’s gunned down by Glenn Ford on the pitcher’s mound.

The baddie also sneaks up on Lee in a hallway disguised as an old woman… I forget why:

Written by The Gordons, who are best known for That Darn Cat!, and scored by Henry Mancini, the opening theme sounding like a warmup for The Pink Panther the following year.

by ·Comments Off on Murder By Contract (1958, Irving Lerner)

A gritty, efficient movie… hit man Vince Edwards is sent by his unseen boss to knock off a guy at the barber, a guy at hospital, then one of his own associates Mr. Moon. Vince gets a big head about being good at his job, suddenly making self-important speeches to everyone and being shitty to waiters. Then he loses his composure upon finding out his next target is a woman. He wires her TV knobs to a high voltage line but she defeats him by using the remote control, and the whole criminal conspiracy starts to fall apart.

“The only type of killing that’s safe is when a stranger kills a stranger… now why would a stranger kill a stranger? Because somebody’s willing to pay.”

Vince the Barber:

Kathie:

Vince’s hired hand, Herschel Bernardi of TV’s Peter Gunn and Arnie, gets a side plot where he learns to shoot a bow and arrow for one of their attempted hits. Their loud annoying partner Phillip Pine was in a sci-fi apocalypse movie the same year, later directed a 1972 anti-drug movie which potheads watch to laugh at. The girl, Caprice Toriel, was never seen before or since, but Kathie Browne, the hard-drinking party girl who lets Vince know that his second attempted hit killed a cop instead of the intended target, appeared in the late Howard Hawks comedy Man’s Favorite Sport?

Vince, almost getting away with it before falling into a police trap:

First movie watched on the new Criterion Channel! Irving Lerner would not go on to direct The Empire Strike Back – that’s Irvin Kershner, and I get them confused. Lerner also edited films for Scorsese, Kubrick and Vic Morrow and made two other crime dramas in the late 1950’s. Lead killer Vince Edwards was in Too Late Blues and played the wife’s boyfriend who gets everyone dead in The Killing. Composer Perry Botkin must’ve recently watched The Third Man.

by ·Comments Off on Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (2018, Bruno Dumont)

It’s a good thing Criterion is releasing the slow-moving serious-art early Dumont films on blu-ray, because I need to catch up, and this also gives me auteurist justification for absolutely loving this goony miniseries where aliens visit the town of Lil Quinquin and start duplicating the residents. The twitchy racist cop is given more screen time than ever, but I’m into it this time. Random resident Mr. Leleu gets copied, then Coincoin’s brother Dany, his ex-girl Eve, D’nis, then the captain himself. The Captain and Carpentier find out about the clones, are on the case, guns drawn, with the kids at their side, and then instead of solving the alien mystery, the “Cause I Knew” girl returns as a zombie and the series ends with a full-cast singalong.

by ·Comments Off on Random Acts of Flyness season 1 (2018)

It becomes less random as the series goes on and sketches start calling back to each other or continuing from previous episodes. It is pretty random tho, also one of the most imaginative series I’ve ever seen. Seems like a high-budget Adult Swim thing, with sketches and animation and music and interviews – can’t believe it’s on HBO, or that creator Terence Nance (An Oversimplification of Her Beauty) landed a big-budget live-action cartoon on the heels of this.

Very many participants, including actress Dominique Fishback, the Ghanaian director of Afronauts, and Solange Knowles.

by ·Comments Off on I Am Not a Witch (2017, Rungano Nyoni)

Shula is not a witch, but is tied to a leash and sent to live in witch camp, with other women who are actually not witches but have proven inconvenient to keep around. From the enraging first section (mob superstition meets government corruption) and the tragic/triumphant ending, it’s a beautifully shot movie, and our first from Zambia.

by ·Comments Off on Climax (2018, Gaspar Noé)

I keep thinking I haven’t watched a Gaspar Noé film since I Stand Alone, but that’s because I forget about Love, which if I’d remembered, I might not have gone out to let this movie mess up my mind on an especially heavy weekend. But Love is forgiven, because this totally worked for me, as horror and a filmmaking exercise and an ensemble dance piece and an extended collective freakout. Every player gets their own solos (in interview, dance and neurosis), and their interactions after the spread of the drug punch (and/or the collective paranoia) prove horrible, sometimes fatal. It’s all shot with a confident, formalist flair, unafraid to get ugly.

Blake Williams in Filmmaker:

The film ends up reaching, or at least approaching a state where it can’t even decide itself who is fucking and who is dying — the camera, now upside down, even loses its own bearings on gravity and horizons. It’s a monumentally liberating film, and so what if it offers us nothing other than the pleasure of being entirely there with it for the time it’s in front of us.

by ·Comments Off on Segunda Vez (2018, Dora Garcí­a)

This wasn’t supposed to be our closing night movie – it was gonna be an early night to make up for Treasure Island the night before, then our third Chinese movie One Child Nation in the morning, an undecided afternoon, and The Magic Life of V before the drive home, but a snowstorm changed our plans.

This was an endurance test along the lines of The Task, but far less easy to figure out what is happening and why. Supposedly they are recreating “happenings,” and there’s some mysterious tension but very little happening when a group is approached by a helicopter then asked about about the experience, or when we spend an eternity in a room with a handful of people waiting to be interviewed. These are separated by wandering academic discussions in a library with no tension at all. I focused hard on every detail at the time, hoping to unlock any meaning, even after Katy ditched the movie to go drinking at the Craft Beer Cellar, but no time for post-film note-taking then a stressful drive home has wiped out any useful thoughts. “Repetition is the main concept” says Felipe on letterboxd, and I’m starting to think you need to have studied the Oscar Masotta theories to grasp the film at all… in fact, I’ve belatedly discovered the accompanying 320-page book online.

by ·Comments Off on Chinese Portrait (2018, Wang Xiaoshuai)

I wrote that “Nicholas from Iowa” opened, “quiet and GOOD,” so I guess he was this year’s Lomelda. We managed to get a stout at Ragtag, but it’s madness there. Long single takes at first separated by black and/or film leader, but sometimes it’s multiple shots with sound continuity and straight cuts between. Scenes from around the country, sometimes natural scenes and some posed. My faves are when everyone acts natural except one person stands still, staring into the camera. Michael Sicinski has useful context and references in his letterboxd writeup.