by ·Comments Off on Apollo 11 (2019, Todd Douglas Miller)

This was in theaters the week we got back and, as I write this, is still at the Fernbank Imax. Not knowing it’d stick around in theaters for most of the year, it was a hot ticket at T/F and we sat up front crammed into a corner. The picture worked out, but I think the sound was muffled up there. You can easily tell which is the newly-restored 70mm footage, and it’s mostly front-loaded. I’m no fan of the bass-drone dum-dum-dum-dum score, but overall a real good space movie.

A.A. Dowd in AV Club:

Including hindsight recollections would have spoiled the manufactured present tense – the way director Todd Douglas Miller, working with a trove of stunningly preserved archival footage, creates the sensation of experiencing these historic events as though they were happening right before you, not half a century ago.

by ·Comments Off on Cold Case Hammarskjöld (2019, Mads Brügger)

Really there were only a few crowd-pleasing hits at this year’s T/F, which was interrupted (for us) by a snowstorm and fouled by some too-late nights and difficult film picks. This was one of them, despite being a two-plus-hour crackpot investigation into unprovable murder cases. I caught up with Brügger’s The Red Chapel shortly before this year’s festival slate was announced, and this was the #1 Sundance movie I was pulling for.

Some good uncomfortable laughter, some twisty investigation and humor in construction/presentation offset the ultimate topic: power grabs, espionage, mercenaries, murders, white supremacy, attempted genocide – US and UK governments blatantly destroying Africa’s hopes of self-sufficiency. Göran sparks off the investigation and does all the background research, and Mads provides context, theatrical antics and the overall sense that we can’t tell how much of this is true.

Opener was River Arkansas again, but with new songs, and we grabbed a juice at Main Squeeze beforehand.

by ·Comments Off on Up The Mountain (2019, Zhang Yang)

This year’s True/False was pried in between two moves and the China trip, so I made a point to schedule two of the Chinese movies playing. This one’s about painting and a scenic retreat, figured it’d at least be some nice scenery a la last year’s Next Guardian. Turned out to be an excellent movie by an unknown master of the “sixth generation” who often casts people as themselves.

A squarish aspect ratio helps him create compositions that look like the paintings which he explicitly mirrors. The movie plays like a slice-of-life village portrait that happens to mostly be set at a painters retreat, with a birth, a death, a wedding. You wouldn’t necessarily know about the documentary aspects – and I still don’t, since we skipped the Q&A to get snacks – except that we see the women sketching and painting, and most of the character names match the actor names in the credits.

River Arkansas opened with a pleasant sort of country thing, and I noted not to get the french toast next time we’re at Cafe Berlin.

by ·Comments Off on The Grand Bizarre (2018, Jodie Mack)

True/False 2019! I’m writing it up almost five months late, but at least I took notes at the time.

This feature was not as frenetic as I expected from the few shorts I’ve seen – certainly frenetic in segments but not for the entire hour. Sunlit stop-motion, shadows moving across the frame, sometimes obscuring the textiles. Flashes of notes, sheet music, paper planes, representing work, grids, global commerce. I was on the “less drowsy” motion pills after a very heavy week and six hours of travel, so instead of my zoned-in attentive mode, I had to tired-watch and space out to the images and music. Maybe a third was set to upbeat electro music, featuring the cinephile-notorious skype-tone remix, the rest calmer and less dense sound, including the noises made while shooting a scene. She started taking materials with her on trips instead of sourcing locally, since the fabrics she found weren’t locally produced anyway. Mack seems smart and energetic, ends every Q&A answer with “was that an answer?,” K says she’d be a great professor. Opening act Gibbz was poppy and lo-fi/distant-sounding – that might’ve been a quirk of the sound system, but I really dug it.

Nov 7, 2020: Watched again, non-drowsy, on a momentous night. I’d intended to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but felt like some positivity was in order.

by ·Comments Off on Jeannette (2017, Bruno Dumont)

A musical Joan of Arc story soundtracked by a metal band! It’s a bit of wacky fun – except it’s not, really… you can still detect the serious Dumont of Hors Satan in the dramatic scenes (which stop the movie dead between musical numbers) and the comic Dumont of Quinquin in the playfulness and the casting, and this movie hangs weirdly in between. The two girls playing the lead seem very much like girls, without the fervor and obsession of other cinematic Joans. These Jeannettes are still figuring out what God wants from them, and their own headbanging and awkward dances (to metal songs interrupted by sheep) is filmed at about the same level as the religious figures and miraculous apparitions. It’s a materialist movie, if that’s the right word OR the right understanding of what he’s doing here, focusing mostly on Jeannette (with great help from her uncle D’nis) being unsure and hesitant about the journey she finally undertakes at the end.

Mouseover for headbanging:
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by ·Comments Off on The Alchemist Cookbook (2016, Joel Potrykus)

I still want to catch up with Coyote and Buzzard, but had the chance to see this first, and like Ape, it’s about a delusional loner – and now that Relaxer is out, it looks like Potrykus is gonna make a career of cult indie films about delusional loners, not the worst idea. Or maybe the overall theme is “in Canada, you gotta make your own entertainment.”

Ty Hickson (Gimme the Loot) lives alone in the woods, is paranoid and undernourished and working through a series of occult rituals towards certain wealth. At the end it seems he’s just self-destructively off his meds.

Amari Cheatom returns as Cortez in Relaxer, hinting at a Potrykus Connected Multiverse, even though he is a zombie by the end of this movie.

by ·Comments Off on Claire’s Camera (2017, Hong Sang-soo)

This movie also contains a possible thesis statement on Hong’s cinema:
“Why do you take pictures?”
“Because the only way to change things is to look at everything again very slowly.”

Unfortunately, it’s also the worst movie of his I’ve seen. Everything’s going fine until Kim Min-hee meets Isabelle Huppert for the first time, they converse in English, and the movie stops flowing and I start feeling embarrassed for everybody. Set in Cannes, Kim is fired from her film sales company in the middle of the festival for sleeping with Film Director So (Jung Jin-young of Ring Virus), who is in a relationship with Kim’s boss (Chang Mi-hee of 36th Chamber: The Final Encounter). That situation’s not gonna resolve itself in 70 short minutes, and Huppert as a naive tourist blundering into meals and hangouts with the other three characters doesn’t add anything but international star power.

Of course, Sicinski and Bahadur on letterboxd put in more thought than this, figured out the point of Huppert’s connections, and appreciated the movie more than I did, so if letterboxd is still in business when I finally decide to go through all of Hong’s movies in a chronological marathon, remind me to re-read their reviews before rewatching this film.

by ·Comments Off on Search Party season 2 (2017)

“Everything is gonna be okay. You know why? Because we’re good people.”

Our four sleuths head home from Canada victorious, with the rescued Chantal (Clare McNulty of Fort Tilden), but having left Keith behind in a shallow grave. They completely fail to act naturally or cover their tracks, evidence mounts against them over the course of the season and two more people end up dead, but they pull it off in the end? No they do not.

Dory’s ex Julian publishes an article about Chantal being a huge fake. Drew briefly dates Chantal and schemes against a coworker, Elliott loses all control and does not write his book, and Portia breaks up with her mom because her theater director Jay Duplass tells her to. Dory blackmails a politician (J. Smith-Cameron, Anna Paquin’s mom in Margaret) to get the money for her own blackmailer, crazy neighbor April (Phoebe Tyers, also of Fort Tilden, which I should obviously watch). Also, Judy Reyes (Scrubs) is Keith’s ex-wife who knows about Dory, Tymberlee Hill (The Hotwives of Orlando) is a cop investigating Keith’s murder, Dory sends an email from a dead man, and a Canadian fucks a tree. Season three coming soon!

by ·Comments Off on High Flying Bird (2019, Steven Soderbergh)

I loved watching this, paid attention to the access afforded by the phone-cam cinematography and the always-good Soderbergh editing. But is it just me, or does nothing major actually happen? There’s an NBA lockout, agent Andre Holland threatens status quo by proving that the players can play for big money without the league, and the owners and players suddenly come to an agreement. It’s a strong move within the system, earning the players a small percent higher pay in negotiations, but doesn’t upend the power structure as promised.

The cowriter and costar of Moonlight, along with that Netflix money, apparently gave Soderbergh a chance to revisit his abandoned Moneyball project, dramatizing “the game on top of the game” and cutting away to interviews with sports stars. The movie is all dialogue, but either it’s omitting some conversations or I didn’t pick up on some of the sly maneuvering, since I still don’t know how the climactic one-on-one between rookie Melvin Gregg (excellent as the dupe pawn who never realizes he’s being played) and established star Justin Hurtt-Dunkley is arranged. The excitement around this game, staged only for a community gym run by Bill Duke (Commando, director of Hoodlum) forces a quick settlement between owners-rep Kyle McLachlan and players-rep Sonja Sohn (Kima!). I guess Andre gets fired as Melvin’s agent but keeps his agency, his former assistant Zazie Beetz (Atlanta) who helped pull the strings is moving up, maybe Andre is getting his boss Zachary Quinto’s job, and again I’m missing some details, but it’s pulled off so convincingly.