While a young couple is having their trite relationship drama, flesh-eating fungal tentacles are literally hellraisering inside their mattress. This movie has stop-motion tendencies, and a lot of fabric-level textural views with insectoid rumbling audio. Death Bed meets She Dies Tomorrow: many other movies have aimed for this synthwave cronen-core vibe and missed.
I did not like the lab scene where they implanted an eXistenZ gamepod port into a dog’s underside. After that, I felt free to skip ahead during the other b/w lab horrors. Observational long takes of Moscow street dogs pays off when one is filmed catching and killing a housecat. Or maybe “pays off” isn’t the term, since Kedi played theaters across the country, and this one played nowhere. Narrator (the star of Leviathan) tells of Russia’s history of firing animals into space, intercut with observational doc scenes of Moscow street dogs. The directors followed up with another Moscow street dogs movie, and their first film about people debuts in a couple days at Locarno. The Tori Amos song > the movie… Katy’s least-favorite shorts director edited.
The directors didn’t have space in mind when they started filming [Seventh Row]:
Suddenly, when we found out that Laika had been living on the streets, the film became so rich. These street dogs we see in the film are real explorers. They have to be in order to survive. They have to understand every movement in the city. They have to know how the city is changing and how they can find a place to stay and survive. We found it interesting that there were similarities between these dogs and their ancestors, the heroic cosmonaut dogs.
Space explorers set out to find a home beyond the reach of monopolist capitalism – sounds serious, but the actors in the rebel mission’s crew are absolutely goofing around. Early on, their ship catches fire and they’re not sure whether to try to save it or to sell it for scrap.
Some good montage, and the lo-fi outer space effects are fun, but the actors reading from scripts with indifferent blocking is too much. I guess this is self-consciously bad, but it is bad. Raymond Gun-Virus speaks for us all: “Extra .5 star for the 100+ individually designed intertitles and a live-in-space performance by Amon Düül II.”
My first by film-philospher Kluge, falling somewhere in the middle of his features both chronologically and in popularity. I don’t know what his whole deal is yet, besides that his career spans from Lang’s latest works to our all-digital present, and Cornell calls him “the German Godard.” This movie’s janky space-travel aspect reminds me of Ga-Ga, which I loved – am I not supposed to be watching more of Szulkin’s weird sci-fi films instead of digging up new German nonsense?
Hark Bohm, Fassbinder regular and a doctor in Underground:
Returning from part one are determined detective Lau Ching-wan (suddenly listed as Sean Lau online) and incompetent commissioner Hui Siu-Hung. Not returning is criminal mastermind Andy Lau, who wasn’t faking his fatal illness. In his place we get impossibly suave and brilliant magician-thief Noodle Cheng (the 2001 Zu Warriors), who keeps assaulting the police and playing mind games (is this where the Now You See Me movies came from?). You don’t think of Johnnie To cops & robbers movies as having CG-crud animal companions, but Noodle’s got a bald eagle, and Lau’s men track him down with help from some eagle-tracking ornithologists. Kelly Lin (Sparrow) is a boring important businessperson whose company is being blackmailed by art thief Noodle, and Lam Suet a gambling-addict cop who the thief is personally tormenting. The point of the thief’s scheme was to robin-hood the money from the company to charity, or some such thing. It’s all beautifully shot by the usual crew, Stephen Chow’s regular composer working extra hard on the score. A collapsing-bicycle race joins To’s pantheon of perfect nighttime street scenes along with Throw Down‘s dollar-chase and tree-balloon, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart‘s headlight-silhouette, Sparrow‘s finale, and half of PTU.
1960s movie about the threat of artificial intelligence, shot in high style for a British spy drama, which is medium-low style for a Ken Russell picture.
Caine covering up Karl and Francoise:
Villain Ed Begley is a wacked out texas oilman whose computer tells him how to overthrow communism. Oskar Homolka is the KGB man trying to stop him from starting WWIII. Karl Malden and Francoise Dorleac are getting rich playing multiple sides, toting a carton of eggs injected with lethal viruses. Guy Doleman is the British spy boss trying to retrieve the eggs. And all of these groups befriend and/or kidnap special agent Michael Caine, who doesn’t exactly solve the case, but is at least present while it solves itself.
Nazi-coded Texan:
A True/False Poto and Cabengo: twins were raised without ever being let out of the house or taught anything useful (such as language), then are set free by a social worker, who locks the dad into his own house until he agrees to cut it out. Outside, the sisters meet other kids their age, including a boy who fishes for girls with an apple on a string. Rosenbaum liked it.
Bad-luck dummy Itsushi (guy with the writing on his face in the same year’s Kwaidan) loves his student Shoko (Pale Flower) but she marries someone else. Itsushi tries to protect her by pushing some guy off a train, but is spotted and blackmailed(??) by another dummy who stole a suitcase full of money and wants someone he doesn’t know to watch it while he’s in prison. Itsushi decides he’ll just spend it all on women and let the criminal kill him when his sentence is up. First he shacks up with Hitomi (Green Maya in Gate of Flesh), the ex of a gangster who catches up with her, at the cost of her pinky finger. Then he buys Shizuko (Eros + Massacre), sending the money to her shady husband, who eventually comes to take her back. Then he’s with Nurse Keiko, who feigns illness for a whole month to avoid having sex with him, then tries walking into the sea, then marries him but doesn’t stop hating him. Finally he buys sexy deaf-mute Mari from a thug, who tries to steal the rest of the money. And when his true love Shoko comes back to him in need, he’s just finished spending it all, so she turns him in to the cops.
Hitomi with knife, about to lose a finger:
The year before Violence at Noon, based on a story by the Samurai Reincarnation guy. I’m really enjoying all the pre-1971 Oshima movies, should maybe watch more of those.
Keiko:
Mari:
Glowing restoration of a classic western – you wouldn’t know it’s the mid-1960s except for some casting failures, and the occasional Pink Panther-ass music. John Wayne is a Yojimbo-type gunman, taking the side of the MacDonald family he’s supposed to have been hired to kill, Mitchum the hopelessly drunk sheriff who needs to sober up before the big showdown. Michele Carey is very good as the pissed-off McD girl who shoots Wayne in the spine early on – too bad her career never rose past couple-episode appearances on big TV shows. Pre-Godfather James Caan and Wayne’s girl Charlene Holt both suck, however. There’s gotta be a grizzled deputy – in this case Arthur Hunnicutt, returning from The Big Sky. Baddies include Ed “Up” Asner as Black Bart and Scarface McCloud (Chris George of City of the Living Dead and Pieces) as the hired gun who takes the assassination job offered to Wayne. And gunsmith “Swede” is a Swede (played by a Dane).
Wayne and his girl:
Our heroes:
Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)
I don’t know Sato’s work, but I know animation producer Masaaki Yuasa, and this has got the wavy woozy quality of Yuasa’s features. A cat hits the town with his catatonic sister, whose soul was half-ripped by an evil shaman, and they experience all the major elements (desert, sea, time-freeze, soup) before landing back home. Incredible. One scene is set at the “Big Whale Circus,” making this part of the Werckmeister Harmonies universe. Sato is known for a series called Martian Successor, also did animated sequel series to both Ninja Scroll and Tokyo Tribe. There’s a separate Cat Soup series from the director of a Battle Angel Alita series.
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Little Pancho Vanilla (1938, Frank Tashlin)
Kid claims he’s a bullfighter, gets catapulted into the arena, lands on the bull and is awarded first prize. Not top-tier Tash, it passed the time.
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King-Size Canary (1947, Tex Avery)
Oh yeah, what if the cartoon had actual gags in it, wouldn’t that be better?
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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)
After a major storm, books become birdies and Morris becomes a bookseller where reading turns the enchanted town residents from b/w to color. It’s all too precious for me, but wonderfully assembled – no surprise it won the oscar (over the Brave-era short La Luna). The directors are suspiciously named Brandon and William Joyce – also suspicious that each one co-directed a different 2014 11-minute Edgar Allen Poe short.
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Seventh Master of the House (1966, Ivo Caprino)
Traveler asks a guy for a bed for the night, and gets sent to the guy’s father, and so on… then he gets the bed. It’s not much of a story, but it’s always good when our refined puppet animation devolves into increasingly bizarre characters until the final guy is shrunken to a quarter the height of his beard and resting in a horn hung on the wall. Some festival must’ve had a 12-minute minimum length so they added a framing story of a whitebeard man sitting in the snow writing this story (women do not exist in Norway).
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Three Inventors (1980, Michel Ocelot)
2D doily-paper cutout stop-motion, oooh. Family of inventors keep creating wonderful things. The town “notables,” having no vision or creativity themselves, conclude that the inventors must be criminal philistines, and a mob burns their house down, destroying everything that is beautiful.
Mouseover to operate the magic lace pipe-organ sewing-machine:
Aftermath tells us it was only a movie:
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George and Rosemary (1987, Snowden & Fine)
Guy is obsessed with gal across the street, when he finally builds up the nerve to march over there he learns she’s been obsessed with him too. Oscar-nominated, but against two of the greats: Your Face and The Man Who Planted Trees.
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There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)
Guard dog is old and busted so he gets kicked out of the house, makes a deal with a wolf to get back into the family’s graces then repays the wolf with stolen food. Cute story and animation, and the would-be sentimental ending provided the biggest laugh of the night.
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Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)
The kind of paint-meets-clay blending that I love in The Wolf House. In standard-def I can’t even tell the difference between the 2D and 3D layers sometimes, or maybe it’s all 2D, but it’s wonderful. Feels freeform, making up new patterns according to whim, but returning to some (sexual/creature/religious) themes, like McLaren meets Bickford. I was gonna say the music is sometimes overwhelming, but I got caught up in the visuals and forgot that it’s a silent film and I’d hit play on Matmos A Chance to Cut.
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Simple Destiny Abstractions (1938, Douglass Crockwell)
A later film, but feels like the early demos that became Glens Falls. We’ll call it the bonus tracks. An advertisement painter, Doug made crazy motion experiments at his home in eastern New York state.
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Mind the Steps! (1989, Istvan Orosz)
B/W Escher-sketch of a perspective-defying apartment building, sometimes telling little stories of residents or political oppression and sometimes just transforming things into other things. Scraps of warped sound effects and harmonica made me forget I wasn’t still playing the Matmos.
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Syrinx (1966, Ryan Larkin)
Sexy forest gods keep materializing then dissolving into abstraction. Music video for a flutey Debussy piece.
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America is Waiting (1981, Bruce Conner)
Also a music video, for a good Byrne/Eno song. Not just a montage of fun stock footage, he warps the meaning of some shots by running them in forward and reverse. Lotta fun. I should’ve read that giant Conner book in the Ross library when I had the chance. At least there’s Screen Slate:
The success of [Mongoloid] led to an invitation from Brian Eno and David Byrne to make America is Waiting, a parody of paranoia that remains depressingly relevant. Using sourced material from the 1950s, he criticized reactionary politics, Western individualism, the Reagan administration, and military violence. When MTV rejected the video as part of their early programming that same year, it proved that corporate media always sanitizes rebellion.
