by ·Comments Off on Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)

Really good rock doc, because the talking heads feel like punctuations to the flow of music instead of vice-versa. Like most movies, it is 90 minutes long when it could be LP-length, but say la vee. A musician’s musician, impenetrable as a person, at least in the movies I’ve seen. I first heard him in another doc, his mouth wide open, playing technically-imperfect tunes, immediately striking, a true jazz weirdo. That movie’s archive footage was shot in 1969, this one’s in 1967, both released decades later.

Paul Grimstad for Criterion:

From the [1967] Blackwood footage, interspersed with other archival film, photographs, new interviews, and narration, Zwerin distilled an hour-and-a-half-long structure not all that different from a Monk composition: jumpy, elliptical, catchy, moving … As a counterpoint to the archival material, Zwerin shot new footage of pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris (both Detroit natives, like Zwerin) playing through Monk tunes as four-hand duets. We see how much fun they’re having, how generous and congenial their sharing of the music is, and how a Monk song like “Well, You Needn’t” allows for endless elaboration without its melodic outline ever becoming blurred.

by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Nothing But a Man (1964, Michael Roemer)

Low-budget realistic dramas with lyrical photography weren’t a whole genre back then, so this must’ve stood out when it premiered, winning three prizes at Venice the year of Red Desert. For me that lyrical photography had to pull a lot of weight to carry the story of an idealistic hard-working union-loving Black man in a racist town/country/world, his hopes getting increasingly crushed. He wanders off from his train work to marry a preacher’s daughter and settle into a factory job, but gets called “boy” by everyone and is fired for trying to start a union. Blacklisted, tormented by whites all day, he finally throws his wife across a room then walks out to visit his deadbeat father just in time to see dad drop dead from alcoholism. Good soundtrack!

Singing star Abbey Lincoln only acted in a few films: this, a 1968 Sidney Poitier joint, and as Denzel’s mom in Mo’ Better Blues. Our Boy Ivan also starred in Car Wash a decade later. His dad was in Hell Up in Harlem, and dad’s girl was the damn Oracle in The Matrix.

by ·Comments Off on Final Destination 6: Bloodlines (2025, Lipovsky & Stein)

Good twists on the formula, becoming both prequel and sequel while still leaving the series open to infinite new premonitions. Kaitlyn has been having someone else’s deathdream, that of her hot young gramma Brec “Iris” Stargirl. She tracks down Iris, who saved so many people that death took forty years to rube-goldberg each of the restaurant survivors and is now coming for their families who never should’ve been born, Back to the Future style.

But Death is catching up fast: Uncle Howie gets lawnmowered at the picnic, which is as full of death-bait as a gymnast’s balance beam. Tattoo Parlor Erik survives a fan-chain attack and shop fire, then a garbage truck compacts his sister, then he’s killed by an MRI machine while absurdly trying to flatline Peanut Allergy Bobby in order to escape Death. That’s right, they’ve learned the Death Rules from Tony Todd (who finally gets his own lore besides just being the Harbinger Coroner), though it never seems to help. The three survivors retreat to grandma’s fortress, but it explodes and everyone dies. The most suspenseful bit was when someone almost says the words “clear river.”

The directors are following-up their live-action Kim Possible movie, and one of them made a 2010s Leprechaun sequel, jeez. Sequels that are named Bloodline(s): Final Destination 6, Hellraiser 4, Wrong Turn 5, Tremors 5, a Rosario Dawson Wonder Woman, and Pet Sematary 4 (which features “Bad Moon Rising” just like this movie does).

by ·Comments Off on The Woman in the Yard (2025, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Something is up with mirrors, and mom realizes the woman in the yard is her own confused, chicken-murdering self, or rather her suicidal ideation incarnate, and that she’s trapped in the mirror world, like if Us was 100x less interesting and featured Nosferatuan shadow-snatching. Yard Woman never seems to do anything, but all the pets are dead and everyone’s hurt and she’s spreading family discord, letting the days go by. Her first words are “how did I get here?” Mom saves the day by time-tunnelling into the gun locker(?). Cameo appearances: before dad’s fatal car crash they park outside a movie theater showing The Mirror Has Two Faces… and was that a Uneeda Biscuit canister in their shed?

by ·Comments Off on The Monkey (2025, Oz Perkins)

“A bit annoying and overwritten,” was my first thought, before landing on “uniquely idiotic.” But the opening sequence features Adam Scott with a flamethrower, so among all the sorry humor and sub-Final-Destination Rubegoldbergian kills, we get a few undeniable pleasures. Also some nice long cross-fades, and a couple of possible Bruce Campbell references. Skeleton Crew has now birthed two and a third theatrical films (The Mist, The Raft) plus some anthology horror episodes and apparently a Guy Maddin version of Here There Be Tygers?? That’s what the wiki says, though the lboxd description of Maddin’s Tygers sounds as faithful to the King story as The Lawnmower Man.

The Streaming:

Anyway, the monkey… twin boys (nu-Fregley in an animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid) inherit the thing, it kills their babysitter (not that they’re even aware) and their mom and uncle, then 25 years later their aunt, as they grow into twin Divergent Theos who are trying to find the monkey in order to kill each other. This latter part is supposed to be in the present-day, but all the phones still have cords. Also starring Orphan Black as their mom… Young Timothee Wonka as one twin’s kid… Elijah “Wirt” Wood as a guru stepdad… Sarah “daughter of Eugene” Levy as the aunt… and Rohan “no relation to Bruce” Campbell.

Horses:

by ·Comments Off on Caught by the Tides (2024, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Mark Asch:

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

Vadim Rizov:

Li has aged much more dramatically than Zhao but both their transformations over nearly a quarter-century are inevitably poignant. Does that generate anything beyond a reflexive effect? I think so; Caught by the Tides is a multiverse manifestation rather than nostalgia trigger — or, at least, this is a lot of neat footage, and it’s fun to see it find a home. Above all else, Zhao is a seemingly infinite performer whose affect hasn’t really been unpacked yet. Her stony unreadability is broken by unpredictable responses to others, manifestations of interest punctuating the deadpan surface of inscrutable women who, over the long haul, are reconfigured as martyrs or stoic survivors. Caught by the Tides reminds us that we’re all lucky as viewers that she and Jia found each other; it’s maybe the actress-director partnership of the ages.

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year 90 Nine Zero / Phony Wars (Godard)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)

Bursts and scraps, especially impressive in headphones.
“Now that the cold war is over, being American is pointless.”

Lemmy Constantine travels through Germany, speaks three languages. Good stuff.

–
Phony Wars (2023)

More scrapbooky than ever, and made of smaller scraps – his scrappiest one yet, but charmingly homemade in its montages and handwriting, without the typed titles.

Still, even when directors seem to have fully ignored or subverted the assignment, I continue not to like shorts commissioned by fashion companies. May ’68, tho. :raised-fist:

by ·Comments Off on Litoral (2008, Raoul Ruiz)

Lost Ruiz miniseries, made between Klimt and Mysteries of Lisbon. Cortinez has been onboard the ship Lucerna all week without seeing any other crew members, they assemble and tell him their own (or each others’) ghost stories. “We’re here either to tell stories or to jump into the water.”

The captain grows horns whenever his wife has affairs, a sailor is set up with a woman who lives 70 years in his past. A demon sets a guy up in the business of selling dead men’s clothes. They might all be dead, or imaginary, or miniaturized on the toy boat of a rich man. “What you see in here, don’t remember it even in dreams.”