by ·Comments Off on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006, Mamoru Hosoda)

High school girl Makoto discovers she has the power to leap through time, uses it to relive each school day when she says or does anything wrong or lets a situation get embarrassing, which is almost all the time. She later discovers her number of time leaps is limited, and that she accidentally stole the power from a friend of hers who traveled from the future obsessed with a painting that’s being restored at the local museum. Makoto’s “Auntie Witch” works at the museum, claims to know about time leaping and says “many girls do it at your age,” so we suspected some deeper time mysteries, but replaying the scene I think she might have been kidding (or it’s a reference to the novel). The story has been adapted a bunch of times, including a film by the director of House. Katy thinks it captures the essence of being a girl, calls it Girl: The Movie.

Makoto and Auntie Witch:

by ·Comments Off on The Little Prince (2015, Mark Osborne)

Magical, delicate-looking stop-motion retelling of the Little Prince story, in which I guess he leaves his beloved rose, wanders some asteroids meeting strange adults, then crashes on Earth’s desert where he trades wisdom with a stranded aviator. Surrounding this, in a more Pixar-like CG animation style, is a sort of Little Prince Expanded Universe, in which eccentric Jeff Bridges tells the story to a neighbor kid who’s being meticulously groomed to be a serious-minded adult. When Bridges is sick, the girl flies into space to find the Little Prince, who has been corrupted by adulthood. You think of the Little Prince story as a fairy tale and the grey-cube grown-up CG world as reality, so it’s fun when they merge into one adventure at the end. Life Lessons seem pretty uncontroversial: protecting your inner child and holding onto important memories, but it’s all told in a pleasantly unusual way. This movie was dumped onto Netflix, but we drove an hour to see one of its rare theatrical screenings, and it was worth it for the gorgeous stop-motion scenes alone.

I recognized the director’s name from the great animated short More, which also features lead characters with colorful inner lives trying to break out of conformist grey-box worlds. All-star cast but the best voices were the non-actor kids, except for Bridges, and I’ll give credit to Ricky Gervais as “the conceited man”.

by ·Comments Off on The Tempest (2010, Julie Taymor)

Sometimes a movie feels less like a cohesive work to be taken on its own merit than something to be picked apart. As a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest it’s pretty okay, not as consistent or intelligible as the version we saw at the fountain in Piedmont Park, but more intelligible than Prospero’s Books was on VHS. Helen Mirren is wonderful as Prospera, the set design is marvelous and the rest is hit or miss. Too much flailing about before green screens, and I could’ve done without the song. Personnel in decreasing order of goodness:

– Tom Conti as the Richard Jenkins-looking companion of the king

– Alan Cumming and Chris Cooper (I kept thinking he was Sean Bean or some other lord of the rings) as the king’s men, incompetently plotting against him.

– Alfred Molina as the king’s drunken butler

– Ben Whishaw as the sprite Ariel

– Djimon “Digimon” Hounsou as the monster Caliban

– David Strathairn as Shipwrecked King Alonso

– Felicity Jones and Reeve Carney as the Young Lovers (the king’s son and Prospera’s daughter)

– the extras in the shipwreck scene

– Russell Brand as Molina’s companion – he was tolerable for a long time, longer than one would expect, but finally doesn’t belong in this movie or anywhere else.

by ·Comments Off on The Exquisite Corpus and animated shorts

The Exquisite Corpus (2015 Peter Tscherkassky)

More exquisite, sensorial film manipulations from the great Tscherkassky, this time with lots of nudity. And as always with his films, I had to watch it twice, and it’s completely incredible.

M. Sicinski:

The film’s odd mismatches of erotic styles and tendencies (70s Eurotrash, early stag loops, bucolic nudist films, hardcore porn, surprisingly genuine-looking lesbian expression) ultimately comprise some kind of whole. Tscherkassky never employs technique to put pornography at arm’s length. Indeed, in some ways his experimental treatment of the material actually heightens its capacity to titillate. Indeed, the sheer visual excess of bodies on film produces a highly singular new “film body,” a sort of structuralist orgy.

Tscherkassky in Cinema Scope: “My approach was to show the naked body of cinema. So it made sense to use films whose main goal was to show the human body.”

I never really have a fixed image of what the film is going to look like. It’s always about time. Time to study the footage and then learn it by heart, so it seeps into your memory and there it sits and waits for the ideas to come. The second aspect is the production time itself, when you sit in the darkroom, exposing your individual frames – frame by frame by frame – and that takes a lot of time, time during which the film grows. Time to memorize, to remember something completely differently than how you thought about it three years ago. That’s the beauty of my way, my style of filmmaking.

There’s a famous Roland Barthes quotation that the erotic takes place where the woven textile has ripped. You look inside of something that is not meant to be seen. I wanted to move from straight porn and transform it into something that might fit this Barthes quotation.

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Watched a few, scattered animated shorts over the last couple months – since I didn’t have anything to pair with The Exquisite Corpus, here’s a round-up of those.

Harvie Krumpet (2003, Adam Elliot)

One night nobody felt like watching a full-length movie so I weirded them out with this instead. Harvie is a unique stop-motion guy, not so bright but armed with rules and bits of wisdom, like your Forrest Gumps and your Chance The Gardeners. And like those movies, this one won an oscar (impressively beating both Boundin’ and Destino). The award is well-deserved – it’s a bittersweet narrative of a vividly drawn, damaged character who ends up happily nude at a bus stop. “He knew it would never come, but… he didn’t mind.” I still haven’t watched Elliot’s feature Mary and Max, but now I’m more likely to.

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The Danish Poet (2006, Torill Kove)

We liked Kove’s Me and My Moulton, so it was time to find her earlier oscar winner. And it’s just wonderful. Maybe not as visually stylized as the follow-up (can’t remember for sure), but a beautifully designed movie both in its visuals and story (a roundabout telling of how the narrator’s parents first met). Narrated by Liv Ullmann – another indie(?) short that beat both Pixar (Lifted) and Disney (The Little Match Girl) at the oscars.

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Black Soul (2000, Martine Chartrand)

Beautiful paint on glass technique shows a mother taking her son through stories of black history, which are mostly nightmarish. Chartrand studied in Russia with Alexander Petrov, won the top prize for shorts in Berlin with this film.

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Triangle (1994, Erica Russell)

Nude line-drawing dancers are interrupted by black-cloaked triangle person and a red ninja square. The dancers grow more and less abstract, combining and separating, the force of the triangle warping the very frame of the movie, until it settles as a happy, sexy threesome. Lovely work – every frame a painting, as they say. Oscar-nominated against The Monk and the Fish and Bob’s Birthday. Russell is from New Zealand and South Africa, and created a “dance trilogy” with this film in between Feet of Song (1988) and Soma (2001).

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Snop / Candy (1991, Jan Konings)

Meaningless reminiscing about the popularity of candy when the narrator was young, with below-average animation. From a blu-ray of Norwegian animation that I suppose I won’t be running out to buy.

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Protege (2000, Levni Yilmaz)

Drawing paper shot from the other side as the pencil finishes drawing each panel, just like The Mystery of Picasso, but with a monotone voiceover guy explaining his history of imitating people he thought cooler than himself. Cute, and I suppose it technically counts as animation. Since I don’t have the book this disc came with, I’m not sure if this short predates Lev’s long-running Tales of Mere Existence youtube series, or if it’s part of it.

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Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014, Steve Purcell)

Another toy story is always nice but this is more of the same ol’ thing. Bonnie from part three is on a post-Christmas playdate at a spoiled boy’s house, neglecting his complete set of some fantasy war toy collection to play a VR videogame, and our gang discovers that the war creatures haven’t yet figured out that they’re toys. Reptilius Maximus (Kevin McKidd) and tree ornament Angel Kitty probably won’t make it to the next theatrical sequel. Purcell is credited as a writer/director of Brave, and with animation on some 1990 video games (Loom and Monkey Island, wow).

by ·Comments Off on When Marnie Was There (2014, Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

Young Anna is sent to live with relatives in the country for a summer (as are the protagonists of all Japanese movies), where she solves family mysteries by befriending the ghost of her grandmother.

Sometimes the mystery aspects seem slow-moving since Anna is oblivious to details we pick up right away, but the movie is pure pleasure, beautifully animated, with lovely details. Her dreams and fantasies mix with reality, she forgets things within and without them, seems to sleepwalk and lose track of time, and it all makes for a more emotionally complex experience than a plot summary would imply.

T. Robinson for The Dissolve last year:

It’s still possible there will eventually be more Ghibli features. It’s just hard to imagine that a reduced studio staff could keep up the lavish, loving quality of When Marnie Was There, the last movie on Ghibli’s animation docket. Like so many Ghibli features, Marnie is an accomplished animated showcase. But this time, the images seem particularly lustrous, the colors especially rich. If the studio has to cut back from here, at least it’s set yet another high-water mark before the tides recede.
…
in spite of the third-act reveal, Marnie isn’t really a movie about surprises. Like so many Ghibli films, it’s about the power of emotion. Anna’s transformation from faint-hearted and miserable to enthusiastic and engaged with the world closely mirrors the transformations other Ghibli heroines have gone through, from Chihiro in Spirited Away to Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service to Sofî in Howl’s Moving Castle. Her change in attitude changes her ability to perceive truths about the world she’s been unable to accept.

by ·Comments Off on Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016, Taika Waititi)

Fun comedy with spot-on performances, a step up from What We Do In The Shadows. Family crowd-pleaser with some harsher realities than most (Ricky Baker’s foster mother / Sam Neill’s wife’s death was horrifying, as was Sam having to shoot his beloved dog after a boar attack). Misfit orphan Ricky is homed with Bella, who dies soon afterward, so he tries to run off into the woods and grumpy old Neill ends up joining him, both of them on the run. Not enough of the director himself (he plays a priest) but we get a good dose of Rhys Darby as a foil-hatted master of disguise who helps our guys nearly escape at the end. In the coda, Ricky and his new family adopt Neill, kind of an obvious wrapping-up but it works.

Ricky previously appeared in a Sam Worthington movie about an international paper plane competition. I haven’t seen Neill since Sally Potter’s Yes. Bella was Rima Te Wiata, of recent comedy/horror Housebound. Rachel House, dedicated child-services Ricky-pursuer (who helps draw connections to Moonrise Kingdom) was in Waititi’s Eagle vs. Shark.

by ·Comments Off on BBC’s list of The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films

I’ve done this before many times, and there’s no point, but I can’t help myself. The only thing I like more than movie lists are lists of movie lists, and the BBC’s got a new one. I must turn it into a viewing list for myself, even though it’s Criterion Month now, and SHOCKtober is coming up, and when that’s over I will have forgotten all about this until I stumble upon it two years from now and get annoyed that I still haven’t watched any of these. Movies like Innocence keep showing on these lists – it’s also here and here – but if I ever make a list comparing the frequency of titles on my various lists, someone will need to take this blog away from me. Anyway.

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Movies from the Top 100 that I’ve never seen, or never written about so should probably watch again, in increasing order of greatness
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Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)
The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)
Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)
Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

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Must-see titles from the individual lists
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Sam Adams in Slate:

As always, the real action is in the individual ballots, all 177 of them. That’s where you’ll find the outliers, the beloved orphans and oddball singularities … Polls tell us what everyone likes, but sometimes it’s more interesting to focus on the movies that just one person truly loves.

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Simon Abrams
The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2009)
Night Across the Street (Raoul Ruiz, 2012)
Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)
Fados (Carlos Saura, 2007)

Thelma Adams
Snow White (Pablo Berger, 2012)
Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2008)
Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)

Matthew Anderson
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009)
Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín, 2008)

Adriano Aprà
These Encounters of Theirs (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 2006)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009)
The Profession of Arms (Ermanno Olmi, 2001)
Gostanza da Libbiano (Paolo Benvenuti, 2000)

Michael Arbeiter
The Comedy (Rick Alverson, 2012)
The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013)

Cameron Bailey
Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)
Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)

Lindsay Baker
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)

Diego Batlle
The Son’s Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
Extraordinary Stories (Mariano Llinás, 2008)

Mahen Bonetti
Cuba: An African Odyssey (Jihan El-Tahri, 2007)
Sexe, gombo et beurre salé (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2008)
Shoot the Messenger (Ngozi Onwurah, 2006)
The Colonial Misunderstanding (Jean-Marie Téno, 2004)

Richard Brody
Butter on the Latch (Josephine Decker, 2013)
Heaven Knows What (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2014)
The Future (Miranda July, 2011)

Enrico Chiesa
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)

Robbie Collin
You, The Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

Colin Covert
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

Mike D’Angelo (via letterboxd)
Afterschool (Antonio Campos, 2008)

Ken Dancyger
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Fernand Denis
Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008)

Lindiwe Dovey
Hooligan Sparrow (Nanfu Wang, 2016)

Alonso Duralde
Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Bilge Ebiri
An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson, 2002)
Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2000)

David Ehrlich
Girl Walk: All Day (Jacob Krupnick, 2011)

Kate Erbland
Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)

Joseph Fahim
Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, 2002)

David Fear
Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004)

Kenji Fujishima
In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman, 2015)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

Owen Gleiberman
Chuck & Buck (Miguel Arteta, 2000)
Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
Lilya 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002)

Ed Gonzalez
Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

Jean-Philippe Guerand
Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)

Tom Gunning
Daylight Moon (Lewis Klahr, 2002)
The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser, 2000)
Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)

Angie Han
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)

Aisha Harris
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, 2006)
Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Brick (Rian Johnson, 2005)

Tina Hassannia
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, 2013)
Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)

Shiguehiko Hasumi
Triple Agent (Éric Rohmer, 2004)
Seventh Code (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2013)

Katarina Hedrén
Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley, 2011)
Tey (Alain Gomis, 2012)
Eat, Sleep, Die (Gabriela Pichler, 2012)
Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay, 2012)

Alexander Horwath
Wolff Von Amerongen: Did He Commit Bankruptcy Offences? (Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, 2004)
Longing (Valeska Grisebach, 2006)
The External World (David O’Reilly, 2010)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, 2004)

David Jenkins
Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)
Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

Kent Jones
My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)
The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)

Butheina Kazim
Theeb (Naji Abou Nowar, 2014)
A Time for Drunken Horses (Bahman Ghobadi, 2000)

Andreas Kilb
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)
5×2 (François Ozon, 2004)

Uri Klein
The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)

Eric Kohn
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009)

Dan Kois
You Can Count On Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2012)
Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2010)

Tomris Laffly
Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009)

Rebecca Laurence
The Consequences of Love (Paolo Sorrentino, 2004)

Maggie Lee
Café Lumière (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003)
Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)

Fiona Macdonald
The Taste of Others (Agnès Jaoui, 2000)

Hans-Christian Mahnke
Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006)
Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

Calum Marsh
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)

Lee Marshall
Silent Souls (Aleksey Fedorchenko, 2010)

Adrian Martin
Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2011)
Mia Madre (Nanni Moretti, 2015)

Joe McElhaney
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
The Blues: Warming by the Devil’s Fire (Charles Burnett, 2003)

Farran Smith Nehme
About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)

Michael Phillips
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)

Hannah Pilarczyk
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012)

Agnès C Poirier
Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002)
The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)

Claudia Puig
Sin Nombre (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009)
Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alberto Ramos Ruiz
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers, 2015)
From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014)
Lost and Beautiful (Pietro Marcello, 2015)

Isabelle Regnier
The Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000)
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002)
Shara (Naomi Kawase, 2003)
Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola, 2011)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)

Scott Renshaw
Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008)

Vadim Rizov (via twitter)
In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)
Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2015)
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)
Could See a Puma (Eduardo Williams, 2011)

Antonio Mazón Robau
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

Tim Robey
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Jonathan Romney
The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010)

Rasha Salti
The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009)

Matt Zoller Seitz
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amselem (Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz, 2014)
The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014)
Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014)

Avner Shavit
No (Pablo Larraín, 2012)

Matt Singer
Step Brothers (Adam McKay, 2008)

Justine A Smith
Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

Fernanda Solórzano
Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

David Stratton
Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)
The Man Without A Past (Aki Kaurismäki, 2002)

Cédric Succivalli
Secret Things (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2002)
La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

Ella Taylor
Burning Bush (Agnieszka Holland, 2013)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

Jake Wilson
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006)

Raymond Zhou
The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen, 2007)
Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)

–

My own top fifteen, at the moment, unranked:

2046
25th Hour
Boyhood
The Forbidden Room
Holy Motors
Hot Fuzz
Inglorious Basterds
Le Havre
Mulholland Dr.
The New World
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Trap
The Turin Horse
Up
World of Tomorrow

by ·Comments Off on Masterworks of Avant-Garde Film: 1968-2002

Watching shorts from the Flicker Alley blu-ray, part four.

Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968 Owen Land)

Repetitive little piece in which people draw a character, then it comes to brief stop-motion life, then they ponder this, then it happens again with a constant, quiet burbling horror of a soundtrack. Not as much fun as I’m making it sound.

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Our Lady of the Sphere (1969 Lawrence Jordan)

I was rather dismissive of this last time but I’m starting to find its variety of techniques and combinations of images and cutouts from old-time illustrations pretty charming. It’s certainly a funnier and more imaginative way to spend nine minutes than the last movie was. “Jordan orchestrates the film in terms of a rake’s progress” say the liners, but I couldn’t make out much of a story (though I could identify recurring characters, at least).

Mouseover to hit the bear:
image

Mouseover to BZZZZZZT the donkey:
image

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DL2 (1970 Lawrence Janiak)

Differently colored patterns fill the screen to varying degrees, from starfields to spaghetti-o’s to shower-curtain dots to bright silly-string and confetti parties, all created by organically Begotten-ing strips of film. Chiming, percussive soundtrack. Hypnotic and strangely relaxing to watch, though next time maybe play my own music.

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Love It, Leave It (1970 Tom Palazzolo)

Speech from a car show plays over a nudist festival. Speech honoring the military plays over clowns. Then the soundtrack goes into a hypno-loop of “love it, love it, love it, leave it” under images of contemporary America (sports and recreation, demonstrations and celebrations, people and get-togethers and riot police), the sound finally mutating into a patriotic song layered over itself like that remix I made of the Brave trailer. The liners say he had a “sharp eye for Americana,” true. And the last page of Cinema Scope #66 points out where more Palazzolo films can be found, if I get into an Americana mood later.

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Transport (1970 Amy Greenfield)

One of those dance shorts where the camera moves with the dancers, only the movements here are not too exciting – small group of people lifting each other across a dirty field. And the sound is completely unbearable, a series of horrible tones like the ones they play in movies after a bomb goes off to indicate tinnitus in the lead character. Also, two minutes of opening credits in a six minute movie?

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Sappho & Jerry, Parts 1-3 (1977 Bruce Posner)

Early film by one of the anthology project’s many film restorationists. Three two-minute pieces where Bruce takes existing film elements, combines, mutates and split-screens the living hell out of them, adding more simultaneous frames in each ensuing chapter. Great fun.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

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Ch’an (1983 Francis Lee)

Pans, zooms and crossfades of black and white watercolors, with some short bursts of animation. Nice texture closeups of the watercolor work. I preferred Lee’s 1941 from earlier on the disc (these are his first and last films).

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Seasons… (2002 Solomon & Brakhage)

Gorgeous variety of textures and patterns, colors and rhythms. “Intentionally silent” doesn’t fly with me, so I played the second half of the new David Grubbs album, which I would highly recommend. If I understand correctly, Brakhage did the textures and patterns, and Solomon did the lighting and coloring? Bravo to both.

I dig this frame because it looks like a dragon crashing into an aerial antenna:

by ·Comments Off on Sunset Song (2015, Terence Davies)

Starring the lovely, ever-suffering Agyness Deyn, who recently played Aphrodite, as Chris. It’s more recognizably a Davies movie than The Deep Blue Sea was, because it centers around a piece of shit domineering father (Peter Mullan of War Horse, Children of Men) for the first half, then he’s dead (a la Distant Voices, Still Lives) so we focus on a husband Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) who might become a piece of shit domineering father – but doesn’t, because he’s shot for cowardice while at war. Opens with Chris’s mom poisoning herself and her young twins because she’s become pregnant again. So it’s basically a domestic horror movie.

Beautiful lighting, and per Davies tradition, some terrific crossfades. I turned on the subtitles half the time to make out the accents… and even then I sometimes have trouble. “I’m going to live on at Blawearie a while and not roup the gear at once. Could you see to that with the factor?”

I’m on M. D’Angelo’s side here, and I’ll add that the juxtaposition mentioned below was already done very well in Distant Voices, Still Lives:

Whatever Gibbons’ novel means to Davies — and it must mean a lot, as he reportedly spent many years struggling to get this film made — it doesn’t come across, except perhaps in the occasional juxtaposition of brutality and joyous group song. A few stray moments of piercing beauty toward the end (which also complicate what had previously seemed like the tediously downbeat trajectory of Chris’ marriage) can’t redeem the unrewarding slog that precedes them.

As far as beautifully shot but disappointing Davies films I watched this year go, I preferred The Deep Blue Sea, and as far as films I watched this month where soldiers get shot for cowardice in World War One, I’ll take Paths of Glory.

Always difficult to adapt poetry to the screen, so including words from the book as narration is nice. “So that was her marriage – not like waking from a dream, but like going into one. And she wasn’t sure, not for days, what things she had dreamt and what actually done.” Previously filmed as a 1971 miniseries, by the same director who shot Testament of Youth, which was also remade last year.