by ·Comments Off on Dogs & Cows (Bill Plympton)

The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger (2010)

Because the advertising billboard looks cool. Then he finds out the horrible truth and with his mom’s help, rebels against the burger factory. Has a different look, Bill says he drew with sharpie on small sheets of paper, and I believe he said painter Kandisky was his coloring inspiration.

Gary Guitar (2007)

Gary invites Vera Violin out. Obstacles threaten to derail their picnic, but Gary is prepared for almost anything, and friend/annoyance Danny Drum helps out with the rest. Was meant to be a pilot.

Gary makes the mother of all sandwiches, which will later be used as a weapon against a fire-breathing robot:

Waiting For Her Sailor (2012)

One minute, one gag, but a good one.

Summer Bummer (2012)

Colored-pencil illistration of unrealistic fears of sharks in swimming pools.

The Flying House (1921, Winsor McCay)

Kickstarter-fueled restoration of McCay’s final film (a predecessor to Up), using McCay’s newspaper cartoons for color reference. I had Mr. Show flashbacks when they blew up the moon.

Tiffany The Whale (2012)

Rivalry between two top runway models, a woman with huge blonde hair, and a whale. Long and talky – I’m surprised Bill meant this to be a pilot as well, since I’m not sure where else you can take a whale-as-model story.

Drunker than a Skunk (2013)

Cool poem by Walt Curtis (subject of Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche and of an hour-long doc by Plympton). The poem’s partly lost under music and effects so I watched this twice, but the animation is wonderful – my favorite on the disc.

Horn Dog (2009)

Finally I get to see the fourth dog film. The dog finds love in the park. Tries to give her gifts, but imagines terrible repercussions a la Guard Dog. Finally settles on a violin serenade but accidentally kills her owner.

Guard Dog Global Jam (2011)

Based on a Marv Newland concept called Anijam, Plympton coordinated online to get animators to recreate Guard Dog, one shot each. The best bit: the guy with the laughing-girl shot subcontracted each frame to different illustrators. Good story on the commentary about this film’s near-failure – submissions were open and they thought nobody was signing up, but really it was so many people the server crashed.

and from the Cheatin’ blu-ray:

The Gastronomic Shark (Bill Plympton)

A very silly, very short, bad-taste piece on human meal options for sharks.

There’s more on the Dogs & Cows disc, commissioned shorts and extras, which I haven’t explored yet.

by ·Comments Off on American Ultra (2015, Nima Nourizadeh)

Not the masterpiece I was hoping for based on those great posters, but pretty fun. Action-comedy with good dialogue, likeable actors and timeline-shuffling storytelling that actually works. The action scenes could’ve been shot better, but the music is great. Of course, second half kinda falls apart as the standard series of plot-reveals and final-showdowns all come together.

Tony Hale:

Adventures of Apollo Ape:

Coincidentally I watched this the night Jesse Eisenberg made film-critic-site headlines for saying something mean about film critics. He and Kristen Stewart are local losers in love, but he’s actually a CIA experiment, a super-soldier with erased memory, and she’s his CIA handler who chose to stay by his side. They both seem about 10-15 years too young to be retired CIA super-agents, but I guess Spy Kids exists, so nevermind.

Romance:

Secrets:

CIA dickweed Topher Grace sends killers led by “Laugher” Walt Goggins to exterminate all the ex-super-soldiers, so project head Connie Britton (star of two of Katy’s favorite shows) sneaks over and activates Jesse to defend himself. End result is a lotta people get killed, CIA bigwig Bill Pullman gets called in, and Jesse and Kristen are finally left alone. Also featuring John Leguizamo as Jesse’s weed and fireworks connection and Tony Hale as Connie’s flustered assistant. Written by Max Landis (Deer Woman), who seems to have a good knack for combining the awful with the hilarious. Director Nourizadeh made party-out-of-control movie Project X.

by ·Comments Off on November 2015 Shorts

The Benaki Museum (2013, Athina Tsangari)

Lovely seven-minute advertisement for a Greek museum narrated by Willem Dafoe, children acting as curators, interacting with ancient artworks.

The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg (2000, Paul Driessen)

Crazy… split-screen with a boy’s ordinary day on the left and his imagination (which usually involves being captured and making a daring escape on the right. Then he and his family die when travelling on a boat that hits an iceberg. The imagination side takes another minute to adjust to this ending. Animation is fluid, doodly and wonderful. Driessen is Dutch, has a long career of award-winning shorts.

The Lost Thing (2010, Tan & Ruhemann)

Dude is collecting bottlecaps when he finds a Lost Thing (sort of an armored contraption with mechanical parts, jingle bells and tentacles), seeks its origins, finally returns it to a secret area in the city where crazy mecha-organic beasts all live. Won the oscar, same year as Day & Night. Tan created the source book, Ruhemann lately produced something called Chuck Norris vs. Communism.

Zerox and Mylar (1995, Joel Brinkerhoff)

Wicked one-minute claymation thing. Cat wants to lure mouse, paints his hand like a lady mouse, but mouse traps the lady-mouse-hand and has his way with it/her. Brinkerhoff is obviously a madman, apparently worked on Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension, which is on one of the Looney Tunes blu-rays.

The Temptation of Mr. Prokouk (1947, Karel Zeman)

Mr. Prokouk is building his own house when he’s tempted by the evils of alcohol. After going on a massive bender and literally losing his head, he recovers, murders the ghostly barrel-shaped liquor salesman who got Prokouk hooked on the stuff, and continues with the house building. I dig the little birds who build a nest on his sign.

Mr. Schwarzwald’s and Mr. Edgar’s Last Trick (1964, Jan Svankmajer)

Svankmajer’s first short! Stop-motion, live actors, painting and puppetry, all very well blended, with extreme close-ups, frequent zooms and super fast edits. So JS was accomplished at making great-looking, creepy films from the very start. Two wooden-mask-faced magicians take turns performing elabotate tricks, aggressively shaking hands after each one, until the handshake turns lethal and they tear each other apart.

Your Acquaintance aka The Journalist (1927, Lev Kuleshov)

A 15-minute excerpt from a feature. Possibly Kuleshov’s follow-up to the great Dura Lex – IMDB isn’t so clear on Russian cinema. Aleksandra Khokhlova (Kuleshov’s wife, crazy Edith from Dura Lex) is a newspaper columnist who gets fired for turning in an article late while she was distracted by a handsome rich man. That’s about all I got from this fragment, plot-wise.

Edition Filmmuseum:

She is a modern woman, in-your-face and interesting in both the way she dresses and the way she handles the men who surround her in her everyday working life: she writes almost all of them off as wimps but the one she loves, a functionary, proves to be a conformist: disappointment ensues … The mise-en-scène is unique, with razor-sharp contours and extreme lighting provided on the one hand by Aleksandr Rodchenko with his constructivist design of the materialistic world, and on the other hand by cameraman Konstantin Kuznecov with his “svetotvorchestvo” (light-making) already known from [Dura Lex].

The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014, Thom Andersen)

A found-footage piece, Andersen taking three films and isolating only the scenes with imposing character actor Tony Longo in them. Tony is an ineffective doorman in The Takeover, is seeking Justin Theroux in Mulholland Dr., and fights with Rob Lowe before being murdered by Jim Belushi in Living in Peril. Why was Thom Andersen watching Tony Longo movies? Tony died soon after this came out, unrelated to the fact that IMDB says he was once struck in the mouth by lightning.

Cinema Scope:

What makes the videos in The Tony Longo Trilogy both exciting and frivolous is that it’s not terribly difficult to imagine Andersen repeating the operation for Tony Longo’s other hundred-odd screen credits, or, to push the idea to its limit, for anyone who’s ever appeared in a motion picture.

Riot (2015, Nathan Silver)

Home movies of 9-year-old Nathan reenacting the LA riots in his back yard wearing a Ren & Stimpy shirt

Uncle (1959, Jaromil Jires)

Kid in crib makes friends with the thief breaking into his house. Jires’s second short, still in film school. Uncle Vlastimil Brodsky was already an established actor, would later star in many Jiri Menzel films and Autumn Spring.

Tramwaj (1966, Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Silent… guy is miserable at a party, so leaves and gets on a dismal night train where he tries to impress a sleepy girl. One of Kieslowski’s first shorts, made in film school.

Logorama (2009, Alaux & Houplain & de Crecy)

Fantastic concept, a world made only of corporate logos. The writing and voice acting could’ve been better though. After creating this graphic-design logo monstrosity, they fill it with some sub-Tarantino cops-and-robbers shootout stuff, Michelin cops fighting a rogue Ronald McDonald. Logorama beat A Matter of Loaf and Death at the oscars, also won awards at Cannes and the Cesars. Two of the directors went on to make a tie-in short to a Tom Clancy video game series. David Fincher did a voice, along with the writer of Se7en and a guy with small roles in half of Fincher’s movies.

Sniffer (2006, Bobbie Peers)

Sniffer works as a deodorant tester in a world where people wear metal boots to keep from floating off. One day after seeing a pigeon crash into a window, Sniffer decides it’d be nice to float off, and unstraps his boots. Norwegian, I think.

The Foundry (2007, Aki Kaurismaki)

Seen this before in an anthology but now it’s available in HD so I watched again.

by ·Comments Off on Junun & Oddsac

Junun (2015, P.T. Anderson)

Cool music documentary with emphasis on the music – no narration or explanation, only a few titles and stories. The best story isn’t even related to the album, but a guy who feeds birds from the roof of the fort where they’re recording, and whose family has done so for countless generations.

Shot with a camcorder and a drone. Shye Ben Tzur is a singer, composer and organizer, then there are bunches of great musicians playing great instruments, then there’s Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead sitting engrossed in his guitar/laptop world. Engineer Nigel Godrich comes out regularly to knock noisy pigeons off the sound baffles.

Baffled pigeon:

Drone’s-eye view of bird feeding:

–
Oddsac (2010, Danny Perez)

Psychedelic imagery with a paint-splatter wash of colors and great music by Animal Collective.

Does it turn into a horror movie at the end, or was it one all along?

Coincidentally the day after I watched this, Perez’s first narrative feature was announced (premiering at Sundance this January). Sign me up.

by ·Comments Off on Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer (2015, Jack Walsh)

Lovely event by The Ross. Went out to dinner with director and cinematographer, and it occurred to me towards the end to feel guilty to be celebrating with the filmmakers of a documentary I’m probably not going to like. Docs about artists tend not to be very artistic themselves, and talking-head interview movies seem pointless to watch in theaters. So I was expecting another Altman, but this doc was great. Yvonne had a fascinating life, and the movie does a good job following it, showing groovy clips of dance routines and films, and not playing the “then this happened, then that happened” narrator games. Yvonne had breast cancer and got a mastectomy, then would stand in classic shirtless male-model poses. Later in the Q&A someone asked if she had breast cancer and I thought “of course she did,” but I guess the movie didn’t explicitly state this, just expected you to follow the stories. This counted as the U.S. theatrical premiere – that’s for a regular week-long release, since it played festivals already.

Screening Room: Yvonne Rainer (1977)

To prep for the Yvonne doc, I watched most of this TV special, in which the great Robert Gardner interviews Yvonne about her film Kristina Talking Pictures, showing about a half hour of it. Local film critic Deac Rossell joined the conversation, and the two men seemed very anxious to talk about film technique, leaving Yvonne to mostly smile in the background – a shame, since I watched this to hear what she’d have to say. I was most uninterested in the film itself at first, with its typically dry, amateur acting, but then I started to notice the unconvincing actors were discussing unconvincing acting in films, and towards the end of the episode the clips played with sync sound in a cool way. So I still haven’t seen a full Yvonne Rainer film, but I know a lot more about her.

Kristina Talking Pictures:

Yvonne:

by ·Comments Off on Bitter Lake (2015, Adam Curtis)

It says a lot about the tone of your movie when Burial is your theme music – beautiful but fragmented vocals overlaid on a sprawling, complicated song structure. The original song even opens with the dialogue “excuse me, I’m lost.”

I learned a new word: Wahhabism. Movie gives a history lesson on Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, then leads into the present debacle, which seems even more hopeless after watching this. Combo of staged material with rough outtakes from news footage and who knows what else. Afghanistan is compared to the planet Solaris. None of our leaders are any good at leading. Everyone is hugely corrupt.

The movie goes for long stretches without voiceover or titles – a new approach for Curtis – though not as long as the Bitter Lake trailer would suggest.

Worst part: Afghani government officials are super corrupt. Local police force become evil militias, suppressing the people. British troops don’t know this, arrive in town offering to help the local police. Townspeople say oh great, more oppression, and attack British troops, who assume they’re Taliban and bomb the shit out of them. Eventually, fighting factions realize British troops think anyone hostile to them is Taliban, start telling the Brits that people they dislike are Taliban, basically using the Brits as hit men.

The woman Julia Roberts played in Charlie Wilson’s War:

by ·Comments Off on Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland)

Domhnall Gleeson (time travel kid in About Time) is invited to social-media mogul Llewyn Davis’s mountain tech-mansion to evaluate android Ava (Alicia Vikander of The Danish Girl and Testament of Youth). But who is evaluating whom? Who’s really calling the shots here? And who… ah nevermind, after much slow-paced intrigue, she kills Llewyn, locks Domhnall in the house and escapes.

I had such hope from the opening scene, most efficient setup/backstory ever, then pacing goes to hell in the saggy middle, consisting mostly of halting, whispered conversations in unadorned rooms. Nice throwaway bit on global surveillance, as Llewyn casually spies on the entire human race to get data for his AI. Suffers in comparison to Her, but Vikander and her Ava-body effects make the movie worth watching.

Also when Llewyn dances with his robo-assistant:

Dissolve:

[Gleeson] makes a perfect fit for what seems to be Garland’s favorite role: the Nice Guy whose self-effacing charisma hides a deeply selfish, narcissistic core. But [Llewyn] is Ex Machina’s most important player, tasked with most reliably drawing and repelling Caleb and the audience, and giving the story its spine. He’s the one responsible for selling the film’s queasiest undercurrent: a feeling that if this is what humanity looks like, we’re definitely better off with artificial, alien, inhuman intelligences in charge.

by ·Comments Off on Inventory: Chris Marker

Ever since I first watched Sans Soleil on VHS (probably by recommendation of John at Videodrome) it’s been one of my very favorite movies. I’d previously seen La Jetee on one of those late-90’s shorts DVDs with a commentary track by the writers of Gilliam’s great adaptation 12 Monkeys. For the next decade, these were almost the only available Marker films on video, but IMDB claimed he’d directed fifty more. With help from the mighty Internet, I set out to find and watch as many of these as possible, reading a couple books and following a few sidetracks along the way. As recently stated in my Post-Dissolve write-up, it’s getting kinda old to make endless projects for myself and finish none of them, so ten years after starting the Chris Marker Completism Project it’s time to declare it a success and organize my mess of Marker posts.

Warning: links go to journal posts… sometimes there are multiple short Marker films per post, or one Marker will be lumped in with unrelated shorts, or I’ll watch the same film twice and write about it in two places. Release years may be wrong, and I’ve chosen English or French titles on a whim.

Thirteen Marker-involved Masterpieces:

Sunday in Peking (1956) / Letter From Siberia (1957) / Description of a Struggle (1960)
La Jetée (1962)
A Valparaíso (1963, dir. Joris Ivens)
The Koumiko Mystery (1965)
If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966)
Far From Vietnam / The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967)
Sans Soleil (1983)
Immemory (1998)
Remembrance of Things to Come (2001, with Yannick Bellon)
Chats perchés / Case of the Grinning Cat (2004)

Three (point one) great filmmaker documentaries:

A.K. (1985)
The Last Bolshevik (1992) / The Train Rolls On (1971)
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000)

Three more popular features:

Grin Without a Cat (1977)
Le Joli Mai (1963)
Level Five (1997)

Advanced Studies:

Cinétracts (1968) & Blue Helmet (1995)
The Second Trial of Artur London (1970)
Broadway By Light (1958 William Klein) & Eclipse (1999)
Three Video Haikus (1994)
Cuba Si (1961)
Pictures at an Exhibition (2008) & Silent Movie (1995)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer (1974)
The Owl’s Legacy (1989)
Junkopia (1981)
Tokyo Days (1986) & Berlin ’90 & Prime Time in the Camps (1993)
Be Seeing You (1968) & 2084 (1984) & We Maintain It Is Possible (1973) & Set Theory (1985)
Matta (1985)
Embassy (1973) & Viva la baleine (1972) & Petit Bestiare (1990)

Also of interest:

The Confession (1970, Costa-Gavras)
It For Others (2013, Duncan Campbell)
Description of a Memory (2007 Dan Geva)
America as Seen by a Frenchman (1960, Francois Reichenbach)
Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011, Agnès Varda)
The Marker Variations (2007, Isaki Lacuesta)
The Battle of Chile (1975-78, Patricio Guzmán)
Happiness (1934, Alexander Medvedkin)
Les Astronautes (1959, Walerian Borowczyk)

–
There are still some I haven’t found, but none that I’m killing myself to acquire. In this post I looked at some missing films from 1967-1977. I’m also missing subtitles for his Simone Signoret doc from 1986 and La Spirale from 1976, and haven’t bothered with the appalling-looking and untranslated youtube copy of his debut Olympia ’52. I haven’t forgotten the Alain Resnais collaborations, but will get to them in a later post.

Olympia ’52:

by ·Comments Off on Far From Vietnam (1967)

Piecemeal protest doc with surprisingly great location footage and interesting scenes, each one a bit too loud and going on for too long. The pieces are mostly unsigned, but I believe Chris Marker put the project together, and some segments are either identified online, or just very easily guessed (ahem, Resnais). They mention that Joris Ivens shot on location – most everyone else stayed home and used stock footage or filmed protest marches.

“It is in Vietnam that the main question of our time arises: the right of the poor to establish societies based on something else than the interests of the rich.”

Cluster-bomb:

Supposed to be President Johnson:

The Resnais segment is interesting before it wears out its welcome. Bernard Fresson (of a few Resnais films, including a small part in Je t’aime, je t’aime) is playing “writer Claude Ridder” (name of the lead character in Je t’aime, je t’aime played by Claude Rich) while a woman Karen Blanguernon (Rene Clement’s The Deadly Trap) glares from the corner of his office. This segment was written by Jacques Sternberg (Je t’aime, je t’aime, of course), so perhaps Claude Ridder was his standard lead character name, since this Ridder seems too impassioned to be the heartbroken dead soul from the feature. “Ridder” monologues on the war, politics, and his own inability to make change. “A spineless French intellectual articulating excuses for his class’s political apathy,” per the NY Times.

Next, a history lesson using stock footage, photographs and comics, drawing connections to the Spanish Civil War (the Resnais had mentioned Algeria).

Then Godard, who monologues in front of a giant film camera, talking about the distance, his inability to connect with the war itself, or even the French working class, the focus of so many of his films. Since he can’t film on-location, he inserts Vietnam into his feature films. “I make films. That’s the best I can do for Vietnam. Instead of invading Vietnam with a kind of generosity that makes things unnatural, we let Vietnam invade us.”

After a jaunty music video to a protest song by Tom Paxton, a longer somber voiceover reading the words of Michele Ray who spent three weeks with the Viet Cong, showing her footage before it goes crazy at the end.

“Why We Fight,” in which General Westmoreland explains the official U.S. position on the war, filmed off a TV while someone zooms around and twiddles knobs. Title must be referencing the 1940’s U.S. propaganda film series Why We Fight, which Joris Ivens contributed to.

Anti-napalm rabbi:

Monologue by Fidel Castro, who gives his theories on guerrilla warfare and how this applies to Vietnam. The new wavers seemed to have easy access to Fidel back then.

Ann Uyen, a Vietnamese woman living in Paris discusses Norman Morrison’s setting himself on fire outside the pentagon, and what that meant to her people. “We think that in America there is another war, a people’s war against everything that’s unfair.” Then an interview with Norman’s widow, who seems in sync with Norman’s politics. This was by William Klein.

War protest zombie walk, probably shot by Klein:

Marker’s outro:

In facing this defiance [of the Vietnamese], the choice of rich society is easy: either this society must destroy everything resisting it – but the task may be bigger than its means of destruction – or it will have to transform itself completely – but maybe it’s too much for a society at the peak of its power. If it refuses that option, it will have to sacrifice its reassuring illusions, to accept this war between the poor and the rich as inevitable, and to lose it.