Thought I wrote this up already, but can’t find it. Must be thinking of The Philadelphia Story. Yuk yuk, but no, really. I recall saying that everything felt like an imitation (and it doesn’t help that they’re reading the exact same dialogue) with a few unnecessary songs added… that even the most well-loved actors of the 1950’s have unenviable positions playing roles originated by Cary Grant (here Bing Crosby), Jimmy Stewart (Sinatra) and Katharine Hepburn (Grace Kelly). Kelly even seems to be impersonating Hepburn, or maybe they’re both just doing generic upper-class east-coaster, but Hepburn did it first, and for longer. Of course it’s still a hell of an enjoyable movie – you don’t remake The Philadelphia Story and end up with an unenjoyable movie. Best addition: Louis Armstrong!
A Touch of Sin (2013, Jia Zhang-Ke)
Two motorbike rebels meet at the site of a tomato-truck accident: Dahai (seen on the movie poster with a shotgun) and Fuzzy Hat San’er, who kills a few illegal toll-takers a few minutes prior. First let’s follow Dahai (Jiang Wu of Shower and To Live), who is openly contemptuous of his corrupt bosses at the coal mine, finally confronting the big boss himself, at which point Dahai gets his ass whupped on an airport runway. Doesn’t take long for Dahai to heal up, collect himself, and take brutal shotgun-revenge on his bosses plus anyone who gets in his way. It’s about the most blunt anti-corruption half-hour screed I’ve seen, showing the problem then proposing a swift solution – and coming from arthouse slowpoke Jia it’s pretty shocking.
It’s an episodic movie, but more interconnected through characters, locations and themes than something like Wild Tales. In a larger city, Fuzzy Hat (Wang Baoqiang of Blind Shaft and Romancing in Thin Air) has money troubles, and a solution: purse-snatching and murder. Xiaoyu (Zhao Tao, just seen in I Wish I Knew) can’t get her boyfriend to leave his wife, goes to work as a receptionist at a masseuse parlor and when some drunken dudes assume they can buy her, she cuts them up. Young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) has shitty luck in the workplace and jumps out his window.
Zhao Tao, never more badass:
A. Cook:
The film paints a bleak picture of modern China for the people in a position of powerlessness. Setting each story in a different region of the country further illustrates this sense of widespread exploitation … Each act of violence is a tragic climax in the lives of the characters who can take no more of the injustices that surround them.
R. Koehler in Cinema Scope:
Jia is sending out an early signal that his film is directed from and for a cathartic response, and as we observe his four characters across four segments — roughly traversing a geographic line across the Mainland from north to south and through the seasons — they operate out of gut instinct and momentary impulse. The contemplative young intellectual artists of Platform are long gone — or likely, by now in the new China, have sold out — and in their place are desperate people doing what they need to do to survive.
Fuzzy Hat and his neglected son:
Marie-Pierre Duhamel:
The last two shots of the film show Zhao Tao’s Xiaoyu watching an ancient representation of her destiny, and the audience of the opera looking into camera. The audience is looking at the audience. This is what consistency is about in Jia’s world: to lyrically recreate reality as a folk singer improvises a ballad, so that the untold stories come to light, and that everyone hopefully remembers them and sings along.
Her essay at Mubi puts the movie in essential context. It seems the most obvious of Jia’s films – I don’t mean that as an insult, since I felt the others all went over my stupid head – but even so, there’s so much depth I missed. And of course the film looks as splendid as Jia’s others, which is what keeps me watching them even when I don’t know what they’re about. Won best screenplay at Cannes, the year of Blue is the Warmest Color, Only Lovers Left Alive and Inside Llewyn Davis.
Duke of Burgundy (2014, Peter Strickland)
Complicated movie about a complicated relationship. I’ll bet this is fun to watch a second time. Cynthia seems an awful high-haired rich woman who mistreates her maid Evelyn, but it turns out these two are in a relationship, and Evelyn is ordering Cynthia to order Evelyn around – even providing a script for Cynthia to follow. One or both of them are lepidopterists and/or cheating with the neighbor or the custom-furniture saleswoman. I can’t tell if it has a happy ending – or if it has an ending, or simply loops back on itself. It has sensuous atmosphere in spades – no shit, from the director of Berberian Sound Studio. I like what he does, the hermetic cinephile worlds he creates, but never seem to fall in love with the films.
Sidse Knudsen (Borgen, After The Wedding) is Cynthia and Chiara D’Anna (a tormented actress in Berberian Sound Studio) is Evelyn. Shout out to Buñuel – one of the few auxillary characters is named Dr. Viridiana.
Uses songs by Flying Saucer Attack and Nurse With Wound. Great credits, with Human Toilet Consultants, recording notes on all the insect audio (“Gryllotalpa africana: recorded by D.R. Ragge & W.J. Reynolds on 21st May 1974 at 14:00 hours on a nagra 4d tape recorder and sennheiser mkh 405 microphone in very dim light at 25 degrees centigrade”), and this right after the human cast:
J. Teodoro for Cinema Scope:
Though not used as a one-to-one metaphor, the shadows that will soon enter Evelyn and Cynthia’s perverts’ paradise are telegraphed in The Duke‘s hallucinatory images of butterflies, pinned, with labial wings spread, neatly contained in frames and displayed in seemingly infinite rows, their ornate patterning and careful classification rhyming with Evelyn’s carefully composed erotic scripts – written in an elegant calligraphic hand – to which Cynthia is meant to scrupulously adhere.
M. D’Angelo:
Strickland is clearly a heavy-duty cinephile—Berberian Sound Studio paid tribute to Italian giallo, and there’s a dream sequence here that includes an homage to Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde short Mothlight — and he has a lot of fun early on establishing the parameters of his Eurotrash softcore aesthetic. The movies he’s ostensibly aping, however, took place in an erotically exaggerated version of the real world, whereas The Duke Of Burgundy dispenses with literally anything that doesn’t meet the needs of its story. Other women are seen from time to time, but nobody does anything resembling “normal” work; the entire population appears to consist of amateur lepidopterists, who gather regularly to take turns giving lectures on various species of butterflies and moths.
In a BFI interview Strickland lists influences: Mothlight, Morgiana (1972), Belle de Jour, A Virgin Among The Living Dead (1973), Mano Destra (1986) and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
The inclusion of an obscure reference done in an obvious fashion can be precarious in terms of what that reveals about a director’s motivations. At worst, the act of homage is merely posing and diverting attention onto the director rather than the film, but when done organically and effectively, as with both Greenaway at his best and Tarantino, it enriches the film and places it within a wider (albeit self-imposed) lineage that can be rewarding for the curious viewer.
The Movies Begin, discs 1 & 2
Shorts! I have discs and discs of shorts and rarely watch them. I’m awfully excited about the new blu-ray of avant-garde shorts from Flicker Alley, but how can I justify buying it when I’ve got a hundred shorts collections just sitting around unseen? Let’s watch some, shall we? And what better place to start than with a Kino collection called The Movies Begin?
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The Great Train Robbery (1903, Edwin Porter)
Stunts, explosions, color, brutal murders, thievery, daring escapes – and dancing! Bandits rob the train of its lockbox loot and all its passengers of their wallets, then escape on horseback. Local bunch of ruffians is alerted to the crime and rides off to kill the perpetrators. All this in ten minutes – more economical than the Sean Connery remake.
One of the more famous shots (haha “shots”) in cinema:
Fire in a Burlesque Theater (1904)
Either this was ineptly framed or I’m seeing a cropped version, because there aren’t nearly enough burlesque dancers with smoke inhalation on display here.
Airy Fairy Lillian Tries On Her New Corsets (1905)
Hefty Jeffy helps her out… then faints. Was this a comedy?
Spoiler alert:
From Show Girl to Burlesque Queen (1903)
A woman removes her costume – but the good part is done behind a screen. The title was better than the feature, making this the A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence of its time.
Troubles of a Manager of a Burlesque Show (1904)
Troubles because the women are angry at the crappy clothes he expects them to wear, and they flee and throw things when he tries to molest them.
The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905, Edwin Porter)
So many lost films in history, and this dam thing survives. Hilarious title for a movie without any jokes in it, making this The Ridiculous Six of its time.
The Golden Beetle (1907, Segundo de Chomón)
Ornate, hand-colored, dangerous-looking Meliesian disappearing act. I think a man tries throwing a golden beetle in the fire, and she torments him with showers of sparks before burning him to death. This is great.
Rough Sea at Dover (1895, Birt Acres)
Two shots of the rough sea. Were any other 1895 movies more than one shot long?
Come Along Do! (1898, RW Paul)
Supposedly the first film to feature action carried over from one shot to the next. But I watched it twice, and it appears to be only one shot. Is there an invisible Birdman-like cut in there somewhere? Or did I get the descriptions of the previous two films mixed up? Anyway, two drinkers on a bench outside some mysterious establishment with an “Art Section” and “Refreshments” opt for the art section.
Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903, RW Paul)
Cabs being horse-drawn at the time, a guy stumbles into the street, is trampled to death, then mysteriously recovers and runs off. I’ve seen guys transformed via editing into scarecrow dummies then thrown off trains in The Great Train Robbery, but this one does a good job transforming the dummy back into a guy.
A Chess Dispute (1903, RW Paul)
There is a violent dispute over a game of chess. Mostly this dispute is waged just under the camera’s view, thrown punches and bottles and clothing flying up into frame.
Buy Your Own Cherries (1904, RW Paul)
Awful brute man causes a drunken scene at a bar, then another at his home, then after a quick visit to church he’s wonderful and generous. Extra long at four minutes. Paul also produced the great The ? Motorist, which I had credited to director Walter Booth.
The Miller and the Sweep (1898, GA Smith)
Just a silly half-minute fight/chase in front of an operating windmill. But it’s a really nice shot of the windmill.
Let Me Dream Again (1900, GA Smith)
Happy couple at a party wake up as grumpy old couple in bed… so the movie’s title is the punchline. Smith invented the pull out-of-focus to indicate shift from dream to reality.
Sick Kitten (1903, GA Smith)
Kino says Smith invented the POV shot, and the idea of breaking a scene down into shots from different angles, which he does here. Kids dressed as grownups feed a kitty from a spoon. As is true today, cat films were incredibly popular back then, so this is a remake of his 1901 cat film which had worn out from overduplication.
The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899, GA Smith)
Train goes into tunnel, GA Smith and wife have a quick smooth, train back out of tunnel.
The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899, Bamforth & Co)
A remake! Two different people kiss in a different tunnel (the train shot from different angles than Smith used), in a cabin with worse production design.
A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903, Frank Mottershaw)
Action thriller with multiple shots and locations, reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery. Kino says some plot action in the silent doesn’t make sense because the showman was supposed to provide benshi narration during the screening.
A Desperate Poaching Affray (1903, William Haggar)
Men with guns chase men with nets. Oh damn wait, the poachers have guns too, and blast at least three of the pursuers. Poaching was deadly serious business. Just a big chase scene, really.
Attack on a China Mission (1901, James Williamson)
A man’s house is attacked, he defends with rifle, then more groups keep arriving and I’m not sure what side they’re on. Kino says it’s a reenactment of the Boxer Uprising, which must have been a confusing uprising. Kino says JW was famous for moving action across multiple shots, mainly during chase films, which sounds like what everyone was famous for in 1901.
An Interesting Story (1905, James Williamson)
Mustache man pours coffee in his hat, injures the maid, wrecks some children’s fun, and keeps running into things because he won’t put down his book (just like kids today with their cellular telephones). Satisfying conclusion as he gets run over by a steamroller, but some passing bicyclists inflate him, using the ol’ dummy-replacement trick last seen in Extraordinary Cab Accident.
Electrocuting an Elephant (1903, Thomas Edison & Edwin S. Porter)
Never forget, no matter what his achievements in human history, Thomas Edison once electrocuted an elephant for fun and profit.
Actress (2014, Robert Greene)
Apparently a doc about Brandy Burre (Carcetti’s campaign manager in The Wire), and her attempt to get her acting career back on track after taking time off for her family, while that family is falling apart (brewer boyfriend Tim is leaving over Christmas since she has been cheating on him). Highly recommended by film-critic-types for playing around with the documentary format. I noticed retakes, musical segments and slow motion, but was constantly wondering if there was something deeper, like for instance it’s all a put-on and the boyfriend is an actor too, or some big twist ending was coming. Then I was mystified when it just continued to be about Brandy’s daily life, not getting acting jobs. The experiments in documentary form weren’t noticeably experimental enough for me.
M. D’Angelo:
I feel like the film has a serious Tim Problem, which grows more and more significant as the dissolution of that relationship becomes the dominant narrative arc, swamping Brandy’s tentative efforts to revive her acting career. It’s one thing when Greene’s camera improbably follows Brandy into the shower, as she’s clearly “complicit” in Actress’ interrogation of form. It’s quite another thing, however, when, for example, we observe Tim arriving home late at night, with the rest of the house apparently asleep, and he pretends that the camera isn’t there.
V. Rizov:
Director and subject collude, not so much valorizing her attempts to jumpstart her career and finances (“I have to make a living to get my freedom”) as sympathetically heightening her existence — providing her, indeed, with a worthy comeback role within a confining matrix of daily responsibilities. It’s a film of big gestures, formally mirroring Burre’s transitions from one actorly mode to another, always courting the possibility of total failure or over-the-top silliness.
Greene in Cinema Scope, on the best shot in the movie, a startling moment when Brandy’s face is injured, looking into camera as it pulls back and her kids come in for hugs: “I’ve had one good idea in my life, and that was to shoot that scene that way.”
Greene:
In the scene where Brandy is confessing about her affair, the camera is moving; it’s subtle, but we know that there’s another person in the room. So I’m there. There’s a whole bunch of ways to make movies, and the way I want to do it is to put all the things that we’re supposed to be hiding out there. I hate when people say editing is supposed to be invisible. Like, take all these things – the camera being present, the act of making a documentary, the fact that you’re only using exteriors when the light is nice – and make them part of the movie. Don’t hide them. The act of making a documentary is an insane thing sometimes, so let’s use that fact.
20,000 Days on Earth (2014, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard)
Appearing on the blog in 2016 but watched last year – I’m about 15 posts behind. Writing this up alongside Actress, now I see why I didn’t appreciate the Robert Greene documentary more. It’s because I’d just watched this one: a semi-doc with an electrifying subject (Nick Cave), big music numbers and great camerawork.
Takes the concept of Lindsay Anderson’s Is That All There Is – a day in the life of an artist, but an obviously staged “day,” written and orchestrated to poetically illuminate the artist’s life more than a verite approach would’ve managed. Instead of letting Cave ramble on to an unseen interviewer, Cave revisits his career by conversing with ghostly visitors and examining his own relics at an archive.
Cave actually does speak to an interviewer at the beginning – his psychiatrist, which should clearly let viewers know (through the framing and TV monitor, if not only the intrusion of cameras in a psychiatric session) that this is not your usual fly-on-the-wall doc.
On the floor with Warren Ellis, singing Animal X:
Squid ink fettucini and severed hand at Warren’s place:
Nick and Warren trade Nina Simone stories. He speaks with Blixa and Kylie and Ray Winstone in his car. Records the song Push the Sky Away. In the studio rehearsing Higgs Boson Blues. Stagger Lee at a small club then Jubilee Street at the Sydney Opera House. Eating pizza with his sons. It’s a retrospective using the songs of his great latest album.
A. Muredda for Cinema Scope:
Forsyth and Pollard do well to emulate the lyrical vein in their subject’s sensibility that more prosaic filmmakers would have remanded to portentious shots of keyboards clacking, which is here sensibly kept to a minimum. In their use of Cave’s slick black car as a neutral, roaming headspace where thoughts about the job percolate in voiceover as Cave flits between the satellite points of his life (home, studio, countryside), the filmmakers’ work takes some odd but ultimately fitting cues from Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. As in that film, Kylie Minogue appears as a backseat passenger and a spectral trace from the hero’s past … [Cave] seems to give his best as a performer when he’s called upon to make utterly false situations that aspire to reality (like concerts, or documentaries) feel intimate and true.
The Movie Year in Review, 2015
Happy New Movie Year! Here is a look back at the movie year that was.
The Lists
Favorite New Movies, 2015
Favorite Older Movies watched in 2015
Series and Retrospectives, 2015
Favorite Shorts of 2015
2015 Movies To Watch
2010 Favorites Redux
Previous year lists
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Television
Strong showing from television this year. Favorites:
1. Parks & Recreation seasons 5-7
2. Rick & Morty season 1
3. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season 1
4. Inside Amy Schumer seasons 1-2
5. Over The Garden Wall
6. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp
7. True Detective season 1
8. Girls seasons 2-3
TV series abandoned in 2015: Sense8 (watched three episodes), Always Sunny (one episode), M*A*S*H* (most of season one, I think), and Transparent (half of season one).
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SHOCKtober
It’s not fair to expect the horror movies to compete with the others.
Here are eight really good ones.
The ABCs of Death 2 (2014)
Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo Del Toro)
Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968, Ingmar Bergman)
The Hunger (1983, Tony Scott)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Siegel)
Let Us Prey (2014, Brian O’Malley)
The Nightmare (2015, Rodney Ascher)
Proxy (2013, Zack Parker)
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The Year In Bad Movies
I didn’t much enjoy watching Godard’s Film Socialism, but I enjoyed trying to figure it out afterwards, reading articles about it, writing it up. I feel like there’s value in watching Godard movies, that Film Socialism gave me more of a sense of his late work, tying together threads from Eloge de l’amour and Histoire(s) du Cinema, and that his movies contain unique ideas. Here instead are some movies I watched this year (each out of obligation to a favorite filmmaker or critic) that I wish I hadn’t, containing nothing of interest.
MacGruber (2010, Jorma Taccone)
Maps to the Stars (2014, David Cronenberg)
Story of My Death (2013, Albert Serra)
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher)
Willow Creek (2013, Bobcat Goldthwait)
Burying the Ex (2014, Joe Dante)
and I’m still mad at The Martian, but won’t go as far as calling it a bad movie.
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Favorite Rediscovery
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Buñuel)
Also watched/enjoyed for the first time in years (in no order):
Nightbreed (1990, Clive Barker)
Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)
Our Hospitality (1923, Buster Keaton)
Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)
A Bug’s Life (1998, John Lasseter & Andrew Stanton)
Monsoon Wedding (2001, Mira Nair)
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Viewing Projects & Lists
I made a bunch more must-see lists and made serious progress on none of them. But hey, I finished my Chris Marker project after a decade, which seems pretty tremendous. As ever, I’ve got big plans for exciting stuff to watch in 2016, which I’m not mentioning here because I’ll inevitably change those plans, make a ton of new plans, then feel foolish when I go back and read this.
“It’s more pleasant to work in such a way that things multiply instead of dividing.”
– Jacques Rivette
No particular progress on this blog itself, other than to keep it going (for nearly ten years now!). Sometimes I mean to work on improving my writing, but I have little motivation for doing so. Inspiration from hero blogger and accomplished filmmaker and horror writer David Cairns: “I think it’s all creative work, or I try to make it so. When I write about a movie, it’s never ‘How can I express my opinion?’ it’s ‘What fun can I have with this?'”
Favorite New Movies, 2015
1. World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt)
2. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
3. Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas)
4. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
5. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)
6. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
7. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-Liang)
8. Inside Out (Pete Docter)
9. The Double (Richard Ayoade)
10. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)
I don’t have strong feelings about the ranking order of the next ten:
11. Shaun the Sheep (Mark Burton & Richard Starzak)
12. Room (Lenny Abrahamson)
13. Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland)
14. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)
15. They Came Together (David Wain)
16. Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
17. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
18. 20,000 Days on Earth (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard)
19. You and the Night (Yann Gonzalez)
20. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Julie Taymor)
Honorable mentions, alphabetically:
Bitter Lake (Adam Curtis)
Blackhat (Michael Mann)
Brooklyn (John Crowley)
Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman)
Girlhood (Céline Sciamma)
Junun (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
Tehran Taxi (Jafar Panahi)
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow)
Bill Plympton’s Cheatin’ was a favorite, but got moved to another list.
This is from a pool of about seventy titles, most of which I liked since I research movies before seeing ’em. I think the cutoff, determining which (and how many) movies I list here, is “would I watch this again right now?” So what I’m saying is that I’d strongly recommend any/all of these, including the honorable mentions list.
Favorite Older Movies watched in 2015
Top ten, chronologically since there’s really no comparing these.
Roman Holiday (1953, William Wyler)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
My Name Is Ivan (1962, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Z (1969, Costa-Gavras)
Hairspray (1988, John Waters)
What Time Is It There? (2001, Tsai Ming-Liang)
Damsels In Distress (2011, Whit Stillman)
Her (2013, Spike Jonze)
Ten more:
Little Women (1933, George Cukor)
High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953, Ingmar Bergman)
Twelve Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)
What a Way to Go! (1964, J. Lee Thompson)
Chimes at Midnight (1965, Orson Welles)
Far From Vietnam (1967, Marker, Resnais, Godard, Varda, Klein, Ivens, Lelouch)
Doomed Love (1978, Manoel de Oliveira)
Blue Remembered Hills (1979, Brian Gibson)
Secret of Kells (2009, Tomm Moore)
Since I made a separate 2010 list, I couldn’t justify a whole other list just for 2011-2013, so “older movies” includes everything I could’ve technically seen before this year. That means all the stone classics have edged out last year’s popcorn flicks, so some special recognition is needed.
Best Traditional Comic-Book Action Blockbuster: X-Men 5: Days of Future Past
Best Non-Traditional Comic-Book Action Blockbuster: Speed Racer