by ·Comments Off on Bergman Island (2004, Marie Nyenröd)

“I’m actually scared of everything.”

This is the source of the short introductions and DVD extras that begin with video of Bergman’s car arriving at his house. Filmed interview segment is just okay, but Bergman tells good stories and the editing of stock footage and his own films into the interviews is done well.

This was originally three one-hour episodes with more focus on the theater, later recut into a single, cinema-focused feature. The director: “I was the first and only journalist who was ever allowed to step into the world of Bergman on its lonely cape on Fårö.”

Asked about his conscience after abandoning so many families: “I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is mere affectation. It’s a way of achieving a little suffering that can’t for a moment be equated to the suffering you’ve caused.”

by ·Comments Off on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011, David Fincher)

Fincher brings his sleek style to an exasperating, overlong, coincidence-filled thriller. If I was a proper auteurist the story wouldn’t matter and I’d go on about the great technique – but I’m not, so I was bored.

A Man Without a Country:

Disgraced journalist Daniel Craig is hired by Christopher Plummer of a rich nazi family to discover who killed Plummer’s granddaughter forty years ago – and since there’s no body, we already know that Racer X is really Speed’s bro… I mean that the girl is still alive. Halfway through the movie Craig meets (hooks up with) antisocial goth hacker Rooney Mara. First part of the movie sets up horrible, dangerous people: the businessman who sues Craig, Rooney’s rapist parole officer, Plummer’s evil nephew Stellan Skarsgard, then in the end our heroes take bloody revenge on all of them.

Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck:

Stellan’s fiery end:

I love that everyone knows all about Craig’s life and work – for an investigative journalist he’s quite bad at keeping secrets. A few amusing parts: most of the dragon-tattoo hackery-fakery, and Stellan soundtracking his torture chamber with an Enya song. Rooney Mara won best actress at Cannes (for Carol) the same day I watched this.

by ·Comments Off on You and the Night (2013, Yann Gonzalez)

Fully bizarre and exceptional movie, which I think I need to watch again before attempting to say anything about it. Immortal couple with their undead “maid” hosts orgy which never quite gets off the ground, as participants exchange (hi)stories, then one host sneaks off and kills himself. Great lighting and imagery, action taking place in a stylish, dream-logic void.

Kate Moran (Goltzius and the Pelican Company) and Neils Schneider (Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother) are the hosts, Nicolas Maury (Regular Lovers) the “maid”. Guests include The Stallion (former soccer star Eric Cantona), The Star (Fabienne Babe of Rivette’s Hurlevent), The Teenager (Alain-Fabein Delon) and The Bitch (Julie Bremond).

Special appearance by whip enthusiast Beatrice Dalle (The Intruder, Inside):

Surprising restraint on use of music considering the director is a member of M83.

by ·Comments Off on Nostalgia for the Light (2010, Patricio Guzman)

All I knew from Guzmán was The Battle of Chile, which is newsreel documentary with explanatory postscript. I heard this was another doc about Pinochet horrors made forty years later and thought ah, more of the same. But this is something very different: a poetic, visual doc encompassing early man, human history and the cosmos, past and present colliding in beauty and horror.

One of the movie’s subjects, Lautaro Núñez, explains:

The astronomers created an enormous telescope … They are in the present recording a past which they have to reconstruct. They have only minute clues. They are archaeologists like us. … Why are there archaeologists and astronomers in the same place? The answer is simple. Here, the past is more accessible than elsewhere. The translucency of the sky is, for the archaeologists of space, what the dry climate is for us. It facilitates our access to evidence from the past.

Guzmán: “And yet, this country has not yet considered its past. It is held in the grasp of the coup d’etat which seems to immobilise it.”

Guzmán slowly brings the focus from ancient archaeology to more recent, focusing on a group of women who have combed the desert for decades looking for the graves of their relatives who were murdered and disappeared by Pinochet’s men. Then he connects even this to the cosmic, all with beautiful photography.

Astronomer Valentina Rodríguez’s parents are among the dead. “Astronomy has somehow helped me to give another dimension to the pain, to the absence, to the loss. I tell myself it’s all part of a cycle… we are all part of a current… like the stars which must die so that other stars can be born… nothing really comes to an end.”

by ·Comments Off on Surviving Life: Theory and Practice (2010, Jan Svankmajer)

Stop-motion cut-out animation of psychoanalytic dream-imagery.

Yes there’s a story – a married man attempts to carry on an affair with a woman in his dreams – but it’s the imagery and editing tricks and invention and sidetracks (eggs, fruit, flowers, suit-wearing coworker with dog head, fighting Freud and Jung portraits, reptiles, tongues, doppelgangers) that kept us endlessly entertained. Svankmajer’s features tend to feel overlong with their obsessions and repetitions but this one (though it opens with an extended apology from the director) was completely wonderful.

by ·Comments Off on La Distancia (2014, Sergio Caballero)

I loved Caballero’s Finisterrae, putting it in my top five of the year. Didn’t feel the magic with this one. Maybe it’s me and not the film. I feel like I’m being too harsh, but everything felt contrived, jokey and pandering – a conscious desire to create a cult success.

Three psychic dwarfs are hired by an imprisoned performance artist to steal a macguffin from an abandoned factory, which is guarded by a solitary man and his haiku-spouting bucket. I love the clay-faced artist, baby foxes, matching cars and campers. But there aren’t enough of these moments of pleasure – mostly it’s slow, talky, committed to its pointless plot. Still holding out hope for his 25-minute horror/comedy also released last year.

Lynch, but with more crotch-sniffing:

All three of the dwarf actors appeared in Blancanieves, Pablo Berger’s Snow White movie, obviously.

by ·Comments Off on Welcome To Me (2014, Shira Piven)

Kristin Wiig goes off her meds and spends her lotto ticket winnings on a talk show with no guests, spending hours each week just talking about things she loves, doing things she enjoys, gradually gaining an audience of hipsters, driving her producers (Joan Cusack, Wes Bentley and Cyclops) insane, and unknowingly insulting everyone who loves her, including best friend Linda Cardellini. More mental illness than comedy, though her televised reenactments of traumatic events from her past (using real names, which gets the studio sued) are good. Wiig gets fired by her psychiatrist Tim Robbins, romances Wes and tears the studio apart, then all gets wrapped up nicely at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Monsoon Wedding (2001, Mira Nair)

Movie #3 in our irregular Criterion Thursdays series. Dazed and Confused was #1, a Linklater link from Before Mondays to Criterion Thursdays, then after a month we picked up with The Cranes Are Flying. Last time I wrote up Cranes I didn’t note the insane life-flashing-before-eyes scene, all overlapped images, when the romantic hero gets shot. The point of the Criterion Thursdays was that I wanted to watch more new/unseen movies but so far they’ve all been rewatches… starting slow, but maybe we’ll get there.

I guess we last watched this pre-movieblog. Since then we’ve seen a bunch of movies about family drama before/during a holiday or event (Rachel Getting Married and A Christmas Tale come to mind), and none of them get the balance right… conveyed chaos vs. artful filmmaking, joy vs. conflict, individual vs. group scenes. But Mira Nair nails it, even managing to pull out a dark family secret at the last minute without upsetting the flow too badly. Between this and The Namesake she seems unusually great at family dramas.

The bride has been carrying on an affair with her boss. Her little brother wants to sing and dance. Her uncle used to molest the bride’s cousin and is showing interest in a new young girl. Bride’s mom thinks nobody knows she smokes, dad is stressed out, and the wedding planner PK Dubey is fond of marigolds and falls for the family’s maid Alice. That’s just the parts I remember. Won the Venice Film Festival, same year as Waking Life, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Secret Ballot and The Others (No Man’s Land won the oscar and Amores Perros the bafta).

by ·Comments Off on The Age of Adaline (2015, Lee Toland Krieger)

Can’t tell if this was named after the acclaimed Sufjan Stevens album because I never listened to that. Good movie, as far as time-travel romances go, easily beating About Time and Safety Not Guaranteed.

Adz (Blake Lively, Renner’s police-informant sister in The Town) loses her husband to an accident, then loses her ability to age to another accident. This is seen mostly as a burden, since she doesn’t want to get close to guys anymore, and keeps having to change her identity so the FBI won’t kidnap and dissect her. One day decades later, her daughter has grown into Ellen Burstyn, and Adz meets a hot, very rich, and extremely persistent Michael Huisman (Treme, Black Book), who turns out to be the son of Harrison Ford (turning in his first decent performance since Air Force One), an ex-boyfriend who recognizes her and wants answers. This is where Katy gets creeped out, not Huisman dating a hundred-year-old, but dating someone his dad once wanted to marry. Anyway, she gets into another accident, starts aging normally again, ends up happy with Huisman.