by ·Comments Off on Tammy and the Bachelor (1957, Joseph Pevney)

Katy had a powerful hankering to watch this after we heard the main song in The Long Day Closes. Tammy (Debbie Reynolds, a few years after Susan Slept Here) is a young girl living on a houseboat with granpappy Walter Brennan (two years before Rio Bravo, already quite Stumpy-like). They help a wounded traveler (hunky Leslie Nielsen, only looking like Lt. Drebin occasionally from certain angles) and when Brennan goes to jail for moonshinin’, Tammy goes to stay with the rich city-dwelling Nielsen. Lovesick hijinks ensue.

The great Fay Wray plays Nielsen’s mom, I think, and he has an aunt (Rosemary Clooney-looking Mildred Natwick) who’s a painter, or ex-painter or something. Tammy inspires them all with her country simplicity. Pevney later directed a chunk of the original Star Trek episodes, and Sandra Dee took over as Tammy in the sequels.

by ·Comments Off on Blissfully Yours (2002, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

After Syndromes and Uncle Boonmee I thought okay, now I’ve got a handle on this Weerasethakul fellow, got a general idea what his movies are like. This one proved me wrong. It’s got the long static shots, and scenes where characters don’t seem to be doing or thinking much, but it has more of these than the others (maybe not more than Tropical Malady, which I haven’t seen since it came out). One of those movies with a slow, slow build-up to a transcendent finale, though it doesn’t feel that way while you’re watching it.

Orn’s hands:

Orn (an older woman), Roong (younger woman) and Min (illegal immigrant pretending to be mute) are the leads. No exposition, so it takes me the first 45 minutes to figure out their names and what they do and how they know each other, more or less. Min and Roong go on a trip into the forest then suddenly, a pop song and the opening titles – halfway through the movie. And now we can hear his thoughts.

Min and Roong:

Orn and some man (not her husband?) also escape into the forest, and much explicit sex follows. Orn seems to be in trouble then – her man chases motorbike thieves off-camera and we hear a gunshot, which she does not investigate. She stumbles across the other couple and they manage to have a damned nice time splashing in the river, before drying their clothes, dumping their litter (Orn chucks it right into the river) and heading home. Weirdly peaceful/happy film.

Roong (actress/character) also appeared in Uncle Boonmee – I don’t remember her, but it’s sometime after the funeral – and Orn appeared in Luminous People.

Min’s drawing:

NY Times with more specific insight: “There’s a suggestion that Roong is a member of the Karen ethnic group, a hill tribe people who live in northern Thailand and eastern Burma and have been involved in human-rights struggles with both countries. Like Min, whose skin rash probably developed after he hid from the police in a septic tank, she enters the forest like a refugee.”

by ·Comments Off on Tetro (2009, Francis Ford Coppola)

“There’s only room for one genius in this family.”

Were I not charmed by the excellent black-and-white cinematography, the performances of Vincent Gallo (year before Essential Killing) and his girl Maribel Verdu (lead actress in Y Tu Mama Tambien) and the movie’s quick bursts of entertaining craziness, I might’ve found more time to be annoyed by the story of family rivalry and Alden Ehrenreich’s lead character of Bennie. And it’s a very annoying story, taking inspiration from Coppola’s own family and a million boring novels, of a family of rich geniuses and how they each deal with their gifts and emotional problems. Talented Uncle Alfie wastes away from regret while his brother Carlo (both of them Klaus Maria Brandauer, star of István Szabó’s Mephisto) becomes a famous composer/conductor and steals his own son’s pregnant girlfriend. Son Angelo (Tetro) escapes to Argentina, hiding the fact that young Bennie is his son and not his younger brother.

That at least explains why Tetro doesn’t kick out Bennie, who pretty much ruins everything while visiting for a few days, giving away Tetro’s true identity and stealing his life story then producing it as a play for a festival run by celebrity artist Alone (Carmen Maura, Cruz’s dead mother in Volver). It’s nice how artistic talent runs in the family, and with no training or practice, Tetro’s cruise-ship-waiter brother/son can adapt someone else’s writings into an award-winning play.

Maribel dances for Alden:

I appreciated the ending. Early in the movie Bennie finds Tetro’s gun in a desk drawer and, having seen movies before, I know it’ll reappear. But it doesn’t, and the expected blow-up fight between the “brothers” at Alone’s festival turns into a quick reconciliation, telling her to piss off so they can have some family time.

The movie is widescreen B&W and flashbacks (plus clips from Tales of Hoffmann) are cropped (or shrunk) in full-color. Supposedly a near-remake of Rumble Fish, which I also rented but didn’t find time to watch.

Tetro is a spotlight operator for the play Fausta:

A. Nayman in Cinema Scope: “Tetro is also Italian for ‘gloomy,’ and Gallo glowers accordingly. … If this sounds like an unlikely series of events (and I haven’t even mentioned Bennie’s hotel room hot tub deflowering at the hands of a gorgeous local girl and her aunt) that’s because Tetro doesn’t have any pretenses to verisimilitude: it’s more obviously an operatic fable, with Malaimare’s exquisitely shadowed cinematography sealing the characters within a hermetic, slightly unreal screen space.”

by ·Comments Off on A Hollis Frampton Odyssey disc 2 (1971-1980)

Frampton explains his Hapax Legomena cycle:

Hapax Legomena means things said one time. The phrase is a piece of scholarly jargon that refers to words that occur only once in an entire literature or in the entire corpus of a writer’s work in the antique languages. The problem typically with a hapax legomenum is that because it occurs once, it occurs only in one context, and the context does not always reveal the meaning… There is always an element of uncertainty.

Poetic Justice (1972)

Frampton: “a film script in the act of becoming a film”

HF shoots 240 pages of a script upon a table, one at a time, describing a film in four scenes (tableaus). The first describes a couple of rooms in which “you” (I didn’t expect to be the star of the film) attempt to film a blue jay out the window until “your lover” comes home. The second scene alternates between shots of empty rooms, and shots of “my hand holding a photograph of the same scene” but populated. Next, the two of you make love while different impossible visions appear out the window. Back to photographs in the fourth scene, as your lover rifles through a stack of photographs, alternately showing the two of you in similar scenarios. The filmmaker returns: “Your lover’s hand is holding a still photograph of myself, filming these pages.”

Critical Mass (1971)

Slowly step through the audio of a two-character improvised drama, looping two steps forward, one step back, like a less intense but no less methodical version of a Martin Arnold film. Audio plays over black for a couple minutes, then picture, then picture disappears halfway through, and comes back (but out-of-sync) after an interval. Near the end, the editing stops interrupting every word of the dialogue, lets them run on for 20 or 30 seconds at a time, repeating sections we’ve heard before.

Briefly annoying, then thoroughly mesmerizing for the first half, then back to annoying.

I’ve watched (Nostalgia) before. The other four in the series are Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Remote Control and Special Effects.

–
Criterion summarizes Magellan: “His intention was for the cycle to include thirty-six hours of film, to be shown over the course of 371 days, which Frampton dubbed the Magellan Calendar.” This never made sense to me until I heard HF’s comments on the disc:

First of all, it’s a kind of encyclopedia or inventory of sites (sights?) which proposes to have so many different images that it will function as a kind of voyage through the world… If one were to undertake to see the final film in a certain form there would be really a little bit to see every day… One of the aspects that I think is important is that I feel that the spectator of film who has been invited or asked to experience film… might also enjoy having another kind of experience of film that filmmakers have. For a filmmaker, film is not an exotic thing that you go out to, it is a thing pretty much that you do every day. For a filmmaker, whatever you’re doing, even if you’re making Cleopatra or something like that, still you live with it, it becomes an extremely intimate part of your life, which is vivid on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s very ordinary. Film is not an exotic thing to be doing for a filmmaker, it’s daily.

The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I (1980)

Green flickers on black as an orchestra tunes up. A thunderstorm. Then alternating shots of a wedding preparation (applause) and a silent film (a low buzzing sound), with a white/red circular wipe separating the two. Bizarre.

Pans 0-4, 697-700

I thought from the title that HF would be panning the camera for a minute, each in a different location, but these are simply minute-long idea-films using any sort of motion or effect.
0: two cloud patterns strobed together
1: hippie bead thing penduluming left and right
2: thin white stips falling downward
3: manic time-lapse run through cornfield
4: sheets of paper on wall blowing in breeze, overlaid with the same shot at a different time, so each page looks like two sheets, moving through each other
697: argh, machete man removing dead cow’s head
698: whipping back and forth in a flower field
699: boy taunts camera with a still-living frog on a fishhook
700: ghostly translucent road traffic

Selected Pans:

Ingenivm Nobis Ipsa Pvella Fecit, Part I (1975)

Nude woman walks, turns, skips rope, plays ball on a black field in stuttering stop-motion. To HF, this represents springtime.

Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I (1976)

Skulls and mummified things. Red and green overlaid patterns that would probably make your eyes fall out if you watched with 3D glasses on. A hexagonal pattern rushes past as a palate cleanser between the other sections. I liked this one a lot.

Winter Solstice (1974)

Opens with what looks like the bonfire shot from Zorns Lemma. Jittery handheld shots of fire – dark, all yellows and red, with single frames of light blue at the cuts. A shower of sparks which might have been Pan 2. It’s all repetitive, hypnotic and silent – an excellent film to doze off to.

Also on the disc is Gloria!, which I watched once before.

by ·Comments Off on Shall We Dance (1937, Mark Sandrich)

Elements of this movie in order of importance:

1. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dancing on roller skates
2. Eric Blore (Sullivan’s valet) as an uppity hotel manager
3. The awful “you say potato, I say po-tah-to” song
4. E. Everett Horton as Fred’s fretful manager
5. A bunch more Gershwin songs, not that I can remember them
6. The plot

Famous ballet star Fred with a fake-Russian stage name is a closet jazz enthusiast, arranges to be on the same ocean liner as pop-musical star Ginger. As they get to know each other, a rumor spreads through the boat then the media that they’re already married. She is pissed at the rumors, goes home to marry her boring fiancee (there’s always a boring fiancee). Complications arise, a fake scandal is manufactured using a Ginger-faced mannequin, and Ginger agrees to secretly marry Fred so they can get publically divorced. But they stay together in the end. More importantly: they dance on roller skates.

by ·Comments Off on The Horse’s Mouth (1958, Ronald Neame)

Alec Guinness, a few years after The Ladykillers, plays dedicated painter Gulley Jimson, introduced getting out of prison and shooing off devoted fan Nosey. Jimson is a gruff-voiced wreck, living on a leaky boat at the docks, spending his days at the bar run by Cokie (Kay Walsh, Guinness’s costar in Oliver Twist and Last Holiday) or harassing a man who owns some of his work (Ernest Thesiger of The Old Dark House in one of his final roles) until he can afford enough paint to create more.

Jimson is extremely interested in feet:

Gulley and Cokie:

“Of course you want to be an artist. Everybody does once, but they get over it, like measles and chicken pox.” Jimson compares his artistic drive to a sickness – more like a drug addiction, taking down everyone around him in his weird quest to create (and sometimes destroy) new works. He finds a rich holidaying couple interested in art and installs himself in their apartment, selling their furniture to buy paints and food, as a similarly obsessed sculptor (Michael Gough, of Horror of Dracula the same year) takes the apartment below. Then he orchestrates a huge wall painting using art students to finish on schedule before the wall is to be demolished, and finally collapses it himself as the students clash with the construction crew.

Michael Gough:

The author gave his beloved creation a Catch-22 ending – Jimson escapes, sailing out of the harbor, contemplating new works on ever-larger canvasses.

I noticed an awkwardly dubbed line in the apartments, and even figured out that the sculptor was originally telling Nosey to “drop dead”. IMDB says the actor playing Nosey did drop dead a few days after shooting, hence the line change.

Film Quarterly liked it: “Guinness’ screenplay and performance amount to a rare comic achievement that speaks of serious things from behind surface flippancies and outrageous hokum.”

Also on the disc:
Daybreak Express (1953, D.A. Pennebaker)

New York train ride, jazzily edited and set to a train-sounding tune by Duke Ellington, really wonderful.

by ·Comments Off on Samurai Trilogy (1954-56, Hiroshi Inagaki)

An epic trilogy, obviously conceived as a single story – it would be foolish to watch just one. It might, in fact, be foolish to watch all three. A weighty, picturesque drama with restrained emotions, occasional action, and side characters I kept losing track of, adding up to a decent story about a great fighter learning to be a great person.

1600 AD: Toshiro Mifune (in his follow-up to Seven Samurai) is violent, spontaneous Takezo, whose weak-willed friend Matahachi (Rentaro Mikuni, lead of the first segment in Kwaidan, son in chains of Profound Desire of the Gods) joins him in going to war, leaving behind Matahachi’s mom and his fiancee Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa, who starred in Madame Butterfly between sequels). Their side is wiped out, and the two misfit warriors wash up with a mother and daughter, where they recover from battle wounds amidst sexual tension cued by rape attempts.

wide-eyed Matahachi and grim Takezo at war:

Takezo up a tree:

Mother and daughter survive by stripping dead samurai and selling their equipment – just like in Onibaba. Takezo flees after defeating the bandit that torments the women, then shrugging off the mom when she throws herself at him. She changes the story: “He attempted to assault me. He’s a savage.” Matahachi marries the mom, while his ex, Otsu, joins the search for Takezo, who is repeatedly captured by a smiling priest, who finally locks T. up in an attic full of books. T. emerges years later, calmer and wiser, renamed Musashi Miyamoto, tells Otsu to wait, and wanders off.

Akemi, Matahachi and Oko:

Otsu left behind:

Part two opens with a duel, MM telling a young kid called Jotaro to leave the arena. But of course he doesn’t, and tags along behind our hero after he kills the chainfighting Old Baiken. Akemi (Mariko Okada, married to director Yoshishige Yoshida, also star of some Ozu films), the girl whose mom married Matahachi is now darkly obsessed with MM, also pops up to torment Otsu, seems to be everywhere. Most of the movie concerns MM challenging the master of a fighting school, who will not fight him honorably so MM kicks the asses of some hundred students instead. By the end, the teacher mans up and meets MM, who does not kill him, after remembering how pissed everyone was when he killed the chainfighter.

MM vs. the chainfighter:

MM controlling his rage at the second duel:

Meanwhile some dickish birdslaying swordsman, supposed to remind us of young MM, wants to duel MM. And Otsu keeps pining after MM, who insists that he needs to keep training. I like the brief moments of animation (a lightning strike, cartoon birds flying across a painted sky) and the catchy theme music.

Akemi:

Part 3: predictably, Akemi has met the birdslayer. MM is still an undefeatable warrior, but now believes it’s best to avoid conflict. He postpones the birdslayer’s duel challenge and lives in a farming town with the kid and ever-suffering Otsu. The town is under siege by bandits (what peaceful small town in ancient Japan was not under siege by bandits?), and Akemi makes a deal with them. The siege goes wrong – MM kills many bandits and they kill Akemi shortly after she fights Otsu with an axe.

Bird guy:

MM and his little follower:

MM finally decides to give up his sword and marry Otsu, but first has to kill the birdslayer, which he does with a wooden sword, keeping the sun behind himself so the other man won’t notice.

by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Memorial Shorts

A night of avant-garde shorts watched in memorium of a fellow enthusiast who died young.

Let Me Count The Ways (Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6) (2004, Leslie Thornton)

“August 6, 1945 – Dad observes the bomb drop on Hiroshima from a reconnaissance plane” Processed stock footage, some of it labeled “dad”. Motion seems sped up. Japanese dialogue, a woman is questioned about having lived through the Hiroshima explosion. “Not one white person was burned.” Onscreen text about plant mutations. Flyover camera with a blue circle flashing on and off, scrolling faster and faster. Stills of Hitler striking poses warp into one another, with confusing voiceover in German and English.

The Whitney uses big words: “By editing together controversial or transgressive material, she creates discursive cinematic spaces in which to consider humanity’s inexplicable behaviors, as do fellow avant-garde filmmakers Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman. . . . Thornton’s employment of footage relating to Hiroshima and the atomic age, elucidating her preoccupation with anxiety, trauma, and culpability, derives in part from her grandfather’s and her father’s roles in developing the atomic bomb and from her up-close childhood experience of the Cold War.”

Tusalava (1929, Len Lye)

Animation that looks like it’s inspired first by cellular biology, then at the end by an abusive relationship, all with great piano music.

Glimpse of the Garden (1957, Marie Menken)

Brief static and longer motion shots of the garden, with nice extreme close-ups. It’s all set to the ceaseless chirping of a bird whose song I know well, since my parents had a mechanical singing version. But which bird?

Wintercourse (1962, Paul Sharits)

Quick movement and fast cuts form light patterns with recognizeable images: trees, statues, a gutter gushing water, flashes of nudity. The movie pauses to watch some TV, then goes on and on. I dozed, but I think there was a wedding near the end.

Pixillation (1970, Lillian Schwartz)

I liked the inky liquid-on-glass effects more than the computer graphics, though those are probably impressive for 1970. Music that gets increasingly harsh, loud and grating, so I kept turning it down. Didn’t count on me being able to do that, huh Gershon Kingsley? Lillian Schwartz did computer animation on The Lathe of Heaven.

Dirty (1971, Steven Dwoskin)

Two topless girls drink a bottle of wine then roll around in bed, printed with differing levels of extreme slow motion, the light all pulsating. There’s supposed to be music but I just hear a staticky rumble

Yantra (1957, James Whitney)

A million colored specks slide into different patterns, surely animated by some mathematical obsessive. Soundtrack goes from annoying to nice and quickly back – sounds computery, but this was 1957 so maybe not.

Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968, Joyce Wieland)

Illustrating current politics using rats, wonderful. Nightmarish soundtrack: from a siren to a sax solo to carnival music to the beach boys (but covered in buzzing flies). Joyce was married to Michael Snow at the time – wish he’d provided some lighting or sound editing help.

Valentin de las Sierras (1968, Bruce Baillie)

A Mexican family at work and play, shot in extreme close-up, with music and some voice on the soundtrack.

Carabosse (1980, Larry Jordan)

More madcap cutout animation, made less madcap by the dour piano tune on the soundtrack. Maybe cropped at the top?

by ·Comments Off on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay)

“There is no point. That’s the point.”

I always enjoy a good Tilda Swinton performance, and was willing to put up with a grim school-shooting drama to get one. I wasn’t expecting the movie to be such a cartoon, though. Her son is portrayed as so single-mindedly hateful that I’m disappointed the movie didn’t turn into straight supernatural horror by the end. Stylized movie with blatantly unrealistic portrayals of human behaviour (there’s definitely, definitely no logic) are usually okay, but the movie acts like Tilda’s world, feelings, situation are to be taken seriously. I couldn’t put all the parts into a whole that made sense.

Tilda has a devil child who has hated her since birth. Movie flips back and forth in time, culminating in the shooting (with a bow and arrow!), before which Kevin (sadly not Devon Bostick of Rodrick Rules) also shoots his little sister (whom he partially blinded in an earlier scene) and dad John C. Reilly. It seems like the whole rest of the movie was his build-up, that everything Kevin has ever done was to make Tilda’s life miserable, which it finally is as the town’s parents sue for all she’s got, and she ends up working a shitty job at a travel agency, living in a shack, drinking herself to sleep, with no family, visiting her mute homicidal son every week. Then the movie sabotages its demon-spawn horror by almost making Kev seem human in the final scene – what for?

Based on a novel. Intriguing Jonny Greenwood score featuring old-timey songs, well-shot by Seamus McGarvey (Atonement).

F. Croce:

The symbiosis between anxious mother and psychotic son—is she absorbing his growing malevolence out of guilt or responsibility, or is she projecting her own bad vibes onto him?—is what gives the film its shape, the sense of a deforming bulge resulting from turmoil swept under the maternal rug. But Ramsay doesn’t let the horror arise from the material; instead, she pulverizes it with a cacophony of clashing sound bridges, crudely symbolic colors and overwrought edits. Like Steve McQueen’s Manhattan in Shame, Ramsay’s Connecticut is a netherworld of vacant signifiers (Home, Office, Hell) where blunt abstraction and blunt literalism wrestle for control.