by ·Comments Off on Rock Docs: 20 Feet & Trances

20 Feet from Stardom (2013, Morgan Neville)

Expertly put together, a great show. Attempts a late swerve into pathos because all of their solo stardom didn’t take off, which clashes with the early sentiments about being all about the music. In the discussion of who treated the singers better or worse, Jonathan Demme and Joe Cocker and Sting and Luther Vandross come out well, Ike Turner and Phil Spector less so. I thought about Kelly Hogan at least every couple minutes.

“Rock and roll… saved our lives.”
“You get hooked on music, you’re fucked.”

–
Trances (1981, Ahmed El Maanouni)

An ambient rock doc – if it’s not self-evident that the music is good, if you don’t know why these guys are big, nobody’s gonna tell you. The band is called Nass El Ghiwane, and we get a mix of performance, rehearsal, and, not exactly interview, but pointing the camera at a band member until he starts talking.

I dunno about “a free-form audiovisual experiment” or “pure cinematic poetry” per the Criterion press, but it’s got nicely edited archive film and some really good closeups. The group (with two original members) was still playing as recently as last year.

by ·Comments Off on Happer’s Comet (2022, Tyler Taormina)

Wordless nighttime portrait of a restless town. Opens with rotting corn, ends with a rollerskate couple making love in the cornfield. An hour-long pillow-shot between Ham on Rye and the new Christmas Eve thing.

by ·Comments Off on Dredd (2012, Pete Travis)

Is this the first movie I’ve watched in full after previously watching its last ten minutes? It’s not the first time I’d watched the end of a movie and thought “this isn’t bad, I should see the rest of it” – that’d be Waxwork. This one I simply lost track, and ended up half-watching while working on something, looking up whenever someone got killed in super-slow-mo (they’re taking hummingbird-brain drugs). Some good violence, if nothing else. I noted all the important details last time – in the years since, Judge Urban has gotten involved in all the major properties, Psychic Thirlby was in Lousy Carter, Villain Headey did Game of Thrones, and the writer and DP made Trainspotting 2 together.

Zooted Dawg:

Slow-mo final boss plummet:

by ·Comments Off on Il Posto (1961, Ermanno Olmi)

Aka The Job, I watched this to see what it must be like to have a job (it sucks). Older brother goes to Milan to find work so maybe his little bro will be able to stay in school. First you gotta pass the interview, which seems to be one easy math problem, then a physical, which weeds out the desperate old guys. Then you’re mercifully given a post with nothing to do as a delivery boy’s assistant, and eventually a desk, along the way attending the saddest company holiday party ever, and attempting to connect with a hot girl who’s also the only person around your age.

After work:

Forgot I’d already seen something by Olmi – he did the best segment of Tickets. This was gloriously shot, a poetic upgrade to the early neorealists. Per Lawrence: “A collection of brilliant moments, some fleeting and improvised, others punchy and precise, fused together with an outlook at once generous and satirical”

Desk anxiety:

Kent Jones:

To say that Olmi identifies with Domenico, the young hero of Il Posto on the verge of a “job for life,” is to put it mildly. The pull of his narrative is fitted to Domenico’s inner turmoil, his curiosity and his romantic longing, like two pieces of wood joined by an expert carpenter. Even the lovely section in which the story veers off course to examine the private lives of Domenico’s future office mates (there are oddly similar tangents in Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us and Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, made around the same time) feels like an illumination of Domenico’s own perceptions: these hushed vignettes represent the lay of the adult land, as well as a set of possible futures.

by ·Comments Off on Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010, Panos Cosmatos)

Coasts purely on VIBES, which is frankly losing me, everyone croaking their lines glacially, TV-Glowing too hard, all whispering portent, nothing ever happening, until the patient explodes an employee. Reminded me more than once of The Catechism Cataclysm.

The patient is Eva Bourne, and the mad doctor was appropriately in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. He smooshes the face of his wife, or perhaps his mom, who cares. In the end he falls down and busts his head.

by ·Comments Off on Abraham’s Valley (1993, Manoel de Oliveira)

Not the most compelling story, but the film itself is so lovely. It’s been a minute since I watched an Oliveira but this has got to be among his greatest color cinematography, shot by Mário Barroso who’d soon move on to Monteiro films when Oliveira started working more in French and English. Came out between Non and Inquietude – there are seven other 1990s features I need to catch up with. The actors wait patiently while the narrator speaks their thoughts or backstory, or talks about them telling stories or doing actions we don’t see them doing, then they carry on with their scripted business.

Doctor Luís Miguel Cintra is set up with the beautiful young Ema, who is really too young until her aunt dies and she turns into wide-eyed Leonor Silveira. Time accelerates, and soon enough she’s sleeping with violinist Narcisco who is her daughters’ age. Nobody figures out how to have a successful relationship or marriage, eventually all of them die.

Leonor/Ema with Luís Lima Barreto and young Diogo Dória:

Moments before Luís tosses this cat straight into the camera:

Per Rosenbaum:

“This is a lyrical film,” Oliveira has aptly written. “It is so in the way a woman resists men, who represent power, on the strength of her poetic outlook on the world, even if it is mere illusion… This is the theme of Abraham’s Valley: how poetry will lead Ema to her own agony, how she will construct her death on the basis of a poetic view of the world and finally, how she will, step by step, organize such agony poetically.”

Young Ema:

I thought I was a bad viewer getting time periods mixed-up, but Michael Sicinski:

Part of what makes Oliveira’s cinema so constantly disarming has to do with this auteur’s disarming use of time, a factor that became much more pronounced in his later years. Take Abraham’s Valley, a film more than three hours in length. The characters in the film, particularly married couple Ema and Carlo and their servants, scan as aristocratic holdovers from another age, the same type of subjects who so often populate Oliveira’s cinema. Looking at their dress and behavior, one would place them in the mid-19th century. But only after 90+ minutes of screen time is it affirmed that Abraham’s Valley takes place in the present day (1993).

Unhappy Family:

by ·Comments Off on Outrage Coda (2017, Takeshi Kitano)

I’m starting to wonder if these movies do have continuity and they’re not just starting over every time with the same cast playing new characters. I checked my writeups for parts one and two, and still don’t know for sure – but hey, one of those cops is back in this one.

The bulk of the movie is the higher-ups of a Japanese crime family plotting against each other: Ren Osugi, Sansei Shiomi, Toshiyuki Nishida. This goes on forever, and right when you can’t take any more of it, Kitano flies in with his buddy Ichi and they shoot a hundred guys. A few women appear, all of them prostitutes. I’m making this sound bad, but of course it’s a good time, and I’m looking forward to the brand new Kitano joint.

by ·Comments Off on Carry-On (2024, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Joey Gordon-Edgerton? – Of the Tetris movie, I guess? – is playing TSA Agent Joey while evil remorseless terrorist Michael Bluth threatens his disney-cute gf Sofia and Agent Deadwyler puts the clues together to help out. Upgrade star Joey Logan-Green is a fake cop who gets in a big Children of Men car-fight with the agent, Nanny‘s Sinqua Walls is a coworker who’s gotta get gotten rid of, and Son of Anarchy Theo is Bluth’s hit man. The tension of the useless guy getting coerced into helping blow up a plane is all on point, but the attempts at deeper characterization and psychoanalysis and Joey’s redemption arc only serve to drag the movie to the full two-hour mark. Lately everything reminds me of Red Eye, so why do I not simply rewatch Red Eye? Maybe the least-good Joey Gordon-Serra film I’ve seen (and I skipped the obviously bad ones). Closing credits are excellent.

by ·Comments Off on Spermworld (2024, Lance Oppenheim)

He’s outdone himself in camerawork and subject matter. Needs slightly less focus on megafather Ari, whose psychosis has already attracted other doc-makers. Finds an amazing source of cringe in having people read their text messages aloud.

Read: Mark and Rafa and Neil, but mainly the Filmmaker interview.

Lance:

I think there’s the bigger questions that the movie ended up becoming really about: What exists of me when I’m no longer here? All these people are chasing something bigger than themselves. They want to be bigger than life and feel in different ways that they haven’t achieved that sense of importance. I relate to that. That’s more or less why I make movies, right?