Besides Jimmy Stewart the main thing I love about this movie is that they kept the Hungarian character names and signage when adapting for Hollywood. The boss thinks Jimmy is sleeping with his wife and fires him, but fellow salesman Joseph Schildkraut was the cheater, and the boss’s suicide is foiled by the errand boy. This all leads to some holiday season personnel-shuffling in the shop, and in the final couple seconds, romantic penpals Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy finally get together. The boss was the actual Wizard of Oz the year before, the cheater won an oscar for The Life of Emile Zola, and the errand boy followed-up with Ford and Hitchcock movies.
Daaaaaali! (2023, Quentin Dupieux)
A goof on Salvador Dali (who is played by multiple actors wearing the same mustache), and another meta-game after The Second Act. Journalist (Bird People star Anaïs Demoustier) repeatedly schedules interviews with a preposteous, self-obsessed Dali, and he keeps walking out. Even more Buñuelian than the last Dupieux/Demoustier movie Incredible But True, the action loops and rewinds, roles swap, there’s Black Lodge reverse motion, and it ends with everyone watching the interview film which was never made.
The Second Act (2024, Quentin Dupieux)
Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”
The Human Surge 3 (2023, Eduardo Williams)
I’ve been liking the still with the parrot from this movie all year – turns out that is its one really cool image, from a rare time when the image mutates and deforms its subjects into digital moosh. Roving fisheye handheld through city streets, following people (are they characters, or just people?). The camera isn’t sure either, and wanders off. Once it stood between two people talking and just spun in circles – Katy hated that. I guess it’s innovative(?), and the cinema contains multitudes, but it’s pretty harsh to watch this the same week as Days of Heaven.
Our people are kids with nothing going on, so it’s not clear why we want to listen to them talk for ages. But then sometimes one of them can fly, and sometimes the camera gets lost or glitches way out. I think I figured out that it’s a spherical google-maps lens, when the kids roll it down a hill at the end – Williams apparently framed the shots in post with a VR headset.
Michael Sicinski calls it:
a film so aggressively forward thinking that it leapfrogs over the concept of a second installment — features characters who enter stations in Peru and exit in Taiwan or Sri Lanka. In addition to creating a world of travel that moves at the speed of thought, an almost physical remapping of the planet, The Human Surge 3 dispenses with ordinary zones of dramaturgy, instead staging lengthy sequences in the middle of the water or on an arduous hill. As Williams melds different space-times into single scenes, even the basic rules of gravity are up for debate. Like living clip-art, people occupy the same location, but cannot possibly share a contiguous environment.
Careful (1992, Guy Maddin)
They don’t make movies like this, and they never did. I thought I remembered this well, but I was missing most of the second half, plus the quality of light, some acting and scenery particulars, and lines like “a single wobbly stone can pry you loose from the path and serenade you with the whistling wind of the death-plummet,” so it’s always worth watching again.
George Toles named the movie’s town Tolzbad, haha. After Johan’s mountain-madness incest-suicide, his brother Kyle gets a job at the Count’s castle, then hears his mom saying she only ever cared for the count. Kyle kills the count in a duel, leading mom to kill herself in front of mute cobwebbed haunted attic-dwelling brother Franz. The late Johan’s girlfriend Klara gets a job in the mines, tries to enlist Kyle to kill her dad.
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)
Bogart Marlowe is hired by wealthy recluse with two daughters: wild Carmen and tough Lauren Bacall. Bookseller Dorothy Malone helps him spot a gambler who’s thought to be involved, but the gambler turns up dead, and so does another guy, then Bacall brings up a new blackmail plot, then yet another guy gets killed, and finally Marlowe helps the cops wrap it up and all is finished.
But it can’t be finished – there’s still a half hour left and I haven’t seen Elisha Cook Jr. yet. Here he is, offering to sell info about another plot – all this time Bacall has been covering for evil landlord Eddie, whose thug Bob Steele poisons Elisha. Bogart Marlowe liked Elisha (who wouldn’t?) and takes this one personally, goes to Eddie’s hideout and blasts those fuckers instead of informing his cop friends.
Nerd Dorothy:
Bacall and Eddie:
Elisha, in over his head:
Ladies of Leisure (1930, Frank Capra)
Thought we would watch an early Barbara Stanwyck movie… ho-hum.
Painter Ralph Graves is a charisma vacuum.
The Movie Year in Review, 2024
Happy New Movie Year!
Once again I made a letterboxd list of all the must-see movies released during the year. I’ve watched about 60 percent of these, which is good, for me. We went to the movie theater fewer times than any year in history, for reasons not worth mentioning, so I especially need to catch up with late-year releases like Anora and Queer and Juror #2 – but I live in a city that is not New York, so Oh Canada and Hard Truths and Nickel Boys and The Brutalist are 2025 movies. At least I fixed https and some of the character encoding issues mentioned a year ago on the ol’ blog. Writeups have been pretty tossed-off these days, ho hum, what are you gonna do.
The 2024 Lists:
2024 Favorites: New and Recent Movies
2024 Favorites: New and Recent Movies
The best 2024 movies:
1. Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik)
2. She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico)
3. A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
4. Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
6. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
7. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
8. The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)
9. Trap (M. Night Shyamalan)
10. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
The best from the previous five years, watched this year:
1. May December (Todd Haynes)
2. The Kingdom 3: Exodus (Lars Von Trier)
3. Detective vs. Sleuths (Wai Ka-Fai)
4. The Kid Detective (Evan Morgan)
5. Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
6. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)
7. The United States of America (James Benning)
8. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
9. Gemini Man (Ang Lee)
10. Evangelion 4.0: Thrice Upon a Time (Hideaki Anno)