Anthology of night scenes and into the next morning, mostly involving couples getting together or not – one her most lovely and compulsively watchable dream-films, looks to be an influence on Claire Denis and Tyler Taormina.
Magellan (2025, Lav Diaz)
A daring thing to say in January but I’ll be surprised if we see a better pig sacrifice scene all year. Justin Chang compared this to Zama, but I dunno. This was less phantasmagorical, more of a bio/history pic than I wanted, and sitting up front at the digital screening felt like “TV in public.” Still some undeniable imagery here (with Serra’s DP, looking like Pacifiction) and Gael entering his Viggo era.
Lav in Slate:
It’s just one film for me—one whole thing. This is a continuing discourse. It’s all dealing with the suffering of other people, and not just particularly [that of] the Philippines.
…
I studied cinema as well, all the theories and everything. It’s very distracting, but it helps with discourse. Before you go into the process of filmmaking. It helps when you talk about the rigidness of Antonioni, the spirituality of Tarkovsky, and the humanism of Ozu. You mix all those perspectives and then just destroy them.
Season of the Devil (2018, Lav Diaz)
Trancefilm, eases you into slow rhythms so you get alternately fascinated and bored. On one hand it’s a musical and I love it, on the other it’s about paramilitary violence and I was sick of that subject before pressing play. I had a few small beers, spaced out a little, and how’d we start hanging out with this drunk poet? Watched this movie featuring a Janus-headed military leader in anticipation of seeing Lav’s Magellan in theaters (a Janus Films release).
High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)
Documentary of high school life in the late 1960s. Actually incredible, and so was the post-film Q&A, where a bunch of 20 year-olds debated how hilariously wrong everything was in the Ancient America before their parents were even born, then the one attendee who personally experienced the late 1960’s said the movie documents a unique moment when the old authorities were starting to lose their grip.
Half a Loaf of Kung Fu (1978, Chen Chi-Hwa)
Love the jesus christ superstar joke in the credits. Good cartoony music. Jackie fights a guy called King Kong in a henhouse; there is bird tossing. Popeye jokes, dream sequences, overall a very silly movie, the comedy/action ratio outta whack. Hundreds of actors in this, including James Tien, a Dragon Inn guy, and some Flying Guillotine veterans.
Heroes?
Birdie:
The TAMI Show (1964, Steve Binder)
Rock performance show/film from the first wave of the British invasion. Killer opening title sequence, with a montage of artists heading to the show with a Beach Boys song about these same artists heading to the show. Chuck Berry opens with an invisible backing band, then Gerry and the Pacemakers takes over from Chuck mid-song to the delight of the crowd even though they are 10% as cool. Audience gets screamy so the sound mix isn’t great, but the crowd calms down whenever someone non-white is onstage. Some of the best music acts at the peak of their powers (and also Jimmy D Whoever, who’s a drag) play a handful of songs each, hosted by cheeseballs Jan & Dean. The prizes for dancing, vocal performance and stage presence all go to James Brown – a shame that pretty-decent dancer Mick Jagger has to follow him. Dave Kehr raves: “Shot on videotape and transferred to film, this was the first full-scale rockumentary, and it’s still a model of the genre, well paced and mostly in focus.”
Mick vs. the Santa Monica crowd:
Björk: Cornucopia (2025, Isold Uggadottir)
A ton of cool stuff here, absurd costumes and masks, a large variety of setups: scrims and screens, organics meet computer graphics – every song is the most bananas shit you’ve ever seen. Not my favorite arrangements of Bjork songs (woodwinds and beats) but I melted at “Hidden Place” a cappella with a whole school of choir kids. Icelandic film director capturing stage production by the great Lucrecia Martel.
Other arguably non-movies watched lately: Aparna Nancherla Hopeful Potato, and Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One Backflip, both excellent.
Alexandre Larose shorts
930 (2006)
Rorschach black/white blobs in a slow reversal strobe, shifting to other things but always returning to what looks like a graveyard image morphing into the back of a person’s head. The sound turns from circus music at 10% volume (to trick you into cranking up your speakers) to nightmare industrial grinding at 100% to bubbly noise-reduction artifacts at 25% to a piano tune recorded in a room with terrible acoustics. Actually filmed inside a train tunnel, so that headstone image was the tunnel entrance. Larose is Canadian, roughly my age, and supposedly did more interesting work later, so let’s go.
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Artifices #1 (2007)
Ordinary traffic/street lights streaked into timelapse lines with ambient-doom music. It shows you the dot form and the line form, so know what you’re looking at, then a mirror view of the camera’s rotation apparatus at the end, so you know how they made it. Under/overscanned with visible sprocket holes, an impressive condensation of technique and imagery in three minutes.
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Ville Marie (2009)
Shapes and forms, sometimes human, in reverse-image flicker motion. Green person next to towering inferno. Unexpected face kaleidoscope. Trance-pulse, rainbow blotch, lot of different things visually as the soundtrack moves from haunted-house ambient to light piano to projector noise.
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La Grande Dame (2011)
Changing perspectives on building window grids, silent
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Brouillard #14 (2014)
Holy cow, what is this? Could be someone walking the same grassy path towards (and into) the water sixteen times, the images overlaid and masked so they bob and weave into each other, but I’m not sure if that would account for the trees being blown apart into pointillist abstractions. It adds up to a very cool trance effect, made even better by the song “Aghora” by Bill Laswell, which I added since it’s the right length.
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Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016)
1. Grainy indoor low-light scenes with a window in the background and a low hum on the soundtrack, not as cool as the bass parts in the Bill Laswell song, but the image is unstable, subtly changing into different scenes without you realizing how.
2. Similar fragmentary image instability but in nice clear color. A guy and his sixteen trailing shadow-images travel easily through the house, his actions causing exponentially-layered creaking-wood sounds.
3. Vague b/w dream of the previous segment.
4. b/w mountain textures
5. b/w but less vague, the guy and his shadows sit on a couch, the soundtrack clattering echoes in response.
Ohhhh, the layering was done in-camera, Larose must be a mad genius.
The Party (1968, Blake Edwards)
The same day I wished I was watching Mon Oncle during the WC Fields three-story house routines, I end up watching Blake and Peter Sellers make an American Tati movie. And like the Fields movie this has barely a plot (inept foreigner is fired from a movie and accidentally invited to the studio boss’s fancy party), is more about putting a comedian in a setting where he can get into hijinks. The normally racially-sensitive Edwards decided Sellers should be in brownface, because white British men weren’t permitted to be as socially weird as the script requires until the 1990 invention of Mr. Bean.
The hot French girl (mainly known for having shot her boyfriend) likes our guy, but is menaced by her McHale’s Navy costar Gavin MacLeod. Party host Alice was in anti-marijuana picture Assassin of Youth, and the film director was downgraded to a TV director in The Fortune Cookie. Drunk Waiter Steve Franken is the breakout star, went on to appear in some late Jerry Lewis films.
Sellers and the Drunk Waiter:
