Quite often there is a significant disparity between how films are received at festivals versus their broader release. This is usually attributed to the hothouse atmosphere of festivals like Cannes, where the press corps is watching multiple films a day and are asked to render snap judgments on all tha...
2022-03-14 17:35:32 +0000 UTC View Post
It's fairly obvious that Ozon's rebellious days are behind him. We won't be getting another Sitcom or Water Drops on Burning Rocks from him; the best we can hope for are solid, reasonably affecting entries along the lines of Under the Sand, Time to Leave, or last yea...
2022-03-13 21:46:28 +0000 UTC View Post
A rare film I was able to see via the Media City Film Festival online, I Miss Sonia Henie is an absolute waste of time. But if you're an irredeemable completist, it may be worth 15 lousy minutes. The brainchild of Yugoslavian experimentalist Karpo Godina, this is less of an omnibus project tha...
2022-03-07 04:34:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, in addition to being pummeled by grading, the last two weeks have been fairly intense around here, with huge construction projects creating a major racket nonstop. All this to prepare for my son coming back to town for a visit before returning to New Jersey where he's staying for a month or so. S...
2022-03-05 06:34:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Following her well-regarded short film Wasp (2003), British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's debut feature Red Road (2006) bypassed the entire film festival hierarchy, getting selected for Competition in Cannes. And in fact Cow, her new documentary, is her first feature not...
2022-02-24 05:46:32 +0000 UTC View Post
It happens sometimes: the random luck of the draw directs you to a masterwork you'd never have discovered otherwise. This is the second of two feature films by Chilean director Francia, and by the looks of it, he could have gone on to have a brilliant career. Instead, Francia -- a pediatrician by trade...
2022-02-24 05:22:02 +0000 UTC View Post
(...everybody talk about Pop Musik!)
As I begin to tackle the backlog of writing, mostly focusing on Media City, I wanted to quickly alert you to some work I've done elsewhere. In particular, through the kind assistance of Morris Yang, I have written some reviews of a few Berlinale films...
2022-02-24 01:28:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi all,
Just a note to say I've been a bit tied up with the day job, so I haven't posted as much as I'd like. But shortly I will have reviews up for the Media City Film Festival, which I'm currently working through. I also hope to finally see Jackass Forever this weekend, and watch the D...
2022-02-18 21:56:08 +0000 UTC View Post
(Just in case this eons-in-the-making comedy callback was leaving you confused.)
Splendid Isolation (...
2022-02-15 20:49:58 +0000 UTC View Post
There is no obvious way to present an audio field recording. The audience for this type of documentation is mostly restricted to anthropology specialists conducting archival research, even though audio recordings can often achieve an intimacy that ethnographic film cannot. The tape recorder, as a piece...
2022-02-11 01:25:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Burger King Alexandrium, waar je het kunt hebben zoals jij het wilt.
Impersonator (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2021)
Wilson is an interesting artist, someone I've yet to really get a bea...
2022-02-08 20:30:33 +0000 UTC View Post
(pictured above: Het Huis van de Whopper, Rotterdam, Netherlands)
Glass Life (Sara Cwynar, 2021)
It's strange. I suspect that on a semi-objective level, Cwynar's films are among th...
2022-02-04 02:58:15 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the third and final film in Barnett's "Sweet Dreamers" trilogy, a suite of feature-length experimental films. While I have not seen the second film, Substance Without Science, I think I can make some general remarks about the relation of Either or Neither to the first film, 20...
2022-02-03 04:11:33 +0000 UTC View Post
First it must be acknowledged that this is one of the best-looking films in quite awhile. While Simone D'Arcangelo's cinematography for King Crab maintains a consistent texture, it is also attuned to the slightest differences in light and shadow, lending the images the palpable quality one fin...
2022-02-02 05:39:34 +0000 UTC View Post
UPDATE: 120 struck me as a dumb number. So it will be 125.
It's been a few years, so I decided to revisit and revise the favorite song list. There are numerous deletions, and an additional twenty-five slots, because why not?
Asterisk in front of entry = new artist addition....
2022-01-28 06:21:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Given the high reputation of Fat City, I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that it's quite a lovely movie, and a deeply sympathetic portrait of losers still struggling to believe that they aren't yet down for the count. But this is kind of a sly film, and I spent about half of it thinking I sho...
2022-01-28 03:20:18 +0000 UTC View Post
I just finished Fat City (comments forthcoming shortly), so I decided to use ye olde number randomizer to decide the next five 1972 films I will be watching. They are, in order, 134, 44, 12, 41, and 76. Let's see what they are!
#134 Sleuth (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
#44 En...
2022-01-25 21:19:35 +0000 UTC View PostHere are a couple of films I caught up with recently. I liked them well enough, but others seem more impressed.
A Hero (Asghar Farhadi, 2021)
Farhadi was probably acutely aware that his second international effort, Everybody Knows, was widely considered his w...
2022-01-23 23:21:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I wanted to say a quick word about this film, which I recently caught up with. As was the case when writing about Frederic Da's Teenage Emotions, I feel a bit awkward commenting here on a film made by a friend and subscriber to the Patreon. However, since the ranks of filmmakers seem ...
2022-01-21 00:47:12 +0000 UTC View Post
I have been amassing a collection of prospective '72 views here:
https://letterboxd.com/msicism/list/shakedown-1972-to-watch-list/
The plan is to alternate between member polls here, an...
2022-01-20 22:50:58 +0000 UTC View PostLast year saw the release of two new films, each by a prominent European formalist. These are makers I should know a bit better than I do.
A Floating World (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2021)
Rousseau seems to be a bit of an anomaly in French film. His work has affinities with som...
2022-01-20 19:22:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Ironically, this was probably a great choice as my introduction to Elaine May. If the films she both wrote and directed exhibit more of this sensibility, they must be really, really good. Almost everything that doesn't work here is attributable to the script, and I have seen enough Neil Simon to recogn...
2022-01-18 23:24:13 +0000 UTC View PostAs Nicolas and I were discussing Kluge's use of bad fonts, my mind drifted back to Pusha T.
Having recently watched Orphea, the odd film-collage Kluge co-directed with Khvan, I wondered whether the decades-long stint in television had somehow warped Kluge's sense of how images actually worked. Like the TV work I've seen, Orphea is baldly declarative, even when it seems to be...
2022-01-17 22:48:51 +0000 UTC View Post
The tagline for What's Up, Dog? was "a screwball comedy... remember those?"This was certainly wise of Bogdanovich and Warners to clearly label this package -- a far cry from today, when everything is about the opening weekend, so studios insist on selling the sizzle and not the steak. Still, I...
2022-01-17 22:24:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I have been somewhat mixed on the films emerging from Alexander Sokurov's production initiative, it's obvious that the old master has an eye for new talent. This is particularly vital, since the Russian film industry remains under the watchful eye of Putin loyalists who prefer gaudy spectacle ...
2022-01-15 02:12:47 +0000 UTC View Post
The wonderful thing about cinema, or any artform really, is its utter infinitude. For all the moaning about the death of cinema (and cinema, it seems, has been dying since at least 1908), there is such a vast array of underlit corners and historical alleyways ripe for discovery. The more I learn about ...
2022-01-14 05:55:03 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a true-life legend among my cinephile crowd, involving a screening at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. A friend, who is not a professional critic but can more than hold his own in terms of obscure art cinema, went to see Platform, Jia Zhangke's second film and the one that...
2022-01-14 04:49:25 +0000 UTC View Post
If you've ever taken a public speaking course, or read any Toastmasters material, or even gotten personal advice on giving a speech at some function, you've probably been told the same thing again and again. "Break the ice. Open with a joke."
Needless to say, this is a terrible idea.
When y...
2022-01-12 03:14:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Maybe it's because I've been watching Yellowjackets recently, but I am getting tired of movies and shows whose structure is dominated by dual timelines. Granted, there have been flashbacks practically since narrative cinema began, but this is something a bit different. I recall at the time tha...
2022-01-11 18:21:42 +0000 UTC View Post