'Tis the Season (2)
And here's the other. Enjoy.
2020-12-21 00:48:08 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
'Tis the Season (1)
I really only like two holiday songs. Here's one of them.
2020-12-21 00:47:17 +0000 UTC View PostTenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)
I happen to be of the opinion that Christopher Nolan's best film is The Prestige (with Dunkirk a close second). The Prestige, of course, is explicitly about stage magic, and the ontological conundrum of a world in which apparent miracles are possible two ways: through advance...
2020-12-19 03:27:54 +0000 UTC View PostNature (Artavazd Pelechian, 2020)
Armenian experimentalist Artavazd Pelechian has built a reputation on very little work, if by "work" we mean the actual length of film in circulation. But in fact he is a meticulous craftsman who spends years perfecting individual edits, treating him images in much the same way that a composer would em...
2020-12-18 22:09:41 +0000 UTC View PostND/NF: Is This Anything?
Since I am banned from Twitter, I have limited access to the Cinephile Hive Mind (CHM)™️. So I have to put the question to you. Have any of you seen some of these New Directors films? I'm wondering whether any of them seem to be worth a $12 rental. What say you? Also, you can vote more than once. Thanks team.
2020-12-17 20:28:16 +0000 UTC View PostThe American Sector (Pacho Velez & Courtney Stephens, 2020)
I seem to be in a distinct minority on this one, since most reviews I've read are fairly glowing. I wasn't all that impressed by The American Sector, since it struck me as an inferior iteration of a kind of film I very much admire. The experimental documentaries of James Benning and Nikolaus G...
2020-12-14 02:51:42 +0000 UTC View PostMr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)
I'd never seen Arkadin before, and I was partly prompted to see it because of all the discourse circling around David Fincher's Mank. That very tedious film seems to imply that everything great about Citizen Kane -- its flashback structure, its social commentary, its compact ...
2020-12-13 06:33:27 +0000 UTC View PostSomebody please tell me why...
. . . The Prom is 130 fucking minutes long? Haven't we suffered enough?
2020-12-11 20:28:21 +0000 UTC View PostCold Meridian (Peter Strickland, 2020)
I have no interest in ASMR. Not only do I find the videos boring; the sound stuff doesn't work on me. I wonder if avant-garde film has inured me to this response, since hearing whispery noises or seeing slow, repetitive actions is not a notable phenomenon for me, and ASMR presumes that such stimuli are...
2020-12-11 20:11:18 +0000 UTC View PostSpring Blossom (Suzanne Lindon, 2020)
One of the films that apparently would have been featured in Un Certain Regard if Cannes 2020 had actually happened, Spring Blossom (aka Seize printemps) is an impressive enough debut film from 20-year-old Suzanne Lindon. The director has talent, and some good ideas, and is likely to ...
2020-12-11 19:49:42 +0000 UTC View PostTommaso (Abel Ferrara, 2019)
Tommaso is a film that virtually compels us to read it as autobiography. It's about an American film director (Willem Dafoe) now living in Rome, who is married to a somewhat younger woman, Nikki, played by Ferrara's own wife (Cristina Chiriac). The couple have a three-year-old daughter, played...
2020-12-10 21:00:21 +0000 UTC View PostThe Midnight Sky (George Clooney, 2020)
NOTE: This "social reaction" is EMBARGOED. So let's keep it entre nous, fam.
I haven't checked in with George Clooney, Film Director since 2005, and judging from The Midnight Sky I don't need to go back and catch up. Granted, th...
2020-12-09 06:36:49 +0000 UTC View PostCity Hall (Frederick Wiseman, 2020)
The great Frederick Wiseman will turn 91 on New Year's Day. Like a handful of old masters (Godard and Michael Snow come to mind), Wiseman is still going strong and shows no signs of slowing down. At the same time, City Hall is a rather unusual film for Wiseman. Very few directors have exhibite...
2020-12-09 04:40:38 +0000 UTC View PostDear Comrades! (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020)
With the exception of his brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky may be the most well-connected filmmaker in Russia. This may be irrelevant in evaluating his new film Dear Comrades! But one of the things that is rather irksome about this film is its absolute confidence. In dramatizing t...
2020-12-08 18:17:02 +0000 UTC View PostThe Maltese Cross Movement (Keewatin Dewdney, 1967)
Quite unexpectedly, I finally had the chance to see Keewatin Dewdney's The Maltese Cross Movement, a film I've read about for as long as I've been studying experimental film. Dewdney is a mathematician who made exactly one film, following a cinema workshop he happened to ...
2020-12-08 17:29:49 +0000 UTC View PostDavid Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020)
"Utopia -- the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes." (Yvonne Rainer)
Of course it isn't Stop Making Sense. Nothing else is. However, one of the most striking things about American Utopia -- the film, the concert, and the new songs -- is how it subtly...
2020-12-08 07:26:31 +0000 UTC View PostMinari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)
Let's see: Dreamer dad (Steven Yeun), steadfast but skeptical wife (Han Ye-ri), mostly nondescript older daughter (Noel Kate Cho), adorable little boy with a congenital health problem (Alan Kim), and a vulgar grandma (Youn Yu-jung) who must learn to sand down her rough edges in order to conn...
2020-12-03 23:10:12 +0000 UTC View PostCollective (Alexander Nanau, 2019)
Over on Letterboxd, I discovered a Romanian writer, a graduate student in Leeds, who'd had enough of viewers watching Collective and saying "it's just like Trump!" She (sorry -- I think 2020-12-03 03:03:51 +0000 UTC View Post
White Lie (Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis, 2019)
White Lie is almost intolerable. It creates a scenario of fundamental tension -- a liar and grifter continually on the verge of being discovered -- and slowly, methodically turns the screws, showing the walls closing in. We've seen this before. But there are a few things that set White Lie...
2020-12-02 21:14:49 +0000 UTC View PostA Modest Proposal:
Someone should loop this soundbite into a kick-ass EDM cut called "Hit Those Speakers."
2020-12-01 19:35:47 +0000 UTC View PostUncle Frank (Alan Ball, 2020)
Ball gonna Ball. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's mystifying, in a way, that Uncle Frank arrives on global streaming the same week as Happiest Season. Both films are bizarre throwbacks to an era of toxic homophobia, and not just because they depict the struggles of the closet. The Clea DuVall...
2020-11-30 07:05:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe Mole Agent (Maite Alberdi, 2020)
An unconventional documentary in a number of respects, The Mole Agent is effortlessly entertaining and often quite touching. But it seems that some critics find the film uniquely untrustworthy. Part of this is the usual suspicion of heartwarming material, a tendency of critics to police the bo...
2020-11-30 06:30:06 +0000 UTC View PostRoutine Pleasures
Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine, 2020)
Back in 2014, I saw Levine's film Wild Canaries, but I didn't remember much about it except that I did not like it. When I looked back at my review, it all came back to me. It's a seriocomic caper film slathered in Hitchcock and...
2020-11-25 23:35:53 +0000 UTC View PostAfter Lucia (Michel Franco, 2012)
Michel Franco is not Michael Haneke. This strikes me as an obvious enough point that I really shouldn't need to articulate it, but everywhere I look, it seems that critics and programmers insist on explaining Franco as Mexico's answer to Haneke, as "Hanekesque." This is absurd. And I say this ...
2020-11-22 19:34:49 +0000 UTC View PostThe Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020)
With its insistence on atmosphere over plot, The Nest is kind of a perfect sophomore film, the sort of work that a young stylist gets to produce after establishing themselves as a rising talent. It's the mark of an artist unwilling to adapt to the standard codices of industry filmmaking, someo...
2020-11-21 21:06:40 +0000 UTC View PostFireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (Werner Herzog and Armando Christian Pérez, 2020)
Cinetracts '20 (various filmmakers, 2020)
Omnibus films. We all have traumatic memories of them. Do you remember where you where when you saw 11'09"01, the cosmically atrocious international gang-bang intended to pay homage to the memory of 9/11? While some people experienced that disaster collectively, in a film festival setting, I s...
2020-11-20 06:12:39 +0000 UTC View PostTwo Films by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
It's a cliche, but it's unavoidably true. A critic experiences few pleasures greater than that of discovering a major new talent, partly because it's so rare. As the saying goes, 90% of everything is crap. Never is this more often true than with younger filmmakers, who are usually too besotted with the...
2020-11-18 07:10:06 +0000 UTC View PostMLK/FBI (Sam Pollard, 2020)
The documentary as preamble, or perhaps as prolepsis. It is understandable that every generation requires its reintroduction to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., given the active myth-making that surrounds him. King's calls for racial justice are customarily severed from his equally emphatic demands for eco...
2020-11-13 18:31:38 +0000 UTC View PostMake Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
Back when I taught Film 101, I always showed Tokyo Story. In general, students responded well to it -- as well as they responded to anything foreign and in black-and-white, which was a tepid reaction compared with Hitchcock, which struck them as the beginning of "real" movies. But without fail...
2020-11-13 05:11:22 +0000 UTC View Post