msicism

Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland, 2022)

It took me a minute to catch up with Strickland's latest, for a number of tedious reasons. (It never opened here, of course. IFC kept sending me screener links that didn't work. And it took two solid days to find online subtitles that included Stones' Green narration.) And although I remain steadfast in my admiration of The Duke of Burgundy, I'm beginning to think this fellow is less than me...

The Passengers of the Night (Mikhaël Hers, 2022)

Here's how I described the film for the Viennale catalogue:

Beginning with archival footage of celebrations following the election of François Mitterand in 1981, and ending shortly after his second election in 1988, Mikhäel Hers’ The Passengers of the Night might initially be mistaken for a political film. But this is a story of personal freedom, the family as an evolving unit, and...

Cooler Heads Prevail

So yeah. I've taken some time, and I feel like I have a more measured response to some recent events. And it seems worth sharing them with you, in case you're curious.

There are some major stressors at present, mostly relating to my home life. I am having a bit of a parenting crisis, and I won't go into detail, but I do feel that Jen and I are facing one of those moments where our success or fa...

India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975) (take two)

I had been under the mistaken impression that I'd seen India Song many years ago. I had a very bad VHS copy and now, having watching the version currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, I recognize two things. 1) The version I had in my possession was so degraded that the film's essential virtues -- its use of color and shadow -- were nearly illegible. 2) Unless my memory has seriously ...

India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)

10 Things I Prefer to Marguerite Duras:

-a bendy stras

-A Korean spas

-Quick Dras McGras

-broccoli slas

-"Baswitdabas"

-Walter Chas

-"Win, Lose or Dras"

-an early thas

-a circular sas

-"She-Hulk: Attorney at Las"

Currents / Wavelengths / Crossroads

Fairytale (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2022)

Aleksandr Sokurov is a director typically perceived as having a distinctive style, a brand even. The work is thought of as being ponderous, grim, even a bit self-important. And while this may be the case for a number of his films, Sokurov actually has a lot of variety in his filmography. Spiritual Voices, to take one example, is indeed slow and serious. But it is also a landmark work of vide...

The Adventures of Gigi the Law (Alessandro Comodin, 2022)

Following his well-liked (although unseen by me) Summer of Giacomo and his not quite as well-liked (and disliked by me) Happy Times Will Come Soon, Italian director Alessandro Comodin has produced his most accessible film to date, a meandering portrait of a genial cop (Pier Luigi Mecchia) who goes by the nickname Gigi. He is a sergeant, I believe, part of a small police force in a s...

'Carno Knowledge

I reviewed a couple of Locarno competition titles for InReview Online. Here they are. Please excuse the formatting / kerning issues.

Tommy Guns (Carlos Conceição, 2022)

"The film is a changeling, constantly revising and reversing its apparent  intentions. Although it bears many of the hallmarks of a war film, it  also depicts the military mentality as a form o...

Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (Wai Ka-fai, 1997)

Since Wai Ka-fai is "in the news" right now, owing to his very well-received new film Detective vs. Sleuths, I thought it was time to finally go back and watch his defining solo effort, a film that has been recommended to me over the years by numerous friends, most recently Shelly Kraicer. Loyal followers of 2022-08-07 18:53:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Against Time (Ben Russell, 2022)

Ben Russell's latest film is in part an expansion of his 2020 film What Distinguishes the Past, which was featured in this year's edition of Media City. That film, inspired in part by the death of Russell's friend Jonathan Schwartz, is an elaboration of techniques Russell has used in earlier films, Trypps #7 (Badlands) and YOLO (2015). In those works, Russell indeed moved "...

When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories (Éric Baudelaire, 2022)

This new featurette by Baudelaire is actually more of a compilation, comprised to two short films and the longer titular work, a documentary about experimental composer Alvin Curran. One learns a great deal about Curran's post-Cagean philosophy of collective improvisation, in particular how he sees it as an aesthetic model for a more just, egalitarian society. Curran certainly isn't the first to cons...

After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (Bertrand Mandico, 2021)

I have a soft spot for Bertrand Mandico. Granted, I have yet to really embrace his films. That's because they are, for lack of a better way to put it, at war with themselves. Mandico is a fundamentally visual director, driven by outré imagery and amorphous sexuality. In any given frame of After Blue, you are liable to see objects and spaces that look like nothing else you've seen. This is n...

Talking About the Weather (Annika Pinske, 2022)

This is a graduation film from a student at Berlin's dffb, and judging from the information in the credits, she worked closely with Maren Ade. This was my primary reason for watching Talking About the Weather, and taken as a first film from a young maker, it's very promising. Pinske shows great flair in staging the kinds of interpersonal conflict that are familiar to any woman in the academy...

The Poll of Polls

Looking back, I see I have neglected to honor the dictates of a few earlier polls, including the 1972 films and a selection of semi-random, unseen films. So this is a bit of a hybrid poll.

Although you are permitted only three votes, I will be focusing on the top vote-getters in order. (You can, of course, log more than three votes. The system will not stop you. But restrain yourselves!) <...

A Summer's Tale (Éric Rohmer, 1996)

When I was a younger man, I was a complete idiot. This is not to say that I am some beacon of rationality and wisdom now. I'm sure I'll look back on these days years from now and marvel that I was able to pull off some facsimile of adulthood. But during my high school and undergraduate days, I possessed a particular kind of idiocy, and A Summer's Tale reminded me of those glorious salad days...

A little behind....

Hi folks, and thank you (once again) for your patronage, and your patience.

I'm behind on writing up the films I've seen, including a strong final Rohmer selection. And I need to get a new Director of the Month poll up.

But basically, I had a parenting emergency which required making a 48-hour turnaround trip to New Jersey to retrieve my wonderful, wayward offspring. He is now safely home...

Riotsville, USA (Sierra Pettengill, 2022)

A specter is haunting the world of documentary: the specter of the essay film.

Riotsville, USA is a good example of a film that might've been much stronger had its makers decided to attempt less, focusing on the topic at hand. Of course Pettengill has uncovered some amazing footage from the government archives, where we see the US military's very controlled facsimile of total chaos and...

That Kind of Summer (Denis Côté, 2022)

My description for the Viennale:

The protagonists of Denis Côté’s films often live on the margins, having been cast aside because of psychological wounds that refuse to heal. In his latest film, Côté considers the therapeutic situation itself. Un été comme ça takes place during a 26-day retreat for women who have been diagnosed as having sexual dysfunctions. Under the care of ...

Elvis (Baz Lurhmann, 2022)

Although Elvis is generally better than one might expect, it's strangely shapeless and ungainly. Luhrmann and his three co-scriptwriters have some trouble deciding exactly what sort of film they want to make, and the result is a kind of compromise between print-the-legend mythmaking (the first third) and a chronicle of steady decline, greatness marred by greed (the final two-thirds). It prob...

Mother and Son (Léonor Serraille, 2022)

Here's what I wrote for the Viennale catalog description of this film:

Léonor Serraille follows her debut feature, the Camera d’Or winning Jeune Femme (2017) with a film radically different in scope and temperament, confirming herself to be a major new voice in French cinema. A close examination of a family unit under cultural and interpersonal strain, Mother and Son combin...

It Is Night In America (Ana Vaz, 2022)

In her longest film to date, Brazilian experimentalist Ana Vaz turns her attention to habitat encroachment in the city of Brasilia. It is an interesting choice for a first feature, since most of her previous films engage in somewhat more complicated cultural and political histories. Apiyemiyekî? (2020), for example, is about the Brazilian government's genocide against an indigenous tribe fo...

The Unstable Object II (Daniel Eisenberg, 2022)

Clocking in at just under 3 1/2 hours, The Unstable Object II bears the subtitle, "contributions to a future archive." And indeed, there is a comprehensiveness in Eisenberg's film that suggests an attempt at fully documenting a set of industrial procedures, from beginning to end. This is a film in three independent parts, and while each of those parts has its own organic structure, Eisenberg...

Word (Beata Parkanová, 2022)

Depictions of life under totalitarianism tend to focus on dramatic instances, moments when someone either buckles under to compromise or, sticking to their guns, must be eliminated. Word, a film about the years following the Prague Spring in 1968, takes a different tack. Thematically it resembles Terrence Malick's recent World War II biopic A Hidden Life. But where that film focused...

Hit the Road (Panah Panahi, 2021)

Encroaching fascism keeps us perpetually off balance, always braced for the next punch in the gut. This state of anxiety has many side effects, one of them being that as we feel ourselves to be under attack, we reflexively turn inward, looking to insulate ourselves and our loved ones from sudden harm. This inward turn, of course, serves the fascists very well. It places us in a mindset conducive to t...

Three Recent Experimental Films

Surface Rites (Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpor, Parastoo Anoushahpor, 2022)

The Canada-based law offices of Anoushahpour, Anoushahpor, and Ferko have been making reliably deft experimental documentaries for nearly a decade. Although the subject matter of the films varies widely, there are a few commonalities. The films are usually based in the specificities of one or more global ...

Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)

Yes, I am only just now catching up with Mike Leigh's Palme d'Or winner, his biggest critical and commercial success Stateside so far. When it came out, I was generally disinclined toward seeing what I perceived to be "Oscar movies," and although I'd seen three of Leigh's films by this point, something about this film just put me off. Maybe its Woody Allenesque title? Anyway, I had no good reason not...

Leonora Addio (Paolo Taviani, 2022)

This is a film I would have turned off well before the halfway mark, except for the fact that I have a weakness for old school auteurs. Despite it being clear from very early on that Leonora Addio was not a good film, I guess I feel like a master like Taviani has earned the benefit of the doubt. To put it another way: someone asked me at TIFF why I had devoted three hours of my screening day...

Men (Alex Garland, 2022)

Having only read about Men and seen the trailer, I popped off on Twitter, as one does. I remarked that the film looked like the version of von Trier's Antichrist that this era deserves. Now that I have actually engaged with Men, I can see that I was only half right. While both films are about women and trauma, and the way that misogyny militates against the development of w...

The Restless (Joachim Lafosse, 2021)

Belgian though he may be, Joachim Lafosse seems to fall into a particular category of French director whose work seems primarily designed to win Césars and Louis Delluc Prizes. The films embody a 21st century Tradition of Quality, with their undistinguished realism, acrobatic performances, and above all, the sorts of bourgeois family crises that, in their very depiction, have become shorthand for cr...