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 that "bulk viewing." After Yang, the follow-up to Kogonada's stately debut Columbus, ...
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 year's Summer of '85. Everything Went Fine falls squarely into that category. It's ha...
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 than a tedious, ill-conceived Exquisite Corpse exercise. The rules: each film had to take place in the ...
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. So, no peace and quiet, no time to watch anything or write anything. You get the idea.
Sadly, t...
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 to play in Comp (although it did show up in Cannes' new Premieres section.) If Arnold made indie mu...
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 -- left filmmaking to become an author and arts administrator in Chile, founding the Viña del Mar ...
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 for In Review Online. In the coming days, you'll find my write-ups of Lois Patiño's evocative shor...
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 Dominik Graf film I've had on my hard drive for almost exactly one year. Time sure flies.
But I...
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 (Urszula Antoniak, 2022)
I've been seeing Antoniak's name pop up a lot in recent years...
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 of equipment, is just not as imposing as the movie camera, not as intrusive or weapon-like. Given t...
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 bead on. He's produced web-oriented political art (Workers Leaving the Googleplex), funky neo-...
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 the most accessible works of the current experimental film scene. And yet for me, she's definitely bee...
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, 2019's Science Without Substance. It should be noted that both films are remarkably dense, ch...
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 finds in Old Master painting. This approach does a lot of the heavy lifting for the directors, since pa...
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.
Asterisk at end of entry = change of song by previously included artist
1. ADAM...
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 should be impressed but wasn't really. That's because Fat City suggests that it's going to be ...
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 Enough Praying (Aldo Francia)
#12 Bombay to Goa (S. Ramanathan)
#41 Eat ...
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 worst film to date. His best films -- Fireworks Wednesday, A Separation, and Th...
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 to be swelling here, I guess I'd better get used to it.
You can (and should) watch Doug's film...
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, and the good old numerical randomizer.
But next up: Fat City.
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 some of the more rarefied practitioners of the avant-garde, but he doesn't seem interested in abandonin...
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 recognize his brand of sentimental wackiness. In so many respects, May seems to be actively working ag...
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 striving for genuine affect. However, I am no Kluge expert, and having seen Willi Tobler I...
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 think the director may have been selling his effort short. Yes, much of What's Up Doc? fal...
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 to the more slippery artistic gestures of Kantemir Balagov or Kovalenko. These films are united by a...
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 film, the most overwhelmed I am by how much I do not know. Until the recent restoration and re-relea...
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 pretty much established him as world cinema's Next Big Thing. My friend, however, was unimpressed, ...
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 you tell a joke, under any circumstances, you are attempting to forge a bond. And the crux of that bo...
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 that viewers and critics of Lost were sort of amazed by this approach, so maybe that kicked of...
2022-01-11 18:21:42 +0000 UTC View Post