Goldwater was in the White House. America's young men were being sent to Algeria to execute a dying colonialist politic. The Washington Generals had just clenched the Eastern Division. And Bobby Goldsboro (above) had the #1 song in Canada with "Rock Your Baby."
But what of the cinema? Please select THREE of the choices below, and I will watch the winners. (For this initial poll, I chose a combi...
2022-01-11 02:42:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Need it be said? Happening, this year's Golden Lion winner and the sophomore feature from Audrey Diwan, is timely as they come. It's a film about France in 1963, although Diwan quite strategically withholds any obvious time-period markers for the first 20 or so minutes. Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a high school senior on the academic track, seemingly bound for a promising career as a profe...
2022-01-09 20:50:58 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a film I always meant to catch up with, mostly because I have been reading about it in passing for nearly twenty years. Janie's Janie is repeatedly cited in the documentary scholarship of the great Bill Nichols, who noted its unique position at the intersection of direct cinema and intimate character study. And it's true, one could never imagine Wiseman or Allen King devoting all the...
2022-01-08 01:33:40 +0000 UTC View Post
It's sometimes the case that a given artwork takes on more meaning that it might have originally because of unexpected historical developments, and that is definitely the case with A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, Shengze Zhu's follow-up to her 2019 internet-culture collage Present.Perfect. The new film, begun in early 2020, is a fairly straightforward portrait of the city of ...
2022-01-07 22:36:13 +0000 UTC View Post
While there's no question that Koberidze's second feature film is one of the most formally accomplished cinematic works of 2021, I still find myself having some difficulty embracing it. I suspect that part of why it has struck such a chord with cinemphiles is that in addition to exhibiting a rigor that at times resembles the avant-garde at its most rarefied -- Nathaniel Dorsky and especially Robert B...
2022-01-06 19:30:32 +0000 UTC View Post
And I can KICK! And STRETCH! And KICK!
Okay, now that the year-end crunch is winding down -- still need to watch un film de Margalit* Gyllenhaal and a few others -- I wanted to get back to watching older films. And I had an idea.
Maybe instead of doing a director of the month, I would use Mike D'Ang...
2022-01-04 17:13:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 2019)
A film so ambitious in scope that it becomes almost aggressive, Labyrinth of Cinema is truly one of a kind -- mind-bending, frustrating, educational, and ultimately glorious. It's the final film completed by Ôbayashi, a Japanes auteur still best known for a single film (1977's House) but whose oeuvre has been red...
2022-01-03 06:41:13 +0000 UTC View Post
North by Current (Angelo Madsen Minax, 2021)
Minax's deeply humane documentary about a family tragedy might productively be studied against one of my least favorite films, Dear Zachary. While the earlier film is told from the standpoint of a defiant outsider, who believes that behind every crime there is an absolute truth and an irredeemable culprit, North by Curre...
2022-01-02 22:14:14 +0000 UTC View Post
"I just thought I'd do a little hoedown."
Poet (Darezhan Omirmayev, 2021)
A careful, patient film that has an extremely clear set of points to make, Poet couldn't have been made by anyone by Omirbayev. At the same time, the unexpected, incongruous moments that have enliv...
2021-12-28 01:29:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Outside Noise (Ted Fendt, 2021)
As I suggested on Twitter, I admire Ted Fendt's films quite a bit more than I like them. He is part of a loose consortium of younger filmmakers -- Luise Donschen, Ricky D'Ambrose and Sofia Bohdanowicz are others -- who appear to share many of the same basic influences. These include Straub / Huillet (whose collected writings Fendt himself transla...
2021-12-27 05:09:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Although "lightning" may not be the best adjective here. I'm still finding it hard to view movies, as there is always some IKEA that needs my special touch with an Allen wrench. Also, one of the seventeen cats is always hungry. Anyway, here's where we're at.
Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021) 2021-12-22 22:23:38 +0000 UTC View Post
I do want to apologize, not just for the highly infrequent posting, but for the shoddy viewing as well. There's just too much going on, and I can only work in brief spurts.
Drive My Car (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Drive My Car is clearly the more ambitious of Hamaguchi's two 2021 films, but I am willing to court dismay by saying that I much prefer...
2021-12-19 20:03:04 +0000 UTC View Post
I need your help regarding the apparent Film of the Year.
Should I:
2021-12-13 17:33:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
One would have to be heartless not to be affected by the story of Amin, an Afghan refugee who endured years of terror and anxiety in his effort to survive. Before finally arriving in Denmark (courtesy of a comparatively less venal human trafficker), he lost contact with his family for years and felt compelled to deny their very existence. Sinc...
2021-12-11 11:00:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
This adaptation of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel is certainly timely, in terms of its concern with racism as a part of the American DNA. But in its faithfulness to the source material, Hall's debut as a director comes off as a bit studied and leaden. I suppose it's admirable that she avoided the ham-fisted symbolism and contemporary meta-gestures that w...
2021-12-08 23:27:07 +0000 UTC View Post
(Stephen Sondheim, RIP)
It's been a busy couple of months, and I very much appreciate your patience. Jen, the animals, and I are now settling in our new home, a three-story townhouse in Houston's 1st Ward district. I am hoping that constantly going up and down the stairs (to say nothing of the lugging and rearrangement of heavy boxes of books) will do wonders for my figure.
It was not exa...
2021-12-06 07:50:59 +0000 UTC View Post
The Night (Tsai Ming-liang, 2021)
The English title of Tsai's latest experimental short, The Night, seems to ask for consideration alongside his last feature film, Days. That film was shot in Thailand, and paired Tsai's longtime collaborator Lee Kang-sheng with a newcomer, a Laotian immigrant named Anong Houngheuangsy. Across its running time, Days al...
2021-11-26 00:48:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Q: What if the machine kicked back?
I've needed some time to think about Memoria. Although there is no mistaking this film for the work on anyone else, it is indeed a change-up for Apichatpong. Not only does this film star an Academy Award winning actor (Tilda Swinton); it finds the director decamping to Colombia, a bold move for a filmmaker whose peerless work has up to now b...
2021-11-21 04:52:41 +0000 UTC View Post
It's hopeless, really. If I were to actually take the time to articulate how stupid this is, I'd be falling into its trap, demonstrating that I'm the kind of unhip, decrepit "victim culture" leftist that Nekrasova and her "dirtbag left" comrades despite. If it's too loud, Scary seems to sneer, then you're too old. And lodging the complaint that this film exploits the idea of Jeffrey Epstein,...
2021-11-20 04:12:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Hovering in the distance of Gainsbourg's portrait of her mother Jane Birkin is an earlier film, Agnès Varda's 1988 experimental doc Jane B. par Agnès V. That film, which was a kind of companion film to Kung-Fu Master, involved both interviews and staged segments, playing off the fact that Birkin was not only a performer but a rather protean one. As you'd expect, Gainsbourg is less...
2021-11-17 05:34:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Cannes sure does distort things, huh? Penn's last directorial outing, The Last Face, was god-awful. It's script was risible, and Penn's directorial choices were hopelessly incompetent. What's more, its view of violence and civil war in Africa was blinkered, to put it kindly. By contrast, Flag Day is a fairly generic, mediocre film. It has pacing problems, as well as a regrettable ov...
2021-11-14 02:21:43 +0000 UTC View PostI spend a bit of time on TikTok, mostly so I can keep minimally abreast of my son's cultural life. I find it occasionally amusing, but as a platform it's extremely circumscribed. I'm not referring to the time limit, which was recently expanded from one to three minutes. I'm actually thinking about the platform's algorithm, which is all about boosting various iterations of memes -- particular routines, dance moves, and sound clips. Secondarily, the algorithm sends you content based on your (ap...
2021-11-11 22:12:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I will freely admit that I am not the target audience for Dune. It's not just that I'm not a genre guy, although that tends to be true. I'm only really interested when the conventions are subverted or at least seriously tweaked, and that's not the case here. But more significantly, I have an aversion to this kind of world vs. world space-opera business. I thought about this a lot while watch...
2021-11-10 02:45:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Tonight, I was catching up with We (or Nous, if you prefer), the documentary by Alice Diop that played in Berlin and ND/NF. At this point in the film -- about 25 minutes in -- I had to stop because I was overcome by a tremendous sense of loss. But unlike so many losses we experience in life -- the passing of loved ones, growing up and leaving home, the gradual dissolution of memory ...
2021-11-03 04:06:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm very glad indeed that Haynes' The Velvet Underground exists. It's an admirable attempt at something very few rock-docs even think to do: placing the artists under consideration in a broader context of cultural and aesthetic history. Granted, the Velvets kind of demand this. They entered the broader consciousness (so to speak) through the patronage of Andy Warhol, who saw the foursome as ...
2021-11-02 01:32:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Cummings' debut feature Thunder Road was quite the opening salvo, a film defined by its full-on embrasure of squeamish embarrassment -- what the kids now simply call "cringe." It tells us a lot about Gen Z that they so needed to define this often undefinable experience, which usually entails some mixture of astonishment, mockery, and pity. If, as we were told by umpteen thousand t...
2021-10-31 00:34:20 +0000 UTC View Post
This is hard to really evaluate, of course, because it arrives as damaged goods. The PRC engages in censorship all the time, but seldom is it this high-profile. Zhang, probably the most renowned Chinese director currently living, had One Second yanked from the Berlinale competition just days before the festival opened. The official reason was "technical problems." But then, if we think of id...
2021-10-26 21:26:03 +0000 UTC View Post
So obviously there hasn't been much action here. If you check in occasionally with my Films Seen lists (on Letterboxd or the Academic Hack), you've probably noticed what we might generously refer to as a lull. So I figured I'd give you an update on all that has been happening, and all that has not.
First of all, Jen and I sold our house yesterday. It worked out quite well, all things considered...
2021-10-25 22:55:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Mbakam's latest documentary is essentially a portrait film, and as such probably bears comparison with some of the classics of the subgenre, like Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, certain works by Jonas Mekas, or even Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room, the sort of film for which the adjective "magisterial" was invented. Like the Clarke and Costa films, Delphine's Prayers is a...
2021-10-19 04:46:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The Crusade is the final cinematic project of Jean-Claude Carrière, which is both odd and poignant. He co-wrote this featurette with Garrel, and especially when you consider some of the masterworks Carrière has been involved with, this really is a minor-key trifle. And yet, it's such a blatantly goodhearted and optimistic film. So maybe it's instructive for all of us that the man who made ...
2021-10-19 04:17:15 +0000 UTC View Post