msicism

Grading on a Curve (or, NEON vs A24)

I just finished grading a ton of term papers and research proposals, which has thrown me a bit behind on writing duties. But there is an ironic element to this since, while watching these two "elevated horror" entries back to back, I felt as though they exemplified the problems I so often have with student papers. I don't think I typically bring those kinds of evaluative criteria to the cinema with me. But I think it says something about the films themselves, how they each display a great dea...

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)

Magnificently directed, beautifully acted, and driven by a score by Johnny Greenwood that thuds when you expect to lilt and vice versa, The Power of the Dog is very close to a masterpiece. But unlike so many great films that grab you by the collar and shove you in the direction of their greatness, The Power of the Dog creeps up on you. It's a film that actually uses time as its medi...

The Year of the Everlasting Storm (various filmmakers, 2021)

As has been widely reported, The Year of the Everlasting Storm is a bit better than the average multi-director omnibus. This is all the more surprising since it is a project occasioned by the Covid-19 outbreak. Thus far I tend to side with those who've argued that it is simply too soon for anyone to make meaningful art about the pandemic, largely because we are still in the midst of it (even if, optimistically, we may be in the final chapter). 

But most of the filmmakers h...

Back After a Brief Pause

Just a quick note of apology. In addition to having spent a week at my parents' house, where it is not always easy to concentrate, I am now grading papers as well as packing up the rest of my house. I hope to get some new content up here soon -- I have a half-written draft on The Power of the Dog, for example -- but it could take a minute.

Recent Experimental Cinema 2: Grenier, Vaz (x2)

Wishbone (Vincent Grenier, 2021)

Like Jodie Mack's Wasteland No. 3, Grenier's latest film is slated to have its world premiere during MoMA's "To the Lighthouse" program, featuring films selected by Mark McElhatten. Wishbone, Grenier's new film, is just over one minute long, and according to its maker, it was something he created during the Covid lockdown. This...

Recent Experimental Cinema 1: Mack, Fleischmann

As I mentioned in my TIFF Wavelengths wrap-up, the pandemic has been an oddly productive time for the experimental film community. When one considers that certain festival showcases did not really happen in 2020, and dozens of filmmakers were under quarantine in their homes, which for most of them doubles as a studio, it's not entirely surprising that in 2021 we're experiencing a bottleneck of avant-garde cinema, more work than can reasonably be programmed.

Still, some new work by major...

El Gran Movimiento (Kiro Russo, 2021)

I go long for Reverse Shot on what may prove to be the best feature film of 2021. This thing is a stunner.

Dear Evan Hansen (Stephen Chbosky, 2021)

2021-10-01 01:21:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Wheeze Hack Cough

Yep, that was me. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation.

For years, I have paid my annual hosting subscription for The Academic Hack at the end of September, right about the time I got back from TIFF. As it turns out, that's no longer such a great time for the rent to come due. Jen and I have a lot of unusual expenses at the moment, most of them pertaining to fixing up our hou...

NYFF Currents-a-Go-Go

In and Out a Window (Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, 2021)

Although the Currents website lists this as a solo work by Tuohy, the end credits make it clear that this is another co-authored work by Tuohy and Barrie, his frequent filmmaking partner. They are founding members of Nanolab, Australia's premiere independent laboratory for experimental film production, roughly equivale...

Returning to Reims (Fragments) (Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2021)

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what Périot is up to in this film, but maybe that's because it's the first feature of his I've watched. (I've seen a couple of earlier shorts, which were fairly impressive.) Borrowing both its title and overall premise from the 2009 memoir by Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims is very much about geography as destiny, although perhaps not directly. Th...

A Little More NYFF Currents

Grandma's Scissors (Erica Sheu, 2021)

Sheu's previous film Transcript was a delightful discovery, one that approached things with a formalist stance but was so delicately handmade that its maker's personality was palpably felt throughout. Grandma's Scissors is arguably more personal, but in a rather direct, unmysterious way. Sheu tells us about her grandmother...

NYFF Currents Part Deux

As I mentioned to a couple of friends, there is a weird trend with this year's Currents shorts. The majority of them -- 15 in total -- are 20 minutes or longer. Another eight are between 15 and 19 minutes long. What does this tell us? Is digital technology driving independent filmmakers to make longer films? Do the programmers have some kind of affection for this particular length? Is there some misguided idea that longer films, even when they are short, are somehow more "complete" and theref...

Currents Conditions

I will be doing a write-up of some more of the NYFF Currents short films (and a couple of features, maybe) in the next few days. But I'm about 60% through and this is the worst single collection of short films I've ever seen, bar none. And as TIFF showed, there was much better to choose from. No, this was intentional.

Little Girl (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2020)

Little Girl is a documentary about an eight-year-old trans girl struggling with bigotry and ignorance while growing up in a suburb of Reims, and in many ways it's a difficult film to evaluate. It's very much structured like a particularly sensitive TV-news profile, and in that respect it somewhat betrays some of its ostensible ideals. As we watch little Sasha speaking with a gender health ps...

Wet Sand (Elene Naveriani, 2021)

SPOILERS, but you'll never see this anyway.

I suppose as fascism continues to rise the world over, we can expect art in general to get dumber and dumber. It's obvious the Elene Naveriani is a talented young director, and her second film, Wet Sand, certainly has the best intentions. However, she does not really expand on the standard outsiders-vs.-savages template, perh...

France (Bruno Dumont, 2021)

A lot of major French directors, such as Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, make a habit of hopping from genre to genre, bringing their particular sensibility along with them as they try their hand at this and that. So why should Bruno Dumont be any different? There seems to be a misconception about Dumont, that as an artist he is so endemically weird that he simply doesn't have the ability to pl...

I Wrote the Thing (Again)

So MUBI ran my TIFF Wavelengths piece this morning. Way to catch the crest of festival fever!

Here it is. Enjoy.

Arthur Rambo (Laurent Cantet, 2021)

For CINEMA SCOPE's 2021 TIFF Coverage:

In a lot of ways, Arthur Rambo is precisely the film we deserve. Less a full-fledged narrative than an illustrated storytime post, it’s sort of an accidental companion piece to Janicza Bravo’s Zola, which showcased the ability of one young woman to tweet her way into fleeting artistic relevance. By contrast, Laurent C...

Benediction (Terence Davies, 2021)

For CINEMA SCOPE's 2021 TIFF Coverage:

Terence Davies’ latest film focuses on World War I and its aftermath, a period that has been his cinematic lodestar since his early short films. Benediction meticulously recreates the complex world of its subject, anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden as a young man, Peter Capaldi later in life). But the film does much mo...

Moneyboys (C.B. Yi, 2021)

Another film that concludes with an emotionally repressed character dancing it out for all the world to see? What hath Beau Travail wrought? Still, this was a surprise of a sort, since most of Moneyboys, the debut film by C.B. Yi, felt like a formalist grab bag of art film techniques that were there mostly just to announce Yi's bona fides. A great deal of Moneyboys...

Playground (Laura Wandel, 2021)

It comes as no surprise that the shadow of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne hangs heavily over contemporary Belgian cinema. Still, Laura Wandel's feature debut is an unnerving duplication of their essential style and thematic concerns. I am fairly certain that if Playground were screened with no director credits or advance information, most astute viewers would mistake it for a brand new Dardenn...

Medusa (Anita Rocha de Silveira, 2021)

For CINEMA SCOPE's 2021 TIFF Coverage:

It’s spoiling nothing to mention that Medusa, the sophomore film from Brazil’s Anita Rocha de Silveira, ends with a series of blood-curdling screams. In a way, this perfectly sums up the movie as a whole. De Silveira has produced a stylish, disturbing piece of psychological / political horror, one that sometimes lacks focus or...

Recent Experimental Films: Pirker / Lamas / Szlam

These are significant new films that, for whatever reason, are not coming soon to a theater near you.

Real Time (Sasha Pirker, 2021)

Sasha Pirker is an Austrian filmmaker who has been making work for the past fifteen or so years. But like a number of her compatriots, she has not gotten a great deal of attention from North American film festivals. (I sometimes think this d...

The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)

It's 1945, and the anxiety around World War II has turned everything, including courtship, into a race against time. One of the things I've found fascinating about these wartime pictures (cf. the Archers) is the way they depict life on the homefront as a nervous, accelerated form of living, a sense that death is really just around the corner. So this generates a different set of rules. Here, Minnelli...

September: Back on My Bullshit

First, the bad news. I will not complete the viewing of the oldies I selected for this month. I may yet get to The Clock, but there's no way I'll complete the Ray or Ophüls. So I will roll those over into next month, and the most recent films you voted on -- Bunny Lake is Missing, Four Nights of a Dreamer, My Night at Maud's, and Through the Olive Trees -...

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

Having finally caught up with the Archers towering canonical masterpiece, I'm going to have to cast my vote with the estimable Doug Dilliman. Colonel Blimp is the kind of film that is so meticulously wrought that it's difficult for me to approach it with ardor, even as it cle...

NYFF Currents 1 (a mixed bag)

In Flow of Words (Eliane Esther Bots, 2021)

In Flow of Words is an admirable film about an important topic. And while it is constructed with care and a fair amount of formal intelligence. Still, I feel a certain ambivalence toward it, since it adopts only slightly unconventional means to tell its story -- the psychological toll that Bosnian war crimes trials took on th...

From Bakersfield to Mojave (James Benning, 2021)

Between here and there is better than either here or there! (Pavement, "Conduit for Sale!")

Benning's latest feature film may not exactly form a trilogy with his two earlier films, RR (2007) and BNSF (2013), but in a lot of ways it does seem like a very precise amalgamation of those two previous works. RR dep...

Volleyball (Yvonne Rainer, 1967)

As I mentioned on Letterboxd, this is less of a film in the conventional sense than a cinematic gesture drawing. This was made before Rainer had switched to making films full-time, and was still best known as a pioneering minimalist choreographer. If we think about Volleyball as positioned somewhere between a dance film and a motion study, it's a bit easier to see what Rainer was up to (even...