The GOP has received its propaganda brief and they are going whole-hog with it. Sadly, the Trump crowd will lap it up, because as we know, Democrats (especially AOC) are Satan and responsible for everything, from COVID-19 to rained-out ballgames. Every time a Texan hits their ankle on the bedframe, you can be sure there's a Democrat to blame.
And yes, sometimes Democrats are to blame. But not t...
2021-02-18 03:35:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Jane Schoenbrun's new film is, as we used to say back in grad school, a complicated text. There are a number of aspects of We're All Going to the World's Fair that speak very particularly to contemporary Internet culture, and while this adds depth and authenticity to the film, I worry that World's Fair will be mistaken for an "Internet movie," or worse, a "quarantine movie." Let me ...
2021-02-15 04:36:15 +0000 UTC View Post
When Mr. Thatcher accuses Charles Foster Kane of doing a bad job of running a newspaper, Kane replies, "I don't know how to run a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of." This is kind of the spirit behind <...
2021-02-15 02:45:00 +0000 UTC View Post
In order to wrap my puny brain around Preparations, I had to come to terms with a niggling problem that is, in all fairness, more mine that Horvát's. That is, this film is a non-comedic, non-musical rendition of the TV show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," one that swaps Budapest for West Covina, California. The basic premises are identical. Dr. Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork) is an exceedingly competent ...
2021-02-13 23:49:35 +0000 UTC View Post
the presence of Sophie Letourneur's Enormous on your 2020 top ten. I just tried watching it and had to bail after 25 minutes. Not only is the film hyper-aggressive in its assertion that certain things are funny, when in fact they're just annoying. It is also so ethically backward as to suggest Letourneur is making a principled stand against feminism.
Claire (Marina Foïs) is one of the...
2021-02-13 03:41:36 +0000 UTC View Post
First things first: if you haven't checked out Dan Sallitt's wonderful e-book on Naruse, you really should. I'm finding it incredibly helpful as I work my way through these films. I've been reading his entries after making my own notes, just to avoid unconscious copying of Dan's ideas. But I went ahead and looked at his notes ...
2021-02-12 20:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Given the evident mastery behind this documentary, it's strange that I feel so ambivalent about it. But this is a case of a film doing exactly what it's supposed to do, without being particularly revelatory or surprising. The Truffle Hunters could be a TV episode from a series that details the existential toll that global neoliberalism takes on people in various subcultures and interest grou...
2021-02-12 04:27:33 +0000 UTC View Post
DISCLAIMER: It feels a bit odd to write a review of a film made by one of the subscribers to this very Patreon. But I've written about the work of friends and acquaintances before. (When you focus on the avant-garde, it's kind of inevitable. ) Still, hey Fred, hope you find these remarks valuable.
Since I suspect that most subscribers to Obscure Alternatives also read / subscribe to Mike D'Ange...
2021-02-11 20:37:10 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the irritating things about the academy (and believe me, the list is long) is the simultaneous fascination and repulsion some scholars have with Donald Trump. There is an entire wing of Rhetoric and Communications Studies that focuses on political speech, and an even narrower band of study that analyzes U.S. presidential rhetoric. These folks have most framed Trump and the Trump presidency as ...
2021-02-09 19:11:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Pebbles (Vinothraj P.S., 2021)
Nothing struck me as particularly award-winning here. What we've got is 66 minutes (plus seven minutes of credits) of a drunken jerk of a dad (Karuththadaiyan) being a jerk, to pretty much everyone but especially his young son Vanu (Chelle Pandi). Dad picks Vanu up from school so they can go find the kid's mother and the dad can beat her up. They ...
2021-02-08 21:12:27 +0000 UTC View Post
My second Naruse, and given the subject matter, I kept thinking about how this treatment of the lives of former geisha differs from Mizoguchi. There are no elegant, scroll-like tracking shots, and very little in the way of romantic longing or star-crossed lovers reckoning with their pasts. This is a defiantly present-tense film, with the former geisha appearing not as representatives of gender inequi...
2021-02-08 03:43:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan, 2021)
I fear I'm am falling into a habit with these capsule reviews, comparing every new film to some older one, or a combination of older ones. (Stay tuned for my awesomely dope video with my Top 25, cut with overly literal pop songs!) And if any film were going to (mercifully) short circuit that tendency, it's Friends and Strangers 2021-02-06 22:36:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Without really meaning to, I began this month's Naruse project with the director's oldest surviving film. To say I was blindsided by Flunky, Work Hard! would be a bit of an understatement. It's always interesting to see how directors' basic stylistic tools evolve from silent to sound cinema. Ozu's silents are a good example. Aside from some slightly more gesticular acting, the silents slide ...
2021-02-04 23:32:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Aurora (Paz Fábrega, 2021)
Essentially a two-hander character study, Aurora reminded me a bit of Nadav Lapid's The Kindergarten Teacher, although the circumstances are rather different. Luisa (Rebecca Woodbridge) is an architect who teaches art classes to kids as a weekend volunteer. By chance, she discovers one of her students, 17 year old Yuliana (Raqu...
2021-02-04 21:31:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on the action on Letterboxd, it seems I'm the only person who isn't doing Sundance by remote. So far, Rotterdam has been a meager substitute, but I'll take what I can get. And of course, I'm always up for any spare links (though I figure they've got everything on a dedicated streaming site). Anyway....
...
This year's COVID edition of awards season should really be ignored, or at least marked with a gigantic asterisk. The very idea that junk like Mank and Promising Young Woman would be in "the conversation," and that a mediocrity like Nomadland would be the leading contender is utterly absurd. Even the foreign category is ridiculous. The Life Ahead? Yeah, sure, I saw...
2021-02-03 17:38:58 +0000 UTC View Post
I am not sure how many films I will be watching with my IFFR Press credentials. I must admit, nothing looks unmissable so far. But I wanted to provide quick notes on the films I do see. I'm afraid full reviews would slow me down too much.
Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen, 2020)<...
2021-02-02 20:15:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I am well aware of the canonical status of Lola Montès, I can't help feeling a certain ambivalence toward it. For one thing, there is the brute fact of history. This was simultaneously Ophüls' final film and his first film in color. It's hard not to think that, had Ophüls lived to make other films, Lola Montès might have been seen as a transitional work. That's...
2021-02-02 19:24:09 +0000 UTC View Post
This is devastating news. SOPHIE was a groundbreaking artist whose life and career had just begun. Rest in power.
I tried to embed her video for "It's Okay to Cry," but YouTube isn't letting me. So you should watch it here.
2021-01-30 18:31:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I just read that From Mayerling to Sarajevo was a flop with both audiences and critics. Although this surprises me, the more I think about it I can understand why viewers of the time may not have appreciated Ophüls' rather unique depiction of recent European history. Even if we compare Sarajevo to contemporary historical films, it's evident that Ophüls was attempting something qui...
2021-01-29 20:26:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Prior to watching Le Plaisir, all I really knew about it was that it supplied the final shot of Godard's The Image Book. At the end of the film, Godard shows us a masked man in a top hat, quadrilling himself half to death in a ballroom. Of course now, having seen Ophüls' film, Godard's use of the image has a different resonance. In the opening segment, "Le Masque," we discover Ambr...
2021-01-28 20:13:14 +0000 UTC View Post
If the SEC closes out the Reddit investors, and Biden lets it happen, we may witness an insurgence that makes the Capitol bozos look like, well, a bunch of musket-wielding rednecks.
I mean jesus. So a bunch of hedge fund assholes took a million-dollar bath. ASK ME IF I CARE.
2021-01-28 19:11:48 +0000 UTC View PostLike last time, I'm doing a follow-up poll with the three top vote-getters.
Tomorrow I'll write about the (somewhat disappointing) Le Plaisir. And I have saved the last for best. Lola Montès is on deck.
2021-01-28 07:01:02 +0000 UTC View Post
A few years back, I decided to watch a random selection of films on Festival Scope. My thought was, maybe if I randomized the list of available films and watched a few on a whim, I might discover some gems that wouldn't have otherwise gotten my attention. As you might expect, most of the films were mediocre at best, but a couple were quite interesting. One of them was Black Level, a Ukrainia...
2021-01-27 19:18:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Caught is probably the strangest of the Ophüls films I've seen so far. In my lexicon, that would typically equal "best," but I am really not sure how I feel about this film on the whole. Obviously it was released the same year as The Reckless Moment, and so it's interesting to see the two movies as a kind of diptych. For one thing, Caught instigates Ophüls' "trick" of con...
2021-01-27 01:52:48 +0000 UTC View PostI still have a couple of Ophüls films to watch and write up. But I figured I'd go ahead and get the February poll underway.
What will I be watching?
2021-01-25 08:41:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Following the critical and commercial success of Climax, Gaspar Noé did an odd thing. He accepted an assignment to produce a promotional film for Yves Saint Laurent. While I doubt that any working director short of George Lucas is ever in a position to turn down free money, it's unlikely that Noé really needed to accept this commission. Still, he was given complete freedom -- length, subje...
2021-01-25 08:23:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Some Kind of Heaven is a tough film to evaluate. As a documentary, it more than accomplishes what it sets out to do. By focusing on life in The Villages, Florida -- the largest retirement community in the U.S. -- Lance Oppenheim's film shows us a group of compelling "characters" who, in their different ways, are emblematic of "the graying of America" and an extreme version of ersatz, neolibe...
2021-01-23 00:40:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The Reckless Moment may be the perfect auteurist specimen. The story itself is not all that convincing, largely because we have to take so much on faith. Would a mother like Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett), who is clearly controlling and utterly Type-A, actually have no earthly idea that her not-quite-18 year old daughter (Geraldine Brooks) was stepping out with a sleazy older man (Sheppard Stru...
2021-01-22 07:00:25 +0000 UTC View Post