Humongous (Aya Kawazoe, 2020)
One of this year's stealthier entries in the NYFF Currents short film series, Humongous looks like it might be a mere narrative doodle, but is actually much more. A lithe tone poem about a young woman's somewhat dispersed subject development, Aya Kawazoe's film might have benefited from being programmed a bit closer to Laida Lertxundi's
King of Sanwi (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2020)
Conceived as a follow-up to her 2019 film Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us, which explored the appropriation of Michael Jackson as an emblem of defiance by indigenous Brazilians, King of Sanwi briefly surveys Jackson's engagements with various African cultures over the course of his career, from an early trip...
2020-09-13 03:02:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Although Maddin and the Johnson brothers' latest production does not maintain the breakneck pace of Maddin's 2000 mini-masterpiece The Heart of the World -- what on earth does? -- Stump the Guesser! is a bit of a spiritual cousin to that twenty year old film. [Ouch. -- Ed.] Not only does it pack its 19 minutes with the amount of content one usually finds in a feature film. It ...
2020-09-09 04:14:58 +0000 UTC View Post
NOTE: This review contains some thematic spoilers. You may want to go in cold for this one.
A film both fantastical and brutally clear-eyed, Siberia is a work that I honestly didn't think Abel Ferrara had in him. So often a poet of the lower depths, Ferrara shoots for the rafters here and mostly hits, producing a film that is unfashionably ontological in its exploratio...
2020-09-08 19:44:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Ana Vaz's latest film begins with black and white footage that tracks around the empty square outside of an imposing government building. It could be a civic office, or a museum. But we see numerous large sculptures in the quad, shot from odd angles. We are then driven up a highway and into the Amazonian jungle. This is the BR-174, a major road that was built through the land of the Waimiri-Atroari p...
2020-09-06 05:20:36 +0000 UTC View Post
This was a pretty strong year for the Berlinale, and of course it appears even stronger in retrospect, given that there was no Cannes and the Venice lineup is comprised of a rather feeble selection of also-rans. But even back in March, a lot of folks were nonplussed by Mohammad Rasoulof's Golden Bear win. An openly didactic film that does not stack up against the director's more evocative efforts (
So, looking over the dismal competition lineup at Venice, I would say the odds-on bet to take home this year's by-default, Covid-tainted Golden Lion would be....Andrei Konchalovsky. He has already won the Silver Lion twice, and he is just generally the most fêted (not to say fetid) filmmaker in the competition. I suppose if Nomadland is anywhere close to good, they could give it to Chloé Z...
2020-09-05 23:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Um, what the hell do you think?
Here in the still-roiling hot spot of Houston, Texas, I am not going near a movie theater to see Tenet. That's not to say I feel no temptation. I miss the big screen, and this sounds like a genuinely good film. But I am deeply invested in not dying. If Matt should ever decide to have kids, I don...
2020-09-04 09:16:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Another compelling answer to the problem of how to produce new work during a quarantine, Julie Murray's latest film combines curiosity with improvisation, choosing to look more carefully at the objects that are close at hand. Murray, an Irish filmmaker and artist who has been making significant contributions to the avant-garde since the 1980s, is someone who hasn't gotten the critical attention her w...
2020-09-02 20:08:41 +0000 UTC View Post
This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working, thinking, and faring during the quarantine. Most of the other works have a diaristic bent, but Ernie's piece -- his first new release in several years, I believe -- is an exceedingly simple depiction of separation from the outside.
This process of patient looking, of thinking about the larger world relative to one's small place within it and...
2020-09-02 17:05:50 +0000 UTC View Post
I was afraid of this.
Are the emergency exigencies of COVID-19 now going to be an excuse for corporate film festivals and the industry at large to prune away the parts of the apparatus (such as an independent, non-Oscar-obsessed press) that are troublesome to the bottom line?
If so, this is right out of the Milton Friedman playbook. Wait for a crisis, and then when everyone's in a panic, ...
2020-09-02 04:01:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Although they average between ten and fifteen minutes long, the films of Laida Lertxundi fall into the category that I have discussed elsewhere as "small films." There is quite a lot to unpack in any given film of Lertxundi's. They are rich texts, and her deceptively inviting, sun-drenched visual style makes them particularly enjoyable to revisit. Lertxundi's work always seems to capture the tone of ...
2020-09-02 03:52:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, so in the last 24 hours, I have lost nine subscribers. They are all listed as having their pledges declined. Interestingly enough, they are all from the same countries -- Finland and India, mostly, but a couple of unknown origin.
I have a feeling this has to do with Patreon's new tax collection b.s. Have any of you other Creators experienced a similar problem? I have a help ticket into Patreon, but any advice you may have in the interim is greatly appreciated. Nothing gold can stay...
2020-09-01 18:07:05 +0000 UTC View PostA four-part omnibus commissioned by Mexico's FICUNAM, Liminal is apparently thematically united by the relationships between film and music. Clearly this is a pretty tenuous connection, since there are umpteen million ways that relationship can be articulated. The end result, as you might expect, has the same middling batting average as most of these cine-Cerberus efforts.
...
2020-08-31 23:26:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Although Tesla bears a certain resemblance to Experimenter, Michael Almereyda's biography of Stanley Milgram, the new film is only a shadow of that recent triumph. Like Experimenter, Tesla engages in a kind of Brechtian retcon of the twentieth century, not so much changing the facts are recontextualizing our understanding of them. At first, Tesla appears t...
2020-08-31 11:50:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Highly frustrating as an idea, Iannucci's Copperfield is unavoidably entertaining. This is because he and co-writer Simon Blackwell appear to be targeting the entire history of BBC prestige productions, with their prim tone and stately pace. And it's true, these sorts of British literary adaptations have become a kind of genre unto themselves, often feeling far more arduous than simply readi...
2020-08-26 02:03:04 +0000 UTC View Post
FLASH POLL: Is Peninsula one of the Major, Definitive Films of 2020, which Any Good Cinephile Ought to See?
2020-08-25 20:52:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Since I was booted from Twitter, you, my loyal subscriber base, get to enjoy / tolerate the sort of things that probably would have been offhanded tweets of mine back in the day.
But seriously, I would expect that once the discussion of Tenet begins in earnest, there will be (or ought to be) some acknowledgment that the conceit of reversed-time refers directly to the cinema itself, in particular cinema's impact on modernity and our sense of time's plasticity. Entire philosophic...
2020-08-25 20:05:23 +0000 UTC View Post
As you may recall, I made a post in mid-May mentioning that my cat Neko was near death.
Well, as she had done several times before, Neko said "fuck that." Instead, she started eating, taking lots of palliative meds, and rallied for one last Hot Girl Summer. She fought intestinal cancer like a motherfucker. And she was enjoying life, doing the things she loved to do: sit and watch TV with Jen; l...
2020-08-23 05:29:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes okay, too easy.
But just a note to say, I had two assignments to complete this week (one for Mubi, one for Cinema Scope), and I will have more Patreon content up very soon. Thanks for your patience.
Every time it rains, it rains.... penis from heaven...
2020-08-19 18:09:43 +0000 UTC View Post
I was looking for something a little different, and Secret Zoo fit the bill: a broad Korean comedy that adopted a goofy premise and then pretty much played it by the numbers. For a film about a zoo on the brink of closure that [SPOILERS] repopulates its most popular exhibits with the zookeepers in custom-made animal costumes, Secret Zoo is fairly predictable and has...
2020-08-15 05:13:20 +0000 UTC View Post
[SPOILERS, I SUPPOSE]
While watching She Dies Tomorrow, I found myself puzzling over a problem that I eventually worked out into a relatively straightforward proposition. For the time being, I'm calling it the Imitation Fallacy: you can do all the things that "good films" do without making a good film. There's a great deal to admire about She Dies Tomorrow, an...
2020-08-14 10:57:42 +0000 UTC View Post
As I was watching Christian Petzold's latest film, I found myself thinking of an oddly appropriate French / English pun. Historically, French newspapers contain a section of short, random news stories of sometimes-lurid human interest. This section is called the fait-divers. It literally means "diverse facts," but colloquially just means "miscellaneous."
Undine is the sort of ...
2020-08-14 03:41:20 +0000 UTC View Post
...although it's a bit tempting to refer to this film as The Highly Symbolic Fever, since the mysterious illness is a big clunky metaphor. And while it doesn't exactly spoil Da-Rin's debut feature, it does prove rather overbearing, like too much salt in a stew. The Fever is the sort of film that provokes an ambivalence I suspect is common to critics and cinephiles, and possibly uniq...
2020-08-09 23:04:10 +0000 UTC View Post
There is a jarring simplicity to Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, a modesty that, on close inspection, serves to momentarily disguise just how perfect of a film it actually is. If First Cow has any real faults, they lie only in this perfection. More than one review has compared Reichardt's film to a storybook, with its deliberate pacing, Academy ratio, and iconized characters with their...
2020-08-06 19:50:36 +0000 UTC View Post
This is one of the weirdest things I have ever stumbled upon.
2020-08-05 02:27:45 +0000 UTC View Post
"How old is she?!"
"She's so old that when she was asked her age, she couldn't count that high so she had to make up a number: [BLANK]."
2020-08-04 19:54:49 +0000 UTC View Post
In 1995, painter David Salle directed his one and only feature film, Search and Destroy. It was utterly forgettable. (Who'd have thought that of that cohort, Julian Schnabel would have the talent for movies?) But there's one line I often think about when watching films like Clementine. Dennis Hopper's self-help guru tells his listeners, "just because it happened to you doesn't make ...
2020-08-04 17:47:09 +0000 UTC View Post
One of Frampton's simplest films, it's also probably the one that most clearly exemplifies what the supposed project of "structural film" is all about. In it, Frampton takes a completely negligible passage of film -- some friends of his shooting the shit in a painting studio, with the individual shots edited together with somewhat sloppy lap dissolves -- and subjects it to twenty different permutatio...
2020-08-03 21:54:47 +0000 UTC View Post
A while back, I decided that cinephile completism had to have limits. This was mostly around film festival slates (Cannes, NYFF) that included movies I considered to be unwatchable. But now, I have a new conundrum.
Earlier today I started watching Beyond Therapy, a 1987 film by Robert Altman. It is every bit as horrible as its reputation would indicate. But do I have a duty to watch it...
2020-08-03 21:17:20 +0000 UTC View Post