I'm of two minds about this. Overall I think it's great how Ms. Knowles-Carter has essentially taken millions from the Disney Corporation under the auspices of reimagining The Lion King only to completely subvert the assignment. The short dialogue clips from the film are incidental to Beyoncé's broader agenda of celebrating Pan-African culture, even if she is implicitly connecting generatio...
2020-08-02 21:31:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Although I quite enjoyed Matthew Rankin's feature debut The Twentieth Century, there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that I couldn't silence, reminding me that Rankin's work seemed a bit too familiar. The Winnipegger's style and subject matter inevitably calls Guy Maddin to mind, since both filmmakers share a passion for the inherent embarrassment that comes with being Canadian, a...
2020-08-01 23:19:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Objectively "good," just not for me. The thing that has impressed me so much about both A Separation and The Past, and to a lesser extent The Salesman, is the way Farhadi articulates some very writerly, theatrical maneuvers with subtle, skillful direction. At first, the use of transparent and translucent partitions and barriers within the open-concept apartment in A Sep...
2020-07-30 05:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
This is one of those classics that I feel a bit sheepish about writing up. Is there really any more to be said about Klute? Not only is it one of the key paranoid thrillers of the 1970s; it has been rediscovered by a new generation because of Jane Fonda's performance as Bree Daniels, an all-too-rare depiction of sex work that is evenhanded, not judgmental or condescending. Or, to put it anot...
2020-07-29 16:47:00 +0000 UTC View Post
First off, thanks to Jordan Cronk for alerting me to the existence of this experimental gem, a new work from a Spanish filmmaker of whom I was only dimly aware. Delgado Ramo works in Super-8, which is sort of hard to believe when you see his latest film's expansive nature and complex editing. Una película en color ("A film in color") clocks in at just over 30 minutes, and although it bears ...
2020-07-27 18:00:32 +0000 UTC View Post
By far my favorite film by @josephinejambox, although that admission makes me feel a bit guilty, I suppose, as if I am not properly standing up for Auteurs' Rights. But unlike Decker's more freeform efforts, Shirley exhibits a set of external controls that serve to make the director's quirks really sing. Where Madeline's Madeline was a film that was formally restless, casting about ...
2020-07-25 23:36:15 +0000 UTC View Post
A TV legend, a man of great talent and integrity who never took himself too seriously. For non-American readers unfamiliar with Regis Philbin, his closest international peer would be Bruce Forsyth -- an axiomatic presence on the tube who undersold his talents and had an incredibly long, distinguished career without a hint of scandal. Regis, you will be missed.
2020-07-25 22:56:07 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the handful of Fassbinders I had not seen, Martha is striking for a number of reasons. Even now, I find myself struggling as to whether to label it "minor Fassbinder," or "B-level," because that's not exactly what it is. To be more precise, Fassbinder's better-known and more highly regarded work -- Maria Braun, Fear Eats the Soul, In a Year of 13 Moons, ...
2020-07-22 06:28:09 +0000 UTC View Post
I should really know better.
Lately I've been wasting time at a site called futurerocklegends.com. It's an unaffiliated site that deals with all things Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and is mostly stats-head stuff. But of course, there are discussion boards, and that's never good.
Admittedly, most of the people...
2020-07-20 21:02:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A truly stunning document, Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody is a complicated film to watch right now, but also absolutely necessary. A close-up record of a 1969 strike by workers at Charleston, South Carolina's Medical College Hospital, the film makes it achingly apparent that, fifty years later, we are still fighting many of the same battles, and the cops are still the same SOBs they ever ...
2020-07-20 20:00:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I've always been a fan of Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, despite the protestations of tastemakers that it is "the worst film ever made." Yes, it is filled with unintentional comedy, but there is a certain pathos to it that really moves me. It has been said that all films are unintentional documentaries of their own making, and few films demonstrate this more than Plan 9, which so p...
2020-07-20 19:30:46 +0000 UTC View Post
Herzog's latest -- a fiction film that often resembles a documentary -- is a frustrating film that I often wanted to exist in a form much different than it does. In the end, it won me over, for the most part, but only in the sense that I can afford it (and Herzog) a degree of grudging respect. Family Romance, LLC is a conceptual coup that "works" because Herzog doesn't present the material i...
2020-07-14 20:31:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Watching an eight-hour film on F******l S***e, with its shoddy-ass streaming, is going to take some time. So be aware that I am watching it intermittently, and other things will be popping up in this space in the meantime. Grrr....
2020-07-13 20:27:11 +0000 UTC View Post
[CONTAINS SPOILERS]
To say that Desplechin's latest film is "odd" would be accurate, but misleading. Odd is a word that can imply some sort of quirky effort from an auteur we know well, an instance of an artist giving in to his or her most idiosyncratic tendencies. As some have pointed out, Desplechin's most notable artistic tic is his restlessness, a sort of narrative ADD that results in films...
2020-07-11 02:51:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, so when you're under quarantine with your partner, you do things you might not otherwise do, to insure domestic tranquility. As some of you know, Jen is not much into movies. She prefers the pacing of television, and I have done my best to go with the flow and watch more TV with her than I ordinarily would.
Some of these shows have been consuming more of my screen time than normal since M...
2020-07-09 01:24:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, I wake up in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin' me insane
It's a shame
The way she makes me
Scrub the floor
The later works of James Benning represent exercises in "deep looking," in much the same way that Pauline Oliveros's music was meant to inspire deep listening. Many of the films Benning has made since tu...
2020-07-07 18:20:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Having exhausted many of my options, yet wanting to remain semi-relevant to the critical conversations that are happening somewhere, without my social-media participation, I ask you: which inevitably disappointing auteur effort should I watch next?
2020-07-05 23:48:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Eliza Hittman's third feature film is difficult to evaluate. In some ways it's tempting to simply give it a pass, because there are certain things it obviously does "right." It focuses on a very narrow, specific set of problems, and in so doing is able to wrench unavoidably visceral tension out of moment-to-moment questions. Will the protagonists find a place to sleep for the night? How are they goin...
2020-07-04 12:40:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Zacharias Kunuk is the world's leading director in the Inuktitut language. Why doesn't that translate to more interest outside of Canada?
Kunuk made a major splash in 2001 with his epic debut film, Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, a revenge tale set against an Inuit tale of evil spirits. It won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, opened throughout Canada and played internationally, including in the ...
2020-07-02 04:52:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Some of my readers may be surprised that I had not already seen One Way Boogie Woogie, which may be James Benning's absolute masterpiece. I had seen small portions of it over the years, but had never actually sat down and watched the whole thing, mostly due to a strange superstition of mine. If I know that there are films out there by my favorite filmmakers that I still have yet to see, then...
2020-07-02 02:14:17 +0000 UTC View Post
NOTE: Now that I am summarily banned from Twitter, I will occasionally be dropping quickie posts like this, just to comment on various things that I would have tweeted about in the past. But relax! This will not be a substitute for my twitter feed. Politics will be kept at a bare minimum, and actually posts like this will be kept to a minimum as well.
One of those films I always meant to catch up with just based on its reputation, Crime Wave, the debut feature by Winnipeg's John Paizs, turned out to be quite a bit different than I expected. I figured it would be a low-budget, nominally ironic spoof of hard-boiled B-movies like Detour or Gun Crazy, the sorts of highly self-aware films that don't really need to be spoofed ...
2020-06-26 03:23:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The Fuschia is Now....
One of the most interesting things about Color Out of Space, for me, is reading what others have to say about it. I have never been an aficionado of horror fiction, so I have never read H.P. Lovecraft. But one of the things that seems to come up again and again in reviews of this film is the degree to which Richard Stanley has successfully adapted some o...
2020-06-23 15:45:06 +0000 UTC View Post
While watching films for the Visions du Réel festival, I caught Teboho Edkins' medium-length documentary Shepherds, which, like Days of Cannibalism, examines on conditions in the enclaved nation of Lesotho. (Edkins himself is South African.) Both films emphasize the importance of ranching in the small African nation, but while Shepherds is remarkably focused, interviewing ...
2020-06-23 03:53:38 +0000 UTC View Post
Pietro Marcello is a director who, for me, has been hovering in the "interesting" zone for quite some time. The work I have seen from him up to this point has suggested that he might produce something that would touch a nerve with me, but somehow I could not find my way in. Of his last three films, I was most intrigued by his documentary about Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian (The Silence of...
2020-06-23 01:18:06 +0000 UTC View Post
A reasonably promising debut film, Miss Juneteenth speaks to the difficulty of funding and producing a truly independent African-American cinema, even today when there is so clearly a hunger for such films from so many parts of our culture. Filmed in Fort Worth, Peoples' film has a rich, lived-in atmosphere, in which the weathered houses, junkyards, icehouses, and AME churches all teem with ...
2020-06-22 23:03:54 +0000 UTC View Post
By popular demand, here is the brief review I wrote about Curtis's 2016 iteration of his usual libertarian, Chapo-approved cant. I am not going to pretend that he does not make a few good points here and there. But my main problem with the guy is that he is one of those unreconstructed Marxists who despises identity politics...but then has rejected Marxism as well. So when that happens, all you have left is a free-market technocrat who only cares about the oppression of white men, and assumes...
2020-06-22 17:19:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Tete Gulley (Portland, OR -- May 27)
Malcolm Harsch (Victorville, CA -- May 31)
Dominique Alexander (New York, NY -- June 9)
Robert Fuller (Palmdale, CA -- June 10)
Tshegofatso Pule (Roodepoort, South Africa -- June 11)
name not yet released (Houston, TX -- June 15)
2020-06-17 17:10:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I'll get over you, I know I will / though you messed me up by dyin'
I'll get over you, I know I I will / I'm the king of Staten Island...
With apologies to Go West, that tune has been rattling around my brain for weeks. Anyway, I see that opinion is rather split regarding Apatow's latest, and I can certainly see why. If we accept that this is a writer-director who simply...
2020-06-15 22:13:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Isiah Medina's follow-up to the exhilarating 88:88 goes in a considerably different direction, related but no less radical. Where the previous feature worked to convey the emotional and sensual dislocation of being an urban BIPOC subject in late capitalism, Inventing the Future sharpens its focus to a hard point, bringing specific theories to bear in order to address these crises he...
2020-06-15 19:28:26 +0000 UTC View Post