msicism

The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023)

It's patently obvious that Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 is unlike pretty much any film that's ever been made. That's because Williams is employing new technologies that were made for 3D virtual reality, but adapting them for 2D feature cinema. Using cameras that I presume look a great deal like the multi-lensed spheres atop Google Earth vehicles, Williams is capable of disrupting the ...

Boonmee in Action

This is the last dead cat related post. I just think the video gives a really good sense of who he was.

Boonmee, and a Brief Pause

I am going to take a few days off from posting any writing. Yesterday my dear cat Boonmee died very suddenly. I'm still in shock. And although I know that I will start to find pleasure in all the things I cherish about this season -- cold weather, Matt's birthday, screeners, year-end polls, Christmas, lights and decorations, New Year's, and my own birthday -- right now I am having a hard time figuring out h...

Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023)

Although I've always found Armond White's "Better Than" list to be needlessly petulant, I do occasionally understand the impulse. While I certainly admire Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 (review coming forthwith), I have the sense that its formalist showboating allowed a lot of critics and programmers to overlook the fact that contentwise, it's fairly pedestrian. (We live in a complex, i...

Light That Matters

The Light Matter film festival, programmed by my comrade James Hansen, is happening right now in Alfred, New York. Check it out if you can.

They are showing dozens of interesting films, and I wrote about four of them for 2023-11-05 02:30:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Losing Steam

This is always a difficult time of year, even without the added stress of having my reviews sharing server space with bizarre fetish porn. How is this semester still going. How.

A younger, more energetic me would have gone to the Museum of Fine Arts tonight to see Cobweb, the newest film from Kim Jee-woon. As of now I have only seen one of Kim's films (I Saw the Devil), and I ...

Brief Update on WTAF-Gate

The offending website, Kemono, has an email address marked "Legal," and I sent them a firm request to delete my work from the site. Does the address go straight to the trash? Probably.

I did send a notification to Patreon Support, letting them know what has happened and asking if there is anything I can do. They may not be able to help me specifically, but since there are other Patreon users wh...

WHAT (and I cannot emphasize this enough) THE FUCK

So today I got an email from a festival publicist, telling me that a filmmaker had complained to them that my review of their film used "unauthorized" screenshots, instead of their official promotional images. This confused me, because I understood this Patreon to be a private, subscribers-only affair. 

Ah, not so! It seems there are data scrapers like 2023-10-31 18:55:49 +0000 UTC View Post

The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green, 2023)

Two travelers from Canada, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) run out of money in Australia and go to a work-travel agency, where they secure temporary employment working at a bar in a mining town, a hundred miles from nowhere. Soon, they find themselves surrounded by dozens of horny macho men, all vying for their attention but not so subtly suggesting that they'll take the girls by force...

Marathon (Amir Naderi, 2022)

BY REQUEST: Michael Ewins

I watched Marathon a full eighteen years ago. That's a pretty brutal factoid to face, and in a way this is the ideal film to revisit from that period. I was just starting to take cinema seriously as an intellectual pursuit, and Marathon is exactly the sort of small film I would never have seen were it not for my desire, at that time, ...

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023)

Now, as November approaches, we find ourselves careening into the period where prestige pictures assert themselves, demanding our attention. As is often the case, we encounter a number of productions with solid pedigree and appropriate festival attention. Inevitably, many of these films are "good enough," but never as interesting as they purport to be. These films are by no means bad, but there's a s...

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

I knew next to nothing about Here when I watched it, aside from the fact that it's Belgian, and that it's one of the year's most acclaimed films. Reading about it afterwards, and seeing the way people have interpreted the film, I'm utterly at a loss. This is a mildly diverting observational film that is so recessive in its stylistic approach that it barely leaves a footprint. Devos suggests ...

The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Alas, my very first Visconti film. Like a handful of other major directors, he is someone I just never got around to, and for some reason the rep screenings of his films always seemed to correspond to me being somehow indisposed. Seeing The Leopard in 35mm was certainly a fine introduction, and although I found quite a lot to admire here, the film also confirmed some of my suspicions about V...

Tótem (Lila Avilés, 2023)

Lila Avilés' second film is as claustrophobic and enveloping as her debut, The Chambermaid, was standoffishly austere. Someone coming into the theater late would think they've seen something like Tótem before: the members of a large family bouncing off each other and getting under each other's skin as they prepare for a gathering. (It's a template that has produced films as otherw...

Assorted Odds and Ends from InRO

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu, 2023)

I wouldn't bother with the cross-posting, but I loved this film. I hope more folks get to see it.

2023-10-20 01:49:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Selection Time Again!

Since I saw my last lingering Subscriber Request film tonight, it's time to select three more choosers. And here they are!

#105 - MICHAEL EWINS

#110 - MICHELLE BERMAN

#73 - JORGE

Okay, you know the routine. Select something for me to watch and write about, if you please. And as always, thanks to all for your incredible support...

Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984)

BY REQUEST: Lucas Holloway

Among the myriad feelings and revelations I had while revisiting Stop Making Sense (which I probably haven't seen since the late 80s), the first was both comedic and brutal. "My god, he's so young!" I was genuinely taken aback by David Byrne's first appearance onscreen, and while yes, it's been ages since I've seen him with smooth skin and bl...

The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023)

Over on Bluesky Social [got invites if you need 'em], I remarked that The Night Visitors is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of a True/False film. In case it need be said, that's a good thing in my book, because for the most part T/F has a good track record when it comes to singling out the most artistically successful hybrid docs. Since this approach has become so fashionable lately, there ar...

The Fist (Ayo Akingbade, 2022)

There is an inherent fascination with learning how things are made. And while the production of the products in The Fist are secondary to the labor (and laborers) being observed, there is simply a poetry to industrialized production, something Dziga Vertov certainly recognized. Then again, we understand that Vertov could locate that poetry because he was trying to depict a future in which la...

Man In Black (Wang Bing, 2023)

Ambition is a strange thing. By most people's reckoning, Wang Bing's nearly four hour documentary Youth (Spring) is the more ambitious of the director's two 2023 releases. It is expansive, comprehensive, and relates directly to the social collision of Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reformism and Xi Jinping's repression. By comparison, Man In Black is another one of Wang's postmortems on...

Saturn Bowling (Patricia Mazuy, 2022)

Saturn Bowling is a film that is so blatant in its construction that it often just feels stupid. That said, the stupidity is obviously a strategy. Just to clarify, Mazuy's film is one of the most aggressively Freudian movies I've ever seen, so much so that it practically treats Freudianism like some primitive myth with which to anthropologically understand the Contemporary French Man. It's ...

Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

I suppose I've thought about Clarke's Elephant in the same way most cinephiles think about Wavelength. I know what it is. I know what it does. I know why it does it. How much more could I get from actually watching the film? Of course this attitude is always wrong, a way to justify one's own lack of curiosity. At the same time, there's not much about Elephant 1.0 that doesn...

Some Early Wenders

For obvious reasons, Wim Wenders has been back on my cinephile radar, and (for equally obvious reasons) there is quite a bit in his expansive filmography that I've never seen. A few of these early(ish) works were Great White Whales back in my VHS trading days, since at that time they were extremely hard to find. Now of course, almost everything can be found. Even you. 2023-10-11 02:43:13 +0000 UTC View Post

A Few Selections from NYFF Currents

I've been meaning to jot down a brief word about these films for nearly a month now. At a certain point I stopped watching the available screeners for NYFF's Currents selection, mostly out of a stultifying sadness. I recognize that the world of art changes around us, and we either change with it or lapse into obsolescence. But the headlong dive of the "avant-garde" into safe-as-milk, grant-panel-appr...

Wes Anderson's Dahl-House

Fucking Netflix. If 32 minutes of underbaked Almodóvar can open in commercial cinemas, then surely 91 minutes of Wes Anderson material, all based on Roald Dahl stories and all completely consistent stylistically (although I guess that's a given) merits similar treatment. But as we know, theatrical for Netflix is not even loss leader. It's ideological anathema. Anyway, let's look at the films, shall ...