The 1970s were an interesting time, to say the least. I recall my parents sending me out of the room so they could listen to filthy Richard Pryor records with titles like "That N*****'s Crazy" and "Bicentennial N*****," telling me I could laugh along with the misadventures of "Mudbone" when I was older. And yet, when I became older, it somehow didn't seem as appropriate to listen to those albums, and...
2019-11-24 18:44:49 +0000 UTC View Post
A perplexing film in that it is so simple and direct, you could come away thinking perhaps you missed something, some mitigating nuance that would make the project more worthwhile. It's a Bonello film, and so it is gorgeous and intelligent and meticulously constructed. But where films like Nocturama, House of Tolerance, and Tiresia contain elements of the surreal, the macab...
2019-11-23 23:49:30 +0000 UTC View Post
It's always a bit awkward to write about the work of friends, but as I've no doubt mentioned before, it's an occupational hazard when it comes to the avant-garde, and there's no way around it. All the same, I do my best to evaluate the work as objectively as I can. In a sense, I don't think that judging a piece because (for example) "I know Jodie Mack" is all that different from judging a piece becau...
2019-11-23 21:09:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Going through the files to catch up with 2019 experimental films that have somehow escaped me, I found this treat from the always-interesting Johann Lurf. More often than not, films that involve some degree of self-reflexivity or structural examination of the apparatus will find some subject out in the wild -- a train, a landscape, a room, or a hallway -- and then subject the filmed material to vario...
2019-11-18 02:22:22 +0000 UTC View Post
About five hours ago, I have the pleasure of seeing Michael Snow's latest film Cityscape at Rice Cinema, in a program I curated. I'll be honest; I programmed the film sight-unseen, and I was not disappointed. (In fact, I'm sure several people in the theater hear me cackling in delight in the front row.) Part of a project called XL Outer Worlds, commissioned by IMAX to celebrate the ...
2019-11-18 00:35:13 +0000 UTC View Post
All in all, La Gomera really is a better title for this film. That's Porumboiu's original title, named for the name of the Canary Island where much of the film's action takes place. The Whistlers, which catchy in its own way, was a bit distracting. I kept thinking about that Jethro Tull song, o...
2019-11-16 17:37:46 +0000 UTC View Post
The second (and far more interesting) of two short films I've discovered this year by Canadian filmmaker Miryam Charles, The Red Album, or a Poetic Intent is a five-minute mini-drama that finds four Francophones of African descent (it's unclear whether or not they are Canadian) repairing to a nondescript house to take stock of a political battle that has failed. Charles has one of the men in...
2019-11-14 03:30:42 +0000 UTC View Post
I have been toiling away on my PhD. dissertation prospectus. Yes, against all odds, I have been given one more chance to complete my doctorate at Berkeley. with an understanding new advisor and a warning that, well, this is my last shot. And by god, I'm taking it.
I still have a lot of work to do. My target date for completion of the whole shebang is December of 2020. But I have decided to prov...
2019-11-12 16:13:15 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the true pleasures of being a film critic is when you are in the midst of a truly great artist who is in their creative prime. It doesn't happen as much as it should, but when it does it is an affirming thing to know that the medium is in good hands, and that we aren't all wasting our time on a hopeless pursuit. I doubt I am alone in feeling that Jodie Mack is a filmmaker currently operating a...
2019-11-10 20:03:01 +0000 UTC View Post
(First of all, memo to Mike D'Angelo for future reference: the title above appears onscreen, in contrast to the numerals and abbreviations used in the "official" title. Calibrate accordingly.)
I'm a fan of Kaz, and although we are not exactly friends, we have communicated over the years. Of course, that's the case with virtually every experimental filmmaker I've written about, so that hardly co...
2019-11-10 03:05:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's an instance in which I wish I'd kept better notes, and why I now try to write a little something about almost everything I see. I watched Paul Harrill's previous film, Something, Anything, which like his latest was acclaimed in certain circles as a determinedly small, heartfelt film about an ordinary woman experiencing a crisis of faith in a small-town Tennessee setting. But unlike mo...
2019-11-05 17:01:20 +0000 UTC View Post
"Overcorrection," my driver's ed teacher called it. Cannes, having made the mistake of keeping Bi Gan's dreamy but meticulous Long Day's Journey into Night out of competition in 2018, decided to give the bump-up to this superficially similar Chinese offering which, taken on its own merits, is an Un Certain Regard-level offering, if that. I should confess, this is my first go-round with Diao....
2019-11-04 16:28:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, I was supposed to watch The Wild Goose Lake, as per your instructions, and I will either today or tomorrow. But sometimes you need to watch something your wife will watch with you, and this was it. And I'm certainly not sorry. El Camino was diverting enough, and given its relatively strong reviews, I would have felt a need to catch up with it eventually.
But it also remi...
2019-11-03 17:22:59 +0000 UTC View Post
...so Twitter has put me in a time-out. I'll spend this twelve hours thinking about how Twitter is a waste of time, and also, how an offer of fellatio is considered "abuse." Dude! I don't bite!
2019-10-31 23:04:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Astute readers will have already sussed out the pattern: having caught up with this year's winners at Cannes (Parasite) and Berlin (Synonyms), it was time to sit down with the unexpected and, to the minds of many, utterly unworthy recipient of the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival. Although I suspect folks would have been even more nonplussed if jury head Lucrecia Mart...
2019-10-25 05:04:00 +0000 UTC View Post
A very strange film, Synonyms is obviously being mistaken for a good film in many quarters, so much so that it won the Golden Bear in Berlin over several more deserving entries, including Angela Schanelec's elliptical but tight-as-a-drum I Was At Home, But... and the curiously ignored Ghost Town Anthology by Denis Côté. I should note that I quite liked Lapid's two previou...
2019-10-24 16:18:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a very rare film. It is timely, it seems to have emerged from the deep psychology of a culture in crisis, but without exhibiting cheap didacticism or stereotypes. It presents characters who are formed by their milieu but not wholly inscribed by it, individuals whose actions are, in the Brechtian sense, "typical" of their class position, but aren't without conflicti...
2019-10-23 01:59:35 +0000 UTC View Post
In its own way Color-Blind is one of Ben Russell's most challenging films. It certainly offers much in the way of pure sensual pleasure. Shot between Brittany and French Polynesia, the film takes in a wide array of cultural and geographical detail, from local dance competitions to seaside vistas and, at the start of the film, a number of close-ups of Gauguin canvases (reproductions, it turns...
2019-10-22 22:14:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, my friends. It's been too long.
And that's the problem. This semester has been a real killer. I stupidly (well, greedily) took on seven courses to teach this term, because I wanted more money. So I am never not behind on grading something, and it sucks ass. I have also been doing the usual magazine writing, with other assignments sprinkled throughout here and there. And I made arrangemen...
2019-10-21 00:59:02 +0000 UTC View Post
This is British filmmaker Ayo Akingbade's third film in a trilogy about social housing. I have only seen the first film in the series, Tower XYZ (2016), which is considerably more abstract and impressionistic that Dear Babylon. They are clearly related to one another, but they are very different films with considera...
2019-10-15 20:46:23 +0000 UTC View Post
As a feature film, Mister America would be, one assumes, a logical entry point for the large and interlocking Tim Heidecker Project, which has expanded well beyond the sketch comedy program (Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!) that first brought him to widespread attention. Now Deckerheads can follow his fake movie review show with Gregg Turkington, his fake action series, and I g...
2019-10-14 17:17:22 +0000 UTC View Post
For the past two days, we were very fortunate to have Ephraim Asili visiting Houston presenting his work, through a joint effort of Aurora Picture Show and University of Houston's consortium on Media and the Moving Image. Effie presented the five films comprising his Diaspora Suite on Thursday October 10 at Aurora, and at UH showed a couple of those films (American Hunger and Fl...
2019-10-13 06:15:22 +0000 UTC View Post
As time goes on, if future audiences discover Fast Color, one of the defining aspects of the film will be that it was largely ignored because it fell between chairs, that no one knew how to market it or receive it at the time of its release. I suspect its reputation will in fact build over time, but it would be a shame if it got saddled with "cult film" status, and all the baggage that entai...
2019-10-08 03:22:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Franco Maresco is a filmmaker I'm shamefully behind on, and so his newest film seemed like a good place to start catching up. He doesn't have a huge international profile, but he is a major figure in Italy. Reportedly, when The Mafia is No Longer What It Used to Be won a special jury prize at this year's Venice Film Festival, the Italian press went wild. Others were just a bit bemused, many ...
2019-10-02 02:12:43 +0000 UTC View Post
In its own strange way, About Endlessness feels like an epilogue to Roy Andersson's grand trilogy, which in part explains its somewhat abbreviated running time. Where his last film, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, ended with some of the most blatant cruelty we'd yet seen in Andersson's work -- the artist clearly understood the general direction in which the world w...
2019-10-01 03:06:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry, it's been insane around here. Reviews of the Roy Andersson and Franco Maresco in eight hours or so. Thanks for your patience.
2019-09-30 04:14:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Essentially an exploitation film that doesn't have the courage of its convictions, Alejandro Landes' third film is redolent with high-art atmosphere, much of it second hand. There are extreme long shots of mountains jutting out from flatlands, with big swirling skies of painterly circumstance, the sort of celestial light we've most recently come to associate with Carlos Reygadas. Not too long after a...
2019-09-23 04:13:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Last year, several filmmakers made films in memory of Peter Hutton, for a show in New York City. For his contribution, He...
2019-09-20 22:52:12 +0000 UTC View Post
I have been working, on and off, on a project that I have tentatively called "Small Films." The premise of this project is that there are certain filmmakers who make work that is not just "short," but casual in int approach to the idea of a work in the usual sense. They tend to be prolific, and I would argue that understanding their films requires seeing a lot of them. They make cinema the w...
2019-09-20 21:54:43 +0000 UTC View Post