Goddamn you, Gaspar.
Your work is often so rife with childish ideas and cheap provocation, it can be exhausting trying to appreciate your singular formal precision. I mean, there's no one else making narrative cinema right now that comes close to your direct engagement with the psychotropic wing of the avant-garde. Malick and Godard cover their respective waterfronts (mythopoeticism and materia...
2019-01-29 13:40:07 +0000 UTC View Post
What a joy. It's strange how few Rivette films I've actually seen, when compared with the amount of pleasure the ones I've seen have given me. With the exception of Celine and Julie Go Boating, I have only seen late Rivette thus far, those being his films from Secret Defense onward. You might reasonably ask, what have I been doing with my life? Not only are these films delightfully ...
2019-01-28 21:37:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachthani? (Shinji Aoyama, 2005)
I'll admit, I don't quite get why Shinji Aoyama fell out of fashion. Perhaps it's a case of gaining popularity with a non-representative entry, creating expectations that were destined to be disappointed. As wonderful as it is, Eureka, the film that broke Aoyama on the international scene, is quite atypical of his usual...
2019-01-27 19:10:04 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a somewhat straightforward documentary from the Bulgarian filmmaker Paounov, whose previous work was a bit more on the essayistic side. Georgi and the Butterflies and especially The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories had a certain ideational sprawl to them that Walking On Water definitely does not. The new film is focused exclusively on the production of a major wor...
2019-01-26 16:57:44 +0000 UTC View Post
By almost anyone's reckoning, the 2000 Cannes Film Festival was in-SANE. In an average year, you're lucky to have maybe three, possibly four truly great films at the festival. But for whatever reason -- solid funding? pre-millennium tension? genetically modified Nespresso? -- the 2000 fest was just wall-to-wall hits. To wit, here are a few of the films in Competition that year:
In the Mood ...
2019-01-25 18:33:48 +0000 UTC View Post
My viewing of Mekas's films has been a bit of a spotty patchwork. Of the confirmed masterworks, I have only just seen Reminiscences in full a few days ago, although I have seen large portions of it over the years. The same goes for Mekas's two key diary films, Walden and Lost Lost Lost. I have zipped around in them, sampling them in portions, but for some reason haven't yet...
2019-01-24 23:01:27 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a particular caveat one finds in David Bordwell's writing, one that always gives me pause. Bordwell observes that critics and theorists frequently trumpet this or that film as having some extraordinary aspect, without ever demonstrating that they fully comprehend the ordinary way that films of their era actually conducted the formal business under discussion. That is, how can we know what's r...
2019-01-21 02:28:18 +0000 UTC View Post
So the people have spoken. Thanks for your help.
As the great Nictate might put it, "Come at me, Daisy Kenyon."
2019-01-20 15:43:28 +0000 UTC View Post
A few things need to be gotten out of the way. First, I'm not sure why this got such a horrid reception at Cannes. It's entirely possible, likely even, that the decades of legendarily plagued production on this film have created an aura of doom around it, or conversely, the sense that, now that it's finished, it had better be something astonishing. Astonishing it's not, but it is in fact quite good. ...
2019-01-20 03:57:14 +0000 UTC View PostI can't decide what I should watch next. Help me out, folks. Listed in no particular order:
2019-01-20 03:15:15 +0000 UTC View Post
For a film I really don't like, I have quite a lot of sympathy for Touch Me Not. It's a film that aims to explore the hidden depths of the erotic imagination, and how women in particular become repressed in their desires by social pressures and gender expectations. More than this, director Adina Pintilie broadens the scope of conventional representations of erotic bodies, including in her fi...
2019-01-19 19:38:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Marcel Hanoun's Une simple histoire is a film more commonly heard about in vague whispers than addressed head-on. This is because its maker, Marcel Hanoun, remained a marginal figure in the French New Wave, despite the fact that it was he -- not Resnais or Rivette, and certainly not Godard -- who was selected as the representative for the "movement" by Anthology Film Archives for its Essenti...
2019-01-18 19:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
It's often a dicey proposition when a highly experimental filmmaker aims for greater accessibility. But it doesn't have to be, and Rojo, the third feature from Argentina's Benjamín Naishtat, proves that a radical artist can maintain his unique sensibility even while aiming for a wider audience. Of his earlier films, History of Fear displayed a rigorous, at times even rigid formal a...
2019-01-15 03:08:22 +0000 UTC View Post
As hard as it may be to believe, even in 2019 there remains a significant dearth of films, television shows, or really any form of media in which trans folks are telling their own stories. This is why a show like "Pose," or the music of Sarah Jane Grace and Against Me!, is so revolutionary, even while so much of its subject matter is refreshingly mundane. For context, we have to compare this lack of ...
2019-01-13 18:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
I know it's been awhile since I've posted any new material. My apologies. But the spring semester begins Monday and I've been prepping my five (!) courses. So not much in the way of movie watching. However, look for some new stuff soon! And thanks for your patience.
2019-01-12 22:45:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Based on the three films of Wang's I've seen, he is a perfectly solid director of unmemorable films. Granted, it must be difficult being the Phil Ochs of the 6th Generation with Jia is your Bob Dylan. But, to be fair, I have not seen Wang's debut film The Days which, I have it on good authority, is a marvel.
Case in point: Chongqing Blues is a perfectly acceptable Un Cer...
2019-01-06 21:08:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Considerably more structured than You and the Night but no less decadent, Yann Gonzalez's latest ode to being queer, filthy and fabulous is centered around an ultra-low-budget gay porn production house. This allows Gonzalez to exercise his jones for Fassbinderian production design and on-set backbiting, along with the tastefully seedy sensibility he shares with fellow travelers like Bertrand...
2019-01-06 02:10:16 +0000 UTC View Post
No flies on Stephen Broomer! In addition to having made one of the most retro-poetic experimental films of the year, Fountains of Paris, he also completed a featurette of just over one hour, a film that bombards the senses with color and light and the occasional disturbing vision. The film is Tondal's Vision, a found footage fantasia that, at certain moments, calls to mind the work ...
2019-01-05 03:57:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Ashamed as I am to admit it, I have always liked the idea of Ben Wheatley more that I've liked his films. He is just the sort of shot in the arm that the British film industry needs, a young independent upstart with a sensibility that is equal parts arthouse and grindhouse, unafraid to work in the too-often forgotten corners of British cinema history -- the horror films, the "Plays for Today...
2019-01-04 01:37:50 +0000 UTC View Post
In my recent appearance on Craig Lindsey's "The Sour Hour," I made mention of the fact that my education in film history was, to put it lightly, spotty and incomplete. That's because I never studied cinema in a formal way. My academic training as an undergrad was mostly in art history, and my later graduate education in film was more specialized. So I noted that, while I have seen over a dozen Straub...
2019-01-03 12:16:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes you've just got to try the shitty soup.
2019-01-01 20:19:17 +0000 UTC View Post
God Straightens Legs (Joële Walinga, Canada)
This is a potent medium-length documentary portrait of a woman named Renée, who we gradually learn is afflicted with cancer. She cannot walk, which may or may not be a side effect of the cancer -- we cannot really tell (or at least I couldn't; perhaps I missed some crucial detail). She has decided to forego chemotherapy, in part be...
2018-12-31 18:03:25 +0000 UTC View Post
As many reviewers have already noted, the poignancy of Christophe Honoré's new film comes not so much from its depiction of the AIDS crisis and the losses taken during that period. It's the way that Sorry Angel shows a group of men, of various ages, struggling to live something approximating ordinary lives, with the AIDS crisis droning in the background and, in many cases coursing through t...
2018-12-30 22:55:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Without the context of understanding that 1990 was the year that democracy returned to Chile after 17 years of dictatorship, the larger import of Too Late to Die Young is rather illegible. This isn't to say that the goings-on don't have inherent interest value in themselves. But there is clearly a parallel being created between the burgeoning young adulthood of a character like Sofía (Demia...
2018-12-28 21:58:52 +0000 UTC View Post
30. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, U.S. / France, 1976/2018)
29. Commute (Vincent Grenier, U.S. / Canada)
28. The Sun Quartet (Colectivo Los Ingravíd...
2018-12-26 18:39:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Asako I & II (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2018)
I would have expected to be providing a full-length entry on this one, but the truth is, it's surprisingly thin. Now to be fair, not every film is going to match the depth and expansiveness of Happy Hour. But in a lot of ways, Asako I & II is a gimmick looking for a story, or at least a compelling treatment. In f...
2018-12-26 02:28:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a filmmaker who generates highly original films that nevertheless wear their influences on their sleeve. Distant, the film that brought him to international attention, featured a comic scene in which the protagonist puts on a tape of Tarkovsky's Stalker in order to drive his rural cousin out of the room. Once he's gone, he puts on the porno that he wanted to wat...
2018-12-23 19:06:16 +0000 UTC View Post
Ordinarily, a sense of ambivalence would indicate that a film-text was richer than usual and had more to offer its viewers. But in the case of Monrovia, Indiana, I think it just points of an overall confusion. Wiseman's worst film in a long time, Monrovia is both painfully one-note and highly unclear in terms of what it wants its audience to take away from it. At times it even feels...
2018-12-22 17:13:12 +0000 UTC View Post
...I am the guest on the newest edition of the great Peter Labuza's podcast, The Cinephiliacs. Peter and I talk about movies, politics, my son Jace, and Su Friedrich's Sink or Swim. Check it out! Oh, and that's about what I look like.
2018-12-20 16:40:11 +0000 UTC View Post
1. What if Africa were the center of the world? I mean, it's the cradle of humanity. So why not an economic superpower? Black Panther imagines a scenario in which a nation has the technological wherewithal to defeat colonialism, or at least ignore it.
2. What if a summer blockbuster were also a referendum on black militancy? Yes, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) has some very confused ideas, mo...
2018-12-19 05:25:23 +0000 UTC View Post