Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024): 4/5

We don’t really know what to do with these large, unwieldy, mixed-bag omnibus works by one director, including Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Lynch’s Twin Peaks Season 3, and Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl shorts. Are they one movie or many? This one moves from most accessible to least, which is a challenge. The first hour-long story stands with any of his work, but the final story is cruel in about 10 directions, toward all its characters and the audience. Wild times!

 

The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024): 4/5

A very sweet and surprisingly frank movie (with regard to death). We saw it in 3D, and it was really cool, lots of depth. (Haha). I wish the visual design was just a bit more stylized, but I freely cop to crying often and at times continuously. Stupid kid’s movie. 

 

Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024): 3.5/5

Here, as in Harold and Maude, the manic pixie dream girl is an old lady (here Carol Kane) feeding our protagonist psychedelics and self-acceptance on the way to reinvention. When I first saw Harold and Maude when I was 18 or so, I thought it would be improved by not having Harold actually have sex with Ruth Gordon, but this movie reminds me that it’s garbage without it. As someone who loved Taxi when I was young and impressionable, I confess that I also love Carol Kane and want to marry her forever. And this nice conclusion that it’s important for us all to hear once in a while: “From here on out, what you do and who you are is up to you and only you. Amen.”

 

Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024): 3.5/5

Designed for (and, for all I know, by) 13-year-old boys. Jack said in no uncertain terms that it was his favorite movie all time. God knows what he made of references such as “flicking the button.” Not much, I hope.

 

Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier, 2024): 3/5

A tense and original thriller until the baggy second half. The 95-minute cut of this is way better. Not bad, but I don’t love Saulnier’s trajectory toward more anonymous (if “topical”) adult contemporary fare.

 

Harold and the Purple Crayon (Carlos Saldanha, 2024): 3/5

More entertaining than it had any right to be. I like star Zachary Levy, who brings a real sense of actually being a kid to the role (as he did in the perfectly decent Shazam movies).

 

Presumed Innocent, Season 1 (Anne Sewitsky, 2024): 3.5/5

Pretty crappy, but after Melissa and I watched the first 20 minutes, it was a full-on binge sprint to the end, and we never do that. Gyllenhaal is fine, Peter Sarsgaard rules, and O-T Fagbenl is a goddamn revelation.

Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990): 3.5/5

Funny how this is shorter, yet still takes the time to help the audience understand the motivations of several of the characters better than the 7-hour version. No one breathes through his nose louder than Harrison Ford.

 

Chilly Scenes of Winter (Joan Micklin Silver, 1979): 2.5/5

Just as dour, sad and dramatically static as I feared—the reason I avoided it for so long—although it is good to see John Heard and Peter Riegert in their prime. Entirely too much harmonica in the soundtrack.

 

The Late Show (Robert Benton, 1977): 3.5/5

A shaggy LA detective story, not unlike Lebowski, but this one’s a two hander between Art Carney and Lily Tomlin, both a pleasure to watch. Extra half-star because the copy on Kanopy has a very visible cigarette mark in the upper right corner just at the climax of the second act—screaming, like everything else in the film, that it’s a 70s film.

 

Darker than Amber (Robert Clouse, 1970): 3/5

I grew up reading a series of detective stories by John D. MacDonald following beach bum/ detective Travis McGee in Fort Lauderdale. In this low-rent movie adaptation, McGee is played by a too-old but still good Rod Taylor—and there’s his houseboat The Busted Flush and his car, a Rolls Royce he calls Miss Agnes, all that the 50s sexual politics, and last and sort of least, a mystery. Clouse went on to direct Enter the Dragon.

 

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969): 3/5

After a brief introduction, this is almost wordless, and the images are pretty amazing, filled as they are with exotic locations, rituals, and costumes as well as plenty of blood. It’s perverse to cast Maria Callas in the lead role and then barely let her speak, but her gaze and bearing are arias.

 

Cigarettes & Coffee (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1993): 3.5/5

Well-written and formally strong (i.e., he moves the camera rigidly and with dramatic purpose). This kid’s going to be big.

 

Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1971): 3/5

Treats blind and deaf people as if they were most exotic and amazing beings on earth, and indeed they are displayed here not unlike in a freak show. Nevertheless, the net effect is powerful empathy for their great isolation.

 

A Swedish Love Story (Roy Andersson, 1970): 3/5

I was curious what Andersson’s movies were like before his style solidified to its current state where the rooms tells us much more than the faces. This is a naturalistic and sun-dappled story of young love, contrasting the tender hopefulness of the (realistically inarticulate) teenagers with the bitterness and disappointment of their elders.

 

You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007): 3.5/5

Both Andersson’s funniest movie and the one with the clearest prescription for this miserable world: Play music and sing songs. Drink. Fall in love. Don’t be mean or petty. And dream.

 

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson, 2014): 3.5/5

Quite despairing, for all its deadpan humor. Ultimately asks, “Is it right to use people simply for your own pleasure,” implicating everyone who is not actively fighting for equality for all. No wonder all his characters are deeply depressed.

 

Blue Velvet, rw (David Lynch, 1986): 5/5

Lynch is a genius for using secondary characters as projections and analogs to comment on the psychological state of our protagonist (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart). Here, our protagonist feels desire and freedom for the first time and creates Frank so he will be confronted with and punished for his own naughty pleasures.

 

I Am Somebody, 30m (Madeline Anderson, 1970): 3/5

Are the striking hospital workers in Charleston in 1969, mostly black women, harassed by the all-white police force? No! (Just kidding.)

 

America, 30m (Garrett Bradley, 2019): 2.5/5

Early film from the documentarian who brought us Time in 2020. Some lovely images, including some dreamy uses of sound and superimposition, and lots of black people smiling and doing their thing. But more context is required for real meaning and emotion.

 

 

Experimental Film Corner

 

Too Early / Too Late (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1981): 2/5

A call for revolution using mostly landscapes. This is my third film by the Straubs, (after Sicilia and the Bach one), and I am very far from understanding the merits of their methods.

 

The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970): 3/5

An experimental film that is a trial at 80 minutes. Banal images of small town life are degraded, flipped to a negative, superimposed, and otherwise abstracted—often very beautifully. Themes that come to mind include the foggy workings of memory, the art of seeing, civilization vs. nature, then and now. Stan Brakhage called it “one of the few GREAT films of all cinema," and, well, he would. Is a live human birth depicted? You know it is.

 

Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches, 2h57m (Jonas Mekas, 1968): 3/5

This and As I Was Moving… (and as far as I know all of Mekas’ work) is made up of silent footage of his regular life—going to Central Park, weddings, the circus, visiting friends—sometimes chopped and/or sped up, and with a variety of music and the occasional voice-over comment from Mekas. This one lacks the welcome and warm self-analysis from As I Was Moving, possibly because in the 32 years between the two films he has accepted the limitations and power of his methods. “Love is built on very ordinary things.”

 

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, 4h45m (Jonas Mekas, 2000): 3.5/5

This long, long home movie is boring. It’s also beautiful and insightful—and keeps reminding the viewer that their own lives are full of ecstatic beauty and meaning, if only we would notice it once in a while. Mekas, who in his voice-over comes off as a wise, thoughtful and happy guy, says, “By now you must have noticed that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing.” “Keep looking for things in places where there is nothing.” “Happiness is beauty.” “The local is the only universal. Upon that all art builds.” “Every action should be a prayer.” “Why do I have to make a film. Why can’t I just film?”

 

Wim Wenders Film Fest

During the 70s, Wenders made movies about people of their time, reacting to the sins of the previous generation. Perfect Days is about a person out of time. Progress?

 

Same Player Shoots Again, 12m (Wim Wenders, 1968): 2/5

Wenders’ first surviving work. Experimental and repetitive.

 

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders, 1972): 3/5

Very poised for a first feature. Wenders has the utmost confidence that what he is showing you is interesting (although it’s not much). So we get a couple days in the life of a fractious soccer player on vacation—wandering streets, watching movies, picking up girls (he’s good at this), getting beat up repeatedly, taking bus rides. There is one huge event, but overall It’s a violent and empty vision (in a serene sort of way), and the event doesn’t change much. Prefigures both Akerman (especially Les Rendez-vous d’Anna six years later) and Hong Sang Soo.

 

The Island, 25m (Wim Wenders, 1974): 2.5/5

A child’s father is an asshole, so she doesn’t really want to obey/align with them. In other words, 1970s German Youths Confronting the Nazi Pasts of All the Adults Around Them, the Movie.

 

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975): 3/5

Almost an essay movie about loneliness, recent German history, and (sort of embarrassingly) the power of The Author: “I walked through the cement landscape like one who cared, the hero.” This film comes between the Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road (my two favorite Wenders) and shares those films’ co-star Rüdiger Vogler (not to mention good roles for Fassbinder’s Hanna Schygulla and a mute but charming role for “Nastassja Nakszynski” (which is how 12-year-old Nastassja Kinski is billed)). But this film, like Goalie (and Wings of Desire) is written by Nobel-winning German author Peter Handke and is more serious, isolated, disappointed, disconnected, and despairing—even suicidal.

 

The State of Things (Wim Wenders, 1982): 3/5

“You can’t build a movie without a story. You ever try to build a house without walls? A movie has got to have walls, you know?” “Why walls? The space between the characters can carry the load.”

 

Tokyo-Ga (Wim Wenders, 1985): 2.5/5

A portrait of Tokyo and a tribute to Wenders’ beloved Ozu. The Ozu material is slight but welcome, but the “Look at this gol-dang double-decker golf driving range” stuff hasn’t aged well. Chris Marker, whose Sans Soliel is infinitely better than this movie in terms of subtlety and poetics, actually appears in the film.

 

The End of Violence (Wim Wenders, 1997): 2/5

More plot than any other Wenders that I’ve seen, but it’s all nonsense. A film producer is at the center of a conspiracy and someone wants to kill him, so he lives with a random Mexican family and works as a gardener while he solves the mystery. Also involves surveillance, El Salvadoran death squads, Tarantino-esque funny hit men, and some touching scenes with a clearly diminished Sam Fuller (who died the same year the movie was released).

 

Anselm (Wim Wenders, 2023): 2/5

Portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer. Originally shown in 3D, and many reviews attest to the importance of the technique. Whomp whomp. Wenders keeps making portraits of fellow artists, including Tokyo-Ga (Ozu), Lightning Over Water (Nicolas Ray), Buena Vista Social Club, Pina, Notebook on Cities and Clothes (fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto), and The Salt of the Earth.

 

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023): 4.5/5

Beautiful serenity. No non-diegetic music. No current events. No screens. Almost no dialogue. Only what is happening in this moment. Our protagonist lives in an isolated monastery of his own making, in the middle of Tokyo, and his level of presence is basically the subject of the film. In the vein of my beloved Paterson, but while Jarmusch’s movie is funnier and more personally relatable, this one has a refined and classic feel, and the protagonist’s behavior is more aspirational. Great dream sequences. The only misstep is all the fetishistic cassette stuff, which is both dumb and out of character—just to make him seem cool to a particular group of cool people, a la the guitars in Only Lovers Left Alive. Honest question: is this actually a good way to live? Should one live primitively to be authentic? Is it OK to side-eye the reality of all the people who are at Chipotle while you’re eating lunch?