Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2022): 2.5/5

A miraculous, odd, sui generis object involving elaborate set design, plus a slosh of artistry including traditional cell animations, stop motion, puppets, models, stagecraft, photography, sound design, armatures, props, wardrobe. Although, really, it could have used a writer! 

 

The Offer (Michael Tolkin, Leslie Greif, 2022):3.5/5

Low-rent but still a distinct pleasure to hang out with some version of Coppola and Evans, Pacino and Brando. I rank this at the same tier as the Motely Crue movie, The Dirt: high compliment! They used to make movies about kings, now it’s all Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Joan Crawford and Elvis. 

 

Dashcam (Rob Savage, 2022): 3/5

From the director of 2020’s Host (a favorite, made with very scarce means). This one is not the in the same league, but it’s nevertheless worth one’s time. The “Instagram” mise en scène and personalities are a big turnoff. Still, when the horror goes down (which is early and often), the iPhone grammar makes the vicious horror stuff more realistic and intense (while also choppy and abstract). 

 

Love Death + Robots, S3E2, “Bad Travelling” (David Fincher, 2022): 4/5  

Smart, fun and good-looking quasi-retelling of Alien in 22 minutes. My favorite thing associated with Fincher since 2010’s The Social Network. 

 

Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1999): 2/5

A man returns to Sicily to visit his mother. The movie seems to be made by someone who has never seen a movie, just heard them described. The characters declare their lines like kids in a school play, and the camera often lingers on their blank faces long before they speak and long after they have finished. A camera on a hill slowly pans from one side of a valley to the other and back again, then repeats the pan and return. Shrug!

 

THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971): 3/5

Quite a weird, off-putting and bold film—a 2001-drunk fence-swing full of audacious world-building. Unfortunately, it’s dramatically inert and full of barriers to audience identification and enjoyment. Lucas is not quite done with the extreme use of white, technology that is both old-feeling and futuristic, and robot cops. 

 

Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, 2012): 1.5/5

We wander around inside of an old man’s idiosyncratic memories and fantasies, kind of like spending two hours talking to someone else’s quirky father in a retirement home. 

 

Man Push Cart (Ramin Bahrani, 2005): 3.5/5

Simple and specific, but with a deep well of feeling, primarily sadness and nostalgia. 

 

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002): 3.5/5

Survivor guilt, the movie. The watcher. The feeler. The revenant. A sort of greatest hits of Warsaw ghetto anecdotes, all exceedingly grim on the subject of power. Dramatically, extremely compelling.  

 

Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939): 3.5/5

Oh, the pleasure of watching, amidst sundry odd World Classics, a normal, swift, witty entertainment such as we have here. Dietrich is so great: sexy, strong and game for anything, including a prolonged cat fight. Stewart is clever and full of savoir faire—the other side of Stewart in the West, since this is the peacemaker and bringer of the law/future (a la Liberty Valance) instead of the psychopath of most of his Anthony Mann westerns, including…

 

The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955): 3.5/5

Technicolor and cinemascope plus Anthony Mann’s shot composition and those cloudy skies of New Mexico, and you barely need anything else. Which is good, since the themes of this run thin beyond “Apache bad.” This turns out to be a kind of family drama with weak actual sons vs. strong adopted sons, wherein Stewart serves as a vengeful detective character outside of the dramatic action. He and Arthur Kennedy are both predictably great. 

 

Tommy (Ken Russell, 1975): 3/5

Some spoilers ahead for the “plot” of Tommy, but: I had no idea that the reason Tommy was deaf, dumb and blind was that he witnessed his mom and her new lover murder his father (returned from the war). Hamlet alert! But instead of Hamlet's “the play is the thing," Tommy becomes a Stranger in a Strange Land-type spiritual leader. All the consumerism paranoia (and baked beans) are leftover obsessions from The Who Sell Out era. Nicholson and Ann Margaret reunite four years after Carnal Knowledge. Townsend re-recorded all these songs, liberally incorporating the synths he was so obsessed with at the time, and it sounds pretty cool. The vocals by Oliver Reed and Margaret ruin almost everything, but the groovy extended synth rock jam-outs in "Eyesight for the Blind" then "Acid Queen" {starting at 26 mins in), make those parts worth a watch. Unfortunately, I’m only talking about the remarkable music here, not the visuals, which are garbagy.

 

 

Céline Sciamma Mini-Fest

One’s the short, sweet and unforgettable story of a young girl going into the woods and making some discoveries about herself … and the other is Petite Maman. 

 

Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021): 3/5

An 8-year-old tries to grok her own mother—a mysterious process. A dream play, digging into trauma through metaphor (although I feel as if this describes half of the contemporary moves I watch, including those from my beloved Ari Aster and Miyazaki). I was expecting a more overtly supernatural presentation and felt a bit let down; I will re-watch soon. 

 

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011): 4.5/5

Stunningly beautiful and emotional. Although I am unlike the main character in many ways, I related to it deeply. Some of the best child acting I’ve ever seen (outside of Paper Moon.) 

Terence Davies Film Fest

In his later career, Davies has (more or less successfully) ported the intensity and interiority of this autobiographical works to fiction. What surprises me is that the screenplays he writes now are so packed with words. He once make poetic works about normal people; now he makes normal movies about poets. 

 

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies. 1988): 4/5

A movie glowing, vibrating with personal feeling. Here, irony is foregrounded, with the cheery songs juxtaposed with hard times and bad fathers. The group singing of "Roll out the Barrel" in the bomb shelter is a highlight of this method. 

 

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008): 2/5

Liverpool, late 40s to the present, through documentary footage, poetry, songs. My favorite bit is when the narrator (Davies) talks about his adolescent love for Bruckner and Mahler over footage of the Beatles and young people rocking out joyfully in the Cavern, etc—a rare bit of irony in what is for the most part sentimental, sacred and mournful about everything up to about 1960 and cranky about much after. 

 

Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015): 4/5

An “epic” made up of the most normal things of life: parents dying, brothers leaving home, falling in love, the day of marriage, babies being born. Yet Davies makes each moment hum with great feeling (as in his earlier autobiographies). The last 50 minutes, regarding WWI, worked less well for me, but overall this is Davies putting his particular gifts to good work. 

 

A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies, 2016): 3/5

A script full of arguments that are witty to the point of being airless, plus perhaps too few dashes of her great poetry. Still, Davies displays an interest in the melancholy details of not just his own history but also those of other artists. 

 

Benediction (Terence Davies, 2021): 3/5

Some years in the life of poet Siegfried Sassoon, dealing with the aftermath of WWI and a serial love life—with a script once again chock full of catty witticisms (and here Wilde is explicitly cited). Overall, pretty compelling, but one can’t help feeling that Davies is moving through familiar territory in relation to both the subject and style of A Quiet Passion. Only the occasional, startling eddies of dream and surreality enliven the proceedings. 

 

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 60s Film Fest

Always too intellectual, perverse and detached to really make Neorealism, Pasolini increasingly reaches towards realms spiritual, mystical and abstract.

Accattone, rw? (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961): 3.5/5

The lead character is a two-bit pimp, and we spend too long hanging out with him and his woman-abusing pig-friends. In this and in Mamma Rosa, the pimp (played by the same actor) makes the same complaint: that their prostitute ruined them by giving them money: “Without you I would be a decent thief by now.” As the film progresses and as our main character becomes more lost and suffers more, it becomes more complex, more dreamy and more symbolic, eventually becoming a bit of a Passion Play. Bertolucci serves as assistant director. 

 

Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962): 3.5/5

The titular character is indeed a whore with a heart of gold, but thankfully this is mostly about her trying to save her son from idleness and the world’s everyday brutality. Wonder if that works out for her: “You would hang on the cross for him, wouldn’t you?” her friend eventually asks. A deep class resentment extends all the way up the line: “Explain to me why I’m a nobody and you’re the King of Kings.”

 

The Ricotta, 31 mins (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963): 3/5

Part of the omnibus movie RO.GO.PA.G, which also features shorts by Godard, Rossellini and (the undistinguished) Ugo Gregoretti. This one is about a director (Orson Welles, dubbed but seemingly speaking Italian) filming a life of Jesus, specifically the Calvary scene. It’s comic and I guess blasphemous, but it’s grappling toward a re-made sincerity about Jesus and what he stands for. Still, it got him sentenced to several months in prison (suspended) for contempt of religion. 

 

Love Meetings (Comizi d’amore) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964): 4/5

Very generous of Pasolini to create this documentary where he travels throughout Italy and interviews people about their ideas on sexuality of kinds, women’s rights, divorce, the family and so on. Fascinating view of a divided nation (north vs south, men vs women, rich vs. poor, educated vs. non-educated) and quite a clear context for his films’ sense of anger and protest. Similar but superior to Chronicle of a Summer, three years earlier, because of its frankness and interest in taboo.

 

The Gospel According to St. Matthew, rw (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964): 3/5

Peculiarly restrained. For example, when Satan is tempting Jesus in the wilderness, he shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (according to Matthew). One would suspect that any director (and most of all Pasolini) would have some fun with a line like that, but here it’s just the camera looking down from a mountain onto some distant, hazy villages. I suppose this is Pasolini showing he can play it straight and daring the Catholic church to hypocritically condemn him anyway. In the end, Pasolini brings total simplicity and a bevy of expressive (and hot) disciples. 

 

The Hawks and the Sparrows (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966): 1.5/5

A nonsensical and tiresome comedy. Here’s a sample joke. There’s guy whose name is Hannibal the Vegetarian, and his two kids are named Paysthepiper and Colgateandgargle. Do you see what we’re dealing with here? Some broad and silly potshots at religion, class, conformity. Has it ever worked to speed up a bit of action, Benny Hill-style, to make it “funnier”? Bergman did this too, in his worst movie, All These Women. 

 

Teorema, rw (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968): 5/5

Terence Stamp shows up in a bourgeois household and fucks the maid, son, wife, daughter and father, in that order. This profound mystical experience, or as Pasolini called it, “an encounter with the real,” sends each of their lives in a new direction: becoming artistic, sainted, mad, and free from material desires and traditional sexual roles. A kind of solution for the problems of the bourgeoisie, told simply and with little dialogue (The tagline: “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema–but it says everything!”)

 

Porcile (Pigsty) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969): 2/5

Cannibalism, pig-fucking, Nazis, beheadings, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and other atrocities. Two stories, one involving blabby ex-Nazis now successful industrialists and the other an almost wordless tale of people battling with swords and primitive guns (and being visited by the Virgin Mary, Adam and Eve, etc.) on a prehistoric volcanic terrain (left over from Teorema). Basically: bourgeoisie bad.

 

 

Bob Fosse Film Fest

Miserable, sad and obsessive movies from a miserable, sad and obsessive guy.

Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969): 2.5/5

Fosse’s adaptation of Nights of Calabria, but our protagonist is not allowed to be a prostitute, just a taxi dancer. Brilliant dance sequences and lots of fun with the camera and framing, but since it’s a musical from a certain time, it’s a 2 1/2 hour plus intermission roadshow—bloated, overstuffed and undramatic (and a huge flop).

 

Lenny, rw (Bob Fosse, 1974): 2.5/5

Top-shelf movie craft, as Fosse pushes to expand film grammar, with long takes and flashy and new-feeling editing—and demonstrates ample emotional control. But, hot take, Hoffman sucks. He’s comic timing is poop, and his evident desire to be liked by the audience is a turn-off and probably inaccurate biographically. On the other hand, the movie isn’t really interested in Lenny the Comedian but rather in Lenny the First Amendment Warrior. We’re shown him being not funny on the way up, then a very brief window of being pretty funny, then not funny on the way down.

 

Star 80, rw (Bob Fosse, 1983): 3/5

in the conversation for the darkest, creepiest movie of all time—or at least the most repugnant movie that also features The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek.” Roberts is superbly slimy and toxic, and Fosse’s control guarantees an intense emotional experience. It’s Fosse’s most savage condemnation of the entertainment system, featuring not just Paul Snider but also Hugh Hefner and several other gross men victimizing the naïf. Hemingway is perfectly cast.

  

 

Noé Film Fest

Like Kubrick, minus 50 IQ points. This is not necessarily an insult.

 

Irréversible, rw (Gaspar Noé, 2002): 4.5/5

Noé displays a mastery of his medium and an authentic sadism. The film is so powerful and so unlovable—a grotesque, tiresome and mean masterwork. 

 

Lux Aeterna (Gaspar Noé, 2019): 4/5

Coincidently, this has the same plot as Pasolini’s La Racotta, above, but Noé is of course more interested in the pain of the Calvary than in salvation. As if usually the case with Noé, most of the interest is in the technique, which here is all split-screen—something Noé makes seem bold and new, on the level of 3D. But in this case, by combining two planes of drama and tone into a single cinematic moment, it creates emotional and spiritual depth instead of visual. The first Marvel movie that is shot completely in split screen is going to blow people’s minds. Watching this made me realize that Vortex is actually a refinement of this technique, but what is lost? Because … 

 

Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021): 2/5

For a filmmaker whose bread and butter are his audaciousness and originality, this film surprisingly runs over much of the same ground as the great Amour. And in great contrast to Lux Aeterna, I simply don’t understand what the split screen brings to the table. With this technique, the deepest effects occur with the greatest differences between the two images. But here, for the most part, both images are within the same apartment and often within the same room and even abutting one another. What’s the value proposition of the split screen in such a case?