Cha Cha Real Smooth (Cooper Raiff, 2022): 4/5

Refreshingly warm and open-hearted. Sob sob sob at the bittersweet ending not unlike that of Call Me by Your Name. 

 

Better Call Saul, season 6 (Vince Gilligan, 2022): 4/5

Great acting and pacing all around. The time-tripping and ghost-visiting of the last several episodes were a great pleasure. My "save Kim at all costs" stance is satisfied.

Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022): 3/5

A modest sci-fi story, simply told. Not burdened by the need to examine and solve systematic racism, thank god. I wish I had seen it in the theatre.

 

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022): 1/5

I can’t think of a worse-directed movie—with the action chopped up and reassembled in random order. Of course, I never liked the original one either.

 

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Sophie Hyde, 2022): 2/5

Sex-positive but oh so boring. The male lead, Daryl McCormack, is a charmer, and I look forward to seeing him in a good movie.

 

Minions: The Rise of Gru (Kyle Balda, 2022): 1.5/5

The Sea Beast (Chris Williams, 2022): 2/5

Yep, I have an 8-year-old.

 

Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970): 2/5

Packed with strained acting exercises and disgusting misogyny or, to put it charitably, misanthropy. These characters don’t know what they want, and subsequently the actors flounder in many of these long scenes, not knowing what to do. 

 

Un Coeur en Hiver (Claude Sautet, 1992): 3/5

Reserved, intelligent, cold and remote, like it’s main character, who can’t (and doesn’t want to) get out of his own head. Maybe 35 years ago, I could have related, but thank Christ I don’t any more.

 

The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934): 3/5

Ethnography, with a typical interest in ritual, religion, dance and other art, shelter-building, harvest—but atypically poetic and idiosyncratic. Curious use of Western music throughout. 

 

Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015): 3/5

A (double) trip upriver, with plenty of “never get out of the boat” moments. But it never really went cosmic for me, not for lack of trying.

 

Anything for Jackson (Justin G. Dyck, 2020): 2/5

Deservedly obscure Satan-themed horror movie without enough Old Nick. 

 

 

Wilder/Brackett Mini Fest

 

Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943): 3/5

A British soldier stumbles into an Egyptian village moments before Rommel himself (a smoldering and pouty Erich von Stroheim) and serves as a kind of spy, posing as a porter. A packed screenplay, with lots of business in a variety of tones and a screwball pace. I wonder what Hitchcock could have done with the material, streamlining and slowing down what’s there to draw the tension out of the scenes of near-discovery. 

 

The Lost Weekend, rw (Billy Wilder, 1945): 4/5

“Don't wipe [the ring his glass makes on the bar counter] away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle.” Full of wonderfully anti-social behavior. Shirking duties. Breaking promises. Theft (“I assure you I’m not a thief. I’m not a thief!”) Being unshaven and sweaty. Indulging in self-loathing as well as grandiose fantasies about being an artist or some shit. Killing oneself for pleasure. 

 

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948): 3/5

“Fly off back home. Wash your hands. Wash your lips. You’ve got so much soap in the United States.” She’s a judgmental prig. He’s a cynical player of the black market, in love with a nightclub singer and ex-Nazi (Marlena Dietrich) in post-war Berlin. Some crackling dialogue ensues, of course: “That’s where he married Eva Brawn, and that’s where they killed themselves. A lot of people say it was the perfect honeymoon.” However, the light, satiric tone feels a bit glib in such a decimated city. The characters in this movie should be introduced to those in Germany Year Zero. It would straighten them all out. 

 

 

Noir in Color Mini-Fest

 

Leave Her to Heaven, rw (John M. Stahl, 1945): 4.5/5

In Technicolor, and with coloring so bold and unreal that it almost looks like a comic book, favoring blues and oranges as well as insanely glowing skin tones. Our main character is a brand of maniac rarely, if ever, seen on screen, and the famed scene on the lake is one of the iciest in all of cinema and worth the price of admission alone. This is the only John Stahl movie I’ve seen (of 37). 

 

Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953): 3.5/5

Produced and co-written by Charles Brackett who wanted to “do something with Niagara Falls,” and, in fact, the falls itself is pretty powerful and passionate. Shot in Technicolor, the movie is full of hallucinatory reds, yellows and greens as well as a rainbow motif (truly putting a hat on a hat). Features a Hitchcockian use of the falls themselves as well as of Joseph Cotton as a morally ambiguous character. Marilyn Monroe is about as good as I’ve seen her outside of The Misfits, but, sorry, she’s still mostly terrible. 

 

A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956): 3/5

Photographed in CinemaScope, color by DeLuxe, from a novel by ira levin, 14 years before Rosemary’s Baby. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard, who shot Morocco, The Devil is a Woman, The Killing, Mikey and Nicky, and The Wild Bunch. Robert Wagner plays a very modern character: a bland, suave, brooding, good-looking and well-dressed psychopath. The movie efficiently delivers some thrills, and Wagner is perfectly cast as someone undisturbed by any deep feelings. 

 

Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958): 2/5

In CinemaScope and Metrocolor, but unlike the other films in the series I’ve watched, it looks like shit—displaying horrible vomits of colors. Cyd Charisse likewise is stiff and dowdy. The exceptions to both of these observations are during the two dance numbers, where suddenly Charisse reveals herself as long-legged and graceful and the lush pinks and reds show her off like a queen/stripper. Lee Cobb is good but Robert Taylor is a stiff, and hatchet-faced John Ireland is criminally underused. More of a gangster movie than a noir.

 

 

Aki Kaurismäki Film Fest

Simple stories, told with maximum efficiency and minimum dialogue. Still, the feelings come through clearly. Half-funny and half-sad in the way of Tati, Jarmusch, Wes Anderson, Hal Hartley, Chaplin. Live music is often lovingly presented, with beautiful authenticity, fingers-on-strings-wise. 

 

Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986): 3/5

(A bad title.) Love among the barely-holding-on. This is a good time to talk about ensemble players because Kati Outinen (who makes 10 films with Kaurismäki) and Matti Pellonpää (my favorite, who makes seven (and Night on Earth) and dies at 44) are very good and, as time goes on, bring so many lives to each new character. 

 

Ariel, rw (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988): 5/5

“Take the car keys. They’re your inheritance,” says the protagonist’s father, “I’ve had it with this shit.” Cocking a pistol, he leaves the room, a shot rings out, and our protagonist is away in his huge Cadillac convertible, symbol of American-brand freedom. There follows a deadpan crime epic in one hour and 14 minutes, complete with desperation, romance, irony, revenge, a prison break, a bank robbery, lovers on the run and a flight to Mexico. 

 

The Match Factory Girl, rw (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990): 3.5/5

In the running for the most despairing and lonely of Kaurismäki’s films (which is saying something), but at least the main character takes her fate into her own hands. That’s a kind of control. 

 

La Vie de Boheme (Aki Kaurismäki, 1992): 4/5

Aki en Français, in beautiful b&w, and in a lighter register than usual (until it isn’t), with plenty of actual whole-jokes. It must have tickled Kaurismäki to borrow the same source material as La Boheme, playing off the huge emotions of the opera with his own deadpan, matter of fact style. And indeed, it is quite droll. Weirdly, the film features Jean-Pierre Leaud, Louis Malle and Sam Fuller cameos. (Parenthetically, Fuller also shows up in The American Friend, Hammett, The State of Things, and The End of Violence for Wim Wenders; in Sons and Somebody to Love for Alexandre Rockwell; in 1941 for Spielberg; in The Last Movie for Dennis Hopper; and in Pierrot le Fou for Godard).

 

Drifting Clouds (Aki Kaurismäki, 1996): 3/5

A genuinely sad-feeling film (although with usual deadpan distancing devices) about a normal couple, suddenly unemployed. It has an unearned happy ending, and I’m here for it.

 

Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011): 3.5/5

It takes a village to deal with sad immigrant teenagers, especially when the people in said community are all also sad about their dying wives, etc. Lead André Wilms returns 19 years after La Vie De Bohème, which adds great gravity and melancholy (of course) to the role.

 

The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017): 3.5/5

“All melancholics get sent back.” That’s Kaurismäki expressing, in the script, why he identifies so much with the immigrants in his two most recent films. As always Kaurismäki privileges image over dialogue and demonstrates the power of music from one’s own region for conveying self. 

 

 

Miklós Jancsó Film Fest

Jancsó is interested in how moments flow together and uses long, long shots—often containing power and mood-flips as gentle as the wind. Usually long shots (as used by, say, Scorsese or Angelopoulos) are headed somewhere or travel along with characters; Jancsó’s camera instead stalks around restlessly, turning this way and that, searchingly. Most of these movies are semi-musicals, with gorgeous camera movement, choreographed moments and literal dancing. Plus, Jancsó often has his characters sing their thoughts as if no one could hear them—including the rebels at the end of The Round Up as well as the Red who, once he knows the jig is up, sings his pro-Red song right into the White guy’s face. 

 

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966): 3.5/5

Advanced Interrogation Techniques, the Movie. Also: Mustache, the Movie. Seriously, every person on screen has a mustache, even the horses. Trademark radical and ironic flips of fate.  Deliberately confusing (and confusingly deliberate) but, once all the cards have been played, devastating. 

 

The Red and the White, rw (Miklós Jancsó, 1967): 5/5

A god’s eye view of war, full of irony and “the bewildering suddenness of combat” (Richard Brody). Jancsó’s largest-scale work, it confirms and vindicates his interest in groups over individuals.

 

The Confrontation (Miklós Jancsó, 1969): 3.5/5

Turns a jaundiced eye on the revolutionaries once they have achieved power. A group enters a seminary and, at first, it’s all “Let’s debate,” with questions such as “What is the role of the individual in history?” and “Is the world knowable?” However, soon enough it’s “I suggest we set up methods of revolutionary terror.” Of course, Jancsó punctuates this with many, many revolutionary songs and dances.

 

Sirrocco / Winter Wind (Miklós Jancsó, 1969): 3/5

A hero of the war becomes a paranoid fugitive, in 13 long, prowling shots. Lots of stalking around, pointing guns, giving orders, changing one’s mind and giving opposite orders, uncovering plots real and imagined—none of it making much actual sense.

 

Red Psalm (Miklós Jancsó, 1972): 3.5/5

Young socialists stand up to the authorities. Surprisingly it does not go well. The long take from 10:30-15:15 (to take one example) flows across many hundreds of extras, through a dozen set-ups, drop-ins, dramas and moods. 

 

Electra, My Love (Miklós Jancsó, 1974): 4/5

A retelling of the Greek play in 12 beautiful, flowing shots—and the Jancsô film that most explicitly embraces the abstraction and serenity of a musical. A field, a crowd of about 500 people, dance and other ritualized movement, music, a Bob Dylan type with guitar serving as a Greek chorus, three dwarves, 50 horses, a team of men cracking whips, a dozen hawks and 100s of doves, a giant rolling ball, a hill covered with candles, ample (if chaste) nudity, and general socialist hippy vibes. For those needing ties to Hungarian politics, Electra works to overthrow the current, anti-freedom regime. The voice of Young Hungary saying, “Our discontent will not be silenced, and this is something we are willing to die for.”

 

 

The Gorky Trilogy

A project much like The Apu Trilogy—Maxim Gorky at three points in his early life. Stalin loved Gorky and personally invited him back to the USSR in 1932, after years of exile—possibly because of Gorky’s sentimental peasant stories, representing the nobility of “the people of the land,” etc. (This is ignorant speculation on my part, of course). 

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (Mark Donskoy, 1938): 3.5/5

Village life, including a beloved grandmother. A portrait of the artist as a young man approximately 100 times better than Belfast, encompassing multiple touching emotional arcs. My favorite involved one of the kindest characters, a young man, being asked to carry a really heavy cross up a hill to a graveyard (for someone else’s wife); he stumbles and the cross crushes him to death. 

My Apprenticeship (Mark Donskoy, 1939): 3/5

Wherein the protagonist brings his natural honestly into the petty, cruel and dishonest world as a servant to a selfish rich family, on a steamboat surrounded by slippery and thieving characters, and within a casually grueling icon-making workshop. Preaches the simple act of standing up for what you believe in.

My Universities (Mark Donskoy, 1940): 2.5/5

By this final film, the messages get more blatant, quoting Schopenhauer and having people ask our protagonist (now looking like River Phoenix) questions like “What is the truth you believe in?” (which is something like “We must act and fight together, collectively”)