To Leslie (Michael Morris, 2022): 3.5/5

Great, demanding role and performance, more deserving of recognition than cold Cate Blanchette and honorary pick Michele Yeoh. The movie is a bit Sundance, but I admit that after the grim, Sean-Baker-esque first half hour, I was relieved see our protagonist stumble upon the kindly, 12-step-ish Marc Maron character (and the warmer, more confined plot he suggests). No one asked, but Maron also does a terrific job—the Texas lilt gets him right out of his head. 

 

The Menu (Mark Mylod, 2022): 2.5/5

in the 70s the bad guys were the CIA, in the 80s they were Russians, in the 90s they were Arabs, and today they are The Rich. More heavy-handed satire and punishment, but not (even) as good as Triangle of Sadness or Glass Onion. 

 

Glass Onion (Rian Johnson, 2022): 2.5/5

Eager to entertain, but broad and facile as satire.

 

Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022): 2/5

GTFO. I tried to enjoy all the twists but by the end, I just threw my hands up. They say that it’s better the second time, but I won’t soon find out.

 

Pearl (Ti West, 2022): 4/5

Unlike anything I’ve seen before, exactly, and pretty unnerving. A character study of a young lady who just wants to explore the world without the constraints of her strict and infirm parents and who takes it into her own hands to liberate herself with whatever tools she has on hand. It has been observed that this movie—along with its sequel-that-came-out-before-it, X—is indebted to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and for sure Ti West here tunes into the half-dead quality of a family’s patriarch.

 

Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgen, 2022): 1.5/5

Some cool footage ruined by the addition of a bunch of footage having nothing to do with Bowie. But isn’t it cool, like him?? 

 

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford, 2022): 3.5/5

Dreamworks goes Into the Spider-Verse.

 

Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021): 3/5

A man lays dying while a group of spelunkers penetrate ever deeper into one of the world’s deepest caves. That’s just about it. A disappointment after the great Le Quattro Volte, but true mystery is hard to come by. 

 

Vagabond, rw (Agnès Varda, 1985): 5/5

“By proving she’s useless, she helps a system she regrets.” I appreciate the comparison to Citizen Kane, but the film also makes me think of Raymond Chandler. Like Marlowe, Mona is able to move freely among all the classes, granting us intimate and colorful sketches of many kinds of people. And like Marlowe, Mona is able to elucidate the mysteries of others but remains mystified as to her own stubborn motivations. As a social-issue movie it is pretty subtle—she is too stubborn and independent to be helped much by a social safety net—but the movie does keep pointing out all the empty rooms all around this homeless character. Original title literally translates to Without Roof or Law.

 

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001): 5/5

Full of unnerving elisions. A girl jumps into a dirty pool and her friends wait and wait for her to return to the surface. She’s not dead or anything, we are just left hanging. The edit puts her in danger, not the pool. In another example, two kids point shotguns at their little brother. Cut to hills with gunshots echoing. The kid is shown later fine, no biggie. In the end, what impresses is the feeling that death everywhere. Death by glass, by drowning, by gunshot, by machete, by choking, by African rat. Emotionally (and pictorially) it’s a fantastic and intimate swamp. Soft focus and close and cropped framing. Long lenses and flattened space.  

 

The Headless Woman, rw (Lucrecia Martel, 2008): 4/5

When confronted suddenly by her privilege and its anonymity, our protagonist just fazes out—simply forgetting her sins, her burdens, her name. I deeply relate. A mood/tone that crosses both Jeanne Dielman and this one is “vacancy.”

 

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017): 3.5/5

With all the strange rules, customs, rituals, beliefs and lifestyles on display, this almost has the feel of science fiction. Also, with so much occurring off-screen, so many people filmed with their heads out of frame, so many startling elisions, it’s a Martel movie alright—yet the tone is somehow lighter and wackier.

 

Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949): 3/5

More Grapes of Wrath than Detour. So much human misery and failure over fucking $5,000-worth of apples. If you stop this movie with five minutes left, it’s a great Noir ending: no apples, no money, no honesty, no justice or revenge, no friendship, no respect for the dead, no loyalty, no girl, no future. The last five minutes unfortunately pisses all that away, turning the cops into sympathetic helpers and letting sleepy Richard Conte beat up Lee Cobb for Christsake. 

 

The Breaking Point (Michael Curtiz, 1950): 4/5

“I’d just as soon seen you all with your guts hangin’ out.” Superb, under-seen Noir with John Garfield and (the never-young) Patricia O’Neal. In opposition to the drumbeat that Casablanca recreates North Africa on the Warner Bros lot, this film provides ample authentic-feeling footage of boats off the coast of Southern California.  #WetNoir 

 

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952): 3.5/5

Rich and crazy-eyed Joan Crawford marries snake-eyed Jack Palance at the end of act one. What could go wrong? I expected to have to wait an hour for Crawford to find out she is being duped, but, no, she discovers this right away and turns the tables. Crawford is portrayed as too old, really, to be powerful or desired; she was 47 at the time of filming. #FriscoNoir

 

The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955): 4/5

A cop falls in love with the mob boss’ girl. What could go wrong? The mise en scène is dreamy and constructed—a series of rooms in “New York”—and John Alton ensures that the movie features the darkest, most shadowy police headquarters of all time. I haven’t much love for hero Cornell Wilde or mob boss Richard Conte, but Jean Wallace is a knockout. And as a Noir, it has everything: boxing, the detective character being knocked out cold, a prolonged and intense torture scene, German fallen-aristocrat douchebags, and two eroticized gunsels (Fanty and Mingo) who seem…very close. 

 

 

Peckinpah Film Fest

A bunch of violent dudes. Internecine squabbling, drunken honor and self-mythologizing. Leaders who have been in the game just a little too long. Failure and death. 

 

Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah, 1965): 3/5

Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Tim Hutton, James Coburn, Slim Pickens, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson (among others) are a ragtag calvary squad chasing a renegade group of murderous Apaches and being chased by the French. A surprisingly languorous pace leaves plenty of room for infighting between Northerners and Southerners, black soldiers and white, veterans and rookies, etc. A long concluding battle scene displays only flashes of the chopped-up style to come. 

 

The Wild Bunch, rw (Sam Peckinpah, 1969): 5/5

The movie powerfully uses the iconography of the Western (raw landscapes and men riding horses through rivers, on city streets, off of bridges—an ecstasy of horses) while critiquing what was wrong with past Westerns, providing a more realistic portrayal of outlaws who are indeed outside of the laws of decorum or moral behavior. It strangely also wants to reward these characters with casual and happily drunken sex with one-dimensional Mexican girls (always joyous, naïve and as primal and available as a Gauguin subject)—but this just invites critiques to this critique. The protagonists’ final gesture is the heroic act of someone shooting out the lights—destroying all that is corrupt, including themselves.

 

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah, 1970): 3/5

Undeniable influencial on There Will Be Blood. Here, a prospector at the end of his rope discovers…water (which means a new town on the stagecoach line) then hooks up with a “priest.” The resemblance ends there, since Anderson thankfully eliminates the timeworn “civilizing effect of women” part of the equation here, in favor of his pet theme of fathers and sons. The inevitable End-of-West turn comes in the form of an automobile, which requires not water but a different liquid from the ground (see: TWBB). (A pre-Magnolia) Jason Robards is good, and Strother Martin and Sir Slim Pickens are more than welcome. 

 

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971): 4/5

“Rats is life.” I like the tone of the first half, which is both naturalistic in a 70s way and completely edgy and paranoid…in a 70s way. His and her every move is watched and openly criticized by stupid, snickering, angry ghouls—it’s infuriating. Thereafter follows a sequence that rivals any in cinematic history for its transgression, and that disqualifies it (probably correctly) from representation for its other excellent qualities. That’s entertainment! Some of the most exciting and emotional cross-cutting I’ve seen (outside of Eisenstein). Today it would be her story, not his. 

 

Cross of Iron (Sam Peckinpah, 1977): 3.5/5

Peckinpah decamps to Yugoslavia with a shit-ton of explosives, artillery, tanks, ammunition, sandbags, uniforms and an epic script mostly following one German (!) battalion eventually way behind enemy lines on the Russian front. Guzzling 180-proof Slivovitz, Peckinpah shoots for 89 days before the producers pull the plug. The result is lots of chaotic and rhythmic battle scenes as well as the usual gross ultra-masculine behavior. Pretty good!!

 

The Ostermann Weekend, rw (Sam Peckinpah, 1983): 2/5

When you’ve done so many drugs that you begin to think that all your friends are actually Russian spies: “The truth is a lie that hasn’t been found out.” I remember liking this in the theater, at 16, but now I can’t put my finger on why I enjoyed this semi-coherent barrage of sex and violence. I guess I was into that sort of thing. 

 

 

Taiwanese and Chinese Film Festival

Is it racist to group these together?

 

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou. 1991): 4/5

Simple mastery of color and composition. Looking down on each wife’s courtyard, the roofs look like legs spread open, leading to the “door” at the top, glowing, glowing. The red of desire and the blue of death. 

 

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985): 3.5/5

A delicate and ephemeral memory piece with spare compositions and beautiful light, but more traditional than the other films I’ve seen from this director, while still being quite static. Remember when dad gave me the letter and I soaked the stamp off because I collected stamps? Remember when Grandma and I picked a bunch of guavas? It does have a structure, which is expressed in the title, but to say more would be, of all things in a Hou movie, a spoiler. 

 

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1970): 3.5/5

Surprisingly, even bizarrely contemporary and entertaining for a Chinese film from 1971. Marvel has modeled oh so much from this template of an escalating series of cool fights. Lacks the stultifying and lugubrious pretension of Crouching Dragon while retaining that feeling of grace, beauty and delight when these squint-eyed warriors (male and female) defy gravity. 

 

Spring in a Small Town (Mu Fei, 1948): 4/5

A short and melancholy jewel. A love triangle, a handful of locations, lots of silence and so much feeling. Voted by Chinese cineastes as the greatest Chinese film of all time. 

 

Election (Johnnie To, 2005): 3/5

A large and unwieldy cast of characters with names like Big Head, Long Gun, Whistle and Uncle Monk make keeping factions straight almost impossible, for me—leading to a pretty abstract first half. Once the drama focuses on the rivalry quiet Loc and loud Big D, the film delivers some thrills in a unique style and rhythm—realistic and administrative for a genre piece.

 

Exiled (Johnnie To, 2006): 2/5

A very different tone from Election—one that ratchets up the bloody shoot-outs, irony, “coolness,” and tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that all the posturing is a bit silly. It really is.

 

Drug War (Johnnie To, 2012): 3.5/5

Strait-laced (but increasingly reckless) cop teams up with newly arrested meth-maker looking for redemption (or is he?) to bust people higher up the chain. Blessedly light on shoot-outs, this one offers a steady throb of suspenseful business, until the apocalyptic final confrontation between all the cops and all the criminals, one for the ages. One might marvel at how different in tone each of these movies is, but I also note that To has directed 69 movies to date, many of which seem to be rom-coms, historical epics, family dramas, etc.

 

 

Guy Maddin Film Fest

I never loved Maddin’s earlier works such as Careful, but these later pieces show a director constantly pushing his style forward and finding goodness here and there.

 

The Heart of the World, 6 mins (Guy Maddin, 2000): 4.5/5

I happily watched it four times in a row, trying to grok the dense imagery and reference. I would love to give this a 5 but would feel dumb without having more thoroughly watched the Eisenstein and early Lang it is (probably) parodying. 

 

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007): 4.5/5

I’m currently re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow, and coincidentally this movie reminds me of it (as well as of Eraserhead and Davies). Quite a lot of dreamy, quirky, funny, ambiguous, poetic, surreal vignettes and strategies—including parodies and homages to melodrama, silent cinema and documentary. 

 

The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson, 2015): 2/5

A crazy and silly series of dreams is told using a very wide array of materials, various and beautiful. Maddin interrogates the feelings inherent in silent cinema with all kinds, two strip Technicolor, animation, and a very free mise en scène. I wanted to like this one, but at this length, the whole thing is tiresome. 

 

The Green Fog, 62 mins (Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson, 2017): 5/5

A loose recreation of Vertigo, using found footage from about 50 movies and TV episodes set in San Francisco—leading to cinematic reveries about running across roof tops, looking at paintings, the hair on the backs of heads, underwater rescue, climbing and falling off towers. As an obsessive cineaste and re-watcher of Vertigo, it was catnip to me. Genius use of all the non-speaking, gasping parts of a conversation in, say, The Streets of San Francisco.

 

Stump the Guesser, 19 mins (Guy Maddin, Evan and Galen Johnson, 2020): 3.5/5

Embus silent-film framing with a dazzling animation and effects to tell a story that starts classical then becomes psychedelic, with bursts and surges of quick editing and radical disruption of the frame, etc. I’m surprised this radical style hasn’t been borrowed more by car commercials.

 

Shorts worth watching: 

How to Take a Bath (2009)

The Hall Runner (2014)

Cold (with Evan Johnson) (2014)

Elms (with Evan Johnson) (2014)

Colours (with Evan Johnson) (2014)

Puberty (with Evan Johnson) (2014)

 

Shorts not worth watching:

Sissy-boy Slap Party (2004)

My Dad is 100 Years Old (2005)

Nude Caboose (2006)

Spanky: To the Pier and Back (2008)

Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair (2009)

Sinclair (2010)

Lines of the Hand (2015)

Accidence (2018)

The Rabbit Hunters (2020)