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tilbageidanmark · 2 years

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Movies I watched this Week #90

Lots of excellent films this week: ‘I lost my body’, ‘Three monkeys’, ‘Wheel of fortune and fantasy’, ‘Asako l & ll’, ‘Mid90′s’, ‘The recorder exam’, ‘Game night’.

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I lost my body, an Oscar-nominated French adult animation. It’s about a young Moroccan boy who wants to become a pianist and an astronaut, but who, after his parents’ death, ends up as a lowly pizza delivery boy. Also about a severed hand which escapes from a laboratory refrigerator and sets off on an urban odyssey across Paris in search of its owner. Strange, magical and completely original, it’s also about losing everything, your parents, your love, your aspirations, even your limbs.

Unique find of the week!

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2 more excellent Turkish films:

🍿 Three Monkeys, my 5th film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and possibly my favorite by him. A painful, brilliantly-composed story about a family of three who refuses to hear, refuses to see, and refuses to speak. Words left unsaid, a tragic failure to communicate, and a stunning mastery of film-making.

My best film of the week! (Now I wish I could find a copy of his ‘Climates’.)

🍿 Mustang, a feature debut by female director Deniz Gamze Ergüven. A modern teenagers drama about five orphaned, rebellious sisters who are being married off against their wishes in a remote, conservative village. Better than ‘The virgin suicides’. The patriarchy must be destroyed! 8/10.

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Je Tu Il Elle ("I You He She"), my second by Chantal Akerman, her first feature and the film she did a year before ‘Jeanne Dielman’. What a disappointment (for me)! While I loved her slow-burn, subtle and mature masterpiece, this earlier avant-garde piece baffled me. Aimless, tedious, and indulgent, it seemed so much like a film school experiment: A young woman alone in an empty room, eating powdered sugar with a spoon from a paper bag, hitchhiking a ride in a lorry, and then visits an old girlfriend.

The long, graphic love-making scene at the end was revolutionary (being the first explicit lesbian sex scene in a mainstream film), but not enough to elevate this film (for me). I found it on ‘Internet Archive’, which appears to be a good source for more films.

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4 More by Ryusuke Hamaguchi:

🍿 Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, made last year, at the same time as his award-winner ‘Drive my car’ (and “first released nationally in cinemas in Denmark” - yeah!) As terrific as his more acclaimed film, it tells three gentle, elegant but unrelated stories about women impossibly in love.

The trailer describes it well. All three are a great introduction to Hamaguchi’s exquisite style, but the third, ‘Once Again’, is a masterpiece! It tells of two women reunited after 20 years who realize they may in fact be strangers. 9/10.

🍿 Asako I & II, a powerful ‘True Love’ parable about a young woman who falls intensely in love with a beautiful free-spirit guy, who suddenly disappears after 6 months. A fantastically stylish film making, unhurried, delicate, electric.

My favorite of his movies so far (I still have to see “Happy Hour’). 10/10.

🍿 “When I was a little girl, my mother said that when we die, we go to heaven. But I didn’t believe in it. Heaven seemed so far away”.

His 38-min. short, Heaven Is Still Far Away, is a tender ghost story. It’s basically a “three persons in a room, talking” like a Hong Sang-soo film.

🍿 On the other hand, Wife of a spy was written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, but was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's a traditional Spy Melodrama about a wealthy Kobe silk merchant during the war. Dull and uninspired.

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Booksmart, a female-centered version of ‘Superbad’, coming-of-age last day of high-school comedy. Two brainy, socially-deficient girlfriends’ last chance for a party. With my crash Jessica Williams as the cool teacher.

I still wish that American high-school stories on film will not be so over-energized, over-dramatized, so loud and busy, and that actual teens will play the 17 year-olds for once.

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2 With boy actor Sunny Suljic:

🍿 Mid90′s, an authentic and heart-felt coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old boy who joins a group of elder skateboarders. Written and expertly-directed by Jonah Hill. Excellent nostalgic score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. Sunny played the boy protagonist exceptionally well. 9/10.

🍿 I didn’t care much for Yorgos Lanthimos‘ ‘The lobster’, so his next Greek Sacrifice film The Killing of a Sacred Deer was better. A creepy teenager has mystical powers over the family of a surgeon who had killed his father on the operating table. Everybody speaks in robotic, staccato fashion, and expresses weird and shocking ideas. No internal logic. Got too crazy. Here Sunny Suljic plays the most sympathetic character of the story.

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The classic The Stepford Wives, another Suburban Gothic about robotic women in a picture perfect middle class nightmare, brain-washed consumer-friendly females under the thumb of the patriarchy. Written by William Goldman, after Ira Levin's novel of the same name. But this was no ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. If a distinctive author, like a Polanski or a Kubrick, would do it, it could be very good. But as it was, the no-name director did a mediocre and dull job. Not a feminist 'Invasion of the body snatchers’. (Also, it was extremely “White”, although a black couple moved into town at the end). 2/10.

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2 sad shorts about kids:

🍿 Earlier in the spring I saw the Korean teen drama ‘House of Hummingbird’ and loved it. Now I found female director Bora Kim’s first short film The Recorder Exam on YouTube. What a perfectly beautiful children film! As tender as ‘The Red Balloon’. I wish she'll be able to make more films beside these two. 10/10. (Photo Above).

🍿 Cat Skin, a 1962 expressionist Brazilian portrait of very young boys from the slums of Rio, who catch stray street cats, whose skins will be used for small drums at the upcoming carnival. Poverty and pathos.

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Irish film professor and festival presenter Mark Cousine’s recent chapter in his long series ‘Story of Film’, A new Generation, about some of the ‘most exciting films in the 21st century’, at least according to him. In his nasal, serious intonation, and for over 2.5 hours, he just cherry-picks and connects hundreds of random clip samples from lots of scenes, while saying a bunch of meaningless ‘deep thoughts’ like “Nearly all cinema had been anthropocentric"... and “The GoPro camera is cinema’s Copernicus”…

At least he mentions many interesting, non-Anglo-Western films from all over the world. So it gave me a slew of unfamiliar films to look for. Actually, three of this week’s films are already from his list. So that’s good.

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Samuel L. Jackson X 2:

🍿 Whatever happen to director John McTiernan? His Die Hard with a Vengeance is one of the few 90′s action flicks I saw multiple times for some reason. It starts with a big bang, and continues to blow up a little boy’s giant toy box: taxies, dump trunks, 18-wheelers, boats, bikes, and helicopters. And it never slows down. It was released exactly one month before the Oklahoma bombing.

...You're a truck driver?

No I'm a beautician. Of course I'm a truck driver!...

🍿 First watch: Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature Hard Eight. I will have a hard time explaining why I disliked it so much: Is it the dimwit no-talent John C Reilly loser character? The wooden Gwyneth Paltrow sad waitress/ prostitute cliche? The fake premise of a gritty Vegas underbelly, and the story, every single line of which had appeared in many other Noir films before? The only good touch: Calling the gentleman gambler Philip Baker Hall ‘Sydney’ after his role as Sydney The Lawyer from ‘Midnight Run’. 2/10.

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Before ‘Ida’, “Cold War’ and other dramas, Paweł Pawlikowski directed documentaries, including Serbian Epics. It was filmed in 1991 during the war in Yugoslavia and was less than a war reportage, more of an episodic, impressionistic pastiche of rural soldiers getting ready to battle. He got access to nationalist leader Radovan Karadžić, later convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity. The Serbian war was cruel and fucked up. This film does not show any of the usual atrocities committed.

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Re-watching Game Night: I am surprised to see that I wasn’t too crazy about it last year, but I’m sold now. Smart and fun. ...”They didn't have rubbing alcohol and they don't sell hard liquor, so I got you this lovely chard”... Also, I forgot that there’s a one last lovely Easter Egg at the very end, after the final credit roll.

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2 more Buster Keaton:

🍿 The Railrodder (1965), Keaton's next-to-last film, a 25-minute comedic travelogue of Canada, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and supported by the National Railway. Silent with dubbed sound effects and no dialogue.

🍿 The Incredible Stunts of Buster Keaton, a 20-min. YouTube essay, narrated by his great-granddaughter, and hosted on a YouTube Channel dedicated to him

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First watch: Sadomasochistic torture / gore classic Hellraiser. My first (and 100% also last) Clive Barker fantasy. Just because I dislike the horror genre, doesn’t mean I didn’t want to see what it was about. Disgusting. 1/10.

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Finishing the weeks strong, with St. George Carlin on Campus. Years before he achieved comedic perfecting, some of this 1984 material was so damn funny, I was literally in stitches. (Audio only, and that’s all right). It ended with the 5 minutes long “Incomplete List of Impolite Words". 9/10. 🍿

Every week I see at least a few films which I hate or simply find uninteresting, but I usually finish them. This way I can write an angry ‘review’, or at least say to myself, ‘I did see it and it was a piece of shit’. But there are also quite a few ones, that I start watching, and I simply can’t finish. Usually I find them “stupid” or “worthless”, sometimes they are too boring or unbearable for me.

Normally I just cross them off my giant folder of 'Watch List’, but from now on I’m going to start marking them here (because I’m compulsive and also because I can do whatever the heck I want). I’ll call them the “The-Couldn’t-Even-Finish-Films” until I find a better name. So here goes:

I tried David O. Russell’s “existential comedy’ I ♥ Huckabees, because I’m a Isabelle Huppert’s fan, but by the time she appeared on the screen, at 21:00, I could not stand it any longer. I like quirky, brainy deconstructive premises as much as the next guy, but Jason Schwartzman was so insufferably terrible, and the absurd set up so artificially manufactured, I had to bail. Pretentious, pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

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(I may be moving my streaming platform to M4ufree. It seems that Cataz is experiencing some unfortunate bugs on the iPad.)

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(My complete movie list is here)

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artwalktv · 2 years

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| 2021 Winner of Tribeca Film Festival (World Premiere) | AWARDS Tribeca Film Festival '21 | Special Jury Prize Galway Film Fleadh '21 | Best International Film Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival '21 | Flickers' Jury Award, Grand Prize Leiden International Film Festival ‘21 | Pronk Shorts Competition, Best Short Film Port Townsend Film Festival '21 | Best Narrative Short Film New York Shorts International Film Festival ’21 | Best Drama Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia '21 | Best International Actor Woods Hole Film Festival '21 | Director's Choice Award Sidewalk Film Festival ’21 | Kathryn Tucker Windham Storyteller Award OFFICIAL SELECTION Nashville Film Festival ’21 Hollyshorts Film Festival ’21 Tirana International Film Festival ’21 LA Shorts International Film Festival ’21 Indy Shorts International Film Festival ’21 Boston Film Festival ’21 Breckenridge Film Festival ’21 Norwich Film Festival ’21 Indie Memphis Film Festival ’21 Scad Savannah Film Festival ’21 Newport Beach Film Festival ’21 Newfilmmakers Los Angeles '21 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival ’21 Maine International Film Festival ’21 Lone Star Film Festival ‘21 Sulmona International Film Festival ’21 New York Turkish Film Festival ’21 Seattle Turkish Film Festival ’21 Follow us on: https://bit.ly/3xcHutC https://bit.ly/3Fx5hY5 Fiction | 2021 | USA | 16:58 | 16:9 | HD | Color "In present day Queens, New York, a Turkish gravedigger is unable to face a shattering truth, and risks losing the dearest connection left in his life." CAST Yusuf Çelik - Nadir Saribacak Renk Çelik - Isabella Haddock Tulay Çelik - Gamze Ceylan Abdul - Samrat Chakrabarti Markus - Tony Naumovski Ibrahim - Ibrahim Traore The Digger - Louis Pearlman The Digger - Joseph Fernandez The Digger - Burak Kemal Dogan The Digger - Onur Usluca The Digger - Avery Miritello Cemetery Worker - Mark Lyons Cemetery Worker - Max Schuster Turtle - Herman CREW Directors - Scott Aharoni, Dennis Latos Writer - Mustafa Kaymak Producers - Scott Aharoni, Dennis Latos, Mustafa Kaymak Cinematographer - Laura Valladao Production Designer - Anna Driftmier Editors - Scott Aharoni, Dennis Latos Original Music - Ahmet Kenan Bilgic Associate Producers: Janette Hasson Kaymak, Mark Castillo Executive Producers - Sola Fasehun, Yvette Pineyro, Steve Biegel, Robert Pistor, Christian Ladigoski, Stavroula Toska, Lindsey Ryan, Avery Miritello, Iliana Guibert 1st Assistant Director - Lincoln Robisch 2nd Assistant Director - Faith Wardlaw 2nd 2nd Assistant Director - Murat Engiz Camera Operator - Spencer T Nottage Camera Operator - Jackson Eagan 1st Assistant Camera - Seth Herzog 1st Assistant Camera - Will Meade 2nd Assistant Camera - Drew Weiss Gaffer - Cynthia Almanzar Key Grip - Tom Festo Costume Designer - Alexandra Engelson Hair and Makeup Artist - Catrina Grieco Animal Wrangler - Rob & Maria Crowe Supervising Sound Editor - Tristan Baylis Re-recording Mixer - Tristan Baylis Foley - Foley First Foley Supervisor - Yuri Pridachin Foley Artists - Yuri Pridachin, Vladimir Smagin Foley Mixers - Natasha Selezneva,Dmitriy Alexeev Foley Editors - Sergey Klimentovskiy, Boris Tsarev Sound Recordist - Laura Cunningham Boom Operator - Brian Ness Colorist - Kath Raisch Visual Effects Artist - Nick Crist Music Recording Studio - LU Studio Music Mixing - Ahmet Kenan Bilgic Saxaphone & Flute - Guillaume Grosso Guitars - Ahmet Kenan Bilgic Key Production Assistant - Maggie Paragian Production Assistant - Dimitri Tzorbatzoglou Production Assistant - Derek Delson Producer's Assistant - Vivienne Delevigne Script Editor - Janette Hasson Kaymak Script Assistant - Kadir Kaymak Still Photographer - Eleri Ever Key Art and Poster Design - Berkcan Okar, Yer Creative CONTACT Scott Aharoni [email protected]

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