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MOVIES I WATCHED THIS WEEK #211:

SABELLE HUPPERT X 3:

🍿 ISABELLE HUPPERT, A LIFE TO PLAY is a wonderful biography shot in 2001. The director followed her for a whole year during her work with Chabrol on 'Nightcap', just before her 'Piano teacher' premiere and winning in Cannes, and documents her preparations for the live performance as Madea on stage in Avignon. Pure pleasure to anybody who loves to see her anywhere.

🍿 THE SWINDLE (1997), an old-fashioned grifter caper and my 12th crime comedy by Claude Chabrol. Huppert and her much older partner Michel Serrault con small time dentists and insurance men at conventions, but then they move on unto bigger and more dangerous scams. Chabrol's accomplished handle of the story is a joy to behold. 8/10.

Chabrol directed Huppert in 7 movies, of which I've seen three. But I must see them all, with the first being 'Violette Nozière'!

🍿 Narrated by Isabelle Huppert, FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, MY LIFE, A SCREENPLAY is the new documentary about the auteur "Frank Truff". It was a project he started himself, before dying too young at 52. As such, it's not great: fragmentary, unfinished and it jumps randomly from period to period. But it offers many wonderful clips from his personal life, with some new insights as to what influenced him the most: His pained relationship to both his parents, how important were children to his world view, his early friendship with Jean Genet and André Bazin. Recommended at any Truffaut fan. (I need to hunt down the last few of his films that I didn't see, especially 'Mississippi Mermaid', which is hard to find). (Ending Scene From His 'Les Quatre Cents Coups' Above).

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First watch: MIRROR, my 6th or 7th poetic film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and without any doubt my favorite film by him. I can't understand why I waited so long to see it. An emotional and visual masterpiece, about fragments of dreams and small pains of memories. Why is this film so magnificent? The boy's mother, who was Tarkovsky's real-life wife, was angelically beautiful. I am going to re-watch this film again and again. 💯 score on Rotten Tomatoes. 10/10.

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"Basically, I show up at work in the morning and ask: Who's dead?"

What goes into creating the right, balanced obituary? I did not expect to find the 2017 documentary OBIT so engrossing. It's a straight-forward, talky look into the writers of the small obituary desk at the New York Times, and how they do their work. The journalists interviewed were intelligent and reflective people, with insights and stories to tell. It turned into thoughtful study of fame and mortality. And their enormous, defunct "Morgue" of paper files! The NYT of today is just a shadow of what it was only a decade ago, and I'm sure most of all these smart people are no longer there. 9/10. [*Female Director*]

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2 BY WILD HUNGARIAN PAINTER MILORAD KRSTIĆ:

🍿 MY BABY LEFT ME (1995) is a psychedelic, erotic vision of having sex in all the most explicit ways, but drawn in a cubist, surrealistic style. 1940's Picasso would have loved it! A must see for anybody who loves abstract pornography.

🍿 "My nightmares are getting stronger and stronger..."

How come I've never heard of his first eccentric feature film RUBEN BRANDT, COLLECTOR from 2018?? Not too crazy about animation, especially when mixed with crime-Noir trops like kung-fu fighting, car chase, action killings Etc. But this original pop-art story of kleptomaniac, circus-trained acrobat art thief Mimi is rich with so many throwaway references and avant-garde Easter eggs, that I was compelled to watch this extraordinary Art History Course twice back-to-back.

The beauty starts around 0:12, and doesn't stop until the end. The end credit mentions some of its inspirations: CIA subliminals, Warhol's Double Elvis, Hitchcock ice-cube cameo, Joan Miró soup, Peckinpah’s 'Convoy', 'Oops, I Did It Again', Soviet propaganda, the black cat from Manet's Olympia, hundreds more...

This will surely become my January's most memorable viewing: Highly recommended - 9/10 and 10/10.

EXTRA: So I had to watch my other Hungarian animation favorite, Réka Bucsi's SYMPHONY NO. 42 - again, for the 15/20 time... I think I'll just put it on every week, like a record of a song you love.

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2 JAPANESE DRAMAS:

🍿 THE INHERITANCE (1962), my 4th jazzy Noir thriller by Masaki Kobayashi. A dying industrialist wants to divide his $7M estate between his young wife and 3 heirs he bore out of wedlock, and everyone around him schemes to get a piece of it. The corrupting influence of greed, lust, betrayal and selfishness. It includes a rape scene which radicalizes the only impartial character, the CEO's loyal secretary, and turns her into another revenging vulture.

Next on my list - his nearly 10 hour epic 'The Human Condition'.

🍿 MEGANE (GLASSES) (2007) is my second film by Naoko Ogigami, and a companion piece to her 'Kamome Dinner', which I enjoyed so much last week. It even features 2 of the same 3 actresses who played 'lost in Helsinki' in the previous story. But the super-minimalist, "eclectic" plot of an anti-social woman on vacation on a tiny, remote resort inn, where nearly nothing happens, and where everybody takes comfort in doing nothing, bore me for 25 minutes. ⬇️Did Not Finish⬇️ - Sorry! [*Female Director*]

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ETERNITY AND A DAY (1998), my first Greek Magical Realism work by Theo Angelopoulos. It's a story about me, memories of an old poet who's about to die, remembering the many people in his life who are no longer there, and regretting all the decisions that brought him to where he is now. In the end, the only person sharing this last day in his life is a random boy, an Albanian "Squeegee kid" whom he rescues from the police. ''My only regret, Anna... is to not have finished anything. I left all as a draft, shattered words here and there.''

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3 WITH TILDA SWINTON:

🍿 CAPRICE (1986), my first by Joanna Hogg, was also Swinton's very first film, credited here as "Matilda Swinton", made while they were both in art school. An Alice in Fashion-land trifle about a young woman who enters and lives inside a fashion magazine. British New Wave /Duran Duran style nonsense. [*Female Director*]

🍿 THE SLUGGARD (Also 1986, starts at 38:00) was a wordless artsy film school-type attempt at symbolism. She plays a dirty slob.

🍿 Joshua Oppenheimer's new apocalyptic THE END was hailed by David Ehrlich and other critics, as a ground-breaking achievement and the best musical of 2024. So I was excited to finally be able to see it. It opens with a TS Elliot quote, and it stars oil tycoon Michael Shannon and wife Tilda Swinton who fortified their family in a salt-mine luxury bunker 25 years after everybody on the surface of the earth perished. A bold and ambitious project, like 'The umbrellas of Cherbourg', it combines a meditation on the lies and the guilt of being left behind, with characters who burst out singing whenever they want to underscore a painful emotional point. But in the end, it didn't work for me; Except of one beautiful song, If only I, the rest of the score, as much as it tried to emulate Stephen Sondheim, was forgettable, and at the end of the 2.5 hour run, the dramatic interactions of the family felt like an unfocused soap opera. 5/10.

(I was going to follow up with his 'The Look of silence', the companion piece to the masterful 'The act of killing', but never got to it.)

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"You took your shot, now I'm taking mine".

When Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, of 'Every Frame a Painting' fame, stopped producing terrific videos 8 years ago, they penned a thoughtful 'Postmortem’ piece. When they returned last September with new essay, THE SUSTAINED TWO-SHOT, they teased of their first live-action narrative short.

THE SECOND is that short, and it feeds on all the insightful knowledge seen in their videos. How exciting!

It dropped yesterday together with another essay, WHERE DO YOU PUT THE CAMERA. It all makes sense now!

And then, they also posted a bonus video of 'Behind the scenes - Animatic vs. Final'.

More: IN PRAISE OF CHAIRS.

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2 BY ISRAELI DIRECTOR SHIRA HAIMOVICI:

🍿 THE HISTORY OF LONELINESS (2013) tells of a young woman who's addicted to attending 'Shiva' sittings. Like Harold of 'Maud's, she clips death announcements from the papers, and visit the homes of the grieving families. Until that time...

🍿 SUMMER SHADE (צל בקיץ) (2020) starts as an un-interesting story about a vacationing teenage girl cooling off alone in a waterhole in the mountains. But then it becomes very interesting when 4 ultra-orthodox Jewish young men arrive at the little pond for a ritual immersion "tevilah", and chase her off. [*Female Director*]

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METRONOM (2022) is an anxiety-filled Romanian drama taking place in Ceaușescu's oppressive Bucharest of 1972. The first half is an unfocused story of an ordinary teenage girl who's boyfriend is about to leave the country with his family. It's a drab and noisy world, boring and joyless.

But in the evening she goes to a party and they dance to the corrupting music of Jim Morrison. It is being transmitted from an off-shore 'Free Europe' station which was illegal at the time, and everybody's life changes dramatically when the Romanian secret police bursts in and arrests all the kids for treason against the state. It turns sharply depressing very quickly.

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MY FIRST TWO WITH ROBERT TAYLOR:

🍿 THE LAST HUNT was a hard watch. A revisionist western about the genocide of the American Indians, told via a story of two buffalo hunters, one evil and one who had a nominal change of heart. The American original sin, even before importing black slaves from Africa, was the deliberate extinction of all Native Americans. When not slaughtered outright, their way of life was destroyed through the annihilation of the massive herds of buffaloes which sustained them. This movie shows some of the killings, simulated or not, and is generally very unpleasant, even for meat-eaters. It was made in 1956, and unsurprisingly did not do well in the box office.

Robert Taylor plays the Bad Guy as a cruel, self-loathing sadist, an open racist and a mean rapist. But he ends up frozen to death, in a similar position to the one Jack Torrance found himself.

🍿 THE HOAXSTERS (1952) was a shameless piece of American Cold-War, anti-communist propaganda, a "Documentary" made during the height of McCarthyism's reign of Red Terror Scare. Wow! The virulent demagoguery is hysterically prescient. Capitalism version of "Triumph des Willens". You have to see it to believe it.

Robert Taylor was one of the narrators. It's strange that his real-life good friend Ronald Reagan didn't participate.

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SPLASHBACK (2024) is a black-and-white, old-fashioned comedy about a "Milton"-type mousey guy who works in the supply room at Cape Canaveral during the Apollo 11 launch, and who invent the "pee net" you put in the urinals. It looks like an elaborate American production, but it's actually a small-time Croatian gig done on a shoestring. The best part was the title sequence done in 100% Saul Bass style. 3/10.

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THE ONLY LAUREL & HARDY PREQUEL-SEQUEL COMEDIES:

🍿 "He who filters your good name, steals trash."

TIT FOR TAT (1935) was apparently the only sequel these two made, a perfectly excellent 2-reel comedy. A feud between two neighboring store owners with a fine escalation of grievances, while a customer helps himself to free goods from the store which they neglect. 7/10.

🍿 THEM THERE HILLS, made 5 months earlier, was so successful, that they went ahead and followed it with 'Tit for tat'. But that was of distinctively lower quality. Oliver Hardy was really abusive to his pal, here and actually, always.

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THE GRANDMOTHER (1970) is my 7th or so film by David Lynch. I swear that it was on my planned watch-list for this week, even before the news of his death broke. It's a 33 min. experimental short about an abused boy who "grows" a grandmother from a "seed". I'm sorry that he dies, but I never liked any of his films too much, and didn't like this one either. 1/10.

RIP, David Lynch!

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THIS WEEK'S SHORT FILMS:

🍿 NIGHT BUS (2019), a strange and nightmarish Taiwanese animation with a mysterious plot that get weirder, more violent and uglier for 20 straight minutes. Atmospheric score and unusual visual style. CW: Monkey death, brutal vengeance, unrequited love.

🍿 In WILD LIFE (2011), a young Englishman moves to the Canadian prairie province of Alberta in 1909. A wonderful short by Canadian animator duo Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, and their first of two nominations for the Academy Award. Brilliant imagination, extremely well told. This is my third shot by them, after 'The flying Sailor' and 'When the day breaks'. 9/10 - Recommended! [*Female Directors*]

🍿 A STAR IN THE NIGHT, Don Siegel'e directorial debut, earned him one of the two Oscars he won in 1946 (The other was for his documentary short 'Hitler Lives'.) It's a modern day retelling of the Nativity story plus some elements from 'A Chris!mas's Story' thrown in. 3 cowboys riding in the desert and find a motel somewhere in Arizona or so, with Nicky, its mean owner with the thickest Italian accent you ever heard. I've never seen a more sentimental hogwash in all'a my life! But it worked! 8/10.

🍿 A PURE SPIRIT (2004), my 5th by Mia Hansen-Løve , and her very first short. Basically, it's just a poetic exercise of a young woman walking in the park. [*Female Director*]

🍿 THE WINDSHIELD WIPER won the 2022 Oscars, and I'm sure I disagree. Interesting Rotoscope cell animation, but otherwise it's a collage of unrelated snippets about modern dating. There's some hipster sitting at a cafe, smoking a whole pack of cigarettes and asking himself 'What is love?'. 2/10.

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THROW-BACK TO THE ADORA ART PROJECT:

The whole Adora Art Project!

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(ALL MY FILM REVIEWS - HERE).

#movies #film reviews #truffaut #the 400 blows #french cinema #french new wave

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