msicism

Come Coyote (Dani and Sheilah ReStack, 2019)

In 1975, Los Angeles painter Edward Ruscha made one of his definitive works. A "drawing" made with onion juice on paper, it consisted of the piece's title stenciled in block letters, white on light beige: ROMANCE WITH LIQUIDS. I immediately thought of this piece, and this suggestive phrase, while watching Come Coyote, the newest collaborative work by the ReStacks (formerly Dani Leventhal and Sheilah Wilson). A continuation of certain themes introduced in their experimental featurette...

Cannes It, Buddy

This is Alex Billington. He is one of the worst film critics on the planet. And he always gets to go to Cannes. Just a reminder: there is no such thing as meritocracy.

Yomeddine (Abu Bakr Shawky, 2018)

Woe be to the Un Certain Regard level film that somehow gets bumped up to Competition. After all, considering the fact that Yomeddine is a debut film, it is fairly accomplished. It's a relatively observational film about the plight of Beshay (Rady Gamal), a scarred man formerly afflicted with leprosy, who has never strayed from the colony in Egypt where his father deposited him as a boy. Following the death of his wife, Beshay decides to finally leave the colony and return to his childhood h...

Noise (Olivier Assayas, 2006)

A document of various performances from the 2005 Art Rock Festival in St. Brieuc, France, Noise has very little to distinguish it from any of the other run-of-the-mill concert films that once clogged the VHS shelf at brick-and-mortar record shops. The show features a number of interesting performances, by the likes of Metric, Jeanne Balibar, and Afel Bocoum, and at its best Noise resembles the various compilations released by the Knitting Factory during the 90s.However, there are two problems. F...

Busy in the Land of Due Diligence

Just a quick note to say, I've been busy at my day job, watching a passel of student films made for my Diary Film class. They were required to make pieces of at least 30 minutes, to insure that enough footage would be shot to give a sense of a time-logged journal. Three students went feature-length. Whew.Above is a still from one of the most interesting pieces, by University of Houston MFA student Jamie Robertson. Below, you will see a still from a feature-length diary film by Jessica Beyers...

The New King of Comedy (Stephen Chow, 2019)

Note to self: when the world of cinema is letting you down, just see a Stephen Chow movie.For one thing, even when the plot is silly, even preposterous, Chow's films are just so well directed. He is that rarest of creatures, a maker of comedies who actually attends to the basics of cinema. The clearest example of this is Chow's preference for composing establishing shots on the diagonal, like some bastard child of Jerry Lewis and Giorgio de Chirico. But this is really just a subset of Ch...

High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

Sorry, I'm afraid it doesn't quite work. Certainly from the very first shot, Denis and cinematographer Not Agnès Godard (real name: Yorick Le Saux) generate an impeccably sumptuous atmosphere, with the slow pans and tracking shots describing the moist, verdant garden and the sterile, vaguely 1970s interior of the spaceship. High Life does quite a lot with a little, using colored lights and the textures of vinyl and chrome to produce a look and feel that I'm going to call, without an...

I Don't Rate TV Shows...

...but thus far Taskmaster gets a [7].

Unexpected Brakhage Discovery

Big news! It seems that Stan Brakhage produced a heretofore unknown-to-me sequel to 23rd Psalm Branch. In it he explores eerie suburban light textures and the luminous faces of the Christians of the early 21st century, a consideration of the tangible plasticity of human faith.I'm not sure how I missed this. As you can see, it was shown at CANNES and BERLIN! Not to mention NORTH CAROLINA!!!

Sunset (László Nemes, 2018)

Sunset is a film I quite like in theory. It has a relentless formal style from which it never swerves. It uses a personal story, rather minor in the grand historical scheme of things, as a kind of microcosm of global affairs and a class structure in flux. And perhaps most notably, writer-director László Nemes organizes our perception around a character whose motivations and allegiances are frequently shifting and often difficult to surmise. All of this should lead to a film that is both statel...

Fuck Camp

These Are the Jokes, Folks

You know, at this point I've been pretty much all over America. And everywhere I go, people want to know one thing.That seems like a pretty limited knowledge base.

Hidden Man (Jiang Wen, 2018)

Jeez, what a slog. I've quite admired Jiang Wen as a director in the past, and although there's a very good chance that he will never top the exquisite chaos of Devils at the Doorstep, I think there is a lot to be said for The Sun Also Rises and his much more populist Let the Bullets Fly. Each of these films has represented a complex but subtle balance between interpersonal dynamics -- ambition, deceit, sorrow -- with a thoughtfully elaborated historical backdrop. The Japanese invasion o...

Uncle Waz's Corner for Unsolicited Advice

So yeah, sorry, I haven't posted in a minute. In addition to things being intensely awful around the English department even by the usual end-of-term standards, I have been slogging through a very tedious Jiang Wen film, forcing myself to complete it before I'm allowed to crack into High Life or Sunset. If you can't finish your "pudding," how can you have any meat?So anyway, here's something that's been on my mind lately. I am currently obsessed with British game show...

Phil Solomon (1954-2019)

I have only just minutes ago learned that filmmaker Phil Solomon has passed away. Phil had been in poor health for many years, having periods of greater or lesser infirmity. But I was unaware that he had surgery a few months ago, from which he never recovered.Phil studied with Ken Jacobs at Binghamton University, and began teaching filmmaking at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1991. He was a colleague of Stan Brakhage at Boulder, collaborated with Brakhage on a number of films, such as th...

I Wasn't Missing Twitter, But...

It's been two-and-a-half weeks since logging off social media. Generally I feel fine about it. When I get the itch to waste time online, I turn instead to Wikipedia, which has proven to be an edifying substitute. In the past week I have read about, among other things: the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, the history of The Hollywood Squares, Pot Noodle, Premiere Inns, Eton College, Brené Brown, "Invictus," cauliflower steaks, the most efficient method of double glazing window...

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

This is without question Perry's most emotionally direct film since The Color Wheel, although making that statement sounds unnecessarily evaluative. I quite appreciated the fact that Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth played their cards close to the vest, as it were, operating more in a register of allusion and, to an extent, guardedness. While one could possibly say that Her Smell is "about" Courtney Love in a manner similar to how Listen Up Philip is "about" Philip Roth, t...

My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

I suppose a question exists as to how fully I can evaluate My Ain Folk, given that it is the middle section of an autobiographical trilogy, the first and final parts I have not yet seen. (I have found those a bit harder to attain.) At the same time, Douglas's medium-length film about the death of his maternal grandmother and its impact on his childhood feels very complete to me, articulating a distinct perspective around a set of events that are bounded, if impressionistically delineated.Fro...

Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018)

This is a somewhat unconventional effort from Mike Leigh, who has tended in his period pieces to avoid "big history" and to explore important matters from the inside out. Mr. Turner used its protagonist as a kind of spoke from which the mores of the late-19th century world of British painting could radiate, serving as very specific details within a grounded story. The same could be said of Topsy Turvy and Vera Drake as well. The former got inside the nuts and bolts of theatrical creation...

It's In The Game (Sondra Perry, 2017)

Thanks to my friend James Hansen, I got to see the video portion of Sondra Perry's multimedia installation It's In The Game, which is an impressive piece of social criticism. As the debate rages on about the regulations of the NCAA, in particular the stipulations that student athletes remain strictly amateur and draw no compensation for their efforts, Perry's piece examines a very specific component of this problem. It addresses the unauthorized use of college basketball players'...

Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018)

Who is the director behind the mask?Recently I heard a set by British comedian Nish Kumar in which he explained that while there may be no good right-wing comedy, you could just as easily argue that there are no good left-wing action films. ("Avengers! We must assemble before the UN Security Council and attain approval for multilateral action against Thanos!") I guess this might be special pleading in the case of S. Craig Zahler, since his films (at least the two I've seen) seem to m...

A Bit of Feedback

The Kids Don't Stand a Chance

This semester I have been teaching a "Literature and Film" course, and overall it has been reasonably successful. The students are generally quite bright and engaged, and on the whole they have proven willing to delve headlong into a number of substantial challenges I have thrown their way (or at least what seem like challenges to me). We've read Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), Calvino (selections from Mr. Palomar), short fiction by Flannery O'Connor and Guy de Maupassant, film theory...

Shiny Happy People (Holding Hands)

As Mike D'Angelo will happily tell anyone in earshot, I love to read spoilers. If it's going to be awhile before a see a particular movie, I will frequently read a precis of the plot, mainly so that I can follow the film critical discourse around it until such time as I see the film itself. I suppose I'm not all that different from that character in Whit Stillman's Metropolitan who claimed to prefer literary criticism to literature, because it gave you both the plot and an opinio...

Glass (M. Night Shyamalan, 2019)

You gotta give M. Night some credit. When it came time to jumpstart his floundering career, he didn't go back to the obvious well, creating sequels or prequels to The Sixth Sense, still his defining success. Instead he went to Unbreakable, a much less popular film that in fact remains his best. For someone who, let's face it, has frequently evinced an outsized notion of his own talents, Shyamalan can at least distinguish wheat from chaff, which you could never say of, for example, Prince...

Public Service Announcement

Hey, I'm not saying that any of my patrons would do anything as shady as bittorrent. But FYI, the uploader called BiPOLAR has just dumped a whole lot of rarish art films on the RARBG torrent site. So if you've been needing to catch up on any Akerman, Schanelec, Arslan, Schroeter, Kormakur, docs by Claire Denis, or stuff like that, you know what to do.

Shadow (Zhang Yimou, 2018)

From what I recall, the reaction to Shadow was pretty muted coming out of Venice and Toronto last year, although the film did go on to scoop up the Golden Horse for Best Film. I suppose one could fault the film, and Zhang, for falling back on familiar stylistic tropes and tics, but I'd be hesitant to do so. For one thing, Shadow is so effortlessly entertaining from start to finish that it seems to me that finding strictly auteurist reasons to dismiss it as minor is a bit churlish, as if to s...

What's Better Than Silence?

In "A Lecture," Hollis Frampton turns on the projector and begins with the basics. He allows the projector light to simply cast itself at the screen without any piece of celluloid blocking the way. The result is a white incandescent rectangle of illumination, the most elemental thing a film projector can do. Frampton writes, "we must agree that this [film] is, from an aesthetic point of view, incomparably superior to a large proportion of all films that have ever been made." He h...

So Pretty (Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, 2019)

A film so hybridized as to at times feel amorphous, So Pretty is nonetheless a singular, often hypnotic artifact. It is a highly formalized cinematic examination of a tight-knit group of friends and their daily experience of the permeability between art and life, research and the simple act of existing. At times resembling a documentary about an artists' collective that is spilling over into a parallel, diegetic-fictional universe, So Pretty is above all an act of translation and reclamation...

Fourteen (Dan Sallitt, 2019)

Like a strange hybrid of Pialat and Bergman, Dan Sallitt's new film explores the vicissitudes of a close, possibly codependent relationship between two women over the course of many years, observing how changes in life trajectory, as well as fundamental differences in their personalities, gradually pry them apart. Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling) have been friends since grade school, when the tall, aggressive Jo stood up to bullies on Mara's behalf. But as we learn over the cou...