Film Review

Mourning in America

Chet Kozlowski — Sat, 11 May 2024 14:54:32 +0000

Mourning in America Chet Kozlowski May 11, 2024 - 10:54

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Our divided nation is the topic of Mitch McCabe’s harrowing new documentary 23 Mile. Set firmly in America’s heartland, the film is a video diary of a perfect storm of events in 2020: the Presidential election in the midst of the Covid pandemic.

The scene is Michigan, from Detroit to Kalamazoo and stops in between. While the state has “long been a hotbed of militia activity,” as one observer puts it, 23 Mile spreads a wide net, documenting tourists, activists and extremists. What emerges is a disquieting portrait of a disillusioned and confused populace.

23 Mile offers no narration or commentary. Its technique is simplicity itself, purely point-and-shoot: press conferences, rallies, protests, fundraisers. It’s a verité collage of the breadth of involvement (and dissatisfaction) that emerges from behind masks and disinfectant. Bleak scenes—bare trees (it’s fall), red MAGA caps, puffer jackets—are punctuated by radio show call-ins, ghostly voices out of the ether, against shots of waves lapping at a tanker, or media microphones awaiting a speaker.

Mitch McCabe is the director/producer of other topical shorts and features, including You Have Been Lied To (2023), Civil War Surveillance Poems, Part 1 (2020), and the 2009 HBO documentary Youthh Knows No Pain.

Though the time for both sides-ism has passed, the film employs it to great effect. The people just speak. Their affiliations are not readily revealed. It’s a canny device: all the complaints sound alike: something’s got to change in our basic political and social structure. One man who hosts an unpopular Biden display on his front lawn says, “Policies are the same. I just want to vote for decency.”

The media is a pariah, called out as “the most effective devil in America.” Most of the dissent is bull-horned or glad-handed. “I cannot do anything unless it’s defensive,” says a middle-aged man in paramilitary garb, as if that justifies his assault weapon. He knows that whoever fires the first shot potentially sets off a barrage. Yet they carry, concealed or right out there.

To watch 23 Mile is to witness the groundswell and experience the monotony of lives left behind. These people take to the streets, waving the flag and mouthing the mantra “We the people/liberty for all” while marching under the shadow of disinformation. In the span of time covered by the film, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer is exposed. One interviewee is happy to see her unharmed but stung by her criticism of Trump, as if the two acts weren’t related.

It's no spoiler to say that 23 Mile ends first with the election—a lone walker holds up a hand scrawled sign that reads “You lost,” which could be intended for any of us—and then with the first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine from the plant in Kalamazoo. Then the chilling caption “24 days till Jan. 6.”

23 Mile is a searing snapshot of a prophetic time in our history.

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23 Mile. Directed by Mitch McCabe. On VOD, DVD, and Blu Ray. 78 Minutes.

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Ultimate Value of All Things

Gary Lucas — Sun, 05 May 2024 18:05:07 +0000

Ultimate Value of All Things Gary Lucas May 5, 2024 - 14:05

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fantasy

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: I love to go and see films on weekday afternoons in actual cinemas. Very few people are in attendance, a mix of hardcore cineastes and pensioners. I like to get there early, stake out a good seat, and hunker down with buttered popcorn and a cold drink (usually a coke, although Film Forum offers an exceptionally delicious egg cream which they whip up from scratch). Once the lights go down and we are altogether in the communal womb-like darkness, I tend during the trailers to drift into a semi-twilight state--the crash after my cold drink's initial sugar rush--before rousing myself into sharper focus just in time for the opening credits. Which is why I enjoyed Italian director Alice Rohrwacher's magic realist opus La Chimera so much. It pretty much inhabits the same drowsy semi-conscious dream state I normally experience before the film du jour starts--and sustains that mood for nearly three meandering and delightful hours, eventually building to a Very Big Bang I won't reveal here. Suffice to say that the film is sheer visual and narrative poetry, in part reminiscent of the gauzy descriptive wordscapes of late Nabokov (Ada and Look at the Harlequins come to mind), which float in and out of the reader/viewer's consciousness, insistently begging the questions "What exactly is a Dream / And what exactly is a Joke?" (pace Syd Barrett's "Jugband Blues").

Ostensibly a comedic tale of a band of impoverished ragazzi tomb raiders (tombaroli), sifting under the top soil of Tuscany necropoli for ancient Etruscan artifacts, the film is also a profoundly serious inquiry into the Ultimate Value of All Things both corporeal and spiritual. The band sells their unholy pickings for a pittance to a shadowy sharpie, an imperious boss woman who forges documents of fake provenance to better auction the loot off for millions of euros to international museum curators who most likely know better and look the other way. The film leisurely ambles its way through the gorgeous land and seascapes of '80s Tuscany using a variety of different film and video stocks to suggest different mystical psychological and psycho-geographic states. From scene to scene, in a strategy of offhand misdirection and inference, shards of the characters' history--fragments of memory and desire--are gradually revealed like so many pieces of broken amphorae, while real ghosts hover around the proceedings above and below ground.

Soon-to-be-superstar protagonist Josh O'Connor (The Crown) portrays a mumbling, shambolic former British archeologist named Arthur, first seen sprawling in a train compartment wearing a dirty white linen suit which grows grubbier as the film proceeds--gone to seed and fresh out of jail for (it's implied) past grave robbing, and seemingly now on a permanent bummer due to his current impecunious position and the simultaneous disappearance of his Italian girlfriend. He's on the skids but still possesses, to the delight of that old gang of his, a near-preternatural gift for divining ripe and ready grave sites. There are strong performances from Isabella Rossellini as the village matriarch Flora, the mother of Arthur's grand lost love, and in a Fellini-esque touch, Brazilian actress Carol Duarte portrays Italia, a Gelsomina-like Holy Innocent who falls for Arthur and vice versa, and later admonishes him and his gang of tombaroli when she stumbles on them trying to cart off their booty: "These are not meant for human eyes!" Or ears, as Arthur has given her a little jingling bell seemingly dating back to 800 years BCE. which once delighted and now repulses her as she realizes what the lovable gang has been up to. There is a lot of effective music on the soundtrack (including Kraftwerk's "Space Lab"), as well as commentary on the proceedings sung as Tuscan folk ballads live in the film by members of the gang (who seem to be freelance commedia dell 'arte players when they are not raiding tombs).

It's definitely, a film that bears repeated viewing, I highly recommend!

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Quest of Ire

Webmaster — Wed, 01 May 2024 21:04:16 +0000

Quest of Ire Webmaster May 1, 2024 - 17:04

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documentary

Fun fact: there are two kinds of primed lions in South Africa. Primed for what? Primed to be hunted.

"Canned" lions are bred for it and regulated by the state. "Wild" lions are, well, wild. They live free in the plains. The hunts for them are popular because they promise adventure, illicit thrills, and validation. These are run by essentially outlaw outfits. Guides are free agents and unsanctioned. These wild hunts are highly profitable, the first link in a chain of exploiters that includes everyone from taxidermists to international financiers.

These are the guys Rogue Rubin is after.

Rogue (né Joni) Rubin is a South African photographer who specializes in big game in its natural habitat. She's attractive, spirited, and on a crusade: to end the extinction-in-progress of wild African lions. Lion Spy is her stirring documentary about that issue.

She's also the "spy" of the title. Ms. Rubin knows that powerful forces—shadowy individuals and corporations—are at work here. There’s big money to be made, and they would be unhappy with her attempts to stop it. So she's taken on a fake identity and gone undercover, posing as a "trophy intern," an assistant, and a general gofer on these safaris. She uses small, covert cameras to record what transpires.

Most trophy hunters are white, male, rich, and living the fantasy of the bold adventurer triumphing over the savage predator. Back home, the mounted head of a lion or other feral beast is a great story and a display of cojones. These are the clients wild lion guides cater to. The reality isn't quite as risky: the guides who take them out are heavily armed and poised to take over in case the client is a poor shot, or the quarry turns on them.

But that's rarely the case. For the most part, according to the film, wild lions are docile in their home environment and avoid contact with humans. These outings are a setup: the guides spot a lion, pursue it, and just when it relaxes, the client shoots it from a safe distance. The animal doesn't stand a chance. This practice enrages Ms. Rubin. "This wasn't a chase," she hisses into her hidden camera. "This was an execution."

And it's not limited to lions. Unassuming antelopes and zebras are felled by long-range rifles while strolling or foraging. When a majestic giraffe goes down, the hunters gloat over it, and a guide casually remarks that the gigantic animal's hide will make a great rug, running right up the client's stairs.

Ms. Rubin casts a wide net in Lion Spy. Besides the in-country episodes, she infiltrates a PHASA conference (the Professional Hunting Association of South Africa), where one speaker warns that "public opinion will kill this business." At a convention in Las Vegas, we get an animal-by-animal kill price list (getting a hippo will cost you the most).

One of Lion Spy's more jaw-dropping episodes concerns a father and daughter duo. Dad has returned to Africa and the site of his "triumph" over the wild lion—the carcass now mounted and displayed proudly in his home--this time with his teenage daughter in tow. "It's her turn," he explains. The girl is eager and has a good shot and gets hers right away. Wait, will they see this on Instagram?

As film art, Lion Spy is competent. It documents what many of us may never experience, a safari, using the techniques of modern documentaries: testimonials, rapid-fire editing, and a rousing soundtrack worthy of an action film.

As propaganda, Lion Spy is more effective, especially when tracing the path of money generated by the trade (its sponsors may surprise you). Ms. Rubin has a lot of footage to work with, from her hidden cameras and those used by hunters themselves to immortalize the event.

The "spy" part is gimmicky as a framing device. Ms. Rubin wants Lion Spy to be seen as a "thriller," but it's a pointed one: she prods opinions for sound bites (like the daughter-hunter who sees a lion cub and says she "wants one." Who wouldn't, until it's grown up? Yet Ms. Rubin uses the remark as evidence of the girl's insensitivity).

Lion Spy isn't made to play in theaters but on flatscreens at fundraisers. Of course, the jig is up once audiences (and her subjects) see the film and its true agenda is revealed. But in the final account, the movie works because it's persuasive, and Rogue Rubin is so passionate about preserving the lions.

After all, as Debby Thomson of Bushveld Connections, one of Ms. Rubin's supporters, says in the film, "What is Africa without wild animals?"

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Lion Spy. Directed by Joni “Rogue” Rubin. 2021. On digital platforms. 76 minutes.

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Drive On

Gary Lucas — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:54:23 +0000

Drive On Gary Lucas April 27, 2024 - 18:54

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comedy

Fantastic film worth every minute of its nearly three-hour length. Director Radu Jude, whose 2021 feature Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn was so delicious a send-up of woke culture Romanian-style, has made the Film of the Year, if not the last hundred years (give or take a couple, ok). Scabrous, profane, bleak, and blackly hilarious satire lovingly hand-rolled by Rude into one heck of a thrill ride to nowheresville that utilizes a lot of zany jump cuts and cut-ups a la Godard, herky-jerky hand-held camerawork, and random quotations from all sorts of sources poetic and otherwise to continuously disrupt the narrative.

Ilinca Manolache as put-upon, tough as nails gum-chewing taxi driver/PA to a film company named Angela Raducana (and her male social media alter ego Bobita, a bald-headed bearded Andrew Tate-like toxic douchebag with furry eyebrows digitally achieved through her iPhone app ) is a real Force of Nature and should win every best actor award on the planet this year.

What adds so much to this film is the intercutting of scenes in color from a 1981 Romanian romantic drama about a female taxi driver and her lovers entitled Angela Moves On, where actual locations used in that film (which posits a dreamy socialist workers' paradise) are contrasted with the somewhat frowsy, fly-blown black and white industrial vistas of the same Bucharest locations today. To further mix up the mise-en-scene, Radu has Angela meet her actual taxi-driving doppelgänger from the earlier film, now living with her husband, the romantic male lead from that same film, both of them aging not all that gracefully, but both still spry and delighted by the coincidence of meeting their younger counterpart.

Angela toils relentlessly daily, driving hither and yon all day through Bucharest, shifting gears in a stop-start repetitive motion, wending her way through the slow-moving traffic in a POV shot filmed directly next to her in the cab of her van, a shot whose duration eventually leaves you exhausted (if not nauseous)--not that far afield from Straub-Huillet's 1972 History Lessons where the protagonist endlessly shifts gears as he meanders through the streets of Rome.

Throughout the day, we observe various Chantal Ackerman-like slices o' life vis a vis Angela's quotidian behavior at gas stations, fast food joints, restroom toilets, in the bed of her boyfriend for a quickie etc., while she struggles to run errands for her local film studio bosses, with whom she's hoping to ingratiate herself and rise beyond her ascribed entry-level role as a menial gofer. This preening gaggle of media hacks are uniformly portrayed as narcissistic boorish pricks groveling in the service of a monolithic Austrian industrial complex, whose marketing director, the haughty and imperious German Nina Hoss (Tarr), has hired them to film a public service announcement about worker safety that will hopefully absolve the company of any liabilities in a pending lawsuit filed by a local worker injured in an industrial accident at one of their factories in Bucharest.

The film's final scene is one of those jaw-dropping 15-minute or so long takes on the order of Bela Tarr where everything in the frame (including the shifting weather, something that couldn't have been foreseen) conspires to create one glorious, comedic mess as the Romanian film crew tries to repeatedly browbeat and coach the hapless accident victim and his skeptical family into reluctantly mouthing (for a mere pittance) what will prove to be incriminating statements about the accident's circumstances that will surely be used against the family in court so as to deny their pending lawsuit and get the Austrians off the hook from paying out a fortune, while Angela blithely films one of her obnoxious bragging Bobita-rants off to the side (I'm still cracking up as I write this from the sheer sardonic comedy of this scene). I cannot say enough positive things about this film. Jude reinvigorates Cinema with a fuck-you cheeky impertinent swagger not really seen since Bande A Part.

If you want to see a work that exactly describes the Way We Are Today, Here in the Western World, Eastern European division, you could do no better than see this film.

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Jumping at Shadows

Chet Kozlowski — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 16:43:05 +0000

Jumping at Shadows Chet Kozlowski April 21, 2024 - 12:43

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science fiction

In the new Australian film Monolith, a podcaster hears from multiple callers about a mysterious black brick. They "receive" this thing, this artifact, after traumas and it wends its way into their consciousness and their very dreams. It takes over their lives and gives them violent and invasive visions. The podcaster's show, Beyond Believable, explores strange phenomenon. She follows leads who have similar experiences with strange bricks and starts connecting the dots.

She's identified only as The Interviewer and is herself a disgraced journalist. A big investigation she worked on went sideways, and she's exiled herself alone in a big home in the middle of the woods. She's trying for a comeback: "I don't need a break, I need a story," she tells her editor. "A career-defining story." She’s sure she's on to something with these black bricks and is on the verge of a revelation. About a conspiracy? About alien visitors? About the end of humanity?

Monolith is a chamber piece directed by Matt Vesely and written by Lucy Campbell, both whose credits include shorts, online series, and Australian TV work. All the action takes place with one character in and around a very modern open plan house whose floor-to-ceiling windows look out on blank woods.

The filmmakers cite Denis Villeneuve's Arrival as an inspiration, but their ambitions are too spare and their budget is too low for that model. It's like remaking Dune without the sand. Monolith more resembles Alex Garland's Ex Machina in its emphasis on a remarkable manmade structure and its relation to nature.

Narrative structure is the issue with Monolith. Its first fifteen minutes is an exposition dump, a montage of headlines and screenshots about a character we don't know yet and don't have empathy for. We're told too much in the beginning and shown too little later on.

Actor Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise and Netflix's I Met a Girl) is the only character onscreen. While Ms. Sullivan has an appealingly resonant voice, she doesn't have the presence to carry off an entire film. She's left "jumping at shadows," as her character complains, rather than going through significant actions. She's feisty on the phone with a reticent source. "I'm sure it's challenging to remain ethical in your industry," she says sarcastically, but it's unclear if she's insulting the source or the mirror.

Her only interactions are with her callers. The twelve voice actors listed (some quite well-known, like Ansuya Nathan of HBO Max's The Tourist, and Damon Harrimen, Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) give her expressive support. But they are voices on a phone. The only character we see and follow is The Interviewer. And watching one person, regardless of how compelling, respond to voices on a phone, regardless of what they’re saying, makes for a flat cinematic experience.

Director of photography Michael Tessari's muddy palate makes it all dour instead of spooky. (One stirring image, genuinely creepy, is used on the poster to misleading effect, making the film seem bigger than it is). Composer Benjamin Speed's and Leigh Kenyon's sound design is mostly the blips we've come to expect from low-fi sci-fi like this.

Monolith wants to belong to the same class as Shane Carruth's Primer or Andrew Patterson's The Vast of Night, no-budget movies that make up for it by trafficking in ideas that tickle the intellect. Monolith's implications are vague and its execution derivative.

(A quibble: why is her podcast called Beyond Believable and not simply Beyond Belief? Granted, actual podcasts are called that. Titles aren’t copyrighted. There are other recent movies called Monolith, for example.)

Monolith isn't bad, exactly. It's just underbaked, visually and thematically. Its premise is intriguing and deserves more thoughtful exploration. Maybe the filmmakers could expand upon it with a bigger budget and deeper revision.

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Monolith. Directed by Michael Tessari. 2022. Released by Well Go USA Entertainment. In theaters and on digital platforms and Blu-Ray. 95 minutes.

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Labor of Love

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 01:29:37 +0000

Labor of Love Chet Kozlowski April 17, 2024 - 21:29

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The Outside Circle: a Movie of the Modern West is director Craig Rullman's dusty Valentine to the Cowboy Life. It's a documentary, his first film, and may be his only one. But he cares so deeply about his subject that it’s hard to imagine any other one quite measuring up.

Originally conceived as a profile of Len Babb, a painter who emulates the style of turn-of-the-century artist Charlie Russell, Mr. Rullman expanded it to include folks like the Murphy family, fifth generation Oregon ranchers, and Victoria Jackson, a Paiute-Shoshone rodeo champion whose family legacy reaches back 14,000 years.

The word "romantic" is bandied about quite a bit. Also said often: "pride," "ornate," and "where I’m meant to be."

In the 1940s and 50s, the Cowboy Myth thrived: American popular culture was all Stetsons, six-shooters, and spurs. When cinema was born, cowboys came off the prairie, went to Hollywood and exploited their adventures. They gave us heroic figures real and invented, from Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers to Gene Autry and Wyatt Earp. In the early days of TV, cowboys were ubiquitous. Their presence was so strong, it felt as if they would never ride off into the sunset. These days, of course, Westerns in any form are few and far between.

Mr. Rullman, with the able assistance of cinematographer Samuel Pyke, fills The Outside Circle with languorous, quasi-ghostly images: vague silhouettes glimpsed through the haze kicked up by horses, indistinct as in a dream. To be a cowboy is grimier and harder than those fancy Hollywood types would suggest—one talking head reminds us that they were "common laborers," members of the working class. Troublemakers. One wag even refers to them as "Hell's Angels on horseback."

Mr. Rullman and the subjects of his interviews mourn the passing of this "honest, humble" period, but as a film The Outside Circle is lightweight. It’s redundant and superficial. Images and voices say it, then say it again, going in circles, like a ranch hand guiding his herd. With all the public domain material out there, it relies on a few old photos and grainy home movies to take us into the past. We're left with vestiges, and a sense of the "obligation to represent an American ideal" these folks feel.

But The Outside Circle is genuine. Give him that. Mr. Rullman's sincerity is his strength. We care because he does.

The Outside Circle is big skies, sun dappled dreams, and cherished bygones. It's a noble project, heartfelt and worth seeing.

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The Outside Circle, a Movie of the Modern West. Written and directed by Craig Rullman. 2023. On digital platforms. 77 minutes.

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Missing Parts

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 15:02:51 +0000

Missing Parts Chet Kozlowski April 16, 2024 - 11:02

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drama

How do I review The Coffee Table?

Straightforwardly, like any other film? Doesn't do it justice.

Meta, not mentioning the movie at all, but inviting associations? Too cute.

With a trigger warning? I don't believe in them.

Should you see it? Yes.

What happens in it? Jesus and Maria argue about buying a gaudy coffee table. Maria hates it. Jesus claims quid pro quo: she wanted a baby at her advanced age, so he should get what he wants, too. Their newborn son squirms in Maria's arms. They argue about his name. Jesus buys the table and brings it home to assemble it. He can't put on the glass top because he's missing a screw.

To tell more would spoil it.

What's the upside to seeing it? The Coffee Table intelligently confronts issues of maturity, desire, guilt, fidelity, legacy, and the devastating consequences of careless actions.

What's the downside? You can't unsee it.

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The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor). Directed by Caye Casas. Screenplay by Caye Casas and Cristina Borobia. With Estefania De Los Santos and David Pareja. 2022. In Spanish with English subtitles. 90 minutes.

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Believe It Or Not

Gary Lucas — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:28:52 +0000

Believe It Or Not Gary Lucas April 14, 2024 - 14:28

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TV series

RE-MAKE / RE-MODEL: Ripley--well, uh, um, you're, gee, Steven Zaillian's noir-ish 8-part black and white TV adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley novel was pretty much tolerable in certain aspects (cinematography mainly), but honestly, imho, not a patch dramatically overall on either previous big-screen versions Plein Soleil (1960, d. Rene Clement) and/or the eponymous 1999 version directed by Anthony Minghella. "Somnolent" was the word used by the NY Times reviewer in describing this chilly, muted exercise in existential monochrome stretched over eight chapters, which succeeded in bleeding all the color and jeu d'esprit out of the original book and the two cinematic versions—the word "lugubrious" also comes to mind also and would not be far afield in describe the cumulative effect of the series also. It's like being bludgeoned in slow motion by a hammer made of soggy marshmallows.

Both the original music and the selected needle drops on the soundtrack were effective in parts, especially the recurring usage of songs by legendary Italian jazz vocalist Mina Mazzini (in fact, the cover of one of Mina's 50 albums was used as a period prop and flashed onscreen a few times)—but Episode 7 ended inexplicably with Tom Ripley's triumphant entrance into the Venetian Lagoon accompanied by THIS iconic piece of music by Shostakovich, inextricably bound up with the credits fore and aft of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut:

So why use it again? I mean, what was the logic in that?? What were Zaillian and his music tipsters thinking by recycling it—what memory, if any, were they trying to jog here? All it triggered in me was astonishment and a feeling of disgust at the chutzpah of re-contextualizing this beautiful composition (already attached to an iconic film) to no discernible end. As this Johnny One-Note of a series—as bloated throughout all eight episodes as the water-logged corpse of Dickie Greenleaf—bore about as much relation to Eyes Wide Shut (or any other Kubrick film) as the Man in the Moon.

(There were also some musical bits on the soundtrack played on celeste towards the end of the series designed—I guess—as a kind of throwback/homage to the creepy celeste-driven music that accompanied Matt Damon's predations in the 1999 film. It was designed, no doubt, to make one think back on the—unfortunately—superior cinematic version in the process of trying to bolster the cred of this mini-series. "Hey folks, recall this music from the Matt Damon version?" When in doubt, recycle!).

Wouldn't you know that the Minghella version was being programmed on another streaming cable channel almost immediately after Caroline Sinclair and I finished watching this series on Netflix? The contrast between the two radically different takes on basically the same story was breathtaking.

The Italian landscape is the real star of both versions.

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Sibling Reveries

Chet Kozlowski — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:35:47 +0000

Sibling Reveries Chet Kozlowski April 10, 2024 - 10:35

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drama

In this age of hyphenates, the traditional writer (hyphen) director (hyphen) editor (hyphen) actor is more likely to identify simply as a "content creator." That's the way with Jennifer Levinson, whose content has amassed over 300 million views on BuzzFeed Video, VR Scout, and CryptTV. Trust is her first film.

Yet despite Ms. Levinson's Gen Z credentials, Trust is a surprisingly traditional film.

Three siblings assemble on the occasion of the suicide of their mother, an attorney who had gone quietly crazy. Dutiful sister Kate drives in from college full of resentment toward their estranged, cheating father. Flamboyant sister Trini, fresh off a bout of partying, arrives from who knows where with her latest temporary flame. Responsible son Josh, who lives at home and works at his mother's law firm, makes it his mission to keep the lid on the proceedings. Emotional wreckage ensues.

Trust opens at their stately suburban home, packed with mourning family and friends. They are a quirky bunch, mixing grief with eccentricity. Then to the funeral made bittersweet because, against Kate's knowledge and/or wishes, their mother has been cremated. Then, it's off to the lawyer to divvy up the estate. The word "trust" has a double meaning, referring to the sibs' precarious faith in each other and the trust fund to which they are entitled upon their mother's death.

Ms. Levinson's script is smart and solidly constructed, setting up tossed-off situational cues that become laugh or gasp lines later. Her dialogue is witty. Characters are introduced memorably in accordance with their personalities, and scene transitions are fluid. Director Almog Avidan Antonir handles the ensemble well, with an eye for small, telling gestures and reactions. Sten Olson provides crisp cinematography.

Trust is sad and hilarious, a tough combination to pull off. Some scenes stand out: Trini loudly crashes the funeral, Kate eyes the urn, and she wonders aloud if her mother's teeth are in there. "What about the screw?" she asks Josh, "When she tore her ACL?" Later at the house, born-again Trini leads a prayer praising "our dearest lord savior Jesus," prompting Kate to announce, "My mom is Jewish!" Smarmy Dad comes out of the woodwork to appear at the reading of the will. Kate's poignant choice of venue to read her mother's eulogy is well-staged.

Trust's characters have unexpected depth. They defy their initial stereotypes, show different facets, and earn our sympathy. Each of them gets good bits and opportunities to shine. Beleaguered Josh (Heston Horwin) holds it together until he doesn't, about the time when the wheels come off his mother's legacy. Trini (Kate Spare) pretends unity while suppressing an aching vulnerability and daddy issues (asked by Kate why she's sucking up to their father, Trini replies, "Because it's just what I have to do.”) Dad Damien (Linden Ashby) is a dashing philanderer who at crucial moments persuasively insists on his children's respect. Mr. Ashby (from TV's Teen Wolf ) and Wayne Wilderson (from HBO's Veep) as Travis, the family lawyer, are the most recognizable faces in this young and promising cast. (Drugstore Cowboy fans: see if you can spot Max Perlich.)

Kate is the heart of the film, facing an array of emotions while hindered by the drinking problem she hides. We are constantly drawn to her; she has some of the best business in the movie. Jennifer Levinson plays this pivotal role herself.

Joe Santos's score propels the action, but some needle drops are superfluous, like the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it Be Nice" to underscore Dad's arrival. Wouldn't what be nice? It's just a way to use the opening drum beat to comic effect.

However, as entertaining as Trust is, it doesn't expand much on its opening conceit. Characters remain pretty much as they are introduced. If a "protagonist" is defined by the self-knowledge they achieve—how they change by way of the story—then no one here quite lives up to that title. Despite all the tumult, nobody seems to learn anything. They remain true to form.

Speaking of needle drops: Kate escapes to the tune of Etta James' version of "At Last." Really? Trust me, Kate will be back. This family saga is destined to go on and on.

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Trust. Written by Jennifer Levinson. Directed by Almog Avidan Antonir. From Menemsha Films. 2022. On digital platforms. 99 minutes.

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Phantasmagoria Under the Sign of Wojciech Has

Gary Lucas — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:23:22 +0000

Phantasmagoria Under the Sign of Wojciech Has Gary Lucas April 7, 2024 - 20:23

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foreign

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream

—from Edgar Allan Poe's Dream Within a Dream (1850)

Old rope, maybe (Poe was a laudanum devotee)—or one of the oldest tropes in surrealist film and literature.

Episodic stories told through a framing device, stories that refer to and fold in on themselves in defiance of both logic and the space-time continuum—mythological dreams within dreams, in other words—can most likely be traced back in literature to the Epic of Gilgamesh (2150 B.C.E.).

To that, we might add Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey (*00 B.C.E.), Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's The Decameron, Petronius's Satyricon, the Arabian Nights, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and its sundry magic-realism spinoffs—and especially for our purposes here, two towering works by Polish authors: Count Jan Potocki's 1815 The Manuscript Found in Saragossa…and Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz's limited but profoundly impressive body of interlocking stories published in 1934 as Cinnamon Shops a/k/a Street of Crocodiles, and also his 1937 novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

In film, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's radical dream opus, 1928's Un Chien Andalou, set the pace. Bunuel carried on this dream within a dream tradition in much of his work, culminating in his late '60s and early '70s cinematic trifecta comprising 1969's The Milky Way, 1972's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and 1974's The Phantom of Liberty.

Other films in the tradition include Carl Dreyer's 1932 wispy-through-a gauze, darkly ectoplasmic fever dream Vampyr, the multipartite U.K. ghost story anthology 1945's Dead of Night, John Parker's and Bruno VeSota's 1955 Dementia (a/k/a Daughter of Horror), any of the Hammer and Amicus horror anthologies beginning with Tales From the Crypt through Asylum, most of David Lynch's films (especially Mulholland Drive)—and of course, Federico Fellini's full-on retinal assault 1969's Fellini Satyricon, and for me, his most magical confection, 1976's Fellini Casanova.

Special mention should be made to Alain Resnais's 1961 Last Year at Marienbad, Louis Malle's zany, discontinuous 1960 Zazie Dans le Metro, Vera Chytilova's 1966 Daisies, and Patrick McGoohan's 1967 Kafka-goes-Mod television anthology The Prisoner, which set the bar high for sheer wtf-ness that contemporary shows like Lost can only hint at.

For me, though, the ne plus ultra of dream cinema was always master Polish filmmaker Wojciech Has's 1965 The Saragossa Manuscript, a black and white adaptation of the aforementioned Count Potocki's literary magnum opus, a hodgepodge of cabalistic magic, military derring-do, esoteric lore, European folk tales, and occult conspiracies. Rich in madcap visual invention, with startling time-shifts and numerous stories within stories within stories, it is no accident that this was one of Jerry Garcia's favorite films, along with directors Luis Bunuel, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Lars Von Trier.

I say "was always"…that is until I finally bore witness to what I can only describe as Has's 1973 magnum opus, The Hourglass Sanatorium, a/k/a Sandglass, which doubles down on the dream logic throughout in a two-and-a-half hour cinematic phantasmagoria containing multitudes within.

Ostensibly a film about Josef, a 19th-century traveler played by well-known Polish actor Jan Nowicki, who takes a long train journey through the Polish night to a creepy, dilapidated sanatorium surrounded by a graveyard in order to visit his dying father, the film erupts after Josef is put to sleep by a sinister Doctor and his nubile nurse into a riot of dream fugues which so scramble the space-time dialectic that the audience at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater the other night was cowed into silence—not a word was spoken during its unspooling, not a single soul got up to use the facilities—all focus was on this film.

In fact, the only response during the entire 2 1/2 hours was one collective audience guffaw at a deliberate play on the words "new Mexico" in contrast to "old Mexico" by a child philatelist playing a younger version of Josef interacting with his grown-up self.

Reminiscent in parts of an American International vintage '60s Poe film (Daniel Haller-like sets, Floyd Crosby-esque ultra-fluid cinematography), Peter Brook's infernal 1967 Marat/Sade, a late Fellini film gone mad, and any number of Marc Chagall paintings, with a heavy "Golden Age of Czech animation" influence (the fantastic assemblages of Jan Sjvankmajer and Karel Zeman come to mind), Has's film is a relentless mind-blowing assault on the senses. It deserves to be seen—in fact, begs to be seen again—multiple times if only to even partially unlock his rich and strange mise-en-scene and scenario.

Setting the stories of Bruno Schulz to the big screen should have been an impossible task. Schulz's writing is so singular and imaginative one basks in his overall way with words; his multi-dimensional surrealist imagery glows on the page in glittering jewels of thought. His prose style is so luxurious and fabulistic, like the Kabbalah itself, that it should be proscribed reading, not engaged with by rabbinical diktat until the reader hits the ripe old age of 40 (just kidding). This is to say that there has never been a writer quite like Bruno Schulz.

But Has was more than up to the task of translating Schulz to the wide-screen canvas. Here, he cherry-picked some of the best tales from Cinnamon Shops and Hourglass and added his emphasis on overtly Jewish themes that are absent (or, more appositely, well-hidden) in Schulz's original tales. Has also introduced a pronounced erotic component only hinted at in the original stories, which he would undoubtedly be chastised for today—if not canceled outright.

This fate nearly befell this film in general, which the Polish government tried to suppress, partially because of the overtly Jewish content throughout but also because of the film's depiction of the run-down sanatorium and surrounding grounds, which might be taken as a commentary on Poland's at the time semi-ruined infrastructure. Had it not been for a single print smuggled out of the country and shipped to the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize in 1973, this film might never have been exhibited anywhere.

This extra-Jewish quality apparently was Has's reaction to Bruno Schulz's Jewish identity (although Schulz spent most of his life in a small town in Poland on the Ukrainian border as a non-observant Jew who also loved Catholic rituals. He was murdered by a Nazi officer for wandering out of the Dohobrych Ghetto into the "Aryan Area" in 1942)—and also his reaction to the ensuing Polish clampdown on Jews and Jewish culture in 1968, itself a kind of reactionary fallout from the Prague Spring flourishing next door in Czechoslovakia. This world-historical episode terrified Poland's then-Russian overlords, who blamed the revolutionary fervor on the International Jewish Conspiracy from Hell and accordingly clamped down on the Polish Jewish community, many members of which emigrated en masse to Israel, Europe, and the U.S.

From the opening sequence on the train, with its eerie foreshadowing of the trains to Polish-based concentration camps, to a heart-stopping scene near the end in which a tumultuous herd of panic-stricken Jews hurtle past the camera in a mad dash, dragging their meager possessions behind them while trying to escape an off-screen angry mob with a deadly pogrom on their agenda, Has repeatedly ramps up the Jewish quotient in the service of near Proustian poetic themes: the inevitable passing of time, glimpses of a lost era in Polish Jewish history, fragmented memories of happier days, and endless nights.

Some of the panoramic scenes here displaying crowds of dancing Chasidim in colorful but dark, very dark shtetl settings (reminiscent of contemporary Krakow's Kazimierz district, a kind of Potemkin Village recreation of old Jewish Poland) resemble nothing so much as a Bizarro World version of Norman Jewison's 1971 Fiddler on the Roof mega-hit, with traces of Abraham Polonsky's 1971 Romance of a Horsethief. Mention should be made of the influence of Michal Wasynski's spectral 1937 supernatural fairytale The Dybbuk, particularly the weird Wedding Dance sequence, which Has, one of the icons of the 1960s New Polish Cinema alongside such directorial giants as Jerzy Skolimowski, Roman Polanski, and Andrej Wajda would have known very well—an essential work in the history of Polish filmmaking.

Special thanks to Prof. Annette Insdorf's exceptionally informative pre-screening talk, which contextualized the film. Her excellent book Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has contains valuable information on Has's impressive career.

There is so much more to unpack about this particular film. I really cannot wait to see it again: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/the-hourglass-sanatorium