Buys'n'GiftsChristmas comes early when you're friends with the Legion of Super-Bloggers' Little Russell Burbage - thanks for the Starfleet socks, old friend!
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Kristen Stewart has been having a great career for the past few years, at the very least being the one great thing about some of the lesser movies she's been in, so it makes sense to give her a turn at the Oscar wheel with Spencer. Biopics don't enthuse me, but I like Pablo Larraín's take on the genre, focusing on a single event as a way to reveal his subject. With Jackie Kennedy it was funeral arrangements; for Lady Di, it's an emotional breakdown during a three-day Christmas with the family. Some elements are specific to her story - the oppression of her place in "history", food arriving as if on military trucks to highlight her struggle with bulimia, Royal hyper-surveillance and the prison of tradition - but it evokes some universal feelings for people who see the Holidays as an anxiety-laden obligation (raises hand), and for anyone who has lost themselves in a marriage and had to find their way back to their own identity. I found the film quite effective and ultimately, touching. And yes, it's all very well supported by Stewart's performance who would deserve the prizes she'll no doubt be nominated for.
At home: I enjoyed the first season of The Great, but had some issues with it, and the second season seemed to lean hard in the wrong direction. Basically, with Catherine in power, I tended to root for her less and less, and was left with a lot of frankly trying potty-mouthed vulgarity. If Season 1 evoked the Trump years, Catherine facing opposition in her own court could have reached for a Biden era, but it really doesn't work that way. In the back half, things get much more interesting as one finds they are now rooting for poor, simple, love-lorn Peter and the show turns slowly but surely into one of the strangest love stories ever committed to film. But there's a heck of a lot of characters I want to see executed, seemingly kept alive by actor contracts. Not that the show pretends to be historically accurate. Indeed, it's at this point that I decided to finally check out Catherine the Great's Wikipedia entry and it seems it's 95% bollocks, not much chance of getting spoiled if you take a gander.
Only the British can make paranoid CCTV thrillers, and The Capture as whether we can trust all that footage being caught on tape in London and other parts of the UK, though it was evidently made on the back of Bodyguard's success. There are too many surface similarities for that not to be the case. Still, it develops its own identity, and while I spent a long time trying to decide if any of it was believable, there's a flashback episode near the end that explains every convoluted nugget so as to make it work. Well done. (I was going to give an episode number, but that's complicated by all the websites saying it's a six-parter, but Prime presenting it as eight - I didn't notice the chapter breaks falling in awkward places though.) When a second season drops - as one has apparently been commissioned, though I don't think it's a must - it will take some of the edge off the rather cynical ending of this particular story.
50 Years of Criterion/1980: Kurosawa's lavish Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) presents us with a man who plays double to a powerful warlord, appearances he must keep up for an inordinate amount of time when the warlord unseasonably dies lest the whole kingdom fall into chaos. Not easy for a fidgety scoundrel to play the role of the "immovable mountain", and there's a play between what we project and what we become as a result. Tatsuya Nakadai brings a lot of pathos to his double performance (I almost said triple as Tsutomu Yamazaki, playing his brother, looks almost exactly the same). This is a very windy movie, and I have no doubt it's on purpose - the winds of change trying to shift the now precarious mountain - and though a tragic one as well, it's not without its moments of humor. As well as what is probably the most harrowing post-battle scene ever recorded. I mean, it's Kurosawa, what more incentive do cinephiles need?
Paired Short: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, and also can't help but drop a few gems about film making and life. No licorice galoshes for him!
1981: To translate Coup de torchon's title into English here, it means giving something a wipe, so the idea of cleaning up... a town (of its evil doers), after one's own crimes, one's soul (well, that's as maybe), one's bottom (open-air latrines do feature)... but as the word "torchon" means "rag", it's not a deep clean. You're just wiping with something that's dirty in and of itself. Bertrand Tavernier sets his adaptation of the psychotic vigilante western Pop.1280 in pre-WWII French-colonized Africa, and casts sympathetic Philippe Noiret as an ineffectual and ambivalent law man in what is essentially a lawless, and atrociously racist, country. After many everyday humiliations, he finally snaps and starts bumping off the filth, his genius is how he covers up his crimes. At once a meditation of morality and a caustically funny satire (just look at the military officer, for example), Coup de torchon also provides a snapshot of French West Africa in the 30s as a greater commentary on colonialism and how evil can only beget evil. Still haven't completely wrapped my head around the film's bookends though.
Paired Short: Junkopia photographs abandoned outdoor installation art as if it were an archaeological find; kind of eerie.
1982: Antonioni's last feature film, Identification of a Woman, has a recursive quality that may autobiographically signal the end of his career. Tomas Milian stars as a film director between projects, in fact tepidly looking for his next film idea, his next leading lady, the next love of his life, the next PHASE in his life. I wouldn't say it's a film about writer's block, but it certainly evokes the transition between finishing something and starting something new, and the kind of despondency that can come with it. It's mostly about the man's relationships, one of them sexually explicit, and how he essentially sees them as film plots that thus must eventually end. Someone could see Antonioni's own trademark froideur in this ambivalence, keeping his subjects at bay. But there's an opacity to the film that makes it hard to connect with, mirroring the perfect fog it manages to capture (still can't fathom how it's done). Antonioni twice brings his hero/stand-in to environments the color of silver nitrate, and both times herald the climax of his love affairs. Places to get lost in, and like the protagonist, we're not always sure where we're going.
Paired Short: Claude Chabrol's condensed version of M - M le maudit - sure doesn't manage to prove movies should be shorter. (Even though my aching butt does every time I go to a theater these days.)
1983: A slasher flick told from the perspective of the psycho killer, as if the narration was simply reading a true-life confession, Angst lives up to its title by shooting everything from an odd angle. We're too low down, too high up, too close in, feeling every hit and vibration, smelling every drop of sweat and every gush of blood, and if this were to be made now, you could GoPro these shots into existence with a modicum of effort. In 1983?! I can't imagine what uncomfortable rigs were used to achieve this sustained an effect. Though there's an emotional POV (and voice-over that well represents and explains the lead's diseased mind), it nevertheless plays like a procedural, and no slick serial killer, Erwin Leder's psychopath makes a big mess of things. It often feels so real and visceral that I can well believe the film was banned across Europe. It's one flaw is that the dog didn't get second billing.
Paired Short: With Passionless Moments, Gerard Lee and Jane Campion offer up vignettes that are exactly like life, composed of fleeting moments of interest that are immediately forgotten (by ourselves, in life, not as audience to this film). We should be so lucky to have our lives recorded like this.
1984: Juzo Itami's The Funeral proves that while funereal rites are different culture to culture, the feelings surrounding them are universal. This is a surprisingly light film, often focusing on the humor provided by all those awkward moments and things not going according to plan - not farcically, but clumsily - that are true to the experience. Especially, as in the lead characters' cases, when it's your first one. With an obvious nod to Ozu (the low fixed camera positions setting the stage for family drama), though nowhere as strict, the film does provide some poignant as well as amusing moments, the same way funerals aren't awash in sadness, but rather creates a tidal emotion, coming in and out to disturb the stress, the boredom, and yes, the laughs. A beautiful evocation of what it means to lose a parent and having to set grief aside so you can get through the organization and expected ritual. I've seen two films by Juzo Itami now, the other being the most excellent Tampopo... looks like I have work to do.
Paired Short: With 7p., cuis., s. de b., … à saisir (7 Rooms, Kitchen, Bathroom, for Sale), Varda lets an old house that used to be a hospice and is now hosting an art exhibition inspire scenes, images and even documentary content in a free-flowing cinematic improvisation that evokes the feeling of visiting a potential home.
Comics: The More Than Complete Action Philosophers! re-orders Fred Van Lente ad Ryan Dunlavey's "popular history of philosophy" into a chronological framework and adds a few philosophers besides in what I might call an irreverent package. And yet, as silly as it can be at times, it nonetheless does the job of my Initiation to Philosophy course back at university, and a fraction of the time and much more memorably. Part of the trick is giving its subjects iconic cartoon appearances that help the reader parse them from one another. Another part is telling their stories in fun and unusual ways - John Stuart Mill as a Peanuts strip, for example, or Kant as a court case in which God's existence is on trial. Though the cartooning can sometimes be bro-ish (which ages the humor badly), the series and attendant trade paperback remains clever, amusing and instructive. For me, the early chapters are the most fun (because the theories are so wonky), while more modern philosophers tend to lose me in semantics, but it's all valuable.
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