In case you missed it, here's the Gravity's Rainbow/Dark Souls post I was teasing last week.
Movies
A documentary consisting entirely of B-roll and unaired footage of the 1992 New Hampshire presidential primaries. I imagine that this sort of puncturing of political decorum and media norms was a lot more of a revelation in 1992 when political candidates didn't have phone cameras trained on them at every moment and an internet hungry to devour any morsel of video about even moderately famous people, but it's still pretty fun to watch now. Watching Ross Perot tell dirty jokes is something, as is the utterly cringe-inducing scene involving Hillary Clinton urging a homeless man to register to vote, and him responding by asking for a dollar. There's also a surprising amount of footage of George H.W. Bush just staring out into space. I dunno, there's not a lot to this movie, but I got a chuckle out of it. Grade: B
This feels like a graduate student made a slasher movie, not in terms of the professionalism (or lack thereof) but more because everything just feels so freighted with academic symbolism and weight. Normally that wouldn't be a bad thing for me, but it kind of feels like this has more of a thematic eye than a cinematic one, and it's just cumbersome most of the time. The plotting is totally frazzled, though, which does make it kind of interesting—it ping-pongs between Taxi Driver-esque disaffected-urban-male storytelling and just straight-up smut in a way that was unpredictable, and there's a certain entertainment value in that unpredictability. This is my first Abel Ferrara movie—not sure what else to expect from the guy. Presumably more than this. Grade: B-
Probably the least-funny Tati movie so far in my watch through his features—he was never a laugh riot, and at this point in his career, he's more just doing whimsical choreography than actual humor. That said, this has the only gag in his filmography that's gotten a full, out-loud laugh from me (the Roman column trash can), and also, who cares how funny a movie is when it's this visual splendid? Seriously, I don't think there's a movie in the rest of cinema history that looks like this movie does, with Tati's deep focus revealing detail after detail in his mind-bogglingly large, dizzyingly absurd sets—architectural modernism as both playground and nightmare. I couldn't pull my eyes away from the screen. Just a mesmerizing, totally realized creation. Grade: A-
As an avid hater of the automobile, I was really looking forward to seeing M. Hulot bumble through some absurdly elaborate car environments. So it is with a heavy heart that I must report that I was bored to tears. It has the lack of conventional gags of PlayTime with very little of the visual grandeur that elevated that film. There are a couple of good bits—the nose-picking montage, the car with seemingly endlessly unfolding compartments—but the rest of this movie is just shapeless mush, and I can barely remember most of it already even though I finished it just like half an hour ago. I'm really disappointed—I felt like I was getting into a pretty good groove with Tati, and then there's this. I don't get it at all. Not everything can be PlayTime, but is it too much to ask that everything else be Monsieur Hulot's Holiday? (Apparently) Grade: C
I can see what this movie is going for: something like a cross between a TV variety hour (or hour and a half) and a circus that casts Tati himself as ringmaster/MC, calling to mind his mime/vaudevillian past while also moving into the future with TV and video. And there are some good moments: some of the physical acrobatics/stunts are very impressive, and it's incredibly sweet that the movie (and Tati's feature-film career) ends with two children playing on the emptying set, given Tati's sense of play throughout his filmography. But other parts of this just drag, and other parts highlight how much of this sort of live-performance/circus really just has to be experienced in-person for it to have its full effect, because it's pretty flat onscreen. It's kinda the same deal for the video cinematography—sometimes it looks very cool, but other times (most of the time) it looks like trash in the way that a lot of video cinematography from '70s TV looks. Anyway, a movie that's more fun to think about than it is to actually watch, but thematically, it's a fitting final feature. Grade: B-
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