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Siskoid commented on Starlet, Certain Women, Anora, and 3 others , 2538 alter ma jib, Take Out and Star Trek: Section 31 2 weeks 1 day agoSean Baker is the new king of naturalism and in 2012's Starlet, he shows that naturalism doesn't have to mean rambling mumblecore. The characters are real, the performances unaffected except where the characters themselves take on an affect, and we're heading for the kind of emotional reveal that still belongs to the world of movies. Dree Hemingway is an adult film actress who finds money in a yard sale item and having kept it, befriends the crabby old lady she took it from (Besedka Johnson). Starlet is the cute dog who acts as a catalyst for many events, and if a "writer's hand" is ever felt on the plot, it's usually organically, through an animal who wouldn't know a pen from a chew toy. Motivations are important, but hidden from us, only slowly discovered. If guilt motivates Hemingway's Jane at first, it soon gives way to an evident thirst for a mother figure. Johnson's Sadie is more closed off and, not unlike Jane, we spend a lot of time trying to divine what she's thinking. Engrossing slice of (unusual) life.Big, painterly landscapes equal isolation and loneliness in Certain Women, a triptych by Kelly Reichardt (First Cow) with beautiful cinematography by her frequent contributor Christopher Blauvelt, adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy. There are thin threads connecting the three stories, including the wintry Montana setting, and of course, certain thematic underpinnings. But as with most "anthology" films, it's a thing of parts, and those parts are pretty uneven. I could have honestly stayed in Laura Dern's segment for the length of a feature. She's a small-town lawyer struggling to make a male client listen to her advice, and had it been developed further, some of the legal stuff might have resonated more. The middle part is the one least likely to elicit excitement, despite Michelle Williams' participation. She's a woman trying to get a dream house built, often at odds with her husband and daughter, and it doesn't really go anywhere except in the subtlest sense. But everything is forgiven with the last story, which has farmhand Lily Gladstone crush on young lawyer Kristen Stewart with heart-breaking results. We're in Reichardt's world of subdued colors and even more subdued incident, a world of interior lives. And if there's a motif tying these three or four women together is that no matter their accomplishments, they are unheard. Many, many instances of them not being listened to (by characters of both genders), but not for lack of communicating their needs or ideas. In all cases, would have made better full features, or benefited from a more interlocked script, but I like what's there.Anora might just be Sean Baker's most traditional film despite its untraditional structure. It starts out as a very Sean Baker film - a sex worker (check) meets the son of a Russian oligarch and gets her chance at a dream life, and it's all played with Baker's usual realism and absence of "plot devices". But then the childish boy's family gets involved and it turns into a crime picture. So I was keen to see how Baker would handle a trope-heavy genre. I wouldn't call it Baker's usual fare - perhaps more like a cross between the Coen Brothers and Shane Black - but it sure is funny. A real, but absurd situation arises, creating three of the most engaging "goons" in film history, and Baker SITS IN IT. What would normally be a single scene becomes an extended, and therefore especially funny, sequence, and you don't know who to feel sorry for (everyone, probably). Anora IS at last 15 minutes too long, but without that epilogue it can't as powerfully make its point about the sadness of seeing the world through a transactional filter.
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Siskoid checked Starlet, Certain Women, Anora, and 3 others , 2538 alter ma jib, Take Out and Star Trek: Section 31 2 weeks 1 day ago
Starlet
2012Certain Women
2016Anora
2024 -
Siskoid's silver IMDb's Horror Top 50 award has been updated to gold 2 weeks 2 days ago
IMDb's Horror Top 50 gold award
Horror films are designed to frighten and to invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a... -
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Siskoid commented on Thirty Day Princess, One of Them Days and Forty Guns 2 weeks 3 days agoSylvia Sidney puts in a very cute performance (or dual performances) in Thirty Day Princess, playing a down-on-her-luck actress roped into standing in for a foreign princess who catches the mumps just as she's about to embark on a U.S. tour that could save her country's economy (and the real princess too). Cary Grant - though already 30 at this point - looks very young as the newspaper man who thinks it's all a scam, but falls for her faux-royal charms. I could definitely do without the royal fiancé/spoiler as Vince Barnett both overeggs the comedy pudding and can't sustain any kind of accent from one sentence to the next, but this is otherwise a pleasant enough romcom set-up. The 1930s made lots of economic fantasies featuring royals and millionaires, often in a rags to riches-type story, so it's easy to lose one in the shuffle. This one surprises, however, by showing quite a bit of poverty, and people being irate at bankers specifically. You can really see Preston Sturges' fingerprints on the script.Nope's Keke Palmer and Black Panther Oscar-winning songstress SZA are best friends with money trouble in One of Them Days, a kind of comic Odyssey through the 'Hood as the two women try to beat the clock to replace the rent money unwisely spent by a bad boyfriend. But things get worse and worse and their schemes push them further into the red AND tests their friendship to the core. It's a good premise, made better by the really very funny cast of quirky characters that help or impede them on their quest. First-time feature director Laurence Lamont (who came up working on music videos) laces in lots of visual gags and lets the audience discover them naturally, while screenwriter Syreeta Singleton juggles satire, wit and crasser jokes in a pretty effective cocktail. Different parts of the audience laughed at different things, but weren't resentful of the moments that didn't tickle them. Ultimately, this can only work if the leads have chemistry, and they do, quite a lot, with each other and with the rest of the cast. A lot of fun.While generally well-regarded, Sam Fuller's Forty Guns doesn't really work for me. This is an O.K. Corral remix party where Barbara Stanwyck essentially plays Pa Clanton and falls in love with Wyatt Earp, but the pacing is off. At first, she's more a force of nature than a character, galloping through the screen with forty men in tow like it's a visual gag. The middle of the film develops her, but the heroes are definitely the Bonell Brothers who get deputized almost as soon as they walk into Tombstone. Flirtations with a female gunsmith actually lead to a different brother getting married, and no lie, I had trouble distinguishing the two elder brothers from one another, which was kind of confusing. In any case, any feminist good will the film garners from me with its casting is all shot by the end when Stanwyck of course has to choose her rather one-sided love over being a rich, connected rancher. I like how Barry Sullivan isn't interested in her for moral reasons, but Hollywood must Hollywood. Fuller's Noir credentials are strong, and he does provide some dark moments and a lot of witty dialog mixing gun violence and double entendre, but I'd have much rather been in Stanwyck's perspective from the onset, as her situation is more interesting than Yet Another Gunslinger's (TM).
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Siskoid checked Thirty Day Princess, One of Them Days and Forty Guns 2 weeks 3 days ago
Thirty Day Princess
1934One of Them Days
2025Forty Guns
1957 -
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Siskoid commented on Hu-Man, Better Man, Anti-Clock, and 3 others , Blow the Man Down, The Amazing Mr. Blunden and Ba Wong Fa 2 weeks 5 days agoSome of what French film Hu-Man is doing has been lost over the years. I suppose audience today wouldn't realize that Terence Stamp had just spent several years on a retreat in India, nor that he and his model ex-girlfriend had been one of the 1960s most photographed couples. Because his return to film in this surreal picture has him play a retired actor named Terence Stamp still grieving the death of his wife and recruited by Jeanne Moreau into participating in a wild time travel experiment. Essentially, if he confronts his trauma in front of a big enough audience, the emotional energy generated can be used to send him backwards or forwards in time. It's certainly a play on the acting process and the psychic damage the actor risks. With its apocalyptic landscapes (they sent Stamp to some crazy places), it's also a play on grief and depression. He sees no future, but if he thinks of the past, he risks dying. There's a nod to La Jetée in there somewhere. After a few minutes, you know you're in the grip of WTF cinema, and you shouldn't think too hard about the physics at play. It's not about science. It's about the one kind of time travel we really do have access to: Memory and imagination.There's always going to be a self-serving element to a musical biopic in which the subject is a participant, but Better Man hides it better than most by really being about self-loathing and insecurity. Robbie Williams, the low-income boy band bad boy with terrible daddy issues, is transformed into an ape for the purposes of the film, which is a sometimes brutally honest portrayal of an addict and general dick bag, more interested in fame than art. Now, Williams isn't well known outside the UK - I only really knew him from British chat shows, not his music - but that really doesn't matter. Just take it as a musical with mostly original songs (indeed, it throws in some big numbers that have a Golden Age musical feel). The film turns melodramatic moments into music videos, and stage performances into an excuse to create fantasy sequences where Robbie fights his demons. As a biopic, it's more about what it feels like to be a controversial pop star who made it too big, too early in life, than any specific detail, and that's where I like my biopics. It's also got one of the best final lines in cinema.In Jane Arden's Anti-Clock, a man is mentally unmoored from time, but time is many things. It's memory - and time travel is therefore a kind of psychoanalysis - it's physics by way of Buddhism, it's New Age psychic phenomena, it's a mathematical calculation of probability, and it's how we relate to personal identity. It's too much, maybe? I give the film props for using the vocabulary of video editing to represent all this through frame-by-frame moments, stock footage, and side-by-side monitors. But does that mean it's really talking about film making? I think I would like it better if I could confirm that. Instead, I rather think it might be more interested in a very 70s Third Eye kind of cinema, where New Ageism tries to connect to Science and Psychology. Very nearly plotless - it's in many ways a kind of video essay - and very nearly nonsense, but many of its ideas still resonate.
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Siskoid checked Hu-Man, Better Man, Anti-Clock, and 3 others , Blow the Man Down, The Amazing Mr. Blunden and Ba Wong Fa 2 weeks 5 days ago
Hu-Man
1975Better Man
2024Anti-Clock
1979
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