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Adventures in cinema: eastern, promises

Center Stage (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1991)

BUYER WALKER ROVER (YIWU) AKA. THERE THEN (dir. Amalia Ulman, 2019) 

A Short History (dir. Erica Sheu, 2017)

What a way to make a living

Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985, dir. Monika Treut)

9 to 5 (1980, dir. Colin Higgins)
Everyone's got their kink. Ja, genau.

Adventures in cinema: black and white Taiwan

 

Early Train from Taipei (1964, dir. Liang Zhefu)

Dangerous Youth (1969, dir. Hsin Chi)

via HFA

Adventures in cinema: DDL + Wino Forever = ?

Happenstance put ongoing movie club and classroom watching in fruitful collision. Last of the Mohicans teed up The Age of Innocence, previewing next week's A Room with a View. In hindsight, the Merchant Ivory seems much less mannered/overdetermined than the contemporaneous adaptation work of our two homegrown auteurs.

And how to communicate to those not yet born the 90s essence rare of Ms. Ryder onscreen and in the culture?

 

Adventures in cinema: Cities of Love and Sadness

Granted, I was feverish. But these two Taiwanese-dialect melodramas presented by Harvard Film Archive were a trip. The first (above), The Husband's Secret (1960), had plot elements that reminded me of aspects of Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara). No, there're no live births, but there are nightclub hostesses carving out communal living spaces and arrangements in parallel to the de/predations of their sex work.
The second (below), from 1965, May 13th, Night of Sorrow, rang some Mildred Pierce bells, sans pancakes, with its story of a sacrificing older woman working in a low profession--nightclub singer--to provide a younger woman, her sister, with all the advantages. Said kid sister is embarrassed by her sib's work, a snob and an ingrate, and, well, you know how these dynamics play out. There's a man, misunderstandings, a murder....
(The actress shown wearing glasses in the fourth shot was an amazing physical comedian, forever prat-falling into the glassworks at the plant where she and kid sister work as newly hired scientists and pulling unbelievably elastic moues and eyerolls.)

Adventures in cinema: miniatures set to music

Through some happy accident, I came across this video by Pom Pom Squad for their song, "LUX," inspired by Lux Lisbon and quoting heavily from Sofia Coppola's adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides.

It's a microgenre, to be sure, but I love when musicians riff visually on feature films. Ex Hex is another, with their "Donna Wanna Lose" video taking them on a compressed journey through the visuals and plot of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.

And then there are the hybrids I want to speak into existence. HAIM should cover "Help Me" by Robin Gibb and Marcy Levy--THERE ARE HANDCLAPS--and shoot their best Times Square homage with Paul Thomas Anderson (acknowledging it may be too far from the valley to truly take and maybe something from Foxes--Janis Ian's "Fly Too High"?--would make more sense).

I have seen the future

And it's murder.

Goodbye, First Love / Turn Me On, Dammit

[via]

Welcome to the inaugural post in a new category: shit from an old notebook. The idea is to transcribe whatever scribbles I jotted down in the dark but failed to flesh out, so I can stop carrying this shit around, physically and metaphorically.

On 8.8, I caught a gynotastic Brattle double feature: Mia Hansen-Love's Goodbye, First Love and Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's fleet first film, Turn Me On, Dammit. 

What I wrote down on the back of my Brattle membership envelope:

• 8/8 Goodbye, 1st <3
• Paris Feb 1999
• Tadao Ando
• green summer light
• 2007 graffitied ruins
• Sullivan's Studio 1 tee
• "The actors are annoying. It's talky, complacent [illegible]." 
• (French)

____________________________

Turn Me On Dammit

• pink.

What I remember, Goodbye: Lola Créton renders one of the most uncomfortably genuine manifestations of depression and debilitating heartache I can remember, along with the soul sickness of not being able to move past a formative love affair that lingers in her cells like a chronic disease.  Also, scarves. Those fucking French people and their scarf-wearing élan. I can't wait to see what Créton does in Olivier Assayas' Après mai, screening this Thursday at NYFF50.

What I remember, Turn: Lead Alma is plagued by an ache of a different kind but no less painful: raging hormones. She yearns for Artur but can't keep her hands off herself or off the speed dial connecting her to a phone sex line. Glassy pink lipgloss obsessively applied by a self-satified chubby blonde. Gossip at school. And a lovely interlude at a friend's older sister's apartment in Oslo, showing Alma that the world is much bigger and kinkier than her shitty little town.