Category: likey

It’s fun just having that as a heading. Saw Richard Linklater’s very effective adaptation of Philip K.’s novel A Scanner Darkly.

Continue reading Dick!

sunhee turned me on to this no-frills, stripped-down comedy on hbo and i spent the last two days catching up on the 6 episodes shown so far. this is from louis c.k, a writer on letterman, conan and the chris rock show–and also the writer of the chris rock spin-off, and the greatest film ever made, pootie tang. it is very, very good. very simple premise and setup: working class couple in shitty apartment with young daughter work out gender, marriage and adulthood issues. friends, co-workers and neighbours show up every once in a while. the writing is very good, and the performances, especially by the supporting cast, are perfect. well, c.k is the weak link in the acting department but it doesn’t really hurt the show, which while “real” in many ways–their apartment, their possessions, their milieu, everything fits their circumstances–it is not really after realism in the delivery. the show is quite theatrical and stagey, and the diy feel of the sets and the hyper-articulate dialog both nail the class context and highlight the artifice. that said, there’s a certain irony about a working class comedy about a couple not always making it from check to check airing on hbo.
Continue reading lucky louie

I’m waiting on White from our local library (should have it today), and in the meantime watched two films that were better than I expected–but keep those expectations moderate. Continue reading Minor pleasures

Kris and I watched The 7th Victim last evening, a spooky noir-ish story about a young woman trying to track down her missing sister, and runs into a secretive group of (as opposed to a bunch of showboat) Satanists. Which sounds sensationalized, and for a film from the ’40s portends some obvious schlocky “evil” (pronounced, a la Kevin McDonald, EEEE-villllll). It ain’t; like Lewton’s other productions, this is spooky, intelligent. Continue reading Val Lewton

I’m not even sure how, or what, to recommend–but a flat assertion that this is worth seeing won’t do.

The plot: a young man believes that aliens have infiltrated corporate culture, and are carrying out experiments on the Earth. To save all, the hero kidnaps a big-league asshole CEO and starts torturing the guy to get him to contact his e.t. cohorts and stop the destruction. The film begins in strange silly slapstick land and creeps, oddly, into serial killer territory; our hero is, unsurprisingly, a bit whacked, but a dark and often moving backstory turns the film into a kind of psychological thriller. With slapstick. And…

…well, genre’s hard to nail down. The director (Jun-hwan Jeong) has energy and style to burn, and while the film’s plot may suggest z-picture camp it’s done with A-level aesthetics. And, yeah, it actually has some emotional heft. It didn’t fully work for me, or it wasn’t the 5-star dazzle I’d hoped, but I was never less than engaged and always off-guard. Aren’t too many films that so ceaselessly, slyly tangle with genre. (‘Though I’m beginning to think that the great stuff coming out of South Korea has a lock on this hybridized aesthetic.) And now let this post linger without comment for years to come…..

Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.

The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.

He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.

I gotta give one great big shout for the fabulous (in all senses) Kamikaze Girls: the pop-culture-saturated story of an improbable friendship between Momoko (Kyoko Fukada), a young woman striving like Wilde toward a “rococo” way of being in frilly Lolita-inspired dresses, and Ichigo/Ichiko (Anna Tsuchiya), a young woman striving to be a Wild One via a tough-grrl Yanki way of being.

The movie is a joy to watch, moving through flashbacks and fantasy sequences of exuberant playfulness, even presenting one sequence in cartoons (to keep “you kids” attentive, Momoko tells the camera). It’s one big sugary/drug-rush of a film, but not–for all that–simplistic or stupid; it avoids all the expected cliches (especially the seemingly-inevitable breakdown of female friendship into hetero courtship). And best of all it revels in the intelligence and agency of its protagonists–not suckered into prefab style but slyly finding in the trash of consumer culture means to make something of their own. But blah blah: it’s just a blast.

This doc was directed by Fatih Akin, who also directed the much-praised Head-On. (I have a borrowed copy of Head-On at home, but havent seen it yet.) Akin is a German national of Turkish descent, and the film is largely directed at a German audience. The narrator is Alexander Hacke of Einsturzende Neubauten, whose love of unusual music shows through, and he’s a scruffy presence that seems at home among the cig’-smokin Istanbul musicians.

In a well-paced 90 minutes, Akin discovers 15 musicians or groups, from drug addicted buskers to tuxedo wearing ballroom singers whose peak of popularity was 40 years ago. Continue reading Crossing the Bridge: The Music of Istanbul – Akin

Jonathan Demme’s documentary about Haitian journalist/activist Jean Dominique gets a quick recommendation from me. It doesn’t reinvent the form, nor is it the one film to see about Haiti’s political struggles over the last 40 years. But–kind of like the doc on William Eggleston–this film emerges from a personal relationship between filmmaker and subject; its talking head footage of Dominique was collected over a few years, during his periods of exile in NYC, and after Dominique’s assassination Demme spliced it together, fleshed out the history, caught up with some others.

What I very much appreciated about the film was that it didn’t stop to provide tons of explication–it demands that you either inform yourself or pay close attention, rather than giving you Haiti 101 on a plate. I also loved Dominique, garrulous and theatrical and impassioned–the film hews to his personality as a vehicle for conveying the storm of Haiti’s history, but never in that too-pat bio-doc format that collapses personal and national histories into one shared story. Instead, we are learning about Dominique… and necessarily, with this committed social activist, we engage with Haiti.
Continue reading The Agronomist

…or Ferpect Crime is a low-rent blast, starting out as a sleek sort-of-obvious satire about a department-store Lothario but slowly creeping toward Grand Guignol black comedy and finally ending in a garish burst of surrealist comedy. This ain’t for everybody. But it looks grand (director Alex de la Iglesia got an initial boost from Almodovar, and they share an eye and taste for the cartoonish taken seriously–or vice versa). Its meanness is slowly sapped away by an obvious love for those “freaks” and “uglies” it mocks.

I’m having trouble nailing it down, but it was fun. Imagine if Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny got caught up in a bleak noirish erotic thriller, and then had it out for one another. I’m rushing to my queue to line up some more of his stuff.