Never Coming to a Cinema Near You - Arthouse Cinema 2015

I don't recall seeing anything but [x auteur] dbl bill @ Riverside, and always old films.

ok Frederik... anything on this Argentine guy Rejtman?

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/series/sounds-like-music-the-films-of-martin-rejtman

Oh, that's probably why Filmcomment had this article: http://www.filmcomment.com/article/martin-rejtman-two-shots-fired-dos-disparos

I knew nothing about him before I read that article. Actually, I knew nothing about Argentine cinema before 2001. I was thinking of starting a new thread, because I find it so weird. Nothing, no film at all, that I'd heard about before 01, and all of a sudden it's a major hotbed of cinema. That's weird. Iran or Romania, there's a couple old films I've heard about. Nothing in Argentina. Tell me if they're good, especially Rapado!

Also, anyone up for a thread on Argentine cinema? They're having a good year. The new Pineiro is good, and two films called Parabellum and Dog Lady was some of the best surprises at the latest PIX. There's a few films of a guy called Mauro Andrizzi up for stream at DAfilm: http://dafilms.com/event/208-mauro_andrizzi/ Seems kinda interesting. Anybody have some good articles/books on what happened that made Argentina great all of a sudden?

I found Two Shots very droll, but also frustratingly mysterious. (It's probably the most Madness of Mobile Phones-centric film I've yet seen; they ring throughout, and pretty much nothing gets communicated.) Rejtman did a Q&A, emphasizing how slowly he writes and works.

roundup:

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-sounds-like-music-the-films-of-martin-rejtman

This is the only pre-2001 Argentinian movie that comes to mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Official_Story

well Rejtman's debut Rapado was '92, apparently got some attention.

Halfway point poll. Multiplex wins decisively:

http://www.indiewire.com/survey/the-best-films-of-2015-so-far/best-film/

aside from Duke of Burgundy, feel like i haven't missed anything.

(Amour Fou and Gueros at the top for me)

Locarno Lineup:

Concorso Internazionale:

BELLA E PERDUTA by Pietro Marcello
BRAT DEJAN (Brother Dejan) by Bakur Bakuradze
CHEVALIER by Athina Rachel Tsangari
COSMOS by Andrzej Zulawski
ENTERTAINMENT by Rick Alverson
HAPPY HOUR by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
HEIMATLAND by Lisa Blatter, Gregor Frei, Jan Gassmann, Benny Jaberg, Carmen Jaquier, Michael Krummenacher, Jonas Meier, Tobias Nölle, Lionel Rupp, Mike Scheiwiller
JAMES WHITE by Josh Mond
JIGEUMEUN MATGO GEUTTAENEUN TEULLIDA (Right Now, Wrong Then) by HONG Sangsoo
MA DAR BEHESHT (Paradise) by Sina Ataeian Dena
NO HOME MOVIE by Chantal Akerman
O FUTEBOL by Sergio Oksman
SCHNEIDER VS. BAX by Alex van Warmerdam
SUITE ARMORICAINE by Pascale Breton
SULANGA GINI ARAN (Dark in the White Light) by Vimukthi Jayasund4ra
TE PROMETO ANARQUÍA by Julio Hernández Cordón
THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS by Ben Rivers
TIKKUN by Avishai Sivan

Concorso Cineasti del presente:

DEAD SLOW AHEAD by Mauro Herce
DER NACHTMAHR by AKIZ
DOM JUAN by Vincent Macaigne
DREAM LAND by Steve Chen
EL MOVIMIENTO by Benjamín Naishtat
KEEPER by Guillaume Senez
LE GRAND JEU by Nicolas Pariser
LES ÊTRES CHERS by Anne Émond
LU BIAN YE CAN (Kaili Blues) by BI Gan
MOJ BRATE – MIO FRATELLO by Nazareno Manuel Nicoletti
OLMO & THE SEAGULL by Petra Costa, Lea Glob
SIEMBRA by Ángela Osorio Rojas, Santiago Lozano Álvarez
THE WAITING ROOM by Igor Drljaca
THITHI by Raam Reddy

Not as cool as last year, but new Akerman, Warmerdam, Rivers, Hong, Naishtat and Tsangari is cool. And Happy Hour by Hamaguchi is six-and-a-half hours long, so that's cool.

Stations of the Cross, anyone? Its austerity impressed Schrader.

http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/theatrical-reviews/stations-of-the-cross-28544

Alverson seems destined to make the same movie over and over but I am p into that movie

I saw it a couple weeks back. Loved it. Lead performance and the long shots are hard to deny.

Venice lineup:

Frenzy (Emin Alper, Turkey/France/Qatar)
Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, US)
Blood of My Blood (Marco Bellocchio, Italy)
Looking for Grace (Sue Brooks, Australia)
Equals (Drake Doremus, US)
Remember (Atom Egoyan, Canada/Germany)
Beasts of No Nation (Cary Fukunaga, US)
Per amor vostro (Giuseppe M. Gaudino, Italy/France)
Marguerite (Xavier Giannoli, France/Czech Republic/Belgium)
Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitai, Israel/France)
A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, Italy/France)
The Endless River (Oliver Hermanus, South Africa/France)
The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, UK/US)
Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman/Duke Johnson, US)
L'attesa (Piero Mesina, Italy)
11 Minutes (Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland)
Francofonia (Aleksandr Sokurov, France/Germany/Netherlands)
The Clan (Pablo Trapero, Argentina/Spain)
Desde alla (Lorenza Vigas, Venezuela/Mexico)
L'hermine (Christian Vincent, France)
Behemoth (Zhao Liang, China/France)

Docs from Wiseman, Loznitsa and Tsai out of competition is very exciting. And Danish filmmedia is excited that Tobias Lindholm's (A Hijacking) new film A War is in Horizons. Though six months ago they were complaining he wasn't in competition at Cannes, and now the side-competition at Venice is ever so prestigious. Danish filmmedia is weird.

Schrader and stations of the cross go together like a horse and carriage

cool, didn't know there was a new skolimowski

The Indian film Court (ludicrous trial of an elderly protest singer for abetting a suicide through music): understated, funny, angry, little speechifying (even by lawyers).

(Venice prizewinner last year, i think?)

Drake Doremus must be the worst working filmmaker alive

Raves abound for Petzold's Phoenix but I found his last one just OK, so I'm a bit skeptical.

I didn't like it anywhere as much as Barbara.

It's a good genre piece, with a great ending. I'm watching a lot of the old Petzold, and the thing is that he just straight up copies old films and stories and twists them into a German context. Phoenix is basically Vertigo as a rubble film. Which is cool. But aesthetically, it's nothing special.

yeah it's a pulp movie done arty.

Yup. And it's perhaps not very good art, but it's thoughtful pulp. His film Jerichow is just a remake of The Postman Rings Twice, but it's twisted into telling a story about immigration to Germany. I like that style, just doing old and wellknown stories, but using that framework to make new images of your country. Plus it never gets too pretentious, I don't think, which is always a danger with this sort of thing.

after using actors last time, Jem Cohen has a new one more in line with his previous work, which i will likely see tonight as i have little faith it will run more than a week in NY.

http://www.ifccenter.com/films/counting/

i need to get out to that quick myself!

Didn't much care for Jerichow but liked Barbara, which puts me in a good place for Phoenix.

has anyone seen Hard To Be A God?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11sMDQIgggA

i'm not sure i could bear 3 hours of that level of grotesquerie but the FT called it "maybe the greatest film since the millennium began."

I'm really looking forward to it.

And I haven't seen anything that unpleasant in the trailers.

I wrote about it here: http://centrifugue.blogspot.dk/2014/04/cphpix-day-9-hard-to-be-god-road-to.html

It's definitely bewildering and weird and filled with nastyness, but it's cool.

I need to see it again.

it's an experience.
On netflix instant if you have a 12 foot wide television

too muddy and monotonous

Frederik B - just read your review, I'm curious why you and another reviewer I'd seen refer to the black and white being part of the film's difficulty. I wouldn't think this should be an issue for critics, so are you just talking about things that put off casual filmgoers?

Yeah. Probably. Normally something like that wouldn't bother me, it's only the length, the mud, the blood and the impenetrability of the plot which caused I minor headache. And festival sleep deprivation, of course. I want to go to another film festival soon. I wish I was at Locarno. The new Zulawski is supposedly quite cool.

Hard to be a God also b/w in an unusual way, have people seen A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night? That one is b/w in the most modern way possible, almost like Sin City. I liked it. A friend dismissed it as being a 90 minute American Apparel commercial, which is pretty much what I like about it.

I love Possession but I was disappointed by pretty much every other Zulawski film I tried (still three I haven't seen though but I stopped trying).

Not bothering with Girl Walks Home At Night. Same with It Follows. I've learned to trust my "I probably won't like that much" sense more often.

Well, I haven't seen It Follows, but from what I've heard it's a straight up horror film. Girl Walks Home is only horror the same way something like Bande a Part is a crime flick. It's all about the pictures, and the sexy young people, and the dancing. It's not the best film ever, but it's cool.

it follows is a fakeout horror film. Girl Walks Home is a drama with a vampire. hard to be a god is snorting pixie stix while someone dangles chicken feet in front of your eyes.
all three aren't flawless but all three are well worth seeing.

Haven't seen them yet but Hard To Be A God and Tale Of Tales are firmly in the "Finally! Something for me!" zone. Even if they end up boring me a bit.

Hard To Be A God actually looks a bit like Zulawski's On The Silver Globe.

Sounds good with Tale of Tales! Looking forward to that one.

Hong Sang-soo wins Golden Leopard. Zulaswski Best Director. Script and Actress goes to Japanese five-hour film Happy Hour.

http://www.pardolive.ch/pardo/pardo-live/today-at-festival/2015/day-11/LOC68-Palmares/palmares-2015.html

on the Hong film (hope to see it at NYFF)

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-locarno-2015-hong-sang-soos-right-now-wrong-then

He has sorta been on a roll this decade. Though I wasn't as big a fan of Hill of Freedom as many others, and prefer him when he's at his most loose and least willfully experimental. But Our Sunhi and Nobody's Daughter Haewon were great examples of that as well.

Last three Leopard winners: Albert Serra, Lav Diaz, Hong Sang-soo. That's pretty good. Much better than any of the big three festivals, imo.

Neil Young points out on twitter, that Hong has made three films with jury-member Moon So-ri. Locarno has been accused of nepotism before as well. But they consistently award great films, so I guess I'm ok with it.

I recommend The Mend, one of the livelier films ever about adult brothers -- kinda True West in whitepeople Harlem -- men together, acting in utterly disgusting primal ways. Also a career performance by sex machine Josh Lucas!

http://www.slantmagazine.com/features/article/interview-josh-lucas

Queen of Earth was...I'm not sure what it was, but it ruffled my feathers slightly.

just saw a v funny pan on Letterboxd that put me off watching it, for now

Which one?

it was Simon Abrams'

I wish Perry was able to synthesize his influences into something that didn't feel like a collection of neat stuff. And good god, stop it with the fucking extreme close-ups. We get it, Cassavetes is your homeboy.

Alternatively: WORST GRIM AND GRITTY WHAT ABOUT BOB REBOOT EVER!

I mean, seriously, how do you fuck up a film that, on paper, could be described as "Elizabeth Moss plays Klaus Kinski in: Daughter of Repulsion and Deathtrap?"