recognito | Movie Blog Detour

I would not call myself a film bro, on account of being an only child… Some films I watched in October and my thoughts:

The Fall, dir. Tarsem - I guess I am NOT IMMUNE to Lee Pace being beautiful or the fact that it was shot on location and that many of the shots are beautiful… There’s this quote that keeps going around about how The Fall is about how narrative can redeem the teller or that changing the story about yourself is a way of redeeming yourself, but it is soooo clear to me that The Fall is a film about how it’s actually fine to manipulate children … no just kidding. A more serious me would say, “The Fall is about how you don't get to control shit about how your story, which may have initially be told maliciously, is received, and if you're lucky, your audience will be really, really, really nice to you and you’ll feel better for telling it, even if it’s super embarrassing” - an emotion distinct from redemption. I am a redemption hater, just by nature. Jesus owes me a fountain of jizz. This will become relevant later in this post.

By the Stream, dir. Hong - A common Q&A back-and-forth you'll encounter at film festivals is, "How much of this movie was planned?" The standard answer you get is, "Everything was planned! All of it! I refuse to allow for any spontaneity or improv!" and the director will then go on about how this is how all films are made, in a tone of "only an amateur would question me." There are, however, a handful of directors insist on truly insane methods of production; apparently Hong scripts by writing the scene at 4am the day of the shooting. As an actor, I would probably die or have an ulcer, but I also appreciate the appeal: what if everything you did was committed to film? what if you had no option but to play to a camera that refuses to move? what if you have to shoot in natural light only? I was drawn to the film to see how the almost improvisional production of the film would hang together as a completed work and to see the lead performers, Kim Min-hee and Kwon Hae-hyo, long-time collaborators of Hong. Compared to other movies playing at the festival, I did notice the rougher quality of the lighting and camerawork and the highly naturalistic acting--really enjoyable to see play out. It felt remarkably well-balanced as an experience.

Did you know it only cost the director like 100k to make this film? I think it helped that the director didn’t do a Q&A after, but you can get a bonus Q&A by looking up his Wikipedia page and going, “wtf” over the pictures of his press conference. The movie itself is also nice. Cannot forget to mention that, too

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dir. Coppola - I was sold on this as a super campy movie, and it absolutely is. You know the thing that makes me laugh the most? Everyone rags on Keanu's awful English accent, but almost EVERYONE has a bad accent?! Gary Oldman’s doing Romanian, Winona Ryder is putting on another awful English accent, Anthony Hopkins is. German…

This movie is certainly over the top in its production and editing--soooo many match cuts and ominous overlays--but it is also a much more faithful Dracula adaptation than I was expecting, complete with the letters, the journey to London, the journey back to Romania, etc. This really had me wishing I had seen Megalopolis in theaters instead of going, “oh it seems bad, I don’t want to see it” because I can completely understand how watching this Dracula with the right audience would’ve been an amazing experience. Beautiful shots and special effects and so, so, so many choices that made me go, you know, I don’t think I would have done that but watching this choice is pretty entertaining.

Misericordia, dir. Guiraudie - This film lol was not at all what I expected based on the website description of “twisty thriller set in small town France.” The set up looks something like this: Jeremie returns to his small town to attend a funeral and stays with the widow… the widow’s son suspects him of having designs for his mother… whoops! Jeremie has committed a murder! whoops, Jeremie sucks ass at covering up murder.

The romance/sexuality element of this movie is totally bonkers: it initially seems as though the widow cannot possibly be Jeremie’s real interest and that her son is overreacting, possibly because Jeremie is also hitting on the son’s best friend, but nope: very quickly you learn that age is NOT a barrier and that EVERYONE is open to fucking Jeremie. Jeremie will fuck anyone, and just about everyone, except for Walter the token heterosexual wants Jeremie. The elderly priest helps Jeremie set up an alibi based on their passion for one another. There's a very funny scene where Jeremie, burdened with guilt and fearful that the police will catch him, contemplates suicide, only for the priest to launch into a speech about why Jeremie should stay alive and love him: “You may not think you can bring yourself to love me, but I don’t really love people that much either, I had to bring myself to do it… anyway that’s why you can’t turn yourself in and have dinner with me once a week” – Just a sharp left turn into sexual comedy farce but without turning off the small town murder element. Would it have been better as two separate movies? Yeah, I think so.

Two to One, dir. Brunckhorst - The set up of this movie become almost magical once you attach “based on a true story” to it. Initially billed as an absurd heist comedy, it’s more accurate to say that this is a film about how socialism doesn’t want you to have threesomes and neither does ultra-capitalism.

On the face of it, the movie does have individual moments of. “absurd” and “heist” and “comedy” but its dominant tone is a gentle 00s indie film. Summer of 1990: a bunch of East Germans discover a government stash of old East German marks just before they’re slated to be destroyed. They rush to cash in the marks before the deadline to exchange them for West German marks and to secure work/safety before their economy goes to shit, eventually roping in their entire apartment complex. It centers on three people, a married couple and their male friend recently returned from Hungary. Over the course of the movie, they fold their friend easily into their family, except surprise! It turns out they were already a family because the friend fathered one of their kids and the married couple have had a policy of mutual denial over this for years. All this sounds like it could be a film about how systems of ownership operate in familial and economic lines, but lol I don't think anyone aside from me was interested in that.

Stars a few big German actors, including Sandra Hueller in a role that does absolutely nothing for her. Would I watch it again or recommend it? Probably not, but the director came to the screening with a giant bag of prop money and got everyone to stay by announcing, “If you leave, you will not get any money!”

Desire Lines, dir. Rothkam - I had such a strong reaction to the Q&A with the director and such a MEH to the actual film itself that I’m struggling to properly convey like the overall shape of the project itself separately from how stupid I found the Q&A… My initial apprehensions towards Desire Lines was actually rooted entirely in the title – for those of you who have been lucky enough to be spared from the tedious poetry of “What if someone engineered your life to be heterosexual etc. but YOU wanted to take a SHORTCUT to your REAL DESIRE” and I realize the appeal of the concept of “desire path,” I just also think Pythagoreas solved this for us and I don’t have much else to say about walking a hypotenuse… the title unfortunately has. nothing to do with the rest of the film.

The film is split between a more straightforward set of interviews with queer trans men and transmasc people who fuck men, cruise, and/or engage in sex work with men and a narrative around a repressed, older queer trans man going through the archives and discovering Lou Sullivan. In the process of doing his research, the man befriends the archivist, a gay trans man who ushers him through a queer awakening. I was way more interested in the documentary portion, which arose from the director exploring what is it that makes dudes transition and go, well, time to suck cock. The fictional portion of this is pretty straightforwardly underbaked/bad… narratively speaking, it feels purely utilitarian and hmm boring...

When it comes to gay male sexuality, I don’t feel like archives are the best metaphor for the process of discovering and coming into your own identity and sexual awakening… at this point my overall feeling is that a lot of American society is oriented towards getting you to suck dick in some kind of way, either through tedious metaphor or tedious action, and the subversion isn’t a man engaging in gay action but more of like, oh, I see, so much of this is just an elaborate ritual/horseblinders against Gay and now I or we (best if you can get we, but sometimes you just do not!) have willingly cast it aside

Where is this review going. “my metaphor is better than the director’s metaphor!” Hope he doesn’t self-google.

Saw one or two other movies but did not feel anything towards them… regularly scheduled book blog coming up soon.