Movies Watched -- Afire (2023)

In German. 103 minute running time but felt like a lifetime. This movie was shit. Petzold has made a boring, pretentious movie and casts his girlfriend (Paula Beer) as the main female character, once again … awful, I hated this, true, I fast forwarded through most of it once I realized (within minutes of starting it) that it was terrible. Let me find an honest critic:

Maxwell Rabb writes: “this tired trope emerges as an uninspired caricature of a manbaby with few revelations or tensions that make it worthwhile … Afire’s deepest flaw is similar to Leon’s: a failure to self-reflect, and, in turn, the shortcomings result in a tedious investigation of the tortured artist … Petzold’s cinematic architecture feels built by flimsy plot devices that mindlessly carry flat characters from scene to scene … Afire is an imbroglio, a vapid exercise, as Petzold abandons clarity in favor of character-driven complexities. However, the trouble is that almost nothing happens that’s moving enough to justify this opacity.”

It’s just shit, do not waste your time. John Farr did me dirty by recommending this.

Movies Watched -- About Dry Grasses (2023)

In Turkish. 197 minute running time. That’s right THREE HOURS AND SEVENTEEN MINUTES long. Nuri Bilge Ceylan has basically made the same movie over and over and over again. I loved Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, that was his best movie, and probably the only one of his movies you need to see. About Drying Paint is one you can miss. Talk talk talk talk talk talk. And the protagonist was a real bastard, there’s no identifying with this guy. He’s just a prick. Talk talk talk talk talk talk talk. Dorm-room philosophizing, spare me already, geez, come on. Talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk.

Movies Watched -- Ascension (2021)

In Mandarin. 97 minute running time. This movie was like an extension or update to Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes, which was a great documentary. This one is more deeply disturbing and even terrifying to see what China has become in the digital age. As John Farr wrote: “the vast majority of Chinese people [are] nameless, interchangeable cogs in an immense, highly exploitative economic engine.” Super grim and troubling, filled with desperation and insecurity … bleak.

Movies Watched -- All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

120 minute running time … documentary about the artist and activist, Nan Goldin. The pharmacological opioid epidemic is complicated, I’m not sure if tearing the Sackler name out of all the museums and universities of the world is the best approach… but Goldin is a smart and gutsy woman whom you can’t help admiring. This was a John Farr reco.

Text from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness found in her sister’s purse … about as brutal as it gets:

Movies Watched -- Paper Moon (1973)

102 minute running time… Peter Bogdanovich movie … I don’t like movies with kids in them… this probably wasn’t that terrible, but I didn’t make it very far in before going to fast forward. John Farr found it hilarious, but I beg to differ.

She don’t believe in puttin’ out fer free.

Movies Watched -- The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

In German. 98 minute running time, so the perfect length. I wasn’t super thrilled with this. It’s a political picture. Germany is really grappling with being a multi-cultural society now. And things are getting more litigious. One thing you can say for sure is that the German public school system is NOT underfunded.

Makes sense that the director is a Turk who was born and raised in Berlin. Leonie Benesch, the star of this movie, played Eva in The White Ribbon, which is a great movie. The Teachers’ Lounge was a John Farr reco, but I do not second it…

Movies Watched -- Birth (2004)

100 minute running time so the perfect length … I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Glazer, but had never seen his second movie, Birth. It is a weird one and the mainstream critics HATED it, but I didn’t mind it, in fact I liked it, it’s definitely NOT terrible, and I’ve added a copy to my permanent collection. I love Nicole Kidman, she’s super talented. It’s a love story, but a twisted one. I would recommend it if you like Glazer and are a completist like me. Green-go!

[Not just the Wagner getting to her]

Movies Watched -- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

In Italian … 179 minute running time … normally I’d say this is twice as long as it should be, but this was a special movie and gets a pass because it had many beautiful moments … it’s not a single story, but a series of dozens of vignettes… the life of Italian peasants at the turn of the 20th century.

I liked it and am glad I saw it and can recommend it and would have also voted for it if I were on the Palme d’Or committee, but be warned, it’s three hours long.

From the Criterion blurb: “Through the cycle of seasons, of backbreaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, celebrating its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledging the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is intimate in scale but epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.”

Marriage is a Holy Sacrament

Movies Watched -- 3 Women (1977)

124 minute running time which means 30 minutes too long, but this was just terrible and would be at any length. Was Robert Altman a druggie? This seems like drug-addled nonsense. How on earth did 20th Century Fox approve the budget for this? Who was in charge back then? Geez. Shelley Duvall with her weird googly eyes and crooked teeth. Sissy Spacek is cute but plays a nut. The whole story is just dumb and bizarre. Who could watch and enjoy this crap? I have John Farr to blame for this awful recommendation, “one of Altman's finest films of the 1970s.” If that’s true, I’d hate to see his less fine ones!

Give me a slug of that, huh?

Movies Watched -- The Headless Woman (2009)

In Spanish. 89 minute running time so the perfect length. SPOILERS … this is art house stuff from Argentina, shows you what Argentine society is like… a professional woman (a dentist) (probably) hits and kills a peasant boy and his dog and gets away with it (I say probably because it’s never made clear what actually happened, which is part of the movie’s charm) … her brother is also a dentist, and her lover (not her husband) is a doctor and they both help her cover her tracks, but the victim is just a peasant boy so no authorities would ever pursue the case, but just in case, they do manage a pretty thorough cover-up … but the woman, the killer, she’s sort of a basket case (the woman lost her head, get it?) because of the accident, or maybe she was always a basket case, it’s hard to tell … it wasn’t bad, just very art-housey, so not good for a Murkan audience.

Argentina is all screwed up because of the time when political enemies were “disappeared.” The class differences in Argentina are stark. This is a movie about guilt. I thought the kid’s handprint on her car window was a little, er, heavy-handed, but this woman director is talented, no doubt.

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot since I watched it and decided to upgrade it to green-go as a result.