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Spring Season: Weeks 25/26
OOF. I'm honestly not sure if the last few weeks have been extra bad, or if I'm just getting whinier. Who can say!! But this week has been brutally long, no sleep, stress eating, work stupid, brain stupid, world stupid, blergh!!!
Work is bullshit. Haven't gotten a credit memo since Wednesday, so when they DO come in, I get to somehow juggle four days of work at once while dealing with month-end, thanks bitch in Calgary who can't do her fucking job. I HAD ALL WEEKEND WITH NOTHING. Every customer annoys me, even the totally innocuous ones, every moron who rolls up telling me they're there to pick up "the '17 GMC" or whatever, LIKE YEAH, WE DEFINITELY HAVE JUST ONE OF THOSE HERE AT THE GMC DEALERSHIP, DUMB SHIT, MAYBE GIVE ME A NAME TO WORK WITH?? OH, "ROBERT", YEAH THANKS THAT'LL DO IT. It doesn't help that they replaced my bubble plastic with better bubble plastic that I can actually see through, but which people can't seem to actually HEAR through very well, so I either have to constantly repeat myself or just start yelling (shout out, however, to the woman who asked me to repeat myself three times before just answering "yes" to a question that was decidedly not a yes answer in the end, I FEEL YOU LADY, I pointedly just let it ride because it was DEEPLY RELATABLE). Phew. Okay. I am drowning in paperwork, it's fine, I'm Fine.
Aunts are visiting from Edmonton for the weekend, which I decidedly don't love seeing as that's the current 'rona hotspot in Alberta and they decidedly do not Get It, but whatever, not like I get a say in these things, and at least it finally served as the impetus to get my mother to clean her goddamn trash heap of a bedroom (or rather, pay someone else to clean it for her WHATEVER I'LL TAKE IT), so hopefully it'll be worth it in the long run and they won't kill my grandmother (their sister)! Also, they were gonna come next weekend then changed their mind to come this weekend, which on the one hand, feels like KIND of a slap in the face given that... they know my schedule, guess they didn't want to see much of me that badly, but also, the idea of spending half my week off entertaining family really doesn't sound like the reprieve that I need it to be so I don't ACTUALLY mind at all. All works out! MAYBE??? Except we just topped 20 active COVID cases for the first time ever, so hooray for that.
It was over 30 degrees a couple weeks ago! We got frost last night! Super cool that nature's all set to just flip the fucking summer switch off the instant September starts! I really love it a lot! Screaming forever!
Chadwick Boseman, man. I got nothing. To the movies!
Sub-themes for the end of August include German expressionism, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathleen Collins, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and actual new movies in the theatre again!
Le Sacrifice (1986): SO HEY, WOW, GUESS WHO WAITED WAY TOO FUCKING LONG TO WATCH ANY TARKOVSKY BECAUSE THIS WAS SO EXTREMELY HER SHIT????? I loooooved this oh my god, it's exactly my preferred flavour of slow and pretentious, I got that really emotional feeling as the credits started where I realized I just saw one of my favourite movies, all those crazy long oners just sucked me right in, and whenever the characters would start spouting off their long, meandering philosophical diatribes, I was totally into them in a way I, like, never am?? Just, like, nodding along and going 'oh wow, that's so true' or 'damn, I don't know if I agree, but it really makes you think' like a total rube. It's all got such a weird timeless quality, too, like if I didn't know when it was made (and that car didn't show up eventually), I would have NO idea how old it was. And then that ending. What the FUCK, that ending, like that is some serious movie magic, I will forever remember that moment of 'wait, what, how the fuck, is this really happening' when the camera pans back over to the house and it's just engulfed in flames, with no break in the shot or special effects that I could see, and the scene/shot JUST. KEEPS. GOING. Man. MAN. So of course it was his last fucking movie because he was dying of cancer while he made it, good job, Leshia. You played yourself.
Nostalghia (1983): Wasn't really cohesive enough to hit me the same way The Sacrifice did, and my attention definitely wandered a lot for this one, but damn if I wasn't on absolute tenterhooks just waiting to see if that candle would stay lit at the end. MAYBE IF I HOLD MY BREATH, IT'LL HELP.
The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020): The RETURN TO THE THEATRE series is officially OVER, as actual movies have begun coming out again! Nature is healing. Also Squidward twerked.
The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980): Interesting, but I found it tough to engage with. Almost unbearably sad in places. Terrible score. Pretty good overall.
Losing Ground (1982): Now this was really beautiful, spare without ever being boring, emotional without ever being cloying, it was really cool to see Duane Jones in something else after all these years, kind of a perfect summer movie? So of course it was her last one before she died of cancer, I AM ON A ROLL THIS MONTH. Also, Wikipedia tells me it's "the first feature-length drama directed by a black American woman since the 1920s" which excuse me but what the fuck
Le vice et la vertu (1963): Yikes. Heavy-handed and melodramatic to the point of utter goofiness. I'm all for transplanting stories to other eras, but this just felt tasteless. Really only worth it for 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve.
Varieté (1925): Strange, horny, tragic, frenzied little ride of a movie. Emil Jannings somehow sells me on him as a trapeze artist of all things, and the editing made an absolute fever dream out of the whole affair. Loved it.
Orlacs Hände (1924): Delightfully spooky, but I found it weirdly difficult to follow considering how simple and iconic the hook is?
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920): My creeping uncertainty about how antisemitic it may or may not have been at any given time worked against this one, but it's just so good that it couldn't hold me down. He was a good golem. :(
Daughters of Darkness (1971): In fucking Bruges. (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988): Okay, so if The Sacrifice wasn't one of my favourite movies before, it certainly is after watching this, goddamn. THE FUCKING HOUSE BURNING WAS A RESHOOT. THE FUCKING CAMERA JAMMED THE FIRST TIME AND THEY LOST THE FOOTAGE. THEY HAD TO REBUILD AN ENTIRE FUCKING HOUSE. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE FUCKING PRESSURE EVERYONE MUST HAVE BEEN UNDER TO NAIL IT??? Like, I've SEEN the movie, I KNOW they got the shot in the end and it was amazing and totally worth the insane hassle, but that shit was STILL nail-biting to watch. And then I cried like a loser watching him edit the thing from his deathbed, meticulous and exacting to the very last, because yeah, he died years before I was born, but it still kinda felt like losing him just as soon as I'd discovered him?? DUMB.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920): Super weird and intense and SO DAMN COOL, like a Dr. Seuss murder mystery. Fantastic. What a huge cinematic blind spot to have suddenly filled in.
Der müde Tod (1921): And here comes Fritz Lang with his GIANT WALLS OF TEXT again, in favour of a darkly beautiful fairy tale this time. It's genderswapped Orpheus and Eurydice meets Quantum Leap and it kind of rules?? All the racist caricatures aside, anyway.
The Transporter (2002): I'm just gonna quote one of the top Letterboxd reviews for this one because it kinda says it all: "This is a movie in which Jason Statham fights a room full of bad guys by pouring motor oil on his glistening chest and sliding around the room like he's a god damned seal." Indeed.
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922): The only one of these old German bad boys that I'd actually seen before! Everyone in this movie acts like such a goddamn weirdo all of the time, and I love it. (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
Sweetgrass (2009): I've seen one of these Sensory blee blah whatever documentaries before, so I was mostly prepared for something striking but boring, and this broadly lived up to that expectation. There's enough going on on a sheep farm that there was more of a variety of different happenings to follow than I expected, which was nice. Kinda sad!
Caniba (2017): And this one was a HARD FUCKING NOPE, first of all because fuck this guy and continuing to give him notoriety, second of all because it's mostly just excruciating closeups of his fuck-ugly face, which was a deeply unpleasant thing to stare at for over an hour. Oh, except the part where we go through his manga graphically portraying the murder page-by-page for a while, that was also awful, but still better than looking up his damn nose. Give me a movie about the masochist brother, HE was actually kinda interesting.
Leviathan (2012): This is the one I'd seen before! Revisiting it with a little bit more context... yeah, it's still just extreme closeups and GoPro footage of a fishing boat, idk. Pretty gross!
La pelle (1981): Oh look, it's my old nemesis, 'uniformly Italian dubbed movies where the characters are all meant to be speaking different languages'. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME YOU'VE RUINED BURT LANCASTER FOR ME, YOU FUCK. Aside from that, I found this movie a tonal mess; it's an interesting WWII angle that I haven't seen before, and the hard-hitting war crime stuff is well done, but the funny parts aren't funny enough to make the whiplash between the two work, I'm just left kinda wondering if it's actually meant to be funny or if some aspect of the horror is just going over my head. EH.
Metropolis (1927): Another big blind spot filled in, and oh man, this I loved. Absolutely staggering. I'm actually kind of overwhelmed by everything this movie had going for it? The crazy effects and cityscapes and ridiculous religious allegories and super sketchy moral in the end (destroying the upper class that crushes you under their gilded boot will only destroy you as well! you need a Jesus to get them to be nicer to you! also the rich are God I guess!), the fact that I watched it immediately after coming off of a twelve-hour shift and just. Pretty much every dystopian future of the last 90 years should probably credit Fritz Lang somewhere because I have seen pieces of this movie redone so many times! It's too good! It's too much! So instead I will just focus on Brigitte Helm delivering what may be one of my all-time favourite performances; her insane facial expressions (THAT DEEPLY UNSETTLING LUCILLE BLUTH WINK, I LOVE IT) and amazing birdlike movements, the Big Pennywise Energy in the whole Whore of Babylon topless dance scene (TELL ME I'M WRONG), all while pulling double duty as Maria, all at only eighteen years old??? We have no choice but to stan!!!
Tenet (2020): Well, it's not the movie that changes my mind about Nolan being the most absurdly overrated director currently working, but it's the most I've enjoyed one of his in a full decade, so I'll take it. A proper thinky blockbuster.
Stop Making Sense (1984): Ending the month with DAVID BYRNE, GOD'S PERFECT WEIRDO, and just for a little while, all is well.
People who just stand in front of automatic doors, making then constantly open and close while they hold a conversation instead of moving a few feet to either the left or right, are history's greatest monsters! Okay, bye!
Work is bullshit. Haven't gotten a credit memo since Wednesday, so when they DO come in, I get to somehow juggle four days of work at once while dealing with month-end, thanks bitch in Calgary who can't do her fucking job. I HAD ALL WEEKEND WITH NOTHING. Every customer annoys me, even the totally innocuous ones, every moron who rolls up telling me they're there to pick up "the '17 GMC" or whatever, LIKE YEAH, WE DEFINITELY HAVE JUST ONE OF THOSE HERE AT THE GMC DEALERSHIP, DUMB SHIT, MAYBE GIVE ME A NAME TO WORK WITH?? OH, "ROBERT", YEAH THANKS THAT'LL DO IT. It doesn't help that they replaced my bubble plastic with better bubble plastic that I can actually see through, but which people can't seem to actually HEAR through very well, so I either have to constantly repeat myself or just start yelling (shout out, however, to the woman who asked me to repeat myself three times before just answering "yes" to a question that was decidedly not a yes answer in the end, I FEEL YOU LADY, I pointedly just let it ride because it was DEEPLY RELATABLE). Phew. Okay. I am drowning in paperwork, it's fine, I'm Fine.
Aunts are visiting from Edmonton for the weekend, which I decidedly don't love seeing as that's the current 'rona hotspot in Alberta and they decidedly do not Get It, but whatever, not like I get a say in these things, and at least it finally served as the impetus to get my mother to clean her goddamn trash heap of a bedroom (or rather, pay someone else to clean it for her WHATEVER I'LL TAKE IT), so hopefully it'll be worth it in the long run and they won't kill my grandmother (their sister)! Also, they were gonna come next weekend then changed their mind to come this weekend, which on the one hand, feels like KIND of a slap in the face given that... they know my schedule, guess they didn't want to see much of me that badly, but also, the idea of spending half my week off entertaining family really doesn't sound like the reprieve that I need it to be so I don't ACTUALLY mind at all. All works out! MAYBE??? Except we just topped 20 active COVID cases for the first time ever, so hooray for that.
It was over 30 degrees a couple weeks ago! We got frost last night! Super cool that nature's all set to just flip the fucking summer switch off the instant September starts! I really love it a lot! Screaming forever!
Chadwick Boseman, man. I got nothing. To the movies!
Sub-themes for the end of August include German expressionism, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kathleen Collins, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and actual new movies in the theatre again!
Le Sacrifice (1986): SO HEY, WOW, GUESS WHO WAITED WAY TOO FUCKING LONG TO WATCH ANY TARKOVSKY BECAUSE THIS WAS SO EXTREMELY HER SHIT????? I loooooved this oh my god, it's exactly my preferred flavour of slow and pretentious, I got that really emotional feeling as the credits started where I realized I just saw one of my favourite movies, all those crazy long oners just sucked me right in, and whenever the characters would start spouting off their long, meandering philosophical diatribes, I was totally into them in a way I, like, never am?? Just, like, nodding along and going 'oh wow, that's so true' or 'damn, I don't know if I agree, but it really makes you think' like a total rube. It's all got such a weird timeless quality, too, like if I didn't know when it was made (and that car didn't show up eventually), I would have NO idea how old it was. And then that ending. What the FUCK, that ending, like that is some serious movie magic, I will forever remember that moment of 'wait, what, how the fuck, is this really happening' when the camera pans back over to the house and it's just engulfed in flames, with no break in the shot or special effects that I could see, and the scene/shot JUST. KEEPS. GOING. Man. MAN. So of course it was his last fucking movie because he was dying of cancer while he made it, good job, Leshia. You played yourself.
Nostalghia (1983): Wasn't really cohesive enough to hit me the same way The Sacrifice did, and my attention definitely wandered a lot for this one, but damn if I wasn't on absolute tenterhooks just waiting to see if that candle would stay lit at the end. MAYBE IF I HOLD MY BREATH, IT'LL HELP.
The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020): The RETURN TO THE THEATRE series is officially OVER, as actual movies have begun coming out again! Nature is healing. Also Squidward twerked.
The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980): Interesting, but I found it tough to engage with. Almost unbearably sad in places. Terrible score. Pretty good overall.
Losing Ground (1982): Now this was really beautiful, spare without ever being boring, emotional without ever being cloying, it was really cool to see Duane Jones in something else after all these years, kind of a perfect summer movie? So of course it was her last one before she died of cancer, I AM ON A ROLL THIS MONTH. Also, Wikipedia tells me it's "the first feature-length drama directed by a black American woman since the 1920s" which excuse me but what the fuck
Le vice et la vertu (1963): Yikes. Heavy-handed and melodramatic to the point of utter goofiness. I'm all for transplanting stories to other eras, but this just felt tasteless. Really only worth it for 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve.
Varieté (1925): Strange, horny, tragic, frenzied little ride of a movie. Emil Jannings somehow sells me on him as a trapeze artist of all things, and the editing made an absolute fever dream out of the whole affair. Loved it.
Orlacs Hände (1924): Delightfully spooky, but I found it weirdly difficult to follow considering how simple and iconic the hook is?
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920): My creeping uncertainty about how antisemitic it may or may not have been at any given time worked against this one, but it's just so good that it couldn't hold me down. He was a good golem. :(
Daughters of Darkness (1971): In fucking Bruges. (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988): Okay, so if The Sacrifice wasn't one of my favourite movies before, it certainly is after watching this, goddamn. THE FUCKING HOUSE BURNING WAS A RESHOOT. THE FUCKING CAMERA JAMMED THE FIRST TIME AND THEY LOST THE FOOTAGE. THEY HAD TO REBUILD AN ENTIRE FUCKING HOUSE. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE FUCKING PRESSURE EVERYONE MUST HAVE BEEN UNDER TO NAIL IT??? Like, I've SEEN the movie, I KNOW they got the shot in the end and it was amazing and totally worth the insane hassle, but that shit was STILL nail-biting to watch. And then I cried like a loser watching him edit the thing from his deathbed, meticulous and exacting to the very last, because yeah, he died years before I was born, but it still kinda felt like losing him just as soon as I'd discovered him?? DUMB.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920): Super weird and intense and SO DAMN COOL, like a Dr. Seuss murder mystery. Fantastic. What a huge cinematic blind spot to have suddenly filled in.
Der müde Tod (1921): And here comes Fritz Lang with his GIANT WALLS OF TEXT again, in favour of a darkly beautiful fairy tale this time. It's genderswapped Orpheus and Eurydice meets Quantum Leap and it kind of rules?? All the racist caricatures aside, anyway.
The Transporter (2002): I'm just gonna quote one of the top Letterboxd reviews for this one because it kinda says it all: "This is a movie in which Jason Statham fights a room full of bad guys by pouring motor oil on his glistening chest and sliding around the room like he's a god damned seal." Indeed.
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922): The only one of these old German bad boys that I'd actually seen before! Everyone in this movie acts like such a goddamn weirdo all of the time, and I love it. (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
Sweetgrass (2009): I've seen one of these Sensory blee blah whatever documentaries before, so I was mostly prepared for something striking but boring, and this broadly lived up to that expectation. There's enough going on on a sheep farm that there was more of a variety of different happenings to follow than I expected, which was nice. Kinda sad!
Caniba (2017): And this one was a HARD FUCKING NOPE, first of all because fuck this guy and continuing to give him notoriety, second of all because it's mostly just excruciating closeups of his fuck-ugly face, which was a deeply unpleasant thing to stare at for over an hour. Oh, except the part where we go through his manga graphically portraying the murder page-by-page for a while, that was also awful, but still better than looking up his damn nose. Give me a movie about the masochist brother, HE was actually kinda interesting.
Leviathan (2012): This is the one I'd seen before! Revisiting it with a little bit more context... yeah, it's still just extreme closeups and GoPro footage of a fishing boat, idk. Pretty gross!
La pelle (1981): Oh look, it's my old nemesis, 'uniformly Italian dubbed movies where the characters are all meant to be speaking different languages'. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME YOU'VE RUINED BURT LANCASTER FOR ME, YOU FUCK. Aside from that, I found this movie a tonal mess; it's an interesting WWII angle that I haven't seen before, and the hard-hitting war crime stuff is well done, but the funny parts aren't funny enough to make the whiplash between the two work, I'm just left kinda wondering if it's actually meant to be funny or if some aspect of the horror is just going over my head. EH.
Metropolis (1927): Another big blind spot filled in, and oh man, this I loved. Absolutely staggering. I'm actually kind of overwhelmed by everything this movie had going for it? The crazy effects and cityscapes and ridiculous religious allegories and super sketchy moral in the end (destroying the upper class that crushes you under their gilded boot will only destroy you as well! you need a Jesus to get them to be nicer to you! also the rich are God I guess!), the fact that I watched it immediately after coming off of a twelve-hour shift and just. Pretty much every dystopian future of the last 90 years should probably credit Fritz Lang somewhere because I have seen pieces of this movie redone so many times! It's too good! It's too much! So instead I will just focus on Brigitte Helm delivering what may be one of my all-time favourite performances; her insane facial expressions (THAT DEEPLY UNSETTLING LUCILLE BLUTH WINK, I LOVE IT) and amazing birdlike movements, the Big Pennywise Energy in the whole Whore of Babylon topless dance scene (TELL ME I'M WRONG), all while pulling double duty as Maria, all at only eighteen years old??? We have no choice but to stan!!!
Tenet (2020): Well, it's not the movie that changes my mind about Nolan being the most absurdly overrated director currently working, but it's the most I've enjoyed one of his in a full decade, so I'll take it. A proper thinky blockbuster.
Stop Making Sense (1984): Ending the month with DAVID BYRNE, GOD'S PERFECT WEIRDO, and just for a little while, all is well.
People who just stand in front of automatic doors, making then constantly open and close while they hold a conversation instead of moving a few feet to either the left or right, are history's greatest monsters! Okay, bye!
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But more seriously, though, HANG IN THERE, PAL. <3
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