I feel the comedown and yet I persist.
Festival work is starting to catch up to me a little bit but I think I’ve managed to actually get decent sleep all throughout and haven’t had to binge caffeine too much. Should be able to maintain last year’s number but the amount of long films this year may have set the schedule slightly out of whack. Today and tomorrow will likely be filler, as it were.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (Clio Barnard): B-
Clicked into place when the credits rolled and I learned it was adapted from a book. For the runtime it has, five characters is a bit unwieldy though Barnard and the actors make their best efforts to make them distinctive as personalities. Their exact problems tend to slip through the cracks, all of them tending around money except for Con’s, which follows a more typical alcoholism plotline. Biggest disappointment is that Lola Petticrew – who gave one of the year’s best TV performances on Furious – doesn’t get much other than a plot about sleeping with her husband’s best friend years ago but she lights up the screen whenever she’s on. Occasional poetic touches such as security cam footage of the apartment going up to highlight the passage of time or intercuts of buildings going down lend a bit more art to the affair, less so when characters stop to give an extended lecture about inequalities to us. The whole lot of them are quite good all that aside and dareisay by the end it even manages to get itself some tragedy even if it comes off a bit hoary. The Arbor appears more and more like true lightning-in-a-bottle the further time goes on; haven’t seen Barnard’s other films but given they don’t appear to generate much interest outside (or even in) the UK I suppose she’s settled into a lane a bit. Not without interest but nothing you haven’t seen before.
First They Came For My College (Patrick Bresnan): C-
Bad sign when the director gave an introduction encouraging audience participation Rocky Horror style, particularly whenever a fascist or the former administrator appeared onscreen. I agree with everything the film is saying of course; more than most people I’d be open to a documentary on neofascist skullduggery. Bresnan’s film is too sloppily constructed to be anything more effective than a vehicle for shaking one’s head and lamenting the state of the country as you leave the theater (Digger! Now more than ever!) It breezes past the history of the New College of Florida, establishing its new board and president as Bad People without diving into their ideology or who exactly they’re working for. How and why is Chris Fucking Rufo of all people on the board? Sure would’ve loved to know! Obviously it’s affecting seeing people fight hard for the school they love but I could’ve done with a lot less focus on a vacuous transfer student spouting the usual dumb young conservative anti-woke talking points and more with the student journalists and activists fighting to keep their haven and the professors they love. Strangely you don’t get a whole lot of info about them, not even what their majors are or their personalities. The fly-on-the-wall aspects can be a decent tactic but this really needed more context even if it wasn’t a systemic overview of the GOP’s decades long project to attack higher education. I still don’t know what makes New College itself so special as a takeover for this experiment and I’d very much like to read the article about that. At least that way I wouldn’t have to listen to Ron DeSantis speak for extended periods of time.
Vertiginous (Quentin Dupieux): B
As good of a time as I had with this I really can’t justify giving it a higher grade. Dupieux is cinema’s preeminent shitposter and to a degree, you kinda don’t need much more than the trailer to get the central joke of the film. For me personally, that joke – of a guy telling his friend that they live in a simulation, as both of them live in a world that looks somewhere between the PS1 and PS2 – took me pretty far with all the clipping and low-res backgrounds, not to mention the cast’s vocal performances. Even at 67 minutes it comes close to wearing out its welcome; there’s only so many times you can harp on reality being fake and headspinning philosophy. Thankfully it comes around with an incredibly stupid gag that got me back on board and ends with some cute bloopers that are also a stupid gag in their own way. Honestly, the animation does a lot to make this even work, what with the concept of bugs like a pigeon flying in one place for infinity or a baby coming right out of the womb, no umbilical cord. I appreciate Dupieux going off on his own little flights of fancy like this even if I’m not always going to watch them.
Written On The Wind (Douglas Sirk): B+
I usually don’t go to retro screenings in the interest of focusing on the new, but I had to make a stop since Karina Longworth of You Must Remember This was introducing it as part of her tour for The Bisexuals. My first Sirk and a pretty good intro to his deal: lush colors, big emotions. Admittedly there’s not a whole lot of substance here other than a tawdry tale of love triangles, hard drinking, and murder. Sirk does some really cool choices like using the wind to blow the calendar pages back for a flashback and of course it looks fantastic. The big draw is gonna be Dorothy Malone’s Oscar-winning performance, and justly deserved. She manages to stay just under the top but uses every trick in the book to entice a man. I’m always surprised to rediscover how much sex and alcohol 50s films could feature; this was a year after The Man With The Golden Arm and already you can feel the production code straining. Inarguably “problematic” to depict a woman essentially killing her dad with the power of her libido as with one crazily intercut scene but that is pretty wild. The other performers are great as well, retaining enough nuance that they can really go big when the time requires. Never quite fell in love but I want to see more even if they don’t have the bitchiness of “let me get you a towel, your ears still look a bit wet”. Malone playing with an oil derrick is such a galaxy-brained way to end a film, I’ll tell you hwat.
