Flearman’s comments on the post about footnotes* reminded me that I was going to read all the issues of Pox, the Swedish punk indie comix magazine. So I got buyin’:
These are all from Dolores in Göteborg.
That’s like…. thousands of pages of late-80s anthologies that I’ll… get around to reading any day now.
But just like Flearman said, the early 90s issues of Pox seem to be really rare, so I’ve got something to do the next few years. Yay.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. George Clooney. 2002.
I didn’t have tripe sec, so I used a orange liqueur instead. Offal, oranges; it’s all the same.
But this is the first film George Clooney directed, and it’s such a typical first movie. Clooney’s going USE ALL THE TRICKS FROM ALL THE MOVIES in this film. It’s fun. Every single scene is a new thing. So many fun shots.
But does it add up to anything more than a medley of really cool camera techniques?
I’m guessing that everybody ever loves Clooney, because basically everybody ever appears in this film. Mostly as minute cameos.
Hm… Oh, this was written by Charlie Kaufman! Well, then it all makes sense. But while this is fun to watch… it feels kinda… unnecessary. On all levels.
The ending is a huge let-down. After all the weirdness it has a predictable tragic breakdown thing happening that we’ve seen in so many films before.
In a slightly kookier form.
This blog post is part of the Century series.
Hawaiian Gardens. Percy Adlon. 2001.
Well, this is a different aesthetic from Percy Adlon. Instead of super-saturated colours a sound stage and nice film stock, this looks like it’s been filmed on an early-generation digital camera, and it’s all on location with natural lighting.
It’s got a rating of 4.1 on imdb, which is the lowest possible for a real movie, I think, and Adlon wouldn’t do another cinematic release until 2010 (Mahler on the Couch, which is OK, but not as good as his earlier, funnier movies).
Adlon had an interesting career arc if you peek at imdb. I haven’t seen his earliest films, but he won the world over with the iconic Zuckerbaby, and followed it up by leaving Germany and doing three more films in basically the same mode (Bagdad Cafe, Rosalie Goes Shopping and Salmonberries), and they’re all great.
Then you get Younger and Younger, which I remember being… er… not that good? (I should rewatch.) That’s in 1993, and then he apparently couldn’t get financing for any US films any more. Or any financing whatsoever, based on this film.
But I think it’s fair to say that everybody was pretty disappointed by Hawaiian Gardens? (According to imdb the working title was “DogShit”.)
This DVD has an English audio track… which means, I found I just now, that when anybody who’s talking English are talking, they’re not dubbed into German. But when a German person is talking, we get German on the audio track, and the German subtitles disappear. I mean, I understand German vaguely if they talk slow or I’m reading the German subtitles s-l-o-w-l-y. But I basically didn’t really understand a lot of what’s going on here.
So perhaps it’s really brilliant and I just didn’t understand! It’s possible! But it looks like shit and the acting is shocking. Adlon has never exactly gone for naturalistic actors, but there’s a wide gulf between stylised poses and uninteresting acting.
I like the Adlon flourishes in the soundtrack, though.
This blog post is part of the Century series.
Gah! I had the almost perfect machine for schlepping around the apt while cleaning, and then it goes and does this:
Rebooting seems to help… sometimes. One out of five reboots it seems to come up alright again, but if I flip the orientation it goes back to that state again.
It’s an HP Spectre x360, according to dmidecode… Anybody know what’s up with this? Loose wires? Firmware updates? GPU settings?
I imagine there is a setting in the nvidia configuration utility: “[ ] Don’t shake the screen like you just don’t care” and I just have to tick that.
Right? Right?
Right.
Perhaps I should start looking for a new laptop…
In The Mood For Love. Kar Wai Wong. 2000.
The last time I saw this film, it looked completely different!
2046 was more like this film, only much more mannered. This film has nerve and emotional depth. I watched the Anthony Bourdain Hong Kong show the other week, and he mentioned that this was his favourite Wong Kar-Wai film, and I can totally see why.
It’s such a romantic vision of Hong Kong. Almost mythological in the picturesque details.
And the story is a pretty loopy, interesting conceit. He goes all in on the emotional content, but avoids being obvious.
This blog post is part of the Century series.