Random Thoughts

Hey, that’s looks pretty fascinating…

Tilda Swinton is narrating his series. It’s apparently… ten one hour episodes!? Am I going to watch all of this? I mean, I’m interested in movies, but I hate documentaries. I guess we’ll see..

*gasp* In the HOV lane! I hope Swinton had a big enough crew with her!

Oh, I like that… I’m there for practical stuff.

It’s very difficult when you’re doing a movie that consist mostly of clips from other movies. Differences in form factor is fine, but differences in frame rate is deadly. This bit from a Chinese movie was kinda nauseating because it lurched so much. The other approach is to “smear” the frame to get the frame rate, and that looks even worse.

And I don’t know where they sourced this Dorothy Arzner movie from, but there’s so many artefacts here. It’s like it was taken from a 1998 era VCD?

Good! She’s awesome.

The sound on the clips is odd. They sound like they’ve been recorded in a shoe box. Very strange. A kind of very hard, short reverb. I hope all the episodes won’t be like this…

Wow.

Well, OK. They’re showing clips from interesting-looking movies, but the things they’re saying don’t really feel very insightful. I’m wondering who this movie is meant for? If it’s film students, it’s very… basic? Is that the word? It seems like the object here is to show people how to make movies, really. But it’s called “Women Make Films” because they’re only using movies directed by women.

I was expecting this to be a series of talking heads, but in its credit, it’s just one clip after another of movies. I like that.

Oh, I forgot all about the road movie aspect of this… but it’s not really well integrated? They just drop in some driving shots once in a while…

I’ve seen so many of the movies they’re showing clips of…

Believably is apparently set in Germany?

Yay! The shoe-box echo thing from the first episode is gone in the second episode! But… now the audio is slightly out of sync with the video? *sigh*

That’s a 240×320 pixel movie.

Hey, this section is pretty interesting… It’s about believably, and there’s two major insights: 1) Give the actors something to do (like taking off/putting on clothes) to avoid staginess, and 2) chaos is convincing.

*gasp*

Oh my god! Kinuyo Tanaka was a director, too!? She was in all the Ozu movies, but I didn’t know she’d directed movies… I wanna see them.

There’s a French-subtitled box set… Hm… Should I buy that? I think I should.

De rien.

Hey, Norway.

The audio/video sync issues are still present in the third part. I mean, er, sixth…

I didn’t know that Angelina Jolie directed a movie… it looks pretty interesting.

An honest cop!

That’s exactly how anybody would describe this shot.

This thing shows mostly short cuts from movies, but we got a good few minutes from the wonderful Est movie by Chantal Akerman.

I’ve seen ten (of the forty) sections now, and they’ve all been narrated by Tilda Swinton, but:

The documentary is narrated by Adjoa Andoh, Jane Fonda, Kerry Fox, Thandiwe Newton, Tilda Swinton, Sharmila Tagore and Debra Winger.

That doesn’t leave a lot of sections for the rest? Or… are there different versions with different narrators?

Heh heh:

Secondly, we are meant to trust the narrator (and there are a few) that what she is describing is actually what we are seeing but there are many instances that the narrator’s assumptions do not look correct often because she is overly effusive and her description of what she says we are seeing can be easily questioned.

This person seems to believe that the narrator wrote the narration.

This 14 hour movie is written and directed by Mark Cousins, so while this is 100% about movies made by women, this isn’t. Don’t you think?

🎶 it’s like a movie by women directors not directed by a woman 🎶

But seriously, your enjoyment of this thing will depend on whether you find Cousins’ ideas about cinema fascinating or not. This isn’t really a film about women directors — it’s a Mark Cousins monologue about what makes movies work, and he’s using examples from women-directed films.

I’m kinda on the fence — he does say some interesting things, but much of it’s pretty basic.

The other attraction is to watch bits of movies that aren’t very famous, and some of them look pretty awesome.

I don’t usually watch documentaries, but I found this to be a whole lot better than 99% of them just by not having a lot of talking heads spouting a line before cutting to the next (which is apparently what people love to watch), so my opinion doesn’t count.

And I only watched the first four hours, so there’s ten more hours to go — but I’m not sure I’ll actually watch the rest. It’s… moderately interesting?

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

Women Make Film. Mark Cousins. 2018.

Oh Neon… I don’t really follow producers these days, but I’ve noticed that Neon has put out some interesting movies…

BY THE SWORD OF GREYSCULL!!! That’s a lot of co-producers.

This must be the end level of the Executive Producers game… but I guess this is what it takes to get movies made in Europe these days: 40 different companies, all contributing a few euros…

Oh, is this like science fiction? A frozen dystopia or something?

Oh, this is a musical!? The guy has been painfully autotuned — I never understand why they don’t have proper singers do the voices in musicals. It’s pretty horrible.

On the other hand, “proper singers” these days are also usually autotuned into horror.

And the tunes… it’s those horrible tuneful, but no actual tunes stuff that musicals do. That is, they just sing a random walk amongst notes that go well together, but it doesn’t actually cohere into a song.

Is the bad wig a social commentary?

I’m also already annoyed by the colour grading on this. They seem to be in an underground chamber, so they sing about only having night-blooming flowers… which makes no sense! You can have LED lights be whatever colour you want — you don’t have to have your dungeon be all blue just because it’s cold outside. Blue is more difficult than warmer colours, really.

This is really boring, but I like the “set design”.

There’s people that use autotune well, but in stuff like this — where the tunes aren’t there, and the orchestration is culled from Now That’s What I Call Public Domain Musical Orchestration IV, using autotune removes the only potential interest these “songs” have — the voice of the singer.

I like that they haven’t infodumped at the audience — but I guess the setup is so obvious that they don’t have to? (I.e., an encampment of people still surviving after 20 year after The Big Catastrophe That Killed Everybody).

But it’s still so boring! Inexplicably boring.

I think they way it’s filmed doesn’t help — it’s all far-off shots or medium shots: No close-ups. Is the director going for a “well, this is a musical, so it should kinda be like if you’re the audience in a theatre”? I mean, not consistently, but in effect…

And also all the shots symmetrical, as if the director was also prepping the movie for a 4:3 release.

It’s all so curious (including the not-real-sounding name of the director) that I’m tempted to do something I never do: Google the movie!

Well, that’s brutal.

Sounds like it’s his actual name:

Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is known for his Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer was a 1997 Marshall Scholar[3] and a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship.

Wow, no wonder 28 institutions (at least) forked over money to allow him to make this…

Well, that’s brutal, too.

There’s a word for “horrible picture financed by all corners of Europe”… “A euro pudding”. (But not in the British sense.) This seems like one of those.

But you can’t deny that there’s some striking shots.

That’s what I feel! Except the bit about “visionary director”, because I have no idea who he is.

This could have been a two paragraph Substack article instead. We get it.

Hey, a mostly physical set!

He’s over-acting so badly as a twitchy twitchy guy…

So political!

It’s so subtle.

HE”S BEEN DISILLUSIONED! That’s disillusioned face.

Indeed. And they’re bad.

Oh, it’s going to get even worse?

Well, uh. This guy restated the central proposition of the movie as a criticism against the movie? How does Rottentomatoes pick these “critics”? “Vanyaland”?

Is it, though? The guy was using that point about the value of one’s time to dis that woman, and he was a total dick about it. (And even expressed regret later.) So, no, that’s not ironic at all; it’s just stupid.

(“Fish Jelly Films”.)

I’m not defending this movie, mind, but I’ve just never noticed how many stupid reviews there are on Rottentomatoes from venues that sound fake.

Oh wow:

In interviews, Oppenheimer has recounted how The End started off as a documentary examining a “very wealthy, very dangerous” family who was looking to build just the kind of underground bunker that Mother and Father have constructed here. Surely that clan must be more interesting, more layered, than the one depicted here.

Probably not, though — they were probably dicks, too.

Oh wow. And I betcha this wasn’t cheap to make.

Yup:

their ambitious first fiction feature, The End, a six-country co-production with a budget of about $17m

I mean, not cheap on a European scale.

it’s also a complicated six-country co-production that needed 45 shooting days across Germany, Italy and Ireland, and took eight years to finance, plan and shoot

Yeah, typical Euro pudding fashion.

Oppenheimer knew his cast didn’t need to be professional singers – they could all hold a tune and were game for voice training. “What they’re singing is not just a kind of ecstatic expression of what they truly believe is their truth, the songs would actually be sung by fragile, vulnerable human beings in crisis. So they had to be musical in the sense that their voices had to be just right for the character – lovely enough to hold the songs, but not very polished, the way some Broadway vocalists are.”

I don’t think he’s been to Broadway? They’re usually not all that polished (except for the stars). I don’t understand why he says “could hold a tune”, because they’ve been autotuned to “perfection”, anyway.

I hope this isn’t going where I think it’s going… On the other hand, that’s such an obvious ending… that’s it’s probably going to happen.

I think that Oppenheimer probably told the composers that he wanted something like a classical musical score? But it’s not — those classical musical was chock a block with hits. Irving Berlin pumped out one banger after another. Instead they ended up with totally generic tonal phrases that don’t really go anywhere. They should have gone with Charli xcx instead.

(Bumpin’ that)

Well, at least it didn’t end the way I expected.

If I were to be fair, I’d give this movie a ⚁. Because I like the sets, and the cinematography has a certain something going on. And the performances are mostly pretty good? But it’s just an excruciatingly tedious movie.

The End. Joshua Oppenheimer. 2024.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.