Animation Obsessive has a great write-up on The Diary of Tortov Roddle. Great source for finding interesting animation. Also, Kunio Kato did the short, The House of Small Cubes.
Category: film
The Bath, Soyuzmultfilm
“The Bath is a story about an inventor, Strangefellow, and the time machine he’s trying to build. It really does work — yet he finds his project caught in the endless red tape, dead ends and labyrinths of Soviet bureaucracy. Ultimately, a time traveler, the nameless Phosphorescent Woman, arrives from 2030 to carry the worthy into the coming “Age of Communism.” The question is: who’s worthy?”
-“The Bomb That Is ‘The Bath’.” animationobsessive.substack.com. January 22, 2023.
I haven’t watched the film yet, but the write-up made me want to bookmark it.
Edited By
“A survey of two hundred and six editors who invented, developed, fine-tuned, and revolutionized the art of film editing.”
http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/
“A momentous event in online film culture went mostly unnoticed earlier this year [2019]: the unveiling of Edited By, Su Friedrich’s large and invaluable web resource devoted to women film editors. Friedrich, a renowned experimental filmmaker with a body of work spanning over four decades, tells the story of coming upon a film history book, turning to the editing chapter, and finding that each reference to a film mentioned the director—but never the editor. Looking up the cited films on IMDb, she discovered that most of them were edited by women. Out of this seed of curiosity grew the enormous research effort that has now resulted in the website.
Edited By is global in scope, even if the majority of its entries are devoted to American women. Friedrich points to the unjust lack of attention to editors everywhere, contrasting their relative invisibility to the much greater awareness of directors, writers, and even cinematographers that exists in film culture. “It’s time to stop imagining that ‘it’s really the director’ who does the editing,” she writes. This neglect applies to both male and female editors, but it has had a special impact on the latter by occluding the fact that women have a rich but little-known history as editors, especially in American cinema.”
-Giresh Shambu, “Hidden Histories: The Story of Women Film Editors.” The Criterion Collection. September 12, 2019.
All These Vicious Dogs by Will Oldham
From the soundtrack of All the Real Girls, which I recommend.
Movie Review: West Side Story
I’ve always thought the original West Side Story (1961) was close to perfect. I was not excited to see a remake of it. Remakes should focus on flawed films and make them better.
Much to my surprise, the new West Side Story (2021) shows the flaws in the original I simply didn’t see before. It’s a better movie is every way that matters. Highly recommended.
Thanksgiving Movie: The Last Waltz
“Robbie Robertson – Guitar: [Last lines] The road was our school. At the end it was our sense of survival. It taught us all we know. There’s not much left that we can really take from the road. We’ve had our share of, or, maybe it’s just superstitious.
Martin Scorsese – Interviewer: Superstitious in what way?
Robbie Robertson – Guitar: No. You can press your luck. The road has taken a lot of great ones. Hank Williams. Buddy Holly. Otis Redding. Janis. Jimi Hendrix. Elvis. Its a goddamn impossible way of life.
Martin Scorsese – Interviewer: It is, isn’t it.
Robbie Robertson – Guitar: No question about it.
–The Last Waltz
Probably can be said of any way of life. It’ll teach you everything you know, and it will kill you, if you let it. My preferred Thanksgiving movie, although Planes, Trains & Automobiles is also a worthy choice.
Letterboxd
“What is Letterboxd?
Letterboxd is a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past. Showcase your favorites on your profile page. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying. Keep a watchlist of films you’d like to see, and create lists/collections on any given topic. We’ve been described as “like GoodReads for movies”.
https://letterboxd.com
New to me. IMDB doesn’t really do this that well. So, hopefully, this will be an improvement.
Money is the One True God by Blake Mills
Balance by Oleg Abramov
Phil Tippett’s Mad God
“One of Hollywood’s leading visual effects designers since the 1970s, Tippett has just spent three decades directing his first feature film: Mad God, a gruesome animated fable wherein a mysterious spy must infiltrate the lower depths on a dangerous mission. It starts with one of the shirtier quotes from Leviticus, the Bible’s angriest book, before plummeting to the depths of a gory, dripping underworld. Think Dante via Ren and Stimpy, or Pasolini with stop motion animation…
…“When I was a young film-maker, Miloš Forman gave me the best advice I ever got, which was: ‘If you want to take a good shit, you’re going to have to eat well.’”
-John Bleasdale, “‘I wouldn’t take my kids to this’: Star Wars’ Phil Tippett on his hellish animation Mad God.” TheGuardian.com. August 20, 2021.
Backfilling…
“Instead, you watch this film to luxuriate in the exquisite grotesqueness Tippett dreams up and executes through a barrage of old-school filmmaking techniques: mixed media, stop-motion animation, modeling, silhouettes, and puppets—you name it. The sound design includes squishy noises as a sinister surgeon digs into intestines, and the cries of a genuine infant give voice to an alien baby in distress. Each subtle creak of our adventurer’s leather gloves and every measured breath through their gas mask sticks with you—the sound design equivalent of an earworm, I suppose. And sitting through this film on your couch (or in your theater seat for some lucky few) is like being guided through a gallery of lavish kinetic art pieces. The zoomed-out environments themselves are wallpaper-worthy whether Tippet has created a war-torn landscape midstorm, a speeding-by universe, or a room full of giants strapped to electric chairs being zapped to the point of soiling themselves incessantly. That last sequence is truly gross if you stop and think about it, but the sound design and visuals are stunning in the moment.”
-Nathan Matisse, “Mad God: What happens when the best practical VFX artist, ever, writes a film?” Ars Technica. September 4 2021.
cafebedouin.org 