The seldom-seen down-overhead storage shot.

It feels like it’s been weeks since I watched a movie, but it’s… only been four days? Huh. OK, last week was a busy week…

I like the colours here. They’re very un-2014 — not desaturated with touches of colour-graded hues poking through.

Oh! It’s an anthology film? But one director? Well, that’s fun, too.

The first bit was the most Spanish thing ever. But very short and efficient.

Yeah!

These are excellent questions.

The second bit was totally shocking because… there was no twist! I didn’t even know that was legal!

Oh my god. The third thing is the most excruciating thing ever.

But funny.

It’s a nightmare scenario, but both people involved are assholes, so…

So are all these stories about the same? About revenge? The airplane one was definitely about that… oh, and the restaurant one was about revenge. And I guess the car one, too? And this is about some asshole not wanting to pay a parking ticket (because it unfair)… are all the people here assholes? Hm… 1, yes. 2, no. 3 and 4: Yes. So I guess it’s not about toxic masculinity, but just revenge?

Well, if this one is going to be about revenge.

Yup.

Well, anger…

I’m not sure this movie quite works. I think we’re supposed to identify more with these characters, and it’s hard, because they’re all assholes. Even that woman in the second bit could have removed the rat poison food from that asshole eating it… I mean, just pretend stumble?

Is this just a didactic morality play film? “Never get angry?”

Man, I don’t want to do spoilers or anything, but the parking ticket guy turning into a folk hero (after getting his revenge) is possibly the lamest thing ever in the history of movies.

And are the tales getting longer and longer?

The fifth bit seems oddly complicated. There’s a bunch of asshole characters, and a fall guy… so is this bit going to be about somebody committing revenge on the fall guy? That’s not even ironic.

But worse, this bit is positively tedious — it’s taking so long to set up whatever’s gonna happen. The first four bits were efficient, at least.

Perhaps it’s the guy paying off all these people who’s going to get the revenge…

But it’s so boring that it’s hard to care.

Nice!

… oh! I guessed the revenge ending. SORRY Well, it was obvious, so.

That was absolutely dreadful. Well, not… totally. The scene the older guy discovered he was being scammed was great. But otherwise…

OK, the final bit is gonna be half an hour… I hope it’s better.

Yeah. It’s very much like reading a Spanish comics anthology from the 70s (after everybody had fled Argentine for Spain and worked there). The stories are bitter, sad, “ironic” one-liners. Which was understandable then, totally. This feels like a mostly annoying retread.

But it’s well shot, and the performances are really good. I mean, astoundingly so. So the director is obviously talented… and hasn’t done a single movie after this one. (But there’s a couple in production now, almost a decade later, according to imdb.)

Now that’s revenge!

This just isn’t that funny. It’s even more boring than the fifth bit.

It’s annoying that rottentomatoes doesn’t have a way to sort by rating, because this is 94% fresh and you have to wade through so many positive reviews to get to the good ones. I mean negative ones.

Man, that was a bad segment.

This movie started off strong, but every segment wasn’t quite as good as the preceding one, and we ended with segments that were (respectively) tedious and beyond tedious. So:

Wild Tales. Damián Szifron. 2014. ⚁

I’ve seen all of Andersson’s movies over the past few years — but in approximately reverse order. So I’m now back to 1975!

He didn’t direct a movie after this for 25 years, so I’m guessing this is gonna be the best movie ever.

OK, I’m pretty proficient in Swedish, but some slang is beyond me. And I’m not sure whether some of the utterances are supposed to be absurd, or whether they make sense. Like, these guys just mest and that guy sitting there said “jämna plågor” which (non-idiomatically means) “even pains”, which… er… doesn’t mean much…

And unfortunately there’s not Swedish 1975 Slang Search Engine!!! Who knew!

This is a fascinating film. I would never have guessed that it’s from the 70s — it has a sort of eternal/modern quality thing going on. So perhaps it seemed very old-fashioned in 1975?

Oh wow:

The reviews were very negative with almost no exception, calling it pretentious, old fashioned and reactionary on the level of a high school student caught up in French films from the 30s.

So I guessed right about people at the time finding it old-fashioned. But I don’t get a 30s vibe, either.

This is a very strange film, and I have no idea where Andersson is going with this. I mean, much much weirder than his 2000s films — they’re more stylised and clearly arteesteeque. This is like a normal film, only that none of the scenes make any sense.

So I guess it’s not an idiomatic problem:

“These people are evasively walking around each other, saying curious things of the type ‘we are destruction people’ and ‘we live like migratory birds’ and in the end I get the impression that Roy Andersson has got his whole philosophy of life from some film club that has gone through the dark French pre-war cinema with him, you know the one in which Jean Gabin always got shot right on the final step towards liberation.”

Well… it’s a Swedish movie from the 70s… I think there was a law about boobs.

Yes, I feel like that guy.

“wat”

This movie is, like, about that guy there, who seemingly has no personality to speak of, who meets these other absurd people, and then nothing happens.

It’s the sort of thing where you’re (I mean I’m) thinking “perhaps this is brilliant and I just don’t get it?” But I suspect that this is just shite. But it’s shite in a way that’s really original.

Hm:

Andersson admitted that the film contains flaws, and he said that the main reason for them was that he was not completely in control of the production, and therefore he had to compromise in several scenes.

I’m totally open to the idea that this is a work of genius, but I kinda don’t think so? So:

“Giliap”. Roy Andersson. 1975. ⚁

Oh god, this is some kind of religiousey thing?

Filmed on digital? It looks like digital from like 2002, but it’s 2011? Or was it filmed over a decade? It’s got that high-ISO blown out look that plagued movies for a few years until they figured out the sensors and were able to make better cameras, but I thought happened before 2011.

But the heavy-handed colour grading is totally typical for 2011 — desaturated with lots of greens. Perhaps it was shot on film and then just… digitised a bit too much?

I remember during the run-up to the Sight & Sound 2022 poll, people were talking about how this should be a shoe-in for at least the bottom half of the list. Instead Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles became number one and everybody started talking about that instead, so I wonder whether the Malick fans are doing well.

(It’s been fun reading Twitter reactions to Dielman, by the way — at first there was a bunch of “think pieces” from er assholes that said that it winning made a mockery of Cinema and that people were gonna be put off from Film totally for ever, and then reading people going to theatres showing it now and being totally being blown away. It’s like… people will actually enjoy great stuff if they just get an opportunity and an impetus to experience it.)

Oh, I was watching a movie, not kvetching about Twitter…

Oh, this was shot in 1.85:1 but this bluray is 1.77:1. Fuckers! Why does everything have to suck? *inchoate fury at people that don’t like “black borders” on their tvs*

He really likes shoving the cameras into people’s noses, right?

Oooh the grandeur!

Somehow, everything about this movie is rubbing me the wrong way. It feels like undiluted kitch. Perhaps I should try to reset expectations, stop writing snarky comments and try to get actually pay attention..

OK! RESET! NOW!

Nice CGI.

But I’m not sure using CGI this aggressively is a smart choice, because it just leaves the viewer going “is this animation or real? now then? now?” I guess the tell-tale sign here is that when the image sucks, it’s real, because the digital camera he’s using isn’t all there, but then it’s animation, it looks better?

Why so much rubber on Brad Pitt’s poor face? And insets to make his chin and cheeks bigger… is he gonna be younger later in the movie?

Oops, I forgot I was resetting. RESET!

Kitteh!

DADDY ISSUES

Oops reset.

The kid actors are great, though. And somehow seem to be right for the time period in both look and how they act; it’s very impressive.

Hm… perhaps Pitt doesn’t have any rubber prosthetics on his face? It’s just the cheek inserts and an jaw brace to make his jaw jut out like that? It looks kinda eeh.

Oh god, it just goes on and on with this picayune daddy issue stuff… Yes, we know that men suck. We know! This isn’t saying anything interesting about that, but is instead presenting this trite material as if it’s the most groundbreaking thing ever.

Is nominating a movie for a bunch of rewards and then giving it none a bigger insult than not nominating it at all? I hope so.

Those wacky Wacoans.

0.0 points!? I’ve gotta read this… Heh heh:

And for the record, a boy’s inner monologue (circa 1960) would in no way sound like Yoda (“Wrestle inside me mother and father does! Always you will!”)

That’s brilliant, but:

Incredible cinematography? Check. Beautiful soundtrack? Check. Narrative? You won’t find any such thing ’round these parts.

My problems with this movie seem to be perpendicular to this guy’s problems. I think this movie has too much narrative, really — it the movie was nothing but CGI dinosaurs, I’d be fine. (I’m exaggerating slightly.) The problem is that there’s a lot of narrative, and it’s all trite.

Ooh! A door in the desert! How deep!

OK, I guess we’re in the allegorical end section now.

Hm… hey, this is kinda good! The ending works — it’s the best part of the movie, really.

Oh, that’s snarky even beyond me…

I think there’s several scenes here that connect emotionally, and it’s mostly down to the performances of the kids. They’re really great.

But this movie mostly sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It’s like listening to the innermost, deepest thoughts of somebody that’s totally uninteresting.

The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick. 2011. ⚁