Looking for a Thrill. Braden King. 2005.

So this is a … documentary from Thrill Jockey? (That’s a record label.) I’ve had it for what seems like decades, but I’ve never watched it.

This is basically a bunch of people talking at the camera about music with choppy glitchy editing. It’s kinda charming.

The concept is… talking about the first or the most important music experience they had?

Some of the stories are fun and some er not. It’s generally enjoyable, but kinda messy.

A complication is that the DVD ripped in a weird way: It ended up like a gazillion five-to-ten minute scenes, some repeating, so I may not have seen all the scenes.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her. Ned Benson. 2013.

So this is the second (or perhaps the other) movie in this diptych.

This is a very different movie than Colon Him. It’s got, like, better actors. I mean, Isabelle Huppert, Viola Davis, William Hurt… It’s also got a different look, with more reds instead of blues, and… basically a storyline that would be somewhat incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen Colon Him first.

I like it!

Anyway! This movie reminded me of one of the saddest thing about small budget movies: They can’t afford to use real music, so when they have a key scene that requires music, they use a track from Now That’s Kinda Something That Sounds Like An 80s Hit But Totally Isn’t, So It’s Cheap vol 97. But I love that they found the money to do the Cat Powers cover song at least. It was a perfect moment.

I think this movie started off really strong. We don’t quite know what’s going on and it’s all very fresh and it’s all orange instead of blue as in the Colon Him movie and I kinda liked this more than that movie.

But then it flounders. It’s like they don’t quite know what to do with it. I can totally see why Weinstein wanted to cut together the interesting bits (and the better performances) from this movie with the more straightforward storyline from Colon Him.

The Rashomon scenes are fun but aren’t really that interesting.

WTF!? Shoes on… IN BED!?

Such set design.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him. Ned Benson. 2013.

Well, this is an odd movie… movies… I bought the BluRay of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, and there’s three movies on this disc. The first one is The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, which is an edited-together version of the movies called colon Him and colon Her, insisted upon by Harvey Weinstein.

So I’m watching the two other movies.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I definitely wasn’t expecting a movie where Bill Hader plays a chef.

But it’s mostly about Professor X (or is it Cyclops? I can never remember who plays what in the X-Men movies now) and his wife who leaves him. I’m guessing the next movie is going to be like the opposite (i.e., Jessica Chastain leaving Professor X).

It’s a good movie! There’s nothing here that annoys me. I like the silence of the scenes and the cold colour scheme. Chastain is great, of course, and the rest of the actors are OK, even Bill Hader.

I think you could kinda object to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl thing that Chastain could be seen to embody… but it doesn’t quite follow the typical blueprint for that. It’s much weirder and more interesting.

I really liked this movie. Love all the shots of Manhattan streets. Let’s see what the next one’s like.