OK, I have absolutely no idea why I bought this bluray… I haven’t seen any other movie by the director or anything. But I see that I ripped this disk the same day I ripped movies by Jeff Baena, so perhaps he said that this was an amazing movie or something? (Those movies were disappointing, too.)

This is really, really bad. It’s like a metaphorical movie where they state all the metaphorical implications up front. But while high.

I’m so bored by this movie, and I’m only ten minutes in — I didn’t know that it was possible to be this bored.

I’m this bored.

Isn’t that that guy?

After a seemingly interminable 15 minutes which was Dave shouting at them not to enter the cardboard maze, they’ve finally entered the maze — this is where the movie should have started.

Spoilers: It’s bigger on the inside.

It’s still in-credibly tedious.

Actually, I’m not sure why I hate this so much. It’s an inoffensive little small budget whimsical horror/comedy movie… that I hate so much. Sooo much.

*sigh*

*sigh*

Yes:

I don’t know if the same person conceived the visuals and wrote the text, but the former are wonderful while the latter is unbearable.

I really, really disliked this movie, and the dislike was immediate — I loathed this movie from the first scene on. That sounds totally irrational, right? And I can’t explain why I hate this so much. I mean, the performances were bad, and the dialogue was horrible, but it looked pretty OK, and that usually counts for something, right? But nope.

Perhaps it’s the forced whimsy of it all — it’s fake whimsy.

Dave Made a Maze. Bill Watterson. 2017. ⚀

Gates of hell!? (I’m learning French, but I think that’s what it says…)

This Criterion box set feels like a cornucopia, and I’m sitting here wishing they’d give this treatment to other directors (I’m thinking Chantal Akerman, David Lynch or Peter Greenaway, say), but on the other hand, perhaps Varda is ideally positioned to have a box like this made. For one, she had her own production company, so there’s no problems with getting the rights to it all. But beyond that practical issue, her filmmaking also makes for a compelling box set: She didn’t do that many full feature-length movies, but when she did, she revisited them later and made documentaries about making them. So instead of having to sprinkle these disks with people-discussing-her-films, we get her discussing the films herself, which is more fun.

And she also did quite a number of short movies that revolve around the same issues as her main movies, so it all… fits. I’m not sure that there are that many other directors that had the same sort of output.

That said, this isn’t a very good short.

Le lion volatil. Agnès Varda. 2003. ⚂

This is a documentary about the shops on the street Varda lived in — and as usual with Varda, it’s very wistful and emotional. These hand-written signs… these are shops you know won’t last much longer — they’re remnants of an earlier time that would soon disappear. So it’s a movie full of nostalgia for something that hasn’t disappeared yet.

This is not one of those documentaries where you drop by with a camera un-announced. Everybody’s been warned, and are putting their best foot forward — everybody’s got their hair done up nicely, and are presenting their wares, so you get tableaux like this…

(But I’m guessing Varda herself arranged some of this scenery, which makes it even more artificial.)

Right:

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry for this scene. And I have to ask myself if my life is somehow similar to her.

It’s a moving documentary — the couple in the parfumerie is just heartreaking… but some of the things Varda does here doesn’t quite work. They’re too artificial — like the scene with the magician? I just found that really boring, but that may be just me — I’ve got an antipathy towards magic… But moreover, the forced parallels between the stage magic and the “real” stuff was groan-worthy.

She already had gold with the less staged sequences! They’re ⚅ sequences, but I’m going with:

Daguerréotypes. Agnès Varda. 1975. ⚄