OK, I’ve completed all the box sets I had going… so I can start a new one!

And I had to choose the Agnès Varda box set from Criterion simply because it has an oddball format and pokes out of the shelf I have the unseen movies on.

Makes sense to me!

Oddly enough (or perhaps not) the box sets starts with a film from 2019 — which is basically a talk Varda gave to present her movies. So we start the box set with an introduction… I wonder whether she made this with the box set in mind?

This isn’t just Varda talking with clips from movies — we get extensive bits from other “behind the scenes” movies Varda has done before, but it’s presented as if it’s part of the talk.

So it’s a kind of fictionalised presentation? Very strange genre.

Hey… that’s a different venue…

Oh, there’s a lot of different venues — she did a tour?

I dunno… I don’t think this movie quite works? Varda had a really interesting career, but this manages to make it seem kinda boring: It’s just one thing after another — first I did this, then I did this — without really telling us why we should be interested.

Yeah, that tracks: It’s just kinda boring. Which is something that Varda’s movies never are, usually.

(Well, she died a couple of weeks after the premiere, so perhaps that influenced the scores…)

Heh heh.

The final 20 minutes are really good, though, so let’s go with:

Varda by Agnès. Agnès Varda. 2019. ⚂

Very risque.

Is that a matte painting? Hm… Can it be?

That’s one weird-ass god.

I’m guessing that this is a pre-Hayes movie?

Well, I dunno… I mean, I haven’t seen that many movies with Clara Bow (the ‘it’ girl of the silents), and I guess that’s she’s fine here, but the movie kinda meanders weirdly — it seems so formless. We were presented first with one situation (which turned out to be her childhood, being attacked by Savages (I mean Native Americans)), and then another situation 18 years later (which I thought would be the movie), but then we move even later and that seems to be what the movie is really about?

That is, it took a long time to get to the actual plot, and by the time that happened, I’d rather lost interest…

It feels kinda clumsy.

The directory is John Francis Dillon who’s made dozens and dozens of movies — but this is one of his last movies (he died two years later).

Haven’t heard of any of those.

Oh, and Clara Bow only did one movie after this one.

Not only is it a gay bar (the first in a film, according to wikipedia)…

… but it’s a communist gay bar! Wonderful!

Well, I dunno. I don’t think it works? It’s kinda “eeeh” on so many planes at the same time.

Call Her Savage. John Francis Dillon. 1932. ⚂

I dunno… is that really the optimal posture for using a toilet brush in a toilet?

Anyway, I think I’ve seen all the other movies by the Wachowskis, but not this one. It’s starting off pretty well (except for the unrealistic toilet cleaning posture).

Hey, this is really good! It’s interesting and really tense and I think I know where this is going, but it’s very entertaining…

This movie looks great — that fight sequence was awesome.

Some home decor…

Those candles must have taken half the budget.

ANyway… I think this was a box office bomb? (I haven’t looked it up now.) I couldn’t understand why, because this movie kicks ass. But now I’m kinda getting… like… “uhm?” I mean, there’s several twists and several infodumps, but the main character here is just going “well, do you have some less dressy clothes I could wear?” instead of the gazillion questions you’d have… I think perhaps they were going against the “OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING” cliché you have to suffer through in most of these films (as it’s revealed that nothing is what you thought it was), but they kinda went overboard into catatonic instead.

That is, I think we’ve been through like nine doublecrosses and reveals and it’s not confusing or anything, but if I was that woman, I’d sit down with that guy for half an hour and just have him explain everything.

That might not make for a thrilling movie, though.

Instead this is what she chooses to say:

Which is so over the top not what nerdly expectations clamour for that I’m picturing the Wachowskis going HA HA HA THAT”LL LEARN EM

And suddenly we’re into a Brazilesque parody of bureaucracy. Has this movie been a comedy all along and I just didn’t realise it?

… wat

I think I speak for everybody when I say:

wat

And… it’s just… frustrating how the Mila Kunis character does one stupid thing after another, and this guy with the ears has to swoop in, time and time again, to save her. The repetition is annoying.

At some point it gets more “OK, if she’s that stupid and gormless, perhaps she shouldn’t be the Princess and Owner of Earth”.

I loved the first hour of this movie. Then it got progressively more “wat” with every scene, and… I dunno. It feels like the screenwriters just gave up at some point, which is frustrating, because it’s such a great concept and world to set a film in. And it looks great, and has fun performances, and…

So people hated this movie, and I wonder whether that was a brigading effect — I can totally see why Nazis would hate this movie. But no:

If it was brigaded, you’d have a huge number of people at 1, but since most people gave it 5/6, this means that people actually disliked it. And the critics hated it even more:

And it lost a lot of money.

I understand all that, because it’s a lot, and it’s a lot of “wat”. But I liked it anyway. I can totally see this being a cult favourite in 20 years time, because it’s so over the top.

Jupiter Ascending. The Wachowskis. 2015. ⚄