October Digest

A whirlwind of a month for me personally. And it wasn't necessarily all bad either. But here's to hoping this month is exponentially more lax in nature (given this damn election at the very least turns out as hoped). That'd be nice. No other significant media write-ups for this month. Just films.

Horror Express (1972) (Dir. Eugenio Martin) - First rewatch for me since seeing it initially at too young of an age. For those unfamiliar, essentially its an adaptation of John Campbell's novella Who Goes There? (more commonly known as the basis for The Thing/From Another World) but set within the interior space of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. I'm admittedly not too well-versed in Christopher Lee's vast filmography, so this might not end up being as revelatory as it is for me, but having him here playing the role of the courageous, handsome and sophisticated British leading man is casting so perfect it bums me that this niche wasn't taken way more advantage of for him. Had an absolute blast with this one. 

Graduate First (1978) (Dir. Maurice Pialat) - My second Pialat. Puzzled as to how this hasn't ascended higher in the canon of coming of age dramas since I honestly think it's up there as among the very best the genre has to offer.. Just about captures, with striking acuity, the grueling transition from juvenescence to adulthood and the unpleasant necessity of it all, both for the young and their parents as well. For as painful and confusing as those years can be for both parties, you really just have to laugh at it all in retrospect (as do I). Pialat's propensity to side with the youth does more to highlight how narrow-minded and juvenile their pursuits really are. The more I reflect on this movie, the more I find its title so illuminatingly perfect. Graduate first. Concern yourself with everything else later.

Love, Money, Love (2000) (Dir. Philip Gröning) - Pretty much the type of movie I've always had fragmented scenes of in my head realized. I liken it to if early Gaspar Noe (channeling Harmony Korine) had some heart in him to take shelter in what love can truly pull through. A tale of two young outcasts who fall for one another completely on a whim runaway together, whose naiveté for a dreamed life crumbles underneath the overwhelming weight of capitalistic ruin. Shot on high-contrast film stock and consistently imposing images on top of one another with the most gorgeous double exposures you've ever seen, this one's probably going to be replaying itself through the recesses of my mind for years and years to come. Nothing else like it.

Brouillard #14 (2013) (Dir. Alexandre Larose) - Dissolves human consciousness and its intrinsic link to chronology and meshes it into one realized whole. Was quite moved upon completion. 

Anne at 13,000 ft. (2019/20) (Dir. Kazik Radwanski) - One of 2020's strongest new releases. In a contemporary filmmaking landscape oversaturated with unmotivated use of handheld, Radwanski's own usage of this exterior technique as an enigmatic vessel for the internal pointing outwards in physical manifest is as refreshing as it is suffocating. Deragh Campbell gives a career best performance here as the titular recondite Anne. Subtle vibrative gestures that recalled Morvern Callar for me personally.

The Last City (2020) (Dir. Heinz Emigholz) - Another one of the year's most efficacious films as it is genuinely strange. I'm not all that familiar with Heinz's previous architecture studies, but my knowledge of his obtuse narrative shaping as is constructed here within fiction renders an idiosyncratic cinematic language unparalleled by any film I've ever seen. A hyper cynical (but self deprecating) cosmopolitan vision where the causalities of war and societal progression are languidly extrapolated upon, uncovering the modern world's relied infrastructure being built on generations of violence. So so bleak, but its jest is so slight and deliberately piercing, that it may also be one of the funniest films to come out in the past 10 years. Gallows humor done right.