That's it for Rev this year and I can't help feeling I've missed something... Eight films isn't a bad effort but there were a few that I hope I can catch somewhere later. Anyway, here are the films I saw this year, in calendar order of viewing. First up was:
U are the Universe ★★★½
Ambitious Ukrainian film by Pavel Ostrikov about the last person in the universe after an earth-destroying disaster. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is running nuclear waste to Callico, a moon of Jupiter, when he gets the news. His fastidious on-board robot Maxim is his only companion until he gets a message from near Saturn.
There are some lovely moments - 2001 music reveals a replacement office chair floating through space, the Open Me message, the sinister link to 2001 (set up earlier by the music), the tenderness of the burgeoning audio relationship - all leading to a sweet but realistically depressing conclusion. Wonderful pared down, yet grand filmmaking.
Of Caravan and the Dogs ★★★★
The title comes from the saying that 'the dogs bark, the caravan moves on.' This can be taken two ways - either the dogs are insignificant to the behemoth, or they actually provide the impetus for the continual movement. The dogs here refer to the Russian journalists and editors, TV hosts and radio DJs that are trying to keep the bastards honest. Like pushing shit up a hill.
The film is reminiscent of Navalny, 20 Days in Mariupol and Collective and it has a great lead in the boss of the newspaper. It's a sad watch but with surprising hopefulness. As one poet agitator guy says, 'All dodgy empires end with a war' or words to that effect. It's written by Askold Kurov and directed by him and Anonymous. This particular credit permeates the roll at the end of the film, with good reason. An excellent documentary.
Eight Postcards from Utopia ★★★
This is a found footage compendium of Romanian TV commercials from the 80s to the 2010s, I think, with some wild shit going on. The film starts with Adrian Mutu in Roman dress and is broken into 8 categories, such as History, Technology, Money, Masculine and Feminine, Magic, etc.
TV advertising can explain a lot about a country - the Romanians apparently look to Germany with envy, and there's some crazy ads that look to have influenced The Fast Show. Pepsi seems to be the winner of the cola wars in Romania, Dracula Park looks fun, and one ad even had a contest to find the preeminent 'Tits Expert' in the country. The privatisation public service announcements were an interesting document of the times, post cold war. Could have been shorter but worth a watch.
The American Friend ★★½
Wim Wenders adapts a Patricia Highsmith Ripley novel (Ripley's Game). Dennis Hopper plays the lead, though I'd suggest Bruno Ganz is the star of the film. Nothing really felt legitimate about it, I couldn't buy any of these characters, especially not Hopper as Ripley. Maybe a controversial take, but I don't think he's a very good actor - he plays a fine nutter but if he needs to seem 'real', he struggles.
The plot wasn't too bad structurally, especially at the start, but again, I didn't believe the likelihood of the characters' actions within the context of their story. This picture framer family man quite happily becomes a killer? The French geezer simply trusts that he'll do the job? Ripley drops him in the shit, simply because he didn't shake his hand once? Well, perhaps that's the Ripley sociopathy showing out there, so fair dues. But overall, not a satisfying film for me, sadly. I don't have a great track record with Wenders.
Chain Reactions ★★★★
This is a fantastic documentary, right up my alley. Unfortunately, it might have spoiled my enjoyment of the film that followed, as I'd never seen The Texas Chainsaw Saw Massacre before the double bill. This is your basic talking head format where five artists talk about their memories of (or reactions to) the above film. What sets this apart is that the subjects are fascinating and passionate about Chain Saw.
Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama are the people interviewed and they all give great insight into how this film has affected and influenced them since their first viewing. Highlights are Heller-Nicholas talking about Picnic at Hanging Rock and the similarities between Texas and the Aussie bush, and Miike remembering that Chaplin's City Lights retrospective screening in Osaka was sold out so he happened upon Chain Saw. Sliding doors and all that.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ★★★
As mentioned above, this was my first viewing and the forensic analysis laid out in Chain Reactions didn't allow me any surprises in the main event. Maybe it would have been better shown first on the bill but I'm guessing most people had seen it before this screening. I think 50 years is probably long enough for spoilers:) So looking at it like I had seen it before, it seems very dated and not really very scary either. It is iconic, though, and quite well made for a 'slasher' pic, perhaps the benchmark for those to follow.
As some of the subjects in the previous film said, it's not a stretch to feel some kind of sympathy or justification for Leatherface, as these hippy kids are veritable home invaders, and he is clearly disturbed. Not a great film for me but I'm glad to finally see it.
The Thinking Game ★★½
Here's a doco about Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, and his desire to 'solve' AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Hassabis was a bit of a prodigy from childhood, junior chess champion, games developer before entering Cambridge. His interest in AGI and its potential uses is covered in this film. What's not really covered is the danger of letting these fuckers THINK for themselves. I mean, Hassabis and his crew seem to have the best intentions - notably, releasing the code for AlphaFold to the world in 2021. This has almost 'solved' the issue of protein folding, which troubled molecular biologists for years.
All well and good but the ethics angle was only briefly mentioned near the end, and the sale to Google has made this altruism quite murky indeed. I read one local review on Letterboxd that absolutely excoriated the film. It's sits unevenly between a puff piece and an interesting view of where this tech might be going. Polarising, if enough people see it.
Zodiac Killer Project ★★★★½
A brilliant documentary, this one. Charlie Shackleton, a young Brit, optioned the rights to a police officer's book about his hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer. Just as he was prepping the film, the family of the author/cop (deceased) pulled the rights. So Shackleton made an empty film, along the lines of "If we had made it, we would have started with a car parked here....". He narrates his past intentions to images of semi-deserted streets, empty diners, stand in buildings ("We were going to use this police station. Actually, this is a library, it's much easier to shoot at a library").
About halfway through, Shackelton appears on screen, in a recording booth but before this, there's nobody to associate with at all. This works to the films credit as it's presented as a kind of 'non-film'. Throughout proceedings, he dissects True Crime films and TV, specifically those newish Netflix titillators, by mentioning the tropes used - evocative B-rolls, 3D-ifying crime scene stills, dark country music over the opening credits, etc. He's done his research. In fact, it's probably a boon that he didn't get the rights to the book - I can't imagine a generic doco on this topic would have been anywhere near as good as this.
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