April wraps up the busiest season I think I’ve ever had as a freelancer. 12 pieces published across five outlets in a matter of three months. All this too on the heels of a period of personal distress and instability. Two days after Christmas I was laid off from my editor role at Slashfilm, and a month later my apartment was flooded out by the great L.A. rains of February 2024, forcing me and my partner to relocate to a tiny emergency rental further into the suburbs. I thought while in its midst of it that this surge of energy, ambition, and focus around writing came despite the upheaval. Now I think it’s because of it. Work sucks, basically. Really bad. Especially in the media industry.
Most of what I write I write for free or for rates so low the payment is more symbolic than compensatory. And I am happy doing it. These are the outlets where I’ve found the most engaged editors and most thorough editorial processes, where communication is easiest and most respectful, where creative experimentation is encouraged and unconventional pitches are greeted with enthusiasm, and where readers are loyal and active participants in the publication cycle. Plus I get to say as much as I want in as public a manner I choose about how shameful and pathetic it is to write for publications like New York Times — even the culture section! — and keep your head buried in the asshole of new release discourse while Palestinians are eradicated en masse and student protestors are bludgeoned in the name of “safety.” No fear of recourse when they can’t take anything away from you.
And so I look back on this period, thrilled to mine it for content to populate my sad and sparse blog, which I suppose I always meant to operate as an archive for my published work, and as an outpost for the stuff that I either try and fail or choose not to publish. In a period as active as this one however I had no time to write “for myself,” a funny expression which suggests that the force of transactionalism is so dominant that even when one writes for no money and no audience in particular they are still conscripted into a client/contractor relationship. With themselves! Even funnier is the implication that payment rendered for creative work transfers the bill of ownership entirely to whoever foots it.
Anyway, I’m surprised to look back and see how many straightforward reviews I wrote. I have never liked the single film review as a form. Too often critics lapse into a purely evaluative mode. What worked, what didn’t. Who cares? As an instrument, qualitative evaluation isn’t built to pierce to the heart of the matter. It scratches up a bit of the surface and analyzes the appearance of the turned up shavings, taking them for the core still buried deep in the amber. To write a review of a film worth reading you have to work against the limits of the form, which outnumber the creative and analytical opportunities it presents. Did I do that in any of the reviews below who knows. I least of all.
But the films in review consist of three undistributed films, two international films, two local film programs (extremely hard to place coverage on films that aren’t playing nationally/online), and nearly all of them are formally heterodox. An experiment with the silent film form (The Urania Trilogy), the use of music (Pare de Sufrir), mixed modes and community assemblage (The People’s Joker), printing and digitizing (Malqueridas), handheld cinematography and drastically limited resources (New Strains), and animation (Art College 1994). There are always great films to be seen if you dig deeper than whatever major distributor release everyone’s chattering about online. Especially if you get your recommendations from small, inveterately independent outlets!
The Urania Trilogy | In Review Online
“The latest feature film by the musician Tav Falco raises a fascinating and generative question … Not how film might transform were sound made a constituent particle of its atomic structure, but whether the largely abandoned aesthetics of silent cinema are the mere byproducts of their era’s technological limits or something distinct, the origin point for craft templates just as fertile for experimentation in 2024 as they were in 1914. The Urania Trilogy makes a compelling case that the aesthetic and even narrative forms pioneered by early masters like Louis Feuillade and D.W. Griffith remain ripe for exploration, remix, and reclamation. Consciously, that is, for as Hasumi contends, “all movies are but variants on the silent film” — whether they know it or not.”
AG Rojas at Metrograph | Screen Slate
“The fricative and shambolic relations between men remain Rojas’s guiding obsession. Huckleby and Newman’s bodies structure his frame, as he pulls focus in sprawling wides, elongating the constriction of an office hallway or locker room. He employs the high-grain, high-contrast black-and-white format he first used in the music video for Kamasi Washington’s “Truth” to endow music video clichés—overt symbols presented with an almost precocious lack of context—with deeper spiritual dimensions. In one sequence, a man carries a heavy boulder on his back through a field, underlining his burden with each labored step. But Rojas lights the scene using feathered clouds of radiant white mist hovering behind the man and pervading the space overhead. Rendered in black and white, the startling mise-en-scène affirms a source of inspiration Rojas himself cited early on in his career: Roy Andersson. The industry that incubated Fincher, Jonze, and Gray hardly resembles the industry that Rojas is now hatching from, but Pare de Sufrir heralds a future career just as bright.”
The People’s Joker | In Review Online
“The People’s Joker isn’t weaker for its borrowed parts. Indeed, formula and cliche are simply states that narrative types enter into after so much regurgitation and commodification. They can still be used to fresh and invigorating effect — just look at the work of filmmakers like Doug Campbell, Katt Shea, and Riverdale’s Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who work with rather than against formula to manipulate audience expectations and recover the visceral power of broadly familiar story beats. Trans stories are politicized whether they like it or not, so the work of mediating formula’s entropic effects is crucial. Fortunately, trans and queer artists are often the most gifted master narrative manipulators, having found their first community within media rather than real life. Drew displays a considerable dexterity for pop cultural recombination that likely comes as much from personal experience as professional — she was a long-time editor at Tim Heidecker’s Abso Lutely Productions, working on high-profile “anti comedy” projects like On Cinema and I Think You Should Leave. The People’s Joker utilizes formal elements like voiceover to both satirize the coming out narrative and exploit its comic potential, as in this early line: ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Joker.’”
Malqueridas | In Review Online
“Motherhood is the thread that runs throughout each story, and throughout all of Gilbert Fernández’s work. The film opens with indistinct sounds over a black screen, a pinhole of light slowly forming into something figural. The audio comes into focus first — a baby’s gurgling and a mother’s soothing song. The light clarifies slowly, forcing the eyes to scramble in their effort to identify the clump of shaded light. The gradual refining of the image nearly animates it; it’s easy to mistake the static image of a mother holding her child for video footage. Gilbert Fernández employs subtle formal manipulations like these to disarm the spectator’s automated process of conventional cinematic image interpretation. The ensuing stories of suffering on the inside of the carceral system, which are redolent in documentary cinema of the past few years, strike the heart with fresh anguish. The women’s search for simple beauty and relief — mewing cats in the yard, mothers on FaceTime asking their children if they’ve done their homework, fireworks cracking off in the distance — ‘Happy New Year!’ one says; ‘One less year,’ says another — are intercut with disturbing testimony of routine neglect and abuse. One woman recalls being chained to a bed during labor and refused painkillers because a guard assumes she’s a ‘junkie.’ Another shares that her children were offloaded by their caretaker, her sister, to the Chilean Child Protective System, because she was ‘tired of taking care of them.’”
New Strains | In Review Online
“Kamalakanthan’s camera functions like the film’s third character, alternating between fixed shots capturing the couple at an oblique distance and intimate handheld closeups, themselves alternating between tender and terroristic. One scene opens with Ram’s head buried between Kallia’s thighs, heat fogging the corners of the lens. She excuses herself after a few unstimulating seconds to sit on the toilet and scroll through the feed of a Twitter-famous doctor fear-mongering about the virus. The normal ebbs and flows of connubial domesticity are crushed into wild oscillations by the enforced proximity of the lockdown and the delirious effects of the new strain. A hilarious sequence toward the end captures Kallia following exercise instructions from a YouTube video croaking out from her laptop, fixed on a chair on the balcony, her phone propped against her laptop with a close friend mirroring the exercise on FaceTime. The camera gyrates in the opposite direction of Shaw’s body, frenetically cranking left and right, zooming in and out on her winded face as she begins spouting nonsense like ‘how does the remote work?’ in response to her friend’s ‘How are you?’
Elsewhere, the candid sex and nudity in New Strains recalls the freedom of Girls when Lena Dunham was at her very best. Will Epstein’s tinkling, effervescent score hoists the film aloft, ferrying it between slapstick pratfalls and moments of genuine heartache. It ultimately becomes a tribute to Kamalakanthan and Shaw’s love, and treatise on the elastic limits of cinema. These two quite literally had a camcorder and a dream. Now they’re proud parents of one of the best films of the Covid era.”
Art College 1994 | Slant
“There’s a beautiful scene in Jia Zhangke’s 2004 film The World in which the protagonist, Tao, crosses paths with an industrial worker nicknamed Little Sister on the rooftop of an unfinished building. They chat aimlessly beneath towering spires of exposed rebar until a massive plane soars overhead, drowning out their voices. ‘Tao, who flies on those planes?’ he asks, to which she responds, ‘Who knows…I don’t know anybody who’s ever been on a plane.’
It’s this precise contrast of stasis and flux, of the sublime and the quotidian, of simple personal dreams swallowed up by massive national ambitions, that characterizes Liu Jian’s newest feature, Art College 1994. Jia also lends his voice to one of its characters: Gu Yongqing, a ‘roving artist abroad’ who speaks of ‘the mysterious power of art’ during a visiting lecture at the titular art college. This is Liu’s third animated feature film, and it cements his status as one of the most distinct cinematic voices among the still-emergent seventh generation of Chinese directors. Tapping Bi Gan, the leading luminary of this nascent group, and Jia, the leading luminary of the generation before it, to voice characters in Art College 1994 is a canny gesture toward the complex braid of currents that’s easy to miss beneath its tranquil surface.”