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Generation P 2011
Packed as much enthusiasm as I could into this brief capsule. I'd like to see this again and write about it in greater depth, but I missed my chance to see it in a theater because it played NYC for all of 6 days, before being bumped off by The Silver Linings Playbook on Thanksgiving, gah.
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Mulholland Drive 2001
2nd viewing, unseen since initial release (once more, albeit probably for the last time, on 35mm). Compulsively watchable: satisfying as this film is, it would've made a terrific show. No small consolation, this film, and the many theories as to How It Works make for great reading, but they're ultimately irrelevant to the effect: Lynch is a master at making oneiric surrealism hypnotic and oddly accessible. Weird to see Justin Theroux first-billed. At the end, you may recall, the last shot has a blue-haired lady saying "Silencio." Just after her, a piercing senior citizen's voice rang out: "What did she say?" That brought down the house.
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Yoyo 1965
Consistently daring, not least in the double-casting determining its progression and non-outcome: Étaix is the adult millionaire in the first half and his son in the second, forcing the separation of the two (one reason why dad refuses to exit his carriage to view his restored mansion at the end). Few films have so casually compressed the entirety of the WWII occupation of France: bookended by footage of circus performers and frantic music entering the ring slowing down (as war…
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Wake in Fright 1971
Some of the fastest two hours of my viewing year, so quibbles seem especially minor. Flawlessly directed in a largely non-ostentatious fashion with occasional showboating, especially in the There Will Be Blood-esque opening 360 pan around the outback schoolhouse and surrounding areas. (Another shot cranes up up slowly, with every inch creating an artificial ripple from the lines of an outdoor water tank as its position changes in front of the school's walls — a fleeting effect, but an example…
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11 x 14 1977
A relative Benning novice (I've seen and hugely enjoyed Los and RR, not so much Twenty Cigarettes), but various mutterings digital's sapped his rigor may have some basis. Slightly less magisterial than the films I've seen but no less compositionally acute, Benning's views of Chicago and the Midwest strikingly well-composed. (One shot — the view of a plane landing from a sidewalk just before the runway — is repeated with slightly more gravitas in Los.) Read up on before and…