exotica

formative movie for me. watched on endless loop 15 yrs ago and recently rewatched and discovered it all still works. i don't know if atom egoyan has matched it yet frankly. built almost like a collage - themes of grief, money, transformation repeat and ripple thru characters, each mirroring another - but it does not feel randomly assembled, quite the opposite. maybe grief is less so in don mckellar's character. we learn his father died recently but we don't see him being taken under like francis or even like eric, the dj whose lamenting is more about heartbreak than death. mostly. in any event, from the second the title started and the first piano of m. dyanna's score starts progressing i was transported. awesome

humpday

keep going back and forth on this one. love the idea and i liked the actors but i don't love the whole (for lack of better term) mumblecore-y aesthetic. there's something about design to me that feels fundamental, elevating things from a mere recitation of character on a stage w/ a video camera rolling - call it heft, call it a seriousness of purpose, call it gravitas. these films (the bujalskis, the duplass, the swanbergs etc) sometimes feel like a director called two friends and said let's shoot this wknd and just see what happens and cut together the most interesting bits. the only 1 of the mumblecore-y movies i've seen that could be classified as 'designed' would be a. katz dance party usa, which i loved. i don't know. humpday is a pretty innocuous and sometimes funny thing so i should probably just let it off the hook. still, there's a part of me that wishes for a different tech approach. back and forth...

kore-eda, hirokazu

not enough superlatives available for hirokazu kore-eda's 2nd narrative feature. it's 10 yrs old now but 110 yrs from now it will still work. the matter-of-fact approach and tone - making afterlife events the purview of the civil servant rather than the winged cherub - solidifies, seals, and underscores the frame and focus of the film's reach.

Lorna's Silence

another amazing work by jean-pierre & luc dardenne, the belgian brothers of international acclaim (except, as ao scott points out, in the united states - no surprise there really). in the past couple mos i've rewatched 'la promesse' and watched 'l'enfant' (both of which - like lorna's silence - feature jeremie renier). it's hard to classify their importance in any original fashion - some intersection of world-view and aesthetic, engineered and verite-grimy all at once. Lorna's is a simple plot (built on a gnarl of moral complexity) but told in such a manner so as to subvert expectation; just when i thought i knew where this was headed it jumped the tracks and moved into different terrain, more than once.