RECENT VIEWING
Stuff I’ve been watching (and enjoying) lately.
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
I don’t know much about French cinema, so I’m grateful to my friend Pat for showing me this dense, thoughtful, adventurous film as part of a recent Bastille Day movie party. It’s my understanding that Agnès Varda has been a relatively neglected filmmaker till fairly recently, and I know I’m going to be watching a lot more of her work soon.
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MAD GOD
If you caught the Lucasflim doc “Light and Magic” recently, you got a heaping helping of Phil Tippett— the stop-motion master who brought to life the Rancor in “Return of the Jedi” and the titular machine in “Robocop”. If you’re into that, but can handle something darker and often far more gruesome, then this film is for you!
A passion project executed over the course of three decades, “Mad God” throws Ray Harryhausen, H.R. Giger, Brian Froud, and Mike Mignola into a blender, descending into a sensibility that’s not just nightmarish but literally like having a nightmare. Demonic, cyberpunk, steampunk, postapocalyptic… the integration of technology and monstrosity reminds me a bit of “Frankenstein’s Army”.
Dan Wool’s soundtrack is lovely— somehow creaky and melliflous at the same time.
Maybe not the best thing to watch right before bed. Take it from me.
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WEB OF MAKE BELIEVE: DEATH, LIES, AND THE INTERNET
More grimness here, yes, but it’s trickier than that. This documentary series that focuses on crimes facilitated by the Internet is even scarier than one might think (ever heard of “swatting”? Yikes). But there’s also some absurd humor to be found, and— crucially— a pervasive empathy for the folks involved.
I was also struck by just how darn good the storytelling is in this series, as well as how throughtful and yet efficient the intellectual engagement turns out to be. There’s a lot going on here in terms of ideas, and it’s clear that copious effort went into sorting the layers and covering a lot of ground in a brief amount of time.
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