Anima Mundi is Latin for “the shortest Godfrey Reggio / Philip Glass collaboration”—the third of their four “musical nature documentaries.” (The others are the Hopi-titled Koyaanisqatsi, 1982, Powaqqatsi, 1989, and Naqoyqatsi, 2002—although the less said about that last one, the better.) Reggio and Glass also sometimes get assigned Baraka (1992) but, beyond clearly inspiring it, they had nothing to do with it. (They were busy making Anima Mundi!)

Anima Mundi also means “the soul of the world,” although I think Reggio and Glass thought it means “animal world,” because that’s what the movie’s mostly about: animals. (That above image is the opening shot, a kind of counterpoint to the footage of people staring into the camera in Powaqqatsi.)

Anima Mundi (1992)

I’m being snarky, but Reggio’s movies kinda invite that. When I encountered them in college, they were popular—they were enjoyable and perhaps even highbrow (they had Hopi titles!)— but watching them was always accompanied by the frisson that they might be, you know, kind of pretentious and dumb (they had Hopi titles!). I do recall defending them as being trickier than they looked, and I recently showed excerpts of Koy and Pow to a friend who’d expressed an interest in associative editing. But beyond that, these days, I honestly don’t know where I stand on them, other than that they’re fun to watch and argue about (aka, perfect for college viewing). They’re also extremely beautiful and astonishing for what they show, and presumably quite valuable for that if for no other reason.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Philip Glass as of late, as well as thinking about revisiting these movies. We’ll start with Anima Mundi.

Enjoy!

What is so horrible about a newborn baby? Why is that image (one that is seen many times a day in hospitals all over the country) so unacceptable, when much more horrific images are presented on television and the cinema, featuring murder and rape, but glamorized and made safe?

And thus he set out to make a film that would be exactly what he thought audiences wanted.

The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

Written and directed by Peter Greenaway

Starring Julia Ormond and Ralph Fiennes

Enjoy!

Update: Note that this version of the film was put up by its producer, Kees Kasander, himself! (Or by somebody on his staff.) You can see the other two films uploaded by Kasander Films here.

I put off seeing The Room for a long time. Some friends told me it was so terrible that it was good, and me, being a real smartypants, thought I knew what they meant by that, and ignored their requests that I join them for midnight screenings at the Music Box (some of them featuring appearances by writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau). This was in 2008 or 2009 or so.

Then, some time after that, my friend Justin, over one of the holidays, sat me down in front of his laptop and made me watch the thing with him. (He couldn’t believe that I hadn’t yet seen it.) And I was, as so many others have been, immediately captivated. (Since which time I’ve seen it numerous times, including once at midnight at the Music Box. Tommy Wiseau was supposed to show up, but he cancelled.)

My friends were mistaken in one thing: The Room is not “so terrible that it’s good.” The Room isn’t terrible. It’s also not good. It exists beyond labels like “good” and “terrible,” in some other realm, possibly the realm of outsider art. You can see that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make a film, that he was able to amass many of the tools that people traditionally use when making films—but he used them to assemble something other than a film. It looks a lot like a film, to be sure. You can watch it, and should. But it is something very other.

Luckily, that thing, whatever it may be, is bewilderingly adorable.

The Room (2003)

Produced, written by, directed by, and starring Tommy Wiseau

What I like best about The Room—besides how inscrutable it is, and how inscrutable it remains even after numerous viewings—is its nature, which is warmhearted and good. Everyone involved is clearly having fun, and I believe Tommy Wiseau when he says that more than anything he wanted to make something that people would enjoy, in whatever way they wanted. He and the actors he’s assembled are, in ever scene, a total joy to watch, regardless of whatever it is they are doing (I’m not sure it’s “acting”). The whole thing is consistently charming, is basically what I’m saying—and that’s not nothing. It’s more than lots of other “actual” movies will give you.

Note that this isn’t the highest quality copy, but I’m glad there’s one online—and if you haven’t seen it yet, maybe this will convince you to seek out a real copy, or download the RiffTrax track for it, and—who knows?—maybe even attend a midnight screening. The best way to experience The Room is in the company of other people! Bring a football and plastic silverware.

And enjoy!

Don’t let the odd title put you off! It’s just some funny word meaning how things can become interconnected. Cinematically, it contains both “Psycho” and “Taxi” so how can the film be bad? And imagine how smart you’ll sound when it rolls off your tongue in front of your friends.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is an experimental meta-documentary by William Greaves, a documentary filmmaker and actor. The premise is very simple: Greaves auditions couples in Central Park, repeatedly running them through the same inane dialogue. Meanwhile, his crew films him filming, increasingly turning the camera on themselves to express their growing unease with Greaves’s (deliberate) lack of direction. From this cascades a loosely controlled experiment in dissolution, which quickly becomes intensely dramatic and absorbing… It’s proto-reality TV!

Greaves later revisited the project, aided by Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi, in the mid-2000s, to make another version, Take 2 1/2. That you can get on the wonderful Criterion release, which the video below is taken from.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968)

Written by, directed by, and starring William Greaves.

Further reading: Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Reader review.

Enjoy!

OK, so don’t get your hopes up; this is a pretty poor copy of Withnail & I. I mean, you wouldn’t want to watch it this way, not when the gorgeous Criterion edition exists. But it is the whole film, and as such perfectly fine for leaving on in the background while you down lighter fluid and watch your thumbs go all weird…

Withnail & I (1987)

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson. Starring Richard E. Grant, Paul McCann, and Richard Griffiths.

Additionally, here’s a decent little analysis of the opening shot. And Bruce Robinson’s beautifully self-reflective essay, a must-read.

Easily one of the best films of the past seven years, by one of the greatest living filmmakers, Apichatapong Weerasethakul.

A funny story: I actually knew him, when I lived in Thailand (2003–5). I was given his cell phone number by a mutual film friend. One day I went to visit him at his studio in northern Bangkok. We sat around for a while, talking movies. Finally I asked what he was working on. [Note that this was in 2004, by which point I had seen only his first feature, the brilliant exquisite corpse Mysterious Object at Noon (2000).] He told me that he was finishing a new film, trying to get it ready in time for Cannes. “If we finish in time, we go,” he said. “If not—mai pen rai” (“no worries”).

That film turned out to be Tropical Malady (2004), which went on to win Cannes’s Jury Prize, effectively launching Apichatapong’s career. I’m glad I didn’t distract him overmuch!

Two years later, Apichatapong followed it up with a film some consider even better. (I myself rank them about the same, which is to say that they are both essential masterpieces of contemporary cinema.)

Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) (2006)

Directed and written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

… Summarizing Apichatpong’s films is difficult. They’re narrative, but very experimental. And yet at the same time, they’re also very simple. Usually they’re told in two parts, being two separate stories, each one commenting on the other. Syndromes is ostensibly about how his doctor parents met and fell in love. In the first half, they’re working in Isan (Thailand’s rural northeast, up near Laos). In the second, they’re working in Bangkok. Each time the story is different, occurring, even, in different years. (Apichatpong’s fundamental maneuver is to render all narrative, even present-day accounts, as myth.)

Well, the film is just phenomenal. For my money, Apichatpong is one of the most compelling experimental storytellers working today, and anyone interested in experimental fiction or narrative should not resist exploring his work. (I don’t think it’s wrong to compare him to Alain Resnais / Alain Robbe-Grillet / Marguerite Duras.) [Related: Jeremy I talked some about Syndromes and other Apichatpong films here, in our conversation about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.]

And if you don’t watch the whole movie (unforgivable!), at least watch the final fifteen minutes or so, starting around 1:29:00. (But, really, watch the whole thing!)

Enjoy!

What a surprise to find this up at YouTube! Although less and less surprises me these days.

How to describe Celine and Julie Go Boating, other than “one of the greatest films ever made”?

Two women, Celine and Julie, a magician and a librarian, bond over a shared interest in magic and the occult. Together they discover one of the weirdest haunted houses in all of cinema, a mansion in which a Henry James novel is being eternally reenacted. Celine and Julie can enter the house, which will expel them after a few hours with no memory of what’s going on inside. But when they eat a magic candy, they start to remember what they witnessed…

It’s funny and cool and sexy and more than a little spooky.

It’s inspired in part by Lewis Carroll, and was partial inspiration for Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).

Also, it’s one of the greatest films ever made.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau – Phantom Ladies Over Paris) (1974)

Directed by Jacques Rivette. Starring Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Barbet Schroeder.

(You can turn on English subtitles through the CC button. There are Czech subtitles, too!)

I’ve already written at length about this one, a sci-fi alien-invasion zombie gothic horror movie that lurches crazily between genres and plot points while audaciously justifying excessive, excessive, excessive nudity and poetically innovative special effects—and still finds room to let Patrick Stewart kiss a man. But allow me to write a bit more!

Because although Lifeforce (1985) steals shamelessly from many other films—2001, Alien, Erotic Kill, Planet of the Vampires—there is no other movie like Lifeforce.

The screenplay is by Dan O’Bannon, the brilliant screenwriter behind several of the films that Lifeforce pilfers—namely Alien and The Return of the Living Dead; he also penned screenplays for Dark Star, Total Recall, and so much more. (It’s based on a novel, The Space Vampires, by the ultra-prolific Colin Wilson.)

The beautifully aimless direction is by Tobe Hooper, the man behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist (although debate surrounds how much he did on that one). His work here is practically Philip K. Dickian, in that the movie seems to keep forgetting, every fifteen minutes, all that’s happened.

The score (most of it, at least) is by Henry Mancini, the composer behind Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Charade and of course the Pink Panther movies (and theme). He claims that most of what he wrote got chucked from the film, but what remains is a wonderfully playful take on John Williams. (Michael Kamen provided other bits, right around the same time he was scoring The Dead Zone, Brazil, Mona Lisa, and Highlander. Quite a year!)

Finally, and most impressively, the film stars the unsinkable Mathilda May, an alien vampire come to wreak feminine—and possibly feminist?—terror on a cast of weak ineffectual men who stack up one by one beneath her ample, uh, spells.

Just yesterday—day of days!—I discovered that the entire film is online in a single file!

Let he or she
who did not
enjoy
this movie
answer to me.

So I haven’t seen Mostly Martha since it came out, and I’ll freely admit that on paper, it looks god-awful. A tightly wound German chef, Martha, finds her perfectly-ordered world tipped into chaos when her sister dies, forcing her to take in her niece, Lina; meanwhile, her career is challenged by the hire of a freewheeling Italian chef, Mario. Will the 107-minute run time prove enough for Martha to learn about life and love, and wind up a happy family with Mario and Lina?

Of course. But it’s all in how one tells it …

For one thing, the acting is simply tremendous, with every character quite detailed, not at all the typical cartoons found in fare of this sort. What’s more, this nuanced, subtle approach extends to every aspect of the film. Director Sandra Nettlebeck approaches the project sensitively, thinking her way through each shot and scene. It’s beautiful work.

It doesn’t hurt that the film looks phenomenal. Best of all, its soundtrack—which was assembled by ECM Records founder Manfred Eicher—features tracks by Steve Reich, Louis Prima, Arvo Pärt, Dean Martin, and Keith Jarrett. It’s—well, it’s damned odd, but the whole thing works. And so, after 107 minutes, when the movie ends in catharsis, it feels more than earned.

Here’s Jonathan Rosenbaum’s glowing review.

And here’s part one of the film, which is all up at YouTube. Enjoy!

(The quality isn’t the best, but my hope—as with all of these films—is that you’ll enough like what you see to track down a proper copy.)

Little Murders is one of the greatest films of the 1970s—nay, of all time!—and anyone who doesn’t watch it is a scoundrel.

“What’s it about?” you ask. Warily.

Well, it’s about how horrible life is. Yes. And how everyday survival is akin to constantly committing murder.

As you can surmise from that description, it’s arguably the blackest comedy you’ll ever see. It’s based on a play by Jules Feiffer, who also wrote Carnal Knowledge and illustrated The Phantom Tollbooth (among other things). It stars Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Alan Arkin, and several stage actors whose names you probably won’t recognize, but who are all terrific. (If you don’t watch the movie, at least watch Sutherland’s cameo.)

Supposedly Gould asked Jean-Luc Godard to direct it; in the end, Arkin helmed it, with cinematography by the great Gordon Willis. (It’s gorgeous.)

Dave Sim, the genius behind the long-running  comic Cerebus, based the character of the Judge on the late Lou Jacobi’s character in this film.

Here’s Roger Ebert’s four-star review.

And here’s the film!

Now you can impress all of your friends!