Cinematic Disappointments of 2019

In his review published on January 1, 1982, one of the most respected film critics, Roger Ebert, said that John Carpenter's The Thing is 'basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen'. The reason behind this quote (which I and many genre aficionados couldn't agree less!) is to show or rather, confirm that no criticism is immune to subjectivity and bias. So, I sincerely hope that no one will take the following list to their hearts, just because their 2019 favorites and a few touted masterpieces are included (and arranged in alphabetical order). Also, I must admit that some of these entries are my own failed attempts at being adventurous during the excursion out of my comfort zone (such as German comedy 100 Dinge), whereas the others are found guilty on various charges: for being despicably generic, clichéd and flatter than a pancake (Prey); for faking emotions and contemplative atmosphere, while aping Kubrick, Malick and Villeneuve (Ad Astra); for appearing like an overlong commercial that aims for transgression and pretends to be the next Beyond the Black Rainbow (Perfect); for poorly remaking / remixing acclaimed classics although nobody asked for it (Rabid / MetropolisRemix); for lacking any sense of humor, trolling the hell out of the viewer and thinking its eclectic hyper-style is hypnotizing (In Fabric); for unengaging story that seems to go on for 35 years instead of 3 and a half hours, and uninvolving characters played by de-aged actors who still move and grimace like old men that they are (The Irishman), etc.

1. 100 Dinge (Florian David Fitz, 2018)
2. Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
3. Anna (Luc Besson, 2019)
4. Artik (Tom Botchii Skowronski, 2019)
5. Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019)
6. Capharnaüm (Nadine Labaki, 2018)
7. City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes (Kenji Kodama, 2019)
8. Climax (Gaspar Noé, 2018)
9. Darlin’ (Pollyanna McIntosh, 2019)
10. El día que resistía (Alessia Chiesa, 2018)
11. Gangbyeon Hotel (Sang-soo Hong, 2018)
12. Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina, 2019)
13. Hotel Artemis (Drew Pearce, 2018)
14. In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)
15. In the Tall Grass (Vincenzo Natali, 2019)
16. Limbo (Mark Young, 2019)
17. MetropolisRemix (Garrett Guyunn & Andrew John Holt, 2019)
18. Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)
19. Nightmare Cinema (Alejandro Brugués, Joe Dante, Mick Garris, Ryûhei Kitamura & David Slade, 2018)
20. Occidental (Neïl Beloufa, 2017)
21. Perfect (Eddie Alcazar, 2018)
22. Piercing (Nicolas Pesce, 2018)
23. Prey (Franck Khalfoun, 2019)
24. Rabid (The Soska Sisters, 2019)
25. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
26. The Rookies (Alan Yuen, 2019)
27. Tinta Bruta (Filipe Matzembacher & Marcio Reolon, 2018)
28. Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
29. Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy, 2019)
30. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Stacie Passon, 2018)

A dishonorable mention goes to Synonymes (Nadav Lapid, 2019) which I dropped approx. 35 minutes into it.

Still shot from In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018)

Minotaur's Secret

At the Labyrinth’s entrance, there is a dead silence. A small tree which grows out of a lost camera is known as The Sound Devourer, but not a soul can tell the origin of its seed. Some say that it is only a figment of the Poet’s imagination, but others swear its leaves will heal sadness, if they don’t turn to dust right after you pick them. 

Inside the Labyrinth, a dangerous creature may live. Many heroes have fallen trying to put an end to its existence, though their ghosts look like those of the suicide victims, blue-eyed and silver-skinned. The beast is immortal, and it feeds on the fairy tales presented to it by the northern winds... or so the story goes. And it doesn’t like to be referred to as ‘it’, because its persona has two horns and a long tail reflected in the mirror.

Through the hallways of the endless maze, no word is ever uttered, yet their walls bleed with hieroglyphs that only HE understands. Sometimes, when his thoughts swirl around as if in a vortex, even he finds it hard to read the pictograms. His vision becomes blurry and a strong headache causes the appearance of another interdimensional portal. Despite numerous visitors from various worlds, he still hasn’t encountered anyone capable of breaking the curse for good...

I Lost My Body (Jérémy Clapin, 2019)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

Jérémy Clapin's eccentric feature debut marks another great addition to the rich catalogue of French animated films intended for mature audience. Mostly told in flashbacks, from the perspective of a severed (and sentient) hand which could be a distant cousin to Thing from The Addams Family franchise, it brings the story of both physical and emotional loss which comes full circle from macabre to melancholic, somewhat subverting the viewer's expectations as it approaches the deliberately open ending.

I Lost My Body (originally, J'ai perdu mon corps) is based on the novel Happy Hand by Guillaume Laurant (of Amelie and The City of the Lost Children fame) who also co-wrote the adapted screenplay - a simultaneously bizarre and poignant meditation on fate, grief, love, and coming in terms with oneself, while taking matters into your hands... or at least one hand. At the beginning, we are introduced to what appears to be a murder or accident, with only a fly as a witness. A black and white sequence takes us several years into the past which shows a kid trying to catch another fly (turned into a visual leitmotif and plot device), following his intellectual father's instructions. Cut back to the present, a dismembered hand escapes the laboratory refrigerator and embarks on a long journey through the Parisian gutters, subways and ducts, keeping a low profile and fending off pigeons, rats and dogs on its way to reconnect with its owner, Naoufel.

Through the recent and remote memories of this 'beast with five fingers', we learn of Naoufel's predicament as a lowly pizza delivery boy, and his stalkerish romance with a Gen-Z librarian, Gabrielle. The time is the mid-1990's and our protagonist's audio cassette recorder - a childhood present from his parents - plays an important role in the economically constructed narrative. Not a single moment is wasted during less than 80 minutes of the film's running time, and not a single emotion is faked or overstated, thanks to the finely tuned performances from the entire cast, especially the newcomer Hakim Faris, and Victoire Du Bois who has collaborated with Guy Maddin (The Forbidden Room) and Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name). A slice-of-life drama which sees Naoufel evolving from a crestfallen introvert to a daring risk-taker is tightly interwoven with the hand's surreal adventure (a dream?) packed with a handful (no pun intended) of wonderfully orchestrated action set pieces. Clapin employs a stylish, if not consistently seamless combination of traditional and computer animation, with its palette of desaturated colors and Dan Levy's moody, eclectic score co-establishing the autumnal atmosphere of longing for the brighter future...

Holy Sand (Miroslav Antić, 1968)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼(☼) out of 10☼

It is only recently I learned that the prominent Serbian poet Miroslav 'Mika' Antić (1932 – 1986) directed two features which had the misfortune of being brushed under the communist carpet just like many of the Yugoslav Black Wave offerings. His debut Holy Sand (originally, Sveti pesak) - for me, the most precious blast from the past of 2019 - was not officially banned, but it never received regular theatrical distribution.

Told in a lyrical tone, the story revolves around a former political brigade commissar, Aleksandar Vinski (Čedomir Mihajlović, as worn-out as his character requires of him), who returns from the Goli Otok labor camp, only to realize he has been ostracized not only by the society, but by his comrades as well. Neither alive nor dead, he roams the sullen demimonde in the state of pseudo-existence, pushed further into despair by meaningless encounters with other lost souls.

Without any 'warning', his sparse, fragmented narrative jumps back and forth in time, establishing a disorienting atmosphere which is deepened by deliberate discordance between the image and the sound. A perfect example thereof is a brilliant cross-cutting of Aleksandar and a mysterious, mentally challenged girl frolicking around some (WWII?) ruins, and his fellow prisoner having a sexual intercourse with a flirty woman whom the protagonist previously picked up at a bar. Occasionally, the dialogue is completely muted or replaced by the incongruent noises, adding another layer of confusion and simultaneously, putting the viewer in Aleksandar's shoes or rather, head.

What's most impressive about Holy Sand is its black and white cinematography by Petar Latinović. Initially almost expressionist / noirish in its use of shadows, it takes a sharp turn into naturalistic domain, with a few scenes near the end appearing as if they were influenced by the surrealist cinema. The film's formal 'trickery' is (oddly) complemented by unaffected performances from its mostly non-professional cast, and even by a few technical downsides...

The film is available on Delta Video's official YouTube channel, but if you're not fluent in Serbian, I'm afraid that you will have to embark on a bootleg hunt...

Forbidden Without Exception (Dejan Klincov, 1990-1999)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

Balancing on a tightrope stretched between political video art and personal experimental cinema (closer to the former point), Dejan Klincov employs dizzying / anarchical stop-frame montage of old photos and postcards, newspaper and magazine cut-outs, documents and found footage, sketches, drawings and paintings to challenge the notion of national identity, blur the lines which separate ostensibly opposed ideologies and reflect on the turbulent Yugoslavian past. The impressive number of images ranging from the depictions of WWII atrocities to Tito-iconoclasm to Makavejev references to fading memories to bridges that separate and residential complexes that alienate converge into a deliberately messy and slightly overlong, yet uncompromising piece of ‘handicapped’ animation which celebrates artistic liberties in the face of an increasingly dehumanizing society.

Zan (Shin'ya Tsukamoto, 2018)

☼☼☼☼☼☼(☼) out of 10☼

Not bad, but neither great, the latest offering from the father of the cult-favorite Tetsuo: The Iron Man is part period drama filled with tropey and sketchy characters, part formal exercise in raw, shaky camera aesthetics and animesque violence, and all an uncompromising, if somewhat clunky deconstruction of the samurai genre that almost appears like Seven Samurai in reverse, interwoven with bizarre interludes. Although the frenzied editing, contrived emotions, fill-in-the-blanks narrative and the mystery surrounding rōnin protagonists do have some charm attached to them, the film's flat lighting often takes away from the beauty of rural locations and thick forests where the increasingly violent action is set. Its greatest selling point is most definitely a gloomy, pulsating score which is the late Chu Ishikawa's swan song. If Zan had been a firsttimer's experiment, its flaws probably wouldn't have felt so jarring... Nevertheless, one viewing won't hurt.

Kinoskop Afterword

The inaugural (read: shoestring-budget) edition of Kinoskop - the 1st festival of analog experimental cinema and audio-visual performance on the Balkans - concluded on Sunday evening, and went pretty well (for a baptism of fire), notwithstanding some unexpected technical hiccups for which the curators, Marko Milićević and yours truly, sincerely apologize. Our profound respect goes to the audience members who were standing during the first day of screenings, because 60+ chairs didn't suffice, and our heartfelt gratitude is sent to all friendly and enthusiastic people involved in making this ambitious dream come true, from the members of the jury, Nina Lazarević, Nevena Popović and Marko Žunić, to the personnel of art space Kvaka 22 who hosted the event, to the great team of musicians and photographers who participated in the 5th anniversary celebration of Live Soundtrack, and the exhibition of analog photos and collages EndFrame(s). The visitors had the opportunity of seeing some pieces of my artwork like never before - as giant projections on the gallery wall, and I have to admit than even I was caught by surprise!

Picked amongst 220 offerings which met our Call for Entries requirements, more than 50 films were shown in seven selections of the main program and four acts of Live Soundtrack. One particular ciné-thingamajig was bestowed with loud ovations, which is why we decided to have another award in addition to the Grand Prix, Best Original Soundtrack and Audience Favorites (to be announced very soon!). Judging by the post-festival commentary, best-received were the alchemical experiments and sci-fi deconstructions, although the subtleties of micro-poetics, non-human explorations and acts of found-footage sabotage, as well as the diversity of documentaries also garnered positive reactions. The highlight of the festival was the aforementioned Live Soundtrack which opened with metaphysical musings of a hyper-cosmic expanded cinema trance Elementary Particles / Where Do We Come From? from the minds of Aleksandar Lazar and Marko Milićević. This hypnotizing, brilliantly conceived multi-channel experience was followed by the powerful post-industrial performance from Tearpalm - Marko Dabetić's one-man project - whose crescendos must've reached the stars along with Emmanuel Piton's Exposed and Müge Yıldız's A Trip to the Moon. Telemach Wiesinger's Wings to Hear was given the dark, moody and, in a way, post-apocalyptic sonic treatment by Dobrivoje Milijanović and Vladimir Riznić of their fresh collaboration Falling Elevator Music, and the last, but most definitely not the least was the masterful improvisation on analog synthesizer by our guest from Brazil Marcelo Armani (under the moniker of Elefante Branco). Giving each film from the medley of political and personal cinema a new aural identity, ranging from edgy (Window Shopping by Michael Woods) to ethereal (Camelia Mirescu's Telluric Beats of Veil), he succeeded in creating a rhythmically compact oneness - a minimalist, contemplative soundscape...