I just discovered Jay Birch and am digging the remixes.
Here goes Birch's mix of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."
Sunday, February 7, 2021
Saturday, February 6, 2021
Friday, February 5, 2021
holocene
Zella Day & Weyes Blood deliver pretty harmonies on "Holocene" (not to be confused with the Bon Iver classic).
"Time forgets no one..."
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
jockey
Like Chloé Zhao's remarkable The Rider, Co-Writer / Director Clint Bentley's Jockey is an atypical, unsentimental horse-riding film about the industry and its ramifications on the body. The movie is headed by a quietly sublime turn by character actor Clifton Collins, Jr., with his spot-on twangy accent, his world-weary, weathered face and disposition. His Jackson Silva is an aging jockey whose life is disrupted when he meets a young man, Gabriel, who claims to be his son (Moisés Arias). Gabriel shakes up Jackson's long partnership with horse trainer Ruth (Molly Parker), as Jackson begins to teach Gabriel the ways of jockeying.
The spare plot may sound a bit like a route Clint Eastwood drama--those elements of mending lost familial bonds through sport--but Bentley's portrait is a little more gritty. Despite the rosy glow of sunsets, palm trees and washed-out blue skies (the meticulously-lit cinematography is by Adolpho Veloso) and the gentle score, by Aaron & Bryce Dessner, brimming with bright strings, the film manages to avoid schmaltz. Having had a father who worked as professional jockey, Bentley draws from personal experience. There are scenes of real-life trainers and jockeys. And the dialogue has a close-to-the-grain feel: stumbling and overlapping. Collins Jr. makes the most of his role--we witness how his life's work has incurred a toll on his body--heart, shaking hand, the extremities of cutting weight, and injuries. His naturalism and singular quality boost the film. Also strong are the supporting players. Parker (who was amazing and completely different in Madeline's Madeline) and Collins Jr. have an ease of rapport (a shared cigarette, for example) that relay the long bond of their characters. A sort of centerpiece song in the movie of both Jackson and his relationships, "I'm Moving On" by Dylan Leblanc, is a moving alt-country highlight on the soundtrack. While the film didn't leave a strong, lasting impression on me, it was nevertheless a nice watch, buoyed especially by Collins Jr., an interesting look at the "behind-the-scenes" of horse racing and the unexpected final beat of the poignant ending. ***
-Jeffery Berg
don't give up (i believe in you)
The always reliable LUXXURY drops bright new single "Don't Give Up (I Believe in You)." Optimism is needed!
Monday, February 1, 2021
the pink cloud
Maybe I need some more time, like several years, to go back to The Pink Cloud. In the midst of a global pandemic, the film is a particularly distressing watch. Iuli Gerbase's Brazilian science fiction movie imagines a strand of pink clouds hovering over Earth that kills humans within seconds, keeping them barred indoors. The story centers upon Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a pair who have just met for a saucy night of fun who end up quarantined together in a glassed-in, lovely urban apartment as the threat of the pink cloud drifts outside. Their initial worries are minimal, but their desperation of their own isolation and of their friends and family slowly builds as time passes with no end in sight. We witness the bleak deterioration of Yago's father via web calls. And Giovana helplessly watches a suicide out her complex window; eerily she will later play a game of hangman with another neighbor across the way. Packaged food, including a mysterious pink nutritional juice, and supplies are delivered from the government by drones via "tubes" that etch a sealed-off hole in a window: one of the many searing images throughout Gerbase's movie. The film switches between both Giovana and Yago's perspectives as they circumstantially become closer to one another [a sliding camera montage set to the jaunty "La Vita (Life is Just Life)" by Rowena Jameson, establishes a sense of early domestication] and as their relationship later becomes more splintered and fractured.
As the film is an episodic one, it would be a spoiler to reveal how much time passes within the movie, and the specific ways in which their lives and the lives through their interwebs unravel, but let's just say that you feel the agonizing weight of their existence, especially from the perspective of watching in, albeit less severe, quarantine. Also depressing are some of the actions of people around the world, caught on camera for the news, including a family wishing the pink cloud a "Happy Birthday." I would argue the film is overlong, but perhaps the repetitiveness and feeling of time is the point of this movie as an experience. As with many science fiction films, some of the logistics aren't always explained, the emphasis is more on human response in conjunction with an environmental threat. Adding to the atmosphere and weight is the dim color palate: washed-out, grays with shades of faint rose (the photography is by Bruno Polidoro). The music score by Caio Amon is disarming, "the pink cloud" has its own musical motif: raggedy trills of dissonant woodwinds like the shaggy brass stabs from Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film comes with a preface of "written in 2017" and "shot in 2019," to mitigate its prescience. While it's a difficult movie, Gerbase's vision of this dystopian apartment existence is admirable and appropriately upsetting. ***
-Jeffery Berg
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