THE PANDEMIC STREAMING WORLD: Oscilloscope, Kino Lorber, Music Box Films

[Johann]

What a thread Chris!!

Huzzah and thank you.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Johan.

[Chris Knipp]

This by te prolific South Korean auteur was in the Main Slate of the 2016 NYFF, but I didn't cover it then. I will watch it now on virtual cinemas and add it to Filmleaf's 2016 Festival Coverage section.
HONG SANG-SOO: YOURSELF AND YOURS 당신자신과 당신의 것 (2016)


LEE YOO-YOUNG AND KIM JU-HYUK IN YOURSELF AND YOURS

[NYTimes, Gabe Cohn, June 5, 2020.]
Watch on virtual cinemas.. Alcohol and love infuse Yourself and Yours, a new movie from the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. It kicks off with a breakup: Young-soo (Kim Ju-hyuk) tells Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young), his girlfriend, to quit drinking. She quits him instead. The plot that follows involves mystery and despondency. “Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The New York Times. He named the film a Critic’s Pick. "There are a lot of scenes done in a single shot, usually static, but when there’s a zoom (his preferred camera flourish), it’s unfussy and direct," Kenny wrote. "He puts you in tune with the world of his sad-sack characters immediately, and their rhythm becomes the rhythm of the story." The film was released overseas in 2016, but is just now having its stateside debut; it’s available this weekend from many virtual cinemas, including Film at Lincoln Center's.

[Chris Knipp]

VAST OF NIGHT (Patterson) - is a brilliant opening and blah follow up, but the opening is a calling card for great things to come from this young director and if you love great direction, don't miss it.

Maybe after getting a reality check from reading Mike D'Angelo's review of VAST OF NIGHT (on Amazon since May 15) I should say "almost one of the year's best," because he is right - Patterson is a brilliant new director, but the last two thirds don't have the follow-through to make this a great sci-fi movie. D'Angelo's subscription-only Patreon reviews that I get now come on Letterbox'd later, but I don't know when. I'll just quote a little of it. He gives it a 63/100. That's pretty decent for him, but not a "year's best" score. Remember, this is free if you have Amazon and I still highly recommend that you watch it. Also when it comes, Carl Hunter's 2018 British SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER with Bill Nighy, digital this Friday June 12 and on demand in July.

63/100

For half an hour or so, the most exciting indie debut I'd seen in years. Every Amazon Prime subscriber should at the very least watch the film's first act,. . . [but] The narrative... is really weak. Kind of astonishingly weak
But please, someone, give this man a good idea. That's all he needs. I can't even remember the last time I saw a first-time American director create such a credible, distinct, arrestingly specific milieu from the ground up. (Actually, I can: Robert Eggers. But he had the advantage of going way more archaic. . .
) Despite knowing in advance that The Vast of Night is science fiction, and then being assaulted by a bad Rod Serling impression in the first 30 seconds, I kept thinking of films like Diner and Metropolitan and Dazed and Confused, along with the early Jeffrey/Sandy scenes in Blue Velvet. Unlike those filmmakers, Patterson isn't mining his own past (or a warped vision of his past, in Lynch's case), which arguably makes his wizardry even more impressive. Everything's so insanely detailed, with so much evident creative thought expended on each seemingly irrelevant aspect (most of which are in fact irrelevant, but gloriously so—the purloined trombone!) of each shot and interaction, that the cumulative effect exposes just how thinly imagined most contemporary indies are. Wouldn't have worked without actors as strong as Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz, both of whom handle Hawks-speed badinage with insanely casual ease even as they navigate Patterson's magnificently complex traveling shots. . .
[He has some quibbles, but the main, big one is simply that the material once the "story" "kicks in" is too thin, and in this he is right.]
--Mike D'Angelo's review. )

[Chris Knipp]

WASP NETWORK (OLIVIER ASSAYAS)



Filmleaf review

Olivier Assayas is another top director getting his new feature film first released, now exclusively due to the pandemic, on Netflix. It's the political thriller Wasp Network, which is focused on a Cuban spy ring that operated in Miami against the anti-Cuban forces there. Fidel considered this activity only right and understandable to the Americans, and was not the only one who questioned the long sentences the US courts gave the "Cuban Five."

[Report from Toronto 2019:] "Assayas [showed] a tweaked version of the movie — which is adapted from Fernando Morais’s book, The Last Soldiers of the Cold War — at the New York Film Festival in October [2019]," said Deadline On June 19, 2020, the movie, presumably that tweaked version, was released to a larger public on Netflix. Last week Netflix released Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods., which I've reviewed on Filmleaf HERE.

These are the two significant new Netflix June movie releases. (You'll find all their releases for June here.) There are some other good recent (but not new) releases up this month on Netflix, such as Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird. Watch for a review of Wasp Network.

The interesting thing about Wasp Network is -- well, read my review.

[Chris Knipp]

JEANNE FINLEY: SEAHORSE (2019)



Director Jeanie Finlay charts a transgender man's path to parenthood after he decides to carry his child himself. The pregnancy prompts an unexpected and profound reckoning with conventions of masculinity, self-definition and biology.

AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL AND ON-DEMAND FROM JUNE 16, 2020. WATCH THE FILM HERE

This sounded like something that would, frankly, make me very uneasy. But Freddy McConnell, the person in question, who narrates, is an engaging young British man who gained my confidence quite quickly.

Freddy is 30 and yearns to start a family but this poses unique challenges. He is a gay transgender man. He is unprepared for the physical and emotional realities of pregnancy. To him what feels pragmatic, to others feels confrontational; this was not part of his plan. Against a backdrop of hostility towards trans people, he is forced to confront his naivety. Made with unprecedented access & collaboration, Seahorse is an audacious and lyrical story about family, gender and love. FILMLEAF REVIEW HERE.

Rent or buy using Vimeo - in all countries except USA, Canada and Denmark.
USA - Virtual Cinema exclusively at Museum of Moving Image, NYC. RENT HERE
USA - Prebuy on Itunes / Apple TV (available June 16)
Canada - Available on CBC Gem June 21.

[Chris Knipp]

CRISTINA COSTANTINI, KAREEEM TABSCH: MUCHO, MUCHO AMORE

Once the world's most famous astrologer, Walter Mercado seeks to resurrect a forgotten legacy. Raised in the sugar cane fields of Puerto Rico, Walter grew up to become a gender non-conforming, cape-wearing psychic whose televised horoscopes reached 120 million Latinx viewers a day for 30 years before he mysteriously disappeared.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the star and co-creator of Hamilton, regards him as almost a god. Walter Mercado, whose story and celebration this is, is a legend in the Spanish-speaking world and far beyond. For fifty years he was the asexual, feminine, big-haired, magnificently caped shaman on Spaish language TV (though in the film he speaks good English) whose horoscopes could fill an hour-long show, or be the first thing people wanted to hear and see every morning. The most famous astrologer in the world. The documentary comes to Netflix July 8, 2020. In it, you find out Walter seemed to bring a bird back to life with his breath as a young boy in Porto Rico and became a local healer visited by many. Then he studied dance and acting and did ballet and drama (we see how handsome he looked), settling into telenovela - until he did a horoscope and the producer said: More of that, Walter! and it became all he did. His effeminate grandiosity - big hair, big rings, fabulous, weighty and costly costumes - is reminiscent of Liberace. But he represents something warmer, more directly, intimately appealing to the audience. With its extensive interviews, many voices, magnificent inter-titles, and coverage of a grand celebratory apotheosis and love-fest at the opening of a Walter Mercado museum in Miami three months before his passing at the age of 87, this is a fitting portrait. The cape outfits and their richness and variety are worthy of the fashion collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walter Mercado leaves a warm impression of someone who brought magic to people.