“How Does Someone Do That?”
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Drop by if you’re in Austin this weekend. The Criterion Mobile Closet will be parked in front of the Paramount Theatre today through Monday, and who knows, you might bump into Richard Linklater. And of course, SXSW—“the springiest of any film festival,” as Alison Willmore calls it in the preview she’s written with Matt Jacobs for Vulture—opens today and runs through March 15.
SXSW is “a little rowdier and more spirited than the likes of Sundance or Cannes,” writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times, and Jay Duplass, who will be bringing his new comedy, The Baltimorons, tells him that “I think the word is fun. The festival is about fun.” Further previews come from Annie Lyons at Letterboxd and the staffs at Hammer to Nail and ScreenAnarchy, but for the ultimate guide to the movies, the music, and the tacos and BBQ, turn to the Austin Chronicle.
This week’s highlights:
- On Falling, Laura Carreira’s first feature, spends a week with Aurora (Joana Santos), a Portuguese migrant working in an Amazon-like warehouse in Scotland. “Carreira is particularly skilled at conjuring both the crushing banality and the otherworldly strangeness of Aurora’s working environment,” writes Rachel Pronger for Sight and Sound, and On Falling is “primarily an exploration of the cost of unfettered consumerism, a chilling exposé disguised as social realist drama.” Introducing her conversation with Carreira—who is also from Portugal and lives in Scotland—Pronger adds that the film is “the first great work of gig economy cinema.”
- When Želimir Žilnik’s Eighty Plus premiered in Berlin last month, MUBI’s Daniel Kasman wrote that “this disarmingly basic yet exceedingly sophisticated film . . . mobilizes a story covering the entire twentieth century of Serbian history.” Thirty years ago, Žilnik conjured what Fedor Tot, writing for Little White Lies, calls “a DIY miracle, made with Betamax tapes borrowed from an Austrian TV news crew (blown up later to 35 mm), and a cast drawn almost entirely from the trans and gay sex workers of the streets of Belgrade in the mid-’90s, as the Yugoslav wars raged on only a few hours from the capital.” Marble Ass (1995) will remind many of John Waters’s “chaotic, DIY early work, but it also harks towards Billy Wilder comedies, the American underground scene of the 1960s, and to Pedro Almodóvar’s ostentatious early works.”
- In the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), David Lynch “delivers an origin story for the figure of Bob, the spiritual manifestation of human evil, the way a child might,” writes Abe Beame for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Bob is “a disembodied head flying out of an atomic mushroom cloud, a moment that represents the birth of a sort of modern evil, but an evil you can easily imagine flying out of a severed head during the Crusades, or Christ’s wrists as he’s nailed to the cross, or the apple Eve is biting into before being ejected from the Garden of Eden. It’s the war of competing human impulses, a conflict that is ancient and incredibly simple.” The term Lynchian “resides somewhere in this idea and how Lynch is able to relate it. Whether happy or sad or scary, it’s the ability to express your very specific impossible interiority, your emotion and feeling and personal history, which lies beyond language, visually, in a way anyone can feel if not easily articulate.”
- Starting today, Netflix is streaming Errol Morris’s CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which is based in part on Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book. “In archival clips,” writes Alissa Wilkinson in the New York Times, Charles Manson’s “former followers, years after being deprogrammed from his influence, talk about his still being in their heads. How does someone do that?” At Crooked Marquee, Jason Bailey finds that Morris is even more interested in O’Neill, “who started investigating the Manson murders for a 1999 thirtieth-anniversary magazine piece and went into a rabbit hole for thirty more years. He blew his deadline, the publication itself went belly-up, he ran out of money, but he just kept digging, because there were all of these things in the story we were told—in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s bestseller Helter Skelter, in the TV movie adaptation of that book, and in countless true crime books and documentaries much like this one—that simply did not add up.”
- Ben Rivers will be at Harvard Film Archive this weekend to discuss two of his films and to introduce Sunday night’s screening of Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1974), which neatly coincides with Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking, an exhibition now on view at Harvard Art Museums through July 27. Bogancloch (2024) is Rivers’s third portrait of Jake Williams, “a generously bearded dreamer living back-to-the-land in the Scottish Highlands,” as Max Goldberg describes him for Film Comment. In a sequence toward the end, Williams prepares himself an outdoor bath. “Then, for the first time in a film otherwise characterized by static compositions,” writes Goldberg, “the camera moves, pulled skyward by some invisible force, as if splitting the difference between Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986) and Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1977) . . . It is, for me, an especially beautiful illustration of the insight that documentary realism needn’t preclude wild flights of fancy.”
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