writings by craig keller
First Seen of the Year: Charlie Victor Romeo [Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Karlyn Michelson, 2013] Last Seen of the Year: Last Embrace [Jonathan Demme, 1979] === Le 15/8 [Chantal Akerman, 1973] 35 rhums [35 Shots of Rum] [Claire Denis, 2008] O aleijadinho [The Little Cripple] [Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1978] The All Golden: The Polyamorous Soap Opera [Nathaniel Wilson, 2024] All That Money…
These are the books I read in 2024. The list would have been longer, but health-issues were a hindrance for the best part of the year. My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles by Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles edited and with an introduction by Peter Biskind 1983-1985 / 2013 Miracle Methods No. 4: Tricks and Sleights (Second Edition) by Jean Hugard and Fred Braue…
"What's the Showstopper?" "A feature, of course. The other two, calling cards or proof of concept. This is the biggie." — "It's got evyerthing from the previous films?" — "All that and more. I mean, it's different, but the same." — "I get this OJ vibe." — "You're not off. You like the amibiguous shit after all, right?" — "Sure I do." — "So what's to say we doing have IP here. White girl, blames…
"You Know, a Companion Piece. Throw Me the Title." "That would be Whiskey Fist . " — "What's the angle?" — "Late night, house party, more twentysomethings and shit when our lead decides to rawdog this chick from the rear." — "Can we work in some placement?" — "I know a guy at J.D. who's shitting to get eyes on this treatment." — "So 'day after'..." — "'Day after' he's full of regret as the movie…
"So Gimme the Title of The Picture..." "Well it's 'bout a dame can't help it" — "Thinking Roger Avary, eh?" — "Nah, this Horvat character. Gillian Wallace Horvat." — "Sounds a Wiltshire heiress, like a Avery Louisiana." — "Aaron knows her through Eliza." — "Who's the playbill?" — "Kate Lyn Sheil female lead, Anton Yelchin co-pilot." — "What's the big idea?" — "Sheil and Yelchin meet up at one of…
Water Everywhere You couldn't quite call What Doesn't Float [Luca Balser, produced by Pauline Chalamet] an aquatic odyssey through the plunge of the New York City waterworks — there's bongwater on the carpet and it's ruined the collectible Ayoades. What Doesn't Float suggests not so much the end or beginning of a certain era in independent American filmmaking,— Balser seeks neither plaudit nor…
Coming Home Colleen (Addison Timlin) used to be splatter-goth; now she cleans up in modern ash cardigan accented by a silver crucifix. She's come to Asheville to visit her brother (Keith Poulson) who has also arrived home, living in an apartment detached from the main property. The entirety of his head has become disfigured by burns suffered during a tour of duty in the Iraq War and its associated…
Untouchable Tuscarora, Nevada, zero-mile marker, end of the road. Seems like the end of the world based on its isolation alone.Vast horizon murals of lowering clouds; sometimes something near a cyan. At ground level piles of collapsed structure lie strewn like toppled lecture hall skeletons. Schickele's documentary subject, Dennis Parks, was a middle-aged teacher, in fact, a sculptor and master…
Revolutions Can't Be Televised Bushman picks up where David Schickele's Give Me a Riddle left off a few years earlier; it's 1971 now. The self-proclaimed Nigerian "bushman," Paul, has made his way to the States, San Jose environs to be exact. The direct cinema method of Give Me a Riddle has been jettisoned in place of a mixture between the documentary style and a raw narrative (sometimes handheld,…
Sort of a Magic Lantern On the eve of the 1967 Nigerian Civil War, filmmaker David Schickele arrived in a remote village for a multi-year stint courtesy of the Peace Corps's diplomatic relations and cultural exchange program. Give Me a Riddle [1966] employs a direct cinema method that focuses on Schickele's friend Roger Landrum, who is teaching (and frequently meeting with) the work of Chinua…
Show Reel Less regularly than in Queen of Lapa , Collatos and Monnerat's 2022 15-minute Palookaville throws an off-kilter quality inside of its frames, angles that perhaps might better lie (mapped?) elsewhere, damage-signs of Rio. Sounding something like a game level, Palookaville has its charms — sidewalk, Arbor Day offerings, all the things that freedom grants. But a cigarette wedged behind…
Shadow Royalty Luana Muniz was the queen of the brothels in the Lapa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Note the past-tense: a final title card informs the viewer of her passing in 2017. Further research reveals she died from pneumonia, which places her death during or directly after the shooting and editing of Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat's 2019 film. The pair had been given full access…
A Dream Soap Filmmaker Nathaniel Wilson wrote a press blurb for his 2024 film The All Golden: The Polyamorous Soap Operat , which reads: "Our feature film The All Golden is having an exciting, totally independent distribution, only through the enthusiasm of curious programmers, and the unique spaces and institutions where films are discovered (virtual spaces into real ones). Our current run…
1972. 2024. In 1972, state delegations for the recently-formed Congressional Black Caucus decamped to Gary, Indiana, for a convention (hosted by a Gary high school) that sought to unify the disparate factions of the Black Power movement in the wake of the barrage of late-60s assassinations and the push against a Nixon presidency. Nationtime — Gary [1972] serves as a potent example of Greaves'…
Quiet Is Loud, Loud Is Quiet, a Movie That Found Me Too Tired to Untie It I've been away dealing with some recurring health issues that have persisted for about a year. Just before I was hospitalized a few weeks back, I watched Aaron Katz's 2007 Quiet City , the follow-up to the filmmaker's Dance Party, USA . (Both are available on Blu-ray in a nice two-film set from Circle Collective.) I…
– What about the time I chipped my tooth on the bathroom urinal?! What the FUCK is so comical about that?! – It was a back tooth, Hank. ( The Larry Sanders Show ) ===
Fleischer's Last Stand (I Stan for Fleischer) The final film by Richard Fleischer, Million Dollar Mystery [1987], places the emphasis on "mystery." To elaborate: a passage from the film's Wiki page: " Million Dollar Mystery (also known as Money Mania ) is a 1987 American film released with a promotional tie-in for Glad-Lock brand [garbage/rubbish] bags. This was the final feature-length film…
On the Fritz Stuart Heisler's rather tame 1946 Technicolor-musical Irving Berlin revue is well worth seeing — this does come, after all, from the director of the mighty Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman of the following year. No shattered tumblers in Blue Skies though. What Heisler delivers are discrete moments of beauty (see the "Blue Skies" scene alone — a sublime moment) that make for one of the…
This Is Serious Early 'Mumblecore' Dance Party, USA [2006], the debut from Aaron Katz, depicts an early-20-something/late-teens house party, and all the house parties out there, all the Americas within the United States. As such Katz's film's title hits all the spots. (I don't remember this program at all though I had to have seen some of it: " Dance Party USA is an American dance television show…
Barbs Were Traded Cy Endfield grew up in Wilkes-Barre, PA, about twenty minutes from my hometown, Scranton. (Wilkes-Barre: the hometown too of Dan Sallitt.) De Sade , exhibited by Roger Corman's American International Pictures, is the filmmaker's 1969 follow-up to the 1964 epic Zulu . There's a gossamer pattern in the marquis's spacious chamber/theatre-space, a lattice of cobweb evoking draped…
Macro and Micro Show me a cosmos, a deep-focus woods, a young woman standing in relief against a rather ancient garden wall creating by an ivy network running from the edge of one frame to the other. The opening verses of Dante's Inferno carry from a forest path, recited by Jonathan Genet, the main character of Żu ławski 's Cosmos [2015] based on the eponymous 1965 novel by Witold Gombrowicz. As…
Israel and Palestine / No True I started forgetting even in the course of watching — I remembered things related to the situation in Palestine. Forgetting or suppressing? One scene wipes out the territory of the previous scene. Whom do we have to thank? The third Lapid film I've seen thus far returns to the themes of tutorial classrooms and late-teens/early-20s, IDF memories — that is, Synonyms […
IDF Animals (continued but not contained), and the Oracle Wunderkind My favorite of the three Lapid films I've seen to date ( Synonyms might be the best; Ahed's Knee will mark my fourth), 2015's Haganenet sets the mystical alongside the realist — I call this interlock 'realistic' — in its story of sensitive poetry reading and analysis, whereby a kindergartener named Yoav seems to be beamed…
An Early Work by the "Other" Kurosawa Nothing comes close to modern-day security! I had just awakened from a dream in which the drone's POV had taken over my own and within the cheap eye-display the horse could be spotted through the ground-level night-vision sludge bolting inexorably through freeway morass, a gunshot wound through its left front scapula doing nothing to hinder the wild forward…
Forsaken At the start of his career, the French-Israeli filmmaker of the short Why? [ Lama? in Hebrew, 2014], Nadav Lapid, provided us already the biggest question for his protagonist, his audience, the state — for Charles Tesson of the Cahiers du Cinéma . Lapid's mobile chirps with a commission from Tesson to explore the "potency of the image." Super-task to resolve such a question as "Why?" in…