This video has taken on such a different meaning in the past year. It’s my favorite Kennedy Center honors performance. I hope you all have a bright and warm solstice. Brighter days ahead!
Tempo is a mind-bending collaboration by magician and visual artist Kalle Nio and choreographer Fernando Melo, combining choreography and magic arts, and it’s very cool.
The text is by author and poet Harry Salmenniemi, translated by yours truly.
This close-up footage of a comet is kind of blowing my mind.
The video is constructed from still photographs taken by the Rosetta spacecraft as it orbited and landed on the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2016. I don’t know why I never heard about this at the time. It’s amazing.
Here’s something to do on this day of Economic Blackout instead of buying things from our corporate overlords or clicking their dopamine buttons, zombie-like, while they harvest our precious personalities. Listen to some defiant music.
As long-time visitors to the Chawed Rosin know, my husband and I have a custom of saving tickets to events over the course of each year, and getting them out on New Year’s Day to reminisce about all the fun tickety things we did. This year we mostly went to the movies. It’s taken me until nearly the end of January to get around to it, but here are some of our favorite viewings of 2024.
We went to see Wonka on New Year’s Day, partly because it was the first film shown at the beloved, newly reopened Seattle Cinerama after it was acquired by SIFF Cinema, a cause of great rejoicing in our town. I was skeptical about the film, because Gene Wilder‘s portrayal of Willie Wonka is perfect and needs no revision. But when I saw that it was from the makers of the Paddington films, I wanted to see it. It has much of the charm and pleasing palette of the Paddingtons, and also preserved enough of the weirdness, comical grotesquery, and actual set design of the 1971 classic to fill me with sweet nostalgia, but with nifty new special effects that were used wisely. We liked it.
But the Paddington movies are better than Wonka, and we got a chance to see Paddington 2 in the theater this year after having only watched it at home. The Paddington movies are proof that it is possible to adapt a witty children’s classic for film without destroying it. Absolutely delightful. Hugh Grant is a treasure.
American Fiction is a smart, funny, well-constructed take on class, literary culture, and family life, and it’s filled with wonderful performances. The perfect insertion of gonzo surprises culminates its brilliance.
I grew up watching James Mason on television, and liked him well enough, but his later movie and television work didn’t really give me an idea of why he was so well respected. Watching Odd Man Out, one of his early lead roles, as a fugitive Irish resistance fighter, I finally understood what was so exciting about him. Director Carol Reed‘s sound and imagery are poetic and mesmerizing.
I first heard about Hands on a Hardbody on an episode of This American Lifebroadcast in 1997. The story made such a strong impression on me that when I saw the title on the schedule of upcoming films at SIFF almost 30 years later, I remembered it immediately. It’s a bare-bones movie shot on low-quality video with an inadequate crew, and the story is so gripping you hardly notice. It’s homemade quality, in fact, fits its themes perfectly.
Terrestrial Verses is about the insidious ways power is wielded in business and government, shown through vignettes of commonplace errands such as applying for a job, trying to get a driver’s license, or naming a child. It’s a simple concept that feels like a stage play, and it’s powerfully acted. The film is a criticism of Iranian government and corporate bureaucracy, but the humiliating powerlessness the characters experience is familiar to people the world over.
Flow was an exciting film for me, an animation with its own enchanting visual language that felt new. It combines highly detailed realistic backgrounds with characters who look like rough digital sketches, but also move and behave like real animals. Because the story is about “real” animals, there is no dialogue, and everything that happens seems plausible–until it doesn’t. The magic of it all creeps up on you, and the viewer shares the sense of mystery that the animals experience. Seeing this on an enormous screen was a wonderful experience.
Although this post is about movies we saw at the theater, we watched some films on video that were so great I want to mention them, too. The Father is the only work of art I’ve ever seen that captures something of the terrifying disorientation a person must feel when they suffer from dementia. The trailers make it seem like a touching, traditional family drama, but it’s much more mind-bending and brilliant than that.
Perfect Days, the newest film from Wim Wenders, was one I wanted to see in the theater, but we missed its run, and watched it on Kanopy. A very philosophical movie about peace and routine, with Wenders’ favorite music scattered through it. Added perk–it prompted Rick to learn to play Perfect Day on the guitar, which is a lovely thing to wake up to.
What about you? Did you see any great movies in 2024?
The story of two girls thrown together as the Nazis take over Vienna. Cinematic, suspenseful, and sad. Translated by me. Recommended.
Ingria went to the window to watch for Magda coming home from school. Then she saw someone she recognized: the man from Heldenplatz, the one with the icy stare, walking down their street just below her. He disappeared around a corner, but Ingria could see that he had stopped walking. The sun still cast his strange, elongated shadow over the sidewalk. She waited for the shadow to continue on its way, but it didn’t move. Magda appeared and was about to walk past the long, unnatural shadow, but she stopped and went back to where the man was standing and they formed one misshapen shadow, like a creature with long arms and short arms, long legs and short legs, and two heads. A monster.
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The Chawed Rosin
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