Erkki

A thing happened recently that has me a little worried. I took a comedy writing class on a Sunday and it was kind of intensive and after the class I felt like my brain was really really tired while everything else seemed ok. And now this feeling has been coming back. I can function at work, at least most of the day, and I am working on a video project at my spare time, at the writing stage. So maybe it's too much? But it doesn't feel like too much - I'm only spending a couple of nights in the week on the video project, the rest of the time I'm just watching movies or something. There are also other things in my personal life, like a friend being depressed whom I've been hanging out with more, now. My sister is depressed and she's having some marriage problems while being a new mom. My mom is depressed because of the sister situation, and they don't get a long but she has to babysit a lot after my sister went back to part-time work. And now my grandma fell and is in the hospital for at least a month, and I really don't like his son, my uncle, who has somehow become a supporter of the local far right party. I felt fine just a month ago, but now it feels like all of this is a bit much to deal with, and I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to perform as well at work as I need to, or that I'm going to have to slow things down with my filmmaking hobby, which I have actually wanted to spend more and more time on.

Has anyone seen Ms .45? I don't know, I kind of loved it, even though it's quite dark.

Oh yeah, it stuck with me as well. One of the best films I saw at the local festival a year ago. After seeing it, I also immediately went and got hold of as much of the director’s (Alice Rohrwacher) other movies as I could and enjoyed those as well: The Wonders and Corpo Celeste.

Well, I think I want more reason than just getting it on a big screen in front of a few random people. The local one would have been perfect because people who have heard about the film could have checked it out. Also I kind of would want to see for myself how something I put together would look in a cinema. So I don’t want to send it somewhere far and not be able to travel there myself. Basically I think I’d like to send it to somewhere nearby or where I’d want to travel. I guess I have to dig a bit since the main festival said no - I don’t know that many other festivals. I could send an improved cut again next year, of course.

My film didn't get selected for the local shorts festival. Now I have to figure out if I want to keep working on an improved cut (that I've been tinkering with after some additional feedback) and send to some other festivals or just put it online... I have no idea really what festivals I could send it to where there would be some point to it.

I have resumed my top 250 lists watching recently... Only 22 movies to go on the Letterboxd Top 250 narrative films list. Most of them are between 3 and 14 hours long so I might not get through the remainder quickly, maybe next year. But in the past weeks I saw some good stuff. Aliens (1986, James Cameron) is such a brilliant action film. I had forgotten that I had already seen it and it must be because I saw it as a kid because some images came back to me as memories of nightmares. I think the story actually comes out better in the Director's Cut, which really makes the movie a lot more about motherhood, and maybe I looked at it in a naive way, but it felt quite powerful. The ending is still quite disgustingly good. The images in this film are just so amazing. I want to learn more about what they did for the lighting. I have the Alien to Prometheus box set with some extras so might go through those soon. Just watched A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan). This is my second Kazan movie after On the Waterfront and I liked this a lot more. It made me think of films like Ace in the Hole and Scarface from the way it thrusts you into a story that just keeps escalating until something must give. Ok, every story might be said to do that, but in these three it's made very apparent how the escalation happens around and affects one person/event. I think this film deserves to be more well know than it is and today it might even be thought prophetic. The Fifth Seal (1976, Zoltan Fabri). It is an easy to follow film where some men discuss philosophy and steaks at a semi-underground bar during the war and later their philosophy is put to test. I don't want to spoil too much, but it's a film worth seeing and speaks something about the human condition. The Second Mother (2015, Anna Muylaert) is about a woman, Val, who works as a nanny and housekeeper with a rich São Paulo family. When Val's daughter, whom she hasn't seen for 10 years, comes to town to attempt to get into the university to study architecture, her different outlook causes some friction and Val has to re-evaluate her own attitudes towards life. There are some really powerful moments in it towards the end where I really empathized with the mother. Pixote (1981, Hector Babenco) was not on the Top 250 list, but might as well be. I think it was recently restored and was now on Mubi. It's about a young Brazilian boy who gets in with a bad crowd and has to survive in the brutal youth detention system and the criminal world. He just wants to be a child, but nobody gives him that opportunity.

Was Shirkers a Netflix Original? I remember it seeing in close proximity to Fyre, and enjoying it a lot more https://letterboxd.com/film/shirkers/ I haven't seen most of ther others, currently mostly going through various Top 250 lists etc.

This guy gives out solid filmmaking advice: He shot some great short horror films at home with his wife and when they went viral, he got some offers and became a Hollywood director. I haven't seen his features yet. He made Annabel Creations and Shazam and a feature length version of one of his shorts.

Thanks! Next I want to practice on even shorter formats, especially storytelling, lighting and set design. It will be a while before I dare to tackle a feature, but I hope I will one day. I have an idea forming for a 2-3 minute horror/funny currently. At some point it would definitely be fun to do a Mario Bava homage!

This one has probably been mentioned here before, but I just listened to a couple of episodes of PatrickR's Directors Club podcast and it's quite enjoyable http://www.directorsclubpodcast.com/ I loved the Once Upon A Time in Hollywood discussion (I really didn't like that movie and I think they touched on almost all aspects of why I didn't like it).

Oh damn, I knew I made it too hard, just didn’t want password next to link. Tycho almost has it, but It’s Halladay, not Ha. I was a bit drunk yesterday when posting it, and forgot to mention that our own Ben X really helped a lot in making this movie better by providing feedback in multiple phases of the process. Firstly, the script was improved a lot thanks to several iterations after his feedback, and especially some quite dumb dialogue was avoided. Secondly, when I had the movie cut to around 15 minutes and thought I couldn’t cut anything else, Ben identified many sequences that were superfluous and dragged the energy down instead of providing some additional context. And thus I cut almost a third of the movie and it became a 10 minute movie as I had wanted at first. And thirdly during the sound editing again he really helped to make some things sound more natural or impactful. PS Overall I’m happy enough with the result that I’ll try to send it to some festivals before making it freely available online until October 2020 when the music license expires

I just had the premiere for my short film for the people who helped make it, so now I feel like I could show it to more people. https://filmfreeway.com/ModernLove2019 The password is: the full name of the protagonist of Frances Ha, without spaces, with the last vocal of first name replaced with 3 and the last vocal of last name replaced with 4. Also my cousin designed a poster for it:

I finally saw Rififi (1955) and it's a really good movie, but I'm slightly disappointed because I was expecting a masterpiece. And I have a small doubt that maybe I would have seen it as a masterpiece if I had watched it 2-3 years ago before seeing many other classics... Anyway, it seems somewhat derivative of at least these movies: The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Wages of Fear (1953) and Le Trou (1960). Of course, it came out before Le Trou, but I think the latter executed a similar idea to a big chunk of this film much better. And maybe I'm being unfair to it because I saw it after all of these other films, but it just feels too much of a mishmash of different things and there were some sequences early in the film where I just wasn't able to keep full attention on what exactly was being established.

I rarely see superhero movies, but decided to watch Spider-Verse because of its high placing on Letterboxd that doesn’t seem to drop as quickly as usual for new movies. It’s really well animated, occasionally just brilliant, but I to me the story and the actor’s deliveries felt occasionally too generic or scripted.

Congrats!

Elaine May is a director from way back. I saw Mikey and Nicky a few years ago, don't remember why exactly, but I kind of liked the style, it really draws you into the world of a particular character as if you're there next to them. But as I say that I realize I'm saying it more about The Heardbreak Kid, which I just watched right now. But I remember a similar style being in Mikey and Nicky, even though I don't remember the details of the movie that well. I'm also planning to watch A New Leaf and I already saw from a clip that this one has some great comedic moments with Walter Matthau. May also co-wrote Tootsie and Labyrinth.

(or is it better to say female? I dunno, 'female' seems too clinical) I've recently come to realize that many of favourite films from recent years have women as directors. I thought I'd list some of them just to spread the knowledge that there are more than a few women directing great movies. I also am considering starting to watch films directed by women in a more systemic way. My last systemic watching approach of 1 movie from each country pretty much failed when I got to about 40 countries (some no longer existing) and then it became too much effort. Anyway, here are some directors - I'm not big on biographies so I just know the movies, though. Ana Lily Amirpour First caught my attention with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), which was pretty much my favourite movie for a while and I've seen it 4 or 5 times by now. It's somewhat of a Jim Jarmusch style vampire noir love story in the Persian language. I somehow initially got the impression that it's an Iranian movie, but I think it's just that the director has some Iranian ancestors, the movie is made in the US. The Bad Batch (2016) is a bit weirder beast, talking of cannibals and other outcasts living in a vast prison-like desert area just outside of the territory of the US. Andrea Arnold I think I saw Red Road (2006) first, but my favourite is Fish Tank (2009) about a teenage girl from a poor family, her sister, mother and father figure. American Honey (2016) might be most approachable of her movies, and there's also Wuthering Heights (2011). She seems to have some pretty strong feminist themes going through these movies. Kelly Reichardt Wendy and Lucy (2008) is one of my all time favourite movies, and for me Kelly Reichardt is something like the female Jim Jarmusch. I really loved her recent Certain Women (2016), and I also liked Meek's Cutoff (2010), and with some reservations even Old Joy (2006) and River of Grass (1994). There's one movie of hers that I can't stand, though - Night Moves. Greta Gerwig Ok, I haven't seen it yet, but I fully expect to like Lady Bird (2017) Céline Sciamma Girlhood (2015) is a must see and I also enjoyed Water Lilies (2007) and Tomboy (2011) Jazmin Lopez I think she has made only one feature length film and it is Lions (2012), original title Leones. I don't know where else you could find it except on FestivalScope.com, though. But AFAIK it's free there, but you can only see it once until it is "sold out". Anyway, the movie Lions is very interesting, consisting mostly of long shots of young people moving through a forest and talking. Really good steadicam work here, and the use of long shots made me think of Tarkovsky occasionally. I really hope that Lopez will make more movies. Haifaa Al-Mansour All I can say is that Wadjda (2012) is quite good, a Saudi Arabian feminist movie. Jane Campion There's of course Jane Campion with The Piano (1993), but I haven't seen any of her recent stuff, except the Top of the Lake (TV series, 2013). Kirsten Johnson I've only seen Cameraperson (2016), a documentary composed of other movies she has shot, and it's quite good. Dee Rees Pariah (2011) is a really good movie about a lesbian girl struggling with her identity and sexuality. She has shot a couple of movies since then also, haven't seen any others yet. Lynne Ramsay I have sadly only seen We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), should watch the newer ones. Maren Ade Last but not least, Toni Erdmann (2016) is an amazing movie that everyone must see. For me it is one of the best movies of the century so far and seems to be critically underrated. Also not bad: Everyone Else (2009) I didn't mention some pretty famous ones, and feel welcome to add your favourite women directors...

Yeah, I think I saw someone mention that somewhere. I would rather keep the costs down for now though, unless I feel like I really need one and would rather not work on it myself.

I feel like I should make a trailer, but ... I just finished a year of post-production... I'm kind of ready to not do more of that for a while...

I miss the time when I discovered Mario Bava thanks to Patrick. I'm not sure if I would have decided to make a short movie myself if I had not seen Bava. Well, Mad Max: Fury Road was also maybe a big motivator that pushed me on the path that lead to making a film. Not that I in any way approached Bava with my filmmaking, but it inspired me. I'm posting this because I'm about to watch Hercules in the Haunted World soon, that's one of the main ones I haven't seen yet and just obtained a good quality copy. I miss the time I discovered Bava because it was so exciting to find so many amazing movies that most people have not even heard about - but after the initial excitement there is sadness, that great stuff exists, but people don't generally hear about it. I should also convince more of my friends to watch him... they are generally not horror fans, but most of Bava is not SO horror, IMHO. I have to sneak in Rabid Dogs on a movie night or something... Or why not even Hercules. I have a movie night today but planned to watch The Terror. Also after discovering Bava I haven't found anything else that is comparable and now I'm wondering if I ever will - or could there be another set of 10-20 movies out there that I have never heard about but would love. I hope so.

My film is almost finished! After like a year and a half of phases with different intensity... Originally I hoped it would be just a couple of months of intense work. I am planning to submit it to a festival today or tomorrow. I'm actually not sure if I have to have a finished film when submitting, but just to be safe... I just have to work on the credits a bit and maybe add some footsteps. And then I'll probably discover that I need to spend more time on promoting, preparing for more festivals etc....

Wow! Trailer is really cool, also started listening to the podcast.

Ordered the book! It's going to be a nice gift to someone, although I haven't figured out who yet.

Yeah, by “gross” I actually meant two things - the audiovisual gooey stuff and the tropes. Also the whole arc with the sheriff - from domestic violence user to love interest by persistence and then a martyr

Is it just me or is season 3 way more gross than the previous ones? I still like it though