We Are So-So Back (Patreon)

I've been getting back into movies a bit over the past few days. Tomorrow, Jen heads to London for a long weekend, and I expect I'll take the opportunity to hit the Killer Moon-Priscilla-Holdovers trifecta, and maybe I'll even take a peep at Oppenheimer. But I'm setting my expectations low all around. Anyway, here's some stuff I've seen recently.

Mutt (Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, 2023)

"People don't hate you because you're trans. People hate you because you're an asshole." A fairly ordinary statement, but one that takes on greater meaning in context. Writer-director Lungulov-Klotz, in his first feature, knows he cannot just sidestep questions of trans identity and the fact that a lot of society is still trying to invalidate that experience. At the same time, he clearly wants to get past that and look at his lead character as an individual, with a complicated family life and personal history. All in all, he gets the balance right. Feña (Lio Mehiel, in a very impressive screen debut) is a bit of a fuck-up. But that's because he's having to cobble together his own support system after his abusive mother chucks him out into the street.

Mutt is basically a triptych, with Feña grappling with a series of three relationships. By chance he runs into John (Cole Doman), an ex-boyfriend who dated Feña when he still presented as female. While the usual victim narrative would suggest that John couldn't handle Feña's transition, in fact it's heart that was broken. Feña wants another chance with John, now that he's figured his own shit out, but it might be too late. Next Feña meets up with his sister Zoe (MiMi Rider), who felt abandoned with he moved out. And finally, Feña must reconcile with his Chilean father, played by the great Alejandro Goic. The single-day structure is an irritating gimmick, since it allows Lungulov-Klotz to reestablish Feña's most meaningful connections in a kind of interpersonal lightning round. But there's just a lot going for Mutt: a charismatic lead, an attentive approach to the urban hustle of downmarket New York, and above all an ability to depict the texture of daily life as one of struggles large and small, all melding into a fairly recognizable, maybe been conventional portrait of youth.

Stained Night (Andrés Medina, 2023)

When Alex Fields says an avant-garde film is good, I listen. So I took a chance on Stained Night, a film from Light Matter by apparent first-timer Andrés Medina of Argentina. It's an 11-minute work that keeps unfolding in highly unexpected ways. But Medina's primary strategy is working with forms that shift almost imperceptibly from pure abstraction to representation, and back again. A big part of why this works is that Stained Night works digitally to capture light phenomena that are more customarily depicted with celluloid. The film works with the inky, indeterminate blacks of digital video, as well as introducing pixelated glitches, all of which produces a textural instability. By about five minutes in, we are given an actual scene of human engagement -- a concert of some sort -- that is rendered in high-key, throbbing light. While it's hard not to be reminded of Ben Russell's great Black and White Trypps Number Three, Stained Night in quite different in focus. Medina is just as interested in faces in rapture, but will just as quickly subsume them back into blown-out white and red orbs. This is a film to seek out from a filmmaker to watch.

in the fishtank (Linnea Nugent, 2023)

Another Alex recommendation, although I have seen Nugent's previous film and found it promising. I'd say exactly the same thing about in the fishtank. I do not have a clear sense yet of what Nugent is trying to accomplish with her work, and while I find it stimulating in the moment, it tends to elude my grasp in retrospect. But this isn't cause for concern. Nugent is still in the early stages of her career, and the fact that she is a competent maker of uniquely ethereal images is a good sign for things to come. Essentially in the fishtank has four parts in less than three minutes. The first is a hazy black-and-white shot of a tree on the edge of a forest. Then there's a brief pixelated interlude reminiscent of Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. Next, another hazy shot, this time in color, of a horse grazing in a pasture. Finally, the camera moves in jerky, Brakhagesque ways and we see fleeting colors and forms, vaguely suggesting pinhole photography. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that Nugent's approach, and her title, is about the acquisitive miniaturization of the outside world that results from the filming process, and how the camera shapes our experience of the object lensed. But again, I can't really say. Befuddled, but intrigued.