Last (x) movies you saw

A Star Is Born 5/5 - cannot believe I never saw this movie til now. Beautiful and so sad.

'37 or '54? James Mason is great and Judy brings the songs, but Gaynor-March is a better film (and also has many of the remake's good lines).

54. James Mason was fantastic.

Can I ask a dumb question? Why did they make the same movie with Judy twice?

oh wait never mind, lol I thought Judy was in both. DUH

Deep End on Film4 last night - good damn that was beautiful. And how many films will have Cat Stevens AND Can on the soundtrack.

El Anachoreta - Spanish man locks himself in the toilet for 11 years (its a huge toilet, so its cheating as far as I'm concerned). Yeah you know why he's there so its not like the film needs to spend time pretending there is something special about it. The girl who tries to tempt him out is v beautiful tho', so that kept me watching.

Kanal - Wadja smash hit, from '57, detailing the Polish resistance's flight to Warsaw's sewers. Really brutal and to the gut.

The Fall of the House of Usher - Jean Epstein's adaptation, just saw this at the NFT with piano/accordion accompainment. Awesome, such a strong visual language (read about some of his theories beforehand and glad I did). French cinema from the 20s through to the end of the war is my 'biggest gap' and I need to correct this.

Decasia by Bill Morrison followed. Bunch of found silent films that have decayed, now strung together. There is no structure to discern and the score totally gave it away: there is an eletric guitar, but its like it wasn't plugged in. Certainly not worth an hour.

she did a radio play version of the first movie around 1940, when she was "the right age"

xp

Decasia is nearly great.

seven samurai - great great great, rewatching it makes 13 assassins seem that much more disappointing in retrospect
the rum diary - a river of shit
pom poko - non-myazaki studio ghibli flick about balls animals, odd & kind of sad
knife in the water - maybe my favorite polanski, certainly one of his best

also:

the wicker man (2006) - huh

Bottle Rocket 3/5: You can tell it's his first film and it'll get better, but all the things I love about WE (composition, pace, character) are half-formed imo.
To Kill A Mockingbird 4/5: Gregory Peck gives a authoritative performance and I think the two main kids are sweet and fun, but it's got serious POV issues, I think. And I don't get the central theme - is it that justice is universal to all, or that bad people can go without justice? I don't get it. I suppose "sometimes we gotta do bad things for the best" is a very cold war opinion.

haha I like julio's takedown of Decasia

dont avntgrd film bros generally poop on decasia

would like his films more if he didn't insist on adding dreary portentous soundtracks to all of them

dont avntgrd film bros generally poop on decasia

yes!

Bill Morrison and Jem Cohen are like the guys avntgrd bros seem to love to hate.

er...I had no idea of Bill Morrison's existence, ws there for the Epstein.

Oh I wasn't saying you were one of these bros

Thx :-)

last night:

watched hamlet 2. great! laffed my bo.

tried to watch i know who killed me. became stupefied about 10 minutes in, so i went to bed.

Babydoll

Rio Grande - I think I'm in love w/ Maureen O'Hara.
Les Maitres Du Temps - RIP Moebius. Lovely film. The ending always chokes me up.

I finally saw Control. It was pretty good.

Footprints On The Moon (dir L Bazzoni, 1975) got watched at film club last night. Was considering a double-bill with Bazzoni's 'The Fifth Cord' but didn't quite manage it.

Footprints is a hell of a visually striking film, amazing architecture and interior design all through, and Florinda Bolkan is perfect for those surrounds. The ending is so brilliantly done.

dont avntgrd film bros generally poop on decasia

yes!

and they are in turn pooped on by me

Laura - this ws awesome, v funny. Tierney is gorgeous, found myself wanting imperfections tho'.
Renoir - La Chienne. Really good, didn't think the tracking shot up and down the building worked, or what that was for. The thing itself ws good.

the makioka sisters
die hard 1-3
la pianiste
carnage
marcy mae bla

cbfed finishing blank city & a dangerous method which means both of those films are empirically worse than die hard 2

how was The Makioka Sisters?

it's sweet, very well observed and mostly quite subdued

the tanizaki novel is v canonical in japan & it's maybe a bit 'dutiful literary adaptation'

That novel and Some Prefer Nettles have been on my list for a while. Starting Sōseki's Kokoro next so I can get up on my Japanese literature.

I had trouble finishing Carnage and it's only 80 mins long

surely u didnt find it boring? it is pretty trying tho, certainly, and a minor film but even minor polanski is worth seeing

It wasn't funny basically, which i thought was the point. And obviously you're meant to find the characters annoying but in that sense i thought it worked a bit too well

they were supposed to prettty unbearable and they were, it had a cumulative effect of utter acrimonious hatefulness that put me in mind of haneke, or some of that new french extremity stuff like seul contre tous

which is quite impressive given he is just filming some 'controversial' 'thinkpiece' theatre rather than a screenplay full of stabbings and dead foetuses and the like

Woman In Black- really nice gothic horror which suffered from showing the woman in black up close, otherwise good.
The Grey - maybe the best horror film I've recently seen, cause I'm terrified of wild dogs, wolves, nature in general.
Babydoll - kind of a sexy movie in a uncomfortable way
Borderland - why are so many movie about mexico shot in that color?

Lars and the Real Girl - loved this
A Separation
Agora - unwittingly channels Life of Brian early on with the crowd scenes and stonings, but the final act redeemed it.
The Woman in Black
You, the Living - seen this many times, but watched via a UK HD channel and it looks so beautiful in hi-def. Wish Andersson's stuff would come out on blu.
Cold Fish - pretty nuts, certainly not what I expected.
The Guard - tone a bit sketchy, but some good stuff. Gleeson awesome as ever.

I loved Decasia. Boo all the rest of you.

</i>The Grey - maybe the best horror film I've recently seen, cause I'm terrified of wild dogs, wolves, nature in general.</i>

i loved this too. its refreshing to see a horror/action movie with a bit of heart for a change.

Project X lol

I caught the last part of The L Shaped Room, wishing I watched it from the beginning.

that's a good movie. i always remember the club scenes, like i wish i could go to somewhere like that, on the end of my block, working musicians working.

Lars and the Real Girl - loved this

gah. saw this a couple days ago. horrid! nothing credible about anything anyone in the movie said or did. perhaps that's okay as it's a fantasy of sorts in that it's set in a world devoid of conflict, difference and ill will. everyone in the film loves everyone else unconditionally, they all share the same basic point of view, and they all work hard to guarantee the best outcome for everyone. this is a potentially wonderful idea, but it's played out in such a simpering, witless, cutie-pie fashion that it killed any interest i had in the concept. and ryan gosling kind of freaks me out. i've seen him in three films now, and he's played the same bizarre, quasi-autistic cipher in each of them. soulful, romantic vacancy in lars and the real girl, pick-up-artist with a heart of gold vacancy in crazy stupid love, and homicidal, romantic vacancy in drive. it's fucking bizarre.

also:

i know who killed me - dumb, incoherent and relentlessly ugly, but strangely fascinating, especially as a portrait of its star

i mean, i know that's the CW on the film, but it's true, especially in the here and now

>i've seen him in three films now, and he's played the same bizarre, quasi-autistic cipher in each of them. soulful, romantic vacancy in lars and the real girl, pick-up-artist with a heart of gold vacancy in crazy stupid love, and homicidal, romantic vacancy in drive. it's fucking bizarre.

I'm not getting a buy in for the (almost) universal bromantic feelings for Ryan G from this post :D

I rly enjoyed Lars and it just felt like a sweet little film to me, didn't get a witless cutie-pie vibe at all but our mileage clearly varies.

Ryan departs from the template in Blue Valentine a bit, but not enormously. When I saw that I clocked his receding hairline in the first reel and figured that the T-1000's weakspot had been identified, but in fact he'd just had it cut to look like he's losing his hair, the bastard.

is carnage the one about parents?

yeah

I really loved Blue Valentine, the space love hotel scene was great, and the ending was sort of devastating, it left me in tears.

Feel like I should watch it again - I might not have been in the right frame of mind for it, but didn't *quite* connect with it emotionally. The love hotel scene does stand out, and it was gorgeously shot throughout - remember the ending being almost excessively pretty to look at, and then the ace credit sequence.

saw blue valentine, completing my journey into the heart of gosling. liked it, though with reservations. took me nearly an hour to get on board, as the opening act felt a bit too "on the nose", as the brits say (overstated prettiness of the cinematography, all that blue, mom arriving just as the daughter's performance ends, gosling's dwell-perfect decoration of the old man's room), but the first date sequence sold me completely. LOVED the song & dance number, the dirty joke, the chemistry. and yeah, the final moments were quite moving - after the disappointingly overstated workplace dustup, anyway.

also, agree w bill that gosling's (finally) playing a more fully-rounded, credibly human character here. nice to see. shades of david arquette or jason lee, but without the jokes. a good performance if not a great one.

the brits don't say "on the nose".

there you go. a number of ILXors seem to use the phrase to mean "too predictably *significant* in construction". being unfamiliar with that usage, i assumed it was a UK thing. if not, then not.

huh: according to the internet, it's an americanism. well i never.