Last (x) movies you saw

I can't wait to introduce my best friend gay couple to Dressed to Kill in the next few weeks.

c0rey, Femme Fatale, and you're good

little shop was hilarious

the b&w Corman one is OK too

rebecca- marvellous
annie hall- i must re-evaluate my stance on allen, this is obviously terrific
looper- ticked the boxes i needed ticked, tyvm

On youtube:

Pretty Dyana (Boris Mitic, 2003) - Bunch of gypsies from Belgrade re-use old Dyana Citroens to collect recyclable junk around town, reflect on Tito and the Balkan conflict, all to a s/track that includes Husker Du (Diane) and Michael Jackson (Lady Diana) (or "one of us").

Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964) - Brutal masterpiece: tight script and THAT voice. The year of (Brit)pop and Peter Watkins!!

Finally Got the News (Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner, 1970) - more details http://icarusfilms.com/new2003/fin.html"">here. Great to watch back-to-back w/Watkins. The agitators maybe miles apart in experience and background but no one talks like this anymore in documentaries.

Also caught 30 mins (the full film is not on youtube) of Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, 1977) - this is a low budget "third world cinema" masterwork. But I wouldn't box it like that, not agree w/Rosenbaum's write-up as something wild, untutored, imagnative and yet really DIY (i.e. creaky home movie you can't stay with). Kind of along the lines of Ajantrik (Ghatak, 1958) and Touki Bouki (Mambety, 1973) in its use of music as a halfway between sensory experience and comedy device. The main protagonist (plyed by Kidlat) has a love of 1st world tech (interested in rocket science) (as the main figure in Ajantrik is into his car and thinks of it as blood-and-flesh) with a desire to get away from the backwardness and yet a scepticism/rudeness toward it to. Unfortunately, that's all I have, for the moment.

Torrent: Bonus for Irene (Helke Sander, 1971). Sander is a bit of a forgotten figure, but along w/the likes of Akerman she developed a language to talk at feminism to moviegoers. The All-Round Reduced Personality is probably her best (not that I've seen it all but it'll be hard to beat, should be shown more alongside Jeanne Dielman), but this is a good short-film of a single mother who is, again, another agitator against the (usually male) oppressor who starts saying NO and demands.

Cinema:

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi, 2011) - as frightening a piece of being in the middle of it as The Battle for Chile but at one point it distances itself away from (in his own eyes) opportunistic Palestinian politicians. The footage is incredible and totally worth your time, but the wider situation appears to be a non-discussion starter.

Perfumed Nightmare is playing at Anthology Film Archives in NYC this weekend, along with other Kidlat Tahimik movies.

gonna go see dinotasia tonight. pray for me

Wake In Fright (relentless)
The Wrong Man ( starts off great then putters out. Fonda terrific as always. That guy could really carry a film)
Autoluminescent ( Rowland S. Howard docu )

ooh I'm going to watch Wake In Fright this weekend, v excited

Hope you're not an animal lover, Veg Girl (overlong kanga hunt scene)

nope DEATH TO ROOS

lol

(sorry)

haha! I had to look away personally. Good film! Enjoy!

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945) - utter cretin Dana Andrews drifts into town and noir-y stuff ensues. Seemed like a run of the mill noir lacking a really fatal femme fatale, but I found some online review that saw all sorts of semi-mystical meanings to it, so maybe it's just me. (3/5)

Theorem aka Teorema (Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1968) - maybe Pasolini's best imo. Terence Stamp's character is really a blank slate (I'd remembered him having more personality from a previous viewing), but I guess that's the idea. I wonder what kind of films Pasolini would have been making by the 1980s if he hadn't died? (5/5)

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011) - subtly disquieting. The same attention to character detail as someone like Haneke, but less use of shock tactics which makes it all the more disturbing. (4/5)

When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960) - almost perfect story about a bar hostess in Tokyo. Japanese films beat British films hands down in the stiff upper lip stakes. (5/5)

Men Behind The Sun (Mou Tun-fei, 1988) - well at least I've seen it now. (2/5? difficult to say...)

Perfumed Nightmare is playing at Anthology Film Archives in NYC this weekend, along with other Kidlat Tahimik movies.

― MrDasher, Friday, 26 October 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Am no new yorker :-(

Also saw about 2/3rds of Tiny Furniture and its genuinely funny. Read a lot of the talk over here and hope the attention she has been getting makes her do even better things.

Awesome viewing Matt: love Teorema (what is the best Pasolini is a hard qn: I like him as a reader of a text whether its by De Sade or Chaucer). Think he would've struggled in the 80s bcz his politics struggled but we can only guess.

Can't wait to see the Naruse someday: Yearning is utterly beautiful.

Elena looks good too.

xyzzzzz, see "the tree-lined street of morning" (or however it's translated) by naruse if you can

28 weeks later, well part of it.
wasn't overly impressed.but I did miss some of it. Which might indicate how captivating I found it since I was merely on th eother side of the room doing other stuff.

Are they going to do a 28 months later about further population depletion?
Think something I missed further explained something I'm just guessing at as regards further plot development.

Thanks clouds -- I'll try and source that recommendation.

dinotasia was SO BAD

gonna see a preview of wreck it ralph on sunday and ashik kerib on monday - http://www.ifccenter.com/films/ashik-kerib/

I saw Wake in Fright this weekend. That kangaroo hunt was pretty tough for me to watch. :(

I didn't get a chance to watch it yet, dammit. I WILL NOT BE SWAYED

notorious- it was shit half an hour in so off it went
tideland- yet we lasted through this, somehow

i'll have better days

Magnolia (great. loved the way the tension built up for the first 2/3s.)
Citizen Kane (2nd time ive seen it. first on a big screen. awes)
2046 (alright)
A Man Escaped (first thoughts were that it was a bit too pristine/staged, but now I like it the more I think about it.)
Skyfall (fun)

Magnolia

Funny that, I just watched his next one Punch-Drunk Love last night. Very satisfying it was too. What do people think of his new one The Master?

watched about 2/3s of Kim yesterday. Lovely stories of the Raj featuring that famous fascist Errol Flynn & a Tibetan master that looked like he came from Medieval England.

THought I recognised the Kim actor, just found out it was Dean Stockwell.
& isn't 1950 pretty late for Flynn? Well apart from him going on making films until he died 9 years later.

THought it would be much earlier but I guess the public school tie & stiff upper lip continued for at least another 20 years. But the Raj had fallen 3 years earlier so wonder if this was supposed to be some kind of reassurance?

watched 'turn me on, dammit!' - is v good, should be mandatory viewing 4 all teens

watched the scorsese 'cape fear' hadnt seen it since i was a kid - surprisingly classic, 4/5

darraghmac: you'd better be talking about the Notorious B.I.G. biopic.

watched the scorsese 'cape fear' hadnt seen it since i was a kid - surprisingly classic, 4/5

― johnny crunch, Wednesday, October 31, 2012 12:09 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is de Niro based on Henry Rollins do you think? Always made that connection on seeing the tattoos

watched silver city. cuz i'm a sayles stan but i never got around to it for some reason. i liked whatshisname. uhhhh lemme look...danny houston! i enjoyed watching him. he should do a t.v. show about a private eye. would watch. remake the rockford files.

yeah danny huston is almost always watchable, even in bad movies

(son of the great john huston & uncle of harrow from boardwalk empire)

Le Trou (Becker, 1960) - a perfectly paced film.
The Woman in the Rumour (Mizoguchi, 1954)
The Intouchables (Nakache, Toledano, 2011) - at least it doesn't laugh at disability, both the leads are watchable and so on...I saw it for a sub-plot of a man attaining culture, which allows him to get through a job interview later...now that was all highly amusing.

your movie lists should come with a monocle and a top hat. they're so fancy. some day i will watch fancy movies again. need to start smoking pot again first.

thoughts on the mizoguchi, xyz? i haven't seen that one yet.

Well Scott you'd need some stiff to get you through Rendez Vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978) - Jeanne Dielman is almost impossible to follow-up; the film itself = (Jacques Rivette + Hollis Frampton)/Emmanuelle. And its ok, in the end.

Poto and Cabengo (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1979) - great doc, incredibly sad. All sorts of bits resonate. The child's seeming refusal to sing the anthem toward the end...

clouds - refrained from commenting because I wanted to see more of his works set in modern day Japan and get to a more overarching view. Really good though, complicates his relationship wrt Geisha, he shows that sympathetic side and yet manages to display disgust for the society that allows it 9so I wouldn't agree there is too much sympathy as ws argued in the Japanese film thread, but I'm still thinking it through). v good on how families stifle their children, that mix of suffocation coupled w/caring, all dramatized in the form of a love triangle.

A few more I want to see, but w/Crucified Lovers it has a strong chance of making it to a top three (shd I be foolish to try and make such a ranking).

had the '50s version of Seventh Voyage of Sinbad on earlier. half watched it. Wasn't that hooked.
Just left thinking that today's effects will someday look that hokey, guess some of them already do

haven't seen princess yang kwei fei or a lot of his 30s stuff yet so i couldn't name a favorite, but pretty much everything i've seen has left me feeling devastated afterwards

That's my feeling w/the vast majority of his works (apart from Five Women around Utamaro, which I just couldn't quite get involved in). The 30s are still a bit of a blank page, and 47 Ronin...not sure if I ever was going to check it out but as all of it is on youtube...

SkyFall - 3/5
The Perks of Being a Wallflower- 3/5
Barbarella -3/5
Grabbers - 2/5
Poltergeist - 3.5/5
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - 4/5
Headhunters - 3.5/5

Mulholland Drive (decent)
Punch-Drunk Love (pretty good. interesting score)
Passion of Joan of Arc (awesome. an amazing emotional display from falconetti)
The Elephant Man (love it. my fave lynch)

October (Eisenstein, 1928) - love this, the massacre of the crowd is as visceral as the Odessa sequence, if not as imagintaevely done but then again what is? The portrayal of the provisional govt as statues is not as hysterical in tone as that of the factory owners in Strike. Has that partic way of looking at people as a full of joy as Glumov's Diary (the party before the Palace takeover), and then the sombre mood of the night before (the early hours, ships passing, the calm threats for evacuation)...and then there is Shostakovich's music.

The Long Farewell (Kira Muratova, 1971) - possibly the Russian new wave classic that never was. Most probably banned not only because of its formalism, but also the sequence where the kid shows disrespect to the functionary, although he shows him up to be an adolescent full-of-nothing.

Bitter Rice (De Santis, 1948) - this film shows the crappy labour conditions of workers in the midst of the rice harvest. Has a proper lustful dance sequence (probably inspired by Gilda I'm guessing), which is probably why it was attacked by the Italian Communist Party, who were lame.

The Human Bullet (Okamoto, 1968) - a soldier's story as WWII draws to a close in Japan's surrender - done in an absurdist style. Made as part of the Art Theatre Guild group and you notice how characters keep running around towns, bombed roads, deserts...in film after film they are confused by events, or the times they are in. That feels right.

Can be hard going though...

The Paperboy (2012) - despite the couple of O_o scenes it's actually not a bad little crime-thriller. Zac Efron spends 90% of the movie in his tighty whiteys, and has buffed up considerably since I last saw him so ...hmmm...wait what were we talking about again? *sigh*

Cinema:

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) - The central performance in this (Quvenzhané Wallis) was one for the ages, the expressions and intensity conjured up made for a tough watch that you couldn't look away from. The rest was of course Malick like as all the reviews put it; and the central relationship made me recall Empire of the Sun in its toughness mixed w/tenderness.

Youtube finds:
Cairo Station (Chahine, 1958) - Neo-realism, Egyptian style!
Los Olvidados (Bunuel, 1950) - Neo-realism w/surrealist touches!!
Rocco and his Brothers (Visconti, 1960) - epic from a former neo-realist master whose roots never left him!!!

Two shorts: Two Men and a Wardrobe (Polanski, 1958)
O Dreamland (Lindsay Anderson, 1953)

wreck-it ralph

jesus, i really am the anti-xyzzzz__ on here.

lol Scott, am thinking of watching Skyfall next week.

The passion of Joan of arc (watched this again. Lovely stuff)
Ran
The kid with a bike
The great ecstasy of woodcarver Steiner
Paths of glory

Should've said a bit more but sooo tired: Cairo Street would actually make a gtr dbl bill with Bitter Rice. Both feature a mix of a sexually charged atmosphere (the first scene in CS are a bunch of females talking about hot it is in Cairo!) mixed w/local politics. The characters in CS were trying to organise a union to campaign for a living wage. How times, etc.! Both also have a great musical and dance number, and characters that commit crimes that bring the population in that contained universe together.

In the end that combo seems to be missing from cinema. Must've been something in the air. Striking that the De Santis was mde in '48 (w/Italian communism at its political peak) and Chanine making CS post-revolution, just after Suez.

Bunuel would make a contrast w/400 Blows at times, but also Germany Year Zero with kids walking around the poverty of the slums (as oposed to a runied Germany but still) and no hope of anything, but beng kids in all their kindness and cruelty nevertheless, some living day-by-day, others just barely escaping shocks, zig-zagging between 'criminality' and trying to make something more 'honest'...lines that barely blur. The statement that "all characters are real and the story is true" was surrealism that worked for me, as much as the (v great, but surrealism as you see it) dream sequence.

Rocco... chronicles the move of a family from the country to the big town to make ends meet. The one note that rang false was Delon's casting as a reluctant, thoughtful boxer. This has a most shocking rape scene (not in its depiction, more in ts timing...I certainly never saw it coming). Visconti has an incredible feel for living conditions of the working poor, is ruthless on the irrationality and human hypocrisy, and moments of compassion.

Devi (Ray, 1960). Never quite got on w/Satyajit Ray (apart from the middle film in the Apu Trilogy) but this is his best where a woman is "mistaken" for a goddess by the father-in-law and then the village. He constructs a tone where believers and un-believers are paralysed as they are driven to their fate once the course has been set that really packs a punch.

I watched Cairo Station last week. Great film!

Wake in Fright (1971): 4/5
Blank City (2010): 4/5
Bright Leaves (2003): 3.5/5
Argo (2012): 3.5/5
Wreck-It Ralph (2012): 2.5/5