Last (x) movies you saw

(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

el ángel exterminador (luis buñuel). sister movie to the discreet charm, both illuminate each other.

nazarin (luis buñuel). priest dude tries his best to do his job to textbook definition lengths in the super hostile world of early 1900's mexico. there are echoes of jesus and maybe diary of a country priest. this movie is flawless and profoundly moving.

ensayo de un crimen (luis buñuel). black comedy this time, the murderous adventures of a somewhat effeminate upper class dude. highly recommended.

la batalla de chile (patricio guzmán). more than four hours of documentary covering the activities of the US-sponsored fascist chilean right during the marxist government of salvador allende in chile. the director takes side with the workers, the images are there, you have to make a decision. I have to admit that this film is deeply problematic but judging by gut reaction alone and the way it makes the blood almost literally boil it is an instant classic.

wolves what do you find 'deeply problematic' about Battle for Chile?

So far this week (youtube):

Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1994) - a bible for all of those fond of static cinema. Has a great last 9 min sequence. The BFI have got to stop dicking around and screen some kind of season for these type of films...needs concentration that I just can't summon from looking at it via an youtube screen.

And Life Goes (Kiarostami, 1991) - The second of his Koker trilogy. Gonna watch the third one this weekend.

At the cinema:

Peter Nestler films at the Goethe, and it was the best evening I've had at the cinema this year. I would say Being Gypsy stands alongside Night and Fog as an achievement. An account of gypsies who were captured and put into concentration camps and were still not treated with the remotest shred of humanity after their release. Moves seamslessly toward a serious indictment of Germany and her institutions.

Its full of integrity: not single tear was filmed.

Also really enjoyed Bernard Eisenschitz's intro to the evening, really shaped it.

this is for you xyzzzz__. watched Tommy Boy last night with the kids.

http://highdefdiscnews.com/screenshots/tommy_boy_3.png

people very possessive of their Tommy Boy screen shots apparently. Tommy Boy very big in France, I believe.

http://todaymade.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/tommyboy-719742-560x344.jpg

So is Jerry Lewis I believe ;)

If I watch Tommy Boy you will have to watch Out 1 for me. Its about 10 hours, plz check the Jacques Rivette thread.

Anderson Tapes, the (1971, Lumet) - surveillance fascination before watergate. bleep-bloop score by quincy jones and ancient recording tech have both aged very well. A
Boyz N the Hood (1991, Singleton) - has many weaknesses (dad supposed to be the perfect role model, but he doesn't seem that great to me; first appearance of racist cop comes out of nowhere; angela bassett's acting curiously terrible) but it pulls it together in the end. B+
You Only Live Twice (1967, Gilbert) - plot makes no sense; DVD featurette confirms that the Bond movies were by-the-numbers assembly line jobs at this point. D

xyzzzz__: I have no doubt that his account of the story is correct but if you take most of the images just for what they are (general disorder, lack of food, unions protesting, student riots, ladies helping miners, etc) you can just as easily interpret it the way the right view the events, that unidad popular was breaking the country apart. there are these little parts here and there that are not explained and would make you question the veracity of the narration if you had the interest ... you could also go the other extreme and claim that allende almost betrayed his people by not giving them full control over factories, by refusing to close the parliament, you can see the disconnect between the bureaucracy and the workers at the final stages, it's the most tragic thing.

huge night and fog fan, will prob check being gypsy.

I saw Beasts Of the Southern Wild yesterday. Beautiful film, not sure how idealised (or the opposite/flip) that poverty was. Never been to the South of the States probably never will now.

Did wonder how that would look as a play having discovered at the credits taht it started off as one. Left me wanting to ask questions about some of the characters but they're too tied up in spoiler.

& I wonder if Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) is going to go on to act in other things she was pretty good. I take it this was a debut for her? I also wondered if anybody in it had been in anything else, it does seem pretty naturalistic.

wolves lacan: really appreciate your explanation.

My interpretation was not that Allende was breaking the country apart - just that its divisions and tensions came to the fore due to his victory. That really came across in the material he collected, such as that amazing debate between the student and the suit on TV.

As to whether Allende could have taken control of the factories is interesting because I think he gives his reasons - via one of his party in that debate (among a bunch of miners) basically talking about the risk of an embargo by other countries and the markets, or the need for coorperation with the international community. Read a good article on him a while back and what the international community feared the most was of a radical government such as Allende's that was actuall willing to work within a parliamentary system and stand for elections - and the ultimate fear that it would be returned again and again.

But again that isn't exactly explored in the doc, it doesn't try to make those analysis -- but it has those 'lessons learnt' in the 3rd part, which I remember in equal parts exhilarating and depressing.

The Magnificent Ambersons
Bicycle Thieves (this had the worst subtitling ever. only about 50% was subtitled, and often the subtitles would flash up for a milisecond. i lost concentration half way through)

Cocksucker Blues (1972, Robert Frank) 3/5
Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax) 3/5
Genghis Blues (1999, Roko Belic) 4/5
The Live Wire (1925, Charles Hines) 3/5
Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977, Robert Aldrich) 4/5
The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) 5/5
Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker) 4/5
Abraham Lincoln (1930, D.W. Griffith) 3/5
Wake in Fright (1971, Ted Kotcheff) 4/5
The Limey (1999, Steven Soderbergh) 4/5
Room 237 (2012, Rodney Ascher) 3/5
Le Grand Amour (1969, Pierre Etaix) 4/5