Last (x) movies you saw

Cape Fear (Thomson, 1962) A
Skyfall (Mendes, 2012) B+
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden, 2012) C-
The Raven (McTeigue, 2012) B-
Casa Di Me Padre (Piedmont, 2012) C+
This Must Be The Place (Sorrentino, 2012) B
Deep End (Skolimowski, 1970) A-
Night Train to Munich (Reed, 1940) B
Looper (Johnson,2012) B-

Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012) - tense, entertaining, but hollow. 3/5
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959) - Overlong, but solid western. Dean Martin is great, Ricky Nelson awful. 3/5
Ruby Sparks (Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton, 2012) - Really good critique on the manic pixie dream girl trope. Zoe Kazan is superb 4.5/5
Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967) - Brilliantly weird and blackly comic sending-up of the music biz, religion and politics. 4/5
Permissive (Lindsey Shonteff, 1972) - Grim cautionary tale about the downward spiral of a girl who becomes a groupie to a godawful '70s prog-folk band. 2.5/5
Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2012) - Great analog-synth score, set design, and early '80s vibe, but glacially paced and impenetrable. 2.5/5
Blithe Spirit (Lean, 1945) - Rex Harrison's life is one long session of dry martinis, brandy, cigarettes, cigars and coffee. And ghosts. 4/5
Scrooged (Richard Donner, 1988) - Murray's funny, but the film's a messy trifle of cruel humour and schmaltz. 2/5

re Rio Bravo & Scrooged: your words strike at my very heart ;_;

I cherish every rational rating on a Howard Hawks film like the rare gifts they are.

damn, and they call me a h8r.

It's probably because you are a h8r.

not of Ricky Nelson's pillowy lips, I'm not

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2012) - Great analog-synth score, set design, and early '80s vibe, but glacially paced and impenetrable. 2.5/5 4.20/5

its been a classic-american-amoral-movies-from-the-early-to-mid-70s week for me.

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974) great performance by nicholson although it doesnt quite have the All Time Great status i gave on first viewing. forgot how evil the last 15 minutes are.
Badlands (Malick, 1973) the first malick ive seen that i really loved. sheen is a charming scamp of a psycho isnt he.

he shot a football because he considered it excess baggage

haha yes. also: "We had our bad moments like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for the ride while at times I wished he'd fall in the river and drown so I could watch."

The Last Detail is on TV tonight, might watch.

This week:
Le Gai Savor (Godard, 1969) - went all mad for it in the JLG thread. One of my faves from him.
Out 1 (Rivette, 1971) - 2 EPs so far and enjoying loads - continuation of L'Amour Fou and then a branching out into something else. Was actually made for TV but never broadcast, and that's worth thinking about when we have 'settled' for HBO box sets and (lol) are 'proud' not to watch TV.
The Cubans (Varda, 1962) - short film made of photographs (like Marker's La Jetee with even more 'movement') on life a few years after the revolution: talks about art, music, Castro. Witty. (its on youtube)

At the cinema: It Always Rains on Sunday (Hamer, 1947) - classic Ealing about a day in East London - escaped convincts, seedy characters on the make, the entrapment that people feel: the rain on Sunday metaphor works, and the multiple narratives are handled expertly for the most part with a really good final chase. Grim but lots of excellently scripted humour. A thing I'd never seen before: a British noir.

i just refuse to write "nom," ever

― saltwater incursion (Dr Morbius), Monday, November 19, 2012 1:18 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

What about when you want to "nom" on a hot piece of manass.

Wreck-it Ralph and it was putrid.

Louie Bluie (Zwigoff 1985)
A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes 1974)
The Most Dangerous Game (Schoedesack 1932)
Les Diaboliques (Clouzot 1955)
Number Seventeen (Hitchcock 1932)

xpost

Video game cinema: the worst new(ish) microgenre?

Tron, War Games, Spy Kids 3 - the facts aren't with you there.

Argo which I enjoyed and didn't realise was directed by Affleck until the credits.

& cos I was in a bad mood on Wednesday I went to see The Sapphires which has some really nice singing in. Not really sure of it on other levels though, wasn't much chemistry between the romantic leads.
Maybe I should have hung around for another hour and seen THe Master, but I'll probably go to that next week. Possibly End Of Shift too.

xpost when Tron is the best film of the microgenre, you know what you are dealing with

Spy Kids 3 is good?

scott pilgrim!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Last Starfighter

Remember liking WarGames and Last Starfighter as a kid, so ok, though remember being bored by/not finishing Tron when my parents rented it for us. Time to give them all a fresh look, though.

Seriously, however, fuck Scott Pilgrim.

video game movies are all shit because the people making them don't get why video games are fun

also why does something have to be something else first, like every new thing is just a concatenation of references to other things infinitely regressing, &c.

I predict that the next wave of remakes and whatnot will be based around characters from breakfast cereals.

Count Chocula
Summer 2014

made my dreamworks and featuring a Rihanna song.

made by, sorry

i do not own Dreamworks

incisive cultural commentary itt

pithy comments of dubious sincerity itt

I don't get why video games are fun, but I'm pretty sure they are more fun than Tron

(Scott Pilgrim was a B+)

West Side Story (Robbins and Wise, 1961) A-
The House of the Devil (West, 2009) B
The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988) B+
Sleeper (Allen, 1973) B+
Vanya on 42nd Street (Malle, 1994) B
Christine (Carpenter, 1983) C+ (maybe a B-)
Margaret (Lonergan, 2011) A
Hocus Pocus (Ortega, 1993) D-
Fright NIght (Gillespie, 2011) B
Payback (Baichwal, 2012) C-

We'll never get a good western again until a director appears with personal experience of the joys of shooting someone.

GoldenEye = videogame neo-realism.

1984 (radford, 1984)
shadows of forgotten ancestors (paradjanov, 1964)
midnight in paris (allen, 2011)

Arabian Nights (Pasolini 1974). About 40 minutes of it, anyway. Hated it.
Ride with the Devil (Ang Lee 1999)

Compliance -- 3/5
The Red Shoes -- 4.5/5

Need to bug the library here to get that Trilogy of Life set. Really don't want my first Pasolini to have to be Salo.

salo is actually more 0_o i think if you watch the trilogy first.

What did you think of 1984, clouds? I think it's fantastic.

i rate it pretty highly. amazon has it streaming in hd, so the deakins photography looks better than i've ever seen it.

The Master (Anderson, 2012) - dug this
The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986) - awesome opening and ending 10 minutes. the second hour was pretty heavy going tho. still trying to figure out alexander's intentions which is a good thing i think.

Jean-Michel Jarre's Concerts in China 1981 (ridiculous)
Atlas Shrugged Part 1 (very very entertaining, every last second is as inept as the trailer)
Gambling, Gods & LSD (dreamlike three hour long 'documentary' travelogue by Peter Mettler, loosely threaded together on the themes of addiction & enlightenment. if you're going to do a film this free-associative, every shot has to be unbelievable & surprising, or else you simply wake up & lose your patience entirely. I stayed wary for the first 60 minutes waiting for this film to blow it, and then suddenly it just took over -- this film completely works. fantastic collaged soundtrack of O'Rourke + Frith + Fennesz helped. can't wait for his new one.)

Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Bigelow) 2.5/4
The House I Live In (2012, E. Jarecki) 3/4
Looper (2012, Johnson) 3/4
Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story (2012, De Felitta) 3/4
Goodbye First Love (2011, Hansen-Løve) 2.5/4
The Law in These Parts (2011, Alexandrowicz) 3.5/4
The Stones in the Park (1969, Woodhead) 3/4
Searching for Sugar Man (2012, Bendjelloul) 3/4
In Another Country (2012, Hong) 3/4
A Man Vanishes (1967, Imamura) 3/4
Karayuki-san, The Making of a Prostitute (1975, Imamura) 3.5/4
The Master (2012, Anderson) 3/4
Pasolini's Last Words (2012, Crane) 2.5/4

the dark knight rises - reading about it is more fun, 1/10 because the spaceship made me laugh
the white ribbon - kept thinking about the alice miller book from the depression thread, 8/10

I tried watching that Pasolini Arabian nights and didn't get very far. Some of it looked quite good visually but I couldn't really engage, might try it again when I'm more in the mood if I get the chance.

Went to see End Of Watch last night which was pretty enjoyable. A bit bitty, but interestingly done. Guardian review pointed out some implausibilities though I think.
Didn't realise that a supporting character was Ugly Betty until I checked the castlist on IMDB, thought I recognised the actresses name from somewhere though

2012 in theaters:

original release (descending domestic box office b/c reconstructed via boxofficemojo):

The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
Wreck-It Ralph
Argo
Lincoln
Looper
Pitch Perfect
ParaNorman
Moonrise Kingdom
Premium Rush
The Secret World of Arietty
The Master
Seven Psychopaths
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Bernie
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Sleepwalk with Me

in rep:

Tremors
Attack the Block
Repo Man

This weekend I watched:

Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955) 4/5
Eyes Wide Open (Kubrick, 1999) 4/5
Paranoid Park (Van Sant, 2007) 3.5/5

cosmopolis (cronenberg) - just started watching, holy crap, is it all this bad?
holy motors (carax) - mostly great, loses a bit of steam in the final third, could have done without the closing gag
the hole (dante) - skip
red desert (antonioni) - shit yeah
kuroneko (shindo) - nice gothic ghost story from onibaba dude
high and low (kurosawa) - up there with M, kubrick's the killing
beauty and the beast (cocteau) - a favorite