Last (x) movies you saw

the 4th man (verhoeven)

^ love that movie

(re)watched melancholia last night

young Belmondo was beautiful-ugly, btw, like Laurence Fishburne. Woulda done both of em unhesitatingly.

The Turin Horse 3.5/4
Middle of Nowhere 2.5/4
Death Watch (1980, Tavernier) 2/4
Lincoln 3.5/4
Skyfall 3/4
Flight 1.5/4
Goon 2.5/4
This Must Be the Place 2.5/4
Charlie Is My Darling -- Ireland 1965 (1966/2012, Whitehead, Gochanour) 2.5/4
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP 3/4
How to Survive a Plague 3.5/4

Skyfall is beter than Death Watch?!?!

the little foxes
big bang love

Death Watch disappointed me greatly, like Tavernier's eqiv of Truffaut's F451, only worse.

yup

the hobbit
before sunset
touch of evil

totoro (again, current us translation)
rabbi's cat (better than i had hoped!)
wheel of time (again)

going out to see it's a wonderful life. no, i've never seen it.

Well it sure is a thing

It's a Wonderful Life is fine, underapprec'd for its darkness. It just has become a monument for mostly wrong reasons.

Haven't seen since I was a kid, when I liked it but was really like WTF for this very reason.

the preview makes a case for it as being a sexytime movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJfZaT8ncYk

It's a Wonderful Life is fine, underapprec'd for its darkness.

Can't argue with this, but can't stand the sight of it anymore due to overexposure.

well yeah, I don't play Beatles records anymore either.

I've only seen it a couple of times myself, I quite like it. But I luckily escaped all the overexposure

also've never seen it; i know it's showing @ a college near me soon, might go but idk

thirst
ravenous

The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Rohmer, 1963)
Bulldog Drummond Escapes
Bulldog Drummond's Bride

Rushmore. Pretty cool

turkish delight
black book
the draughtsman's contract
the innocents

Catching up on a few rec films:

The Draughtsman's Contract (Greenaway, 1982) - his trademark to care more about framed shots that are never all that than any actual narrative that was only there so people could give him money in the first instance. w/Michael Nyman's so-so soundtrack (which people can make more claims for because it was 'pop', yes seriously).

Le Quatro Volte (Frammartino, 2010) - seeing these next to one another I think if Greenaway wasn't so boring that's what he might've done. Terrific on fast forward.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010) - r/gd. There is a Haneke-like bourgeois nightmare to this except the people don't appear as cultured in a western European way. Has a last 5 mins that owed a debt to Antonioni in a superficial way that paid off.

Cinema: Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)

love LQV

Totally. Wish I'd seen it at the cinema.

i liked the draughtsman's contract

i wanted to poll these but i didn't have the energy to untangle the formatting into a list:

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/news/all/scott_walker_curzon_on_demand.aspx

clouds - I wish I did, quite liked Pillow Book when I caught it on TV about 10 years ago.

i'm not sure if you would like prospero's books more but it is my favorite of his; sensory overload

a friend pointed out that his films are kind of inhuman which is probably one reason i like them

greenaway is like sci-fi for art history majors

Might give Prospero's Books a go.

They are uninterested in character or motivation, which is ok depending on what you replace them with. The sexual encounters were filmed with a relish at Mrs. Herbert's distress, which I don't think Resnais (whom Greenaway liked) would've indulged in for a sec.

man I haaaaated Prospero's Books

greenaway liked resnais so much he stole his dp!

drowning by numbers
masque of the red death

scarecrow

The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
Persona (Bergman, 1966)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)

shouldve watched andrei rublev too so i couldve got the big 3 from '66.

Die Hard, second time watching -- an action classic
Die Hard 2 -- what a travesty. airplane disaster movie with john mcclane pasted in. some decent set pieces (lol @ ejection seat) but that's it. hideo kojima must love this movie because i was spotting metal gear shit everywhere.
Die Hard With a Vengeance -- that's more like it! they revved up the pace to modern action trash levels -- was this the first major movie at this pace?

Vengeance is my fave in the series and possibly my fave action movie ever after Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Die Hard 2: my dad took me to see it when I was 11 on account of us having watched the original on cable so many times. Already afraid of flying from a childhood non-incident (some time following my first plane ride, I was watching tv when the news of a plane crash came on, to which my seven-year-old's response was "They can crash?!"; that my parents would willingly take me on something that could kill me severed a lot of trust right then and there) this film just made it stick. The plane crash in the film remains one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen in a movie. It's a pretty hostile and threatening film overall, what with the killing of the old man in the church and the revelation of James from Good Times as a villain all on addition to THAT CRASH. I guess I get why lotsa ppl hate it, but it remains a key viewing experience in my life, for better or worse.

I still like Die Harder but it's definitely the worst of the three.

I saw Seven Psychopaths, it was okay.

Life of Pi, the 2D version. It was a preview for an official start today including the 3D version. Visually sumptuous enough in 2D so I think it will be pretty phenomenal in 3D. A lot of the near hallucinogenic stuff at sea will look incredible, as will the underwater stuff.

Not sure exactly how true to the book the film is cos it's been about 5 years since I read it. Can't remember the framing device being the same.
anyway, enjoyed it deeply even though I was somewhat distracted by having my mind on other stuff.

Did wonder if Gerard Depadieu who makes a cameo as the ship's cook was the only known actor in it. Though I'm not familiar with Asian/Indian cinema so could be missing household names without being aware of it.

Just got the Pinky Violence boxed set, so a few of those:

* Criminal Women: Killing Melody
* Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess

And...

* The Passion of Joan of Arc
* The Battle of Algiers
* Third Planet (1991 Russian b-movie Stalker ripoff. Odd.)

Porco Rosso
It's a Wonderful Life was pretty good except for the fucked up sci-fi b-plot at the end. What the hell was that nonsense all about?

Just started "The Story of Film" which is on Netflix; holy shit, that's good! Fourteen more hours to go.

Live Free or Die Hard -- it's an e-bomb! hollywood is still as tech-stupid as they were circa Max@Job 3:14

has anyone seen 'the imposter' the film abt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Barclay

this cunt is really irritating

nope but the david grann article abt him is p.good
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/11/080811fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

soldier of orange
holy motors
irreversible

Watched Crazed Fruit (Nakahira 1956) the other night. Don't fuck with little brothers!

yeah it's a good story but the imposter himself is just unpleasant and evasive and not really interesting, his rationalizations for his behaviour are drearily predictable

not worth watching unless it turns up in a curtailed version on bbc4 some time

Death Proof (Tarantino, 2007) - Enjoyed it a bit more than previously. Music and Kurt Russell are the highlights. 3/5
My Best Friend's Birthday (Tarantino, 1987) - What remains of Quentin's first film. Too much of Tarantino jabbering on, and his foot fetish. 1/5

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (Matthew Akers, 2012) - 3.5/5
Amour (Haneke, 2012) - Moving, but no masterpiece. 3.5/5
Excision (Richard Bates JR , 2012) - The film doesn't really work, but AnnaLynne McCord is terrific. 3/5

The Hobbit (Jackson, 2012) - 3/5
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011) - Surprisingly gripping 4/5
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012) - Poignant as a fading memory 4/5

Slade in Flame (Richard Loncraine, 1975) - Unexpected social realist take on a thinly veiled biopic of the foot-stomping glam-rockers. 3.5/5
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993) - Pretty much the apotheosis and the stylistic end point of Burton's twee gothic obsessions. 4/5
The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996) - Campion's best. Coolly beautiful. 4/5