Last (x) movies you saw

Goin Down The Road (1970) 10/10 Perfection. Loved the Satie in the record store scene.

― viacom dios, Monday, March 31, 2014 5:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Watching it a second time this month, I actually tried to see if I could get a clear view of the record cover. Would love to track down a copy of whichever version it was of the Satie piece that was featured in the film. Unfortunately, I couldn't spot it.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"--if that clerk wasn't made for High Fidelity (or at least a job at the original Record Peddler), no one was. HOF record-store-clerk superciliousness.

*Who Is Harry Kellerman... (5.5/10)
*Breaking Away (7.5/10)
Réjeanne Padovani (6.5/10)
*The Hospital (6.0/10)
*The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (8.0/10)
*Bus Riley’s Back in Town (7.0/10)
*Naked City (6.5/10)
*The Final Days (7.0/10)
*Gia (6/10)
*The Weather Underground (8.0/10)

*big-screen + VHS: bound to be the very next craze

Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner

I thought it was pretty interesting, especially in illuminating Andre's Nazi obsession in My Dinner With Andre. Andre's father was a Russian-Jewish businessman who may have collaborated with the Nazis as an agent in France assigned to sabotage the franc. Andre talks about how, when he was a child, people like von Ribbentrop would pop by their house, how he saw lots of older guests at his first wedding wearing their Nazi decorations in full view. He's badly torn up over it.

He also hates Demolition Man with a fiery passion.

Kitch's Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann, 1973-78) (kept it to the avant-garde film thread)

The Past (Asghar Farhadi, 2013) - everything is in equilibrium, no one is right or wrong, wholly sympathetic or not (and just when you think a characer is finally going one way or another this is calculatedly flipped), every bit of key information has its consequences worked through as it passes from one ear to the next, even when the last bit of it is witheld. But by then it doesn't matter. The tragedy is the lives we lead, and we choose to ultimately go on with the blows we receive.

Performance wise I can't remember the last time a child actor had to pull off this much weight of material. Wholly convincing.

Off my usual pace due to Big Ears and baseball season.

The Kid (Chaplin, 1921) - with live accompaniment by Marc Ribot
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo Bros., 2014)
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)
The Night Porter (Cavani, 1974)

seconds per shot, Capt Amer v J Dielman?

ha, probably a 1000:1 ratio, though there are a few longish loving gazes at ScarJo's and C.Evans's kissers.

alas no nipples

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) - 7/10
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (Huston, '72) - 5/10
Mouchette (Bresson, '67) - 8/10
Nymphomaniac vol1 (von Trier, '14) - 7/10
The Apartment (Wilder, '60) - 9/10
Her (Jonze, 2013) - 4/10
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014) - 7/10
Jeune & Jolie (Ozon, 2013) - 2/10
Tremors (Roy Underwood, 1990) - 8/10
The LEGO Movie (Lord, Miller, 2014) - 2/10
Captain America: the Winter Soldier (Russo bros, 2014) - 3/10
The French Connection (Friedkin, '71) - 8/10
Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, Crichton, Deardon, Hamer, 1945) - 7/10
Fargo (Coen bros, 1996) - 8/10

Million Dollar Hands 4/10
A Touch of Sin 8/10
The Life of Oharu 9/10

Her (Jonze, 2013) - 4/10

I dont know if its quite that bad but it could have been so much better

If you gave Snowpiercer and Nymphomaniac 7 then the new 3 Marvel movie must be beyond apology.

The Visitor (1979) - John Houston as a benevolent alien and Franco Nero as a Jesus in a turtleneck. Fun in a way movies aren't fun anymore.
The Swimmer (1968) - 50 year old Burt Lancester swims across the pools of connecticut. Very allegorical.

A Straightforward Boy (Ozu, 1929) - existing fragment
Le Chant du Styrène (Resnais, 1959)
Jubilee (Jarman, 1978) - I confess I turned this off halfway through
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 1960)
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957)

hey, I liked two George Raft movies I hadn't seen before

Shadow Dancer (2012, Marsh) 6/10
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Anderson) 8/10
Enemy (2014, Villeneuve) 7/10
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013, Rivers, Russell) 6/10
Spawn of the North (1938, Hathaway) 7/10
You and Me (1938, Lang) 7/10
*The Woman Next Door (1981, Truffaut) 7/10
*Shanghai Express (1932, Sternberg) 9/10
The Joyless Street (1925, Pabst) 8/10
*Mississippi Mermaid (1969, Truffaut) 6/10
*The Green Room (1978, Truffaut) 8/10
Ilo Ilo (2013, Chen) 5/10
*The Roaring Twenties (1939, Walsh) 8/10
Red Hollywood (1996, Andersen, Burch) 8/10
The Troublemaker (1964, Flicker) 5/10

*rewatched

Ha! Just rewatched "The Woman Next Door" just the other night. Liked it much more this second time around. There's something
lovely about the fatalistic quality of some of Truffaut's last films - bar "Confidentially Yours" which kind of annoys me like few of
his films do.

The best of his late seventies hits.

it's got an anonymity to it though

Fanny Ardant much cuter in "CF" I will add (unnecessarily)? She looks like a human barracuda in "The Woman..."

err.."CY"

Toute Une Nuit (Akermann, 1982) - What this woman does with bodies being lit by street lamps (through curtains and doors) is nothing less than miraculous. Her direction of what, over 50 actors and actresses to convey various stages of grief, longing, the waiting for love that will come one day (but when?!) is another miracle. This film was full of them. Just needed a bigger screen, don't think the ICA one is up to the job but its a minor complaint.

I like the way Woman Next Door bubbles and boils til that scene where Depardieu lashes out at the lawn party.

The Green Room must be my favorite of his last ten years, tho. He said he regretted not casting a "real actor" in the lead, but FT's halting, recessive quality works p well I think.

That's what it lets it down for me.

Depardieu's amor fou freakout reminds me of Gaston Modot's
at the top of Buñuel's "L'age d'Or".

I'm with you Morbs on Truffaut in "The Green Room". Quiet, sad and still creepily obsessive.

From CPHPIX:

Our Sunhi (Hong, 2013)
Free Range (Öunpuu, 2013)
Goltzius and the Pelican Company (Greenaway, 2012)
Jealousy (Garrel, 2013)
Why Don't You Play in Hell (Sono, 2013)
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Porumboiu, 2013)
Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013)
Manuscripts Don't Burn (Rasouluf, 2013)
Éden (Safadi, 2012)
Der Samurai (Kleinert, 2014)
A Touch of Sin (Jia, 2013)
Bastards (Denis, 2013)*
Real (Kurosawa, 2013)
For Those in Peril (Wright, 2013)
Luton (Konstantatos, 2013)
Blind (Vogt, 2014)
Small Homeland (Rosetto, 2013)
The Quite Roar (Hellström, 2013)
Life of Riley (Resnais, 2014)
Story of My Death (Serra, 2013)
History of Fear (Naishtat, 2014)
Casa Grande (Barbosa, 2013)
The Zero Theorem (Gilliam, 2013)
Heli (Escalante, 2013)
Hard to be a God (German, 2014)
Road to Ythaca (Diógenes, Parente, Pretti & Pretti, 2010)
Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013)
Norte, the End of History (Diaz, 2013)
Praia do Futuro (Ainouz, 2014)
The Man of the Crowd (Gomes & Guimarães, 2013)
Moebius (Kim, 2013)
3x3D (Greenaway, Pêra & Godard, 2013)
Like Father, Like Son (Kore-eda, 2013)
Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013)*
Young & Beautiful (Ozon, 2013)
The Congress (Folman, 2013)
Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (Bolognezi, 2013)
Rio Belongs to Us (Pretti, 2013)
Tom at the Farm (Xavier, 2013)

Yup, I saw Stray Dogs twice. It's that good. Best film I've seen since Uncle Boonmee. And I just finished writing about the last ones, so now I've written them all up on my blog: http://centrifugue.blogspot.dk/search/label/PIX14 If anyone is interested.

Also watched a few things afterwards:

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014)
Detour (Ulmer, 1945)
The Intouchables (Nakache & Toledano, 2011)
The Bothersome Man (Lien, 2006)
The Kid with a Bike (Dardenne, 2011)

Grand Budapest Hotel isn't as good as Moonrise Kingdom. Intouchables isn't as bad as everyone says it is. The Bothersome Man is a pretty fun Norwegian satire, a bit like Roy Anderson in places.

wow Fred... that's a lot

Stray Dogs wobbly for me the first time, i will try it again

My job - at another film festival - ended right before, so I had time for just watching films and not doing much else. But there were people going to the cinema from 9:30 to the midnight movie, watching 50-60 films over the two weeks. I don't get how they could do that, 39 was a bit too many for me.

Stray Dogs is just unlike anything I've ever seen, I think. I love late Tsai, stuff like I Don't Want to Sleep Alone and the Walker-shorts with the monk, and the digital, guerilla-like aestethic of Stray Dogs fits these themes amazingly well. The second time I watched it I was also quite surprised at how brisk the film seemed. Once I knew where the film was going, it seemed to repeat itself much less. The red room arrives very early on, which means the blue room isn't far behind, which means the black room-sequence is coming soon. Those last two shots are still taxing, though, but I like them.

Agree with you about Tom At The Farm's psychological incoherence, Frederik, though I liked it a little more than you. Will look out for Stray Dogs.

It just feels very theatrical to me, I guess. Very much like an adaptation. And the filmic qualities are there, but they seem quite superfluous to the story, which remains very much a chamber-piece. Have you seen other Dolan? And if so, is it better? I feel like I shouldn't write him off just yet, though he does sorta annoy me.

If anyone has 25 minutes to spare on some slooooow cinema, the first Walker-short is on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/49339358. There are some very pretty pictures, and a great punch-line! The shorts needs to be collected somewhere, they are quite impressive. I think, from skimming imdb, there might be six of them, which puts the collected runtime to something like 2½ hours. I'd pay to see that.

Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)
Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962)
Land of Milk and Honey (Etaix, 1971)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer, 1949)
Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)

i watched blue ruin -- p deec moral revenge thing; is tense but also nicely grounded in real world logistics etc; end is not entirely ideal but it works; this guy is a good actor, hope he works more -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_Ratray

~3/5

Have you seen other Dolan? And if so, is it better?

No, it was the first one I've seen. I started thinking that with that lack of psychological naturalism, it must be aiming for something else, like it being an allegory. So then I went down that road, but what the allegorical message was eluded me. Then I noticed that brother kept wearing a stars-and-stripes bomber jacket and that Rufus Wainwright "I'm so tired of America" song played over the end credits and I thought: God, please no.

The Hermann-esque score, contriving to have it be taken as a suspense thriller, just didn't come off for me.

But hey, Dolan's 25. God knows I'd have made missteps worse than that if I was a 25-year-old.

The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh,2013)

This is a really powerful doc where Panh a Khmer Rouge survivor talks about his extraordinary life and uses Clay models and old KR propaganda footage to recreate the atrocities. The contrast between his happy childhood and the hellish existence in labour camps is so saddening.

Primary Colors (7/10)
The Best Man (7.5/10)
The Unknown Known (7/10)
The China Syndrome (10/10)
Cleopatra (6.5/10)
Finding Vivian Maier (7.5/10)
The Straight Story (10/10)
Auto Focus (6.5/10)
Slums: Cities of Tomorrow (6.5/10)
Hardcore (6.0/10)

Except for the four or five scenes where George C. Scott fulminates, Hardcore wasn’t bad. Someone should write a piece about the run of late-'70s/early-'80s studio releases that tried to outdo each other in luridness: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, Star 80, probably others.

collected Ladislaw Starewicz shorts (technically brilliant, but aside from The Mascot, hard to get into- they lean a little too hard on cloying sentiment, slapstick or a severely misjudged or at least culturally incompatible idea of cuteness)

Room 237 (I kind of loved this! I like the non-judgmental approach to even the batshit Apollo guy, the mixing together of commentaries and general flow and essay-like structure of the movie, and even the soundtrack- now I know why Death Waltz put it out on vinyl; parts of it are like a mix of Claudio Simonetti, early John Carpenter and Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity)

collected Quay Brothers shorts (finally spent some more time with the "Phantom Museums" DVD set ported over from the BFI's restoration- such an improvement over the old Kino DVD it's like seeing them for the first time again)

The Cremator (I need to see all the Juraj Herz I possibly can now, this was glorious)

Blow-Up

Oh, and the Quay Brothers documentary Through the Weeping Glass, shot not 15 minutes from where I live. It's still weird to see them shooting in digital video (In Absentia was their last shot in 35mm; I have my fingers crossed for Maska, since I don't know how something more like their classic puppet films will turn out in DV) but they make the best of it. There are some wonderful shots of curators' or librarians' hands manipulating some old pop-up/cutaway anatomy books where a third and fourth hand subtly sneaks into the frame, all of them wearing identical red nail polish like in this Guy Bourdin photo.

Tom at the Cabin (Xavier Dolan, 2012) - didn't get much out of it either. You don't care to work but he wants to work in the farm in the first place, and then why he leaves, or why the pretense to it being some prison when it really isn't.

Les Annees 80 (Chantal Akerman, 1983) - a musical like no other -- at first a set of rehearsals gradually cohering into a couple of scenes before shots of Brussels ring out. Want to watch again.

This mini-season of Akerman has been a revelation. You think its the short films and films up to Jeanne Dielman --> The Captive but there's lots to discover in between that, a whole story.

aargh that was garbled - you don't care to work out why he wants to leave/stay in the farm/what bloody for, etc.

Today just a couple of shorts on Youtube to distract myself from studying; both were uploaded by the rightsholders so they should be pretty easy to find:
Jan Lenica's Labirynt, which is beautiful- some heavy influence from Une Semaine de Bonte, and in turn, its DNA is all up in Yellow Submarine.
The Quays' Maska, which I have mixed feelings about. They're challenging themselves with this one, but it results in the most conventional film they've ever made- not some weird fantasy on a literary source, like their Gilgamesh, Schulz, etc films, but a straight adaptation that follows a sequential plot from beginning to end, complete with voiceover. The puppets are still abstracted (the main character has a bald, eyeless doll head and, memorably, breasts that look like the onion domes on a Russian church, and the male characters all have grotesque red and gold faces) but for the first time ever clearly represent human beings (well, and a killer robot) in a real space, and not only do they talk, they walk, something the Quays have been notoriously averse to animating in previous films. But holy shit, the lighting in this film! It's a step above even what they were capable of in In Absentia, only this time it's in the most richly color-saturated thing they've ever shot. A shame the people at Se-Ma-For didn't upload it at anything higher than 480p, because Youtube's compression absolutely butchers large stretches of it.

Captain America: Winter Soldier (Russo Bros, 2013) 6/10
The Double (Ayoade, 2013) 5/10
Calvary (McDonagh, 2013) 7/10
Locke (Knight, 2013) 6/10

Tenebrae (Argento, 1982) 8/10
Tatie Danielle (Chatiliez, 1990) 6/10
The Leopard (Visconti, 1963) 8/10
The Haunting (Wise, 1963) 7/10
Kiss of Death (Hathaway, 1947) 7/10
Rome Open City (Rossellini, 1946) 8/10
Sansho Dayu (Mizogouchi, 1954) 10/10
Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959) 6/10
The Beast (Borowczyk, 1975) 7/10
Motel Hell (Connor, 1980) 5/10

Tenebrae (Argento, 1982) 8/10

I know, right?

Reunion in Vienna (1933, Franklin) 7/10
*Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Coen, Coen) 8/10
Adam & Yves (1974, de Rome) 5/10
*Manhattan Melodrama (1934, Van Dyke) 6/10
Slap the Monster on Page One (1972, Bellocchio) 7/10
Love Is Strange (2014, Sachs) 6/10
Devil in the Flesh (1986, Bellocchio) 5/10
The Eyes, the Mouth (1982, Bellocchio) 6/10
Manakamana (2013, Spray, Velez) 7/10
*An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012, Nance) 8/10
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976, Ross) 7/10
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970, Wilder) 6/10

i need to rewarch llewyn again, i bought it on bluray

Noah (Aronofsky, 2014) - 7/10
The Happiest Days of Your Life (Frank Launder, 1950) - 8/10
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Webb, '2014) - 6/10
Dom Hemingway (Richard Shepard, 2013) - 3/10
Jodorowsky's Dune (Frank Pavich, 2013) - 8/10
The French Connection II (Frankenheimer, 1975) - 6/10
A Night in the Woods (Richard Parry, 2012) - 2/10
Flesh + Blood (Verhoven, 1985) - 7/10
The Wicker Man (Final Cut) (Hardy, 1973) - 9/10
Le Samouraï (Mellville, 1967) - 8/10

Locke (Knight, 2013) - better as a play, but hey Kiarostami has done it so its ok I guess :) The script had to push in a way to make contrived, to say the least so all is left is to go on about how Hardy's performance was really good. It was fine but you know..