Last (x) movies you saw

Thanks- I used to be an absolute maniac for commentaries as a teenager (because there's fucking nobody to talk to about weird movies in Mobile, AL) and kind of stopped doing it somewhere along the line. Starting a Letterboxd account and forcing myself to make a little note of every movie I watch has gotten me back into the habit, even if they don't always pay off (the Blow-Up commentary by a supposed Antonioni scholar is kind of superficial and contains quite a few stupid errors and outright speculations, for example). That said:

think my next one will be Theatre of Blood w/ a League of Gentleman commentary track. Their previous Blood On Satan's Claw track is good fun

HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO TRACK THESE DOWN. I'm not a big fan of his non-League TV writing but I could listen to Gatiss talk about horror for hours, and knowing that I can makes me positively giddy.

Venus in Fur (Polanski, 2013) - Seigner and Amalric were excellent. The play within a novel, all encased in a film sorta ran out of gas about halfway through once it was done with Polanski's hang-ups of art as a thing vs art in the service of society omg-I-can't-finish-this-fkn-sentence-already!!! Thinking back you do sympathise with commie destroy aesthetics pov when "is this play about child abuse?" question comes up. I mean that's worth 10% of the ticket alone!

Biggest problem is S&M. You just lose all interest in this 'fascinating' bit of human behaviour. Schroeder's Maitresse made that point with its up in the air ending iirc. This one was content to follow on its logic.

*Inferno (Argento)
Duffy (Parrish) - I kind of love this movie. Jameses Mason, Fox and Coburn all at the top of their game, gorgeous cinematography (by Peeping Tom's Otto Heller) of the Spanish coast and Tangier, and a vaguely David Axelrod-ish soundtrack. Just wonderful, stupid fun.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava)
The Night Stalker (Moxey)- I love the Kolchak TV series and finally got around to watching the TV movies. This is honestly less entertaining than the best episodes of the show, but still solid entertainment.
*Psycho (Hitchcock)- Midnight screening! Off a DCP instead of real film, but still! It's always interesting to watch this one with a group- literally no one doesn't know the twist, but people still jump at the shower scene and the climactic cellar reveal (Arbogast's death less so), and it's just so perfectly (and I would say intentionally) constructed to work as black comedy upon rewatching. Especially interesting (to me anyway) is the change in the nature of the audience's complicity in Norman's coverup of Marion's murder
*Phenomena (Argento)- I like Opera (and I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised by The Stendahl Syndrome, which has its defenders) but for me this is Argento's last truly great film. And for all the Morricone and Goblin collaborations in his filmography (Simonetti solo and Daemonia not so much), this is the single best music cue in his entire body of work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZ__uy7T_Y

"Jimmys Hall" was enjoyable but a bit disappointing. An uneasy mix of broad humour and socialist debate. Dialogue is a bit stilted at times and a jazz band in 1930s rural Ireland? get tae fuck. Jim Norton is excellent as the parish priest and gets all the best lines. 6/10

Zazie dans le métro (Malle, 1960)
Close-up (Kiarostami, 1990)
Sweetie (Campion, 1989)
A Boring Afternoon (Passer, 1964)
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962)
Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
Marat/Sade (Brook, 1967)
Tokyo Twilight (Ozu, 1957)

Marat/Sade (Brook, 1967)

How was that? Weiss' Aesthetics of Resistance is the most exciting discovery I've made this year.

I loved it, one of my favorites of that last batch. (Cléo was my surprise favorite.) Being a play about putting on a play removed a lot of necessary baggage that a filmmaker has to deal with when adapting stage to screen -- no need to recreate a courtroom or Golden Pond or whatever. The single minimal set in the asylum really put the focus on the text and the cast, and energy just rippled off it and them. Brook's direction helped, lunging around the stage and occasionally looking on from behind the audience, through the bars of the cell. Powerful shit -- made me want to go out and smash the system. (Fortunately a bowl of ice cream and a nap took care of that.)

vamp (richard wenk, 1986)

Need to rewatch that one. What'd you think?

loved the argento-esque atmosphere and the synthy john carpentery soundtrack — and of course grace is amazing

Thanks for your post William - I'll have to chase it.

Seen most of your batch and I'd agree that Varda would come out on top. That's easily in the top 5 French films ever.

The Night Strangler (Curtis)- much, much better than The Night Stalker. A more interesting location (low-budget pictures shot in Vegas always, always look like ass in my experience), a better monster (and one that can talk, avoiding the first movie and subsequent series' "RARH I'M A MONSTER" problem), and, thank god, only one drawn-out fistfight/"our bullets are useless" episode with the cops this time around

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava) (with Tim Lucas commentary)- Lucas's Bava commentaries so far are a bit dry and tend more toward biographical info and production notes than in-depth analysis of the film (especially disappointing when a film has been as influential across an entire genre as this one), but this one makes me want to track down the American version cut by AIP, The Evil Eye. The differences are apparently much more extreme than with the two versions of Maschera del Demonio/Black Sunday, with The Evil Eye being more of the Hitchcock/thriller spoof suggested by "The Girl Who Knew Too Much."

Trailer War- good as far as these things go (42nd Street Forever and so on). And a few of the trailers did their job and made me want to track down the full thing (Partners with Ryan O'Neal and John Hurt, Thunder Cops, Who Saw Her Die- already on my list of giallos to watch, but the moody Morricone-scored trailer bumped it up a few spots, Voyage of the Rock Aliens)

"loved the argento-esque atmosphere and the synthy john carpentery soundtrack"
Awesome. Watching this as soon as I can, then... I was under the impression that it was a campy trifle, probably more from the title than anything else.

oh, it's extremely campy but i wouldn't call it a trifle. the parts that are supposed to be funny are actually funny rather than cringe-inducing, and it's creepy when it wants to be.

and gedde watanabe is horrible

When wasn't he?

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava) (with Tim Lucas commentary)- Lucas's Bava commentaries so far are a bit dry and tend more toward biographical info and production notes than in-depth analysis of the film (especially disappointing when a film has been as influential across an entire genre as this one)

I agree that Lucas is a bit on the dull side, but boy does he know his stuff when it comes to this kind of genre material. Personally, I prefer his 'facts and figures' style of commentary track to the shot-by-shot analysis stuff, which I mostly find a bit redundant - I can see it myself, dummy.

BTW, the LOG commentary tracks I mentioned above are really just four old mates having a laugh together while they watch a movie - there's not much 'analysis' or even production history type stuff, though their love for the films in question is obvious and when they stop larking abt their own experiences as writers/performers etc leads them to make some interesting comments - on the Theatre of Blood commentary there's good stuff about the pathos that Price brings to the lead role, and the way that the film is quite ambiguous abt the actor-murderer's talent, or lack of it.

One of them - Gatiss, I think - also tells a v. funny Laurence Olivier anecdote.

Personally, I prefer his 'facts and figures' style of commentary track to the shot-by-shot analysis stuff, which I mostly find a bit redundant - I can see it myself, dummy.
I can appreciate it, but yeah, the more deep reading/film studies type commentary is hard to do without it feeling really obvious.

BTW, the LOG commentary tracks I mentioned above are really just four old mates having a laugh together while they watch a movie
That sounds great, honestly. Really, the worst thing that a commentary track can be is dull, and tangible enthusiasm for the film almost always wins out over being "educational" or whatever.

My personal rule is to bail on a commentary the second anyone starts talking about the weather on the day of a shoot.

Unless the weather was scary and threatening the filming surely?

Ward, you said you only watch the commentary after you've seen the film before but does anyone watch a film first time with commentary?

I do that sometimes

Which films? Films you expect to be lousy that have good people talking over them?

Usually bad films, but sometimes I'll do it for a classic. It doesn't have to be a particularly interesting speaker. For a lot of films I'm more interested in the process than the result, I guess.

Conspiracy. (crap)
Non-Stop (crap)

Cold in July is a lovely homage to the great bad action suspense movies of the late 80's that's mostly salvaged by decent scripting and great acting

In the last month I watched a bunch of dumb movies aimed at the kids.

Thor: The Dark World (2013, Alan Taylor)
Snatch. (2000, Richie)
Escape from L.A. (1996, Carpenter)
Escape from New York (1981, Carpenter)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014, Singer)
Wolverine, the (2013, Mangold)
Fantastic Voyage (1966, Richard Fleischer)
X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2006, Ratner)

DoFP is worth it. The other superhero movies aren't.

All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955)
Breaking News (To, 2004)
La Collectionuse (Rohmer, 1967)
Last Year At Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
Deep Water (Osmond and Rothwell, 2006)
La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)
Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957)

The best of these was Harakiri. Amazing storytelling and probably the best samurai film I've seen.

The miike remake is... pretty okay. prob worth the trouble. understandably not quite as good.

Autopsy (Crispino)- the latest viewing in MIMSYTHON '14. Sadly, she's not given much of a character here, and the hints of mental illness early on (I was recommended this movie by, IIRC, Mondo Digital, who described it as part of a "Mimsy Farmer goes crazy" trilogy with Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Perfume of the Lady in Black) are really badly handled, again in contrast to Perfume. Her character's instability is really just an excuse for a thoroughly underwhelming freak-out sequence in the movie's opening scene. Also speaking of opening scenes, this may be the fastest opening-title-to-boobs time I have ever seen.

The Devils (Russell)- HOLY SHIT MIND=BLOWN
I've seen maybe a third (probably less) of his feature filmography at this point but I feel like I may not be too far off thinking of this as THE Kenneth Russell movie. Almost every one of his pet themes and stylistic tics is in place, but so well balanced and so cumulatively effective that even the campiest indulgences or anachronisms don't feel out of place. And the BFI DVD is gorgeous! It's easily the best-looking Russell film I've seen- Derek Jarman deserves a lot of the credit, but there's some subtle use of (I think) gel lighting in the scenes set in Grandier's church to suggest stained glass windows out of frame that's just beautiful. I had to look up the cinematographer, David Watkin, after seeing this- he won an Oscar for shooting Out of Africa, and did Chariots of Fire as well, but also a string of Richard Lester's early, good movies (not Petulia, obviously, that's Roeg's baby), Mike Nichols' Catch-22, Russell's The Boy Friend, Marat/Sade (mentioned above by WilliamC), the opening sequence of Goldfinger, the infamously horrifying Return to Oz, so much cool stuff.

The Horse's Mouth (Neame)- I quite liked this (I'll watch and love Guinness in anything), but it feels minor compared to the Ealing comedies- the grasping for SIGNIFICANCE! (and that cringeworthy final line) doesn't really work.

yeah, the devils is amazing and prob the key ken russell flick. tough watch tho.

Absolutely. It was genuinely horrifying in places, which isn't something I really was expecting from Russell, even with the film's reputation for being extreme/transgressive/whatever.

Is the excluded Christ scene on any video site? I've still never seen that part. Huge bummer that they didn't even include that as an extra, in this day and age. Were they expecting protests?

I've still got a fair amount of Russell to see (probably Music Lovers, Louse Of Usher and Mahler next) but Lisztomania is easily my favourite. There aren't enough films like that.
Loved Crimes Of Passion. So weird, but I could have done without the Psycho references. Love that line "I never forget a face I've sat on".

I believe that scene is officially MIA

2001: a space odyssey (kubrick, 1968) 10/10
prometheus (scott, 2012) 7/10
the outlaw josey wales (eastwood, 1976) 6/10
under the skin (glazer, 2013) 8/10

hey I just watched 2001 for the first time the other night too. love it!

"I believe that scene is officially MIA"
Not anymore (though it's unlikely we'll get to see it either on home video or theatrically for a long time, and if WB don't take the proper steps to archive the materials who knows what'll happen). At this point I think the only material well and truly gone for good are the snippets that were cut before submission to the BBFC.

"Is the excluded Christ scene on any video site? I've still never seen that part. Huge bummer that they didn't even include that as an extra, in this day and age. Were they expecting protests?"
I haven't watched it yet, but it's my understanding that the "Rape of Christ" scene is included in the Hell on Earth documentary, on disc 2 of the BFI DVD. Unfortunately Warner Bros. forced the BFI and Mark Kermode to cut the other infamous missing scene (Vanessa Redgrave getting her bone on) to almost nothing, but bits of it are present, and Kermode supposedly filled in the missing time with additional interview material. Warner have been weirdly censorious about this movie for decades- they haven't allowed a single legitimate US DVD release, pulled it (in its heavily cut American version, even) from the iTunes store two days after uploading it and unceremoniously replaced it after almost a year of ignoring questions, refused to license the cut footage (which was rediscovered in 2004) for the purposes of restoring the film (and have placed strict sanctions on public exhibition of the rough 2004 recut), and in a total dick move, specifically refused to allow the BFI to release an HD version, which is why a 2011 release is DVD-only despite having access to a high-quality print.

No, they had to cut the ChristRape scene from the disc Hell on Earth as well. However the original cut of that doc has been on youtube (in 6 parts) for several years. There is also an easily findable American bootleg of a fan reconstruction of the "director's cut" with most of the excised footage present and accounted for, alongside several extras including the uncut Hell on Earth.

But back to the Rape of Christ--imho opinion, after such a buildup it's kind of silly. One of my friends is a major Russell aficionado, and he told me that Russell once claimed it was merely a "gimme sequence", never intended for public consumption, but placed in the submission cut of the film so censors would demand its removal instead of other more important sequences.

I should add that the link to the doc is VERY NSFW.

Spring (1971, Hanoun) 7/10
Tom at the Farm (2013, Dolan) 5/10
A Woman of Rumor (1954, Mizoguchi) 7/10
Tales of the Taira Clan (1955, Mizoguchi) 6/10
Women of the Night (1948, 7/10)
The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944, Wyler) 8/10
(The Battle of) San Pietro (1945, Huston) 8/10

Re:Devils. That is all really weird. Maybe somebody powerful is holding a serious grudge. I heard an old vhs version has some of the censored scenes but I don't know if it's true.
I think I'll watch the documentary later. I think silliness is one of the directors greatest strengths. I'm looking forward to seeing what could be sillier than using a crocodile in a sword fight.

I've seen Dance Of Seven Veils on YouTube but that is not being allowed official release either. It's pretty good though. Isn't Salome's Last Dance in some sort of legal limbo too?

Is there any other big directors who are this censored today?

is is it really so very weird that a big company like warner bros is reluctant to distribute something known as 'the rape of christ sequence'?

the only legit uk vhs edition of the devils was the more heavily cut american version; the bfi dvd is the slightly more complete uk 'x' certificate version. neither of course has the rape of christ sequence.

they have nothing to gain by it. The Devils is not a drop in their grand conglomerate ocean.

I guess I don't follow closely which films the main studios put out but I've whenever I hear about a major film which is shocking people, I (maybe wrongly) assume a major studio put it out. I guess I should start paying more attention to what studios put out any shocking New film.

The only uncut version of Crimes Of Passion is the Swedish DVD called China Blue, which I bought a few years ago. I think the bit where the main character rapes a cop with his own baton still upsets censors.

I saw CoP in a theater in '85 (it didn't last long) and yeah I remember reading about that missing scene.

I watched the documentary. None of the scenes were sillier than the crocodile thing.
That guy with the long blonde hair and glasses always reminds me of Simon Amstell, that made me think that character was even funnier than he would have been.

A Kitten For Hitler was supposed to be Russell's argument to justify censorship in extreme cases but I couldn't find what was supposed to be offensive about it. A dwarf plays a young boy but somehow I don't think that was supposed to be the offensive part.

Lars and the Real Girl (6.5)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (ordeal)
American Gigolo (6.5)
The Ten Commandments (8.0)
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (7.0)
The Word Is Out (7.5)
Children of Men (6.5)
Garden State (6.5)
Entrapment (6.0)
Angel Eyes (6.0)

Completely detached from Children of Men (first time). Sorry. The first and the last three all had their moments. Sorry again.

Dear Phone
and
Water Wrackets (Greenaway)- Greenaway shot a Tolkien-inspired fantasy film! Kind of! What a weird little exercise.

*Tenebre (Argento)- Wow. This is where a thorough chronological rewatch of Argento (more or less; my Suspiria and Opera DVDs are unreachable, and for a while I thought I'd lost my Tenebre disc and skipped to Phenomena instead) pays off. I enjoyed this the first time I saw it, but that was during a period of watching his films in more or less random order based on what was in print in the US and easily obtained cheap; seeing it again while better-acquainted with Argento's career and Bava's gialli makes it a much richer experience. I won't go too far into it to avoid spoilers, but it was interesting to note the move from a young, artistically involved protagonist (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red; Cat o' Nine Tails is something of an outlier, with those two traits split into two characters) to an older one, the relationship between a book critic and a writer (mirroring Argento's own change of career), and what I'm really fascinated by, the avoidance and, I think, deliberate invocation of the the-killer-is-a-woman twist, which has been a feature of the genre since the very beginning and which Argento has indulged in more than a few times. And maybe I'm reading too much into the participation of Eva Robin's, but this is definitely post-Dressed to Kill, and viewing it with that in mind has me thinking of it in terms of the odious and even more shopworn "crazy killer trans person" trope. There's more straightforward fun too, of course; I have to mention the famous over-the-house crane shot (complete with a gag where Goblin's career-best main title theme suddenly becomes diegetic music) and some unintentionally (?) camp dialogue ("She didn't know that you, ____, are COMPLETELY MAD!").

Oh! And another Bird With Crystal Plumage connection that I forgot to mention- I'm pretty sure the opening scene at JFK is meant to evoke the art-gallery opening of Bird, and the killer is ultimately dispatched in the same way (and with the same kind of object) the hero of Bird narrowly avoids being killed during that film's conclusion.

Tenebre was recently my first, and thus far only, Argento, and yeah, it rocks.

Who is Eva Robins, though, and how does it relate to Dressed to Kill (as enjoyable a film as Tenebre if I can separate myself from the transphobia, which I can tolerate on the grounds that De Palma's work involves a wholesale rejection of "good taste" to begin with).

Eva Robin's (her preferred spelling/punctuation, apparently) is an out trans actress who plays the part of the mysterious girl in the killer's flashbacks, which are utterly loaded with (the popular conception of) gender confusion and ambiguity, and the ludicrously fetish-y choking with a red stiletto heel. The more I think about it, the more I think this may have been a response to Dressed to Kill, with the use of a straight razor (which the detective remarks is an unusual and distinctive weapon quite early on)- maybe spurred by De Palma arguably ripping off Bird's elevator/straight razor murder scene in his film?

Interesting! Thanks!

Obviously need to see The Bird with the Crystal Plumage now.