Last (x) movies you saw

scarecrow is junk, h8 when movies treat their blank stock deadbeat characters w/ such undeserved sympathy and reverence

i could see ppl argue that hackman and pacino redeem it from that criticism, but theyd be v wrong, and projecting from their other, better performances

Nuit et Jour (Akerman, 1991) - great screening tonight. Introduced by Olaf Möller, a critic I don't know of but who gave pretty much the best intro a film could have. Funny, sharp, got people to focus on what mattered, didn't spend anytime mechanically giving away the plot, some killer background detail (a proper cinephile), just the right length. Loved his description of catching this film, attending it as the only person in a screening on its one week run in his native Cologne. Touched on the colours (he got a boner over the oranges; I like the light blue coloured pillows a bit more), and I'd add that I loved how Akerman uses colour to point to a crucial change of feeling in Julie's attitude at the very end.

Also possibly interesting to compare this to La Mama et La Putain, which I'm sure Akerman was aware of. There are way more differences than the similarity, which is an inversion of the same plot, i.e. a threesome with the woman in the middle.

Agreed with almost all of what Möller said. Other things that set you on speculation: for the first time I was perhaps made aware of a De Sadean type streak in her. Drama in a confined space, characters are sort of cardboard cutout who spew these quasi-philosophical matter to try to make sense of (in this instance) their in relationship feelings. Her interests in Bausch and her macabre dance sorta works its way through in here.

Great way to end cinema in 2014. May catch Solaris but I've seen that.

The Trip To Italy : (2/10 for the scenery) My God this shit was an unfunny and annoying waste of time. No, haven't seen the first one. Was wishing Coogan and Bryden (or whatever his name is) would drive off one of the many picturesque cliffside roads.
Passion (DePalma) : 7/10. I like that BDP can still do freaky when he wants to/can. He can still do wonders with the crappiest/hammiest acting and some remarkable set pieces.

wonders, huh

If he can keep me watching Rachel McAdams' high school drama class stylee because his mise en scène and editing etc is so badass then - yes- wonders...

*Red Dawn (Milius, 1984)
The Road to Utopia (Walker, 1946)
*Sullivan's Travels (Sturges, 1942)
Pom Poko (Takahata, 1994)
Paris, Texas (Wenders, 1984)
New Tale of Zatoichi (Tanaka, 1963)
A Colt Is My Passport (Nomura, 1967)
Il Sorpasso (Risi, 1962)
Blue Ruin (Saulnier, 2013)

i watched 'adult world' (2013/14? scott coffey) on a whim b/c i like emma roberts and evan peters so much on american horror story and it was surprisingly good -- rich characters and funny, and i say this despite 1). scenes from inside the carrier dome 2). jonathan franzen being name checked & acknowledged by a transvestite & 3). john cusack (not a fan); i give it the j crunch seal of approval, emma roberts is the best actress of anyone under 30 (? at least def 25) 5/5

I liked her in both Lyme Life and Palo Alto--especially the latter.

Settlement (Loznitsa, 2001)
Landscape (Loznitsa, 2003)
Revue (Loznitsa, 2008)
Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975)
Down to Earth (Costa, 1994)
Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Menshov, 1979)
The Hole (Tsai, 1998)*
La Ceremonie (Chabrol, 1995)
Ida (Pavlikowski, 2013)

Shorts:
The Train Stop (Loznitsa, 2000)
Portrait (Loznitsa, 2002)
The Factory (Loznitsa, 2004)
Artel (Loznitsa, 2006)
Blockade (Loznitsa, 2006)
Miracle of St Anthony (Loznitsa, 2012)
Letter (Loznitsa, 2012)*

L'inconnu du lac (Guiraudie, 2013): 9/10
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013): 6/10
Birdman (Iñárritu, 2013): 7/10
Slaying the Badger (Dower, 2014): 8/10
P'tit Quinquin, Pt.1 of 4 (Dumont, 2014): 8/10
Bad Boy Bubby (De Heer, 1993): 6/10
Kaguyahime no monogatari (Takahata, 2013): 9/10

Sils Maria : 8/10
Maps To The Stars : 8/10
P'tit Quinquin : 8/10
Mr. Turner : 7/10 (probably an 8/10 but my experience of viewing it ruined by horrible chatty old couple seated next to me. And the snoring usher behind me once I changed seats. Movie viewing in NYC sucks.)
The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness : 9/10

There was a guy at my Birdman screening who was driving me nuts

These two folks seemed to be out-of-towners from their accents. Can't say where from. But older moviegoers in NYC, bar the occasional loony at Film Forum screenings, tend to be pretty quiet throughout the film. These two... Every time Turner's housekeeper showed up onscreen the husband would guffaw like an idiot. Each time one of the many landscape shots presented itself they would "ooh" and "aah" loudly and "Can you believe the photography?" was repeated maybe 5 times before I got up. The clincher was when Constable appears onscreen, Turner greets him AS CONSTABLE, and the old doofus asks his wife "Is that Sargent? Is that Sargent the painter?"

*Belle de Jour (1967, Bunuel) 9/10
Remember My Name (1978, Rudolph) 7/10
*Images (1972, Altman) 5/10
The Homesman (2014, Jones) 8/10
Bodyguard (1948, Fleischer) 6/10
*The Long Goodbye (1973, Altman) 10/10
*Stranger by the Lake (2013, Guiraudie) 9/10
Still a Brother (1968, Greaves, made for TV) 8/10
Black Angel (1946, Neill) 6/10
Tip Top (2013, Bozon) 6/10
Venus in Fur (2013, Polanski) 7/10
Dear White People (2014, Simien) 6/10

Going to finally get round to torrents I d/l long ago and now have a bit of time to watch.

Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965) - From the standpoint that almost all of Ghatak's films are about the partition of India this can turn the plot that would in any other normal context seem bizarre and improbable into something that makes sense as painful expression.

Rosenbaum (and I'm sure others) have pointed this out before but its worth repeating the guy had an incredible ear for sound and song.

The killing toward the end is an incredibly well made and riskily constructed scene.

Inherent Vice (PTA, 2014) 7/10
Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014) 5/10
The Case of the Grinning Cat (Marker, 2004) 7/10

• Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jireš , 1970)
• I Know Where I'm Going! (Powell & Pressburger, 1945)
• Great Expectations (Lean, 1946)
• The Wreck of the Mary Deare (Anderson, 1959) (A childhood mystery solved -- I saw part of this in the early 70s and some images stuck with me, but I never knew the name of the film. Poor Gary Cooper, he moves and acts like a zombie through this.)
• Hotel Monterey (Akerman, 1972)
• Pygmalion (Asquith/Howard, 1938)
• A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger, 1946)
• Nebraska (Payne, 2013)
• Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Mazursky, 1969)

More torrents...i'm not making it easy on myself this xmas season:

Three Resurrected Drunkards (Nagisa Oshima, 1968) - love the theme song, which gets your very much needed attention but otherwise you need bits of background reading to fill in the gaps. You get they are Korean immigrants trying to escape to Japan (and the Vietnam War) but its all told in such a wacky way. Why are the military uniforms being stolen? Who is the girl trying to help? Why is she naked? (oh wait we don't need to know the answer to that one!) What does register is Japan's contempt for Korea, and if you've seen a few films by Oshima that's all going to slot nicely. I actually like how the political story isn't told as a political story would, it obscures almost all the points its trying to make rendering it virtually without effect into a bored film eating at itself.

The Big Mess (Alexander Kluge, 1971) - this is an SF film based on this baby. Didn't mean to screen these together but there are similarities btw the two films: There is even less of a pretense of plot, also 1x naked woman (oh the 70s!). otoh its a different look, full of colorful intertitles, space and its ships look as if it was made for children's TV, also has scenes filmed in what look like factories and in dumps (the apocalypse comes cheap).

The BFI should've possibly screened this in their SF season.

Yunbogis diary (Oshima, 1966) is a 20 min short/piece of agit that is about the same thing as Three Resurrected Drunks.

The Truck (Duras, 1977)
Numero Deux (Godard, 1975)

Didn't see these back to back or anything but this feels the most 70s French cinema with a capital C dbl bill ever right now.

Too tired to move away from the screen today:

Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio, 2010) - there are some great films that depict fishing communities, or have fishing as an activity (Varda's La Pointe Courte, Benacerraf's Araya). Promising as that is on its own what we are then made to watch is a father-son relationship that wasn't more than sketched out. The film at the end tells you it is about a specific region of Mexico (which one supposes the film wants to help to protect) but you really wouldn't know.

Juliette, or Key of Dreams (Marcel Carne, 1951) - made some great films, all the more disappointing. Its like Carne tried to make this way too 'poetic' with the dream sequences (all too eager for a return at the end). Laughingly short of La Belle et la Bete, which this is clearly going for.

Couple of shorts - one by Chantal Akerman J'ai Faim J'ai froid, always witty and rad, and Thanatopsis by Ed Emshwiller (its on UBU web).

Round it off with the the 1st EP of Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980). Yes the whole gang are here, the music is swingin' and everyone is going to have a good time.

Suspended Vocation (Raul Ruiz, 1978) - first film in a long time where I got, say, 40% of the thing. Maybe less - doesn't impact on whether I liked it. Some things you need to watch in the cinema and this is one of them but hey they won't screen em. Got a couple of others to watch.

Last trip to the cinema in '14 to see:

Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972) (comments on the Solaris thread)

Historic Center (Kaurismäki, Costa, Erice & de Oliveira, 2012)
Lemminge (Haneke, 1979)
Frozen (Lee & Buck, 2013)
Hannibal & Jerry (Wikke & Rasmussen, 1997)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)*
Skyfall (Mendes, 2012)*
Beyond (August, 2012)
Dazed & Confused (Linklater, 1993)
Tabu (Gomes, 2012)
Winter Sleep (Ceylan, 2014)
Two Days, One Night (Dardennes & Dardennes, 2014)

There's a stretch of Christmas family stuff right in the middle of that :)

Hateship Loveship (Liza Johnson, 2013) 4/10
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1989)* 8/10
Jour de fête (Tati, 1949) 9/10

oops, Totoro is 1988.

Ustad Allauddin Khan (Ghatak, 1963) - straight + short portrait of the Indian music guru.

Morgan! (Karel Reisz, 1966) - hilarious comedy about a man obsessed with Marxism and Gorillas. Vanessa Redgrave is great as well, but the best is Morgan's mother: "You know wot you are son? A class traitor" (I can't get the accent sorry)

The Fall (Peter Whitehead, 1969) - quasi-doc of riots (over race, war and art), shouting and violence and assassination in the streets in the late 60s. Features a hot European model, and psychedelic music. Diverting, as I've seen Far from Vietnam. There is one scene where a chicken is brutally killed (it was performance art!) and if it was released today I bet this would cause the most fuss.

Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1989) - this has to be one of the best films of the 80s. Starts off as a woman mourning her husband for the first 30 mins. She cries and wails in the streets, picks fights, resigns from her job. Its in B&W. Then it turns out its a film within a film so it cuts off to colour and a pretend discussion of "the issues" this has raised. No one is interested, they all walk out into the world. And we stay in to walk anarchy on film for another two hours that would make Bunuel proud! The only Russian film to have been banned during perestroika (it actually has lots of scattered detail around Soviet life in the 80s).

It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) 4/10
Pride (Warchus, 2014) 6/10
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2014) 6/10
Inherent Vice (PTA, 2014, rewatch) 7/10
Foxcatcher (Miller, 2014) 3/10

It's a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946) 4/10

Harsh!

First viewing.

It's a baffling movie. The mix of the hysterical, treacly, and cute got on my nerves, and when the fantasy happens it's to my eyes so incongruous as to baffle me: George has been so masochistically good that why on earth should angels look at him as a Job needing a comeuppance?

That's not why Clarence showed up.

Never said it was...?

It's not like the reason isn't repeated

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) 6/10
Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014) 6/10
Tusk (Smith, 2014) 4/10
Detachment (Kaye, 2011) 8/10
Neighbors (Stoller, 2014) 6/10
*Scrooged (Donner, 1988) 6/10
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005) 5/10
*Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012) 8/10

Alfred "Potter" Sotosyn

We Were Strangers (1949, Huston) 6/10
The Babadook (2014, Kent) 6/10
*The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch) 10/10
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Ingster) 5/10
Inherent Vice (2014, P.T. Anderson) 8/10
Nymphomaniac (2013, von Trier) 7/10
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013, Takahata) 9/10
*The Party (1968, Edwards) 6/10
*HealtH (1980, Altman) 5/10
Two Days, One Night (2014, Dardenne, Dardenne) 8/10
*Goodbye to Language (2014, Godard) 8/10
*The Man Who Would Be King (1975, Huston) 9/10
*The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966, Huston) 5/10

Archipelago (Hogg, 2010) 8/10
Exhibition (Hogg, 2013) 8/10
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2014) 7/10
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988) 6/10
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Tashlin, 1957) 6/10
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) 8/10
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene, 1920) 7/10
A Safe Place (Jaglom, 1971) 5/10
Corruption (Hartford-Davis, 1967) 7/10

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 9/10
Dumb and Dumber To (Farrelly Bros, 2014) 4/10

George has been so masochistically good that why on earth should angels look at him as a Job needing a comeuppance?

bad metaphor, Job was also saintly

it's not a comeuppance

Red Rock West. Pretty good, fairly atmospheric. Old fashioned suspense thriller. I'm not sure if I'm imagining there was more Lynch influence than there really was because of the cast.

Saw most of Grand Budapest Hotel and liked it way more than I imagined I would, mostly because of the meticulous visuals.

bad metaphor, Job was also saintly

― poxy fülvous (abanana),

Eh. Good man targeted.

you might say good men need targeting b/c saints are boring though

Since xmas eve:

I Know That Voice
Grand Budapest Hotel
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Paradise: Hope
Gideon's Army
Memphis
We Are the Best!
Horse Feathers
Goodbye to Language
CitizenFour

All of them quite good, a few among the best of the year

Highlights were Straub-Huillet (Pedro Costa worked on Sicilia! and you can see he took...just about everything from them (what gorgeous shots, how can light saturate a frame like this!) and they adapt literature like no one. Too Early, Too Late is a classic in political filmmaking, you could say Cache was Haneke's remake of it.) Duras follows in its austere methods, with a beautiful text - she has to be one of the most distinctive writers for the screen in film history. The self-portrait of Thomas Bernhard is as good of its kind - he is so frank about his methods, takes no prisoners but there is no pose there - committed to film that you could hope to see. The Hart of London begins and stays in a mode that is all of that pure US experimental film like the best of Brakhage/Frampton/Schneemann etc but then breaks into a strange reality. Four hours of Out 1 left me wanting the other 9. Finished this run with Breillat, little nostalgia trip into 90s French film. Love the reveal, same type of story as Before Sunset but for the cynical ones like me.

A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)
The Territory (Ruiz, 1981)
Hypothesis of Stolen Painting (Ruiz, 1979)
Kingdom of Naples (Werner Schoeter, 1979)
Willow Springs (Werner Schoeter, 1973)
The Ister (David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2006)
Genet (Bourseiller, 1981)
Thomas Bernhard, Three Days (Ferry Radax, 1970)
Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971) (4 hr cut)
Too Early Too Late (Straub/Huillet, 1982)
Sicilia! (Straub/Huillet, 1998)
Streghe, Femmes entre elles (Jean Marie-Straub, 2009)*
Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (Straub/Huillet, 1977)*
Agatha et les lectures illimitées (Duras, 1981)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970)
Crossings (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

*short films

Everything Goes Wrong (Suzuki, 1960)
Shadows in Paradise (Kaurismaki, 1986)
49th Parallel (Powell & Pressburger, 1941)
The Spy in Black (Powell & Pressburger, 1939)
Ordet (Dreyer, 1955)
Jimi Hendrix (Boyd/Head/Weis, 1973)
Claire's Knee (Rohmer, 1970)
Nothing Lasts Forever (Schiller, 1984)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014)

Watched on long-haul flights over Xmas / NY :

The Expendables 3 - needed Mr. T (3/5)
Vanilla Sky - oh look it was all a dream or something ffs (2/5)
The Maze Runner - creators of the Maze guilty of over-elaboration imo (2/5)
The Giver - creators of the Community guilty of over-elaboration imo (2/5)

plus some other crap I've forgotten

Human Capital (Virzi, 2013) 7/10
The Lego Movie (Lord/Miller, 2014) 6/10
12 Years A Slave (McQueen, 2013) 7/10
'71 (Damange, 2014) 8/10
Birdman (Innaritu, 2014) 7/10
We Are The Best! (Moodyson, 2013) 7/10

Mandara (Akio Jissoji, 1971)
United Red Army (Wakamatsu, 2008)
Serial Killer (Adachi, 1969)
Postwar History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Imamura, 1970)
Dear Summer Sister (Oshima, 1972)
La Commune (Peter Watkins, 2000)
Trash (Morrissey/Warhol, 1970)
Germany in Autumn (Fassbinder/Kluge/Schlondorff/Reitz, 1978)
Roads to the South (Losey, 1978)
Plastic Jesus (Lazar Stojanovic, 1971)

Discussed the Japanese items on its own films thread. But basically its erm terrorism week in the old ways. Red armies (German and Japanese). Germany in Autumn is brill, has Fassbinder arguing with his mum and snorting coke and treating his bitch even more cruelly (?) than usual. I love Kluge's segment that followed just as much - this collage of interview (with one of the 'brains' behind the RAF), fact-and-fakery, and the scene with the Turk (who was caught by the cops while out to 'kill pigeons') set your nerve on edge (although looking back I am not sure why). Plastic Jesus is a companion to Makavejev's W.R. and then a lot of films around fascism repressing sexuality. Unjustly forgotten. Trash was just so good - "does politics get you hard?". If you ever get to see the Losey curio from '78 around tired nearly dead Spanish exiles waiting for the death of Franco (Yves Montand on the job) I suppose you'd have the exact reaction as Dallesandro.

La Commune is such a ride, exhilarating and awesome. So many historical re-creations of left-wing history in recent times have a feel of funerals - but there are all sorts of questions: whatever you think of its methods really did none of actors think that perhaps 'restoring order' was a good thing on some level (despite the way this was carried out), or that the Commune wasn't working at all (many Communes in later decades never seem to work out either), or was ever going to? A ton to explore here. No wonder Watkins hasn't made another film after this - either he hasn't been allowed or that was a last statement. Seems like he was kicked out from everywhere he worked. We need him now.

Selma (DuVernay, 2014) 7/10
Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984) 5/10
A Room with a View (Ivory, 1986, rewatch) 7/10

*M (1931, Lang) 9/10
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013, Porumboiu) 6/10
*Journey Into Fear (1943, Foster/Welles) 7/10
The Laundromat (1985, Altman, made for TV) 5/10
Precious Blood (1982, Altman, made for TV) 6/10
*Nightmare Alley (1947, Goulding) 8/10
Marlowe (1969, Bogart) 6/10
Li’l Quinquin (2014, Dumont) 5/10
The Normal Heart (2014, Murphy, made for TV) 8/10
The Skeleton Twins (2014, Johnson) 5/10
Kansas City (1996, Altman) 6/10
Interstellar (2014, Nolan) 4/10
Winter Sleep (2014, Ceylan) 8/10
The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, Negulesco) 6/10
Selma (2014, DuVernay) 7/10

*rewatches

Sacco e Vanzetti (1971)

I watched this cos Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima makes a lot of references to this movie in his recent games. It was pretty amazing, and honestly incredibly disheartening that this happened almost a hundred years ago and yet things haven't really changed all that much.