Last (x) movies you saw

Hellboy
First Name: Carmen
Igla
O-Bi O-Ba: The End of Civilization
Death Powder
Tetsuo
Pinocchio 964
Tetsuo II
Rubber's Lover

Igla kicked off the "Kazakh New Wave" in 1988, and is the closest thing to a Soviet "underground film" I've encountered. Stars the singer from Kino. O-bi O-Ba is a Kafka-by-way-of-Lem-influenced nuclear bunker survival piece from Poland.

I realized last week that I had never watched all of Japanese Cyberpunk, in order. It's only five films, so there we go. (Oh, I suppose I should tack Tetsuo III onto that now. Hmm.) I've defended Tetsuo II in the past. I'm not going to do that anymore. Everything else held up for me.

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Huillet/Straub, 1968) 7/10
*The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) 9/10
Citadel (Foy, 2013) 4/10
Mr Turner (Leigh, 2014) 7/10
Vic + Flo Saw A Bear (Cote, 2014) 8/10
Leviathan (Zvyagintsev, 2014) 8/10
*Passion (Godard, 1982) 8/10
Grey Gardens (Maysles, 1975) 7/10
*Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999) 9/10
Fat City (Huston, 1972) 9/10

*The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) 9/10

I just watched this again too, and wholly agree with the ranking. Among its richer pleasures, I was surprised at just how jumpy the film still manages to make me.

Its been a long time since I saw it and I think its even better than I had thought. Its definitely one of the more misunderstood Hitchcock movies imo. Can a movie be hilarious and pants-shittingly frightening at the same time?

I say that every time I watch The Naked Gun

xpost

Pretty sure that the first time I watched it, I sat through the first half thinking "yeah, yeah, yeah...stop talking and get to the killer birds," but I was like 11 or 12. Subsequent (and more mature) viewings definitely reveal more and more depths to the characterizations and the relationships. Hedren and Tandy's eventual bonding moment is so graceful and understated in both writing and performance that it is kind of amazing that it exists in the same movie that also contains what I imagine must have been the goriest image to appear in a mainstream movie at that time.

Tetsuo 3 feels oddly unassured for Tsukamoto, especially for such a recent film, but there is good stuff in there. Tetsuo 2 was way way too long but 3 is very very short. I still think that part in 2 when the main character runs around the buildings is fantastic, one of my favourite Tsukamoto moments. But overall 2 and 3 don't stand very high in his filmography.
Fires On The Plain was going to be screened in my city but it was bloody cancelled.

Shozin Fukui made a comeback but his new stuff is probably a challenge to find.

I don't think there's a lot of Imamura in region 2. Might get more soon.

Pigs & Battleships & Stolen Desires
Insect Woman & Nishi-Ginza Station
Vengeance is Mine
Profound Desires of the Gods
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
A Man Vanishes
The Eel

are all still in print on Region 2 DVD/Blu

I wish Kei Fujiwara would start directing movies again. She did some of the camera work in Tetsuo, and I love her movie "Id". She runs a theatre troupe now.

Métamorphoses (2014, Honore) 6/10
Wrong Move (1975, Wenders) 5/10
Semi-Tough (1977, Ritchie) 6/10
Until the End of the World (1991/94, Wenders, director's cut) 6/10
My Uncle Antoine (1971, Jutra) 7/10
Lonely Are the Brave (1962, Miller) 7/10
*Pennies from Heaven (1981, Ross) 6/10
Eastern Boys (2013, Campillo) 7/10
Phoenix (2014, Petzold) 6/10
Tree of Knowledge (1981, Malmros) 7/10

bonfire of the vanities (90 depalma) 3/10
the brass teapot (2012 ramaa mosley) 5/10
*smooth talk ('85, joyce chopra) 8/10
la pointe-courte ('55, varda) 6/10
very good girls ('14, Naomi foner) 5/10
maps to the stars ('14 cronenberg) 7/10
citizenfour ('14 poitras) 7/10
cisco pike ('72, bill l Norton) 3/10
all this mayhem ('14, danny way) 9/10
whitey: usa v james bulger ('14, berlinger) 4/10
all fall down ('62, frankenheimer) 6/10

Pigs & Battleships & Stolen Desires
Insect Woman & Nishi-Ginza Station
Vengeance is Mine
Profound Desires of the Gods
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
A Man Vanishes
The Eel

are all still in print on Region 2 DVD/Blu

Thank you Ward. It was actually Tsukamoto that made me want to see Imamura and Kumashiro. He listed his top 3 films as Intentions Of Murder (Imamura), Bitterness Of Youth (Kumashiro) and Taxi Driver. Criterion did Intentions Of Murder and I hope Eureka will pick it up eventually. There seems to be only one Kumashiro in region 2.

I wish Kei Fujiwara would start directing movies again. She did some of the camera work in Tetsuo, and I love her movie "Id". She runs a theatre troupe now.

I think I heard about that but I better write that film down. Thanks.

What We Do In the Shadows (2014, Clement and Waititi) 7.5/10
Wild Tales (2014, Szifron) 8/10
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014, Elkabetz and Elkabetz) 7/10
Timbuktu (2014, Sissako) 6/10
Big City Blues (1932, LeRoy) 6.5/10

using ".5"s means you should move to a 20-pt scale

Just jump into the 100-point pool.

Crossfire (Dmytryk, 1947) - 72.3/100

Boiling Point (Harris, 1993) - 100.0/100

Stone (6.5)
Dazed and Confused (8.0)
There’s a Girl in My Soup (5.5)
Heat (8.0)
Rush (6.0)
It’s All About Love (5.5)
The Lady Eve (7.0)
Forty Guns (7.5)
Undertow (6.5)
The Company You Keep (6.5)

The Lady Eve, it's no Knuckleball!

Night and the City (Dassin, 1950) 8/10
Aurora (Sepulveda, 2015) 7/10
In the Grayscale (Marcone, 2015) 6/10

*NATC a third viewing

Between Two Wars (Farocki, 1978)
The Lonely Voice Of Man (Sokurov, 1987)
Maidan (Sergei Loznitsa, 2014)
White God (Mundruczo, 2014)
Tales of Hoffmann (Powell/Pressburger, 1951)

Wanted to like that first Farocki feature but the dialogue let it down. Absolutely loved The Lonely Voice Of Man as an attempt to try and capture Andrei Platonov's voice. Maidan was an interesting application of Straub/Huillet principles w/out it being quite as in love with its boredom. Hoffmann had a section for the credits where the singer was shown on one side and the actor on the other, this at a time when in a musical the singer wasn't given credit. Just found the whole thing incredibly moving.

Crossfire (Dmytryk, 1947)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Hiroshima Mon Amou (Resnais, 1959)
Grey Gardens (Maysles, Maysles, Hovde, Meyer, 1975)
Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)
La Cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995)
Osaka Elegy (Mizoguchi, 1936)
Love Is Colder Than Death (Fassbinder, 1969)
* A Matter of Life and Death (Powell/Pressburger, 1946) -- I first saw this just a few weeks ago, but it was a horrible compressed Youtube video, so I made sure to catch it when it came on TCM a few days ago.
Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (Inagaki, 1954)
Night Must Fall (Thorpe, 1937)

Heart of Glass (Herzog, 1976) 7/10
Limp (Ryan, 2015) 5/10
*The Guard (McDonagh, 2011) 6/10
Edge of Tomorrow (Liman, 2014) 7/10
*Timecode (Figgis, 2000) 7/10
Cheap Thrills (Katz, 2013) 7/10
*Night on Earth (Jarmusch, 1991) 8/10
Happy Christmas (Swanberg, 2014) 7/10

It Follows (Mitchell, 2014) 7/10
Fedora (Wilder, 1979) 5/10
Water Lilies (Sciamma, 2007) 8/10 (rewatch)

oh i smell a Fedora fite coming

hey I liked it didn't I

5?

The first 15 minutes have some of his most confident camera work ever.

First time watches:

The Guest (Wingard, 2014) - 6/10
Chappie (Blomkamp, 2015) - 4/10
Mr Turner (Leigh, 2014) - -/10 (I turner-d it off after 50 minutes)
Blackwood (Wimpenny, 2014) - 3/10
Requiem for a Village (Gladwell, 1977) - 6/10
The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975) - 7/10
Birdman (Iñárritu, 2014) - 6/10

re-watches:

The Piano (Campion, 1993) - 7/10
The Hours and Times (Munch, 1991) - 8/10
Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014) - 8/10
Edge of Tomorrow (Liman, 2014) - 8/10
LA Confidential (Hanson, 1997) - 7/10
A Hard Day's Night (Lester, 1964) - 9/10

documentaries, all 1st time watches:

Here's a Health to the Barley Mow (BFI compilation, 2011) - 6/10
Soul Boys of the Western World (Hencken, 2014) - 6/10
My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Corfixen, 2014) - 5/10
The Wrecking Crew (Tedesco, 2008/14) - 7/10

Billy Wilder haaaated unmotivated camera movement ("down the stairs, into the fireplace; point of view: Santa Claus")

The Hours and Times (Munch, 1991) - 8/10

yeah, i remember this being good.

Listen to Me Marlon (2015, Riley) 7/10
*My Winnipeg (2007, Maddin) 8/10
It Felt Like Love (2013, Hittman) 7/10
China Is Near (1967, Bellocchio) 7/10
*Memories of Underdevelopment (1968, Gutierrez Alea) 8/10
Amour Fou (2014, Hausman) 9/10
Unrelated (2007, Hogg) 7/10
The Haunting (1963, Wise) 8/10
*The Tarnished Angels (1957, Sirk) 9/10
Timbuktu (2014, Sissako) 7/10
Fidelio, l’odyssée d’Alice (2014, Borleteau) 6/10
Leviathan (2014, Zvyagintsev) 7/10
Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013, Rasoulof) 7/10
In the Name of My Daughter (2014, Techine) 6/10
Summer in the City (1970, Herzog) 5/10
Happy Christmas (2014, Swanberg) 6/10

Hidden Fortress
Profound Desires Of The Gods
Kagemusha

I liked them all but the latter two were far too long.

Profound Desires booklet has quite a lot of statements about Imamura's approach and what he didn't like about Ozu and Oshima. Quite interesting.

The portrayal of Nobunaga in Kagemusha really surprised me, I'm used to seeing him portrayed in videogames and animation as so demonic you'd think he was worse than many of the most infamous dictators combined.
But it turns out he's been portrayed in many different, even opposite ways in pop culture. He was even in Pokemon as a playable character!

I read a bit about him because I was confused by the Kagemusha scenes of him associating with Christians. Apparently he was a big atheist yet he helped bring in Christianity to Japan? Why? Was this just part of indulging his interest in European culture?

Since he's been alternately shown as a great hero and evil incarnate in stuff made for kids and teenagers, is Nobunaga a subject people still regularly argue over?

Speed Racer (1994, Sillen) 10/10

^^^ which i guess Jem Cohen did some additional cinematography. i'm guessing he was responsible for all the great rural south montages.

From What Is Before (Diaz, 2014) 9/10
The Duke of Burgundy (Strickland, 2014) 8/10
It Follows (Mitchell, 2014) 7/10

Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1948) 6/10
Rififi (Dassin, 1955) 8/10
Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970) 8/10
Lifeboat (Hitchcock, 1943) 6/10
Rope (Hitchcock, 1948) 7/10
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock, 1934) 7/10
Under Capricorn (Hitchcock, 1949) 5/10
The Paradine Case (Hitchcock, 1947) 4/10
Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1983) 7/10
Shock Corridor (Fuller, 1963) 8/10
Va Savoir (Rivette, 2001) (Shorter Version) 8/10
Young and Innocent (Hitchcock, 1937) 7/10
Castle of the Living Dead (Kiefer, 1964) 6/10
Songs From the Second Floor (Andersson, 2000) 8/10
Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945) 5/10
Sabotage (Hitchcock, 1936) 7/10
Le Samourai (Melville, 1967) 8/10

A month almost completely dominated by catching up on TCM PVRs and highlighted by two Daphne Du Maurier adaptations (though one was a re-watch).

*The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963) 9/10
Dear White People (Simien, 2014) 7/10
The Thin Man (Van Dyke, 1934) 8/10
Top Hat (Sandrich, 1935) 7/10
Don’t Look Now (Roeg, 1973) 9/10
The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940) 7/10
Laura (Preminger, 1944) 6/10

Also, though I don't usually list the shorts I watch here, this one deserves special attention:

Benny’s Gym (Gamlem, 2007) 8/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS3iLKRwHcE

The Old Maid (Goulding, 1940) 6/10
The Collector (Wyler, 1965) 5/10
* The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bunuel, 1972) 9/10
Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) 5/10

wild tales: oof, talk about bad timing

oh, shit, hadn't thought about that. it will premiere here in a few weeks as well, not good.

alfred ordet explain

Too stagebound, too tied to what sounds to my ears like a howler of a play in which the degrees of faith and unbelief are as schematic as what I'll later see in a Woody Allen movie. I love The Passion of Joan of Arc and -- especially! -- Day of Wrath. By the end I was waiting for the girl to die so I could make my own pot of coffee without Grandfather telling me how I should drink it.

to me the movie was one of those cases where after the first half hour I knew exactly what was going to happen and watching these overdirected-to-death actors exit and enter the home was its own kind of spiritual death.

first: thanks for humouring me & elaborating.

so interesting, though, thinking that what maybe reads as stagebound to you might be the thing that's so distinctly-even-quintessentially cinematic to me; i can't think of another film that so authoritatively uses the camera, i guess hitchcock is the other point of reference, to steer and position us. there's no trace of a stage, there, to me; there's space and geography.

sotto voce i've actually never seen dreyer's joan of arc, but this is so far beyond day of wrath, for me. the tone is so whistling & commanding, so much weight pools in the silences, actors' every action seem to emanate thought & real feeling. there's just such weight. it's so remote & so close. if the thing that was going to happen is, you know, the thing that happens in this film, i guess i can understand something of an overwhelming sense of direction to it - i was either lucky enough to not know or else just too blind to read the signals. but it's just so engrossing, i think. the sense in which it's a play to me is seeing such kind of willy-loman-strength broad characters at work, a weary doctor, a nervous woman, &c, & then feeling like i was on the edge of my seat waiting for the nature of the quieter man to emerge or clarify.

i can't think of another film that so authoritatively uses the camera, i guess hitchcock is the other point of reference, to steer and position us. there's no trace of a stage, there, to me; there's space and geography.

wow -- this is a Big Statement. The shrewdest moments of camera use to me were Dreyer's rendering of Jesus guy. Dreyer rarely isolates him; we see him at almost all times within the confines of medium shots with his family or at least doing bits of business in the background (if my memory serves). He didn't judge him. On the contrary -- his psychosis (if indeed it is one!) and his family's traumas bear the same weight.

What's your problem with The Collector?

Takes a while to get going; it's closer to a 6 but I ain't Pitchfork. Stamp is a singular screen presence, no doubt.