Last (x) movies you saw

Just in general, Kracauer is an amazing writer. But there are a bunch of factual mistakes in his book, back in those days a lot of mythology could spring up around a films production, and of course K couldn't easily rewatch all the films. So take the whole thing with a grain of salt. But there's also a new documentary of the same name out, if it interests anyone.

Yeah, the recent Region 2/Masters of Cinema disc of the restored Cabinet of Dr Caligari includes an excellent commentary track by German cinema expert David Kalat that goes into the way that Kracauer's (sometimes erroneous) writing on Caligari shaped the critical discourse around it for a very long time.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/807243459?book_show_action=true&page=1

Interesting review here.

Human Highway (1982, Young, Stockwell) 3/10
Ride in the Whirlwind (1966, Hellman) 5/10
*The Shooting (1966, Hellman) 7/10
La Pointe-Courte (1955, Varda) 8/10
Edvard Munch (1974, Watkins) 10/10
The Bachelor Party (1957, D Mann) 6/10
*Vive l’Amour (1994, Tsai) 8/10
Rio 100 Degrees (1955, Pereira dos Santos) 8/10
The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Pichel, Schoedsack) 7/10
Jauja (2014, Alonso) 6/10
La Sapienza (2014, Green) 6/10
Immoral Tales (1974, Borowczyk) 4/10
Cop (1988, Harris) 7/10
*Things to Come (1936, Menzies) 7/10
Life of Riley (2014, Resnais) 5/10
Dr. Jekyll and His Women (1981, Borowczyk) 6/10
Some Call It Loving (1973, Harris) 6/10
America (1924, Griffith) 7/10
The Loveless (1981, Bigelow, Montgomery) 5/10
Men in Orbit (1979, Lurie) 4/10
From Mayerling to Sarajevo (1940, Ophuls) 7/10
Gone Girl (2014, Fincher) 5/10

Shame the last Resnais was no good..

Edvard Munch (1974, Watkins) 10/10

An ex-girlfriend (who was a painter) mentioned to me before about an excellent Munch biopic (unless there's another) that she was interested in seeing but I dismissed it because ugh, biopics.

That's wrong, esp if you've seen any other Watkins.

haha it is among the most nonbiopics of all time

xpost Yeah, I'm just skeptical of biopics of tortured artistes tbh

Ah, Watkins directed Culloden, which I've always been meaning to see.

Vertigo

Damn this movie was amazing. Feel like David Lynch is heavily heavily influenced by this movie. The doubles felt very Mulholland Drive. So many twists and turns, such a weird tortured cast of characters, and jawdropping still-stylish effects sequences. There was one scene where the room was blue and there was a purple neon light at the window and it looked amazing like something out of Fire Walk With Me. Hitchcock respects his audience and leaves little alleyways and fakeouts all throughout. His movies are self-aware but still searching. The scene where Scottie knocks on a lifesize wooden horse to prove it isn't real. Is he really the crazy one? He is kind of the villain of this movie. That ending came out of nowhere and really flipped the whole film on its head!

Lynch has introduced screenings of the film, yes

actually it was a green light in the hotel room, gen the "ghost" color

Festival haul:

Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-soo, 2014)
Greenery Will Bloom Again (Ermanno Olmi, 2014)
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Spike Lee, 2014)
Sworn Virgin (Laura Bispuri, 2015)
Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro, 2014)
From What Is Before (Lav Diaz, 2014)*
Portrait of the Artist (Antoine Barraud, 2014)
Over Your Dead Body (Takashi Miike, 2014)
Parabellum (Lukas Valenta Rinner, 2015)
Norway (Yannis Veslemes, 2014)
Bridgend (Jeppe Rønde, 2015)
White God (Kornél Mondruczó, 2014)
Limbo (Anne Sofie Hartmann, 2014)
Goodbye to Language (Jean Luc Godard, 2014)*
A Little Chaos (Alan Rickman, 2014)
The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, 2014)
Underdog (Ronnie Sandahl, 2014)*
Until I Lose My Breath (Emine Emel Balci, 2015)
The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)
Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry, 2014)
Gentle (Le-Van Kiet, 2014)
Flapping In the Middle of Knowhere (Diep Hoang Nguyen, 2014)
The Inseminator (Kim Quy Bui, 2014)
Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)
Portrait of the Artist (Antoine Barraud, 2014)*
The Fire (Juan Schnitman, 2015)
The Tree (Sonja Prosenc, 2014)
Dog Lady (Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás, 2015)
Amour Fou (Jessica Haussner, 2014)*
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (Peter Greenaway, 2015)
Limbo (Anna Sofie Hartmann, 2014)*
600 Miles (Gabriel Ripstein, 2015)
The Pornographer (Bertrand Bonello, 2001)
Métamorphoses (Christophe Honoré, 2014)
Eliten (Thomas Daneskov, 2015)
Der Var Engang En Krig (Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt, 1966)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)*
The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, 2014)

Matter Of Life And Death and Colonel Blimp. Both good but I liked the former film way way more, really impressive.

Just saw the trailer for Tale Of Tales and I don't think I've been this impressed by a trailer in several years. Has anyone here seen the film?

Matter of Life and Death and Colonel Blimp both A+++

Watched Now You See It last night, and wish I hadn't. A movie about magicians performing heists would seem to be basically direct-marketed to me, but this was a total shitshow. I should have taken the presence of Jesse Eisenberg (America's most punchable actor—yes, ahead of Michael Cera and Shia LaBoeuf) as the warning it was clearly intended to be. Oh, well.

Matter Of Life And Death and Colonel Blimp. Both good but I liked the former film way way more, really impressive.

Its good on BFI to be putting the odd re-screen of this on. Watched it at a weather-wise depressing Sunday a couple of years ago an it was perfect.

itv4 also had a run of repeating this and they should re-do it. Beats Rambo #poptimistsnotallowed

Also amazes me there used to be british films like that.

P/P did make films that present a realism of their time. i) that is totally alien to us Britishes now and, ii) in film terms they feel like they are from another galaxy, given what else gets made here.

why do you want to punch actors tough guy

My biggest problem with Now You See Me is that the twist ending made the movie worse and required a ton of setup.

It turns out that the magicians aren't modern Robin Hoods, it's all about Frank Grimes Jr getting revenge.("spoilers" i suppose)

Morbius, what did you think of Gone Girl? I've yet to see it, but read a variety of takes, incl the explosive denunciation by Mary Gaitskill (for once, loosing/dropping her cool).

a quick dump of the last couple months. *s are previously seen

Porco Rosso (Miyazaki)
Song of the Sea (Moore)
*Scanners (Cronenberg)
The Dead Zone (Cronenberg)
*Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma)
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Oshima)
Make Mine Mink (Asher)
God Told Me To (Cohen)
*The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Richter)
*Cat Soup (Sato)
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Burton)
The Horse Raised by Spheres (O'Reilly)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour)
Frogs (McCowan)
*The Telephone Book (Lyon)
Friday the 13th (Cunningham)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner)
Friday the 13th Part 3 (Miner)
Please Say Something (O'Reilly)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito)
The External World (O'Reilly)
A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (Fulci)
The Captive (Laloux)
*The ABCs of Death (various)- shit sandwich, no better on a second viewing
Gandahar (Laloux)
Black Belly of the Tarantula (Cavara)
Pierrot le Fou (Godard)

Forgot, the first Friday the 13th was a rewatch. And technically I'd seen Pee-Wee, but as a very small child on VHS, so that hardly counts...

I don't know if this is commonly commented on but I noticed in A Matter Of Life And Death that among the statues of great historical people was Mohammed, but you only see the base of the statue.

Listen Up Phillip (Alex Ross Perry, 2014)
Nostalgia For The Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2011)
Happy People: A Year In The Taiga (Werner Herzog, 2013)

I watched these 3 throughout today with a huge hangover and was very happy. Had very low expectations for Listen Up Phillip but ended up loving it.

Close-Up (6.5)
While We’re Young (7.5)
Simone (5.0)
Wanda (7.0)
Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt--7.5)
The Last Detail (7.5)
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (7.0)
The Cult of J.T. Leroy (6.5)
Best of Enemies (8.5)
Deep Web (7.0)

Ex Machina - worth the ticket

I hoped that film would do well but it seems to have flopped.

It was #5 in per screen average

Aliens (1986)

I need to see the original soon, but this was a lot of fun. It's a James Cameron film so you know there will be cheesy rhyming 80s military banter and a sleazy greedy contractor who will sell out anyone on his one-way ticket to hell. It is crazy how much this movie influenced video games. I liked Bill Paxton losing his shit ("Game over man game over!") and Ripley telling him to man up because this little girl survived for a long time with no weapons on her own and she is infinitely more of a badass than this dramatic space marine. A little blunt with the parental/monsters-under-the-bed motifs but it is cool that Ripley somehow managed to find the one other person in the universe that survived these things and together they get through this mess. It kind of sucks that the only solution is to NUKE THE PLANET.

The Sin Of Harold Diddlebock ( 8/10 : i somehow overlooked this Sturges but wow what a surprise. Loved this.)
The Lady From Shanghai (9/10 : $9 Blu-Ray. A fantastic restoration. Beautiful and head spinning and fun as always.)

Human Highway (1982): I'm biased by Devo love and a chance to see Neil Young play with his model trains so of course I liked it. Really dug the elegiac hippie scene that interrupts the professional outsider art. Have a feeling that this movie is somehow responsible for Talking Heads' True Stories.

Big Eyes (2014): Hey, I wonder if that Feral House book on the Keanes is in the iTunes store? Oh cool, it is!

Starred Up (Mackenzie, 2013) 7/10
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) 7/10
Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959) 6/10
Viridiana (Bunuel, 1961) 8/10
*What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (Aldrich, 1962) 8/10
Beyond the Black Rainbow (Cosmatos, 2010) 5/10
Key Largo (Huston, 1948)
Birdman (Inarritu, 2014) 3/10
Love is Strange (Sachs, 2014) 7/10
Lilting (Khaou, 2014) 5/10
The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean, 1957) 6/10
Fury (Lang, 1936) 4/10
Force Majeure (Ostlund, 2014)

oops....

Key Largo (Huston, 1948) 8/10

and oops again...

Force Majeure (Ostlund, 2014) 7/10

saw Selma & Inherent Vice on a flight, loved them both for very different reasons
Outcast of the Islands (1951 joseph conrad adaptation, very watchable, colonialism on full display, for a sense of what an amazing contrast / double feature this would make with 'Burn!' check out the 1952 nyt review - http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B05E6D7133BE23BBC4E52DFB3668389649EDE )
The Music Room (yep, beautiful)

2 DVD set of Watkin's Edvard Munch just arrived, that's next

While We're Young (Baumbach, 2014) 5/10
Force Majeure (Ostlund, 2014) 7/10
Dr Jekyll et les Femmes (Borowczyk, 1980) 8/10
Jauja (Alonso, 2014) 8/10
The Falling (Morley, 2014) 5/10

The Professionals (Brooks, 1966) 7/10
Fox and his Friends (Fassbinder, 1975) 8/10
Forty Guns (Fuller, 1957) 6/10
Hands of the Ripper (Sasdy, 1971) 6/10
Secret Agent (Hitchcock, 1936) 7/10
The Young One (Bunuel, 1960) 6/10
Aparajito (Ray, 1957) 7/10
Frozen River (Hunt, 2008) 6/10
Yella (Petzold, 2007) 7/10
Jour De Fete (Tati, 1949 - colour version) 6/10
The World of Apu (Ray, 1959) 9/10
The King of Escape (Guiraudie, 2009) 6/10
The Man From Laramie (Mann, 1955) 8/10
Saboteur (Hitchcock, 1942) 7/10

My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Corfixen, 2015) 2/10
Mommy (Dolan, 2015) 6/10
[Removed Illegal Link] (Renoir, 1936) 9/10
* Metropolis (Lang, 1927) 9/10

aaaand

Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2015) 7/10

didnt the Nazis try to ban [Removed Illegal Link]?

Removed Illegal Link cld be the sequel to Boudou

Be Kind, Remove

isn't that what Goebbels said

*Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (Lumet, 2007) 9/10
Palindromes (Solondz, 2004) 7/10
It Might Get Loud (Guggenheim, 2009) 6/10
Dogtooth (Lanthimos, 2009) 8/10
Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962) 9/10
Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014) 7/10
Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959) 7/10
American Reflexxx (Coates, 2015) 7/10
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Remy, 1962) 7/10

omg, YOU are the Devil for loving Lumet's dying fart

no way. great movie and PSH's best performance.

Pickpocket is my least favorite bresson so far, and I still think it's nonsense to give it less than 9. Or 90, if Whiplash is a 7.

pickpocket is fucking spectacular

Pick this man's brain!