Last (x) movies you saw

get out 8
free fire 7.5

I've written more on it elsewhere on ilx, and am currently working on a longer appreciation in English. Excuse me for not writing an essay every time I mention a film.

Its just sorta mindless to say a film that might not get distribution for months (if at all), a film you have seen on a festival is 'best of the year' w/out anything else. A sentence or two showing you might have thought anything through.

Like I'd care to click on a link to a fucking blog after that.

As I said, I did. On the same day, in the Year-Best-Film-Poll thread. I wrote this:

"Hope it'll come further out. It's this absolutely amazing mix of local and trans-national - portraying beliefs on a small Iranian island, but influenced from all over the Persian gulf - + old and modern - mystic belief system portrayed on grainy digital. It does some of the same things as Eduardo Williams The Human Surge, which some of you might have seen a few weeks ago?"

I'm Danish, I do most of my film writing in Danish. As I said, I'm working on something I hope will spread the word further in English, but it's not as simple as just writing a couple of thoughts -> getting it published. I also work several jobs in film, so I don't have a ton of time + I honestly don't owe you anything. You could just ask, though, instead of getting weirdly offended.

LOL I'm not offended.

You owe us everything though.

March:

Certain Women (Reichardt, 2016) 8/10
OJ: Made in America (Edelman, 2016) 8/10
Bunny Lake is Missing (Preminger, 1965) 7/10
Elle (Verhoeven, 2016) 5/10
Personal Shopper (Assayas, 2016) 6/10
Oedipus Rex (Pasolini, 1967) 6/10
The Cracksman (Scott, 1963) 4/10
Celia (Turner, 1989) 8/10

I really did not like "Personal Shopper"

same rating for me at the NYFF last fall; i don't get the raves

Oh, to add to the above,

Prevenge 8.5

I was pretty ambivalent about Prevenge. The music was good though

it was the slasher movie we all needed

OK, who was it? Own up

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39501196

saw "The 400 Blows" for the first time on TCM the other night

xpost

The only rave of Personal Shopper I read (after I'd seen the movie) was Peter Bradshaw's 5 star review in the Guardian, which felt like he was reviewing the film he wanted to see, rather than what we actually got. I wanted to like PS, too - it felt like Assayas was paying part tribute to some of Rivette's more oblique supernatural excursions (esp Histoire de Marie et Julien), but it was done without any of Rivette's playfulness, or abiding sense of mystery. The whole central 'texting' section felt needlessly modish.

I don't think it helped that I'd seen Certain Women not that long before PS, where Stewart gives a not dissimilar performance in a much better film.

400 Blows still stands up, imho - last sequence is sublime. Truffaut certainly never topped it.

Midnight Special (2016, Nichols) 5/10
A Kind of Loving (1962, Schlesinger) 7/10
*Where’s Poppa? (1970, C. Reiner) 8/10
*Georgy Girl (1966, Narizzano) 7/10
The Birth of Love (1993, Garrel) 7/10
*Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964, Forbes) 8/10
After the Storm (2016, Kore-eda) 7/10
America America (1963, Kazan) 9/10
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966, Edwards) 5/10
Le Depart (1967, Skolimowski) 6/10
Rules Don’t Apply (2016, Beatty) 7/10
*The Entertainer (1960, Richardson) 8/10

Certain Women (Reichardt, 2017) 9/10
The Love Witch (Biller, 2016) 8/10
Get Out (Peele, 2017) 8/10
Paterson (Jarmusch, 2017) 7/10
Nerve (Schluman, Joost, 2017) 5/10
Your Highness (Green, 2011) 4/10
Lights Out (Sandberg, 2016) 5/10
The Young Offenders (Foott, 2016) 7/10
The Seven-Ups (D'Antoni, 1973) 6/10
Tombstone (Cosmatos, 1993) 5/10
The Mountain (Dymytryk 1956) 4/10
r/w:
Excalibur (Boorman, 1981) 7/10
The Big Lebowski (Coen bros, 1998) 7/10
The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001) 7/10
docs:
One More Time With Feeling (Dominik, 2017) 8/10
Gimme Danger (Jarmusch, 2016) 6/10
Love Story (Kerry, Hall, 2006) 6/10
Tickled (Farrier, Reeve, 2016) 7/10

Lost City of Z (Gray, 2017) 8/10
Get Out (Peele, 2017) 6/10
Frantz(Ozon, 2017) 7/10
Personal Shopper(Assayas, 2017) 7/10
* Silence (Scorsese, 2016) 7/10
* Elle (Verhoeven, 2016) 7/10
* Wise Blood (Huston, 1979) 6/10
I Will Buy You (Kobayashi, 1956) 7/10
Remorques (Grémillon, 1939) 7/10

Five Came Back (Bouzereau, 2017 – I wouldn't list it but Morbs said it got an NYC theatrical microrelease)
Gate of Flesh (Suzuki, 1966)
People on Sunday (Siodmak, Ulmer, 1930 – I'd never heard of this until Filmstruck added it)
Barbara (Petzold, 2012)
Tiger Bay (Thompson, 1959)
Street of Crocodiles (short – Quay Brothers, 1986)
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (short – Quay Brothers, 1988)
Equinox (Woods, 1970)
An Eastern Westerner (Harold Lloyd short – Roach, 1920)
Mur Murs (Varda, 1980)
Documenteur (Varda, 1981)

The Handmaiden (2016) 3/5
Danny Says (2015) 3.5/5
Full Moon in Paris (1984) 4/5
Five Came Back (2017) 4/5
The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) 4/5
Speed Racer (2008; rewatch) 4/5
Jackie (2016) 3/5

Finally got to see Green Room cos it's on Netflix. Got a free sub for a few months.
Very nasty film innit but well done. & very end is classic.

Also saw Danny Says the bio of Danny Fields. Very good. Leaves me wanting to read the Warhol bio I bought years back and find out how tall the MC5 were. 6ft 2 came as a surprise so wonder if accurate.

The Lost City of Ze (Gray, 2017) 8/10
* Toni Erdmann (Ade, 2016) 9/10
* Cameraperson (Anderson, 2016) 7/10
* Le Corbeau (Coouzot, 1943) 7/10
* Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932) 6/10

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) - 6/10
T2 Trainspotting - 5/10
Manhattan (1979) - 7/10
Your Name - 8/10
Going in Style - 3/10
The Thin Red Line (1998) - 7/10
Gifted - 8/10 (this was surprisingly good, trailer made it look like epiphany-core/xtian values/family inspo bullshit)
Song to Song - 7/10

which Going in Style is that? The remake isnt out yet, right?

ok, so it is. I thought the first one had a p good performance by George Burns.

yeah, it's really really bad, but enjoyable in the same way that Collateral Beauty, Here Comes the Boom, and The Happening are.

free fire (2016) 8/10
*cutters way (1981) 7/10
personal shopper (2016) 5/10
13 assassins (2010) 8/10
sandy wexler (2017) 4/10
*a man for all seasons (1966) 6/10

Bram Stoker's Dracula - bought this on Blu-Ray the other day. There are 3 Coppola movies I give a shit about; this is one.

i love that one too.

agreed, that movie fully rules.

Diving into Fassbinder - mix of MUBI/torrent and big screen (as posted about on the Fassbinder thread)

Effi Briest (1974) 8/10
Katzelmacher (1969) 6/10

Big screen:

Beware of the Holy Whore (1970) 10/10
I Don't Just Want You To Love Me (Hans Günther Pflaum, 1993) 5/10

iPlayer:

OJ: Made in America (Edelman, 2016) 7/10
Hypernormalisation (Curtis, 2016) 5/10

i hated the Coppola Dracula; so did Keanu. Stoker shoulda sued.

3 Coppolas I give a shit about:

Tetro
One from the Heart
Apocalypse Now

I can very well understand why Keanu hated the Coppola Dracula. I liked all the trompe-l'œil stuff - connecting Stroker/Dracula with the very beginnings of cinema etc - and the costuming. Bits of its happily remind me of the (much superior) BBC version w/ Louis Jourdan.

Like the Coppola Dracula for the same reasons but Keanu was awful in it and Hopkins' hamming almost as bad

https://www.berlinale.de/media/filmstills/2016_2/hommage_13/201603204_2_IMG_FIX_700x700.jpg

Like the Coppola Dracula for the same reasons but Keanu was awful in it and Hopkins' hamming almost as bad

'Cause what you want from a Dracula movie is subdued kitchen-sink realism. Mike Leigh should do one.

Reeves and Hopkins are both terrible in Dracula, but in the case of the latter, the performance has a certain fidelity to the novel, in which Van Helsing is a tiresome windbag that Stoker has ramble on at exhausting, skim-inducing length.

from what I remember about the movie, Coppola and Hopkins are in on the joke.

Coppola is the 70s auteur that I understand the least, in that while he obviously made some of the greatest films of that decade, I don't really know (very much Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman...) what he is about. If there is anything personal about his filmography, I haven't managed to locate it.

Not helping at all is that his post-70s filmography makes zero sense to me.

How do you define "personal"? A film, a poem, a story, whatever is an expression of self by its very nature.

Good question. By "personal," I mean that I can't figure out what draws him to the material he chooses. The 70s stuff is obviously marked by a very contemporary anxiety over and fixation with systems and how they can go wrong, but beyond that? I'm all about your definition of personal as artwork-as-expression-of-the-self; on that note, I can't figure out what he is expressing about himself through The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Dracula, or Youth Without Youth.

He's expressing himself by paying his debts. "Personal" filmmaking is a residue of auteurist cinema; I don't believe it's important (I'm not picking you btw).

*picking ON you

I never thought you were!

Debt-paying, huh? Well, I guess that explains Jack.

With The Outsiders and Peggy Sue, he liked the material and needed to make some money -- they're no more or less personal than Tetro or The Conversation. Whether they're any good is a different question.

coppola's dracula is awful, there are at least four or five decent-to-classic film versions of the story better than that garbage

I thought Dracula was great spectacle the first time I saw it--saw it a couple more times, but it's been a few years.

I believe Coppola used to say The Rain People was his most personal film. Which to me says a lot about how much inherent value you should put into that idea.

Coppola had lost a ton of money on zoetrope and "one from the heart" in particular. dracula was another project he took on for money. he was a fan of the novel and it worked out. his commentary track on the blu-ray is worth a listen.

after his 90s movies he won $80 million to not make a pinocchio movie, so i'm guessing his later movies are passion projects. i don't really get a viewpoint from his movies either, but i haven't bothered to watch most of them.

It never really works but I really like his Dracula just for the amount of strong imagery, which puts it way ahead of most horror films in my book. It is really underwhelming when you think about how big a deal it was, but by the time I revisited it I really enjoyed it. Way more films should look like that.

Better Dracula films actually based on the story? Only the two Nosferatu films spring to mind.