Last (x) movies you saw

Anthony Lane went on about it so long and well enough that I feel like I've already seen it, as tends to happen all over The New Yorker these days. Robert, Tree of Life is later-Malicky as Hell, and I dug it as such, but you really should (a word I try to use as little as possible), fucking should start with his early peak, Badlands, also Days of Heaven.

And speaking of early Altman, That Cold Day In The Park (1969) is one that seemed twitchy but/and deserving of more concentration (or maybe less would have helped more) than I could could contribute during a zoned midnight matinee long ago---what the heck, it's got Sandy Dennis, Luana Anders, Laszlo Kovacs...

the unofficial remake is Bruce LaBruce's No Skin Off My Ass

"The 'High Sign'" (Keaton and Cline, 1921) 6/10
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Waititi, 2016) 6/10
My Fair Lady (Cukor, 1964) 7/10
The Boss Baby (Tom McGrath, 2017) 2/10
"Listen to Britain" (Jennings, 1942) 5/10
Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017) 5/10 (in theatre, digital print) land 6/10, water 5/10, air 2/10

Slack Bay (Dumont, 2016)
Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude, 2016) - will be top 2/3 of the year, totally works for me.
Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman, 1961)

how does the Bergman hold up? I saw Shame again with trepidation but it impressed me.

Lego Batman - this was mostly trash, frenetic and stupid

Well it was the first time I saw it and I loved it very much. Its a great play, for one, then you have the scene on the ship and the helicopter at the end - both are inspired. xp

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Waititi, 2016) 6/10

― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Sunday, 30 July 2017 13:56 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Gtfo

Dawson City: Frozen Time (7.5)

I saw this last night and thought it was gorgeous.

lots of good moments in Wilderpeople, but ultimately in service of father-son bonding dreck.

risk (poitras 2017) 5/10
au revoir les enfants (malle, 87) 9/10
the house (Andrew jay cohen 2017) 5/10
remember my name (Rudolph 78) 6/10
a kind of loving (Schlesinger '62) 9/10
the discovery (McDowell 2017) 5/10
domestic violence (wiseman '01) 8/10
hidden in America (martin bell '96) 7/10
youth (sorrentino 2015) 6.5/10

Landline (Robespierre, 2017) 5/10
Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017) 6/10
* Pandora's Box (Pabst, 1928) 9/10

Soylent Green (1973)

Rewatching this was pretty good. Heston as a rogue PI in a dystopian future noir a la Blade Runner. The femme fatale gave off very strong Lana Del Rey.

http://i.imgur.com/jsNp6pV.jpg

soylent green u say

just be happy they moved on from their original prototype, Soylent Brown

*Dick (Fleming, 1999) 5/10
Fox and His Friends (Fassbinder, 1975) 8/10
Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969) 7/10
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (Herzog, 2016) 7/10
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck, 2017) 7/10
My Life as a Zucchini (Barras, 2016) 6/10
For Your Eyes Only (Glen, 1981) 6/10
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (Hartley, 2015) 6/10
Octopussy (Glen, 1983) 4/10
The Salesman (Farhadi, 2016) 7/10
*Pinocchio (Sharpsteen and Luske, 1940) 10/10
Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock, 1940) 7/10
The Big Sick (Showalter, 2017) 6/10

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Herzog, 1979) 8/10
Kedi (Torun, 2016) 7/10
Song to Song (Malick, 2017) 7/10
It Comes at Night (Schultz, 2017) 7/10
Hardcore (Schrader, 1979) 8/10
The Creeping Garden (Grabham, Sharp, 2014) 6/10
Pedestrian Subway (Kieślowski, 1974) 5/10
Dekalog 1 (Kieślowski, 1989) 7/10
Dekalog 2 (Kieślowski, 1989) 7/10
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Olmi, 1978) 10/10
The Beguiled (Coppola, 2017) 7/10
From Russia With Love (Young, 1963) 7/10
Goldfinger (Hamilton, 1964) 8/10
Dekalog 3 (Kieślowski, 1989) 8/10
Hounds of Love (Young, 2016) 6/10
Dekalog IV (Kieślowski, 1989) 7/10
Thunderball (Young, 1965) 5/10

Person to Person
Prevenge
CB4

*The Graduate (Nichols, 1967)
Nights of Cabiria (Fellini, 1957)
Le Petit Soldat (Godard, 1963)
Welcome to the Dollhouse (Solondz, 1995)
Withnail and I (Robinson, 1987)
Medium Cool (Wexler, 1969)
David Lynch: The Art Life (Nguyen, Barnes, Neergaard-Holm, 2016)

Shorts:
Needle (Ghazvinizadeh, 2013)
Asparagus (Pitt, 1979)
Saute ma ville (Akerman, 1968)
Kitty (Sevigny, 2016)

Got a new Blu-Ray of John Frankenheimer's Ronin in today's mail. It looks fantastic, and it's one of my favorite movies anyway, so.
Just watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (free with Amazon Prime). William Jackson Harper, from the TV show The Good Place, is in it, and I spent every one of his scenes trying to place him.

Dark Circle (1982)
https://vimeo.com/24905300

amazing anti-nuke activist film. this was approved for airing PBS before being censored. a heavy focus on Rocky Flats and using newly released footage to show the horrors of the cold war era arms race. there is one bizarre experiment shown where they nuked a bunch of pigs to test the effects of a blast on human skin.

after the movie i went into a wiki rabbit hole reading about Rocky Flats. real fucked up. Dow Chemical and Rockwell pretty much got off scott free and fucked us over for thousands of years.

Razzia sur la Chnouf (Decoin, 1955)
Les Tontons Flingeurs (Lautner, 1963)

Break Up (Ferreri, 1965) - Saw a remaster of this without subtitles, looked beautiful.
Goodfellas (Scorcese, 1990) 7/10
The Blue Dahlia (Marshall, 1946) 6/10
Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983) 8/10
Faces (Cassavetes, 1968) 9/10
Night and the City (Dassin, 1950) 8/10
*The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) 9/10
The Big Heat (Lang, 1953) 8/10
The Big Steal (Siegel, 1949) 7/10

Le Trou (Becker, 1960) 9/10
Accident (Cheang, 2009) 8/10
Election (To, 2005) 9/10
Election 2 (To, 2006) 8/10
Fires on the Plain (Ichikawa, 1959) 9/10
I Love a Man in Uniform (Wellington, 1993) 6/10
The Human Factor (Preminger, 1979) 5/10
Insomnia (Skjoldbjærg, 1997) 8/10
Skip Tracer (Dalen, 1977) 7/10

Second batch of these watched because of All Units, a podcast about deconstructing thrillers that I would recommend.

I don't know where to put this, but I really want to tell someone this. Saw 'Mahana' this morning, the latest from Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, um, Die Another Day). But the Maori wasn't subtitled, only the English parts. So sections of the movie was kinda unintelligible. Also, there was one time where a women said 'Akappa Ti, Poata', and I'm no expert on Te Reo, but I'm pretty sure it means 'A Cup of Tea, Mr Poata?'...

*Ordinary People (1980, Redford) 7/10
*Man of Iron (1981, Wajda) 6/10
To Encourage the Others (1972, TV, Clarke) 8/10
The Hallelujah Handshake (1970, TV, Clarke) 8/10
The Crazies (1973, Romero) 7/10
Sovereign’s Company (1970, TV, Clarke) 7/10
Columbus (2017, Kogonada) 7/10
Days of Eclipse (1988, Sokurov) 6/10
Loves of a Blonde (1965, Forman) 9/10
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981, Bertolucci) 8/10
Algol: Tragedy of Power (1920, Werckmeister) 6/10
*Taxi Zum Klo (1980, Ripploh) 8/10
*Octopussy (1983, Glen) 6/10
Missile (1988, Wiseman) 8/10
Good Time (2017, Safdie, Safdie) 8/10

Sandra (Visconti, 1965)
The Death of Louis XIV (Serra, 2016)
After the Rehearsal (Bergman, 2017)
Chasing the Trane (John Scheinfeld, 2017) - its amazing how awful this was

Why? I agree it was on the generic side, and some of those cosmically swirly segues early on were corny, but (it's been a couple of months since I saw it) wasn't there enough Coltrane music to make it okay by default? I remember it as being pretty good on "Alabama" and A Love Supreme.

Yeah it was good on "Alabama". As someone who likes a lot of Coltrane's music there was very little content on what anyone said beyond "this is genuis", which isn't good if you don't buy it and would like an in (as the friend I was with did) or find him a complicated artist, and even if you like him AND buy it there is very little engagement on the music. A Love Supreme might be up there with Bach and Beethoven, but Coltrane broke up that group after recording it and started doing all the free/strange stuff - that is just the kind of thing that was in no way ever dealt with.

The other good-ish bit was the detour into Nagasaki, it was great to know more about that Japanese tour (Live in Japan 4CD set of recordings taken from it would be my go to Coltrane) but it was marred by that obsessive fanboy.

As for the footage I don't see much of a need to go to a doc for it. I mean I could just chase it up on youtube.

LOL sorry that Bergman is from 1984.

Again, going by a shaky memory, but I think I left wishing there'd been more live footage. Not sure how much exists--wasn't the documentary a lot of Ken Burns-like stills.

I found the Japanese guy kind of hilarious. A little less of him, probably.

Yeah there were a lot of stills - don't know enough of Ken Burns' stuff (like I've seen quite a bit of Jazz but I don't recall much of it rn)

The Japanese fan kinda stood for what the doc was like. No one really able to say anything, or in any way being encouraged to say much that was interesting on Coltrane. I am still trying to get rid of the crap that came out of Santana's mouth!

Have you read Ben Ratliff's The Coltrane Legacy? Def gets into controversies, feuds, and some takes I hadn't seen, incl. Sonny Sharrock, who always gave Coltrane much credit for his own late-blooming conversion/approach to jazz, here says that ultimately C. "had to die" because young musos were getting totally intimidated and/or otherwise overly awe-struck by his giant steps.

"Had to die" may or may not be the exact phrase, but pretty sure that's the gist.

No I haven't but he appeared in the film, along with a Ashley Kahn who wrote a Coltrane biography. Both said nothing that stuck so I wouldn't be hurrying to get any of their books out of the shelves.

From the doc you'd be struggling to think of Coltrane as any kind of central figure in jazz history. Its just someone to worship, cult-like.

Capitolfest 15:

The Coast Patrol (Bud Barsky, 1925)
The Sea God (George Abbott, 1930)
Cheer Up & Smile (Sidney Lanfield, 1930)
Little Orphant Annie (Colin Campbell, 1918)
Four Feathers (Merian C. Cooper, 1929)
The Countess of Monte Cristo (Karl Freund, 1934)
Wild Horse Stampede (Albert S. Rogell, 1926)
One Hysterical Night (William J. Craft, 1929)
Disorderly Conduct (John Considine, 1932)
The Battle of the Century (Clyde Bruckman, 1927)
Naughty Baby (Mervyn LeRoy, 1928)
White Lies (Leo Bulgakov, 1934)
Innocents of Paris (Richard Wallace, 1929)
Hail the Woman (John Griffith Wray, 1921)
Stowaway (Paul Whitman, 1932)
Corporal Kate (Paul Sloane, 1926)

The Champions (8.5)
The People vs. O. J. Simpson (7.0)
Do the Right Thing (7.5)
The Unbelievers (6.0)
The Big Knife (6.5)
Face Off (6.0)
Carlos (8.5)
The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith (7.5)
North by Northwest (8.0)
Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (6.5)

The Unbelievers could have been so much better than it is--felt like a rah-rah Up-with-Atheists promo film. I mentioned The Champions (terrible title) on the Canadian politics thread a few years ago: a three-CBC documentary about the 30-year rivalry between Trudeau and Lévesque.

wow j.lu, i've seen maybe two of those.

The Capitolfest program notes are full of thanks to Library of Congress, MoMA, UCLA, and other repositories for providing prints. Throughout the weekend I was cursing Universal, Fox, and Sony for not exploiting their back catalogs the way Warner Bros does.

Alien Covenant which was a lot more coherent than Prometheus even if the twist end was pretty predictable. Quite good, much better than I expected. It did seem to at least echo the first films in the series both visually and certain plot points.

A Face In The Crowd. Andy Griffiths plays a drifter with the gift of the gab who rises to great popularity and influence. Film has been compared to Trump but sadly Lonesome Rhodes undoing has been survived regularly by him. He just calls it Fake News.
Another really good film. Glad I've seen it odd that I don't think I had before. Female lead is quite iconic & there's a young Walther Matthau to deliver the denouement speech.

MUBI:

The Idea of a Lake (Mullenthaler, 2016)
Balnearioa (Llinas, 2002)
Castro (Moguillansky, 2009)
The Event (Loznitsa , 2016)

Set of films by Argentinian directors: Castro is meant to be a loose adaptation of Beckett's Murphy and I can see something of that in its existentialist slapstick mode. The Llnias was a doc around Argentinian places and resorts that took a turn on focusing on a bourgie art maker in its final chapter. Not sure what to make of it, it didn't give enough on a distracted view for me to think on any further. Idea of a Lake is the most challenging of the lot, quite a few elements of remembrance (via photography, holiday videos, digital image, conversations both live and on the distance of a web chat, song and dream) that build a picture of parental loss that never quite fades into obscurity.

Loznitsa's The Event puts together gootage from 1991's coup that led to the dissolution of the USSR (in one of the frames you can see a young Putin stepping into a car, just this background fucntionary). Similar to Maidan in its concentrated study of crowd and mass. Comparing its hopes on the ground to the reality (its shattering) years later.

At cinema:

Cloud-Capped Star (Ghatak, 1964) - just a total film in its conception, play with sound (Ghatak is really up there with Godard in that regard, very alert to its textures). The symbolism of a giving 'mother' of the house and her eventual destruction as everyone's dreams but hers are realised is executed to virtual perfection (some erratic editing aside??) Such a great and still sorta unknown film-maker. There is a wonderful sensibility to the writing of the main female character (in an Indian context and yet its a story we see often): a very giving, intelligent woman who is crushed by forces around her - its a process that is known to all around and the main character and yet we dive in to it head-on. Fassbinder before Fassbinder.

Interesting. They had a Ghatak retro at Lincoln Center about twenty years ago. I didn't make it, but heard from one of the theater staff later that it was severely underattended, or words to that effect.

Also for anyone who is interested I think its the only rendition of Tagore that really 'translates' for Western viewers. Never got on with the novels and poetry, but he wrote thousands of songs and there are several performances on Youtube from the films: this is from Cloud-Capped. Sadly no subs there, but some of the other clips do have 'em.

Tagore songs is something I am investigating a bit as well.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) - 10/10
Dunkirk - 3/10
Apocalypse Now (1979) - 5/10
A Ghost Story - 6/10
The Emoji Movie - 7/10
Landline - 4/10
Atomic Blonde - 1/10
The Glass Castle - 4/10
Person to Person - 4/10
Stop Making Sense (1984) - 8/10
Brigsby Bear - 7/10
Logan Lucky - 6/10
Wind River - 6/10

what on earth did you expect watching atomic blonde

that post should just have been your apocalypse now and emoji movie ratings tbh

😜

I like that you can tell if flappy liked or not from ratings. Lists that go from 6 to 8 I'm like sure that's just a list of mood-dependent 7s

Wind River - 6/10

About right. What did you think of the late-breaking flashback? It ruined what was a solid, unpatronizing little movie.

Oh whoa, I thought that was by far the best part of the movie. I've been watching all of Nicolas Roeg's movies lately and it felt like something out of Bad Timing or Eureka. Would've loved it even if not for coincidence, I'm a big fan of anything that uses creative editing like that. in Roeg's work it's often disruptive or disorienting, but this was really seamlessly deployed. Only found out after that it's by the same guy that wrote Hell or High Water and Sicario.