I Just Wanted To Take Another Look At You - the 2018 ILX Film Poll Results Thread

With the Breugel painting at the beginning the making-pictures-come-to-life aspect seemed obvious in a crude sort of way. I’m sure was intentional as an opener. It didn’t really occur to me until Frame 15 or so that the static part of each subsequent vignette might have been the original still photograph? (still not sure). The CGI wasn’t what I’ve seen in other films, it was more crude but felt more natural, more surreal and dream-like than most everything else I’ve seen

my #5 I think? Definitely helped seeing it in a big theater and being in the right mood. Shirin didn't grab me because the whole conceit - watching famous Iranian actresses watching a movie - was obviously lost on me.

felt the same way about Shirin

in this film I liked the way each of the frames seemed linked by theme or visual content

That last frame was beautiful, with a person asleep at a desk in a stark modern room, the Wyler film playing in extreme slow motion on the screen and Love Never Dies on the soundtrack.

The view out of the windows of trees in a forest swaying in winter weather at dusk made me want to be in that room at that moment

My enjoyment of it is purely my own.

― Pauline Male (Eric H.), Tuesday, June 25, 2019 5:01 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’d be surprising if it were someone else’s!

haha

Kiarostami's final film "24 Frames" , made in the last 3 years before his death in 2016, is, uh, something. He took a photo of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow and 23 of his own photos (many of them of snow-covered fields, or waves crashing on the shore) and imagined what happened before and after. He via computer tools added 4 minutes or so of action to each of the 24 shots. Some are wearying and repetitious with little happening, but others are special.

― curmudgeon, Tuesday, January 30, 2018

need to watch it

https://i.imgur.com/xDM6vHv.jpg

28. The Rider
w/d: Chloé Zhao
US 2017 digital
117 points, 6 votes

following "the rider", i will be down for the choe zhao Eternals movie but boy am i having a hard time imagining how that will pan out

― forks, Wednesday, May 8, 2019

It was...okay. The boy is cute.

she picked the right person to structure the movie around, Brady Jandreau is really charismatic

It was subtle, it reminded me a little of Kelly Reichardt's films

https://i.imgur.com/kpJ3imT.jpg

27. Monrovia, Indiana
d: Frederick Wiseman (doco)
US 2018 digital
121 points, 4 votes, 1 #1

Monrovia, Indiana is straight out of a Faulkner novel. Tribulation and death in every scene.

― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, October 28, 2018

haven't seen this yet. that's a beautiful image

A hair less wonderful than Wiseman's recent run, but it made my top 15.

besides Monrovia - which I will definitely see - of the films on this list I haven't seen yet, the ones I'm most looking forward to are Ash Is Purest White, Elephant Sitting Still, The Wild Pear Tree, The Image Book, Dead Souls. I liked Frederik’s descriptions of the last three. After a somewhat traumatic experience with Berlin Alexanderplatz I'm approaching Eight Hours Don't Make a Day with trepidation.

one more today?

I'm up for it, but am surprised by how little attended this is. Wish people would post more here. Anything would do

https://i.imgur.com/CZmH9dR.jpg

26. Free Solo
d: Elizabeth Chai Vasarelyi, Jimmy Chin
US 2018 digital 4K
123 points, 6 votes

(doco)

I liked this a lot, but maybe not as much as The Dawn Wall from 2017, which shared one of its protagonists

that's a great still, but there were so many thrilling images from this film

I found it kind of nerve-wracking to watch

It’s not at the end of the day a great film, but did I or anyone else care while actually watching it? Hell no.

wish I had that kind of courage

just saw "free solo" last night. for me, watching it was an emotional experience. i was intensely into climbing at one point in my life, decades ago, when 'sport climbing' was not a thing yet, rock gyms were a rumored curiosity, and shoe selection involved a choice between just two or three brands.

my climbing was mostly done with two good friends. we lived in montreal, so spent most of our time in the adirondacks. all granite. climbing was the first sport in which my gangly body felt gifted and graceful. i had a lot of difficult things going on my head in those days, self-hatred, terror, stuff that has taken me decades to get on top of, but the slow vertical dance on those vast granite faces, the rhythm of crack climbing, the controlled exhilaration i felt when leading a pitch, the feeling of setting up secure anchors for my partners, ...purified me deeply, and after topping out, the sense of feeling, not just okay, but exalted, was incomparable.

some years into this, i had a bad accident. not climbing: a car accident. i emerged with nerve damage in my left hand. could no longer oppose the thumb (i'm only half human now!), grip strength rendered negligible. i've continued climbing, but nowhere near at the same level. mostly bouldering, some indoor stuff.

for me the star of "free solo" was el capitan. i couldn't take my eyes off it. like many climbers who haven't even climbed the big wall i suspect, the profile of el cap, the great crack systems, flakes and roofs -- much of it is imprinted in our mind, from simply looking at so many photographs, topos, and whatnot. hell i went twice to the ansel adams exhibit that recently closed at the museum of fine arts, just to stand in front of those exposures and feel the storm clearing out of the Valley. i don't know, i just love granite. and el cap in "free solo" presented so many facets. massive and terrifying, yes. but on a small scale: textured, multi-colored, intimate even. above all predictable, when it counted.

i was just struck by the beauty of the wall and of the climbing. in some ways honnold's ascent is the supreme way to pay homage to all of what that is.

― collardio gelatinous, Sunday, March 17, 2019

great post by collardio gelatinous

thought it was interesting that functional MRIs suggested that activity in the amygdala, the locus of fear in the brain, may have been suppressed in Alex Honnold

dude has some serious issues but holy fuck he can climb like a spidermonkey

I was surprised people thought that Monrovia, Indiana was apolitical, to me it described the whole place as a death cult. The creepy free mason ceremony, the priest at the end rhapsodizing about death, the pro-gun t-shirts, and of course, the constant work of that small committee (did anyone figure out exactly who they were?) to keep 'people' out of the city, no matter what. The reveal of their party at the city festival is one of the best side gags of 2018.

hmmmm, more of you should've seen Monrovia. (it's even been on PBS already?)

I don't see the point of these polls if seeing a Wiseman doc isn't due diligence.

no uk release yet

oh apparently it played for four days and i missed it, apologies

not seen yet but somehow the computer graphics aspect of 24 frames completely passed me by, thought it was just static long takes

close enough

didn't realize that Monrovia was available on streaming. I downloaded the PBS app on my streaming device and it's there! I will watch it this week

yes, that's great news

I have seen zero Wisemans to date but I really want to

Can't go wrong really with any of his first 10 movies. after that they get progressively longer (still amazing obv). my favorite of that first run is High School.

https://i.imgur.com/bgaeJj4.png

25. The Other Side Of The Wind
d: Orson Welles w: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar
US 1970-71, 1973-76, 1979, 2008, 2017-18 35mm, 16mm, Super 8
133 points, 5 votes

for all it's meta-narrative conceits and internal references, it's kind of remarkable how *little* like Welles the Jake Hannaford character is. Welles was not this macho showman universally hailed for making stars out of actors or with particularly intense relationships w younger actors afaict, and he certainly wouldn't have made anything quite like the film-within-a-film shown here, which (as others have noted) is closer to something like Zabriskie Point or one of the "acid westerns" than anything in Welles' ouevre. Welles loved dialogue too much, for one thing.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, November 8, 2018

i'll be pretty amused if they finish "the other side of the wind" and it turns out to be a huge turd, but you know almost everything welles had a hand in is, at the very least, interesting. as with that talk show above.

― amateurist, Monday, 11 May 2015

It made my list on the strength of my anticipation and the car scene; the making-of documentary helhped too.

I regarded it as a curio, nothing more, though some of the later scenes with Huston are compelling.

1970-71, 1973-76, 1979, 2008, 2017-18

Fantastic.

it's a lesser work in Welles' ouevre, and overlong, but still compelling

the making-of documentary was better

Agreed.

yes