Last (x) movies you saw (II)

La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1936) - 9/10
Kes (Loach, 1969) - 8/10
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) - 7/10
Le Dernier Combat (Besson, 1983) - 6/10
Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980) - 10/10
They All Laughed (Bogdanovich, 1981) - 10/10
Amarcord (Fellini, 1973) - 7/10
Star 80 (Fosse, 1983) - 4/10
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015) - 9/10
All the King’s Men (Rossen, 1949) - 5/10
Hour of the Wolf (Bergman, 1968) - 10/10
Lions Love (… and Lies) (Varda, 1969) - 7/10
On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong, 2017) - 8/10
Chocolat (Denis, 1988) - 9/10
Images (Altman, 1972) - 2/10
Carol (Haynes, 2015) - 10/10
Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961) - 9/10
Lonesome (Fejos, 1928) - 10/10
Alphaville (Godard, 1965) - 9/10
Shame (Bergman, 1968) - 7/10
Shampoo (Ashby, 1975) - 9/10

*1937

Fuckin wowsers Phantasm IV is good

Roma (6.0)
The Great Buster (6.0)
Turn Me On, Dammit! (7.5)
Napoleon Dynamite (5.0)
Boy Erased (7.0)
Hal (7.0)
The Bedroom Window (6.0)
The Whole Truth (4.5)
The Summer of All My Parents (6.5)
Shampoo (7.5)

Colette (Westmoreland, 2019)
Nina (Chajdas, 2019)
Nobody Daughter Haewon (Sang-Soo, 2013)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Sang-Soo, 2016)

January:

Yesterday's Enemy (Guest, 1959) 8/10
The Favourite (Lanthimos, 2018) 8/10
Putney Swope (Downey, 1969) 8/10
Electra Glide in Blue (Guercio, 1973) 6/10
Longing (Grisebach, 2006) 6/10
She (Day, 1965) 5/10
Split (Shyamalan, 2016) 4/10
The Hired Hand (Fonda, 1971) 8/10
The Terror of the Tongs (Bushell, 1961) 6/10
That Sinking Feeling (Forsyth, 1979) 7/10
Enter the Dragon (Clouse, 1973) 8/10
Carriage to Vienna (Kachyňa, 1966) 8/10
Too Early/Too Late (Straub-Huillet, 1982) 9/10
Stan & Ollie (Baird, 2018) 5/10
Curse of the Crimson Altar (Sewell, 1968) 6/10
At Five in the Afternoon (S. Makhmalbaf, 2003) 8/10
The Murder of Mr. Devil (Krumbachová, 1970) 5/10
Murder on the Orient Express (Branagh, 2017) 4/10
Vampire Circus (Young, 1972) 7/10

Vice
quite interesting to see 2 of the leads play against body type. Wondered why they picked Christian Bale to play somebody so much bulkier than him but it's a good performance. Also Sam Rockwell seems a bit skinny or wiry for George W but againhe';s quit e good.
Some Post modernist touches etc and quite amusing film.
NOt sure how sympathetic the leads are. But they do seem to be pretty evil people don't they?

Vice is a loathsome film.

haven't seen it yet, explain why?

Adam McKay's winks and nudges threw me out of the movie, and the straightforward chronology normalizes Cheney.

i don't get stunt casting stars who look nothing like their real life counterparts then applying makeup until you can't tell who it is. last year it was the darkest hour. a few years ago it was depp in black mass.

interesting take alfred

At Eternity's Gate : 4/10 (and this is cause Dafoe basically plays his Jesus again but wow what a dog)
Field Niggas : 8/10
Le Plein de Super : 8/10
Rampant : 6/10
Climax : 7/10

i don't get stunt casting stars who look nothing like their real life counterparts then applying makeup until you can't tell who it is.

The transformation narrative is part of the marketing buzz around the movie. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder is supposed to be parodying such stunts.

Fyre Fraud (Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason 2019)
Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Smith 2019)
Sudden Fear (David Miller, Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith after Edna Sherry 1952) [public screening on DVD]
That Touch of Mink (Mann, Shapiro, Monaster 1962)
Caught ("Opuls," Laurent 1949)
Mute (Jones 2018)
The Warriors (Hill, Shaber after Yurick 1979) [DCP]
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller, Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty 2018) [DCP]
The Kid Who Would Be King (Cornish 2019) [DCP]
Cold War (Pawlikowski, Głowacki, Borkowski 2018) [DCP]
Don's Party (Williamson, Beresford 1976)
Marwencol (Malmberg 2010 )
Six L.A. Love Stories (Dunaway 2018)
Black Dynamite (White, Sanders, Minns 2009)

Fyre docs: 5/10 each, 6/10 collectively

Sudden Fear: never seen a young Palance before iirc. his skeleton is a marvel, at least 40% of the menace just comes from the cut of his suit. 7/10

That Touch of Mink: you can feel Cary Grant falling asleep behind his eyes as the movie goes on, and he brings less and less every minute to justify Day's heterosexual-panic. 4/10

Caught: put Karina Longworth's Seduction hardcover down a sentence or two into her description of this Howard Hughes takedown, and watched the whole thing on youtube before finishing the paragraph. possibly the greatest indicator of Hughes' mental damage, above watching movies naked 28 hours a day for years and shitting in the corner, was him insisting they change the Hughes character's shoes, but nothing about his misogynistic control issues, so ppl wouldn't get that it was about him. I feel bad enough for Barbara bel Geddes getting hyperfriendzoned every time I watch Vertigo; here I had to watch out of the corner of my eye half the time. 7/10

Mute: duplo Blade Runner. 1/10

The Warriors: watched six days before the 30th anniversary of this. was not prepared for a young, hot, hairy Jerry Horne. second-best NYC subway movie? 7/10

Can You Ever Forgive Me?: decent performances in service of a pretty rote script. I avoid 99.9999999% of trailers if I think I'll ever watch the film, but hadn't heard of this when it rolled in front of something eight months ago or w/e, and at the time it felt most of the plot was probably in the trailer. Nope: all of it. Winced in advance when a silence=death window sticker appeared 8 seconds before REG turns up all full-blownsies at the end. 3/10, saw it at the $4 theatre just bcz Reg was so excited about his Oscar nom.

The Kid Who Would Be King: god imagine spending 8 years in director jail after your excellent great-acting-kids-fight-monsters practical effects debut then only coming back with this thin gruel pretty-embarrassing-kids-fight-CGI-on-a-background-of-CGI blah. a perfectly okay kids entertainment tbh but 2/10 for me.

Cold War: I hate to rep a film just bcz it's 88 minutes, but by fuck it was nice to see something slow and bleak and dense with ennui that actually cracks the fuck along. pulls off the "shot on digital and converted to B&W" better than Roma, too. 6/10

Don's Party: this was filmed in a suburban house ten minutes walk from where I grew up. the only time I ever trick-or-treated in my life was in the same cul-de-sac. had never watched this: once I was old enough, in my teens, I vaguely figured I'd get to see a production or two of the play first. bad move! dunno if the outfits and decor were matched for the 1969 setting, or just undressed as they were found in 1976, but a) between the look, and the longys of DA, and all the adultery, it feels like The Most 1970s Film Ever, and b) tbh all local parents still looked exactly like this in the 80s anyway. 10/10

Marwencol: for the last 25 years, Zemeckis' commitment to pushing new technology has generally seemed a reasonable thing for him to do as long as he no longer has any story ideas, or real care for other scripts, and I don't have to watch them. but him seeing this sweet, contained, careful documentary about a damaged man protecting his brain through art and deciding that what it needs is a plastic Steve Carell to mocap cartoon war scenes is really ill-advised. 8/10

Six L.A. Love Stories: the absolute pure example of someone in Hollywood with just enough friends to make a film on favours, despite not having any money or anything to say. still, nice to see Alicia Witt a little more than in Twin Peaks S3. 2/10

Black Dynamite: had never heard of this until it ran at a revival theatre near me last year. didn't know it was on Netflix until a "here's what's leaving Netflix" article gave me two days notice. furious that I didn't see it in an audience now: it's impossibly dead on as both parody of bad blaxploitation and pastiche of good blaxpoloitation, and the Super 16 colour is so lush it's worth watching for that alone. 9/10

Gothenburg Festival Haul:

Aniara (Lilja & Kågerman)
Aurora (Tervo)
Extinction (Lamas)*
Woman at War (Erlingsson)
Monrovia, Indiana (Wiseman)
Obscuro Barroco (Kranioti)
Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (Khavn)
Dead Souls (Wang Bing)
Harajuku (Svensson)
Loro (Sorrentino)
Rafiki (Kahiu)
Angelo (Schleinzer)
The River (Baigazin)
Sons of Denmark (Salim)
Song Lang (Le)
Lucky One (Engberg)
Cutterhead (Bro)
What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire (Minervini)
Säsong (Skoog)
Divine Wind (Allouache)
My Favorite Fabric (Jiji)
Transnistra (Eborn)
Nona. If You Soak Me I Will Burn You (Donoso)
Koko-di, Koko-da (Nyholm)
Aquarela (Kossakovsky)
Aren’t You Happy? (Heinrich)
Queen of Hearts (el-Toukhy)
Ayka (Dvortsevoy)
Azougue Nazareth (Melo)
Sonia - The White Swan (Sewitsky)

Orchids and Ermine (Santell, 1927)
Fast and Furious (Taurog, 1924)
Two-Gun Man From Harlem (Kahn, 1938)
Hell's House (Higgin, 1932)
Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein, 1938)

I saw What Men Want and What Women Want today. Submit post

lol

Girl on a train. As shit as the book

Lizzie. Two thirds of a good movie with a terrible last act

Honeysuckle Rose (1980, Schatzberg) 7/10
The Lincoln Cycle (1917, Stahl/Chapin) 7/10
Jewel Robbery (1932, Dieterle) 9/10
High Flying Bird (2019, Soderbergh) 8/10
Insignificance (1985, Roeg) 5/10
*The Longest Yard (1974, Aldrich) 7/10
Kinetta (2005, Lanthimos) 6/10
*Peppermint Candy (1999, Lee) 7/10
The Son of Joseph (2016, Green) 6/10
The Iron Mask (1929, Dwan) 7/10
Never Fear (1949, Lupino) 6/10
*Cat People (1942, Tourneur) 9/10

Free Solo can be read as an exploration of a remarkably difficult relationship if yo uwant

Step Forward (Beaudine & Jones, 1922)
Brilliantino the Bullfighter (Wilson, 1922)
Hooked (Hibbard, 1925)
Oil's Well (Wilson, 1923)
Felix Lends a Hand (Messmer, 1922)
Felix Turns the Tide (Messmer, 1922)
*Up the River (Ford, 1930)
Felix Goes a-Hunting (Messmer, 1923)
#Animal Behaviour (Snowden & Fine, 2018)
#Bao (Shi, 2018)
#Late Afternoon (Bagnall, 2017)
#One Small Step (Chesworth & Pontillas, 2018)
#Weekends (Jimenez, 2017)
Tweet-Tweet (Bekmambetova, 2018)
Wishing Box (Zhang & Li, 2017)
#Detainment (Lambe, 2018)
#Fauve (Comte, 2018)
#Marguerite (Farley, 2018)
#Madre (Sorogoyen, 2017)
#Skin (Nattiv, 2018)
West of Hot Dog (Rock & Pembroke, 1924)

#Academy Award-nominated short

Updated "things i missed in 2018 and still need to see that are streaming" list:

In Progress/Next:
Roma (Netflix)
You Were Never Really Here (Amazon)
First Reformed (Amazon)
Incredibles 2 (Netflix)
Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix)

Still To See:
Unsane (Amazon)
The Great Buddha+ (Amazon)
Generation Wealth (Amazon)
Loveless (Amazon/Starz)
Western (Amazon)
John McEnroe: in the Realm of Perfection (Amazon)
Minding the Gap (Hulu)
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (Kanopy/Hulu)
Nancy (Kanopy)
Let the Corpses Tan (Kanopy)
The Other Side of the Wind (Netflix)
Black Panther (Netflix)
Avengers Infinity War (Netflix)
Happy as Lazzarro (Netfix)
Bird Box (Netflix)
Filmworker (Netflix)
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (Netflix)
Solo (Netflix)
What Still Remains (Netflix)
Tully (HBO)
The Tale (HBO)
Jane Fonda in Five Acts (HBO)
Won’t You Be My Neighbor (HBO)

The friday the 13th remake. I really wanted to finish it cause of supernatural's jared. But god damn it was horrendous. Also I was so stoned. Fell asleep.

xp the mcenroe doc is a curious one, i watched it yesterday; even coming to it as a huge tennis fan as i am, its prob a bit too niche/odd for me & id be surprised if it has/had much broad appeal

i'm afraid it may be unwatchable if not on the big screen, but let's see

Minding the Gap was really painful, really beautiful; perfect companion piece for Monrovia, Indiana.

I love 'In the Realm of Perfection' but lol at them adding 'John McEnroe' to the title. It's an experimental doc, but I just love the footage. That one clip with Sonic Youth under it is breathtaking.

should I watch Kansas City or Johnny Guitar tonight

Johnny Guitar

Festival haul Berlin:

The Kindness of Strangers (Scherfig)
Gully Boy (Akhtar)
Heimat ist ein Raum auf Zeit (Heise)
System Crasher (Fingscheidt)
By the Grace of God (Ozon)
Öndög (Wang Quan’an)
The Ground Beneath My Feet (Kreutzer)
Out Stealing Horses (Molland)
African Mirror (Hedinger)
The Golden Glove (Akin)
God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya (Mitevska)
Breathless Animals (Lei)
Mr Jones (Holland)
From Tomorrow On, I Will (Markovic & Wu)
Ghost Town Anthology (Coté)
The Stone Speakers (Drljaca)
A Tale of Three Sisters (Alper)
Vanishing Days (Zhu)
The Garden (Jarman)
I Was at Home, But (Schanelec)
Piranhas (Giovannesi)
Farewell to the Night (Téchiné)
Years of Construction (Emigholz)
Varda by Agnés (Varda)
Elisa y Marcela (Coixet)
Synonymes (Lapid)
So Long, My Son (Wang Xiaoshuai)
About Some Meaningless Events (Derkaoui)
Eleven Miles (Joshi)
Variety (Gordon)

that's a lot sans commentary. what do you recommend?

flappy what did you think of johnny guitar

I'm about to watch it! I ran out of time last night and watched a really great, very short (55 min) Godard film/video essay (Ici et Ailleurs / Here and Elsewhere).

i hope you enjoy it, it blew my mind a few years ago when they screened it at the momi

that's a lot sans commentary. what do you recommend?

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), 15. februar 2019 00:29 (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think only Gully Boy is available right now, as it's on Amazon Prime, and that's a pretty funny if very sentimentalized hip-hop rise-to-fame story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGmbUdf6lEM

Elisa y Marcela should be on Netflix soon, but I can't really recommend it. It's supposed to be a story about Spains first same-sex marriage (one of the women claimed to be a man, and they were later sent to jail for, among other things, blasphemy) and it's supposed to show how ordinary same sex relationships are, but the first half is so awfully sentimental that it undercuts the message. Second half gets better.

But mostly I loved the German documentary/Berlin school stuff (Heise, Emigholz, Schanelec) as well as all the chinese stuff. Oh, and 'Stone Speakers' will absolutely define how you look at Bosnia going forward, if you like me don't really know anything about the country.

i think only Gully Boy is available right now, as it's on Amazon Prime

not on Prime in the US, but it is in cinemas this week

i hope you enjoy it, it blew my mind a few years ago when they screened it at the momi

― jolene club remix (BradNelson)

Loved it. Such a weird, enjoyable, inscrutable movie. Poor Turkey :(

Wind River (Sheridan, 2017) 4/10
Crisis (Bergman, 1946) 6/10
Steamboat Bill Jr. (Keaton, 1928) 8/10
*Phantom Thread (Anderson, 2017) 9/10
The Mule (Eastwood, 2018) 7/10
Poison (Haynes, 1991) 6/10
Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959) 8/10
Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001) 5/10
Fifty Shades Darker (Foley, 2017) 3/10
God's Little Acre (Mann, 1958) 9/10
Occidental (Beloufa, 2017) 5/10
*A Matter of Life and Death (Powell, Pressburger, 1946) 10/10
Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong, 2013) 6/10
Angels on the Street (Choi, 1941)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) 8/10
*Burning (Lee, 2018) 7/10

as part of overnight film festival

River of Grass (Reichardt, 1994) 6/10
Still Walking (Kore-eda, 2008) 9/10
Orlando (Potter, 1992) 10/10
El Salvavidas (Alberdi, 2011) 7/10
All these Sleepless Nights (Marczak, 2016) 7/10
Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project (Mack, 2013) 7/10
Green Days (Ahn, Han, 2011) 4/10
Alice in the Cities (Wenders, 1974) 8/10
A Girl's Own Story (Campion, 1984) 8/10
A Bagful of Fleas (Chytilova, 1962) 7/10

OG Darko or director’s?

og, also a rewatch

ah

Aria (various, 1987) - 7/10
Casino (Scorsese, 1995) - 9/10
Daisies (Chytilová, 1966) - 6/10
Contempt (Godard, 1963) - 5/10
Elephant (Van Sant, 2003) - 9/10
Made in U.S.A. (Godard, 1966) - 6/10
Keep Your Right Up (Godard, 1987) - 4/10
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Altman, 1976) - 3/10
California Split (Altman, 1974) - 10/10
A Woman is a Woman (Godard, 1961) - 9/10
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Godard, 1967) - 9/10
What Women Want (Meyers, 2000) - 4/10
Tiny Furniture (Dunham, 2010) - 8/10
Comment ça va? (Godard, 1976) - 4/10
The Last Detail (Ashby, 1973) - 9/10
Wrong Move (Wenders, 1975) - 10/10
Ici et Ailleurs (Godard, 1976) - 9/10
Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954) - 9/10
Kansas City (Altman, 1996) - 3/10
Sympathy for the Devil (Godard, 1968) - 6/10
Alice in the Cities (Wenders, 1974) - 8/10
The Bakery Girl of Monceau (Rohmer, 1963) - 9/10

love california split

Soldiers of the King (Elvey, 1933)
*A Propos de Nice (Vigo, 1930)
*Taris (Vigo, 1931)
*Zero for Conduct (Vigo, 1933)
*L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)
What Price Innocence (Mack, 1933)
When You Read This Letter (Melville, 1953)

Love Story (6.0)
The Straight Story (9.0)
Unforgettable (5.5)
The Image Book (--)
Fuzz (6.0)
Eyes Wide Shut (7.5)
Burroughs: The Movie (6.0)
15 Minutes (5.5)
The American President (6.0)
Disobedience (6.5)

Forever 'B' / Abducted In Plain Sight (Skye Borgman 2017)
* Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Lord, Rothman, Persichetti, Ramsey 2018) [Laser]
Happy Death Day (Landon after Lobdell 2017)
Coherence (Byrkit, Manugian 2013)
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (Gregory 2014)
Gumshoe (Frears, Smith 1971)
High Flying Bird (Soderbergh, McCraney 2019)
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (Lord, Miller, Mitchell 2019) [Laser]
Murder On The Orient Express (Lumet, Dehn, allegedly Shaffer, after Christie 1974)
Shoplifters (Kore-eda 2018) [DCP]
* Miller's Crossing (Coen & Coen 1990)