Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017, Dean) 6/10
Fruit of Paradise (1970, Chytilova) 5/10
The Thief of Paris (1967, Malle) 7/10
Calamity Jane (1953, Butler) 7/10
*The Funeral (1996, Ferrara) 9/10
*Going Places (1974, Blier) 6/10
Welcome to New York (2014, Ferrara) (European cut) 6/10
*The Wrong Box (1966, Forbes) 7/10
The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002, Varda) 6/10
*The Gleaners & I (2000, Varda) 8/10
*The Blackout (1997, Ferrara) 7/10
Poetic Justice (1993, Singleton) 6/10
*Ladybird Ladybird (1994, Loach) 9/10

American Gigolo finally clicked on my third viewing (1994 and 2005 were my first two). I can imagine John Travolta bringing pathos to the role, and it might've worked, but Gere's lacquered shallowness is just right -- boy, does he know how to move in those clothes and thus in character. A scene I'd forgotten about set in a leather bar has less leering from the director than Cruising.

Schrader never leers, Friedkin can't stop himself.

Schrader used to tourist in such places, he's said

*Little Shop of Horrors- sadly not the restored original ending, which I still haven't seen. I'm absolutely not an expert on movie musicals (I want to get there), but I'd love to know how much the claustrophobic stageyness of the exteriors was a conscious choice ("Somewhere That's Green," etc) vs the product of shooting at Pinewood for control over the visuals/budgetary reasons/etc. Always linked with the Burton Batmans in my mind for that reason; that and first seeing them around the same time.

The Death of Stalin- doesn't really have an ending or even a particularly thematically resonant not-an-ending, but up until then it's incredible. The accents are the showy thing (that immediately feels totally natural and obvious after about five minutes) but I'm more impressed by how much Iannucci et al get out of the actual conflicts of the period- the troika, the coup against Beria, etc- instead of relying solely on comic business (which is there, and extremely good; there's an extended bit with people kneeling at Stalin's side not realizing he's lying in a puddle of piss that's one of the funniest lowbrow gags I've ever seen).

The Raid- it's not the perfect action movie its reputation has been built up to in the years since its release but it's a really, really fucking good action movie. Makes me want to track down Merantau and even more so the documentary on pencak silat that kicked off Evans' whole project in the first place; I can't really find evidence of whether it was completed or not (sources say it was work for hire, so he may not be credited) but I've at least found *a* silat documentary on Youtube, so into the queue it goes.

Emanuelle in America- holy christ this movie is bonkers
The first Emanuelle/Emmanuelle film I've seen, directed and shot by Joe d'Amato/Aristide Massaccessi. Episodic softcore shenanigans (d'Amato loves bush)- with, except for the amazing pop art kitsch in Emanuelle (this is one of the knockoff films with Laura Gemser)'s apartment and studio, some of the worst, tackiest, most drab 70s interiors I've ever seen- until it gets to Venice and some hardcore inserts. There's a weird thriller sideline into snuff movies that have been faked with considerably/disturbingly more talent and enthusiasm than any of the non-hardcore sex scenes and a weirdly (not all that weirdly for 70s Italy) racist denouement. Oh, and a lady jacks off a horse, which is less shocking after going on a Borowczyk deep dive earlier this year but still leaves me wondering what the fuck was up with 70s porn audiences. Killer soundtrack though

the claustrophobic stageyness of the exteriors

Shot entirely on the soundstage... The early '80s stage version was of course among the unlikeliest of runaway off-Broadway hits, so Oz wanted to honor the artifice of that stagey look. It was an expensive film, budget around $25 million (when that was real money).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Shop_of_Horrors_(film)#Filming

Saw booksmart the other day, it’s fine. Didn’t laugh much. Baffled it didn’t make a zillion space dollars obv

xpost Oh definitely! And I didn't finish or even really start that parenthetical aside about "Somewhere That's Green"; I meant as opposed to that sequence (and the theatrical ending), where the flatness of the suburb backdrop functions along with the catalog of sad, shitty consumer products and etc.

I'll read up on it more- I'm low key obsessed with 80s movies that tried to convey the sense of a city entirely or mostly on sound stages (the Super Mario Bros. movie is another key title here)

well of course nearly all studio films did that in the '30s and '40s, til location shoots became the thing

Tolkien seemed to be lacking something.
Also seemed heavily cliched in some places
Had initially hoped for more from it.

Live & let Die
Bond in Harlem, New Orleans and Jamaica in the early 70s.
A tad racist, odd that the one new supporting cast member to return is the redneck sheriff. Also wondering why they cut the death of the CIA agent for whatever broadcast that was I watched
A bit cliched
& I prefer Connery to Moore.

Destroyer
quite harrowing and Nicole Kidman has looked healthier. She does in this film too I guess.
Quite good really.

From the trailer, Booksmart looked like Superbad with a dollop of Yas Queen feminism

re Booksmart: i would imagine so but the reviews suggested something more? May watch tonight.

the Dardenne Brothers' "The Kid With the Bike" is simultaneously on Hulu and Mubi and, like everything else I've ever seen by them, is a great opportunity for painful slice of life underacting and intense shifts in perspective and sympathies; totally worth a watch even if you know nothing about the director

i got as far as the annoyed handjob in Destroyer and found it too ludicrous to continue. I get that this is a role a thousand men have sleepwalked through too but those films were also stupid.

Trailer is misleading. it's closer to Blockers, Flower, Bridesmaids, Neighbors... I don't think it's similar to Superbad but I understand why they went with that in the marketing. it's very good.

See Booksmart in a theater if you can. Shot anamorphic widescreen, looked beautiful, CINEMATIC unlike other similar comedies.

The Interpreter (6.5)
The Beach Bum (6.0)
The Real Mad Men of Advertising (7.0)
The El Duce Tapes (6.0)
Native Son (6.5)
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (8.0)
Hail Satan? (6.0)
Apollo 11 (7.0)
Black Girl (1966--7.5)
Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland (7.0)

Took me a month to log 10 films.

Superbad > Flower > Blockers > Bridesmaids > Neighbors imo

guessing that Booksmart ranks second, but turned up five minutes late for a preview screening and wasn't let in

White feminism: the teen years is a very minor element of booksmart tbh. I did have to check it wasn’t produced by apatow with his weird fetish for women throwing up during sex, ppl saying “vagina” a lot being the height of humour &c

I did get emotional at the end despite not really caring (or laughing much) throughout. The two leads are great, talented young cast in general - you do feel you’re watching 50 theatre kids even though only two of them are playing “theatre kids”

I think it's even aware of the absurd wealth of the kids & their parents, cf. the stoner dude being like "oh yea I got a job coding at Google"

Oh yeah all the kids are going “lol we’re gonna be the elites when we grow up” that’s the heartwarming message so if that turns you off stay away

Live & let Die
Bond in Harlem, New Orleans and Jamaica in the early 70s.
A tad racist, odd that the one new supporting cast member to return is the redneck sheriff

live and let die is the first appearance of the sheriff (who is played as a white racist caricature who all the other characters laugh at). his second appearance is in the man with the golden gun, where he is allowed to be wildly racist without any disapproving undercurrent. this is why i don't think live and let die is very racist and the man with the golden gun is very very very racist

The only thing I can say in Live and Let Die's favor re: racism is that it's way, way, way less racist than the source novel.

lol yeah fleming's always reliable for that. color me surprised when i learned all the outrageously racist elements of you only live twice were taken straight from the novel

It was a real shock reading the source novels as a kid and seeing that the patronizing "all in good fun" racism of the movies was usually just straight-up unvarnished hate from Fleming.

Just got round to John wick parabellum. Laughed a lot, utterly at a loss as to how it outperformed booksmart obv

Live And Let Die is idiotic on race from a 2019 perspective but not hateful

by 1973 context it p much reads as celebratory as blaxploitation pics, just with the ham in the other fist

I just saw Booksmart and laughed literally all the way through. The characters are completely hyper-realised, but that just throws you into their headspace more. The closest analogue for me is 21 Jump Street, but this is much more charming.

From the trailer, Booksmart looked like Superbad with a dollop of Yas Queen feminism

You're not wrong, but by the end of the movie our "woke" Cinderellas have not only gone to the ball, but learned to recognize that their peers are more than just the stereotypes out of the past three or four decades of teen movies. Of course, the whole thing is a blue-state fantasy (and probably a red-state nightmare).

Before the movie I saw a red-band trailer for what appeared to be be Superbad in a middle school (possibly elementary school?), starting with three boys who have found a parent's sex toys (of course, not recognizing them as such). THAT was disturbing.

Anemic Cinema (Duchamp, 1926)
A Corner in Wheat (Griffith, 1909)
The Night Club Lady (Cummings, 1932)
Jeffries Jr. (McCarey, 1924)
The Messenger Boy (Ludwig, 1931)
Booksmart (Wilde, 2019)
Mabel at the Wheel (Normand & Sennett, 1914)
Mabel's Busy Day (Normand, 1914)
The Girl in the Arm-Chair (Guy-Blache, 1912)
One Step Behind the Seraphim (Sandu, 2017)

good couple of weeks

Machorka-Muff (Straub, Huillet, 1963) 6/10
Thief (Mann, 1981) 7/10
New Rose Hotel (Ferrara, 1998) 8/10
The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991) 7/10
The Nun (Rivette, 1966) 8/10
The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou, 1983) 8/10
That Day, on the Beach (Yang, 1983) 9/10
*A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991) 10/10
Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai, 1992) 7/10

A Brighter Summer Day was amazing I thought

also really liked Rebels of the Neon God, although on first viewing not as much as Goodbye, Dragon Inn or Stray Dogs

totally, nothing really comes close to a brighter summer day for me; and only getting richer as i find myself following the plot mechanics less.

feel the same about rebels (tho yet to see stray dogs!), very charming to see something that feels like such a debut. tsai and lee really were born to make films together

LOcal African film festival. So Ko Knanga the south African film set in the francophone Congolese ex-pat community showing a naive girl arriving from Congo and getting messed around by trhe partner of her aunt. Could have done with some script editing.

Finding Fela the film based around teh Fela on Broadway show. I think I saw thsi around teh time i saw the production of the stage show in London but can't think when i saw that. I'm seeing 2011 as when it was first on in London but i didn't think it was then, can't tie it in mentally with any significant point in my life to the time. & i thought 2011 would have done.
Combines footage from the show and its rehearsals with a biography of Fela which is quite good. & has me reassessing his later work which I hadn't payed much attention to previously. Worths eeing anyway. As was the stage show, quite amazing stamina on the performer's part 3 hours of major energetic dancing from a lot of them.

Anbessa
a film about a 10 year old boy living in a shack he's been moved to since a condominium has been set up on the land his farm used to sit on. Nice little film.

Queen of Katwe a film about a chess playing girl from Uganda which I'd already seen last year. Was put on because they couldn't get Finding fela to play. So that got put off til the day after.
It was made by a division of Disney which means it is a bit glossier tahn it might have been, possibly not as glossy as it could have been though. Quite nice, not sure how well it repays multiple screenings though.

The Fisherman
short with an ageing fisherman meeting a talking Fish.

Rebels of the Neon God is not as great as what comes later, but already Vive l'Amour is probably a masterpiece. For some reason I've never watched The River, should fix that as soon as possible.

The River is a big uncomfortable bummer, iirc.

The Man From Hong Kong (Trenchard-Smith 1975) 📺
Hard Ticket To Hawaii [4K restoration] (Andy Sidaris, Arlene Sidaris 1987)
Origin Story (Kulap Vilaysack 2019) 📺
Teacher's Pet (George Seaton, Fay Kanin, Michael Kanin 1957) 📺
* John Wick (Stahelski, Leitch, Kolstad 2014) 📺
* John Wick: Chapter 2 (Stahelski, Kolstad 2017) 📺
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Stahelski, Kolstad, Hatten, Collins, Abrams 2019)
Captain Marvel (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve, Geneva Robertson-Dworet 2019) 🚗
Avengers: Endgame (Russo, Russo, Markus, McFeely 2019) 🚗
The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, Collier Young 1953)
In Fabric (Strickland 2019)
Crystal Swan (Darya Zhuk, Helga Landauer 2018)
Deadwood (Minahan, Milch, Pizzolato 2019) 📺

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Hitchcock, 1941) - 8/10
Letter Never Sent (Kalatozov, 1960) - 9/10
The Blue Angel (Sternberg, 1930) - 9/10
The Pride of the Yankees (Wood, 1942) - 7/10
The Warped Ones (Kurahara, 1960) - 6/10
The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969) - 5/10
To Sleep with Anger (Burnett, 1990) - 6/10

Three Days of the Condor (Pollack, 1975) - 10/10
Little Women (Cukor, 1933) - 7/10
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Varda, 1977) - 9/10
Roseland (Ivory, 1977) - 6/10
Women of the Night (Mizoguchi, 1948) - 8/10
Pearls of the Deep (various, 1966) - 5/10
*Let the Sunshine In (Denis, 2017) - 10/10
Mur Murs (Varda, 1981) - 8/10
Sudden Fear (Miller, 1952) - 8/10

John Wick 3 (Stahelski, 2019)
Claire's Camera (Hong, 2018)
Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Fassbinder, 1975)
The Ear (Kachyna, 1970)
Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein, 1938)
Moonrise (Borzage, 1948)
Deadwood (Minahan, 2019)
Our Man in Havana (Reed, 1959)
Isle of Dogs (Anderson, 2018)
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Dougherty, 2019)
Frankenstein (short - Dawley, 1910)
The Tram (short 0 Kieślowski, 1966)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007)

MUBI:

The Fire (Schnitman, 2015)
Machorka-Muff (Straub/Huillet, 1963)
The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
Not Reconciled (Straub/Huillet, 1965)

Cinema:
Maborosi (Kore-eda, 1995)
A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991)

The MUBI season of the Straub/Huillet is a really interesting experiment by itself. Especially if you are (as I was) watching Not Reconciled after a night drinking! Gotta say I am really looking forward to mangled soundtracks, lack of subs, Marxism and history lessons over the next little while.

Catching Maborosi at the cinema was wonderful, had only seen it as a shagged out torrent where the use of natural light turned pitch black. One of the great films around grief, and how sometimes there just are no answers. Finally A Brighter Summer Day was an exhausting (at four hours with a short break) Sunday evening screening, the kind of experience I always found the most rewarding when actually going out to the cinema.

Ha, I came back from a friend’s degree show last night and decided not to watch not reconciled precisely because I thought I was too drunk for it

I also saw maborosi at the cinema, and still walking which I loved

I watched it once sober and I can tell you now it didn't make much of a difference.

not reconciled my fav shraub/huillet i've seen so far, though immediately felt like i needed to rewatch it. should say if yr at any more of close up/taiwanese season xyzzzz, feel free to say hi (i'm usually reading a book)

I am also reading a book if I go on my own. But yes will let you know, intend to be at a couple more.

I loved The Souvenir even though it alienated most of my set. At my showing yesterday I counted three walkouts and a pair of old ladies whom I had to shush because the film bored them enough to inspire them to jabber.

*Service With a Smile (Mack, 1934)
*Good Morning, Eve! (Mack, 1934)
*What, No Men? (Staub, 1935)
Gypsy Sweetheart (Staub, 1935)
*Okay, Jose (Staub, 1935)
Carnival Day (Staub, 1936)
La Cigarette (Dulac, 1919)
The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac, 1923)
The Running Actress (Moon, 2017)
*Bone Crushers (Wing, 1933)
Der Raub der Mona Lisa (von Bolvary, 1931)
Madame Racketeer (Gribble & Hall, 1932)

The Principal Enemy (1974, Sanjinés) 6/10
Madeline’s Madeline (2018, Decker) 3/10
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara) 9/10
Becket (1964, Glenville) 5/10
City of Lost Souls (1983, von Praunheim) 6/10
Soleil O (1967, Hondo) 9/10
Lover Come Back (1961, Mann) 7/10
*King of New York (1990, Ferrara) 7/10
The Dupes (1973, Saleh) 8/10
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017, Wilkerson) 7/10
*Micki & Maude (1984, Edwards) 6/10

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Hara) 9/10

astonishing film

you all have access to such obscure films

I'm envious

ok, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On appears to be available on netflix dvd, so I will watch it