Last (x) movies you saw

The whole first half of the film definitely worked better for me, yes. If I hadn't been watching it in a class, though, I woulda abandoned it the first time someone started talking to their furniture.

Anyone watched Aquarius yet?

documentaries:

Holy Hell (Allen, 2016) 7/10
A Place In The Sun (Stevens, 1951) 5/10
*Slacker (Linklater, 1991) 8/10
*Jeremiah Johnson (Pollack, 1971) 8/10
Mascots (Guest, 2016) 6/10
Deep Web (Winter, 2015) 5/10
HyperNormalisation (Curtis, 2016) 7/10
Weiner (Kreigman/Steinberg, 2016) 7/10
Return of The Secaucus Seven (Sayles, 1979) 6/10
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016) 7/10
Everybody Wants Some! (Linklater, 2016) 5/10

wait on, not all of these are documentaries, well maybe "everybody wants some" is

45 Years. Not as good as I'd read, but of the two of us who watched it, I liked it more.

Sausage Party (2016) - not sure why no review i read of this mentioned the non-stop "ironic" racist stereotypes. this movie is nothing but lazy stereotypes. yes, the Mexican is a drunk tequila bottle. yes, the irish guy is a potato. yes, the Chinese guys are boxes of rice. yes the wise spiritual leader of the film is a talking redfaced pack of American Spirits. there is an atheist message in here that is as leaden and awkward as a 15-year-old summarizing "God Delusion" on reddit for the first time. the rest of it is sub-Family Guy Edgelord comedy. if you think saying the word "Bro" is funny this will leave you in stitches.

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) - gave this a shot cos i found the first very visually entertaining even though it had sucked all the wonder out of Wonderland. man, this was bad. if you have ever wanted to see The Mad Hatter depressed cos he thinks his parents are dead, this is the film for you. it's almost incredible how much this movie stretches to actually ruin the story of Alice in Wonderland. like now we have an in-universe explanation for why the Mad Hatter's tea party always thinks it is one minute to tea time, and it's even stupider than midichlorians.

I got about a half hour into the first Burton Wonderland movie before shutting it off in disgust. What really sucks about these films, though (aside from a generation of kids growing up associating AiW with Johnny Depp), is that the Burton of the 1980s could have probably done something great with them.

Anyone seen My Feral Heart? Looks like kind of a typical brit realist film but it's apparently got a light supernatural aspect to it.

The Lady and the Beard (Ozu, 1931)
La Notte (Antonioni, 1961)
Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2002)
The Lovers (Malle, 1958)
No Home Movie (Akerman,2015)
Ornette: Made in America (Clarke, 1984)
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (Bjorkman, 2015)
The Floorwalker (Chaplin, 1916)
Adventures on the New Frontier (Pennebaker/Maysles/Stilson/Leacock, 1961)

From CPH:PIX:

The Girl, The Mother & The Demons (Osten)
The Son of Joseph (Green)
The White People (Achan)
Being 17 (Techiné)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong)
Soy Nero (Pitts)
The Woman Who Left (Diaz)
The Yard (Månsson)
Paviliion (Sutton)
Cemetery of Splendour (Weerasethakul)
Parents (Tafdrup)
Staying Vertical (Guiraudie)
The Ornithologist (Rodrigues)
Raw (Ducournau)
Anti (BH)
Nocturama (Bonello)
The Eremits (Trocker)
Godless (Petrova)
Shambles (Lemiux)
Sand Storm (Zexer)
Swiss Army Man (Scheintert & Kwan)
Scarred Hearts (Jude)
The Last Family (Matuszynski)
El Futuro Perfecto (Wohlatz)
Aloys (Nölle)
Stories of Our Lives (Chuchu)
Neon Bull (Mascaro)
Hedi (Ben Attia)
The Death of Louis XIV (Serra)
In the Last Days of the City (El Said)
Shelley (Abbasi)
Certain Women (Reichardt)
Mimosas (Laxe)
37 (Grasten)
The Island Funeral (Towira)
A Quiet Passion (Davies)
Illegitimate (Sitaru)
Park (Exarchou)
Zoology (Tverdovsky)
Clair Obscur (Ustaoglu)

The Death of Louis XIV (Serra)

How was this? Hoping to catch a Scottish screening later in the month

His most focused film so far, there's a dramatic backbone to all of it, that hasn't been there in the past. Beautiful, of course, wonderful mood. There's not that much in it, though, and of sickbed films, like Cemetery of Splendour and Scarred Hearts, it's the least fantastic.

Encino Man (Mayfield, 1992)
Heavyweights (Brill, 1995)
Son In Law (Rash, 1993)
The Pacifier (Shankman, 2005)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Cohen, Cohen, 2000)
Llyn Foulkes One Man Band (Halpern, Quilty, 2014)

amour (2012 haneke) 8/10
joy (2015 Russell) 1/10
arrival (2016 Villeneuve) 8/10
American pastoral (2016 McGregor) 5/10
the goodbye girl (72 ross) 5/10
complete unknown (2016 josh marston) 4/10
mamma rosa (62 pasolini) 7/10
weiner (2016 josh kriegman & elyse Steinberg) 8/10

Supersonic (Whitecross, 2016) 8/10
Holy Motors (Carax, 2012) 7/10
Bobby Fischer Against The World (Garbus, 2011) 6/10
American Honey (Arnold, 2016) 9/10
I, Daniel Blake (Loach, 2016) 6/10
*Millers Crossing (Coen, 1990) 8/10
The Neon Demon (Refn, 2016) 6/10

Another Woman (Allen, 1988)
A Poem Is a Naked Person (Blank, 1974/2015)
Dr. Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
*Blood Simple (Coen/Coen, 1984)
Basquiat (Schnabel, 1996)
Violent Cop (Kitano, 1989)
Code Unknown (Haneke, 2000)
Every Man For Himself (Godard, 1980)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971; rewatch) 10/10
Arrival (2016) 6/10
Into the Inferno (2016) 7/10
Moonlight (2016) 9/10
Young Frankenstein (1974; rewatch) 9/10
Supersonic (2016) 8/10
Lisa and the Devil (1973) 6/10
No Home Movie (2015) 7/10
Love Streams (1984; rewatch) 8/10
Jack Reacher (2012) 6/10

Always feel McCabe & Mrs Miller should be docked half a point for Julie Christie's terrible cockney accent (tho' I concede that might be the deep point - ie Mrs Miller is faking it)

la creme of my exile:

*Hustle (1975, Aldrich) 8/10
Sieranevada (2016, Puiu) 7/10
From the Notebook of… (1971/1998, Beavers) 8/10
Staying Vertical (2016, Guiraudie) 8/10
*North to Alaska (1960, Hathaway) 7/10
The Silent Partner (1978, Duke) 7/10
Elle (2016, Verhoeven) 9/10
A Quiet Passion (2016, Davies) 8/10
Tell Me Lies (1968, Brook) 7/10
*Blazing Saddles (1974, Brooks) 7/10
Tower (2016, Maitland) 9/10
*The Terrorizers (1986, Yang) 8/10
*A Taste of Honey (1961, Richardson) 8/10
The Mad Fox (1962, Uchida) 7/10
The Handmaiden (2016, Park) 8/10
A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (1955, Uchida) 7/10
*Emperor of the North (1973, Aldrich) 9/10
A Fugitive from the Past (1965, Uchida) 8/10
*Le Plaisir (1952, Ophuls) 10/10
Twilight Saloon (1955, Uchida) 7/10
A Generation (1955, Wajda) 8/10

At least the sound is bad, so it's hard to hear it. xp

Emperor of the North is an insane movie more people should know about. Lee Marvin as the "A no. 1" hobo taking on Ernest Borgnine as a sadistic train conductor. In the Secret History of Twin Peaks, part of the backstory of Harry Dean Stanton's character from Fire Walk with Me is being a stuntman on that movie.

it's a shame the original title, Emperor of the North Pole, wasn't retained

Ugh, I was so disappointed by Staying Vertical. Sloppy, weirdly predictable, and with such a diminished sense of place compared to L'Inconnu.

and I was so disappointed by Rodrigues' The Ornithologist

u r a good reverse barometer

*Hustle (1975, Aldrich) 8/10

I've always liked this one - full of beauty and ugliness

Lol. At least we agree on A Quiet Passion, though 8/10 is a bit too low for me.

But I don't get how anyone could prefer Staying Vertical to Ornithologist. Everything is better in Rodrigues' film. The landscape is prettier, the naked men are prettier, the ideas are crazier, but also more coherent...

and Eddie Albert as a porn addict/murderous union lawyer! xp

And Deneuve/Reynolds a way more convincing couple than Deneuve/Jack Lemmon's dorky character in The April Fools as far as Franco-American relations go

Emperor of the North is an insane movie more people should know about. Lee Marvin as the "A no. 1" hobo taking on Ernest Borgnine as a sadistic train conductor. In the Secret History of Twin Peaks, part of the backstory of Harry Dean Stanton's character from Fire Walk with Me is being a stuntman on that movie.

Thanks for the reminder; Twilight Time has it on Blu-Ray. Ordering now.

In the past five days I watched two different farces, the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! and The Wrong Box, a british film from the mid-60s, starring Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine and Peter Sellers, among others.

As others have pointed out, the Coen's movie was very slight and mainly functioned as a rack upon which to hang a variety of brief parodies of film genres. It all added up to mildly entertaining and harmless fluff. No shibboleths were harmed in the making of this movie.

The british film was a much better constructed farce, equally nonsensical as Hail, Caesar! and filled with the usual assortment of cunning idiots, but much sharper, because it took aim at more deeply beloved targets and skewered them more deftly. It kept its satirical bite right up to the final scene, when it devolved into into slapstick as the handiest means of arriving at an ending. It's worth digging up, if you like farce. Oh, and the butler steals every scene he's in.

i remember Sellers and all his cats

and then

*Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask (1972, Allen) 6/10
Turkish Delight (1973, Verhoeven) 6/10
A Burlesque on Carmen (1915, Chaplin) (31m) 7/10
Don’t Call Me Son (2016, Muylaert) 6/10
Certain Women (2016, Reichardt) 8/10
The Dark Road (1921, Murnau) 8/10
Total Recall (1990, Verhoeven) 7/10
Spetters (1980, Verhoeven) 6/10
Autumn Leaves (1956, Aldrich) 7/10
Taza, Son of Cochise (1954, Sirk) (3D) 5/10

yea Wrong Box is funny, its been revered in my fam to an extent

Magic Mike (Soderbergh, 2012)
American Honey (Arnold, 2016)

Working class survival tale double bill!! Plenty to recommend in both tbh - what I liked about Magic Mike was how nothing was laid on too thick: the lack of money (due to the crash), the romance (that felt very real: stop-start, the waiting, the complicated getting-to-know-each-other business that almost goes up in smoke for good! And anyway, she is seeing someone else..), the seediness in business mixed with the friendships formed in there too.

Forest of Oppression — A Record of the Struggle at Takasaki City University of Economics (Ogawa Shinsuke, 1967)

The Shinsuke Ogawa season started at the ICA last night. I think this was pretty good as an early film (having some of the great later ones). Spending time with Marxist-Lenninist students and their failed, beaten down politics and half-digested jargon (I have followed that story on film all the way through to the United Red Army faction and its not pretty, nor would I recommend it) is not anybody's idea of fun but there is enough humour in the confrontation some of the students had with their parents. The riot scenes had a charge (but these scenes almost always have) but as a precursor for what he would go on to do its a good piece of the jigsaw.

Halfway through Betty blue, taking a quick break just to say: how the fuck am I only halfway through Betty blue?!

This is the directors cut to be fair, apparently the original release was an hr shorter. I'd probably have been way more into this if I'd seen it at the time, I'm enjoying it ok but not as much as diva

Manchester by the Sea (Lonergan, 2016) 8/10
La La Land (Chazelle, 2016) 7/10
* Lacombe, Lucien (Malle, 1974) 8/10
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2016) 6/10

I thought Buckaroo Banzai might be fun but it was surprisingly boring. Apart from the wonderful credits music.

I thought Buckaroo Banzai might be fun but it was surprisingly boring.

I've never understood the appeal of this movie.

I found it baffling in a not-exactly fun kinda way when I first saw it years ago, but I'm willing to give it another shot.

Hairspray (Waters, 1988) 4/5
A Blade in the Dark (Bava, not the good one, the shit one, 1983) 1.5/5
*The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970) 4/5
Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (Crump, 2015) 3/5
*The Cat O' Nine Tails (Argento, 1971) 3/5
*Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Argento, 1971) 4/5

This was somehow my first time seeing all of Hairspray as god/Waters intended instead of random chunks on Comedy Central when I was a kid. Kind of amazed how appealing it is without sacrificing much of the Waters sensibility- I mean, this is a movie where a big fist-pumping triumphant moment involves the heroine spitting in someone's open mouth. The Pia Zadora/Ric Ocasek scene may be my favorite cameo in anything, ever.

A Blade in the Dark fucking sucks, but it's a Lamberto Bava movie without Argento holding his hand, so that's pretty much to be expected. Literally the only noteworthy thing about it is the horrendous translation, which seems to get worse and worse as the film goes on, culminating in the line "Are you such a vacant nerd that your pleasure is to lie like a frog in the sun?"(paraphrased, since I can't find my awestruck note and nobody seems to have ripped the scene to youtube or even bothered to transcribe the line past "vacant nerd").

Troublemakers was a bit of a difficult watch because Carl Andre is a fucking creep.

Finally, I'm rewatching Argento in conjunction with Maitland McDonagh's Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds; this is the first time I've watched the "animal trilogy" so close together and it's been an interesting experience. The comedy doesn't get any better, though the Franciscus/Malden pairing in Cat is still fun; nothing looks as good as Vittorio Storaro's work in Bird (Cat suffers especially in comparison, but there are some surprisingly lovely shots of covered shopping arcades in Flies, and that dreamy final decapitation scene); and yes, I will still watch pretty much anything with Mimsy Farmer in it.

Next is the undeniable classic period of Argento (Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebre), Phenomena (which I value much more than McDonagh, and which I think has grown in stature over time, or deserves to), Opera (which I haven't watched in ages) and finally Two Evil Eyes, which I've never seen.

Wetlands has a lot of pointless scenes (the classical music on the pizza jizzing scene was such a hackneyed choice) but I don't know if there was much point to the film but I enjoyed it still. It looked great and Carla Juri's smile is so wonderful. She's going to be in the new Blade Runner.

Mann's Thief is pretty good, not much to say.

After I saw and loved Possession nearly a decade ago I watched another 7 Zulawski films then gave up because apart from some things in On The Silver Globe and Devil, and some humorous moments in the others they didn't really do anything for me. The philosophical ranting got a bit tiresome and I couldn't see much to grab onto.
But I'm so glad I bought Cosmos. There's still a lot of stuff I didn't get into but there's a lot more fun and beauty than I saw in most of the other films. The main character is hilarious and the woman he wants looks so much like Zulawski's previous female stars.
I might go back and try Blue Note and Boris Godounov. It's a shame he couldn't have made a few more new films.

So much fun watching Jonathan Genet's face. He's hardly been in anything.

Watched Takeshi's "A Scene at the Sea" (1991) (or ""That Summer, the Calmest Sea") and found myself baffled by its high reputation. It's extremely minimal (virtually dialogue free, composed static shots held for long meditative periods, simple plot and relationships) but rather than profundity I found it pretty empty. Maybe the DX7 cheese of the soundtrack has aged poorly, maybe the 90s audiences expected profundity from Japanese cinema, maybe I missed it. I'm a big fan of Ozu, Korēda and to a lesser extent Mizoguchi so I think I have a pretty good handle on actually-profound Japanese cinema. Anyone else seen it?

xp did you watch Szamanka? Its not really very good but the ending is all-time.

I agree. Some people rate it very very high but I don't get it. But even more incomprehensible to me is why some people completely adore That Most Important Thing: Love. Not that it's bad or anything.

Cosmos has been swimming around my brain really pleasantly for the last few days. It's been such a long time since anything lingered like that.

Finding films I really like seems very hard. Most of the time it feels like I'm effectively watching remakes.

I thought Buckaroo Banzai might be fun but it was surprisingly boring. Apart from the wonderful credits music.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 19 November 2016 18:11

Another thing that seemed like it should be fun was The Good The Bad And The Weird. Curiously dull.

inside Daisy Clover (1965, Mulligan)
The Crucifer of Blood (1991, Heston)
I'm Dancing as fast as I Can (1982, Hofsiss)
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976, Ross)
Phenomena (1984, Argento)
Carnal Knowledge (Nichols, 1971)
Alien Nation (Baker, 1988)
Murder By Decree (Clark, 1978)
Doctor Mordrid (Band & Band, 1992)

My Blu-Ray of Emperor of the North arrived today; watching it now. Trumponomics'll make hobos of us all by this time next year, so it's a good time to watch it.

Chevalier - thumbsup outta 10
King Cobra - this James Franco "haha I'm gay" thing is getting tedious but otherwise not bad
Certain Women - 2/3 awesome
Hell Or High Water - not blown away by this but nice to see my boy David Mackenzie back on a somewhat correct path after his however many days in the desert
War Dogs - I have nothing against Goodfellas but fuck this voiceover culture it has created, I think I've seen this exact film like 22 times. Actually, I do have something against Goodfellas: that stuff I just mentioned.
Jason Bournzzzzzzzzzzz
Dog Eat Dog - if Paul Schrader sucked me off in an alley for crack money I'd prolly respect his fall from grace more than I do now
The Greasy Strangler - is this just Napoleon Dynamite but with Old Man Cock?
Boy - awesome, better look up the Taika Waititi thread, which will involve spelling his name right in the search, but he's worth it
600 Miles the Tim Roth film was actually not bad
And I coincidentally watched "The Witness" the Kitty Genovese documentary by her brother (which I have specific thoughts about, but seems like now is not the time for serious Kitty Genovese conversations on this board) and a shitty drama called "37" that was theoretically set amongst her neighbours, which was worthless except for one particular child performance.