MOVIES!

how was visual acoustics?

I liked it, not knowing anything about Shulman aside from that one famed Hollywood Hills nightscape photo, and he had a charming persona.

looking forward to it

Kings and Queen, which holds up well.
Dangerous Liasions
The Informant!
Belles Toujours

Swing Time (Fred & Ginger being awesome, until Fred Astaire blackface number oh noes)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (glitch on DVD fucked me up, never made it to the crucifixion)

sometimes you feel like a motherless child.

White Material (NYFF, Claire Denis, intense but wobbly)
Pit and the Pendulum (Corman/Price; less, Vincent, less)

L'Avventura
Adventureland

^^^^ lol nice accidental double feature. see what I did there

the hired hand, enjoyed thoroughly.

Been on holiday for a week, took a bunch of DVDs with me:
"Gold Diggers of 1933" poss my favourite ever film.
"The Circus" (great, unfuckable w/.)
"Bare Knees" (1928) great, totally "other" in every way.
"Shipmates Forever" Borzage romance w/Dick Powell & Ruby Keeler, atrocious.
"When a Man Loves" (silent vers of Manon Lescault w/John Barrymore & Dolores Costello) really bad, Ms Costello a terrible actress
"Colleen" 1936 Powell/Keeler musical w/Joan Blondell. Pure fluff, but for what it was, just about perfect. Probably dug this film the most this week. A pleasant surprise, i was expecting it to blow.
"Ready Willing & Able" Ruby Keeler w/o Dick Powell. Oh dear. Not too great, but not actually terrible.
"The Sea Hawk" silent swashbuckler. A++++ fucking great. Totally thrilling from start to finish.
"The First Auto" Silent movie depicting the arrival of the first motor car in a hick town. Snore.
What I have learned:
1/DARE I SAY IT WB/1st National silents not A PATCH on Paramount's.
2/Add Joan Blondell to any movie = you have a better movie
3/what kind of nutjob puts Ruby Keeler into a film, but doesn't have her sing or dance?! Dancing was about all she could do really.

going through the George Kuchar films: http://www.ubu.com/film/kuchar.html

first two are good. third one 'Eclipse of the Sun Virgin' is the first one that really just did me in. sort of like Kenneth Anger crossed with a straight repressed John Waters.

moolaadé -- wow, good movie. so lively and colorful and entertaining that it shouldn't be as heartbreaking as it is, or vice versa.

MP, I don't find George K straight and repressed...

Baby Doll (So great, why did I wait so long to see this one?)

>MP, I don't find George K straight and repressed...

maybe he's not, it's just so much of the love scenes in his films are beautiful young straight couples shown in a campy but pretty gratuitous & uncritical light, cut in with lumpy shots of kuchar by himself looking excluded so I may have jumped to a conclusion about the nature of the exclusion

donna rouge & I saw some SF school stuff he shot w/ his students in the '70s that was the most blatantly queer stuff I've seen from him (and I've seen a lot)

Remember The (That?) Night
La Nuit du Carrefour
Hour Of the Wolf
A Double Tour
Kraftwerk/Krautrock doc

>donna rouge & I saw some SF school stuff he shot w/ his students in the '70s that was the most blatantly queer stuff I've seen from him (and I've seen a lot)

ok well last night I got to Pagan Rhapsody in 1970, and that's the first one where you can't miss it. scanned through the earlier ones and it's there too, less blatant -- like the occasional lingering POV shot of a guy's neck. overall orientation seems more omnivore than queer though, any character can suddenly be fucking any other character at any time, except for kuchar himself who just sits there with a strange expression on his face and his hair uncombed

they're all total fun though, I love the way he uses music

Two Lovers
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Ne change rien
In a Dream
35 rhums

I just watched The Time of the Wolf also. Interesting but kinda clammy example of Haneke's aesthetic working through a hostile genre form. I liked the weird overlaps with his over movies (the premise that starts it resembles Funny Games, but now the whole world has been levelled down into a Hobbesian war of all against all, a young boy named Benny ala Benny's Video, etc.).

other movies, oops

L'Avventura
Adventureland

^^^^ lol nice accidental double feature. see what I did there

― dmr, Sunday, October 11, 2009 4:21 PM (5 days ago) [IP: 69.112.173.223] Bookmark

ha, i just watched adventureland too. pretty enjoyable and v. nice soundtrack imo

did you like l'avventura?

The Mist (loved it, especially the Cthulhu elephant creature at the end)

Anvil The Story of Anvil - pretty good!

Wings of Desire
Z
A Serious Man
Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo)
Bright Star
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Wild River (Kazan)
White Material
The Shout (Skolimowski, 1979)
Afterschool
The Third Man
Paper Flowers
A Day in the Life (Italian neorealist tale of nuns and partisans, 1946)
Rembrandt's J'accuse (Greenaway)
Motherhood

Buffalo Bill & The Indians
Vincent & Theo
Le Jour Se Leve
Teorema
Subarnarekha

and slowly finishing Berlin Alexanderplatz but the last couple of episodes (10 & 11) actually gave me nightmares!

did he lose his foot there?

North by Northwest
Force of Evil
The Hand of Fatima
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

A++ hater tots

I bet you're glad Fox didn't send Slant a Blu-Ray of NxNW!

(Warner, I mean)

Yes, dodged a crop-duster on that one.

and so it got 4 stars instead of 2!

Everybody wins.

Talladega Nights
Two Lane Blacktop

^^^ another unintentional double feature courtesy of my Netflix q

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
A Perfect Couple
Touch of Evil

going to see bad lieutenant this afternoon
at home to watch: poor pretty eddie.

Man Push Cart
The Delinquents
Mammoth
Scanners

how is it possible to not like north by northwest!!

La Cage Aux Folles - nuff said
Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin)- omg Jacques Demy incest fairy tale movie starring Deneuve with wayyyy trippy sets n costumes

black narcissus
homicide (mamet)
burden of dreams
the nomi song
mona lisa

Watched My Dinner with Andre for the first time last week. Loved it.
Will watch The Postman Always Rings Twice tonight or tomorrow.

also:
Zigfield Girl

Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin)- omg -- yeah liked this a lllot better than Girls of Rochefort. But nothing's Parapluies.

Splendor in the Grass - aw gee whiz

The Swimmer - Super Good! Totally overdone pathos late 60's mid-life crisis film -- you know Burt Lancaster is playing someone who's lost their mind, but the slow reveal to show you just how completely mad he's become takes it to the level of an A++ Twilight Zone episode

Killer of Sheep - at moments it almost seems too beautifully stylized, but then you blink and you realize it's not style at all, the camera's just effortlessly showing you beautiful things and interactions and you're just not used to seeing a film about life in the projects in the 70's outside the lens of blaxploitation films, it's an incredible film

500 Days of Summer - you will see this on a plane

The Room - I expected youtube to have all the best moments, but no, EVERY SCENE DELIVERS, it's the real thing

Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans - I expected more, but yes pretty good

what did you expect more of?

mark, Eric hates the "screwball" elements.

bah

Children of Paradise
The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond ('new' Tennessee Williams)
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (nice, docked for too much jazz)
The Bad Lieutenant -- Port of Call: New Orleans

what did you expect more of?

expectations set by the promise of a franchise (the title is pure marketing, Ferrara's within rights to feel disrespected), Herzog keeping things relatively normal apart from a few precious moments of Gator & Iguana, and I'm still waiting for the film where Cage goes to where he did in 'Vampire's Kiss' but this time around as a terrifying mid-lifer, and this could have been it. so... led astray by expectations but when promised Herzog + Cage + Ferrara, no way around having expectations

Ferrara's films that I've seen, The Funeral excepted, are kinda shit, and this is the better Bad Lt, unrelated or not.

Gomorrah (we'll see)
The Bad Seed
On Dangerous Ground
Funny People
An Education