MOVIES!

The Bank Job - flashy and well-directed but too many loose ends and implausibilities in the plot. the sub-p about the real life radical/criminal "michael x" was strange because I just read a 30 year old book about this guy Guerillas by VS Naipaul. now that would make a great movie in the right hands

"Rope" is the kind of thing people would lose their fucking mind over if some 32-yo director made it any time within the last decade and a half

too bad hitchcock was around way back to pwn every dipshit since him

hahaha otm

chameleon street

wow so so good

YES

I like Rope well enough, but c'mon, Stewart is the least convincing Nietzschean evah, and Dall and Granger are kinda terrible.

the perfect crime!

resaw Zodiac last night. I liked it better this time around, but the ending still sucked buckets.

Heaven Can Wait (Lubitsch)
It Always Rains on Sunday
The Boston Strangler (surprisingly creepy Tony Curtis)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Roman de Gare
Brokeback Mountain
Changing Times
War Made Easy
Under the Same Moon
The Other Boleyn Girl (ugh)
Frownland (even worse)
Never Back Down (the pits)

what were YOU doing watching Boleyn – was it for Eric Bana's sake?

and wtf Brokeback Mountain?

Yeah, Brokeback sucks.

Frownland is basically a no wave Adam Sandler movie.

I had to review Boleyn...

Frownland is sub-Woman Under the Influence trendy bullshit.

I had only seen MMtn once! and I recall Eric calling it "a harmless mediocrity." Which it is, but Ledger is good, esp in his last scene w/ Gyllenhaal. (Also I'd never seen the choice Jake-in-wifebeater making-of footage.)

^BMtn

I got "That Night in Rio" for a fiver, reduced from 14 quid or whatever. Way better than I thought it was going to be, w/funny script & appealing performers. The tunes were great, Alice Faye was very attractive, this not always obvious from stills of her, where she always looks kind of matronly. Her singing voice is gorgeous. Carmen Miranda is the most wired performer I think I've ever seen. Also the technicolor was nice and lurid. Was it some kind of rule that in any latin-american flavoured fox musical, they had to refer to the good neighbor policy in the first 5 minutes or something? Funny bit near the end where Don Ameche carts Alice Faye off upstairs to bed, which cuts to one of the performers from Carmen Miranda's band playing some kind of percussion instrument which seems to involve vigorously pumping yer forearm in and out of a wooden cylinder. Outrageous!

Eh, we watched "Dames" as well. The musical numbers apart, this film is so bad! EXCEPT when Joan Blondell shows up, then it gets good again. There's nowhere near enough of her in it though.

Before The Devil Knows Your Dead — made me sad
Terminator 3 - serious bullshit
The Graduate - I like this film

I wish Zodiac had been an adaptation of the Neal Stephenson book and not the movie it actually was.

Yeah, Brokeback is more mediocre. I wish it sucked a little more, harhar.

Most of the wives' scenes are among the weakest. Needed more classic-Disney-style misogyny. ;)

Nu-uh, Anne Hathaway was like the perfect person for a closeted but way gay guy to marry.

Sudden Impact

I read an excerpt of BBM slash fiction when the film was originally released in which Lureen helped Jack Twist in the bois department.

Trading Places
Lifeforce (aka Space Vampires)
Dogfight

I haven't seen Dogfight in years! Still my favorite Lili Taylor performance.

she even almost charmed Mrs. Dancer, who hates Lili Taylor.
Phoenix makes sure to have a different "funny walk" in every film he's in. My coup was to indentify an bit character in the penny arcade scene as one of the Hayward sisters from Twin Peaks. (The poet one, not the piano playing one)

TV: Repo Man (just awesome!). Love Alex Cox, wish I'd seen more than just Repo and 'Sid and Nancy'.

Cinema: cpl of Haneke's Austrian films at the recent retrospective at the Lumiere.

Bande a part. V funny, awesome use of music.

There will be Blood. Some good stuff in it, uses too much music.

The Edge of Heaven.

Gonna see a screening of this on thursday.

Bank Job - eh

dogfight is good, yeah. felt like a little undiscovered piece of something. a different angle on the '60s movie.

i like this scene. (it's true about river's funny walk.)

More River funny walks:
-in Running On Empty, during the nature walk with ol whats-her-name from Goonies
-in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, River pulls off a strange, pigeon-toed squat gallop descending a sand bank

maybe he was walking funny cuz he was sleeping w/Martha Plimpton at the time

wonder if he did speedballs with Short Round...

Plimpton used a dildo?

great world of sound

triplets of belleville

It's Errol Morris week:

The Thin Blue Line
The Fog of War
Standard Operating Procedure

also
Chop Shop
The Housemaid

how was standard operating procedure

national treasure 2 was pretty fun

xp: I'm seeing SOP tnite

Happiness - this film was funny when I was 17
Rollerball (1975) - long
Gone Baby Gone - confusing and not interesting enough to try and keep up

Black Book - very entertaining.

M*A*S*H* - had never seen before & feel like its aged badly; reminded me of porky's

The Nines - good except RPG angle is boring

I like killing files - totally loved this + wanted to eat everything made

phase iv

capricorn one -- less fun then i hoped
now shitty dub of infernal affairs 3

three burials of melquiades estrada

capricorn one -- less fun then i hoped

When every critic wrote "this sucks" 30 years ago, not always wrong.

The Insect Woman (insane '72 Kim Ki-young melodrama, like a Sirk movie taken over by Ken Russell)
Francisca (Oliveira)

Gold Diggers of 1935, by request of my dear wife, she's developed a thing for Dick Powell. Unfortunately she got loaded on the strong beer I bought her & fell asleep halfway through it. This AM she was like "did I really wake up and see a load of grand pianos all spinning round on a flight of stairs". Oh yeah. Film starts well, but flags pitifully after a little while. The bit where the gold-digging stenographer tricks the snuff tin collector into writing some sappy love song lyrics, which she gets him to "autograph", and then uses it to sue him for breach of promise is pretty funny. Portrayal of tricky gold-digging female as protagonist in these films is pretty o_0. Lack of Ruby & Joan in this film is :(

After she went to bed I watched "Hotel Imperial" 1927, Mautritz Stiller, feat Pola Negri. Great! Pola is so good in this, a good print of this, with a lush orch. soundtrack would be amazing to watch.

Pola's American filmography makes for some srsly depressing reading:

Bella Donna - survives
The Cheat - lost
Hollywood - lost
The Spanish Dancer - survives incomplete
Shadows of Paris - lost
Men - lost
Lily of the Dust - lost
Forbidden Paradise - survives
East of Suez - lost
Flower of the Night - lost
The Charmer - lost
Woman of the World - survives (I've got this one, it's great)
The Crown of Lies - lost
Good & Naughty - lost
Hotel Imperial - survives
Barbed Wire - survives
The Woman on Trial - lost
The Secret Hour - lost
Three Sinners - lost
Loves of an Actress - lost
The Woman from Woscow - lost

I mean for fuck's sakes, you know? There's almost nothing left. The 2 films I have from that list are great, it really gets me down.

man, infernal affairs 3 sucked but was funnier with American Dubbing.

Ulrike Ottinger's 'Ticket of No Return', from '79, is fantastic. The 'plot' centres on a group of women on an unapologetic weekend bender along Berlin's many drinking establishments. The un-apologetics are matched by the style (throwing great, often funny images away in a drunkenly fashion), the design, as well as a score by the recently departed Peer Raben.

Magnolia. What is this shit?
Epic of the inner struggle of fallen child actors?
Or does for melodrama what Space Mountain did for rollercoasters?
It's always sad to finally see the source material for all these wack Tom Cruise quotes.