MOVIES!

I think it's the long one.

short one's better imo; jc shot new footage for it and it's a better edit. actually, they're both good. long one's a bit repetitive, tho.

I've seen one of them before. It won't be hard to watch, anyway.
I believe in what Scott S said, more Ben Gazzara can't be a bad thing.

agreed. "The Paris Number?!"

"Fido" was a fucking ridiculous Canadian movie that is basically a genre-exercise Lassie-parody in which the family dog is replaced by "the family zombie".

Totally awesome art-film bizness: "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon" is a note-perfect Eric Rohmer time machine of a movie in which you are transported to the highly stylized and artificial world of a 17th century French pastoral romance. Queers of all genders take note that Andy Gillet is super-scrumptious in and out of drag as Celadon. This is a fussy rendition of an already *highly* artificial genre (early modern pastoral) and it is the kind of artsy fartsy celebration of Renaissance classicism that probably acts like Kryptonite to Michael Bay. In short, I loved it.

I think Rohmer announced that as his last, I still haven't seen it.

Partial recent list (since, um, May):

Lorna's Silence (good not great Dardenne)
Yasukuni
The Seventh Veil
You, the Living
Milestones
Party Girl
In a Lonely Place
On Dangerous Ground
Hamlet Goes Business
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
Bruno
The Beaches of Agnes
Devi
Bullitt
Sex Positive
Rashomon
Army of Lovers, or Revolt of the Perverts
The Middleman (S. Ray)
Magnificent Obsession (both versions)
Summer Hours
The Friends of Eddie Coyle

InglorioUS BasterdSS
The Reckless Moment
L'Argent
La Horse

We finally hooked up our VCR so that we could watch "Hell Comes to Frogtown"! Roddy Piper as the last fertile male human in a post-apocalyptic batrachian nightmare world of 80s Nagle-girl bimbos. Like "A Boy and His Dog" with brain damage ("A Boy and His Frog?"). Fun n trashy.

Apparently there is a sequel, which I've been unable to find. On the trashy post-apocalyptic fun tip -- World Gone Wild with Bruce Dern and Adam Ant, and Warriors of the Wasteland which is pretty much a seriously homoerotic low-budget Italian re-imagining of Road Warrior

Not by design, 3 by women directors:

The Headless Woman (one of year's best thus far)
Born in Flames
Near Dark

Born In Flames is playing Walter Reade soon? I only know it because of the post-punk soundtrack.

it just did. I'd say it's aged badly, except I see a few contemporary reviews also thought it was soapboxy, dullish rad-feminist claptrap. (one Red Krayola song get replayed endlessly.) Most amusing for tiny roles filled by 1980 downtown types -- Pat Place, Eric Bogosian, Ron Vawter, Kathryn Bigelow (!).

Lesbian Vampire Killers - ineptly made and insanely unfunny. It even fails to live up to the Nuts magazine level of titilation the title promises. Just feeble, amateurish and boring.

Also rented Electra Glide in Blue - where my display name comes from - an interesting little low budget '70s cop movie with a really good central performance from Robert Blake. Shot like a kind of western noir, the long, lonely desert highways and the desolate Arizona landscape look great.

The Final Destination 3D **HIGHLY REC'D**

inglourious basterds - massively entertaining and the cinema scene at the end had my fiancee teary-eyed(!)

Still Walking (likely into the year's best list)

The Most Dangerous Man in America (good Daniel Ellsberg doc)

Beach Red (1967, Cornel Wilde -- sort of a precursor to both Thin Red Line & Saving Pvt Ryan, w/ Rip Torn as a hayseed sergeant)

The Criminal (1960, Joseph Losey -- hardbitten Brit prison pic)

Yield to the Night (1956, Diana Dors on death row)

Kind Lady (1951, Maurice Evans leads home invasion on Ethel Barrymore)

Hell Drivers (1957, trashy, fun UK spinoff of Wages of Fear)

Tell No One was pretty bad

The Damned United. I had fairly middling expectations for this, but it far exceeded them. I don't think it adds up to much, but it was fun to watch.
Michael Sheen's become the go-to guy for playing real life flawed/driven/quirky Englishmen of course, but this was his best work since Fatabulosa. He dominates, naturally, but others do fine work, especially Colm Meany and Jim Broadbent.

Near Dark - Bill Paxton was funny in this

xpost
Warriors of the Wasteland

contains hilarious decapitation

Baader-Meinhof Komplex (shamelessly pro-Baader-Meinhof, plodding plotline resulting from incoherent patching together of the timeline, tedious final hour, still -- liked it)
Heaven (best reason to love Diane Keaton = her first Negativland-ish media cut-up / interview film of strange people talking about what happens to you when you die)
A Face in the Crowd (more amazing now than ever)
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (in 1969, the concept of open marriages was still an innocent & open-eyed one, Robert Culp's character is so hard to pin down because his gold chain outfits later became associated with sleazy middleaged horrorshow guys, a stereotype that later became a stand-in for someone you're supposed to hate, and yet in this film, he's kind of a likable guy who loves his wife more than anything -- all the group therapy scenes are so hilarious & wonderful and wow I really loved this film)
Mary Hartman Mary Hartman - volume 1 DVD box (some of the most surreal and demented television I've ever seen)

watched Two-lane blacktop yesterday and a couple of documentaries.
Poto and Cabengo by j-p gorin, made after the dziga vertov group was over, that sort of addresses what he had done with godard \ his voluntary exile in a foreign language for a change via the story of 2 little girls who invented a private language .

hands on a hard body. a contest for a truck where the winner among the couple of dozens of contestants is the one who keep a hand on it for the longest amount of time. after many hours of standing in the heat pain +hallucinations ensues but still it turns out that for most contestants this experience gets to be, uh, a sort of a rite of passage to... nothing in particular, it's absurd but still most feel it's a transformative experience. one of those participants said :"Don’t they realize that we’re sufferin’, that we’re hurtin’? And you feel like they’re kinda bloodthirsty. It seems so absurd, very absurd. It’s a human drama thing; it’s more than just a contest, and winning a truck."

memorable thing i watched a couple of weeks ago : The Polish Ambulance Murders . if it was a fiction, a diatribe against market economy and the commodification of death i would have wished they toned the grotesque down a bit. more realism for a better deliverey of the criticism. but it's all real and revolting. messed up stuff.

i want to see the baader-meinhof complex but i don't think it will be showing near me. even though reviews i read were mixed, i think i would like it.

― ketchup dood (harbl), Sunday, November 16, 2008 7:36 PM (10 months ago)

k it's finally here. should i go?

someone told me to see poto and cabengo and i promptly forgot about it. thx 4 reminder

― straight b*tch (harbl), Saturday, February 7, 2009 8:27 PM (7 months ago)

lol, forgot again. thx myself and sébastien 4 reminder

devil fetus - hong kong ghost story horror film that is completely inexplicable and basically makes zero sense, but features some decent gore. i still have no idea what happened, if there actually was a devil fetus, and there were many other questions left unsolved. also one of the best things about HK films is how they have wonderfully inconsistent tones, and this one just stays on one the entire time. and even by HK standards this has bad subtitles.

possessed II - a much better hong kong ghost story film, with lots of awkward comedy and good bloodletting, just the sort of juxtaposition of tones that i like in HK films. it doesn't make much sense either, though.

Who Can Kill a Child? - opening montage of atrocities against children in history take on a different meaning in the context of the film

A Face in the Crowd (more amazing now than ever) - It's one of my all time favorites

Casino Royale - starring Daniel Craig's neck - it seemed like almost every close up shot of him focuses on his neck

i want to see the baader-meinhof complex but i don't think it will be showing near me. even though reviews i read were mixed, i think i would like it.

― ketchup dood (harbl), Sunday, November 16, 2008 7:36 PM (10 months ago)

k it's finally here. should i go?

― steamed hams (harbl), Sunday, September 27, 2009 5:45 PM (Yesterday)

yes, its pretty entertaining. fast-paced, surreal at times. im not sure if the movie makes sense to those not familiar with raf history, though.

i was only vaguely familiar with the history, and it still made sense. It made that movie, The Third Generation that came out a few years ago make more sense.

The Third Generation (Fassbinder) was 30 years ago.

ok i think i am familiar enough, will probably go tonight

yes it was entertaining. not the best thing ever but it was about all i expected. thank you, ☆.

The Third Generation (Fassbinder) was 30 years ago.

― A Patch on Blazing Saddles (Dr Morbius), Monday, September 28, 2009 5:22 AM (13 hours ago)

Sorry, I meant The Edukators.

kontroll -- stylish enough and some nice moments, but oh the heavy hand of allegory. memo to filmmakers: your christ figures do not need actual bleeding wounds on their palms.

also just watched rikyu, which i enjoyed but would have liked more if the digital transfer hadn't been so godawful. like watching a movie through a dirty window.

Werewolf of Woodstock - dude hates hippies and festivals so much he turns into a werewolf (that's simplifying the plot a bit)

Still Walking (very fine)
The Cloud-Capped Star
35 Shots of Rum (2nd time, among year's best)
Fat City
Sawdust and Tinsel
Paradise (Michael Almereyda)
Liverpool
A Swedish Love Story (Roy Andersson)
various Andersson shorts
That Hamilton Woman
The Gay Divorcee
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (crazy-bad UK gangster film)
The Architecture of Doom
The Bigamist (Ida Lupino)
The Milk of Sorrow
An American Journey
JAMES MASON:
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
Odd Man Out
The Upturned Glass

the band wagon -- why have i never watched this before?

Hurt Locker
Fire Walk With Me (whoa)
Wendy & Lucy (i don't think i could bear these films if they were longer than 70 mins, but as they are i really like them)
Hud

No more cinema for me for a while now that I'm in Germany. Non-English films are not an option (subtitling is in German) and only the blockbusters make it to the one place that screens English-language films undubbed.

phantom of the paradise

the 1970s were funny

To Die Like a Man (Rodrigues, NYFF)
Son Frere (best Chereau of the '00s?)
Marlene (Dietrich doc)
Visual Acoustics
Road House (yes, the Swayze cheeseball)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Sirk)

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.