Last (x) movies you saw

been wanting to see last summer for a while, seems like something criterion should tackle

lol @ the last movies I've seen in the theaters

x-men first class
green lantern
harry potter & dh pt 2
tree of life

Enter the Void - avoid.

Cross of Iron - on blu-ray. Haven't watched this since I was a kid, but a lot of it had stayed with me, and it was good to revisit after all this time. Many terrific scenes, but doesn't quite add up to a wholly satisfactory whole for some reason. Coburn - an actor who it feels has been overlooked somewhat - is solid, but the best scene is between James Mason and David Warner as demoralised German officers:
Mason: "What will we do when we lose this war?"
Warner: "Prepare for the next"

Burke & Hare - Landis, Pegg, Serkis. Mildly entertaining rubbish.

Winter's Bone - Not quite the misery porn I was dreading. Pretty decent.

Howl - Boring.

Inferno - Argento's messy headscratcher on blu. It's pretty bad, but a few brilliant and bizarre moments redeem it. The tales from behind the scenes are revealing (Argento didn't shoot the memorable flooded cellar scene - he was ill in hospital. And when the actress in that scene became ill herself, he hastily had her character killed off. Such anecdotes go towards explaining the disjointedness of the film).

Morning Glory - Quite enjoyed this. Rachel McAdams is ridic cute, Ford is ridic growly. It's fun.

Stanley Kubrick collection on blu-ray: 2001 and Barry Lyndon look so, so good. Blew me away. The only issue I have with Lyndon is the central performance. Ryan O'Neil just isn't believable, sympathetic or very interesting, imo (also see Tom Cruise in EWS). I didn't enjoy Full Metal Jacket all that much. The first half is really repetitive, the second half kinda empty.

skipping the real stinkers:

Billy Budd (1962, Peter Ustinov)
Born to Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)
The Interrupters (2011, Steve James)
19 Buster Keaton shorts (1920-23)
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (2010, Joann Sfar)
Girls About Town (1931, George Cukor)
Union Depot (1932, Alfred E. Green)
Littlerock (2010, Mike Ott)
Waterloo Bridge (1931, James Whale)
The Optimists (2006, Goran Paskaljevic)
Four Adventures of Reinette & Mirabelle (1987, Eric Rohmer)
Weekend (2011, Andrew Haigh)
Happy (2011, Roko Belic)
Leap Year (2010, Michael Rowe)
Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin Schaffner)
Terri (2011, Azazel Jacobs)
Momma's Man (2008, Azazel Jacobs)
The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)

Azazel Jacobs!

Littlerock!

what'd you think of Leap Year, morbius

pervy, good

Black Book (Verhoeven, 2006)
Bronco Bullfrog (Platts-Mills, 1969)
Mr Nice (Rose, 2011)
Trading Places (Landis, 1982)
Strange Powers:Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields (Fix, O'Hara, 2010)
Attack the Block (Cornish, 2011)
Black Dynamite (Sanders, 2009)
Gainsbourg (Sfar, 2010)
Red (Schwentke, 2010)
The Cement Garden (Birkin, 1989)
The Guard (McDonagh, 2011)

Saw Thor and Super last night...

Thor was good...Super was depressing.

Horrible Bosses (crap)
Red State (crap)
Sense and Sensibility (love this, second time watching it)
Michael Clayton (ok)
Salvador (love this, second time watching it)

Since my last post in this thread:

Funeral Parade of Roses (dir T Matsumoto, 1969)
You, the Living (dir R Andersson, 2007)
Il Profumo della Signora in Nero (dir F Barilli, 1974)
The Night Of The Hunted (dir J Rollin, 1979)
Deep End (dir J Skolimowski, 1970)
Lake Mungo (dir J Anderson, 2008)
Vampyr (dir CT Dreyer, 1932)
The Day After (dir N Meyer, TV 1983)
When The Wind Blows (dir J Murakami, 1986)
Séance on a Wet Afternoon (dir B Forbes, 1964)
Last Night (dir D McKellar, 1998)
The Year Of The Sex Olympics (dir M Elliot, TV 1968)
Privilege (dir P Watkins, 1967)

Thinking about 'Footprints On The Moon' (1975), 'The Shout' (1978), Songs From The Second Floor (2000) for watching soon.

I'm on (mostly) low-brow overdrive of late:

Robocop
Total Recall
Baraka
The Song Remains The Same
The Kids Are Alright
Tango & Cash
Cobra
Our Idiot Brother
Hatchet
The Sentinel
The Legend Of Hell House
Dazed & Confused
The Terminator

(That's The Who's Kids Are Alright, for those who aren't in any way keeping score.)

midnight run
charley varrick
the sting

strip search ('04 lumet)
haywire ('12 soderbergh)
the hole ('98 tsai ming-liang)
eden lake ('08 watkins)
marriage material ('11 swanberg)
fahrenheit 451 ('66 truffaut)
the king's speech ('10 hooper)
inside daisy clover ('65 mulligan)

Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011)
The Boyfriend (Ken Russell, 1971)
Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011)
Incendies (Dennis Villeneuve, 2010)
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008)
Holy Rollers (Kevin Asch, 2011)
Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)

hey craigo, 'the year of the sex olympics' is written by nigel kneale, yes - is there a legit release?

most recent dvd i watched - carnal knowledge (never seen this before - think i'd built it up in my mind too much, cos i was a bit underwhelmed - the ending is esp dreadful - but would still like to see little murders, another film written by jules fieffer (some of whose comics i love, esp his great graphic nov Tantrum))

Ratatouille (Brad Bird/Jan Pinkava, 2010)
Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)
Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011)
Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011)
Potiche (Francois Ozon, 2010)
The Informers (Gregor Jordan, 2008)
Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987)
The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)

ratatouille ftw there

Haywire (Steven Soderberg, 2012)
Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011)
Dangerous Liasons (Stephen Frears, 1988)
Belle de Jour (Louis Brunel, 1967)
Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011)
Une Femme est un Femme (Jean-Luc Goddard, 1961)
Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1961)
The Tree of Life (Terrance Malick, 2011)
The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppolla, 1983
The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Mellville, 1970)

ugh. Soderbergh.

Kind of guessing and working backwards here:

Gimme Shelter
Mr. Mike's Mondo Video
Wedding Crashers
The Descent
Carnage
Branded To Kill
Tokyo Drifter
Diabolique
Dark of The Sun
Rancho Deluxe
Rancho Notorious
Puncture

hey craigo, 'the year of the sex olympics' is written by nigel kneale, yes - is there a legit release?

Not a legit release sadly, yr bog-standard DVDr jobbie. The BFI put it out a while back didn't it? Think it's stupid money for a proper copy.

Essential Killing
Submarine
Hobo with a Shotgun
Animal Kingdom
Sucker Punch
Green Lantern
Meek's Cutoff
War Horse
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher)
Margaret
Five Easy Pieces
Whisper of the Heart

mix of cinema and home, some for the first time.

>Tokyo Drifter

Would you recommend? I'm tempted to get the Criterion blu, have heard good things from a couple of friends.

Tintin : yeah it had ADD but I loved this.
Hamlet (Branagh) : Also kind of manic but I guess that's the point(?) Liked.
The Age Of The Medici
The Puppet Master
Habemus Papam
Sleeping Beauty (Leigh) : this was terrible

>Tokyo Drifter

Would you recommend? I'm tempted to get the Criterion blu, have heard good things from a couple of friends.

Yeah, I'd recommend it, although I'm more of a Branded... fan myself. When watching TD, take in the spectacle and don't worry about the story so much. I have the reissue DVD, which is gorgeous, but I've heard the blu is beyond stunning.

the mill & the cross (lech majewski): not sure what to make of it, some aspects of it were rly impressive tho

The Myth of the American Sleepover
Beginners
Meek's Cutoff
The first 40 minutes of The Help
Certified Copy
The Ides of March
Nostalgia for the Light
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Moneyball
Le Quattro Volte

Oh, and The Grey

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Face of Another

Submarine ('10 Ayoade) - hated this
Missile ('87 Wiseman)
The Great Santini ('79 Lewis John Carlino)
The American Friend ('77 Wenders)
Notebooks on Cities and Clothes ('89 Wenders)
Lightning Over Water ('80 Wenders/Ray)
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Berlinger/Sinofsky)
Mon Oncle D'Amerique ('80 Resnais)
Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie ('12 Tim + Eric)

>The Myth of the American Sleepover

saw this a month or so ago and several of the scenes have really stuck w/ me for some reason, like the older brother w/ the twins stuff

film socialisme
the valley of the bees
drive
vantage point
l'argent
ashes and diamonds
mongol
texas killing fields
transsiberian
jonathan meades on france x 3

How was Valley of the Bees?

very good, you should see it

fred camper describes the visual style as perfunctory, rather unfairly....it is v poised for vlacil, there is a sort of cold horror in both the hieratic confines of proto-state and the lawless hinterlands and consequently it's amenable to tendentious political readings (1968 and all that, tho it was made before the prague spring)

the teutonic knights are all haughty psychopaths with some interior religious frenzy, you'd never mistake them for the enterprising imperialists who begot the slow accumulation of a superstate

Been watching a lot of '68 - '72 stuff myself...

Death By Hanging - Oshima sets up an absurdist situ: man is hanged by the authorities, doesn't die and then has to be made to admit guilt again but, since he has lost his memory he must be made recall his crime so that he must be hanged again. In the process he must remember who he is and who are his masters (a Korean sinking in Japanese Xenophobia). Real sucker punch, no prisoners taken, pardon the pun n' all.

W.R. mysteries of the organism - formally unique: doc (made by makavejev himself) about nutso psychologist Wilheim Reich spliced with a purposefully thin story of a liberated woman's attempt to seduce a soviet 'people's artist' ice skater by the name of Ilyich. Really want to read Durgnat's bk on this.

Ecstasy of the Angels - a film about the inter-factional struggles of a terrorist cell: they argue with each other while fucking! One for the erotic thriller thread.

Nanami and the Inferno of First Love - this japansese new wave film kind of looks fwd to Blue Velvet in a story about a shy youth who dates a 'nude model' and gets entry into a seedy underbelly blah. But there are certain awkward twists, courtesy of a script by Shuji Terayama. There is a season of his films at Tate Modern in March so I'll get to find out more then.

Dillinger is Dead - would make a great dbl bill w/Death By Hanging, as both are cinematic absurdist plays in 'attack' mode. Michel Piccoli is manages to be utterly compelling as a man who spends much of the time saying 'nothing'.

Here and Elsewhere - Godard film from '74 on the Palestinian struggle...but its never straightforward, which is as it should be.

The Last Bolshevik - Chris Marker doc from the early 90s, using the films of Aleksandr Medvedkin as a jump off point on the (recently deceased) Soviet Union and its films.

loved dillinger is dead + remember almost nothing about it; feel like that's somehow suitable or specific to that film, that it's hazy somehow.

were you into WR? liked 'makavejev's switchboard operator & am p interested

Loved 'Switchboard Operator' (have it as a VHS but unfortunately I can't get my video to work dammit) but 'WR' buils on this, and is possibly better. One bcz the Reich story is so bizarre and two bcz of what he is trying to argue - that we should use Reich's ideas to revive the utopian dream, to somehow make communism more 'fun' - in a decaying Soviet set-up that has brutalised millions by that point...its barking mad, and yet I can't entirely dismiss.

'WR' makes more sense every time you see it, and the followup 'Sweet Movie' is one of my favorite films of all time. every single detail in the film that at first seems like simple surrealism ends up completely true, it is the exact opposite of a self-indulgent film

Harakiri
The Face of Another
Poto and Cabengo (finally on DVD!)
Pina (I fought this for the first 30 minutes, not that it was bad but I just wasn't in the mood, and then suddenly I wanted it to go on forever)

loooove poto

i only just watched routine pleasures, i think i'm in a minority of maybe preferring p&c overall. though still enjoyed a lot. k psyched for the third film, even though people aren't so into it.

Has anyone seen Robert Kramer's Ice?

Pina DID go on forever, MP.

She Married Her Boss (1935, Gregory La Cava)
Pretty Poison (1968, Noel Black)
Unfinished Business (1941, Gregory La Cava)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)
Of Time and the City (2008, Terence Davies)
Come Back, Africa (1959, Lionel Rogosin)
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster? (2010, Carlos Carcas, Norberto Lopez Amado)
Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson)
The Devil Probably (1977, Robert Bresson)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

how was 'the devil probably', that is scheduled 2 play near me in march

Pina DID go on forever, MP

cool opinions

it's good; not top-shelf R.B. for me but I usually find films about teenagers inherently less interesting. xp

ive enjoyed the pina trailer every time ive seen it, have no desire to see it at full length

Bombay Beach. Didn't like it.

On the '68 trail:

I am curious (yellow) - I really like the questioning of the leftie social democracy ideal (through the film within a film device that is taken to breaking point) which is, even now, highly praised in the non-scandinavian West.

But like W.R. there is the political, and then there is the personal too.

L'Amour Fou - Jacques Rivette, 1968, posted on his thread

Malina - had a look at the Isabelle Huppert thread and a notion did come up of parts that no one else could've played (exemplified by The Piano Teacher) and this is one more for that file. In fact it would be a terrific dbl bill. She nails the artful madness in this Werner Schroeter film. Werner has -- for the one other film and a cpl of shorts I've seen from him -- drawn on operas excesses and contrasted with a somewhat 'underground' aesthetic that foregrounds the rawness I always felt was contained by opera houses, and he brings this to bear on an adaptation of this novel (by poet Ingerbord Bachmann, which surely includes plenty of biog detail). But its tricky in the end bcz there is money in the production, hes got stylistic ticks he couldn't employ before so Huppert not only pulls off the mental anguish, but does so in surroundings she somehow finds a space to be 'comfortable' in whereas you suspect the underground muses that worked w/Werner might have stiffened up.

I think its true for the main actors on this. Their performances seem stiff because they had to work w/elemens he brings from his other work; and maybe their roles have less meat to them.