Last (x) movies you saw

The Sure Thing (3.3174/5)

Daphne Zuniga is fetching; the rest is from some world I missed by about seven years, though I will add it to my list of road movies. Doesn't anyone else on this thread ever watch stupid movies?

yes. I watched Trance.

Subway (1985, Besson) 2/5
The Wages of Fear (1953, Clouzot) 5/5
Italian for Beginners (2000, Scherfig) 3/5
Stroszek (1977, Herzog) 5/5
The Queen of Versailles (2012, Greenfield) 4/5
What Richard Did (Abrahamson, 2012) 4/5

A couple from the SFIFF:

The Act of Killing (2012): I found this incredibly disturbing and a bit morally questionable, but it was fascinating nonetheless. Also it made me painfully aware of how little I know about Indonesia and its history. 4/5

After Tiller (2103): Very good documentary about the four US doctors who provide late-term abortions, in the years after the murder of their mentor Dr. George Tiller. Surprisingly moving and well-made. 4.5/5

2013, not 2103!

saw the russian movie in the fog at the cinema tonight, anyone seen it? Wartime thriller about collaboration/resistance with like philosophy & that, pretty #slowcinema, started off with an incredible long-take scene at a hanging. I knew just from that that it was my kinda movie, drifted off for a bit but it was really good I reckon

Le Rapace
Colors
Gangs Of Wasseypur 1

Post Tenebras Lux 7/10
*This Is Not a Film 8/10
Something in the Air {Apres Mai] 7/10
In the House 6/10
*The Kid with a Bike 8/10
Four Around the Woman (1921, Lang) 7/10
Sorcerer (1977, Friedkin) 7/10
No 7/10
*Rebecca (1940, Hitchcock) 9/10
Portrait of Jason (1967, Clarke) 8/10

*rewatches

is Sorcerer worth tracking down? always been curious about it.

A Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Rolling Thunder (1977)
48 Hours (1982)
Who'll Stop The Rain (1978)
The Lords of Salem (2012)

All great films save 'Salem' which is Rob Zombie's newie. Bailed an hour in, though.

Also, xpost, yes, Sorcerer well worth watching. Among Friedkin's best.

Cracks (2009)

Oblivion
Withnail & I
Groundhog Day
City Lights
Crumb
Chungking Express
Ordet
The Last Laugh

Sorcerer DVD due at year end

Saw "Fire Over England" (1937) on TCM the other day, great film about the Spanish Armada with Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Excellent period sets and costumes. Doesn't seem to be well loved or talked about much.

Lady and the Tramp (1955) first viewing since childhood -- i like the beginning where the dogs act like dogs. the 50s social mores are pretty WTF, like Lady's platonic friends almost proposing marriage after she leaves the tramp.
Killer Joe (2012, Friedman)
Alien 3 (1992, Fincher) ["Assembly Cut"]
Friday the 13th (1980, Cunningham)
Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Bigelow)
Django Unchained (2012, Tarantino)
Get Crazy (1983, Arkush) on youtube while distracted
Great Ziegfeld, the (1936, Robert Z. Leonard)
All the King's Men (1949, Rossen)
Around the World in 80 Days (1949, Rossen) rewatch -- at least i think i saw this before. early todd-ao photography is interesting. not much else is.

oops on 80 Days, that's '56, can't remember who the director is

yeah, michael anderson. he also did logan's run

The Godfather - 4.5/5
The Godfather Part II - 4.5/5
The Godfather Part III - First time watch, and, yeah, it pales in comparison to parts I and II. Andy Garcia and George Hamilton are no substitutes for John Cazale and Robert Duvall, and the film just doesn't have compelling enough characters, and the bloodbath set-pieces don't have the same power. But it's Pacino that is the biggest let down - so contained and intense in the first two, here he sleepwalks through, bleary-eyed with a Bart Simpson haircut. It's as if he had completely forgotten how to play the character. Otherwise, ah, it was okay if you view it as a standalone film, out from the shadow of near masterpieces. Coppola's audio commentary on this is basically a three-hour apologia for a film he openly resents. 2/5

Star Trek Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013) - it's one long sugar rush. Cumberbatch may be the best thing about it; the heavy-handed moments of pandering to the base, the worst. The film itself is mindlessly entertaining and bombastic, but it doesn't leave much of an impression. I preferred it to the 2009 film, for what it’s worth. 3/5
Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) - A strange mess of a film. I did enjoy Ben Kingsley's character, and the '80s action-series-style titles over the end credits. Enough, now. 2/5
Cloud Atlas (Wachowski's/Tyker, 2012) - I quite liked the novel, but here they took the book's 'eternal recurrence' gimmicky narrative device very seriously and it made the film very ponderous. All of the separate stories get short-changed, and the black/white/yellowface make-up and prosthetics were really distracting and argh... 2/5
The Place Beyond the Pines (Cianfrance, 2013) - Feels like it's cut from the same cloth as other indie-cop films like End of Watch and Copland; I didn't like this nearly as much, though. Bradley Cooper's good, and the middle-section focusing on his character is the strongest. Ryan Gosling needs to get a new schtick, though. 3/5

Killer Joe (2012, Friedman)

Friedkin

thx

black swan (aronofsky)
the second circle (sokurov)
zebraman; zebraman 2 (miike)

The Cat o' Nine Tails (Dario Argento, 1971) - watching American actors dubbed into Italian with English subtitles is disconcerting. (4/5)
In The Fog (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012) - pretty good; good acting, slow burning atmosphere etc but any film about the Nazi occupation of Belarus really has to be compared to Come And See, in the same way that any film about the water supply in California would have to be compared to you-know-what. And it's nowhere near, unfortunately. (3/5)

He Who Gets Slapped
Gangs Of Wasseypur 2
The Grandmasters
Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die
The Place Beyond The Pines

A couple potentially controversial scores here:

Carnage 6/10
Ikiru 8/10
A Hard Day's Night 5/10
Lady and the Tramp 8/10
M. Hulot's Holiday 5/10
Plan 9 From Outer Space 6/10
Sea of Love 7/10

But it's Pacino that is the biggest let down - so contained and intense in the first two, here he sleepwalks through, bleary-eyed with a Bart Simpson haircut. It's as if he had completely forgotten how to play the character.

― DavidM, Monday, May 13, 2013 11:23 AM (6 days ago)

Exactly. It wouldn't be correct to say it's literally not the same actor, but in so many ways it's not.

how's The Grandmasters Jay Vee? Why didnt you like Hard Day's Night cryptosicko (i havent seen it myself)

Passion of Joan of Arc 5/5
City Girl 4.5/5
Greed 5/5
L'avventura 3.5/5
Dead Man 2/5
The Fireman's Ball 4/5
The Flight of the Red Balloon 4/5

The Grandmasters is the most languid and romantic Kung Fu flick I have seen.

cp I wasn't that fussed about Hulot's Holiday tbh. Maybe I haven't seen enough Great Silent Films Stars but it all seemed a bit broad for me

xp obv

I'm just going to copy/paste a review of AHDN that I posted to another forum in answer to cajunsunday's question:

Locating a dissenting opinion on "A Hard Day's Night" is proving nearly as difficult as locating one on the Beatles themselves. I certainly don't dislike the Beatles, but I don't much like "A Hard Day's Night," which I was initially surprised to learn was only the *fourth* entry in Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series, meaning that he he felt the need to cover it before tackling any other film aside from "Casablanca," "Ikiru" and "Vertigo." But the film really does seem to have a solidly regarded place within film history. Even at the time, it seems, few were able to dismiss the film as being merely a cash grab for the then-rising band; hell, the film even received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay! And, of course, the film has been said to have had a great influence on what would, a couple of decades later, become the music video format, what with the Beatles goofing around in sped-up motion while one of their songs plays on the soundtrack, although I must say that I was surprised at just how few and far between these sequences were.

Implicit in the praise that the film has received over the years is the claim that you do not need to love the Beatles to enjoy the film, but truthfully, there isn't really anything here that I can imagine appealing to anyone who isn't already a devoted fan. The individual Beatles never really do or say anything all that interesting or funny (despite their dialogue consisting mainly of one-liners) during the film, which mostly jumps from one thinly-sketched scenario to another, mostly killing time in between musical numbers (all pre-recorded album versions, by the way; "The Ed Sullivan Show" aside, were the Beatles ever really all that renowned for their live performances?). It all feels a bit sanitary as well: their goofing off is mostly just that, and there is no real sense of authority being challenged here at all. The establishment of the Beatles of this film as particularly cuddly rebels is highlighted by the contrast of their antics with those of Paul's slightly daffy grandfather, inexplicably accompanying them on their tour. While they run around playgrounds and hit on girls, Grandpa McCartney is sneaking off to casinos and staging practical jokes. The point doesn't seem to be the positioning of the boomer generation (represented here by the Beatles and their screaming fans) as uniquely rebellious as much as it is the skewering of the Greatest Generation (here the managers, the TV producers and one old stick-in-the-mud who, early in the film, chides one of the guys with the typical "I fought in the war for your freedom" line) as stodgy and joyless. What both the Beatles' generation and Grandpa McCartney's have in common is that they are both locked under the stern, authoritarian thumb of the generation that sits between them.

There were two sequences that I quite liked: the first has George being harassed by some advertising people trying to get him to shill for their products. When he blithely dismisses both the product and their teenage spokesmodel, the advertisers are genuinely shocked by their sudden inability to control the youth market, illustrating just how much of a game-changer the Beatles were in their effect on youth culture. The second is a strangely melancholic sequence in which Ringo takes off an hour before showtime to walk around town taking photos. He meets a young boy who is delinquent from school, finally introducing himself with "I'm a deserter, too." There's a real weight to the scene that just isn't there in the rest of the film in this idea that rebellion isn't worth very much if it lacks any sense of play.

As for Hulot, yeah, I just didn't laugh that much, sorry. Tati's approach to comedy (at least on the basis of this film) feels too gentle to work as satire and too laid back to work as slapstick. The movie is tres pretty to look at though, I'll give it that, and I actually did laugh quite a bit at the sequence where Tati accidentally joins a funeral procession. I'm still curious to check out Playtime, though. A friend described it to me as " the most passive voyeuristic movie you could think of," so I'm intrigued.

I'm a fan of AHDN, but if you're looking only for laughs I'd say Peter Sellers' cover of the song as done by Olivier's Richard III is superior.

Tati's otherworldly not-like-anyone-else quality/pacing is part of his appeal to me. MHH is def no more than his third-best, tho.

Devil In A Blue Dress (5/5)
I Stand Alone (Seul Contra Nous) (5/5)
The Place Beyond The Pines (2.5/5)
Upstream Color (3.5/5)
The Arbor (5/5)

cryptosicko, please don't skip "playtime"!

I laughed a lot at Playtime and I'm not even an old grouch like Dr. Morbius!

love 'm. hulot's holiday' a lot, but it prob helps if (like me) you're a clouseau-esque klutz who kind of identifies with tati's character.

i think AHDN's charms may be lost a bit if you watch it expecting it to be some great masterpiece; i like the kind of offhand goofiness of it, and there's so many weird, off-key lines and moments that just kind of shoot by faster than you can take them in, like george 'shaving' someone else in the mirror. (john singing the first line of 'if i fell' to ringo always cracks me up.) and i agree about the ringo-on-the-beach sequence -- very poignant and very much in line with the tone of 'a taste of honey' and a lot of the other great kitchen-sink films of the day.

Ms. 45 was a good time, totally dorky and heavy handed as hell with earned artistic pretentions.
Francis Ha is among the worst films I've ever seen.

If you have a visceral loathing of rich folk, avoid Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's (or have fun exercising your contempt). I liked it. I've seen a few fashion documentaries now--Anna Wintour, Valentino, Halston, Isaac Mizrahi--and it's a world that interests me but makes zero sense. I want to understand!

The Wise Kids (4/5)
Deja Vu (3/5)
The Seven-Ups (3/5--generous)
Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's (3.5/5)
Spring Breakers (2.5/5)
Side Effects (3.5/5)
The Case of the Grinning Cat (3/5)
A Grin Without a Cat (4/5)
The Shining (4/5)
Room 237 (4/5, to sidestep a torrent of abuse)

querelle
world on a wire
piano tuner of earthquakes
a life less ordinary

Iron Man 2 (Favreau, 2010) 2.5/5
Intouchables (Nakache/Toledano, 2010) 4/5
Star Trek: Into Darkness (Abrams, 2013) 2.5/5

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) 3/5
The 39 Steps (1935) 4/5
Repo Man (1984; repeat viewing) 3.5/5
Tiny Furniture (2010) 2.5/5
Rapture (1965) 4.5/5

Brave (2012, various)
Ben-Hur (1959, Wyler)
Platoon (1986, Stone)
Despicable Me (2010, Coffin and Renaud)
Searching for Sugar Man (2012, Bendjelloul) 1/5
Chicken Little (2005, Dindal)
No Man's Land (2001, Tanovic)

Iron Man 3 (Black, 2013)
Three Colors: Red (Kieslowski, 1994)
(the surviving 10 minutes of) I Graduated, But... (Ozu, 1929)
Shorts by David Lynch:
- "Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times)" (1966)
- "The Alphabet" (1968)
- "The Amputee" (1974), both versions
- "Premonitions Following an Evil Deed" (1996)

XXXXXP - Clemenza, have you sen the documentary about Bill Cunningham? It's really enjoyable.

I saw that and liked it, yes--put it on a Top 10 I posted here that year.

fucking hell, 'shadows of forgotten ancestors' is SO GOOD
also 'paranorman' far better than i could have expected

yeah that's a great movie. her fall, the camera in the forest, swoon.

I can see not loving Sugarman but 1/5 is pretty harsh

shadows of forgotten ancesctors is fire