Last (x) movies you saw

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

ugh, ancestors

i saw shadows as part of this: http://atrium.lincolncenter.org/index.php/atrium-2013-a-hawk-and-a-hacksaw
need to resee it shortly without the backing; curious if hawk+hacksaw added or detracted and can't tell without a rewatch

oh yeah i saw them bumbling over it too. i thought they were fine but i'd rather have seen it w/something approximating whatever it was originally presented with. barely remember but seem to recall thinking that they were occasionally going elegiac when it should have been sorta rowdier, more brutal.

i remember thinking several times that they'd just shut up and let me watch the film... but i LIKE them! The film is just too good.

Something in the Air (Assayas, 2012) - If he hadn't made Carlos this would be pure hokum. Works in that line, with a great last scene.
Cloud Atlas (Tykwer, A & L Wachowski, 2012) - now this is a nostalgia trip of all the SF/apocalypitc films you've seen. Adds nothing to it, with loads of parallelization, for not v much of a point.

anyone seen Ginger & Rosa?

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, April 20, 2013 8:15 AM

Me, tonight. Bare-bones story, veers into melodrama, but I think it'll stay with me. Brooding (and kind of annoying) writer leaves Christina Hendricks for gorgeous 19-year-old--only in the movies. Excellent but too-brief use of Kind of Blue, plus some other famous jazz music.

Actually, "leaves + takes up with" would be more accurate.

The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013) - Enjoyed the camera swooping impossibly around the Busby Berkley champagne-popping party scenes, and most of the performances. It's technically pretty faithful to the book except it completely lacks its bruised heart and yearning ache. 7/10
Iron Man 3 (Black, 2013) - The use of Ben Kingsley's character was perhaps the film's one decent idea. 3/10
Skyfall (Mendes, 2012) - Perhaps not the worst Bond film, but without doubt the most boring. 4/10
Antiviral (Cronenberg Jr, 2012) - Wash away the body-horror blood-vomit and it's just another plodding, heavy-handed satire on celeb culture. Not without inventive ickiness, but such a slog. 5/10
The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) - It's gauche and looks cheap, but it stands up as a decent anti-authoritarian yearn for tweens. JLaw is the film's real strength, though. 6/10
Silver Linings Playbook (Russell, 2012) - There's something pre-e-etty dodgy about using debilitating mental illnesses as eccentric character quirks. That aside; great cast, but the corny, slushy sitcom writing pulled it further and further down. 4/10
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013) - Swapping Raimi's anarchic spiritedness for straightforward, grittily sadistic splatter. In that sense it works, but the serious approach to dumb-teens-in-woods horror - esp after Cabin in the Woods - is... hard to take seriously. 5/10

Knightriders (Romero, 1981) - Arthurian legend told as a modern day motorcycle jousting drama. Ed Harris takes it all very very seriously, which is great. Nice to see this cult classic get a Blu-ray release. 7/10
The Party's Over (Guy Hamilton, 1965) - '65 feels a bit late to have had a cautionary tale about irresponsible, hedonistic beatniks. Oliver Reed plays his usual brooding bullish bully. 5/10
Paranoiac (Freddie Francis, 1963) - Hammer stepping away from the vividly colourful Victorian horrors to make this weird Hitchcockian psycho-drama about a man who turns up at the house of an emotionally unstable family claiming to be the son/brother who they believed had died. Is he? Wonderful B&W photography, with a tense and decidedly off-kilter vibe. Oliver Reed, again, is terrifically menacing. 8/10

Love yr capsule reviews, DavidM. Please keep them coming.

La Cinquieme Saison - pretty damn bleak (plot: little French village gradually falls apart when winter never leaves). Looks beautiful, though the humor disappears halfway through and the misery gets a little overpowering. Reminded me a bit of Heart of Glass, especially the running gag of a stone-faced man staring down a rooster that refuses to crow.

Notorious (Hitchcock) 4.5/5
The Dark Knight Rises 2/5 (rewatch) much worse than I remembered
Blue Valentine 3.5/5
Gerry (Van Sant) 3.5/5
The Third Man 4.5/5 (rewatch)
Lola Montes 4.5/5

Argo (Affleck, 2012) - came to this without knowing much about the events, and expected something worthier and more inert. Pleasantly surprised by the capersome vibe, pretty decent Saturday night fayre. 3/5
Dredd (Travis, 2012) - my youthful enthusiasm for 2000AD was stoked for this and it didn't disappoint. Clearly of a feather with The Raid, but v solid fun and I loved Urban's take on JD. The exquisite photography from Anthony Dod Mantle took me by surprise, the early sequence with Headey zoning out on SLO-MO in the bath was spellbinding. 4/5
The Hunt (Vinterberg, 2012) - never saw Submarino so I didn't expect such a stylistic tone down from Vinterberg's earlier films. Mikkelsen superb throughout. The way events unfurled managed to mostly avoid cliches, found the whole thing powerful and believable. 4/5
Lady & the Tramp (Geronimi, Jackson, Luske, 1955) - as sweet as ever, and it looks stunning on blu-ray; the detail and artistry in the background drawings is really able to shine. 3.5/5
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (Lord, Newitt, 2012) - actual lols in nearly every scene, gloriously animated too. Masses of freeze-frame gags. The Pirate King's arrival on stage by bellowing a request for "any lubbers in the house?" inflating a hot water bottle to bursting and then punching out a lackey dressed as Queen Victoria confirmed for me that this is how children's films should be. Loved it. 4/5

The slo-mo effects in Dredd were actually pretty dang cool.

that final slo-mo scene & buildup was worth it.

Something in the Air (Assayas, 2012) - If he hadn't made Carlos this would be pure hokum. Works in that line, with a great last scene.

saw this tonight, really enjoyed it. Long & meandering & pretty & fun & namedroppy. There's kevin ayers! There's john ashberry! &c

some v cuet actors in it too

I'll see Something in the Air within a week or two--I hope it's better than the Bertolucci's The Dreamers.

Get rid of that stray "the."

Disorder (2009, Huang) 9/10
Vamps (2012, Heckerling) 8/10
Stories We Tell (2012, Polley) 7/10
Augustine (2012, Winocour) 6/10
Broken Arrow (1950, Daves) 7/10
*Badlands (1973, Malick) 8/10
*The Girl Can't Help It (1956, Tashlin) 6/10
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012, Nance) 8/10
*Sabotage (1936, Hitchcock) 8/10
The Red House (1947, Daves) 7/10
Pride of the Marines (1945, Daves) 7/10
Who's Minding the Store? (1963, Tashlin) 7/10
The Last Wagon (1956, Daves) 7/10
Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990, Wu) 8/10
*Voyage to Italy (1954, Rossellini) 10/10
Under the Sun of Satan (1987, Pialat) 5/10

*rewatches

Le Jour Se Leve (Carne, 1939) 9.5/10
The Connection (Clarke, 1961) 7/10
Cocksucker Blues (Frank, 1972) 4/10
Ornette: Made in America (Clarke, 1986) 7/10
Moi, un Noir (Rouch, 1958) (bailed 20 minutes in because shakycam makes me nauseous)

Providence (Alain Resnais) 10/10

Looking forward to 'The Wall' on Friday.

Gangster Squad comic-book escapism with added violence.
& Josh Brolin looking like a young Nick Nolte, who was himself in the film though he's spread rather latitudinally so might no longer be immediately recognisable.

Quite enjoyed it though I missed th ebegining and then spent ages trying to work out when it was set. i remembered thinking i'd read that it was '49 which would make sense of the heroes being ex-army, now cops.

the cowboy guy looks like Bowie playing Tesla, was it the liquid metal Terminator actor? Knew I'd seen him somewhere.

― Stevolende, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 7:33 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was better than i'd hoped, straight lift of untouchables with more than a dash of black dahlia/la confidential. schlock but well done schlock, knew it was schlock kind of thing. nolte weird looking, brolin nolte looking, penn wtf looking and robert patrick looking like john voight kinda

i'm p sure gf did not draw breath at any stage while ryan gosling was on screen

The Loved Ones - ridiculously unhinged enough to work, despite the gore porn tendencies
The Future - I really hated this. Indie mumblecore at its most grinding

Oh I enjoyed Sugarman

The Wall was less enjoyable than I hoped. Too gloomy ultimately.

the future destroyed me, but i can see why someone would find it irritating.

Seduced and Abandoned (on Hulu/Criterion) is A+ indictment of sicilian patriarchy, just a great film

Miranda July was really proud of those damned cat v/o's, but slice them out and The Future would've been tolerable (if a lot more generic).

latest batch:

the battle of algiers
melancholia
valhalla rising
rio bravo
casablanca
jesus of montreal
a canterbury tale

I had vaguely meant to see The Future, but that was before I discovered (just now) that they had cat voice overs.

Spring Breakers. Well, THAT scene, you know which one I'm talking about, with the... song... was absolutely freaking brilliant. The rest was ok.

Only God Forgives. I've been a bit proud that there has been three Danish directors with films in Cannes these last few years, but after seeing this I remembered that two of those are bat-shit crazy misogynists, and the third is Thomas Vinterberg... Still, I like the career Winding Refn has build up, few people have had as many ups and downs, and pretty much all of his downs are because he's made a stylish but mindless sadistic film like this. At some point you would have thought he would have learnt his lesson, but no... Still, it's very well made, beautiful to look at, and with iconic characters, but you've seen almost all of it before...

The cat voice-overs are not the sort of twee whimsy you might think though. They are the saddest thing in the movie.

xp

Sad that they're in the movie.

p sure i have indignant & blustering defences of the future elsewhere on ilx so won't repeat, but yeah the dismissal of that stuff/this film in general as twee is really lazy, i think - it's a really thoughtful, personal film about anxiety & creativity but receives a lot of the same reflexive rejection as something like girls, with assumptions that it's just some kind of miranda july video diary capturing entitled whites. such an interesting film, it really gets at some of the boundaries that people draw around their activities in a way that nothing else i can think of does.

a funny thing about The Future is that Miranda July let the Old Christine guy play the "Miranda July part".

trailer for the future was insufferable, were any of those bits in the film

I liked The Future and the cat parts were heartbreaking

I actually went out and strangled a cat on the way home from seeing that movie.

nooooooo

we can't talk anymore xp

i pretty much avoid all movies where bad things might potentially happen to cats

but it's a cat voiced by Miranda July

i pretty much avoid all movies where bad things might potentially happen to cats

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, 5 June 2013 06:34 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

never ever watch Satantango!

Or Maurice Pialat's L'enfance nue.