Last (x) movies you saw

Wild Palms (8.0)
Life Upside Down (7.0)
The Crossing Guard (6.5)
The Pleasures of Being Out of Step (7.5)
Advise and Consent (8.5)
Flipped (5.5)
The Good Girl (7.0)
Art School Confidential (7.0)
Ides of March (7.0)
We Are the Best! (7.0)
Regarding Susan Sontag (7.5)

wolf of wall street really is kinda boring in the final analysis huh

only the last 2-1/2 hours

polyphonic why do you hate Our Boys?

Fort Apache (Ford, 1948) 7/10
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949) 5/10
Rio Grande (Ford, 1950) 6/10
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise (Bunuel, 1972) 9/10
Death Wish 2 (Winner, 1982) 2/10
*Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) 9/10
Tiny Furniture (Dunham, 2010) 7/10

*rewatch

*Blue Velvet (Lynch) & deleted scenes
Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor)
*Possession (Zulawski)
Mean Girls (Waters)
*Blow-Up (Antonioni) (w/Peter Brunette commentary)
*Black Sunday/Mask of Satan (Bava)
Hell Comes to Frogtown (Kizer/Jackson)

Bright Days Ahead (2014) 5 out of 10
Le Bonheur (1965) 8 out of 10
Young & Beautiful (2013) 7 out of 10
The Immigrant (2014) 8 out of 10

Threepenny Opera (Pabst, 1931, German version)
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948)
Carlos (Assayas, 2010, long version)
Permanent Vacation (Jarmusch, 1980)
Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Oshima, 1970)
Popeye (Altman, 1980)

LouLou (Pialat, 1980) 8/10
Ikarie XB1 (Polak, 1963) 7/10
Blue Ruin (Saulnier, 2013) 7/10
Death Line (Sherman, 1972) 8/10
Dexys - Nowhere is Home (Evans & Kelly, 2014)

Perverts Guide to Ideology - basically a two+ hr long zizek lecture about expressions of ideology in film. I really enjoyed it and it bolstered my sense that zizek really shines as a cultural philosopher like this (as opposed to other realms he might occasionally dip into)

all at SIFF:

The Case Against 8
The Double
The Congress
Obvious Child
We Are The Best!
Whitey: United States of America vs. James J. Bulger
The Signal
Boyhood
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

All Is Lost is kind of a morbid superhero daydream for rich people about how even when you do everything right, the world is going to be hard on you but don't worry because you'll be respected in the final analysis and saved by the hand of a just god.

A touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke, 2013) - this was great. No real false notes (apart from people in the bus watching the action film, like I needed pointing out the violence here was going to be 'for real'). Love the slow cinema bits (the woman wonadering about after dropping her lover at the train station, hanging out, thinking about one suspects nothing much), and how the animals and nature that are worked into the story.

The Soft Skin (Truffaut, 1964) - glad I'm seeing these now. 400 Blows is almost like the only really amazing thing Truffaut made.

*The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (Argento) (with Alan Jones & Kim Newman commentary)
His Girl Friday (Hawks) (Bringing Up Baby >>>>>>>> His Girl Friday, fwiw; the politics are really offputtingly shitty in HGF, too, but more importantly it's just not as funny and Cary Grant's character is a tremendous creep)
Windows (Greenaway)
Intervals (Greenaway)
The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Barilli) (THIS. IS. BEST. I am on a goddamn crusade to force everyone I meet to watch this movie. Formally it's a particularly beautiful example of mid-70's horror in the vein of Bava- not a giallo, but adjacent to it- but the content and tone are all Polanski's apartment trilogy. At this point I've started just picking up anything I can find cheap with Mimsy Farmer sight unseen.)
*La Femme Publique (Zulawski) (with Daniel Bird & Andrzej Zulawski commentary) (Z talks Dostoevsky, reflexivity, lenses & handheld camera work, hates Greenaway and loves Blade Runner)
*Black Sunday (Bava) (with Tim Lucas commentary)
Mickey One (Penn)

I think Shoot the Piano Player is right there with The 400 Blows.

^Yes.

what politics in His Girl Friday, exactly? It's based on a classic stage comedy where the 2 leads are men, u know. And it's hilarious. Yes, Walter Burns is a classic creep, comedies are often about them.

Margaret (2011, Lonergan, director's cut) 7/10 (*release ver was 8)
The Famous Sword Bijomaru (1945, Mizoguchi) 6/10
Portrait of Madame Yuki) (1950, Mizoguchi) 7/10
*Which Way to the Front? (1970, Lewis) 3/10
The 47 Ronin (1941, Mizoguchi) 7/10
Accident (1967, Losey) 7/10
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jarmusch) 6/10
Maine-Océan (1986, Rozier) 7/10
Liquid Sky (1982, Tsukerman) 6/10
Tenderness of the Wolves (1973, Lommel) 6/10
The Love of the Actress Sumako (1947, Mizoguchi) 7/10
Miss Oyu (1951, Mizoguchi) 8/10
Victory of Women (1946, Mizoguchi) 6/10
My Love Has Been Burning (1949, Mizoguchi) 7/10
Gebo and the Shadow (2012, Oliveira) 8/10

*rewatch

I think Shoot the Piano Player is right there with The 400 Blows.

― clemenza, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^Yes.

― You guys are caterpillar (Telephone thing), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok I've yet to see that one.

HGF is much funnier than BUB (which is really more horrifying than funny).

HGF/The Front Page basically has no respect for anyone or anything except the forward momentum of yellow journalism.

Local film critics are gaga over Only Lovers Left Alive, but I'm a Jarmusch agnostic.

it coasts on style for the first half at least, diminishing returns after. He lights Tom Hiddleston's pecs beautifully.

what politics in His Girl Friday, exactly? It's based on a classic stage comedy where the 2 leads are men, u know. And it's hilarious. Yes, Walter Burns is a classic creep, comedies are often about them.

Not gender politics. I'm maybe overreacting to this, but the early discussion that well of course the governor isn't going to commute Earl Williams' sentence because he killed a "colored" policeman seemed both over-the-top cynical and ugly and also kind of weird, historically speaking. Not to mention the use of the word "pickaninny" later on, which, yeah, I know, movie from 1940, but still. Goddamn. I guess I'm just weirded out by the casual use of gross racial attitudes in a fairly zippy comedy. I mean, as far as darkness goes, it's not exactly Ace in the Hole- it felt less like a conscious look at the attitudes of the time than an unthinking reflection of them? I don't know, really, I'm still trying to work out why that bothered me so much. It's still a damn good film, though. The fact that this (and Burns' skeeviness, though that doesn't really bother me now that I have some distance from first seeing it- the fact that he has little to no real interest in Hildy as a woman or even a human being keeps it on the right side of the funny/creepy divide) bothered me makes me want to revisit it in a week or so

And the only new movie I've watched since the last post:

Super Mario Bros. (i forget their names, they made Max Headroom I think?)
Some of the most compulsively watchable shit I've seen in a while. Bob Hoskins is a total pro, the Blade Runner-y production design is ugly and cheap and still jaw-dropping in its sheer misguided scale, Dennis Hopper...is, and the little incidental details (the Divinyls' cover of "Love Is the Drug," a minor character played by Mojo Nixon screaming THE KING IS EVERYWHERE)...who the fuck was this made for?

Telephone Thing, I like the way you list films you've watched w/ commentary tracks and I'm going to do the same from now on (i only tend to 'watch' commentary track discs for movies i've seen at least once)

think my next one will be Theatre of Blood w/ a League of Gentleman commentary track. Their previous Blood On Satan's Claw track is good fun, and I'm sure they'll enjoy themselves with TOB, too.

Thanks- I used to be an absolute maniac for commentaries as a teenager (because there's fucking nobody to talk to about weird movies in Mobile, AL) and kind of stopped doing it somewhere along the line. Starting a Letterboxd account and forcing myself to make a little note of every movie I watch has gotten me back into the habit, even if they don't always pay off (the Blow-Up commentary by a supposed Antonioni scholar is kind of superficial and contains quite a few stupid errors and outright speculations, for example). That said:

think my next one will be Theatre of Blood w/ a League of Gentleman commentary track. Their previous Blood On Satan's Claw track is good fun

HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO TRACK THESE DOWN. I'm not a big fan of his non-League TV writing but I could listen to Gatiss talk about horror for hours, and knowing that I can makes me positively giddy.

Venus in Fur (Polanski, 2013) - Seigner and Amalric were excellent. The play within a novel, all encased in a film sorta ran out of gas about halfway through once it was done with Polanski's hang-ups of art as a thing vs art in the service of society omg-I-can't-finish-this-fkn-sentence-already!!! Thinking back you do sympathise with commie destroy aesthetics pov when "is this play about child abuse?" question comes up. I mean that's worth 10% of the ticket alone!

Biggest problem is S&M. You just lose all interest in this 'fascinating' bit of human behaviour. Schroeder's Maitresse made that point with its up in the air ending iirc. This one was content to follow on its logic.

*Inferno (Argento)
Duffy (Parrish) - I kind of love this movie. Jameses Mason, Fox and Coburn all at the top of their game, gorgeous cinematography (by Peeping Tom's Otto Heller) of the Spanish coast and Tangier, and a vaguely David Axelrod-ish soundtrack. Just wonderful, stupid fun.
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava)
The Night Stalker (Moxey)- I love the Kolchak TV series and finally got around to watching the TV movies. This is honestly less entertaining than the best episodes of the show, but still solid entertainment.
*Psycho (Hitchcock)- Midnight screening! Off a DCP instead of real film, but still! It's always interesting to watch this one with a group- literally no one doesn't know the twist, but people still jump at the shower scene and the climactic cellar reveal (Arbogast's death less so), and it's just so perfectly (and I would say intentionally) constructed to work as black comedy upon rewatching. Especially interesting (to me anyway) is the change in the nature of the audience's complicity in Norman's coverup of Marion's murder
*Phenomena (Argento)- I like Opera (and I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised by The Stendahl Syndrome, which has its defenders) but for me this is Argento's last truly great film. And for all the Morricone and Goblin collaborations in his filmography (Simonetti solo and Daemonia not so much), this is the single best music cue in his entire body of work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZ__uy7T_Y

"Jimmys Hall" was enjoyable but a bit disappointing. An uneasy mix of broad humour and socialist debate. Dialogue is a bit stilted at times and a jazz band in 1930s rural Ireland? get tae fuck. Jim Norton is excellent as the parish priest and gets all the best lines. 6/10

Zazie dans le métro (Malle, 1960)
Close-up (Kiarostami, 1990)
Sweetie (Campion, 1989)
A Boring Afternoon (Passer, 1964)
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1962)
Sanjuro (Kurosawa, 1962)
Marat/Sade (Brook, 1967)
Tokyo Twilight (Ozu, 1957)

Marat/Sade (Brook, 1967)

How was that? Weiss' Aesthetics of Resistance is the most exciting discovery I've made this year.

I loved it, one of my favorites of that last batch. (Cléo was my surprise favorite.) Being a play about putting on a play removed a lot of necessary baggage that a filmmaker has to deal with when adapting stage to screen -- no need to recreate a courtroom or Golden Pond or whatever. The single minimal set in the asylum really put the focus on the text and the cast, and energy just rippled off it and them. Brook's direction helped, lunging around the stage and occasionally looking on from behind the audience, through the bars of the cell. Powerful shit -- made me want to go out and smash the system. (Fortunately a bowl of ice cream and a nap took care of that.)

vamp (richard wenk, 1986)

Need to rewatch that one. What'd you think?

loved the argento-esque atmosphere and the synthy john carpentery soundtrack — and of course grace is amazing

Thanks for your post William - I'll have to chase it.

Seen most of your batch and I'd agree that Varda would come out on top. That's easily in the top 5 French films ever.

The Night Strangler (Curtis)- much, much better than The Night Stalker. A more interesting location (low-budget pictures shot in Vegas always, always look like ass in my experience), a better monster (and one that can talk, avoiding the first movie and subsequent series' "RARH I'M A MONSTER" problem), and, thank god, only one drawn-out fistfight/"our bullets are useless" episode with the cops this time around

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava) (with Tim Lucas commentary)- Lucas's Bava commentaries so far are a bit dry and tend more toward biographical info and production notes than in-depth analysis of the film (especially disappointing when a film has been as influential across an entire genre as this one), but this one makes me want to track down the American version cut by AIP, The Evil Eye. The differences are apparently much more extreme than with the two versions of Maschera del Demonio/Black Sunday, with The Evil Eye being more of the Hitchcock/thriller spoof suggested by "The Girl Who Knew Too Much."

Trailer War- good as far as these things go (42nd Street Forever and so on). And a few of the trailers did their job and made me want to track down the full thing (Partners with Ryan O'Neal and John Hurt, Thunder Cops, Who Saw Her Die- already on my list of giallos to watch, but the moody Morricone-scored trailer bumped it up a few spots, Voyage of the Rock Aliens)

"loved the argento-esque atmosphere and the synthy john carpentery soundtrack"
Awesome. Watching this as soon as I can, then... I was under the impression that it was a campy trifle, probably more from the title than anything else.

oh, it's extremely campy but i wouldn't call it a trifle. the parts that are supposed to be funny are actually funny rather than cringe-inducing, and it's creepy when it wants to be.

and gedde watanabe is horrible

When wasn't he?

*The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Bava) (with Tim Lucas commentary)- Lucas's Bava commentaries so far are a bit dry and tend more toward biographical info and production notes than in-depth analysis of the film (especially disappointing when a film has been as influential across an entire genre as this one)

I agree that Lucas is a bit on the dull side, but boy does he know his stuff when it comes to this kind of genre material. Personally, I prefer his 'facts and figures' style of commentary track to the shot-by-shot analysis stuff, which I mostly find a bit redundant - I can see it myself, dummy.

BTW, the LOG commentary tracks I mentioned above are really just four old mates having a laugh together while they watch a movie - there's not much 'analysis' or even production history type stuff, though their love for the films in question is obvious and when they stop larking abt their own experiences as writers/performers etc leads them to make some interesting comments - on the Theatre of Blood commentary there's good stuff about the pathos that Price brings to the lead role, and the way that the film is quite ambiguous abt the actor-murderer's talent, or lack of it.

One of them - Gatiss, I think - also tells a v. funny Laurence Olivier anecdote.

Personally, I prefer his 'facts and figures' style of commentary track to the shot-by-shot analysis stuff, which I mostly find a bit redundant - I can see it myself, dummy.
I can appreciate it, but yeah, the more deep reading/film studies type commentary is hard to do without it feeling really obvious.

BTW, the LOG commentary tracks I mentioned above are really just four old mates having a laugh together while they watch a movie
That sounds great, honestly. Really, the worst thing that a commentary track can be is dull, and tangible enthusiasm for the film almost always wins out over being "educational" or whatever.

My personal rule is to bail on a commentary the second anyone starts talking about the weather on the day of a shoot.

Unless the weather was scary and threatening the filming surely?

Ward, you said you only watch the commentary after you've seen the film before but does anyone watch a film first time with commentary?

I do that sometimes

Which films? Films you expect to be lousy that have good people talking over them?

Usually bad films, but sometimes I'll do it for a classic. It doesn't have to be a particularly interesting speaker. For a lot of films I'm more interested in the process than the result, I guess.

Conspiracy. (crap)
Non-Stop (crap)

Cold in July is a lovely homage to the great bad action suspense movies of the late 80's that's mostly salvaged by decent scripting and great acting