Last (x) movies you saw

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

In the last month I watched a bunch of dumb movies aimed at the kids.

Thor: The Dark World (2013, Alan Taylor)
Snatch. (2000, Richie)
Escape from L.A. (1996, Carpenter)
Escape from New York (1981, Carpenter)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014, Singer)
Wolverine, the (2013, Mangold)
Fantastic Voyage (1966, Richard Fleischer)
X-Men 3: The Last Stand (2006, Ratner)

DoFP is worth it. The other superhero movies aren't.

All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955)
Breaking News (To, 2004)
La Collectionuse (Rohmer, 1967)
Last Year At Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)
Deep Water (Osmond and Rothwell, 2006)
La Grande Illusion (Renoir, 1937)
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Fassbinder, 1974)
Harakiri (Kobayashi, 1962)
X-Men: Days of Future Past (Singer, 2014)
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957)

The best of these was Harakiri. Amazing storytelling and probably the best samurai film I've seen.

The miike remake is... pretty okay. prob worth the trouble. understandably not quite as good.

Autopsy (Crispino)- the latest viewing in MIMSYTHON '14. Sadly, she's not given much of a character here, and the hints of mental illness early on (I was recommended this movie by, IIRC, Mondo Digital, who described it as part of a "Mimsy Farmer goes crazy" trilogy with Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Perfume of the Lady in Black) are really badly handled, again in contrast to Perfume. Her character's instability is really just an excuse for a thoroughly underwhelming freak-out sequence in the movie's opening scene. Also speaking of opening scenes, this may be the fastest opening-title-to-boobs time I have ever seen.

The Devils (Russell)- HOLY SHIT MIND=BLOWN
I've seen maybe a third (probably less) of his feature filmography at this point but I feel like I may not be too far off thinking of this as THE Kenneth Russell movie. Almost every one of his pet themes and stylistic tics is in place, but so well balanced and so cumulatively effective that even the campiest indulgences or anachronisms don't feel out of place. And the BFI DVD is gorgeous! It's easily the best-looking Russell film I've seen- Derek Jarman deserves a lot of the credit, but there's some subtle use of (I think) gel lighting in the scenes set in Grandier's church to suggest stained glass windows out of frame that's just beautiful. I had to look up the cinematographer, David Watkin, after seeing this- he won an Oscar for shooting Out of Africa, and did Chariots of Fire as well, but also a string of Richard Lester's early, good movies (not Petulia, obviously, that's Roeg's baby), Mike Nichols' Catch-22, Russell's The Boy Friend, Marat/Sade (mentioned above by WilliamC), the opening sequence of Goldfinger, the infamously horrifying Return to Oz, so much cool stuff.

The Horse's Mouth (Neame)- I quite liked this (I'll watch and love Guinness in anything), but it feels minor compared to the Ealing comedies- the grasping for SIGNIFICANCE! (and that cringeworthy final line) doesn't really work.

yeah, the devils is amazing and prob the key ken russell flick. tough watch tho.

Absolutely. It was genuinely horrifying in places, which isn't something I really was expecting from Russell, even with the film's reputation for being extreme/transgressive/whatever.

Is the excluded Christ scene on any video site? I've still never seen that part. Huge bummer that they didn't even include that as an extra, in this day and age. Were they expecting protests?

I've still got a fair amount of Russell to see (probably Music Lovers, Louse Of Usher and Mahler next) but Lisztomania is easily my favourite. There aren't enough films like that.
Loved Crimes Of Passion. So weird, but I could have done without the Psycho references. Love that line "I never forget a face I've sat on".

I believe that scene is officially MIA

2001: a space odyssey (kubrick, 1968) 10/10
prometheus (scott, 2012) 7/10
the outlaw josey wales (eastwood, 1976) 6/10
under the skin (glazer, 2013) 8/10

hey I just watched 2001 for the first time the other night too. love it!

"I believe that scene is officially MIA"
Not anymore (though it's unlikely we'll get to see it either on home video or theatrically for a long time, and if WB don't take the proper steps to archive the materials who knows what'll happen). At this point I think the only material well and truly gone for good are the snippets that were cut before submission to the BBFC.

"Is the excluded Christ scene on any video site? I've still never seen that part. Huge bummer that they didn't even include that as an extra, in this day and age. Were they expecting protests?"
I haven't watched it yet, but it's my understanding that the "Rape of Christ" scene is included in the Hell on Earth documentary, on disc 2 of the BFI DVD. Unfortunately Warner Bros. forced the BFI and Mark Kermode to cut the other infamous missing scene (Vanessa Redgrave getting her bone on) to almost nothing, but bits of it are present, and Kermode supposedly filled in the missing time with additional interview material. Warner have been weirdly censorious about this movie for decades- they haven't allowed a single legitimate US DVD release, pulled it (in its heavily cut American version, even) from the iTunes store two days after uploading it and unceremoniously replaced it after almost a year of ignoring questions, refused to license the cut footage (which was rediscovered in 2004) for the purposes of restoring the film (and have placed strict sanctions on public exhibition of the rough 2004 recut), and in a total dick move, specifically refused to allow the BFI to release an HD version, which is why a 2011 release is DVD-only despite having access to a high-quality print.

No, they had to cut the ChristRape scene from the disc Hell on Earth as well. However the original cut of that doc has been on youtube (in 6 parts) for several years. There is also an easily findable American bootleg of a fan reconstruction of the "director's cut" with most of the excised footage present and accounted for, alongside several extras including the uncut Hell on Earth.

But back to the Rape of Christ--imho opinion, after such a buildup it's kind of silly. One of my friends is a major Russell aficionado, and he told me that Russell once claimed it was merely a "gimme sequence", never intended for public consumption, but placed in the submission cut of the film so censors would demand its removal instead of other more important sequences.