Last (x) movies you saw

You convinced me to get Perfume Of The Lady In Black.

True Romance (Scott)- My first Tony Scott film, somehow, not counting endless fragments of Top Gun on TV. I don't know him well enough (beyond the stereotypes) to really pick apart what's his style and what's an embryonic Tarantino sensibility, though plenty of the latter is screamingly obvious. The Elvis stuff feels a bit Wild at Heart, only less so, and it turns out that the secret to make Christian Slater tolerable is to make his character a good-natured idiot. The big name cameos are fucking bizarre, though- I have to wonder where and when that happened. Was it always in the screenplay that these big, charismatic characters would pop up for a single scene and (usually) die? Was it made this way when Tarantino and/or Scott found they had enough pull to borrow Gary Oldman or Christopher Walken for a day's shooting? I will never not enjoy watching Saul Rubinek.

Starman- Part one of a John Carpenter double-header put on by Philly's Exhumed Films, and one of the major gaps in my Carpenter viewing. I hadn't really sought it out because it seemed too obviously a reaction to Spielberg; besides, I only have room in my heart for one Persecuted Alien Space Jesus movie and, despite the title, this one doesn't have David Bowie in it. But! It was fucking great! I was worried it might be impersonal work for hire, but it slots so easily into Carpenter's blue-collar liberal humanist streak that I was surprised to find he didn't have a hand in the screenplay. Bridges is perfect as another variation on the Carpenter's male hero (alongside Kurt Russell and Roddy Piper) and the road-movie structure lets him do a little John Ford tribute with a too-brief ride through Monument Valley in winter. It's fundamentally nice, to the extent that this is the only Carpenter movie I have or will ever recommend to my mom, but not schmaltzy, which is tricky. My only complaint is the Richard Jaeckel character, who I would have dropped completely. He just feels totally superfluous, and Jaeckel brings nothing at all to the part except take screen time away from Charles Martin Smith's vastly more interesting and watchable scientist character.

*Escape From New York- Starman was screened as a pristine print straight from the Sony vaults; Escape was badly faded, scratchy, and looked like it had been screened for years non-stop in some 42nd Street shithole. Which was perfect- I almost wish that there was a deliberate scan from a bad print as a DVD extra, because the experience is fundamentally different but not worse in any way. I can't really say much about the film except to say how I'm always slightly taken aback at how deadpan and how quiet it is (the score's one really memorable moment outside the credits is the minimalist cowbell funk when Isaac Hayes' glorious Liberace limo makes its first appearance) and how much I love Romero (the flamboyantly weird guy who looks like the cover of Bad Music for Bad People).

*Black Sabbath- The Italian dub, which is the only version I've seen and the only version on the mid-2000s DVD. I'd love to watch the AIP version someday. Wikipedia says that they replaced the score with one from Les Baxter, as with Bava's previous films, but reshot the introduction and hacked the first segment to pieces, removing the lesbian relationship and making the vengeful pimp into a ghost for no goddamn reason, with some hilariously tortured plot convolutions ("The character of Frank is also no longer a pimp but a ghost who leaves behind enchanted notes that magically write themselves as soon as the envelope they are contained in is opened"). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's an extant cut of the film with Karloff dubbing his own voice, which is a goddamned crime against one of the best voices in horror. The movie is still perfect, and "The Drop of Water" can still scare the crap out of me even after this many viewings.

Saw The Lego Movie, which was great until they brought in human characters and sucked about 80% of the fun out of it. Didn't come for a lesson on parent-child relationships, thanks; came for awesome Lego-based animation, and was getting plenty of it until Will fucking Ferrell had to shove his giant face onscreen. Biggest disappointment in quite a while.

I've seen several big summer blockbusters this year, too—Godzilla (fun, but again, the people were mostly superfluous), the X-Men movie (not as good as the first two but better than the third one), and Edge of Tomorrow, which was a blast. Who doesn't want to watch Tom Cruise die screaming over and over and over again?

Re: Black Sabbath- Do you like the Karloff "behind the scenes" part at the end? I like it but some people think it spoils the otherwise serious film.

I love it. I mean, it's of a piece with the opening (Karloff warning people to check the seat next to them for VAMPIRES! as Bava hits him with a blood-red spotlight is pure William Castle) and even if it weren't, it's just far too charming to have any real problems with. Maybe the rinky-dink piano music that runs over the very end and the credits is a bit much, but that's it.

The Signal (2014): 1.5/5

this weekend's batch -- lotsa 1990s lol nostalgia:

Princesas (2005, Fernando León de Aranoa): 3.5/5
Amador (2010, Fernando León de Aranoa): 3.5/5
Beavis & Butthead Do America (1996, Mike Judge): 3.5/5
Extract (2009, Mike Judge): 2/5
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995, Betty Thomas): 3/5
Private Parts (1997, Betty Thomas): 3.5/5
The Late Shift (1996, Betty Thomas): 3.5/5

Betty Thomas, the not-quite-Amy Heckerling.

Adding to the ambivalence over Ida. Well done, but the basic contrast between Ida and her aunt didn't seem all that complex or new. I'll have to go back and read David Thomson's rave ("It is like seeing Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for the first time.") The use of "Naima" was nice; I think Mo' Better Blues is the only other film where I've encountered Coltrane.

starship troopers (paul verhoeven, 1997) 7/10
gojira (ishirō honda, 1954) 9/10

Love Starman. Seen this many times on TV over the years. Its actually one of the few really good Romantic SF films isn't it? I can't think of that many. Love the scenes where the Karen Allen (whose eyes are crystal beautiful in that last shot) is teaching the Alien about love, how he doesn't develop anything himself. Only mimics. You think the alien does love her but there are all these doubts. Is he being the anthropologist more than a humanoid being that is fulfilling something that his "poeple have lost".

Very much a Carpenter film you could recommend to mum. The soundtrack implies a 50s kinda apple pie schmaltz. Its a very 80s film that is obsessed with the 50s kinda film.

I don't remember much of the soundtrack past a general positive impression (a fault of mine- I rarely retain much of the soundtrack after seeing a movie for the first time unless it's really showoffy or the film goes out of its way to foreground it) but I do remember it's by Jack Nitzsche, who also had a hand in one of my favorite movies of all time, Performance. I'll have to go back and give it a deeper listen.

Finding Vivian Maier (4/5) : Fascinating story though the guy who "discovered" Maier's photographs (and co-directed this film) often came across as a smarmy twerp. The people she worked for/babysat look like living Alice Neel portraits.
Tess (/5) : the Blu-Ray is glorious. Love this film.

Tess is 5/5

*Tenebre (commentary- Dario Argento, Claudio Simonetti & Loris Curci)
An older (1998) commentary track with some technical issues (pops and dropouts early on, inconsistent volume, Dario's heavy accent with no subtitle option). There are at least two more floating around out there, and I hope the upcoming Synapse blu-ray at least has the Alan Jones & Kim Newman track- their commentary for The Bird With the Crystal Plumage is excellent. Wikipedia tells me (yeah, I was bored) that Jones has recorded several commentaries that weren't ported over to US releases, for Nicolas Winding Refn films (Fear X, Bronson and Valhalla Rising), Lucio Fulci (Zombie) and Argento (Suspiria, Tenebre, The Stendhal Syndrome and The Card Player, though really who gives a shit about that last one). Anyway, there's some good stuff to be had- the theme has lyrics, or lyric anyway (the vocoder is stuttering "paura"); the actress who played the main character's estranged wife went on to marry Silvio Berlusconi, and Argento blames this connection for some of the censorship it's experienced on home video in Italy; one of the shots cut to pieces in the heavily re-edited Unsane version was that 3-minute Luma crane shot (why? how?!); and Daria Nicolodi's voice was dubbed by Theresa Russell, then wife of Nicolas Roeg. There's a good deal more, and it's worth tracking down if you want to hear Dario Argento deadpan the phrase "careful with that axe, Eugene."

Murder a la Mod (De Palma; extra on Criterion's Blow Out)
I had to give up on this halfway through since it was literally putting me to sleep. That's not a knock on the film; I have borderline narcolepsy and I've been put to sleep by some of the best movies of all time (the endless San Francisco driving scenes in Vertigo, the entirety of In the Mood for Love, etc). What I did get through was fascinating, and I intend to go back to it later- it's probably not a good starting place for my De Palma watching, even though it does feature many of his later obsessions almost fully formed, along with a sizeable chunk of Peeping Tom and a tone that wobbles between his usual tongue in cheek and straight-up melodrama. The theme song (by Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise's William Finley) is an earworm of the worst kind.

I'm probably going to put away Murder a la Mod for a while, along with the shorts on Arrow's Obsession blu-ray (Woton's Wake and The Responsive Eye) until I'm back in the proper De Palma mindset. Tonight's plan is Pasolini's Teorema, since International House here in Philly is doing a three-day run of his Trilogy of Life and I just read a glowing recommendation from John Waters in his book Crackpot.

Her - Interesting premise that could have been explored in more detail. As such bits of it rang stupendously false while others plumbed pretty dreadful indie-rom depths. On the whole it wasn't that bad at all, just could have been a bit less fanciful.

The Selfish Giant - Gritty northern drama. Thought some of the acting was excellent. Not sure what it had in common with the Oscar Wilde story though.

I spent a silly amount of time yesterday researching horror films on Rateyourmusic lists, then reading reviews of Argento's newer films. His Dracula sounds atrocious.

I only just found out why Brody sued over Giallo, he says his contract was broken and he wasn't payed. I wonder how often that happens?
I don't know what to make of his wishes to suppress the film (or is that what he wanted?), There are plenty of copies available. Initially I thought he was just embarrassed about the film and was crazy enough to sue for that, maybe I got that impression because that was a running joke.

I feel bad for reading Rutger Hauer being excited to be in an Argento film. Maybe they aren't familiar with the newer films.
I wonder how someone could lose it this bad? I once posed this question to a horror critic about Argento and Tobe Hooper. He said Hooper has had horrendously bad luck and Argento has no excuses for being bad.
Many believe that unlike other declining horror directors, Dario simply stopped caring about making films good.

There are old clips of Kazuo Umezu meeting Argento on YouTube.

Is Asia Argento a good director?

Anyone read Enchanted Screen by fairy tale expert Jack Zipes? It's supposed to have a good section on European (mostly Soviet era) fairy tale films.

Re: Argento - loss of talent is a mysterious, wayward thing w/ many causes - I'm not sure it's just that Argento 'stopped caring', things like changes in the Italian film industry and more broadly the horror film genre, the absence of some of his key collaborators and the difficulties of aging, have also all played their part. Nowadays I find that watching new Argento is a bit like listening to late Lou Reed or Iggy or someone - even the most mediocre offerings have occasional flashes of their old 'good stuff', and sometimes that and fond sentiment is enough to keep you going (The Stendahl Syndrome, and especially Sleepless are his 'return to form' movies.)

Giallo is really terrible, but I quite enjoyed Mother of Tears as a romping bit of Euro exploitation, so long as you put Inferno etc out of your mind while watching.

The run between The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and Opera is as good as any major horror film director's - only Cronenberg really eclipses it, imho, and the decline of Cronenberg's talent, while maybe not so steep or shameless as Argento's, is equally dispiriting in its own way.

Telephone Thing, the Alan Jones and Stephen Thrower commentary track on the recent Arrow Region 2 blu/dvd of Fulci's Zombi is excellent, and especially worth tracking down. A bit confusingly, Newman also records genre commentaries with STEPHEN Jones - they're p. gd, too.

Punishment Park - is this the first pseudo-documentary? V repetitive but p compelling historical document. My wife went to bed before the end and when she asked me how it ended I said they reached the flag and then walked off into a land of lollipops and rainbows and unicorns.

Peter Watkins, who made Punishment Park, was producing pseudo-docs as far back as the mid-sixties. His fake nuclear holocaust pic The War Game was banned by the BBC before transmission because it was considered too harrowing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game

the brutish military personnel were v scary bc of how easily i could imagine a current police officer/national guardsperson saying the things they say xp

its an eternal mindset

I haven't seen A Dangerous Method or Cosmopolis but I don't think Spider (one of his best works in my mind), A History Of Violence or Eastern Promises looks anything like a decline. I watched his Secret Weapons X a few days ago and that was not remotely looking like the good old days. I've heard M Butterfly was his low point.

Cronenberg seems on a way better streak than Argento, Hooper, Raimi, Peter Jackson, Carpenter, Craven and Romero.

I've heard Yuzna made some good stuff not long ago.

Cronenberg's always scattered his CV with duds - I don't think Cosmopolis or M Butterfly (or Crash, which I also hated) signal anything other than bumps in the road. A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and a Dangerous Mind are all solid films imo. They are smaller in scope and more thematically conventional than I would hope from a director with such an audacious past. While Carpenter's films have all been shit for decades, I do agree with him that Cronenberg's problem is not necessarily an erosion of talent, it's that he wants so badly to be taken "seriously" that he's abandoned his pulpier roots in horror and sci-fi, which is really what he is best at.

It's all well and good that he's proven he can make gangster flicks and relationship dramas but such diversions seem unnecessary, or at least less compelling.

do you consider Dead Ringers pulp?

I consider it his most overrated

:p

I like classy Cronenberg, everything before Scanners is grungy shit.

no argument from me there really. There's flashes of brilliance in the early stuff but even Scanners is a bit of a slog tbf. Shivers feels like a test run for Wheatley's forthcoming High Rise adaptation; has its moments but also fairly sloppy and aimless. Rabid I really don't care for. The Brood I should watch again. Otherwise his 80s run is p flawless until M. Butterfly (I don't think Dead Ringers is terrible or anything but some people REALLY love it to death, which I don't get. It feel shallow).

I didn't even know Maps to the Stars even came out. anyone seen it?

Dead Ringers is my fave.

Is there any real evidence he is distancing himself from lurid pulp? Naked Lunch is probably his grossest.

I heard he was seriously considering a Fly sequel.

both gangster films are pretty pulpy I guess.

But he seems to have abandoned horror and scifi altogether since eXistenZ, which (while often criticized as a pointless retread of Videodrome) was still really enjoyable and unusual. You'd think as he got older the body horror stuff would be even more central to his work but I guess not.

Maps to the Stars has not opened in the US

ah sorry didn't notice the wiki release dates were for Cannes

I'd really like to spend some time with late/decline period Argento. All the late work I've seen is Stendhal Syndrome (which I saw during a pretty bad depression and barely remember; I'm not even sure I finished it) and his Phantom of the Opera. Phantom of the Opera is a massive, massive turd- in places it feels more like a Charles Band movie than Argento, and when he tries to shock or do some awful Fellini-derived grotesque stuff it's pretty clear that he doesn't have the slightest handle on his material. It could be bad enough to be funny provided you can somehow convince someone else to watch it with you and you're able to stop cringing at how badly his career went off the rails.

The stuff I want to track down first is Sleepless (which I have heard good things about, but which has been a bit difficult to get my hands on- there's an OOP Artisan DVD I vaguely remember having some major issues, maybe to do with the framing or re-editing?), Trauma, and Mother of Tears (there's enough talk about this being intentional, enjoyable camp that I'm curious). Giallo and The Card Player I can take or leave- the thought of an Argento movie where a generic serial killer taunts the police over a fucking webcam is just deadeningly awful, but I'd watch it someday if it came up on a streaming service.

I do have one more well-regarded Argento left to see- The Black Cat with Harvey Keitel, from his Two Evil Eyes anthology with George Romero.

Re: Cronenberg, I don't really think of him as being in a decline at all. There are low points, sure, but even his worst I can still enjoy and readily identify as a Cronenberg movie (nb: I have not seen M. Butterfly). I'm a little more excited about his upcoming novel than I am Maps to the Stars, though.

A Dangerous Method among his best.

a very protestant remark

Two Evil Eyes is pretty good, it has some striking moments, Keitel is kinda funny when he goes really crazy. The Romero section is very poor.

His Dracula is supposed to have some of the Suspiria team. I think changes in the industry, ageing and other things don't really explain someone losing all their knowledge of making a film.
For an ageing filmmaker who isn't as popular, resources might be a big problem. I could easily imagine old horror directors being surrounded by submissive fans who aren't really that talented.

Peeping Tom (Powell)- One of those movies I've read about voluminously but taken forever to actually sit down and watch. Deeply grotty and unpleasant, which is all the more upsetting for how fundamentally sympathetic killer is (Manhunter definitely learned a lot from this, not to mention De Palma taking the basic premise of Lithgow's character in Raising Cain from here).

*Black Sabbath (Bava; Tim Lucas commentary)- Another Lucas track heavy on biographical info, but with some interesting insight into the development and production of the movie and some more appreciation for Bava's signature lighting and camera techniques now that he's working in color. Most interesting/devastating fact from the commentary: until the project was taken away with AIP and made into their own fairly crap movie with Dean Stockwell, Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" was almost developed as a Bava/Karloff film with the working title Scarlet Friday. The degree to which that would have fucking ruled is impossible to accurately measure and the world is an objectively worse place for it not happening.

Theorem (Pasolini)- I wasn't expecting this to be quite so...approachable, I guess? It's beautifully shot and kind of sweet and even funny, despite the self-consciously heavy philosophical content and Marxism and Catholic dread. I am basically an idiot as far as any film with religious subtext goes, and this is my first Pasolini, so I'm going to have to do some further reading.

Mr. Mike's Mondo Video (O'Donoghue)- Some bits go on far, far too long (the Hawaii Five-O church bit could have easily lost a full minute or two and been none the worse for wear) but I kind of love the low-budget, homemade feel of most of this. It's a weird mix of bits that could have fit into early SNL (the Jack Lord bit, "chicks dig creeps," some others), Americanized Monty Python (the opening and closing bits especially) and stuff that feels like it could fit into later shows like the Ben Stiller Show, Get a Life or Mr. Show. The entire thing's on Youtube, which is fine since the DVD is out of print and video quality doesn't really matter much. (sadly, I can't find a clip of MOUSE PRINCESS HIT BY TWO TRAINS, which is the dumbest fucking thing but almost made me piss myself laughing)

Re: commentary regulars. Kim Newman+Stephen Jones also did The Shout and I'm fairly sure they did Mark Of The Vampire. Those are the ones I've listened to anyway.
I think Alan Jones is with Jodorowsky on some Jodo films I bought recently.

I've heard that on one of the Hammer DVDs, Newman has an uncomfortable argument with one of the actresses on a commentary.

Thanks for the heads up on The Shout! I didn't even know there was a newer DVD than the mediocre 2003 Prism release, which is the only one listed on the US Amazon. I do know Jones is on the recent-ish DVD and blu-ray release of Santa Sangre.

Just checked Nebraska out of the library for the second time, and for the second time I don't think I'm gonna have time to watch it before its due back, so I guess I can safely wrap up June. Lotsa re-watches lately; was wrapping up another semester this month, and I think I tend to look at things I've seen before when my mind is preoccupied with other things, rather than let any new ideas in. Glad I saved the two new things I watched for after my term paper was handed in. They needed, and rewarded, my full attention.

*Funny Farm (Hill, 1988) 7/10
*Pink Flamingos (Waters, 1972) 7/10
Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013) 9/10
*Election (Payne, 1999) 10/10
Her (Jonze, 2013) 9/10

Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948) - pretty flat. The small town is a claustrophobic chamber of about five actors. The moral was simple and drove to a fairly predictable end. Its not that interesting to sell this as contrast to the communist fare being peddled around at the same time.

When I saw you (Annemarie Jacir, 2012) - one of the first almost entirely (?) Palestinian made features. Wasn't entirely feeling it.

Remembrance of Things to Come (Chris Marker, 2003) - late cine-essay. Not bad, but the voice and music narrating and sound-tracking are off, so this bit of undercover surrealism is falling flat as well.

Flatness all round. Not a great run at the mo.

I talked more about it in the post2005horror thread but since all the talk of giallo here, I gotta say that Strange Color Of Your Bodies Tears is wonderful and probably better than Amer. One of my favourite films of the past few years.

xp gonna see that fei film tomorrow, that summary is unencouraging. I've had a decent run recently: Heli, Long Live The Republic, Little Fugitive, Wrony, La jaula de oro, Chef, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, Godzilla, Batman: Year One, Chef, We Are The Best!

no years of release or ratings but I enjoyed all to varying extents, I like everything tho

I was drinking way too much before so I might be off base, but the friend I was also with agreed - hope you find it better.

I want to see more films: Camille Claudel 1915, Of Horses and Men. World Cup taking over everything right now.

I swear to god if I see Ninetto Davoli ONE MORE TIME I will tear the screen apart with my bare hands

EVEN IF IT IS A TELEVISION