Last (x) movies you saw

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

^^^ haha. Don't mind him except when Pasolini puts him in a Little Tramp getup
and goes for the "homage" . Was it in "Decameron"? Not sure.

Under The Skin (8/10)
Lou Lou ( 8/10)
Double Suicide (7/10)

The Chaplin routine is in Canterbury Tales, though for me that was Davoli at his most tolerable- at least there he was aping someone who's actually funny! His parts in the other two Trilogy of Life films (and his bizarre, tone-shattering cameo in Theorem as the dancing, arm-flapping, possibly developmentally disabled mailman) just seem to proceed from Pasolini's assumption that we'll find him just as adorable as the director does, so why bother writing him a character?

That, and there's a weird sort of reaction shot Pasolini seems to elicit from all of his male actors in the Trilogy, this kind of goony expectant grin, usually with an audible "huh-huh" on the soundtrack, that is just unbelievably irritating to me.

I'm coming across way too negatively for films I did, overall, enjoy; I'm just suffering from Davoli Fatigue. I'll try and type up something a little more coherent tomorrow.

Oh and: thanks to good ol' Triple P, I have now seen Doctor Who's cock, so there's that.

expiring soon from my Netflix extravaganza:

mission impossible: ghost protocol (2011, brad bird): 3.5/5
bang the drum slowly (1973, john hancock): 3.5/5 (did people REALLY think that DeNiro trying to be a cracker was THAT convincing back then?!?)
robinson crusoe on mars (1964, bryon haskins): 3.5/5 (mad men LOL it's the 1960s moment -- when the main character calls Friday a retard)
captain kronos - vampire hunter (1974, brian clemons): 3.5/5 (old school po-faced horror)

Hey Robert, not to be a giant creep, but good to see you on Sarah Horrocks' blog! Her HMOD thing kind of pointed me toward my current giallo obsession (and probably unsustainable between-semesters movie-watching pace), and I'm the anon who suggested The Perfume of the Lady in Black a couple weeks ago.

It's great to hear some positive feedback on Strange Color, too. Mainstream reviewers have been pretty negative, but I love Amer (and the hilariously portentous Strange Color trailer cut to Justice) so I've been crossing my fingers for Olive (or anybody really) to pick it up for US release.

Obvious Child (4/10)
Twilight ('98 Robert Benton movie 6/10)

The Decameron (Pasolini)
The Canterbury Tales (Pasolini)
The Arabian Nights (Pasolini): International House Philadelphia showed all three parts of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life from original 35mm prints this weekend, so I couldn't say no. I can admire these films, but I couldn't really get on Pasolini's wavelength. Ninetto Davoli aside (I WILL END YOU, YOU HARPO MARX-LOOKIN' MOTHERFUCKER), a lot of his choices in framing, camera movement (or, more frequently, the lack of camera movement) and editing felt unnecessarily distancing in an attempt to invoke medieval portraiture and devotional painting. The production design was phenomenal, though- Dante Ferretti across all three films, a name I remember from being obsessed with Julie Taymor's ridiculous and equally gorgeous Titus as a kid. Canterbury Tales was the most enjoyable for me, partly because of a more clearly defined structure and feeling more, well, cinematic- things like the Little Tramp sequence with Davoli and its undercranked chase scenes and slapstick. By the time Arabian Nights ended, one million hours of Ninetto Davoli later, I was just worn out on exuberance and barely-motivated dick shots. I think I might enjoy Arabian Nights more if I revisited it on its own; on first viewing, the nested stories-within-stories structure (with its frequently unclear breaks between narratives and cutting in between several concurrent stories at different "levels") was just exhausting and tended to obscure brilliant locations and mise en scene and Ennio Morricone's best work out of all three movies.

*Peeping Tom (Powell) (Laura Mulvey commentary)- This was fascinating. Mulvey is a Lacanian, which I don't really have the academic background or personal inclination to get fully behind, but while I'm embarrassed to admit this is the first I've heard of her, she put together some of the Freudian and Lacanian concepts I do understand in a fairly lively and engaging way, and paid special attention to camera setups, movement, and editing rhythms, something many commentators gloss over in favor of talking about mise en scene or performances. I'm kind of amused that she never remarks on all the key symbolism in the film- maybe there is such a thing as a too-obvious castration symbol?

*Sisters (De Palma)- I totally and unabashedly love this movie, and watching for the first time in years soon after the Mulvey commentary was an interesting experience. Sisters literally opens with a gameshow-within-the-movie called Peeping Toms, and plays with the idea of the gendered gaze in really fascinating ways. And of course, it has literally castrating violence- both of the violent onscreen murders feature gratuitous stabs and slashes to the crotch. Also notable for one of Herrmann's best ever non-Hitchcock scores. I didn't know this until going over the extras in detail (side note: Arrow's De Palma blu-rays/DVDs are fucking ace; the "visual essay" format used for Justin Humphreys' discussion instead of a commentary might actually be a better medium), but that's not a theremin in the title theme but an early Moog Modular.

Next up is Phantom of the Paradise, which I haven't seen before but oh my god do I ever want to.

Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' is p much the defining document of 70s Feminist/Lacanian film theory :

http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf

The BFI have recently released a set of two excellent experimental/avant-garde films Mulvey made w/ Peter Wollen at round abt the same time she wrote VP and NC:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/riddles-sphinx

Mulvey also wrote a good BFI classic monograph on Citizen Kane, and her commentary on the Region BFI disc of Rossellini's Journey to Italy is also of interest. Didn't know she'd recorded a commentary on Peeping Tom - is that for a US release? There's a UK DVD of Peeping Tom w/ a pretty comprehensive commentary by Powell/Pressburger expert Ian Christie (even if he does make a bad error about the Carry On films right at the start of the track).