Last (x) movies you saw

*Fast Company (Cronenberg) (David Cronenberg commentary)

*Seven (Fincher)- Reeeally doesn't hold up. I mean, it's okay; it's visually interesting, but I have a lot less patience for Andrew Kevin Walker than I did as a teenager. Just didn't find a lot to hold onto for this viewing, which makes me a little worried for my rewatch of The Game

Maitres du Temps (Laloux)- This ruled, though. The budget limitations (which I'm guessing coincide with the move of production from France to Hungary) really show with some of the stiff adult human characters, but the little space gnomes are really fluid and beautifully designed. The plot is all over the place in the "one goddamn thing after another" style of so many SF movies (Barbarella, etc) and had me wondering why the hell it was called "The Time Masters" until the last ten minutes, when that question was answered with all the subtlety of a ton of bricks, but it's so good-natured and fast-paced that I couldn't really have any serious problems with it. Not a patch on Planete Sauvage, but that wasn't really going to happen without Topor and Goraguer, and I can't fault it for that.

The Fury (De Palma)- I'm going to have to give this one another couple of spins before I really know what to think. It's so technically brilliant (split diopters everyfuckinwhere, that rotating rear-projection shot of Amy Irving on the stairwell, the slow-mo escape sequence) and funny ("I KILLED IT. WITH A MACHINE GUN") that it's hard for me to really process as a film and not a collection of (awesome) setpieces on first watch. I do have to pick a fight with Edgar Wright, who in his Trailers From Hell commentary repeated the scurrilous claim that it contains a better exploding head than Scanners. First of all, everything but the head explodes here; and second, while an exploding Cassavetes is nothing to sneeze at, especially one filmed from like 20 different angles and shown again and again in a positively Cormanesque reuse of film (like he splurged all his House of Usher burning-mansion footage on a single movie), it's honestly not that great an effect, with the visible pyrotechnic charge and unconvincing dummy. Fiona Lewis' death stuck with me much more, partly for being really disturbing and upsetting but mostly for just being a more imaginative effect.

*After Hours (Scorsese)- BEST SCORSESE. I WILL TOLERATE NO DISSENT. I mean if you want to be wrong, that's okay. I only recently learned of the plagiarism scandal around the screenplay, which is a shame (and explains why Joseph Minion's career didn't really go anywhere after this and the almost as glorious Vampire's Kiss, and the fascinatingly bonkers-looking Motorama) but even that cannot diminish my love for this movie.

Charlotte et son Jules (Godard)- Cute. I mean, it's Belmondo, and a super rough draft of the Godard gamine with none of the darkness and uncertainty of Jean Seberg, but it's fun and everybody looks great and the punchline is good.

*Breathless (Godard)- Speaking of which. Really makes me want to seek out the Preminger films with Jean Seberg and Rappaport's Seberg film (which was on Youtube the last time I checked).

*After Hours (Scorsese, Schoonmaker, Ballhaus, Dunne, Robinson commentary)- Fun fact: not only was this almost Tim Burton's live-action debut instead of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Robinson and Dunne approached him on the strength of Vincent after Scorsese couldn't commit to the project, and graciously backed down after funding for Last Temptation fell through and Scorsese wanted to pick it up), it was recommended to Robinson in the first place by none other than Dusan Makavejev.

The Nest (Cronenberg)

Burton backed down, that is. Bad sentence! BAD!

You and the Night (2013, Gonzalez) 5/10
Up the River (1930, Ford) 6/10
Susana (1951, Bunuel) 7/10
Closed Curtain (2013, Panahi, Partovi) 7/10
*Tristana (1970, Bunuel) 10/10
Cousin Jules (1972, Benicheti) 8/10
The Sniper (1952, Dmytryk) 8/10
El Bruto (1953, Bunuel) 8/10
*A Summer's Tale (1996, Rohmer) 9/10
The Burglar (1957, Wendkos) 7/10
Passion (2013, de Palma) 5/10
*The Killing (1956, Kubrick) 9/10
I Am Happiness on Earth (2014, Hernandez) 4/10
Boyhood (2014, Linklater) 7/10
Él (1953, Bunuel) 9/10

Coo, might watch Tristana tonight

Spring in a Small Town (Fei, 1948) 6/10
Boyhood (Linklater, 2014) 6/10

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (Fisher, 1973) 6/10
The Long Good Friday (MacKenzie, 1979) 7/10
Classe Tous Risques (Sautet, 1960) 8/10
The Uninvited (Allen, 1944) 6/10
White of the Eye (Cammell, 1986) 7/10
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Wyatt, 2011) 7/10
Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971) 8/10
Horizons West (Boetticher, 1952) 6/10
Crimson Gold (Panahi, 2003) 7/10
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai, 2006) 8/10

Boyhood (2014, Linklater) 8/10
On the Run (2014) 5/10
Under the Skin (Glazer, 2014) 6/10
Stage Door (La Cava, 1937) 8/10

The Steel Helmet (Fuller, 1951) 8/10
Klute (Pakula, 1971) 8/10 rewatch
Boyhood (Linklater, 2014) 8/10
Fruitvale Station ( Coogler, 2013) 6/10

xp Let's honeymoon in Stage Door.

one of those backstage dramedies where the sass is great and the drama is pretty awful

oh I've seen it about seven times and I'm in awe at how well La Cava gives Ball, Arden, Patrick, et al. get great bits and Andrea Leeds gets her shitty I'm-an-actress chunk of the movie (and got Oscar-nominated).

Stage Door is a better send-up of received notions about Katherine Hepburn's arrogance and "difficulty" than The Philadelphia Story.

Ahead of its time in that regard.

La Cava was a great screwball director, dontcha think?

No.

Gravity (Cuaron, 2013) 7/10
Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? (Gondry, 2013) 6/10
*The Falcon and the Snowman (Schlesinger, 1985) 8/10
Make Way For Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937) 9/10
*Pleasantville (Ross, 1998) 5/10
To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944) 7/10
Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932) 8/10
The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013) 4/10
In a World... (Bell, 2013) 6/10
Sex Tape (Kasdan, 2014) 2/10
Take This Waltz (Polley, 2011) 8/10
*The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925) 8/10
*Back to School (Metter, 1986) 4/10
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957) 6/10

*rewatches

I would raise Chaplin, Lubitch and Dangerfield all about two points there

Trouble in Paradise is one that I could easily find myself loving after another viewing. The Gold Rush is kind of the opposite; I'd forgotten about some of its pokier moments since seeing it last.

I had kind of built up Back to School in my mind as the ultimate Rodney vehicle, but with the exception of Sally Kellerman at her most sexy and winsome, everything that surrounds him is painfully dull. I didn't like that Rodney's character was fabulously rich and able to buy himself out of any situation; this worked in Caddyshack where his role was basically to show up and do his standup act (and where his dialogue was funnier, as well), but here it removes any tension or potential for pathos (Chaplin provides a convenient and obvious counterpoint here). I'll likely revisit Ladybuys and Easy Money at some point, but for now I feel fairly confident in saying that Rodney's best role remains Larry Burns on The Simpsons.

Of all Chaplin's top tier flicks, The Gold Rush seems undeniably the thinnest.

L'Enfant (Dardenne, 2005)
Election 2 (To, 2006)
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946)
A Better Tomorrow (Woo, 1986)
Pay Day (Chaplin, 1922)
Forrest of Bliss (Gardner, 1986)
Revenge (Shinarbaev, 1989)
Trances (El Maanouni, 1981)
Salut les Cubains (Varda, 1963)

Just finished the last one, it is awesome! Made with help from Chris Marker, I think, and it is quite Marker-like, made of photos like La Jetée, and also reminds me of All Statues Must Die. But oh so joyful, with the photographs 'dancing' along with the Cuban rhythms on the soundtrack. I mean, I know it's bullshit, that the country and the revolution wasn't like this. But as a film, it's amazing.

i didnt know thickness was important in comedy

letter to momo is pretty solid coming-of-age and dealing-with-loss miyazaki influenced anime. gorgeous art, solid story but (as an ilxor told me) you kinda need to go in from a kid's perspective or it feels a little facile

Finding Fela is a solid biopic that leans a little hard on the musical to provide b-roll but some of the found footage is nuts... a shot of fela showing his scars for the camera is batshit. the marks of torture are all over his body. then that juxtaposed with him saying that even a queen has to understand that in his bedroom if she doesn't do what he says, he'll kick her ass. such a complex character.

femi was on hand at the screening and he also singled out the scars sequence, very stoically saying that the memories of those beatings are still very vivid for him.

btw, the night screenings of every one of four screens at IFC for boyhood are STILL sold out; people are treating that film like it's an event

How dare they!

I'm just surprised. It's been over three weeks and they've been running eight screening a night!

Ken Russell's Savage Messiah.

The constant loudness of a few of the characters and the caricatures of the art crowd could annoy the shit out of most people but it's a minor quibble for me. In all the Russell films about artists, the constant highlighted/underlined scenes of famous people shouting their famous manifestos and other famous things might have been a lot more cringeworthy under a different approach, but maybe the loud cartoony quality saves it a bit. Maybe I'd feel different if the subjects were far more modern and familiar to me.

I don't like it quite as much as the other big Russell films. Cant believe that Peter Vaughan (old blind guy of the Night's Watch in Game Of Thrones) has been an old man for so long. The dirty home of the artist was very good. I was kind of amazed how much Helen Mirren looks like a Richard Corben heroine.

A couple of years ago there was a 2CD best-of by Fela that was bundled together with a one-hour documentary, Music is the Weapon. Have you seen that one, forks? Filmed in Nigeria in 1982, with lots of great interview footage. Not much performance footage, but lots of Fela sitting around in his underwear, surrounded by wives, smoking and pontificating.

yeah, a lot of that footage shows up in Finding Fela...maybe not quite enough honestly. if the film has a weakness, it's the near overdependence on FELA! the Musical to provide backstory and b-roll. There's also some exceptionally brutal film of biafran killing and starving children that felt really brutal to see but i get the historical necessity of including that i suppose.

Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1966)
*Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)
*2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968 - @ Plaza Theater, Atlanta)
Lucy (Besson, 2014)
The American Soldier (Fassbinder, 1970)
The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Kazuo Mori, 1962)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1933)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)

What's Lucy like?

I think "poky" moments in The Gold Rush can frequently be chalked up to giving the theater audience time to recover from sidesplitting laughter? (I last saw it in Alice Tully Hall @ Lincoln Center where this made perfect sense.) Laurel & Hardy, even moreso.

At the basic narrative level, Lucy might seem like gibberish (20% brain capacity = laws of physics are suddenly optional?), but it's a very stylish page-turner, and its core theme that humanity is way overrated is pretty interesting. Banaka would love it.

I just watched the trailer, now I'm not that interested. I'm not really a fan of the few Besson films I've seen but I'm kind of interested in checking out more of the French directors that the "Look" tag was attached to. I saw the directors cut of Betty Blue recently and although I wasn't wowed or anything, I could easily watch more like that because it did look fantastic. I wasn't huge on Holy Motors either but it was also good enough to want more Carax.

Anybody like any of that stuff? Carax, Besson and Beineix are the only ones I see listed in articles but there must have been more directors categorized this way.

wakolda is good

lantana has gone from boring to silly via lil bit racist and I might go to bed and finish it tomorrow

Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013) 3/5
Paper Moon (1973) 4/5
Scanners (1981) - 3/5
The Visitor (1979) - 2/5
Seconds (1966) - 4/5
Yellow Sky (1948) - 3.5/5
Le rayon vert (1986) - 4.5/5
La Pointe-Courte (1955) - 2.5/5
Snowpiercer (2013) - 3/5
Boyhood (2014) - 5/5

crimes of the heart (Beresford '86) 2/5
baise-moi (viriginie despentes & coralie trinh thi 2000) 1/5
pitch perfect (Jason moore 2012) 3/5
the son (dardennes 2002) 3.5/5
blue is the warmest color (kechiche 2013) 4/5
mademoiselle (tony Richardson '66) 3/5
moonstruck (jewison '87) 3/5
accident (losey '67) 4.5/5
the internship (shawn levy 2013) 0/5

Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959) - this shared a Cannes' critics prize with Hiroshima Mon Amour and it really is that good. The script mines a poetry in its repetition of salt, sweat n' beating sun (felt like picking up Neruda's poetry again straight after), the voice-over felt right, the images of pyramids of salt even had a Marienbad type look to them, and (compared to something similar to be made today) it is politicized in subtle and clever ways. Easily one of the best things I'll see this year.

Finding Vivian Maier (John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, 2013) - Maloof just got more and more unsympathetic as this went on. Do see the Imagine.. programme on this (repeated last night). Never convinced there was a fight against the establishment (these prints now sell for thousands), his trip to France was wasted. The BBC doc actually talked to quite a few more people in her village, whereas the doc actually traced her development: her change of cameras, what shows she was seeing, her themes (the pictures of garbage are actually traced to a period in the mid-60s). Maloof makes it out that she was an original, and while she did know what she was doing with a camera she was also visiting shows at MoMA. The 'sorta spy' anecdote is contextualized in the doc: her trip to France in '46, and her dropping on people's lives is a sorta spying too (although none of the programmes said that). There is a pointless mystery: very clear as to why she didn't want the attention: her family history, she was shy, etc. Spent too much time with the now grown-ups she looked after. Got the point she was a bit 'weird' and 'had a dark side'.

Some of those grown ups Maier raised were super odd. Like living Alice Neel portraits (I may have said this upthread). Have that Imagine docu ready to watch.

La Notte (Blu Ray rewatch / 5/5)
L'Eclisse (3.5/5)
Brancaleone II (3/5)
Nazarin (5/5)
Tabu (5/5)
L'oeil du malin (3/5)
Les choses de la vie (4/5)

that's a beautiful comparison, really on point. similarly p skeptical about that maloof docu, though obviously the work shines.

The Stendhal Syndrome (Argento)
Le Petit Soldat (Godard)
Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston)
*The Avengers (Whedon)
Mad Max (Miller)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn)
Thunderball (Young)

A couple of the grown-ups were odd but mostly they felt as what you'd expect - a tad neurotic, but as one of them said also "she lived the life she wanted to" - which felt correct to me. To feature that many felt unnecessary. Imagine... featured 3-5 of the dozen or so in the Maloof, who certainly went for the 'what she was like' angle rather than really trying to sketch out an understanding of the work. Maloof is shown to be conflicted about being so interested in Maier, but I wasn't about to absolve him of this - it didn't feel v convincing.

Even 'what she was like' matter was mishandled: disliked this narrative of Maier as a caring nanny at the beginning of the film who then turns out to be this evil monster who isn't shy of giving a girl a beating and takes children on trips to rough places.

Maloof is the one who did show interest in her photos, scanned and put them up when no one else did - but was he the only one? The BBC doc states that he was one of a few who did buy the pictures. There were others, he may be the one who did the lion's share of the work but still...its a measure of how bad this was that I haven't really given him any 'credit' till now.Imagine gave a glimpse of the world of these auctions, how people scavenge around on other people's throwaways.

The work is very clearly good, the fact she didn't bother with editing and the rest of what 'the work' entailed was somewhat undiscussed but it will certainly take time and space so we can all breathe and complete our thoughts, reach consensus - it won't be done while the circus building: NY, Berlin, celebs buying a picture here and there.

The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) 8/10
Das Fraulein (Staka, 2006) 8/10
Pierrot Le Fou (Godard, 1965) 8/10
Scarface (De Palma, 1983) 9/10
The Flowers of St. Francis (Rossellini, 1950) 9/10
Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994) 9/10
The Circle (Panahi, 2000) 9/10
Queen of Hearts (Donzelli, 2010) 5/10
A Moment of Innocence (Makhmalbaf, 1996) 9/10
Offside (Panahi, 2006) 9/10

Dry summer
Terror 2000

Gotta say I'm really enjoying my mubi subscription, it's like Netflix but for films

me too. they put up some really weird films which is fun. looking forward to watching Hausu

Dry Summer is great, isn't it? There was another Erksan-film on Danish mubi, but I missed it. I also just missed Terror 2000, but I didn't really prioritize it.

Tale of Cinema (Hong, 2005)
Viridiana (Buñuel, 1961)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)
Birdsong (Serra, 2008)
The Big Combo (Lewis, 1955)
The World (Jia, 2004)
I Hired a Contract Killer (Kaurismäki, 1990)
I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You (Ainouz & Gomes)

Shorts:
Letter (Loznitsa, 2013)
Castro Street (Baillie, 1966)
Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex (Varda, 1975)

If Birdsong pops up on your mubi, do check it out, it's really something! Also the Ainouz & Gomes one with the long title, though it's a bit hard to recommend a film where the subtitles basically doesn't work. I did not get the plot... But the pictures were beautiful. There seems to be a really cool film-underground in Brazil, I saw films by both Ainouz (Praia do Futuro, a bit bland) and Gomes (The Man in the Crows, weird but alluring) at CPHPIX along with a lot of other strange and lofi stuff. Nothing was better than Neighbouring Sounds, but it was still really cool.

Reality (Garrone, 3.5/5)
The Adventures Of Robert Macaire (Epstein, 4.5/5)

oh i remember i travel because i have to. i thought it was very pretty, yeah, its looseness kinda heightening the value of the images - those video-bleary columns hit by sun toward the end, the sort of halting presence of some of the more docu segments. interesting. was thinking about neighbouring sounds after the strange little cat keep up; two new domestic cinemas.

how's tale of cinema btw? i watch one of the hong movies that diehards rep for about once a year & it was the next on my list

I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You (Ainouz & Gomes)

Sounds fantastic - the sertao is a great setting. Source for much, great Brazilian cinema.

Yeah, the sertao is great. One of the other films at PIX was called Road to Ythaca, and was a no-budget roadmovie made on the sertao for, like, 1500 dollars. And it was beautiful. They're lucky like that.

Tale of Cinema was cool. The plot was tricky and funny, etc. It was quite a bit darker than I'm used to from Hong, but I've normally seen his later stuff, so that might be it. Definitely one of the better Hong's.

Citizen Koch (6.5)
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (7.5)
Detroit Rock City (5.0)
The Double (7.0)
A Hard Day’s Night (7.5)
54 (6.0)
Boyhood (7.5)
MASH (7.0)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (8.5)
The American (6.0)
Brewster McCloud (5.5)

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her was a lot better than I ever would have guessed, Detroit Rock City much worse. And I learned once again that I prefer Help! to A Hard Day’s Night.

Escape From Alcatraz (7/10)
Guardians of the Galaxy (6/10)
The Opposite of Sex (rewatch, 6/10)
buncha "Unsolved Mysteries" reruns (11/10)