Last (x) movies you saw

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)

The Opposite of Sex (rewatch, 6/10)

Were you more enthusiastic about it before? I loved this when it was new, but haven't seen it in about fifteen years.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier 4/10
Locke 5/10
Mistaken for Strangers 6/10
Black Pond 5/10
Calvary 7/10

Christina Ricci always the weakest element; she tries so damn hard. Lisa Kudrow and (even better) Martin Donovan are the ones to watch.

Anyone else see "Calvary" yet? Im eager to hear what people here thought of it. Its worth a watch but not without its flaws either. Brendan Gleeson is getting some Oscar buzz for it.

Moebius (Kim Ki-duk, 2013) - Or In the Realm of the Senses played for laughs! Genuinely funny, disturbing.

Bad Words - terrible.

xxp I saw it the other month with a friend who absolutely hated it for being ludicrously overwrought (as in the sheer cartoonish malevolence of just about everyone in the town but esp little finger carcetti), whereas I enjoyed it for pretty much that reason.

Oh and gleeson is great

Yeah I thought the characters were a bit OTT myself. Gillen sounded like an Irish Batman. There was a lot of dialogue that called too much attention to itself also ("If this was the third act what would happen?" GAH). Gleeson brilliant as usual.

Put that stuff down to the writer spending too much time with his wasteman brother

Dead Reckoning (1947, Cromwell) 6/10
Stella Maris (1918, Neilan/Pickford) 7/10
*The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Anderson) 7/10
*Wuthering Heights (1954, Bunuel) 9/10
The Great Madcap (1949, Bunuel) 6/10
The Strange Little Cat (2013, Zürcher) 8/10
The Long Good Friday (1980, Mackenzie) 8/10
What Now? Remind Me (2013, Pinto) 7/10
Tall Stories (1988, Pinto) 6/10
Hour of the Gun (1967, J Sturges) 6/10
City of Pirates (1983, Ruiz) 8/10
7th Heaven (1927, Borzage) 8/10

man push cart. ehh idk he's clearly pulling it. D-

Heavy Metal (Potterton)- This kind of sucks, but in a way I like, if that makes any sense. Like the stuff holding it back (the inexcusably awful wraparound story/structure, the totally thoughtless mix of tones and styles, the weirdly chunky pacing) is charming in a sort of un-businesslike way? And that first segment is an unabashed ripoff of Dan O'Bannon and Moebius's "The Long Tomorrow" (to the extent that I'm surprised not to see Moebius/Giraud's name acknowledged anywhere in the credits with a "based on..." like Richard Corben and Bernie Wrightson were for their direct adaptations) but it's a good ripoff, aside from the wank material for 13-year-old boys that infects every other segment but O'Bannon's WWII horror short (the filmmakers make up for it by having this be the entirety of the Corben segment). Stupid as hell, would probably watch again.

*Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma)- Still brilliant. I haven't gotten into his post-Untouchables filmography yet (aside from seeing Mission: Impossible in its theatrical run, and discovering Massive Attack and Pulp thanks to the Mobile, AL public library's habit of stocking its CD section with too many soundtracks and some dumbass label guy just licensing every song he could with the word "spy" in the title) but this and Blow Out are the best De Palmas I've seen yet, with the technical brilliance and nasty satire working perfectly together.

The Warriors (Hill)- Not counting this as a rewatch since it's the first time I've seen the unadulterated original theatrical version (the DVD director's cut is just pointlessly shit). It was a little irritating seeing this in a theater full of people who started out laughing at everything (including what I'm pretty sure was the same dude who shows up most weeks at the Trocadero's Movie Monday and has an incredibly loud and distinctive, fully-enunciated HA), the joke being, I guess, "the seventies happened," but eventually they no longer felt like they had to prove they could dig it (do you see what I did there haha please kill me) and the movie itself stepped up with the shit they should have been saving their enthusiasm for (Baseball Furies et al) and a good time was had by all. Like every Walter Hill movie I've seen, it's a much quieter, slower affair than anyone raised on post-Tony Scott action movies expects, and that's a great thing.

Snowpiercer (Bong)- LOVED. I am if anything too willing to suspend my disbelief for someone whose work I admire, and admittedly that let me paper over some logic and story problems (the underwhelming Ed Harris cameo, the upper-class riot at the end that makes no sense except as a Bioshock homage, that security guy who, come on, no, he was fucking dead) for everything else (the production design, Song Kang-Ho and Go Ah-Sung, TILDA SWINTON, the sniper faceoff). I might have more calm and measured thoughts on this after it's had some time to settle in.

*The Game (Fincher)- Mixed. I haven't seen this in like 14-15 years, and ended up liking it more than I did at the time (it's held up better than Seven, at any rate) but the screenplay (by a pair of ridiculous hacks responsible who haven't done anything else even remotely good, including part of the shared blame credit for Catwoman) is just so cheap that any sense of consequences goes out the window after about halfway through. The script is so basic (and those guys' CV so fucking terrible) that I have to wonder if the little playful nods to vastly superior paranoia thrillers (the film loop from The Parallax View, the overflowing bloody toilet from The Conversation) came from Fincher. At least Harris Savides makes the whole thing look gorgeous, with a really well-considered color scheme that still feels natural.

*Lost in Translation (Coppola)- Rewatched kind of by accident thinking it was another Savides joint (it's not; it's Spike Jonze regular Lance Acord, and Savides only started working with Coppola on Somewhere). Still a spectacularly well-shot movie, which does a little to make up for the shameful lack of curiosity and borderline racism (I feel that it comes down juuust barely on the right side of that, but "failure to render the Japanese characters as human beings" is nothing to be proud of). Bill Murray is still fun, but this much later it's not exactly a revelation that Murray can do Sad. And I'm not sure how much of the like I have for Johansson is just for the costume design, because she is adorable here. 's ok.

*Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (Maddin)- Started watching Guy Maddin, had a sudden sleep attack 20 minutes into Careful and had to put it off until another day with more free time. Rgh. Still one of my favorite short films ever.

Mother Joan of the Angels (Kawalerowicz)- This was kind of devastating. I didn't actually know going in that it was loosely based on the Devils of Loudun case, which gradually dawned on me when characters started discussing the late, lamented "Father Garniec." Lucyna Winnicka is wonderful as Mother Joan (I would even favorably compare her to Vanessa Redgrave in the same role in Russell's The Devils), with a really impressively athletic, dance-like performance, and there are some Dreyeresque full-frame closeups (including a really frightening closeup of panicking horses near the very end).

Jump (Konwicki) (aka Somersault or Salto)- This was a bit rougher going; I'm not sure how much of that was deliberate obtuseness, poor translation (or idioms that just couldn't translate), or drastically different cultural context, but I was flailing for a while. Also not the most visually stylish movie, especially right after Mother Joan. Still, though, Zbigniew Cybulski is a hugely charismatic weirdo (I love how his leather-jacketed Man of Mystery is constantly tripping over shit and is never, ever "cool," just a totally bemusing, flop-sweaty, anxious mess) and there is no one who can convince me that David Lynch hasn't seen this dance scene and taken notes.

Corben's Den is mainly notable for the variety of bodies, bodily transformations and stunning rendering techniques; the story never had much going for it. I've never seen the animated film but I've heard Den in particular was a mess.
News of a comic adaptation never brings a smile to me but the looming prospect of a live action remake of Heavy Metal does sound very interesting. How on earth would they do Den? How many statuesque actors can do action and drama while naked?
Also wondering if they would change the story roster to go with the retrospective Heavy Metal canon.

I've always wanted to see a nudist drama with well known actors just to see what it'd be like. I'm sure the public would freak out and hate it regardless of merit.

I thought Calvary was pretty good. Nice looking too. not much to say about it.
I don't know if Gleeson did one of this year's best performances but it would be nice to see him win an Oscar.