Last (x) movies you saw

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014) 6/10
Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014) 6/10
Tusk (Smith, 2014) 4/10
Detachment (Kaye, 2011) 8/10
Neighbors (Stoller, 2014) 6/10
*Scrooged (Donner, 1988) 6/10
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005) 5/10
*Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012) 8/10

Alfred "Potter" Sotosyn

We Were Strangers (1949, Huston) 6/10
The Babadook (2014, Kent) 6/10
*The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Lubitsch) 10/10
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Ingster) 5/10
Inherent Vice (2014, P.T. Anderson) 8/10
Nymphomaniac (2013, von Trier) 7/10
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013, Takahata) 9/10
*The Party (1968, Edwards) 6/10
*HealtH (1980, Altman) 5/10
Two Days, One Night (2014, Dardenne, Dardenne) 8/10
*Goodbye to Language (2014, Godard) 8/10
*The Man Who Would Be King (1975, Huston) 9/10
*The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966, Huston) 5/10

Archipelago (Hogg, 2010) 8/10
Exhibition (Hogg, 2013) 8/10
Ida (Pawlikowski, 2014) 7/10
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988) 6/10
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Tashlin, 1957) 6/10
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) 8/10
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Wiene, 1920) 7/10
A Safe Place (Jaglom, 1971) 5/10
Corruption (Hartford-Davis, 1967) 7/10

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 9/10
Dumb and Dumber To (Farrelly Bros, 2014) 4/10

George has been so masochistically good that why on earth should angels look at him as a Job needing a comeuppance?

bad metaphor, Job was also saintly

it's not a comeuppance

Red Rock West. Pretty good, fairly atmospheric. Old fashioned suspense thriller. I'm not sure if I'm imagining there was more Lynch influence than there really was because of the cast.

Saw most of Grand Budapest Hotel and liked it way more than I imagined I would, mostly because of the meticulous visuals.

bad metaphor, Job was also saintly

― poxy fülvous (abanana),

Eh. Good man targeted.

you might say good men need targeting b/c saints are boring though

Since xmas eve:

I Know That Voice
Grand Budapest Hotel
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
Paradise: Hope
Gideon's Army
Memphis
We Are the Best!
Horse Feathers
Goodbye to Language
CitizenFour

All of them quite good, a few among the best of the year

Highlights were Straub-Huillet (Pedro Costa worked on Sicilia! and you can see he took...just about everything from them (what gorgeous shots, how can light saturate a frame like this!) and they adapt literature like no one. Too Early, Too Late is a classic in political filmmaking, you could say Cache was Haneke's remake of it.) Duras follows in its austere methods, with a beautiful text - she has to be one of the most distinctive writers for the screen in film history. The self-portrait of Thomas Bernhard is as good of its kind - he is so frank about his methods, takes no prisoners but there is no pose there - committed to film that you could hope to see. The Hart of London begins and stays in a mode that is all of that pure US experimental film like the best of Brakhage/Frampton/Schneemann etc but then breaks into a strange reality. Four hours of Out 1 left me wanting the other 9. Finished this run with Breillat, little nostalgia trip into 90s French film. Love the reveal, same type of story as Before Sunset but for the cynical ones like me.

A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)
The Territory (Ruiz, 1981)
Hypothesis of Stolen Painting (Ruiz, 1979)
Kingdom of Naples (Werner Schoeter, 1979)
Willow Springs (Werner Schoeter, 1973)
The Ister (David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2006)
Genet (Bourseiller, 1981)
Thomas Bernhard, Three Days (Ferry Radax, 1970)
Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971) (4 hr cut)
Too Early Too Late (Straub/Huillet, 1982)
Sicilia! (Straub/Huillet, 1998)
Streghe, Femmes entre elles (Jean Marie-Straub, 2009)*
Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (Straub/Huillet, 1977)*
Agatha et les lectures illimitées (Duras, 1981)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970)
Crossings (Catherine Breillat, 2001)

*short films

Everything Goes Wrong (Suzuki, 1960)
Shadows in Paradise (Kaurismaki, 1986)
49th Parallel (Powell & Pressburger, 1941)
The Spy in Black (Powell & Pressburger, 1939)
Ordet (Dreyer, 1955)
Jimi Hendrix (Boyd/Head/Weis, 1973)
Claire's Knee (Rohmer, 1970)
Nothing Lasts Forever (Schiller, 1984)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Anderson, 2014)

Watched on long-haul flights over Xmas / NY :

The Expendables 3 - needed Mr. T (3/5)
Vanilla Sky - oh look it was all a dream or something ffs (2/5)
The Maze Runner - creators of the Maze guilty of over-elaboration imo (2/5)
The Giver - creators of the Community guilty of over-elaboration imo (2/5)

plus some other crap I've forgotten

Human Capital (Virzi, 2013) 7/10
The Lego Movie (Lord/Miller, 2014) 6/10
12 Years A Slave (McQueen, 2013) 7/10
'71 (Damange, 2014) 8/10
Birdman (Innaritu, 2014) 7/10
We Are The Best! (Moodyson, 2013) 7/10

Mandara (Akio Jissoji, 1971)
United Red Army (Wakamatsu, 2008)
Serial Killer (Adachi, 1969)
Postwar History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Imamura, 1970)
Dear Summer Sister (Oshima, 1972)
La Commune (Peter Watkins, 2000)
Trash (Morrissey/Warhol, 1970)
Germany in Autumn (Fassbinder/Kluge/Schlondorff/Reitz, 1978)
Roads to the South (Losey, 1978)
Plastic Jesus (Lazar Stojanovic, 1971)

Discussed the Japanese items on its own films thread. But basically its erm terrorism week in the old ways. Red armies (German and Japanese). Germany in Autumn is brill, has Fassbinder arguing with his mum and snorting coke and treating his bitch even more cruelly (?) than usual. I love Kluge's segment that followed just as much - this collage of interview (with one of the 'brains' behind the RAF), fact-and-fakery, and the scene with the Turk (who was caught by the cops while out to 'kill pigeons') set your nerve on edge (although looking back I am not sure why). Plastic Jesus is a companion to Makavejev's W.R. and then a lot of films around fascism repressing sexuality. Unjustly forgotten. Trash was just so good - "does politics get you hard?". If you ever get to see the Losey curio from '78 around tired nearly dead Spanish exiles waiting for the death of Franco (Yves Montand on the job) I suppose you'd have the exact reaction as Dallesandro.

La Commune is such a ride, exhilarating and awesome. So many historical re-creations of left-wing history in recent times have a feel of funerals - but there are all sorts of questions: whatever you think of its methods really did none of actors think that perhaps 'restoring order' was a good thing on some level (despite the way this was carried out), or that the Commune wasn't working at all (many Communes in later decades never seem to work out either), or was ever going to? A ton to explore here. No wonder Watkins hasn't made another film after this - either he hasn't been allowed or that was a last statement. Seems like he was kicked out from everywhere he worked. We need him now.

Selma (DuVernay, 2014) 7/10
Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984) 5/10
A Room with a View (Ivory, 1986, rewatch) 7/10

*M (1931, Lang) 9/10
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013, Porumboiu) 6/10
*Journey Into Fear (1943, Foster/Welles) 7/10
The Laundromat (1985, Altman, made for TV) 5/10
Precious Blood (1982, Altman, made for TV) 6/10
*Nightmare Alley (1947, Goulding) 8/10
Marlowe (1969, Bogart) 6/10
Li’l Quinquin (2014, Dumont) 5/10
The Normal Heart (2014, Murphy, made for TV) 8/10
The Skeleton Twins (2014, Johnson) 5/10
Kansas City (1996, Altman) 6/10
Interstellar (2014, Nolan) 4/10
Winter Sleep (2014, Ceylan) 8/10
The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, Negulesco) 6/10
Selma (2014, DuVernay) 7/10

*rewatches

Sacco e Vanzetti (1971)

I watched this cos Metal Gear director Hideo Kojima makes a lot of references to this movie in his recent games. It was pretty amazing, and honestly incredibly disheartening that this happened almost a hundred years ago and yet things haven't really changed all that much.

Flubber (1997)

Never saw this when it came out..... oh boy, it's pretty hilarious. Some incredible 90s slapstick humor. The slow parts tend to drag but this movie was pretty ahead of its time. Michael Bay certainly stole a lot from the professor's flying robot (who is yellow and tends to talk using quick pop culture clips). Robin Williams rules, and it's a thrill to watch him experiment with the mysterious flubber. Best part is after watching a flubber-coated golf ball dangerously ricocheting around the room, smashing everything in sight, he decides the next step is TO COAT A BOWLING BALL WITH THE STUFF. Cue some Home Alone-esque bad guys and some brutal PG live action cartoon violence. A fun time!

Thought for sure that was a Hungry4Ass post.

Parkland (4.5)
No Country for Old Men (10.0)
Citizenfour (8.0)
The Double (6.0)
St Vincent (5.5)
National Gallery (7.5)
Talhotblond (5.5)
The Forest for the Trees (7.0)
Perfect Sense (7.5)
Listen Up Philip (6.5)

Hardly any films recently as I worked my way through Mad Men. Coincidentally, had no idea Elizabeth Moss was in Listen Up Philip; thought she was the best thing about it.

is the forest for the trees the maren ade film? kinda heavy going iirc, & then wow its conclusion

That's the one. Mentioned on a teaching thread that it was very good conveying the challenge of class control when you start out. The ending was bizarre--the logistics of it.

she's really interesting, i think, & in both of those films i feel simultaneously pretty wary of how depressing, & maybe kinda sadistic, the arc is getting, but also appreciative of her handling & judgment of the subsequent terrain. but yeah the ending of TFFTT was really exquisite, i thought, a really wonderfully judged small leap, something hard to calculate but true of a bunch of other things in not dissimilar territory, stray kawase & denis films. she has a new flick comin' i think.

One other thing about Listen Up Philip: the moment when Elizabeth Moss says to Jason Schwartzman "You're a monster." She'd said the exact same thing to John Ham/Don Draper in a Mad Men episode I'd watched days earlier. (I have a hard time evaluating Schwartzman's performance--he's still so much Max Fischer to me, I don't know where that character ends and Philip begins.)

Hamm--he's really hammy, so he needs the extra 'm'.

Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée, 2013)
Philomena (Frears, 2013)
The Normal Heart (Murphy, 2014)
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946)
The Element of Crime (Von Trier, 1984)
12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013)
*Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999)
Contraband (Powell & Pressburger, 1940)
All the Boys Are Called Patrick (Godard, 1959)
The Warped Ones (Kurahara, 1960)

Conrad Veidt is so good in The Spy in Black and Contraband, even sort of believable as a romantic lead in the latter. And the sound recording in Contraband is remarkably good for something shot in late 39/early 40.

National Gallery (Wiseman, 2014) 7/10
Two Days, One Night (Dardenne, 2014) 6/10
Foreign Correspondent (Hitchcock, 1940) 6/10

really you never saw Clementine before, Wm? Top 3 Ford for me.

Agreed. A pleasant shock when I saw it twenty years ago accustomed to booze-blarney from Ford.

I'm catching up after a late start as fast as I can, guys. But yeah, it was great.

Take the Money and Run (Allen, 1969)
Barbara (Petzold, 2012)
The Hundred Year Old Man (Herngren, 2013)
Back to the Future (Zemicki, 1985)
To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1945)
The Green Butchers (Jensen, 2003)
Adam's Apples (Jensen, 2005)
Pot Worth a Million Ryu (Sadao, 1936)
Angels With Dirty Faces (Curtiz, 1938)
Los Muertos (Alonso, 2004)
Young Girls of Rochefort (Demy, 1967)*
Strictly Ballroom (Luhrman, 1992)
Sullivan's Banks (Emigholz, 2000)

I've never seen My Darling Clementine either, though I have the blu-ray sitting right here in my to-watch pile. Feel obligated to move it to the top now.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (Deardon, 1970) 7/10
*Gertrud (Dreyer, 1964) 6/10
Intolerable Cruelty (Coen Bros., 2003) 5/10
The Immigrant (Grey, 2014) 5/10
Inherent Vice (Anderson,2014) 8/10
The Saragossa Manuscript (Has, 1965) 6/10
Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012) 7/10
Putney Swope (Downey Sr., 1969) 7/10
In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1976) 8/10

*Gertrud (Dreyer, 1964) 6/10

I know I've said it before, but this film stands alone among my favorites in that I actually LOVE when people don't respond to it or like it.

I thought it was better second time around but that type of austere style just isnt my thing tbh

Khadak
Haider
The Committee
I Woke Up Early The Day I Died
Car Cemetery
Guy Maddin's Dracula
Räuberinnen
Raging Phoenix

I hope Guy Maddin's Dracula is better than Dario Argento's Dracula

dancier

Much dancier. Ha ha.

nice anecdote in the first paragraph here: http://www.avclub.com/article/guy-maddins-dracula-one-best-adaptations-story-210092

I think it's quite nice but a bit too boring. It's the only feature length Maddin I've seen so far, I really should fix that soon.

Dave, could you tell us about some of those other films? The titles are intriguing.

Khadak - 2006 Belgian flick about life sucking in Mongolia under the communists, with a heavy dash of Mongolian shamanism. Beautifully shot, a bit surrealist. There's a really great music scene near the end that you can easily find on youtube.

Haider - brand new Indian film retelling Hamlet with Muslim militants in Kashmir in the 90s. INTENSE.

The Committee - 60s British indie weirdness.

I Woke Up Early The Day I Died - late 90s very indie (student?) shoot of an abandoned Ed Wood script. Hipster weird violence. Ron Perlman's in it.

Car Cemetery - Punk-rock post-apoc passion play by Arrabal.

Dracula - silent filmed version of a ballet production.

Räuberinnen - FANTASTIC Swiss feminist female uprising comedy sort of thing. I found this because it shares a main actress with Pepperminta, which is sort of a modern Daisies.

Raging Phoenix - Jeeja Yanin's second martial arts flick, after starring in Chocolate. DRUNKEN BREAK-DANCING MUAY THAI. So cool.

(Oh yeah - that famous clip of Arthur Brown performing Nightmare in mask & fire cap at what looks like a party, is a scene from The Committee.)

Floating Clouds (Naruse, 1955)
Red Persimmons (Shinsuke Ogawa and Peng Xiaolian, 2001)
A Petrified Forest (Shinoda, 1973)
Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg, 1977)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980)
Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) (part one of two)
Mosaik im Vertrauen/Adebar/Schwechater
/Arnulf Rainer/Unsere Afrikareise/Pause! (Peter Kubelka, 1955 - 1977)
Stan Brakhage - The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971)

All about utter unflinching brutality this year - whether its Fassbinder's melodramas extended for fifteen and a half hours or Syberberg's questionable lament for a Romantic ideal Germany. Then there is the abstraction of those Kubelka films but within this run you could argue for Pause! as being in line with Syberberg's Hitler and Fassbinder's Biberkopf. We do all of these things to ourselves and each other (Yukiko in Floating Clouds has to). But in the end we are gorgeous flesh, in Brakhage's eyes.

Hitler, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Shoah, and Brakhage on the same list. Take a break and watch Tootsie tonight.

Broken Flowers (2005) 6/10
Monsters University (2013) 4/10
The Monuments Men (2014) 3/10
The Last of Sheila (1973) 7/10 because I like mysteries. 4/10 as a film.
The Lego Movie (2014) 8/10
That Guy... Who Was in That Thing (2012) 5/10
I Know That Voice (2013) 4/10
Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2012) 4/10
Ed Wood (1994)* 7/10
Glen or Glenda (1953) glen/10 way weirder than I thought it would be
Bride of the Monster (1955) 2/10
Back to the Future (1985)* 6/10
August: Osage County (2013) 6/10
Birdman (2014) 7/10

Birdman (2014) - Par for Inarritu's course, this is engagingly slick but also somewhat irritating in its superficial flash and unearned intimations of profundity. Lots of funny bits, though, and a wonderfully anxious soundtrack. Keaton looks strangely leathery, Stone almost alarmingly skinny, Galifianakis weird in jazz glasses.

Hard to Be a God (2013) - My first exposure to Germanov, a claustrophobic, three-hour wallow in bodily fluids and Breugel-inspired grotesquerie held together by the thinnest of plots and a bit of philosophical rambling. I can't say I enjoyed the experience, but I'm told I shouldn't have expected to. Not that I'm complaining: imagery and atmosphere are clearly the point, and on that level, it's a complete and singular (and utterly revolting) triumph.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - Rewatched this following some ILE conversation. I dunno, it's pretty entertaining for what it is? My favorite moment is the near-kiss on the balcony of the giant alien/titan/whatever skull mining colony, with bluish-purple space swirls and tumbling yellow sparks in the background. It's an absurdly artificial image, but witty in its ersatz romance, light and lovely as a soap bubble. Most of the rest is clunky if intermittently colorful.

Gone Girl (2014) - Okay, so I watched this crap movie. I guess I felt I ought to have an opinion about it. And I wanted something relatively undemanding. My opinion is that it sucks and is horrible. Not horribly inept or offensive (arguable), just dreary in the manner of a moderately-priced hotel room.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) - Playing catch-up with the year, obv. My expectations going into a new Jarmusch film have tumbled to the point where I commend this lazy goof simply for being less crushingly awful than The Limits of Control. The whole thing's insistently dumb, and it fails to exploit the (splendid) idea that post-industrial urban decay might provide a fitting landscape for classically atmospheric gothic horror. Nevertheless, the scenery and soundtrack are quite seductive, and to be honest, I'd probably have been happy just watching Tilda Swinton swan about in vampire drag for an hour or two.

Predestination (2014) - I'm a sucker for paradox-baiting time travel yarns, so maybe I'm not the best judge, but I had a damn good time with this. Co-written and directed by the Australian Speirig brothers, whom I've never before had reason to rate, it's an adaptation of R.A. Heinlein's "All You Zombies" starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook. While the budget was obviously very limited, it's tightly constructed, satisfying despite some unsurprising twists, and Snook is flat-out brilliant in a seemingly impossible role. Recommended to anyone who enjoyed Looper or Timecrimes.

Enemy (2013) - An eerily surreal psychological thriller from Denis Villeneuve, with a story adapted from a Saramago novel I've never read. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a rather nervous young history professor who accidentally encounters his own double, with unhappy results. A vocal minority on IMDb insists that the film's "real story" is hidden within a secretly fragmentary timeline, but I take the ambiguous narrative at face value, as concerning the intrusion of impossible dreams into ordinary reality. Also, perhaps the yellowest movie I've ever seen. Eat your heart out, Soderbergh.

Maps to the Stars (2014) - Better than Cosmopolis. At this dismal late stage in my lifelong Cronenberg fandom, that's enough. I can't call this a great film, but it's certainly distinctive, and Julianne Moore turns in an absolutely heroic (albeit largely wasted) central performance. I'm searching for nice things to say, which kind of says it all.

Nymphomaniac: Vols I & II (2013) - A decade ago, I might have called Lars Von Trier my favorite working director. I'm no longer tempted to do so, and these films did little to win me back. I enjoyed watching them, both for the novelistic blather and the pornographic black comedy, and Von Trier's cinematic eye hasn't failed him in the slightest. The whole thing's just so strenuously "shocking" though, and for all the philosophical pretension, never for a moment really worth thinking about. I did love Uma Thurman's hilariously brutal marital meltdown scene. And, uh, that shot of the snow in the alley with the brick and the water dripping and all. Both Gainsbourg and Skarsgard are quite good. But grow the fuck up, man, c'mon.

Morocco (Sternberg, 1931) 7/10 (rewatch)
Black Sea (McDonald, 2015) 4/10
Safe (Haynes, 1995) 8/10 (rewatch)
Elena (Zvyagintsev, 2009) 7/10