Last (x) movies you saw

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

Love Streams (Cassavetes, 1984) 8/10
Bad Influence (Hanson, 1990) 5/10
Murder by Death (Moore, 1976) 2/10
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2014) 7/10
Ministry of Fear (Lang, 1944) 6/10
*Boomerang (Hudlin, 1992) 6/10
The Master (Anderson, 2012) 7/10
*In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950) 9/10

*rewatches

good stuff division:
two days, one night (dardennes bros, 2014) - 9.5/10, first exposure to the dardennes did not disappoint in the least. said so much about how work itself is devalued w/o being didactic, one of the most accurate portrayals ever of how depression feels.

inherent vice (PTA, 2014) - 9/10, kind of a beautiful mess, ultimately amazing. helped to have read the book but wasn't too hard to follow; I'm a noir junkie so no stranger to convoluted narratives.

and re: two days, holy marion cotillard.

ugh division:
american sniper (Eastwood, 2014) - 5/10 as a piece of moviemaking, 0/10 for the politics and the debate surrounding them, 8/10 for cooper.

foxcatcher (bennett miller, 2014) - 5.5/10, loved the acting by everyone except carell tbh, didn't think it was effective as a dramatic narrative, thought a lot of it ended up playing as unintentional black comedy. and while mark schultz's motives for his lambasting of the flick are selfish, def seems like miller bent facts to fit established ideas of his about these people.

sentimental rewatch division:
bourne supremacy, ultimatum & legacy (greengrass/gilroy, 2004, 2008 & 2012) - 8.5/10 overall, I feel like these say so much more about the consequences of violence in the name of US world policing than anything in american goddamn sniper, and in a completely unpretentious way, within the Trojan horse of espionage/action flicks. you sure as hell couldn't imagine chris kyle trying to make amends for his victims, even in cooper's fictionalized/haunted portrayal

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

― clemenza, Friday, January 30, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol, I'm gonna make dinner and see what I can do - not a lot of laughs around here. Won't be Tootsie as I watched that when I was ten.

Advanced Style (2014) 3/5
Southern Comfort (1981) 4/5
Jour de Fete (1949) 3/5
Inherent Vice 4/5
Gone Girl 3/5
A Girl Walks Home at Night 3.5/5
Whiplash 4/5
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) 3/5
Images (1972): 4/5

Simon Killer (Campos, 2013) 7/10
The Tall T (Boetticher, 1957) 7/10
The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958) 8/10
That Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel, 1977) 8/10
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948) 8/10
A Separation (Farhadi, 2011) 8/10
Tusk (Smith, 2014) 3/10
Dans Ma Peau (Devan, 2002) 7/10
Rancho Deluxe (Perry, 1975) 6/10
Shame (Bergman, 1968) 9/10
Play (Ostlund, 2011) 7/10
The Spy in Black (Powell, 1939) 7/10
Enfants Du Paradis (Carne, 1945) 8/10

Birdman (Inarritu, 2014) 6/10
Big Eyes (Burton, 2014) 6/10
Foxcatcher (Miller, 2014) 5/10
Whiplash (Chazelle, 2013) 5/10

Enfants Du Paradis (Carne, 1945) 8/10

Changed your mind over this? Or am I misremembering it?

You remember correctly, think having now watched some of the earlier Carne/Prevert films helped me to 'see through' the theatricality, or whatever was bothering me before. The ending, which I didn't get to on my last attempted viewing, is as bleak as any neo-noir.

I love the earlier films, just never got around to this.

MOEBIUS. Really enjoyable, almost fun but not quite. I thought all his previous films were supposed to be completely realistic with moments of poetic fantasy but after seeing this totally unrealistic film I think maybe Coast Guard wasn't supposed to be as serious as I thought (I thought it was flawed because it was it was a series of unlikely fuckups presented as reasons against what the south Korean military were doing, but maybe not).
I not sure what to make of the whole Buddhist aspect of Moebius. What kind of sex life is Kim Ki-Duk advising?

Really got me in the mood for more Kim Ki-Duk. I thought I'd seen all I needed of his after 7 or 8 of his films but I think he's changing enough to be refreshing.
He's not my top favourite director but I think he's the most consistently enjoyable director I've ever encountered.

Would a Kim Ki-Duk poll be viable?

haven't seem any of Kim's work; is moebius an okay intro point?

It is but it's not totally representative. It's more extreme than most of his films. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring is probably the standard entry.

the isle and bad guy were my entry points, and i'd probably recommend the latter to those curious abt kim. moebius is amazing, but also insanely grisly, fair warning.

Big Eyes (Burton, 2014) 6/10

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Sunday, February 1, 2015 2:59 AM (9 hours ago)

oh yeah, i forgot that one when making yesterdays list. did not enjoy it at all. 4/10 (if we're doing this imdb style)

But The Isle has some of the most horrific and nasty injury I've ever seen despite the film being so quiet. I'd give this one more warning despite Moebius being more extreme overall.

wait, make Big Eyes a 3/10 after all

also, though redundant:

Birdman (2014) - 7/10
Hard to Be a God (2013) - 8/10
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - 7/10
Gone Girl (2014) - 4/10
Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) - 7/10
Predestination (2014) - 8/10
Enemy (2013) - 8/10
Maps to the Stars (2014) - 6/10
Nymphomaniac: Vols I & II (2013) - 7/10

xp yeah, i'm recommending bad guy as a starting point, not the isle

Bad Guy is maybe more consistently bleak than the others. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring is a really gorgeous film and although all his films are depressing or unpleasant in some way, most of them have beauty or moments of joy. I think Bad Guy doesn't have much of a bright side so I'm not sure about that entry point, it may not have enticed me to want more.

Here's how I'd rank the ones I've seen.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring
Moebius
Breath
Time
3-Iron
The Isle
The Bow
Bad Guy
Samaritan Girl
The Coast Guard

Moebius was banned very briefly but I don't think it's nearly as unpleasant as I Saw The Devil or Sympathy For Mr Vengeance.

I've heard worrying things about growing censorship in South Korea. Maybe Park Chan Wook is trying to make his films outside there now?

Hmm, Spring, Summer, Fall [etc.] is probably my least favorite among the Kim films I've seen. It's both lovely and accessible, but I just didn't get much out of it. I recommend Bad Guy because it came as such a gripping, startling and difficult viewing experience for me - without quite so fully crossing into the toe-curling nastiness of stuff like The Isle and Moebius. Not that it's by any means a pleasant film, and it's arguably the most morally troubling of the lot. I haven't seen as many as you, RAG, but i'd rank them:

Moebius
Bad Guy
Pieta (just watched, still sorting)
The Isle
3-Iron
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring

Need to see Samaritan Girl and the post 3-Iron run from The Bow through Dream (avail thru Netflix atm).

so glad people have realized that Christoph Waltz turns only one boring trick.

yeah :[

As horrific as those scenes are in The Isle, looking back I think the kissing scene at the start of Bad Guy is the most unpleasant thing in any of the Kim Ki-Duk films I listed. The first time I saw that was really hard to deal with.

I not sure what to make of the whole Buddhist aspect of Moebius.

Karma-like, innit?

Yes, the repetitions and cycles are made clear but I wasn't quite as clear as I'd like about the choice the son makes at the end. But that can't be discussed without spoilers.

"overcoming attachment"

lol

Watched the Dumb and Dumber sequel last night. Really just about as lame as you'd think. Maybe 10% as funny as the first one.

Festival!!!

Key House Mirror (Noer, 2015)
Timbuktu (Sissako, 2014)
The Iron Ministry (Sniadecki, 2014)*
Mateo (Gamboa, 2014)
Tokyo Tribe (Sono, 2014)
La Sapienza (Green, 2014)
My Skinny Sister (Lenken, 2015)
Goodbye to Language (Godard, 2014)
Daugther... Mother... Daughter... (Rezaee, 2014)
Pixadores (Escandari, 2014)
Alive (Park, 2014)
In Your Arms (Salhstrøm, 2015)
Life May Be (Cousins & Akbari, 2014)
Field of Dogs (Majewski, 2014)
Winter Buoy (Kempff, 2015)
Journey to the West (Tsai, 2014)*
Paris of the North (Sigurdsson, 2014)
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Decker, 2014)
Wild Tales (Szifron, 2014)
Still the Water (Kawase, 2014)
Something Must Break (Bergsmark, 2014)
They Have Escaped (Valkeapää. 2014)
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Andersson, 2014)
Homesick (Sewitsky, 2015)
Underdog (Sandahl, 2014)
When I Will Be a Dictator (André, 2014)
Amour Fou (Hausner, 2014)
Every Face Has a Name (Gertten, 2015)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2014)
Pervert Park (Barkfors & Barkfors, 2014)
From What Is Before (Diaz, 2014)
Good Girl (Melkeraaen, 2014)
Women In Oversized Men's Shirts (Flikke, 2015)
Democrats (Nielsson, 2014)
Horse Money (Costa, 2014)*
Jauja (Alonso, 2014)
Dust in the Wind (Hou, 1987)*
Exit (Chienn, 2014)
Butter on the Latch (Decker, 2014)
National Gallery (Wiseman, 2014)
Li'l Quinquin (Dumont, 2014)

Shorts
Mommy (Alami, 2015)
Cupcake (Magnusson, 2014)
Four Women (Vinberg, 2015)
Northern Great Mountain (Kernell, 2014)
Boys (Carbonell, 2015)
Second Deputy Speaker (von Aertryck, 2015)
(Fragments from Lost Swedish Silent Films)

42 showings. Only possible because I could stay on the couch of my cousin, who lived right in the center of the circle of cinemas, meaning I never had more than a 15 min walk to and from a showing. And they even made dinner and coffee for me at times! I loooove festivals!

National Gallery (Wiseman, 2014)

Any good? Don't know anything about Wiseman but I love the National Gallery.

I was absolutely riveted, but I majored in cultural communication, and most of it is people explaining works of art, so it was right up my alley. It will probably make you love the National Gallery even more, they seem like they are really great at what they do.

Cool, looks like I've missed the theatrical release but might be able to catch it at a festival next month..

loved it

it's fine but i'm ready for FW to move off the institutional settings (eg Jackson Heights, Queens is his next subject)

Frederik B - Over what period of time did you see all that? And what were the highlights?

Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, 2014)

how was this