Last (x) movies you saw

Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013)
Timbuktu (Sissako, 2014)
Phoenix (Petzold, 2014)

xxxps

talking of Queen Latifah I thought she was ace in that HBO Bessie Smith biopic.

what'd'y'think of stray dogs xyz

Gates of Heaven (Morris, 1978) 6/10
Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014) 6/10
The Way He Looks (Ribeiro, 2014) 9/10

schlump - watched it a couple of weeks ago and feel a bit too far from it now to comment in the detail I want to. Certainly had a craving to watch it again as soon as it ended. The ending and cabbage fucking are all classic Tsai moves (man I could have the last 15 mins over and over), its always great to see Tsai refining his thing and watching that...faith someone has in what he or she does. No regrets, no doubts. Haven't even read much about it, which I should.

It was nice to watch it in a small cinema/room with about 15 people on a Sunday morning and the woman behind me emit a 'thank god' at the end of the film. That's the #magicofcinema for you.

How was Girlhood crypto or anyone else? Went to watch it with a friend but screen was sold out so after going all no way Jose @ Mad Max we watched Timbuktu which was the right move.

My favorite film of the year to date.

I was really set to love Girlhood, and for about the first half of the film I did. The lead and her friends dancing to Rihanna's "Diamonds" is an instant classic scene, and has been acknowledged as such by both Armond White and our very own Sotosyn (I especially recommend checking out his review). When the film moves away from the group of friends and towards a kind of downward spiral of bad-girl behaviour, though, I lost interest. To its credit, the film avoids easy cliches, and isn't at all exploitive (well, depending on how you view one somewhat transgressive instance of nudity), but I still felt a bit too much like I'd been down this road before. Or, I just liked the scenes with the friends so much that I wanted them to be the whole movie. Tentatively recommended, then, but I still wish that I liked it better.

Did you write any posts about it schlump? As Morbius would say, its from 2013. I need to look in the archives. xp

it's up on netflix instant and i wanna watch it

hey ty for that xyz. i only saw it last month myself, at a retro, but it's funny, i caught myself thinking the same too far out thing a couple weeks later, trying to remember how i felt about it. i liked it, i thought it was very strong. i think it maybe had a more direct, ever-so-slightly-less lyrically-open-ended effect on me than his others; i found it so sad, like a very urgent, well-crafted rendering of something so sad, tsai working in social ... non-realism. when i think of those kind of romantic films of the '00s, what time is it there?, i don't want to sleep alone, i think they're getting at something quite open and present-moment, tsai making these really inventive, sorta lubitschian minor gestures that express loneliness, anomie in ways that feel fresh & indirect & so which shortcircuit the standard grammar usually leaned on to convey that kinda thing. & i think the energy of this was more straightforwardly tragic, colder still. the shots of lee holding the sign culminating with the close-up, & just the sense of lee's body, so heavy. even the cabbage felt sad, honestly, as a kind of downgrade from the watermelon you'd expect in a tsai film. i'm still having a really hard time watching filmmakers i love - eugene green, andrew bujalski today - switch to digital, & i held my breath a little, thinking so much of tsai is contingent on the classic kind of still, suspended, sealed timeframe that's stretches & hangs in the air on celluloid & doesn't on digital. but i thought he slowed it down as much as anyone has, & the image-making was really strong, & that to watch lee is just as affecting as always (like bresson's beautiful with all the movements he does not make (could make)). so i liked it. i actually watched five minutes of the newest walker, the one that just surfaced on youtube, & it looked super engrossing, so i hope i can sit with it sometime. i think inasmuch as it is a refinement of his thing, it's still as big a leap as he's made for a while.

I've probably said it before, but Tsai Ming-liang is the most important creator of digital imagery atm imo. Stray Dogs especially is a milestone.

I've seen a bunch of stuff, most of it to write about other stuff. Five Loach and eight Ozon, for instance. Saw Costa-Gavras Section Speciale tonight, that was cool. Better than expected, loved the whole pragmatic aspect of it. I could easily imagine it'll be my favorite CG, most of the others seem more traditional thriller/melodrama.

schlump - thanks for the write-up. That bought back some good memories. Agree on the image making: I didn't think that much as to whether it was digital or not, and yes he is a master at capturing that brand of urban loneliness among the ruins of life.

Just got back from a showing of Herzog's "Nosferatu". I had seen it before but this time a few things stuck out. First there was a professor from a local college giving some historical perspective before the piece, and noted how Herzog was attempting to connect his new wave directly to German Expressionism. The very theatrical lighting in many of the scenes drew attention to this, I felt. Some scenes use almost distractedly theatrical lighting setups for dramatic effect.

Also kind of crazy to have Lucy taking all the initiative, with Van Helsing being a helpless and ineffectual intellectual, trying to explain away the supernatural in the midst of the world collapsing around him in a plague.

Oh yeah another thing that came across was a complete subversion of the usual romantic undertones wrt Dracula feeding on a woman. The climactic feeding scene in this has him slurping and sucking his victim like a pathetic addict rather the suave Universal-style Dracula archetype. It's gross and horrifying rather than darkly beautiful and erotic.

News from Home (7.5)
The Go-Go Boys (6.5)
A Fuller Life (6.0)
Lambert & Stamp (6.5)
True Story (6.0)
Satan’s School for Girls (5.0)
Hoosiers (6.0)
Regular or Super (7.0)
Inside Llewyn Davis (8.0)
Love & Mercy (7.0)

Satan’s School for Girls has Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd and Satan; all it needed was uniforms.

maybe some Brando '50s films next

The Pearl (1947, Fernandez) 7/10
*To Sleep with Anger (1990, Burnett) 8/10
The Shepherd of the Hills (1941, Hathaway) 8/10
Liliom (1930, Borzage) 7/10
The Toll of the Sea (1922, Franklin) 6/10
Moonfleet (1955, Lang) 6/10
Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, McCarey) 5/10
That Cold Day in the Park (1969, Altman) 5/10
The Blood of Jesus (1941, Williams) 6/10
Güeros (2014, Ruizpalacios) 8/10
*Mr. Arkadin (1955, Welles) 7/10
*Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky) 10/10
Babes in Arms (1939, Berkeley) 6/10
*The World of Apu (1959, Ray) 7/10
*To Be or Not To Be (1942, Lubitsch) 8/10
Coherence (2013, Byrkit) 7/10

Results (Bujalski, 2015) 7/10
* The Verdict (Lumet, 1982) 5/10
The Merchant of Four Seasons (Fassbinder, 1971) 9/10
* Amadeus (Forman, 1984) 5/10
The Color of Lies (1999, Chabrol) 6/10
* Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, Benton) 5/10
Eastern Boys (Campillo, 2014) 5/10

It's not normally my kind of film, but I think Kramer vs. Kramer is pretty great within its movie-of-the-week trappings (a lot better than Ordinary People). The performances are uniformly excellent. Love The Verdict too, although I realize they add a few extra layers of grim to Newman and deny him a lot of the things that made him so good.

Alice In Wonderland (1966 BBC) 8/10
The Last Days Of Disco 7/10
Dupont Lajoie 8/10
Damsels In Distress 6/10
The Shepherd Of The Hills 8/10 (thx for the tip, Morbs!)
Avengers 2 : The Age Of Confusion 6/10

Re: "The Shepherd..." : Hathaway was pretty untouchable, as far as major studio filmmakers go, whenever he got into lyrical/romantic mode. His "Peter Ibbetson" is extraordinary and some of the quieter scenes in "Shepherd" produced that same rare mix of melodrama and high poetry.

yr welcome

I appreciate The Verdict 's snowbound Boston atmosphere, Mason, and the scenes with the black doctor. I can't get past its contrivances and wholly unbelievable ending.

I think Newman's flowery summation is one of the film's weakest scenes, but I don't find the particulars of the ending--that this venerable doctor might have fudged the admittance form to cover up his negligence, and that the nurse would have disappeared to avoid dealing with that--not believable.

Winning the case seemed way too easy a solution to his dilemma, although with a better director and less schematic script it might've worked as as an example of the final cackle of fate. He was a horrible lawyer (refusing the settlement w/out consulting the family? That'll get you disbarred, I think!), and the movie insists he deserves a chance.

There's no movie if he takes the money..."Watch Paul Newman in the role of a lifetime, as he wins an out-of-court settlement!" It's a movie--you've got to cut them a little slack.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell, Pressburger, 1943) - 9/10
The League of Gentlemen (Dearden, 1960) - 81/0
Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964) - 7/10
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Feust, 1971) - 7/10
Dr Phibes Rides Again (Fuest, 1972) - 5/10

rewatches:
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015) - 9/10
Kill Bill vol.2 (Tarantino, 2004) - 7/10
Rollerball (Jewison, 1975) - 7/10
They Live (Carpenter, 1988) - 7/10
Bound (Wachowskis, 1996) - 7/10

They Live rated too low!

They Live has its moments, but I can't quite get beyond the self-consciously campy tone. Its like Carpenter didn't trust the material enough play it as a straight sci-fi B-movie.

If you're a fan of either They Live (which I'm kindasortanotreally) and/or Jonathan Lethem (which I definitely am), though, his monograph on the film from a few years ago is very much worth reading.

Zizek has some great stuff to say on it too

Black Souls (Munzi, 2015)
Katyn (Wajda, 2009)
Jack Strong (Pasikowski, 2014)
Wild Tales (Szifron, 2015)

what was katyn like

I thought it was decent and had a very haunting finale. Probably not a classic, but I am glad they made it.

Mysterious Skin (Araki, 2004) 7/10
It Follows (Mitchell, 2015) 7/10

Marnie a much better fetish movie than Kill Bill

KB has David Carradine

that fucking Clark Kent speech

^yeah to both points

has anyone seen jerzy skolimowski's walkover? It's playing tonight as part of that scorsese polish cinema thing, considering going but I do have work to do

haven't b u t what else are you seeing/have to you seen in the season? it was here awhile ago & i loved it. killer zanussi movies.

This is the 1st I've managed to catch but plan on seeing the rest although I don't know what's upcoming. It was great btw

Marnie was impressive on the whole. I even quite liked the artificiality of it. Tippi Hedren was a knockout, and the cleaning lady, and the horse riding scenes both classic Hitch, in a technical/suspense sense.

But the moments of high drama just became increasingly heavy-handed, and Hitchcock takes all of the armchair psychology stuff too seriously. It was also pretty disappointing how Diane Baker's character didn't really live up to its potential. The Marnie / Lil rivalry was never resolved.

Marnie bummed me out when I first saw it as a precocious, Hitch-loving teen, but I even suspected at the time that it was "adult," for lack of a better word, in a way that kept me from digging it the way I did Psycho or North by Northwest or even Frenzy. I owe it a re-watch.

I like Marnie. You'd probably never get such a direct shot of a dog's anus in mainstream film even several years after that. Not that I'm an expert.

pink flamingos iirc

Marnie is Hitchcock at his most giallo

I can't tell if Dr Phibes Rides Again is deliberate or not

You'd probably never get such a direct shot of a dog's anus in mainstream film even several years after that.

The way he frames the injured horse, too: you don't see its head, but you do clearly see its genitals.

dont blame that awful Italian shit on Hitch

the fire within ('63 malle) 3/5
fearless ('93 weir) 1/5
red flag ('12 karpovsky) 4/5
don't bother to knock ('61 roy ward baker) 3/5
young adam ('03 david Mackenzie) 3.5/5
even cowgirls get the blues ('93 gvs) 1/5
hits (2014 david cross) 2/5
lil quinquin (2014 Dumont) 4.5/5
the immortal story ('68 welles) 2/5
term of trial ('62 peter glenville) 3.5/5
pretty baby (78 malle) 3.5/5
*the descent ('05 neil marshall) 3/5
actress ('14 Robert greene) 5/5
bluebird ('13 lance edmands) 1.5/5
loving ('70 kershner) 2/5

http://c4941054.r54.cf2.rackcdn.com/8934.jpg