Last (x) movies you saw

My movie-watching seriously curbed this month thanks to being busy with a move and my electronics being inaccessible for a good chunk of it.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (Wrathall, 2013) 7/10
Don Jon (Gordon-Levitt, 2013) 6/10
The Way, Way Back (Faxon and Rash, 2013) 8/10
Get on the Bus (Lee, 1996) 7/10

foxfire: confessions of a girl gang (cantet 2012) 6/10
Rachel, Rachel (newman '68) 8/10
the guest (wingard 2014) 4/10
mistress America (baumbach 2015) 9/10
queen of earth (alex ross perry 2015) 5/10
suburbia (linklater '96) 5/10
the prince and the showgirl (Olivier '57) 6/10
a streetcar named desire (Kazan '51) 5/10
the end of the tour (pondsoldt '15) 5/10
obvious child (Robespierre '14) 8/10
tom at the farm (dolan '13) 6/10
Niagara (Hathaway '53) 4/10
tangerine (sean baker '15) 7/10
lone survivor (berg '13) 4/10
mortal thoughts (Rudolph '91) 4/10

u crazee on Mortal Thoughts, not to mention Streetcar

johnny, you must explain yourself re: Streetcar!

brandos great, meh to the rest. melodrama sometimes/often just doesn't read to me *shrug*

haven't seen Mortal Thoughts in years but thought it was a reasonably well done melodrama with a good Willis perf. Closer to a 6, I think, but it doesn't matter

willis is so arch, goatee and all. hes not bad. only other touch of life is john pankow. Keitel is sleepwalking, demi is ok, otherwise its just kinda rote idk didn't enjoy it

can't be reducing St'car to 'melodrama'

i mean, it was part of a radical new avenue in American theatre

streetcar is prob the single greatest american play, give or take an o'neill or two

The Lost Squadron (1932, Archainbaud) 7/10
Medea (1969, Pasolini) 8/10
The Tomb of Ligeia (1964, Corman) 6/10
'71 (2014, Demange) 7/10
Alice in the Cities (1974, 9/10)
*Chameleon Street (1989, Harris) 8/10
The Iron Ministry (2014, Sniadecki) 7/10
The Elusive Corporal (1962, Renoir) 9/10
The Skin aka La Pelle (1981, Cavani) 6/10
Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983, Resnais) 8/10
Ex Machina (2015, Garland) 7/10

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) 6/10
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) 6/10
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) 5/10

Starsky & Hutch (2004) 5/10
Nightcrawler (2014) 8/10
Men in Black 3 (2012) 4/10
Interview with the Vampire (1994) 3/10
Flash Gordon (1980) 4/10
Vamps (2012) 5/10
Oculus (2013) 7/10
*Mission: Impossible (1996) 7/10
*Mission: Impossible II (2000) 3/10
*Mission: Impossible III (2006) 7/10
*Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) 8/10
*L'Avventura (1960) 6/10

I now love the scenes in MI1 where Tom Cruise goes to the newsgroup Job@3:14 to send a cryptic, apparently public message to Max@Job3:14. MI1 is from a different movie-making era than the others, with the special effects being limited to the crap stretch-masks and the ridiculous helicopter-in-the-Chunnel ending.

Agree with your rating for "Ghost Protocol". It's the most fun and best directed of the bunch. The new one was disappointing in that it looked like it was shot with TV in mind: all medium shots and close-ups and it felt somewhat...cheaper by comparison.

Hu-Man (7/10)
The Great Cuckold (6/10)
Venus In Furs (Polanski - 6/10)

Ghost Protocol is wonderful. Constantly inventive and elegantly staged all the way through. Maybe the best action film of the last 20 years?

While We’re Young (Baumbach, 2015) 7/10
The Wolfpack 7/10
Aloha (Crowe, 2015) 3/10
* Two Days, One Night (Dardennes, 2014) 7/10
Kill The Messenger (Cuesta, 2014) 5/10
* Odd Man Out (Reed, 1947) 8/10
Mata Hari (Fitzmaurice, 1931) 6/10

The only weakness of Ghost Protocol is the generic villain. I'd put the Crank movies and maybe Cellular above it.

Tellingly, I don't even remember the villain in GP.

Older guy. Briefcase. Car "factory" or car park at end.

His Kind of Woman (Farrow/Fleischer, 1951)
Valentino (Russell, 1977)
Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder, 1957)
Breaker Morant (Beresford, 1979)
Horse Feathers (McLeod, 1932)
The Woman on the Beach (Renoir, 1947)
Why We Fight: Prelude to War (Capra, 1942)
Shaft (Parks, 1971)
Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia (Capra/Litvak, 1943)
The Born Losers (Laughlin, 1968)

Results and Trainwreck - both self-described

Closed Curtain (Panahi, 2014) - loved all the switching. both in all the forms this took: there was a switch from the Beckett-like one man and his dog to an aborted thriller to a three way mini-play (much going up and down stairs) to this jaded magicky realist composition to take a look at the inside Panahi's mind. This just ran risks shot-by-shot by that point, just when you think the camera is lingering way too long on the man looking forlornly out and blank, with the pile on from woman-ghost -- and what a face she had for the job -- it pulls back and forth between a frustrated creative mind that cannot realise the dreams he has to a reality that he perhaps doesn't want to, that it would rather be left alone to physically stay, or to come and go from the place as it wishes, or to jump in the sea and not come back, despite what he says ("there is more to life than work" "But all that is foreign to me").

Yeah, it's amazing. Just in general, I love it's filmicness, as it comes right after This Is Not a Film, and complicates/discusses/refutes the strategies put forth in that film against censorship. And spoiler-warning, but Taxi makes the whole thing even more complex and artful and heartfelt and brilliant.

crucial, everlasting dog performance in cc also
i feel having seen his films i should be prepared for general fourth-wall-crumbling activity & narrative folds but his big reveals always just knock me for six

I am a tad blind to dogs in films (more into cats but actually never owned a pet) but yeah, come Oscar time etc.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Amirpour, 2014) 7/10
The Servant (Losey, 1963) 9/10
*Alarm (Stembridge, 2008) 7/10
They Came Together (Wain, 2014) 6/10

Watched "Closed Curtain" - solid 8 or 9/10.

The Barefoot Contessa - 7/10 - loved the script and direction and performances overall but found Gardner to be seriously miscast. Still, she gave it her all it seems though they should've splurged on a Spanish dialogue coach for her. Can see why this was a favorite of the Cahiers crew.

Just watched I WALK THE LINE, a fun, sleazy little John Frankenheimer movie from 1970 with Gregory Peck as the morally flexible sheriff of some stain on the map in Tennessee, and Tuesday Weld as the possibly underage girl he takes up with after she more or less throws her panties in his path to keep him distracted from chasing her moonshiner dad, played by former Mike Hammer Ralph Meeker. Charles Durning's in it, too, and Estelle Parsons is great as Peck's wife. I was recently thinking about revisiting Jim Thompson, but after seeing this I don't think I need to bother. Recommended.

saw Cop Car last night. a bit flawed overall and couldn't settle on a tone but some very unsettling, claustrophobic scenes. I just have a thing for procedural films, like where you see someone scheming using mundane objects/scenarios to complete a really unsettling task.

also Kevin BAcon with a mustache.

all first time watches:
Straight Outta Compton (Gray, 2015) - 8/10
Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960) - 9/10
Whiplash (Chazelle, 2014) - 7/10
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Richter, 1984) - 4/10
Force Majeure (Ostlund, 2014) - 7/10
Big Hero 6 (Hall, Williams, 2014) - 5/10
It Follows (Mitchell, 2015) - 8/10

The Alain Robbe-Grillet boxed set:
L'immortale (1963) - 8/10
Trans-Europ-Express (1966) - 7/10
The Man Who Lies (1967) - 6/10
Eden and After (1970) - 6/10
N. Took the Dice (1971) - 4/10
Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) - 7/10

The Banquet (1948, Ekman) 7/10
Intermezzo (1936, Molander) 5/10
*The Defiant Ones (1958, Kramer) 7/10
*Help! (1965, Lester) 8/10
The Mend (2015, Magary) 7/10
*Magic Mike (2012, Soderbergh) 6/10
The Cobweb (1955, Minnelli) 6/10
*2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick) 10/10
A Woman’s Secret (1949, N Ray) 6/10
Gerontophilia (2013, LaBruce) 5/10

I forgot about Perceval, which was fairly forgettable.

Saw Meru earlier in the week. Now planning trip to Nanda Devi in undefined future year when I have both the cash and the cardiology

Foxcatcher (Miller, 14)
Calendar (Egoyan, 93)
Devil’s Knot (Egoyan, 13)
Wall Street (Stone, 87)
Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, 12)
Still the Water (Kawase, 14)*
Cape Fear (Scorcese, 91)
The Life of David Gale (Parker, 03)
Gaslight (Cukor, 44)
Homeland (Tzoumerkas, 10)
Eskimo Diva (Stæhr, 15)
Mr Nobody (van Dormael, 09)
Notorious (Hitchcock, 46)*
All is Forgiven (Hansen-Løve, 07)
Goodbye First Love (Hansen-Løve, 11)
Eden (Hansen-Løve, 14)
Kagemusha (Kurosawa, 80)
Dirty Harry (Sigel, 71)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Allen, 10)
Stray Dogs (Tsai, 13)*
A War (Lindholm, 15)
Taxi (Panahi, 15)*
Anastasia (Litvak, 56)
Goodbye Again (Litvak, 61)
The Hunt (Vinterberg, 12)
The Visit (Wicki, 64)
Great Expectations (Cuaron, 98)

Stray Dogs once again on the big screen! Best film of the decade, at this point.

Pasolini (Ferrara, 2014) - doesn't really hang together but there were enough moments, like the scenes with Pasolini and mother - her waking him up as well as her expression as he put on tight jeans. The interviews made him look like Jesus preaching anarchy. In typical Ferrara mode it didn't shy away from the violence of his murder and the grubbiness of the events leading up to it in Pasolini's hilarious attempt to build some 'connection' with the youth he was about to fuck. Learnt a bit about his last - scripted but not completed - film, which actually seemed to be a reversal of Salo's unflinching bleakness.

Lots of useful bits but unless you are really into Pasolini..not a huge problem for me.

^^Really enjoyed it when I caught it last year. Looking forward to seeing it again. The adaptation of his last unfilmed treatment (unfilmed by Pasolini, at least) was great and I loved seeing Ninetto Davoli on screen.

Silence (Shinoda) 7/10. - almost word for word adaptation of Endo's novel by Shinoda and Endo himself. Faithful, broad and overheated in parts yet they definitely caught some of the book's intense paranoid vibe, especially in the early beach/village scenes. The book is better. Let's see what Scorsese does with it...

Liked seeing Davoli too. Its heart was def in the right place.

Really enjoyed Hiroshi Teshigahara's "The Face of Another" thanks to TCM the other night

The Golden Child- HOW DO YOU WASTE CHARLES DANCE
THAT IS AN INDEFENSIBLY PERVERSE THING TO DO, DIRECTOR WHOSE NAME I DO NOT CARE ENOUGH TO LOOK UP

It Follows (Mitchell)

Goto, Island of Love (Borowczyk)

The Conformist (Bertolucci)

Zombeavers

Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland)

Witchfinder General (Reeves)

*Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)

Female Vampire (Franco)- only my second Franco, after his surprisingly sedate Klaus Kinski Jack the Ripper. I never knew I could get tired of Lina Romay rolling around in the nude and feverishly masturbating, so I feel the experience was educational. I want the hood ornament on her car though.

Foodfight! (the all-consuming hatred of a vengeful God)

Mysterious Object at Noon (Weerasethakul)

Quay brothers program at Film Forum- Three of their best shorts projected from 35mm, a short (9 minutes) Christopher Nolan documentary that gets a little deeper into their methods than most without ruining any of their mystique, and- a massive surprise since I thought I'd missed this by not attending the opening night- a Q&A with the Quays afterward! I even managed to ask a question without forgetting how to speak or spontaneously combusting with embarrassment at talking to my filmmaking idols or whatever.

Short Peace (various)- Not as good as Memories, but "less good than the best anime anthology film ever" isn't saying much. The Oscars nominated the wrong segment, of course ("Possessions" is fine, just not the best segment here), there's some unnecessarily gross rapey stuff in "Gambo," but Otomo's ukiyo-e styled segment, "Combustible," is fantastic.

*Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller)- shiny, chrome, etc

Genius Party (various)- not as great as I was hoping for based on Masaaki Yuasa's "Happy Machine," which is brilliant and perfect in isolation (it has visual motifs and themes that tie it to his best work, like his adaptation of Cat Soup or the TV series Kaiba) but there are some dull entries here ("Deathtic 4"- it feels dickish to complain about a segment in an animation showcase being dull and only made worthwhile by virtue of having a unique style, but fuck it, I'ma be that dick) and "Limit Cycle," which goes on forever and just fucking sucks.

Such Hawks Such Hounds

Genius Party Beyond (various)- maybe the better of the two? It has a 5/5 perfect masterpiece ringer just like the first film (Koji Morimoto's "Dimension Bomb"), and a surprise from a director I really only knew as a visual artist (Tatsuyuki Tanaka's "Toujin Kit" and nothing as obnoxious as "Limit Cycle" (though there's some dumb, odious shit in "Moondrive").

Tokyo! (Gondry, Carax, Bong)- see below re: catching up with Carax. I have a copy of Pola X and would have watched that first but for time constraints. Loved this despite the lukewarm critical response (IIRC)- it helped that I adore the Gabrielle Bell comic Gondry's section is based on, but it felt like his most human, un-twee thing in a long time. Merde is fucking amazing, and while I'm not as sold on Bong's segment it's still a solid mood piece.

Holy Motors (Carax)- a Ph.D candidate at Penn was presenting a chapter from his thesis as a colloquium and I'd been catching up on Carax over the summer, so this was a no-brainer and an urgent necessity- literally watched it the morning of the presentation.

The Golden Child- HOW DO YOU WASTE CHARLES DANCE
THAT IS AN INDEFENSIBLY PERVERSE THING TO DO, DIRECTOR WHOSE NAME I DO NOT CARE ENOUGH TO LOOK UP

I remember thinking that this was total crap even when I was 8, but it did inspire a pretty great Forgotbusters essay:

https://thedissolve.com/features/forgotbusters/31-the-forgotten-blockbuster-the-golden-child-marks-t/

I'm still getting over what a bizarre tonal clusterfuck that movie is. Literally nothing works, and every element fights against every other element. Coming out in the same year and with both Victor Wong and James Hong, it's like watching the shitty bizarro world version of Big Trouble in Little China.

* The Aviator (Scorsese, 2012) 6/10.....Di Caprio is brilliant in it. It looks great but something bloodless and inconsequential about it all

Blue is The Warmest Colour (Kechiche, 2013) 9/10....Take away the lesbianism and shagging, its still a very moving story about young love

Tyrannosaur (Considine, 2011) 6/10....why are all these Brit actors (see also: Oldman, Roth) making the most grim and depressing movies about working class life. maybe a 6 is harsh but something smacked of misery porn about this

Stray Dogs (Tsai, 2013) 7/10....very powerful but shit the unrelenting stasis of it all was a bit indulgent tbh

Speaking of The Golden Child, it's weird to know that its director has a movie in the Criterion Collection (his debut, The Downhill Racer). And then there's The Couch Trip and Fletch Lives and Cops & Robbersons...

yeah why don't you list his good stuff now

they stopped financing his kind of film. whaddyagonnado?

Cool Runnings?

bee-oo-tifully photographed Hitchcock rips

Side Effects. Mildly entertaining.

Los Tiempos De Pablo Escobar (7/10)
Inglourious Bastards (sp?) (8/10): Still holds up. Sally Menke was a guiding force to QT for sure.
Uncle Boonmee ... (8/10)

Help! (7.0)
Dance, Girl, Dance (7.5)
Stromboli (6.0)
Europa ’51 (7.0)
Bladerunner (7.0)
Before I Disappear (5.5)
The Company (CIA, not Altman--7.0)
Ivan’s Childhood (8.0)
Blackhat (5.0)
The One I Love (6.5)

Only a 7 for Blade Runner?