Last (x) movies you saw

The DVD has a quote from Pauline Kael on the back - "Undiluted pleasure and excitement. It may be the best film of its kind ever made." - which is going it a bit.

I goofed--Foxy Brown was supposed to read Jackie Brown (night I got Pam Grier's autograph).

Bridge Of Spies : 7/10
Mr. Holmes : 6/10 (though edging into 7 mainly because of how faithful it is to the source novel. Found McKellen too sympathetic as Holmes.)
Voici les temps d'assassins : 9/10 (incredibly dark late period Duvivier. Gabin as a chef is A++ casting. Just a great film.)
Danny Collins: 5/10 (Oscar bait crap but I admire Pacino's kinda restrained perf. )

Macbeth (Kurzel, 2015) - 8/10
The Martian (Scott, 2015) - 7/10
Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015) - 7/10
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946) - 6/10
Frontier Marshall (Dwan, 1939) - 4/10
Mortdecai (Koepp, 2014) - 1/10
Kingsman - Secret Service (Vaughn, 2015) - 4/10
Wild (Vailee, 2014) - 7/10
Catch Me Daddy (Wolfe, 2015) - 7/10
The Gunman (Morel, 2014) - 4/10
Good Kill (Nicol, 2014) - 6/10

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) - 8/10

I think Morbs must be busy with the sportsball playoffs and such so I'll fill in for him.

Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015) - 7/10
My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946) - 6/10

wtf you heathen

hahaha. Yeah - I was wondering where Morbs was once I saw that 6/10

some ppl just don't deserve John Ford

Ford country in Clementine looks like a dream - especially the wonderfully effective day-for-night photography of Monument Valley - but the view of it is few and far between. For me, the film stays indoors with stuffy melodrama a tad too long.

Field Niggas (2015, Allah) 8/10
The Noose (1958, Has) 8/10
The Forbidden Room (2015, Maddin, Johnson) 8/10
*Baby It's You (1983, Sayles) 7/10
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973, Has) 6/10
The Codes (1966, Has) 9/10
*Death Becomes Her (1992, Zemeckis) 7/10
The Red and the White (1967, Jancsó) 9/10
Right Now, Wrong Then (2015, Hong) 6/10
What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Clement, Waititi) 6/10

The Martian (Scott, 2015) 4/10
Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (Gibney, 2015) 6/10
The Lobster (Lanthimos, 2015) 8/10
Savage (Muldowney, 2009) 6/10

Polytechnique (Villeneuve, 09)
Prisoners (Villeneuve, 13)
Enemy (Villeneuve, 13)
Sicario (Villeneuve, 15)
Leatherheads (Clooney, 08)
The State I am In (Petzold, 00)
Mia Madre (Moretti, 15)
Topsy Turvy (Leigh, 99)
Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, 22)
Die Niebelungen: Siegfried (Lang, 24)
Die Niebelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Lang, 24)
Die Frau Im Mond (Lang, 29)*
The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Lang, 33)
The King’s Whore (Corti, 90)
I Killed My Mother (Dolan, 09)
Laurence Anyways (Dolan, 12)
Mommy (Dolan, 14)
Windows on Monday (Köhler, 06)
Concrete Love - The Böhm Family (Starkle-Drux, 15)
Watermark (Baichwal & Burtynsky, 13)
The Latin Skyscraper (Schindel, 13)
The Architect of Urbino (Piccardo, 15)
Beyond Metabolism (Gaus & Sattel, 14)
Exotica (Egoyan, 94)
Muddy River (Oguri, 81)
The Sting of Death (Oguri, 90)
Sleeping Man (Oguri, 96)
The Invisible Army (Jacobsen, 45)
Slow West (MacLean, 15)
45 Years (Haigh, 15)
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Mazursky, 86)
Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 12)

*The Cell- Dumber than a stump but still gorgeous. Really missing Eiko Ishioka. Also missing the isolated score track on the old DVD, which the new budget blu-ray inexplicably drops- the best way to watch this movie by far is to totally cut the dialogue and just let Howard Shore do his Master Musicians of Jajouka thing.

White God- Disappointed. This kind of did nothing for me, other than marveling at how well the animal wrangler dealt with a shit-ton of dogs, and a friend deciding that the little terrier who's the main dog's Small Friend was named "Cap'n Scraps."

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present- what is David Blaine doing here

Death Wish 2 (Winner)- Gun porn for the morally retarded. Not even really likeable as sleaze, and I *love* sleaze. This episode's talented early-career character actor slumming it as a generic thug: Laurence Fishburne!

*Ghost in the Shell (Oshii)- I will never not love this movie. It's not perfect (still better than what Masamune Shirow is up to, though, jesus christ) but its' such an amazing time capsule of 90s cyberpunk. Oshii has a reputation for slow, drifty movies, but this is really economical (under 90 minutes without any wasted time) and manages to fit in these gorgeous mini-travelogue sequences where we just slowly part ways with the main character and watch people go about their daily business to that soundtrack.

Children of the Corn (Kiersch)- oh my god this is so fucking dumb
Still probably in the top half of King adaptations, which isn't saying much; so many things went wrong on what should have been salvageable with the actors and shooting locations they had to work with. But the cloyingly cutesy "good" kids, the horrible voiceover narration and the terrible ending pretty much scuttle the whole thing. I do like the defaced paintings and corn-based folk art, though- whoever decorated the sets earned their paycheck.

The Vampire Lovers (Baker)- One of the ur-texts of the modern lesbian vampire movie, way better than other Hammer productions of a similar vintage, more faithful to Carmilla than any Dracula adaptation has ever been; I'm not head over heels in love with it, but it's a keeper.

The Blob (Yeaworth Jr)- The original. Lives up to the classic billing- great effects, great color photography, and one of the only PARENTS JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND horror films where the conflict between 30-year-old teenagers and authority figures isn't predicated on one or more people being absolute fucking morons.

Ici et Ailleurs (Godard, Gorin, Mieville)- my first Dziga-Vertov Group film, and one I need to rewatch and spend some time really digging into.

*Suspiria (Argento)- Drags a little more than I'd remembered, and I somehow forgot both the presence of a badly-dubbed Udo Kier and a SPOOOOOKY BAAAAAT, but still: Suspiria, A+++ would watch again

*Zazie dans le Metro (Malle)- Still basically a perfect movie. Not sure what I can add to this, really.

A Field in England (Wheatley)- Wonderful. Maybe a little too self-consciously clever, but fuck, I'll take that over a movie that doesn't try hard enough any day.

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Farocki)- Dense, beautiful and achingly sad. My first Farocki film; definitely not the last.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven)- I loved this! Seriously, aside from the overwritten pileup of bullshit endings, it's a mostly smart, effective horror film, and there's even what I'm pretty sure is a nod to the underwater ballroom scene in Inferno (the impossibly deep bathtub).

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder)- I...did not love this. As much. For the reasons the producers intended, anyway. I went into this knowing that it was deliberately crammed with as much gay subtext as humanly possible, and it absolutely delivered on that front. Some decent 80s-vintage practical effects, too, and an above-average score from Hellraiser's Christopher Young.

You're Next - I'd previously seen The Guest, from the same writer and director; that's a great modern update of an 80s action thriller. This one is kind of a splattery thriller with a twist that you'll piece together as the body count rises. Lots of practical gore effects, some of them quite wince-inducing. Highly recommended.

The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter is excellent; great look into a publically disowned history.
Collins' "Losing Ground" is WAY ahead of its time, a sign of great things to come unfulfilled.

The Martian (Scott, 2015) 6/10
The Walk (Zemeckis, 2015) 5/10
The Lobster (Lanthimos, 2015) 8/10

Castle Freak (Gordon, 1995) 5/10
Young Mr Lincoln (Ford, 1939) 8/10
The Shanghai Gesture (Von Sternberg, 1941) 7/10
Lancelot du Lac (Bresson, 1974) 8/10
Die Sage Des Todes aka Bloody Moon (Franco, 1981) 6/10
Before I Go To Sleep (Joffe, 2014) 3/10
Pretty Poison (Black, 1968) 8/10
Puppet Master (Schmoeller, 1989) 5/10
Cactus Flower (Saks, 1969) 6/10
Canyon Passage (Tourneur, 1946) 7/10
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (Hartley, 2014) 7/10

The Assassin (Hou, 2015) 7/10
Room (Abrahamson, 2015) 6/10
El Club (Larrain, 2015) 6/10
* Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981) 7/10
The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979) 6/10
* Witness For the Prosecution (Wilder, 1957) 5/10
La Captive (Akerman, 2000) 8/10
12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995) 4/10
* Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) 7/10
Man is Not a Bird (Makavejev, 1965) 6/10
Death of a Cyclist (Bardem, 1955) 6/10
* All That Heaven Allows (Sirk, 1955) 9/10

Fidelity (Zulawski): 7/10
Any Number Can Win : 7/10
Tomorrowland : 6/10
The Man From U.N.C.L.E : 5/10
L'âme sœur : 8/10
Cockfighter: 8/10

finishing up the bond series
Live and Let Die (1973) 3/10
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) 2
Moonraker (1979) 2
Octopussy (1983) 3
A View to a Kill (1985) 3
GoldenEye (1995) 3
3 to go (licence to kill, never say never again, the new one) :(

spooky movies for october
The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) 5
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) 3
Dance of the Vampires a.k.a. Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) 7
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) 5
*The Wicker Man (1973) 8
*Drag Me to Hell (2009) 8
Frozen (2010) 3
Crimson Peak (2015) 5

misc
Ministry of Fear (1944) 6
Short Circuit (1986) 4
*Back to the Future Part II (1989) 5
David Wants to Fly (2010) 6

missed one
Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) 2
nice animation -- drac's spindly legs are great. the first one was bearable because the animators crammed a ton of stuff into the background. this one doesn't. also: adam sandler's sleepy voice acting, rehashed jokes, and a plot that is obviously going nowhere.

why do you keep watching Bond films, abanana, if you hate them that much?

i already watched the ones i like. the first three, ohmss, and casino royale are all 7/10 or better.

The Martian (Scott, 2015)
Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015)
The Big Country (Wyler, 1958)
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971)
Ill Met By Moonlight (Powell/Pressburger, 1957)
Outrage (Lupino, 1950)
Vivre Sa Vie (Godard, 1962)
Kameradschaft (Pabst, 1931)
Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)

Insiang (1976, Brocka) 7/10
Inferno (1953, Baker) 6/10
Heart of a Dog (2015, Anderson) 8/10
Eat Your Soup (1997, Amalric) 5/10
Kingpin (1996, Farrelly, Farrelly) 6/10
Girlhood (2014, Sciamma) 6/10
Taxi (2015, Panahi) 8/10
*The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, Reisz) 6/10
*Late August, Early September (1998, Assayas) 7/10
*Juggernaut (1974, Lester) 8/10

I forgot to add a rewatch asterisk to Lost Highway.

the clearing (Pieter jan brugge, 04) 4/10
losing ground (Kathleen Collins '82) 5/10
decline of western civ 1 (spheeris '81) 3/10
decline of western civ 2 (spheeris '88) 5/10
Gucci: the director (Christina voros 2013) 7/10
rage (George c scott '72) 4/10
apartment troubles (Jennifer prediger & jess weixler, 2015) 7/10
the beast (borowczyk '75) 7/10
results (bujalski '15) 8/10
diary of a teenage girl (marielle heller 2015) 5/10
dumb and dumber to (farrellys 2014) 6/10
99 homes (bahrani 2015) 7/10
black mass (scott cooper 2015) 5/10

Rewatched Aliens and Alien3 - Alien3 is a much better movie.

Captives (6.0)
The End of the Tour (7.0)
Tab Hunter Confidential (7.0)
Charlie Bartlett (4.0)
The Spectacular Now (6.5)
Waking the Dead (7.0)
Promised Land (7.5)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (6.0)
Paul Sharits (7.5)
Eat the Document (8.0)

can't even manage a facepalm re "what's better than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf"

the cinematography is annoying in that one imo

because...? Wexler was one of the greats.

The Legend of Leigh Bowery (Atlas, 2002) 6/10
Dollhouse (Sheridan, 2012) 3/10
Bicycle Thieves (Di Sica, 1948) 8/10
Glassland (Butler, 2015) 5/10
The Seventh Continent (Haneke, 1989) 8/10

From CPH:DOX

Man Falling (Wivel, 15)
Rabin: The Last Day (Gitai, 15)
Behemoth (Zhang, 15)
A Young Patriot (Du, 15)
Innocence of Memories (Gee, 15)
Brothers (Holm, 15)
The Pearl Button (Guzman, 15)
The Other Side (Minervini, 15)
Arabian Nights pts 1, 2, 3 (Gomes, 15)
Academy of Muses (Guerin, 15)
The Event (Loznitsa, 15)
Uncertain (McNicol & Sandilands, 15)
Lost and Beautiful (Marcello, 15)
Mallory (Trestikova, 15)
The Fear of 13 (Sington, 15)
The Death of JP Cuenca (Cuenca, 15)
Over the Years (Geyrhalter, 15)
Cartel Land (Heineman, 15)
The Swedish Theory of Love (Gandini, 15)
The Moulin (Huang, 15)
A Good American (Moser, 15)
Unseen: The Lives of Looking (Goodwin, 15)
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Anderson, 15)
The Letters (Gutierrez, 15)
Birobidjan (Hinant, 15)
In Limbo (Viviani, 15)
In Jackson Heights (Wiseman, 15)
A Girl of Her Age (Laranjeira, 15)
Ah, Humanity! (Casting-Taylor, Paravel & Karel, 15)
Event Horizon (Moncayo, 15)
No No Sleep (Tsai, 15)*

Dope: Friday + Juice x Risky Business. Recommended.
Metalhead: It's not about metal, it's about pain (and cows). Also recommended.

you had me at "cows"

Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
Taxi Tehran (Panahi, 2015) - not a normal film yet Panahi becomes such a good actor, or at least he seems to have developed a straight face/persona to everything and everyone and every situation.

Re-watching Tombstone tonight. Greatest collection of mustaches in movie history?

Monsieur Klein (8/10)
Life of Oharu (rewatch--11/10)
Ant Man (7/10)
Mistress America (6/10)

Stalker 11/10
The Lady In The Van 8.5/10

latter genuinely funny & affecting with two amazing central performances. british cinema/alan bennett's not dead!

I liked the look of it until I saw Cordon bleurgh! But tbf it looks pretty good.

Spectre. Maybe 40 good minutes rattling around amid 2 1/2 hours of pointlessness.

Spotlight was magnificent

Some Came Running (1958) 3.5/5
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) 4.5/5
Uninvited (1988) 1/5; featuring a mutant cat terrorizing people on a yacht
The Assassin (2015) 3/5
The Mummy (1959) 2/5
It Follows (2015) 3/5
The Nightmare (2015) 3/5
Winter Sleep (2014) 4/5

I liked the look of it until I saw Cordon bleurgh! But tbf it looks pretty good.

― xelab, Sunday, November 15, 2015 6:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

james corden is in it for approximately 6 seconds

props for the pun though lol

Kidulthood cos it was on BBC3

Benny's Video (Haneke, 1992) 8/10
The Trouble With Harry (Hitchcock, 1955) 5/10
Call Me Lucky (Goldthwait, 2015) 7/10
Tangerine (Baker, 2015) 8/10

Didn't mention that I have also seen:

Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003) - this is probably the best tribute from one director to another I have ever seen, from my pov the more obscure a tribute the better.

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2008) - I saw about five films from the Hou season, and they weren't enough

Mother and Son (Sokurov, 1997) - this is from the Tarkovsky season and its incredible in terms of execution and a great counterpart to Mirror, both in themes and real shared spirit.

Viridiana (Bunuel, 1961) - good to catch this one, got a lot more from it than I first saw it ten+ years ago. Its like chocolate box of surrealism uncovered, with added anarchist anger at catholicism (the crucifix as swiss army knife) but also any system. The patriarch's suicide is at that intersection of the funny and macabre. Love the non-endings too.

Think I've seen almost everything from Bunuel season currently screening at the ICA and I was kinda do I want to revisit? Well, yes I do.

The Salvation, a Danish Western starring Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Eva Green. It's on Showtime this month, so I pulled it in through Hulu. It's fairly straightforward "you killed my brother"/"your brother raped my wife and killed my son" revenge stuff, with a few twists. Eva Green's great in it despite having literally not a single line of dialogue, and the guy who wasn't played by Donal Logue in Terriers is in it, too, which was cool - I hadn't seen him in anything since then. It's nicely shot, though some scenes feature not-quite-distressingly obvious CGI (used for day-for-night, rain, and fire).

Spotlight (McCarthy, 2015) 7/10
What Our Fathers Did; A Nazi Legacy (Evans, 2015) 7/10
Tangerine (Baker, 2015) 7/10
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (Morgen, 2015) 7/10
I'll See You in My Dreams (Haley, 2015) 6/10
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015) 3/10
Satantango (Tarr, 1994) 10/10
* License to Kill (Glen, 1989) 4/10
* The Virgin Spring (Bergman, 1960) 8/10
Summer with Monika (Bergman, 1956) 9/10

just thinking to myself that I would probably struggle to take in Satantango in a single viewing, but it looks amazing