Last (x) movies you saw

Weird, also watched Never Take Sweets from a Stranger just the other night (I'm trying to catch up on all the Hammer films I haven't seen before). Thought it merited more than 5/10 tbh - seemed pretty 'advanced' for the time, nice Freddie Francis cinematography (especially the sequences in the woods), and a bleak ending that still packs quite a punch. I also liked the way that the film was set in a British fantasy vision of what Canada might be like; some great bad accents.

I always enjoy DavidM's contributions to this thread, and he always awards at least one mark out of ten that leaves me utterly baffled. While I don't rate Amour Fou quite as highly as some other Ilxors - in particular, the little girl's curtsy at the very end irked me because it seemed to be tipping the director's hand just a little too much - it's plainly not a negligible film. And yes, to see guff like Ferris Bueller (not even John Hughes' best film) ranked much higher only compounds my confusion. Still, Deep End - what a movie.

just thought Sweets was too 'on the nose' as the kids say, and Felix Aylmer more Frankenstein monster than child molester.

x-post: Could you elaborate on the ending of Amour Fou? I love the ending for finally giving us the in context pretty chilling final verse of Wo Die Berge so Blau.

I know Ward means about the curtsy, and I can understand a viewer backing away from its occasional archness (it made my top twenty).

xpost

Just found the direct bow to camera (to both the audience in the room, and the audience in the cinema) way too meta, too ironic - I already knew this was a film circling round the idea that love-death-illness-madness are things that can be performed just as much as they can be felt or experienced (ie Kleist is performing the role of the insane aesthete because it's what his contemporaries expected of a German poet). Some of the visual shifts between foreground and background objects/people also seemed a little too 'on the nose', as the kids say.

Yes! I was going to use the word arch, too.

Huh, I don't remember a bow at all, I just recall the blankness of her eyes. To me it's not meta or ironic at all, it's horrific. That kid is going to be fucked up, was what I got out of it.

otoh archness is part of the sensibility – the literary tradition – that the film tries to evoke; this era of literature was moving into Romanticism.

Amour fou (Hausner, 2015. Arrow DVD) - 4/10
The male lead reminded me faintly of Zach Braff. By the end I decided that Braff would actually be perfect for a US remake.

State of this.

I think von Kleist's bahaviour is something he performs because it isn't expected from him - he is a new kind of poet/artist/human being (i.e. the scene where the granny tells von Kleist after a reading of one of his stories that she prefers Goethe)

The little girl's bow at the end is v much a Haneke 'Funny Games' move.

yeah we're seeing the birth of a new lit movement.

Reminds me of the New Yorker article published a couple weeks ago on Goethe's absence from American university syllabi.

There was a piece at the New Yorker a few weeks ago about Goethe and he is one of those people I just never got in English (the piece pretty much acknowledges his poetry never 'translated' although his fiction is unjustly ignored). Buchner, von Kleist, Holderlin are completely of their time and ours too, and writing like seemingly nobody in their time.

Bueller, jesus

https://talesfromasmallkitchen.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/abe-froman.jpg

(not even John Hughes' best film)

Okay, I've got to ask... Bueller might be the only Hughes I still like, and I'm trying to think what you would rank above it. Breakfast Club? (even that is superior to the empty, doll's house formalism of A-bore fou.)

Sorry to derail but: Was gonna watch "The Lobster" but heard there's some animal cruelty throughout. Seems to be a thing with Lanthimos from what I gather and it's something that I abhor - haven't been able to rewatch "Weekend" and a bunch of other films for this same reason. Anyone know if this is at all simulated in his films?

Goethe Dies

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (6.5)
Alice in the Cities (8.0)
Bridge of Spies (6.0)
Kings of the Road (8.0)
Youth in Revolt (7.0)
Janis: Little Girl Blue (7.0)
Passenger Side (6.0)
Joy (6.5)
Girlhood (7.0)
Best Laid Plans (5.0)

my god

I know, its The Bridge of Spies

The Big Short (who cares, 2015) - too much exposition when I think most people sorta know it was a bit all casino-like bets on the housing market. Most of the money-making seems to have been done with a heavy heart - whether that's true or not isn't the point. But it was laboriously done #Oscar

Numero Deux (Godard, 1975) - one of the best films I'll see this year. I've got a torrent of it but the way he uses sound is so good. The birds all have a Metal Machine Music quality to them. Godard weaves a large number of things in his text, and seeks to do so in a way that sticks around for longer than in his 60s work. He often aims at an interesting misogyny (Mulvey), the naked children and certain scenes might have a minor controversy to them today. The factory metaphor is also heavy-handed but I never really switched off when it came up. This is a fantastic period for him (see also Here and Elsewhere), he made the idea of leaving cinema behind seem truly exciting. The action was now in TV and video.

A Bigger Splash (who cares, who cares) - top dad dancing from Ralph Fiennes and his daughter reading Malaparte's The Skin aside for some lols I wasn't engaging and constantly looking at my watch. Then again there is still a month left on the BFI Godard season. I feel sorry for anyone else putting out films in the next month.

Tag (Sion Sono, 2015) - Absurd, low-stakes splatter movie with an overt feminist agenda, one of five (!) Sono-directed films released in 2015. Enjoyed the dreamlike series of cascading non sequiturs, but it never adds up to more than the sum of its mysterious implications and slapstick transgressions. Fans of Suicide Club, Strange Circus and/or Why Don't You Play in Hell?, will probably enjoy the ride, but don't go in expecting Love Exposure.

Pebdoul (generic white guy, 2015) - Yeah, I paid ten buck to see this in the theater. It's okay. I liked the part where he got a knife in his head and saw squiggly cartoon animals. Also romance stuff was cute.

15, 16, whatever

love (noe, 2015) 5/10
ex machina (garland, 2015) 7/10
amy (kapadia, 2015) 9/10
some call it loving (james b harris, 73) 3/10
hail, Caesar! (coens, 2016) 3/10
us go home (denis, '94) 6/10
plot to kill jfk: rush to judgment (emile de Antonio, '67) 6/10
unfriended (leo gabriadze, 2015) 8/10
mustang (deniz gamze erguven, 2015) 7/10
welcome to new York (ferrara, 2014) 6/10
top five (rock, 2014) 2/10
the hole story (karpovsky, 06) 7/10

the jfk doc is more just a historical document imo so that rating could be n/a instead

Oh yeah, I sawHail, Caesar! too. It was bad.

*Timbuktu (2014, Sissako) 7/10
*The Towering Inferno (1974, Guillermin, Allen) 5/10
The Black Vampire (1953, Román Viñoly Barreto) 7/10
*On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan) 10/10
From the Other Side (2002, Akerman) 7/10
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015, Greenaway) 5/10
*Beauty and the Beast (1946, Cocteau) 9/10
South (1999, Akerman) 6/10
*Three Days of the Condor (1975, Pollack) 7/10
Native Son (1951, Chenal) 6/10

Miss Hokusai (6/10)
Phoenix (7/10)
The Queen Bee (6/10) -- crazy HK giallo (!!) courtesy of Golden Harvest.
Legend (Tom Hardy version) - 5/10 -- Hardy hams it up and it's fun but the clichés kill it

Phoenix may actually be closer to an 8 for the lead performance but something about it felt hollow.

M.A.S.H. (1970, Altman) 5/10
*Cinderella (1950, various) 4
Happiness (1998, Solondz) 5
Driving Miss Daisy (1989, Beresford) 4 -- eight best pic winners to go
Magic Mike XXL (2015, Jacobs) 5
Magic Mike (2012, Soderblergh) 3
Moonwalker (1988, various) 4

*Jackie Brown (Tarantino, 1997) 10/10
White God ( , 2014) 4/10
Listen To Me Marlon (Mundruczo, 2015) 7/10
The Look Of Silence (Oppenheimer, 2014) 6/10
Best Of Enemies (Gordon/Neville, 2015) 6/10
The Big Short (McKay, 2015) 6/10

MOVIE DUMP. Most of them, anyway, there's a bunch of Bruno Bozzetto shorts i don't care enough about to list individually. !s next to the ones I hadn't seen before that were noteworthy or just, you know, awesome

!Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
*Wild at Heart
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
*Wings of Desire
!The Sixth Side of the Pentagon
Urgh! A Music War
!Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
!Mommie Dearest
*Labyrinth
!World of Tomorrow
WALL*E
BURN*E
Presto
!Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture
Ghost World
Allegro non Troppo
! Ciao! Manhattan (this movie is exploitative and fucking terrible but weirdly compelling)
Serenity
Martin
!Irma Vep
Remembrance of Things to Come
The Ghost Galleon/Horror of the Zombies
The Werewolf and the Yeti/Night of the Howling Beast
!Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll/House of Psychotic Women
Herb & Dorothy
!The House With Laughing Windows (goes up there with Perfume of the Lady in Black and Footprints on the Moon in my personal giallo canon)
!L'Immortelle

King Solomon's Mines (1985) - Loved this when I was a kid, hadn't seen it in 25+ years, still holds up. Sharon Stone is FAF. If Indiana Jones was way more pulp. It even has John Rhys-Davies as a really sadistic villain. This film would never get made in a million years nowadays.

Never saw, but from what I recall the sequel was all kinds of dreadful.

yeah i mean this got 13% on Rotten Tomatoes and these movies are considered complete crap. they are super backwards but they are a lot of fun.

it's more comic strip, more cartoony than Indy. there is a scene where Sharon Stone has hijacked a German monoplane and is dropping bombs on the bad guys and she is holding them up and they look just like Acme bombs

My parents had taped KSM off TV along with the first two Indiana Jones movies and Romancing the Stone. as a kid i thought it was the worst of those.

The Perils of Gwendoline FTW

Pi (1998, Aronofsky) Π/Π

(not really)

ok i saw Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986) and it was way worse than the first movie. far less of the two leads and too much comedic relief and generic fantasy stuff. King Solomon's Mines was filmed at the same time but is a way better movie.

KSM is a classic imho

e/π is fair for Pi I think

O/-

One Way Ticket to Love (Shinoda 1960)
Veronika Voss (Fassbender 1982)
Suzanne's Career (Rohmer 1963)
Horse Money (Costa 2014)
Emotion (Obayashi 1966)
La Commare Secca (Bertolucci 1962)
A Short Film About Love (Kieślowski 1989)
Tout Va Bien (Godard/Gorin 1972)
Woman of Tokyo (Ozu 1933)
L'assassin habite au 21 (Clouzot 1942)
Night Journey (Hammid 1960)
Young Mr. Jazz (Lloyd 1919)

Aguirre: Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972) - 9/10
Cruel Story of Youth (Ōshima, 1960) - 5/10
Love (Noe, 2015) - 6/10
Eden (Hansen-Løve, 2015) - 7/10
Magic Mike XXL (Jacobs, 2015) - 6/10
Timbuktu (Sissako, 2014) - 8/10
Song of the Sea (Moore, 2015) - 9/10

rewatches:
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Reeves, 2014) - 7/10
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015) - 2/10
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Gilliam, 2009) - 7/10

*Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand, 1937) 7/10
The Candidate (Ritchie, 1972) 7/10
Fletch (Ritchie, 1985) 7/10
The Boys in the Band (Friedkin, 1970) 8/10
Chi-raq (Lee, 2015) 8/10
Hail, Caesar! (Coens, 2016) 7/10
Best of Enemies (Neville and Gordon, 2015) 5/10
Tangerine (Baker, 2015) 7/10
Class (Carlino, 1983) 4/10

Guess I should see "Chi-raq" then.

Youth (Sorrentino, 2015) 5/10
Spotlight (McCarthy, 2015) 7/10
Arabian Nights: Volume One, The Restless One (Gomes, 2015) 8/10
Arabian Nights: Volume Two, The Desolate One (Gomes, 2015) 7/10
Arabian Nights: Volume Three, The Enchanted One (Gomes, 2015) 7/10
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Jones, 2015) 5/10

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD (Goodwin, 2014) 5/10
Amour Fou (Hausner, 2014) 8/10
The Nanny (Holt, 1965) 7/10
Never Take Sweets From a Stranger (Frankel, 1960) 6/10

Amy (2015) 9
World on a wire (1973) 7
45 years  (2015) 7
8 1/2 (1963) 9
Valhalla rising (2009) 8
The passenger (1975) 10

*The Ladies Man (1961, Lewis) 9/10
Queen of Earth (2015, Perry) 5/10
Benilde or The Virgin Mother (1975, Oliveira) 7/10
Wake (Subic) (2015, Gianvito) 8/10
Experimenter (2015, Almereyda) 6/10
Grandma (2015, Weitz) 6/10
Golden Eighties (1986, Akerman) 8/10
*The Look of Silence (2014, Oppenheimer) 8/10
*Tabu (2012, Gomes) 7/10
Our Little Sister (2015, Kore-eda) 6/10
Rider on the Rain (1970, Clement) 5/10
Chi-Raq (2015, Lee) 6/10
The Devil (1972, Zulawski) 6/10
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922, Christensen) 8/10

Hitchcock/Truffaut (Jones, 2015) 5/10

Friend is dragging me to this on Friday - knew from the trailer it wouldn't be any good.

I am missing a screening of Godard's Germany Nine Aero :-(

Lol Zero I mean, not the chocolate bar

Well, there are some nice clips in the H/T doc, and Hitchcock is often p amusing on the excerpts from the tapes. But the parade of talking heads are largely insufferable (dear old Marty partially excepted) and the critical insights on offerare pretty bog-standard - whatever you think of Zizek, there's far more provocative and interesting stuff about Hitchcock in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema series.