Last (x) movies you saw

Duplicity (6.5)
Maggie’s Plan (7.5)
I Knew Her Well (7.5)
Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All... (7.0)
Wiener Dog (7.0)
Trudeau (7.0)
Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (6.5)
Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (5.5)
Josie and the Pussycats (5.0)
Aloha, Bobby and Rose (6.5)

town & country ('01 peter chelsom) 2/10
what we do in the shadows ('14 jemaine clement & taika waititi) 8/10
criminal activities ('15 Jackie earle haley) 2/10
harper ('66 jack smight) 5/10
white palace ('90 luis mandoki) 7/10
the man in the moon ('91 mulligan) 7/10
*lost highway ('97 lynch) 6/10
the night before ('15 Levine) 6/10
shy people ('87 Andrei konchalovsky) 6/10

criminal activities is oddly based on a screenplay by the poet Robert Lowell; harper is inferior to its sequel

south (akerman 98, 8/10)
tokyo story (ozu 53, 10/10)
kes (loach 69, 8/10)
benefit of the doubt (whitehead 69, 5/10)
from the other side (akerman 2002, 7/10)
ten (kiarostami 2002, 7/10)
pool of london (dearden 51, 6/10)

*whitehead 67, that is

Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass, 2016) - Sad to report the thing never recovered from the buddhist bare-knuckle fighter routine at the beginning of this.
Eva Hesse (Marcie Begleiter, 2016) - breathtaking misjudgment to use fucking CARTOONS to illustrate Eva's time in a concentration camp and hospital as she battled a tumour. Eva's work and some of the talking heads saved this.
Sid & Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986) - Lydon hilariously miscast otherwise think its good once it moves to just the two of them - builds on the utterly squalid atmos (with well-judged humour to provide some breathing space) and the central perfs are powerful. Nancy especially had to convey a hurtful history of family neglect, an unencumbered childishness plus a healthy dose of Warhol-level like blank. Pulled it off.
Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016) - first time in a long-time where I didn't know quite know where it was going. Still didn't so much by the end. Really good.
Sweet bean (Kawase, 2015) - the march of the Japanese humanist drama is relentless but this was good, actually didn't mind the incessant tugging of the heart strings that might've come in at the end, probably because there was no big conflict ever dramatised.

Cemetery of Splendor (Weerasethakul, 2015) 9/10

shit think I've missed this.

Swiss Army Man (Daniels, 2016)- 3.5/5
*Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (Hyams, 2012)- 4/5
Kung Fury (Sandberg, 2015)- 1.5/5
*Suspiria (Argento, 1977)- 5/5
Baron Blood (Bava, 1972)- 3.5/5
Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie (Konner, 2016)- 1.5/5
The Thoughts That Once We Had (Andersen, 2016)- 3.5/5
Eva Hesse (Begleiter, 2016)- 3/5

weet bean (Kawase, 2015) - the march of the Japanese humanist drama is relentless but this was good, actually didn't mind the incessant tugging of the heart strings that might've come in at the end, probably because there was no big conflict ever dramatised.

I wanted to love it but it was way too mild.

The American Friend (1977) 4/5
The Night of the Iguana (1964) 3.5/5
Mr. Freedom (1969) 3/5
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) 3.5/5
Particle Fever (2013) 3.5/5
La Cienega (2011) 3/5
Ghostbusters (2016) 2/5
Lancelot du Lac (1974) 4/5

Sweet bean (Kawase, 2015) - the march of the Japanese humanist drama is relentless but this was good, actually didn't mind the incessant tugging of the heart strings that might've come in at the end, probably because there was no big conflict ever dramatised.

I wanted to love it but it was way too mild.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), 12. august 2016 05:13 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I watched Koreeda's Our Little Sister the other day, reminded me how good Sweet Bean is. There is real, actual shadows in that film, a sense of real darkness. I don't know, I like Kawase a lot.

Don't know about mild or dark - good attempt to get at filming people's internal journeys.

And the boiling of beans! Beautiful pictures of boiling beans.

No, what I mean is that Sweet Bean uses natural lighting a lot, and is filmed on overcast days, and in small unlit rooms. It seems wistful, subdued.

ah got it - yes all of that was v good.

The shot of cherry blossoms on the street for instance was beautiful and wistful (in Denmark the film was actually called The Moon Over the Cherry Blossom Trees. I spent some time laughing at that title change, until I saw the film, and it actually makes perfect sense) A lot of Japanese films use cherry blossom trees (Our Little Sister as well, though that scene is absolutely great) but it's rare to see the flowers on a street, next to a sewer, in rain. I was just happy to see the film, and in Danish cinema's, after Still the Water was such an amazingly bad film.

aw cmon lancelot du lac is at least a 4.5/5

A lot of Japanese films use cherry blossom trees (Our Little Sister as well, though that scene is absolutely great) but it's rare to see the flowers on a street, next to a sewer, in rain.

Probably a good piece to be written on how Cherry Blossom imagery has been played in Jap film and lit in a love-and-hate way over the decades.

Fritz Lang's Nibelungen. Great looking actors, costumes, hair, settings, great looking everything but I had to watch most of it on fast forward. Sorry. Annoying because there's still quite a few silent films I want to see, they have some of my favourite film imagery ever but I tend to enjoy the screenshots more than the films as a whole.

Jason Bourne (Greengrass, 2016)
Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, 2012)
Eisenstein in Guanajuato (Greenaway, 2015)
Harikomi (Nomura, 1958)
Dreams (Bergman, 1955)
The Lobster (Lanthimos, 2015)
Queen of Earth (Perry, 2015)
Army (Kinoshita, 1944) - would be great in a double feature with some of Why We Fight

Peed Into the Wind (1972, McDowell) 5/10
Me and My Brother (1969, Frank) 6/10
The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978, Pennell) 7/10
Khartoum (1966, Dearden) 6/10
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) 7/10
Matinee (1993, Dante) 6/10
La Tendre Ennemie (1936, Ophuls) 8/10
La Bandera (1935, Duvivier) 7/10
La Horse (1970, Granier-Deferre) 6/10
*Night and Day (2008, Hong) 7/10
*The Candidate (1972, Ritchie) 9/10
*Purple Rain (1984, Magnoli) 6/10

The Gambler (7.5)
Helter Skelter (6.5)
Up the Junction (7.0)
Menace II Society (8.0)
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (7.0)
Fastball (7.0)
The Nun’s Story (8.0)
Firewall (6.0)
*A Face in the Crowd (8.0)
*The Best Man (7.5)

*Trump research

*Purple Rain (1984, Magnoli) 6/10

one of the few times recently when you've overrated a movie

Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016) - 5/10
Jason Bourne (Greengrass, 2016) - 4

Fantastic Planet (1973) - 7
Cat and the Canary, the (1939) - 4
Road to Singapore (1940) - 3
*You Only Live Twice (1967) - 5
The Good Dinosaur (2015) - 4
*Star Trek II (1982) - 8

you really need to relax and laugh at young Bob Hope, abanana

Purple Rain gets a 9/10 musically and 3/10 when people talk (or stare vacantly)

I liked Bob Hope, it was the rest of the movies that were the letdowns.

Road to Utopia is the best one with Crosby

loved Hell Or High Water

Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975) 7/10
The Gambler (Reisz, 1974) 8/10
Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016) 5/10
Ronaldo (Wonke, 2015) 5/10
Serpico (Lumet, 1973) 7/10
*The Lobster (Lanthimos, 2015) 8/10
Pretty Baby (Malle, 1978) 7/10
*The Falcon and The Snowman (Schlesinger, 1985) 6/10

The Falcon and The Snowman (on netflix now) didnt really hold up on the rewatch although Sean Penn is pretty great as the deluded wannabe spy. Like Jeff Spiccoli overloading on Le Carre novels. Boyce's motivation seems a bit muddle-headed but maybe this was true of the real Boyce? Movie drags a little bit too but it is an incredible story.

Pretty Baby (also on netflix) is definitely not a film that would have a hope of being made these days. Malle gets the period details spot on, little things like the paint peeling on the brothel walls. It makes for an unsettling watch though as its played so cold (and refreshingly free of judgement). Some awful acting from the brothel madam (Francis Faye) who recites her dialogue like a visually impaired woman reading from cue cards. The shocking scene where Brooke Shields is brought into the room for the delectation of old perverts and that final freeze frame of her at the train station stay with you.

Compulsion (Fleisher, 1951) 7/10
Tootsie (Pollack, 1982) 8/10
Putney Swope (Downey Sr, 1969) 7/10
Suffragette (Gavron, 2015) 6/10
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016) 7/10
The Reeds (Cohen, 2009) 3/10

Optimum's The London Collection boxset (great set of films all set against the backdrop of a redeveloping London. The first three I've logged on here before, but now I've finished the box:)

Pool of London (Deardon, 1951) 8/10
The Yellow Balloon (Thompson, 1953) 7/10
Sparrows Can't Sing (Littlewood, 1963) 8/10
The Small World of Sammy Lee (Hughes, 1963) 8/10
The London Nobody Knows (Cohen, 1967) 7/10
Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (Hickox, 1969) 4/10

rewatches:
In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950) 9/10
Repo Man (Cox, 1984) 8/10
Three Amigos (Landis, 1986) 8/10
Waking Life (Linklater, 2001) 8/10

Caught up with Love & Friendship on Amazon. Funniest movie I've seen all year.

lolly-madonna xxx ('73 sarafian) 6/10
trees lounge ('96 buscemi) 8/10
the big short (2015 McKay) 7/10
foxfire ('96 Annette haywood-carter) 3/10
bloodbrothers ('78 mulligan) 6/10
indignation ('16 schamus) 6/10
stardom (2000 arcand) 4/10
the Adderall diaries ('15 Pamela romanowsky) 4/10
the world, the flesh & the devil ('59 ranald macdougall) 2/10

So my wife and I went to see the new Jason Statham movie, Mechanic: Resurrection today. Did we expect it to be "good"? No. Did we expect it to be Elvis-movie bad? No, but it is. Like Elvis, Statham plays himself in most of his movies - he shows up somewhere, does the thing you've paid to watch him do (kick lots of anonymous dudes' asses), kisses a girl (in this case, Jessica Alba), and grimaces his way through approximations of human emotion (in this case, "I am angry," "I am momentarily happy," and "I am reluctant to embark on this orgy of violence, though you and I both know I must"). Sometimes these movies are quite good: I like Homefront and Safe a lot, for example. But Mechanic: Resurrection is almost laughably bad - it really feels like nobody involved in its making gave a shit. There are numerous blatant green-screens used to put exotic backdrops (Rio, Sydney) behind Statham's head; the script sets up the big action items with narration that sounds like a video game level is being explained to you ("in order to break into the impregnable prison and kill Villain X, here's what you're going to have to do"), and Tommy Lee Jones (who's in it for maybe five minutes, cumulatively) looks like he's calculating his salary into an hourly rate in his head the whole time. (Michelle Yeoh is also in it, and never hits or kicks anyone. What the hell is that about, I ask you?) And here's the final insult: One of the places Statham has to go is described, with great emphasis, as being surrounded by shark-infested waters. Statham is seen buying shark repellent ointment, and smuggling it into the prison/fortress. When he's about to escape, he takes off his shirt and slathers his entire torso in the shark repellent. He then dives into the water. Wouldn't you, the paying Jason Statham customer, naturally expect to see him fight a shark? Of course you would. What do you get? A single CGI shark drifting in the gloom behind a swimming Statham, and never coming anywhere near him. For that alone, I should have demanded a refund.

Why do you this to yourselves?

High Heels (Almodovar, 1991) - In a post-Cruz worl its easy to forget how good Abril was.
Ingrid Bergman: In her Own Words (Stig Björkman, 2016), found her to be almost a prototype for someone like Huppert - certainly a transitional figure - between Hollywood and art house, in her desire to work with specific directors, to do things because they might be great not just for cash and fans (although the equation isn't as straightforward as all that), and to cut and run and re-build when things aren't working (lesson to us all here, although not having kids might also be a good idea).

Both films touch on Autumn Sonata. That was a remarkable coincidence.

*Being There (7.0)
*The Magic Christian (3.0)
*Bob Roberts (6.5)
*Bulworth (5.5)
Art & Copy (7.0)
*The Truman Show (7.0)
*The Dark Knight (7.5)
*Superman (7.0)
Under the Sun (7.0)
Don't Blink - Robert Frank (7.5)

*Trump research

The In-Laws (Hiller, 1979) 6/10
Mustang (Ergüven, 2015) 8/10
Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016) 2/10
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962) 7/10
Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939) 5/10
*Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989) 9/10
*The Great Outdoors (Deutch, 1988) 4/10
The Best Intentions (August, 1992)

*re-watch

Er,

The Best Intentions (August, 1992) 7/10

Always hate it when someone makes a big deal out of ratings on this thread--mine are purely in the moment, not a great deal of deliberation--but I'm interested in the relatively mild response to Manchurian Candidate. Not that I think it's perfect or anything--the Sinatra/Leigh romance always seems really out of place whenever I watch it. But I think the brainwashing and the paranoia and just the whole conception are great. I remember my parents getting me to watch it on TV at a fairly young age--11 or 12 or something--and then it disappeared for a long time after that.

Manchurian Candidate was one of my major blind spots for years; thank Criterion for finally spurring me into action. Probably the main reason why I'd never made it a priority is because of its reputation as being "political," which generally isn't my thing. And it is more than likely that my relatively muted response to the film has to do with my own political cynicism--"paranoia," I think, supposes that one begins in a place of at least some idealism, and I've operated under the basic assumption that politics are evil and corrupt for as long as I can remember, so there isn't much that's revelatory about this or others in the whole "paranoid" cycle (one could make the case that there is something generational about this; Watergate was before my time, and my earliest exposure to politics was via SNL and other such comedies taking shots and Reagan and Bush Sr). No surprise, then, that the much more cynical and ridiculous Dr. Strangelove is far more my speed (which brings me to another minor letdown re: MC--where Stragelove has *at least* three great performances, Lansbury is the only one who is really in top form in MC).

That said, the film looks stunning and those early hypnosis/demonstration scenes are beautifully staged and genuinely frightening. I also have to admire the nerve it took to make it--not in terms of pushing uncomfortable political buttons but just in terms of how daffy the story is. This thing must have look just nuts on the page, and for Frankenheimer, Sinatra, Leigh and Lansbury to all commit to it is impressive.

Killing Ground (2016) 8/10
After the Storm (2016) 9/10
Umimachi Diary (aka Our Little Sister, 2014) 7.5/10
Bakuman (2015) 7/10
Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1954) 7/10
Kicking and Screaming (1995) 4/10

A lot of Japanese viewing, when I list it!

c'mon crypto, Sinatra was never better.

also it's NUTTIER on the page! read the novel.

Pretty sure it's the only Sinatra I've seen tbh. Unless his appearance on Who's the Boss counts (in which case, yes, this us better).

August:

Sovereign's Company (Clarke, 1970) 7/10
Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach (Osmond, 2016) 6/10
The Hallelujah Handshake (Clarke, 1970) 6/10
To Encourage the Others (Clarke, 1972) 8/10
Topaz (Hitchcock, 1969) 6/10
The Shadow of the Cat (Gilling, 1961) 6/10
Four of the Apocalypse (Fulci, 1975) 7/10
Under the Age (Clarke, 1972) 5/10
Horace (Clarke, 1972) 7/10
The Love Girl and the Innocent (Clarke, 1973) 7/10
A Follower for Emily (Clarke, 1974) 6/10
God Told Me To (Cohen, 1976) 8/10
The Childhood of a Leader (Corbet, 2015) 7/10
Diane (Clarke, 1975) 7/10
Funny Farm (Clarke, 1975) 6/10
The Insider (Mann, 1999) 6/10

Wow, that's a high grade for After the Storm, MatthewK. Can you say a bit more about it?

Watched ab it of Frank last night but didn't really get into it.
Obvioulsy the large artificial head looks like its lifted from Frank Sidebottom the Chris Sievey character from the 80s but that seems to be about as far as that goes.

THink I was in the middle of doing a number of other things or might have paid it more attention.

Innisfree (1990, Guerin) 7/10
Work in Progress (2001, Guerin) 8/10
Happy Hour (2015, Hamaguchi) 6/10
Hell or High Water (2016, Mackenzie) 8/10
*Rodrigo D: No Future (1990, Gaviria) 7/10
Bell, Book and Candle (1958, Quine) 6/10
The Fool Killer (1965, Gonzalez) 7/10
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Zugsmith) 5/10
Theatre of Blood (1973, Hickox) 6/10
Hail, Caesar! (2016, Coen, Coen) 5/10
Little Men (2016, Sachs) 8/10
Ornette: Made in America (1985, Clarke) 7/10
The King of Texas (2008, Pinnell) 6/10
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, Cimino) 7/10

Election (2016, Menon) 2/10

Equity, sorry. Election is a solid 8/10

Sinatra is first-rate in The Manchurian Candidate!

whereas I can barely watch Dr. Strangelove