Last (x) movies you saw

"almost every individual act of discrimination is defensible."

Most aren't. But Loach's win is not discrimination

You're wrong. And you're wrong. And also, you're not bringing anything to the table, other than that you like this film so everything else doesn't matter. So goodbye.

Another film critic bites the dust!

My Scientology Film (Theroux/Dower, 2016) - the squirelling was diverting, slapstick-like fun (the cameraman who is being asked to film-stalk must be putting his kids through college with all of the jobs he gets) although I didn't get what role scientology was playing, like what was it giving those people, who in turn gave so much of their lives to it. Power, community, control over chaos, certainties are all answers, but why this and not Christianity or Buddhism or another form of spirituality or cultism?

There seemed to be a draw for actors (and pictures of Hubbard directing films had its fascination), a weird crossover into Hollywood/LA life that was built-on (the re-enactments) yet skirted around..then again Theroux is not that kind of doc maker.

My Twilight Time Blu-Ray of Runaway Train arrived today. I remember liking this movie 25 years ago or so; gonna see how it holds up next to Unstoppable.

*Children of Men (Cuaron, 2006) 9/10
The Nice Guys (Black, 2016) 7/10
The Immortal Story (Welles, 1968) 5/10
*Cat People (Tourneur, 1942) 7/10
Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (Jones, 2007) 7/10
The Good Dinosaur (Sohn, 2015) 4/10
*Pink Floyd The Wall (Parker, 1982) 6/10
The Bad Seed (LeRoy, 1956) 4/10
Chungking Express (Wong, 1994) 5/10
No Way Out (Donaldson, 1987) 4/10
*Blood Simple (Coen, 1984) 8/10
*Breathless (Godard, 1960) 6/10

*rewatches

Re-watched Scanners last night. I'd forgotten how much that movie is a thriller, not a horror flick; it's all shootouts, car chases and bureaucrats arguing in conference rooms.

but head asplode

I've been off my game lately while I rewatched all of Deadwood.

L'Eclisse (Antonioni, 1962)
Jack Reacher 2 (Zwick, 2016) (I'm not renouncing action trash altogether, but I'm done with this series – 1/10)
The Beatles: 8 Days a Week (Howard, 2016)
Equinox Flower (Ozu, 1958)

Deadwood is better than most movies.

Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964) 5/10
Christine (Clarke, 1987) 9/10
Road (Clarke, 1987) 7/10
Elephant (Clarke, 1989) 9/10
The Bloodstained Butterfly (Tessari, 1971) 6/10
Electra, My Love (Jancso, 1974) 8/10
The State of Things (Wenders, 1982) 7/10
Killer's Moon (Birkinshaw, 1978) 5/10
Nightmare Alley (Goulding, 1947) 8/10
Deadpool (Miller, 2016) 5/10
Transfer (Cronenberg, 1966) 3/10
From the Drain (Cronenberg, 1967) 3/10
I, Daniel Blake (Loach, 2016) 9/10
Stereo (Cronenberg, 1969) 4/10
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Guest, 1961) 7/10

just watched the old artificial eye jean vigo collection: a+

5/10 for Chunking Express is some bullshit imo.

I mean his... 4th? best film still merits an 8 at least

handmaiden wasn't very good 6.5/10

5/10 for Chunking Express is some bullshit imo.

― Jonathan Hellion Mumble, Tuesday, 1 November 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cryptosicko likes Deadwood, which I believe is television.

Chungking Express looks gorgeous, but really acts up my twee allergy.

The Brigitte Lin story isn't so twee.

The whole first half of the film definitely worked better for me, yes. If I hadn't been watching it in a class, though, I woulda abandoned it the first time someone started talking to their furniture.

Anyone watched Aquarius yet?

documentaries:

Holy Hell (Allen, 2016) 7/10
A Place In The Sun (Stevens, 1951) 5/10
*Slacker (Linklater, 1991) 8/10
*Jeremiah Johnson (Pollack, 1971) 8/10
Mascots (Guest, 2016) 6/10
Deep Web (Winter, 2015) 5/10
HyperNormalisation (Curtis, 2016) 7/10
Weiner (Kreigman/Steinberg, 2016) 7/10
Return of The Secaucus Seven (Sayles, 1979) 6/10
Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016) 7/10
Everybody Wants Some! (Linklater, 2016) 5/10

wait on, not all of these are documentaries, well maybe "everybody wants some" is

45 Years. Not as good as I'd read, but of the two of us who watched it, I liked it more.

Sausage Party (2016) - not sure why no review i read of this mentioned the non-stop "ironic" racist stereotypes. this movie is nothing but lazy stereotypes. yes, the Mexican is a drunk tequila bottle. yes, the irish guy is a potato. yes, the Chinese guys are boxes of rice. yes the wise spiritual leader of the film is a talking redfaced pack of American Spirits. there is an atheist message in here that is as leaden and awkward as a 15-year-old summarizing "God Delusion" on reddit for the first time. the rest of it is sub-Family Guy Edgelord comedy. if you think saying the word "Bro" is funny this will leave you in stitches.

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) - gave this a shot cos i found the first very visually entertaining even though it had sucked all the wonder out of Wonderland. man, this was bad. if you have ever wanted to see The Mad Hatter depressed cos he thinks his parents are dead, this is the film for you. it's almost incredible how much this movie stretches to actually ruin the story of Alice in Wonderland. like now we have an in-universe explanation for why the Mad Hatter's tea party always thinks it is one minute to tea time, and it's even stupider than midichlorians.

I got about a half hour into the first Burton Wonderland movie before shutting it off in disgust. What really sucks about these films, though (aside from a generation of kids growing up associating AiW with Johnny Depp), is that the Burton of the 1980s could have probably done something great with them.

Anyone seen My Feral Heart? Looks like kind of a typical brit realist film but it's apparently got a light supernatural aspect to it.

The Lady and the Beard (Ozu, 1931)
La Notte (Antonioni, 1961)
Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2002)
The Lovers (Malle, 1958)
No Home Movie (Akerman,2015)
Ornette: Made in America (Clarke, 1984)
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (Bjorkman, 2015)
The Floorwalker (Chaplin, 1916)
Adventures on the New Frontier (Pennebaker/Maysles/Stilson/Leacock, 1961)

From CPH:PIX:

The Girl, The Mother & The Demons (Osten)
The Son of Joseph (Green)
The White People (Achan)
Being 17 (Techiné)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong)
Soy Nero (Pitts)
The Woman Who Left (Diaz)
The Yard (Månsson)
Paviliion (Sutton)
Cemetery of Splendour (Weerasethakul)
Parents (Tafdrup)
Staying Vertical (Guiraudie)
The Ornithologist (Rodrigues)
Raw (Ducournau)
Anti (BH)
Nocturama (Bonello)
The Eremits (Trocker)
Godless (Petrova)
Shambles (Lemiux)
Sand Storm (Zexer)
Swiss Army Man (Scheintert & Kwan)
Scarred Hearts (Jude)
The Last Family (Matuszynski)
El Futuro Perfecto (Wohlatz)
Aloys (Nölle)
Stories of Our Lives (Chuchu)
Neon Bull (Mascaro)
Hedi (Ben Attia)
The Death of Louis XIV (Serra)
In the Last Days of the City (El Said)
Shelley (Abbasi)
Certain Women (Reichardt)
Mimosas (Laxe)
37 (Grasten)
The Island Funeral (Towira)
A Quiet Passion (Davies)
Illegitimate (Sitaru)
Park (Exarchou)
Zoology (Tverdovsky)
Clair Obscur (Ustaoglu)

The Death of Louis XIV (Serra)

How was this? Hoping to catch a Scottish screening later in the month

His most focused film so far, there's a dramatic backbone to all of it, that hasn't been there in the past. Beautiful, of course, wonderful mood. There's not that much in it, though, and of sickbed films, like Cemetery of Splendour and Scarred Hearts, it's the least fantastic.

Encino Man (Mayfield, 1992)
Heavyweights (Brill, 1995)
Son In Law (Rash, 1993)
The Pacifier (Shankman, 2005)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Cohen, Cohen, 2000)
Llyn Foulkes One Man Band (Halpern, Quilty, 2014)

amour (2012 haneke) 8/10
joy (2015 Russell) 1/10
arrival (2016 Villeneuve) 8/10
American pastoral (2016 McGregor) 5/10
the goodbye girl (72 ross) 5/10
complete unknown (2016 josh marston) 4/10
mamma rosa (62 pasolini) 7/10
weiner (2016 josh kriegman & elyse Steinberg) 8/10

Supersonic (Whitecross, 2016) 8/10
Holy Motors (Carax, 2012) 7/10
Bobby Fischer Against The World (Garbus, 2011) 6/10
American Honey (Arnold, 2016) 9/10
I, Daniel Blake (Loach, 2016) 6/10
*Millers Crossing (Coen, 1990) 8/10
The Neon Demon (Refn, 2016) 6/10

Another Woman (Allen, 1988)
A Poem Is a Naked Person (Blank, 1974/2015)
Dr. Strange (Derrickson, 2016)
*Blood Simple (Coen/Coen, 1984)
Basquiat (Schnabel, 1996)
Violent Cop (Kitano, 1989)
Code Unknown (Haneke, 2000)
Every Man For Himself (Godard, 1980)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971; rewatch) 10/10
Arrival (2016) 6/10
Into the Inferno (2016) 7/10
Moonlight (2016) 9/10
Young Frankenstein (1974; rewatch) 9/10
Supersonic (2016) 8/10
Lisa and the Devil (1973) 6/10
No Home Movie (2015) 7/10
Love Streams (1984; rewatch) 8/10
Jack Reacher (2012) 6/10

Always feel McCabe & Mrs Miller should be docked half a point for Julie Christie's terrible cockney accent (tho' I concede that might be the deep point - ie Mrs Miller is faking it)

la creme of my exile:

*Hustle (1975, Aldrich) 8/10
Sieranevada (2016, Puiu) 7/10
From the Notebook of… (1971/1998, Beavers) 8/10
Staying Vertical (2016, Guiraudie) 8/10
*North to Alaska (1960, Hathaway) 7/10
The Silent Partner (1978, Duke) 7/10
Elle (2016, Verhoeven) 9/10
A Quiet Passion (2016, Davies) 8/10
Tell Me Lies (1968, Brook) 7/10
*Blazing Saddles (1974, Brooks) 7/10
Tower (2016, Maitland) 9/10
*The Terrorizers (1986, Yang) 8/10
*A Taste of Honey (1961, Richardson) 8/10
The Mad Fox (1962, Uchida) 7/10
The Handmaiden (2016, Park) 8/10
A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (1955, Uchida) 7/10
*Emperor of the North (1973, Aldrich) 9/10
A Fugitive from the Past (1965, Uchida) 8/10
*Le Plaisir (1952, Ophuls) 10/10
Twilight Saloon (1955, Uchida) 7/10
A Generation (1955, Wajda) 8/10

At least the sound is bad, so it's hard to hear it. xp

Emperor of the North is an insane movie more people should know about. Lee Marvin as the "A no. 1" hobo taking on Ernest Borgnine as a sadistic train conductor. In the Secret History of Twin Peaks, part of the backstory of Harry Dean Stanton's character from Fire Walk with Me is being a stuntman on that movie.

it's a shame the original title, Emperor of the North Pole, wasn't retained

Ugh, I was so disappointed by Staying Vertical. Sloppy, weirdly predictable, and with such a diminished sense of place compared to L'Inconnu.

and I was so disappointed by Rodrigues' The Ornithologist

u r a good reverse barometer

*Hustle (1975, Aldrich) 8/10

I've always liked this one - full of beauty and ugliness

Lol. At least we agree on A Quiet Passion, though 8/10 is a bit too low for me.

But I don't get how anyone could prefer Staying Vertical to Ornithologist. Everything is better in Rodrigues' film. The landscape is prettier, the naked men are prettier, the ideas are crazier, but also more coherent...

and Eddie Albert as a porn addict/murderous union lawyer! xp

And Deneuve/Reynolds a way more convincing couple than Deneuve/Jack Lemmon's dorky character in The April Fools as far as Franco-American relations go

Emperor of the North is an insane movie more people should know about. Lee Marvin as the "A no. 1" hobo taking on Ernest Borgnine as a sadistic train conductor. In the Secret History of Twin Peaks, part of the backstory of Harry Dean Stanton's character from Fire Walk with Me is being a stuntman on that movie.

Thanks for the reminder; Twilight Time has it on Blu-Ray. Ordering now.

In the past five days I watched two different farces, the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! and The Wrong Box, a british film from the mid-60s, starring Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine and Peter Sellers, among others.

As others have pointed out, the Coen's movie was very slight and mainly functioned as a rack upon which to hang a variety of brief parodies of film genres. It all added up to mildly entertaining and harmless fluff. No shibboleths were harmed in the making of this movie.

The british film was a much better constructed farce, equally nonsensical as Hail, Caesar! and filled with the usual assortment of cunning idiots, but much sharper, because it took aim at more deeply beloved targets and skewered them more deftly. It kept its satirical bite right up to the final scene, when it devolved into into slapstick as the handiest means of arriving at an ending. It's worth digging up, if you like farce. Oh, and the butler steals every scene he's in.

i remember Sellers and all his cats

and then

*Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask (1972, Allen) 6/10
Turkish Delight (1973, Verhoeven) 6/10
A Burlesque on Carmen (1915, Chaplin) (31m) 7/10
Don’t Call Me Son (2016, Muylaert) 6/10
Certain Women (2016, Reichardt) 8/10
The Dark Road (1921, Murnau) 8/10
Total Recall (1990, Verhoeven) 7/10
Spetters (1980, Verhoeven) 6/10
Autumn Leaves (1956, Aldrich) 7/10
Taza, Son of Cochise (1954, Sirk) (3D) 5/10