Last (x) movies you saw

Supernova (2000) - This was really cool SciFi Channel-style pulp horror/sci fi with James Spader as Nick Vanzant leading a doomed space research team that has stumbled upon a weird alien glowing orb (treated as a major discovery - the first discovered sign of alien life) that emits distorted video effects. Angela Bassett has a cool turn as the doctor who receives the distress call that leads them astray and into the path of a psychotic and supernaturally powerful space outlaw, murderer and thief who is basically a lo budget version of the T-1000 complete with regenerating capabilities. Robert Forster (of the new Twin Peaks) plays the first captain and pilot who ends up a mutilated flesh casualty splattered on the inside of his hibernation chamber when they initiate a risky light speed wormhole sequence gone wrong. Fun and trashy with some cool horror scenes!

Highway to Hell (1992) - Rad early 90s pulp comedy horror, very much like Evil Dead or Dead Alive but with a heavy dose of Mad Max desert car chases and lots of cheesy visual Hell puns. There are several Beetlejuice-style scenes with things like Cleopatra playing cards against Adolph Hitler (played by Gilbert Gottfried). Kristy Swanson is the damsel in distress (her handcuffs are a chained pair of severed hands) and taken by Hellcop (played by C. J. Graham AKA Jason Vorhees) to Hell with her boyfriend, a hapless kid and his mangy but usefully scrappy dog, chasing them across a desert fantasyland. Lots of rad guest appearances here: Richard Farnsworth, Lita Ford, Ben Stiller, Jerry Stiller. I think Jerry Stiller gets shot in a cowboy saloon and Ben Stiller is some demonic biker who does a short comedy routine after the lead characters leave one of the many divebars they visit on their journey.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) - Vincent Price plays a weird faceless mummy organist who designed crazy ways to murder people based on the 10 Plagues of Egypt all while pining for his go go dancer goth queen and aided by his assistant Vulnavia. He lives in this crazy gothic mansion with tons of colored lights everywhere and rad surreal set design. What can you say? This is my shit. Like visiting the set of TV's Batman on Halloween. Vincent Price is the man and he has made so many awesome movies and this is one of the best. I have an undying love for 60s/70s Technicolor Goth. Romantic, colorful, dark, comedic, psychedelic, occult, it really has it all.

I won't be able to go to the movies again until 2018, so fyi re: this list I'm missing out on Call Me By Your Name, Antiporno, Phantom Thread, Happy End... anyway this is my top 10:

1. Personal Shopper
2. Get Out
3. Beach Rats
4. Long Strange Trip
5. Blade Runner 2049
6. War for the Planet of the Apes
7. Battle of the Sexes
8. Lady Bird
9. The Beguiled
10. Ingrid Goes West

MUBI:

Umberto D.(De Sica, 192)
Irma Vep (Assyas, 1996)

xmas films:

Calle Mayor (Bardem, 1956)
Shadow of Angels (Schmid, 1976)
L'Homme Atlantique (Duras, 1981)
The Graduation (Mungiu, 2016)
Niaye (Sembene, 1964)

Calle Mayor was a bit of a discovery, I'd be confident in arguing for it being a very great film from that time. It pretty much follows from I Vitelloni: bored casino boys playing about, being bored in a provincial town (it probably didn't need the professor character as the interpreter is the weakest bit). What's powerful is the how the story is twisted as a woman (at 35 already a 'spinster') being tricked into a marriage as a 'prank' by one of the bored boys (the proposal taking place in the square is a highlight), and the feeling of guilt that ensues as her happiness has no bounds (brilliantly conveyed by Betsy Blair, a US actress dubbed into Spanish, but she totally works). The feeling of everyone being trapped, and by the end, the escape to the city as a non-option, as there is no ultimate escape from the loneliness - all you can do is wait, and hope this changes. I watched it alongside Shadow of Angels, an adaptation of a Fassbinder play by Daniel Schmid. The dialogue is heavily stylized and its crying for a restore (this was a shagged out VHS, the compositions look interesting but deformed). Fassbinder plays a pimp (much of his team are in the cast), the story of a sex worker who is too beautiful...her clients are seemingly scared to have sex with her, so they pay to monologue @ her instead. It was accused of anti-semitism due to his treatment of a Jewish businessman but its hard to tell whether that's Fassbinder overdoing the provocation, as the story is opaque in its telling.

Having these two films alongside each other like that was instructive. You could say these women didn't wait, they took the train, are mixing with power and sex. The lack remains. Merry Christmas.

You are too kind to Darkest Hour.

And to Murder on the Orient Express. That film was shockingly bad, and also disturbing in how much was taken up with close ups of Kenneth Branagh's face.

yeah, i think a lot of these scores reflect my expectations going in. Darkest Hour was as bland as I expected, so that's a 5 or a 4. MOTOE was entertaining and better than i thought going in, not something i'd ever watch again, so that's like a 6.

at home last 1.5 months

Blue - 9/10
No More Excuses - 8/10
White - 7/10
Desert Hearts - 7/10
Red - 7/10
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 5/10
Solaris - 10/10
Greenberg - 9/10
The Trouble With Harry - 7/10
Network - 7/10
City Lights - 9/10
Stalker - 9/10
Kiss Me Deadly - 8/10
Summer Interlude - 9/10
The Long Goodbye - 9/10
Pickpocket - 8/10
The Naked Kiss - 7/10
Summer with Monika - 9/10
To Catch a Thief - 5/10
Blow-Up - 4/10
The Killing - 8/10
Autumn Sonata - 9/10
Woman of the Year - 7/10
Lifeboat - 9/10
Magnificent Obsession - 7/10
High and Low - 10/10
Frenzy - 7/10
Bigger Than Life - 8/10
La Chambre - 10/10
Good Morning - 8/10
Night and Fog - 10/10
Chafed Elbows - 9/10
Safe - 10/10
Election - 10/10
They Live By Night - 8/10
Night Moves - 8/10
I Confess - 6/10
Ikiru - 9/10
Personal Shopper - 9/10
News from Home - 10/10

McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 5/10

Ouch!

Network - 7/10

Salt in the wound.

Wow, McCabe is all time.

Just saw the Big Sick. It was okay.

As much as some special-effect extravaganza, but for completely different reasons, you've got to see McCabe in a theatre.

Impressive tally of films.

Star Wars : TLJ - 7/10
Sans Mobile Apparent - 8/10
Killing Of A Sacred Deer - 6/10
Veronica - 6/10
Odds Against Tomorrow - 9/10
Bladerunner:2049 - 7/10 *
Le Cercle Rouge - 10/10
Jabberwocky - 5/10
aka Doc Pomus - 7/10
Cesar et Rosalie - 8/10
Classe Tous Risques - 8/10
The Ash Tree - 7/10
A Warning To The Curious - 8/10
The Stalls Of Barchester - 7/10
The Treasure of Abbott Thomas - 8/10

Just saw "Rat Film." Tries to be profound, mostly just pretentious.

was it your life story

As much as some special-effect extravaganza, but for completely different reasons, you've got to see McCabe in a theatre.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 27, 2017 3:31 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

definitely will jump at the opportunity to see this in a theater, as with any altman. i love him but this one left me cold, 5 is harsh maybe but again my expectations were higher

Network is great but oh my god talk about overwritten. i laughed out loud at the "why is that every woman's first instinct when they want to hurt a man is to impugn his cocksmanship?" i mean, come on. not the movie's fault but it is responsible for aaron sorkin.

I liked Rat Film. as a local I thought it did the city justice, and the video essay construction worked for me. the bit at the end about the 'apocalypse' was forced or maybe rushed, but i dug it overall... felt sorta shaggy and perhaps didn't justify its running time, even though it was like 80 minutes. lots of unnecessary shots of Dan's rat music setup. felt like a behind the scenes digression.

saw Okja yesterday. thought it sucked real bad after the first third (basically after english speaking characters showed up)

The dialogue in Network is a hate crime.

man i loved Network and everyone who finds it 'too preachy' or whatever misunderstands it (or i did)

Chayefsky's arias are both an asset (the florid ballsiness) and a drag (most of the ideas)

Chayefsky was reveling in the fall of the Hays Code and the absence of TV networks' Standards and Practices departments. I understood all that overripe dialogue (at least I think), but kept wondering what modern mass audiences would make of it.

xpost Rat Film had a lot of potential, and we actually saw it on a few year end lists. We were just bummed at its ... lack of focus? Like, several of the characters it featured would have made good doc subjects themselves, but they were squeezed into this amorphous and yeah shaggy snapshot of a city approach that was heavy on portent but light on execution, with an insanely affected narrator, lots of quirky camera stuff, digressions into Dan Deacon, not enough about rats, and (imo) ultimately not enough about Baltimore, either. Like, early on the main rat catcher makes a point of saying "Baltimore does not have a rat problem, it has a people problem," but then it doesn't really deliver on that point, which I guess I was expecting. Like you said, when it gets to the metaphoric apocalypse, it just seems rushed and unearned, because what little we see of the city and its people ... they seem pretty happy! And even the rat problem does not seem like much of a problem.

One Eyed Jacks really surprised me with how good it is.

Is there any particularly good youtube channels for arthouse trailers? The channels of BFI, Criterion, Eureka, Second Run, Arrow Academy etc hardly ever upload trailers.

Red Garters (Marshall, 1954)
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Holiday (Griffith, 1930)
Love and Hisses (White, 1934)
Alibi Bye Bye (Holmes, 1935)
Justice League (Snyder, 2017)
Max Linder Pratique Tous les Sports (Linder, 1913)
Max Victime du Quinquina (Linder, 1911)
Max et son âne (Linder et Leprince, 1912)
Lured (Sirk, 1947)
The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (Ising & Harman, 1933)
The Goat (Keaton & St. Clair, 1921)
The Black Hand (McCutcheon, 1906)
Convict 13 (Keaton & Cline, 1920)
Dixiana (Reed, 1930)

I, Tonya
Shape of Water
Disaster Artist
We Are The Best (annual screening)
Fanny and Alexander (theatrical release)
To Catch a Thief

I, Tonya was 30 minutes too long... but some of the best acting of the year. Margot Robbie is obviously excellent, but Allison Janney steals the show.

Multiple Maniacs (Waters, 1970) 6/10
My Blue Heaven (Ross, 1990) 5/10
The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940) 8/10
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Peckinpah, 1970) 5/10
*The Sting (Hill, 1973) 7/10
It’s Only the End of the World (Dolan, 2016) 5/10
*My Cousin Vinny (Lynn, 1992) 6/10

Comfort and Joy (Forsyth, 1984) 7/10
Happy End (Haneke, 2017) 8/10
Raising Cain ('Director's Cut') (De Palma, 1992) 5/10
Blade of the Immortal (Miike, 2017) 7/10
The Disaster Artist (Franco, 2017) 6/10
The Yakuza (Pollack, 1974) 6/10
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017) 5/10
Spotlight on a Murderer (Franju, 1961) 6/10
Remember the Night (Leisen, 1940) 6/10
Payroll (Hayers, 1961) 6/10
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Miike, 2011) 5/10

Antoporno (Sion Sono, 2016)
Winter Light (Bergman, 1963) - yes, I went to the cinema for New Year's day punishment. It was good.

So the last movie I watched in 2017 (Chantal Akerman’s News From Home) and the first movie I watched in 2018 (Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild) ended and began respectively with the same shot: on a Manhattan ferry facing the Financial District. Was pretty wild coincidence & I’m taking it as a good omen.

unfortunately i believe both those shots feature my workplace

Get Out (2017, Peele) 6/10
Lucky Star (1929, Borzage) 8/10
Phantom Thread (2017, Anderson) 9/10
In Transit (2015, Maysles, True, Usui, Wu, Walker) 8/10
*Cinderfella (1960, Tashlin) 8/10
*Pola X (1999< Carax) 9/10
The Sea Wolf (1941, Curtiz) 7/10
The Work (2017, McLeary, Aldous) 8/10
Ex Libris: New York Public Library (2017, Wiseman) 7/10
What About Me? (1993, Amodeo) 5/10
Chains (1949, Matarazzo) 7/10
Stay Hungry (1976, Rafelson) 6/10
Strong Island (2017, Ford) 8/10
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965, Hathaway) 7/10

Phantom Thread (2017, Anderson) 9/10

dang

others' reactions might be "well that's only one notch better than Cinderfella."

silence ('16 Scorsese) 7/10
certain women ('16 reichardt) 7/10
life ('17 Daniel Espinosa) 3/10
boat trip ('02 mort Nathan) 7/10
goin' south ('78 Nicholson) 5/10
*arrival ('16 vileneuve) 8/10
midnight express ('78 parker) 4/10
blue jasmine ('13 allen) 6/10
song to song ('17 malick) 7/10
any given sunday ('99 stone) 4/10
best of enemies ('15 Gordon/Neville) 6/10
kate plays Christine ('16 greene) 9/10

others' reactions might be "well that's only one notch better than Cinderfella

Too busy noting the true-to-yourself-ness of ranking the critically acclaimed, crossover horror hit as the second worst thing you saw in the whole batch.

Ward: Comfort and Joy is one of my favourite films ever.

But Eric, I filter for quality! Get Out is still better than average (for ppl who watch average movies).

(it's true, i give less of a shit about hits/non-hits than ever)

Lucky 8/10
The Disaster Artist 4/10
J'Accuse (1936 ) 8/10
Lady Bird 6/10
I, Tonya 6/10

Donnie Darko (Director's Cut) 8.5/10

Much prefer the hazier non-director's cut

The Thief of Bagdad (1940) 3.5/5
49th Parallel (1941) 3.5/5
Moonstruck (1987) 4.5/5
Crime Wave (the John Paizs one;1985;rewatch) 4/5
Liquid Sky (1982) 3.5/5
Kedi (2016) 3/5
Wormwood (2017) 4/5
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) 3/5
Logan Lucky (2017) 3.5/5
Nocturama (2016) 4/5

ladybird - 9/10
gilbert - 7/10
we're the millers - 3/10
wilson - 3/10

lol........ wilson

which Wilson? The 1944 Woodrow biopic?

doubtless better than

All the Money in the World (Scott, 2017)
Out West (Arbuckle, 1918)
The Hayseed (Arbuckle, 1919)
Week-End Wives (Lachman, 1929)
Neighbors (Keaton & Cline, 1920)
*There It Is (Bowers & Muller, 1928)
The Far Country (Mann, 1955)
Million Dollar Legs (Cline, 1932)
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (Joyce & Oldenberg, 2011)
Dreams that Money Can Buy (Richter, 1947)
*Fatty's Tintype Tangle (Arbuckle, 1915)
Oh, My Operation (Cozine, 1931)
Max Wants a Divorce (Linder, 1917)
His First Cigar (Gasnier, 1908)
Max Plays at Drama (Linder et Leprince, 1911)
Liliom (Lang, 1934)
The Florida Project (Baker, 2017)
Out of the Blue (Gerrard, 1931)

Finally saw Lady Bird, and found it frustating. From the hype and some conscientious reviews, I expected dark, dense mother-daughter conflict on the foreground, not all the way through, but the plot leading to spiraling clashes---and we got the schematics for that, with as much force as Laurie Metcalf could squeeze in there---but breaded with the sweet hyper YA mediocrity; Sacremento Beeing and Nothingness. Lady Bird is the bee, buzzin' through the sweetburbs, though makes sense that she would be like this while mainly pushing against the repressive mothering. Mom announces that she's the child of an alcoholic mother, and the other threat of chaos breaking out again concerns the economic and emotional undertow of Dad, who has finally [?] lost his disappointing job (but is the most convenient depressive ever, far as Lady Bird's current plans are concerned). So Mom makes sense too (incl. being the empathetic mental health professional, efficiently compulsively earnestly compartmentalized).
But jeez all this watered down, perfectly timed high school crap, watered-down nuns, for instance, and the one guy who cares about the outside world, who is shown reading A People's History of the United States, is a paranoid depresso flake--says his father's dying of cancer, and the connection is never developed, no way Lady Bird's gonna think to even ask if he wants to talk about it, and the depiction of the brown people, the insular classmate, the adopted brother and his girlfriend in limbo for the moment (but they're stunned by the idea that they can't get jobs cause metal in the faces)--does make sense that they're wary of hyper Lady Bird, but they are otherwise props, and the depresso brown teddy bear priest eh; the little boy at the end is a reminder that some people are worse off than sheee, cause he's got a big ol' bandage, awww. 5/10

Everybody here that I've seen before can do better, prob most of the noobs too. Can Gerwig make better movies, better TV when she gets more clout? I hope for that too. Bring in the candles.

Saw Assayas' Personal Shopper last night (it's on Showtime; it might also be free if you have Amazon Prime), and I liked it. It reminded me of William Gibson's trilogy of thrillers about marketing (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History), with some mildly goofy ghost-story stuff thrown in. Kristen Stewart's a nonentity whose appeal is totally baffling to me, but she was moderately OK in a few scenes here. Mostly I enjoyed the sense it conveyed of living in a nonplace-ish EU populated entirely by ultra-rich people and their servants.

I liked Stewart in Personal Shopper, but she was definitely aided by a script and direction that used her blankness as an asset.

You bitchy queens. She was magnificent.