Last (x) movies you saw (II)

oh the cinematography is the best thing about it

and hard not to compare to Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, two of the most beguiling performances/characters ever

i admire it more than *love* it but it's great, i think the unrepentant ugliness of LaMotta as a human being vs the beauty of the film itself is pretty compelling. though i put it below a number of other Scorsese pics.

night and the city ('92 winkler) 7/10
the ballad of buster scruggs (2018 coens) 3/10
barfly ('87 schroeder) 7/10
the house that jack built (2018 lvt) 2/10
stepmom ('98 columbus) 7/10
hot summer nights (2017 elijah bynum) 7/10
wildlife (2018 dano) 6/10
american animals (2018 bart layton) 4/10
the price of everything (2018 nathaniel kahn) 8/10
kill me again ('89 dahl) 4/10
man up (2015 ben palmer) 9/10
crooked hearts ('91 michael bortman) 6/10

The Magnificent Seven (Sturges, 1960)
Quick Change (Franklin/Murray, 1990)
*Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)
Dheepan (Audiard, 2015)
Performance (Cammell/Roeg, 1970)
Glastonbury Fayre (Neal/Roeg, 1972)
*No Regrets for Our Youth (Kurosawa, 1946)
Mr. Freedom (Klein, 1969)
Tess (Polanski, 1978)
and about 15 minutes of The Awful Truth before Filmstruck went black this morning

some shorts:
Hunger (Foldes, 1974)
Sea Devil (Marcial/Potter, 2014)
Alice's Mysterious Mystery (Disney/Iwerks, 1926)
The Fresh Lobster (unknown, 1948)
Ko-Ko Sees Spooks (Fleischer, 1925)

Kind of guesswork as to where I left off last time, but anyway:

The Czech Year (Trnka, 1947)
The Devil's Mill (Trnka, 1949)
The Emperor's Nightingale (Trnka, 1949)
The Asphyx (Newbrook, 1972)
Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (Lynch, 1992/2014)
Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (West, 2010)
Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (a committee of assholes, 1989)- this was the feature (all three goddamn parts) screened at my first Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society meeting, and I experienced it as both a personal affront (it fucking sucks) and a test of endurance (it was something like three hours long)
Why UNESCO? (Trnka, 1958)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Trnka, 1959)
And Then There Were None (Viveiros, 2015)
Resolution (Moorhead & Benson, 2012)
Hereditary (Aster, 2018)
*Perfect Blue (Kon, 1997)
WNUF Halloween Special (LaMartina, 2013)
Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018)
V/H/S (various, 2012)- I don't know why I keep thinking modern anthology horror films will be any good, or that Ti West will ever impress me again
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (Krulik & Heyn, 1986)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Stoller, 2008)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen, 2018)
Forbidden Zone (Elfman, 1980)

The Night Walker (Castle, 1964) 7
Bohemian Rhapsody (Singer and Sigel, 2018) 6
Murder by Contract (Lerner, 1958) 9
The Thing From Another World (Nyby, 1951) 3; has a few scary moments
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Lanfield, 1939) 6
Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Forbes, 1964) 8

* The Marriage of Maria Braun 4/5
Theodora Goes Wild (1936) 3/5
Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989) 4.5/5
The Silver Cord (1933) 3/5
The Merry Widow (1934) 3.5/5
* Awesome! I Fuckin' Shot That (2006) 3/5
Manila in the Claws of Light (1975) 3.5/5
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) 4/5
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) 4/5
Heaven Can Wait (1943) 3.5/5

only one this week:

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

The first film had a very sinister lure to it and its thin story was elevated to something more foreboding by both its direction and its screenplay POV from an out-of-the-loop protagonist, and the mysteries only somewhat answered really helped as well. Plus the astonishing score. The sequel is a lesser film which gets by on some great action scenes and a very good core cast (Del Toro, Brolin, Donovan, Isabela Moner.)

It definitely suffers from having somewhat more anonymous skilled craftsman direction -- Sollima seems to come more from the Philip Noyce school of Jack Ryan movies type action as opposed to what Villaneuve brings to the table. That's not an insult, more an observation!

The terrorism/government side of things is really uninteresting; Modine and Keener don't do anything story or character-wise. I wish they'd found another way in to the story, but whatever.

It's decent enough, better than a lot of action flicks but it's missing the original's singular spooky quality. ymmv on this one.

13th to the 30th:

120 battements par minute (Campillo, Mangeot 2017) 📺
* Starship Troopers (Verhoeven, Neumeier 1997)
Night Of The Hunter (Laughton, Agee, Grubb 1955) 📽️ 35mm
* Thor: Ragnarok (Waititi, Pearson & al. 2017) 🏋️
The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (Coen & Coen 2018)
* The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (Coen & Coen 2018) 📺
Three Days Of The Condor (Pollack, Semple Jr., Rayfiel, Grady 1975) 📺
Addams Family Values (Sonnenfeld, Rudnick 1993)
Slap Shot (Hill, Dowd 1977) 📽️ 35mm
Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (Bernstein and Edelstein 2012) 📺
The Nice Guys (Black, Bagarozzi 2016) 📺
* Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Wright, O'Malley, Bacall 2010) 🏋️

To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944) 8/10
The One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967) 8/10
Suspiria (Guadagnino, 2018) 5/10
Burnt Offerings (Curtis, 1976) 7/10
Shoplifters (Koreeda, 2018) 8/10

Reading about this re-make of Suspiria and it just sounds awful.

Not reading about it cos I have tickets for it on my birthday

I went into it so determined NOT to be an Argento purist that it took me a while to realise how bad it mostly was. Happy birthday NV!

Not till a week on Tuesday. My son really liked it but I know our tastes don't always coincide. Still better than going out for a hangover tho :)

after reading our messageboard tonight I think watching anything but MOTD sounds like a plan.

lol wrong thread again, I'm losing it today.

but to keep it on topic I'm watching Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood tonight!

A Simple Favor (6.0)
White Boy Rick (5.0)
Mid90s (7.0)
Broadcast News (9.0)
The Passion of Anna (8.0)
Persona (8.0)
How to Steal a Million (6.0)*
Fahrenheit 11/9 (5.0)
Fanny & Alexander (8.5)
The Last Pogo Jumps Again (7.0)

Not sure if I drifted off for 10 minutes during How to Steal a Million or if it was longer. So the rating is somewhat provisional--there really isn't much there besides Audrey Hepburn anyway.

Persona is obviously a 10, maybe Fanny & Alexander too. If I rated films solely on how much their place in film history engaged me, the excitement of watching something masterful and unique, that's what I'd give it. But I rate almost solely on emotional engagement, and it is rather hermetic. (Both Kauffmann and Kael basically wrote that it was like eavesdropping on Bergman's innermost thoughts--praise for him, a limitation for her.) Broadcast News I'd give a, I don't know, 3.0 for its place in film history--it's of zero consequence. But it does, for whatever reason, move me.

Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018) - this has been compared to Shoah and while both centre around testimonies of camp survivors (in this case of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps) its a completely different approach, to its credit. Bing seldom resorts to a cinematic approach, he allows the survivors the time and space they need to tell and share what they can (Lanzmann would cajole them to get what he wanted) and doesn't push them if they aren't able to (as in a couple of cases). In a couple of examples we hear from the wives of the men who either survived the camps or died (as in the last case - where the link to the events of the Cultural Revolution taking place a few years later is made in the most harrowing of ways). Wang Bing, unlike Lanzmann, doesn't appear to have as much of an ego - you only see him twice and in the most discreet of ways. All in all its quite an achievement.

On a plane to and from Oslo:

Kingsman: The Secret Service (.000001/10)
Avengers: Infinity War (.00001/10)
The Predator (.5/10)
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2/10)
The Meg (3/10)

sorry for your flight looks like it was a drag

I would never have watched any of these movies had I not been on a plane. The Meg had some decent jump scares, and, you know, Jason Statham fighting a giant shark. And with the Mission: Impossible movie, at least you knew Tom Cruise actually fucked himself up doing his own stunts. But that Avengers thing, holy fuck.

xxxp otm, also saw it this week. thought it was interesting that Wang only becomes a visual presence when he interviews the cadre.

*A Story of Water (Truffaut et Godard, 1961)
Les Mistons (Truffaut, 1957)
Broadway Love (Park, 1918)
Off the Record (Henabery, 1934)
*Leap Year (Cruze & Arbuckle, 1921)
Old Czech Legends (Trnka, 1953)
My Grandfather's Clock (Feist, 1934)
There Ain't No Santa Claus (Parrott, 1926)

thought it was interesting that Wang only becomes a visual presence when he interviews the cadre.

yes, and shot at this angle where Wang was looking at him at all times.

will have to catch Wang's Dead Souls at some point. I love Lanzmann and lots of the important work he did, but he could be a ruthless interviewer, and I think it's fair to say that you shouldn't do that any more. Not meant as a criticism of Lanzmann because it was a different era, a different scale of atrocity he was chronicling, a different generation etc...

in theaters past month & a half

A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) - 9/10
The Old Man & the Gun (Lowery, 2018) - 7/10
Mid90s (Hill, 2018) - 5/10
Beautiful Boy (Van Groeningen, 2018) - 3/10
Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman, 1955) - 10/10
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Heller, 2018) - 7/10
Wanda (Loden, 1970) - 10/10
Wildlife (Dano, 2018) - 4/10
Boy Erased (Edgerton, 2018) - 2/10
Widows (McQueen, 2018) - 4/10
Instant Family (Anders, 2018) - 6/10
The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) - 10/10
Nobody’s Fool (Perry, 2018) - 4/10
Green Book (Farrelly, 2018) - 4/10
Playtime (Tati, 1967) - 10/10
Mirai (Hosoda, 2018) - 6/10
Baby Doll (Kazan, 1956 / 35mm) - 5/10
Casque d’Or (Becker, 1952 / 35mm) - 9/10

flappy bird your passion for Bergman has convinced me to explore his films

Aniki Bóbó (de Oliveira)
No, or the Vainglory of Command (de Oliveira)
Voyage to the Beginning of the World (de Oliveira)
Mandala (Im Kwon-taek)
Sopyonje (Im Kwon-taek)
The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo)
The Net (Kim)
The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (Hong)
Yourself & Yours (Hong)
On the Beach at Night Alone (Hong)
Claire’s Camera (Hong)
Five Boys from Barska Street (A. Ford)
Knights of the Teutonic Order (A. Ford)
The First Day of Freedom (A. Ford)
Dear Wendy (Vinterberg, script by von Trier)
The House That Jack Built (von Trier)
Titicut Follies (Wiseman)
Ex Libris (Wiseman)
A Bomb Was Stolen (Popescu-Gopo)
Opera Jawa (Nugroho)
Gosford Park (Altman)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen & Coen)
The Other Side of the Wind (Welles)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948) 9/10
Three (To, 2016) 6/10
No Home Movie (Akerman, 2010) 9/10
Predators (Antal, 2010) - a spanish dub, seemed ok?
Suspiria (Argento, 1977) 7/10
Dead Souls (Wang, 2018) 8/10
Shoplifters (Kore-eda, 2018) 7/10
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992) 7/10
* The Red Shoes (Powell, Pressburger, 1948) 8/10

what's the streaming service to watch like bergman and ozu again? that exists right

no art house w/in 300 miles of me and i want to check some of these out. have no idea who kore-eda even is.

Kanopy.

Korla (Turner, 2015): Documentary about the musician and personality Korla Pandit. He had a pretty interesting story, and the doc was low-key enough to not get in the way. Interviews with Santana, Harry Edwards, Ben Fong-Torres, the Muffs, etc. Really changed the way I think about Liberace.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coens, 2018) 9/10
*Gilda Live (Nichols, 1980) 8/10
The Great McGinty (Sturges, 1940) 7/10
*The Fog (Carpenter, 1980) 7/10
The Mortal Storm (Borzage, 1940) 6/10
BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018) 7/10
*The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940) 10/10
The Incredibles 2 (Bird, 2018) 7/10
The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, 2018) 5/10
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Neville, 2018) 6/10

flappy bird your passion for Bergman has convinced me to explore his films

― Dan S, Monday, December 3, 2018 11:58 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

get the box 😈

The Secret Bride (Dieterle, 1934)
Next Aisle Over (1919)
Triumph of the Heart (Molander, 1929)
A Little Hero (Sennett, 1913)
Woman Haters (Gottler, 1934)
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018)
The Night Before Christmas (Jackson, 1933)
The Emperor's Nightingale (Trnka, 1949)
Smash Your Baggage (Mack, 1932)
The Ascent (Shepitko, 1977)

how did you like The Ascent? I saw Wings and wasn't really into it

Terribly grueling, although certainly true to the subject and period. I saw Wings so long ago I don't trust my memories of it. (It does end with the teacher taking a plane for a joyride?)

Re-watching Carpenter's The Thing tonight.

xp yes, and that's pretty much exactly what I thought of Wings (although I do love that ending, but more in concept than execution)

* Pickup on South Street (1953) 4/5
Roma 3.5/5
Gotti (2018) 0/5
Shirkers (2018) 4.5/5
Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay (2012) 4/5
The Favourite 3.5/5

saw the Roger Ailes doc DIVIDE AND CONQUER, v good, catch it in theaters if you can bc it's doing terrible business. likability of subject never occurred to me as a factor but runaway success of Mr. Rogers, Gila Radner, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg docs this year gives me pause (and depresses me - Ailes is inarguably one of the most important and influential people of the last 50 years).

College Swing (1938, Walsh) 6/10
Filmworker (2017, Zierra) 6/10
For Heaven’s Sake (1926, Taylor / Lloyd) 9/10
*Love Songs (2007, Honore) 7/10
White Lightning (1973, Sargent) 4/10
*Porcile aka Pigsty (1969, Pasolini) 6/10
Wolfsburg (2003, Petzold) 7/10
Yella (2007, Petzold) 7/10
Vester-Vov-Vov aka People of the North Sea (1927, Lauritzen) 6/10
Bisbee ’17 (2018, Greene) 8/10
Son premier film (1926, Kemm) 5/10
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Lupino) 7/10

Tried watching Eastwood's Hoover movie on a plane. Holy shit, what a smoking trash pile.

First Reformed (Schrader, 2018)
Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018)
Deep Red (Argento, 1975)
You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay, 2018)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen/Coen, 2018)
Zama (Martel, 2018)
Let the Sunshine In (Denis, 2017)
Revenge (Fargeat, 2017)
The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, 2018)
The Polymath (Taylor, 2009)
Theory of Obscurity (Hardy, 2016)
The Night Comes for Us (Tjahjanto, 2018)

The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles, 1942) - 9/10
M (Lang, 1931) - 10/10
Topaz (Hitchcock, 1969) - 3/10
Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936) - 9/10
Career Girls (Leigh, 1997) - 8/10
Trafic (Tati, 1971) - 9/10
The Thing Called Love (Bogdanovich, 1993) - 5/10
A Report on the Party and the Guests (Němec, 1966) - 8/10
Intimidation (Kurahara, 1960) - 9/10
Blue is the Warmest Color (Keciche, 2013) - 7/10
American Honey (Arnold, 2016) - 10/10
Brewster McCloud (Altman, 1970) - 9/10
Mouchette (Bresson, 1967) - 9/10
Roma (Fellini, 1972) - 6/10
Claire’s Knee (Rohmer, 1970) - 4/10
Parade (Tati, 1974) - 6/10
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson, 1945) - 4/10
El Norte (Nava, 1983) - 8/10

Making Christmas Crackers (1910)
Santa Claus (Smith, 1898)
The Masquerader (Wallace, 1933)
Bubbling Over (Jason, 1934)
Shoplifters (Kore-eda, 2018)
The Favourite (Lanthimos, 2018)
L'Innocente (Visconti, 1976)

(xpost) Ratings are ratings, everyone has different taste, and I hate having a solitary rating of my own cherry-picked and held up ridicule here, so I'm not trying to doing that. But I'd be interested in hearing some elaboration on the 4/10 for Claire's Knee.

not only boring but contemptible, a film revolving around an absurd conceit and a 'moral tale' that gives too much (any) credit to the protagonist's dilemma. it's the first Rohmer I've seen and I will continue to plug away, but wow, after trying to see Claire's Knee for the better part of a year, it was a real letdown.