Last (x) movies you saw (II)

it wasn’t a puzzle, but Josh’s mind is gonna be blown when he sees his first ten or twenty Woody Allen flicks

(yes, Van Peebles, plus Welles)

Woody who?

I'm not a fan of Woody Allen films, really. I don't think he's that great of an actor. Or even director, for that matter, though he has made a couple of movies I've liked. Cassavetes is kind of a more impressive writer/actor/director. Citizen Kane is pretty good, too. But it's been a while since I've seen a movie written, directed by and starring the same person, which is why it struck me.

Though I appreciate the pedantic sarcasm.

Oh yeah, speaking of Shane Carruth, he's a more recent triple-threat, too. And Sling Blade? Seemed to happen more during the indie boom of the '90s.

Kane was 1941 btw

The Kindergarten Teacher (Colangelo, 2018) 7/10
Dodsworth (Wyler, 1936) 8/10
Broken Arrow (Daves, 1950) 7/10
*Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante, 1990) 8/10
Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018) 8/10
Querelle (Fassbinder, 1982) 6/10
The Rachel Divide (Brownson, 2018) 7/10
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Lubitsch, 1927) 7/10
Mikey and Nicky (May, 1976) 7/10
*Annie (Huston, 1982) 6/10

Birds of Passage was outrageously good and Shakespearean in scope; highest recommendation to anyone near where it's screening

The Artits, which I hadn't seen before last night's BBC4 showing. Quite effective largely silent film or at least the sound consists of soundtrack music apart from a couple of crucial points. Hope taht isn't too much spoiler.
French/US film with 2 French leads and several internationally known ones. I didn't recognise the actress who played Peppy so has she made much of a move intop International film, or is she well known in france?
Quite fun.

fwiw Woody Allen has always said he's not an actor

Enoch Arden (1911, Griffith) (33m) 7/10
Shoplifters (2018, Kore-eda) 7/10
*Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007, Jones) (TV) 8/10
Stan & Ollie (2018, Baird) 7/10
*The Crying Game (1992, Jordan) 8/10
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Matsumoto) 6/10
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991, Callow) 5/10
*Mikey and Nicky (1976, May) 10/10
Warlock (1959, Dmytryk) 8/10
*Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (1993, Riggs) (38m) 8/10

Morbius what is it about Mikey and Nicky? I haven't seen it & you're pretty parsimonious with 10/10's so my interest is piqued.

I read Frank Bill’s DONNYBROOK last year and really didn’t like it much at all. It felt like a try-hard cross between Harry Crews and Jim Thompson, lapped up by soft-handed, voyeuristic critics. The movie, which I just watched tonight via Amazon, is much better. It’s beautifully shot, and minimalist in a good way, and although there’s a lot of violence it’s handled…tastefully, sort of. Recommended, if you’re a fan of movies about hillbilly bare-knuckle boxing tournaments.

fb, it's Elaine May's masterpiece -- the two actors' too. Not a wasted frame.

Cold War (2018) 7/10
Fyre (2019) 6/10
Burning (2018) 7/10
The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) 3/10
The Handmaiden (2016) 7/10
Tarnation (2003) 7/10
Every Man For Himself (1980) 6/10
The Big Chill (1983) 5/10
The Cat Returns (2002) 7/10
Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse (2018) 7/10

Iron Man (Browning, 1931)
The Lemon Drop Kid (Neilan, 1934)
Below Zero (Parrott, 1930)
You're Darn Tootin' (Kennedy, 1928)
Too Busy to Work (Blystone, 1932)
Douro, Faina Fluvial (de Oliveira, 1931)
Aniki-Bóbó (de Oliveira, 1942)
The Green Years (Rocha, 1963)

Self/less (Tarsem, 2015) abandoned
Trolls (Dreamworks, Mike Mitchell, 2016) 3/10
Green Book (Farrelly, 2018) 3/10
*rewatch of A Star is Born (WB, Cukor, 1954) 9/10
BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018) 8/10

slow month.

Apollo 11 is an amazing achievement, genuinely awe inspiring and beautiful. I'm sure it'll be on CNN before end of the year but do yourself a favor and see it in theaters or, better yet, IMAX.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/25/apollo-11-review-eye-opening-documentary-is-a-five-star-triumph
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/27/we-felt-a-huge-responsibility-behind-the-landmark-apollo-11-documentary
Director said they went through over 11k hours of footage and 18k hours of unsynched audio; took years to shake out. The effort and the love of production really shows.

Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964) 9/10
High Flying Bird (Soderbergh, 2019) 7/10
The Green Ray (Rohmer, 1986) 10/10
Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer, 1972) 8/10
Daisies (Chytilova, 1966) 8/10
This Land is Mine (Renoir, 1943) 6/10
Hanagatami (Obayashi, 2017) 5/10
Let The Summer Never Come Again (Koberidze, 2017) 8/10
Yourself and Yours (Hong, 2016) 7/10
The American Friend (Wenders, 1977) 8/10

Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Yourself Yours (Hong Sang-soo, 2016)

does burning live up to the hype?
seeing woman at war tonight; will report back

I liked it. There is a thread here with a variety of takes:

BURNING (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 2018) - Murakami adaptation feat. Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, and Jeon Jong-seo

Burning was great

You should definitely see Burning. In all honesty I probably prefer Woman at War, but both films good.

February:

Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) 8/10
Fire (Smith, 2019) 6/10
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004) 7/10
Casque d'Or (Becker, 1952) 8/10
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Heller, 2018) 6/10 - might have rated this higher if the trailer hadn't given away the entire plot of the movie
Five Element Ninjas (Chang Cheh, 1982) 8/10
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Aldrich, 1964) 7/10
The Creeping Flesh (Francis, 1973) 7/10
Bram Stoker's Dracula (Curtis, 1974) 6/10
CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans (Dumont, 2018) 8/10
Machorka-Muff (Straub-Huillet, 1963) 7/10

Will wait on that thread till i view... bit looking forward to it!

might have rated this higher if the trailer hadn't given away the entire plot of the movie

snap

January & February in theaters:

Shoplifters (Kore-eda, 2018) - 9/10
On the Basis of Sex (Leder, 2018) - 4/10
Destroyer (Kusama, 2018) - 2/10
Glass (Shyamalan, 2019) - 1/10
Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2018) - 8/10
Stan & Ollie (Baird, 2018) - 1/10
When You Read This Letter (Melville, 1953) - 8/10
Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987) - 9/10
Clara’s Ghost (Elliott, 2018) - 2/10
They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) - 2/10
Secrets of Women / Waiting Women (Bergman, 1952) - 4/10
What Men Want (Shankman, 2019) - 8/10
2019 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Live Action (various, 2018) - 0/10
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954) - 7/10
Cold Pursuit (Moland, 2019) - 6/10
2019 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary (various, 2018) - 3/10
The Image Book (Godard, 2018) - 10/10

Free Solo. Amazing feat, but Meru was the much better man-vs-mountain face movie, imo.

Lost In The White City - 8/10
Peterloo - 5/10 ( broadest acting of any Mike Leigh film I've seen. Nearly Pythons-level broad. Extra point for the beautiful period look.)
All Is Lost - 7/10

flappy, why so down on Stan & Ollie? just the bio genre in general? this one was about as good as those get.

Funny aside re: that one. A friend of mine was telling me the other day that she had some time to kill a while back, and Stan & Ollie was literally the only thing playing in the time slot she had free. So she went to see it, more or less blind, and really enjoyed it. Which is typically a sign of a good (or at least successful) movie.

Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954) - 7/10

Tough audience.

Yes, if any films demands a 10/10 rating it's Sansho - though it obv has to be seen in as pristine a print as possible for maximum perfection. Never sure if I favour Sansho over Ugetsu Monogatari, another 10 out of 10er.

Ugetsu is such a great looking movie. I haven't seen it for a long while but I remember it being as visually arresting as Sunrise.

idk, i much prefer a geisha and sisters of the gion to ugetsu or sansho but the problem might be i haven't seen any of them in the cinema

Stan & Ollie left me totally cold and bored. I don't seek out biopics but I don't have anything against them. I thought the production value was suited for Netflix or something even less ubiquitous, just no artistry or anything interesting going on aesthetically, such a bland looking movie. Also, this could've been an issue with the theater I went to, but it sounded like elements of the soundtrack were missing or muted. Almost as if watching a sitcom without a laugh track, it felt technically incomplete. I would've been more forgiving and more engaged if I were a fan or even familiar with Laurel & Hardy's work. But I couldn't even get into it as an old Hollywood period piece, especially since it's them later in life and in theater. I was eager for a movie to lose myself in because right before it started, the woman sitting in front of me started screaming at me for talking with my friend about how much I disliked Roma - steam was practically coming out of her ears when the lights went down.

Sansho I will give another chance another day. I love Mizoguchi but I prefer him in contemporary settings, like Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy. Sansho was confusing, but I was tired, and couldn't keep up with the particulars of whatever era of feudal Japan it's set in. The ending is brilliant and the "Isn't life a torture?" song is haunting, but my friend and I were flagging for most of it. A few days later I watched A Story from Chikamatsu and liked it a lot more, but I have a soft spot for star-crossed lovers damned by society. I liked Ugetsu and will watch The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums... tonight maybe!

I saw The Image Book for the third time today and might go back tomorrow for a fourth.

Don't see Greta, it really sucks.

Yeah, that Greta trailer makes me think Huppert did this on a whim. Looks awful and CGM always seems like she'd rather be doing something other than acting.

well, she's doing a play in New York right now.

sorry, CGM isn't! Huppert is.

saw Cold War in one of my favorite theaters. It was really beautiful to look at (pretty much enough for me), although I had a hard time staying interested in its single-minded focus on the disordered central relationship

I feel bad for missing image book. Is it at Lincoln center?

gone; gotta pounce on JLG, not a crowd pleaser

take the train down to Baltimore and we'll see it together

the trailer for was sorta bad but I thought how could you possibly screw up Isabelle Huppert + CGM?

watch Greta to find out

Wrong Again (McCarey, 1929)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Birds of Passage (Guerra & Gallego, 2018)
Elmer's Pet Rabbit (Jones, 1941)
In the Money (Strayer, 1933)
Zama (Martel, 2017)

Greta wasn't even good camp.

trying Transit tonight and Anthropocene on Thursday; Burtynsky has a killer eye but i wouldn't be half as interested to see it on television. Scope!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBrXykjecx8

xp Zama and Birds of Passage are among the best films of the past five years, great doubleheader!

I'm still trying to process both films (plus Burning that same weekend).