Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Yeah Godard said that was how he wanted people to watch it:

During our second visit in March 2018, the film was almost finished. The room in which we talked (and where Zoé Bruneau watches a character from Fritz Lang's Metropolis in Goodbye to Language) has now been turned into a small screening room. This is where the first screenings of The Image Book take place, in conditions Godard judges to be the most appropriate. The room is designed in a particular manner: a big TV screen in the center, two big speakers set forward toward the viewers who sit against the opposite wall. These three elements structuring the space recall the ultimately abandoned idea of making a film-sculpture for three screens. But most important is to distance the sound from the image as Godard stresses during our short conversation with him and Fabrice Aragno just after the screening.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/jean-luc-godard-2018-words-like-ants

it was worth seeing 3 times in a theater because the sound design is awesome and there's some great, restrained use of surround sound later on.

Life and Times of Don Rosa

I'll comment anyway because it's directed by a friend of mine :) His followups are more distinct, he makes slow cinema documentaries now.

Will give image book a shot.
Don Rosa doc was well worth it for me, just a question of a very niche topic!

The Souvenir (2019)
The Witch (2015)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Motor Psycho (1965)
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
Vampyr (1932)
The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)
Eyes Without A Face (1960)
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Bedlam (1948)
Mandy (2018)
Witchfinder General (1968)

x-post: One of the greatest artists of the nineties? What do you mean?!?!?!?

No, I do get what you mean. Just yesterday I saw this lifestyle program on Danish television where two experts go through the home of a celebrity and has to guess who lives there, and they both were really surprised that the guy in question had a signed drawing by Don Rosa hanging on his wall (I don't, but I did give my brother a signed copy of the first Don Rosa collection fifteen years ago. And the fact that me and a girl I met one summer couldn't stop writing about Don Rosa with each other probably added a couple of months to a relationship that really didn't have long-term potential). He just shouldn't be niche, you know? I'd say he should be considered as significant a comic book writer as Moore, Gaiman, Morrisson, etc.

Preaching to the converted here as I have slipcover copies of his work. Have had a pair of meaningful conversations with him. He's lesser known in America than any of the guys you mentioned of course.

Well, yeah, but he is huge in Finland. Sigh.

didn't realize until now that The Image Book is on Kanopy

― Dan S, Sunday, 13 October 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Reminder I need to get on Kanopy

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder)
Wonder Woman (Jenkins)
Justice League (Snyder & Whedon / Whedon & Snyder)
Aquaman (Wan)
Joker (Philips)
Black Panther (Coogler)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo)
Rapado (Rejtman)
Silvia Prieto (Rejtman)
The Magic Gloves (Rejtman)
Two Shots Fired (Rejtman)
La Ciénaga (Martel)
The Headless Woman (Martel)*
Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (Heymann)
Wolfland (Chamby-Rus)
Hunting for Hedonia (Grønkjær)
The Idealist (Rosendahl)
Violently in Love (Rosendahl)
Reconstructing Utøya (Javér)
Rediscovery (Ambo)
Neon Heart (Flensted-Jensen)
Valhalla (Madsen)*
Valhalla (Ahmad)
Go With Peace, Jamil (Shargawi)
Western Arabs (Shargawi)
Where Do We Go Now? (Labaki)
Capernaum (Labaki)
Chronicle of the Years of Fire (Lakhdar-Hamina)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)*
In Syria (Van Leeuw)
Clash (Diab)
Atlantiques (short) (Diop)
A Thousand Suns (Diop)
Badou Boy (Diop Mambety)
Down to the Bone (Granik)
Winter’s Bone (Granik)*
Leave No Trace (Granik)
Skin (Nattiv)
The Myth of the American Sleepover (Mitchell)
Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell)
Patti Cake$ (Jasper)

I'm not good with ratings, but Batman vs Superman and Justice League are pretty much 0/10

you had yourself a little superhero filmfest i see!

i would rep these from your pile:
The Headless Woman (Martel)*
Leave No Trace (Granik)
Winter’s Bone (Granik)*

not rep for Patti Cake$

and have these on the waiting list:)
La Ciénaga (Martel)
Where Do We Go Now? (Labaki)
Capernaum (Labaki)
Atlantiques (short) (Diop)
The Myth of the American Sleepover (Mitchell)
Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell)

i should know by now but how/why do you see so much film Frederik? Are you a critic?

Yes :) Also, my girlfriend left me, so now I have much more time for film

(she just moved away, we're long distance, I'm joking)

I do NOT recommend Under the Silver Lake either, btw. Really kinda hated it.

Go on... (I was going to rent it)

I kind of liked Under the Silver Lake

it was definitely too long though and it fell apart at the end

reminded me a little of Southland Tales

Yeah I thought it was pretty fun.

not sure if it was a great film but I really enjoyed Capernaum

I just fought my way through Synonyms, which was beautifully shot and rivetingly acted but so completely outside of my own experience or understanding that I felt I needed an interpreter. Reading through the required postprandial reviews suggests my presumptions regarding the context clues were mostly accurate and that Lapid's tendencies are willfully obscurist and just as unwelcoming as they felt in the watching... but I still feel a bit stupid american trying to untangle this nest of prejudices and presumptions about Frenchness and Israeliness and the alienation and integration of those cultures that was central to the film's humor and insight. Mercier was, as noted, outrageous and captivating but it's a bravura performance within a framework that I'm afraid I was only barely following.

(and I thought Mitchell's 'It Follows' was a brilliant and affecting work about the boogeyman of sexual violence in youth but man, the press for Silver Lake was so unanimous in it's "this guy doesn't get it"-ness that I've been a bit worried to try it)

I was too but there's enough people that love it to make me curious

although the same thing happened with Bad Times at the El Royale and that movie suuuuuuuuuuuuucked

also, as long as I'm rambling here, can i just say how weird it is to me that Parasite has become this phenomenal event film? I love Bong Joon-Ho (though Snowpiercer was unbelievably bad) and Parasite is a very fun, enjoyable movie but I don't get how it somehow become this vortex of total critical assent and drawing massive (young!) crowds to theaters. Everything I'm reading ascribes a much more heightened and nuance sense of social critique when it seemed pretty obvious, if funny, in its EAT THE RICH thesis. I'm happy he's getting love for it but it's not nearly his third best film and i get the sense it's gonna get a best picture, best screenplay and best director nomination.

seems like the same momentum Shoplifters had but BJH is more established in the west than Kore-eda. if its topical message is super obvious that's probably why it's an event film.

didn't really like Snowpiercer

if Parasite is even close to being as good as Shoplifters I will be happy

Silver Lake feels like it was a stretch for Mitchell, but I like films that are a leap forward for the director even if they fall flat

Under the Silver Lake probably benefitted significantly from me going in expecting a total dog based on some of those early reviews (I loved It Follows fwiw), but it put together a pretty goofy, paranoid, panoramic, late-millennial, surrealist noir melange that kinda nailed a certain element of LA. Like Pynchon, Lynch, and The Long Goodbye for dopey LA kids. I haven’t seen Southland Tales, but it didn’t seem far off from a Richard Kelly thing. I don’t think it amounts to much, very shaggy dog, but I thought it was really entertaining.

I don’t understand the hatred for it from some sides. Seemed really ambitious yet utterly silly (intentionally) in a way I found disarming.

that is a good description of it

xp its topical message is SUPER obvious and it's artfully delivered but i think people are treating it as if the whole upstairs/downstairs thing is some sort of supergenius move and freighting it with too much implied cleverness. Bong is a masterful filmmaker and has obvious style but subtle he is not.

i honestly liked Shoplifters a lot more than Parasite but both films suffer from fractured Psycho-esque "did you see what i was getting at there?" endings so ymmv.

The thing about Silver Lake is that I'm an obsessive Pynchon fan, so I thought I would like it, but it just bypasses every point of Pynchon in favor of having Andrew Garfield being goofy. There's no sense of history, of knowledge, of psychology really, it's just all jokes about pop culture. I also thought the aesthetic, while accomplished, was fatally impersonal, and I hated the soundtrack. So there. Plus, I'm writing about it for my blog on Cannes, and part of that blog is thinking about whether it should have been in competition or not, so I can't stop comparing it into Long Day's Journey Into Night as a pomo convoluted noir, and I seriously think choosing Silver Lake over Long Day should be a firing offence. And I don't even really like Long Day. But come on! That final shot! I did like It Follows and The Myth of the American Sleepover, so I'll just call it a misfire and hope Mitchell does something better next time.

Capernaum is quite good, though I also thought it was a bit simplemindedly miserablist. Where Do We Go Now? is really worth checking out, though it's a lot more uneven. Moving rumination on death and sorrow, but I also liked the musical number about hashish cookies.

I saw Synonyms at Berlin, and to me the main thing to get about it is that it's about a Jewish soldier who is really mad that the Jewish people have a country and a military and all that. The key dialogue to me was when his family pointed out he would never be good enough in French, and that it was a shame to shift languages, and he retorted that his grandfather had gone from Yiddish to Hebrew when he went to Israel. It's about wanting to not be strong anymore, to be a nomad, to be an underdog, the way I see it. It's funny, because I thought about it just yesterday while thinking about Peter Handke. It's kinda the same thing, Handke was Slovene, thought that was a romantic and underdoggy thing to be, and completely lost his mind when his fellow Slovenes wanted to be masters of Slovenia, instead of a powerless minority in Yugoslavia. If that makes sense?

hm i have thoughts on that Frederik and will write later but for the moment since we're talking It Follows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMxz6sU1FM0

El Camino 3/5
* Jackie Brown 4.5/5
* Halloween (1978) 4/5
* Witchfinder General (1968) 4/5
Mister America 3/5
Chopping Mall (1986) 1.5/5
The Exorcist III (1990) 3.5/5
La vie de Jesus (1997) 3.5/5
Joker 3/5
Viy (1967) 3.5/5
In the Mouth of Madness (1994) 4/5

Bi Gan's Kaili Blues is one of my favorite movies of the last several years, still curious about Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I chose not to watch it at the Embarcadero because they didn't have the capacity to show it in 3D, regret that now

I'd be really interested in how Long Day plays without 3D, the final shot must seem really weird without it. I'm pretty sure Kaili Blues is the better film, but after I saw Long Day a second time I grasped it a bit more, and while it doesn't really make sense or is that smart or insightful about anything, it's kinda hilarious that it exists. There's a scene where a character plays a video game that makes me laugh just thinking about it, whereas the first time I just got annoyed because it was another weird thing that came out of nowhere.

there's a very endearing dumbness to long day's journey...

Enjoyed your post about Silver Lake Frederik, but mostly fascinated by how radically different of a lens you saw it through. It seemed very arch and playfully aware of the games it was playing, so some of those criticisms don’t really land for me.

Also this is forever a movie I’m saying “It’s got problems, but it’s actually pretty cool in a way” about. I think it’s a really good LA movie.

Pain and Glory (Almodovar, 2019)
*Artistic Temper (Mack, 1932)
*Wild People (McCarey, 1932)
Men of the North (Roach, 1930)
Underworld U.S.A. (Fuller, 1961)
City That Never Sleeps (Auer, 1953)
The Crimson Kimono (Fuller, 1959)
Private Hell 36 (Siegel, 1954)
Murder by Contract (Lerner, 1958)
Deadline-U.S.A. (Brooks, 1952)
A Kiss Before Dying (Oswald, 1956)
The Burglar (Wendkos, 1957)
Woman on the Run (Foster, 1950)

They Live (1988, Carpenter) 8/10
Ginza Cosmetics (1951, Naruse) 8/10
Ningen Gari (1962, Matsuo) 7/10
Act of Violence (1949, Zinnemann) 8/10
What Happened To Rosa? (1920, Schertzinger) 6/10
*The Circus (1928, Chaplin) 9/10
Kansas City Confidential (1952, Karlson) 8/10
Ad Astra (2019, Gray) 8/10
*Gregory’s Girl (1981, Forsyth) 8/10
*The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981, Schumacher) 6/10
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952, Ozu) 8/10
What Did the Lady Forget? (1937, Ozu) 7/10

Cinema

Third Man (Reed, 1949)
Le Franc (Mambety, 1994)
The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Mambety, 199)
Getting to Know the Big, Wide World (Muratova, 1978)

MUBI

Kika (Almodovar, 1993)
Plein Soleil (Clement, 1960)
Silvia Pietro (Rejtman, 1999)
Too Late to Die Young (Castillo, 2018)
How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Green, 2018)
Thursday till Sunday (Castillo, 2012)
Workers, Peasants (Straub/Huillet, 2001)

Mike Wallace Is Here (6.5)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (6.5)
Midsommar (6.0)
Mean Girls (6.5)
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (7.0)
L.I.E. (7.5)
Where’s My Roy Cohn (7.0)
The Hired Hand (7.5)
The Go-Getter (5.5)
A Serious Man (6.0)

Waited a full decade before going back to the last one.

A Woman Under The Influence 7/10
Portrait Of A Young Girl On Fire 8/10
Blood And Roses 7/10

Just got back from the “Surprise Film” that closed out the film festival, here’s what I managed to catch over the week:

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019)
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (Costin, 2019)
Brief Story from the Green Planet (Loza, 2019)
Singing Lovebirds (Makino, 1939)
Fragment of an Empire (Ermler, 1929)
Muse (Brady, 2019)
Docks of Hamburg (Waschneck, 1928)
Caméra D’Afrique (Boughedi, 1983)
7 Reasons to Run Away (From Society) (Soler, Quinto & Torras, 2019)
The Irishman (Scorsese, 2019)

Long-haul return flight means shitty movies galore! Actually they weren't all shit, although I only made it 20 mins into I Feel Pretty which lowers the crap count somewhat.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) 4/10
Edge of Tomorrow (2014) 5/10 (the extra point is for not being Battle: Los Angeles)
Yesterday (2019) 4/10
Stardust (2007) 7/10
Ossan's Love: Love or Dead (2019) 6/10
Diner (2019, directed by Mika Ninagawa who also did Sakuran) 5/10
Bento Harassment (2019) 5/10

They also had 8 1⁄2 available but it didn't seem a plane movie, nor did Annihilation

i couldn't get past the first fifteen minutes of wick 3, which was my first try at the series. just a really gleeful bloodthirstiness in the choreography that seemed downright mean and antihuman. And i'm all about bullet ballet and whatever but this was just dark and dank.

Les Biches (Chabrol, 1968) - 8/10
Effi Briest (Fassbinder, 1974) - 9/10
When Willie Comes Marching Home (Ford, 1950) - 8/10
Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (Becker, 1954) - 9/10
Nightcap (Chabrol, 2000) - 10/10
The Illustrated Man (Smight, 1969) - 6/10
*Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974) - 10/10
The Host (Boon, 2006) - 8/10
Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Fassbinder, 1970) - 8/10
The Swindle (Chabrol, 1997) - 8/10

Whity (Fassbinder, 1971) - 8/10
Torment (Chabrol, 1994) - 9/10
Elevator to the Gallows (Malle, 1958) - 9/10
Les Bonnes Femmes (Chabrol, 1960) - 8/10
They Came Together (Wain, 2014) - 8/10
*His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940) - 9/10
Story of Women (Chabrol, 1988) - 10/10
Bastards (Denis, 2013) - 9/10
Le Trou (Becker, 1960) - 9/10
*Masculin Féminin (Godard, 1966) - 8/10
Scarface (Hawks, 1932) - 7/10
Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette, 1961) - 7/10
Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell, 2018) - 4/10

Hips, Hips, Hooray! (Sandrich, 1934)
Murders in the Zoo (Sutherland, 1933)
The Real McCoy (Doane, 1930)
The 9th Guest (Neill, 1934)
*Dante's Inferno (de Liguoro et al., 1911)
*Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922)
Parasite (Bong, 2019)
The Lighthouse (Eggers, 2019)

looking forward to seeing The Lighthouse and Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is one of the great films of all time imo

Cry of the City (Siodmak, 1948) 7/10
Night of the Demon (Tourneur, 1957) 5/10
*rewatched James and the Giant Peach (Selick, 1996) 7
Cat's Eye (Teague, 1985) 6
The Tomb of Ligeia (Corman, 1964) 3
The Southerners (Renoir, 1945) 9
The Believer's Heaven (the Ormonds, 1977) 5
I Bury the Living (Band, 1958) 7
Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960) low 7
The Wasp Woman (Corman, 1959) 3
From Dusk Till Dawn (Rodriguez, 1996) 4
El Camino (Gilligan, 2019) 6

Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell, 2018) - 4/10

― flappy bird, 26. oktober 2019 05:38 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It really isn't good :)

Dolemite Is My Name - 8/10 - Great fun. Snipes steals it.
Lilliom (Borzage) - 8/10
Greendale - 7/10
La Dentilliere - 8/10 (extra point for Huppert's performance)

Lilliom (Borzage) - 8/10

― SQUIRREL MEAT!! (Capitaine Jay Vee), Monday, October 28, 2019 5:17 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You're being extraordinarily generous to Charles Farrell. The man is the dictionary illustration of "adorkable," but he's way out of his league as a playboy carnie.

Rather than continuing to be the only one who uses the 5-star system I'll try to switch it up this time.

The Lighthouse 8/10
The Beyond (1981) 4/10
Night Nurse (1931) 6/10
Robert Frost: a Lover's Quarrel with the World (1963) 4/10
Tales from the Hood (1995) 5/10
White Zombie (1932) 4/10
Parasite 8/10