Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972) 6/10
Hearts of Darkness (1991) 8/10
Memory (2019) 6/10
Son of Frankenstein (1939) 8/10
House (1977) 8/10
Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) 6/10
Dolemite Is My Name (2019) 7/10
Dogman (2018) 6/10
The Blob (1958) 9/10
Do the Right Thing (1989) 7/10

The Blob (1958) 9/10

Saw this for the first time this Halloween season and hated it.

xpost Oh wow "Do The Right Thing" is *at least* an 8/10, no?

The Blob is a dumb drive-in film (and even though i may have last seen it on TV in the '70s, i'm p sure this judgment wd hold up)

re:Do The Right Thing - yeah I dunno, I never like it as much as I wish I did. I think this was my 3rd time seeing it since the 90s and it diminishes a bit for me each time. There are some performances that I really hate in it, the treatment of the female characters looks worse each time, and some of the stagier elements land with a heavier thud for me. I watched it with my partner who had never seen it and we had a great time talking about it, but I dunno if I need to see it again by myself.

Re: The Blob - saw it for the first time last year and it was way different than i expected... the weird stilted acting, slow pace, the empty streets, the beautiful nighttime lighting and primary colors, the way its padded out with character moments like the cop playing chess or Steve McQueen trying to talk his way out of a ticket, it almost feels like Aki Kaurismaki or something. The fact that it all takes place across one long night gives it a weird dreamlike quality, my partner compared it to a Stephen Millhauser story. I think I really, really like it a lot.

The beautiful crisp print & colors of the criterion dvd must help a lot with this, i doubt i would have the same reaction to it if it didnt look so visually singular imo. One of my favorite bits, which I dont know if this would come across on a small screen or bad print, is the famous shot when all the people are running out of the movie theater, you can see almost all of them are smiling and laughing, having a great old time getting to be in a real movie in their very own town.

Yeah, I'd much rather have been in that movie than have been watching it.

lol fair enough

The Farewell 8/10 - Really wonderful. One of the best recent American indie films I've seen: affecting, wonderfully written and performed.
*Ugetsu Monogatari 8/10
*The Image Book 9/10

Motherless Brooklyn isn't quite a dog, but it's a thoroughly unremarkable two and a half hours. Like so many novel adaptations, it works on paper but doesn't amount to much in the end. It's not a disaster like The Goldfinch, or faithful to a fault like If Beale Street Could Talk, but it's just... so middle of the road and merely competent. it's ambitious but ambition is not a virtue in itself.

Ad Astra (Gray, 2019)
The Turin Horse (Tarr, 2011)
J-Men Forever (Patterson, 1979)
History Is Made at Nigh (Borzage, 1937)
*A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger, 1946)
Early Spring (Ozu, 1956)
Fire Over England (Howard, 1937)
*Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
Raw Deal (Mann, 1948)
The Beaning (short - McCoy, 2017)
*True Stories (Byrne, 1986)
Unrelated (Hogg, 2007)
Che - Part One (Soderbergh, 2008)
Invasaion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956)
El Camino (Gilligan, 2019)
Che - Part Two (Soderbergh, 2008)
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Haskin, 1964)
Fractured (Anderson, 2019)
The Others (Amenábar, 2001)
High Life (Denis, 2018)
Fires on the Plain (Ichikawa, 1959)
Sorceror (Friedkin, 1977)
And Life Goes On (Kiarostami, 1992)
Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994)

Soylent Green was great. Heston’s character is pretty amoral/desperate for a lot of it, blatantly stealing from crime scenes, partying with hookers, etc.
Don’t Breathe is a heist movie that takes a hard swerve in its final third. A little too long but still very solid; gets the job done.
John Carter of Mars was a lot more violent and gorier than I expected.

i agree w/ one eye open about the blob, it has a weird unique atmosphere that doesn't really feel like other drive-in/50s sci-fi movies. gorgeous colors, too.

Don't Breathe is so fucked up

In the tall grass: just avoid.

Maleficent. Mediocre.

as noted in the devoted thread: I saw the Irishman opening night, it was very good. the first two hours were so preordained, so much gangster fan service scripting, so much special effects and explosions that i did have the "well how is this different from a marvel movie" thought but the last 30 minutes really redeem the film and act as apologia for scorcese's big dick bad guy fantasy fuel. DeNiro is fine, Pacino is a restrained as he's likely to be for the rest of his career and Pesci is fucking amazing as the most menacing grampa ever. He'd be winning a best supporting actor Oscar as long as he did the press stuff and is friendly on camera which i suppose he won't do.

Greener Grass: AVOID AT ALL COSTS

agreed. cardinal sin: it's boring.

The Greene Murder Case (Tuttle, 1929)
Archipelago (Hogg, 2010)
Murder By the Clock (Sloman, 1931)
*The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström, 1921)
*Haxan (Christensen, 1922)
Forbidden Paradise (Lubitsch, 1924)
*Girl Shy (Newmeyer & Taylor, 1924)
Duck Soup (Guiol, 1927)
Liberty (McCarey, 1929)
*Wrong Again (McCarey, 1929)
*Two Tars (Parrott & McCarey, 1928)

xp Yes it is, and at 100 minutes, far too long for a comedy. I assumed the filmmakers were UCB alumni and yes they are. that is a poisonous organization. AWKWARDNESS IS NOT FUNNY IN AND OF ITSELF. I swear to god, I thought the Tim & Eric ripoffs would've stopped by now. Tom Goes to the Mayor premiered 15 years ago.

Criterion just debuted Julián Hernández's 2009 Raging Sun, Raging Sky. Yes?

100 minutes, far too long for a comedy.

Huh?

a comedy with the depth and range of an SNL skit? cut that shit down to the theatrical minimum

I finally got around to watching Trainspotting 2, it wasn't as pathetic as I expected. Definitely much better than El Camino, which was basically pointless.

Trainspotting 2 left me with questions though. Was there a reference to Shallow Grave? (And should I watch that again?) Also was Spud meant for kind of a stand-in for Danny Boyle? I don't really know anything about Boyle other than the fact he has made some good movies and some not-so-good movies.

Halloween viewing

* Diamonds Are Forever (Hamilton, Mankiewicz 1971)
Driller Killer (Ferrara, St. John 1979)
* M:i-2 (Woo, Towne, Moore, Braga, Goldman, Tolkin, Strick 2000)
* Face / Off (Woo, Werb, Colleary 1997)
Child's Play (Holland, Mancini, Lafia 1988)
Witchfinder General (Reeves, Baker 1968) [📽️ 35mm]
* Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (Tarantino 2019) [DCP]
Mister America (Notarnicola, Heidecker, Turkington 2019) [DCP]
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman et al, Oliver et al 1987)
El Camino (Gilligan 2019)
* Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (Herek, Matheson, Solomon 1989) [DCP]
Night Of The Creeps (Dekker 1986) [DCP]
Any Port In A Storm (Penn, Cohen, Ross 1973)
Dolemite Is My Name (Brewer, Alexander, Karazewski 2019) [DCP]
The Laundromat (Soderbergh, Burns 2019)
Candyman (Rose, Barker 1992)
* Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven 1984) [DCP]
Vampire In Brooklyn (Craven, Murphy, Lynch, Murphy, Lucker, Parker 1995)
Little Shop Of Horrors (Corman, Griffith 1960)
The Wrong Man (Hitchcock, Anderson, MacPhail 1956) [📽️ 35mm]
* Dead Ringers (Cronenberg, Snider 1988)
Dead Heat (Goldblatt, Black, Starr 1988)
* Mad Max 2 (Miller, Hayes, Hannant 1981)

Why the joint credit for Witchfinder General, sic? Nice to see it on 35mm, which I would think wld especially suit the grimy cinematography - was it the UK cut?

I credit writers!

The cinema weren't sure which cut they were getting, but based on running time guessed it was the US cut. however it wasn't titled Conqueror Worm on the print, and didn't have excessive gratuitous nudity, so I'm assuming it was the UK.

and yeah, that is one grotty-looking movie, feeling as if you could wipe the print down and see everything brighter. I noticed the soldiers in the first scene were especially dusty and muddy, as befits people who've been living in the same clothes for months, but the rest of the film leans more towards (well-worn but cared-for) costumes, and wondered if Reeves shot that opening scene last especially to set a tone for era-accurate filth in viewers' minds.

also the first scene of Hopkins hauling accused to trial takes place beside an old but pleasant looking house with flowerbeds & such, before the rest of the settings are more medieval-hangover taverns and town squares and keeps, like he's dragging the audience out of a m/l familiar environment into the movie's timeframe

The Algerian War! (Straub, 2014) 8/10
En Rachachant (Huillet, Straub, 1982) 4/10
*24 City (Jia, 2008) 9/10
Workers, Peasants (Huillet, Straub, 2001) 9/10
Thursday till Sunday (Sotomayor, 2012) 7/10
The Arboretum Cycle (Dorsky, 2017) 9/10
Mister America (Notarnicola, 2019) 6/10
Mar (Sotomayor, 2014) 4/10
Mrs. Fang (Wang, 2017) 8/10
The Fall (Glazer, 2019) 3/10
The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (Hong, 1996) 7/10
Grass (Hong, 2018) 9/10

some scores and blurbs from above

Diamonds Are Forever 7/10 - I'm not sure if this is about anything or even has a real plot, and it's probably not any good at all, but has more bits that I like in it than nearly any other Bond. Gay contract killer couple! Fake Howard Hughes analog kidnapped! A car chase where Bond goes up on two wheels! A really cool camera move where it rushes up to his head when he's being coshed!

Driller Killer 7/10 - the serial killer stuff is v implausibly motivated and really doesn't fit with the film's main purpose of being a slice-of-life survey of a downtown arts scene. the whole thing is so patchy I assume it was shot in semi-random chunks whenever Ferrara could get some short ends. but it's compelling and would presumably have been a laugh-along hoot in Soho fleapits during the video nasty ban

M:i-2 7/10 - all I remembered from this was some amusingly nonsensical local geography at the climax, but basically everyone who said this was a bad Woo or bad Mission flick for the last 20 years is dumb and wrong. it's totally Woo getting to make a Hollywood spy movie in his style the way DePalma did, and they should have kept going in that vein. there's a gunfight / car ballet / foreplay scene! also John Polson was presumably so shamed by the accent they had him do that he retired from acting immediately to run the world's largest short film festival

Face / Off 9/10 - obv the only REAL TRUE Hollywood Woo though. Travolta playing Cage playing Travolta is perhaps the most acting he's ever done on screen, even if he can't quite suppress his dancer's grace enough

Child's Play 5/10 - perfectly fine slasher movie, I will never make it through the entire series to get to properly appreciate the all-Mancini flicks I've seen bits of

Witchfinder General 8/10 would grime again

Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood 9/10

Mister America 4/10 as an actual movie, 7/10 experience of watching in a sold-out theater of fans

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II 4/10 - acceptable slasher flick, a few good scare sequences

El Camino 5/10 - fine as an epilogue, highly unnecessary to suddenly do in 2019 with everyone six years fatter or older or cancery, especially as "Jesse driving away" adds zero resolution to the series' ending of... Jesse driving away

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure 8/10, took a 10-yo and a 14-yo to a $1.99 screening, high hopes for the sequel next year

Night Of The Creeps 6/10 effective pastiche of everything it's pastiching

Dolemite Is My Name 8/10

The Laundromat 6/10 - as Burns / Sodes entertainments about capitalism destroying humans go, it's more fun than Side Effects, nowhere close to The Informant

Candyman 6/10 - weird mishmash of physical-horror-manifests-from-brain in Barker style, with metaphor and direct commentary on racist gentrification in the US, by an English director without enough budget to include substantial characters whose lives are affected by said gentrification. really strong and distinct '80s tone that varies from the other '80s horror I watched this month - in a way that feels of its time and wouldn't be replicated by period pieces

Nightmare On Elm Street 7/10 - have still never seen any other Elm St movie. so many elements of incompleteness or cheapness feel fitting due to dream logic, which one imagines has diminishing returns in later flicks by different people

Vampire In Brooklyn 2/10 - then again sometimes Wes Craven can't make the most of a script that doesn't connect up to itself. John Witherspoon nearly holds it together by himself

Little Shop Of Horrors 9/10 - sorry I waited so many decades, glad I saw it with an audience

The Wrong Man 6/10 for Hitchcock storytelling, 2/10 for significant suspense given it's about a real-life mistaken identity accusation from about a year earlier

Dead Ringers 8/10

Dead Heat 1/10 for being a movie, 8/10 for overall entertainment value, 9/10 for makeup effects and puppets. laughed enough at the undead Chinese restaurant sequence streaming on a bad TV that in the theatre that scene alone would have made up for Joe Piscopo and his tits in the rest of it

Mad Max 2 10/10 streaming on a bad TV, obviously scores much higher in a theatre

I watched the first Nightmare on Elm Street recently too. like so many horror movies that spawned 4+ sequels, it feels half-cocked, even down to the credit "Fred Krueger."

yeah, there's a little disjunct when that mom names him Fred Krueger, then you realise "Freddy" is a product of the successful attempt to rebrand the child mol-- murderer as a fun kiddie character for toys and sweatshirts and syndicated TV shows

everyone who said this was a bad Woo or bad Mission flick for the last 20 years is dumb and wrong

*slaps table* OTM

nightmare 1 is a fuckin classic, the only bad thing about it is the ending

yeah the first nightmare is genuinely pretty good imo. apparently the studio forced that stupid ending on wes craven so they could do a sequel (which seems kinda funny now -- imagine someone deciding not to do a sequel to a slasher movie because "well, we killed off the bad guy in the first one, so that's that!").

interested in Grass, remember liking 24 City

tina getting dragged across the ceiling, her corpse in a translucent bodybag dragging itself through the high school, johnny depp getting sucked into his bed and turning into a blood vortex, the claws through the bedroom wall/the claws in the bathtub... all of these scenes still look amazing and are still deeply upsetting

the ending works OK as dream logic / having the audience walk out hyped and scared instead of comforted, even though it's cheap and gratuitous. would be way better if the only change from Craven's intention was that the car was striped like Freddy though, just adding some spooky ambiguity to the happy ending.

brb, making a '90s erotic thriller called Craven Intentions

Grass is such a wonderful little film. I've rarely seen a film that felt so small and inconsequential, and coming from Hong Sang-soo that might be saying a lot, but it's just such a nice way to spend an hour.

I really liked Too Late to Die Young, so sad to hear that Dominga Sotomayors other films aren't that good, according to devvine. They've been on my to-do list for a while.

i think thursday till sunday is good!

and yes grass really is a beautiful, elusive, little film. hong taking so many of his obsessions to their extreme

The Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (1957, Kawashima) 6/10
*Miller’s Crossing (1990, Coen) 6/10
Subarnarekha (1965, Ghatak) 6/10
Mur Murs (1981, Varda) 8/10
*Wolfen (1981, Wadleigh) 7/10
La hora de los niños aka The Children’s Hour (1969, Ripstein) 5/10
By the Grace of God (2018, Ozon) 8/10
Shitamachi (1957, Chiba) (57m) 8/10
Kanto Wanderer (1963, Suzuki) 7/10
I Dood It (1943, Minnelli) 6/10

loveless (zvyagintsev 2018) 9/10
never look away (von donnersmarck 2018) 8.5/10
ironweed (babenco '87) 5/10
us (peele, 2019) 6.5/10
hidden love (capone, 07) 2.5/10
the laundromat (soderbergh 2019) 2/10
the missing (howard '03) 4/10
wendingo (fessenden '01) 5.5/10
the invitation (karyn kusama 2015) 5/10
joker (phillips 2019) 3.5/10
diego maradona (kapadia 2019) 10/10

Cinema

Judy (Goold, 2019)
Monos (Landes, 2019)
The Naked City (Dassin, 1948)

MUBI

Father of my Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)
The Magic Gloves (Retjman, 2003)
Communists (Straub, 2014)

Nifty Nurses (Jason, 1934)
Sea Sore (McCarey, 1933)
A Regular Trouper (Mack, 1932)
Butterfly (Clarke, 1967)
24 Frames Per Second (Clarke, 1977)
24 Frames Per Century (Tsangari, 2013)
*Nine O'Clock Folks (Mack, 1931)
Five Minutes From the Station (Hurley, 1930)
*The Oyster Princess (Lubitsch, 1919)
*The Racket (Milestone, 1928)
*Filibus (Roncoroni, 1915)
*Neighbors (Cline & Keaton, 1920)
*The High Sign (Cline & Keaton (1921)
*The Goat (Keaton & St. Clair, 1921)
*Cops (Keaton & Cline, 1922)
Captain Applejack (Henley, 1931)

The Damned (Visconti, 1969) - 8/10
Faces Places (Varda, JR; 2017) - 8/10
The Champagne Murders (Chabrol, 1967) - 7/10
The Niklahausen Journey (Fassbinder, 1970) - 8/10
Nénette et Boni (Denis, 1996) - 9/10
In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000) - 9/10
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) - 7/10
Ten Seconds to Hell (Aldrich, 1959) - 8/10
The Store (Wiseman, 1983) - 9/10
Altered States (Russell, 1980) - 7/10
Public Housing (Wiseman, 1997) - 9/10
Ophélia (Chabrol, 1963) - 10/10
Suspiria (Guadagnino, 2018) - 8/10
Scandal (Kurosawa, 1950) - 6/10
*Weekend [Godard, 1967) - 9/10

Cluny Brown (Lubitsch, 1946) - 10/10
La Cérémonie (Chabrol, 1995) - 9/10
Last Summer Won’t Happen (Gessner, Hurwitz; 1968) - 8/10
Time of the Locust (Gessner, 1966) - 8/10
But I’m a Cheerleader (Babbit, 1999) - 8/10
Trouble in Paradise [Lubitsch, 1932) - 8/10
The Merry Jail (Lubitsch, 1917) - 7/10
Far from Vietnam (var., 1967) - 10/10
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (Marker, 1968) - 9/10

My Own Private Idaho (van Sant)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (van Sant)
Elephant (Clarke)
Elephant (van Sant)*
Last Days (van Sant)*
Paranoid Park (van Sant)
Promised Land (van Sant)
The Sea of Trees (van Sant)
Erin Brockovich (Soderbergh)
Solaris (Soderbergh)
Haywire (Soderbergh)
Side Effects (Soderbergh)
The Laundromat (Soderbergh)
The Married Couple of the Year Two (Rappeneau)
Death Watch (Tavernier)
Revenge of the Musketeers (Tavernier)
L.627 (Tavernier)
Safe Conduct (Tavernier)
Les Revenants (Campillo)
Eastern Boys (Campillo)
120 Beats Per Minute (Campillo)
Fireworks Wednesday (Farhadi)
A Separation (Farhadi)*
The Salesman (Farhadi)*
Everybody Knows (Farhadi)
Taxi Teheran (Panahi)*
3 Faces (Panahi)
In the Palm of Your Hand (Gavaldon)
Macario (Gavaldon)
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Faraut)*
On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship (Stokkendal Poulsen)
The Weight of Elephants (Borgman)
Loving Pia (Borgman)
Limbo (Hartmann)*
In Your Arms (Sahlstrøm)*
The Man (Sieling)
All In (Dyekjær)
The Witch (Eggers)
The Babadook (Kent)
High Life (Denis)
Shakti (Rejtman)
Cocalero (Landes)
Porfirio (Landes)
The Brink (Weiss)

So, yeah, this must be one of the worst movie-watching months I've had in a very long time. van Sant is up and down, though I'm very happy to have finally seen My Own Private Idaho. Still, Sea of Trees, nobody should do that to themselves. Apart from Haywire, not the best collection of Soderbergh either. All the Tavernier were frightfully boring, disappointing after I really liked Round Midnight. And Farhadi. Don't ever watch too much Farhadi, sigh. Hate that he is so important, and that I kinda feel I should be able to say something qualified about him. Here's something: He has only gotten continually worse over time. Even the Denis was a bit of a disappointment, though I'd definitely expected too much from it. It's not bad.

A few bright lights. I looooove Panahi, and while 3 Faces might honestly be his worst, that's still pretty incredible. Felt all happy and fuzzy inside afterwards. Macario is cool, I thought Mexican cinema had collapsed in 1960, but it's amazingly beautiful. And I'm really looking forward to seeing Monos in a few days after seeing the two other films by Alejandro Landes. Though Cocalero is depressing, it's a portrait of Evo Morales from his first campaign in 2005 :( So much hope, so much promise.

So, yeah, this must be one of the worst movie-watching months I've had in a very long time

Shut up.

Thoughts on Laundromat? Babadook? VVitch? Highlife?

my last four days was:
Framing John DeLorean
Mike Wallace is Here
Maiden (aborted, this felt very rah rah plus i realized i don't give a shit about yachting)
Be Natural: Alice Guy Blanche
Poetry (Chang-Dong)

Started Jacqueline Audry's The Great Deception last night and it seems great so far. Was going to go see Marriage Story last night and then realized i was almost guaranteed to hate it so i opted out.