Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Taurog, 1934)
It’s the Old Army Game (Sutherland, 1926)
America (Griffith, 1924)
Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (Beaudine, 1966)
Shine Em Up (Davis, 1922)
A Thrilling Romance (Robbins, 1926)
*The Scarecrow (Keaton & Cline, 1920)

Busy week and a half.

Great:
Jasper Mall (Thomason and Whitcomb, 2020)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Iannucci, 2020)

Consistently Pretty Good to Very Very Good:
Red Dog (Pinkston and Dick, 2020)
Miss Juneteenth (Peoples, 2020)
Pahokie (Lucas and Bresnan, 2020)
Pipe Dreams (Tenenbaum, 2020)
Aya of Yop City (Abouet and Oubrerie, 2013)
Jump Shot (Hamiton, 2019)

Almost Okay to Occasionally Pretty Good:
Inmate 1: The Rise of Danny Trejo (Harvey, 2020)

On-Deck:
First Cow, Lynn and Lucy, Radioactive, Ghost of Peter Sellers, Fanny Lye Deliver'd, John Lewis: Good Trouble, Radioactive, Relic, Scheme Birds

I thought "Palm Springs" was better than I expected it to be, if not really as good as it could have been, but it was still enjoyable. Great soundtrack.

Watched "The Seventh Seal," "Spirit of the Beehive" and "Some Like it Hot" with my daughter this week. Appreciated but I don't think liked the first, liked the second, but (of course) really enjoyed the third.

where is Palm Springs? Netflix?

Hulu

Booloo

ilplex too!

There should be a streaming service called Fomo.

I should say my *daughter* enjoyed those aforementioned movies to varying degrees (I'd already seen them of course). I'm always curious what a 2020 teen thinks of classic movies or "foreign" or art films. Will their iconic qualities transcend the language barrier, or the black and white, or the grainy image or the style of filmmaking? Or, as is frequently the case with her and classic American movies, the everyone-is-whiteness, or everyone-is-maleness. It's always satisfying to watch decades old classics still able do the thing they're classic for, but it's also interesting to rewatch classics that for whatever reason don't hold up or hold her attention. Everyone is different, but it's something we (or at least) generally can't recall, the moment when our brains shift when we're young from more or less mindless mainstream consumers to more discerning cineastes. Doesn't happen to everyone, obviously, and doesn't need to. There are plenty of movies to go around. Still, it's wonderful when you realize there's a whole section - or several floors - of the library you've never learned about before.

Encouraging and also makes sense that His Girl Friday was a hit, I think

Raining Stones (Loach, 1993) - 7/10
—The Curve (Shaki, 1999) - 10/10 <------ INCREDIBLE short by Edwige Shaki
*The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979) - 9/10
*Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980) - 10/10
Hardcore (Schrader, 1979) - 9/10
Drums Along the Mohawk (Ford, 1939) - 8/10
*Metropolitan (Stillman, 1990) - 8/10
The Cinema and Its Double (Fischer, 2011) - 8/10
*In a Year with 13 Moons (Fassbinder, 1978) - 10/10
Blue Collar (Schrader, 1978) - 9/10
Berserk! (O'Connolly, 1967) - 7/10
Fixed Bayonets! (Fuller, 1951) - 7/10
We Won’t Grow Old Together (Pialat, 1972) - 10/10
Joe (Avildsen, 1970) - 7/10
Sing a Song of Sex (Oshima, 1967) - 7/10
Sleep, My Love (Sirk, 1948) - 6/10
Loulou (Pialat, 1980) - 9/10
Beggars of Life (Wellman, 1928) - 9/10
*Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 1954) - 9/10
Ruthless People (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker; 1986) - 5/10
The Steel Helmet (Fuller, 1951) - 8/10
Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963) - 6/10
Three Resurrected Drunkards (Oshima, 1968) - 8/10

Afraid to Talk (Cahn, 1932)
My Best Girl (Taylor, 1927)
Open All Night (Pearson, 1934)
Oranges and Lemons (Jeske, 1923)
A Bathtub Bandit (Santell, 1917)
*The Rink (Chaplin,, 1916)

xpost She loved His Girl Friday.

A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressburger, 1946)
The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980)
Hana-Bi (Kitano, 1997)
Ad Astra (Gray, 2019)
*I Confess (Hitchcock, 1953)
Dolemite is My Name (Brewer, 2019)
It's Alive (Cohen, 1974)
Pain and Glory (Almodóvar, 2019)
*Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951)
Bodyguard (Fleischer, 1948)

The bad thing about the Netflix-made comicbook action fantasy Old Guard is that it's not better: tonally all over the place, regularly show-stopping lines of tin-eared dialogue, astonishingly bad music queues, a few poorly/under-acted characters and jam-packed with clichés. Pontificating about making the world better while ruthlessly murdering balaclava-masked men by the dozens, check; midlevel miniboss dispatched with a pithy punchline, check; betrayals that you can smell coming a half hour away, check; one last job for shit that you're getting too old for, check; gratuitous sequel-set-up at the end, check.

BUT it's intelligently laid out, well directed, mostly engaging and Theron is a magnetic presence and an unbeatable special effect. If you're even thinking about watching it, it's likely worth about an hour and a half of your time and I'll bet you won't begrudge the extra half hour they jammed in there to juke the stats.

fights are well-done, the attempts to show various historical warzones across thousands of years by having close-up two-shots of Charlize's face wearing different stock "period" headdresses while talking to someone in smoky eye make-up are unintentionally v funny

*The Idle Class (Chaplin, 1921) (33m) 8/10
Ernie Pyle’s Story of G.I. Joe (Wellman, 1945) 9/10
The Married Woman (Godard, 1964) 8/10
Riffraff (Ruben, 1936) 6/10
Secrets (Borzage, 1933) 6/10
Family Viewing (Egoyan, 1987) 7/10
Between the Lines (Silver, 1977) 7/10
*The Comic (C. Reiner, 1969) 6/10
The Symbol of the Unconquered (Micheaux, 1920) (incomplete) 6/10
Next of Kin (Egoyan, 1984) 7/10

Central Park (1989) 4/5
I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) 4/5
* Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) 3/5
Lenny Cooke (2013) 3.5/5
* Pale Flower (1964) 3.5/5
* Depeche Mode: 101 (1989) 4/5
Palm Springs (2020) 3.5/5
* Demolition Man (1993) 2.5/5
* Having a Wild Weekend (1965) 3/5
* Casino (1995) 4.5/5
Bullitt (1968) 4/5
Skidoo (1968) who knows
Time After Time (1979) 3.5/5
Ford v Ferrari 3/5
My Brother's Wedding (1983) 3.5/5
* All About Eve (1950) 4/5
Monrovia, Indiana (2018) 3.5/5
* Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) 4/5
Nightfall (1958) 3.5/5
* The Abyss (1989) 3/5
Roger Waters: The Wall (2014) 3.5/5

Daughter very much approved of "Double Indemnity."

The Live Ghost (Rogers, 1934)
Super Stupid (Jason, 1934)
The Babbling Book (Scotto, 1932)
The Railrodder (Keaton & Potterton, 1965)
The Crosby Case (Marin, 1934)
Fast and Loose (Newmeyer, 1930)
Atlantic (Dupont, 1929)
The Water Plug (Jeske, 1920)
Robinet's White Suit (Perez, 1911)
*Number, Please? (Roach & Newmeyer, 1920)

I just saw those last 3 via the Watch Party as well. I'd seen the Robinet before, but not Lloyd.

made in u.s.a. (ken friedman '87) 6.5/10
female trouble (waters '75) 6/10
the lighthouse (eggars 2019) 8/10
palm springs (max barbakow 2020) 5.5/10
coco (unkrich 2017) 10/10
*the humbling (levinson 2014) 6/10
marianne & leonard: words of love (broomfield 2019) 6.5/10
recorder: the marion stokes project (matt wolf 2019) 7/10
frankie (sachs 2019) 7.5/10

The Bigamist (Lupino, 1953)
Nymphomaniac Vols. I & II (Von Trier, 2014)
Duvidha (Kaul, 1973)
Naseem (Akhtar Mirza, 1995)
Woman at War (Erlingsson, 2019)
The Hitch-hiker (Lupino, 1953)
Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975 (Olsson, 2011)

Edmond O'Brien's face in The Bigamist... when he's found out, but really throughout. Such a bizarre movie

Just watched it tonight and that was my reaction too.

The Fearless Hyena (Chan, 1979)
Almayer's Folly (Akerman, 2011)
It's Not Just You, Murray! (short - Scorsese, 1964)
But I'm a Cheerleader (Babbit, 1999)
Last Hurrah for Chivalry (Woo, 1979)
The Above (short - Johnson, 2015)
Orpheus (Cocteau, 1950)
Mafioso (Lattuada, 1962)
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (Schible, 2019)
Uncle (short - Jireš, 1959)
Blood on the Moon (Wise, 1948)
D'Est (Akerman 1993)
Miss Annie Rooney (Marin, 1942)
Loves of a Blonde (Forman, 1965)
The White Balloon (Panahi, 1995)
*My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991)
The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)
A Night in the Show (short - Chaplin, 1915)
The Rink (short - Chaplin, 1916)
Pygmalion (Asquith, Howard, 1938)
The Bigamist (Lupino, 1953)
*Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, 2012)
Death by Hanging (Oshima, 1968)

The Human Factor (Preminger, 1979) 7/10
The Kentucky Fried Movie (Landis, 1977) 5/10
*Lost in America (Brooks, 1985) 10/10
Walk on the Wild Side (Dmytryk, 1962) 5/10
Le Gai Savoir (Godard, 1969) 5/10
*The Kid (Chaplin, 1921) 9/10
*Head (Rafelson, 1968) 8/10
Min and Bill (Hill, 1930) 6/10
Smart Money (Green, 1931) 7/10
The Big House (Hill, 1930) 6/10

Great (non-2020):
The Tiger of Eschnapur (1960, Lang… racist as fuck unfortunately)

Consistently Pretty Good to Very Very Good:
Palm Springs (Barbakow, 2020)
The Ghost of Peter Sellers (Medak, 2020)
Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020)
John Lewis: Good Trouble (Porter, 2020)

Almost Okay to Occasionally Pretty Good:
Old Guard (2020, Prince-Bythewood)

No:
The Translators (Roinsard, 2020)

Rewatched Sorcerer tonight. Friedkin’s second best movie after TLADILA.

Funeral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1966) 10/10

Upon rescreening I realized that a) this is one of my top three comfort movies, and b) like the other two movies (Cheung Foh & Topsy-Turvy) it has a godawful soundtrack.

If you've never seen The Breaking Point, you are missing one of the most devastating final shots in film history.

Parasite (Bong, 2019)
*Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1953)
Born in Flames (Borden, 1983)
*Airplane (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, 1980)
Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937)
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Petri, 1970)
*Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Britannia Hospital (Anderson, 1982)
Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991)
*The Breaking Point (Curtiz, 1950)

The Lucky Number (Asquith, 1932)
Slipping Wives (Guiol, 1927)
From Soup to Nuts (Kennedy, 1928)
The Beloved Rogue (Crosland, 1927)
*The Land Unknown (Vogel, 1957)
The Hole in the Wall (1919)
At Coney Island (Sennett, 1912)
*A Little Hero (Sennett, 1913)
*Distilled Love (Smith & Moore, 1920)

the hitchhiker
the truth
die sieger

quickly recommend me a movie to watch tonight. can't think of anything. nothing macho. maybe something with a girl and an irresistible beat from the radio.

last tenish were probably

from the journals of jean seberg - rappaport (loved)
come and get it - hawks/wyler (loved)
my brillian career - armstrong (hated)
les dames du bois de boulogne - Bresson (loved)
Showgirls - Verhoeven (only okay, people who go on about this are kidding themselves)
seventh continent - haneke (only okay, felt like a tumblr account)
malina - schroeter (loved this, hilarious)
that cold day in the park - altman (some parts were great but i could have easily not watched this)
splendor in the grass - kazan (strongly suggested that american theater in the 60s was unbearable.)
alice doesn't live here anymore (i started tidying the room before this was over. not captivaing)
taxi driver - scorsese (this was fine)
touki bouki - dijbril diop mambety (would have loved this without all the incredibly explicit animal slaughter shots, have watched so many films with animals being slaughtered recently and i would prefer not to ever again especially after this one)

quickly recommend me a movie to watch tonight. can't think of anything. nothing macho. maybe something with a girl and an irresistible beat from the radio.

Zazie dans le Métro

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

Thank you both!

splendor in the grass - kazan (strongly suggested that american theater in the 60s was unbearable.)

You might be aiming at the '50s since it was shot in 1960; you mean bcz it was written by William Inge? I think Kazan was more focused on movies by this point; his period of remaking American theatre was more 1945-59.

i mean bcz it has so much horribly mannered acting and a very puffed up sense of 'significance.' the first act where everyone keeps spouting exposition is so tedious. I watched this because sandy dennis and barbara loden are in it but barbara loden disappears too early and sandy dennis is basically an extra. its really weird how barbara loden is in the chorus line that beatty and his dad go to see in the scene where he comes to take him out of harvard. she's standing right there. i thought it was a plot twist but then it wasn't.

but yes, 50s, excuse me.

It's true that that stuff often works better with the 'bigness' of the stage. But I haven't seen SitG in eons (and i think i was most impressed with Zohra Lampert as Beatty's ultimate spouse). It very well could be the weakest of Kazan's prime features (ie the seven he made from '54-63).

plax, you should try "You Don't Nomi" as a nice bookend to Showgirls.

BELLY

Analyze This (Ramis, 1999) - 5/10
Between the Lines (Silver, 1977) - 4/10
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959) - 10/10
First Cow (Reichardt, 2019) - 8/10
Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger, 1958) - 8/10
The Final Comedown (Williams, 1972) - 8/10
Graduate First (Pialat, 1978) - 10/10
*Bamboozled (Lee, 2000) - 10/10
The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993) - 8/10
Gloria (Cassavetes, 1980) - 8/10
*Magnificent Obsession (Sirk, 1954) - 8/10
Saint Jack (Bogdanovich, 1979) - 9/10
Dead Ringer (Henreid, 1964) - 7/10
Revolutionary Road (Mendes, 2008) - 5/10
Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut, 1960) - 6/10
I Shot Jesse James (Fuller, 1949) - 8/10
Noises Off (Bogdanovich, 1992) - 7/10
Black Widow (Rafaelson, 1987) - 8/10
Edge of Eternity (Siegel, 1959) - 8/10
*The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ozu, 1952) - 9/10
Don’t Bother to Knock (Baker, 1952) - 7/10
*Breathless (Godard, 1960) - 6/10
The Mouth Agape (Pialat, 1974) - 8/10
Illegally Yours (Bogdanovich, 1988) - 6/10
*Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) - 9/10
The Night Porter (Cavani, 1974) - 10/10
Take a Girl Like You (Miller, 1970) - 9/10
Little Odessa (Gray, 1994) - 8/10
New Jack City (Van Peebles, 1991) - 8/10
Love and Anarchy (Wertmüller, 1973) - 9/10
*Zoolander (Stiller, 2001) - 10/10
Stardust Memories (Allen, 1980) - 9/10
Year of the Comet (Yates, 1992) - 7/10

V much enjoyed zazie dans le metro and thank you wmc. I also intend to watch the other recs this week

everyone should watch the newly available 1977 doc "Word Is Out"; it's remarkable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bXfALa7YlU
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wordisout

July:

Dr. Phibes Rises Again (Fuest, 1972) 6/10
Kelly's Heroes (Hutton, 1970) 6/10
Don't Panic Chaps! (Pollock, 1959) 4/10
Martin (Romero, 1977) 8/10
Detour (Ulmer, 1945) 8/10
Blue Collar (Schrader, 1978) 8/10
The Mummy's Ghost (Le Borg, 1944) 4/10
The Case of the Bloody Iris (Carnimeo, 1972) 7/10
City Hunter (Wong, 1993) 4/10
The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (Ercoli, 1970) 6/10
The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (Ozu, 1952) 9/10
Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) 7/10
The Night Stalker (Moxey, 1972) 7/10
The Body Beneath (Milligan, 1970) 8/10
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (Griffith, 1916) 8/10
A Weekend With Lulu (Carstairs, 1961) 5/10
Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956)
Bob & Carol & Ted * Alice (Mazursky, 1969) 7/10
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Werker, 1939) 7/10
Funeral in Berlin (Hamilton, 1966) 6/10
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (Gibson, 1973) 6/10
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (Rawlins, 1942) 6/10
Eaten Alive! (Lenzi, 1980)

The Parallax View, one of my favorite 1970s movies.

City Hunter has the worst signal-to-noise in astonishing action pieces patched together by the flimsiest acting/plot.

It was all the terrible 'comedy' that killed City Hunter for me, though the Street Fighter parody is indeed all kinds of wtf

oh it's all time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBsajdIZf74