Last (x) movies you saw (II)

More television than films for me in the past two weeks, but here's what i got.

Great:
Short Films of Charley Bowers - 1927 to 1935
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (Mariposa Film Group, 1977)
The Legend of Drunken Master (1994, Chia-Liang – Hadn't seen this in twenty year, boy does it ever hold up!)

Consistently Pretty Good to Very Very Good:
All I Can Say (Hoon, 2020)
Cunningham (Kovgan, 2020)
Trust Us, This Is All Made Up (Karpovsky, 2009)
Too Funny To Fail (Greenbaum, 2017)

Almost Okay to Occasionally Pretty Good:
The Indian Tomb (Lang, 1960)
Fist of Fury (Wei, 1972)

No:
Vanilla (Dennis, 2019)
The Disappearance of My Mother (2019, Barrese)

is legend of drunken Master drunken Master 2?

yah

yep. goddamn, the fight sequences in drunken master are jaw dropping 25 years later. The story is near gibberish of course, but i didn't come here for the conversation.

I've been showing my kids Jackie Chan fights the last few months, actually. They were really amazed. Lots of "wait, didn't that hurt?" And me saying yeah, it probably did, let me fast-forward to the outtakes at the end.

The Way of Youth (Walker, 1934)
The Erl King (Iribe, 1931)
Night in Montmartre (Hiscott, 1931)
The Good Bad Boy (Cline, 1924)
Creature With the Atom Brain (Cahn, 1955)
Her First Kiss (Griffin, 1919)
*The Goat (Keaton & St. Clair, 1921)

Elevator to the Gallows (Malle, 1958) 7/10
7 mainly for Jeanne Moreau and the cinematography of Henri Decaë, especially when she's wandering around in it, later and later, still waiting for/wondering what to do without her war-tested Action Man boyfriend, who was sent to kill his boss, her husband ("an arms dealer and an asshole," as another veteran, old colleague of bf puts it). Bf can't get back to her, he's stuck in an elevator---but somebody saw his fancy car taking off, so assumed the driver was him, with a teen babe who works across from his office (actually it was her, but the guy was *her* boyfriend, a juvenile or arrested-development delinquent). Bf's old acquaintance observes that he was always a shit with women; Moreau gets this mirthless leer, twisting the despair that don't look new---she's great as ever.
But otherwise, the somewhat promising critique of possibly movie-damaged wannabeeism, (no doubt about the b couple, who haplessly settle into Romance on the Run, going for Nicholas Ray etc.(and prob Action Man and Moreau's character, livin' the noir even more than she bargained for) is detached and plotty, begging comparison to Godard especially, who leaves Malle in the dust, at least here.
It's watchable enough, but from now on, think I'll stick to my old Miles Davis soundtrack, which works better as an album---especially considering the way music is used to heavily underscore the already and atypically overdone final scene; gimme detachment after all.

I was very happy that my daughter enjoyed "Predator." She (correctly) finds Arnold innately hilarious and entertaining.

i watched elevator to the gallows really recently and i can't remember a single thing about it!

The Champ (Vidor, 1931)
*North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
Black Orpheus (Camus, 1959)
The Irishman (Scorsese, 2019)
Doctor Sleep (Flanagan, 2019)
*Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
Sidewalk Stories (Lane, 1989)
Knives Out (Johnson, 2019)
Marriage Story (Baumbach, 2019)
In Fabric (Strickland, 2018)

Black and Tan (Murphy, 1929)
Why Change Your Wife? (De Mille, 1920)
Such Men Are Dangerous (K. Hawks, 1930)
Shoe Palace Pinkus (Lubitsch, 1916)
Astronomeous (Messmer, 1928)
The Young Rajah (Rosen, 1922)
Safety in Numbers (Schertzinger, 1930)
Indiscreet (McCarey, 1931)
Rome Express (Forde, 1932)
Punch the Clock (Beaudine, 1922)
Waiting at the Church (Lyons & Moran, 1919)
The Cure (Chaplin, 1917)

Day of the Outlaw (1959) 4/5
The Baron of Arizona (1950) 3/5
What's Up, Doc? (1972) 4/5
La Belle Noiseuse (1991) 5/5
* Dressed to Kill (1980) 3/5
Dirty Ho (1979) 3/5

Shorts:
Cosmic Ray (Connor, 1962)
Pinball (Pitt, 2013)
Last Days in a Lonely Place; Rehearsals for Retirement (Solomon)

Love Malle’s documentaries and his American outings like “Atlantic City” but I never thought he was even remotely in the same league as, say, Truffaut. Much less Godard. His French features, with a couple of exceptions, always felt they were missing a core *something*.

*felt like

I prefer Malle's soft generosity to Truffaut's suffocating sentimentalism

I made a note to check out Malle's "Le Fou Jollet" - I read a piece on In a Year with 13 Moons that claimed RWF "remade" Malle's film (???)

If Lucy Fell (Schaeffer, 1996) - 6/10
Whirlpool (Preminger, 1949) - 7/10
Pin Up Girl (Humberstone, 1944) - 8/10
Angels with Dirty Faces (Curtiz, 1938) - 7/10
*Death to Smoochy (DeVito, 2002) - 10/10
Boyz N the Hood (Singleton, 1991) - 8/10
She Dies Tomorrow (Seimetz, 2020) - 5/10

Psychomania (Sharp, 1973) - 6/10
Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939) - 9/10
*Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) - 10/10
Hatari! (Hawks, 1962) - 5/10
Bulworth (Beatty, 1998) - 9/10
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Preminger, 1950) - 8/10
In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1976) - 9/10
Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966) - 7/10
I Could Go On Singing (Neame, 1963) - 7/10
*Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997) - 10/10
*Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977) - 7/10
The Parallax View (Pakula, 1974) - 10/10
Primal Fear (Hoblit, 1996) - 9/10
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Tashlin, 1957) - 7/10
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Hall, 1941) - 9/10
Spree (Kotlyarenko, 2020) - 9/10 <--------------- best new movie of the year
Cutter’s Way (Passer, 1981) - 7/10
The Outlaw (Hughes/Hawks, 1943) - 6/10
Super Fly (Parks Jr., 1972) - 7/10
*Pleasure Party (Chabrol, 1975) - 9/10
*Querelle (Fassbinder, 1982) - 7/10
They Were Expendable (Ford/Montgomery, 1945) - 8/10
Drive, He Said (Nicholson, 1971) - 5/10

Death to Smoochy 10/10

expand?

Death To Smoochy’s great iirc

a quick search of ilx answers shows most of us who are familiar with the material seem to agree

does it show why flappy bird in particular has historically rated it 10/10?

I cannot answer for flappy bird but probably the songs

One of the best corporate media satires ever made

I remember quite clearly the way Edward Norton had a terrible bachelor-with-clippers home haircut in every scene

imo DeVito does a great job with the tone, balancing the earnest desire to entertain that various characters have (not just the naivete of Norton), the bleakness of business, and the almost-sweaty desperateness of nearly everyone involved, but both the satire and the plot reverses are fairly by the book

if you folks aren't down with cinephobe yet: http://cinephobe.tv/

I prefer Malle's soft generosity to Truffaut's suffocating sentimentalism

― flappy bird, Monday, August 17, 2020

That's why Au Revoir, Mes Enfants is my least favorite of his major films -- it played like A Walk Through Truffautland. Otherwise, yeah, Elevator to the Galoows, The Fire Within, Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe, Lucien, Atlantic City, Vanya on 42nd Street -- what a filmography.

Agreed, tho I'd chuck Murmur as well for similar reasons. and I haven't seen Vanya!

J-U-N-K (1920)
Sissy-Boy Slap-Party (Maddin, 2004)
One Man Law (Hillyer, 1932)
Twin Husbands (Strayer, 1933)
Whose Baby Are You? (Horne, 1925)
The Affairs of Anatol (De Mille, 1921)
The Curse of Frankenstein (Fisher, 1957)
The Simp (Davis & Roche, 1920)
*The Waiters' Ball (Arbuckle, 1916)

Live Flesh (Almodovar, 1997)
Dragon Inn (Hu, 1967)
A Touch of Zen (Hu, 1971)
Awaara (Raj Kapoor, 1951)
The Portuguese Woman (Gomes, 2018)
Something in the Air (Assayas, 2012)
Gumnaam (Nawathe, 1965)
The Invicibles (Graf, 1994)
Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014)

A Touch of Zen is unclassifiable, sorta begins very Antonioni-like but it goes places I've never seen before.

Worth watching Something in the Air as a follow-up to Carlos...probably his finest period. And Girlhood is the one Sciamma I hadn't seen, just classics all round.

"Avalon", Mamoru Oshii's Polish-language Japanese science fiction film from 2001 was interesting I thought. The entire film was shot in various shades of sepia, the sets were extremely Eastern-European gothic, and the story had a quaint early 20th Century online datedness (like a more primitive Southland Tales) that was appealing

IN Like Flint
James Coburn as the titular hero in a spoof james Bond film from 1967. He looks good for the most part apart from being a major stan for the patriarchy. BUT yeah that does slightly massively seem to be a problem with this film about women trying to take over the world and having to face this playboy type and a male heirarchy that seem sto have very few women in.
Assume that must be a major turn off for a lot of people, ruins the lighthearted fun. probably true.
I know i saw this a few decades ago as well as the first one. So watched this when i found it while channel surfing. Not sure how well dean martin's Matt Helm stands up at the moment assume it must suffer from the same thing. Probably wasn't as 'cool' to start off with anyway.

was trying to remember what the other film I saw thsi week was, now see why.

Pirates of Th e carribean Dead Mans Tails

The last of the series so far i think. Will Turner's son is one of the 2 protagonists as well as a female lead who doesn't know who her parents were,.
Doesn't seem to be quite embodied i the way that earlier films were. Possibly starting with the pointless band heist though possibly there's something even earlier.
A little naff possibly. BUt I thought I might as well watch it through while i was doing other things. think I ate at the same time and stuff. So I guess I only half watcheda lot of it.
BUt do hope they don't add another sequel.
Also I don't see any chemistry between the 2 protagonists which i think was supposed to be a running thread through the film. NOt enough just to say she blushed throughout. Cos what ain't there ain't there.
Still bet there is another one along with them as the starring couple.

I enjoyed most of the Malle movies I've seen, but thought that for instance Goodbye, Children was better than Murmurs of the Heart probably because the former stayed close to historical events as he reportedly witnessed them, while Murmur went from his own experiences to the son and his mama actually doin' it, which he's said was the made-up part, and not in the original plan for the movie, which wasn't really ready for something that deep, however brief---just seemed like the mechanism of the movie trundling along 'til it hit a big bump, then got back on course. Which goes with my take on xpost Ascension as promising themes falling into plotty detachment, when Moreau wasn't on screen, anyway. Ditto for Zasie in the Metro, which looked great right off, but couldn't even finish that one. Maybe I'll give these another shot eventually.
(That's the main prob I have with movies, when I have one: that distracting sense of the machinery, contivance involved, and scenes timed with a stopwatch---not that big a ratio of these to the good ones in Malle's filmography, but it can be frustrating when it happens.)

New "Phineas and Ferb" movie is 10 times better than the new "Bill and Ted" movie, which is inexcusably ten times worse than the new "Phineas and Ferb" movie.

Night Life in Reno (Cannon, 1931)
We! We! Marie! (A. Ray, 1930)
Manhattan Tower (Strayer, 1932)
Lawful Larceny (Sherman, 1930)
The Golem: How He Came into the World (Wegener und Boese, 1920)
St. Louis Blues (Murphy, 1929)
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (Carreras, 1964)
The Flame of Love (Summers & Eichberg, 1930)

Three weeks where I went heavy on quirky indie docs and got what I deserved:

Great Movies:
Martha: A Picture Story (2020, Miles)

Consistently Pretty Good to Very Very Good:
Lucky Grandma (2020, Sealy)
Korla (2015, Turner and Christensen)

Almost Okay to Occasionally Pretty Good:
She Dies Tomorrow (2020, Seimetz)
Tu Me Manques (2020, Bellot)
Tiny Tim: King for a Day (2020, von Sydow)
Class Action Park (2020, Porges and Scott III)

Deeply Flawed to Barely Watchable:
Boys State (2020, Moss and McBaine)
Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story (2020, Cicero and Easterwood)
Pretending I’m Superman: The Tony Hawk Game Story (2020, Gür)
Feels Good Man (2020, Jones)
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020, Parisot)

*Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Altman, 1976) - 8/10
Hi Diddle Diddle (Stone, 1943) - 8/10
Blue Denim (Dunne, 1959) - 10/10
Black Widow (Johnson, 1954) - 7/10
*Spree (Kotlyarenko, 2020) - 9/10
The Crimson Kimono (Fuller, 1959) - 9/10
*Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Fassbinder, 1970) - 7/10
Tobacco Road (Ford, 1941) - 8/10
In Bruges (McDonagh, 2008) - 8/10
*The Image Book (Godard, 2018) - 10/10
*World on a Wire (Fassbinder, 1973) - 9/10
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Curtiz, 1933) - 8/10
Me and You and Everyone We Know (July, 2005) - 8/10
Bunny Lake is Missing (Preminger, 1965) - 8/10
High Sierra (Walsh, 1941) - 7/10
Dragonwyck (Mankiewicz, 1946) - 8/10
Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932) - 7/10
*The Merchant of Four Seasons (Fassbinder, 1971) - 10/10
The Panic in the Needle Park (Schatzberg, 1971) - 7/10
The Princess Comes Across (Howard, 1936) - 7/10
Seven Psychopaths (McDonagh, 2012) - 6/10
The True Story of Jesse James (Ray, 1957) - 7/10
Night and the City (Dassin, 1950) - 9/10
*Vivre sa Vie (Godard, 1962) - 10/10
The Last Hurrah (Ford, 1958) - 8/10

August:

The Kid (Chaplin, 1921) 7/10
The Boston Strangler (Fleischer, 1968) 5/10
The Lost Continent (Carreras, 1968) 7/10
The Scarlet Blade (Gilling, 1963) 6/10
The Bad Seed (LeRoy, 1956) 5/10
Two Thousand Maniacs! (Lewis, 1964) 7/10
The Pleasure Garden (Hitchcock, 1925) 4/10
Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Vibenius, 1973) 7/10
Tenderness of the Wolves (Lommel, 1973) 8/10
Angst (Kargl, 1983) 9/10
Watch it, Sailor! (Rilla, 1961) 3/10
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946) 8/10
Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948) 8/10
El Topo (Jodorowsky, 1970) 8/10
Deadhead Miles (Zimmerman, 1972) 8/10
Slave Girls (Carreras, 1967) 4/10
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965) 8/10
A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954) 8/10

*The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciama, 2019)
Uncut Gems (Safdie & Safdie, 2019)
Little Women (Gerwig, 2019)
To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (Fimognari, 2020)
*Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964)
My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears, 1985)
Atlantics (Diop, 2019)
*The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920)
The Day of the Dolphin (Nichols, 1973)

I doubt I will ever see the new Janelle Monae movie, but I find it kind of amusing/amazing that it co-stars Jena Malone, whose name is practically an anagram for Janelle Monae.

The Golfers (Sennett, 1929)
English as She is Not Spoken (1928)
The Woman in Black (Marston, 1914)
Working Girls (Arzner, 1931)
Movie-Town (Sennett, 1931)
Borrowed Wives (Strayer, 1930)
Red Heels (Curtiz, 1925)
The Blob (Yeaworth, 1958)
Short Orders (Roach & Pembroke, 1923)
His Busy Day (Roach, 1918)
*From Hand to Mouth (Roach & Goulding, 1919)
Tillie & Gus (Martin, 1933)

A list from some of your summer lists---minus the ratings, because I haven't seen any of them recently enough, though I believe, I know, that they're all distinctively good) (some others prob as good, possibly better, aren't on this list because don't remember them as well as these):
Ghost World (Zwigoff, 2001)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Altman, 1976)
Bunny Lake is Missing (Preminger, 1965)
High Sierra (Walsh, 1941)
Grand Hotel (Goulding, 1932)
The Panic in Needle Park (Schatzberg, 1971)(corrected to only one “The”)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Meyer, 1965)
A Star is Born (Cukor, 1954)
The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963)

someone pick me a movie for tonight!

(please)

not like shoah or anything though

I'm Thinking of Ending Things? Haven't seen it yet and want opinions.

peep the charlie kaufman thread

Ash Is Purest White. I think that has stuck with me more than most new movies i've seen in the last few years and it looks so good.