Last (x) movies you saw (II)

My Talk with Florence (Paul Poet)
Xiao Mei (Maren Hwang)
Interchange (Brian M. Cassidy, Melissa Shatzky)
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette)
The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
Anthropocene (Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier)
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse)
Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies)

Is Anthropocene worth a look?

Yes, especially if you like their earlier work. I found it just as compelling as the previous films, with great visuals of course.

lff:

Asako I & II (Hamaguchi, 2018) 9/10
Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (Wheatley, 2018) 5/10
Ash is Purest White (Jia, 2018) 8/10
Last Child (Shin, 2017) 7/10
Non-fiction (Assayas, 2018) 6/10
The Image Book (Goddard, 2018) 7/10
Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018) 7/10
The Green Fog (Maddin, Johnson, Johnson, 2017) 6/10
Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi, 2018) 8/10
Maya (Hansen-Love, 2018) 4/10

other viewings:

*Late Autumn (Ozu, 1960) 10/10 - perhaps the most perfect film
The Day He Arrives (Hong, 2011) 8/10
Eros + Massacre (Yoshida,1969) 6/10
*Hill of Freedom (Hong, 2014) 9/10

The Wizard's Apprentice (Levee, 1930)
Frankenstein (Dawley, 1910)
Fast Life (Pollard, 1932)
The Frog (de Chomon, 1908)
Hallucinations pharmaceutiques ou Le truc de potard (Melies, 1908)
Bluebeard (Melies, 1901)
The Killers (Siodmak, 1946)
The Killers (Siegal, 1964)
The Headless Horseman (Iwerks, 1934)
The Mad Doctor (Hand, 1933)
Strange Justice (Schertzinger, 1932)
Son of the Border (Nosler, 1933)

xp is Late Autumn in the Late Ozu Eclipse box? been eyeing that one for a while

idk, this was a theatre screening but there's a bfi blu ray out there

A Life in Waves (6.0)
Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (8.0)
Deterrence (5.0)
Bravetown (5.5)
My Generation (6.0)
Buffalo ’66 (5.5)
The World of Henry Orient (7.0)
Cold Water (8.0)
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (7.0)
Studio 54 (7.0)

One of the friends I saw Studio 54 with tonight was in there around '81 or '82, after Rubell and Schrager sold the club. I figure they would have asked me to vacate the line in 1977. Pretty conventional, but lots of great footage, including Rubell's 1976 club in Queens, and Michael Jackson dropping in on Rubell.

Really enjoyed that Studio 54 doc

Yayoi Kusama - Inifinity (Heather Lenz, 2018) - this was ok. Struck by the relation between someone asexual like Kusuma ending up on the end of transgressive art in the mid-60s. An under-explored facet.

The Night of the Shooting Stars (Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani, 1982)
Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)

Small Foot.
musical animation about the tribe of the yeti's encounter with a Western film maker.
Quite fun. Noticed it had a G certificate which I don't remember having seen on a cinema screen before.
& for the lowest certificate there seemed to be a lot of what would be violence if it was real or is the idea that what would be physically or life threatening behaviour actually needing to be shown to have consequences before it makes the certificate go up.
Also questions of blasphemy and challenging received religious wisdom being a central theme of a lot of the film.

JUst hope 5 year old kids don't start dropping off the side of Himalayan mountains cos they've seen it's quite fun.
& there's easier ways of waking villages than displayed here.

I think i was just assuming that a worthwhile film couldn't be rated as low as G but may have been watching things rated as that without seeing the certificate.

Or taht since I'm so far above any certi8ficate age exclusion it becomes nominal but not really getting what allows anything to be a certain certificate. Presume for a lot of things the lower the certificate the better because the higher the potential audience. THough there is still the attraction/prestige of seeing a higher certificate or knowing that things may be more authentic and less bowdlerised if they're thought of as adult/mature.

Enjoyed most of this though.

The Merry Skeleton (Lumiere, 1898)
A Terrible Night (Melies, 1896)
The Bewitched Inn (Melies, 1897)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Henderson, 1912)
*Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party (Fleischer, 1933)
The Shriek (Lantz & Nolan, 1933)
The Monster Walks (Strayer, 1932)
The Smoke Scream (Messmer, 1928)
*Salome (Bryant & Nazimova, 1922) (Who would have thought half-naked men and an atmosphere of sacrilege and sex would be just what I DON'T need right now?)
*Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922)

Being There (Ashby, 1979)
Hold the Dark (Saulnier, 2018)
The Gates (Maysles et al, 2007)
*Bulldog Drummond (Jones, 1929)
*King Kong (Cooper & Schoedsack, 1933)
Neighbours (short - McLaren, 1952)
My Josephine (short - Jenkins, 2003)
The Voice Thief (Adan Jodorowsky, 2013)
Army of Shadows (Melville, 1969)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, 2009)
Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992)
*Y Tu Mamá También (Cuarón, 2001)

Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 1957) - 10/10
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995) - 7/10
Schizopolis (Soderbergh, 1996) - 9/10
In a Year of 13 Moons (Fassbinder, 1978) - 10/10
Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999) - 9/10
Rome: Open City (Rossellini, 1945) - 8/10
The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) - 9/10
Basic Instinct (Verhoeven, 1992) - 8/10
Risky Business (Brickman, 1983) - 7/10
Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) - 9/10
Dekalog I (Kieślowski, 1988) - 9/10
Avanti! (Wilder, 1972) - 9/10
Uncle Yanco (Varda, 1967) - 9/10
Thief (Mann, 1981) - 9/10
Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) - 9/10
Dekalog II (Kieślowski, 1988) - 9/10
Dekalog III (Kieślowski, 1988) - 9/10
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1978) - 8/10
Black Panthers (Varda, 1968) - 10/10
Dekalog IV (Kieślowski, 1988) - 10/10
Before Midnight (Linklater, 2013) - 9/10

The Eye (Pang Bros, 2002) 3/10
The Deadly Trap (Clément,1971) 6/10
The Comedy of Terrors (Tourneur, 1963) 7/10
The Mind of Mr. Soames (Cooke, 1970) 6/10
The Ugly Ducking (Comfort, 1959) 5/10
The World of Henry Orient (Hill, 1964) 7/10 (because of the ILX revive - slightly surprising credit for Boris Kaufman, but no wonder all the New York locations look so good)
Road to Utopia (Walker, 1946)
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wenders, 1972) 7/10 (this was the recent restoration supervised by Wenders, with some new 'cover version' soundtrack substitutions for the now prohibitively expensive rock and pop hits heard throughout the film on jukeboxes, radios etc. Film looks stunning, Robby Müller already fully formed)
Halloween (Green, 2018) 6/10 - Haluk Bilginer making for a great, tiny degree of separation between this film and the work of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose latest film opens in the UK next month

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (Joseph Green, 1959) 2
Night of the Ghouls (Wood, 1952) 2
Doctor X (Curtiz (!), 1932) 4
Dead of Night (Cavalcanti, 1945) 6
*Gremlins 2 (Dante, 1990) 8
First Man (Chazelle, 2018) 7; shame about the suffering wife trope
Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018) 8

Mandy (2018) 7/10
*Casino Royale (2006) 8/10
Sorry To Bother You (2018) 7/10
*Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) 4/10
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) 7/10
Nerve (2016) 4/10
Zero Dark Thirty (2012) 5/10
*California Split (1974) 10/10
*Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) 8/10
Straight Time (1978) 7/10
*Bone Tomahawk (2015) 8/10
The Negotiator (1998) 5/10

The Uninvited (1944)
Cat People (1942)

Went with a couple of spooky classics. Simone Simon is astonishing in Cat People, she's so adept at playing fearful and coy and sweet and kind and terrifying in equal measure, in subtle and smart ways. The two separate scenes where Jane Randolph is stalked are scary precisely bc you know the reason she's being stalked is something very personal, very primal, and she's being specifically targeted. Simon simply talking to her at the pool in the second scene is chilling.

Ant-Man 8/10

One of the better Marvel flicks out of the dozen I've seen thus far. It was funny to read the thread for this one, everyone groaning over production issues and trailers and what not, and it winds up being a really good breezy film, a good 30-40 min shorter than the other Marvels and less weighted down by Avengers business. Paul Rudd was *delightful*. Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas make for a great daughter/father pair, some proper tension in those scenes. I enjoyed Corey Stoll's villain, even though he ticked off a lot of the boxes that a few villains who have gone before him have also ticked off.

Cat People is great, I haven't seen any of the remakes, are they worth checking out?

also what should I watch tonite for hAlLoWeEn???

i'm watching Ringu. i already feel that this is a mistake.

Damn, probably, yeah.

I have The Thing and I've never seen it... should I?

yes!

the 1951 version first

def watch the carpenter thing tonight

I think you should work backward from the 2011 thing

Watching Ringu alone at night is one of the scariest thing to do, lol. Would not do it again, not even on Halloween.

i thought it was pretty tame (but ask me again in a couple of hours). i remember it being worse, and more jump-scary than it was. maybe i'm confusing it with part 2, or the remake.

it also seemed quite quaint - vhs cassettes and landlines and all.

ok im gonna watch the carpenter thing rn!!!!!!!!

October is the only month of the year where my viewing is genre-specific (thought not any good, even the cartoon I watched while babysitting my nieces fit the theme).

Psycho II (Franklin, 1983) 5/10
Suspiria (Argento, 1977) 7/10
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Tartakovsky, 2018) 4/10
The 7th Victim (Robson, 1943) 7/10
The Dead Zone (Cronenberg, 1983) 8/10
Eyes Without a Face (Franju, 1960) 7/10
The Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925) 8/10
The Stuff (Cohen, 1985) 5/10
The Fly (Neumann, 1960) 6/10

er, The Fly is 1958.

Hereditary 2.5/5
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) 3.5/5
* The Wicker Man (1973) 4/5
* Suspiria (1977) 4/5
* Cure (1997) 4/5
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) 3/5
Spotlight (2015) 3.5/5
Venom 2/5

I Am Not a Witch(Nyoni, 2018), 7/10
Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018) 7/10
Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2018) 5/10
Mandy(Cosmatos, 2018)
Wildlife (Dano, 2018) 7/10
A Star is Born (Cooper, 2018) 5/10
The Guardians (Beauvois, 20218) 7/10
Burning(Lee, 2018) 8/10
Leave No Trace (Granik, 2018) 7/10
Museo (Ruizpalacios, 2018) 7/10
Support the Girls (Bujalski, 2018) 6/10
Love Songs (Honoré, 2007) 7/10
La Vie de Bohème (Kaurismaki, 1992) 8/10
High School (Wiseman, 1969) 8/10
* Richard III (Olivier, 1956) 7/10
* The Little Foxes (Wyler, 1941) 5/10
* Stage Door (La Cava, 1937) 9/10

film fest

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (Gilliam)
The Raft (Lindeen)
Fortuna (Roaux)
The Waldheim Waltz (Beckermann)
Jean-François and the Meaning of Life (Portabella)
Mug (Szumowska)
You Go To My Head (de Clerq)
Studio Bankside (Jarman)
Journey to Avebury (Jarman)
Tarot (Jarman)
Sulphur (Jarman)
Sloane Square (Jarman)
Sebastian Wrap (Jarman)
Waiting for Waiting for Godot (Jarman)
Electric Fairy (Jarman)
Departure (Wüst)
The Blot (Weber)
The Chaotic Life of Nada Kadić (Hernaiz Pidal)
*The Ornithologist (Rodrigues)
The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (von Trotta)
Shoplifters (Kore-ada)
Birds of Passage (Guerra & Gallego)
Marquis de Wavrin: From the Manor to the Jungle (Winter & Plantier)
A Woman Captured (Tuza-Ritter)
Roobha (Sivam)
Burning (Lee)
Isabelle (Heydon)
Touch Me Not (Pintilie)
*Le Mepris (Godard)
Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher)
The Silence of Others (Carracedo & Bahar)
Is That You? (Riverón Sánchez)
Trees Down Here (Rivers)
Snow (Jones)
A Year Along the Abandoned Road (Skallerud)
3 Days in Quiberon (Atef)
Eastern Memories (Kullström & Kaartinen)
The Skier (Najafi)
The Image Book (Godard)
The Image You Missed (Foreman)
Monsters and Men (Green)
Roma (Cuarón)

How is Birds of Passage? Been offered an interview with one of the directors, still wondering if I want to work on it.

Thoughts on Mug? I liked it quite a lot. Quite surprised by it.

and Gilliam's Quixote? it of the 25-year wait?

Birds of passage was cool tho I think I preferred guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent - this may have been the film I was most tired during* so I think I was a little impatient with some of the more inevitable genre story turns. There are certainly enough things that make it atypical, and it’s well done.

Mug was a highlight for sure, loved the grim humour, the stylistic gimmick, the way they shot the construction site

The Gilliam - well bearing in mind I’ve been assuming for years that this would be a shitshow if it ever got made, I ended up surprised at how successfully they pulled it off. Obv not worth 25 years, or 2.5 hours for that matter. It’s definitely better than the Johnny Depp version would have been, not just because of driver vs depp - I didn’t know this going in but they’ve made a couple of major changes to the original premise that not only make it less awful and misconceived but bring it closer to the spirit of Cervantes’s novel. So props I guess for credibly updating Quixote, which is kinda miraculous in itself, there’s just the slight problem that the film is nothing special

Oh yeah the asterisk: I was just proud to get through a festival without once nodding off tbh

Btw I should say Gilliam was a surprise guest at the screening and seemed quite aware of the film’s flaws (in particular its length) and was imploring people not to watch it as a 25-years-in-the-making culmination of a life’s work, but just as another movie

Rosa Luxemburg (1986, von Trotta) 6/10
Wildlife (2018, Dano) 7/10
*After Hours (1985, Scorsese) 8/10
Kuroneko (1968, Shindo) 9/10
The Dam Busters (1955, Anderson) 7/10
*Prime Cut (1972, Ritchie) 7/10
I, Jane Doe (1948, Auer) 5/10
The Oblong Box (1969, Hessler) 6/10
Exit Smiling (1926, Taylor) 7/10
*Silent Movie (1976, Brooks) 6/10

*The Ornithologist
*Le Mepris

-imo the last films in that list you should be nodding off to!

that's not what the asterisks mean, i don't think

i've always intensely disliked Le Mepris; had contempt for it, you could say.

really? I haven't seen every Godard film, but so far it's my favorite

hetero lovers fighting constantly -- blechhh

Yeah I guess but I was just turned off by the casual, romantic depiction of crime in Breathless and overall thought Contempt was a much better film

Godard is the ultimate *straight* director though

second rental from the brand new video store (!!!):

Pierrot le Fou
La Captive
Beau Travail
Hush.... Hush, Sweet Charlotte

got the Godard because Akerman said that seeing it as a child made her want to be a filmmaker. very excited for La Captive, most recent non-doc Akerman I've tracked down. only Denis I've seen are White Material (eh) and Let the Sunshine In (fantastic). consensus is Beau Travail is her best, yes? and the Aldrich I've wanted to see for a while and seen referenced often (most recently in a book about Nashville session musicians).

The Captive is the best Proust adaptation I've seen after Ruiz's.

Beau Travail not in my top 5 Denis

The Curse of the Cat People (von Fritsch & Wise, 1944)
The Haunted Castle (Smith, 1897)
Mr. W's Little Game (Shores, 1934)
Bimbo's Initiation (Fleischer & Natwick, 1931)
*Under a Spell (Smith, 1925)
Her Defiance (King & Madison, 1916)
The Cardboard Lover (Leonard, 1928)
*The Navigator (Crisp & Keaton, 1924)
Beauty's Worth (Vignola, 1922)
*Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Reisner & Keaton, 1928)
L'Inferno (de Liguoro & Bertolini, 1911)
*Safety Last (Newmeyer & Taylor, 1923)
*Show People (Vidor, 1928)
When Knighthood Was in Flower (Vignola, 1922)

xp morbs what are your top 5 Denis

lady gaga bradley cooper movie - it was ok..? i can already barely remember it. i guess on second thought, it sucked
basic instinct (verhoeven) - this was maybe the most enjoyment i've had watching a movie in a year
deep red (argento) - good, yet often boring when not slashy. sickchops prog soundtrack
andrei rublev (tarkovsky) - v good, didn't actually feel long at 3h perhaps because every terrible hollywood action movie is 2.5h?