Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Sorry if all the rewatches are annoying.

The Adjuster (1991) 4/5.
The Cameraman (1928) 4/5
Nationtime (1972) 3/5
* Vendredi soir (Friday Night)(2002) 4/5
Starman (1984) 3/5
* Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) 4/5. This one feels like more of a gem as time has gone by.
* Bad Lieutenant (1992) 4/5
* The Big Sleep (1946) 4.5/5
* Fat City (1972) 4.5/5
Human Highway (1982) 3/5. Had mostly just seen the noisy and sublime Neil Young/Devo jam before.
* Wolf of Wall Street 4.5/5
Starstruck (1982) 3.5/5. Thought this was going to be annoying but it won me over. Very breezy and poppy viewing, if that's what you want.
Chinese Roulette (1976) 3.5/5

had the same thought about ghost dog after a rewatch last week. i didnt really rate it when it came out but it felt a lot stronger this time.

Grizzly Man (2005) 4/5
Mad Love (1935) 4/5
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) 4/5
We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) 2/5
Wild Strawberries (1957) 5/5
Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai (1999) 3/5
A Serious Man (2009) 4/5
The Laughing Policeman(1973) 2/5
Dishonored(1931) 4/5
Con Air (1997) 8/5
Town Bloody Hall (1979) 3/5

Mad Love was a great surprise, hadnt heard of it before, terrific direction & atmosphere and a legit performance by Peter Lorre, v spooky

tenet (nolan, 2020) 5/10
titicut follies (wiseman, '67) 8/10
*enemy (villeneuve, 2013) 7/10
ismael's ghosts (desplechin, 2017) 5.5/10
olympic dreams (jeremy teicher, 2020) 9/10
the vanishing of sidney hall (shawn christensen, 2018) 4/10
not carol (eamon harrington & john watkin, 2019) 8/10
never rarely sometimes always (hittman, 2020) 9/10
north by northwest (hitchcock '59) 10/10
serenity (steven knight, 2019) 2/10
blood relatives (chabrol, '78) 3.5/10
bloody nose, empty pockets (ross bros, 2020) 10/10
zeroville (franco, 2019) 2/10
the last thing he wanted (rees, 2020) 1/10
i love you, beth cooper (columbus, '09) 7.5/10
samui song (ratanaruang, 2018) 5/10

Toy Story 4 (2019) 6/10
Heathers (1988) 5
*Clue (1985) 5

criterion channel
Holiday (Cukor, 1938) cary grant does a somersault, 8/10
Indiscreet (Kramer, 1958) 4/10 a snooze
The Black Cat (Ulmer, 1939) 6/10
Blind Alley (1939) 5/10
Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937) 8/10
Primary (Drew, 1960) 5/10
Klute (Pakula, 1971) 7/10
Bamboozled (Lee, 2000) 3/10
Certified Copy (Kiarostami, 2010) 7/10
You Only Live Once (Lang, 1937) a high 7/10
The Mouse That Roared (Arnold, 1959) 6/10
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) 6/10 lost a point because of the ending speech

more of a cartwheel, actually

Dream Castle (von Bolvary, 1933)
Stage Struck (Dwan, 1925)
Ladies Should Listen (Tuttle, 1934)
Running Wild (La Cava, 1927)
The Three Musketeers (Schaefer & Clark, 1933)
Underground (Asquith, 1928)
The Black Balloon (Safdie & Safdie, 2012)
Recaptured Love (Adolfi, 1930)
Help Wanted, Female (Ceder, 1931)
Trader Mickey (Hand, 1932)
King Klunk (Lantz & Nolan, 1933)
*The Invisible Man (Whale, 1933)
*Cook, Papa, Cook (MacDonald, 1928)
*Fatty and Mabel Adrift (Arbuckle, 1916)

Cop Car (Watts, 2015) - 3/10
The Baron of Arizona (Fuller, 1950) - 8/10
Chop Shop (Bahrani, 2007) - 6/10
*Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970) - 9/10
*Postcards from the Edge (Nichols, 1990) - 6/10
Deep Red (Argento, 1975) - 6/10
Red Road (Arnold, 2007) - 8/10
*Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) - 10/10
*The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971) - 10/10
Zombi 3 (Fulci, 1988) - 6/10
Man Hunt (Lang, 1941) - 8/10
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Schlöndorff, von Trotta; 1975) - 9/10
*Forty Guns (Fuller, 1957) - 9/10
El Cochecito (Ferreri, 1960) - 9/10
SexWorld (Spinelli, 1977) - 7/10
*Fort Apache (Ford, 1948) - 10/10
The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945) - 9/10
*Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara, 1992) - 9/10
Portrait of Jennie (Dieterle, 1948) - 9/10
Who’s Who (Leigh, 1979) - 7/10
*Contempt (Godard, 1963) - 7/10
*Blue Collar (Schrader, 1978) - 9/10
*Beware of a Holy Whore (Fassbinder, 1971) - 9/10
Late August, Early September (Assayas, 1998) - 8/10
Bad Girl (Borzage, 1931) - 8/10
Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Martino, 1972) - 8/10
*The Unfaithful Wife (Chabrol, 1969) - 8/10
Intermezzo (Molander, 1936) - 7/10
Angel Face (Preminger, 1953) - 7/10
Xala (Sembène, 1975) - 8/10
Summer Night, with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil (Wertmüller, 1986) - 8/10
*Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong, 2015) - 9/10
*Murder-Rock: Dancing Death (Fulci, 1984) - 9/10

January

Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, Gibson 2021)
Small Axe: Mangrove (McQueen, Siddons 2020)
* Ghost World (Zwigoff, Clowes 2001)
Small Axe: Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, Courttia Newland 2020)
* It Follows (Mitchell 2014)
* Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante, Haas 1990)
Small Axe: Red, White And Blue (Steve McQueen, Courttia Newland 2020)
Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap (Ice-T, Baybutt 2012)
Small Axe: Alex Wheatle (McQueen, Siddons 2020)
Secret Honor (Altman, Freed, Stone 1984)
Blood Bath (Jack Hill, Stephanie Rothman 1966)
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz 2020)
Slumber Party Massacre II (Deborah Brock 1987)
Love & Basketball (Gina Prince-Bythewood 2000)
Storefront Hitchcock (Demme 1996)
Big Eyes (Burton, Alexander, Karaszewski 2014)
Baby Done (Curtis And Sophie 2021)

sorting movies by the year they are set in, nice

https://scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/jm-1-internet-2021.png

i just saw booksmart and loved it

i was shocked it only cost $6M to make! that would have been low-budg in the 90s. according to IMDB it made its money back in the first weekend so i hope we see beanie feldstein (!!!!!) in more - she is just outstanding. everyone was good though

the stylized reality of it and underlying sweetness remind me a lot of Sex Education

seriously, one of the great high school movies imo

the airport scene at the end really got me. it is crazy how these intense, life-molding relationships just stop, if not completely then transformed beyond recognition, and it literally happens in like one second. you go away for the summer and then you're off to whatever else. it's all over. don't let college fuck you up.

booksmart is elevated by the lead performances for sure; both those women are at the start of great careers.

Artemnis Fowl
though dropped off in the middle of it last night. kenneth branagh has pretty much bowlderised the film of a book I quite enjoyed. Actually enjoyed it enough to read through several of teh series and read a couple of the author's more adult books.
So the film is no longer about an overachieving criminal mastermind and now about a precocious teen who is looking to rescue his father.
Though they do refer to the criminal mastermind at one point towards the end.
I'd been intrigued from having read the books but I don't think it lives up to expectations. So wonder if it will be a standalone. Released at a weird time which is likely to go against it too isn't it?

I don't know what Branagh is doing with his current movies. I tried watching one of his Poirot movies and it was awful. and I like his Hamlet quite a lot.

Nomadland was ... OK. But I kept thinking back to "Wendy and Lucy" the whole time.

JUdas and the Black Messiah
Really enjoyed it.
Told from the perspective of the guy who's been blackmailed into spying on Fred Hampton and his branch of teh Black panthers. But showing the flaws in that a lot better than mario van peebles Panther which seemed to make way too much of an excuse for Cointelpro which destroyed teh movement.
Thought it really good though i did think that the actor playing Fred Hampton might be a bit short. or am I right in thinking he was really tall?
Has a lot of recognisable ypoung black faces from both sides of teh Atlantic in . I hope it stands for a while.

& this which is on film because of the pandemic but is pretty moving whatever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPJYWmxHpK8
but would be a stage performance otherwise.
3 enslaved women who Dr Sims is practising gynaecology on tell their story. Alonside a white ndentured servant.

(xpost) Meaning it felt like a lesser version? I've been anxious to see it for months, but it still hasn't opened here (and theatres are still closed--should reopen soon).

Gambling Ship (Marcin & Gasnier, 1933)
Singapore Sue (Robinson, 1932)
Blood and Sand (Niblo & Arzner, 1922)
A Connecticut Yankee (Butler, 1931)
One Heavenly Night (Fitzmaurice, 1930)
Don Q Son of Zorro (Crisp, 1925)
The Invisible Man Returns (May, 1940)
A Fraternity Mixup (Pembroke, 1926)
*The High Sign (Keaton & Cline, 1921)

xpost Yeah, a lesser version. Weirdly, though I was the only one that had seen "Wendy and Lucy," all of us actually felt "Nomadland" fell short of its reputation.

It was on Hulu here, fwiw.

We Are Your Friends, Zac Efron is an EDM DJ. Four Tet briefly joked about it on a podcast and I had to see if it was as bad I expected - it was.

The Worst Idea Of All Time podcast watched it and reviewed it every week for a year. I have listened to at least 30 hours of two skinny Kiwis talking about how bad this movie is, without ever seeing it myself.

*Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini, 1975) - 10/10
*The Devil is a Woman (von Sternberg, 1935) - 8/10
The Last Boy Scout (Scott, 1991) - 5/10
The Boy with Green Hair (Losey, 1948) - 8/10
The Watermelon Woman (Dunye, 1996) - 8/10
The Mortal Storm (Borzage, 1940) - 7/10
Born Yesterday (Cukor, 1950) - 7/10
Woman on the Run (Foster, 1950) - 8/10
*What Time Is It There? (Tsai, 2001) - 10/10
Door into Silence (Fulci, 1991) - 4/10
Meat (Wiseman, 1976) - 10/10
*Dillinger is Dead (Ferreri, 1969) - 10/10
*I Was a Male War Bride (Hawks, 1949) - 9/10
*Shanghai Express (von Sternberg, 1932) - 10/10
A Cat in the Brain (Fulci, 1990) - 9/10
*The American Soldier (Fassbinder, 1970) - 9/10
Stage Struck (Dwan, 1925) - 8/10
The Driller Killer (Ferrara, 1979) - 8/10
Eva (Losey, 1962) - 9/10
Where the Boys Are (Levin, 1960) - 7/10
*Vendredi Soir (Denis, 2002) - 10/10
*Straight Time (Grosbard, 1978) - 9/10
Grave Robbers (Galindo Jr., 1989) - 6/10
Touki Bouki (Mambéty, 1973) - 8/10
The Rising of the Moon (Ford, 1957) - 7/10
Midnight Run (Brest, 1988) - 5/10
*The Trial (Welles, 1962) - 10/10
*2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Godard, 1967) - 9/10
The Sweet House of Horrors (Fulci, 1989) - 7/10
Stage Door (La Cava, 1937) - 10/10
Douce (Lara, 1943) - 7/10

Midnight Run (Brest, 1988) - 5/10

Seriously? I love that film. What it does it does perfectly

I'd say that about Beverly Hills Cop, his previous film. there's absolutely no reason Midnight Run needs to be 127 minutes. There's a lot of DEEP 1980s muck, particularly the awful, awful soundtrack, and rather than indulging in its stupidity like a good comedy, it hits all these "mature" beats (like visiting the wife & daughter) that are totally unnecessary. Just follow De Niro & Grodin annoying the shit out of each other. Joe Pantoliano is FANTASTIC tho

I guess I could do without the family stuff but I don't mind it. Agree about the music. Pantoliano, Yaphet Kotto, the two leads, even John Ashton, are all at the top of their game

okay here's my last 20 odd basic af opinions

Great:
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020) - well I LIKED Synecdoche New York so this is my jam
*Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012) - top-tier comic book-to-movie IMO
Trip to Greece (Michael Winterbottom, 2020) - I doubt I'll ever get bored of these two chucklefucks
Aladdin (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1992) - wall to wall bangers, charm from every frame. Shame that almost everything that happens is problematic
Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020) - creepy gory sci-fi. Not sure if it adds up to anything much but supremly fun while it lasted
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020) - sometimes two charismatic performances is enough

Pretty Good
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020) - liked despite the poverty tourism
David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee, 2020) - good music. I'd have liked to have seen it live.
The Kid Detective (Evan Morgan, 2020) - I thought it was breezy and fun! y'all gonna hate it
Palm Springs (Berbakow, 2020) - good high-concept romcom with requisite improbable meetcute
Hercules (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1997) - looks great, good songs, barely bored. glad I didn't watch this as a kid otherwise Meg would have done something to my prepubescence
Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020) - down it down it down it
News of the World (Paul Greengrass, 2020) - looks nearly as good as RDR2. I'm a fucking sap so I was moved.
One Night in Miami... (Regina King, 2020) - terrific fun, if a little hollow imo
A Glitch in the Matrix (Rodney Ascher, 2021) - Room 237 was better but obviously disconnecting yourself from reality has greater consequences when its not just a movie

Good
The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1989) - The odd nice song, great floating hair animation.
The Great Mouse Detective (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1986) - charming but kinda dull. finale on Big Ben makes it worth it

Bad
Rose Island (Sydney Sibilia, 2020) - what if a movie was charming, but nothing else?
Archive (Gavin Rothery, 2020) - pretty design, otherwise bad in a innumerable ways
The Dig (Simon Stone, 2021) - Merchant Ivory + Time Team

blank it

damn straight thank it

charming but kinda dull. finale on Big Ben makes it worth it

wait, did you edit your post? I've never read this before

need to get around to "ending things"

xp Finale's got cool Cary-Grant-Mount-Rushmore vibes but otherwise I didn't really take to any of the characters (scottish mouse girl excepted), and since the animation looks kinda cheap there's nothing for me to gawk at, hence me finding it a touch dull in places.

forks did you like S,NY? It really is the last half hour of all that kaleidoscopic meta shit stretched to a whole movie.

(I was elegantly and deftly shoehorning the Big Ben bongs bit in)*

tonight I will be captain obliviousness

Dredd (Pete Travis, 2012) - top-tier comic book-to-movie IMO

ya it's good (though doesn't adapt much of what Dredd's about), saw it in 3D on release so fear that rewatching on a TV would be a disappointment.

icyc, Alex Garland is totally the "author" of the film: as well as writing and producing, he was on set throughout, and Urban openly said in promo that he ignored Travis and asked all his questions of Garland (then came out six years later and said "be clear, Garland directed that movie and it should 100% be the first thing on his filmography.") Travis was locked out of post and the edit, and Garland only agreed to not formally seek a co-director credit after press leaks & some negotiating that ended up with a teeth-gritted press release, eleven months before the film came out, saying that Travis had agreed to "an unorthodox collaboration" when taking the job and everybody was proud of their work.

I didn't know any of this until Urban went fuck it, mask helmet off in 2018, but! Garland and (Beach producer) Andrew Macdonald had done the press tour in Australia. A reporter or three asked why Travis wasn't there to answer their questions, like they were being shortchanged. MacDonald started saying (pp) "filmmaking is a delicate weft of many skills and collaborators, a tapestry crafted by many hands," and Garland cut in with "look, if you've got someone who wrote the thing and produced the thing and hired the designers and worked with them for a year before hiring someone to run the camera department for a few weeks, then carried on making the film for over a year afterward, why not accept that they might know something about it, and ask him?"

Which was such an otm decentering of the default conceit of director as author that it was almost a letdown to read Urban go "nah he directed it."

*((also I'm not watching any of the M&C movies - 100% cannot concentrate on an animated feature 51 weeks into lockdown - so genuinely was surprised by the reference here: would have been mostly tuned out & waiting for the box office game if they did the bit on the ep))

NotEnough are you following along with the Blank Check podcast?

Last (x) movies you saw (II)

forks did you like S,NY?

I didn't know any of that about Dredd! I love how we get straight into Dredd just doing his job, like this is just another day on the beat. Turns out we don't need 45mins of teenage Dredd becoming a cop because a gang member shot his dad.

Following along with blank check is a good exercise in calibration for me. I usually only watch movies that have a good rep or I'm otherwise predisposed to like, and BC's stubbornness in watching a whole filmography, even the shit ones, forces me to reckon with bad movies on an contextual level, rather than the tediousness of HDTGM or the like.

I love how we get straight into Dredd

"filmmaking is a delicate weft of many skills and collaborators, a tapestry crafted by many hands,"

Save it for the AVN Awards speech, pal.

xpost Earned a lot of comparisons to "The Raid" for that reason, didn't it? It's a funny coincidence, since "The Raid" had only just come out the year before, so it's not like someone (let alone Garland) saw that and immediately decided to make a movie about a badass storming an apartment tower.

you're right about that.

Seeing The Raid in a crowded theater was a great movie experience.

Dredd was shot before The Raid was.

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) 4/5
* Beau Travail (1999) 4.5/5
My Little Chickadee (1940) 2/5 the anti-Native American racism is off the scale here.
Innocent Blood (1992) 2.5/5 Seeing Don Rickles and various Sopranos actors deal with vampirism is fun but John Landis brings nothing to this.
Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021) 4/5
Green Snake (1993) 4.5/5
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) 3.5/5
Angel Heart (1987) 3.5/5
The Tall Target (1951) 4/5
The Loveless (1981) 3/5 Even though she co-directed it, hard to believe Kathryn Bigelow's first film is so languidly paced.
Morocco (1930) 3.5/5

Friends Of Mr. Sweeney (Ludwig, 1934)
Hula (Fleming, 1927)
The Flying Ace (Norman, 1926)
High Stakes (Sherman, 1931)
The Phantom of the Air (Taylor, 1933)
Moran of the Lady Letty (Melford, 1922)
Nomadland (Zhao, 2020)
Devil Doll (Shonteff, 1964)
An Expensive Visit (Louis, 1915)
The Serenade (Louis, 1916)
Collars and Cuffs (Jeske, 1923)
When Knights Were Cold (Fouce?, 1923)

second half of february

The Big Short (McKay, 2015) 5/10 feels like homework
Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter, 1933) 8/10
*Saboteur (Hitchcock, 1942) 6/10 the one with the statue of liberty, not the one with the bomb on the bus

criterion channel:
Bell Book and Candle (Quine, 1958) 7/10 mostly for being made right after vertigo
The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946) 7/10
She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) 5/10
My Little Chickadee (Cline, 1940) 5/10 love seeing margaret hamilton
Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954) 9/10
The Golden Coach (Renoir, 1952) 10/10 english language version, my first 10/10 on first watch in quite a while
Images (Altman, 1972) 6/10 a dry run for 3 women
The Great Mouse Detective (Clements & Musker, 1986) 4/10
Disney Howard (Disney, 20Disney) 5/10

shorts
A Fraternity Mixup (1926) on ben model's live show
My Dad is 100 Years Old (Maddin, 2005)
*Diatoms (Painlevé, 1968)
Lick the Star (Sofia Coppola, 1998)