Last (x) movies you saw (II)

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)

Feb:

Born to Win (Passer, 1971) 7/10 YOUTUBE
Devil Girl From Mars (MacDonald, 1954) 5/10 DVD
King Rocker (Cumming, 2021) 7/10 SKY ARTS
Boomerang! (Kazan, 1947) 7/10 DVD
The Painted Bird (Marhoul, 2019) 6/10 MUBI
Whistle and I'll Come to You (Miller, 1968) 8/10 YOUTUBE - part of the Scorsese/Wright/Tarantino British cinema list
Fantastic Planet (Laloux, 1973) 7/10 MUBI
Strongroom (Sewell, 1962) 8/10 YOUTUBE - part of the Scorsese/Wright/Tarantino British cinema list
Mothra vs Godzilla (Honda, 1964) 7/10 DVD
Death in Venice (Visconti, 1971) 8/10 DVD
I Bury the Living (Albert Band, 1958) 7/10 YOUTUBE - an ILX old horror film thread recommendation
Thelma (Trier, 2017) 6/10 DVD - an ILX new horror film thread recommendation
A High Wind in Jamaica (Mackendrick, 1965) 7/10 YOUTUBE - part of the Scorsese/Wright/Tarantino British cinema list
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (Honda, 1964) 7/10 DVD
*Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979) 9/10 BLU-RAY

Gotta go back to Fantastic Planet. I remember loving it in all its hippy-dippyness - in my memory its a 9.

Love Stalker. The way it was described to me before my first watch made it sound like the Dark Souls of movies but its really not. It manages to avoid being a slow movie by somehow making the audience's universe slow down to match its pace.

Ward, I also looked up Strongroom as the most compellingly-discussed film in that podcast - but startled you'd not seen Whistle And before! I was shown it the only time I visited HC near Christmas, on the grounds that it was an essential part of the season.

Trees Lounge (Buscemi 1996)
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (Swift, Fosse, Loesser, Burrows, Weinstock, Gilbert, after Mead 1967)
The Silent Partner (Duke, Hanson 1978) ⚰️⚰️⚰️⚰️
The Sound Of Music (Wise, Lehman, Lindsay, Crouse, Rodgers, Hammerstein, von Trapp, Hurdalek 1965) ⚰️
Citizen Ruth (Payne, Taylor 1996)
* Goodfellas (Scorsese, Pileggi 1990)
* Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, Avary 1994)
Thief (Mann after "Hohimer" 1981)
The Misfits (Huston, Miller 1961)
Mikey And Nicky (second director's cut) (Elaine May 1976)
* Submarine (Ayoade after Dunthorne 2010)
Small Axe: Education (McQueen, Siddons 2020)
Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar (Josh Greenbaum, Annie Mumolo, Kristen Wiig 2020/21)
* Mad Max:Fury Road (Miller, McCarthy, Lathouris 2015)
The Kid Detective (Morgan 2020)
* Magic Mike (Soderbergh, Carolin 2012)
* The Invisible Man (Whannell 2020)
* Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, Brackett 1950)

NON-FICTION
In & Of Itself (DelGaudio, Oz 2020)
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Bowser after Biskind 2003)
* Not Quite Hollywood (Hartley 2008)

SHORTS:
Sunday Dinner (Mead, Fanelli 2021)
Wise Girl (Swinfen 2019)
Bald (Lucas 1971)
Khaite (Baker 2021)

Sic, yes, Whistle And is fairly frequently shown on UK TV and I'd certainly seen bits of it before, but had probably not actually sat down and watched it all in one go until I went through the Scorsese list recently, adding things to my YouTube likes. I did see the later BBC version when it was broadcast a few years ago - it wasn't v good!

coffins: how many times you fell asleep?

how good this Christopher Plummer movie was

Sylvie et le Fantôme (Autant-Lara, 1946) - 6/10
*L’argent (Bresson, 1983) - 10/10
The Big Fix (Kagan, 1978) - 6/10
*Pierrot le Fou (Godard, 1965) - 9/10
Mamma Roma (Pasolini, 1962) - 8/10
Bush Mama (Gerima, 1979) - 9/10
*Weekend (Godard, 1967) - 8/10
Becky (Milott, 2020) - 4/10
Smooth Talk (Chopra, 1985) - 8/10
Platinum Blonde (Capra, 1931) - 5/10
*À nos amours (Pialat, 1983) - 8/10
*Inside Man (Lee, 2006) - 8/10
*Vagabond (Varda, 1985) - 8/10
Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999) - 8/10
*Satan’s Brew (Fassbinder, 1976) - 9/10
The Last Mistress (Breillat, 2007) - 9/10
*Eating Raoul (Bartel, 1982) - 10/10
The Gospel According to Matthew (Pasolini, 1964) - 9/10
Figures in a Landscape (Losey, 1970) - 6/10

Vittorio de Seta shorts: Islands of Fire (1954), Orgosolo's Shepherds (1958), Golden Parable (1955), Solfatara (1955), Easter in Sicily (1955), The Age of Swordfish (1954)
Neat (Altrogge, 2018)
M le maudit (Chabrol, 1982)
My Dad Is 100 Years Old (Maddin, 2005)
Holiday (Cukor, 1938)
Vitalina Varela (Costa, 2019)
Accidence (Maddin, Johnson, Johnson, 2018)
Stump the Guesser (Maddin, Johnson, Johnson, 2020)
Glorious (Maddin, 2008)
The Tall Target (Mann, 1951)
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938)
Home of the Brave (Anderson, 1986)
Joker (Phillips, 2019)
Vendetta of a Samurai (Mori, 1952)
Only Dream Things (Maddin, 2012)
*How to Take a Bath (Maddin, 2009)
*Lady Vengeance (Park, 2005)
Paris Is Burning (Livingston, 1990)

Bringing Out the Dead (Scorsese, 1999) - 8/10

was just thinking about this the other day, how it was a few years too soon for the memification of gonzo cage performances, whereas if the exact same project was announced today it would be pretty much all the internet would talk about for a year

Completely. Very good movie. Don't make me take off my sunglasses

Atlanta (S1/S2--7.5)
Inventing the Abbotts (7.0)
The Royal Tennenbaums (7.5)
The Sunshine Makers (6.5)
Capote (7.5)
Shirley (6.5)
Everybody Wants Some!! (5.0...I mean, 5.0!!)
Dead to Me (S1/S2--6.0)
A Man for All Seasons (7.0)
Morvern Callar (--)

I finished Morvern Callar but don't feel like I can rate it. I watched a DVD at home with no captioning: between that, poorly mixed sound (the music was twice as loud as the voices, so I had the volume down a bit), and, always tough for me, accents, I'm lucky if I picked up 30% of the dialogue. I think it's a film I could like, but hearing it would be the first step.

The Love Trap (Wyler, 1929)
A Blasted Event (Goulding, 1934)
Walk Cheerfully (Ozu, 1930)
That Night's Wife (Ozu, 1930)
Woman of Tokyo (Ozu, 1933)
Submarine (Capra, 1928)
A Merchant of Menace (Sweet, 1933)
The Thing That Couldn't Die (Cowan, 1958)
Bashful (Goulding, 1917)
Ice Cold Cocos (Lord, 1926)
One A.M. (Chaplin, 1916)

working on a longer post, because it's been a long time since I did this and I want to write more, but posting this in advance/separately because a) I want to emphasize it and b) the offer is open:

The Dancing Hawk (Królikiewicz, 1978)- THIS MOVIE FUCKS. Hadn't seen it or even heard of it before my current Polish cinema seminar (apart from a lauded repertory showing at Berlinale 2009 it's basically unreleased on home media; I think this was a rip from Polish TV with subtitles by my professor) but it's shot by Zbigniew Rybczyński and has the same careening lunatic energy as his work on Gerard Kargl's Angst, maybe even more so with Królikiewicz's scrambling of perspective, time, etc. For real, if that sounds remotely interesting to you hit me up and I will share a copy; this movie deserves to be seen.

Thought "Judas and the Black Messiah" was pretty average, which I guess makes it a missed opportunity, given the quality of the actors and the importance of the story. Nitpick: we kept watching thinking, huh, for a period piece set in Chicago, with classic cars and perfect period fashions, it's awfully strange that there's not been a single shot identifying this *as* Chicago. And indeed, it was filmed in Cleveland.

* The Lady Eve (1941) 4.5/5
Killing Them Softly (2012) 2/5. The Studio 60 of mob movies
The Hole (1998) 4/5
The Seventh Curse (1986) 4/5. the logic of this movie is insane. Like they let a 9-year-old boy with a gory imagination plot an Indiana Jones movie.
* Brief Encounter (1945) 5/5
Blonde Venus (1932) 3/5

*Numbered Men (LeRoy, 1930)
The Trumpet Blows (Roberts, 1934)
Behind the Mask (Dillon, 1932)
So This Is Marriage (Barker, 1929)
High Hats and Low Brows (Sweet, 1932)
The New Gentlemen (Feyder, 1929)
*The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Curtiz, 1933)
Carmen, Jr. (Goulding, 1923)
He Wouldn't Stay Down (Chase, 1915)
The House of Flickers (Stoloff, 1925)