ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

Here is an idea I hope catches on.
I've made a spreadsheet compiling

* The top 100 from the ILX Morbsies
* Any additional films which had a 1st place vote in said Morbsies
* The top 100 from the Sight & Sound critics' poll
* The top 100 from the Sight & Sound directors' poll

Here is the spreadsheet - please tell me if there is anything wrong and I'll do my best to fix it.

And I'm going to watch all 205 of them, one per week, in chronological order, until I finish at the start of 2027. And you can join me! If you like.

The first on the list is Sherlock Jr., from 1924 - I'll watch it this weekend, then it will be open for discussion from Monday 13th. It will be easy to share links at the start, as we go on will need more help probably. If people want to rate the films as we go, please feel free, don't think I will.

Think this will be useful for me as I have only seen 78 of these before, despite having spent three years at film school, hope it's useful to you too.

I've been privately working on catching up on the missing films from these polls; this could be fun, though, after looking at the spreadsheet, I'd be skipping the movies I haven't seen that only made the list due to someone here listing it at #1 on their ballot.

think there are only something like 15 of those in any case, we'll see how you feel when we get to Holiday On The Buses, but this project is very much a hop on, hop off deal.

Hugh Leonard, reviewing Holiday on the Buses gave the film zero stars out of four. Leonard added "This one should be buried in unhallowed ground".

I'll for sure chime in even if I haven't given the movie a fresh watch. (But I'll try my best to give each film a fresh watch.)

^ditto (except for this part)

I've been slowly watching the ones I haven't seen from the S&S top 100. It's only about 10 (though I might not see Peele's "Get Out" as I don't fancy it and it's obviously going to drop off next time).

Might extend it to the 250.

Another 40 on the rest. Would watch most of it bar Blue by Jarman. Fuck that shit.

Or Annie Hall.

Why Blue? I've always meant to "watch" that as I love a few of his other films.

xp Yeah this same project 20 years ago would have at least four or five Woody Allen films on the list, instead of zero.

I find Jarman's films to be pretty exasperating, and I feel I will hate it even when the subject matter is sad.

xp

i will try to participate, when i can! i find it really difficult to take part in film discussions, for various reasons, but i do enjoy watching them. i'm no kind of old-school buff but, due to the ilx influence (and using morbs' letterboxd list) i've seen a lot of the earlier films here, and within the last several months, to boot. it'll be nice to give them a rewatch so soon after my first encounter with them.

Sherlock Jr. is perfectly 45 minutes long

Or Annie Hall.
― xyzzzz

I'm probably one of the few (only?) people on here who was heartened to see Annie Hall show up. Not defending Woody Allen, just glad there are some people left who can make that distinction between the person and the film (easier with Rosemary's Baby/Chinatown, I think, just because they're so much better as films; also, Polanski's largely invisible, though he does have the cameo in Chinatown).

For some other thread, I know.

I think that this film club needs to do the On The Buses film trilogy to truly capture how it was in Ted Heath's Pre & Post EEC Britain.

I think we can all agree that the ending to Annie Hall is, in effect, a happy one

"just glad there are some people left who can make that distinction between the person and the film (easier with Rosemary's Baby/Chinatown, I think, just because they're so much better as films; also, Polanski's largely invisible"

I wouldn't watch a Polanski film nowadays either, Clemenza. I have no interest in supporting their work while these people are alive.

I think that this film club needs to do the On The Buses film trilogy to truly capture how it was in Ted Heath's Pre & Post EEC Britain.

― Toshirō Nofune (The Seventh ILXorai), Friday, 10 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink

We just have to step outside for that, these days..

I’m in

I think we can all agree that the ending to _Annie Hall_ is, in effect, a happy one

Ugh, for some reason, I ventured outside this safe haven and ended up interacting with Jeffrey Wells. Not pleasant.

Yeah I'm in, tho can't promise to keep up every week - one objective I have this year is to watch more films from the rest of the world than US films overall and while these lists are varied and wonderful I fear they'd still land me on the wrong side of that in the end.

Why does ILX hate L'Atalante so much?

Is this true?

Yes, fuck all canal barges.

Alba can you tell which ilxors are hating I'll bully them for you.

Ha ha I was just making a glib comment after seeing the spreadsheet and noticing tha it placed relatively well in the S&S top 100s but nowhere with ILX.

I think that applies even more to Beau Travail but I was looking at the early films.

Gonna watch Beau Travail in a proper theater next week -- my first non-DVD/streaming experience w/it!

While everyone's gearing up, a reasonably engaging quiz:

Try this quiz - https://t.co/yyLpPtjiKP pic.twitter.com/fdHFKTXEpL

— DVDBeaver (@DVDBeaver) February 11, 2023

66/100. I raced through it, probably wouldn't have done much better if I'd taken my time (I either knew it or guessed--though I would have gone back and changed a few guesses based on subsequent answers).

more mainstream:
https://www.cinenerdle2.app/

68/100. Projectionist but no professor. But what's wrong with being a projectionist?

Wtf, I'm boycotting this quiz

Reasoning?

Putting professors above projectionists!

Ah!

96/100 and only because I accidentally put Jacques Rivette when I meant François Truffaut

Check out the big brain on Brad!

77/100 -- a couple of dumb mistakes on movies I've seen, a couple of lucky guesses on movies I haven't seen

71, though at least half were guesses.

(Some of them informed guesses, though.)

76. About five films I did see and couldn't place grr

88. Nailed every one I knew, every guess I guessed wrong

Oh and messed up Spike Lee . Just couldn't place that image in that film somehow

84/100!

I guessed on most of the contemporary Asian stuff, which rarely payed off. And I got the Black female directors all switched around. The only film I've seen that I miscredited was Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

I just exchanged texts with my friend who actually is a projectionist but did not mention this quiz.

I got 89. several of them were guesses based on what I know about the filmmakers’ visual aesthetics or the time periods from the images. I got several directors mixed up - Mizoguchi and Kobayashi, Kazan and Wyler, Etrice and Saura and others. I guessed Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent correctly only because I have recently seen stills from it on twitter, but I haven’t watched it. Also still have yet to watch Djibril Diop Mambéty’s films, a few of which are on Kanopy, or Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman

My projectionist friend told me about this yesterday:
https://framed.wtf

If you don't mind hard-coded subs: https://archive.org/details/rear-window-1954_202007
gear icon -> HD

Eric otm. When Stewart, Kelly, and Ritter plot together, it'direction. point of Hitch's ensemble directing.

Yeah, Rear Window rocks. Has overtaken North By Northwest as my fave Hitch.

some of the early relationship scenes drag
otherwise it's great

i find that "heavily foregrounded meta but glommed onto pure story-telling thrills" is the core of Hitchcock's attraction tbh

Whoa -- I apologize for my phone-posted post. I meant: "best Hitchhock-directed ensemble."

Forget Vertigo -- Stewart never played a better Pure Acting moment than when he watches Thorwald assault Lisa.

Forget Vertigo

I will not

Just rewatched RW for the first time in ages because of this thread. Agree, hugely entertaining and well conceived and executed. It’s also so perverse of Hitchcock to cast Stewart in two different parables of impotence. (Tho he let him have TMWKTM in between I guess.)

Something there obviously about the WWII generation of men becoming redomesticated and incorporated into bland American life.

Yeah, they give a little more shading to the conventional wisdom about ‘50s America

The domestication of the American male was fodder for thinkpieces in the 50's - a lot of talk about "a crisis in masculinity". Pretty funny when now you hear mra types say we need to get back to that era.

Grace Kelly cooing about seeing him in a grey flannel suit a couple years before the infamous short story.

I love the shot at the end where she puts down her Himalayas travel book and picks back up Harper's Bazaar. She's not going anywhere, and neither is he.

My memory is so terrible. I spent this whole rewatch convinced thorwald didn't do it.

Poor miss lonely heart! What a damning indictment on Jeff and Stella, ignoring the potential suicide happening in front of them multiple times for the simple thrill of the chase.

Think I might be in love with Grace Kelly. Hope to get a date when I meet her up in the stars one day

Sorry, very slow right here. Yes, this was much better than I remembered, love the construction of a particular space and a time, just so vividly conjured. And the story is so self-contained, doesn't feel like it's just under two hours at all. Parallels with Vertigo are spot on, when he falls at the end, that's basically the start of Vertigo, isn't it? The exploration of viewer as voyeur is fine, but it was good not to think about it too much.

Still prefer Vertigo though

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Seven_Samurai_poster.jpg

Morbsies #97
Sight & Sound Critics #20
Sight & Sound Directors #14

Another biggie! For context here are the next five in the list

Johnny Guitar
Journey to Italy
Sansho the Bailiff
Ordet
The Night of the Hunter

LOL, perfect timing: Male weepies: Pick the "best," I guess

Every single one of the next five movies in line is a flaming goddamned masterpiece. I love all of the next five movies in line. They are great. Yep, love 'em.

Ordet happens to be your particular abnormality

(j/k I can understand loving it)

xps

Greatest film ever made IMO

Hm, guessing you mean Seven Samurai?

mibbes aye mibbes naw

Can be found here - https://archive.org/details/seven-samurai - it is quite long, isn't it?

The length of it feels fine

should explain that I somehow haven't seen it before

It flies by. Not a second overlong.

I wouldn't rank Seven Samurai in my Kurosawa top five.

I probably wouldn't either, but that's more about how many great films the dude has.

It is a bit sad that this is The One because there's a lot of more accessible intros - Yojimbo, Stray Dog, Ikiru.

The samurai film genre is interesting because if you compare it to the western, even though Ford and Hawks and etc certainly had moments where they questioned the myths there are a few decades' worth of films that mostly celebrate those myths, and so when the revisionist western rolls around we know what it's revising. But the samurai film, for a western audience, only comes into vogue in the postwar era, and so it's a generation of writers and directors who grew up with the samurai sprit being part of govt wartime propaganda and so it's pretty much all revisionism, very few movies come to mind where bushido is seen as anything other than a sick joke. At some point it just becomes part of the trope.

Donald Richie's book on Kurosawa is essential reading, and not surprisingly the chapter on Seven Samurai is great. (It may have been his favorite Kurosawa film - he usually listed it as one of his favorite films, period.)

I think it's very compelling to look at how WWII impacted Japanese films and how Japanese films grappled with the aftermath, especially now in light of the current rise of nationalism in certain parts of the world (like ours). Generally speaking, I never found comparisons between Japanese period epics and American Westerns all that interesting, but comparing The Seven Samurai to the American films it inspired (not just The Magnificent Seven but also Saving Private Ryan) does seem edifying in highlighting the differences in history and culture. The Seven Samurai always seemed like a great war film to me - nine years isn't that far removed from the end of WWII, and I was left with the impression that a defeated country was far more likely to re-examine and interrogate the culture surrounding war in ways that a proud and jingoistic country would not like to do. The myriad class conflicts and moral hypocrisies are either watered down or stripped away in something like The Magnificent Seven (turning samurai/military officers into "gunfighters" will do that), but they're always there in The Seven Samurai.

Kikuchiyo gun stealing scene the heart of this movie. Stunning end shot with the Katanas in the graves

The horses in this movie reminded me of the horse(s) in Andrei Rublev. Put me off, for what were some great scenes. hmph. I did eat stake for dinner though so I'm a bit of a simpleton in this way

I like my stake either well done or in the ground.

Rear window is a movie that I had seen so many parodies of that end at first reveal (most famously the Simpsons, but so many others), so the second part suddenly felt really disorienting!

the moment the man looks out of the screen at the audience is so crazy the first time you see it,

and the film is incredible in how it seems to surface filmic epistemologies in an instantly graspable way that can't be untangled from the film's dramatic dynamism! Sorry for the turgid way of phrasing that but I think its clear what I mean???

That said there's something that really 'wears off' about the effect that is very different from e.g. Vertigo, where it burrows down into your subconscious (why does she take the backdoor to the florist???). I think this one relies too much on a central trick or conceit, very A minus grade Hitchcock. There's also something about how its been parodied that gives it a flat, repackagable quality although that's not really its fault. Its a shame because its got so much good stuff in it (thelma ritter, wendell corey, Dior by Head and barbara bel geddes designing gravity defying bras etc) but i could probably never see it again and I wouldn't lose sleep.

seven samurai is so good and to me so obviously one of the best kurosawas so i'm curious what people who think this mid level would put ahead of it

Vertigo wears me down at the hour mark. Acts I and III are strange and powerful

What I'd rank over Seven Samurai:

Red Beard
The Bad Sleep Well
Throne of Blood
Stray Dog
High and Low

lol high and low is fun but bad

the scenes where they're all shouting at each other about shoes are really funny so i'll allow it

so much melodrama for the sake of a shoe mogul!

lol xpost

The shoe business can be a great setting for tragedy: see Bastards by Claire Denis.

yeah i remember the shoe company stuff being kind of dull, but the police procedural half of the movie is excellent

High & Low is my 2nd fave Kurosawa

Ran and High & Low are my fave Kurosawa's

High and Low and Ran are among my very favorite Kurosawa films too (along with The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru and maybe a couple of others. I have no desire to actually rank them, they're all great films doing very different things.

Ran's in my top ten.

It's in my top 10 ... of 1985

I need to see "The Bad Sleep Well"

FWIW, if there's ever a 35mm print of Ran playing at a repertory theater near you, it's definitely worth seeing. Obviously an epic is going to play better in a theater, but the current restoration that's being used in all DCP's, streaming and Blu-ray/UHD masters is marred by dubious color grading, something older film curators have pointed out given their familiarity with the oft-programmed film.