ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

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

oh, it's a one-per-day thing, like wordle

Yes. I only started doing it yesterday.

But I like, I like.

I love Framed but I get annoyed every time a Marvel movie zilches my overall record

Will we be using this thread for discussion of films that are not on your list but are still, say, Morbius favorites?

Just the ones on the list, think there are several which wouldn't be there without his influence.

just downloaded sherlock jr, which i think just sneaks in as public domain. only i seem to have an entirely silent one and i can her neighbours clanking around

Looking through the list, some of my favourite directors, Louis Malle, Miloš Forman, Roy Andersson, Sidney Lumet, are either missing entirely or have a single entry, think this is probably A Good Thing on a personal level, more to explore, less so to those whose favourites are more well-represented I suppose, though otoh everyone likes talking about their favourites.

xp There are many different options for watching Sherlock Jr on YouTube with different soundtracks.

To your last post: that is sort of the whole good and bad of lists in a nutshell.

I've watched the first hundred.

For those who have MUBI, try to catch The General over the next 3 days before it gets yanked

I really am going to be forced to watch Holiday on the Buses huh

Whose first place vote was that?

Is Holiday on the Buses the same as Mexican Bus Ride?

Man those MUBI Leaving Soons are torture. I rewatched THE GENERAL recently and maybe still have it saved on my cable box so I think I will pass on that and watch a few others.

i never her.

finished Sherlock Jr as it was only 44 minutes long. (this was an archive.org download rather than youtube. ogg video in fact, only 100MB, 400x300 but perfectly watchable)

is that a recognised meaning of the work sheik?

yes -

2 usually sheik : a man supposed to be irresistibly attractive to romantic young women

lots of things that are now cliches, probably a lot different back in 1924. the suitcase jump kinda spoilt it - everything else was at least possible

THE GENERAL also avaiable in several other places, Amazon Prime, Criterion and... wait for it... Tubi. https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-general

Actually I have to be careful here as I have been fooled before. Oftentimes something will show up there as being on Amazon Prime but in fact it is only there with a subscription, a subscription to MUBI.

Is Holiday on the Buses the same as Mexican Bus Ride?

― The Windows of the URL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 12 February 2023 17:27 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I like to think so.

As Mark S likes to tell me, the first On The Buses film was the highest grossing film at the box office that year.

Pfunkboy was Holiday on the Bus's #1 vote

I knew it would be him, that wacky pfunkboy.

hes a menace

> I knew it would be him, that wacky pfunkboy.
> ― Toshirō Nofune (The Seventh ILXorai)

letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

Ok, close enough to Monday.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Sherlock_jr_poster.jpg

Sherlock, Jr., Buster Keaton 1924
Morbies #480 Sight & Sound Critics #54
Youtube link

First time I'd seen this, I do have a complete Buster Keaton box set but am only halfway through it. Had to watch it twice as the story only made sense with the final scene (to be fair the fact that I had about 20 acupuncture needles stuck in me probably didn't help) - second viewing I found I could appreciate the whole thing, not just the astounding set-piece stunt scenes. Suppose the reason that this is the Keaton film of choice is not just the intricate plotting, the metafictionality of having the action take place on a cinema screen as a projection of the character's own life, represented as this grand, escapist drama is a brilliant conceit, and the final scene where he learns how to propose to his girlfriend by watching the couple on screen is just a great bit of cinema. Also recognised a few scenes from the 1980 documentary series "Hollywood" - including the water tower shot which broke Keaton's neck.

I loved it when I saw it in my 20s, just kind of drifted away.

On the Keaton thread, I posted about how perplexing Bogdanovich's Keaton documentary was.

What about it?

Buster Keaton

I kind of liked that but fair enough.

THE GENERAL also avaiable in several other places, Amazon Prime, Criterion and... wait for it... Tubi. https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-general

― The Windows of the URL (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, February 12, 2023 11:34 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also Wikipedia (it entered the public domain last year): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(1926_film)

Oh wait, actually, it's been in the public domain for decades. But anyway, yeah, it's widely available.

That's happened to me more than once, seeing multiple versions of the same film, sometimes on the same platform, many in terrible shape, wondering why this is so and then... d'oh!

I guess I should try again with Kurosawa. I’ve only seen a couple but found them kind of boring.

Which ones?

FWIW, I've seen Kurosawa get knocked down a few pegs simply because he's gotten so much more praise in the U.S. than Ozu and Mizoguchi. I think mainstream critics typically gravitated towards Kurosawa during his lifetime - I have a vague recollection of Roger Ebert and the staff at Entertainment Weekly more or less calling him Japan's greatest filmmaker - and a much higher percentage of his films are available to U.S. audiences. A big factor may be Spielberg and Lucas - at the height of their careers, they championed him endlessly as an enormous influence, so I'm sure that raised his profile.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker flat out wrote that he's "certainly not in the same artistic league with either Ozu or Mizoguchi." I suppose I would agree, but I also think it's also an incredibly uncharitable assessment.

Yeah, Kurosawa's experienced a counter-revolution in the last 30 years as Naruse, Mizoguchi, and Ozu's films have become available. He's "not human" in that Renoir vein or something.

There's also the fact that Kurosawa's movies are full of gangsters and swordplay, which gives them a crossover appeal to genre audiences...though frankly Kurosawa's non-violent dramas are great too.

Overall though I'd say Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi are all still benefiting from the lack of availability of so much from the golden age of Japanese cinema - I'd say at this point the Japanese New Wave is even more well represented. Take someone like Tomu Uchida - according to Kinema Junpo he made the second greatest film in the history of Japanese cinema, but how many of his movies have you seen?

Also gonna do that annoying reductress "men gets little charge out of telling ppl John Lennon beat his wife" thing and mention again that, when Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka embarked on her (very good) directorial career, Ozu and Naruse supported her in the press and during shooting, while Mizoguchi went to the papers to decry his star actress as "limited" and tried his best to blackball her from working altogether.

He also tried to get a 13-year old John Lennon to intervene.

For many years, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu were the big three Japanese directors, so it's natural that they'd be pitted against each other. I'd take Oshima over them all myself.

Which ones?

Yojimbo and Dreams, I think, but it was a while ago.

I find them boring too.

Ikiru
Throne Of Blood
Stray Dog
Dreams
Yojimbo
Kagemusha
Seven Samurai
One Wonderful Sunday
Rashomon
Drunken Angel
Sanjuro
Ran
The Men Who Tread On Tiger's Tails

Haven't seen the rest yet. Even the bottom choice here is still far from a bad film tho.

It really needs a reissue (and a restoration) to bring it back into print, but Rhapsody in August is worth catching. Haven't seen it in a long time (maybe high school?) so I'm not sure how the filmmaking would come off now, but at the time it was the first film I saw to really address the use of nuclear weapons to more or less end WWII. Plenty of famous examples pre-date it and according to Wikipedia there was controversy with some vocally criticizing the film's political stance, but at least to me I didn't think it was defending Japan's wrongs with regards to WWII - simply on humanitarian grounds it made a deep impression.

i've bought a copy of that in the last year (currently unwatched)

(the two i'm missing are The Idiot and Dreams)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_vs._the_Spider

why is this not titled "A small town sheriff and high school teacher vs. the spider"