Olivier Assayas Poll

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/movies/personal-shopper-review-kristen-stewart.html?referrer=google_kp

I saw Summer Hours recently. Really good. I felt for these people and their possessions.

It's not top drawer Assayas -- I can see the joints holding it together, and Assayas must stop writing expository dialogue and scenes -- but it's moving and spooky enough. Jamesian too -- remidned me of Truffaut's The Green Room Stewart is first-rate.

Anders Danielsen Lie is in this! hubba hubba

― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius)

and his is the worst scene!

wasn't feelin' his brown hair either

I would say this is minor but it's not not top-drawer. His movies offer such unique pleasures it's hard for me to be too objective about them. I savor/anticipate them so. The crowd I saw it with was terrible and didn't seem to enjoy or even "get" the movie. I would love for him to widen his scope a bit more next time. Stewart is a great muse though.

Stewart is a good actress but there's something dour and depressing about her.

Stewart is a good actress but there's something dour and depressing about her.

Right on. She's really good in a really specific way but she's not a pleasant screen presence. Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Personal Shopper nailed it for me:

She’ll never be a lovable actress, but neither can she be ignored; she’s so on, and so bereft of peace. She fidgets, twitches, snaps at her lines as if they were candies, and mops her hand over her face in the hope of wiping her cares away.

"bereft of peace" is a good turn of phrase to describe the tone of PS. So unsettled and unsettling.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/personal-shopper-and-frantz

I think that movies are always about something else than what they seem to be about, in some way or another. A few days ago I saw the Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake, which has been received as some sort of epitome of social filmmaking. Yes, sure, of course, it’s there—but I also see a movie of an old man scared of death. I see an old man, who is losing his grip with the world. It’s a very dark film about the human condition. It’s not a social film at all. It’s really like the last Leonard Cohen album.

god, the french and their love of abstraction. there isn't an extra layer to literally any movie that loach and lavery have ever done.

i thought stewart was so fantastic in the latest one

kept vacillating between being bored and utterly transfixed during Personal Shopper. The opening and the ending were brilliant, and that goes a long way. The best film I've seen this year, a great slow burn. sooooooo much better than Clouds of Sils Maria zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

hm idk i preferred sils maria to this; still dug shopper ok, lotta layers

via press release...

Assayas will write and direct Wasp Network, which is based on Fernando Morais’ book, The Last Soldiers of the Cold War.

Wasp Network is the unbelievable true story of Cuban spies in American territory during the 90's which reveals the tentacles of a terrorist network based in Florida with ramifications in Central America and with the consent of the US government.

cannot pull all the threads together yet (or maybe ever), but I thought Personal Shopper was tremendous. KS is so good it almost seemed that the movie as a whole was a meta-textual statement about her persona/performance.

yeah i saw it at NYFF and am still thinking about it

"it's me" - fade to white. one of my favorite endings in recent memory.

We just saw Personal Shopper yesterday, really enjoyed it. It's been a while since I saw Demonlover so my memory is a bit hazy, but I felt like this one did a better job the whole ghost-in-the-machine techno-disorientation vibe. And Kristen Stewart was really good -- she was in just about every scene, it's a heavy lift.

Did a better job WITH the...

Personal Shopper! Watched it last night. It's very good. And yes, Stewart was great in it.

I was blown away by Personal Shopper. Easily my favorite movie of 2017 so far. Incredible ending- that last shot (!!).

Can't understand Jean-Pierre Leaud's accent whilst speaking English in Irma Vep much of the time, and I've seen it before.

Sure would like to see this:

http://www.monabismarck.org/events/conversation-on-culture-greil-marcus-mai-68

Saw Cold Water last night. The whole bonfire segment was incredible.

Assayas did, if you take notice of such things, slip up with music chronology a couple of times. The film is set in '72, and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Cosmic Wheels" are '73. I doubt it was a slip-up, though, I think more likely he (wisely) didn't care.

I had the same reaction to the bonfire sequence - I didn't know much about it going in, and it was a lot bleaker than I was expecting, but that section was perfect. I loved how great/terrible the kids were at DJing - the audible scratches when changing records, just deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

This could use a repoll.

Cold Water is a superb first draft of Something in the Air.

I loved Irma Vep, Carlos, and Clouds of Sils Maria, need to watch Cold Water for the first time, need to rewatch Clean, Demonlover, Summer Hours and most of all Personal Shopper (which I liked but didn't really get the first time)

deciding to go back to the start of "Up Around the Bend" halfway through, etc.

That was a highlight, and then the way the camera mostly stayed on the one guy (maybe the guy who moved the tonearm back to the beginning) in the throes of hippie sun-grope bliss. Kind of an easy, slow-motion sun-grope.

I found Non-Fiction an arch, garrulous film that's a dud as sex farce and commentary on The Way We Live Now. His characters talk about the internet with less savvy than Sandra Bullock in 1995.

Yep, pretty much a total dud. One of my biggest disappointments at last year's TIFF.

it's as if Assayas wanted to pick up Woody Allen's 2010s mantle with Non-Fiction. I liked it fine, my expectations were tamped by Alfred & Simon's post, but yeah compared to the last two a dud. but I enjoy 2010s Woody Allen fine.

surprised Eric liked Cold Water so much given all the klassik rokk

That's like saying you're surprised I hated Thank God It's Friday so much given all the disco.

I remembered the bonfire party centerpiece pretty well, but otherwise the core of the film is very familiar, incl the Tragic Babe embodied by Ledoyen. Very well made from scene to scene of course, but I don't get the claims of greatness.

and he repeated the bonfire sequence to more sublime effect in Summer Hours.

well that i don't remember at all

it's at the end

Girish Shambu situates Cold Water as an "art-teen movie"

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5916-cold-water-dancing-on-the-ruins

They're not art movies, but there is much art in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless.

and Heathers!

well, Girish points you toward Bresson and Yang

His list is fine, but it seems to be based on marketing--this is an art film, this is a commercial teen comedy--not artistic quality. To me, it's not that different than saying On the Beach must be a better film than Psycho, because On the Beach is about nuclear annihilation and the fate of mankind, while Psycho's about a murderer who keeps his mother's corpse locked in the basement. Many film critics would have subscribed to that in 1960.

Norman only moves his mother's corpse from her bed to the basement near the end of the movie

I'm sort of in the dark about what the discrepancy is here, clem.

Just that I think Fast Times and Clueless belong with the films he listed, but I get the sense--maybe I'm wrong--that the writer thinks non-English films about teenagers are inherently more artistic.

Oh, in that case I think you're wrong.

There are art-film releases and multiplex releases in the USA, at least in the last 44 years.

Right--which kind of circles back to my point that his notion of "art-teen movie" is grounded in marketing, not art. But I think we're going in circles now.

I think he's way more interested in art than teens, tbh.