Never Coming to a Cinema Near You - Arthouse Cinema 2014

Awards from Berlin:

Golden Bear – Black Coal, Thin Ice by Diao Yinan
Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) – The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson
Alfred Bauer Prize (Silver Bear) – Life of Riley by Alain Resnais
Silver Bear for Best Director – Richard Linklater for Boyhood
Silver Bear for Best Actress – Haru Kuroki for The Little House
Silver Bear for Best Actor – Liao Fan for Black Coal, Thin Ice
Silver Bear for Best Script – Stations of the Cross by Dietrich Brüggemann
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Cinematography – Blind Massage by Lou Ye
Best First Feature Award – Güeros by Alonso Ruízpalacios

Has anyone seen a Diao? Any good?

Also, the three winners of the Tiger award at Rotterdam, awarded for first or second features:

Anatomy of a Paper Clip by Ikeda Akira
Han Gong-Ju by Lee Su-Jin
Something Must Break by Ester Martin Bergsmark

I have a feeling I would be a happier cineaste if I was watching more youthful films, instead of just all the latest by the great masters. Though obviously they're masters for a reason.

So yeah, I'm going to spam this thread with blogposts on the Copenhagen PIX festival. Hope that that's okay with you.

Day 1, on Hong Sang-soo's Our Sunhi, Free Range, a weird film from Estonia, and Peter Greenaway's newest Goltzius and the Pelican Company.

http://centrifugue.blogspot.dk/2014/04/cphpix-day-1-our-sunhi-free-range.html

Later on will be stuff on the latest Jia, Tsai, Porumboiu, Lav Diaz, German, etc. I hope.

Film Comment starts a rotating list of 25 films not yet distributed in the US

http://filmcomment.com/entry/the-film-comment-hot-25

Can you please repost that list on the other thread so that RAG can find out about them?

I see it. Pretty sure the Kiyoshi Kurosawa will get a dvd release at least.

The Kiyoshi Kurosawa one is not good. One of the worst endings I've ever seen. Story of My Death, Our Sinhi, Hard to be a God and History of Fear are good.

So has anyone, esp you Frederik, seen The Strange Little Cat?

http://www.kimstim.com/cat.html

I saw that! Tape Store brought it to town as part of his foreign film series. I loved it.

damn where is my tape store roadshow

+: yeah i saw & loved this. it was at lincoln center for a minute, right? think of it pretty often as maybe one of the finest digital films, as in things that are actually made responsive to the new medium; it's of such a perfect scale & has such an appropriate focus for the technology, it really glows. incredibly confident for a first feature, too.

p sure fred mentions it elsewhere on ilx in the same breath as the new pahani fwiw, all the valuable ilx film chumps clearly throwing their weight behind this petite german juggernaut

I watched it.

it finishes its week at Linc Ctr tomorrow

I saw it tonight and didn't like it much, not that I'm any kind of authority. It certainly looked good.

oh dang btw at "pahani"; fwiw, & to desperately try to retain my self-appointed cineastical juggernaut status, i caught & reversed a typo reading 'gernam' in the same post, i regret the error. whatchsayin eric?

I've seen it. It won the main prize at CPH:PIX last year, and I caught it. It's very good. Was at 16 at my list for the ILX-poll. But it wasn't my favorite in the competition, and I'm perhaps not as bowled over as many critics seem to be. It seems like such a small film, so I am quite surprised it's getting so much attention. But in a good way. Zürcher is definitely one to watch.

I do like that it apparantly grew out of a workshop with Bela Tarr, that the director participated in. I like the thought of someone seeing Turin Horse, and then making it into this... Seeing it brought up again also reminds me I really need to watch Jeanne Dielman.

Sicinski rates it first on his 'poll-eligible' 2014 list

http://academichack.net/notasteforaccounting.htm

Man, Stray Dogs is low on that list. That is the best film I've seen this year, probably the best since Uncle Boonmee. Journey to the West might also be my favorite world premiere of 2014 so far, but I haven't been able to see that much yet.

SD didn't work on me

u mad doggie

OK, partially it did. The long take near the end I did not find transcendent.

some Little Cat love from Kevin Lee:

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/why-the-best-film-of-the-year-so-far-is-the-strange-little-cat

I'm biased because my friends made it, but Black Box is really good. About a bunch of grad-school theater students staging a V.C. Andrews-type novel and freaking themselves out in the process.

so, Starred Up. Viselike arted-up Oedipal "Oz" episode, i suppose, w/ three splendid lead performances... until it goes full (bone-crunching, mayhem-filled) sentimental bullshit / loony twists in the last third. I suppose this Jack O'Connell kid is going supernova til he burns out.

Thought Young Adam was promising back in the day, but everything from MacKenzie since then has been middling at best, save for some really good moments in Perfect Sense.

this is the only film of his i've seen besides Young Adam. Anyway, the script and the acting give most of what's notable here, not the other aesthetics of his direction.

hey is anybody keeping up with these matías piñeiro movies?

anyone see the new Dolan yet, my friends are split btwn it being amazing and terrible, as usual

Pineiro: I haven't seen Princess of France, just the two immed before

Only seen Viola but I liked it a lot.

i'm going backwards, after catching the princess of france a second ago, then catching up on viola. they're really interesting, i think, & it's satisfying to be cruising backward knowing that the others are going to relate and reverberate. the new one is kind of almost love and death-ish in taking his playful approach to language & attention to an overwhelming level. i liked viola especially, i think; there's a nice interview in the new cinema scope where he talks about the value of honouring half-thoughts, & letting the constituent parts of his film just vaguely echo against each other. the small-independent-theatrical milieu he's tracking is just so vibrant & magnetic to watch, i think.

what about this Italian fella who deals with rural life in Texas? Planning on Stop the Pounding Heart tonight, I don't believe the first two ever got a NYC release.

http://www.filmlinc.com/daily/entry/meet-the-new-director-roberto-minervinis-stop-the-pounding-heart

and ye gods, I have to see Memphis after if I can stay up.

rural americana generally sounds alarm bells, now, but i would watch that

Bruno Dumont has a made a three-hour farce -- on purpose

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-nyff-2014-bruno-dumonts-lil-quinquin

Oh man, the program for CPH:Dox is sweet. New Lav Diaz called Storm Children - Book One. New Openheimer, obviously. Pedro Costa will be there for a showing of Horse Money. Journey to the West from Tsai Ming-liang. New Seidl. New Geyrhalter. New Porumboiu (though I didn't really like Metabolism). New Loznitsa. Visitors by Reggio. Last Farocki. A showing of Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marhces On. New short from Leonardo Brzezicki, a young Argentinian filmmaker who's debut Noche was really good.

NYC doesn't get Metabolism til January.

It wasn't at NYFF?

dunno

One of my favorites to open in NYC this year, now out via Olive Blu-ray

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/himizu

Yeah, Sion Sono is kinda on a roll, it seems. Looking forward to seeing Himizu, but Land of Hope was really quite good, Why Don't You Play in Hell was insane, and Tokyo Tribe is apparantly completely bonkers. So that's cool.

Interesting, some Sono fans feel Himizu and Land Of Hope was him going downhill (but several of his more recent films still haven't had a western release so the picture is incomplete). I think they're probably more solid overall than Exte, Suicide Circle and Strange Circus but all of them had something really memorable but not as good as the film's that came slightly later (Love Exposure, Cold Fish, Guilty Of Romance).
I thought Himizu was great in places but I wasn't much into Land Of Hope.

Looking at newer stuff like Why Don't You Play In He'll, Tokyo Tribe and Shinjuku Swan (a comedy about a horrible retirement home), looks like he'll be doing louder films again for a while.

so I saw Listen Up Philip last night, and Alex Ross Perry isn't really all that, is he? His second film (The Color Wheel) was funny and creepy in mostly good ways, but here he splits the worst speculative traits of Philip Roth into Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Pryce, and you just want to inflict pain on both of them (even more than they're suffering onscreen). Elisabeth Moss has a couple really good scenes.

I prefer his interviews

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/interview-alex-ross-perry-listen-up-philip

and the retro book covers they designed for the film

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/10/21/listen_up_philip_ike_zimmerman_books_in_the_movie_satirize_philip_roth_and.html

hm; i kinda really enjoyed listen up philip, & the shortcomings were in its structure and probably ambition, i think, rather than the characters' general poisonousness/insufferableness. it starts very strongly, & i think if it had been able to stay as quick as it was - a case study of solipsism, a demonstration of schwartzman as this awful churning engine - it would have been maybe more successful. what felt strange to me was that, as distinct as it seemed in committing to this kind of direct, rolling, physical stylisation, whipping us between the characters, close & involved, it actually would have had to be more like this - even more unmoored, fully drunk - to carry off the kind of peripatetic, panoramic thing it was going for; there were sections like the night when the novelists invite women back to the apartment that weren't enveloping enough to really pay off, weren't transportive enough to feel distinct, to me.

agree totally about elisabeth moss, & am kinda tempted to pour the credit more on her than the character, here; i'm loathe to creditably invoke baumbach but i feel like, for her to be as compelling a subject as philip was at the start, her slight anomie would have been better rendered as this frances ha kind of stumbling directionless thing, rather than as a sort of shallow confusion, which seemed to be as deep as the writing allowed. ARP seemed to be perpetually straining for stardust-memories-charlotte-rampling close-ups every few minutes, but her character eventually accumulated a real weight, i think, the performance really affecting.

there were sections like the night when the novelists invite women back to the apartment that weren't enveloping enough to really pay off, weren't transportive enough to feel distinct, to me.

this was prob the best sequence of the whole thing, & I don't disagree that it mightev benefited from going a bit further

*SPOILER*

I thought the Bogosian narration culminating in "and he lived miserably ever after" was a sort of both fait accompli and fig leaf. It's obvious from the first scene in the diner with the ex that this guy is probably irredeemable, so what are we watching for?

yeah i was kinda straining for a stylistic point of reference - something like il divo, maybe?, which i at least remember as being incredibly sumptuous, or perhaps some of those very sensual sequences in i am love -- either way something working with that very classical celluloid vocabulary a.r.p. is definitely involved with - but to me it kind of had the tenor of late night, the grim boisterousness of the suddenly hellbent cranky older guy, without feeling like that, without feeling weary and disoriented. even to use a slightly tired language, like the stoned sequence in a serious man; it felt slightly frustrating to me given that it should have been more involving.

narration kinda worked for me but, sure, it didn't need tying up.

"I am going to make certain the audience knows I disapprove of this fetid man by punishing him after the final image"

how far through sopranos are you, again?

just over a year. i am not going to do that quickly, there's too much.

ignatiy vishnavetsky gave an incredibly enthusiastic review to "listen up, philip" which made me pause b/c aren't he and perry friends? shouldn't he disclose that?

i have a strong allergy to behaviorist indie dramas with a "loose" camera style... it would take a truly spectacular film to overcome that. so i tend to avoid anything like "listen up, philip." somebody tell me if i should make an exception to that policy.

probably watch the color wheel if your interest is at all piqued; i do think he's doing quite sophisticated things as a writer while still vaguely resembling five other slackery mumblecore people. morbs otm re his interviews being maybe as satisfying as the films.

to close the circle, I.V. used to work at odd obsession, a cinephile video store in chicago.

#vishnavetskygate

I'll watch it tomorrow and update you guys.

His second film (The Color Wheel) was funny and creepy in mostly good ways, but here he splits the worst speculative traits of Philip Roth into Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Pryce, and you just want to inflict pain on both of them (even more than they're suffering onscreen)

This is the trick in most Roth fiction after The Ghost Writer, and the unpleasantness and self-absorption get refracted. Again, I haven't seen the movie -- yet -- but it looks as if Schwartzman is the perfect actor to play a Zuckerman type; the schmuck's been playing unpleasant self-absorbed variants for 15 years.

i have no use for schwartzman & thought this was better than anything else he'd been in, fwiw

this character makes his Rushmore and Huckabees twerps look like Gandhi

I know the Zuckerman stratagem from reading...reviews of Roth novels! (Nothing after Portnoy's for me.)

also i saw this '84 PBS adap of The Ghost Writer:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087331/

guess i shouldve started a Perry thread.

after Portnoy is when Roth gets funny!

well i'm from Newark so i thought the early novels were funny. Also we read "The Conversion of the Jews" in HS.

oh yeah, this film is on VOD, it shouldnt even be in this thread.

I thought it was amusing enough at first but wasn't at all bothered with another "look at this pretentious asshole" movie so was genuinely delighted when it expanded out. Thought it was really good.

so all you people saw this but didnt start a thread bcz it wasn't MARVEL or what?

did someone say marvel

you started this marvel-lous conversation.

we have this thread.

not really arthouse but Dear White People was okay. keeping on the sundance tip I was actually surprised at how good Whiplash was.

Guard's high up for me on both those films. But I am excited about LUP.

i have no time to see any of these movies. the next movie i see might be the new godard in two weeks.

nice having an all purpose art-film thread, i think, though i will jump into an a-r-p thread if there's one too. but here we can digress. tonight i saw olivier assayas at the multiplex. i feel like maybe he was going to maps to the stars. buying a ticket like a regular joe. v handsome.

oy vey

Pryce gives the worst I'm-a-writer performance since Frank Langella in Starting One Evening. It's not his fault so much as the dialogue. From his complaining about "the innate ineffability" of human emotions" to "Every looking at the girls here brings a cascade of emotions" this is Chayefsky levels of pseduo profundity.

*Starting Out in the Evening

I agree with schlump that the movie could've been crueler, channeling the true Roth -- the Roth of Sabbath's Theater.

Boy, I love film festivals. That is all.

cautiously optimistic about Dumont goes comic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ_-U6msBio

^My most anticipated viewing of 2015 (full TV version please)

love the look of the actor playing principal detective

...however, aside from the nearly lush 'scope cinematography i was generally annoyed by this.

Go see Winter Sleep, tho.

btw WF, i think there's only one version of Quinquin

Todd, no!!!!

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/todd-solondz-plots-sort-sequel-742966#

xpost

Thanks Morbs, can't remember why I thought otherwise. You'll be delighted to hear that, according to Sight and Sound, Dumont is working on a second series of Quinquin and a 'rock and roll musical' based on the early life of Joan of Arc!

Are we doing a poll this year

i'll be skipping those, Ward

Its a comedy Morbs.

so anyone, ie Frederik, seen Ostlund's pre-Majeure films, like Play f'rinstance?

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/series/in-case-of-no-emergency-the-films-of-ruben-oestlund

i don't really "get" bruno dumont, although i thought hors satan was fairly interesting.

Yeah, Play is a must-see. Amazingly composed shots, almost all of them, so unlike pretty much everything else in Scandinavian film. Probably my favorite Scandinavian film of the decade, I think. Would be pretty interested in hearing what people outside of Europe gets out of it's politics, though, it's... complicated.

My conservative friend went up to NYC to catch all of those, but he had seen PLAY before and said it was essentially about how Sweden needs to stop immigration.

should i go see leviathan today or tomorrow?

(the russian movie, not the harvard sensory ethnography one)

Of course -- so you can tell us later whether it's worth watching.

I did not like Force Majeure

(after the first 45 minutes, at least)

I didn't either. The Loneliest Planet did it better.

exhibition was really interesting; my first hogg film. all three up on netflix.
such a woman-centric and private story

Hogg's collective is presenting a screening of Akermann D'Est tomorrow.

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/nos-amours-chantal-akerman-16-dest

Harun Farocki season @ Goethe in Feb:

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en13760253v.htm

Two programmes of Straub-Huillet in March:

http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lon/ver/en13760246v.htm

Lots of nice things on at the Glasgow Film Festival this year:

http://www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/whats_on

They're offering five tickets for £32.50, not a bad deal. I've gone for:

-Jodorowsky's Dune (otherwise unavailable to view in the UK)
-A Pigeon Sat on a Branch
-Li'l Quiquin
-Jauja
-From What is Before (new Diaz, 5h38m)

Thanks for the heads-up, picked up the brochure for this and forgot about it.

Stephen Cone's Black Box is out on a bunch of platforms this week and is really good. Grad students spook themselves adapting something like a V.C. Andrews novel. Not a horror movie at all.

i should see that, if for no other reason than to support independent chicago filmmaking

I didn't either. The Loneliest Planet did it better.

― Vulvacura (Eric H.), Monday, January 19, 2015 10:39 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i thought that film walked a thin line between hauntingly terse and pretentious, but ultimately i liked it

Best of luck with From What Is Before. Saw it tonight, it is good, but very long indeed.

I didn't either. The Loneliest Planet did it better.

― Vulvacura (Eric H.),

if you mean "shots of Gael Bernal"