Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Yeah I guess but I was just turned off by the casual, romantic depiction of crime in Breathless and overall thought Contempt was a much better film

Godard is the ultimate *straight* director though

second rental from the brand new video store (!!!):

Pierrot le Fou
La Captive
Beau Travail
Hush.... Hush, Sweet Charlotte

got the Godard because Akerman said that seeing it as a child made her want to be a filmmaker. very excited for La Captive, most recent non-doc Akerman I've tracked down. only Denis I've seen are White Material (eh) and Let the Sunshine In (fantastic). consensus is Beau Travail is her best, yes? and the Aldrich I've wanted to see for a while and seen referenced often (most recently in a book about Nashville session musicians).

The Captive is the best Proust adaptation I've seen after Ruiz's.

Beau Travail not in my top 5 Denis

The Curse of the Cat People (von Fritsch & Wise, 1944)
The Haunted Castle (Smith, 1897)
Mr. W's Little Game (Shores, 1934)
Bimbo's Initiation (Fleischer & Natwick, 1931)
*Under a Spell (Smith, 1925)
Her Defiance (King & Madison, 1916)
The Cardboard Lover (Leonard, 1928)
*The Navigator (Crisp & Keaton, 1924)
Beauty's Worth (Vignola, 1922)
*Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Reisner & Keaton, 1928)
L'Inferno (de Liguoro & Bertolini, 1911)
*Safety Last (Newmeyer & Taylor, 1923)
*Show People (Vidor, 1928)
When Knighthood Was in Flower (Vignola, 1922)

xp morbs what are your top 5 Denis

lady gaga bradley cooper movie - it was ok..? i can already barely remember it. i guess on second thought, it sucked
basic instinct (verhoeven) - this was maybe the most enjoyment i've had watching a movie in a year
deep red (argento) - good, yet often boring when not slashy. sickchops prog soundtrack
andrei rublev (tarkovsky) - v good, didn't actually feel long at 3h perhaps because every terrible hollywood action movie is 2.5h?

flappy, w/out rewatching or thinking too hard

35 Rhums
Chocolat
Let the Sunshine In
Nenette et Boni
Friday Night

well, bless your heart, we finally agree *reaches for smoothie*

thou dost exaggerate, honeybunch

The Bench (Fly)*
The Inheritance (Fly)*
Manslaughter (Fly)*
Forestillinger (Fly)
The Woman Who Dreamt of a Man (Fly)
Monica Z (Fly)
Aftermath (Steen)
That Time of Year (Steen)
Art History (Swanberg)
Drinking Buddies (Swanberg)
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Decker)*
The White Reindeer (Blomberg)
The Harvest Month (Kassila)
Inspector Palmu’s Error (Kassila)
1. April 2000 (Liebeneiner)
Flamenco (Neville)
Main Street (Bardem)
Pickpocket (Jia)
Still Life (Jia)
Kaili Blues (Bi)
Wolf Children (Hosada)*
The Boy and the Beast (Hosada)*
A Page of Madness (Kinugasa)
Blue (Jarman)
El Movimiento (Naishtat)
The Dead Nation (Jude)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Le Plaisir (Ophüls)
Christopher Robin (Forster)

Tale of Cinema (Hong, 2005) 8/10
Cat People (Tourneur, 1942) 7/10
In The Mood for Love (Wong, 2000) 9/10
The Childhood of a Leader (Corbet 2015) 7/10
*A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991) 10/10
The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, 2018) 6/10 - the unrestored version the great minds at netflix put up on the first day
The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973) 9/10
Love's Crucible (Sjöström, 1922) 9/10
Freaks (Browning, 1932) 6/10
Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987) 7/10
Winchester 73' (Mann, 1950) 8/10
The Woman in the Window (Lang, 1944) 7/10
Mandy (Cosmatos, 2018) 5/10
Emitai (Sembene, 1971) 8/10
*The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, 2018) 8/10
The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong, 1998) 9/10
Hotel by the River (Hong, 2018) 7/10

Fred what did you think of Drinking Buddies? I saw that at a fest 5+ years ago and it remains one of the worst movies I've seen this decade.

dev thank you for the Spirit of the Beehive reminder, I haven't watched that in 10 years and just found my copy buried in my basement last night.

oh yeah - has anyone seen the new Suspiria? I'm not a fan of the original, but I'm intrigued by the new one being described as more of a "cover version" than a remake - I'm getting heavy Blade Runner 2049 vibes from everything I've heard.

Drinking Buddies is... kinda okay? Utterly uninteresting and a really boring way for Swanberg to develop. But what did you so dislike about it?

his loose/improv dialogue style didn't work at all with those actors. I don't like mumblecore in the first place and that one felt like a gigantic waste of time and money - it felt like watching an awkward rehearsal.

The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West (Wong, 1917)
Mabel's Blunder (Normand, 1914)
Caught in a Cabaret (Normand, 1914)
Cendrillon (Melies, 1899)
The Ancient Law (Dupont, 1923)
*Seven Chances (Keaton, 1925)
*Mare Nostrum (Ingram, 1926)
*Corporal Kate (Sloane, 1926)
Barbed Wire (Lee, 1927)
Lilac Time (Fitzmaurice, 1928)

I thought "Neon Demon" was a fantastic "Suspiria" cover version.

Good point - and I liked Neon Demon a lot and don't like Suspiria at all.

The Thing (Carpenter, 1982) - 9/10
Veronika Voss (Fassbinder, 1982) - 8/10
Lola (Fassbinder, 1981) - 8/10
Ten (Kiarostami, 2002) - 10/10
Wings (Shepitko, 1966) - 5/10
10 on Ten (Kiarostami, 2004) - 10/10
The Fortune Cookie (Wilder, 1966) - 7/10
Dekalog V (Kieslowski, 1988) - 8/10
Fellini Satyricon (Fellini, 1969) - 7/10
Dekalog VI (Kieslowski, 1988) - 9/10
Man is Not a Bird (Makavejev, 1965) - 8/10
Pierrot le Fou (Godard, 1965) - 6/10
Dekalog VII (Kieslowski, 1988) - 10/10
Dick (Fleming, 1999) - 6/10
Topsy-Turvy (Leigh, 1999) - 9/10

* The Devils (censored version; 1971)
Burning (2018) 3.5/5
Vampire’s Kiss (1988) 3/5
* I Waked with a Zombie (1943) 4/5
* Mikey and Nicky (1976) 4/5
Cluny Brown (1946) 4/5
* Theatre of Blood (1973) 3.5/5
Derek (2008) 3/5
Belfast, Maine (1999) 4.5/5

on track to get 31 scary films into a, let's say, six-week Halloween period

made it to 30 in six weeks. here's October 19th to November 10th:

* Nightmare On Elm Street (Craven 1984) 📺
Entertainment (Alverson, Turkington, Heidecker 2015) 🏋️
Life After Beth (Baena 2014) 📺
I Am Road Comic (Brady 2014) 📺
The Happy House (Young 2013) 📺
The Cat And The Canary (Reni, Cohn, Anthony, Hill, after Willard 1927) [Photoplay restoration projected with live organist. Organ also recently restored. Organist original.]
Slice (Vesely 2018) 📺
The Nightmare Before Christmas (Selick, Elfman, Thompson, McDowell & Burton 1993) 4DX 😞
Summer Of '84 (Simard, Whissell, Whissell, Leslie, Smith 2018) 📺
Hearts Beat Loud (Haley, Basch, DeWitt 2018) 📺
Society (Yuzna, Keith, Fry 1989) 📽️ 35mm
Piranha (Dante, Sayles, Robinson 1978) 📺
The Stranger (Welles, Trivas, Veiller, Huston, Dunning 1946) 📺
Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko (Shindo 1968) 📽️ 35mm

I guess you could count Entertainment as a horror film tbh. 31!

What does the weight lifter emoji mean?

watched it in chunks at the YMCA while climbing non-existent hills

Anything Goes (1936, Milestone) 6/10
Artists & Models (1937, Walsh) 5/10
Burning (2018, Lee) 7/10
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018, Neville) 7/10
Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951, Lupino) 6/10
Monrovia, Indiana (2018, Wiseman) 8/10
*Ossessione (1943, Visconti) 9/10
*Orson Welles: The One-Man Band (1995, Silovic) 6/10
Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (1979, von Trotta) 7/10
*Family Plot (1976, Hitchcock) 7/10

The Blob (1958)

Completely classic monster-from-space movie, with the perfectly odd titular blob oozing around killing people, and a nice setup for the killings at the beginning. It feels like a template for various other viral outbreak horror stories that followed in its wake, and it's a very swift 82 minutes slowed only by a couple of conversation scenes in the first act. It's fairly suspenseful in place, though obviously not grisly. However, the unstated fact that the blob has turned red because it's been consuming and dissolving humans is a nice touch.

McQueen is great, he doesn't look anymore like a teenager than he did when he played the Cooler King or Frank Bullitt but he's fully committed to the role and he delivers some great ridiculous dialogue as if it means something.

Best throwaway line (spoken by one police officer about another who's tired of these troublemaking teens): "Just because some kid smacks into your wife on the turnpike doesn't make it a crime to be 17 years old!"

I like how dark the backgrounds of the outside scenes are, like it was made for drive-ins.

is there a "Good books about movies" thread? not fiction, not biographies, I'm looking for anything on the beginning of cinema, early cinema, history of cinema as a sociological phenomenon, & the history of movie theaters. Grazi

The Blob has a great theme song too

...composed by Burt Bacharach

The Great Beauty - (Sorrentino, 2013) - 7/10 - empty
Anomalisa - (Kaufman/Johnson, 2016) - 5/10 - annoying
Sherlock Jr - (Keaton, 1924) - 10/10 - lol
Mandy - (Cosmatos, 2018) - 9/10 - swirly
Moonlight - (Jenkins, 2017) - 6/10 - oscar-bait

Linda (Davenport, 1929)
Bridal Bail (Stevens, 1934)
The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924)
Carmen (Lubitsch, 1918)
*Flesh and the Devil (Brown 1926)
*The General (Keaton and Bruckman, 1926)
Salt Water Daffy (McCarey, 1933)
*A Woman of the World (St. Clair, 1925)
Heart to Heart (Beaudine, 1928)

Moi, un Noir (1958) 3/5
The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) 2.5/5
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 2/5
Paris Was a Woman (1996) 2.5/5
I Called Him Morgan (2016) 3.5/5
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018) 3/5
Mad Love (1935) 4/5
A Page of Madness (1926) 3.5/5

I just saw Upgrade. It was pretty good! Clever b-movie premise, great execution for what must have been a low budget. Reminded me a bit of the original Terminator, or maybe Robocop, if it was directed by David Cronenberg.

the best film of the year only better on rewatch

Burning (Lee, 2018) 7/10
The Curse of the Cat People (von Fritsch, Wise, 1944) 7/10
Terminator (Cameron, 1984) 6/10
Terminator 2 (Cameron, 1991) 4/10
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Neville, 2018) 4/10
Bigger than Life (Ray, 1956) 8/10
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen, Coen, 2018) 6/10
*Claire's Camera (Hong, 2017) 9/10
My Night at Maud's (Rohmer, 1969) 10/10

Klute is free on Amazon Prime, so I watched that last night. The extremely giallo-esque score in the Jane Fonda-is-stalked-by-the-killer scenes was what stuck out to me the most. That, and the scenes between Fonda and Roy Scheider.

Autumn Sonata (Bergman, 1978) - I don't why it took me so long to get around to watching this but its one of his best. It was screening on a double bill with Haneke's Piano Teacher which is quite a good choice. It was nice to see what Ingrid Bergman could do with such a challenging script. Bergman (the other one) really goes places and provokes, and the scene where the daughter is playing chopin to her mother is a real high.

Eighth Grade (Burnham, 2018) 6/10
Panic in the Streets (Kazan, 1950) 8/10
Can’t Stop the Music (Walker, 1980) 4/10
To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942) 9/10
Pinkus’s Shoe Palace (Lubitsch, 1916) 5/10
Sorry to Bother You (Riley, 2018) 8/10
Mavis! (Edwards, 2015) 6/10
The Late Show (Benton, 1977) 5/10
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Akhavan, 2018) 5/10
The Man with Two Brains (Reiner, 1983) 7/10

I\m pretty sure The Late Show is a lot better than that

Yeah, I really expected to like it better, but I found it kind of aimiable to a fault. It doesn’t help that Altman (who also produced this) already made the much better version of this movie a few years earlier with The Long Goodbye. Tomlin has a few good moments, and I liked the scene where she keeps failing to notice a dead body in the refrigerator, but I mostly felt like I was watching one of those “cute old people” movies that George Burns and Walter Matthau fell back on in the later stages of their careers.

Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock, 1952)
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1978)
Cluny Brown (Lubitsch, 1946)
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Akerman, 1978)
Kaiju Bunraku (short - Levya/Mayer, 2017)
* 3 Colors: Blue (Kieślowski, 1993)
* 3 Colors: White (Kieślowski, 1994)
* 3 Colors: Red (Kieślowski, 1994)
Widows (McQueen, 2018)
The Mackintosh Man (Huston, 1973)
*Close-up (Kiarostami, 1990)
Close-up Long Shot (short - Mansouri, Chokrollahi, 1996)

The Long Goodbye is not an antic noir comedy. Also, Tomlin was like 38 when that film was made. I thought her chemistry with Carney was good.

Sorry to Bother You is streaming free on Hulu (it's a paid rental on Amazon). It's mostly pretty funny with some good running gags, Armie Hammer is great in it, the turn into SF body horror is well handled, but the ending is weak. Still, worth watching.

The Long Goodbye is not an antic noir comedy.

It isn't?

while there are funny scenes, it has some serious things on its mind (while also being a genre travesty)

Both films are essentially about the classic noir detective navigating the weirdness of the 1970s. Altman's film just feels like the far more vivid, resonant take on this idea, to me.

The new Wreck-It Ralph was the rare movie the whole family agreed on. We all thought it was boring and lazy and ugly, and reminded us of something they would show before a ride at Epcot, but 10 times as long.

Saw Widows today; it's about a 2.5 out of 5. It's a half hour too long, with a lot of pointless digressions (Lukas Haas's character should not have gotten a second scene, and Viola Davis and Liam Neeson didn't need a dead son, never mind Carrie Coon's "role"). And how do you make a heist movie without one montage? Davis is good, but Elizabeth Debicki gets most of the best scenes.

College Humor (Ruggles, 1933)
Motherhood: Life's Greatest Miracle (Lawrence, 1925)
Something New (Shipman & van Tuyle, 1920)
Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti, 1960)
Cold Turkey (Lord, 1940)
*The Opry House (Roth, 1929)
The Dream Lady (Wilson, 1918)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen & Coen, 2018)