Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Winter Kept Us Warm (1965, Secter) 7/10

Famous Canadian film--might even have been the first Canadian feature of any consequence. I saw it at the University of Toronto about 15 years ago, along with one of Cronenberg's early ones (Stereo or Crimes of the Future, can't remember which). Thought it was almost impossible to see...so of course it's on YouTube.

That's where I saw it, tho a NYC rep house recently showed a 16mm print.

Hypocrites (Weber, 1915)
Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945)
On With the Show (Crosland, 1929)
Bum Voyage (Grinde, 1934)
*The Wedding March (von Stroheim, 1928)
Blind Husbands (von Stroheim, 1919)
The Paneless Window Washer (Fleischer, 1937)
While the City Sleeps (Conway, 1928)

Just to correct myself a couple of posts above, Don Owens' Nobody Waved Goodbye predates Winter Kept Us Warm by a year.

American Beauty (8.5)

This film seems to have taken a fairly big hit in reputation, tho i disliked it in '99, and Alan Ball's subsequent shtick seemed milked from the same cow. What do you like about it?

Great cinematography, iirc.

well yeah, Conrad Hall. but kind of unnecessary for a windblown plastic bag.

In terms of its point of view, it strongly resembles a film from the '70s New Hollywood, is my guess?

I don't usually do this, but rather than just repeat myself, here's some stuff I wrote about it about 10 years ago. I'm basically in the same place today. (Scroll down to #32.)

http://phildellio.tripod.com/movies1.html

I think I understand some of the main reasons people hate it, above and beyond standard backlash against films that win a lot of awards.

1) It's a couple of British guys commenting on American life.
2) It's written by and stars two guys who could be interpreted as being self-hating gay men--I think that's a complaint, I'm not sure.
3) It's the nine-millionth film to say there's this dark side to suburbia, and the makers seem to think they're the first people to hit upon this.

And there are no doubt other things people hate about it. I'm not oblivious to the counter-arguments.

In addition to what I wrote then, Eric's right, I probably do get the mood of a mid-'70s film.

After this last rewatch, I went back and read some of the original reviews in Salon, Slate, the Times, Slant, and a few others. Most were really positive; one or two weren't. Also looked at some ILX reaction, and found two or three people who said they liked/loved it initially, then hated it second time around. It was already doomed to vanish--in a way, Spacey's troubles may be the one thing that keeps it around.

I shouldn't let this fall under the umbrella of "other things":

4) In its treatment of Thora Birch and Mena Suvari, it's male-gazey or creepy or worse. I get that too.

5) bag headed straight for the ocean

I tried my best to shield that poor plastic bag from further vilification, but was not to be.

who is British besides Sam Mendes?

I blame Alan Ball (from Atlanta) first.

You're right--a British guy, not guys. That's a common thing, though: Zabriskie Point, Lost in Translation, etc. The tourist charge.

But it's clearly Ball's -- and I hate to use the word -- vision.

Maybe that reason doesn't apply then. I'm trying to understand why people loathe the film--not just a poor pick for Best Picture but possibly the worst pick ever--and maybe it's as simple as glib and facile most of the time, occasionally (plastic-bag monologue) wildly pretentious. I go back to it every few years, and I've just never felt that way.

If it hadn't won, by the way, I'm guessing The Sixth Sense would have (which I never watched a second time); people here would have gone for The Insider (which I find very slow).

Loathing toward American Beauty is probably the potent combo of treacly, precious, dumber than it thinks it is, and arrogant. It goes beyond pretension, there's something mean and dumb in that movie. Nothing to do with Spacey, I think his performance is the best thing in it.

Sorry to Bother You (man WHAT; I have some problems with the big twist, and much as I admire its politics, for some reason even magical realism didn't help with my suspension of disbelief re: the world being breathlessly attentive to a strike at a call center;loved it nonetheless)

*L'Important c'est d'aimer (loved it more on this latest rewatch where I'd previously found it somewhat cold; Fabio Testi is ok I guess but Romy Schneider deserves all the accolades, and Kinski is spellbinding, pulling off the greatest acting challenge of his career in portraying a fundamentally decent human being [fuck him for real though] and a sympathetic gay character in a movie that unfortunately leans on homophobia for some cheap shock value)

Death Laid an Egg (started with the drastically shortened original "giallo cut," will return to the Touch of Evil-esque restoration on the blu-ray in a few days; absolutely fucking bughouse, reminds me of a more flamboyant Elio Petri, with a score by composer Bruno Maderna that bounces between Stockhausen-esque electroacoustics, melancholy guitar that reminds me of Lech Jankowski's work for the Quay brothers, and manic scat-heavy nonsense)

Please Kill Mr. Kinski (still on my mind a few days later)

*The Case of the Scorpion's Tail (rewatched with Ernesto Gastaldi's commentary; as ever, the man misses no opportunity to shit-talk Argento or any thriller where the villain's motivation is pathological, which is an entertaining listen at the very least- especially since my introduction to the giallo, as with so many other non-Italians, is very much one that started with psychos and supernatural horror thanks to Argento, Fulci, etc)

L'Assassino (first film in as exhaustive a Petri rewatch as I can manage with what's available on disc in the US & UK)

The Killer Is On the Phone (middling 1972 giallo with Telly Savalas as the heavy; decent Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack heavy on the fuzz guitar; unusual Bruges setting; very little else to recommend it beyond those three factors- Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints on the Moon does the amnesia plot a thousand times better, plus gorgeous Vittorio Storaro cinematography and an actual sense of dread, minus this film's gratuitous homophobia)

I say Petri "rewatch," all I've seen until now is Investigation... and read some of his writing, so this is mostly uncharted territory for me.

Enemy (2014) - 6/10
Mojave (2016) - 7/10

CPH:DOX festival haul. Last festival in six months, thank God. No grades, but ama.

A Cherry Tale (Mulvad)
Winter’s Yearning (Larsen & Pilskog)
Chinese Portrait (Wang Xiaoshuai)
The Reformist (Skovgaard)
Los Reyes (Perut & Osnovikoff)
La Flor (Llinás)
The Border Fence (Geyrhalter)
Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
A Moon for My Father (Akbari & White)
The Rest (Ai Weiwei)
I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (Gibson)
The Grand Bizarre (Mack)
Graves Without a Name (Panh)
Dark Suns (Elie)
House of Furies (Matzen & Rebekka)
The Dream of Lady Hamilton (Cheval)
You See the Moon (Nunes)
Nakorn-Sawan (Aksornsawang)
Faust (Bussman)
The Edge of Democracy (Costa)
The Last Male on Earth (van der Meulen)
The Disapearance of My Mother (Barrese)
Ceremony (Collins)
Everybody in the Place (Deller)
Searching Eva (Hellenthal)
Kabul, City in the Wind (Amini)
Inland (Palacios)
American Dharma (Morris)
Evelyn (von Einsiedel)
Divine Love (Mascaro)

Thirst (1917)
Madcap Ambrose (Hibbard, 1916)
The Affairs of Cellini (la Cava, 1934)
*The Countess of Monte Cristo (Freund, 1934)
Eleanor's Catch (Madison, 1916)
The Hole in the Wall (Florey, 1929)

* Hudson Hawk (Lehmann, Waters, DeSouza, Willis, Kraft 1991)
* The Player (Altman, Tolkin 1992)
Todos lo saben [Everybody Knows] (Farhadi 2018) [DCP]
Climax (Noé 2018) [DCP]
Izzy Gets The Fuck Across Town (Papierniak 2018)
* Mission: Impossible (DePalma, Towne, Koepp, Zaillan, Pollack, Cruise, Wagner, Huyck and Katz 1996)
Us (Peele 2019) [DCP]
Dottie Gets Spanked (Haynes 1994)
Fear And Desire (Kubrick, Sackler 1953)

Finally caught LET THE SUNSHINE IN and the end credits placement was the highlight.

March:

The Heartbreak Kid (May, 1972) 8/10
The Sect (Soavi, 1991) 7/10
Black God, White Devil (Rocha, 1964) 7/10
Caught (Ophuls, 1949) 7/10
The Snorkel (Green, 1958) 6/10
Jeremiah Johnson (Pollack, 1972) 8/10
It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934) 8/10
Stromboli (Rossellini, 1950) 9/10
The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1979) 9/10
Captain Marvel (Fleck & Boden, 2019) 6/10
Night of the Big Heat (Fisher, 1967) 5/10
The Swimmer (Perry, 1968) 8/10
The Roaring Twenties (Walsh, 1938) 8/10
Cape Fear (Thompson, 1962) 8/10
The Fall of the Roman Empire (Mann, 1964) 7/10
Arsenic and Old Lace (Capra, 1944) 7/10
Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau, 1946) 7/10
City of the Living Dead (Fulci, 1980) 7/10
Real Life (Brooks, 1979) 9/10
No Blade of Grass (Wilde, 1970) 7/10
The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (Martino, 1971) 8/10
The Mephisto Waltz (Wendkos, 1971) 7/10

The Right Stuff (1983) 4/5
The Beaches of Agnes (2008) 5/5
Trouble Every Day (2001) 3/5
9 to 5 (1980) more like 3/5
Us (2019) 3.5/5
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) 3/5
Shampoo (1975) 3/5
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) 3/5
Full Contact (1992) 3.5/5
The Loved One (1965) 2/5
The Magician (1958) 3.5/5
* Inherent Vice (2014) 4/5
Let the Sunshine In (2017) 3/5

Diane is highly, highly recommended; found it really honest and deeply moving. Place deserves an Oscar nomination.
Saw it in preview, followed by an hourlong conversation with the director and Scorcese about movies in general and was reminded that New Yorkers will literally walk out on ANYTHING

xxxxpost wait WHAT Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were involved in Mission Impossible???

March:

Leaving Neverland (2019) 6/10
Mike and Dave need Wedding Dates (2016) 5/10
Danger: Diabolik (1968) 8/10
Filmworker (2017) 6/10
Shoplifters (2018) 7/10
The Gospel according to Matthew (1964) 7/10
*Darkman (1990) 5/10
Dragged Across Concrete (2019) 8/10
The Dirt (2019) 4/10
The Intern (2016) 6/10
The Double Life of Veronique (1991) 6/10
Umberto D (1952) 8/10
Poitin (1978) 7/10
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) 7/10
The Other Side of The Underneath (1972) 6/10
My Scientology Movie (2015) 5/10

probably the least involved in anything that made it to screen. DePalma basically ended up inventing the way McQuarrie makes them now: “I have three setpieces in different global locations figured out, Tom just had a new idea for one scene, nobody likes any of the scripts but I know Robert Towne’s phone number and we have a release date so let’s start shooting”

MUBI:

Portrait of a Lady (Campion, 1996) - Really good adaptation. Like it does things -- with Nicole Kidman's face, with the cast and locations -- and it possibly gets at the narrative difficulty present in James' novels (lol I just couldn't quite follow beyond surface detail...brain undergoing a meltdown, I just can't watch demanding fare on TV anymore). I think there is a correspondence with Dangeours Liaisons (in a very light way, mainly because Malkovich is in this).
Detour (Ulmer, 1945) - hilarious noir. Ann Savage is...savage as the fatale and the monologue on this is totally fucked up.

Cinema:
Us (Peele, 2018)
There's Always Tomorrow (Sirk, 1956) - loved the script and Stanwyck turning around on the adulterous husband's children was A+. With the final -- totally artificial -- line, and you can see what Fassbinder saw in him.

Heddy Honigmann's "Buddy" was honest, sweet, insightful and occasionally jaw dropping in terms of how outrageously capable the profiled animals are. Probably worth a watch on the big screen if you can, if only for the extreme cuteness. My friend and I were literally the only people in the theater tonight; first time that's ever happened to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xQjL-hmPiA

Hudson Hawk - still feels like it could have been something delightful if Willis hadn't caught lead singer disease, and Danny Aiello knew he was in the same movie most of the cast and crew were making, and Andie McDowell was an actress (nb: she's great in MMXXL), etc etc. 3/10 as a coherent film, 6/10 for the ambulance chase and the singing heist gag and Sandra Bernhard attempting t carry the entire flick on her shoulder pads

The Player - holds up, failed to resurrect Young MC's career after "Keep It In Your Pants." 8/10

Todos lo saben - a thriller with no twists that might have held up at 90 minutes, but takes two and a half. a film starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, set in wine country, that chooses to contain only 0.01% horniness is squandering its resources. 3/10

Climax - my first Noé, watched for the soundtrack, and was totally worth it. takes those moments in a night, especially on a come-up, that feel like everything might turn disturbing, and makes a horror movie out of them -- with, just like IRL, enough flickers of fun and dance that you keep riding through it. 8/10 for the ride, 9.2/10 for the choreo bits.

Izzy Gets The Fuck Across Town - amiable One Bad Work Day caper that makes the most of getting a bunch of character stars for a day's shoot each. 6/10

Mission: Impossible - coming back to this after one TV viewing 21 years ago, and watching/rescreening some BDP horrors last Halloween, it's a ride to see just how DePalma-y he made a slick blockbuster action film (and Snake Eyes totally plays as a B-side to it). 7/10

Us - lol at the opening being a stack of clue-giving VHSes around a 4:3 TV playing exposition, just like Climax. production design seems packed with references designed for VHS, too, where you'd rewatch before returning to maximise your rental, or get it out again periodically with the same group. 8/10

Dottie Gets Spanked - half-hour TV film about TV, and mediating one's identity through culture in lieu of IRL referents to your internal life. 7/10

(also started watching this on Kanopy: THE AMAZING ADVENTURE OF MARCHELLO THE CAT is the first-ever live feature with a cast of real cats and was heartwarmingly filmed over six years, from the cats' point of view--eight inches from the ground. Turned out to literally be cat videos shot on VHS and edited together with very bad dialogue dubbed over the top, by real Hollywood actors, shouting. Finished it off later with the sound off and a podcast on bcz once you watch 2 seconds of a Kanopy stream, you've used one of your 5 for the month. At 67 minutes, it's a cut-down version of a 76-minute 2008 DTV called A Cat's Tale. 0/10)

Us - lol at the opening being a stack of clue-giving VHSes around a 4:3 TV playing exposition, just like Climax. production design seems packed with references designed for VHS, too, where you'd rewatch before returning to maximise your rental, or get it out again periodically with the same group. 8/10

I remember C.H.U.D. was one, what were the others?

Huh, I was really up for climax but found it quite disappointing iirc, loved the soundtrack and dancing and the slow shift into wrongness but found the last half hour, 45 mins, whatever of arseholes writhing around while the camera goes wOoOoOooOoo really dull

a lot of people told me to see Climax, one said "it's not so much a film as it is a ride" - pass

I remember C.H.U.D. was one, what were the others?

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Tuesday, April 2, 2019 11:04 AM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the man with two brains, goonies, the right stuff, nightmare on elm street

Todos lo saben - a thriller with no twists that might have held up at 90 minutes, but takes two and a half. a film starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, set in wine country, that chooses to contain only 0.01% horniness is squandering its resources. 3/10

I've been waiting for this to show up for rent on Amazon. Now that I know it's that long I'm substantially less interested. Did you see the movie with Bardem as Pablo Escobar and Cruz as the Colombian TV journalist he had a years-long affair with? It's not bad. His accent is way better than hers - she doesn't even try.

I didn't.

found the last half hour, 45 mins, whatever of arseholes writhing around while the camera goes wOoOoOooOoo

fair! for me it goes from the first half of dancers bonding & interacting as people, and the camera staying almost still to capture moments of their incredible control of their bodies, into a second half of the people losing control of everything, and the camera in constant questing motion w/ them only existing relative to it. flip of a coin, dark side of the moon.

I would have enjoyed 90 minutes of dance and a proper club soundsystem better, for sure, but that's probably the case for any film.

Well as ever when my reaction to a film is out of step with ilx’s, I doubt myself and want to see it again. I did give it props for capturing the essence of a bad trip, which ime = nightmarish + boring

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Vibenius) 8/10
Der Todesking (Buttgereit) 7/10
Gummo (Korine) 7/10
The Terrorizers (Yang) 8/10
Certified Copy (Kiarostami) 9/10
Drug War (To) 7/10
Running in Madness, Dying in Love (Wakamatsu) 7/10
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai) 6/10
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes, 1978 cut) 8/10
Le vent de la nuit (Garrel) 9/10

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006, Kijak) 6/10
God Told Me To (1976, Cohen) 6/10
The Mechanic (1972, Winner) 4/10
*The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Schoedsack, Pichel) 7/10
Genesis (2018, Lesage) 7/10
Projections of America (2014, Miller) 7/10
The Wild Horse Stampede (1926, Rogell) 6/10
*Shampoo (1975, Ashby) 9/10
Indiscreet (1958, Donen) 6/10
Birds of Passage (2018, Guerra, Gallego) 7/10

Re-watched Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers again last night. Now that's what I call a PG-rated movie!

The 10th Victim (1965, Petri)- didn't like this as much as I was expecting to, to be honest. The production design and costumes are incredible (in particular Mastroianni's bleach job and use of sunglasses to cover incredibly exhausted-looking eyes, and his wife's creepy lack of eyebrows), it incorporates Rome as a setting remarkably well, but it also feels weirdly static and stagey and Petri's recurring themes feel blunted by some retrograde gender politics. Still liked it, and I'll rewatch it at some point (it's becoming obvious that I need to do a Mastroianni-focused deep dive; besides, it's a gorgeous film to look at)

Surfer: Teen Confronts Fear (2017, a certifiable fucking lunatic)- I'd read a Vice article about this but I was totally unprepared to see it as a screening choice at Philly's Psychotronic Film Society. I haven't seen any of them- no, not even The Room; I keep meaning to make it to a midnight show but not really caring enough- but it feels of a piece with the Neil Breen/Wiseau kind of B-movie where it's an ego-stroking star vehicle for one man's very dubious talents. Here it's nominally to show off writer/director/goddamn maniac Greg Burke's son Sage and his surfing skills (approximately 40% of the movie is GoPro footage of Sage surfing) but Sage either cannot or does not care to act- fair- and Greg just eats the scenery, just shoveling handfuls of it into his mouth and flailing and shouting and making a goddamn fool of himself, including a TWELVE

MINUTE

MONOLOGUE conducted in a single take with no cuts or camera movement, with several obviously flubbed lines left in (I listened to as much as I could take of the Projection Booth episode on this thing and Burke revealed that he regularly used cue cards, asking someone to move them around in his and Sage's line of sight to make their performances seem more natural; it works about as well as you'd think). Full of bizarre violations of film language throughout, ranging from the static no-cuts approach to a totally unmotivated flurry of cuts in a totally unnecessary scene featuring a character who has no lines and no import; a badly green-screened background that includes the same loop of footage with the same seagull swooping towards the camera three times; the most egregious continuity error I have *ever* seen in a film...it's a treat if you can see it with an audience, but sitting through it solo would be absolute hell

*A Fistful of Dollars (Leone, 1964)- I haven't watched this in years but it's still shockingly great. It's definitely the first time I've watched it knowing who Gian Maria Volonte is; having a better idea of his persona made the antagonist that much easier to care about, though the other crime family remains weirdly underdeveloped. I hadn't seen this on anything but the ancient, kind of shitty MGM dvd, and this is the first time I've really seriously tried to get into spaghetti westerns, so I didn't know about Monte Hellman's bizarre prologue for network TV, starring Harry Dean Stanton and the back of someone who's about six inches shorter than Clint Eastwood, and saved from oblivion by one very dedicated fan who took out a bank loan to buy a Betamax recorder for $1500 in 1977 for the express purpose of recording Fistful.

Knife in the Water (Polanski, 1962)- Criterion's (assuming that's the version Kanopy uses) subtitles for this are absolute dogshit, fwiw; the general ethos seems to be if lines are short enough or their content can be reasonably guessed at from context, there's no need to bother, which makes tracking conversations understandably difficult. Anyway: ground zero for Skolimowski as well as for Polanski the feature director, some great deep focus cinematography, Krzysztof Komeda rules (and is dearly missed in the next Polanski film on my list), Polanski is fucking scum but at least his films aren't banal pastiche like Woody Allen's

A Quiet Place in the Country (Petri, 1968)- This is brilliant and shockingly underappreciated. I knew virtually nothing going in- just the cast, principal crew (Petri, Morricone and Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, who also shot Deep Red) and very misleading poster and tagline, which led me to expect some kind of revenge/captivity thriller- but its closest relatives are things like The House With Laughing Windows (Quiet Place's tenuously "giallo" elements are closer to Avati's film, where the trauma isn't so much Freudian as it is that left by fascism), as well as Petri's own Investigation of a Citizen etc (with its unhinged male lead and hallucinatory/delusional elements). Highest possible recommendation, and it doesn't hurt that Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave are one of the most attractive screen couples I've ever seen.

M*A*S*H (Altman, 1970)- I had never seen this! Altman is something of a blind spot for me still; The Long Goodbye and Brewster McCloud are some of my favorite films of all time, and I have a little mini-festival lined up at home based on an article by Samm Deighan for Diabolique lining up his gothic/"women's pictures" influenced films (That Cold Day in the Park, Images and 3 Women) but my first was Gosford Park, which would've been a poor point of entry even if it hadn't been during one of the deepest depressions I've ever experienced. MASH, though: problematic, sure, also super fucking funny and an interesting test of the Truffaut chestnut about war films. And again, just really, really goddamn funny; Sutherland or Gould are usually enough for me to check out a film on their own but they're unstoppable as a comedy duo.

Repulsion (Polanski, 1965)- On my to-watch list for over a decade and finally done; left me surprisingly cold compared to, say, The Tenant (which remains my favorite Polanski film). Remarkably empathetic toward its protagonist coming from a rapist. To be totally honest this was watched more for context for other films (the Altman trio mentioned above, Jose Larraz's Whirlpool and Symptoms) than on its own terms, which is probably a factor in how cold it left me. It's still an achievement and a landmark and etc, just not doing it for me this morning.

Polanski is fucking scum but at least his films aren't banal pastiche like Woody Allen's

Username officially up for grabs.

Remarkably empathetic toward its protagonist coming from a rapist

expecting (or ruling out) this kind of correspondence in art is childish

Annie Hall is not a banal pastiche

Baby Driver. Loved it.

Watched that last night too. It took me a while to get to it because I expected the focus on the soundtrack to be way too cutesy, but it actually wasn't, and as a crime movie and a car chase movie it was better than I expected.