Last (x) movies you saw (II)

non-christmas december

Computer Chess (2013) 4/10
The Power of the Dog (Campion, 2021) 9/10
Black Widow (Nunnally Johnson, 1954) 5/10
The Matrix Resurrections (Wachowski, 2021) 7/10
Lady on a Train (Charles David, 1945) 8/10
The Innocents (script by Capote, Jack Clayton, 1961) 8/10
Man on a Swing (Frank Perry, 1974) 6/10 a vehicle for joel grey to show off in

Anyone else see "Ascension"? Hypnotically beautiful narrative free doc about labor and aspirational capitalism in contemporary China. I think it's on Paramount. Good score from Dan Deacon.

Kate. Mary Elizabeth Winstead kills half the gangsters in Japan while trying to figure out who poisoned her...so, half John Wick, half Crank. A little long at an hour 45, but made with real love of the action-movie craft.

East of Eden (Kazan 1955)
Night and the City (Dassin 1950)
Testament of Orpheus (Cocteau 1960)
Devi (Ray 1960)
Jennifer's Body (Kusama 2009)
Please Vote for Me (Chen 2007)
Get Back (Jackson 2021)
The Black Cat (Ulmer 1934)
The Chalk Garden (Neame 1964)
The Raven (Friedlander 1935)
The Power of the Dog (Campion 2021)
*The Red Shoes (Powell, Pressburger, 1948)
Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over (Beth B, 2019)
The Mystery of Picasso (Clouzot 1956)
Thunder Road (Ripley 1958)
Pig (Sarnoski 2021)
Somewhere in the Night (Mankiewicz 1946)
The Matrix Resurrections (Wachowski 2021)
The Bandit (Lattuada 1946)
* Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman 1975)
Topaz (Hitchcock 1969)
Sunday Bloody Sunday (Schlesingre 1971)
*The English Patient (Minghella 1996)
Les Vampires (Feuillade 1915-1916)

Is Les Vampires worth the time?

I'd say barely. They pull you in with the shorter early chapters before the later ones which are close to an hour each. Musidora as Irma Vep has great villainous screen presence, and Marcel Lévesque as Mazamette is terrific comic relief.

Fern Silva’s enjoyable tone-poem essay Rock Bottom Riser (2021 and no obvious relation to the song that I could hear) is a hour-long, occasionally dreamlike exploration of Hawaiian cultural and scientific colonialism with particular emphasis in volcanology and astronomy. Silva enjoys underlining interesting parallels and making his points quietly so we get an interview with the Rock about island activism on a television in a hotel room, a bunch of vapers popping smoke rings juxtaposed with underwater thermal vents, the crawl of magma across the countryside and a group of white creative writing students listening rapt to Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” There’s also considerable attention to traditional methods of way finding and stargazing and the intrusion of Western telescopes on sacred ground but much of the heart here is devoted to the awesome power of molten rock, with deep love for it’s velcro sound in motion, it’s psychedelic tearing and merging and its raw bully spread. Repeated scenes of streets overlaid with messy heaps of fresh black stone suggest that we may be more a part of the natural world than we think.

Mario Furloni and Kate McLean’s Freeland (2020) offers the sprawl of verdant and wild forest as a contrast to the capitalist order of the factory farm. We are meant to find the rhyme with Devi, the hippy sexagenarian and last woman standing at the outskirts of a California commune that she’s crafted into a small but functioning pot crop. Devi has pledged allegiance to the art of crafting an artisanal strain (this year’s is called “God’s Pussy”) and harvesting with a crew of three kids. When the city puts the squeeze on Devi she finds herself outside the legal grow network and unable to compete in a world that devalues everything she stands for. There’s a better film somewhere inside this one that meditates more clearly on the concept of obsolescence as a kind of violence. The striking Krisha Fairchild, playing Devi, does a great job of conveying that sentiment not via dialogue but through some lovely acting and interaction with her beautifully set dressed home; the verisimilitude of her hunt for hidden hundred dollar bills stashed throughout the decrepit estate is worth the price of admission all by itself. The issues here can mostly be ascribed to filmmakers so concerned with their vision being seen that they become overbearing: constant close-up, low angles on the indoor sequences intended to emphasize the paranoia and discomfort get repetitive and cramped, making the long view nature shots feel strangely sterile. The tone and story have a hard time synching, which isn’t helped by the on-the-nose music and the heavy specter of A24 visuals. The latter issue rears its head as trademark dark foreboding, turning the second half of the movie into terrible stress weed and paranoid freakout aimed at a broadly painted villain. As the film starts to eat its own tail in desperation, there’s a sense that the directors and not the lead character has lost its way, bogged down in nostalgia instead of building nuance and providing much needed plot.

The Saga of Gosta Berling (Stiller, 1924)
The County Fair (Tourneur, 1920)
For the Love of Mike (Banks, 1932)
Don't Bet on Love (Roth, 1933)
Beyond the Rocks (Wood, 1922)
Monsieur Beaucaire (Olcott, 1924)
*Wife and Auto Trouble (Henderson, 1916)
*Bad Boy (McCarey, 1925)

+1 for Ascension, xp, was amazing. Cool that Sheila Nevins/MTV picked it up.

Behind the Makeup (Milton & Arzner, 1930)
The Marriage Playground (Mendes, 1929)
The Pointing Finger (Pearson, 1933)
Strangers in Love (Mendes, 1932)
Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (Irving, 1917)
Kiss Me Again (Seiter, 1931)
Raffles (Baggot, 1925)

The Final Girls (2015) 5/10
Rare Exports (2010) 6/10
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (Irwin Allen, 1979) 4/10 the movie he did after The Swarm stung him. really dumb but what a cast - Michael Caine, Telly Savalas, Peter Boyle, Karl Malden, Sally Field being Sally Field, Slim Pickens as drunk Slim Pickens.
Saint Maud (2019) 6/10
Encanto (Disney co., 2021) 5/10 great music. all of the characters are dicks.
half of *The Animatrix (various, 2003) but I stopped because it was boring. one segment features voice actors Hedy Burress and Phil Lamarr which I want to think is a joke.

The Mother and The Whore (1973) 5/5
* Chimes at Midnight (1965) 5/5
Radio On (1979) 4/5. Totally shameless Wim Wenders homage but the restoration looks fantastic.
Asako I & II (2018) 3.5/5
* An American in Paris (1951) 4/5
Under the Volcano (1984) 4/5
Love & Basketball (2000) 4/5
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) 3.5/5
Once Upon a Time in China (1991) 4.5/5

BuyBust, a Filipino drug-war action extravaganza from 2018. A squad of cops raids a slum searching for a drug dealer, but he's been tipped off and mobilizes not just his own soldiers, but pissed-off slum residents, against them and they have to fight their way out. Tons of shooting, but later also tons of hand-to-hand combat with knives, bats, household objects, etc. The wildest thing about it was when I found out that the filmmakers built the whole slum — it was something like an 8000 square meter mazelike set. That's when it went from an excellent post-The Raid, post-Michael Mann crime/action movie to a Hard To Be A God-level masterpiece.

Double Trouble (Cabanne, 1915)
Mr. Fix-It (Swan, 1918)
The Night of the Party (Powell, 1934)
They Never Come Back (Newmeyer, 1932)
The Blue Eagle (Ford, 1926)
The Souvenir: Part II (Hogg, 2021)
Back Stage (McGowan, 1923)
Should Sailors Marry? (Parrott, 1925)

Wow, some great January takes, thanks yall! Forks on Freeland, re actress and storyline somewhat at odds with insecure directing reminds me of having seen Let's Scare Jessica To Death (on TCM) starring the remarkable Zora Lampert, with filmmakers---surefooted re backstory, setting, cinematography, casting, maybe not concept-wrangling---as well as on-screen randos, adding a bit much to keeping Jessica and the audience off-balance: is she having another breakdown, did she fool everybody into thinking that she was cured, to get out of the nuthouse, is she being gaslighted, are the supernatural baddies really that? Thee ending--well, whole thing was well worth watching, I thought. And there's not that much Lampert to be found.

Watched Nobody on HBO Max yesterday. Really well put together, and I'm really happy they got the one thing right that every other movie gets wrong — at one point the title character is driving away from the villains and they're shooting at him, and the bullets shatter the car's back window, and they also pierce the windshield. In most movies, it's like the back seat of the car is a portal into another dimension; bullets come in through the back window and then they just dematerialize. This movie got that right. It has lots of other good qualities, too.

Tonight I watched Sidney Lumet's Q&A on Hulu. I hadn't seen that in 30 years and several scenes were stuck in my memory almost shot for shot. Nick Nolte is absolutely terrifying in it, and Luis Guzman is really, really good, too. The dialogue is singe-your-ears racist and homophobic, but if you're not a moral child like the people who talk about movies on Twitter, it's a really solid crime-and-corruption story.

Midway, although i am way less than midway through it.

"Four years later the world was at war", well yes, would be more accurate to say 4 years later the world had been at war for nearly 4 years. pearl harbor was not the start of wwii.

dialogue also very quiet, like inaudible. and the guy from cheers has just turned up.

Enjoyed The Tragedy of Macbeth tremendously. Nonstop entertainment, superslick everything, great performances.

The Unforgivable (5.5)
Minding the Gap (6.5)
Paranoid Park (6.5)
Mona Lisa Smile (6.0)
Impeachment: American Crime Story (6.0)
Crime Scene: The Times Square Killer (6.0)
The Assistant (7.0)
The Conversation (10.0)
Drive My Car (7.0)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (7.5)

The Witching Hour (Hathaway, 1934)
The Midnight Lady (Thorpe, 1932)
The Midnight Girl (Noy, 1925)
Border Romance (Thorpe, 1929)
The Gaucho (Jones, 1927)
Love ’Em and Leave ’Em (Tuttle, 1926)
Tell Me Tonight (Litvak, 1933)

Seized. Director Isaac Florentine and performer Scott Adkins have made a bunch of movies together; some are really good, others are not. This is one of the latter; it feels pretty phoned-in to me. Adkins' son is kidnapped by a cartel leader (played with great realism by Mario Van Peebles) who forces him to kill his rivals and strap a camera to his chest so he can watch and the audience gets some first-person-shooter action. There are some decent John Wick-ish fight scenes — it's still a Scott Adkins movie — but it's nowhere near the greatness of the two Debt Collector movies or Accident Man, all of which were directed by Jesse V. Johnson, not Florentine.

In the Heat Of The night. 1967
Don't think I've really seen this in years. Do think i had seen it some time ago. & I really should have put off the chores I did in the kitchen until it ended. Cos it is an amazing looking film. I like the use of lighting in various scenes.
May need to rewatch it so that i get the bit I only heard.
& probably the sequel too.

Should have looked taht up befgorehand, hadn't realised taht In The Heat Of The Night was out the same year as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Interesting look at black empowerment vs a white liberal wet dream.

Also definitely should have looked up director cos Norman Jewison has done a lot of great stuff I've seen and not connected .

I really liked "Last Night in Soho." Very crafty.

hated that movie but also kinda hate the device whereby the twist of the movie is a result of the main character seeing a vision incorrectly

Oh, I didn't care about any of the vision stuff or the mystery or anything (though I did fall for at least one misdirect). I just liked all the visual allusions to Hitchcock, Polanski, giallo/Argento, et al. Felt nice just to luxuriate in the style for a couple of hours. As a director I've always found Wright kind of spazzy, so it was nice to watch him slow down a little (and give a long leash to his DP and editor). Preferred it miles over "Baby Driver," which I barely remember as anything more than annoying.

Triple Threat: an action movie starring Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais and Tiger Chen as the heroes, and Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White as the villains. Shit-tons of hand-to-hand fighting, giving you pretty much every possible combination of those guys in twos and threes (there are a couple of other performers/fighters, but these five are the big names). On Netflix.

* Memoria (Apichatapong, 2021) 9/10
Drive My Car (Hamaguchi, 2021) 7/10
* The Verdict (Lumet, 1982) 6/10
Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974) 8/10
* Fort Apache (Ford, 1948) 7/10

Without giving away the plot, does "Memoria" have a plot? "Uncle Boonmee" is the only one of his I've seen, and I thought it was ... just OK. The new one's log-line is vaguely reminiscent of "Safe."

it's marvelous -- read the discussion on the '21 film poll results thread

memoria is the least accessible weerasethakul film i've seen but it's also the best one

lol I am trying to process this through the Brad filter and not sure if my conclusions are correct.

memoria does have a plot but it’s very minimal. true of every film of his i’ve seen. tho?

There are moments of his last film burned into my memory, but the vast majority of it evaporated, like a dream.

Like, I remember something about a monk, something about a Bigfoot/monkey spirit, someone having sex with a fish, someone working on a farm? If there was a plot I don't remember it being particularly linear or constant.

weeraseethakul films are meant to be remembered as dreams if you're doing it right

there is not much plot in his films but the in-the-moment aspects of them are so mesmerizing

The question I suppose boils down to: if I tell my wife this movie is good and convince her to watch it, will she be mad at me? I kind of wonder the same thing about "Drive My Car."

I liked Drive My Car enough that I'll see it a second time next week so I can see it in a theatre. I don't know Uncle Vanya from Uncle Buck, so I was at a disadvantage there, but it's a good mournful-widower mood piece, certainly more accessible than the three Weeraseethakul films I've seen. I was unsure of one plot point that I probably just missed and should be cleared up by a second viewing.

i would say don't take someone who doesn't like it when scenes go on for really long xp

thought Uncle Boonmee and Cemetery of Splendour were both amazing but don't think I could recommend a Weerasethakul film to someone else. How were you planning on seeing Memoria? It's definitely not showing in any theater near me

Huh, I had no idea of the film's distribution gimmick. Seriously, one theatre at a time? No streaming, no planned physical release? As if it wasn't hard enough to see a movie these days. Well, anyway, it's out there to be found in the usual places.

It’s amazing, never watch it

I will say as someone who loves the ~cinema experience~ these stances from directors can come across as out of touch and potentially discriminatory not to mention borderline covidiotic

BUT for anyone who decides to watch memoria at home I do recommend that you use the best headphones you have access to

Can I listen to whatever I want to listen to, or do I need to listen to the movie?

You may listen to the movie as long as you never watch it

Lol, that would be kind of genius, selling a film's audio track only and requiring the audience be at a specific place at a specific time to watch the movie itself. Like on the side of a building, or in the middle of the desert, or at the beach or something.

Letter from Siberia (1957) 4/5
Jackass Forever (2022) 3.5/5
Five Shaolin Masters (1974) - this has something in common with the film above in that someone's testicles get absolutely destroyed.
* Park Row (1952) 4.5/5 - 2nd viewing I realized Samuel Fuller basically made a western but with eastern newspapermen.
Niagra (1953) 3.5/5
The Golden Coach (1952) - Bobby Hill would love this movie

Border Law (King, 1931)
Fighting to Live (Cline, 1934)
South of Panama (Hunt, 1928)
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi, 2021)
Jackass Forever (Tremaine, 2022)
*Nightmare Alley: The Blatant Cash Grab Vision in Darkness and Light (del Toro, 2021)

(...another informal double feature of performers degrading themselves to entertain the public?)

April Fool's Day (1986) 3/10
Enemies of the State (2020) 5/10
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022) ?/10, was playing with my phone
You're Next (2011) 6/10
First Reformed (2017) 9/10
Who? aka Robo Man (1974) 3/10 that makeup, lol
The Night Of (w: Richard Price, 2016) 8/10...
...and then the original Criminal Justice (2008) 7/10

♥ golden coach