Last (x) movies you saw

Sandra (1965, Visconti) 6/10
*Night of the Living Dead (1968, Romero) 9/10
*The Color of Pomegranates (1969, Parajanov) 8/10
Kung-Fu Master! (1988, Varda) 7/10
La Belle Noiseuse (1991, Rivette) 6/10
*The Virgin Suicides (1999, Coppola) 9/10
*A Foreign Affair (1948, Wilder) 9/10
*Multiple Maniacs (1970, Waters) 7/10
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017, Zahler) 6/10
*Tombstone (1993, Cosmatos) 7/10

Titicut Follies (1967) 4/5
Key Largo (1948 (4/5)
Zama (2017) 4/5
Evil Genius (2018) 2.5/5
Judex (1963; rewatch) 4/5
Alexander Nevsky (1938) 3/5
Ant-Man (2015) 3/5
First Reformed (2017) 3.5/5

Taipei Story (Yang, 1985) - this is a masterpiece
L'avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2017)

Careful Please (Taurog, 1926)
*Sea Spiders (1932)
Manslaughter (DeMille, 1922)
At First Sight (Howe, 1924)
The Poor Fish (McCarey, 1924)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (Young, 1934)
Beer and Pretzels (Cummings, 1933)
Señorita (Badger, 1927)
The Great BK Mystery (Sprocketts, 2017)
Midnight Lovers (Dillon, 1926)
Nertsery Rhymes (Cummings, 1933)
A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire (Miles, 1906)
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Méliès, 1903)
Detained (Pembroke & Rock, 1924)
*A Trip to the Moon (Méliès, 1902)
*The Battle of the Century (Bruckman, 1927)

i think i am seeing that Melies/Detained program in NY this week

Serge Bromberg, Saved From the Flames? This time the National Gallery actually let him light up a scrap of nitrate film to show how quickly it burns.

Game Night
Heard it was quite fun

Nightmare City (Lenzi, 1980)- shit city

Head of the Family (Band, 1996)- gotta make that Full Moon trial membership earn the $0 it cost me; I am not at all on Band's wavelength but this was an agreeable enough waste of like 80 minutes. would watch if bored in a motel

The Pit and the Pendulum (Gordon, 1991)- this, on the other hand! Lance Henriksen is a treat, Jeffrey Combs is always welcome, Gordon manages to make Full Moon's Romanian (iirc) castle location look good, and it's just a nasty piece of work in the grand tradition of yr Witchfinders General and yr miscellaneous Vincents Price

*Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)- shamefully, aggressively stupid, fully makes Pinhead into a witless slasher and Cenobites into a shitty punchline, all to chase those Freddy Krueger dollars that were already starting to dry up. Even the Image Animation fx guys turn in subpar work, between the, as I mentioned, stupid as a bucket of rocks Cenobites and some particularly cringey early CGI

Leviathan: The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (McDonagh, 2015)- some regrettable stuff (framing archival interview footage in really hacky comic-panel frames, overlong "artsy" credits, etc) but- with the notable exception of Barker- the breadth and depth of the interviews over this four-hour monster is really something special. Bonus points for contrasting Doug Jones' starry-eyed nostalgia for all things Pinhead with Image Animation folks saying "It's shit. Stop making Hellraiser movies until you can fucking do it right."

Out of the Blue (Hopper, 1980)- Still processing this incredibly bleak film. I want to compare it with a certain set of other films (Welles, Godard, Cammell, a couple others I can't immediately recall right now) but will leave it at least a little cryptic if anyone cares about spoilers. The kind of self-indulgent mess where a scene plays dialogue-free with Dennis Hopper driving a trash compactor to THE ENTIRETY of Neil Young's "Thrasher" but somehow it works? Anyway, I have some hope that this one might be more widely available soon- there was no like Janus logo or anything, and the introduction at Philly's Lightbox/IHP didn't mention restoration, but this was an absolutely pristine 35mm print that looked brand new.

Times Square (Moyle, 1980)- moony-eyed and sentimental and romanticizing homelessness but I don't care because feelings, basically, and the unfuckingbelievable soundtrack- which I imagine is what's been keeping it off home video formats for ages; if this comes out with a fake soundtrack a la Return of the Living Dead I will scream- which carries the weight of the storytelling so much more than the script, to the point where there are multiple editors credited specifically with the musical sequences in the end credits. The nearly back to back sequences of "Down in the Park" and "Pissing in a River" might be one of my favorite film moments of my year so far. No such luck with the print this time; it was faded and pink, which added to the pre-Giuliani grime of it all, but it's a shame that this isn't easier to see.

Lu Over the Wall (Yuasa, 2017)- SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE OH MY GOD OH MY GOD SEE IT ON THE BIGGEST SCREEN
It's a little plotty and exhausting but Yuasa is my shit and this is revolutionary. I didn't even fully understand what was going on until I read about the use of Flash (!) and hand-drawn keyframes to make this incredible, fluid Tex Avery-looking thing. It has all the detail and solid worldbuilding of, let's say Tekkonkinkreet, one of my go-to examples in feature animation, but feels like A Cartoon in the western sense as well.

I mean just look at it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIJ8z34dvE0

Knight Duty (Gillstrom, 1933)
The Love Nest (Kline & Keaton, 1923)
In the Dough (McCarey, 1932)
Secrets (Borzage, 1933)
*Fatty's Tintype Tangle (Arbuckle, 1915)
Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day (Arbuckle, 1915)
Cliff Edwards and His Buckaroos (Negulesco, 1941)
Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
Transatlantic (Howard, 1931)
A Bedroom Scandal (Raymaker, 1921)
Shadows in Paradise (Kaurismäki, 1986)
*Le Havre (Kaurismäki, 2011)

Breathless - 8/10
Faces - 9/10
Twixt - 1/10
Red Desert - 10/10
To Live and Die in L.A. - 10/10
Opening Night - 10/10
Pioneers in Ingolstadt - 8/10
The Exorcist - 8/10
A Woman Under the Influence 9/10
White Material - 8/10
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - 9/10

Body of Lies (Scott)
The Last Boy Scout (Scott)
Sweeney Todd (Burton)
Hollow Man (Verhoeven)
Remember (Egoyan)
In My Father’s Hands (Vinge)
Hjerter Dame (Detlefsen & Schepelern)
No Stone Unturned (Gibney)
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (Tyrnauer)
Austerlitz (Loznitsa)*
Safari (Seidl)
Images of Liberation (von Trier)
The Idiots (von Trier)*
Nymphomaniac (von Trier)*
The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche part 1 (Thuesen, script by von Trier)
Cairo Station (Chahine)
The Land (Chahine)
The Sparrow (Chahine)
The Nightingale’s Prayer (Barakat)
Caramel (Labaki)
Rock the Casbah (Marakchi)
Outside the Law (Bouchareb)
Omar (Abu-Assad)
The Message: The Story of Islam (Akkad)
Al Medina (Shargawi)
Before Snowfall (Zaman)

Secret Ceremony (1968, Losey) 4/10
Summer 1993 (2017, Simón) 7/10
*Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976, Mazursky) 8/10
Ludwig (1973, Visconti) 7/10
Ash Wednesday (1973, Peerce) 5/10
*They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969, Pollack) 9/10
*Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Kubrick) 8/10
I, the Worst of All (1990, Bemberg) 7/10
*The Nutty Professor (1963, Lewis) 9/10
*Life of Brian (1979, Jones) 8/10
*Dick Tracy (1990, Beatty) 7/10

*Dick Tracy (Beatty, 1990) 4; down from 6, last seen in 1990
Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) 5
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Yonebayashi, 2017) 6
Hail, Caesar! (Coens, 2016) 5
Hereditary (Ari Ansel, 2018) 8
36 Hours (George Seaton, 1964) 4; incompetent second half

Ari Aster

are asterisks rescreens?

yes

whoa @ the 9 for They Shoot Horses.

It'd be a great '30s literary-bummer double bill with The Day of the Locust. Possibly a career peak for both Fonda and Pollack (not to mention Gig Young and Red Buttons).

I'd deduct a couple points for the horse symbolism (Pollack isn't the director for mystification), agree on career-high work by the actors.

whoa @ the 9 for They Shoot Horses.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 June 2018 13:03 (nine minutes ago)

Deserves it! Great film

seeing Sicario Too today

I had never seen (all of) The Sweet Smell of Success or Tokyo Story. You heard it here first, they are both masterpieces of the highest order, you should see them.

btw a "9" doesn't nec mean anything more than it's in the theoretical upper fifth of film i've seen. Nor does a "10" mean perfection.

https://www.nbc.com/sites/nbcunbc/files/files/images/2014/11/06/98c236580303ada95a749436d4db5cb3_1a73ecafa4abd727808bd9f84bb8af24.jpg

that's quite a cultural reference to have lodged in yr noggin, honeybunch

A 3-star reference to be sure.

*munches on salted peanuts*

https://ibhuluimcom-a.akamaihd.net/ib.huluim.com/video/40031081?region=US&size=600x400

this reminds me of an old shelf label in Kim's Video:

"SNL Shit"

I had never seen (all of) The Sweet Smell of Success or Tokyo Story. You heard it here first, they are both masterpieces of the highest order, you should see them.

If I can trust my eyes, and I think I can, Susie knows all about your dirty work. (Don't get me started.)

My Tokyo Story subtitles must have been different than yours.

http://i1.wp.com/dellioandwoods.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/download.jpg?ssl=1&w=450

Fucking Criterion ripped me off with shitty subs.

and Setsuko Hara plays cookies full of arsenic!

The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973) 10/10
Quicksand (Pichel, 1950) 5/10
Cabaret (Fosse, 1972) 7/10
Happy Birthday, Gemini (Benner, 1980) 2/10
Every Day (Sucsy, 2018) 6/10
Game Night (Daley and Goldstein) 6/10
Annihilation (Garland, 2018) 5/10

Take a Chance (Goulding, 1918)
*Lizzies of the Field (Lord, 1924)
Bashful (Goulding, 1917)
Just Neighbors (Lloyd & Terry, 1919)
*The Big Idea (Mohr & Pratt, 1917)
*Look Pleasant, Please (Goulding, 1918)
A Gasoline Wedding (Goulding, 1918)
By the Sad Sea Waves (Goulding, 1917)
The Marathon (Goulding, 1919)
Captain Kidd's Kids (Roach, 1919)
Billy Blazes, Esq. (Roach, 1919)
Expensive Women (Henley, 1931)
Rambling Round Radio Row #4 (Wald, 1932)
Flaming Gold (Ince, 1932)
The Iron Horse (Ford, 1924)
A Dream Walking (Fleischer, 1934)
Versus Sledge Hammers (Clements, 1915)
Just Pals (Ford, 1920)
*Pay Day (Chaplin, 1922)
Just Suppose (O'Brien, 1948)
Cellbound (Lah & Avery, 1955)
*Beyond the Rockies (Allen, 1932)
The Two-Alarm Fire (Fleischer, 1934)
Under a Spell (Smith, 1925)
The Guardians (Beauvois, 2017)
Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)

seeing Sicario Too today

like, shockingly bad

Thoroughbreds is a lot of fun, looks amazing, and the ending is a genuine surprise.

Sicario One was pretty bad and dumb as well, I don't get the hype at all.

Hotel Artemis (Pearce, 2018)
Faces Places (Varda & JR, 2017)
Old Joy (Reichardt, 2006)
Madame Tutli-Putli (short - Lavis & Szczerbowski, 2007)
Old Man (short - Shore, 2012)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles, 1971)
Reflections in a Golden Eye (Huston, 1967)
The Firemen's Ball (Forman, 1967)
Last Flag Flying (Linklater, 2017)
Begone Dull Care (short - McLaren & Lambart, 1949)
The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017)

j.lu: why the middling response to Wild Strawberries?

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985) - 8/10
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999) - 9/10
The Imperfect Lady (Lewis Allen, 1947) - 7/10
The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960) - 10/10
Cruel Gun Story (Takumi Furukawa, 1964) - 8/10
Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984) - 9/10
From the East (Chantal Akerman, 1993) - 10/10
The Happy Ending (Richard Brooks, 1969) - 7/10
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné, 1945) - 10/10

A City of Sadness (1989) 5/5
* Topsy-Turvy (1999) 4.5/5
Sorry to Bother You (2018) 3.5/5
The Other Side of Hope (2017) 4/5
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) 5/5
* Predator (1987) 4/5
Aquarius (2016) 3.5/5
* Aliens (1986) 4.5/5

xxpost

It was my first Bergman (although I do plan on seeing more of the retrospective), and I had a hard time staying awake. For what it's worth, I have a history of reacting badly to the canonical "masterpieces." I seem to be more attuned to racy little pre-1935 programmers and two-reel comedies.

flappy how do you curate your watch list? good stuff on there (well honestly a lot I've never heard of)

recommendations from here and elsewhere, borrowed discs from friends, and continuing to search out work by people I really like (Akerman, Bergman, Kiarostami, Teresa Wright). and to stymie infinite choice paralysis, sometimes if I watch a movie that starts with "The" or is just a single word, I'll watch three or more of those in a row (consecutive days - I almost always watch at least one movie a day, often two or three if I went to the theater early in the day).

envious of your sched

i'd like to watch a movie every night but most nights i'm too tired and opt to fall asleep to a sitcom

Being an insomniac helps

eyes wide shut (kubrick, 1999) 9/10
the gate (takács, 1987) 7/10
the wicker man (hardy, 1973) 10/10
vampyros lesbos (franco, 1971) 9/10