2015 poll

[niminy-piminy]

fucking hell the world is full of coincidences

it is because my aura has the same hue as your aura and my chakras spinning in the same pace as your chakras!
then to think about the poo at the very same moment is not a miracle.

[sally]

why are there so many movies over 2 hours in 2015? this is hard work if you're not enjoying it, eg gangnam blues which promised to be a gritty 70's crime thing but was mainly some utterly confusing, weird st sebastian blood-fest attempt to make what i assumed was a 12 year old k-pop teen idol look gritty and mature. it didn't work. unless you like looking at red wounds on a clean-cut boy in emo poses.

enjoyed bridge of spies much more (158k views on letterboxd, i can't even remember the last time i watched something with over 1k) and the 2+ hours flew by. (7 mins for credits, really?) i was going to see this at the cinema (a rare event!) and dammit, i wish i'd gone now because i actually would have enjoyed it, but the afternoon i said i was going to go the incel at work coincidentally announced that he was going and it was just not worth the added resentment that he would somehow create from that (apparently i had already devoted my life to trying to castrate him)....so the idea of it was tainted from then on...oh well

but lol 2015 for the overwhelming lethargy

bridge of spies


minotaur (nicolás pereda)

[Holymanm]

man i do not want to put the horrible standard international english title for my #1 here instead of the flick's real title... but i will

Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2015)

The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, 2015)
Demolition (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2015)
Tough Love (Rosa von Praunheim, 2015)
Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015)
Goosebumps (Rob Letterman, 2015)
Ernie Biscuit (Adam Elliot, 2015)
Remember (Atom Egoyan, 2015)
How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) (Josh Kim, 2015)
45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)
Born to Be Blue (Robert Budreau, 2015)
Gamera (Katsuhito Ishii, 2015)
Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015)
Sparrows (Rúnar Rúnarsson, 2015)
The Other Side (Roberto Minervini, 2015)
Our Times (Yu Shan Chen, 2015)
Across the Line (Director X., 2015)
Keith Richards: Under the Influence (Morgan Neville, 2015)
Boruto: Naruto the Movie (Hiroyuki Yamashita, 2015)
The Case of Hana and Alice (Shunji Iwai, 2015)

pretty decent year. only one 5/5 but lots of good stuff. How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), Tough Love, The Other Side, Ixcanul, Our Times and some others are potentially recommended for some random "international fare" that most people here haven't seen/logged, if anyone is curious.

i am a big sucker for hockey movies, so obviously i liked across the line - but i am proud of myself for watching it and saying "jesus christ this young canadian stephan james kid is TERRIFIC and is gonna be a big star!" ...and then the next year he starred in race and then beale street and a bunch of other things. talent agent 2 the stars here

[sally]

my 2015 coincidences today are that both films i watched contained cows & misogyny (at best elbow-fluff to the dynamic actor, at worst commodified meat-based coin slots) and am now wondering if i should go vegan (or at least watch a few female directors for a while)



(still pissed off at the guerin and sainted furtado's (not the only instance, but never so glaring) short review which was all 'o the impossibility, the anguish' and nothing about watching a disgusting piece of shit lecturer groom & abuse his students)

[thoxans]

go vegan

pro tip: oreos are vegan... wait. you're british. this joke works only if you have oreos in britain. do you guys have oreos in britain? if you do, then the joke is that veganism can be humorously used as an excuse to eat nothing but lots of junk food that happens to be vegan. if not, then this was all for naught (which is a british joke cuz you brits say naught... wait. do you guys say naught in britain? if not, all i got left is cowboy emojis)

[rischka]

[thoxans]

it's the scfz version of hold my beer

[nrh]

still pissed off at the guerin

i've always had issues with the guerin but i remember like 95% of the people whose taste i mostly trust just raving about it, to the point i was seriously considering going to see it in its run at anthology. i mentioned this to a friend who was visiting at the time and he warned me away from it with the kind of terror i associate with the guy at the gas station in a horror movie telling the teenagers not to go to the haunted cabin. always felt like i dodged a bullet there.

[Curtis, baby]

tbh don't agree about the Guerin, I've been impressed, getting kaprizov to come over is alone praiseworthy

[MrCarmady]

we have oreos. didn't realise they were vegan, though. i know most if not all meat-flavoured crisps (chips if you're american) are vegan which is quite funny.

[...]

Don't know if I'll get a chance to post often before the deadline so here's 20 I liked, maybe I'll edit the list later if I do get some time.

The Fits
Manifesto
Cemetery of Splendor
Happy Hour
Baahubali: The Beginning
Our Little Sister
The VVitch
Songs My Brother Taught Me
The Lure
Bajirao Mastani

Aferim!
Carol
Miss Hokusai
A Fool
Anomalisa
The Club
Parched
The Whispering Star
SIngh is Bliing
Bird Boy

Oh Christ, blackhat is gonna not only end up on the final list, but rank higher than the Apichatpong isn't it? Fuck. I might need another vacation from the site to avoid seeing that.

[sally]

do you guys have oreos in britain?

yeah we do but when i was hanging around with the vegan straightedge kids in the late 90's, the equivalent junk joke was that chips and beans were vegan. except that those sugar-swimming baked beans are disgusting, so that never really worked

still pissed off at the guerin

i've always had issues with the guerin but i remember like 95% of the people whose taste i mostly trust just raving about it, to the point i was seriously considering going to see it in its run at anthology. i mentioned this to a friend who was visiting at the time and he warned me away from it with the kind of terror i associate with the guy at the gas station in a horror movie telling the teenagers not to go to the haunted cabin. always felt like i dodged a bullet there.

i really love guerin's movies that don't feature women much, but the ones that do were always horribly disquieting. to be fair to guerin here he's not sugar-coating the creepiness, and this seems to be his self-awareness movie (altho as i said before, perhaps not self-aware enough, it was basically a 'shrug, what can you do?' ending) - it was just an unpleasant watch, and then to go to the reviews afterwards and see most of the ones by men not seemingly even realising how ghastly the film was....

there was a white, pretty, middle-class woman murdered here recently and all the media is awash with privileged women announcing (truly) how their lives are curtailed simply for being women...the effective after-dark curfew for journeys alone, the keys between the fingers, rape convictions at lowest level since records began etc etc and it's just so tiring to be reminded of it all as well as everything else that's going on

[rischka]

thx for mentioning the fits, greg, i remember reading about this one. will check it out.

[cinesmith]

Oh Christ, blackhat is gonna not only end up on the final list, but rank higher than the Apichatpong isn't it? Fuck. I might need another vacation from the site to avoid seeing that.

Agreed. I'm rather disturbed by the fandom of this particular one. I've enjoyed a number of Michael Mann's films but that one is hardly worth mentioning.

[rischka]

i really liked crumbs too. mad max may get bumped from my list but i doubt blackhat will (sry greg) apichatpong up next!

[Lencho of the Apes]

Some thrills:

Murmur Of The Hearts - Sylvia Chang
Loosely-wrapped melancholy at WKW levels.

Kill Me Please/Mate-Me Por Favor - Anita Rocha da Silveira
Brazilian take on those hermetic post-giallo abstractions like strange color Of Your Body's Tears. Esp. recommended to NRH for the Japanese tonality, landscape + spiritual decay vibes, to thoxans for giallo and to greenennui for being vaguely Rollin-adjacent.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Also, I'm aggressively pro-Carol.

[rischka]

YAY. I am pro-cemetery of splendor

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1372 ... 80485?s=19

[thoxans]

Carol

shoulda called it sterile eeeyyyyyyooo where's that rimshot emoji when you need it?

[rischka]

thoxans expected more nudity i'm guessing

[thoxans]

nah that was my review of coyote ugly! idk. i appreciated carol on a technical level. beautiful obvs. maybe i was expecting more melodramatic bursts, ala far from heaven...? but carol was so much more subdued, so much more languorous, which is not necessarily a bad thing, it just didn't capture me on my one and only watch. had that reaction to hou before, so maybe haynes was onto something not so immediately accessible to the senses...? just remember coming away thinking that it was like a fine fur coat. it's nice and all, but it's just not for me

[Searchlike]

i really love guerin's movies that don't feature women much, but the ones that do were always horribly disquieting.

Like this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5USqY429Irg

It's funny, I remember reading an interview in which Guerín expresses his desire to work with Pilar López de Ayala again, after In the City of Sylvia. I wonder why that never happened.

Carol is fine, but I believe a good film should never remind you of a better one and Carol "quotes" (pays homage to/rips off, whatever ) one of the most famous scenes in Brief Encounter, so yeah.

[sally]

Like this one?

It's funny, I remember reading an interview in which Guerín expresses his desire to work with Pilar López de Ayala again, after In the City of Sylvia. I wonder why that never happened.

yeah, excruciating. get flashbacks to dwoskin's dyn amo and things like that..

[rischka]

so today i'm going to watch bridge of spies and i haven't seen a spielberg film since lincoln. but i like spy stuff. and i've learned to ignore TOM HANKS (i think)

[Silga]

I love Bridge of Spies. It’s the best Spielberg film in the last 15 years. Coen brothers did a rewrite of a script and mostly worked on the dialogues. And it shows. Dialogues have that ‘zest’ that Spielberg films sometimes miss. He should colab with Coens more often.

[rischka]

it is pretty good. easy to forget how talented spielberg is and i'm sure the coens sharpened up the script. lots of dry humor and spycraft



and i can bear tom hanks again even if he's playing his heroic 'tom hanks goes to washington' character. good suspense and only light propaganda

everybody ought to go careful in a city like this

[thoxans]

damn y’all gonna get me to watch a steven movie

[rischka]

The music becomes more unbearable toward the end mostly cuz I just don't watch many recent Hollywood movies. One thing I always respect is allowing people to speak in their own languages without subtitling everything. If you were a dumb American in this situation you would NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE SAYING. Anyway. Pet peeve of mine

[ralch]

1. I Promise You Anarchy — Julio Hernández Cordón

A Bigger Splash — Luca Guadagnino
Bleak Street — Arturo Ripstein
Bridge of Spies — Steven Spielberg
Carol — Todd Haynes
Francofonia — Aleksandr Sokurov
From Afar — Lorenzo Vigas
La Gunguna — Ernesto Alemany
Heart of a Dog — Laurie Anderson
Inside Out — Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen
Joy — David O. Russell
Land and Shade — César Augusto Acevedo
Land of Mine — Martin Zandvliet
Mad Max: Fury Road — George Miller
The Martian — Ridley Scott
Mia Madre — Nanni Moretti
Que viva la música — Carlos Moreno
Right Now, Wrong Then — Hong Sang-soo
Spotlight — Tom McCarthy
The VVitch — Robert Eggers

[greennui]

By the Sea (Angelina Jolie) - This one was pretty much...nothing. Jolie seemingly watched La Piscine and some Antonioni films and decided to do something just like that. As far as period pictures go though, I probably prefer it to Carol...