It's a quirk rather than a motif, but I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless!

La Chienne: rewatch. Renoir's 30's films generally seem to improve with repeated viewing. Simon is great in it, and the humour is quite black for its time. 7.5/8/10.

Another thing I remember from that movie are the quite numerous shots of bare (female) feet. Has there been any academic research on this phenomenon in Tarantino movies? I hope not! Who cares about that nerd's foot fetish! :D Was Emil Jannings cinema's first great actor? I believe he was. Just fini...

* = rewatches. All ratings out of 10. Starman* (Carpenter) - 5 Little Giants (who cares) - 4 Danger Diabolik* (Bava) - 6.5 The Innocents (Clayton) - 7.5 Osaka Elegy (Mizoguchi) - 6.5 Trial on the Road (German) - 7.5 Amazon Women On The Moon* (misc) - 4 The Week of (who cares) - 4 Anger Management* (...

Points taken, sure. I don't have a problem with mugging, when it's good mugging. Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion is mugging, John Barrymore's Oscar Jaffe is mugging. De Niro Pacino and Nicholson mug -- is there a muggier performance than Nicholson's Jack Torrance? Or Pacino's glorious Big Boy Caprice? An...

Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1972) . Decent character study about the decline of a man and the vanishing of the West etc. A little wooden and predictable. You can set your watch to some standard scenes - the drunken bar brawl, the quick and systematic romance with a random babe, the dinner at the ...

All scores out of 10. * = rewatches. Smoke On The Potato Fields (Vlacil) - 6.5 Tommaso (Ferrara) - 5.5 Adelheid* (Vlacil) - 7.5 Come and See* (Klimov) - 8 Portrait: Orson Welles (no idea) - 5 The Cat and The Canary (Leni) - 7 The Last Warning (Leni) - 7.5 Shadows of a Hot Summer (Vlacil) - 7 The Lit...

That film was hot trash. Even Vampire in Brooklyn was better. WBA is trolling for sure

I will say, I think New Nightmare is a really fun idea, and has several quite clever bits. I don't find the overall execution very effective... but I think it really set up some ideas he later did much better in Scream 3. First time I've ever read that! :D Romero's limitations as a director were cl...

new nightmare always just felt both corny and clumsy to me... I think New Nightmare is one of the worst horror films ever made. It doesn't help that I'm no fan of Elm Street franchise which I think never had at least a decently directed film. I am very surprised how Elm Street series even achieved ...

Seen 21.

1.A Nightmare on Elm Street
2.Wes Craven's New Nightmare
3.Scream
4.People Under The Stairs
5.The Serpent and The Rainbow

Eureka: Can we stop pretending that Roeg was a great director? Thanks. In its first 15 minutes, it works as a kind of narcotic drug addled McCabe and Mrs Miller, then it devolves into a dull, stilted and completely dated period drama with no visual compensations. When Roeg wasn't misapplying his sty...

Silga: It barely resembles the source material, so that couldn't be the problem. Sleepy Hollow is just a glorified Hammer film. Hammer mixed with Bava. I like it quite a bit, but I agree the story is a mess, and Burton's movies often have pacing issues. A close friend of mine once said that Burton k...

JOKS -- I suspect the CATS cult is a marketing creation, once the realized they had a stinker they did whatever they could to squeeze a few more bucks out of it. I can't imagine anyone enduring it more than once, but there's lots of things I can't imagine going on lately. I've considered that too, ...

Roscoe: The idea that Cats is becoming the new cult/midnight film is worrying to me because it doesn't really have much personality. It's more the type of film where you wonder how it managed to get made the way it did, but that's it. Carlito's Way is De Palma's best film to me. Certainly his most b...

I don't get the fuss about Chinese Bookie, and I like JC a lot. Always found it to be one of his draggiest and most pointless films. It's as if he didn't really have the balls to make an outright genre piece but didn't want to make a conventional drama either, so he settled for something that falls ...

Ed Wood is by far his best. No contest. Seen 20.

Ed Wood
Batman Returns
Beetlejuice
Sleepy Hollow
Mars Attacks!

Cats is garbage. Body Double: never been convinced and still not. I suspect that the high praise for De Palma's mediocre films is some kind of geeky auteurist 'correction' for past critical sins. The fact that he understands how stupid this all is (debatable) somehow makes it all worse. Acting is ba...

Sirius: Vlacil's after school special. Better than its American equivalents, using that term loosely, but not that interesting. Great if you like the idea of a boy and his dog film with Nazi's. 5/10 Shadows of a Hot Summer: more interesting. Has been compared to Straw Dogs, but it is really a story ...

I'm pretty sure I read that Vlacil's drinking problem started in the 60's, around the time he made Marketa. Regarding his shift towards realism, who knows. Perhaps one could argue that he no longer felt the need or desire to cloak his films in abstraction after the late 60's. Do you like Mag Jiri? I...

Seen 12.

A Woman Under The Influence
Love Streams
Opening Night
Husbands
Faces

One of the main reasons I started playing guitar in the 80's, along with millions of others. There were rumours flying around that his cancer had returned, but the VH camp didn't confirm it. They don't update their fans much at all.

R.I.P.

The Last Warning: Damn this is underrated! Was any film maker working in America moving their camera like Leni in the 20's? The camerawork in this film seems years ahead of its time. Only Murnau in The Last Laugh was really on this level to my knowledge. Perhaps I'm just not knowledgeable enough abo...

The Cat and the Canary.

Fat City (John Huston, 1972) 9/10 One of the best from Huston that I've seen. A calm, understated look at the world where everyone wishes they find the path to a 'fat city' of their dreams. Stacey Keach and young Jeff Bridges deliver two great performances. The other thing I like about Fat City is ...

After watching The Serpent's Poison, I don't believe that Vlacil was that great at 'realism', which was a tendency of his work after Adelheid. I have a feeling that I will feel the same way about that Shepherd's film. He excelled when he was trading in 'poetics', so to speak, and moral ambiguity. Sh...

All scores out of 10. * = rewatch Three On a Couch (Lewis) - 5.5 Who Killed Jam Master Jay? (who cares) - 4.5 Kingpin* (Farrelly Brothers) - 6 Husbands* (Cassavetes) - 8 White Zombie* (Halperin) - 7 The Mysterious Mr.Wong (who cares) - 4 Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events (who cares) - 5 ...

^^A debut film too right? It looks interesting.

White is an oddball. I wouldn't say he is a troll exactly.

Brody is good but prone to overstatement.

Martin is good but shallow, and Farber's white elephant vs termite reductionism caused a lot of problems in film criticism, especially in the Anglosphere. Rosenbaum is noteworthy for sure, but I can't say I follow critics too closely anymore. Armond White deserves credit for being more honest than m...

Interesting that this board shows a preference for Valley over Marketa. This is not typical. The consensus seems to be that Marketa is a much better film and that Valley is a more simplified, less interesting version of it. The last time I watched Valley I thought it wasn't far off from Marketa in ...