Last Watched

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Sure, but there reason to believe those two things are actually correlated, given Hitchcock couldn't make the film he wanted given Selznick's interference, which can cause the types of problems like changes in tone or diminished emphasis and so on.

[Holymanm]

For REBECCA It's not the Selznick/Hitchcock thing -- it's the "movie that impresses on a first viewing but forty years later feels rather thinner than it did at first sight" thing.

I can't scientifically prove that theory for another... 31 years, so I am flummoxed. But isn't a movie being fantastic the first time enough, sometimes?

Sure, but there reason to believe those two things are actually correlated, given Hitchcock couldn't make the film he wanted given Selznick's interference, which can cause the types of problems like changes in tone or diminished emphasis and so on.

And didn't really know anything about that... maybe that makes me a fake 'Cock fan, for so esteeming and supporting his interfered-with movies

[Umbugbene]

For REBECCA It's not the Selznick/Hitchcock thing -- it's the "movie that impresses on a first viewing but forty years later feels rather thinner than it did at first sight" thing.

My first impressions were similar - Fontaine's mousiness hard to stomach, the courtroom a lead weight on the ending.

Rebecca's still not a favorite Hitchcock, but it's gotten better for me. As the unseen Rebecca looms larger and larger, Joan Fontaine correspondingly shrinks - fireplaces dwarf her, doorknobs are at her shoulders, servants loom over her, the camera constantly pulls back to shrink her in real time. She's out of place in aristocratic England, and Hitchcock, the son of a greengrocer, was no friend of the aristocracy. But I think Hitchcock was more interested in Miss Danvers. There are characters like her in so many of his films, subservient to higher villains and corrupted by their sexuality.

It's also fascinating for the omens of Vertigo. The portrait of Caroline de Winter looks like the portrait of Carlotta Valdez, and when Fontaine dresses up like the painting, Maxim's revolted the same way Scottie is when Midge paints herself like Carlotta.

Hitchcock always bore a grudge against Selznick - in Rear Window the villain's made up to look an awful lot like the famous producer - but in his more generous moments he also admitted that he learned a lot from his first employer in Hollywood. There's a pretty good book on their relationship by Leonard J. Leff.

[Roscoe]

For REBECCA It's not the Selznick/Hitchcock thing -- it's the "movie that impresses on a first viewing but forty years later feels rather thinner than it did at first sight" thing.

I can't scientifically prove that theory for another... 31 years, so I am flummoxed. But isn't a movie being fantastic the first time enough, sometimes?

Well yeah, but a guy's gonna grow up, and move on, and what impresses in one's teens doesn't necessarily impress in one's late middle age (REBECCA, among others), and what leaves one cold in one's teens can turn out to work very well indeed in one's maturity (the first half of NOTORIOUS meant nothing to me at all until I had a couple of actual relationships under my belt, and I doubt that I'd have gotten CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT in my youth, and I recently expressed a desire to travel back in time and kick the ass of my late-twenties-self who saw WORLD OF APU all those years ago and didn't like it). Mileage is gonna vary, of course, it's not like I have to have experienced everything in a work of art to get it. I've never been the Prince of Denmark, or gone on a hunt for the whale that bit off my leg either.

It's not like I hate REBECCA with a burning passion. It's just not a movie that I watch much, and as I said, like less each time I do revisit it. Not like NOTORIOUS or SHADOW OF A DOUBT the glories of which never fade.

[Roscoe]

COME AND SEE -- restoration at Film Forum. "Harrowing" is usually the word used in connection with this film, and yeah. Most impressive all round. I appreciated the mounting intensity a good deal. I'm not sure about the occasional use of documentary footage, especially that montage near film's end, which I'm going to have to read and think about.

[MrCarmady]

Saw Dark Waters which mostly reminded me how good Michael Clayton is. It's great visually, not surprisingly, sharing the director and the DoP with Carol, but gets a little bogged down in Hollywood clichés and just sort of plods along.

[Roscoe]

THE HOWLING, Joe Dante's 1980 werewolf horror movie with flashes of dark humor, and a good time overall. Some rough edges that either detract or not, as you like. I pretty much like. I wish Dee Wallace's character had a bit more spine, though. She does do some strategic acid-flinging in one scene, and I'd have liked a little more of that. A quibble. Sayles' script gets in some good jabs.

PARIS IS BURNING in the lovely Criterion Blu-Ray, and the damn thing still works.

[MrCarmady]

Saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire which was sad, sexy, and beautiful, just as everyone said it would be.
Re-watched Good Time which is still not as good as Uncut Gems, which adds more human elements and a healthy dose of humour, but it improved in my estimation on re-watch. That soundtrack is simply amazing.
Watched eXistenZ last night, which is quite dumb but has its moments and a fantastic cast. Here, too, the soundtrack may be the best thing about it. Still yet to love any Cronenberg but I quite like his shtick regardless, it just muddles the potentially interesting readings of it with direct-to-video dialogue and crappy plot twists. The ending is great, though.

[Roscoe]

THE BANK DICK, a W.C. Fields film where there's some actual plot going on, sort of, but the real joy is in watching Fields be Fields, suffering the slings and arrows of late middle age, muttering little bits of meanness under his breath and just generally being glorious all over the place. His mention of the local newspaper being the "Lompoc Picayune Intelligencer" will endure in my soul for all eternity.

[Holymanm]

^ Great flick!

[thoxans]

eXistenZ

kinda sorta luv this one tbh, and idkw. i do think it's wonderfully directed. some really striking shots throughout, even during the simplest setups like dialogue between two characters. feel the dumbness is purposeful. seems like the type of flick that will be brilliant to those budding cinephiles of the future, who catch it at 2am as a b-movie during some late night block of cult films. it's interesting to me that this came out the same year as the matrix. in a more civilized (read: cultured) world, dave's flick woulda been the one that made hundreds of millions of dollars, and spawned two gawd awful full-of-filler money-grabbing shit sequels. pretty sure the movie reviewer for my local paper back then gave the matrix a solid rating, and eXistenZ like one-and-a-half stars. after years of reading his reviews, i learned if that reviewer hated something, then i'd probs like it (and vice-versa)

[MrCarmady]

I haven't seen The Matrix sequels but the original is a terrific film - it's fun, atmospheric, and is a good vehicle for its (admittedly simplistic) philosophical themes. eXistenZ is also very atmospheric and well-directed but by the time the 18th twist came around, I stopped caring. Loads of my favourite films are light on plot, but it's much harder to pull off a bad plot and bad dialogue than no plot and no dialogue.

[Roscoe]

The MATRIX sequels are mixed bag. The action sequences are handled very well indeed, but the dialogue gets terribly heavy-handed, the profundity gets shovelled into your face. The humorlessness of it all gets choking -- I started to want more of Gloria Foster's Oracle, when she gloriously tells Keanu that he's "not too bright, though."

[thoxans]

i enjoyed the first one, tho it's probs been fifteen years since i last watched it, so dunno how it might've aged. it also has a special place in my heart cuz keanu is my celeb doppelganger, and when the first one came out in '99, the other kids in middle school all called me neo. cue the keanu whoa gifs right about now. the sequels imo were unbearable. padded to the extreme with overlong action set pieces that became less and less impressive the more and more they get thrown at you. it's the same problem that plagues the star wars prequels and jackson's hobbit films. stretching out a one-movie storyline over the course of multiple features for no other reason than to cash in on a franchise. also, as roscoe alluded to, reloaded and revolutions are more or less gibberish, so the 'storyline' as such is made even thinner than all the superfluous fight sequences would already suggest. so, in reality (pun intended), the sequels are pretty much an album with one hit single surrounded by b-side after b-side

[MrCarmady]

Oh man the Jackson Hobbit films are so, so bad, a real travesty considering how good both the novel and the Lord of the Rings movies are. He also made an insanely bloated version of King Kong. You'd think he'd have enough money now to do whatever he wants (and to be fair, the documentaries look much more like passion projects). Same thing with Spielberg, West Side Story looks dreadful and he hasn't made a really good film in so long but his bank account must be astronomical, I don't get it. Especially if you're 73 years old, wouldn't you rather just chill out and not get involved with the major studios?

[Lencho of the Apes]

John Carpenter's sitting home, smoking dope and playing video games...

[Roscoe]

Oh man the Jackson Hobbit films are so, so bad, a real travesty considering how good both the novel and the Lord of the Rings movies are. He also made an insanely bloated version of King Kong. You'd think he'd have enough money now to do whatever he wants (and to be fair, the documentaries look much more like passion projects). Same thing with Spielberg, West Side Story looks dreadful and he hasn't made a really good film in so long but his bank account must be astronomical, I don't get it. Especially if you're 73 years old, wouldn't you rather just chill out and not get involved with the major studios?

I kinda dug the first two HOBBITs, but the third one just goes on forever, and the sight of Billy Connolly riding a pig is one of the lowpoints in film history. Uneven, and all, sure, with some dull spots, right, ok. But that Smaug in the second one was pretty amazing.

As for Spielberg, well, that's always been the thing with him. He's had money and power enough to do whatever he'd want for all these years, and he only ever turns out crap. Four fucking Indiana Jones movies.

[MrCarmady]

I hated the love triangle in the second one, and while Cumberbatch is enjoyable as the dragon, that interminable action sequence which doesn't progress the plot in any way was awful. I like the first and the third Indiana Jones films, and I also love A.I., so I'm always disappointed when I see Spielberg doing some crap.

[thoxans]

Carp

my hero

[nrh]

late as usual, but after the poll i rewatched lester's three musketeers and four musketeers, i think the first time i ever saw both films at once like that. and splitting them up really does do them a huge disservice - if anything it feels a little bit like the way hindi films often split in half by an interval moment, the more entertaining world building in the first half and the denser, more difficult emotional material in the second.

here that's complicated by just how cynically lester (and his writer george macdonald fraiser; often this resembles his flashman books more than it does dumas) takes the material; the whole formal trick is the messier slapstick swashbuckling of the heroes with an incredibly detailed background world of people just getting on with their lives, and then the more formally framed plots of the aristocracy on top of it all.

i get how the whole thing could grate, especially since they really do lean into dumas more erratic serial storytelling tendencies. but there really is nothing like it, even in the crowded world of '70s european coproduction swashbucklers (even skolimowksi couldn't pull it off).

plus the cast is nuts...

[Joks Trois]

John Carpenter's sitting home, smoking dope and playing video games...

He has actually spent a lot of time touring with his band over the last few years! He has lost interest in making films it seems, or at least isn't getting the kind of offers he would like.

The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On: Took a while to get to this one, but I'm glad I did. I'm not a huge fan of documentaries, but this is an example of when it's done right. Focusing on a pretty compelling and strange character with an ambiguous point of view towards him. Lots of interesting and thorny political and social questions raised here. 7.5 to 8/10.

[Roscoe]

Love me Lester's MUSKETEERS films. Agreed mostly with your assessment. Not seeing anything particularly cynical in Lester/Fraser's take, though. A pity that their film of ROYAL FLASH is such a disaster, but I think much of that has to do with the colossally miscast Malcolm McDowell.

[nrh]

maybe cynical is the wrong word but the films, i think, definitely position the heroes as pawns of the whims of a grotesque aristocracy (the dog chess game from the first film being the overarching metaphor), with lester constantly showing the lives of the peasants disrupted by all this swashbuckling. and the ending has a distinctly bitter feeling... but again it's been so long since i read the dumas that i can't remember how much of that is in the source text.

royal flash isn't half bad as a comic prisoner of zenda riff, but yeah it's a disaster as a flashman film.

[Lencho of the Apes]

hero

I'm going to watch Elvis for the year poll. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

[nrh]

hero

I'm going to watch Elvis for the year poll. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

it's a great film. top carpenter for me, but forgot it was '79...

[Silga]

I’ve also got Elvis on my immediate watchlist.

[thoxans]

suspicious minds ftw. not to mention, the role kurt was born2play

[Joks Trois]

Always thought it was one of Carp's weakest. Visually anonymous and a fawning tone. Russell is great though.

Joker: NO! 5.5/10

[Roscoe]

maybe cynical is the wrong word but the films, i think, definitely position the heroes as pawns of the whims of a grotesque aristocracy (the dog chess game from the first film being the overarching metaphor), with lester constantly showing the lives of the peasants disrupted by all this swashbuckling. and the ending has a distinctly bitter feeling... but again it's been so long since i read the dumas that i can't remember how much of that is in the source text.

royal flash isn't half bad as a comic prisoner of zenda riff, but yeah it's a disaster as a flashman film.

Gotcha. I don't remember Dumas's Louis XIII being quite the utter boob that Lester put onscreen. And bitterness is a part of the Dumas universe. He doesn't really do happy endings. The other books in the series are kind of amazing, too. You get to watch Aramis devolve into a major villain.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Working through Schrader's filmography chronologically. Last night was Mishima. Really amazing work. The absolute impotence of art is a constant anxiety of mine... which is explored here. But also a certain lionization of art, which contradicts in such a beautiful way. My wife was thoroughly disappointed that more people haven't stolen his formula for biopics.