1997 poll

[pabs]

1.Public Housing (Wiseman)

Mother and Son (Sokurov)
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami)
Robinson in Space (Keiller)
Abre los ojos (Amenábar)
Lost Highway (Lynch)
Jazz 34 (Altman)
Funny Games (Haneke)
The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan)
Lolita (Lyne,1997)
Gattaca (Niccol)


Seen for this poll:

Public Housing (Wiseman) √
Jazz 34 (Altman) √

[thoxans]

got to see lost highway on a grainy vhs back in the day, when that was the only commercial source available. stylistically, i think it's one of his most impressive films, though i remember not liking the reznor soundtrack. it's badalamenti or bust for lynch. need to see the film again, but i didn't much care for it overall back then. the freudian interpretation is clever, but didn't work for me in execution. it didn't help that once the initial shock of the shift in narrative happened, i just didn't find balthazar getty's storyline particularly interesting. though robert loggia's reaction and subsequent actions toward an asshole driver who cuts him off in traffic is one of the most cathartic things on film

[Monsieur Arkadin]

A huge Lynch fan I agree. Lost Highway is simultaneously everything I like about Lynch and also completely unengaging to me (save brief moments with both of the Roberts in the film). Even in the DVD days all you could find was a pan & scan copy (which I think is the version I own) so I feel like maybe I'd enjoy it more if I were to ever get to watch a better print of it. But it feels like a dry run for Mulholland Dr. which incorporates a lot of similar ideas in a much more organic fashion.

Also, I enjoy the cartoonish moments of Rammstein bursting onto the soundtrack whenever a specific door is opened.

[Lencho of the Apes]

No Sympathy For The Devil (Dimitris Athanatis, Greece)

Postpunk Orpheus and Eurydice, something similar to FJ Ossang.

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[Holymanm]

Did enjoy Cure, though it was a liiiittle too 'smurt' for its own good. I always would sedulously deny that any movie needs to have a "point", or even an "explanation", but that flick gets a teensy bit too lost up it's own nebulous haze. But it's good! Why focus on the negative? Just because Memories of Murder was better?

(Am I the only one on the board/in the world who still hasn't seen Se7en?)

[Lencho of the Apes]

I haven't seen Se7en either. I thought KK's Retribution had the same tone and more "point"...

[greennui]

Frost (Fred Kelemen) - My third Kelemen film. He's perhaps mostly known as the cinematographer on many of fellow gloomlord Bela Tarr's films. Contrary to Tarr however, Kelemen's films are in colour and mostly set in seedy city enviroments. The story: a woman and her son flees from an abusive, alcoholic husband and goes on an aimless and misanthropic odyssey of dreary fairs, crummy bars, frozen croplands and predatory men and women. Angelopoulos on benzos. A good film, not Abendland good, but good. It's also got a merry-go-round scene that rivals Cœur fidèle's.

[rischka]

taste of cherry was great! i need to sit with that ending for awhile

[pabs]

I think 1997's Lolita (by Lyne) is much more creepy and sleazy than Kubrick's version. It's truly awful, just as I guess it was meant to be.

[rischka]

labyrinth of dreams, ishiii -- a ghost story both beautiful and creepy. i think nrh recommended me this long time back and i'm glad i finally got around to it. definitely in the list! thx for excuse to watch all these films i've had on hand for ages. having a good run! next either henry fool or the hips of jw

[rischka]

pierre clémenti is so great in this. tw for skinny old man nudity



a sort of play on straub/huillet to whom the film is dedicated

[Roscoe]

I always took LOST HIGHWAY to be Lynch's summing up of his career up to that point, from ERASERHEAD through DUNE into the collapse of TWIN PEAKS -- an individual artist undergoes a transformation into a mechanic in Hollywood and finds himself stuck in a particularly cliched neo-noir plot. That last bit of transformation at film's end leads right into the start of Lynch's next film, with the stunning titles WALT DISNEY PICTURES PRESENTS A FILM BY DAVID LYNCH.

[greennui]

Double Team (Tsui Hark) - A fairly tedious watch though I did snigger at the lack of conviction in some of the dubbing and at the Colosseum being casually blown up with everyone being saved by product placement.

Knittelfeld - Town Without History (Gerhard Benedikt Friedl) - A sprawling genealogy of crime involving a family in Austria. Same director as Wolff Von Amerongen and it's pretty much in the same style though only 36 minutes long. It'll be high on my final list.

A text on the film and Friedl:
https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-m ... kt-friedl/

[thoxans]

always took LOST HIGHWAY to be

this is actually the most interesting take i've read on lost highway; and pretty well sums up how i feel about corman's x: the man with the x-ray eyes (a film i quite enjoy)

[thoxans]

Double Team (Tsui Hark)

ahhh nostalgic cinema that would only ever mean something to folks of a very particular time and place. ten-year-old me might've had this flick pegged as legendary...

[greennui]

ahhh nostalgic cinema that would only ever mean something to folks of a very particular time and place. ten-year-old me might've had this flick pegged as legendary...

I was younger than that back in '97. The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island was my jam at the time, was all about that dinosaur craze of the mid 90's. Also, Hercules, Megara was my first cartoon crush. I'm reading now:

Meg was inspired by 1940s screwball comediennes,[34] specifically actress Barbara Stanwyck's performances in the films The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire (both 1941).[22] Both Egan and supervising animator Ken Duncan drew inspiration from Stanwyck's "tough-minded" demeanor in her films,[22] with Egan describing Meg as a "fast-talking, 1940s dame who has guys wrapped around her little finger".[35] Egan believes Meg is a character "somewhere in between" good and evil, unlike most Disney heroines who are typically either one or the other.[

So, that's why took a liking to those performances so easily later on perhaps, huh.

[blueboy]

not my final list

A Casa (Sharunas Bartas)
A Man whose life Was full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (R. Bruce Elder)
Cat of the Worm's Green Realm (Stan Brakhage)
Char Adhyay (Kumar Shahani)
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
De Profundis (Lawrence Brose)
En une Poignée de Mains Amies (Manoel de Oliveira & Jean Rouch)
Frozen (Fred Kelemen)
Habitual Sadness (Young-Joo Byun)
Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O' Neil)
Knittelfeld - Town without History (Gerhard Benedikt Friedl)
Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Ossos (Pedro Costa)
River (Ming-liang Tsai)
Study of a River (Peter B. Hutton)
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami)
37 Stories about Leaving Home (Shelly Silver)
Three Stories (Kira Muratova)
Timeless Botomless Bad Movie (Sun-Woo Jang)
Train of Shadows (Jose Luis Guerin)

[brian d]

welcome back blueboy!

[blueboy]

welcome back blueboy!

I'm glad to be back

[rischka]

HI BLUEBOY HOW'S EVERYTHING IN GREECE

a friend of mine wants to visit there when this pandemic is over and i've said i'll go with her. maybe we'll buy a hotel like in mamma mia

[blueboy]

We just went into a second lockdown as there are only a few intensive care beds left. Unfortunately the greek government did nothing for its health system all these months.
I'm sure there will be many hotels available for sale when you visit us

[rischka]

stay safe!!

[blueboy]

stay safe!!

Thanks. You too

[Holdrüholoheuho]

EDIT (the film i posted was actually from 1996, so i removed it)

[Silga]

The House of Yes (Mark Waters) is the best of 5 films I've watched for the poll so far and is definitely going to be on my final list.

Also enjoyed Full Tilt Boogie (Sarah Kelly), a documentary about the making of From Dusk Till Dawn.

Retroactive (Louis Morneau) disappointed more than I anticipated. Terrible acting by pretty much everyone involved save for M. Emmet Walsh. He's always cool.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

poll viewing No7:
NOCTURNAL BUTTERFLIES (Raoul Servais)
letterboxd says 1998, but imdb 1997...
https://letterboxd.com/film/nocturnal-butterflies/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0207001/

serene and melancholic homage to Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

https://vimeo.com/157798546

[Holdrüholoheuho]

poll viewing No8:
LOVE, MATH AND SEX (Charlotte Silvera)
finally, started with 1997 French "Lolita"(Sabine)-point-of-view counterpart to Lyne's 1997 more "traditional" flick.

this is how forty-something "Czechslavokian" playwright Jiri from Prague (dwelling in Lille), brimming with Slavonic charm, looks like.
(besides having a warm, magical voice with a foreign accent, he has also a weakness for distinctive purple accents in his outfits)...


they met on a bus and Jiri (at first being mistaken for a cop) is a quite straightforward ephebophilia-driven foot fetishist...


i am getting severe doubts this film will make it to my ballot (despite i really really wish to have a french freaky Jiri on my final list).
anyway, still more than 1 hour to go and a miracle might happen.

-----------------------------------------

now, only 30 min to go.
it turned out, she is a foot fetishist too and pronounces Jiri as Žiri with a charming foreign accent.
he is homesick, immersed in heartfelt memories of Vltava (misspelled as "Vlatva") and of Bertramka (misspelled as "Bartramka").


--------------------------------------

15 min till the end
both of them like to discuss esthetics and geometry on the beach.


--------------------------------------

i am afraid i have to leave (this film out my 1997 ballot).

[greennui]

Career Girls (Mike Leigh) - Took a while for me to get into it's groove, what with the eccentric acting and smooth jazz coating in the flashback scenes but Katrin Cartlidge's weird, acquired posh accent won me over. As usual with Leigh there's some neat slice of life observations underneath all the kookiness. Not top-tier Leigh but def enjoyable.

[karl]

If you require yr Iranian film of a more "intellectual" bent like Taste of Cherry and scorn something like Children of Heaven or Majidi-type films, I'd say avoid it, but we thought PAPER AIRPLANES (dir: Farhad Mehranfar) a lovely one. It'll definitely make the list for this dull year:

On Youtube with subs:

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=t5ijJN84F_o&ab_channel=IMVBox

[pabs]

Thanks, Karl!