Last Watched

[Roscoe]

RAN -- seen in the new 4K restoration at Museum of the Moving Image. It works so well that nobody seemed to mind the total absence of noticeable air conditioning in a New York heatwave.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Oh, good, you'll still get some of this year's monsoon, the biggest best one I've seen in thirty years or so.

[rischka]

Oh, good, you'll still get some of this year's monsoon, the biggest best one I've seen in thirty years or so.

ahahaha the ceiling in my living room is collapsing and roads are impassable every other day here. my yard looks like a jungle. i can hear the creek running like a freight train right now

it is all rather glorious but i hope we can dry out for a few days, my couch is ruined

[Lencho of the Apes]

ahahaha

Yikes, I thought at least you could come home to something good. I thought anything other than paralyzing heat would be an automatic win -- but what do I know (not being a frontierwoman like yourself...)

[rischka]

after fires and floods and trumpers i may be ready to move to the old pueblo (:

[---]

Do we have a subforum for shitty letterboxd reviews? This one gotta take the cake

https://letterboxd.com/etdoesgood/film/ ... he-palace/

[Roscoe]

KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE -- the second half of Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN, and a pretty hideous couple of hours. I'm always a little limp at the end of it.

[rischka]

ive had a rivette breakthrough: HAUTE BAS FRAGILE

[Lencho of the Apes]

Yay!

[Roscoe]

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI -- in the Criterion Blu-Ray, and I hope I'll be able to see it in a cinema before my timespan is up. I'll cop to having a hard time keeping track of those characters onscreen and where they were, the subtitles being my main guide as to who was speaking and to whom. But I rolled with it, and enjoyed it a good deal. The supplement with Tony Rayns was most helpful. Repeat viewings looked forward to.

[Lencho of the Apes]

One for Brian:
La muerte de Sebastián Arache y su pobre entierro, Nicolás Sarquís, Arg, 1974

Anti-naturalist old-country folktaling -- not outright supernatural like Nazareno Cruz, more just hag-ridden and bleak. Oddly, in spite of the roots-Argentine content, it gave off a strong Corkidi vibe, like Rafael's version of Tiempo De Morir. Hideous TV rip is the only copy I know to be available, sorry 'bout that. So bad that there was a recurring shot that only made sense if I accepted that one of the flapping, veiled crones was in communication with a UFO hovering over the village.

[Joks Trois]

Annette: Is Carax for real, or is this his idea of a pretentious joke? Either way, I'm not laughing, and the style did not impress much. I much preferred Holy Motors, which was also overrated, but at least that had Levant rather than dorky Driver. The songs are terrible and so is the dialogue. I'm awarding some points for gall alone, but ultimately it fails spectacularly. Only an 'artist' drunk on his/her own hype is capable of producing fascinating failures on this scale. 4.5/10

[flip]

interesting, i watched the trailer for it and thought the same thing, and i was wondering what the whole film was like. i also didn't think as highly of holy motors as a lot of people.

[---]

i will NOT see this in theats. even tho i rly rly like the 4 caraxes i've seen (including holy motors)

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I quite liked Annette. I mostly agree that the music/lyrics were silly at best and grating at worst... but I'm not a fan of Opera much in general. I had a similar experience to when I first saw Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I physically rejected the overall lack of clear melody. But Demy's film is musically more interesting, imo.

But I saw Annette in the theater, and I'm glad I did, because I don't think it would have worked for me at home. I found myself crying by the end and thinking "this is really dumb" simultaneously. I kinda love that he made something that seems so absolutely destined to bomb. It's for sure his most challenging film. But in the end it takes a bunch of stuff that doesn't work and combines it all together in a way that connected for emotionally despite rejecting everything on an intellectual level... and the music that I decidedly disliked played a big part in that somehow.

I was baffled by it, but I was also moved much more than anything else I've seen recently... and challenged more viscerally than I've gotten from any other theatrical releases over the last few years.

[Joks Trois]

^^Most of those reasons are why I won't lower my score. I did not like it, but I developed a begrudging respect for it, especially as it became more ridiculous as it went along. It isn't a lazy film by any means, just extremely misguided.

[nrh]

i watched annette this weekend and liked it a lot, but i am more or less the target audience - carax run from boy meets girl to pola x was a big deal for me in my early 20s, and i fell in love with sparks at around the same time.

it's been a while since i've seen a big movie divide people whose opinions i've roughly share this forcefully? i am not seeing a lot of middle of the road responses. but then lovers on the bridge and pola x were more or less the same when released. certainly every choice seems chosen for maximum friction (that sparks most recent collaborator was guy maddin gives a sense of how perverse a choice carax stylized physicality is for their material). the most despairing aspect of holy motors - the feeling of being trapped in a role - is here; the first thing you hear after carax spoken intro is a lullaby to pierrot, and there is a lot of comeddia dell'arte in the way the drama is conceptualized.

i think filipe furtado made a note that this movie seems to play very differently for people who primarily know carax through holy motors (his weakest work by a mile i think) rather than through the earlier movies; based on the reviews i've been reading it seems like most of the younger film kids haven't seen them at all. certainly pola x hangs over this movie, with carax nearly recreating specific shots, and as adrian martin points out it is very difficult to watch this and not think of golubeva (who starred in pola x, married carax, gave birth to the daughter the movie is dedicated to, died suddenly and under murky circumstances) and even her ex husband and carax's old friend sharunas bartas (who played the conductor in pola x). i'm not sure how interesting that is if you aren't heavily invested in carax life and career but i do think it adds some significant weight to a movie obsessed with public role and private life.

i saw it at home - i wish i saw it in a theater (if only because some of the music was difficult for my tv sound bar to handle). i've always had wildly different reactions to carax movies on rewatch and suspect this won't be any different.

[St. Gloede]

Pola X is the only Carax film I did not find great and Holy Motors blew me away as his best work, so now I am becoming a little vary. Still, love Carax' style and font mind its overwrought elements. Oh, and I am in the camp of The Forbidden Room being great, with the Sparks collaboration one of the highlights, so I should not be too worried.

[Searchlike]

but I'm not a fan of Opera much in general.

Don't dismiss opera entirely until you've seen Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives. I mean, you might hate it too, but for different reasons. It's on Ubuweb. Now, whether that qualifies as an opera or not is up for debate.

[Lencho of the Apes]

If anybody's been looking for an Egyptian Anna Karenina, with too-young Omar Sharif as Vronsky, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeobF02KPeI&t=27s

[sally]

i watched (obviously) the man without desire (1923) & i have no idea what to make of it. underneath the leaden british stuffiness and ivor's ham (he's a sexy nostril-flarer but jesus) is a baffling film - i can't tell if the good shots were well-constructed comments or accidental because most of the others just look like a filmed stage-play (also intentional given the story? i can't tell!) & there's no drama in this most dramatic of traditional narratives, because what would otherwise be the subversive bit is declared in advance by the title. man falls passionately in love, his love dies, he's stricken with grief, something something magic, he wakes up 200 years later and finds his love & enemies again reincarnated (played by the same actors) and it's IMMOVABLE MOVIE LAW that love reunites eternally etc etc except here he can't get it up & fuck her so kills himself, his passion only returning in his last death gasp.

what the fuck. i have no idea what it means because the LAW of such a story is so inescapable i can barely grasp that it didn't happen. is it all just something about him being gay? i can't find any reviews, from then or now, which might help me out. help.

[Joks Trois]

Malignant: Wan's latest horror mishmash. The giallo references have been overstated although they are there. It mixes cheesy 80s horror like Basket Case with the slickness of 00s horror with a strong Raimi influence. The 3rd act makes up for the pedestrian 1st and 2nd acts and boring detective story. 5.5/10, and that is mostly for the 'twist' and finale.

[Roscoe]

THUNDERBOLT -- Josef von Sternberg's 1929 sound film is a fascinating mess of expressionist lighting and camerawork, with some really remarkable early sound games being played. Lots of overlapping dialogue and unexplained sound effects and ironic use of music -- much of the film takes place on a particular prison's Death Row, which seems to have an especially lenient warden and more than usually musically gifted inmates, gospel quartets and small chamber ensembles are heard throughout. Well worth a look. And listen. This isn't the kind of early sound movie parodied in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. It's way more sophisticated than that.

[nrh]

o som da terra a tremer by rita azevedo gomes - i haven't watched a lot of movies recently, but that's a great movie.

[rischka]

i haven't watched anything recently either but finally got round to obayashi's epic hanagatami yesterday and it was pretty spectacular

[rischka]

Disaster film fest: outbreak (1995) followed by 2012 (2009) simply one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. It's not every day I watch a Roland Emmerich film and it won't happen again anytime soon

[rischka]

rewatched the good the bad and the ugly on tcm. not a good movie but it is entertaining for the most part. tuco's accent kind of annoys me now. i miss my cat

[Roscoe]

BARRY LYNDON in a badly faded print at Museum Of The Moving Image. Almost unwatchable, but it got better as it went along. All these years of seeing this film, and I found something I hadn't spotted before, a little nod of recognition that Barry gives to Bullingdon after firing his shot into the ground during that final duel, I'd always been watching what the seconds were doing off to the side, and there's Barry silently telling his enemy "fair enough, kid, I get it."

[MrCarmady]

The Lineup, which suffers from being staunchly pro-police and boringly procedural but does come alive when the villains or the SF landmarks are on screen. Makes me wonder how Dirty Harry holds up, haven't seen it in over a decade.
Dune, which has some pretty sick set design and was generally very engrossing on the big screen, though I have no idea whether it would work the same way at home, probably not.

[rischka]

The romance of astrea and celadon-- this thing is goofy as hell but in the end I was completely seduced. Soundtrack of birdsong and costuming of artful draperies didn't hurt