2009 Poll 2.0

[...]

Well I'm counting it as Angel's favorite either way. Heh.

Really though showing up on the list at all is still a surprise. I didn't know there was an Emmericher among us!

[Angel]

I have to admit that I have a soft spot for disaster movies (look at my 1972 ballot). Nobody is perfect!

2012 gives us such a wide variety of scenes that the set pieces never bog down under the weight of repetition. In the absence of film serials, I enjoy Emmerich's ridiculous insanity.

[sally]

invisible girlfriend - david redmon, ashley sabin

Charles is in love with his invisible girlfriend, Joan of Arc, so he decides to ride his big red bicycle 400 miles from Monroe through rural Louisiana to find her in a New Orleans bar.

(not going to make my list at all, but i am gonna renew my docalliance subscription)

[der kulterer]

2009 poll watchlist:

GREAT MAN AND CINEMA (Jim Finn, 2009)

Kim Jong Il, the Stalinist David O. Selznick, runs the state film studio as a way of promoting his own and his father's cult of personality. The film's title "Great Man and Cinema" comes from a propaganda booklet filled with stories of how the Dear Leader has written, edited, produced and given acting advice in films for the last 40 years. This film succinctly synthesizes the Dear Leader's directing philosophy with his feelings toward the imperialist beast at his heels.

https://impakt.nl/channel/films/great-man-and-cinema/

[sally]

i love my boring life / mám ráda nudný život - jan gogola jr

adorably sweet doc (visuals wryly commenting on text) that like a lot of the czech docs on dafilms is not on letterboxd (grrr) about the daily diaries of some pleasant but slightly insane rural housewife who seems to do endless amounts of laundry. (and frustratingly, director made a doc before this of the diaries of her mother-in-law but that doesn't have subtitles)

[der kulterer]

i love my boring life

ha, i love love love this film!
tho, already forgot this part about Jirka.
and didn't notice before it is 2009, so thx for a (high) entry on my ballot!

[rischka]

i watched the limits of control and it was pretty cool. an anti-action film set in beautiful spain

very nice cinematography and surprise guests. it could make my list

[rischka]

if you enjoy this guy walking you're in luck

[sally]

ha, i love love love this film!
tho, already forgot this part about Jirka.
and didn't notice before it is 2009, so thx for a (high) entry on my ballot!

it was lovely, more like that please! it's a real shame that deník babičky němcové doesn't have subtitles but i will be watching the director's národ sobě some time probably before the next 2003 poll, if only cuz the pic advertising it on dafilms has a naked man in it....

anyway another hooray! (for dafilms and 2009)

city of signs / la ciudad de los signos - samuel alarcón

researcher into psychic background sounds goes to pompeii to see if he can pick up echoes of the eruption, only to find that he captures a few strange english words and discovers that he's picked up bergman & sanders filming voyage to italy....cue investigation into rossellini's neo-realist films, matching film footage with their exact locations today (i LOVE this) with that very spanish sensibility of mysterious hidden lives, meaning and doom, à la tren de sombras...♥♥♥

so i've had a fake documentary for antonioni for 2009 already, and now an uncanny meander thru rossellini....

[sally]

absolutely there for middle aged women making films about middle aged female losers

for this brilliant miniature not quite genre i really recommend Lee Suk-gyeong's the day after from 2009, which i only knew about because angela schanelec requested it to be programmed as part of her lincoln center retrospective. if nothing else it has the best fried chicken + alcohol melancholy breakdown scene in any movie.

thanks for the recommendation! i don't think i've ever seen such a 'normal' korean film before

[rischka]

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1503 ... Yid-85p0BA

very much enjoyed 3 hours of dance

[sally]

^ i sat in front of that for three hours and don't remember a thing, maybe that means i was relaxed?

anyway....i am coming to the conclusion that 2009 is the year of masquerade! antonioni through lies, italy through spain, yesterday it was korea via schanelec and today it's the japanese kaurismäki! (such cute dialogue)

dark harbour / futoko - takatsugu naitô

lonely fisherman finds woman in cupboard

[der kulterer]

MAN AND GRAVITY (Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2009)

A man with a colourful tricycle tries to raise an impossible freight in inaccessible surroundings.

https://youtu.be/z-a7B_m-AR4

[der kulterer]

GEORGIC FOR A FORGOTTEN PLANET (Lynne Sachs, 2009)

“I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple.”
—Lynne Sachs

“The film, like Vergil’s Georgic, is a lovely and meditatively poetic paean to agriculture, although, unlike Vergil, the film’s focus is on the separation of our citified culture from the husbandry of the earth as well as the separation of our own persons from what surrounds us. I was struck in particular by a number of plaintive shots of the Moon over the city, hardly visible against the streetlights, ignored by those below, a forgotten deity.”
—Erling Wold

https://vimeo.com/170861052

[sally]

^ ta!

need more shorts...

just watched two by FAMU student květa přibylová on dafilms: mind the horses & my fair baby. gently ironic, classically icky. (films should always open with shots of portaloos) i'm beginning to think it's a milieu!

[der kulterer]

have seen from květa only "Chitter Chatter, that's all you're good at. Said Vegetable." and "Traces, Fragments, Roots" so far.

i see "Mind the Horses" is here (with Eng. subs) as well ↓
https://vimeo.com/124834273

("My Fair Baby" is on vimeo too but without subs.)

so far i have seen the following shorts for the poll ↓
(all are online)

59/184/84 (Lukáš Kokeš, 2009, 25m)
60 Seconds of Regret (Ed Gass-Donnelly, 2009, 1m)
La Dolce Vita (Steven Woloshen, 2009, 2m)
Delight (Thomas Draschan, 2009, 3m)
Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell (Jim Finn, 2009, 3m)
Great Man and Cinema (Jim Finn, 2009, 3m)
Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days (Ken Jacobs, 2009, 4m)
Robes of War (Michèle Cournoyer, 2009, 5m)
Parallax (Inger Lise Hansen, 2009, 5m)
Toxic Mango (Khavn, 2009, 5m)
Sangria (Mikel Guillen, 2009, 5m)
Chick (Michał Socha, 2009, 5m)
Dahlia (Michael Langan, 2009, 3m)
Man and Gravity (Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2009, 11m)
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (Lynne Sachs, 2009, 11m)

[sally]

berlin berlin - arnaud gerber

kierkegaardian ruminations on repetition, and in a digression about repeating european repetitions, it seems we are repeating even now:

[wba]

Final ballot

films seen: 110+

01. Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, Austria/France/Germany)
02. Pink (Rudolf Thome, Germany)
03. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, USA)
04. Kosmos (Reha Erdem, Turkey/Bulgaria)
05. Public Enemies (Michael Mann, USA/Japan)
06. Bakjwi "Thirst" (Chan-wook Park, South Korea/USA)
07. Kanikôsen (Sabu, Japan)
08. Viyon no tsuma "Villon's Wife" (Kichitaro Negishi, Japan)
09. Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura "Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl" (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/Spain/France)
10. Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore, USA)

11. Rampage (uwe Boll, Canada/Germany)
12. Die Tür "The Door" (Anno Saul, Germany)
13. Lulu und Jimi (Oskar Roehler, Germany/France)
14. Vihir "The Well" (Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, India)
15. Politist, adjectiv "Police, adjective" (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)
16. Mitte Ende August "Sometime in August" (Sebastian Schipper, Germany)
17. Alter und Schönheit "Age and Beauty" (Michael Klier, Germany)
18. Die Liebe der Kinder "The Love of the Children" (Franz Müller, Germany)
19. Les herbes folles "Wild Grass" (Alain Resnais, France/Italy)
20. Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, USA/UK/Germany/Australia)

[Lencho of the Apes]

I haven't been finding much to get excited about, a lot of "nice little movies" in that forgettable "mid" zone -- and that includes the year's Resnais. BUT it's the year that Raul Ruiz made A Closed Book, a d2v psychological thriller in the Single White Female mold, and played it almost completely straight... something I never would have expected of him... with the Ruiz touches reduced to surreal jokes and eyeball kicks where the villain is taking chaotic pleasure in disrupting her victim's perceptions of reality. It's also the year that Alex Cox made Repo Chick which was... a massive failure probably? But I'm continuing to think about it and I may eventually find ways to justify everything that was off-putting about it, which was basically the whole movie from start to finish.

Also a good year for Iran-based feminist movies; Women Without Men and My Tehran For Sale were both kinda lovable. And Los Viajes Del Viento by Ciro Guerra was the best ethnofiction thang I've seen in a long time, something like Birds Of Passage without the drug/crime action. I don't kow if subtitles are available for that one...

[rischka]

thx for those recs lencho! i'll watch the ruiz tonight

[sally]

was that actually a recommendation for the ruiz? i wasn't sure....i'll probably get to it tho, it's the only ruiz on netflix!

am really struggling to finish mouret's please, please me! cuz it's so cringe-embarrassing i have to keep either muting it or stop it and go do something else. he's such a pillock. (said with affection)

[nrh]

it really is a master class in turning anything that remotely looks like a fantasy into a nightmare scenario.

i remember hating the ruiz, and i like nearly everything he did in this period. always guessed it was a favor to his friend adair - the whole production sounds odd based on everything i've heard, and the changes to adair's book (making the male main character darryl hannah to start with!) seem pretty damaging. maybe i should watch it again but i don't think it had even the termite pleasures of shattered image...

[greennui]

From that to Mysteries of Lisbon in one year is something.

[rischka]

yeah sally don't watch it

i did somewhat enjoy it tom conti was good but frozen face daryl hannah was terrible and the ending was ridiculous

[Lencho of the Apes]

I just liked the pictures hanging upside-down, empty frames on the wall, dialogue about Madonna and O J Simpson...

[der kulterer]

2009 poll watchlist:
a film by the coolest Lemieux in Canada!

MÉMOIRES IMPRIMÉES (Karl Lemieux, 2009)

https://vimeo.com/421346089

[sally]

the ferrari dino girl - jan němec

not sure what it really adds to the original invasion footage, other than being a bit creepy about girls & wondering if he gave a fuck about his cameraman (oh and also, did chabrol actually say that? fuck chabrol) but that's harrowing enough. old footage suddenly not so old

depressed now

[ororama]

1. Coraline (Henry Selick)
2. Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)
3. Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer)
4. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
5. District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) 
6. White Material (Claire Denis)
7. Lebanon (Samuel Maoz)
8. The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey)
9. [Rec]² (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza)
10. The First 7th Night (Herman Yau)
11. Polytechnique (Denis Villeneuve)
12. La reine des pommes (Valérie Donzelli)
13. The House of the Devil (Ti West)
14. I Corrupt All Cops (Wong Jing)
15. Mary and Max (Adam Elliot)
16. Away We Go (Sam Mendes)
17. Jaffa (Keren Yedaya)
18. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev)
19. Amer (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani)
20. Up (Pete Docter, Bob Peterson)

[sally]

i watched mikhaël hers' montparnasse last night but was too angry to say anything. a man. a man (!) a man writes & directs 3 stories about women in the most pathetic, patronising, controlling, misogynist, wish-fulfilling 'thing' i have seen in ages. 1st girl is neurotic, hopeless anxious incapable, 3rd girl is pretty exotic dream-girl falls for normal looking guy, and the second girl is DEAD. a fucking hark o victorians dead girl. pathetic. outrageous.

it's also an absolutely gorgeous cityscape tour set in montparnasse by night but that is beside the point.

also due to lencho updating the watchlist links i went back and did what i should have done at the beginning and properly investigated what was available for me to watch, and, limiting it to documentary-ish only, i have about 30 films to watch and need approximately another month to get through them....

[rischka]

i watched women without men - it was difficult. beautiful screens though