SCFZ

Moment of Terror (Mikio Naruse, 1966) - A car crash melodrama that kinda felt like a self-exorcism by Naruse before directing the much more romantic and much better car crash melodrama Two in the Shadow the year after. Fairly overdetermined, dark and not as graceful as you'd expect from Naruse, it almost felt like there was an exploitation film bubbling underneath the surface waiting to get unleashed, something in the vein of *Mikio Naruse's Lady Snowblood* or "Mikio Naruse's Female Prisoner 701" starring Hideko Takamine in the Meiko Kaji role.

The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) - I've had this one ticked as 'watched' for ages despite only watching like 20 minutes of it years ago so I thought I'd watch it in it's entirety. What fantastic landscaping...main takeaway was the hotness of middle-aged Eleanor Parker, her voice had unlocked a new level of huskiness, definitely would have picked the baroness over Julie Andrews who I thought was pretty sexy as Mary Poppins but in this one rather meh.

ash is purest white (jia zhang-ke) what an odd beast. will need to sit on this one for a while. been turning it over in my mind since finishing it, a sign that it left more of an imprint than my initial perplexed reaction might suggest. starts off in a sort of troubled youth vis a vis hou hsiao-hsien vein, but much more abrasive and eventually violent. goes slightly social realist for a little bit. then turns into a road movie, a travelogue. then seemingly out of nowhere veers into some odd adventitious weerasethakul territory, even if only really momentarily, prior to settling back down to settle things overall. throughout time is always fleeting, flowing fast. years go by in the blink of an eye. major events occur off-screen. chunks of time exist outside the chunks of time we witness. we know things have happened in between, but always find out after the fact. the first 45min are ominous, always with a sense of dread lingering just behind the veneer of the jianghu lifestyle, even as the jianghu aren't what they used to be, just as china isn't what it used to be, and yet in the end the more things change, the more they stay the same. people end up right where they left off, playing mahjong, smoking cigarettes, and trying to find some stasis in times and places forever passing them by. as they say, wherever you go, there you are

thoxans wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 3:38 pm ash is purest white (jia zhang-ke)

Ash is a great film that certainly stayed on my mind longer that films usually do. But that's the case with Jia's films in general. I've seen 5 and loved all of them. A Touch of Sin is probably my favorite.

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.

I like what Roger Ebert said about Fat City in his Four Star review: "A few critics of "Fat City" found it too flat, too monochromatic. But this material won't stand jazzing up. If Huston and Gardner had forced the story into a conventional narrative of suspense, climax and resolution, it would have seemed obscene. There just isn't going to be any suspense, climax, or resolution in the lives of these people: Just a few moments of second-hand hope that don't even seem worth getting very worked up about at the time."

thoxans wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 3:38 pm ash is purest white (jia zhang-ke) what an odd beast. will need to sit on this one for a while.

didn't want to say anything before you watched but this is a really weird one if you haven't seen a lot of jia! he is obsessively revisiting scenes, locations, even individual wardrobe choices from previous movies. like the ufo moment is a repetition of a scene in still life, to pick just the weirdest example.

THE FISHER KING -- never my favorite Gilliam, the over-obvious self-helpiness of the story and Robin Williams's too-frequent blasts of manic over-acting, the screaming and the shouting get annoying and feel artificial. It's Jeff Bridges' movie, and Mercedes Ruehl's movie. 7/10

nrh wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:15 pmobsessively revisiting

interesting! so its dually reflective of jia's own career. that makes its narrative circularity even more intriguing. and that also means ash is purest white is to jia as three times is to hou. hmmm. will be looking even more forward to his other films now to find those parallels. got the world lined up at some point in the future, and suppose i need to revisit platform eventually as well

Silga wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:25 pm 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 that it fit right into the 'mood' of the era, so to speak, without being a geeky New Hollywood film.

no one doing pordenone?

not managing much 1915, since had to watch the beautiful but antisemitic merchant of venice (1923) before it expires tomorrow
on vimeo.com/459424272



on to pordenone, some lovely travelogues that made me want to waft round bruges and go back to krakow, and then some film about irritating children, penrod and sam, which was nicely done, but i couldn't care less.

but they're doing aftershow zoom chats on youtube which made me end up buying another film book from amazon that i'll never read.

Griffith's The birth of a nation so I could finally remove it from my watchlist, but now it's forever tainting my watched list. What a dilemma.

Seriously, this was vile. Sort of as expected, but then again even more. The film truly manages to catch you off-guard even when you already expect the worst of the worst. I'm only glad that I'm done with it and I don't have to deal with it again.

Before that I watched Ned med vaabnene / Lay down your arms by Holger-Madsen, released one year earlier and it was nice, yet not good enough. But it's a film that denounces war and is actually coherent with this message, which is already more than I can say about Griffith without putting the blatant racism in the equation. So yeah, much better.

The other movie I watched today was a Spanish documentary on a blind ornithologist who is very good at recognizing bird sounds. El silencio que queda or The silence that remains, it's not on Letterboxd. I quite liked it, pretty laidback and healing stuff with beautiful shots of nature.

the brilliant biograph!

it was. the quality is amazing. it might be because just the best bits get picked, but i think i prefer nonfiction silent films best

and to continue venice theme from yesterday, here it is in a screenshot from 1898

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 about early cinema, but there is a fluidity and relentlessness to the editing and camera movement here that still feels fresh today. Contrary to popular belief, TLW is superior to The Cat and The Canary. While the latter certainly helped establish some of the grammar/lexis for modern horror films, TLW was really a consolidation of what Leni had learned from Canary and The Man Who Laughs and makes the best argument for why he would have probably adapted to talkies better than any other silent film director. A genuine surprise. His early death was a great loss to cinema. 7 or 7.5/10.

The one time I saw THE LAST WARNING I was seriously underwhelmed, in what should have been ideal circumstances at the San Francisco Silent FIlm Festival, Big Fucking Screen, live score, and it just never came to life as anything but fancy camera stuff. Maybe a revisit is in order. I'm looking forward to Leni's restored WAXWORKS in a few weeks.

And talking of pretty but meh, I watched about as much as I could stand of that goddamn BLACK NARCISSUS, a film I dislike more with each viewing. Full disclosure: I've made it all the way through exactly once, at Film Forum rather than home video. Yeah, it's pretty. I just don't give a damn about those stupid women. My now total lack of religious feeling doubtless has something to do with it, but Powell/Pressburger's silliness has a lot to do with it too.

twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Sun Oct 04, 2020 5:16 pm the brilliant biograph!

it was. the quality is amazing. it might be because just the best bits get picked, but i think i prefer nonfiction silent films best

and to continue venice theme from yesterday, here it is in a screenshot from 1898

That looks mint.

halloweennui wrote: ↑Tue Oct 06, 2020 6:37 pm That looks mint.

yeah, i should have taken more screenshots when i had the chance, these 68mm films are beautiful, shame they didn't catch on (no sprocket holes!). really hope this comes out as a dvd or something

watching days





incredibly restful.

SHOULDER ARMS -- Chaplin's WWI comedy, a frankly rather clumsy affair plotwise but with some splendid moments. Lonely Charlie in the trenches reading another soldier's letter over his shoulder, and both faces reacting identically to the news in the letter, for example. Feature length structures were a problem for Chaplin -- he didn't really get them right until THE GOLD RUSH.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND on Netflix, a new filmed version of the play by Mart Crowley about gay men and their issues with themselves and each other, taking place at a birthday party. An overwhelmingly sad play and films, it can't help but touch a nerve, and with this cast (Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, Zachary Quinto, Andrew Rannells and the rest of the cast of a recent Broadway revival) a lot of nerves get touched, and touched again, and stamped on with steel-toed boots. Director Joe Mantello keeps it all moving with good sense, but alas one big moment is botched when Mantello just has to cut it into lots of quick edits and a camera position in the rafters for reasons that pass my understanding. Enough of the rest of it works like gangbusters for it not be a big problem.

apaches of athens (gaziadis 1930) via pordenone

greece's first sound film except they lost the sound so now it's a silent and it's a neo-neo-realist 'comedy' drama that has some disconcertingly delicious cinematography/direction spliced in amongst some weirdly bad choices, it doesn't make sense to me at all, but oh the lovely location shots (when are you ever going to see athens looking like this?)

i felt bad about my lack of screenshots previous so have now overcompensated (but for a rare-ish film that has few other testaments...)



also was totally perplexed by unusually...broad(?) hero, but then.....his eyes...appeared.....wooosh....



and then even more fascinatingly, as the film went on and his pride caused him agony, he almost stopped moving at all and just became a mesmerizing upright statue, in what i call the rigid-phallic-melancholy pose, as everyone else fluttered and collapsed and swirled around him...oh ♥

i have to go do life stuff tonight so i don't have time to rave but

ABWEGE (pabst 1928, restored, pristine with restored tints) h.o.l.y. fuck i love all the screwed up sexual tension stuff. new one for my four faves on letterboxd. the intelligence of some of those shots. the entire club thing. yeah ♥ pabst was high class

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 about power and resistance rather than male aggression. This is probably the best of Vlacil's post-Adelheid films out of the ones I've seen. A intense slow burn that gets under your skin. 7/10.

the cinephobe is back to scheduled programming and i just saw henry king's 1938 'in old chicago,' pretty good stuff pre-election. don ameche and tyrone power play brothers, one becomes crime boss of chicago, the other a crusading mayor. impressive fire sequence kicked off by their mother's cow. sort of a sequel to 1936's 'san francisco' but somewhat better imo

going back to bed now

put on mikey and nicky as background noise while i clean the house (this is technically a rewatch; watched it for the first time a few weeks back), and man, peter falk was so great. his first outburst, in the diner, when the guy at the counter is giving him a hard time about a cup of cream, whoa. pure dynamite. def stopped cleaning in that moment to rewatch the scene, and take it all in. luvvv the reaction of the black lady in the background, sitting at the counter, to the right. you can see her look off-camera to the crew presumably, visibly just thinking to herself 'whoa this some crazy shit.' also, this is not a cassavetes film, as directed by elaine may. it has may's rambling comedic timing written all over it, simply much more darkly comic than what she'd done before. has more in common with a flick like loden's wanda imo, especially in how it blends a meandering character study with propulsive genre (crime) elements. also also, the film's essentially a children's movie for adults. cassavetes and falk are two kids who never really grew up, now they just smoke and drink a lot, and the city is their playground, breaking the rules while riding the bus, hopping fences to sneak into the cemetery, going to the movies. also also also, pretty sure cassavetes was literally a crazy person, right?

Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley, 2017) - I really loved the opening shot of the waterfall, my cat actually ended up getting disturbed by it. He rarely reacts to what's going on at the screen but he stared at it with fear for a while before running off, then he peeked through the doorway before running off again. Anyway, I wasn't quite as enamoured with the rest of the film, still good stuff though. Hutton through a Sokurov filter, and it might have just been that fact for me, that I saw too many other filmmakers in it.

ok brigitte helm not everyone can pull this off. or maybe anyone. it sort of looks like a viking helmet though. wagnerian

abwege is exquisite looking, completely debauched and a lot of fun. i can't imagine mary pickford in the woods is anywhere near the same league lol

CATS -- Tom Hooper's garish tasteless avalanche of awfulness, there's just nothing like it. On the other hand, if it finally puts a stop to Rebel Wilson then it will not have been entirely in vain.

Women from Kihnu (Mark-Toomas Soosaar, 1974) - After watching a few depressing horror films in a row I felt like I needed a change of scenerey, and this one proved to be a perfect choice. Ethnographic film with a few experimental touches, depicting the women of a small Estonian island in the Gulf of Riga.

halloweennui wrote: ↑Tue Oct 13, 2020 11:56 am Women from Kihnu (Mark-Toomas Soosaar, 1974)

Watchlisted! This looks great.

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 bad too, and it isn't as visually impressive as his other 80's thrillers. 4.5/10.

BODY DOUBLE is garbage -- always has been, always will be. CATS at least has a sort of "Oh My God Did They Actually Do THAT?" pleasure to the experience. It doesn't last long.

Any admirers of Waleryan Borowczyk in the house? A friend was enthusing, and pressed GOTO: ISLE OF LOVE on me, and I suspect it wasn't the place to start.