Last Watched

[rischka]

has anyone seen red rocket? omfg

[DT.]

Wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time, but couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards. Hell of a lead performance.

[rischka]

it was hilarious and also i wanted to kill that guy

[Pretentious Hipster]

The Wolf of Snow Hollow was the perfect parody of those square face, huge jaw, alpha male lead type of films. A comedic horror with a cop that's incredibly oblivious and inept. It goes for that "quirky indie" tone but it suited the film very well.

[Roscoe]

KHRUSTALYOV MY CAR! on the Big Screen at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a fascinating trip it was. I feel like I get more out of it every time I see it, but the feeling that I'll never see it quite enough to get quite enough out of it is growing on me.

[rischka]

watched raavanan, amazing experience, ratnam has monster vision. top notch action in beautiful setting. i did get tired of seeing aishwarya rai suffering in a tug-of-war between two men! that said, i'm glad her husband couldn't make it vikram is a hottie and both leads give shattering performances. is it worth watching the one with abhishek? i wonder

[Lencho of the Apes]

On the subject of... that... I wonder about the first version of Om Shanti Om -- is Karz worth watching?

[nrh]

is it worth watching the one with abhishek? i wonder

it's definitely worth watching, especially to see vikram play the cop. prithviraj plays him as just kind of an asshole, vikram plays him as straight up demonic force. abhishek really doesn't have the physical weight to play ravaan so he plays him as unhinged, taking the ten heads literally as slipping between different personalities. it doesn't really work but it's kind of fascinating. and govinda is great as the hanuman/forest ranger character.

but it's certainly the lesser movie. they even cut out the kodu poatta group song with the big group dance in the outlaw compound!

[nrh]

On the subject of... that... I wonder about the first version of Om Shanti Om -- is Karz worth watching?

definitely worth watching. oso is further away from karz than some people imply (farah takes the reincarnation plot, and has some footage from karz in the beginning, but plot doesn't really match, and whole climax for example is madhumati) but karz is a great pop spectacle from the peak of the masala era.

[rischka]

is it worth watching the one with abhishek? i wonder

it's definitely worth watching, especially to see vikram play the cop. prithviraj plays him as just kind of an asshole, vikram plays him as straight up demonic force. abhishek really doesn't have the physical weight to play ravaan so he plays him as unhinged, taking the ten heads literally as slipping between different personalities. it doesn't really work but it's kind of fascinating. and govinda is great as the hanuman/forest ranger character.

but it's certainly the lesser movie. they even cut out the kodu poatta group song with the big group dance in the outlaw compound!

i shall watch it eventually then just to see vikram again. he's quite impressive. and that dance was one of the best scenes!

[sally]

also enjoyed two today that i stalked from other scfz-ers...

via greg, viggo larsen's 1906 rivalinder which......escalates.....and via greennui, the utterly bonkers (& too cute) 1907 nurses' strike (la grève des nourrices)

thanks guys!

and haven't had a diva film in ages so watched the 1918 la moglie di claudio. no subs and there were masses of intertitles, so didn't really have a clue what was going on, looked a bit fascisty and definitely tons of misogyny, but this is the highest quality print i've ever seen pina menichelli in and she was amazing. pure arm-flinging hell-cat bitch (honestly don't understand why those creepy old silent movie necrophiles wet their pants over two seconds of theda bara when pina exists)

[sally]

of course i don't want to trash theda completely. not when she can complement the victorian sex-skeleton craze so well

[...]

Oh, now I gotta see la moglie di claudio!

[sally]

not saying it's a great film (i mean maybe it is, pastrone was involved also, i was too busy trying to figure out what was going on plot-wise most of the time, aside from noticing 'weapons') but pina's performance is excessively entertaining

'floppy weapons'


i watched it here:
https://vimeo.com/97531343

[sally]

oh god, i watched the garbo/gilbert 'love' (1927)

it was so bad.

edit: oh god i agreed with filipe furtado, back to the potato bin with me!

[sally]

just watched stephen dwoskin's film about bill brandt. and i'm guessing intentionally, every place and figure in brandt's photos was namechecked apart from the deafening silence surrounding the models for his nude photos who are obviously just meat.

but really nice rene crevel quote whose mannequin essay i went and read immediately after...

(pg 240) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10. ... 15.1038904

[rischka]

i watched project A and sammo is still a better director. it's fun to see them together.



i do find '80s jackie chan adorable but he's too much of a chaplinesque slapstick clown. sry jackie

[sally]

x-paroni - 1964 (spede pasanen, risto jarva)

yearned for finns today, they're so damn cool, even when they're silly. the crooks are adorable, straight out of the 1985 calamari union - the more finnish cinema you see, the more you realise that nothing aki did, though perfectly, was something that he hadn't seen before, but even the stereotypes (country bumpkin, posh blue-blood) weren't stereotypical in this not-so-new-wavey-that-it's-annoying daft comedy.

not a kaurismaki film


cutest bad guy ever, couldn't take my eyes off him


apropos of stereotypes, re: the joke playing on so-called finnish reservedness - (in finland how do you tell the difference between an introvert or an extrovert - when he's talking to you a finnish introvert looks at his feet, a finnish extrovert looks at yours) this is still the funniest youtube comment i've seen, under a video about life in finland, was crying with LOLs

[greennui]

Kaurismäki's films might as well be documentaries, finns really are like that, now i'm missing my finnish ex-girlfriend...

[rischka]

i've watched licorice pizza (so you don't have to). the young stars are great: hoffman jr and alana HAIM (the whole HAIM family is in it). for me PTA is always just a little off: i see what he's going for but it's happening in a parallel universe. also sean penn and bradley cooper are caricatures - learn from the kids! not surprised at the nominations - hollywood loves a story about itself (or the nearby valley)

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I dug it more than I expected to. I'm always kind of baffled by how much people go ga-ga over PTA. It doesn't bother me, I just don't fully get it. The strong reaction to this one made me feel like I was in line for another The Master, where I go "Cool, I guess" so I was pleasantly charmed.

But I lived in the valley and formed a strong emotional attachment to it. So I'm sure that is painting my perception significantly.

[rischka]

the japanese restaurant owner -- WOW

still haven't seen the master but i will sometime. i respect him as a craftsman, i just don't feel it.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Haha. I knew people were talking about something to do with a Japanese accent before I went in, so I was expecting that to some degree.

I haven't read anything particularly interesting that engages with that yet, but I feel like he was trying to do something. There's a whole bunch of playing with tasteless cultural appropriation by small business owners (even Alana, who's father is former IDF, markets a matress as the "Arabian Night: for the most exotic night's sleep of your life" all while an oil crisis looms due to Israel's actions in the middle east.) that interaction is just the most overt (and also tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film) so I see why people have singled it out. It really doesn't work, but I'm generously assuming the obviousness of it was meant as a sort of rosetta stone to engage with... something else that I don't currently have a clear idea about.

[Curtis, baby]

SPEDE IS THE BEST!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOu_On_6vMY

[sally]

SPEDE IS THE BEST!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOu_On_6vMY

fabulous! is there any more of that in english?

[sally]

o que foi o carnaval de 1920! (alberto botelho, 1920)

little carnival doc in rio streaming here: https://www.cinelimite.com/post/o-que-f ... -1920-1920

your average crazy float:



but then they filmed the 'children's ball' and just a wonderful stream of miserable, miserable kids hating every second of it. these are my people (little girl in hat, on right in bottom pic! ♥)

[savannah]

Emitai (Ousmane Sembène, 1974)





Simple, beautiful images. A very necessary reminder of the difference between war epics that are often oppressor-made misery/guilt porn vs voices of the real lives and cultures so pettily, pathologically slaughtered.

[sally]

give the devil his due - hynek bočan (1985)

i forgot that docalliance had a load of random fiction films on there. needed to cheer myself up so watched a silly fairytale. bizarre lack of czech ickyness but hello most adorable little (actual) devil!

[sally]

also watched peter nestler's rather stunning 1964 mülheim/ruhr & didn't grab screenshots cuz it would have been every other second. basically a perfect almost-silent-era doc/actualité as if filmed by a great photographer. could have watched hours of it

[rischka]

i'm in the middle of spielberg's west side story, having seen the original 4-5 times, i kinda miss russ tamblyn otherwise the songs and choreography are exactly the same? spielberg didn't see the need to plaster his genius all over jerome robbins, bernstein, sondheim and shakespeare's work?? there's some fancy camerawork and it's still corny but i'm enjoying it. cool to see rita moreno again and i guess the script is more pc? otherwise seems like a big waste of money

err according to wiki some critics found this superior to the 1961 film. yeah no