Last Watched

[rischka]

cuteness overload vehicle for ginger rogers called 'professional sweetheart' (seiter 1933) it's not what you're thinking. ginger is followed everywhere by advertising men to protect her 'wholesome' image. by no means a great movie but a wonderful selection of character actors.



there's a big part for theresa harris as ginger's maid, teaching her all the latest dances from harlem. she gets to sing but no screen credit



and ginger's minders include franklin pangborn and frank mchugh



sterling holloway turns up in one scene



and zasu pitts is a delight as an intrepid journalist



anyway that was fun

[mae west]

cuteness overload vehicle for ginger rogers called 'professional sweetheart' (seiter 1938) it's not what you're thinking. ginger is followed everywhere by advertising men to protect her 'wholesome' image. by no means a great movie but a wonderful selection of character actors.

Oh, it's 1933 actually—best year in film history! I agree, this is supercute. I love the old-time radio vibe of it, and Ginger's very pre-code furious lust for experience Should watch again, I think I watched it too late and fell asleep last time...

[rischka]

cuteness overload vehicle for ginger rogers called 'professional sweetheart' (seiter 1938) it's not what you're thinking. ginger is followed everywhere by advertising men to protect her 'wholesome' image. by no means a great movie but a wonderful selection of character actors.

Oh, it's 1933 actually—best year in film history! I agree, this is supercute. I love the old-time radio vibe of it, and Ginger's very pre-code furious lust for experience Should watch again, I think I watched it too late and fell asleep last time...

d'oh how did i make that mistake. agree - best year in film history

i might have known with ginger dancing in her underwear lol

[rischka]

watched a couple of recently subbed shimizus その後の蜂の巣の子供たち/children of the beehive: what happened next (1951) ♥ further adventures of the beehive kids

霧の音/sound in the mist (1956)







some of the master's most impressive photography and long luxurious pans at an inn in the japanese alps. selfish men, self effacing women, tragedy ensues

[ofrene]

is there decent copy of Sound in the Mist ???

[rischka]

decent yes but it has hard portuguese subs. i can't upload it as it over 5gbs but i'm sure a better one will turn up soon

[rischka]

i had thought there was a documentary thread but i am damned if i can find it. anyways i enjoyed scorsese's film about powell & pressberger, 'Made in England' so much i've watched it twice already. what a sweet sweet story









marty talks about becoming obsessed with the tales of hoffmann ♥



on the million dollar movie playing every afternoon on his parents' tiny b&w tv

[pabs]

i had thought there was a documentary thread but i am damned if i can find it.

Here it is!! https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=967

[rischka]

padlocked (allan dwan 1926) - restored from a single print found in prague. an early work of james wong howe















a sort of diary of a lost girl (lois moran), driven away by her too strict father (noah beery), preyed upon by a jeffrey epstein character with his own giselle maxwell, sent to reform school and rescued from same, purity intact. lovely photography. guessing the epstein model was common in the last century

[rischka]

sea porn courtesy powell & pressberger's battle of the river plate (1956)

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Currently at TIFF.
Only got to two films today.

Wael Shawkys Drama 1882 which is a 40 minute opera depicting the 1882 Urabi Revolt in Egypt. I'm just guessing, but I'd assume it takes a bit of inspiration from Med Hondo's West Indies
Spectacular production design.


Then I saw Sean Ellis' new Orlando Bloom boxing movie The Cut.
Had the worst opening boxing sequence I've ever seen, and was immediately disheartened. But the rest of it was alright. Trying really hard for a black swan/Whiplash sort of thing, and semi-succeeds.

Overall, not a bad start to the festival for me.

[Jürka]

not a bad start to the festival

this year's TIFF is getting truly memorable.

[pabs]

A doco called THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE (2023).

About the lady who conducted a huge survey, handing out questionnaires to be filled out anonymously by women. She published the results in a book called The Hite Report.

It turns out most women are unhappy and miserable about their sex life and are bored with, or dislike, their spouses after only a few years together. Most men don't know how to give women orgasms and most women fake them to please their male partners and to get them off their bodies and leave them be.

Shere Hite did a survey on men next and published the results in another book. Most men in America felt isolated and terribly lonely and didn't have anyone to confide in. They had no meaningful relationships with their fathers and felt cut off from their fathers when they were growing up. Men's adult friendships with other men were superficial and shallow.

American men were furious about Hite publishing all these results. She was hated. She felt she had to leave America so she did. She never returned, living the rest of her life in Europe.

[rischka]

what's happening at TIFF?!

[Monsieur Arkadin]

You mean the canceled Russians at War screening?

[rischka]

nah just in general see anything good ?

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Lol. I was only up there for the first weekend. But Miguel Gomes' new film Grand Tour was my highlight.

Andrea Arnold's new one is my least favorite of hers thus far. But seemed to garner very strong and very negative reactions.

My students felt like Mother, Mother a Somali film was the highlight. I liked it, though it felt a bit more like general classic festival fare to me.

[rischka]

it's a zabriskie, zabriskie, zabriskie, zabriskie point (daniel kremer 2023) an essay film that tries to do for death valley what thom anderson did for los angeles. featuring some of my favorite films and some interesting thoughts about america and the desert on film. glad i recently saw zabriskie for the first time. i'll be visiting there next week!!

[greennui]

Watched a few of them Mission Impossible films, much more enjoyable than the smug, self serious and bland Bond franchise. Need to watch more films with Vanessa Kirby...

[pabs]

Past Lives (Song, 2023) 7.5/10
Priscilla (Coppola, 2023) 1
After Love (Khan, 2020) 9
Hamlet (Kozintsev, 1964) 9
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Jude, 2023) 8
Ophelia (McCarthy, 2018) 1
Biutiful (Inarritu, 2010) 8.5


Do Not Expect Too Much was excellent! So much fun in its scathing comment on the state of Romania.

Priscilla is the most pointless film I've seen in a very long time.

[rischka]

damn i wanted to love vanishing point. then a naked woman riding a motorbike showed up



and i realize i am not the intended audience

[pabs]

Marianne and Leonard - Words of Love (Broomfield, 2019). documentary

Very sad story of Leonard Cohen and his part-time girlfriend Marianne, living the hippie dream of free sex and free love and tons of drugs on the Greek island of Hydra. The parents' hedonism and their irresponsibility and lack of care and neglect for their kids led to many of these hippies' children, like Marianne's son, Axel, being institutionalized for life, or they killed themselves through drugs/alcohol.

[cinesmith]

I wasn't aware that Peter Lorre made his directorial debut in 1951 with the feature called 'Der Verlorene' aka The Lost One. You can find the link below and it's well worth a watch. Particularly with his very grim testament of a serial killer who survives WWII only to be discovered by a nazi who had worked with him prior to the end of the war. One could call it a companion piece to Fritz Lang's 'M' which makes this all that much stranger a find.

Der Verlorene (1951)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozR7QxnRlq8

but here's the crazy part..

This sent me down the rabbit hole and I ended up watching this rather benign action-comedy-mystery-thriller(with this many genre cross overs you start to wonder how is this going to work) called 'Holiday In Spain' (1960) directed by Jack Cardiff (the cinematographer on such classics as 'The Red Shoes', 'A Matter of Life & Death' and far. far more films) He only directed some 13 films and I don't think any of them have a glowing review. Thus, this made for a weird view. Shot entirely in Spain in Cinerama 70mm which also added to a very specific visual ratio. Thus, someone uploaded this which was restored in 2014 evidently and it includes a curtain opening and closing for the Intermission in the middle of a fight scene by freezing the frame.
FYI, this is a 2 hour movie. It stars a young Denholm Elliot and a much heavier Peter Lorre who gained all the weight from a glandular ailment that caused him to gain over a hundred pounds and have high blood pressure for his remaining years alive.

Holiday in Spain (1960)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVWCiUHut_E

[rischka]

i watched conclave on streaming and it was pretty boring. good acting. making church people mad is a positive goal i suppose

impressive buildings and costumes. funny to me they take themselves so seriously but i'm not catholic. i liked this review:

divas in long dresses gossiping with each other trying to snatch a win… this is basically rupaul’s drag race

[rischka]

mulher de verdade (cavalcanti 1954)

pretty cute brazilian screwball comedy with lots of samba. a nurse, through wacky circumstances, ends up with two husbands

https://www.locarnofestival.ch/media/vo ... rdade.html

thx to sally for this tip ♥

[serri]

feeling a little into movies lately. watched mississippi siren, bride wore black, the servant, after hours and king of comedy. and some shorts.

[rischka]

shimizu's girl's reform school (1956)







hard hitting, including a scene where a girl hurls herself from a wall repeatedly, to what purpose i'm sure you can imagine

[karl]

A second recommendation for "Girls' Reformatory." Pic is the Shimizu "formula," yes, but in some directors you don't mind the formula because of the skill with which the movies are made. Only the best manage to escape the formula becoming a mannerism: for me Ozu and Bresson fit into this category and Hong Sang-soo doesn't.

[rischka]

anora is my least favorite Sean baker film. should've known when it won at cannes

[rischka]

chang cheh made a film about marco polo. it's very dumb and that's what i need rn



in this version he goes to work for ghengis khan, part of which involves spying on local rebels



he's the only white man for thousands of miles i'm sure no one will notice him



anyway it cracked me up. fun movie with extensive training sequences for learning semi-magical skills



and a lot of homoerotic flexing



馬哥波羅 the four assassins (1975) i still think alexander fu sheng is the original (and best) jackie chan