SCFZ

twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2019 7:30 pm is full frontal female nudity normal by 1929?
la femme et le pantin (baroncelli 1929)

Great to hear from you, magpies !

Below the belt nudity in the silent era would sure be a new one to me! I'll have to check this one out. I can maybe recommend The Fireman of the Folies-Bergere (1928, France) as the most thorough-going evidence I've found of above the belt nudity in the silent era.

twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2019 7:30 pm i'm only watching silents these days

silents are just the best, a whole different art
and often such educational documents of yesteryears too

Evelyn wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 12:28 am I can maybe recommend The Fireman of the Folies-Bergere (1928, France) as the most thorough-going evidence I've found of above the belt nudity in the silent era.

through-going indeed!

so many things to still discover! love it when i assume a film is just point-and-click early-days dumb-directing, and then something in one scene seems out of kilter enough to slip my brain into realising eg the poetry of an intentional mise-en-scene underscoring the psychological movement of the characters etc (feuillade, bauer). the poetry was fierce back then! and maybe because cinema was so new, its implications wrt imagination were more clearly grasped & displayed than now when we're too long accustomed to drowning in images in time...(?)...anyway.....so much romance....

and it's raining today, so i'm staying indoors and going to scandinavia...

HIGH AND LOW, Kurosawa's policier works like crazy even in a dreadful over-contrasty barely-subtitled 35mm print at Film Forum. The only real criticism I have of the film is that Nakadai's reactions in those scenes in Mifune's house get to be a bit much, too obvious.

Roscoe wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 1:10 pm even in a dreadful over-contrasty barely-subtitled 35mm print at Film Forum.

that's really disappointing. momi showed a print a year or two back that was absolutely pristine...

johan - mauritz stiller, 1921

i could almost hear stiller yelling more peril more peril!...those nordic countries and their actual death-risk approach to filming river rapid scenes....insane. (this early 1910's italian film i watched the other day had a similar take on filming things in aeroplanes - which, as i'd just read virilio's war & cinema, seemed astonishingly apt - i see! i fly! (i die))

anyway, the actress chloë sevigny was very good in this umpteenth re-telling of juha:

Gunslinger (Roger Corman, 1956) — No one else seems to like this one, so bear that in mind, but I found this to be an awesome woman gunslinger western, with Corman providing some compelling compositions and, of course, ample dramatics/thrills. Recommended to fans of Woman They Almost Lynched, Cattle Queen of Montana, etc.

If you're digging into the early Corman, you might find this essay of interest, as it is about the women in those early Corman movies.

http://brightlightsfilm.com/she-gods-ga ... WxHRi5KjIU

Ooo, thank you greg, that article looks really interesting! Yeah, I'm planning to dive into more early Corman soon, especially after thoroughly enjoying Gunslinger.

I'll want to come back to Essinger's specific readings of the Corman films - she's doubling my watchlist of potential Corman gems

I have a major qualm with her introduction though, and I must, simply must, register my harrumph:

"His Girl Friday, in which gifted reporter Rosalind Russell is desperate to quit her job so she can start a family with a dim, but steady, insurance salesman

That's the wrong interpretation of Hildy's desires in the film, no? I definitely interpret Hildy as imploring Grant to save her from this fate, and after all the entire appeal to her of her relationship with Grant is that it's primarily a professional one, because she loves working together. Essinger's implying that Hildy ends up with Ralph Bellamy in the end! Harrumph.

watched the hilarious private eyes. michael hui kills me. the kitchen 'kung fu' battle is one of the best things ever

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1171909959635750913

^ one of my absolute favorites!!

Damn it you guys, I'm gonna have to see it too now!

Evelyn wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 9:58 pm Gunslinger (Roger Corman, 1956) — No one else seems to like this one, so bear that in mind, but I found this to be an awesome woman gunslinger western, with Corman providing some compelling compositions and, of course, ample dramatics/thrills. Recommended to fans of Woman They Almost Lynched, Cattle Queen of Montana, etc.

Thanks for the recommendation! Haven't seen that one, but Corman's FIVE GUNS WEST (1955) is one of my favorite westerns. You should check that one out, if you haven't already.

wba wrote: ↑Fri Sep 13, 2019 9:56 am
Thanks for the recommendation! Haven't seen that one, but Corman's FIVE GUNS WEST (1955) is one of my favorite westerns. You should check that one out, if you haven't already.

Thanks! Haven't seen it, but I'll check out Five Guns West soon, as well as The Oklahoma Woman.

liquidnature wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 8:18 pm Das Hofkonzert / The Court Concert (1936)

Whimsical, floating romcom presented with the always splendid Sirkian touch. A few shots reminded me of Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach. The type of film I feel like I could watch endlessly - beautifully shot and staged lighthearted '30s musical romance. Mártha Eggerth is the worthy star of the show with her charm and lilting soprano vocals. Film lacks something though - perhaps genuine passion. Watched this with the spanish subtitles as there are currently no english subs available; understood mostly everything, but will def rewatch whenever english subs are made available.

Spoiler!

Update: Just saw on KG that someone claimed the pot for the English subs, so we'll have another Sirk available soon.

Caught Uncut Gems at TIFF. It was good, and it kind of works as quirky subversion of recent Adam Sandler comedies. Not as cohesive as Good Time, but I enjoyed it. I was supposed to see Anderson's About Endlessness, but fucked up the time and showed up just as it was ending. So I'll only get to 3 films this round.

Endured what I could of MACBETH, the version from a couple years back with the usually excellent Marion Cotillard and Tyrell Corporation Model 3567/B Michael Fassbender, there's lots of elegantly composed shots of people standing around in Middle-Earth-looking scenery and slow motion battles and ever-so-carefully arranged squalor all over the place, and some very good actors (and that Fassbender machine) exchanging glances and some gruffly rasped out snippets of dialogue and only occasional whispers of that Shakespeare guy, it's like they're afraid of an epidemic of iambic pentameter breaking out.

etoile violette, axelle ropert

her first medium length short. lonesome tailor serge bozon attends night class on french literature, presided over by bald professor in ill-fitting suits who seems more obsessed by rousseau's late life solitude than any specific reading. he listens to call in radio shows, deals with clients, hallucinates meetings in the woods with the elderly rosseau. more than anything a film about loneliness and the possibility of finding a peer group around a found interest, which is a guess telling for a group of writer/directors who convened around a film magazine. form is more like bozon's mods (which she wrote, and shares celine bozon as dp) than her later, lusher films like tirez la langue. loved it i think.



the little match girl, alejo moguillansky

moguillansky bringing his mix of dramatic material, documentary footage, c ollaborative hybrid stuff, and obsession with arts workers and finance together as elegantly as i think he ever has? i kind of miss the weird edges of a parrot and the swan but think this is an amazing and underrated movie. its a dense hour and 15 minutes or so, but very funny and warm, can't recommend enough if it hasn't been on your radar yet.


politzeiruf 110: smoke on the water, dominik graf

can't quite see this as the sex comedy that olaf moller described this as! but it's a very mean european crime thing, in the politicized post manchette mode, with graf's ability to push a scene with very specific/mean cultural observation making everything more interesting. what seems like a fairly rote detective thriller turns, in the second half, into a truly bleak paranoia thriller on euro state corruption and surveillance state. kept being ready to discount this as minor, and it kept surprising me. have watched most of season one mindhunter this week and graf much more unfussy but no less rigorous take on crime procedural honestly feels like breath of fresh air.



my friend 'a', takahisa zeze

the plot synopsis - slumming journalist turned factory worker thinks his new co-worker, who might have murdered a kid when he was young, might be connected to a brand new similar murder in the region - somehow led me to think this would be some kind of a thriller.

but instead it's one of zeze's odd prestige films, a novel adaptation that charts a vision of japan of grief-stricken drop outs, both young and old, somehow paying for social stigma of the past. zeze is an amazing moment for moment director - single scenes, like a factory accident that comes out of nowhere, or a character that hasn't allowed themselves a moment of happiness in years enjoying karaoke, or any dozen others, are truly great. not sure about the whole structure, which is very slow burn, using 3 or 4 other threads apart from the main plots that don't cohere until the very end (and one of these only intersects for vaguest thematic reason). on the other hand think film would be lesser for that big weird gambit...

edit - should say i watched the moguillansky/mariano llinas/santiago palavecino tres fabulas de villa ocampo thing and found it almost totally worthless. has nothing to say about the literature, the politics, or even the fetishism of the that circle, and has one trick (slow moving pans around the villa with some superimpositions) that it repeats over and over. hopefully the money from the institute helped finance historias extraordinarias and castro and so on.

Watched and loved a forum favourite: Une si jolie petite plage, or, as I found it in English translation, Muscle Beach Party. "I have now seen all 7 of American International Pictures's official beach party movies" is a sentence I never thought I'd write.

Evelyn wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:04 pm"I have now seen all 7 of American International Pictures's official beach party movies" is a sentence I never thought I'd write.

wait does that include Ski Party??

bure420 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:22 pm

Evelyn wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:04 pm"I have now seen all 7 of American International Pictures's official beach party movies" is a sentence I never thought I'd write.

wait does that include Ski Party??

Lol, if so, you got me! My understanding is that Ski Party is considered a spin-off, not an 'official' entrant (ditto with Sergeant Deadhead, Dr. Goldfoot, etc.) In any case, I don't think I could muster the courage for that one.

nrh wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2019 7:00 am
politzeiruf 110: smoke on the water, dominik graf

can't quite see this as the sex comedy that olaf moller described this as! but it's a very mean european crime thing, in the politicized post manchette mode, with graf's ability to push a scene with very specific/mean cultural observation making everything more interesting. what seems like a fairly rote detective thriller turns, in the second half, into a truly bleak paranoia thriller on euro state corruption and surveillance state. kept being ready to discount this as minor, and it kept surprising me. have watched most of season one mindhunter this week and graf much more unfussy but no less rigorous take on crime procedural honestly feels like breath of fresh air.

Any experience with other Graf films? I just mentioned him in the other thread and I have encountered one person who has claimed one of his early TV films as among their very favorite films, but I have only found easy access to one film which had that same constant surprise factor to it...

@JADEreigns i've only seen 2 other grafs, one a very recent television film called Am Abend aller Tage (quite roughly based on the aspern papers!) which i thought was very intriguing but i couldn't quite get my head around.

olaf moller curated a retro at anthology this year, but we only got to see his 1988 feature die katze, which was incredible. wish we could've seen more, both for the films and for moller's introductions. wba has a great list on letterboxd but unfortunately many of his favorites are not available with subtitles.

ronda nocturna, edgardo cozarinksy

cozarinksy returns to make a feature in buenos aires after many years, and it strangely feels more like a young man film than an old man film, maybe because of the naive openness of the actors, maybe because of the excitement of just going out in the world with a camera in what seems to be practical light.

young hustler makes his rounds over the course of one night, moving between clients and friends, entering empty spaces and secret interiors where both power and vice seem to concentrate. eventually memory seems to assert itself as ghosts or dreams, and then dawn comes.

interesting to see people argue over this in the kg comments threads - there is a stylization to this that could seem like awkwardness i suppose. but even if it is awkwardness i don't think i would like it less.



fragil como o mundo, rita azevedo gomes

can't believe it's taken me this long to see one of her features, but this is kind of extraordinary. two young lovers in rural town run off to the forest, where their romance takes the expected tragic course. somehow manages to be very beautiful without ever being precious, very rigorous without ever being schematic. constantly surprising, heterodox use of voice and narration; this is the kind of film where every drift of fog across the screen (or those shifts to color!) can announce major shifts in narrative register.

Robocop 2 and 3: I'm going against the grain here: 3 is better. It's more interesting visually, that's for sure. Dekker directs with some energy and there are some good transitions and use of dissolve that kind of surprised me. The effects are a bit ropey, but it's a fun film with a comic book feel to it that sometimes works and makes me forget about the bad performances from most of the supporting cast. It's cheesy, but unlike R2, at least it works as a dumb popcorn film, and the premise is superior.

2 has a really good ending with the two Robo's duking it out, but it really drags in the middle act, and the psychotic kid character just doesn't work. Noonan helps though and so does Weller, and it's a shame he wasn't in the 3rd installment, although Burke is OK in 3. 5/10 for 2 and 5.5/10 for 3. Maybe a 6 if I'm feeling charitable.

NASHVILLE -- the Altman I'm most taken with, damn near all of it works and works like hell. The occasional misstep into silliness (someone as vain as Haven Hamilton would make sure that his toupee matched his hair, or vice versa) doesn't dim the brilliance of the rest of it.

Ad Astra (Gray, 2019)

I agree, I didn't feel anything for the characters, either. Brad Pitt is, as always, Brad Pitt. I did like the sound effects/design, and the scenes of weightlessness were convincing. I haven't seen Gravity (2013) and probably won't, though I wonder how the technical effects there compare with this film's.

6/10

There's an amusing review of AD ASTRA on Digitalbits. There's just no way I'll sit through that.

Scanned through that review. Doesn't seem accurate to me. Gray doesn't make 'dumb' films. Flawed ones, yes, but dumb? No chance.