Last Watched

[greennui]

That sadistic violence near the end of OUATIH really rubbed me the wrong way, teenage revenge fantasy stuff.

[rischka]

teenage revenge fantasy stuff.

aka qt's brand. happy holidays y'all



i watched 3 godfathers and today will be for the GOAT christmas movie: donovan's reef!

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Merry Christmas.
I kind of was rubbed wrong by it... I have no love for the manson family... but I kept trying to parse why they in particular deserved such fierce and gleeful violence.
But the more I dwelled the more I liked it. Because taken as a whole, they represent the death of the hope, positivity, and potential that the 1960s presented (particularly the death of American Cinema as a significant creative force, because like most Tarantino movies, this is about movies more than anything else.)
The hippie movement represented a burst of human spirit... and the excess of the Manson family led to the death of that burst of spirit... led to Reagenomics, Hyper-capitalism, pre-existing ips, a lack of care for the environment at a large, cynical scale never seen before. All the problems coming to a head today. We're facing the death of Cinema as a significant art-form, or at least a medium where significant works of art have great reach, the earth is in the beginning of the fever that will wipe out our species like some unwanted bacteria, fascism is on the rise, having children seems a goddamn mistake... and capitalism has reached its tipping point with inequality being completely unsustainable, etc...
It's not fair to realistically blame all that on the Mansons... but emotionally it kind of makes sense. It's a realease that's not a revenge fantasy about the death of Sharon Tate... it's a revenge fantasy that allows for the release of rage from all the collective anxiety wrought by the death of the movement they (metaphorically) killed with Sharon Tate...
And the more that emotional logic sunk in with me... the more the violence felt earned and the film felt a lot more mature and of RIGHT NOW, rather than just a nostalgia piece.
In the end, I think it's probably my favorite of his films.

[Joks Trois]

^^Blaming the fall of cultural standards, or 'failed idealism', on the Manson's? That's a reach if I ever heard one. I guess it's just too hard for some to accept that Tarantino, for all his bluster, is fairly mindless. Hippies accomplished very little anyway, and we already have Easy Rider and The Last Movie. They were made decades ago

Rischka: I have 3 Godfathers lined up to watch before New Year!

[Roscoe]

A quick google search about what the Manson family members actually did to those people next door might give one an idea of why such fierce violence might have been deserved. It's kind of a MINORITY REPORT situation here, isn't it, heading off criminals before they've even committed the murder. Spielberg puts the criminals to sleep, and Tarantino slays them with flamethrowers.

[rischka]

the few old hippies i know are avid trump supporters

[greennui]

I guess it's just too hard for some to accept that Tarantino, for all his bluster, is fairly mindless.

Yeah, to me it didn't seem to go deeper than him filming his adolescent Tate murder fantasies whilst sticking the boot into hippies at the same time. The rest of the movie felt like a laborious collection of dvd extras, extended and deleted scenes. Brad Pitt's charismatic performance was a rare highlight. I'm not a big QT fan which probably shows...

https://twitter.com/BootsRiley/status/1 ... 87201?s=20

[Monsieur Arkadin]

^^Blaming the fall of cultural standards, or 'failed idealism', on the Manson's? That's a reach if I ever heard one.

Maybe, but it's not a new interpretation. The Manson Murders have consistently been referred to as the end of the 1960s. It's been the dominant meta-narrative of the whole ordeal since at least the late 70s.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

Also, I think Boots is wrong on this one. Not about the fact that they were white supremacists... that's objectively true. But the rest of the world saw them as hippies. That was more important than what their ideology actually was, the right was able systematically militiarize the narrative of Hippie Excess (which to be fair, Manson deliberately used the hippie movement aesthetically to gain followers who thought they were a part of it... even as early as when it was in its infancy in Haight Ashbury). They were definitely not making a "left" critique of society, but they were viewed that way, and also co-opting the aesthetics and certain rhetorical aspects of leftist critique, which was then used to deflate a legitimate leftist movement.

[Monsieur Arkadin]

I watched Jordan Peele's US as a christmas movie with my family.
Similar to Get Out, it falls apart in the third act due to a weird obsession with trying to explain the mystical elements of the film instead of leaving everything more mysterious and metaphorical. But the literal explanation kind of ruins the allegory and is so laboured, that the weakened allegory becomes the most interesting part of the film. Which then leaves us with a weirdly tedious surface narrative, and a slightly more interesting subtext that no longer really works.
I liked it as a horror movie at least through the end of the second act. Then quickly got bored from that point onward.
Quite liked Lupita in this though.

[DT.]

Cats - even with the lowest expectations, this was a nightmare.

[rischka]

ZAMA -- loved it, ordered the book!

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1210 ... 92449?s=20

[greennui]

The sound design is so wild and ingenious in that one ^

[Roscoe]

UNCUT GEMS -- Adam Sandler's marvelous as Howard, a slimebag dealer in gems and general tackiness, who seems to be on to the Big Score, and of course everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and I was watching through my fingers more than once. Fast caffeinated stuff. I dug it.

[liquidnature]

Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

I understand and agree fully with every criticism lobbed at it, from fans and critics alike, but I also just really enjoyed watching it, as with all of the other films in the saga and even the two anthology films. As a very spiritual person, I tend to view everything through that lens and therefore experience and latch onto spiritual metaphors in ways others may not.

Very interested to see Uncut Gems, Knives Out, A Hidden Life, and Top Gun 2, which is the most I've been interested in current releases in many years.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

2 hours into The Irishman. It's quite interesting and, caveats aside, good! I was not ready for Ray Romano to be in this, and, remarkably, he's my favourite performance by far.

Edit: A hilarious line to end my first day of viewing this on.

[Roscoe]

TUNES OF GLORY -- Ronald Neame's picture of a power struggle in a Scots Army post, between a rowdy officer and the new commanding officer who wants everything by the book. Alec Guinness seems to have been very proud of his scenery chewing in the role of Jock Sinclair, and he's effective enough in places, but the strain at being so over top so much is evident too much of the time. The movie's secret weapon is John Mills as the new colonel, an overly brisk and fussy man who seems to have some demons of his own. And there's the radiant Susannah York in an early role, and a whole bunch of those British character actors that had me going, "oh yeah, him/her!" -- chief among them is the sublime Kay Walsh.

I'd watched BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI the day before, which might explain my lukewarm response to this film. Lean's picture of corrupt leadership and collapsing principles makes this film seem rather prim somehow.

[sally]

hi

i love john gilbert. that's it.


(the show - browning, 1927)

my brother pointed out to me at xmas when i was gushing over adam driver that it's a well known (apart from to me) family fact that i generally fancy the big-nosed. i don't see it.

[thoxans]

::insert gerard depardieu joke here::

[Joks Trois]

Vitalina Varela: Seen it twice since last week. It's a mix of his last 3 major films. Visually it's stunning, next level kind of stuff, but it is the first of Costa's films since 2000 that doesn't really stand for more than itself. It is just about a woman's grief, and it mostly lacks the universal dimension of Colossal and Horse. Having said that, it is better than any other 2019 film, but I still feel slightly disappointed. Perhaps my expectations were too high. 7.5 to 8/10.

What Did The Lady Forget?: Kind of boring. Probably the worst Ozu talkie I've seen. Then again, I'm of the opinion that he didn't make a truly great film until Late Spring. The actors are dull and visually it's nothing special. 5/10

[rischka]

homeland: Iraq year zero -- a 5 hour documentary chronicling the director's family and friends, before and after the US invasion of 2003





i guess i picked the right week to watch this. 5 stars easy

[sally]

wow. doesn't that make you even more depressed though? i was thinking about starting to look at news again, but not this week.

[rischka]

you'd think so but i feel like it helps me to keep the truth straight in the sea of propaganda. i can't help looking at the news. maybe when i'm in a jungle in mexico...
(conveniently happening during 'super tuesday')

[Roscoe]

RISE OF SKYWALKER -- at least Denis Lawson got a day's work out of it. More derivative than I'd expected, not just of classic narrative tropes but of movie gimmicks, nods to Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS and THE MATRIX and even GONE WITH THE WIND had me rolling my eyes.

[Roscoe]

MEPHISTO -- Istvan Szabo's picture of Hendrik Hofgen, an actor in 1930s Germany who sheds every possible conviction in his rise to the top of Nazi cultural life, and a fine film that I've always admired, in a new 4k restoration soon to be coming on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, and alas, someone has decided to use the original Hungarian soundtrack, which means that Klaus Maria Brandauer's voice performance has been dubbed over by another actor, and for me the impact of the film is lessened by about 90%.

Hoping for Kino to add the other soundtrack, where Brandauer (among others) is speaking in German in his/their own voice(s) when it comes out on Blu-Ray. Really fervently hoping.

Edit: checked out Brandauer's performance in my old DVD, and yeah, the difference is palpable. It's like a restoration of DUCK SOUP where Groucho Marx is dubbed by Keanu Reeves.

[liquidnature]

Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018)

Actually watched something new-ish (and non-Hollywood) for a change, and oh my sweet lord was it good. Haven't been this impressed with a newer feature since maybe Serra's Birdsong or Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, which are not even new anymore, but also haven't watched hardly any - maybe there's some good stuff out there after all. Gonna try watching more from the past decade, with the resolutions and all.

[sally]

argh i've got the willies watching pollet's la horla

i think we finally found where louis le prince went argh

[Roscoe]

HOLIDAY -- the Cukor thing with Cary Grant and K. Hepburn, a film I've never liked and a repeat viewing did nothing to significantly change it. I still think it's one of Grant's very worst performances, he never for a moment convinces as someone who's actually had to pull himself up by hard work since the age of ten, and his evident discomfort in the role isn't helped by the mugging and face-pulling he resorts to. James Stewart might have been better casting. The rest of it is pretty standard "It Ain't Easy Being Rich" bullshit, with some pretty good performances that occasionally transcend the cliche -- I'm thinking especially of Lew Ayres, who manages to make his character more interesting than the Poor Little Rich Drunk a lesser actor might have settled for.

Overall -- 3/10

[Roscoe]

THE CREMATOR, a tasty little black comedy from 1969 Czechoslovakia, set in late 1930s Prague where a professional cremator is very very proud of his life in general and his profession in particular, and he starts to notice those Germans massing at the border, and realizes that things might not be as good as he thought. It casts a coldly malign little spell. I dug it.

8/10

[Roscoe]

THE JOKE -- part of the Czech New Wave box set, and a fascinating little movie on all counts. It lost me a bit toward the end, gotta admit. I'll give it another go before committing myself.

And then the next day along came---

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, seen at the Metrograph on the Big Screen where it belongs. Wow. I'm finding it hard to think about much else since seeing it. The four hours went by far more swiftly and engagingly than in a lot of much shorter films about to pick up awards bling in the coming weeks (I'm looking at that ponderous elephantine bore called PARASITE, yeah, you, PARASITE, fuck you PARASITE). I'm sure that I missed a good deal, cultural and historical and social and language issues that will go right by a mere American, to say nothing of issues with the subtitles, where I was struggling to put names to characters more than I wish I was (I still have no idea exactly who Airplane is). And it just means that I have to pull out that Blu-Ray and re-check some scenes, and do some online reading, and the good fun has only just begun.

10,000/10