SCFZ

Roscoe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:48 pm10,000/10

awww yeah

der verlorene sohn - luis trenker (1934)

was expecting the lush mountain movie (snow! yay!) and watched it go to new york and film skyscrapers as if they were equally as immense and grand. was not expecting the insane pagan nightmare....

the pagan digression was my favorite part !

watched a recently subbed kawashima cuz he's generally doing something i enjoy, even if it's a geisha tale. the radiant ayako wakao spends her youth as a bar girl and mistress to an older man but doesn't let it keep her from having desires and when she's finally freed by his death, realizes her mistake in devoting herself to a someone who never put her first. letterboxd calls it 'a geisha's diary' but a more literal translation yields 'women are born twice.'

office (johnnie to) felt like midtier to tbh. while quite enjoyable, it didn't have much of an impact on me overall. i'm sure it has to do with the film's hermetically sealed (literally and figuratively) universe. impressive set design aside, everything is so independent of authenticity as to appear plastic. the characters are just that: characters; types; rarely do any of them become people (although, in the last quarter of the film, to does achieve some genuine drama and emotional heights). and cuz of this, there simply wasn't much tension. nothing feels at stake. the ending can be seen coming from a mile away, so its culmination just doesn't satisfy like it should. it's most effective as a commentary on capitalism corrupting the individual within a communist society, and in this way the artificiality makes perfect sense, even as it works against other parts of the film. at the beginning, i got a hawksian vibe, and really thought it'd go all out as a fast-paced screwball quasi-musical, but these expectations were met only intermittently. idk. maybe it was my (expectations') fault. it's certainly watchable (seems to is incapable of making an outright bad/boring film), but it's far from the dir's best imo

Rewatched just the "I'll Be Hard to Handle" number from Astaire-Rogers's 1935 Roberta. It has me wanting to make a supercut for myself of all the Astaire-Rogers song-and-dance numbers lined up in chronological order. Would be the perfect thing to watch when in need of a pick-me-up. Off the top of my head, Ginger's the most delightful style-iconic song-and-dance performer in movie history, maybe.

the terrorizers (edward yang) exceptional craftsmanship, but i think the ending kinda ruined it for me. feels like it should be a four, and yet i gave it a three. would luv to hear others' thoughts

keep turning the terrorizers over in my head, so i'm pretty sure that i really liked it. its forcefulness toward the end was simply unsettling, which is a testament (not a detriment)

The late silent Orchids and Ermine (1927) proved to be fine Thursday night 'comfort film' viewing, starring the ever impressive Colleen Moore and directed by underrated craftsman Alfred Santell. Pauline Kael nicely described Moore as so - "the best comedienne of the silent flapper period, wore her dark hair short and straight with bangs--it was an almost abstract frame for the games she played with her eyes and mouth. No mere personality girl but a light, unaffected, inventive actress, in style she was a little like Buster Keaton." Indeed Moore steers the film with the expressiveness in her eyes and Santell mediates nicely between subtle tracking shots and static mediums to highlight Moore's comedic gestures, as in this abrupt transition from reverie to discomfort below.

https://streamable.com/xclm5

Roscoe wrote: ↑Sun Jan 19, 2020 12:42 pm 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

Herz made a few good films. I'd recommend checking out Morgiana and Beauty and The Beast if you liked The Cremator. They aren't as good as The Cremator though.

Needed something light and smart, and there was Lumet's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS on the Criterion Channel, and good pleasure was ours for a couple of hours. For all the fun the movie never forgets the tragedies at the story's base, which can't be said of many of the Christie adaptations that followed, which settled for high-camp histrionics and easy (if entertaining) bitchiness.

wagon master -- for john ford's bday

I was a bit disappointed with Duvidha (Mani Kaul), but everyone here seems to loves it, so maybe y'all can tell me what I'm missing. Here's a short review I wrote:

A spirit in a banyan tree falls in love with a newlywed bride and takes advantage of the groom's five-year absence to impersonate him and live with her. He admits his identity to her only, and she accepts him, but when the husband comes back confusion reigns.

Based on a Rajasthani folk tale, it's a nice story, and putting the movie in its best light it's about the unavoidable ambiguity of humanity. Just as the ghost represents a second side of the husband, the wife's indecision represents her own duality. Does she prefer the honest husband who leaves her for work, or the lying husband who's attentive to her?

Compared to the tale itself however, the movie is disappointingly abstract. It relies too heavily on voice-over narration, and there's no acting in it - the characters go through enough motions to illustrate the story, but not enough to bring it to life.

q: are the thin man movies supposed to be actually good; or are they merely pleasant distractions? cuz i just finished the first two, and i'm pretty sure i'm feeling the latter...

For me, the astonishing chemistry between Loy and Powell elevates the first THIN MAN movie onto a higher level of pure ecstatic delight than mere "pleasant distraction" would supply. Profound it ain't -- the real brutality of Hammett's novel is sweetened a great deal, that family of poisonous predatory slimeballs toned down to mere eccentricity. And I'll always enjoy Nick's dinner-table summation, as he lays out the entire scheme -- as Nora says, "how do you know all this?" and Nick replies, "I don't -- it's the only way it all makes sense."

The other films in the series have some glimmers, but I never bother with them for long. But yeah, I'll stick my neck out for the first one. That Christmas morning scene alone...

Umbugbene wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2020 8:26 pm I was a bit disappointed with Duvidha (Mani Kaul), but everyone here seems to loves it, so maybe y'all can tell me what I'm missing.

kaul is a difficult filmmaker, both to watch and to write about - duvidha is probably the most approachable of his films that i've seen, and the very appealing original vijaydan detha story (he was a modernist writer who often worked off of rajasthani oral traditions, and a good deal of the spoken text is pretty directly from detha's version; there's a much more traditional version of the underlying folktale called paheli that's streaming on netflix) has a lot to do with that.

to put the narration/flat performance thing in context his previous film (ashad ka ek din) is a 2 character theater adaptation set in a single small hut, where the entire dialogue track was recorded prior to filming, so we get a dialogue heavy film where we never see the characters actually speak the dialogue, just a succession of poses, fragments of bodies, gestures etc. so duvidha's approach to narrative is actually much more straightforward in many ways. and it should be said that satyajit ray infamously found this approach totally infuriating.

for me, at least, the approach is very moving in duvidha just as an extension of the dramatic concerns - the fragmenting of time as an extension of waiting and desire, of the self and the body, the cruel dilemma at the end (after all the ghost might be lying but he's the husband who loves her, while the other abandons her out of greed) which she has no agency in solving. but then i find the movie kind of mesmerizing just on the level of form and rhythm, and wonder if it's more difficult to approach if it's not immediately appealing just on that level...

thoxans wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2020 1:44 pm q: are the thin man movies supposed to be actually good; or are they merely pleasant distractions? cuz i just finished the first two, and i'm pretty sure i'm feeling the latter...

pretty much agree with roscoe - they are pleasant for the chemistry between the two stars (3 if you count the dog), have some good scenes, not much more. i loved these when i was a kid and watched on tcm but the more '30s american films you see the slighter they feel.

the book on the other hand is genuinely great; not only are mystery genre elements handled beautifully but nick and nora themselves, treated like actual drunks rather than funny movie lushes, are a good deal more interesting.

Re: Duvidha - Thanks NRH... I was genuinely curious why it's so well liked. I watched Paheli the same day after finishing Duvidha and preferred it slightly, though I usually welcome more challenging modes of storytelling. At any rate the story comes across well in both films (in different ways). By casting Shah Rukh Khan, the Bollywood version puts more weight on the husband's character vis-a-vis the wife.

I saw a different ambiguity in the husband - that he might love his wife too, but not the way she hopes to be loved. He leaves her to provide for her, and upon his return he accepts her infidelity with the utmost understanding. Paheli's ending more clearly recognizes the husband and the ghost as two sides of one man, but I got the same idea from Duvidha without being "told" ...and in that sense maybe Kaul's version is better.

two weeks in another town







this might be izzy's finest film. and possibly minnelli's too. like godard's le mepris via fellini and fassbinder. a requiem for old hollywood

rischka wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2020 10:51 amtwo weeks in another town

nice! just recorded this one off tcm

Matthias and maxime

Dolan's latest. Top tier Xav. Tender. Simultaneously vague and precise. Great use of nondiegetic pop tunes as always. 5/5

1917 is a pretty lousy movie, except for a couple of minutes toward the very end when an actual human being appears onscreen to add some actual humanity to the cliched and mechanical video-game proceedings.

He isn't there for long.

But even in those couple of moments he manages to add more warmth and life to 1917 than ever happened in the entirety of that PARASITE thing.

saw my first schanalec last night, her 1995 feature debut my sister's good fortune. found myself fascinated by it and more than a little perplexed - a young man and two sisters love triangle (sallitt compared the scenario to doillon, which tracks) shot with a precise, fragmented style. it's at once very good with the underlying drama and utterly aloof from narrative expectations, the kind of film where entire scenes or portions of scenes that would be essential to any other version of this story are quietly elided.

schanalec picked three films to screen along with her retro - pialat's we won't grow old together, oliveira's i'm going home, and lee suk-gyung's the day after, which nobody i talked to had ever heard of before. and it's kind of amazing, a portrait of a recently divorced single mother in the days after learning her ex husband is getting remarried. small, sketch like scenes of her life add up until the film pivots towards its centerpiece, a lengthy (i think at least 30 minutes though i could be wrong) two person scene in a remote riverside hotel room where she and another (similarly divorced) woman, a lecturer at the same convention, stay up all night drinking, smoking and eating as they talk about their lives and push at each other's vulnerabilities. debut film by the director, and doesn't seem like she's made anything else since...

So Parasite only came out in the UK last week which is ridiculous, so I've missed the whole discourse on it, but I'm a bit confused by the unanimous critical adoration for it because the last act is clearly inferior to the mastery of the last two. Did people actually like that ending? Seems like a cop-out to me, though I'm not sure how it could've ended otherwise.

PARASITE struck me as a total waste of time -- flashy plot gimmicks and glibly facile social commentary but with a self-pitying ending so folks can pretend the movie's got some "feelings" or something. As is so often the case, the only thing missing was any reason to give a flying fuck about even a single frame's worth of what was being shown onscreen.

MrCarmady wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:55 pmDid people actually like that ending? Seems like a cop-out to me, though I'm not sure how it could've ended otherwise.

I'm enthusiastic about the movie, but I also had minor reservations that correspond with your criticisms. The movie ratchets the tension so high that the yard party climax is a bit of a letdown, using violence instead of imagination to resolve the situation. Does your question pertain more to the climax or the coda? I preferred the latter.

Saw your review on Letterboxd too, where you question whether the film makes any point about inequality beyond the obvious and widely known. As far as I saw (I've only seen it once and haven't studied it properly yet), your doubts seem well founded. Still, isn't it also worthwhile when a movie conveys an old or well-trodden idea in a way that people can feel it more urgently? Inequality is an increasingly relevant topic, and not everyone necessarily gives it due weight. Movies probably work better than essays at convincing people... think for example of all the films of the Great Depression or WWII that rallied people to embrace the New Deal or the fight against fascism by reiterating shared values. They weren't original ideas, but movies still played a valuable role.

I'm only being hypothetical here. I need to see Parasite again to say more. One thing I like is the ambiguity of the title - which family is really the parasite? It could go either way. We don't doubt which side the movie takes, but because of this ambiguity it doesn't play its hand too forcefully.

Umbugbene wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:54 pm

MrCarmady wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:55 pmDid people actually like that ending? Seems like a cop-out to me, though I'm not sure how it could've ended otherwise.

I'm enthusiastic about the movie, but I also had minor reservations that correspond with your criticisms. The movie ratchets the tension so high that the yard party climax is a bit of a letdown, using violence instead of imagination to resolve the situation. Does your question pertain more to the climax or the coda? I preferred the latter.

Saw your review on Letterboxd too, where you question whether the film makes any point about inequality beyond the obvious and widely known. As far as I saw (I've only seen it once and haven't studied it properly yet), your doubts seem well founded. Still, isn't it also worthwhile when a movie conveys an old or well-trodden idea in a way that people can feel it more urgently? Inequality is an increasingly relevant topic, and not everyone necessarily gives it due weight. Movies probably work better than essays at convincing people... think for example of all the films of the Great Depression or WWII that rallied people to embrace the New Deal or the fight against fascism by reiterating shared values. They weren't original ideas, but movies still played a valuable role.

I'm only being hypothetical here. I need to see Parasite again to say more. One thing I like is the ambiguity of the title - which family is really the parasite? It could go either way. We don't doubt which side the movie takes, but because of this ambiguity it doesn't play its hand too forcefully.

The coda has a certain elegance but as Roscoe points out below, it's quite self-pitying and anyway, by that point the father had lost my sympathy, I only felt sorry for the sister. The yard party climax is a letdown exactly in the way you described, going for a bombastic conclusion in lieu of any interesting resolution of a seemingly unsolvable class conflict. I've also only seen it once and I'm not a big re-watcher so any more elaborate thoughts will have to wait. I agree with you that not every film has to make a deep point about inequality, but I guess I was expecting to come away with a bit more after all the gushing reviews.

Roscoe wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:51 pm PARASITE struck me as a total waste of time -- flashy plot gimmicks and glibly facile social commentary but with a self-pitying ending so folks can pretend the movie's got some "feelings" or something. As is so often the case, the only thing missing was any reason to give a flying fuck about even a single frame's worth of what was being shown onscreen.

This, on the other hand, I think is too harsh, though the film's elevated reputation certainly invites a dismissive response. I liked the camaraderie of the family, the plot gimmicks worked because the film was very funny and quite tense. Do you care about what's being shown onscreen in any other con movie? I think it succeeds at being that if not being particularly emotionally moving or especially thought-provoking.

MrCarmady wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 7:23 pm Do you care about what's being shown onscreen in any other con movie? I think it succeeds at being that if not being particularly emotionally moving or especially thought-provoking.

Maybe "care" isn't the right word -- more like "interest" is closer to the mark. I was just never interested, invested, whatever, in the proceedings, and the final "oh dad poor dad you're living in their basement and I'm feeling so sad" ending fell very flat -- poor guy, all he ever had to do was not commit bloody murder in front of multiple witnesses, if he's not happy where he is, well, he should do some serious counting of blessings, he could always be in jail where, not to be all heartless, he fucking belongs.

Con Movies I cared about, was interested in, didn't have to struggle to stay awake in, not all masterpieces but didn't strike me as being colossally overrated goop: THE STING, THE KILLING, THE HUSTLER, WHITE HEAT, RIFIFI, RESERVOIR DOGS, Donald E. Westlake's novels THE HOT ROCK and BANK SHOT and WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS?, any number of episodes of COLUMBO, even THE PRODUCERS...

typically late for the corman poll, but finally watched one of his poe cycle and...the haunted palace is actually a lovecraft film, a kind of gloss on the case of charles dexter ward, rather than a poe, with the poe name grafted on for brand value i guess?

has issues - if i recall the young charles dexter ward actively takes part in unleashing the ancestor who will murder him and take over his body, where here vincent price just kind of gets possessed without any real cursed agency on his part. the nastier apects of lovecrafts horror ideas aren't really investigated (but you can't really expect that at this point), and there's a treatment of congenital deformity as horror shorthand that's typical of genre but i guess always feels a little cheap to me. climax kind of fails, the elder god in the pit is a bit of a miss...

but...it's kind of amazing? the haunted palace is a great evil edifice, one that seems constantly larger every time we're introduced to some new corridor, no less fascinating for the limitations of the set. the foggy, cursed town of arkham is a great set, all the faces are great even (especially?) if they seem to be coming from local rep theater, there is a real sense of doomed atmosphere that helps sell everything.

and even if price transformation is handled as harshly as it could have been the kind elegant husband who suddenly transforms to misogynist brute (pawing at wife and declaring husband has certain rights no less) is treated with real disgust and gravity. if this is lesser entry in the cycle i'm curious to see more...

masque of the red death - kind of an odd one for me. the setup is brilliant, with price's satanist prince prospero subjecting the elite class to his decadent whims as the country outside dies of "the red death" plague. combining red death and hopfrog stories is a really good idea! and price is incredible - there is a strange current of self loathing or melancholy running through his performance that makes it hard to dismiss as camp. corman and roeg work well together, and the mix of the stylized sets and roeg's fleshier, more impulsive camera is pretty interesting.

it's also a frustrating film in some ways. hard not to love a movie this unique, an american grindhouse art film with dreams of grandeur and a genuine connection to some version of the counter culture of the time. at the same time it's hard not to lament a kind of lost opportunity, a feeling that the staging could be a little tighter, that the major set pieces (the flaming ape finale, which always makes me think of the james ensor hopfrog painting, or any of the major group choreography scenes) could be a little more elegantly worked through.

there is also something very sincere about following this line of willful doom and damnation that i think demands real engagement. it's there in haunted palace and much more pronounced here.