1997 poll

[FLABREZU]

End of Evangelion (Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki)

Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai)
Bounce Ko Gals (Masato Harada)
Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven)
Titanic (James Cameron)
Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson)
As Good as It Gets (James L. Brooks)
Grosse Point Blank (George Armitage)
The Game (David Fincher)
The Ice Storm (Ang Lee)
Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan)
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Hana-Bi (Takeshi Kitano)
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)

[sally]

jiri it's broke.

and now? i changed the link for another one. give the mole a second chance...

someone else try! i'm getting paranoid! i googled krtek a houby and if it's approx 5 mins long, then i am OK, but why o why is scfz killing all the little videos?

(also thank you for pointing out friedl's knittelfeld is 97, totally missed that ♥)

[niminy-piminy]

if it's approx 5 mins long, then i am OK
(also thank you for pointing out friedl's knittelfeld is 97, totally missed that ♥)

it's 5 min long bedtime story.
(yw! knittelfeld is on my watchlist for a long, so finally gonna watch it when i know it is truly worth watching.)

[niminy-piminy]

oh, i almost forgot about my past obsession with Ulrich Seidl and his films about ppl with various strange obsessions.
https://letterboxd.com/film/the-bosom-friend/

Main character of this movie is Rene Rupnik, a former math teacher. He is forty years old and lives together with his mother in a desolate block of flats. Ever since his early youth women with big breasts have fascinated him, because they symbolise a kind of earth mother to him. Object of Rene’s fantasy is the actress Senta Berger, to him everything a woman should be. Standing by the blackboard and explaining the mathematical laws of sine and cosine (‘sinus’ is bosom in Latin), Rene sings the praises of the female curves and those of Senta Berger in particular.

https://youtu.be/wDvKNwr9PX4

[niminy-piminy]

omg! i just discovered the ultimate 1997 "storyline" on imdb...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115797/

Sabine, an adolescent girl with a gift for mathematics becomes involved with JIRI, a 40-something man-of-the-theatre from PRAGUE. The story of their relationship and the gradual transformation of Sabine's life as a result of it.

i see, letterboxd tends to omit all the important trivia while describing films...
https://letterboxd.com/film/love-math-and-sex/

A highly intelligent teenage girl has an affair with a 40-year-old man.

in any case, LOVE, MATH AND SEX (Charlotte Silvera) is now (logically) on top of my watchlist!

from imdb user reviews...

a forty-something brimming with Slavonic charm

Czechslavokian playwright

comes from czekia

i like "Czechslavokian" neologism, "czekia" is not that good, never heard of "brimming with Slavonic charm" related to Czechslavokian males who usually wear socks in sandals (instead of sword & sandals).

The dialogue, when it does not integrate maths in its lines remains trite and dull. But when the heroine says that her "derivative" turns negative that her lover is her "vector" or when she uses the probability in her father's problems it's pretty original.

She impulsively prostitutes herself to him, even though she is still a virgin, and they fall in love even as she prepares to go to Belgium for a international math competition.

At first blush this looks like another French "lolita" movie kind of along the lines of "36 Fillete", "White Wedding", or "The Little Thief". It is a little better than some of the others though. It's told from the perspective of the young girl (i.e. from the perspective of "Lolita" rather than "Humbert Humbert"), which is kind of refreshing and--if it had been directed by someone like Catherine Breillat--might even be considered feminist.

If I remember well, the curve of the tangent function sometimes tends towards infinity whereas the cosine one endlessly goes up and down: that's why I'd rather have cosine to describe this movie which fluctuates between bad and good.

Strangely enough, this movie kind of reminded me of "Baxter" where you have a highly intelligent dog that nevertheless still acts like a dog a lot of the time.

[niminy-piminy]

the third 1997 poll viewing, THE MOLE IN THE UNDERGROUND (Zdeněk Miler) also called "Krtek a metro" or "The Little Mole and the Metro".
it's a bit a sharksploitation (shark swallows a hare, but is forced by a robot to vomit him back among his animal friends on the beach which they all reached via diy subway)...
https://youtu.be/kL8516au93w

for us, the (Mid European) Czechslavokian moles (with no access to the sea), to dig an underground tunnel up to the sea shore is a recurrent wet dream. the proof of it is another film, called RETURN TO ADRIAPORT(Adéla Babanová, 2013)...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5524862/

Czechoslovakia was a landlocked country. During the communist regime, workers were receiving vouchers to spend their holidays in resorts in the mountains, etc. But there were no Czechoslovak resorts at the sea and the regime could not let their citizens travel to the sea because the people might find a way to escape to the West. So in 1975, Czech professor of economics Karel Zlábek designed a tunnel linking Czechoslovakia to the sea. The plan, relying on approval by Yugoslavia, called for spoilage from the tunnel - which would have led beneath the territories of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Yugoslav Slovenia - to be used to construct an artificial island in the Adriatic Sea, Adriaport.

In 1975, Czech professor of economics Karel Žlábek, in collaboration with engineers from Pragoprojekt, designed and calculated the shortest route for linking Czechoslovakia with the Adriatic Sea via a tunnel. The plan called for spoilage from the tunnel – which would have led beneath the territories of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Slovenia – to be used to construct an artificial island in the Adriatic Sea. The island, which was to be called Adriaport, would have belonged to Czechoslovakia. This scripted documentary tells the story of professor Žlábek's meeting with President Gustáv Husák in order to convince him of his vision.

https://youtu.be/WwK8bdguq24

[niminy-piminy]

poll viewing No.4, CUP-O-ABOMINATIONS (Ben Hillman)...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0459249/

Straight from the Bible to Your Lips (it's devilicious)...
https://vimeo.com/46400455

[MrCarmady]

Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage)
Mat i syn (Aleksandr Sokurov)
The Game (David Fincher)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai)
Face/Off (John Woo)
Gattaca (Andrew Niccol)
Henry Fool (Hal Hartley)
Lily and Jim (Don Hertzfeldt) sh
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki)
Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon)
Con Air (Simon West)
The Man Who Knew Too Little (Jon Amiel)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson)
The Fifth Element (Luc Besson)
Gummo (Harmony Korine)
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Sex & Violence (Bill Plympton) sh
Hana-Bi (Takeshi Kitano)
In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute)
Fever Pitch (David Evans)

A bunch of these could use a re-watch but let's go with that for now.

The two shorts on my list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDt-Fz0 ... &index=112
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2uebu

To Watch:
Lost Highway
Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie
The Sweet Hereafter
Titanic
Contact
Cube
Level Five
Public Housing
The Eel
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

[kanafani]

Unranked long list of notable movies for now:

Same Old Song (Alain Resnais, 1997)
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (Mark Rappaport, 1997)
Innocence (Zeki Demirkubuz, 1997)
Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997)
The Expression of Hands (Harun Farocki, 1997)
Ossos (Pedro Costa, 1997)
HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Olivier Assayas, 1997)
The Crazy Stranger (Tony Gatlif, 1997)
Bhoothakkannadi (A K Lohithadas, 1997)
The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)
The Life of Jesus (Bruno Dumont, 1997)
Public Housing (Frederick Wiseman, 1997)
Still Life (Harun Farocki, 1997)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997)
The Mirror (Jafar Panahi, 1997)
The Second Civil War (Joe Dante, 1997)
The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
Jazz-34 (Robert Altman, 1997)
Robinson in Space (Patrick Keiller, 1997)
Blue Moon (Ko I-Chen, 1997)
Crazy of You (Akram Zaatari, 1997)

[rischka]

and xiao wu/pickpocket is 98 on imdb

DAMMIT

[kanafani]

and xiao wu/pickpocket is 98 on imdb

DAMMIT

Oh

[rischka]

and may i say it will be my personal mission to keep two of my least favorite films down as far as possible (life is beautiful and the fifth element)

[kanafani]

I am intrigued by the total absence of Altman's Jazz-34 from ballots. Has nobody seen it? I remember loving it even though not particularly interested in jazz music in general. Perhaps I will put it in a certain place for curious souls.

Also unfortunate is the absence of Blue Moon, one of my favorite discoveries of 2020. It's made of 5 20-minute parts that can be watched in any order, but far from being an empty gimmick, it is actually a lovely movie.

[thoxans]

in alphabetical order rn w/ no clear number one

the blackout (abel ferrara)
brother (aleksei balabanov)
cure (kiyoshi kurosawa)
the fifth element (luc besson)
fireworks (takeshi kitano)
gridlock'd (vondie curtis-hall)
innocence (zeki demirkubuz)
jackie brown (quentin tarantino)
lifeline (johnnie to)
mother and son (aleksandr sokurov)
nowhere (gregg araki)
ossos (pedro costa)
princess mononoke (hayao miyazaki)
rainy dog (takashi miike)
the river (tsai ming-liang)
romy and michele's high school reunion (david mirkin)
starship troopers (paul verhoeven)
taste of cherry (abbas kiarostami)
timeless bottomless bad movie (jang sun-woo)
ulee's gold (victor nunez)

and this doesn't even include all the guilty pleasures and childhood favs...

[kanafani]

and may I say it will be my personal mission to keep two of my least favorite films down as far as possible (life is beautiful and the fifth element)

Fifth Element I remember as good dumb fun. Life is beautiful is an atrocity. Another clunker from this year is the Devil's Advocate.

[Holymanm]

Spawn (Mark A.Z. Dippé, 1997)

so disappointed with that one to this very day... remember when '97 was gonna be the year of spawn, with a theatrical flick, a tv show, and a playstation game all being released? sigh. the movie was garbage (even if leguizamo was solid), and videogame was crap (bad controls, crummy graphics, and pretty much just plain ol' boring); only the tv show was good (especially that first season), but it never really took off cuz a cartoon aimed at an adult audience based on a comic book aimed at teenage boys that aired on hbo late on friday nights was kind of a hard sell. but i still have all my issues of the comic book in plastic sleeves with the hard cardboard slide-ins, 99% of them in mint condition. have most of the issues through #100, as well as some of the crossover/spin-off stuff. out of curiosity, checked not long ago to see how much they were worth, and the value had increased ~0% in the twenty years i've owned them. thank god i started investing in mutual funds instead

I'm too young to remember all that about '97 but I remember seeing the show on a couple times, and then later I read a decent amount of the comics and played the video game. Yeah it's sort of funny how it never became the incredibly huge big new character/franchise it was supposed to! And then McFarlane's edgy 90s drawing style sort of went out of vogue...

[Lencho of the Apes]

A theme for 1997?

Of the four movies I watched first for this year's poll, three of them dealt with a combination of mental illness, pssychotherapy (optional), actes gratuites, existentialist bad-faith and gazing into the void.

Cure - K Kurosawa
Funny Games - M. Haneke
Genealogies D'Un Crime - R. Ruiz.

It's like they were all in the shadow of American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter or something.Are there other examples of this?

[mesnalty]

Watched Bressane's Miramar, which might be his most accessible film that I've seen (all relative, of course). Despite the typically experimental, skeletal style it's basically an autobiographical Kunstlerroman in structure, which also means it's useful for understanding the artistic reference points of the rest of his work. A lot of classic Hollywood and Brazilian modernism, but interestingly to me also Camilo Castelo Branco. My (uninformed) impression was always that Eca de Queiros is the major 19th-century Portuguese novelist, but I feel like Castelo Branco has been more of a cinematic touchstone in the lusophone(-adjacent) world (Doomed Love, Mysteries of Lisbon). Maybe Romanticism's just more inspiring than realism...

[Curtis, baby]

hm ok yr i guess

1. The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997)

Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, 1997)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997)
The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997)
Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997)
Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997)
"Feeling My Way" (Jonathan Hodgson, 1997)
"Comingled Containers" (Stan Brakhage, 1997)

[thoxans]

Cure - K Kurosawa
Funny Games - M. Haneke

hmmm i kinda get clarke's elephant vibes from kurosawa's cure... also, watched haneke's og funny games for halloseen, and strangely enough didn't hate it like i hated the remake, even though the remake is pretty much the same exact film, albeit english language cast and all. still don't care for that '*insane* breach of the fourth wall' (as you put it in your boxd thoughts). it's like, i get it, it's a moment of stupid senseless manipulation in a film about stupid senseless manipulation, and maybe the film would be less of a critique of films about stupid senseless manipulation without that moment, but to hinge the entirety of the film's commentary on that single scene kinda diminishes everything else around it. like a flick that relies solely on a superficial twist ending, it dissolves all replay value cuz you already know that that 1min of runtime is what defines the other 108min of everything else in the film

[Lencho of the Apes]

What I think Haneke is missing is that an audience doesn't thrill to/identify with bad guys because of the bad stuff they do, but because film grammar manipulates us into that subject position -- in Psycho, we aren't holding our breath hoping the car will sink like Norman wants it to because we love Norman, but because Hitch has teased us with the "oh no!" of seeing that the car might stay afloat. Haneke doesn't do any of the things that would create that bond between viewer and villain,but he seems to think the audience will respond the same way regardless.

[nrh]

Cure - K Kurosawa
Funny Games - M. Haneke
Genealogies D'Un Crime - R. Ruiz.

It's like they were all in the shadow of American Psycho or Hannibal Lecter or something.Are there other examples of this?

the two films i know kiyoshi kurosawa has cited as influences on cure are se7en and fleischer's boston strangler. i also can't help but see it as a post aum shinriykyo film (cure i think does suggest, however ambiguously, that mamiya is in part the result of a larger conspiratorial entity acting over many years), if in a more abstracted way than say sogo ishii's angel dust. i'd have to see them again before i could put them on the list but takahisa zeze's raigyo and shinji aoyama's an obsession make great bookends to the kurosawa.

[rischka]

What I think Haneke is missing is that an audience doesn't thrill to/identify with bad guys because of the bad stuff they do, but because film grammar manipulates us into that subject position -- in Psycho, we aren't holding our breath hoping the car will sink like Norman wants it to because we love Norman, but because Hitch has teased us with the "oh no!" of seeing that the car might stay afloat. Haneke doesn't do any of the things that would create that bond between viewer and villain,but he seems to think the audience will respond the same way regardless.

wow i finally get why funny games doesn't work on me lol

[nrh]

the funniest tip off for me about just how out of his league haneke is in approaching popular culture movie violence is when he has his killers driving at the beginning and they're listening to early john zorn naked city in the car. if i'm being exceptionally charitable i could see haneke using it to delineate a certain kind of cosmopolitan hipsterdom to the killers but that's not the way they're coded in the film at all. it's a choice that has continued to irritate me for well over a decade at this point (cant remember the music cue in the remake but if its the same that is even goofier).

[sally]

i haven't seen funny games since it came out but isn't that what haneke was aiming for? by not having the bond, to expose the bond as film grammar manipulation? that's what made it offensive, it being so patronising. maybe i'm remembering it wrong because, as i'm assuming it intended, i couldn't care less about it

i'm afraid my only reaction to naked city was oh cool something i recognise

[...]

Yeah, that's closer to what Haneke was going for, by my take. He did something closer to the Hitchcock subversion in Seventh Continent to a somewhat similar though less obviously didactic end. I remember getting into a extended back and forth about Haneke at Mubi on the subject, back when Haneke was considered a big deal, something that seems to have faded a fair bit.

[nrh]

i remember there being a pretty big backlash to the 2008 remake of funny games, at least in america, that not only disliked the film but seemed to (negatively) revised the cult status of the original. amour and white ribbon were art house hits (somehow my grandmother, who didn't follow movies at all, heard of both and decided she wanted to watch them) but in much more conventional festival cinema veins (at least in terms of genre).

the half decade between amour and happy end really seemed to have eroded some of his reputation. at least in 2013 i feel like you had to kind of take haneke seriously even if you disliked him, at this point i can't imagine someone writing something like ricky d'ambrose dissenting opinion (https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/hanekes-lessons/) rather than just making a twitter joke or quoting rivette on the film ("it's a piece of shit") and moving on.

[sally]

to be fair, my fave (train of shadows) from 1997 is doing a very similar thing, but it's less didactic, more like...we're all victims of some mysterious cinematic demonology,, woooo-ooooo, plus it's much more lovely to look at in the way that the construction of the images themselves contribute to film's purpose as well

i vaguely remember that haneke mubi thread...i think my take away from that was that poor haneke's audience was never going to be, couldn't be, the audience that his films needed to work

that reminds me i was going to watch happy end because it had toby jones in it.....but then he did some dreadful tv 'comedy' show here and his star rather fell a bit....maybe i'll just watch detectorists again instead

[pabs]

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[pabs]

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