Recently Watched Films 2012

[Dan Warburton]

Ettore Scola, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, 1976

Black comedies don't get any blacker than this - and I wouldn't watch it right after dinner if I were you: Giacinto giving himself a gastric lavage using a bicycle pump is as harrowing as it is grotesquely hilarious. An unremittingly bleak vision of humanity indeed: there's absolutely nobody in the film who isn't filthy, vicious and amoral, with the possible exception of the girl in the yellow boots who has to go out for water each morning. But, as the last scene of the film makes heartbreakingly clear, it's a cycle of horror destined to repeat itself from generation to generation. Yikes.

[Dan Warburton]

Max Ophuls, Le Plaisir, 1952

Et quel plaisir!

[Eyjafjallajökull]

The Color of Paradise dir. Majid Majidi


Been watching Iranian films lately

This might be of interest for you then, provided you're located in NY:

https://www.feministpress.org/news-even ... ithout-men

[cheerios]

Looks cool, but am not in NY
tho there is this happening that is close to me: http://www.umass.edu/film/mmff.html

[Dan Warburton]

Anton Corbijn, The American, 2010

Was quite impressed until the plot (such as it was) showed up about twenty minutes from the end. Corbijn's talent for framing is clear, Clooney does a good job and the numerous nods to favourite films (Le Samourai, of course, but also Profession Reporter, The Talented Mr Ripley, Don't Look Back, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, Non si sevizia un paperino maybe even Rififi and certainly Once Upon A Time In The West) are fine by me, but the priest's corny sub-Graham Greene dialogue is as hard to believe as the luxury whorehouse Clooney frequents (as if you'd find a place like that in the armpit of rural Italy - the local working girls are more likely to look like something out of the Ettore Scola film I saw three days ago), and the "tart-with-a-heart" subplot doesn't convince. Shame Anton didn't go the whole way and leave us with a genuinely enigmatic Antonioni ending.

[billygomberg]

definitely echoing the "oh SO CLOSE" feeling I had watching the above film.

[MRS]

Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

". . .clean machine"

"It's clean enough"

"Not bad for home grown"

"It's a little bit more than that, sonny"

"I see you must have somethin real special here. . .gee mister I bet it's pretty quick"

"You wanna find out?"

"Well ordinarily I'd jump at the opportunity, but the thing is I'm just not in the habit of seein the Chevy work against a two-bit piece o junk"

"Let's make it fifty"

"Make it three yards motherfucker and we'll have us an automobile race"

[grant]

BACCHANALLES SEXUELLES (1974 - Rollin)



SCHOOLGIRL HITCHHIKERS (1976 - Rollin)

[Dan Warburton]

Arthur Penn, The Missouri Breaks, 1976

So glad you pointed me in the direction of this one a while back. A trip! Brando was apparently as potty offscreen, biting the heads off frogs and eating grasshoppers or some stoopid shit (see Wiki), and managed to drive everyone mad, including Nicholson. But what a crazy character - there's a doctoral thesis lurking in there on the way different vernaculars collide: compare Cal (Harry Dean Stanton - superb)'s straight-talkin' cowboy to Braxton's literary sheen (one of the first things we learn about him is that he has a library of 3500 books.. and the one he asks his daughter to fetch for him is Tristram Shandy, a picareresque meta-text if ever there was one), and Brando's Irish brogue (just one of several accents he adopts during the film.. and which one is his real voice?). Penn does to the cowboy what he did to the private investigator in Night Moves, run him round in circles of confusion. It's fuckin' great stuff. Now I need a decent quality copy of Monte Hellman's China 9 Liberty 37, another eccentric late 70s post-western (whose ending this reminded me of).

[MRS]

Back Door to Hell (Monte Hellman, 1964)

Three OSS-minded soldiers sneak upon a remote cranny of Luzon, overtake a Japanese communications hub. One of Nicholson's first turns, albeit brief, yet his disaffection, dainty head held high and hoots are to be remembered. And he speaks fluent Japanese. This was filmed contemporaneously with Flight to Fury in the Philippines. I'd heard awful things going in but superb gunfights and a realistic armorer win the day. Weird timpani, high brass and low strings, the antithesis of Don Ellis almost, mutant crickets and critters at night paint a green-grey backdrop. Jimmie Rodgers looks like Elvis, his precarious trust in chief partisan Paco (looks like a mannequin and sounds like James Mason) provides for me the big suspense of the film. "Tell me. . .why did you kill this man Miguel?" "I've nothing to explain. I told you a fact." Lots of talk about facts amid jungle chaos.

Found island battle footage buffers the last scene as Lt. Craig learns Paco's perished and we're left again nowhere to go. Hellman and Jack's association aside, excellent, concise, odd little WW2 flick.

[Dan Warburton]

André Téchiné, Barocco, 1976

Vertigo (yet again), but sex-changed this time - it's Isabelle Adjani who gives Gérard Depardieu a makeover to make him look like himself - and set in Amsterdam (not credited as such), with an added an element of political sleaze (Jean-Claude Brialy excellent again as the newspaper boss Walt) and another prostitute with a heart of gold - an amusingly (but deliberately?) miscast Marie-France Pisier - "je vais te faire la Radicale!" All adds up to a dense and not always successful but intriguing film, whose Hitchcock influence is clear (North by Northwest should be mentioned too), but filtered through Godard and Rivette. Maybe too stylised for its own good, but it's nice to see Adjani looking like a young woman instead of a china doll. Cool soundtrack too by Philippe Sarde.

[cheerios]

Samira Makhmalbaf, Blackboards, 2000




Can't really say anything about this film without giving it away. Pretty bitter film but worth a watch.

[Dan Warburton]

Richard Sarafian, Vanishing Point, 1971

Why do I love this film so much, and keep coming back to it? I remember so well the first time I saw it, when I was about the age my son is now (he just watched it with me, and I think it'll stay with him too), and Super Soul's line "speed is the freedom of the soul" (speed not meaning the pills Kowalski pops to keep going, because I tried those mothers and they didn't free anything much).. OK, Ed (Howard - love your blog entry on this as ever), the flashbacks are hamfisted, but one's still left wondering if the naked chick on the bike in the desert isn't the girl who cop K "saved" back in San Diego (why else would she have kept press clippings about him?) - and even if she isn't, the whole parade of counter-culture heroes and viillains (special mention for Severn Dardern as J. Hovah, the same mean sonofabitch with the same mean round spectacles as McVey, the villain he played in The Hired Hand, another GREAT film) makes this one hell of a trip. Fabulous shots, terrific editing, so who cares about plot? Grow your own.

[aaarg]

Q: the Winged Serpent

Larry Cohen's great. Michael Moriarty's great (as an actor not as a person). Stop-motion monsters are great.


lots of great helicopter shots too.

[Dan Warburton]

Claude Chabrol, La Decade Prodigieuse, 1971

Chabrol described it as a failure, but as failures go it's an amusing one, and not without its moments, most of which have more to do with the rakish camera angles and incredible crane shots - Piccoli's arrival at the station in Alsace, wow - than with the input of the cast. The Ellery Queen story on which it's based is typically symbol-heavy and not exactly subtle (the Ten Commandments, Oedipus, yawn), and nor is the casting of Welles as Theo (God, ha) and Perkins as the tormented bloodstained fucked up adopted son, but one wonders what it might have been like if Deneuve had played Marlene Jobert's role, as was originally intended. And casting Michel Piccoli, surely one of the most perverse antihero actors in modern cinema, as the straight guy / detective / Ellery Queen himself (always the hero of his own stories), is the most curious move of all. Whatever, whoever dubbed Orson did a great job, the Pierre Jansen soundtrack is alarmingly good in places, and if I ever win the lottery you betcha I'lll buy Jobert's Karl Lagerfeld dress - the one she wears when she leaves the blackmail money in the hotel room - for my wife.

[billygomberg]

really had me going on that last sentence there Dan. sure, your wife, sure....

[MRS]

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (Monte Hellman, 1989)

Curiously little gore to speak of, save maybe for a sharp cut between severed head and grandma's tomato sauce. Would it help were the head watching Jack Nicholson in The Terror on a small black and white television? It comes on a single 4fer DVD otherwise featuring My Best Friend Is A Vampire, Repossessed & Slaughter High. Hellman's noted pride in this derives from the efficiency of making it, we can hope not more. Robert Culp in a shock as world-weary cop: "Well studyin' snakes is your thing doc. . .stompin' on 'em is mine." Bear in mind our killer's brains slosh within a translucent dome affixed as the top half of his head throughout. After another unnecessary stuntcock prepares to double-barrel the psychopath, he signs it "Is it live? Or is it Memorex?"

You can see tape on the floors of many sets. Twin Peaks casting (thanks to my better half) again: Richard Beymer (Ben Horne) in an awful turn as insidious doctor, Eric Da Re (Leo Johnson) who looks like Dee Snider, and Laura Harring from Mulholland Drive. Indescribable filth, I kind of feel like I took one for the team here. $4 from an Amazon seller and 90 minutes I'll never have back. Again zero slice n' dice, I was at least giddy for that. Let's end here: "Ricky isn't a killer, he's a way to stop people from killin' like. . .like snake venom is a way to cure the bite."

[free math]

I assume you know this? After 1:45 Licht just reads all of [one actor's] dialogue from the movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGnd4jOr64

Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

". . .clean machine"

"It's clean enough"

"Not bad for home grown"

"It's a little bit more than that, sonny"

"I see you must have somethin real special here. . .gee mister I bet it's pretty quick"

"You wanna find out?"

"Well ordinarily I'd jump at the opportunity, but the thing is I'm just not in the habit of seein the Chevy work against a two-bit piece o junk"

"Let's make it fifty"

"Make it three yards motherfucker and we'll have us an automobile race"

[MRS]

I assume you know this? After 1:45 Licht just reads all of [one actor's] dialogue from the movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGnd4jOr64

I had not heard that, thanks, bizarre. The film itself doesn't nearly blow up my skirt as it does others, always liked 50s/60s muscle cars yet. So funny going in I thought Oates/GTO would be some mega-badass but it was the reverse, "the only human in the film" according to Hellman. Anyway this is the best I could find, apologies, in retrospect the sandwich is so fundamental, 2:55

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi1cHV0Iez0

[Dohol]

for the 500th time....