Recently Watched Films 2018

[Dan Warburton]

Paul Verhoeven, The Fourth Man, 1983

Very stylish and De Palma-esque (not a put-down this time), and with its glacial blonde femme fatale you can see Basic Instinct coming down the line. Of course, the Gerard Reve story's pretty basic instinct to start with, the classic cocktail of Freud for Dummies and Heavy Religious Imagery, but the performances are solid and Jan de Bont's camera work impressive. A decent HD reissue would be cool.

[walto]

I remember really liking the fourth man when it first came out. How's it hold up, in your view, dan?

[Dan Warburton]

You pipped me to the post there Walt - hope the above answers yr question. I liked it! And the more Verhoevens I see the more I like them.. like De Palma, and a whole slew of giallo directors, he's very good at not taking himself (or anything much else) too seriously. I mean, you can't help laughing when she serves him a Bloody Mary, of all drinks

[Dan Warburton]

Luc Besson, Léon, 1994

I read somewhere that IMDb users voted this 27th Best Film of All Time, which if true (it can't be true... can it? ) speaks volumes about IMDb users, and makes me happier than ever to be among the 5% of Rotten Tomatoes readers who didn't like it. It starts out well enough - it's always gratifying to see some ugly fat bastard baddie and his horrid henchmen get shot to bits - but as soon as Gary Oldman hits the screen the smell of baked ham is unbearable. (At least in True Romance Tony Scott had the good sense to kill off his character pronto.) Jean Reno's fine as the milk-swigging, plant-loving loner hitman until Natalie Portman comes along. Thereafter things go from twee (the Charlie Chaplin impersonation.. ugh) to maudlin ("I love you Léon".. hmm..) to downright barfacious. The only good thing is the brief clip we see of

[Dan Warburton]

Gene Kelly & Stanley Donan, It's Always Fair Weather, 1955

It's clear that someone high-up in the studio wanted the same order of box office returns as On The Town and Singin' in the Rain, so Comden and Green cooked up a script that tried to borrow elements of each (an impossible task - not surprisingly the film bombed in comparison). But for all its faults, specifically its rather cynical downbeat theme (which I didn't mind, actually) and the inexplicable lick of a dance featuring both Kelly and Cyd Charisse (unforgivable!), it's not bad at all. Certainly worth the price of admission for Gene's rollerskating.

[Dan Warburton]

Björn Björnsson, Mannaveiðar ("I Hunt Men"), 2008

Four-part three-hour Icelandic crime series (best watched in one fell swoop), entertaining enough but not as good as Trapped (see reviews last year), even though it stars the magnificent Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (left, above) as the Columbo-like outsider. It's a small place, Iceland - I managed to recognise at least three bars in Reykjavik (and one provincial airport, Akureyri) that we already knew, haha

[Dan Warburton]

Edgar Reitz, Heimat 3, 2004

I probably shouldn't have waited over a year to watch the third season, as we had to do a quick zoom through Heimat 2 to remember who was married to whom and whatnot, but this final set of six films - total duration 11.5 hours - is a magnificent end to the story of the Simon family, in the eleven years dating from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Y2K celebrations. I still haven't figured out why Reitz switches from colour to b&w, but never mind. It's a truly epic piece of work, a worthy companion to that other great German monster series, Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz. To quote the end of this review http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 90096.html it's "a vibrant expression of confidence in the spell-binding power of traditional narrative cinema - a hybrid of docu-drama, TV soap and page-turning roman fleuve, that leaves you wanting to go right back to 1919 and start the saga again." I hope to do that one day.

[Dan Warburton]

Roberto Rossellini /Jean-Luc Godard / Pier Paolo Pasolini / Ugo Gregoretti, Ro.Go.Pa.G, 1963

Pasolini's hilariously satirical La ricotta, denounced by a furious Catholic Church and starring Orson Welles, is the most famous segment of this four-part film à sketches, but it's certainly well worth your while checking out the other three. Rossellini's Illibatezza is an amusing but disconcerting (in these stupidly puritanical times) tale of sexual harrassment, Godard's Le nouveau monde a truly bizarre tale of Parisians in a post-nuclear daze (how naïve to assume that an airburst nuclear bomb would leave the French capital so gloriously unscathed) and Ugo Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante ("Free Range Chicken") one of those acidic Italian sideswipes at consumerism, starring the doyen of black humour à l'italienne, Ugo Tognazzi. Yeah, they don't make 'em like this anymore. https://www.unifrance.org/film/7049/rogopag

[Dan Warburton]

Joaquin Romero Marchent, Cut-Throats Nine, 1972

Quoth IMDb: "A wagon load of convicts on their way to prison is being escorted through the mountains by a cavalry troop. They are attacked by a bandit gang, and only a sergeant, his beautiful young daughter and an assortment of seven sadistic, murderous prisoners survive, and they are left without horses or a wagon. The sergeant must find a way to get his prisoners to their destination while protecting his daughter, watching out for the still pursuing bandits and trying to determine which one of the prisoners was the man who raped and murdered his wife." Not sure where the number nine comes from, but you could certainly say eight if you include the sergeant, who's as brutal as the convicts he's escorting. Bleak stuff, especially the ending (which I won't spoil for you) - but I imagine Quentin had it in mind when he was scripting The Hateful Eight. The dubbing is pretty ropy and the image, assuming you can find a copy, is rough, but it'd be great to see a well-restored version one of these days.

[Dan Warburton]

Alvin Rakoff, Passport to Shame, 1958

Also known as Room 43, and inexplicably not listed in Canadian expat director Rakoff's English Wiki page, this has a great cast - Odile Versois (Marina Vlady's elder sister) as the innocent French girl lured across the Channel into a world of Soho streetwalking sleaze, Herbert Lom as the sharp-dressed gangster cad who runs the operation, Eddie "Lemmy Caution" Constantine as the warm-hearted taxi driver who's tricked into marrying the unfortunate démoiselle, and Britain's answer to Marilyn Diana Dors as the hooker who comes to her rescue. It's a nice, tight little flick, and for once I've found a good IMDb user review I won't try to compete with:
"Among the sundry delights to be found in this British white slavery sexpose is the gonzo turn by Herbert Lom. As London's mac daddy supreme Nick Biaggi, Lom is a sight to behold, a horn-doggie dandy in homburg, lapel carnation and spats (au courant fashion be damned). He's low-key at first, oozing oily charm and generosity, the better to bamboozle naive French waif Odile Versois, who's been lured into a life of shame by Lom's field procurer/mamasan/mistress Brenda De Banzie. But behind closed doors it's a whole 'nother Herb. Channeling his inner Michael Gough, he's all over Odile like a cheap suit, manhandling her love handles and assaulting her face with wet, slobbering kisses. It's truly an unhinged spectacle; even Lom's toupee looks like it has an erection. Also in the house: affable tough guy Eddie Constantine as the world's least likely Canadian, the always welcome Robert Brown (Tumak's dad in One Million Years B.C., 'M' in the Bond films of the '80s) as a two-fisted cabbie who rouses his fellow hacks to do battle with the 'ho-mongers, Diana Dors, poured into bum-busting skirts and Frederick's of Soho lingerie, as a hooker with a score to settle, and, as the groom at a wedding party, a remarkably young Michael Caine." Enjoy!

[Dan Warburton]

Philippe Garrel, L'ombre des femmes, 2015

They don't get more French than this, so here's a jolly good review in French for you http://www.slate.fr/story/102047/ombre- ... ppe-garrel But if your French isn't up to it, if you don't like Bresson, Rohmer or Rivette and if you're looking for special FX, car chases, drug busts and gore, this disarmingly straightforward tale of marital infidelity set for the most part in one of Garrel's timelessly haunted Parisian apartments (looks like most of it was shot round the corner from where we used to live near Grands Boulevards) isn't for you. Luc Besson this ain't - but there's more artistry in one of Garrel's shots of empty doorways than in an hour of Léon's bloody fluff. Très beau.

[Dan Warburton]

Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley, Dames, 1934

I'm just a sucker for Busby Berkeley set pieces, and this one's a real stunner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M2sI0zFHgE but quite apart from that, it's a superbly written (Delmer Daves, hats off!) and well-acted story. Joan Blondell's "Girl With The Ironing Board" is another little treasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iixUP9oZIS8 Magnificent!

[walto]

Caught some "live music to silent films" at a local theater the other night. First, there were several imaginative shorts by the French innovator, Georges Méliès, set to arrangements of Debussy and Beethoven piano pieces by an excellent electric guitarist. These films are strange and fun: one, e.g., turning a solar eclipse into an erotic relationship between "heavenly bodies."

The main course, however, was as bad as bad can be--Larry Semon's 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz, accompanied by a noodling original synth "score." The movie is an abomination. Not only extremely boring, but violently racist. It has very little to do with any of the Oz books, although Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry appear in it, and much of it takes place in Oz, which in this flick can be visited by bi-plane. The "plot" involves an evil throne usurper who, to keep his power, abducted Dorothy, the rightful ruler, and dumped her at Henry's farm in Kansas when she was a baby. Henry is a fat asshole who is made to fall into mud a lot, and, in what must have been one of his first roles, Oliver Hardy plays one of his farm hands. Other employees include a black man who likes watermelon, shakes his knees together when scared (which is, naturally, quite often), and is treated very roughly; and the Larry Semon character who is a useless hand with a crush on Dot.

Semon was a Chaplain wannabe whose career suffered from the fact that he was not even a little bit funny. The movie goes on for what seems like hours to get Dorothy, now 18, back to her throne. Eventually, the hands don scarecrow, lion, and tin man costumes either to hide from bad guys or for no reason at all, and at one point the man in the lion costume gets mistaken for one of the several real lions in the movie. These animals are, incidentally, treated in ways that would be outlawed today, and which, while endless, are also not at all funny.

Utter shit from beginning to end. And, adding injury to insult, the music was (I suppose fittingly) also boring, fidgety, repetitive, and unpleasant, both stylistically and in timbre. Not a single patch change was made, and an organ would have been preferable to the garbagey synth sound. The style was, I suppose, supposed to remind one of the live piano music used to accompany these sorts of films when they first came out. That stuff was usually pretty bad, but this was worse, although the writer/performer was technically proficient. In any case, I wanted him to shut up as much as I wanted the movie to end.

Unfortunately, I couldn't easily get out mid-flick.

[Dan Warburton]

Wow, I didn't know anyone had made a film of Oz before the one we all know.. To misquote G.B. Shaw, "I shall waste no time seeing it..." Always a bit wary about music for silent films - maybe Lutz has more input on this subject.. I tried (improvising) some myself but it was all too easy to fall into horrible primitive imitation of what's on the screen. Man falling downstairs = descending glissando etc etc yawn. I find most of the "highly respected" Carl Davis scores really rather tedious, and the eternal Dixieland stomps to accompany silent comedies don't do much for me either. Then again, watching a two-hour Stroheim or Griffith in total silence is a scary prospect. I saw Bill Frisell's band twice doing live music for the Keaton shorts, and remember being impressed. Did he ever put out a DVD of that stuff, I wonder?

[walto]

Gary Lucas and I got on that bandwagon quite early (not too long after Coppola's Napolean, anyhow) performing music to Der Golem at BAM in 1991, then at the Walker Art Center, the Knitting Factory and at ArtProjekt 1992 in Munich.

https://issuu.com/jbk_osc/docs/programm ... m__nchen_1

[Steve Minkin]

I saw Bill Frisell's band twice doing live music for the Keaton shorts, and remember being impressed. Did he ever put out a DVD of that stuff, I wonder?

Two CDs (I have the first, quite enjoyable!) and this DVD. https://www.billfrisell.com/dvd/films-b ... ll-frisell

[Wombatz]

I saw Bill Frisell's band twice doing live music for the Keaton shorts, and remember being impressed. Did he ever put out a DVD of that stuff, I wonder?

this DVD. https://www.billfrisell.com/dvd/films-b ... ll-frisell

ouch, the sample on that page is rather awful, you can hear the luxurious studio and the musicians' casual chops much too much, they're in a totally different world (live it might have been good, though).

Always a bit wary about music for silent films - maybe Lutz has more input on this subject.. I tried (improvising) some myself but it was all too easy to fall into horrible primitive imitation of what's on the screen. Man falling downstairs = descending glissando etc etc yawn.

nothing new since last we had this topic family favorites would include ktl (o'malley/rehberg) for phantom carriage, loren connors for the passion of joan of arc, chris watson for asquith's underground ... but on the whole it's indeed a dreary area. on the other hand, i'm quite happy with my own approach, though not the execution, to this thing, and then it always seems quite easy: no mickey-mousing at all, let the pictures keep their rhythm (which is why mild electronica is so popular and even partly successful here, e.g. cinematic orchestra will ruin the man with the movie camera much less than michel nyman does); on the other hand i massively manipulate the contents, as most silents need some help during stretches (e.g. burkhard stangl's lowercase soundtrack to the joyless street starts dragging after 20 minutes or so because the film has to do all the lifting), or some counterbalance to the corn ... i usually bring sound from later movies of the same story for subtext, looped field recordings as rhythm machines, lofi samples from vaughan williams or a single monk chord, these are all tied to specific moments, and then improvise over that ... and it's amazing what uncomfortable sounds perfectly mainstream audiences will enjoy when they're tied to moving images (similar to avant soundtracks in horror films) ... but of course this approach works only live in front of small audiences, for a dvd you'd have to be more objective, copyright-free, and respectful of the movie (and have your thing together), so it's really more difficult ... maybe my official favorite soundtrack to a silent is the one for page of madness pasted together by the director at some later point, which sounds like an old cassette used for recording random stuff from the radio (i think this also came up here before?) ...

[walto]

If anybody's interested, there are fairly lengthy excerpts of our Der Golem on the album 'Skeleton at the Feast.'

https://www.allmusic.com/album/skeleton ... 0000077183

There was a broadcast of the movie with our music in NYC on some station at one time, but it got increasingly out of sync as it went on. Not sure if that still exists anywhere. I did a version of it in Boston with another guitarist who was an addict, I think. And there are some clips of that on youtube somewhere.

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Montgomery, Lady in the Lake, 1946

Well, it was a cute idea, I suppose, to film the whole thing from the POV of the protagonist, our old friend Philip Marlowe, but it really didn't work very well. Firstly because the cameras at the time were so unwieldy - when Marlowe turns to watch the secretary sashaying out of the office it's so sloooooow it feels like something from an early 60s Antonioni. Today's handheld technology would be more appropriate - I was thinking of that Sean Baker film shot on an iPhone - but then again the whole idea of the screenplay (as opposed to the Raymond Chandler novel) is that Marlowe falls for Adrienne, and vice versa. Not being able to see both of them together in the same frame, with the rare exceptions of the mirror shots above, is a major drawback - added to which Montgomery, who plays the detective himself, and his leading lady Audrey Totter certainly don't seem to like each other at all. Montogomery's delivery of Marlowe's dialogue is so brutal there's no way you could imagine anyone falling in love with him; plus Totter, with that Marlene Dietrich snooty upper lip pucker, reminds me of Boris Johnson's hilarious description of Hillary as a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital. You only need to watch Bogart and Bacall for about thirty seconds to realise how good this film might have been had they been in it - and in the frame together.

[Dan Warburton]

John Carroll Lynch, Lucky, 2017

"Harry Dean Stanton is Lucky", the titles read. So is director Lynch, because anyone daring to say anything not entirely positive about his debut feature is bound to be instantly shouted down as a heartless curmudgeon. I mean, who can't feel any affection whatsoever for Harry Dean Stanton? He did what a lot of us dream of being able to do, living to a ripe old age in his own home in the sunshine, chugging cocktails and puffing through a pack a day. Hell, I wouldn't mind that. So any film co-written by HDS's right-hand man Logan Sparks incorporating several well-authenticated details of the actor's own life is guaranteed rave reviews from the get go, especially if the cast also includes seasonal lovables like Tom Skerritt, Ed Begley and David Lynch and the soundtrack features Johnny Cash singing "I See A Darkness", whose lyrics sum things up quite nicely. Many times we've been out drinkin' / Many times we've shared our thoughts. Not a great film per se, I'd say (I was more touched by Sophie Huber's documentary on HDS, Partly Fiction), but I hope it gets Harry a posthumous Oscar, for what it's worth.