Recently Watched Films 2013

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Altman, Short Cuts, 1993

Third time, and now off to re-read the eight short stories and one Carver poem Altman manages to tie together with nothing less than bravura. Indeed, part of the fun of the experience is spotting the links ("oh she's his daughter, right.."). Some of the additional stories (you'd have thought nine would have been enough) are pretty mawkish and might have been dispensed with - Annie Ross's songs are excellent and important narrative links themselves, but I could have done without her Veggie Marys and her suicidal daughter. Could have done with a little less Mark Isham too. None of the characters is really developed fully, which is not surprising since there are so many of them (in fact, editing the film down to just over three hours must have been a challenge), but most of the thumbnail sketches are crisp and credible.

[Dan Warburton]

George Armitage, Miami Blues, 1989

After seeing both Jennifer Jason Leigh and Fred Ward in Short Cuts, couldn't resist a return visit to Willeford's Miami. Love it, the film and the book, as have said before.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I tried the vinegar pie a few weeks ago, it's good but there's way too much sugar in the recipe.




Le Corbeau, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943

I think that it is, um, overrated. Didn't feel any real tension, except for a few scenes with Ginette Leclerc.

[Dan Warburton]

Well, it'd be a dull old world if we agreed on everything But I think I can say with absolute certainty that IMDb was totally up the pole when they described this





Juraj Herz, The Cremator, 1969

as a "comedy", albeit a "very black" one. Maybe they didn't get further than the strange Terry Gilliam-like photo montage title sequence. Rudolf Hrušínský scares the living daylights out of me. No more so than when he puts out a saucer of milk for his cat after hanging his wife. Cripes!

[Dan Warburton]

Mario Monicelli, Caro Michele, 1976

This one is a comedy, though as Lao Tsu Ben posted above, those Italian comedies often have a disturbing hidden vein of cynicism (seen this one yet, Ben? you seem to be on an Italian trip at the moment, and it is another one of those heaven blessed KG Featured Torrents..). With their uncomfortable pokes at the class system, they're often closer to something Mike Leigh might have dreamt up. The cast includes Delphine Seyrig, Aurore Clément (two good reasons to watch any film, as far as I'm concerned), a wonderfully forlorn Lou Castel and an amazingly energetic Mariangela Melato as the adorably trashy single mother Mara, and they all have a ball with another first class screenplay by the incomparable Tonino Guerra.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Rudolf Hrušínský scares the living daylights out of me.

Ha! I just watched this



Jiří Menzel, Capricious Summer, 1968

...and Rudolf is in a much more playful mood, though his cynicism and melancholy do sit heavy. He and his wife (played by Míla Myslíková) steal pretty much every scene they are in, but everyone turns in great deadpan performances. I've been working my way through the Criterion Eclipse set Pearls of the Czech New Wave, and while this is certainly the lightest, thematically of the ones I've watched so far, it's the toughest nut to crack. The dialogue can be elliptical, open-ended and weirdly formal (whether that's due to translation or the actual dialogue I can't really say --- the little Czech have doesn't help me here) and for a 75-minute movie the pacing is languid, but I suppose in a film about the middle of summer in a countryside village that's the point. There's a lot to relish here: the colors – all saturated summer greens – the humid, hazy light, the almost too-dark night scenes, the repeat shots of the main village street and the locals on the terrace of the village bar. I couldn't work out if it was sadness, boredom, an urge for life or just straight-up lust that drove the three friends to go after the magician's assistant but it sure was fun trying.

[Matt Wuethrich]

More Czech cinema from the 1960s:



Jindřich Polák, Ikarie XB-1, 1963

Best space calisthenics ever? Maybe, and I’m sure the choreographer who put together the dance moves for the ship crew’s party had a blast coming up with that number, just as Zdeněk Liška got to stretch out with the score – electronic music, instrumental pop and more conventional string writing all get space.

The story, and really the whole tone of the film, has the same mix of moods, ideas and approaches. Somehow though it never feels less like a mishmash. There's a lot packed in here, from sci-fi speculation about technology and physics to noir-ish psychological tension to more earthly concerns about relationships. There's even a funny dig or two at American-style capitalism and excess when the crew happens upon the drifting wreck of a previous exploratory mission.

The range of the film, thematically and visually, is pretty well summed up in pairs of images like the following:

From the comic...



to the Kubrickian (there's more than few images in the film that Kubrick seems to have co-opted)...

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Mario Monicelli, Caro Michele, 1976
(seen this one yet, Ben? you seem to be on an Italian trip at the moment, and it is another one of those heaven blessed KG Featured Torrents..).

Nope, I haven't seen it. As for Italian cinema, I have a lot of catching up to do. I might even watch those Antonioni's that once looked so daunting to me such as L'Avventura, L'Ecclisse or The Red Desert, though I'm afraid they are too one-note.

with another first class screenplay by the incomparable Tonino Guerra.

Thanks for pointing out the name. Never paid any sort of attention to it and I realize that his contribution to Italian cinema (and, needless to say, cinema at large) is outstanding. Shame on me.



Devil in a Blue Dress, Carl Franklin, 1995

Neo-noir is too derivative a genre for me to really enjoy it in a way that isn't shallow, and actually the same goes with the original films lately. The hero in a film noir is disillusioned like someone who goes through the same vicissitudes time and again. Whence the witticisms and the hip talk characteristic of the voice-overs, the smart rejoinders, all of which get on my nerves sometimes. It remains nonetheless one of the most enjoyable genres, perhaps because it is so coded, and this film just proves it for the nth time, but it's a little too slick. Look here for another, more laudatory opinion. Great turn by Don Cheadle in his, I think, breakthrough role.

[Dan Warburton]

Victor Erice, El Sur, 1982

One of Pauline Kael's greatest lines was "this movie is so good, it's thrilling." Amen to that - I honestly lost count of the times I felt the hairs stand up watching this. Can't fault it, won't bother describing it other than to say there's not a single image or a single word out of place. "The original script consisted of more than 400 pages and was scheduled to be shot in 81 days. 48 days into shooting, when production was to be moved to south Spain, producer Elías Querejeta unexpectedly suspended the project, allegedly because of financing objections by Televisión Española, the backing television network," sez IMDb. First reaction to that was to find out where said producer resides and go pee through his letterbox, but I'm not sure the film doesn't end well where it does. Who else out there has seen this? (If you haven't, do something about it) What do you think?

[Dan Warburton]

Bob Fosse, Star 80, 1983

Eric Roberts does a noble sweaty job as Paul Snider, despite a little too much borrowing from De Niro and Hoffman, and seeing the skilful way he demolishes the B-movie failure at the Hefner Mansion you wonder why he never made it big himself. Fosse clearly indentifies with Snider, and said as much during the shooting (hm, I suspected Bob had a screw or too missing watching All That Jazz, and that just confirms it), but the only way he can make him into the central character of the movie is by dumbing down Dorothy into something "insultingly stupid". I have to quote Kael again, who nailed it: "she's so malleable she's nothing." Spineless, and curiously sexless too - hard to imagine Mariel Hemingway balling Roger Rees, whose performance as Aram the film director is even more bloodless than her own (I wonder what Bogdanovitch, who the character was based on, thought of the movie). Shooting the murder in the actual house where it happened - shades of In Cold Blood - is an extra cheap thrill (read some of the comments in the IMDB threads - seems some of the punters there are curiously turned on by the fact), but no amount of beautiful photography courtesy Sven Nykvist or snappy editing can alter the fact that I just don't care about these people and their lives - and, worse, there's nothing Fosse does that makes me want to care about them. As Kael says, the movie's nauseated by itself. Not worth Mariel Hemingway's silicone implants.

[MRS]

Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956)

Rather unexpected, implied gunning down of two hoods inside a tent under dark storms to kick it off. Ben Stride's (Scott) tan is so Palm Springs it's probably realistic in context. Never have I seen the process of washing horses in a river's shallows more thorough. Lone husband and wife on the remote trail via schooner, expected specter of rape, Stride accompanies the couple as charitable cowboy with a past. "They're headed for Flora Vista alright" whispers Lee Marvin from afar in one of his absolute best turns, what a sleaze throughout, he keeps fawning over the wife/egging the husband in near romance novel prose until Stride finally kicks him out of the group, I've never heard Marvin's voice at lower frequency. Think Gere in Internal Affairs sleazy. He wears a Kelly green neckerchief throughout, not sure what that signifies. Stunning rock formations and chaparral even for your stock Western, Henry Vars' score stands up with any Max Steiner. One of the windiest films of the genre, genuinely shocking twist of plot at the end to boot. Purportedly the quickest gun in the West, Boetticher elects not to show Stride draw in neither the first nor ultimate slayings. My favorite part was the wife (mysterious looking Gail Russell) singing black gospel while washing clothes in the river. 1:18.

[P. Wretch]

Who else out there has seen this? (If you haven't, do something about it) What do you think?

I saw it a few years ago and can't remember anything about the plot off the top of my head, but do remember it being powerfully atmospheric and haunting, in a vein similar to Saura's Cría cuervos, which I saw more recently. The strange thing about Spanish cinema, given the Northern European stereotype of sun and siestas, is how dark and autumnal many of the classic titles seem to be. The shadow of fascism (and austere Catholicism) probably had something to do with it, of course.

Talking of Spanish shadows - incidentally, the news leads with yesterday's train crash - I highly recommend José Val del Omar's experimental, faintly terrifying documentary short Fuego en Castilla (1960), which can be seen on Vimeo (and read about in Cinemascope). The flickering lighting effects were part of a system that he called 'TactilVision'.

[Dan Warburton]

Wow, thanks for those links - another great discovery. (Now I see it's an FT over at KG.. how come I missed it before?)



Gus Van Sant, Psycho, 1998

The ultimate postmodern trip. First viewing, would like to watch it again with GVS's commentary before writing anything lengthy - not that there's a shortage of intelligent articles on this much-maligned, "shot for shot" remake http://www.reverseshot.com/article/psycho http://cinemademerde.com/Essay-Psycho_vs_Psycho.shtml http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/feature- ... /psycho-2/. Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a good read if anyone's interested, and I suspect Van Sant had read it himself, if only for finally realising what Hitch had dreamt of doing (but couldn't, technically) at the time: take that helicopter swooping above Phoenix right into Marion and Sam's hotel room. Anyway, you could probably write a book on the remake. FWIW, I didn't mind Vince Vaughn (no need to remind you of the differences between him and Tony Perkins), thoroughly enjoyed William Macy's Arbogast and Chad Everett's Cassidy, and was bemused by the rest of the cast. I can only assume that the things I found incongruous - the clouds, cows and the chick above intercut with the murder scenes, the nice, bright basement in the Bates house, anything and everything that Anne Heche says, does and wears - are there for a reason.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Victor Erice, El Sur, 1982

Monte Hellman mentions it in this interview which I came across yesterday.

http://www.money-into-light.com/search/ ... ED%20FILMS

[Dan Warburton]

Figures.. he "sampled" El espíritu de la colmena in Road to Nowhere. Interesting set of films Monte lists there - I enjoyed but wasn't entirely blown away by Stavisky when I saw it, but maybe I should give it another shot.

[Dan Warburton]

Ingmar Bergman, Fanny och Alexander, 1982

“Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.”

I'm still amused - and a little bemused - to see how many "Greatest Films Ever" lists this seems to pop up on (I should make it clear we watched the 312-minute TV version this weekend, not the 188-minute theatrical release - that's for later, along with the documentary in the Criterion box). Placing things on pedestals is a risky business, and the higher the pedestal the greater the damage when the thing falls - or is pushed - off. Even Pauline Kael, whose enthusiasm for earlier Bergman was at times seemingly unbounded, is underwhelmed: "Its lovingly placed warm gingerbreading is enormously enjoyable. But the conventionality of the thinking in the film is rather shocking. It's as if Bergman's neuroses had been tormenting him for so long that he cut them off and went sprinting back to Victorian health and domesticity." Others put the boot in with more (idelogically skewed) vigour. Alex Cox's particularly scathing review of it for The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/07/film led to a furious thread in the IMDb comments column.
On Bergman in general I tend to find myself agreeing with much of what Jonathan Rosenbaum has to say in his NYT obituary http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/opini ... nbaum.html, whose title nails his colours to the mast (but Roger Ebert astutely points out that you could substitute Dreyer and Bresson - Rosenbaum heroes - for Bergman in many of his stinging criticisms).
Anyway, while there's much to admire in Fanny (the sets, the costumes, the photography, the lighting, the acting, etc etc etc), with the possible exception of the grandmother and Maj, I found it hard to like any of the characters, even the "good guys" - what are we supposed to engage with in the blustering philanderer Gustav Adolf or his cringeworthy flatulent brother Carl (actually I got even more annoyed with the teary masochism of his German wife)? This world of starched shirts and boozy bourgeois bores seems a long way away from where I find myself at the moment.

[Hayao Yamaneko]

Sorcerer (William Friedkin)

I picked up this one after good reviews from Dan (and others I think?) and wasn't disappointed. This might be the finest action film I've seen.

Calling something an "action film" in 2013 borders almost on an insult - the label having come to stand for an airless concoction of sentimental platitudes and ejaculatory pyrotechnics. But there's no other word for this, and the film redeems the label, returning to its original sense - narrative built from actions.

Everything here is carried by action - whether that means the characters' gestures and behaviours, or the beautifully orchestrated scenes of survival and destruction that propel the narrative in the film's second half. Dialogue is pared down to essentials and for long stretches completely absent. Everything is acheived by gesture, incident and image, and for all that, nothing is left wanting explanation and there is no lack either of depth or clarity.

In fact without the usual dialogue drawing us back to sentimentality or explanations (which are very often one and the same) we see everything all too clearly. We're given four men who have done what they have done - reckless things, endangering lives and livelihoods. The country they find themselves in is, like them, where it is, has done what it has done. Run down mud-track shanty towns with propagandist posters the only decoration. In place of infrastructure there's a coalition of business and despotic government there to exploit resources. When a riot flares up it's dealt with perfunctorily and the next day it's as though nothing happened. We're given to understand our heros will be treated the same way.

In the action film as we know it, the world is at stake, and final, individual victories to be had. For the individuals here there's no hope, or thought, of regaining what's lost, still less thought of saving the locals who share their lot. Motivation is strictly local and essential. For the company man the need is to hold onto his job little while longer, for the exiles the prize is bare survival and perhaps some small increment in personal comfort. The fate of the world or a people is not at stake, the situation here is as peripheral as it is chronic. And none of this is hidden, justified or lamented, nobody looks for a reason, moral or otherwise. Everything that happens happens. What's there on screen is more than enough.

I can't think of another film so committed to an image of life as constituted by contingency and precarity. It might even out-Herzog Herzog. And on that note, there's little outside of the rapids scenes in Fitzcarraldo to top the truck-on-a-rope-bridge scenes here for visceral man vs elements awe.

[Wombatz]

Fritz Lang, While The City Sleeps, 1956
it's a world of backbiting, blackmail and booze (dagnabbit, those dames knew how to drink - watch Ida Lupino knock it back), and the "happy ending" is so cynical it'll have you squirming in your seat.

Maybe my favorite Lang. Loved those scenes in the bar.

Watched this yesterday and didn’t care for it. Too much of a set piece, no surrounding world in which the bleak outlook could come alive (somehow made me think of Dogville, let’s expose human nature by pushing protagonists scene by clever scene through our craftily predestined model world). To begin with, I found it hard to believe they would all want to have the job so desperately ... there was no atmosphere of power or corruption or whatever, the murders also served just as a nice plot point for a guy to use his gal as bait but I found no thematical repercussions ... Liked the acting, boozing, camerawork very much, not so much the direction which strung scene after scene with too much string in between.



Then I watched The Tenth Victim (Elio Petri, 1965) with Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress which was good brainless stylish fun except the ending which jammed on a riff and still faded out.



The day before, in a rare walk to an actual cinema (well, we suddenly had one just across the road): La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser (Davide Manuli, 2012), hugely entertaining retro electronica black and white arthouse pseudo existentialism, despite that I didn’t care for the acting (self-consciously funny Vincent Gallo is dreadful (half of his performances here)). Aside: The only way for me to experience boredom these days seems to be watching movies, and often I can’t figure out how I do it, with all the information going down that stripped of coherency I’d find fascinating (except determination overkill and directors in love with their supposed poetry). This has much potential awfulness in low doses (grainy desolate Sardinian landscape, sub-surrealist arthouse spoofiness, perfume ad existentialism, fellinesque extras, desert video clips), throttled down (xept Gallos bike motor aping his flat readings of Cowboy inflections) to a point where although there was not a single aspect that I loved for itself, I left the house refreshed. Good use of music I don’t like. Manuli says this film was about the non-sense of life, but it all hangs together, so at that he has failed.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Mud, Jeff Nichols, 2012

An improvement over his previous film, the terribly overrated and heavy-handed Take Shelter in which Jeff Nichols had the effrontery not to choose between two endings (as if actually you were given the alternate ending that you usually find on the dvd along with the "right" one), his is a manner that is still too schoolish, too underlined to really convince, in spite of the good premise of the story.
And that humming music which has my nerves so worked up (though I exaggerate, it's hardly annoying since it's more a token of unobtrusiveness) is there again.
It's always a pleasure to hear and see Matthew McConaughey but he should be careful not to rely too much on his Texan persona that is so trendy nowadays. Reese Witherspoon is just bad, but you can hardly blame her given her role.
Not bad by any means but it should have been a better film.

[Dan Warburton]

Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1973

Thanks to Matt W for pointing me to this and Lao Tsu Ben for linking that pinksmoke article, very informative. Must check out the book. Yes, well, it almost feels inappropriate to shower the film with superlatives - on the surface, it's so unglamorous, dusty, dowdy and - the movie poster nails it, grubby - you feel you need to shower yourself when it's all over. Even the Dave Grusin soundtrack - and I'm a fan - feels too lite and brite, somehow. Beautifully shot and lit, inside and outside: Yates manages to make even sunny weather look grey and dull, and the "action" scenes, such as they are, are shot with such ferocious economy they appear cursory, matter-of-fact, banal. Michael Mann picked up on this nicely; Scorsese had it and threw it away. I wish Short Cuts had looked like this too. Anyway, it's a great story, and what stellar performances, right down to the minor roles: I agree with MRS - those two brief scenes with Eddie and Sheila at home are precious.