Recently Watched Films 2018

[Dan Warburton]

Theo Angelopoulos, The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991

Enjoyed this much more than Ulysses' Gaze (Keitel was a bore in that one) - it's Angelopoulos, so it's a) slow b) exquisitely shot c) serious and d) set once more in the kind of landscape you'd probably never think of if someone says "Greece".. No blue skies and white churches here - brown, bare winter trees, snow on the ground.. Refugees stranded in a melancholy no man's land.. Contemporary Europe, quoi. Which is why I'm happy to be flying off to the other side of the planet, see you all in the New Year Bonnes fêtes à tous.

[henriq]

Gesundheit!

One of the greatest endings. With you on the rest, my associations get a little flighty and fancy sometimes.

[henriq]

Alan Zweig, Vinyl, 2000

Henrik, mon ami, this is one that you'd have a few words to say about.. not that you're as crazy as the collectors Zweig goes to interview in his native Toronto. Needless to say, it's a film more about obsession, loneliness and addiction than about record collecting. Disturbingly frank - "I'm trying to walk the line between maudlin and pathetic", confesses the director, and frequently falls off it on either side - it's well worth a look. For anyone that collects anything, obsessively or not - should appeal to many folks here, I suspect. Oh, and click on the link at the bottom of the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Zweig taking you to the Stuart Berman review CMJ New Music Monthly. pp. 69–70.

Will check and report back. Off the cuff though, I think there is a divide between people in love with music of all stripes, and collecting just for the sake of having all the misprints or that ultra-rare testpressing where Johnny Thunders sneezes into the mike. A blurry and thin divide, but still one of relative health or not, and I think I'm on the right side of it. Then again, I saw a doc on cinephiles in New York (back in the days when I lived at the cinematheque) and that was really painful. So we'll see. Bonne vacances!

[j-p]

nunsploitation evening:


Yo, la peor de todas (1990)



La Religieuse (1966)



The Nun (2018)

Alucarda (1977) is up next.

[henriq]

Nagisa Oshima - Shiiku ("The Catch") (1961)

Based on a short story by Kenzaburo Oe, modernity comes to a Japanese village in the form of a black POW in this magisterial film. Or, more than modernity, the trauma and crisis of the dying breaths of World War Two, set as this is in 1945. The villagers don't know what to do with him: keep him alive for the authorities, and the recompense that comes along with it, but who foots the bill? Who gets paid? Then, as civil and military government collapses in the wake of the Tokyo fire bombings, he becomes the figurehead of a mounting wave of increasingly violent tensions and prejudices, and of course all does not end well. Along the way, as in Gishiki ("The Ceremony"), Oshima works in issues of family, wealth and power, with an illegitimate boy one of the local children, with an evacuee family the focus of other forms of ostracism and aggression, with a simple-minded draftee escaping into the woods before enrolment. Around these figures the director elaborates an elegant thinking on wealth and accumulation, banishment and propriety, property and violence, class and resentment. Astounding work, thus. David Thomson rightly points out that among his peers in the Japanese new wave, Oshima is the only one who never did a jidai period film - no such release available for him, no possible escape into historical pastiche or allegory. Relentlessly modern, terse, dark and poetic in equal measures, one of the towering greats of modernist cinema.

[henriq]

Alan Zweig, Vinyl, 2000

Henrik, mon ami, this is one that you'd have a few words to say about.. not that you're as crazy as the collectors Zweig goes to interview in his native Toronto. Needless to say, it's a film more about obsession, loneliness and addiction than about record collecting. Disturbingly frank - "I'm trying to walk the line between maudlin and pathetic", confesses the director, and frequently falls off it on either side - it's well worth a look. For anyone that collects anything, obsessively or not - should appeal to many folks here, I suspect. Oh, and click on the link at the bottom of the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Zweig taking you to the Stuart Berman review CMJ New Music Monthly. pp. 69–70.

So, watched it now and quite liked it. But I stand by my initial reflection - if I am a collector it's more the obsessiveness of an erstwhile compulsive Wire and PT reader that has brought me here. But of course I recognise myself in a few of the traits common to Zweig's gaggle of misfits. And I do believe that most any collector would say that the love of music brought them here, even Zweig as he obsesses over the bad easy listening discs. ("Can it really be as crap as it looks, ooh it was, I almost like it!" "Deliciously bad!" as Dan Aykroyd's Leonard Pinth Garnell brayed.) But, that sickly dog-to-its-vomit aspect of his collecting is something I don't really share. He does feel a little too sorry for himself - if things are that bad, how about chucking the discs (not all of them possibly), cleaning the apartment, try and stop smoking, maybe work out a bit? Any of these steps would be a healthy start. And also, the unhealthy sort of nostalgia you will find in collectors like Harvey Pekar, Robert Crumb, a lot of the guys portrayed here (like the guy with a billion country records) for the good old traditional days. All country, jazz, blues 78s, trad soul and rockabilly. There are quite a few interesting and even amazing sounds coming out now, or even a little more recent than say 1967. That's why hanging out with our mutual DJ friend is such a treat: always some new angle, insight or inspiration come out of those sessions. Donner le patte blanche, as apparently you say in France? DJs in general are much more fun to be around than collectors. They or critics

[Steve Minkin]

MY FAVORITE WIFE (1940) -- Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott

Funny and clever romantic comedy that starts off with a bang and runs out of gas before the finish line, but still a very enjoyable if lightweight entertainment. Grant's wife has been missing for seven years, presumed drowned at sea, and the movie begins with him getting her declared dead and then immediately marrying his current girlfriend. Later that same morning, his long-lost wife (Dunne) reappears, rescued from being stranded on a tropical island by an off-course Portuguese freighter. The next day it's revealed that she has spent the seven years on the island with fellow castaway Scott, and that they called each other Adam and Eve, etc. The chemistry between Grant and Scott gives the film an extra dimension.

Loosely based on the poem Enoch Arden by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

[Steve Minkin]

THE FAVOURITE (2018) -- directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, with Olivia Colman as the sickly and insecure Queen Anne, and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as her two viciously competing favourites and sex toys. Visually very lush, full of pointedly funny skewerings of the crass and dim-witted extravagances of early 18th Century aristocracy, startlingly frank and frequent explorations of the sexual mores of the age, and utterly devoid of any sympathetic major characters. Unique! Not for all tastes, but I loved it!

[Steve Minkin]

Here's a link to a bizarre little short from MGM, 'Master Will Shakespeare,' (1936) directed by Jacques Tourneur presented as a brief biopic but actually a promotion for the studio's upcoming release of Romeo and Juliet (Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer, John Barrymore, Basil Rathbone). Best of all is the story that Will was first hired to tend the horses at The Blackfriars, then as a prompter, and -- because his improvised prompts were better than the original text -- eventually as a playwright. It's a great story, made entirely out of whole cloth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBv_-3asEnI

[henriq]

Stephen Frears - Bloody Kids (1979)

OK, as so many times before I'm following monsieur Warburton around a bit, but oh the dividend: this is fucking amazing. (How are the Antipodes treating you, Dan? For once an emotionally satisfying winter up my own nordic corner - more about that in private, sometime). A prank fight with a penknife sees one kid in the hospital, the other lost in a kind of lower depth along with rockstar Gary Holton (pictured). As Dan wrote seven years ago, English television during these years was brilliant. You'd be hard pressed to mention film directors from this period other than Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, or I would, but TV delivered this, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alan Clarke, Dennis Potter, Stephen Poliakoff (who wrote the screenplay here), Howard Brenton's excellent Dead Head, The Comic Strip - and pushing on a bit, Prime Suspect, Graham Duff's mighty Ideal, the marvellous 15 Storeys High. Superlatives run away from me a bit, but who can help it?

[Antoine]

Au Poste ! (Quentin Dupieux, 2018)
An enjoyable, 1 hour absurd comedy.