Recently Watched Films 2013

[MRS]

Killer Joe
William Friedkin, 2011

two beers that bring me home

[Dan Warburton]

William Friedkin, Sorcerer, 1977

I can't for the life of me see why certain crrrritics described this as "distant" and "uninvolving" - those are about the last two adjectives I'd use. Sure, Hurricane Billy was taking a risk remaking Clouzot's Wages of Fear in the first place, even more so without a big box office star to lead the cast, though as far as I'm concerned Roy Scheider is just fine - can't imagine Steve McQueen, Friedkin's first choice, doing any better (the price of McQueen's participation was a part for Ali McGraw, so just as well the director said no - interestingly, he might have got Marcello Mastroianni and Lino Ventura aboard if McQueen had taken the lead, but again I have no problem with Bruno Cremer and Francisco Rabal). In several respects I prefer the remake to the original: the opening half hour with the back story of the four characters is superb - the Jerusalem anti-terrorist raid and New Jersey car crash are brilliantly filmed and edited - and the ending (which I won't reveal) is more chilling than Montand careering drunkenly over the cliff in the Clouzot. The contrast between Cremer's swanky Avenue Foch apartment in Paris and the squalor of the unnamed Central American Republic he finds himself in couldn't be more extreme. So I can't see what the detractors are moaning about, to be honest. This is an action film about four desperate guys driving trucks of unstable nitroglycerin through a wild jungle, not an adaptation of Dostoyevsky, dagnabbit. But, yes, it bombed at the box office, taking in less than half of the $22m it cost to make (the seemingly rickety rope bridge alone cost a million, and had to be built twice during the shooting) - maybe because it opened just after Star Wars. Pas de bol, as we say round these parts. But for my money it can stand alongside The French Connection and The Exorcist with pride. See what you think.

Decided to watch this again with Marie and Max - fun observing others' reactions when you know what's coming next and they don't - and was even more impressed. The montage is absolutely awesome. Not an ounce of fat on this one. Lean and mean.

[Mo Noyz]

two beers that bring me home

Which is rather unfortunate.

At least there's Schlafly...

[Dan Warburton]

Fritz Lang, Human Desire, 1954

I wonder what Truffaut and his crew thought of one of their heroes - Lang - doing a remake of a film by another one of their heroes - Renoir's La bête humaine - and making such a sorry mess of it. It probably wasn't Fritz's fault - the screenplay had to be reworked no fewer than nine times, even then the strictures of the Production Code still made sure that the sex and violence (in short everything that made the Renoir film so gripping) were airbrushed away more or less altogether. Gone too is the essential fatal flaw in the hero - the emotionally scarred Jacques Lantier (Gabin) is replaced by the affable Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), who's apparently just returned from a tour of duty in Korea but looks as if he's just got back from a relaxing fishing holiday. No traumatic shellshocked flashbacks, no nervous twitches, sudden explosions of temper.. in fact no compelling reason for the viewer to believe him capable of killing anyone, which is just as well because he doesn't. The happy ending just doesn't work. Gloria Grahame and her sexy upper lip are just fine, but the metamorphosis of her character from bored housewife into scheming slutty femme fatale is unconvincing. Too much melodrama, not enough noir. And not enough dirt. Disappointing.

[Mo Noyz]

Melancholia


Very good. Loses a little steam about three quarters through, but finishes strong.

Still not sure what the significance of 678 is...

[Lao Tsu Ben]

The Moderns, Alan Rudolph, 1988

As an 80's extravaganza, it's far more successful than Diva for instance, only on par with One From The Heart indeed, and a few other films. However, I cannot really partake to Rudolph's nostalgia, of the Robert McAlmon-Kay Boyle kind (read Being Geniuses Together) for the Paris of the Lost Generation. It calls for unnecessary but inevitable comparisons with Woody Allen's recent Midnight In Paris which, though I've not seen it, I'm sure is far less sophisticated on a technical level. There are some beautiful camera-works, especially at the beginning in the café when Rudolph's camera, like little strokes of brush, goes from one character to the other. Rudolph's mastery over his art is also on display in the way he's using inserts. The semblance of a plot is meretricious and uneven: what with the Fu Manchu-like bad guy? One gets a sense that the movie would have been better by cutting him some slack, which it does, a little too late. With Rudolph, from one moment to the other, the dialogue may be brilliant or naively, embarrassingly referential. When we catch glimpses of Hemingway, the casual references that are made in passing are a little heavy-handed for my taste. For instance, there is no chance that you would see Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis or even James Joyce in a film about the period, perhaps because they are either too little known or not enough exotic figures (as, for instance, Dali is), in spite of them being the real geniuses (to make myself clear, I have no desire to watch this movie). But overall, the atmosphere, which is what all the film is about, is lovely, and the ending, as naive as it is, entrancing. Perhaps I'm being a little too harsh.

[Dan Warburton]

Can't decide what's more gorgeous in this movie, Charlelie Couture singing "Parlez moi d'amour" or Linda Fiorentino. Can I have both? Should have stayed in and watched that yesterday instead of trekking out in the snow to see this



Quention Tarantino, Django Unchained, 2012

Comments in separate thread.

[F&B]

The Lookout (2007), Scott Frank, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode.

Scott Frank's debut as director, he wrote screenplays of Minority Report, Get Shorty, and Out of Sight.

Somewhat all over the place, this film treads youthful stupidity and it's handicapping consequences as Chris Pratt (Gordon-Levitt) crashes his car, killing his friends and girlfriend, and cause a braindamage. The damage causes short attention span, so he has to write memo's; not as bad as in Memento, but halfway. As time goes, he gets less and less satisfied with his weekly cleaning job in a local bank, and with his father treating him like he has somehow dishornoured someone, Pratt is lured into the criminal world by a sneaky bastard who gets him laid and then surprises him with a heist plan. The film sets a cliché moralistic standard in it's characters, and we even have a silent badguy robber who walks around inside and outside with his sunglasses on. Come on! Though entertaining enough, it felt like it was written for a PG-13 crowd.

5 out of 10.

[Dan Warburton]

Carlos Saura, La Prima Angélica, 1974

Not as well known as Cria Cuervos, perhaps - maybe because everything there is filtered through the intensity of a little girl (Ana Torrent), while here the protagonist is a slight, balding middle-aged man (José Luis López Vázquez) - but any film that causes a scandal amongst a bunch of fascists is fine by me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_prima_Ang%C3%A9lica I love the subtlety and simplicity of Saura's gentle surrealism.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Killing Them Softly - Andrew Dominik, 2012

Okay, subtlety is not precisely the prominent feature of Killing Them Softly but who cares; the pounding political speeches that pop here and there in the background at a steady pace are not the bad idea that they seemed to be, not enough anyway to justify the facile dismissive comments that critics like to make. They are the stuff of an apocalyptic movie, but it is also true that you just have to turn on the tv or the radio to hear someone rant about the financial crisis and what needs to be done. In some ways, the film reflects that. Armond White's more than lukewarm review is spot-on, except for its diagnosis, for all its faults, I think that it is one of the best films that was released last year. There is a poignancy about the characters that makes them rather unimportant. Comparisons with the Coen Brothers and Scorsese are lazy and wrong, save for the soundtrack which is as hackneyed as that of the Goodfellas (did Scorsese use the complete version of Eric Clapton's "Layla"? Probably not but it is what I remember) and one of the weak spot of the film. James Gandolfini is absolutly great in the guise of a worn-out killer who drinks himself to death, and Brad Pitt, at his most subdued, makes a perfect foil for him. Their scenes together are both hilarious and sad in a brilliant way. Again, Dominik may not be the subtlest director around, but one should make the better of it, Killing Them Softly is the perfect match for last year's also underrated Dark Horse (by Todd Solondz). In both films, there is a character who says something like "we are all alone anyway", which some critics mistake for the film's lesson. It is very possible, at least, that those characters meant it just as they spoke..

[MRS]

Killer Joe
William Friedkin, 2011

Texas, black, fun.
(a song from The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Jon Wayne to start the end credits would have been perfect)

Picked this up at the video store this evening. That's monster truck on the television. Same playwright (Letts), same screen adapter, same spaces as Bug. McConaughey (gulp) steals the show, but there should've been more about his day job to keep the script honest. Emile Hirsch is dreadful, annoyingly so even amidst a poor picture, I can't yet reconcile his bursting into a single wide circus of incest, group sex and McConaughey's buttocks. Church's ambivalence is well played. This was weirdly brought to market. Not near the same church as Bug but worth watching, don't gather the kids 'round. Jumped out of my chair at the last cut, just as with Bug, if that helps any. HBO or Showtime should give Friedkin hour serials and I would totally pay their tolls. Very curious to hear Leroy's Ghost's thoughts.

[Dan Warburton]

Alain Tanner, Dans la ville blanche, 1983

Paul (Bruno Ganz) jumps ship in Lisbon with a harmonica, Super 8 camera, portable cassette player and little else, takes a room in a cheap hotel by the waterfront and does nothing much other than film the city around him and send the images to a girlfriend / wife back in Basel, fall in love briefly with the girl who works at his hotel and wander the streets of the city. I suppose it's a road movie of sorts, except he doesn't travel much, and with Ganz on board comparisons with Wim Wenders are inevitable. But the influence works both ways, I think: Wenders' own Lisbon Story (1994) clearly picks up on its themes and imagery– Paul's shots of the 28 tram winding its way through the Bairro Alto surely inspired the later film's ending (there's a peculiar intimate magic to shaky, grainy Super 8 footage when blown up to full screen size – Derek Jarman understood that too). Exquisite framing and camera work – Jacques Rivette comes to mind, and Bresson too: love the way a shot lingers on a doorway or a piece of furniture – and beautiful ambient sound. You could kill the image altogether and enjoy it as a field recording, honest. Well, Jean-Luc Barbier's plaintive soundtrack is a little obtrusive at times – that pining saxophone inevitably recalls Gato in Last Tango – but that's a small quibble. Fine, fine film.




Claude Chabrol, La Rupture, 1973

Slowly but surely working my way through the Chabrol back catalogue, but this is the best one I've seen so far, the perfect combination of the director's vicious critique of bourgeois mores and Hitchcock thriller. The first few minutes are so raw and bleak (who today would begin a movie showing a young child being hurled across a room and his father beaten unconscious? not even Quentin) you wonder if you'll have the strength to make it through. But when we meet the scheming villain Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel, fuckin' outstanding performance), his nymphomaniac girlfriend Sonia (Catherine Rouvel, deliciously depraved and slutty), the trio of Tarot-playing, hard drinking witches in the boarding house (shades of both Macbeth and Clouzot's L'assassin habite au 21), the insanely melodramatic out of work actor Mostel, and add a thoroughly unhealthy cocktail of liquor and drugs (yes, this is acidic in more ways than one, you'll see), things become grimly hilarious. But the twists and turns in the plot had us literally sitting on the edge of the seat and screaming at the screen - "no Stéphane, don't drink the orange juice!!" - and I haven't done that for a while. Top notch stuff, strongly recommended. As ever, our man Ed Howard has a fine write-up (though he does make one mistake: Emilie is the retarded daughter of the landlady, not the mad nympho)
http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.fr/2008/ ... pture.html

[leroysghost]

Killer Joe
William Friedkin, 2011

Texas, black, fun.
(a song from The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Jon Wayne to start the end credits would have been perfect)

Picked this up at the video store this evening. That's monster truck on the television. Same playwright (Letts), same screen adapter, same spaces as Bug. McConaughey (gulp) steals the show, but there should've been more about his day job to keep the script honest. Emile Hirsch is dreadful, annoyingly so even amidst a poor picture, I can't yet reconcile his bursting into a single wide circus of incest, group sex and McConaughey's buttocks. Church's ambivalence is well played. This was weirdly brought to market. Not near the same church as Bug but worth watching, don't gather the kids 'round. Jumped out of my chair at the last cut, just as with Bug, if that helps any. HBO or Showtime should give Friedkin hour serials and I would totally pay their tolls. Very curious to hear Leroy's Ghost's thoughts.

pretty much identical to yours. kind of bored for most of it, but the third act played out nicely. seemed like the only time the film reached the manic absurd hilarity it was striving for was the bit with the chicken. clarence carter was the best thing about the movie.

[Dan Warburton]

Philippe Garrel, La cicatrice intérieure, 1972

An archer brings a bowl of fire to a boy lying on a bed of white fur nestling in an iceberg. A horse and its rider stand motionless in a ring of fire in the middle of a desert. This is the stuff of dreams - who knows what it means? Even the director didn't understand half of what Nico said (in German) - and he's objected to subtitling the film ever since (though I see a Japanese DVD has titles - in Japanese!). Shot in the deserts of New Mexico - White Sands, I think (can anyone confirm this?), the desolate tracking shot referencing Stroheim's Greed before it and looking forward to Gus van Sant's Gerry later - Sinai and Iceland (Pierre Clementi, naked throughout, must have frozen his rocks off - though they were probably all so stoked on LSD and other chemicals they didn't notice), it's a total trip. Wonderful.

[Mo Noyz]

That's a wonderful image, Dan.

[Dan Warburton]

Here are a few more! Hope they all show up OK!

[Mo Noyz]

Very nice.

I see the complete movie is on Youtube, of all places. Going to try to sit and watch it later.

[Dan Warburton]

Only lasts 57 minutes - treat yourself to a Garrel double bill by starting with Le Revelateur

[MRS]

Really fucked up double feature last night, starting with



Abel Ferrara, The Funeral, 1996

Good cast, each doing what he or she does best - Walken sallow and reptilian, Penn volatile and sweaty, Gallo smooth and shifty, with solid supporting roles from the girls: Annabella Sciorra, Isabella Rossellini, Gretchen Mol - but I still can't decide if I think Ferrara is really good or not. Certainly won't forgive him for butchering Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday" to fit over the opening sequence. Goes out with a bang though.

Didn't mind the Billie opening, on the contrary. Artie Fucking Bucco features prominently early, David Patrick Kelly (Luther in both The Warriors and 48 Hrs.) delivers a compelling red sermon of the era. Victor Argo (Taxi Driver's convenience store clerk) breathes menace in maybe thirty seconds of screen. More importantly this must be Chris Penn's finest hour, he's insanely good and orca fat, the way his voice cracks threatening women, testing himself, sweating. And weird within a garden variety fascist gangster movie, every alpha turns, even if involuntarily, to women for advice or consolation in dire straits, Rossellini disarms like ever. Spoiler, and this is tasteless but the finale evokes school shootings. Watched this tonight during an ice storm in the South. Walken isn't too caricature should that put you off. Pretty boring though. Great late 30s Cadillacs.

[Dan Warburton]

his must be Chris Penn's finest hour, he's insanely good and orca fat

Word. Talking of orcas, we saw one last night



Steven Spielberg, Jaws, 1975

As Roy Scheider quipped, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Hilarious stuff, with salty sea dog Quint (Robert Shaw) making up half of his ridiculous USS Indianapolis speech on the hoof, and looking like he was having a ball doing it (or maybe he was just pissed out of his tree again - that binge drinking was as hard to keep under control as his American / Irish / Mid-Atlantic accent). Love the scene where he and Hooper sit around and compare their shark bites ("Mako! Match that!"). John Williams's famous E-F ostinato (most famous semitone riff in music history? or does the prize go to Ludwig van for "Für Elise"?) is fine for the shark attacks, but those triumphant brass fanfares when the Orca is out on the high seas have the opposite effect, turning the whole affair into just another jolly ripping yarn. Nothing wrong with that, though - we were all kids once (some of us still are) - dig the famous dolly counter zoom shot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEPWBxpYjo yippee!