Recently Watched Films 2014

[Matt Wuethrich]

Two from Peckinpah:




The Wild Bunch, 1969




Junior Bonner, 1972

Peckinpah's themes never changed much, did they? Aging men out of place in a changing world. But what's interesting for me is that Peckinpah's films never seems nostalgic, even Junior Bonner, where his sympathies clearly lie with Steve McQueen's character. (What would Warren Oates have done with this role, I wonder? He certainly wouldn't have cut the same faded, handsome figure that McQueen does.) The tone is always tragic, and that mood hangs over every scene, even the rollicking ones like from the screen shot above.

[Matt Wuethrich]

Jerzy Skolimowsk, The Shout, 1978

Awesome photography and editing - tight as a cat's ass (if you'll pardon the expression) at 86 minutes, and leaves you puzzling and thrilling for at least that long afterwards. Right up there with Don't Look Now. Strongly recommended.

Need to see Don't Look Now, I figure, but I agree 100% with what Dan says here. I also won't speak to the plot at all, because it's worth going into it without any info. The best part about this film may be that it's structured around a cricket match at a mental institution. Along with The Cremator, definitely one of the most engaging horror/thriller type films I've seen, though I think those descriptions aren't adequate to the levels this has to offer.

[Dan Warburton]

Apologies for hogging the thread - have now written up 58 of the 70 films I've seen so far this year, and caught up on the backlog which accumulated while I was deprived of a decent internet connection these past six weeks.

We expect nothing less!

You're not doing too badly yourself, mate - LOVE the avatar, Albert - if you're on a Peckinpah trip, check out that early western I mentioned above. A goody! And there's a great TV short with Jason Robards called Noon Wine (go KG go) I enjoyed enormously last year (or was it the year before? ha)

[Dan Warburton]

Bill Douglas, Comrades, 1986

It's great to see this out in a BFI Blu-Ray / DVD triple-disc set, as Bill Douglas's monumental three-hour film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs – six Dorset farm labourers who were transported to Australia after they'd formed a trade union of sorts to campaign for a decent wage – dropped off the radar only six weeks after it was released, and has been only very rarely screened since. The reasons for its lack of success were numerous, and not only due to problems with the film itself: by the time the long, arduous process of shooting and editing was over (Douglas's perfectionism being principally to blame), Thatcher had finally broken the back of the British Trades Union Congress after the protracted and catastrophic Miners' Strike, and it's hard to imagine anyone other than disillusioned card-carrying socialists thrilling to such a tale in 1986.
The sour political climate of the period aside, there are some serious questions to be asked about the movie itself. Is it too long? Maybe, but it's hard to see where any cuts could have been made, as Douglas had already telescoped key story events into mere fleeting images (Edward Legg's treachery, the almost non-existent trial of the six..) and pared dialogue down substantially. No, like Rivette (or, to take a musical example, late Feldman), the film never feels long: none of the extended loving shots – the gorgeous changing light of the Dorset landscape, Betty methodically tearing up George's books to burn them for much-needed heat, the eternally muddy streets, the drizzle, the baking heat of the Australian desert – feels out of place.
Douglas's choice of relatively little-known actors to play the martyrs (Robin Soans is especially touching as George Loveless) was understandable – one thinks of Peter Richardson's hilarious Comic Strip sketch The Strike in 1988, in which an American film crew set out to sell the Miners Strike to Hollywood by casting Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill – but in inviting major names to play cameo roles (baddies, for the most part) he very nearly capsizes his boat: Freddie Jones, Michael Hordern, James Fox, Robert Stephens and Vanessa Redgrave are all exceptional, but the subtler performances of Philip Davis and Keith Allen are often bullied into the background. As the Tolpuddle Martyrs were in real life. Maybe it was deliberate, then. Meanwhile the casting of Alex Norton in multiple roles – as the lanternist, the circus barker, the silhouettist and the mad Italian tintype photographer (what a great scene) – is inspired. So is the choice of Hans Werner Henze as composer. Even so, the Brechtian say-it-straight-to-the-camera speeches are heartfelt but, well, a little too.. earnest (couldn't Harold Pinter have been brought on board?). The Loach/Leigh rich=baddie poor=goodie game isn't exactly subtle. But, quibbles aside, this is a major work and anyone remotely interested in British cinema – not only Ken and Mike but Alan Clarke and Terence Davies - simply can't afford to miss it.

[Dan Warburton]

Federico Fellini, I Clowns, 1971

artful and sometimes very amusing, but it doesn't work as fiction because Fellini is tied to facts, and it doesn't work as documentary because Fellini will not (cannot?) abandon his gift of giving the raw material an artistic shape

[eraritjaritjaka]

Jerzy Skolimowsk, The Shout, 1978

a fine picture indeed.
this and Kurosawa's Seance always stick out in my mind for their sound recording scenes.



ive also never seen Don't Look Now....but I read the de Maurier story!

[dialectics of shit]

Trys dienos (1991), Šarūnas Bartas

[Dan Warburton]

Paul Mazursky, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1969

Well in the above shot it's - from left to right - Alice & Ted & Bob & Carol, actually. I started out wondering whether I'd make it to the half hour mark - groovy communes and beautiful love-ins are about as far away in space and time as medieval Japan as far as I'm concerned - but it sort of grew on me. Thanks mainly to Alice (Dyan Cannon) and Ted (Elliott Gould - who gets the best line in the pic: "First, we'll have an orgy. Then we'll go see Tony Bennett" - that one had me literally falling out of my seat). Didn't spot much Quincy Jones music in there - unless he did the awful rocked-up Hallelujah chorus that opens the movie. The Bacharach song at the end is pretty. Hard to figure out what the director makes - or wants us to make - of his characters: Robert Culp and Natalie Wood are, well, wooden - and I can't decide if that was deliberate on the the director's (or their) part. Rohmer, you say, (Lao Tsu) Ben? Hmm, I think I can see the connection. Just. But sitcoms set in palatial California homes aren't really my bag. May try it again later and report back -

- but I won't be returning to this one again:



Monte Hellman, Beast From Haunted Cave, 1959

In fact, it's not a bad idea, a hybrid heist / horror mutation - band of robbers (with alcoholic floozy in tow) nick gold bars, and instead of buggering off head to the hills for a cross-country ski where they're all gobbled up by a giant spider-like thing which itself is torched to death in what must be the most peremptory ending in film history - and you can see where Peter Jackson might have got the idea for Shelob from.. but the acting is terrible, the script desperately uneven and the special effects so laughable it just doesn't take off at all. The punters over at IMDb who wrote that it was genuinely scary must have been as thoroughly soused as the leading lady.

[F&B]

Rewatched Poltergeist, for the third time, it's one of those movies where I never really remembered the proceedings or the exact plot development; and it's quite strangely paced so no wonder. The film is all over the place. Comedic, family friendly, suddenly grotesquely violent (mirror face ripoff scene), and climaxes twice. Laidback parents react peculiar - for film - to the events unfolding, but somehow feel realistic, as if they are unable to express the fear when their daughter is gone, since it's due to supernatural events.

It feels a lot more of Spielberg than Hooper. I've always found the film to be strangely likable, somewhat stylish, and keep returning to it.

[Dan Warburton]

Mario Caiano, Il mio nome è Shangai Joe, 1973

Yes, it's a western actually, but I couldn't find the screenshots I wanted (of when Chen Lee pulls a guy's eyeballs out, or when Scalper Jack - Klaus Kinski - gets disembowelled). Great fun, even in this crappy French dubbed DVD I picked up for 3€ at the fleamarket - but who cares what language it's in? All the spaghettis featured actors of many different nationalities so there's no such thing as an original spoken version. Kinski, as was his style at the time, nearly gets top billing but appears for barely five minutes (and he got paid top dollar too). But fear not, there are plenty of racist villains and they all meet sticky ends. Great fun.

[dialectics of shit]

Koridorius (1995), Šarūnas Bartas

[Dan Warburton]

Michael Haneke, Das Schloß ("The Castle"), 1997

You may need more than one pint to help you through this, I can tell you. It's been a long time since I read the Kafka novel - which he never finished (how could he have?), and whose ending in mid-sentence Haneke replicates faithfully - but from what I can recall, Haneke's done a good job of bringing its bleak futility to the screen. It's an oddity in the Haneke canon, though, with extracts from the text often narrated before and during the events they describe. One wonders why - out of respect / love for the writing (what a wonderful language German is), or the director's perennial mistrust of the image overload? Haneke regulars husband and wife team Ulrich Mühe and Susanne Lothar - both now no longer with us, alas - are magnificent. Can't say I'm in a hurry to watch it again - or re-read the book for that matter - but, fan though I am of Welles' Trial and Soderbergh's Kafka, I'd say this is the best adaptation of the author I've seen.

[Hayao Yamaneko]

I had no idea Haneke had done The Castle. It's one of my favourite books, partly due to circumstances of reading - bundled up in assorted woollens in a shed, during a cold and occasionally snowy December working as a Christmas tree salesman. I'd just finished my unreasonably drawn out MA thesis, and the job was great - in the early weeks there was plenty of time to read between customers, and nobody shops for a Christmas tree in a bad mood.
No doubt all a healthy contrast to smiley Franz.

Anyway, I'll definitely grab this.

[mudd]

oh i saw that film at a festival when it first came out, never connected with the name of the director. definitely really captured the atmosphere of the book.

m

[Piano Mouth]

The Nymphomaniac Vol 1



Where to start talking about this film...some random thoughts, pretty good casting choices, some surprisingly disturbing scenes/moments, some are more effective than others.

Onto Vol. 2...

[99vadim]

Can't say I'm in a hurry to watch it again - or re-read the book for that matter - but, fan though I am of Welles' Trial and Soderbergh's Kafka, I'd say this is the best adaptation of the author I've seen.

Haneke's Kafka is very memorable, I was quite traumatized by this movie, but in a very positive way. There's also this one particular Kafka-on-screen that will stick in mind forever and it is Klassenverhältnisse by Straub & Huillet (based on Der Verschollene). The very particular style of mise-en-scène utilized by the pair is very befitting Kafka and makes for a brilliant adaptation, though a bit neglected, I reckon. The movie also resonates very well with Deleuze's & Gauttari's book "Kafka: Toward a minor literature" especially in the aspect where they give some thought to the usage of space and language by the Prague writer.

[Dan Warburton]

Yes, that Straub Huillet is on my "to watch" list already. Do I need to read Amerika beforehand, though, I wonder? Anyway, no background research needed before last night's fun:



Michel Gondry, La Science des rêves, 2005

Like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, Gondry's created his own distinctive fantasy world (the special effects are even more impressive in the later L'écume des jours), and his actors - Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Alain Chabat (here hilariously foulmouthed) - clearly have a ball living / working / dreaming in it. Decidely potty and great fun - about as far from Haneke as you could probably get

[99vadim]

There's no obligation to read to novel beforehand, I guess.

Saw some crazy and thoroughly enjoyable stuff last night:



Moebius by Ki-duk Kim

Very cool and challenging (silent) movie, definitely one needs some distance to asses it properly. Ki-duk managed to push some unbearable Freudian (oedipal triangle) cliches into new territories and somehow it works. Also, some of the scenes are almost physically painful to watch, mainly because of the really unconventional affects the convey. I feel refreshed.

[F&B]

Just restarted watching one of my alltime favourites, Watkins' Edvard Munch. This movie goes right into me every time.

I love the constant use of Verfremdungseffekt, direct statements to the camera, the brillant non-actors' performances, the somewhat sterile voiceover.

One of the darkest films ever.

[jon abbey]

Just restarted watching one of my alltime favourites, Watkins' Edvard Munch. This movie goes right into me every time.

I love the constant use of Verfremdungseffekt, direct statements to the camera, the brillant non-actors' performances, the somewhat sterile voiceover.

One of the darkest films ever.

we had to stop watching this like an hour in because we both started feeling empathetically sickly.