Recently Watched Films 2020

[Dan Warburton]

Nikos Papatakis, La Photo, 1986

A new discovery for me, though I maybe should have started with his earlier films (à suivre!).. Papatakis was born in Ethiopia but fled when Mussolini's idiots arrived, ending up in Paris where he befriended (amongst others) Sartre, Genet (he produced the mythic Le Chant d'Amour and based his own first feature on Genet's Les bonnes), married Anouk Aimée, ran a club where Juliette Greco performed, then moved to NYC where he produced Cassavetes's Shadows and shacked up with Ms Christa Päffgen, who borrowed his first name and called herself Nico. Quite a biography for a start! La Photo is set in the Greece of the Colonels, in 1971, where Ilyas returns from a punishing stint in the army where he's been persecuted for having a Communist father (even if the poor kid was only three when he died) and, unable to find work in the nasty little redneck town, is forced to relocate to France where he's helped by Gerrasimos, another Greek exile, who helps him out with work and papers. Unfortunately, Ilyas doesn't repay the compliment.. Not saying more. Very fine. Awesome ending.

[henriq]

Lost in TV-land for a few weeks, not much energy going into watching or writing about film - but anyway:



Brian DePalma - The Fury (1978)

Ok, so let’s consider this at least a partial flip-flop, or maybe an olive branch considering my earlier vitriol re the director - but I quite liked this. Or, I really liked this. Maybe to do with the seventies framework, more Lumet than Hitchcock. (And about that, John Williams should have his ass kicked up and down the place by the estate of Bernard Herrmann.) The set-pieces actually work - the camera that picks out the two girls on the beach and the weird guy eyeing them from a few paces back: brightly lit and disquieting, nice one. Same thing with the camera swooping down from a height to land and track along the Chicago street outside the hotel - surely the same from Blues Brothers, no? - you feel there is a sort of messy urgency to it, it has to be told this way. As is the car chase on the construction site - it could have been just stupid, bumbling feds stumbling over each other, but somehow the confusion feels real, the friendly fire traumatic where it could have gone Keystone Cops. I honestly didn’t think DePalma had it in him. Great performances from Charles Durning and John Cassavetes too. And the ending is just awesome, more Verhoeven than I would have expected. Just a few years down the line we will find the DePalma I hate - garish and loud and set-pieced to within an inch of it’s life. Everything plotted and orchestrated and empty, sterile and salacious at the same time. But I’m happy that the director has at least this, and Scarface, to his name.

[Dan Warburton]

Haven't seen it for a while, but I remember enjoying it, I think (see below). (I see you too are in Kirk Douglas RIP mode) I can't stand Scarface though.

Brian De Palma, The Fury, 1978

One of many things De Palma learnt from Hitchcock is the viewer will forgive / forget all kinds of plot inconsistencies and character coherence if the director "puts them through it" well enough. For diehard BDP fans it seems The Fury is better than Carrie (more technically assured, or do they just regret it wasn't as highly acclaimed?), but it's more funny than frightening. Maybe it's the absence of a genuinely scary baddie in the background. Piper Laurie's fucked up mom in the earlier film needs some beating, and while Cassavetes does a good job here, to quote Ms Kael's gushing review, "one regrets there wasn't a real writer around to provide dialogue that would match his gloomy, viscous nastiness." Whatever, he certainly goes out in style here.

[Dan Warburton]

We watched I Walk Alone again last night by way of Kirk homage (nice new 1080 rip) but I don't want to annoy Walto by posting another picture of Burt Lancaster So let's try this instead --



Norman Jewison, In The Heat of the Night, 1967

Some nice trivia here https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/n ... an-jewison - but I imagine you know most of these stories already, like the film. Always worth a look for Poitier, Steiger and Oates - but this time I was more attentive to Haskell Wexler's photography and Hal Ashby's editing. Good work.

[Dan Warburton]

On a Jewison kick.. but not for long (back to Kirk Douglas tonight) -



Norman Jewison, Rollerball, 1975

I remember as a kid - I was 12 when this came out - there was something terrifically taboo about this film (Last Tango in Paris and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were similarly risqués), presumably something to do with its violence, though that doesn't come across as particularly shocking now. It's loud - the bangs and crashes during the match make a hell of a racket - brash, bright but empty. I don't care a toss for Jonathan - James Caan has never been an actor to elicit much sympathy - and as almost everyone else in the cast is a cartoon character (god knows why people rave about Houseman's performance, all he does is mumble and scowl), the dystopian backstory is never satisfactorily explained, I lost interest, and fell asl...zzzzzzz

[henriq]

Robert Siodmak - Cry of the City (1948)

I absolutely fucking hate Richard Conte in this, awful prima donna, smug, hammy and sentimental all at the same time. From when he can speak in the film you hope for an ignominious death. A real pity, because the rest of the film is excellent. It seems the shining path of the hero doesn’t really interest the director, because the incidental characters and the drama touching them are so much more interesting and nuanced. A different kind of gaze, the camera leaning in to capture and accentuate languid tonalities in the performances. A little bit like what Hawks did at the same time (all those interiors), and Eastwood would do later. Victor Mature and Fred Clark as the cops are great, but special mention must go to Berry Kroeger as the scumbag lawyer, and Hope Emerson’s murderous masseuse is simply astounding - her hands gradually tightening around Conte’s neck is an image for the ages. I might could do without the moral uplift and Mature’s paternalist concern for Conte’s younger brother, but it is both the age and the genre of the film, so I’m not really complaining.

[henriq]

On a Jewison kick.. but not for long (back to Kirk Douglas tonight) -



Norman Jewison, Rollerball, 1975

I remember as a kid - I was 12 when this came out - there was something terrifically taboo about this film (Last Tango in Paris and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were similarly risqués), presumably something to do with its violence, though that doesn't come across as particularly shocking now. It's loud - the bangs and crashes during the match make a hell of a racket - brash, bright but empty. I don't care a toss for Jonathan - James Caan has never been an actor to elicit much sympathy - and as almost everyone else in the cast is a cartoon character (god knows why people rave about Houseman's performance, all he does is mumble and scowl), the dystopian backstory is never satisfactorily explained, I lost interest, and fell asl...zzzzzzz

You know, I watched the first interminable minutes of this, with the setup and the space presented, the game gets rolling...and you realise this is probably meant to Say Something and Mean Something, but what? You couldn't care less. The soppy pacing of some seventies cinema really annoys. For rollerblades going round in a circle, give me Alan Clarke's Stars of the Roller State Disco any day.

[Dan Warburton]

The soppy pacing of some seventies cinema really annoys

Careful matey, you know how much I love the 70s See what you mean about Conte though - but sometimes that ooze works well with the role he's playing. Anyway, meanwhile -



Joseph Mankiewicz, There Was A Crooked Man, 1970

-- the crooked man being of course our dear departed Kirk Douglas. Actually, the French title of this was "Le Reptile" - not a very flattering description of our leading man (and a spoiler to boot, if you've seen the film). It's a comedy western (slight sigh - that means silly music and too much of it), not written by Joe M either (shame), but with a solid cast - Fonda, Oates, Burgess Meredith, Hume Cronyn - and a good plot. Very enjoyable Sunday evening movie.

[henriq]

Careful matey, you know how much I love the 70s See what you mean about Conte though - but sometimes that ooze works well with the role he's playing.

As do I, I said some Conte yeah, I don't remember disliking him this intensely in The Brothers Rico. A while since I saw that.

[Dan Warburton]

Tommy Lee Jones, The Sunset Limited, 2011

Wiki: "Black and White converse about White's attempted suicide. White feels as though everything ends up in death, and that his life is minuscule in the throes of time. From White's point of view, no matter how great someone or something is, all that is created eventually fades away. This is the opposite of what Black believes. He believes that there is a God and that we all must go through the troubles of life to get to paradise (Heaven). By his own account, his story is that of a man who has committed murder and was far away from God, but has now changed. Black feels that he can persuade White from committing suicide. With Black stopping White right before he was about to kill himself, Black feels that this is destiny. In the end, Black is not able to persuade White from suicide; he lets him leave the apartment. When White leaves, Black is left pondering why God would put him in a position to save this man's life knowing that there is nothing that he can do to stop White from going through with the suicide."
Tour de force acting-wise, I suppose, with Jones and Jackson at the top of their games - but the fact that White does indeed persuade Black to let him leave leaves you in little doubt as to where playwright Cormac McCarthy's sympathies lie - not that anyone already familiar with McCarthy's work would be surprised. Right on for the darkness.

[Dan Warburton]

Groupe Dziga Vertov, Lotte in Italia, 1971

I keep trying, goodness knows, and am determined at some stage to make my way through all the Godards from this period, but, Christ, this is really is pretty tiresome stuff. I guess I'm probably revealing my hideous bourgeois capitalist reactionary nature, but I have to admit feeling a certain sympathy with the lady at the sewing machine in the sweatshop who, when given one of the heroine's tracts, shrugs and tosses it aside. http://www.rayonpolar.com/Films/cineast ... &numero=35 Maybe Louis Althusser enjoyed it - the folks at Italian state TV (who it was made for) didn't, as they refused to show it.

[Dan Warburton]

After that Godard, I thought I needed a bit of light relief, so I went for another film featuring dinosaurs -



Harry Hoyt, The Lost World, 1925

Wiki: "1925 American silent fantasy monster adventure film adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. The film was produced and distributed by First National Pictures, a major Hollywood studio at the time, and stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger. It was directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien, a forerunner of his work on the original King Kong. Doyle appears in a frontispiece to the film, absent from some extant prints. In 1998, The Lost World was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Because of its age the film is in the public domain, and can be legally downloaded online." Hope you can find a version with the cameo of Conan Doyle himself at the beginning. Of course, it's nowhere near as great as King Kong, but it's worth a look for the last scene when the escaped brontosaurus runs amok and tears down whole apartment blocks. Yippee!

[Wombatz]

ah i saw that film in the perfect theater, it was huge fun and the rubber sauruses easy to empathize with ... the only problem being the music ...



( ... as i had to comp that thing solo on short notice and was running thru my limited stock of moves much too quickly)

[Dan Warburton]

How do you got about preparing music for silent films in the first place - do you take a copy of the film home and pore over the exact timing of certain shots, or chart out a loose plan of the whole movie? I was always impressed by Frisell's work behind the Buster Keaton shorts (definitely the former approach), but found it exceedingly difficult when I tried to do it myself. It's a shame that the vast majority of silent films I download, even in decent restored quality, are spoiled by obtrusive and often totally inappropriate music, the Hoyt film above being a prime example - while two dinosaurs slug it out on a cliff edge a demure string quartet sounds like it'd be more at home in a Victorian drawing room. Funny, but frustrating.

[Dan Warburton]

Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story, 2003

Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea, 2003

Peter Greenaway, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish, 2004

I've been following Greenaway since I was a spotty teen shoplifting Lacan and Derrida from Haigh & Hochlands University bookshop in Manchester and pretending I understood them (I still don't), so the character of Tulse Luper, who pops up in most of Greenaway's early shorts as the éminence grise behind all the compulsive cataloguing - the director himself, of course - was already familiar. These three films, which as the Wiki page says are rather hard to watch because they were designed to accompany another monumental multimedia project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tulse_Luper_Suitcases are a kind of summary of the oeuvre so far, with connections to almost all the films in the director's output (notably absent was Drowning by Numbers, though Cissie Colpitts does pop up in Part 1). It's all rather exhausting, I suspect even for hardcore Greenaway heads - but could still benefit from a sharp HD reissue. How many times I'd be prepared to watch it all again, I don't know.

[Dan Warburton]

Alain Jessua, La vie à l'envers, 1964

There aren't many films that approach the delicate subject of mental illness / madness and succeed in doing anything at all other than unleash uncontrollable waves of indignation (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Nurse Ratched ) and other violent passions (Shutter Island, etc etc take your pick). Very rare indeed are those movies that explore the fragility of the character, the subtle details: Rossen's Lillith is one, and this debut feature from the criminally overlooked Alain Jessua is another. Charles Denner was good in Landru and L'homme qui aimait les femmes, but, damn, he's absolutely extraordinary here, an amazing performance. Anne Gaylor plays the ditzy fiancée, and you end up feeling as sorry for her as you do for Jacques. Outstanding work - and, I read, Marty Scorsese's a fan. He should be.

[Dan Warburton]

Hun Jang, Secret Reunion, 2010

Starts out ever so well, with a terrific chase sequence, but soon settles into rather predictable tropes (the firebrand ex-cop, the undercover agents who both know the other guy is undercover all the way along etc) and tips over the John Woo abyss into wtfness when our heroes manage to survive more bodily injuries that would normally wipe out an entire army division: Lee survives multiple stabbings to hop onto a plane a couple of weeks later, and Ji-won gets shot and falls off a fucking building but is also on the same flight, reunited with wife and children released (yeah, right) from lovely North Korea.

[Dan Warburton]

Dennis Hopper, Backtrack, 1990

Bob Dylan's cameo as a chainsaw-wielding sculptor is one of many funny details in this decidedly potty tale of an eccentric Mafia hitman (Dennis) who ends up falling in love and running off with the woman he's supposed to take out (Jodie Foster, a conceptual artist who specialises in writing trite clichés in digital signage, who accidentally witnesses a mob killing). I watched the director's cut, which is no doubt more self-indulgent than the commercially released version, which was 18 minutes shorter and retitled Catchfire. Very entertaining, with a good cast - Vincent Price, Joe Pesci (uncredited), Dean Stockwell (but why did the director insist they all speak with that same dumb guinea shit accent Jack Nicholson adopted as Charley Partanna?!) - and Foster seems to be enjoying herself. But the ending is absolutely bloody ridiculous. Eh, who cares? Watch out for Alex Cox as D.H.Lawrence (I kid you not)

[Dan Warburton]

Volker Schlöndorff, The Handmaid's Tale, 1990

A sorry affair. I bought my wife the 2017 series on DVD for Christmas, watched the first two episodes and guessed that the original Margaret Atwood novel was much better (it is - though it's hardly what I'd call a great novel). So I abandoned the series - I really have a problem with series anyway - and read the book, but was curious to see a film adaptation with screenplay credited to Harold Pinter. As it turns out Pinter threw in the towel halfway through (the original director, Karel Reisz, also jumped ship) and gave Atwood and Schlöndorff carte blanche to rewrite. They did, but Pinter's name's still on it, and it shouldn't be. I have no idea why the filmmakers wanted to deviate from the book (though I can see the logic of doing that in a series, where you have to find a dozen hours' extra material): the casting is up the bloody pole: Victoria Tennant as Aunt Lydia? WTF! Or Faye Dunaway far too glamorous and chummy as Serena Joy.. Duvall's Commander is also nothing like the character in the book. The tension of a brutal police state that permeates the novel is airbrushed away, Jezebel's is a jolly CBGBs 80s disco romp. It's a bloody mess. https://lamovieboeuf.wordpress.com/2017 ... tale-1990/

[Dan Warburton]

Satyajit Ray, Charulata, 1964

A good, thoughtful review here: https://www.thedailystar.net/star-weeke ... on-1373314 Though there's obviously much to admire (Godard was a big fan, I read somewhere), the glory days of the British Raj now seem so far away as to be almost embarrassing to this expat Brit. When Rabindranath Tagore wrote the original short story The Broken Nest, Victoria was still on the throne (just) and Britannia ruled the waves. And all that. Hearing Bhupati and Amal wax lyrical about figures of British imperial culture that are these days (rightly) condemned as outdated, discriminatory and elitist (if not downright racist) makes watching Charulata a kind of whimsical experience. Something I didn't find with the Apu trilogy, curiously. Unfortunate (for me) perhaps, as the performances are magnificent and the ending unforgettable.