Recently Watched Films

[Dan Warburton]

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[markt]

Two great (and particularly labyrinthine) films in the last couple night...

Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)

Hands down one of my favourite movies. Just perfect.

North By Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)

Great thriller. Really intense. I had forgotten how damn good that cropduster scene was.


Right now I'm watching Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which is neither great, nor labyrinthine.
Fun, cheesy SF, though. I'm enjoying it.

[Dohol]

John Frankenheimer, Seconds, 1965

I'm no Rock Hudson fan but he's terrific in this one. Great cinematography by James Wong Howe too.

You know, this is one of the most unsung films out there...Anyone who can scare up a copy should do so.


And I agree. Hudson puts in the performance of his life in this one ( not saying much, but on the other hand he's great here..)

[surfer]

JFK (Stone, 1991) - It was really fascinating to me to watch this film after finishing Libra. Its an example how two quite different artists approach the same material, the same characters, and the same event, and how they go about creating two different works of art. What they choose to focus one, what themes they underline, what type of broader context they create. Where DeLillo chooses to pivot the novel on the axis of Lee Harvey Oswald, a conflicted and untrustwrothy protagonist who seems to encompass all the of infinite paths of a labrinythine conspiracy, Stone chooses a pillar of Truth Justice and the American Way in flawed DA with a heart of gold and a Nawlins accent of honey Jim Garrison. Where Delillo has Oswald operating as a free agent who has contact with the CIA before and after his defection to Russia, but who essentially knows exactly what he is doing while he feels "the pull of history" and being swept up in escalation of events. Stone protrays him entirely as a puppet who was unaware of the conspiracy of which he had been made an unwilling participant, thus wasting imo a great performance by Gary Oldman who has surprising few lines because almost the entire story is told in flashbacks.

Delillo focuses almost entirely on a handful of characters: Oswald and Marina, Ruby, TJ Mackey, Ferrie, and few others; Stone uses many many more, including a band of brothers in the DAs office who I could give a rat's ass about, but the only one with real depth is Garrison played by Costner. Costner's face seems to be completely unable to affect any emotions at all. Whether he's fighting with his wife, having just escaped a assasination attempt, or giving one of his interminable and unlistenable monologues on "We need to stand up for JUSTICE for our children's sake", his facial expression is the same as if he were lining up a putt on the 7th hole. Untimately the 3.25 hour movie is going to ride on his performance, and its pretty clear he is not that good actor. He cant occupy a role and take over a movie the way Denzel in Malcolm X can. In the last hour, when the trial begins, the movie (which moved well through the first hour), becomes interminable, monologue after monologue, fact after fact piled on in an attempt to solve an unsolveable crime, it becomes a parody of To Kill a Mockingbird, Perry Mason, 12 Angry Men, and every other 50s courtroom drama, complete with people fanning themselves in the front row.

Pesci as Ferrie is all wrong. Pesci cant do effeminate and paranoid and psychotic, not the way I and Dellilo imagine it. He's too New York gangster, and he cant seem to escape those mannerisms, plus he's too short. He ends up just talking fast and chain smoking. Ferrie is a guy who was a right wing nut and pedophile and former priest and ace pilot and hypochondriac who thought he had brain cancer and kept mice in his apt that he performed experiments on. Pesci cant really do that kind of weird.

Tommy Lee Jones is awful. Not sure what else I can say, completely wrong for Clay Shaw.

John Candy is like some sort of caricature out of one of his comedies like Uncle Buck. Completely over-the-top and inappropriate imo.

Garrison's wife and his DA staff are OK, but really those relationships (esp the DA office) are just distractions. Later, Stone tries to half-assedly (we're now at the 3:10 mark) tie in the killing of Oswald, the assasination of MLK, Bobby Kennedy, into some kind of larger cultural picture (all of which Garrison watches on tv, nodding to his wife "see I told you so"). Jack Ruby is not eve addressed as a character at all, and barely as a shadow on the tv.

Whereas DeLillo embraces the "history as confetti" idea, calling the Warren Report "the novel James Joyce would have written if he had retired and moved to Iowa City", Stone tries to tie up the loose ends and solve the assasination of JFK with one clear path, trying to piece the confetti back together (in the form of Donald Sutherland CIA informant spilling his guts to Costner for 15 minutes uninterrupted with the Wshington Monument in the backgroudn, and light dusting of snow covering democracy), embracing every fringe theory in the books, while ignoring completely almost all of his characters, thumping the viewer on the head with one grandiose speech after another, missing completely the awful poetry of the event. I have more to say but I'll just leave it at that.

[Dan Warburton]

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[sarahelockhart]

Privilege - Peter Watkins (1967) - a bit dry considering when it was made, but pretty awesome. There are some absurd wtf moments. Promotional text for the DVD talks about it being prescient. It does strike me as being very British, though viewed in the context of the careers of American pop stars like Michael Jackson or Brittney Spears, it does have broader relevance.



Lost Boys 2 (2008) - not that the original was all that great, but this one is marginally worse. Includes cover of "Cry Little Sister" (song from original soundtrack). Reminded me of recent conversation with a friend (we're both in our mid-30s) about the power of nostalgia and youthful musical tastes. I had very little nostalgia for said song or said movie.

Slightly more nostalgia came into play with this one:


However, said nostalgia consisted of singing the chorus of "Rock you like a Hurricane" (Scorpions) during campy moments in this piece of mindless schlock, which you can imagine had far too many campy moments.

[Dan Warburton]

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[eraritjaritjaka]

Kim Ki-young - Insect Woman (1972)
Kim Sung-su - Beat (1997)
Lee Myung-Se - Nowhere To Hide (1999)
Kong Su-chang - G.P. 506 (2008)
Yun In-ho - The Game (2008)


ki-young is awesome. im not even certain how much i really like him yet, he's just intriguing. hopefully more of his work will see the light of day.

[Tanner]

Aki Kaurismäki - The Man Without A Past



Hou Hsiao-Hsien - Cafe Lumiere

[Dan Warburton]

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[MRS]

One great aspect is how his suit (meticulous costume work needless to say) gets incrementally dirtier and dirtier throughout the course of the film.

[Dan Warburton]

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[MRS]

I think it's miles better than Straw Dogs, never warmed to that one. As you likely already know the local tuffies were actually drinking upon Sam's request and evidently the. . .

SPOILER

filming of the rape scene was just punishing.

[markt]

The White Sheik (Fellini, 1952)


South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut (Parker, 1999)

[Yii]

Kim Ki-young - Insect Woman (1972)


ki-young is awesome. im not even certain how much i really like him yet, he's just intriguing. hopefully more of his work will see the light of day.

WORD

[Dan Warburton]

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[Salty Swift]

Le souffle au coeur - Murmur of the Heart [Louis Malle, 1971]

Hilarious...I liked it a lot better than last time I saw this when I was experiencing growing pains.

[surfer]

Amarcord (Fellini, 1973) - I hadnt seen this in a long long time, I think it might have been the first Fellini movie I ever saw. Still not in the top shelf, but quality second tier, and its easy to fall under its charms.

[surfer]

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch, 1992)

My brief but memorable sojourn to the idyllic greater Twin Peaks area has ended.

[walto]

There Will Be Blood

Kind of irritating. I did like the guy who played Lewis's phony brother, and wondered whether he'd been considered for a supporting actor Oscar. Don't think I've seen him before.