Recently Watched Films

[leroysghost]

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Okay. River Phoenix is good in it.

The house cleaning fetish is pretty hilarious. Keanu Reeves, worst Prince Hal ever?

udo kier's bit is good too

[fearandpanic]

True, those bits are great, and there lots of nice touches to enjoy (the blowjob, the sex shot in still images, the other rent boys speaking to the camera about their clients--makes you wish he had filmed it with real ones as he originally intended, but Phoenix does get close to some James Dean-style moments, right down to the red jacket).

[Dan Warburton]

Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Pierre Gorin, Tout Va Bien, 1972

Less opaque than Godard"s 60s stuff (I now need to catch up on the Dziga Vertov period with Gorin that preceded this one), but not without its charms.. notably the factory sit-in (the set a deliberate homage to the cutaway set in Tati's Playtime?) and the splendid left right left right tracking shot in the Carrefour supermarket towards the end (love the argument between the young revolutionaries and the Communist Party apparatchik selling his little red books!). Starring Jane Fonda (surprisingly good French, surprisingly awful hairdo) and Yves Montand. Hard to imagine them together as a couple, but never mind.

[surfer]

Kieslowski Camera Buff Whoever it was made the recommendation in the films about film-making thread: Thanks, had never heard of this before and was fairly blown away.

C'est moi! Glad you liked it.

[leroysghost]

Luis Buñuel - Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1933)

brilliant parody (the first mockumentary?) and Buñuel's first mature film (the least dated anyway).

it's a crime that this isn't on dvd in america, but then you could say the same about any number of great Buñuel films.

[Dan Warburton]

Luis Buñuel - Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1933)

brilliant parody (the first mockumentary?)

Ah, happy days, when sheep's eyes were sliced open and goats were shot and thrown over cliffs in the name of Art. Great little movie, this.

Meanwhile..



François Truffaut, Domicile Conjugal, 1970

Léaud and Jade on fine form again, and you might argue this one was better edited than its predecessor; Baisers Volés, but despite the fun references to Renoir and Tati (the latter quite explicit - M Hulot pops up on the platform of Barbès Rochechouart Métro station of all places), thought the extra-marital affair bit with the oh-so traditional Japanese woman was a bit heavy-handed.

So to cheer myself down, last night's fun was



Sydney Pollack, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, 1969

"I may not know a winner when I see one, but I sure as hell can spot a loser."

[maRi]

thought the extra-marital affair bit with the oh-so traditional Japanese woman was a bit heavy-handed.

Deliberately so, I would say. That's certainly the most exaggerated character, but exaggeration is one of the main features of the film. It's about role-playing after all.

[cheerios]

Yes, indeedy. I'll second that. I couldn't sit through that one, but thought Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me was great all the way to the end. Anyone seen that Truffaut film?

[Dan Warburton]

Yes, that's a goody - but this is definitely not



François Truffaut, L'Amour en fuite, 1978

Why oh why FT had to return to the Doinel saga 8 years after Domicile Conjugal, I'll never know. Even he admits (in a brief interview inc in the DVD bonuses) that it doesn't work. Understatement of the century: it's a fucking mess, nearly as bad as the Curse Of The Pink Panther. You know you're in trouble when you have to start including extracts from the earlier films, and seeing how good Léaud was at 13 in Les 400 Coups only drives home how dull he is in 1978. All the sparkle has gone. Lousy script, dreadful acting (less said about Dorothée and Dani the better). Avoid like the plague.

[Dan Warburton]

John Ford, The Grapes Of Wrath, 1940

Jean-Luc Godard: What brought you to Hollywood?
John Ford: A train.

[cheerios]

You know you're in trouble when you have to start including extracts from the earlier films, and seeing how good Léaud was at 13 in Les 400 Coups only drives home how dull he is in 1978

I think I saw that film, Dan. I thought it was horrid as you stated before me! I was utterly, utterly, utterly, appalled when I found out that the main character was the character in 400 blows. I think I turned it off a few minutes after that flashback scene.

[eraritjaritjaka]

friday the 13th
halloween
nightmare on elm street
the omen

catching up on some pop culture. hadnt seen any of these before; in fact these are the very first american horror films ive ever seen. best death: the omen.

[Dan Warburton]

Douglas Sirk, Magnificent Obsession, 1954

[leroysghost]

Luis Buñuel - Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1933)

brilliant parody (the first mockumentary?)

Ah, happy days, when sheep's eyes were sliced open and goats were shot and thrown over cliffs in the name of Art. Great little movie, this.

i love the goat bit.
while the voice over talks about only eating goat meat when one of the goats accidentally falls off the cliff, you can clearly see the gunshot in the frame .
the best thing about the film is how Buñuel will slip in something real and tragic amid all the blatantly fraudulent things and dare you to not believe that it too is fake

[leroysghost]

Lewis Milestone - The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

weak


Howard Hawks - Ball of Fire (1941)

screwy

[franz bieberkopf]

how do you cats generally feel about Leaud as a non-child actor? he's in a lot of stuff. i'm not sure if i have a set opinion about it... i find it generally difficult to judge acting, tbh... curious to hear opinions tho...

[Dan Warburton]

how do you cats generally feel about Leaud as a non-child actor? he's in a lot of stuff. i'm not sure if i have a set opinion about it... i find it generally difficult to judge acting, tbh... curious to hear opinions tho...

I'm a big fan (though I wasn't a few years ago - my wife dragged me along to see Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain six or seven years ago and I moaned all the way through, all 4 or so hours of it.. now I can wait for it to be properly released on DVD). He was there at the right time for the new wave - esp Godard (Masculin Feminin, Week End, La Chinoise, Gai Savoir..) and Truffaut (the Doinel series). Hard to answer your question in a way because he was well known for ad libbing lines and making things up on the fly, so it's not always easy to tell whether he's following a script or not. But I love his freshness and timing in those films (L'Amour en fuite excepted, because it was made at the end of the 70s and he looks tired, and seems to be playing Léaud more than Antoine Doinel.. but as I said above it's a shitty screenplay). That said, it must be mighty hard to be Jean-Pierre Léaud today, constantly surrounded by those images of the early career which won't go away.

[Dan Warburton]

[img]http://auteurs_production.s3.amazonaws.com/stills/13635/bitter-tears-of-petra-von-kant.png[/img]

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, 1972

[franz bieberkopf]

i watched that the other night. been plowing thru a lot of his stuff lately. that one definitely stood out as one of the one's i enjoyed more. quite a beautiful kammerspieler of sorts... really liked the weird painting/print as locale on her wall... and her attendant was super creepy. i've been cramming them in at a pace where i don't think i have much to say about that one at this point, save for my general impresssion i guess...

just did the whole trilogy, and then Querelle last night... and yea: i will watch Alexanderplatz now... i actually hadn't seen it. the name is drawn from Satansbraten, but honestly, at the time, it was really just about how it sounded... forget most of the time that it's drawn from fassbinder. guess i'm paying more dues now.

[Dan Warburton]

Guten tag Herr Bieberkopf! Wow, Querelle, haven't watched that for over a year or two now. Keep meaning to go back to it when I finally get through the third and fourth boxes of the RWF collection (Querelle not included). Meanwhile, on the subject of Léaud, I bought this last week

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053671/

(Julien Duvivier's Boulevard) which also features young JPL in what was only his second appearance after Les 400 Coups (there was a brief cameo in Cocteau's Testament d'Orphéé, you might recall). Must give it a watch - tonight maybe - and report back. Looks mightly interesting (and Duvivier's a great director: Panique with Michel Simon is awesome)