Recently Watched Films 2012

[leroysghost]

The Beguiled is great.

[patois]

PLAY av Ruben Östlund
Subtle, thought-provoking and exceptionally crafted.

[Dan Warburton]

Terry Gilliam, Brazil, 1985

[Dan Warburton]

Jacques Demy, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967

Well, I had a choice last night - either argue the toss with you lot about Wandelweiser or gaze adoringly at Francoise Dorléac and Catherine Deneuve..

[jon abbey]

any thoughts about Brazil? I saw that a bunch of times back in the day including back to back days on the big screen in college (to see where the dream at the end started), a huge favorite back then, but I wonder how it would hold up now.

[Dan Warburton]

Didn't have much time to scribble about it yesterday, but, yes, I thought it held up very well indeed. This was my fourth or fifth viewing, and the first time in about three years. Amused to read that Gilliam claimed to have been influenced by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (well, of course) without having ever read it... But I love that retro-futurism look, transparent computer flat screens + 40s noir snap-brim fedoras. Also like the subversive homoerotic charge - Sam and Harvey Lime (ha! how about that for an interesting name..) hugging each other as Sam tries to get past him to his computer.. Goes without saying that for spectacular sets - Gilliam had access to huge empty Kafka-like office spaces in Docklands just in time before the place was taken over by huge empty Kafka-like multinationals - this takes some beating. Wonder how it would have been though if De Niro had ended up playing Jack the torturer instead of Harry Tuttle..

[Dan Warburton]

Dennis Hopper, Out Of The Blue, 1980

Once more Jonathan Rosenbaum nails it: "Here was proof, if any is needed, that a celebrated burnt-out case came back to establish himself as the legitimate American heir to the cinema of Nicholas Ray — a cinema of tortured lyricism and passionate rebellion that reached its fullest flower in the 50s, as if to match the action painting that was roughly contemporary with it." Shot in just four weeks when Hopper stood in at the last minute for a director who'd jumped ship, this is as bleak and chilling as Made In Britain (though imagine if Cassavetes had directed it instead of Alan Clarke), with outstanding performances from Linda Manz - whatever happened to her? she's terrific here, as she was in Days of Heaven - Don Gordon and Hopper himself, plus (goes without saying) a great soundtrack.

[Gaendaal]

Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975)

Hooo. I enjoyed this. Enjoyed it quite a lot, actually. But who knows what it's about? Not even Malle's brother, from the looks of the documentary extra. There's so much symbolism and oblique references flying about that you could do anything you like with it. Perhaps better to sit back and just let the dream-synthesis flow over you.

Both my wife and I looked at each other once the film had finished and pretty much said "Alice In Wonderland directed by Tarkovsky" if you want a tag-line.

[leroysghost]

Linda Manz - whatever happened to her?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij0YgYAofHk

[Dan Warburton]

Thanks for the link, LG!

[Mo Noyz]

Any Sci-Fi fans here seen the trailer for the new Total Recall?

Looks like it'll be nothing but eye candy yet again...

*sigh*

Will anybody ever step up to the plate and get a PKD movie right again?

[leroysghost]

the fist Total Recall was great.

[Dan Warburton]

Max Ophüls, Lola Montès, 1955

My goodness, where to begin? Finally saw this for the first time in its (fully?) digitally restored Cinémathèque Francaise edit. From the opening tracking shot - as extraordinary in its way as the celebrated opening sequence of Touch Of Evil - it's clear we're in another world, and it doesn't take long to see why the Nouvelle Vague loved it, and why it was Fassbinder's favourite film. The camera movement, the symbolic geometrical framing, the garish lighting.. they're all par for the course now, but I find myself in agreement with this article by Andrew O'Hehir for Salon (which I dug up at Rotten Tomatoes - as you know, I like negative reviews ) http://www.salon.com/2008/10/10/lola_montes/
"Part of the problem with Lola Montès is that it’s the apotheosis of Ophüls’ mature style, with its ultra-deluxe set pieces, ambitious traveling shots and ambiguously detached attitude — and if he himself drew that style from Orson Welles, Ophüls’ influence is so pervasive in later cinema as to be almost invisible. From Hitchcock to Kubrick to Coppola to Scorsese to Spielberg and onward, most big-name filmmakers of the Western world from the late ’50s onward owe an incalculable debt to Ophüls, who abandoned the “larger theater” model of moviemaking for a more fluid, more spectacular and more imagistic storytelling mode that was driven first and foremost by camera movement. But it takes a prodigious degree of sympathy and imagination — a degree I clearly don’t possess — to see Lola Montès after you’ve already seen Vertigo or A Clockwork Orange or The Godfather and to grasp the correct relationship between them. In large part, that’s because Ophüls’ forward-looking technique is married to his perplexing fascination with the social rituals of 19th century Europe, and because of his total lack of interest in anything we would consider psychological realism."
That more or less nails it for me - this is as remote and exotic and wonderful and unattainable as Fritz Lang's Tiger of Bengal, even if it is based, amazingly enough, on a true story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_Montez
Few groans: Martine Carol is awfully wooden (I wonder if Monsieur Rivette, who like his Cahiers brethren presumably loved the film, found her as débandante as I did..) - hard to see why everyone from Liszt to Ludwig would fall under her spell, though she was something of a sex symbol at the time. If that's why she landed the part, to get bums on seats (this was, after all, one of the most expensive films ever made at the time) it failed: the film was a spectacular flop - Marcel Ophüls, in a terrific bonus docu on the DVD, recalls how the Parisian police had to erect barricades to separate those queueing to see the film from those who'd walked out in disgust and wanted to dissuade others from getting into the Gaumont Marignan. Other sour note: Oskar Werner, lousy as ever. But Anton Walbrook and Peter Ustinov save the day. Amazing film - look forward to spending more time with it in years to come.

[Mo Noyz]

the fist Total Recall was great.

Honestly?

I thought it was horrid outside of some of the special effects.

I thought Minority Report was better, and that is really saying next to nothing. And Colin Ferrel was one of the stars of that turd as well...

[leroysghost]

Honestly.

Hated Minority Report though.

I've never read PKD so I can't speak to how well he is "captured" in either. I'd assume poorly.

[Dan Warburton]

Ulu Grosbard, Straight Time, 1978

Roger Ebert once wrote that any film with either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in it had to be good - so this, with both of them, is double good. Actually, it's even better than that - have been on the lookout for it since reading Jesse's comments on it here a while back, and was delighted to see it's just come out as a Talents du Cinema mid-price Zone 2 DVD. Stanton, Walsh and Theresa Russell (another fine undersung actress) are all wonderful, but the film belongs to Hoffman (whom you could say Grosbard "discovered" when he cast him in A View From The Bridge at the Sheridan Theater in NY in 1965). Read on IMDb that there was some legal hassle about final cut, with Hoffman suing WB, but I'm wondering how much better it could be. The script is as raw and honest as a Raymond Carver short story - haven't read Eddie Bunker's book on which it's based (and on which Michael Mann also had a hand, I see) but I assume many of the lines came straight from there - and Grosbard's direction is precise and economical, never getting in the way of the disturbing moral dilemma we find ourselves as viewers: how far are we prepared to go in our sympathy for Max Dembo? At what point does hero turn into antihero and even villain? (To discuss amongst those who have seen the movie - if you haven't, you damn well should)

[Dan Warburton]

Bernard Queysanne, Un homme qui dort, 1974

My thanks to Kostis Kilymis for burning me a disc of this several months ago - I don't know if it's still in print (there's a copy going for an astrofuckinomical price over at Amazon), but I see it's viewable in chunks at Youtube. Nowhere near as boring as the title might have you believe: the text of Georges Perec's novel - read wonderfully by Ludmilla Mikaël - is nothing is not passionate. If existentialism is your thang, you'll love it (wish I'd had a VHS of this when I was a student.. and wish I'd been a student in Paris!) - Jacques Spiesser (who doesn't say a word) is awesome as the student, either biting his nails or going on long lonely walks through the streets of the French capital (and if you love this city as much as I do, this is a must), and the concrète quasi EAI soundtrack, by Philippe Drogoz (misspelled as Drogos in the credits and on IMDb) and Eugenie Kuffler, is absolutely terrific. (Drogoz - b. 1937 - studied with Messiaen and Jolivet, and Kuffler - born in Baltimore in 1949 - studied with Nadia Boulanger and Henri Dutilleux - no wonder it sounds so damn good). IMDb says it lasts 93 minutes but what I've just seen clocked it at an hour and a quarter. No matter - it's a sensational piece of work and I hope you manage to check it out.

[Mo Noyz]

Honestly.

Hated Minority Report though.

I've never read PKD so I can't speak to how well he is "captured" in either. I'd assume poorly.

Very poorly.

As good as Blade Runner was it didn't capture his style very well either. Came closer than any other film has, I suppose...

[Dan Warburton]

Olivier Assayas, Demonlover, 2002

Thoughts to follow as soon as get my brain descrambled..

[Jesse]

glad you caught up with straight time, there are so many finely observed details, and walsh has never been slimier. seeing russell looking fresh as a daisy before her career path began to consist of roles frequently calling on her to be debased [she married the creepy, if occasionally gifted, roeg] is touching. anti-hero seems to be a malleable term, but SPOILER when dembo ices the busey character, my empathy shifts to aversion. great casting across the board.

grosbard's real life bride is the madam in his nearly as fine true confessions, so good.