Recently Watched Films 2012

[billygomberg]

Cabin In The Woods (Drew Goddard, 2010/2012 - yeah this sat on the shelf)



a rather rare trip out to the cinema (see the receipt in my wallet for reasons why). incredibly well worth it for the 1020p show at Atlantic Ave/Court St multiplex with a full theater.

I'll keep this spoiler free, but suffice to say that the arc is one of a long, slow twist (which starts the film and encapsulates the titular narrative), so if the real horror buffs are reading this post, get thee to the cinema. Lots of fun, very smart and well executed horror and good jokes. To say it's full of references is an understatement. Doesn't shy on the violence but keeps off of the contemporary "Let's just show a bunch of guts and screaming people."

Just go see it dammit.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Ulu Grosbard - True Confessions



What a good, understated movie. It is so discreet in a way that it is no wonder it fell off the radar. You cannot get any more pudic, in fact. The film may be a little too elliptic at times, but I suspect that was intended, since at every turn any sense of resolution seems to be made impossible. One could think of it as a truism about films noirs in general, but I think it is particularly evident here, that's probably why I liked the beginning as much as the rest of the film. You know what it is that will be unraveled, but there always remains some of this awkwardness that I tend to associate, in keeping with my education, with the Catholic Church. De Niro mimicking the mannerisms of a priest is somewhat of an hilarious sight to me. Don't get me wrong, he is excellent. Duvall looks like Christopher Walken, had he fathered both Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Harrelson (I know- that doesn't do him justice - and was intended as some kind of joke), and in the end I'm left wondering if casting George Carlin as a cardinal would have been an appropriate move.


Edit: problem solved.

[Dan Warburton]

Terence Davies, Children - Madonna and Child - Death and Transfiguration, 1976-83

Trilogy of autobiographical (very) shorts about Davies's childhood in Liverpool, growing up gay and Catholic. Plenty of serious guilt, crucifixes and confessionals (not my cup of tea, I'll admit, heavy Catholicism) and the odd shot of our miserable hero out cottaging - what saves it from becoming as bleak as Bleak Moments (that's one Mike Leigh film I don't think I can ever bring myself to watch again) is Davies's inspired make-it-up-as-you-go-along cinematography.. Some great shots - the boy and his mother on the bus looking out at row after row of dismal terraced houses (note en passant to Ed Howard, whose fine write-up of this is here http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.fr/2011/ ... ilogy.html - that's a cor anglais not a flute solo, and it's lifted from Shostakovich's 7th Symphony) - and the magnificent slow pan across the Stations of the Cross in a local church while our hero tries to persuade a local artiste to tattoo his testicles.. The final chapter, Death and Transfiguration, is almost unbearable (providing you can forget that the actor playing the dying man is Wilfrid "Steptoe and Son" Brambell). Have yet to see Davies's documentary on Liverpool, Of Time and the City (maybe tonight?), but so far I prefer his 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives.

[Dan Warburton]

Terence Davies, Of Time and the City, 2008

And for the 10,000 pearls sewn on to her wedding dress Her Majesty allegedly saved all her clothing coupons. Even more money was wasted on her coronation as yet another fossil monarchy justified its existence by 'tradition' and deluded itself with the notion of 'duty', privileged to the last, whilst in England's green and pleasant land the rest of the nation survived on rationing in some of the worst slums in Europe.

"The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time." - Willem de Kooning.

The trouble with being rich is that it takes up everybody else's.



The heart that beats beneath the heart is tender, is not savage.
It beats, in time though years apart from struggles silent marriage,
of storm and stress, of quiet love, as when the lights begin to fall
And he just smiles, as she just hums a tune that fitted like a glove,
That tapped its rhyme, still and small into their room,
When nightfall thrums a kind of peace,
That soothes the heart and lets the years fall from nought and down,
As they shuffle off to bed, apart, then meet again beneath the eiderdown.

[MRS]

Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman, 1965)

You couldn't draw up a more direct line of plot; wrong place wrong time, on the run to the bitter end (which naturally lay undecided). Dean Stanton as credited I've never seen more diminutive, Blind Dick. Nicholson wrote and co-produced, not a terribly violent western, though one wonders how all the interminable ambient rifle reports could be replenished so far out in the caliche. Certainly not an acid western as I understand the term either. 82 minutes, worth digging up, I watched a really shitty transfer, the sound dropped at one point and my better half asked if the color vacillation had been intended. Millie Perkins of Anne Frank fame has a nervous spell.

Not kidding: "Boy he sure does cook up a good mess o' beans!"

[Dan Warburton]

Sorry that transfer wasn't good Michael - really makes a difference. Prefer The Shooting myself, but Whirlwind is a good mess o' beans too. Both westerns were reissued on DVD here and very nicely too a while back.. don't know if like me you're a sucker for the physical object, but if so see if this link works http://www.amazon.fr/Shooting-Louragan- ... 658&sr=1-3

[Gaendaal]

Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaud, 1966)

Dated, stilted and strangely empty. Which is what makes it great. So much happening behind the scenes (weird hints of permanent war a la "1984", the strange sexualisation that kicks in halfway through) which only adds to the eerie blankness of what's shown on the screen.

It's telling, too, that even in these days of Kindles and online documents the lingering shots of books being burnt made both my wife and I grimace.

[Dan Warburton]

Agree with you on the first sentence there, can't say I do on the second (but I've got a serious problem with Oskar Werner so that might just be me). The more Truffaut films I see, the more I find myself in agreement with Colin MacCabe in his Godard bio, when he regrets that FT gave up writing about film just when French critical theory really took off at the end of the 50s..

[Gaendaal]

It plays to my interests and, despite there being so very much wrong with it (See this woman being burnt alive?! See this picture of Joan of Arc?!?!) I did enjoy it.

[Dan Warburton]

Alex Cox, Three Businessmen, 1998

DVD Beaver is right - the transfer on the BFI twofer DVD (with Highway Patrolman) is rather poor, but the film is so amusing and well done it doesn't matter. Forget Lost In Translation - this is the most telling vision of the banal horrors of globalisation I've seen so far (and it's funny to boot), the bizarre wanderings of two businessmen in search of a meal (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is an obvious reference - not by chance is Cox's production company called Exterminating Angel..), starting out in Liverpool and ending up somewhere in the (Mexican?) desert, where.. oh, I won't spoil it for you. After Hours meets Buñuel, and there are a number of sly nods to 2001 too. Tod "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" Davies's dialogue is hilarious but terrifying in its triteness, and Cox's cinematography - master shots only, 102 of them - unassumingly brilliant.

[Dan Warburton]

Wim Wenders, Hammett, 1982

It took four years to get this off the ground, during which WW found the time to run off and shoot Nicholas Ray dying of cancer in New York (Lightning Over Water, see a few pages back) and another film crew dying of boredom in Portugal (Der Stand der Dinge). Hard not to see the storyline of the latter as a commentary on Wenders' frustration with his own producer on Hammett, Francis Ford Coppola, who, at the height of his post-Godfather / Apocalypse Now fame was suffering from serious delusions of grandeur when he set up the fabled Zoetrope Studios. Result: Wenders, a real master of location shooting, was confined to the studio and had his first choice of actor to play Hammett, Sam Shepard, vetoed by FFC, who imposed Frederic Forrest instead (not that he doesn't do a good job - a bit on the small side, but he looks remarkably like the real Dashiell Hammett). One wonders how much of the final cut is Wenders' work and how much his producer's - Coppola apparently insisted on reshooting 80% of the movie, and it looks like he did much of it himself. I find myself more or less in agreement with Fernando Croce's review http://www.cinepassion.org/Reviews/h/Hammett.html :
"The cavalcade of facsimiles reaches some kind of pinnacle as a rubout in a makeshift porno studio is witnessed through a one-way mirror: What you get is a screen-within-a-screen of David Patrick Kelly as Elisha Cook Jr. in The Maltese Falcon opposite Jack Nance as Elisha Cook Jr. in The Big Sleep, while the real Elisha Cook Jr. waits outside in his cab."

[Dan Warburton]

Clint Eastwood, A Perfect World, 1993



Henri-Georges Clouzot, L'Assassin habite au 21, 1942

[Antoine]

Asghar Farhadi
About Elly
2009

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Beresina, or the Last Days of Switzerland - Daniel Schmid



Loved the music. As for the rest, it is rather heavy-handed satire about Switzerland, contrived and annoying, yet likeable. As most of the film, the resolution is inept but somewhat hilarious (don't take me too literally, it is not side-splitting hilarious). I shall say I'm rather disappointed, but perhaps less than I should. There is some niceness which plays, like a smile, about this film. Daniel Schmid's films seem hard to find, and they seem to be in the vein of both Werner Schroeter, RW Fassbinder, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard. I detected some sort of Schweiz streak (see the also irritating but delightful Ce jour là by Raul Ruiz). Had I the chance, I would like to take a look at Violenta or Paloma.

[MRS]

Clint Eastwood, A Perfect World, 1993

For what it's worth on a Sunday, far and away my favorite Costner associated movie. I especially like when he insists they acquire a Chevy.

[Dan Warburton]

Was it a Chevy or a Ford (I know these things matter to you chaps across the pond )? I saw the film dubbed in French (l'horreur, l'horreur) on TV last week during my email-free, DVD-less holiday.. might have missed that particular nuance. Back in the saddle now though, and enjoyed this last night, having read the book during the abovementioned week off:



Stephen Frears, The Grifters, 1990

Shame characters like Carol and Kaggs had to be cut out of Donald Westlake's script (well, Carol is in there, but only en passant, and without the concentration camp ID tattoo), presumably dispensed with to avoid dating the film with any accuracy: cars, music in bars and Cusack's wardrobe suggest late 70s, but the architecture says 50s. Elmer Bernstein's OST is a bit underpar, but Angelica Huston's wig more than makes up for it.

[Gaendaal]

I saw the film dubbed in French (l'horreur, l'horreur)

Interesting Costner-fact: The only time I've seen Dances With Wolves, it was dubbed in French. I don't speak French.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

I saw the film dubbed in French (l'horreur, l'horreur)

Interesting Costner-fact: The only time I've seen Dances With Wolves, it was dubbed in French. I don't speak French.

Funny, I saw Dance With Wolves in German the first time I was in Germany. I didn't speak much German at the time, that is, less than now. I remember a rather silent movie, though. It was also interminable.
Didn't care much for The Grifters. I tried to watch it recently and didn't get to the end. According to wikipedia, Donald Westlake first refused to write the script because he found the story "too gloomy". Too bad he changed his mind: he was right. Fuck these lousy characters. Ok, I must admit that, on the other hand, I don't have any problems reading Jim Thompson's novels.

[MRS]

Does the bit about the oranges come from the Thompson novel? Pat Hingle such a great part.

[Dan Warburton]

Didn't care much for The Grifters. I tried to watch it recently and didn't get to the end.

You missed the best bit. First time I saw the film I didn't get much out of it, but after reading the book and returning to it I did.

According to wikipedia, Donald Westlake first refused to write the script because he found the story "too gloomy". Too bad he changed his mind: he was right.

Well, if you want a Jim Thompson adaptation with a happy ending, try The Getaway

Fuck these lousy characters.

As you know, I think caring for characters is something I find important - and, curiously enough, though all three major protagonists here are pretty detestable, I found myself doing that: not so much for Bening, but certainly for Cusack and Huston.

Does the bit about the oranges come from the Thompson novel?

Sure does. Westlake did a very good job with the script.

Meanwhile, last night (comments to follow maybe when I've ploughed through the bonus DVD and swotted up on my Shakespeare):



Akira Kurosawa, Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well"), 1960