Recently Watched Films 2012

[Dan Warburton]

Sidney Lumet, The Group, 1966

Now that TV series are all the rage, maybe someone could revisit the Mary McCarthy novel that was adapted for this "juicy, glossy soap opera" about eight Vassar grads emerging into the world in 1933 with high hopes only to see them dashed or browbeaten into dull conformity, ending in death on the day WWII breaks out. There's certainly enough material here for at least a season, but scriptwriter Sidney Buchman manages to compress it into two and a half hours (that sounds long, but it's so dense the time just flies by). Buchman, who was blacklisted in 1950, must have relished the opportunity to rap on about Trotsky, the Spanish Civil War and Roosevelt, not to mention contraception, alcoholism and psychoanalysis, and Lumet evidently had a ball with sets and costumes to match. As for the girls themselves, none of the actresses was well-known at the time, and just as well - a petulant prima donna would have upset the careful balance the script sets up between the women - but several went on to be, including Candice Bergen (making her debut here as a lesbian ice queen), Jessica Walter (whose Libby blows Joan Collins out of the water for acid bitchiness, though you may know her better as Evelyn, the deadly stalker in Play Misty For Me), and others (Shirley Knight, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman) should have been. The men are, with the possible exception of James Broderick (and even then I'm not sure) and the terminally ineffectual Hal Holbrook, an odious bunch. Larry Hagman - yes - warms up for J.R. by drinking heavily and beating the shit out of his wife, while James Congdon uses flowers and psychological warfare to drive Priss into the dirt (Hartman's perfectly cast as the fragile, wounded idealist), and Richard Mulligan (Custer in Little Big Man) has his wicked way with Dottie and then sends her off to be fitted with a diaphragm (racy stuff for the mid 30s, this). Back to Pauline Kael -again - does anyone have a copy of her essay "The Making Of 'The Group'" in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (it's not in The Age Of The Movies, alas)? Would like to read that. Meanwhile, a decent DVD reissue of this one is long overdue.

[jon abbey]

still in print in the UK evidently, some of those used prices look tolerable:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kiss-Bang-Pauli ... 977&sr=8-5

[Dan Warburton]

Dennis Hopper, The Last Movie, 1971

It's funny how you can do several things at the same time. While the DVDR (ha: a real DVD reissue for this? dream on! - but I will) was going I was running back and forth to the other computer burning DVDRs of other films. Attention span wanders - where is the film? What is the film? We start off with a religious procession in a remote Peruvian village, Chinchero (Hopper originally wanted to shoot in Mexico but correctly foresaw problems), and suddenly jump to a furious bloody Western shootout, followed by an actors' post-shoot cast party.. talk about film within a film.. after 12 minutes we see (in black) "a film by Dennis Hopper", but we have to wait until 25 minutes in for the title! Before that there's an amazing scene shot in a Peruvian marketplace with "Me and Bobby McGee" sung in the background - CUT to Kris Kristofferson actually singing the song while Hopper rides by, unwittingly into middle of the above-mentioned shootout, directed by Sam (no, not Peckinpah, but the Wild Bunch references are numerous), Sam Fuller! Turns out Hopper is stunt coordinator on Sam's Billy The Kid movie, but when Billy (Dean Stockwell) is accidentally killed.. you following me? ("Well stop following me, I'll have you arrested" - Groucho)
When Sam's crew moves back to Hollywood, Hopper stays on and hooks up with a local hooker (yeah, all puns intended), Maria, but is horrified to see that the local Peruvians are so taken with the idea of making a Western they pretend to do it themselves, with wicker models of cameras and boom mics - and REAL violence instead of the fake Hollywood variety.. So we end up with three films in one - the Fuller Western, the Peruvian "real" Western (though of course this is a film so it's about as real as the Billy The Kid thing) and Hopper's own story in the village. Add to that Hopper's pal who owns a tract of land that turns out to be rich in gold - and, yes, he explicitly mentions The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - and you've got something that blows Easy Rider off its chopper and into the long grass.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Puzzle of a Downfall Child - Jerry Schatzberg

Yesterday, on an inflatable screen, open air cinema at La Villette (a social rout if there ever was one). Though it is a gruesome movie, it is not as bad as I had imagined, granted that the bits and bouts of humor here and there were intended. It would be way too silly if they weren't. Like the character played by Faye Dunaway, the cinematography has its moments, but this is trite, pseudo-chic, post-godardian stuff, not something to write home about, really. Ulrich Seidl's documentary about models was better but disappointing in the same way. Do I really care ?

[presquepartout]

i haven't posted in this thread in a while. here's what i've seen this month:



debra granik winter's bone

i was surprised by how much i liked this one.



stanley kubrick barry lyndon

this launched up to my second favorite kubrick (after dr. strangelove). utterly gorgeous.



christopher nolan the dark knight rises

so fucking abysmal. the only redeeming part was anne hathaway.



james cameron aliens

lacks all of the dread i remember from scott's alien (it's been a while since i've seen it), thought not quite as awful as prometheus



benh zeitlin beasts of the southern wild

best new movie i've seen this year.

[cheerios]

Yeah, Beasts was pretty good. My friend worked as a production assistant on the set. He told me that they used mostly non actors for all the parts. The dad is actually a baker and has his own business.

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Himizu - Sion Sono

Ok, I may agree with the festival crowd and all lovers of weird cinema to say that Love Exposure is some kind of masterpiece. That Sion Sono is obviously talented does not conceal the fact that he might also be a little overhyped. But Hizimu is just great, I must admit. Another very impressive effort, to the point that many times as I was watching it, I told myself, that's how movies should look like. Sion Sono does not care at all about good taste which is a good thing, and he seems to me a sort of Japanese Zulawski, that is, he may be brilliant, but also sometimes a wearisome, pretentious, pointless provocateur.

[bryan]

Snow on tha Bluff (2012)

Gritty mix of real and directed footage telling the (part real, part fictional) story of a (real) drug dealer and hustler from Atlanta. First new film in a while that I've gotten excited about. What's real and what's staged (of course, the bookends are obviously staged)? Does it matter when the characters and milieu are real?

One of the more compelling things I am left with is not that the director was literally putting himself in the line of fire, but that Curtis 'Snow', both a family man and a hustler, wanted to put his life on view like this. Maybe as a corrective to the sensationalized portrait of the Southern American ghetto in pop culture via radio rap, etc. It's a rough life filled with choices that don't feel like choices.

Poverty sucks and intelligent people are stuck (trapped) and they are our neighbors. Maybe that is dumb to say, but I'm surprised at the callous attitudes people have about poverty IRL as if it is a choice to be born comfortable or not.

RIYL Hate (La Haine), Cyclo, Killer of Sheep, Gummo, City of God

[mono tony]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullhead_(film)

found this mostly watchable, somewhat affecting.

[jinx8]

Attack The Block - Joe Cornish



This was pretty ok for summer night entertainment. Didn't know very well what to expect, just knew it was a comedy. Turns out it is a comedy/action with aliens mixed in for good measure.
The setting was a South London project development (the Block mentioned in the title).
I found it engaging and actually well done, especially the music, which sometimes blended seamlessly with the dialogues, so much so that at times (mostly in the beginning of the film) it seemed the characters were rapping.

[Dan Warburton]

Jesus is that Dominique Strauss-Kahn on your avatar?! Holy shit, Batman! (Welcome DSK..)

On a more serious note, last night's entertainment - and that's not the right word to use for this:



Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet, 1954

"Everything that son of a bitch ever made was great" - Pauline Kael. Word!

[leroysghost]

entertainment - and that's not the right word to use for this

there is something I find very funny (in a deeply depressing kind of way) in the xxxxxxxxxxxY structure that seems to pop up frequently in Danish art that I (most likely mistakenly) take to be the cultural sense of humor.

[P. Wretch]

"Everything that son of a bitch ever made was great" - Pauline Kael. Word!

See this entry to the Sight & Sound poll, by a fairly obscure French director (omitting Jeanne d'Arc, because that would be too obvious). The recently-released lists contain various amusing examples of critics/directors trying to 'make a statement' (e.g. Zizek, of course), although the aggregate list, inevitably, holds few surprises.

[Dan Warburton]

Howard Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings, 1939

This rather daft tale of a band of seemingly stoical expat pilots flying mail over a dangerous Andean mountain pass might seem far-fetched, but, as the director pointed out, it was based largely on true stories. Like Macpherson (played by former silent film star Richard Barthelmess, complete with botched plastic surgery scars), Hawks himself once had to bale out of a burning plane and leave his co-pilot to die; and The Kid's deathbed speech is also apparently lifted from a scene the director personally witnessed. Sounds pretty grim, you might think, but genres collide with gleeful abandon here, as piano-playin', whisky-chuggin' Jean Arthur adds a dash of screwball comedy to the melodrama (Jules Furthman's bubbly script also manages to reference the music hall chestnut "Yes We Have No Bananas" and Sam Goldwyn's famous "include me out" line) elegantly counterbalanced by the geometrical precision of Hawks' compositions and Joseph Walker's stylish camerawork. Making the character of Geoff believable is no easy feat, but Cary Grant does a good job (they say he never played a villain but that doesn't mean he wasn't pretty unlikeable at times). Better than Rita Hayworth anyway, whose Judy (Geoff's ex who shows up unexpectedly, now married to Macpherson.. more you analyse the "plot" the stranger it becomes) is desperately wooden. Nice to look at though.

[Dan Warburton]

Michel Deville, Le Dossier 51, 1978

Intriguing espionage flick about covert surveillance of a junior French diplomat which, like the microcassette recorders and great clunky printers used by its (ever unseen and never named) secret agents, now seems rather quaint and dated, though none the worse for it. Deville took plenty of risks adapting Gilles Perrault's novel, notably by his consistent use of "caméra subjective" (remind me to watch Lady in the Lake again soon) - we see what's going on "through the eyes" of the mysterious agents - and by refusing to cast well-known actors. Despite some rather unconvincing acting here and there, and a rather pat conclusion (yeah, dig deep enough and you'll discover a murky secret, though not really a surprising one), it's well worth checking out, especially if like me you're a fan of 60s/70s techno paranoia. Not as great as Blow Up, The Conversation and Blow Out, to which I've seen it compared, but can certainly stand slightly behind them.

[presquepartout]

lawrence kasdan body heat



lauren greenfield the queen of versailles

[Dan Warburton]

Stephen Elliott, Welcome to Woop Woop, 1997

Reasonably enjoyable but decidedly trashy adaptation of Douglas Kennedy's The Dead Heart, about an American travelling from Darwin to Perth in a second hand VW bus who gets shanghaied, drugged and kidnapped by a voracious blonde and wakes up "married" to her in a hellhole in the middle of nowhere from where there seems to be no escape. The book is curiously compelling, even slightly scary at times, but Elliott's fucked up wacko version, playing up the bizarre Lynchian side of the community our man finds himself in (and his transformation of the hero from a middle-aged, middling smalltown journalist in the book to a glamorous criminal - bird smuggler - in the movie is totally inexplicable), goes more for the gonzo comedy. Talking of gonzo, Terry Gilliam would have done a better job. Rod Taylor's Daddy-O is fun though (so much so you actually end up feeling more on his side than Teddy's - and that's a mistake), as is Susie Porter's blood-spattered hard hitting nympho Angie. Imagine Patricia Arquette with rotten teeth after a month sleeping rough in the street with only beer and crack as company. See above

[surfer]

lauren greenfield the queen of versailles

I've heard A LOT about that one, is it worth seeing?

[presquepartout]

lauren greenfield the queen of versailles

I've heard A LOT about that one, is it worth seeing?

i enjoyed it. the siegel family enjoyed it so much that they sued the director for defamation.



simon west con air

[Lao Tsu Ben]

Sexy Beast - Jonathan Glazer

This is a surprising film with a moving turn by Ray Winstone as a gangster who just wants to be left alone and enjoy his retirement in Spain.