Recently Watched Films 2013

[Dan Warburton]

[jon abbey]

[Dan Warburton]

[Mo Noyz]

Potential fulfilled.

[Moon]

Just watched RZA's directorial debut, Man With the Iron Fists. It's undeniably seven shits in a one shit cup, but man doth its cup runneth over. It's probably best enjoyed by the few who thought Hideaki Anno's live action adaptation of Cutie Honey was splendid entertainment. Please understand that this is not a recommendation.

There's no intelligent way to write about this nonsense, so I won't even try. The opening fight scene/opening credits plays out to Shame On a Nigga and there's a surprising amount of mileage in watching Russell Crowe embarrass himself in a film this moronic. And it's very funny, in an Itchy and Scratchy kind of way.

You expect a film like this to be shameless, tasteless crap, so on that basis its two biggest crimes are killing off everyone who could pull off a decent fight scene well before the climax and a for-the-sake-of-it Pam Grier cameo in which she doesn't even get a line of dialogue.

I can loosely agree with what you say, but I did actually like it. Compared to RZA's other sound design/film music adventures, I thought he did a terrible job with the tracks on this. The Shame On a Nigga opening part was the best imo, completely set the mood to what the movie was about - if you can listen to it without letting the actual words get in the way, that is. I guess you have to put some very good will towards what he could have meant by throwing that in there.

It's supposed to be polished retro kung fu ironic fun, so shameless is good, but tasteless is a bit strong, isn't it? Completely agree about the end though, very anticlimatic.

[Dohol]

re-watched:



The Innkeepers.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1594562/

very slow.. atmosphere and dread (often implied by what you hear, rather than what you see...)



i loved it (though many won't..)

[Antoine]

So, I've been a big fan of this record. Among my desert island albums, I'd say.
But I didn't know anything about Rodriguez' story, until this documentary:


Searching for Sugar Man
Malik Bendjelloul, 2012

Unknown everywhere, except in South Africa where he was a superstar ("bigger than Elvis, The Rolling Stones etc."), without being aware of it.
Quite a unique, beautiful story.

[Dan Warburton]

James Mangold, 3.10 to Yuma, 2007



Delmer Daves, 3.10 to Yuma, 1957

Fifty years separates the original and the remake, and the comparison between them is fascinating. First up, Mangold's heart was obviously in the right place, and his scriptwriters chose to include many of lines from the earlier version, presumably culled from the original Elmore Leonard short story, but making a western four decades after the genre more or less petered out (I'd love to read a good piece of Marxist criticism on the history of the cowboy film - does anyone know of one?), post-spaghetti, post-Vietnam, post-9/11 is a risky business. To make it more, umm, exciting (or marketable?), Dan Evans is no longer an earnest, lumpy potato-faced (Van Heflin) rancher, he's a lean and hungry one-legged Civil War (read Vietnam) vet (Christian Bale). And while Heflin's issues were with neighbours and simple access to water for his cattle during a period of drought, the Mangold film begins with Bale's barn being burnt down by heartless henchmen working for the nasty old railroad, who want to kick him and his family off their land (how many times have we seen that plotline in a western?). Spoilers below, beware.

In the Daves original, Evans and Wade arrive in Contention to wait for the train halfway through the film, while in the remake they have to negotiate a dangerous mountain pass full of renegade bloodthirsty Apaches (wtf is this, The Return of the King? shades of Viggo and the Dead Men of Dunharrow) and shoot their way out of a tunnel full of brutal railroad bosses (complete with Chinese slave labour), the leader of whom just happens to be the brother of someone Ben Wade killed back when.. I'm no great Russell Crowe fan but he's good as the scarily likeable Wade (Glenn Ford's role in the original was a hard act to follow - Ford can do as much with a corner of his mouth as Dirk Bogarde can with an eyebrow), but the script doesn't make it easy for him, and the last twenty minutes are patently absurd.
Wade's vicious (and I suspect gay) sidekick Charlie Prince (Ben Foster does a nice job, the Klaus Kinski tics are presumably deliberate) manages to persuade the good townspeople of Contention to become amoral bounty killers by offering them $200 cash for shooting the lawmen, all of whom chicken out with amazing speed leaving Bale alone to deliver his package to the station on time. High Noon, remember? Amazingly, Wade's gang, which includes an Indian (or is he Mexican) sharpshooter who can drop a guy off a moving stagecoach from half a mile away, can't hit the one-legged hobbling vet for love nor money, but finally gun him down more or less out of spite when he reaches the train. At which point Crowe goes ballistic and shoots all his guys who've risked life and limb for him and happily boards his train, but whistles to his faithful steed (huh? where the fuck did the hoss come from?) to follow along, presumably so he can escape later (therefore there was no point his getting on the damn train in the first place, and certainly no point running through a hail of bullets to get there). Such a finale, "bloated toward total absurdity [in] an ending that taxes believability while pandering to modern tastes for nihilism" as Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post puts it, really doesn't work, and spoils the careful character work of the principal actors.

[negative potential]

Potential fulfilled.

[Dan Warburton]

Antoine de Caunes, Monsieur N., 2003

To be frank if it hadn't been a Featured Torrent over at KG I'd never have snatched it, let alone even heard of it - round these parts Antoine de Caunes' claim to fame is as presenter of Canal+'s late lamented satirical review Nulle part ailleurs - but with Monsieur N he's turned in a respectable if somewhat wooden tale loosely based on the popular (a few years back) conspiracy theory that Napoleon might have traded places with his valet Cipriani and even escaped from St Helena. Part fact, part fiction (more of the latter), it's an entertaining if a little slow movie, well acted for the most part (Philippe Torreton is good as Bonaparte), but with Stephane Eicher's pretty dull score mixed too high, some of the dialogue gets swept out into the South Atlantic. The bloke responsible for the make-up should be exiled to St Helena too.

[F&B]

Mark Robson, Isle of the Dead (1945)

Robson is most famous for the Bogart vehicle The Harder They Fall, as well as 1949 noir, Champion. This one is produced by Val Lewton, and as usual for him, the film is stylish compared to other low budget shockers, and gets the most out of only a few locations. It's set in 1912 in Greece, quite an unusual setting, but it plays on an old Greek belief in the vorvolaka spirit which drains people of life. Karloff plays a general who slowly loses his mind (or does he?) when he is isolated in a house on an island with a reporter, a doctor, and a small group of people - the reason being that they start getting sick one by one. The doctor mentions plague, but as he dies from it, Karloff changes from a rational mindset to slowly believing in occult forces controlling what's going on... Typically Lewton, it's quite atmospheric, and there's one scenes that's really scary, clever effect. I have a hard time figuring out whether or not Karloff is a good actor. That must mean he isn't the best. But I seriously can't decide. Nothing like watching flicks like this after midnight. 6/10.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI4D8KokkWg

[Antoine]

Le Trou
Jacques Becker, 1960

A solid prison escape movie, probably close to documentary (based on a 1947 story... and yeah, the world has changed a lot since then).
+ http://www.criterion.com/films/668-le-trou

[Dan Warburton]

Robert Redford, Ordinary People, 1980

20-year-old Timothy Hutton got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor here, but I don't know who he was supposed to be supporting - did the Academy think the key role in the film was Donald Sutherland? Or Mary Tyler Moore? And RR scooped up Best Picture too (it was either that or Coal Miner's Daughter, Elephant Man, Tess or Raging Bull - which one would you have picked?), which meant two melos in a row after Kramer vs Kramer the year before. And both movies feature French Toast. Hm. As directorial debuts go, it ain't shabby, but the script is, as Pauline puts it, "heavy on pyschobabble" and the flashbacks to Buck's death (any parents who call their son Buck in the first place deserve to lose him in a boating accident) seem a bit clunky by today's standards. Kael makes another interesting point when she says "the joker about this movie is that part of the audience weeps for the unloving Wasp-witch mother, who cares only for appearances and who can't change because of the pride and the privacy she was trained in; she seems the gallant last standard-bearer for the Wasp family ethic, and the picture somehow turns into a nosegay for Wasp repression." Didn't feel like weeping for Mary myself, but I'd like to know who was responsible for the hairstyle.

[Dan Warburton]

Sidney Lumet, Deathtrap, 1982

"When the batteries are running low, film a hit play", said Hitchcock (or words to that effect), talking about Dial M for Murder, which is actually namechecked in Jay Presson Allen's snappy adaptation of Ira Levin's Broadway hit. The most obvious reference though is to Sleuth, both the Anthony Shaffer play and the 1972 Mankiewicz film adaptation of it, which also featured Michael Caine, who excels at playing these smarmy baddies. Dyan Cannon was nominated for a Razzie, but her ditzy excesses work just fine as far as I'm concerned (love the scream, too), as does the Reeve / Caine kiss above (ha, I suppose the screenshot is a spoiler after all, but fuggit), which was booed by audiences at the time - queer Superman? horreurs! It's all very fluid and smart, with Lumet's camera dollying gracefully around the set, but the tables turn so often you get neckache. I could watch Sleuth several times more, doubt I could say that of Deathtrap, entertaining though it is.

[jon abbey]

I saw that on Broadway, amazingly enough, and saw both this and Sleuth a long time ago, but remember virtually nothing about either except that there were lots of major twists.

[Dan Warburton]

Really fucked up double feature last night, starting with



Abel Ferrara, The Funeral, 1996

Good cast, each doing what he or she does best - Walken sallow and reptilian, Penn volatile and sweaty, Gallo smooth and shifty, with solid supporting roles from the girls: Annabella Sciorra, Isabella Rossellini, Gretchen Mol - but I still can't decide if I think Ferrara is really good or not. Certainly won't forgive him for butchering Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday" to fit over the opening sequence. Goes out with a bang though. After which -



Luc Moullet, Brigitte et Brigitte, 1966

- couldn't be more different. Whoever did the English subtitles for the version I snatched tried valiantly but just couldn't keep up with the pace of this snappy Nouvelle Vague tale of two provincial French girls who end up rooming together as students in mid-60s Paris. Very Godard in its brusque editing, use of sound and oddball humour (with de rigueur in-jokes about cinema and de rigueur cameo appearances by Chabrol, Rohmer and Sam Fuller), the film it reminded most of was Věra Chytilová's Daisies, which came out the same year. If you like that, and like JLG, you'll find much to enjoy in this.

[pluto92]

Elem Klimov's Welcome or No Trespassing. A movie about a pioneer camp in post war Soviet union, watch for more. Quiet a movie, quiet a laugh.


( off topic. since it's my first post in IHM i have a problem resizing the image in [img], i usually add the w= h= parameters.)

[Dan Warburton]

Yves Allégret, Les Orgueilleux, 1953

Jean-Paul Sartre is credited (on IMDb, not in the film) with writing the short story Typhus on which this is based, but it was set in what was then known as Indochine, and there was no way a film crew was going to shoot there at the time, so the action was transposed to Mexico instead. Sweaty Central American countries were all the rage - Clouzot's Salaire de la peur dates from the same year (though that was filmed in France, while Allégret's was shot on location). But somewhere along the line scriptwriters Jean Clouzot (brother of Henri-Georges) and Jean Aurenche (famous later for his work with Tavernier) must have been bounced too hard by the producers, as there are as many potholes in the story as there are in the streets. Michèle Morgan running into drunken doctor Gérard Philipe's arms at the end is surprising because it hasn't been sufficienly well prepared. Not the director's fault, I guess - Allégret moaned about the happy ending, but presumably didn't have final cut. Shame, because I'd have liked to see more vomit, plague, drunken rape scenes and giant cockroaches.

[Dan Warburton]

G.W. Pabst, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929

"There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!" - Henri Langlois. Well, she certainly fills the screen here. A mighty performance in an extraordinary film. Suspect the rather tame happy ending was the producers' idea (again), though I haven't read Margarete Böhme's Diary of a Lost Girl myself. But it was certainly well-known at the time, and had been translated into 14 languages and sold more 1,200,000 copies by the time the Nazis pulled it off the shelves. Shame also that an earlier (1918) film adaptation directed by Richard Oswald seems to have disappeared.

[Antoine]

Killer Joe
William Friedkin, 2011

Texas, black, fun.
(a song from The Legendary Stardust Cowboy or Jon Wayne to start the end credits would have been perfect)